The Blog I'm Not Writing

Dateline: Sunday 7/14. K & I and A Woman Unknown To Us (AWUTU) boarded the light rail. For K & I the destination was the zoo, but there must have been something going on in Portland because the train was packed.  Two gray-haired, bearded men and one white haired woman – older folks with seemingly permanent smiles tattooed across their faces, clad in identical, loose-fitting white tunics and pants and head scarves, and with that refugee-from-the-Sixties look in their eyes – were seated in the center seats of the car. K & I found seats by the door, and AWUTU took one of the few remaining open seats, next to the white tunic people, who right away began chatting her up.

I caught snippets of their commentary.  It definitely was not a conversation, as AWUTU “hm-hmed” and immediately pulled her cell phone from her pocket and otherwise indulged in the social cues of someone who’d rather be left alone, thank you very much. [1] The snippet I most enjoyed was, “Hare Krishnas are used to train travel.”

My first reaction: Hare Krishnas; excellent…haven’t seen any in a while…Dang!  What happened to the orange robes? [2] I miss that color. It was so distinctive.

It was a good day for people-watching on public transit.  Comment-worthy sights included a young man…woman…person…with the oddest overall body features I have seen in some time on a bipedal humanoid.  The most noticeable was, well, picture a uniboob abdominal tumor [3].

Details, details.  Nah.  That’s as much as I can handle right now, as the thermometer creeps back up to yesterday’s high of 101.8˚.

I thought I’d avoided the strange summer virus that first inhabited MH’s brain bucket, then crept up the nostrils of son K, and is now jostling for which-one-of-us-can-make-her-more-miserable? status with my seasonal pollen allergies.  I was looking for pity-pictures to illustrate my plight, and Googled “Feverish Woman” [4]. This is what came up. Now I really feel ill.

If it was just the Nose Blowing Spree From Hell I could handle that.  A couple of sick days, permission to lie around and do nothing but read? – holy nostril enema, I’d even welcome it.  I have the lie around part down, and have been parked upstairs, drifting in and out of consciousness.  But when I have a fever, I get really stoopid.  I can’t read.  That is, I can’t read for very long before my eyes and brain hurt and I have to close the book, and later I discover later I can’t remember most of what I apparently read.

The new issue of National Geographic arrived yesterday, and I forced myself to remain vertical for 30 minutes while I sipped my Noodles and Company Thai curry soup (the result of sending MH on what turned out to be a wild goose chase for Hot and Sour soup [5])

And read an article about Lions of the Serengeti.

I finished it, I know I did. Here’s what I could tell you about the article.  It’s about Lions. Serengeti Lions.  Life is tough for lions of the Serengeti.

Another pathetic example is the identical pictures above.  It’s too much effort to get rid of one.

Another another pathetic example is the Goodreads review I’m not writing. Still.  Yeah, I recently joined yet another SM [6] site, with the promise to myself that it must not be another time-leaching endeavor: I would rate books, not review them, and if someone wants to know what I mean by this book’s  two stars and that book’s four stars they can ask.

But I was having fun reading the book by that football player – the book that is probably causing many a literary writer to envision their polite social strategy should they ever meet its affable author, a strategy involving vigorous application of the smile/bared teeth grimace of congratulations (the dude pens one letter [7] to a politician, a letter that goes viral and he gets a book contract that essentially states, hey, write whatever you want to write about and we’ll print it).

Where was I going with this?  Oh, yeah, I was having so much fun reading the book I wanted to give it a shout out on my blog, and yesterday, in another 30 minute vertical phase, I thought I had done so.  Today, I look at what I’d written, at what I thought was a complete and coherent assessment:

Chris Kluwe “Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies,”: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities
Now what do I need to do to this guy, now that he’s stolen my title for the sequel to The Mighty Quinn and then yes there’s that
Whose letter to anti-gay pol went viral and due to that rare combination of articulation, profanity and anger – most people can pull off 2 & 3 and not 1. Plus, it was so fucking funny
Maryland doofus piehole “inhibit such expressions”; He’s a good (not great, not yet) writer, with a personable style that would lend itself to ebooks, or screaming from roof tops. Inventive invectives Magically transform into lustful cockmonsters 

Just between us, if you could pretend I’d written an incisive critique of a thoughtful, intelligent newbie author’s perspective on contemporary American social, political and cultural snafus, I would be most grateful.

And perhaps the hijinks will once again ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!