Snoozing in the Rubbish Bin

Tensions run high in the pastoral paradise that is Chez Conley. My parents had several blistering (but generally short) rows about furniture, but now my mother refuses to go into the sitting room, where my father's asleep. She's sequestered herself in my erstwhile library, undoubtedly soiling my precious books with her filthy cancer-smoke and watching, tirelessly, as a monolith watches its charged landscape, re-runs of daft soap operas or well-worn, familiar sitcoms.

So here sit I, the remnants of a surprising winter gush of rain throbbing slowly outside. I poked my nose out during the height of the blazing damp, while lightning tore ragged through the sky, and sniffed about (also, I looked about). My thought, at that moment, was, one might expect me to write something rather serious and dramatic just now. As my computer was uncoupled from its heart's-blood (that is, the electrical outlet) due to surge dangers, I couldn't comfortably write much of anything.

As the tensions run through the house like streakers into the Channel come Boxing Day, I'm not sure that I'll get much writing done (depending entirely, as it normally does, on a sense of goodwill and humor to pervade it), though I'll try. I thought, to try and re-capture the mood, I'd post one of the several footnotes the story, tentatively titled "Bernard and the History of Crime," sports thus far:

Many highwaymen, or “gentlemen of the road,” as they often preferred to be called, might order their flunkies to open sensitive negotiations in just such a way – The Well-Mannered Butcher; Jacob Stanley, the Noseless; The Florenese Scrum, Esq.; and, most famously, Blind Old Tommy, the Archer were all well-known aficionados of the opening bevy of fletches.

This is the first footnote, found on page two; it references the firing of a crossbow quarrel before opening negotiations begin.

". . . I've got more hits than Sadaharu Oh"

Well, as I'm quite bored at this point in the night, I thought I'd go through all the trouble it takes to update - the veritable lack of effort required slides from my wildly-firing brainpan like burnt egg from Teflon.

I really haven't done much of consequence. I've been reading some of my textbooks for next semester; I finished The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics. Now, if I'm right about the acronym (at this late - early, really - juncture, I can't be bothered to fact-check) and "DC" stands for "Detective Comics," then that title is The [Detective Comics] Comics Guide to Writing Comics. Rather redundant, really. I'm also mostly through Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. As I've read this book I keep thinking back to all the things we discussed in my theory and criticism class, especially reader-response (McCloud's "Closure" and "Blood in the Gutter"), semiotics ("Icons"), and myth-criticism ("Cartooning"). I'm also nearly finished with Jane Eyre - I described this to my cousins last week as "inconsequential people doing inconsequential things" and James (having read it previously) agreed. It's decent enough, but it's painfully obvious how certain things will turn out, and Jane's attitude tends toward the anticlimax.

I got a few video games for Christmas, so I've been playing those - Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance; Final Fantasy IV Advance (actually, I haven't played this yet, because I'm so caught up with the others); and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap.

I've played a great deal of Morrowind, and I think I'm fairly close to finishing the storyline actually - I'm already the master of all the groups I could join, and I'm just waiting around for Goldbrand to have all the Daedric quests finished.

I don't have much of a real interest to say, I guess. I could talk about my writing, but that seems reasonably silly, especially as I have so little done - just a bare 1600 words of a new story, and a few pages of another that I'll probably turn into a comic script instead. I suppose it's about time to ring off, then.