Countdown Baby, and other things.

T-minus 10 days and counting to Molly's due date. Lots of folks have been saying that babies like to come out on the full moon. Here's to hoping that our little baby will be a werewolf then. Sue's been having on again off again contractions for about two weeks now, and we're both ready for Molly to just come out already. But, fortunately, the end is in sight.

Another fortunate end in sight is semester three of grad school. All around, this has been a really rough semester for me. My Extended Critical Essay drove me to the brink of insanity for several weeks, and with all the chaos of work, and baby, and sick cat, It's been awful hard to keep focused. But the end is near.

While the ECE did take up most of my semester, I have managed to finish one story, "Deconstructing Happily Ever After," as well as start two more. The latter two have been fizzling at the moment, but I think once all the dust settles from the baby and everything else going on, the both should pick up pretty fairly. The good news is that I'm rapidly closing in on completing all of the stories for the projected setlist of Not an Autobiography. I'm planning for 13 stories and I'm sitting at about 10 right now. With a good concerted effort, I may be able to push out the final three in conjunction to my Creative Thesis and use the whole book instead of just excerpts. We'll see, though.

Recently I finished reading Opium4. Great lit mag. If you haven't been to their site, check them out, http://www.opiummagazine.com I'm also nearly 2/3 through Maxx Barry's first novel, Syrup, which is a riot. Sue and the baby are enjoying it thoroughly as well.

Finding something

Note: This is a pretty long post, and it really doesn't go anywhere. I posted it more for myself than for you.

My Good Friend, Rod, posted this blog the other day, and I attempted his suggested exercise this morning. Clearly, something is wrong with me. Let me explain, I'm enchanted the idea that someday, somehow, I will achieve a zen-like state. And, truthfully, It's happened, and it's happened plenty of times. But it's the Zen-on-demand that I want (Hey, I'm American--I was brought up to expect to get what I want, when I want, If I want it). Kidding aside, though, I'd really like to get better at the grand scheme of calming the self. I get worked up (for good reasons and bad) far too easily, and then end up wasting a lot of time running the events over and over in my head, augmenting, changing things, until I end up either winning or losing whatever situation I'm currently obsessing over. When I used to walk to work, I'd spend my whole way there running shit by--medititating on mundinaeity, if you will.

Over the years, I've noticed that repetition breeds itself, and I'm really good at repetition. At work, I've spent days, brute force manually populating thousands of table records because no one else had the patience to do it. If repetition is involved, I'm infinitely patient, but at the same time, I'm stuck on it. And more unfortunately, I'm drawn to focus upon the bad repetitive moments of my life.

I've heard that horrible events imprint on your mind more easily than happy events because your mind becomes more active to try to deal with the horrible occurrence. And by the same action, it becomes less active during happy moments because there's no stress on the system; we feel safe when we're happy, and thus don't pay much attention then.

Sue's always telling me that I need to let go of my shit and pay more attention to the present. And she's very right. We're incredibly fortunate to be soon-t0-be parents, and furthermore blessed to have more than 2 friends thanks to all the great people I met at Spalding. But the nature of repetition comes with a definite drawback--repetition must always have an end point. You're always working towards some end or means. And such an assumed end point, causes the present, or the Journey, to steal from Rod's blog, to be obliterated under the weight of "the greater plan." And that end point, is always something a little ludicrous, a little idealistic, yet plausible. I want to write books and teach the writing of books; that is my end-point at this point in time. But the problem is that the end-point becomes the universal-problem-solver in the eyes of the man overtaken by repetition. It becomes too easy to say, "life will stop sucking once I reach my end point." And to say that, is to miss out on everything going on around you during the perceived time of suckyness.

I've spent the last several years fighting to break out of this cycle of grinding the millstone till I achieve x. First it was "I need a laptop so I can write more." Then it became "I need to go to grad school so I can write better." But in truth, I'm limiting myself. And Sue's been trying to tell me all along how much I limit myself by this sort of thinking. I just haven't been listening. And I'm sorry that I haven't. She's always right, you know, and I know it frustrates the hell out of her when I don't listen.

