9/3/03: 3:13 AM: I love pie.

If you talk to anybody who's spent time with me recently, they'll probably agree that I have developed a somewhat disturbing fixation on pie. The sad thing is that it has very little to do with literal baked goods. It's really the concept of pies -- filling inside of crust, baked to sweet perfection, with a name that rolls off the tongue -- that has so captured my imagination.

It's wholly possible I've gone stark raving mad.

The problem would be determining the difference between that and what passes for normalcy with me.

Today's vitriol and gibberish has been brought to you by the 285th Rule of Acquisition: "No good deed ever goes unpunished." At least for me ...

I'm late with the next chapter of The Crown. The reasons why will become partially evident in the next few paragraphs.

A friend of mine is a bestselling novelist, twice over, and she's not happy enough being smart, beautiful, happily married and successful in a number of creative fields. No, now she's moving into being a literary agent, and I, for one am ecstatic about the choice. Y'see, after hearing some of my Dancing in the Dark essays about my divorce experience (see archive, it's all in there), she remarked (as did my best friend Daniel's wife Ana) that they'd be a compelling book. I'd have to edit most of the ones I have now, and that's no problem. I'd also have to write a whole lot more, and that's a bit less groovy.

Y'see, I'm almost six months out of the marriage, and the divorce (hell, the ex-wife) cross my mind less and less every day. Now, I'm not the whole, happy-go-lucky guy I was when I walked into that relationship (well, honestly, I was kind of screwed up then, I'd broken up with a fiance just two months prior, which may have something to do with my decision making process at the time), but I don't dwell on it. The last time I really thought seriously about the whole debacle was when a beautiful woman asked me about it. Luckily, when I was in the throes of it all, I wrote down tons of notes and topics for essays I never got around to writing, so I've got a leg up, but it's still gonna be an uphill climb. Must always remember, "the justification for profit is profit." Rule 202, doncha know ...

(Before you think I'm some emotionless bastard, I did not intend to trivialize either my feelings about my failures and the loss of my marriage nor the seriousness with which I approached it during its season. I've also been told recently that I rely very heavily on humor and flippancy to protect myself from pain, so I seem a lot less affected by things than I really am. Your mileage may vary ... and now, back to our regularly scheduled ranting)

Part of why the whole thing never crosses my mind is because I have a whole lot of other stuff in my head. I got an email two Fridays ago from an editor at a major publishing company, who asked me to send in a script for a 22-page comic book so she can run it up the flagpole and see who'll salute it. I did it for a variety of reasons -- so she could see I can turn work around in a reasonable amount of time (dealing with the forms is more of a hassle than the writing or the formatting), so people at this major publisher can get acquainted with my skills and my ideas, and oh yeah, on the off chance they'll say "yes" and send me a check. If so, great, if not well, it's paying dues, you know? I can take some lumps.

I'm not really very confident in my scripting abilities, because it's such a drastically different kind of writing from everything else I've ever done. Technical. Meticulous. More science than art, in some cases. My method is to normally either write the whole issue out in beats (i.e. "this happens, then this happens") guestimating page counts, and then going back to script. I don't know the rhythms of pages well enough to go straight to script, and that's been part of my problem. My fun comes in telling and honing the story. Scripting (thus far) is a very mechanical process that involves me retelling the story in a very specific fashion to an artist who (at the time of almost all of my scripting) I don't know. It's like writing a love letter to somebody you haven't met, complete with details and inside jokes from a relationship you haven't had. I dunno what I think about all that.

I've been playing this game called Star Wars Epic Duels with an almost animal passion. I've literally driven home at five, six, seven, eight AM after playing all night with members of the "Karaoke Mafia" (my compadres Eliot, McGowan and Lawson). We've tried other board games, but this one's kind of simple elegance, a balance of familiar elements, delicately crafted game elements and "aw cool!" fanboy glee. It helps that the combination of players I normally encounter are a fascinating mix -- a die hard independant, a wily mercenary type willing to make deals, and a wholly unpredictable chaos spirit with consummate skill and deadly determination. I believe I need to slow down with it, but I'm not doing to well with that. Truthfully, I restrained myself for much of my marriage (hah, there you go, there's a reference) and now I'm all about doing whatver the hell I want virtually all the time (which luckily includes a lot of creative work).

