Bowling For Mustangs

Winter arrived in California and by that I mean rain... and lots of it. They call it the "Pineapple Express" and it's a huge storm system that blows in from Hawaii and just drenches all of the Southland. I'm predicted to get 10" up here in my little canyon in the span of about 36 hours. Oh Goodie. Wether or not I can even get down the mountain and in to work tomorrow is still a toss up. The road was already bad on my way home tonight. I watched a boulder the size of a large dog, roll down the hill, bounce on the road in front of me, and then continue over the ledge on the other side. It sorta freaked me out. Who knows what another 12 hours of this monsoon will do to the road. Call me crazy, but I'm predicting it won't get better. On the bright side, at least I still have power (knock on wood)... I witnessed a spectatcular accident on the freeway this morning that I'm sure was a result of the rain. I was headed southbound on the 5 when a double tractor trailer headed north, sorta spun out of control. It crashed into and through the concrete dividing wall and ended up facing backwards in the far left lane of southbound traffic. I couldn't see if he took out anybody on the northbound side, but miraculusly, no one on my side of the wall got hit. Traffic was crawling, but there happened to be a gap right where he came through the wall. A Hollywood stunt coordinator could not have choreographed it better... So yeah, fucked up traffic day all around. The traffic gods are pissed at SoCal and decided to bring their wrath down upon us today, that's for damn sure... As seems to be the case these days, my weekend didn't really turn out the way I planned. I have a nasty cold I'm trying to get over and that made me sorta grumpy to begin with. I had to work for a few hours on Sat and then had planned to go look at an apartment and then go see a movie with S-boy. Well, the apartment manager was sick and cancelled the appointment and S-boy had a personal thing come up and couldn't go to the movie. I didn't feel like going alone so I came home and played EQ for like 8 hours. Not horribly productive of me, but I wasn't motivated to do anything else. I did however finally get a sizeable check I'd been waiting on, so that definitely improved my mood a lot... On Sunday I had hoped to go see "Capote" with S-boy, but he ended up with Laker tickets so that plan sorta fell thorugh :P So I ran some errands and came home and played some more EQ, and did some website work, and read for awhile, and basically just fucked around for the whole day. Actually not such a bad thing. My brain has been kinda fried lately and I think I needed to just not DO anything for a couple of days. It helped some, but then the rain rolled in today and kinda killed my good mood. I'm not in a bad mood, but the rain does make me kinda blue... Things are also a little weird with my three favorite men-folk lately. I think I was kinda "short" with TNI when I talked to him on Saturday and I feel bad about that. I miss him tons and its just hard not having him around all the time anymore. I haven't talked to HWMNBN in over a week (although I've left him several messages and he's bothered to take the time to post comments to my blog, but not to pick up the phone and call me) so I really miss him too, but I'm kinda annoyed with him at the same time. S-boy is just busy, and I get that, but dammit, I wanted to hang out with him this weekend! Whatever, I'm just in a rain-induced funk right now and it's making me irritable... So, it's off to bed for me. I'm going to go hang out with the ka-tet for a couple of chapters and then catch some Z's. Hopefully by this time tomorrow the rain will have blown through and everything will be sunny in sunny SoCal again...

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity." -- W.B. Yeats - "The Second Coming"

Pocketful of Kryptonite

Well, it lasted almost two whole months, but I finally got sick of Pepto-Bismal pink, so Kryptonite green it is! I don't think Tom Welling reads my blog so it's probably a safe (albeit still obnoxious) color choice... Besides, it's Lex Luthor I'd rather impress anyway ;) Happy Saturday kids!

"It's a complicated world, Clark. Only the naïve view it in black and white." - Michael Rosenbaum - "Smallville"