So I tried Rod's exercise today, both on the way to work and on the way home. I turned off the AC, rolled down the window, killed my radio (despite the fact it was playing some awesome music by Scarling), and I tried my damnedest to stay focused. I wasn't really successful. Work creeped in steadily. I also thought about Sue, and wondered when the baby would come, and tried to talk myself out of worrying about whether or not work would be ok while I took my Vacation time to be with the baby (of course work will be fine, but I have that horrible dedication gene that won't allow me to stop worrying that things won't be fine. (If I had a back up, I suppose I wouldn't worry so much, but out of my hands)). I also worried about some other stupid stuff--like stupid things I did five years ago or more. Point is, while trying to focus on driving, I thought about a lot of bad things, and not enough of the good things, and even less about my supposed focus on driving. All because I was driving towards a day that I perceived to be becoming "a bad day."

But nothing bad happened to me today. It was actually a fairly good day at work--I impressed the Executive Director with my automation, assisted a friend with some testing, and scored some free lunch (because Deb Rocks!). Then I got to come home to my wife, who is beautiful and loving, and so pregnant that it hurts (her). We both independently thought up "fish and chips" for dinner and enjoyed sharing brains for that moment. We snuggled whilst watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and shared mutual relief that our sick Chu is still peeing and hopefully on the mend. Now, I'm up here writing. This is a good day all around. In fact, it's pretty great, approaching grand, even. But yet, why would I assume otherwise from the get-go?

So what was the point of all of this? Why have I rambled on so long? Well, I guess I'm starting to understand what Sue's been saying all along. There is something more to life than the day-to-dailies. Something more than crossing things off an index card to-do list. Something more than going through the motions. I need to learn to embrace this "something more." To experience things in the moment, allow myself the emotional space to feel my actions and not just my fuckups.

My mind isn't quiet. And I'll never say that I lived a life without regrets, but I'm learning.

Rod, thanks for writing that blog, and suggesting the exercise.
Sue, thank you for being patient, and by my side. I love you very much.

Can you get high off of psychodelic rock?

Probably not, but I've been listening to one of Pink Floyd's earlier albums, Ummagumma, lately, and man, for as atypical as it is, I love it. Last week, while I was working 2nd shift, I popped the Studio disk in and went for a couple of midnight walks, and it was a great experience. The album is just such a break from everything that I normally listen to that I'm really connecting to it in different ways than I normally would. It's also cool to notice the groundwork for a lot of Pink Floyd's later works within this album. It's some crazy shit. Crazy good shit.

Over the last few weeks we had our two baby showers, and they were both very wonderful. Our parents (especially Sue's dad) went way out of their way to help us bring the families' first grandbaby into the world in style. Molly "Marzipan" Lackovic has more clothes and blankets and toys than I do. All thanks to the loving, doting grandparents. Having the families come together like this really ramps up the whole excitement factor. And speaking of excitement, I present 2 anecdotes: 1. My mom shakes and shivers like a little kid getting candy whenever she see's Sue. Then she immediately dives for the belly and starts talking to Molly. My teeth rot out every time. 2. We went to Baby's R Us the other day to pick up a couple of things that we didn't get at the shower, and the lady said to Sue, "I thought you had the baby already. I haven't seen Chuck in a few days." Yes, the lady at Baby's R Us, knows Sue's dad's name on a first name basis. And as a 3rd (unannounced) anecdote, Sue's mom has been making constant excuses to come up and visit. I believe she's coming up this weekend to help Sue "clean house." Yeah right, she wants to spend time with the baby. Point is, everyone has baby fever, and it's great. Molly's setting up for coming into the world spoiled to hell, and while I'd rather her not to be so, I don't think I have much choice right now. All I gotta say is our parents are awesome.


Also I want to thank all of you who went out and bought a copy of Alligator Juniper. I really appreciate you for taking the time to do so, and I totally didn't expect it to happen. If you still want to read the story, and don't have the money, let me know and I can send it to you.


