Synchronous

June 29

10:28 a.m.

Hi! General note to readers/friends: If I owe you e-mail or crits or anything, it's coming, it's coming. What with Radiohead and the beginning of my Heatherlicious weekend and other running-around-type-stuff and the fact that American Gods has grabbed me firmly by the head and won't let go, I've gotten a bit behind. Apologies.

Work yesterday was nothing particularly special, neither pleasantly nor unpleasantly. I left around 4 o'clock, hurrying home to meet Heather. I parked my car (Denise the Nissan) a block away from my house and walked home. No Heather. I pulled a chair over by the window that overlooks the street, propped my feet on the windowsill, and read some of American Gods.

A few minutes later Heather walked by, carrying a couple of bags of trash. It turns out she hadn't expected me to be home yet, so she'd been cleaning out her car. The amusing thing is that she was parked right across the street from where I parked, and I just didn't notice her. Thus my reputation as Oblivious Boy remains secure.

She was feeling icky from the long drive, and I hadn't showered the night before (what with the onslaught of Radiohead), so we took a long shower together, which made us both feel immeasurably better, I think.

We took a walk downtown, mostly so I could check my mail. I had nothing. A barren box. Some other people have been getting rejections from The Paris Review lately, and I was hoping for my rejection, but alas, it did not arrive. Ah, well.

We succumbed to our baser impulses and got cookies. We ordered a half dozen, three apiece. We wanted exactly the same kinds of cookies. This sort of silly synchronicity pleases me. We had other moments of synchronicity-- we both began singing exactly the same line from the Violent Femmes at exactly the same moment. And later last night we both made the same dryly humorous observation, with identical wording, simultaneously. Hee.

We grocery shopped at some length last night, which was surprisingly fun-- though the ice cream coolers were bare. I don't mean that there wasn't much selection, no, I mean they were bare. Empty to the racks. Very disturbing. We whimpered. "What, are we in Russia?" I asked. I felt like I was in a post-apocalyptic movie. Such is the luxury of my life, people-- being denied my Breyer's can make me whimper.

Despite the fact that Heather and I are both brutally poor, we managed to acquire more than enough food for the weekend-- and it's a lot cheaper than eating out every meal would be. We're hoping to have dinner out with some people on Saturday night, but for the rest of the time, we're cooking.

We rented Quills, which I've seen and wanted to see again, and which Heather hasn't seen. We haven't watched it yet.

We bustled in the kitchen, Ani Difranco's Not A Pretty Girl playing on my CD player, getting us prepped for the concert on Tuesday. Ani's doing a show on the third, then another show at the same venue on the fifth... so we assume that she's going to be around, somewhere relatively nearby, on the fourth (she could be taking a jet to Idaho or something, I guess, but indulge us in our fantasy). So we came up with all sorts of wonderful scenarios in which we would encounter Ani hanging out at Pergolesi on the fourth, and in which she would fall in love with us, and so on. Entertaining.

We cooked a pile of pasta and sauce and Heather's famous garlic bread. We ate garlic-stuffed olives straight from the jar. We made yummilicious salads. So much goodness. Heather didn't like the sauce, found it too sweet, but I enjoyed the meal. I'd been craving exactly that dinner, and I got what I wanted.

That's the awesome thing about being a grown-up: you can do what you want. I love being a grown-up.

While we ate dinner, Scott and Lynne and another Astro person arrived. They sat in the living room and talked about science stuff-- there was a lot of math flying around in that room, let me tell you. Heather and I just kept glancing at each other, listening to the strange esoterica coming from the other room. I guess writers do the same thing... but not with so much math.

I sort of halfway cleaned up the kitchen after dinner, and we watched a bit of some awful movie with Scott & Co.-- it was Police Academy 2 or 3. The first one with Bobcat Goldhwait.

Man. Bobcat Goldthwait. Heather said "Isn't he dead?" And Scott said, "No, he was in Blow, he was the bartender who couldn't feel his face."

Then some more Astro people showed up. One of them looked at the television, saw Bobcat, and said "Isn't he dead?"

There appears to be this pervasive idea that he's dead. But he's not. He's just doing gigs on, like, Hollywood Squares and Hercules, the Legendary Journeys. Which is kinda like death.

Heather and I were not sufficiently captivated by Police Academy to remain there, watching, so we retired to my room.

And this is the part where, in the old novels, you don't get to see anything more than a line of asterisks.