Contrasts

I've had a schizophrenic week. It's been good and bad all rolled into one. Sadly, more good than bad if you're keeping score though... although, next week promises to be better so at least there is light at the end of this dimmly lit tunnel... Lunch with S-boy on Tuesday, that was good. Really, really good... although reflecting back on some of the conversational topics, it now seems kinda odd. He and I talk about the weirdest shit, and most of the time it doesn't seem weird until I starting thinking about it... The rest of the week has been pretty crappy. I've just been kinda blue. I miss TNI something awful. I'm tired. I'm horny. Work has been crazy busy so I've barely had time to take a break to wolf down even something resembling lunch most days. On the bright side, it's Friday and next week is Oscar week which is practically a religious holiday in this town... and I may have charmed my way into a actual Oscar party... and not just any Oscar party, but THE Oscar party to go to. I met this really cool manager today and he's got some clients who are outta town filming and won't be able to use their passes to the Vanity Fair after-party and so I may benefit from their absence and get to go instead. I'll know by Tuesday. If that happens, then I get to start stressing over what the fuck to wear and who to take as my date... I was thinking I should take HWMNBN, but I happen to know that he's already on a couple different guests lists and he hasn't bothered to ask me to go to any of those parties, so why should I take him? TNI is suffering back in the ATL right now, so I'll prolly take S-boy. I'm thinking he would make some yummy arm candy and he's friends with a lot of these pretty people already. Maybe I can find a nice producer who wants to throw some $$$ for my movie my way. It's all about who you know in this damn town, so hopefully I'll meet some people worth knowing... more on that as I find out if I actually make it onto the guest list. Cross your fingers and toes :) Have a great weekend everybody!

"We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave action." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Black and Blue

Sorry I missed my regularly scheduled posting on Sunday. It rained here all weekend and that plays havoc with my phone lines and I couldn't keep a connection. It kinda sucked. Oh well. How it goes sometimes. Aside from the rain, the weekend was pretty good. I worked for a few hours on Saturday and the rest of the time just hung out with TNI. He was supposed to leave on Sunday to go back to the ATL for awhile, and I was really kinda bummed about it. Fate took pity on me and conspired with me to keep him here for one more day though. I dropped him at LAX and like 1/2 an hour later got a call saying he wasn't going to get out until the next morning. Woo Hoo! Call me selfish, but I was glad he had to stay one more day... even if it meant getting up at 5:15 on Monday morning to take him back to LAX before I went in to work. By staying one more night he also got to be witness to me getting head-butted by my dog. Roland and I were fucking around and we both sort of dove for each other at the same time. Skull met skull and almost immediately a big welt swelled up on my forehead right over my left eye. It hurt like a bitch. I got ice on it right away and the swelling went down, but I'm now sporting a lovely purple bruise. S-boy was throughlly amused by it when he unexpectedly dropped by the shop today to take me to lunch. He had some bruises of his own to show off as well. Apparently I almost lost him to a horrific car accident last week. For any of you that know LA, you'll know the stupid, fucked up 6-way intersection over by the Beverly Hills Hilton. It's confusing and drivers usually just make up their own rules when they get to it. Well, apparently S-boy was sitting at one of the stop signs minding his own business when two cars ran the intersection at the same time. They plowed into each other hard enough that one of the cars flipped over and landed on top of S-boy's Jeep. Thankfully he was ok, but his Jeep was practically totalled. Scary... So we wnt to this nifty little restaurant called Cheebo that I'd heard great things about, but never been to. It rocked. Robert Downey, Jr showed up and was trying to be incognito in a baseball cap and sunglasses but wasn't really fooling anybody. Apparently they get a lot of celebs in the place though so no one really seemed to care... So that's the report for this week. Work is still pretty busy. I'm working again this Sat and then am going to go see this Russian horror film called "Night Watch." S-boy and I talked about trying to go see "Capote" this weekend too. I also need to go look at an apartment... Did I mention I'm thinking about moving? There were 2 nights last week that it took me almost 2 hours to get home so to say that I'm "over" the commute at this point would be putting it mildly. So anyway, I found an apartment complex that's like 3 miles from work. They have covered parking, a fitness center, and most importantly, allow big dogs. It's a little more $$$ then I'm paying now, but I'll save enough in gas to cover the difference. Hopefully that'll work out. I'm just going to get a studio for now and then once TNI gets back out here full-time we'll get a 2-bedroom in the same building. That way I only have to move like across the hall or something and that won't be too bad. It's not like the nightmare of having to rent a truck and everything then. Did I mention how much I miss TNI already? My apartment seems very empty and my poor dog has a serious case of the blues. I think Roland misses him even more than I do :) Ok, I'm going to finish watching some figure skating and then am off to bed. Everyone have a good rest of the week!