I kind of missed blogging.

I've been looking around and noticed that tons of "blogs" just kind of rant without a real theme or purpose. My old journalism instincts kicked in most of the time, and I would blog "on target." I dunno if that disqualifies me. I also dunno if it disqualifies me because I actually write all this crap in real HTML code without one of those fancy "blogging engines."

Yeah. I'm pretty sure I don't care.

Comic books are late this week, due to Labor Day. Blah.

I missed a great party at my homeboy Mikey's place, but these things happen. Oh, go check out the Cockeysville and check out the gig they'll be playing soon.

My 13-year-old brother is in Vegas. I've been unable to get out there and see him. Not really pleased about that.

Yes, I'm dating. That's all I have to say about that. I don't kiss and tell in public anymore. Apologies for any inconveniences that may cause you.

Writing, love life, life in general, what have I missed? Oh, right. I don't care at all about the proposed recall election involving Gray Davis. I don't vote for the same reason I don't do nice things for people spontaneously (see today's sponsor) -- it doesn't work for me. KRS-ONE said "whether you vote for the lesser of two evils, you vote for evil, politics and god are not equal." I don't want anything to do with the corrupt systems in place, I don't want any responsibility for this madness that was set up long before I came along. That said, I have a $5 bet with my publisher at the Herald-Dispatch that the voting populace is stupid and will elect Arnold Schwartzenegger based on the same kind of brand recognition that kept people going back to Jack-in-the-Box after that baby died from eating one of their burgers in the early '90s (I remember a lot more than I let on). I also think that, regardless of who was governor at the time, the energy crisis would have gone pretty much the same and whoever was in office would be catching hell. Gray was in the daddy chair at the wrong time, poor bastich. Yeah, that's all I have to say about state politics.

My apartment is not quite where I want it. In my mind, a classy wooden room divider blocks people from just stumbling into my house and borders my shoe caddy. In real life, it's a mountain of boxes my friend Monique gave me to help me move. In my glorious mental world, I have shelves filled with my stuff, and a huge curtain dividing my office from the rest of the house. In reality, you can gaze across my couch and see boxes of toys jammed into my bookcase, see the mountain of dented comic book longboxes from the recliner. I discovered that my apartment came with a roommate -- street noise from La Brea, less than twenty feet away from my living room window, which roars ceaselessly through the day and most of the night. My kitchen looks like a bad day in Mogadishu, with a mountain of laundry bordering the north wall (I was tired of looking at it in the bedroom) and unpacked boxes full of kitchen items on the floor. My forks and knives are still wrapped in newspaper, as they sit in the drawer. I'm always seized by anxiety when I'm driving home, wondering if my tandem parking spot will be available, or if it will be filled by some unauthorized vehicle. I've recently fought to fall asleep as somebody in the next building plays Coldplay and Edie Brickell at such a volume that you can hear it on the sidewalk, always between three and five in the morning.

Honestly? I love this place. My neighbors are mostly older Black people, and they've all been endlessly nice to my -- Mike and Nora, my next door neighbors, made me a big plate of vittles so I'd have a home cooked dinner on Labor Day. The Carribean family that lives up front go to extreme measures to let me know who's trying to bogard my parking spot. I'm on smiling and waving terms with all the kids who flit around like butterflies. I missed living in the Jungle, warts and all.

Did I mention the pie thing? That's just plain weird.

"... especially at night, I worry over situations/ I know will be all right, perhaps it's just imagination ... day after day, it reappears. Night after night, my heartbeat shows the fear ...

" ... ghosts appear and fade away ... ghosts appear and fade away ...

"ghosts appear ... and fade away ... "