Still No Blowjobbery...

Good part/bad part: The good part is that much bigger sections of A Book of Tongues backstory and overall plot are revealing themselves to me with every note-taking break; suddenly, I even sort of understand why one of the main characters is doing what he's doing, which is never unwelcome. The bad part is that although I've probably done another 1,000 words today, none of them get me from page next to page after that in the actual damn chapter I'm working on. I move stuff around, hook stuff up, realize something's missing, go back and fix it, and still end up with a spotty, barely-readable archipelago that's not really fit to show anybody (as yet). It's annoying.

So instead, I'm going to do some chores, correspondence and other catch-up stuff. Try to weed down this insane pile of crap on my desk. Cal was crazy on Saturday, crazy-but-happy on Sunday, and today had a massive meltdown with Rod because Rod wouldn't let him get away with not using his words, the way we more-than-occasionally do. I'm also getting a clear signal that the people at JK would really, really like it if we could get him toilet-trained sometime soon; he'll be five by September, for Christ's sake. I know I'm failing him in that respect, but...urrgh. Man, it's just really hard, especially when he isn't into it (which is always).

OTOH, when I went to pick him up today he smiled at me, and said: "It's a Mommy!" And it turns out that he likes getting his hair brushed, which is good, because he really needed it. So that's a couple of positive--events, if not developments.

Over the weekend, I bought Joe R. Lansdale's graphic novel adaptation of Robert E. Howard's "Pigeons From Hell" (updated, more of a sequel than a straight revisioning, but there's some fun and awful stuff in it nevertheless; the artist used wouldn't have been my own choice, unfortunately), Parasyte #6, and the oddest new manga I've seen in quite some time: Me and the Devil Blues, by Akira Hiramoto, which purports to cover "the Unreal Life of Robert Johnson". In it, RJ sells his soul to the devil at the crossroads, then immediately loses his wife, unborn child and home, and hooks up on a bizarre cross-Dustbowl road-trip with a post-Bonnie Clyde Barrow. The art is weirdly photo-realistic, dark and surreal, with fetishistic attention paid to reproducing the Carnivale-esque South Gothic minutiae of the time period; each chapter is named after a Johnson song, too, which rocks: "If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day", etc. Clyde manages to be both a genuine bad-ass and dumb as a stump, while RJ comes off as perhaps the most "normal" person involved. But it's also sloooow in a Noh-play kind of way, and there's something really offputting about thinking of Hiramoto constantly writing the n-word out over and over again, probably in English, because it gets used a lot here--not inaccurate, just creepy. (I could only find Volume #2, but it was worth it; the people at the Hairy Tarantula tell me Volume #1 is on re-order, and may be in by next week.)

At the end of a first week of double classes, meanwhile, I can also report that I feel generally improved--my stamina has definitely shot up, so I think I'll be keeping to this system. But my digestive problems continue; when we went to Push on Saturday night, if I'd liked the movie better (or it'd been quiet enough for people to hear me), I might have actually felt like apologizing to the audience members around me for the truly grotesque amount of methane and repulsive noise I produced throughout. One way or the other, I seem to spend a whole lot of my time tracking things moving through my body, which needs to stop; I don't have the energy, and don't need the distraction.