"The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us that we are still alive after all." -- Stephen King -- "The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla"

The Killing Fields

I would have preferred to stick with the werewolf dreams. My subconscious had different plans though it seems and has upped the ante a bit. I don't know how many "Samurai Champloo" fan are out there, but that was the world I dreamed last night. I was some sort of rogue samurai wandering through the forests and mountains basically slaughtering everyone in my path. I'm not sure why. I don't know if it was my job to kill these people or I had some sort of vendetta to fullfill or what. It was fucked up. And violent. And bloody. I even had to seduce some of my victioms in order to get them close enough to kill them. there was this one pretty little Asian woman that I found myself making out with... only then I slit her throat. These random little vignettes of death did not make for peaceful sleep time. I tossed and turned and woke up after pretty much each one. Dammit. Dammit. Dammit. I am not ready for another period of bad dreams, migraines, and insomnia. I know why it's happening. Sorta anyway. I just have a lot going on in my life right now and a lot of it is shit I can't control, which we all know makes me absolutely fucking crazy. I have gotten very good at wearing my public mask though. The huddled masses generally can't tell if I'm having a good day or a bad day. TNI can read me pretty well, but he spends a lot of time with me and is good at studying people so he sees me better than most. Even so, I don't think he has a clue how bad some of the days are. The days when my brain and my stomach tie themselves up in knots and I just want to scream and scream and scream until I'm hoarse and can't scream anymore. I would like to have a scapegoat to blame, but with The Devil officially out of my life, I have lost the one person I got to blame everything bad on. Sure, TNI and S-boy, and HWMNBN each wind me out in their own way from time to time, but honestly, I'd be sooooo much worse if I didn't have them. No, this is all me. I make myself crazy. I admit that. Part of it is that I was unhappy for so long that I think now that things are finally going well, I don't know how to just enjoy them. I let things that should make me happy, stress me out. I love having TNI around. I need him to bounce ideas off of and just to hang out with and make the voices in my head quiet down for awhile. Just hanging out with him makes me very happy... but he's leaving for a bit and the thought of not having him around even for a little while makes me very, very sad. I know he has to go, and that he'll be back, but that isn't going to make it any easier to say good-bye. Then there's HWMNBN. On the good days he makes me the happiest girl on this level of the Tower... but on the bad days he makes me feel like Wesley after the Albino dragged him down into The Pit of Dispair and Prince Humperdinck cranked The Machine up to 50. (For all you non-"Princess Bride" folks out there, that means really, really bad.) Sorry about the rant. I just had to get these thoughts out of my head. Actually, I feel better now. Ahh the joys of blog-therapy. Enjoy the rest of your week. Now that I got all this bullshit off my chest, I'm going to try to too...

"The wheel is turning and you can't slow down. You can't let go and you can't hold on. You can't go back and you can't stand still. If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will." -- Jerry Garcia

Be Jealous

Days like today are one of the reasons I moved back to SoCal. Here it is, fucking February the 12th and TNI and I spent the day at the beach. It was sunny and clear and 80 degrees out. The water was cold, but then the Pacific usually is. Roland had a good time, but really wasn't into the whole playing with strange dogs thing. He was perfectly content to just lay on the beach blanket and hang out with his pet humans. Somehow TNI and I have turned into my dog's entourage... but you know what? I'm ok with that :) It was a long week and I spent way too much of it intoxicated. I partially blame Vampire Vodka. Have you seen this stuff? It's basically vodka with red food coloring in it, but it's damn good vodka with red food coloring in it, and that makes all the difference. So anyway, when you put it in orange juice, it looks just like a goblet of blood. How could I pass that up? Then Thursday night was 1/2 price sake night at Yoshi Sushi and I had way too much to drink... or so I thought until last night when we found ourselves at this really horrible British pub-like place. The bartender was nice enough but didn't have a clue how to make any cool drinks. TNI had to keep telling her how to mix what we wanted. Well, she mixed mine way to strong and after 1 martini and 1 oatmeal cookie shot I could hardly remember my name. It was sad. I'm a light-weight, but not that much of a light-weight. I honestly don't remember the last time I was that drunk... no wait. I do. It was New Year's Eve 1998 and there were 2 hockey teams and lots of free alcohol involved. Until last night, that was the last time I got sick drinking. It was a bad night. We came home and I vaguely remember watching "Entourage" and then passing out. Fortunately getting as sick as I did probably saved me from what would have been a hell of a hangover... and it would have sucked if I had been sick and missed out on the beautiful day we had here today. I talked to my mom back in the ATL and she said it was cold and ugly and was possibly going to snow some tonight. I'm sooooo not missing Atlanta... Nothing else too terribly exciting to report. I've met some cool people at work the last week or so. Thursday was WB (and former WB) day. I talked to 3 people from "Smallville," 2 people from "Roswell," and like half the supporting cast of "Buffy." One of whom was James, which was cool. He's headed back to Vancouver to do a couple more eps of "Smallville." Yay Brainiac! The story arcs with him have been some of the best so far this season and I so like seeing he and Lex play off each other... I had some weird dreams this week. I don't remember most of them. There were definitely werewolves involved in a couple of them though. That probably came from seeing "Underworld:Evolution." (Quick review - It was good. I liked it. Good action. Lots of violence and a 1/2-way decent story. Kate looked good in leather and Scott was just HOT.) However, I don't recall any of my werewolves looking like Scott Speedman. Mostly my werewolves just ran around eating people. Which was all fine and good except that at some point I realized that I was one of the werewolves and seeing as how eating innocent bystanders is not one of my favorite hobbies, well, that just made the dream disturbing. At least when I have vampire dreams I usually get to bite really hot guys. Still, I guess there is something therapeutic about hunting down your enemies and ripping them to pieces, huh? Oh come on. Don't give me that look. Hello? I did say it was a disturbing dream... Tonight is the first day of the full moon. I suspect I'll dream about the werewolves again tonight. I guess that's better than dreaming I'm a ThunderCat or something though... ThunderCats, ho!