Thankfully, work's been a lot less demanding of me lately (they actually hired someone to take care of all the tech support I was doing on the side for nothing), so I've been able to spend more time working on automation and a potential lead to have said automation rolled out to other call centers (which has been talked about for about 3 years now). So we'll see where that goes.

Otherwise, we're finishing up our baby classes tomorrow, and entering week 34 of the pregnancy. September 30 is the due date, but we'll take her as soon as she's ready to come out as a healthy baby. She's been moving a lot lately...and it's like world shifting moves; the kind that you can see from five feet away; the kind that make you think of the chest-bursting aliens in Alien...or the one from Spaceballs that pops out and starts singing (I like the singing better).

I'm currently working on last minute edits of my ECE, and, more importantly, the 3rdquel to "(Un/Re/I )Do" -- all about how Johnny loses his job (poor guy).

Dave has encouraged me to start reading and writing more poetry, and I've been doing a bit of both as time permits. I'm going to end today with a poem. It's still pretty early in its lifecycle, and I'm still early in my learning cycle, so suggestions would be great:

First Words

I don't yet have a voice
for these words spun in darkness.

Fluid filled, I speak
bubbles enriched with life.

I am complete. Unborn
within you.

Right now, you
are my world, and

I leave my mark
on your ribs.

Now in Print and other Rambling

As time whittles onward towards the inevitable future, a little blurp of excitement arrived via our friendly neighborhood postman today: my four contributor's copies of the latest issue of Alligator Juniper complete with "(Un/Re/I )Do" fastened somewhere between the book's cover. I haven't had a whole lot of time to flip through the book, but it does have some very cool photography in it as well, and I'm sure lots of other stuff. In short, the whole shebang looks very nice.

In other news, the first baby shower is this weekend, and we're doing it co-ed style in the sense that men are coming to an historically female dominated affair. Sue's mindset on it was that she didn't want to leave her dad, my dad and me out of the picture. I'm a little afraid to be entering such a sacred and secretive womanly domain, but I'm sure us guys will trample all over the protocol like a pack of snorting wildebeests, making everything at once awkward and new to the point that the women forget that we've just trampled tradition in favor of food and gifts for all expectant parents.

On the Up and Up (with fingers crossed)

Despite being scheduled 2nd shift during a packet week, I successfully completed and sent my 33 page first draft of the ECE last Friday. And while the pressure's not completely off, I feel markedly relieved to be at least done with the drafting stage. For me, drafting is the pits. In a way, critical papers are kind of easier than creative pieces because you have to structure them very thoroughly, and such structuring leads pretty much in one direction: supporting your thesis and proving it. The lack of the creative spark in such composition, makes critical sentence slugging kind of boring after a few pages. While thinking up the things to say, and researching is very exciting, laying it all down is pretty boring.

But at least until I hear back from Louise, I'm taking a break on the ECE and working on some new creative material and getting back to reading non-research books. I'm currently about halfway through Barthelme's Forty Stories, some of which I really like, and other bits that are just a bit too quirky to really capture me. I'm also reading Rachel Harper's book out loud 1 chapter per day to Sue. It's a great book, and I'm really glad that it was picked for this fall's book in common for fiction. Our nightly poem is coming from the Poetry section of McSweeney's Quarterly vol 23--they do this big poetry chain thing where 10 poets pick 10 poems. Since I haven't read much poetry, I'm hoping all the exposure will turn me on to some more people. So far, it's been kind of lukewarm; Dave's book was much better in every way. I'm also looking forward to reading Lincoln's Melancholy, the new issue of Fence, Opium4, Democracy (Joan Didion), and Demonology (Rick Moody). If I get through that, I'll be about half way through the list of books that I considered for this semester.

Change sucks until it happens, then everything's cool till it's about to happen again

For me, the writing area is a sacred place. There's a certain sense of comfort mixed with intention loaded into such a place. I guess there's probably a fair amount of psychobabble I could dig up to further establish this point, but I'll just point out that most sleep deprivation studies say that the leading cause for insomnia is because the bed is being used for things other than sleep and sex. Isolate your area, and it becomes damn near magical.

