just another manic monday

Our friends Rob and Mandy came over tonight, and Mandy fixed a delicious fettuccini alfredo dish with chicken and broccoli and garlic bread. We sat around the table and devoured it in all our hunger. “There will be leftovers,” Mandy said. There weren’t. Mandy said it was a “Thank You” meal for letting us do their laundry at the house. I don’t care what it was, it tasted amazing. A lot better than the run-of-the-mill chicken & rice I generally eat for lunch and dinner.

“Dwellers of the Night” will be on Amazon.com within the next couple weeks. I’m excited about that. I am realizing more and more how much the writing of that novel infected me. I drowned myself into the main character, and in a sense his worldview (which was not mine; I made it his worldview in my original character sketch) slowly infiltrated itself into mine. I find myself battling between two opposing worldviews, and I find myself suddenly overcome with some of the same tendencies and habits and ways of speaking that I put into the main character. He is the only character I have ever become so deeply ingrained with, and when the book was over, I felt as if a part of myself had died (not that the main character died; maybe he did? maybe he didn’t; you’ll have to read Page 640 to find out!). I have been wanting to write again, but I find myself unable to depart from “Dwellers of the Night.” Not surprising: having invested one and a half years and innumerable hours in the planning and writing and revising of the novel, it almost became an extension of myself. Now that it’s done, I feel like a man who has lost a leg or an arm. Alive, breathing… But incomplete.

Remember how Sarah, Amanda and I carved a pumpkin some time ago? Apparently you’re supposed to do it late in the season, because the current humidity and temperatures cause mold and fungus to grow on them. And this mold and fungus attracts not only flies and beetles but also, in our case, yellow jackets. Hundreds of yellow jackets (okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration; but they had carved holes and crannies into the pumpkin and were crawling all over and inside it). I knew that it was a problem (they can get into the house and swarm the front porch), so I knew there was only one obvious answer: burn them out. So I dumped a quarter bottle of flammable Bacardi 151 on the pumpkin (with Sarah and Mandy observing), and I dropped a match into it. The pumpkin crackled and smoldered. Most of the yellow jackets simply flew away, but some were engulfed in flames, and with the alcohol on their feet and thorax, they were basically walking around on fire. The obvious issue would be incensing them, but I didn’t worry about it. Until they started flying into my clothes. Most of them (probably because they were drunk?) just flew out from under my clothes, but one unlucky yellow jacket managed to sting me on the leg, right above my ankle (it is currently swollen with what is called a regional reaction). In pain and angered (an unjustifiable anger, at that), I took the bottle of Bacardi 151 and doused the yellow jacket, and then I lit it on fire. I stood with my leg throbbing in pain, and I said to myself, “Looks like I got the best out of that exchange.”