"His beast was formed of that part of our brains that we bury, only dragging into our consciousness in the worst of our nightmares. Not the dreams where we are hunted by the monsters, but the dreams where we are the monsters. We raise bloody hands to the sky and scream, not from fear but from joy. The pure joy of slaughter. The cathartic moment when we plunge our hands into the hot blood of our enemies and there is no civilized thought to stop us from dancing on their bodies." -- Laurell K Hamilton - "Burnt Offerings"

Weekend Update

It seems like Sundays are going to be my posting days at least for the next little while. The rest of the days just don't seem to be long enough to get everything done that I need to do. It was a weird, fucked up week. It started out bad. TNI and I went out for brunch last Sunday and then planned to go see "Underworld," but I got hit with a killer migraine that blindsided me out of fucking nowhere. It was my third in a week, which is not good. I haven't had one in months and suddenly three in a week? The aliens must have reactivated the chip they put in my brain and it's short circuiting or something... This one was really bad too. I couldn't see out of my right eye and the pain was so blinding I found myself curled up in a little ball on the floor and crying almost hysterically. So TNI made me some soup and I took a Percoset and I passed out for a few hours. I woke up to find myself mind-melding with my dog. Roland was curled up next to me, with his paw on my arm, snoring away and I really thought I was channeling his dream. Something about running through the woods chasing something. That was when I knew the drugs had kicked in. It was a weird night to say the least... And things didn't really normalize from there. Work was crazy busy. All sorts of shit happened with the various scripts I'm working on. Some good. Some bad. Most I don't want to get into right now. I'm having lunch with S-boy this week to talk about his involvement on 2 of the projects, so hopefully that will go well... I talked to HWMNBN several times, things are getting interesting there, professionally and personally. Not sure how I feel about that so I'm just not thinking about it right now. I feel like we've been down this road before. Hopefully our final destination will be different this time around though. He's outta town for the next month or so but once he gets back we're going to sit down and talk about where we go from here, so we'll see what happen there. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. The whole field seems to be in play at this point... Between my day job and my writing gigs the stress got a little outta control the past few weeks. I was looking forward to a nice restful weekend of doing virtually nothing. In a literal sense, that was what I got. I haven't really done anything, but I definitely would not call things "restful." I got way too emotionally wrapped up in Friday night's episode of "Battlestar Galactica." There were parts of it that just hit way too close to home. I know it's just a fucking TV show, but it really upset me. Then there was some household drama that came to a head on Friday night and it definitely added to my stress level. As we all know, I'm something of a control freak and I hate things that I can't fix. I don't like feeling powerless. That was sorta the situation. So I just locked myself inside my own head and read some comic books and and napped and tried to pretend that everything was peachy. It wasn't, but fuck it. I couldn't really do anything to fix it. I finally just kinda freaked out and had to get the hell out of my apartment so I coerced TNI into going out to dinner. Turned out to be the right thing to do. We ate too much and drank too much and just had a good time. We came home and continued to consume mind-altering substances and it just turned into a really silly kinda night. It's amazing how much funnier some of the comedians on Comedy Central are when you're really fucked up... Today we had planned to go to the beach and check out this photography exhibit that's going on down at the Santa Monica pier, but after last night's festivities we just didn't get up in time to go. It's definitely on the agenda for next weekend though. I don't care if we're having a damn typhoon, I'm going to the beach... Ok, so that's it for now. I'm going to go give my dog a bath. Everyone have a beautiful week. Try and stay out of trouble and I'll check back in next Sunday. Same bat time. Same bat channel...

"I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day." -- James Joyce