Anyway, in addition to being very attached to my area, I'm also very attached to not changing things. Today we changed things. With the baby on the way, we moved the futon couch upstairs into my room, and in order to get it to fit we had to do a lot of shuffling. One of my book cases moved around the corner into the other attic room, Sue's drawing table shifted 90 degrees to the right, a lot of her fabric found a new home, our D&D bookshelf galavanted across the threshold, and most terrifyingly (for me at least [until now]), my desk had to move. Granted, it was just a straight slide from one side of the room to the other, but god you'd think I was taking an icepick in the forehead for it....I whined a lot. And Sue persisted. In the end, she was right to make me move (she always is), but what a shift.

I have an "L" shaped desk and a slanty roofed attic. Originally, the slanty wall was to my left (and covered in index cards, papers, and other random stuff). The short arm of the desk faced doorward, and the long arm was to my right (so basically I had to walk the long way around my desk to sit down. Cramped and narrow, it became very cave-ish up in the attic. Now the long arm is against the wall where the other bookshelf used to be. It's pretty swank-ish (now that I'm getting used to it). Here are a coupla pics. For a long time, I've been thinking about getting a picture of my writing area up, but apathy always took center stage. Does anyone else share a sense of insanity with their writing areas? What kind of crap do the rest of you put around your writing nooks?

Metaphysical Angst and other BS

I live in a brick rowhouse in lovely downtown Lawrence Park, a suburb subsidized entirely by GE (well at least it was back in the day). All the rowhouses are pretty much the same looking, with the only major difference being open porch vs. closed porch, duplex vs. quad. I have an open porch quad (middle) layout (in case you were wondering). These houses are damn nigh centenarians, and despite creaky floors, small kitchens, and "old man showers" in the basement, they're generally quite wonderful, especially in heat dissipation. Well, that is until the daily high temp breaks 90. And that's exactly what's happened the last few days. It's 22:00ish now and 86 outside and 85 inside, 80% humidity on both sides. In short, summer in Erie sucks. I'd much rather be shivering in my attic office than sweating on my porch hoping that 1. my laptop doesn't overheat 2. I don't get eaten alive by bugs and 3. that sometime before I go to sleep it'll cool down a little bit somewhere.

Of course, all of this heat comes at a pretty rotten time. I'm two arms deep in ECE, and it's starting to stink. By stink, I mean rot. By rot I mean that I'm currently writing the third draft of my first draft. WHAT?! Yes, that's right. It all came about because I have this wonderful talent, see. I can read a book with intent to write on it, then I can read supporting books, one after another, for weeks. This ability allows me to think of all kinds of wonderful connections, explanations, and beautifully tight critical prose. BUT. This ability manifests in logorrhea. Basically, it's a left handed skill that allows me to talk about things in a manner that is logical to me...not anyone else. Also this process tends to lend itself to considerable over-writing. Packet 1's response told me that 1. I have 4 ECE topics worth of ambition started, and 2. None of what I'm writing would make any sense to the average reader of an ECE.

So draft 1, revision 2 began, and fortunately died at only 4 pages (Draft 1 v1, was fifteen before it got shot down). Rev 2 died thanks to a lot of good conversation with Sue. She made me consider the "Why" of everything in a much more logical manner than I was able to conceptualize under my own left-handedness.

In short, instead of writing about how Postmodern literary theory operates to create a layered ontology within Ben Marcus' Age of Wire and String, I'm writing Why Marcus needed to make an ontology, and how it relates to the reader in a meaningful way--it's really almost the same thing, but not at all...

I do miss writing fiction.

Angst. Angst.

P.S. We went to my mom's today to escape into some AC, and got to see the original "Sweet Dreams" music video along with other 80s music videos on the magical Cable TV box. Someday, maybe I too can join the modern world and have cable channels other than Discovery. Maybe even a tv with a remote... Nah. Bitching about such lack is much more fun.