Semi-decent weekend here, here. Lifted the scotch moratorium Friday night and bathed my mind in Glinkinchie 10 yr accompanied by a few drams of Chimay White and Real Ale's Fireman's #4. The kind of top shelf drinking one does on a pay day. It was productive for me and I got loose and loquacious and spoke my unconscious and danced with my ghosts and dirged a bit. I spoke such a sentence as, "It is important to me that I am murdered at some point in my life" and other such (yes sometimes morbid) profundities that make the company I keep look at each other with eyebrows raised. Went into the wee hours of the night calling everyone I'd ever known whose phone numbers I still had, ex girlfriends included (oops). The next morning the reports suggested that my conversations and rambling voice mail messages were kind and funny and full of laughter, and that's nice. It's good to have a full on drunk like that from time to time.
I did make the bad decision to work the paper cutter in my weakened state of eye-hand-coordination and ended up slicing the Shin Yu Pai broadsides right down the middle. Shame nearly crept in then. But I got up early and reprinted the b-sides and cut em soundly and all was well.
Saturday I cleaned and I cleaned and I cleaned. Took all the furniture out of the front room and cleaned walls, floors, and ceilings. Rearranged things and made the binding/cutting tables clean of clutter and org'd the book and paper shelves. Made a pile of all the old notes and drawings and stuff she'd left and box'd em. Couldn't bring myself to light the match and burn it all to ash and that's okay. I don't want to forget.
The Skanky Possum gig Saturday night at 12th Street Books was a blast with a great crowd of 45 or so. Rex Rose read from a few of his novel manuscripts and kept us rolling. Two things I won't forget anytime soon:
"Don't deadweight me."
and
"'Dude,' I told him."
And Shin Yu Pai (hi Shin Yu!) was a real treat. This is one sharp poet! I found her attention to her studies fascinating and her poetic approach incredibly competent. The first series she read from, Love Hotel, was my favorite. I wish I could quote from it but I can't remember the words but I learned stuff. I think we all did. Word is that Love Hotel is coming out as a book in the spring. Cool. (Read Shin Yu's write up of the reading here.)
After several months hiatus for the reading series it was good to see the familiar faces. Folks like David Hadbawnik, RJ Oehler, Paul and Foster Foreman, Denise Sczymczak, Mark Garrison, Kim Dorman, Luke Bilberry, and Dave (whoselastnameIhaveforgotten) and others. And I finally got to meet Corrine Lee, owner of Winnows Press, who of course recently published Down Spooky by Shanna Compton (a book reviewed today in fact by Ron S.) And Zack Tuck has come back to Austin from his brief stint of schooling at UNT in Denton. Glad to have the Zach back in our folds!
Afterward we milled about and drank cheap beer and then went to Dale and Hoa's. These are my favorite times in Austin with my peops and the weather is fine and the wine is sweet and the conversations have no bounds.
(Apologies to Travis and Shannon whom I was supposed to call but whose numbers I had left at my house.)
I made a smoking instrument out of a golden delicious apple and those of us in the kitchen got a little funny, talked at length of the giant squid. (note, there is no end to the puns one can make from a smokeable apple.) The faces were shiny and happy. Afterward myself, Eric, Susan, and Farid went for some midnight Thai and did we dine like we owned the earth? We did.
Sunday I cleaned more, more, more. So deep. And there's more to go. The closets, for instance, need to be excavated. I also watched Fog of War and a couple of discs of the second season of Nip/Tuck. Can't remember why I like N/T but I do, I really do. Some of the age/beauty/family/morality tropes are pretty right on. I might argue as well that it has the best title sequence of any of the popular series (though Carnivale has a good one. The Sopranos I think has the worst.)
And in effing news, the guts of Tony T's chap are printing presently and the cover design has been color separated and the plates of it at this very moment are most likely being strapped to a Ryobi by a thick, muscle-y pressman with a mustache in a warehouse shop in north Austin. The Tom Clark proofs came back clean and that book now takes its place in the printing queue. Now we set to designing out chaps by Gloria Frym and Jim Goar and David Hadbawnik. I have some invites to publish going out to a few people in the next week or two as well as I start to look to the future, also called 2006. The future.
Lucas, my bearded friend, chilled with me last night at my house. Always nice to hang with The Beard.
And Floyd worked the couch arm most of the weekend, his integrity as an animal unchallenged and unwavering.