Hello my friends and welcome back to another episode of “Sleep Deprivation Theatre”
I am coming off of another long night that fed into another long day. With only three hours sleep in the last 48, things are going to get interesting for me by tonight.
As usual, I have been running around the state on behalf of the FA with little to no sleep. In my few moments of “normalcy” I have not typed up an update for the website. So nothing has changed…
As I drove from Pensacola to Orlando (by way of Jacksonville) I was struck by a sudden flash of inspiration and I ended up pulling over on the side of the road to note it all down. I limped into the next rest stop where I spent three hours typing at all out on the laptop. The muse strikes me at the most inconvenient times. Why not when I’m sitting in a hotel room with nothing to do? Oh well, I got a few new chapters out of it and I think I am approaching the 90k count. I still have the denouement to come and I’ll top out well over 110k. I haven’t turned on my “editing side of my brain” and I already know of a few scenes that I need to trim down. Too much info-dump that I never used later in the story. So the final work will be closer o a nice trim 100k. This will be my fifth novel-length work completed and I am promising Teresa that it will be the last one to burn. She gets so frustrated that I never let her read them. I never promised that I’d let her read any new stuff, just that I’d stop setting them ablaze.
Last weekend was supposed to be my “big weekend alone” when I could just hang out and let loose without the family around. Well, that never happens with me. I mowed the lawn (some of it anyway) and cleaned off the back patio. I went out with some friends but nothing I wouldn’t have done if Teresa weren’t in town. I cleaned up what mess I had made in the house and then went back to work. Time off is a very relative term and I live a very boring life without my family around.
Friday I made it back in to town in time to visit with Wade and pull out the scuba gear. I didn’t realize how “stored away” it was. It took us a while to gather but by Friday evening we had the gear ready and all we needed was to rent the air tanks for Sunday’s dive. Wade showed off is talents by making me a pen out of a random chunk of Cypress log lying on the workbench. He is very talented and I am always impressed with how he sees the object in the raw wood and coaxes it out using these awesome tools. I’ve got a really nice “stuff holder” he made for me sitting up on my computer. He made a really nice plate/bowl for Teresa that she keeps up on her altar. He says that some of his stuff is in a local art gallery and it really is beautiful. I bought a new notebook to go with my new pen. I’ve already started a bunch of ideas in it, let’s see if I finish any of them.
Originally Saturday was booked for Kristin’s 16th birthday party but it was postponed.
I kept Saturday open to hang out with Heffner but he was busy so I ended up at the scuba shop renting tanks and then mowing the lawn. The shop can be real depressing because I saw that I’ll need just under $1000 in order to buy my own gear. Lisa said I should look at e-Bay but the thought of buying used scuba gear on line scares the hell out of me. So Saturday day was spent and I was really looking forward to an evening of just flat-out nothingness. I was going to cook up an experimental dinner and just laze around, maybe play some StarCraft. I just wanted to melt down. While getting the tanks from the shop, Wade tells me that although Kristin’s party was cancelled there will still be a few people getting together and hanging out. I just wanted to stay at home tonight… BUT, how can I be reluctant to drive across town when John and Dawn (I missed you Jeannie!) are driving in from across the state? I was just so tired and lazy… And I was glad I got off my fat ass and showed up. Nothing amazing or spectacular happened except that feeling you get from hanging around good people and that is spectacular enough for me.
Sunday was fun. Once again, not for the events of the day but for the company. We drove out to “Peacock Springs” and the water was incredibly low. The drought conditions are lowering the springs to the point that only cave divers are bothering with them for the most part. We drove over to “Troy Springs” and although the water was low there too, we decided it would be a waste to come all this way and not even get wet. If we used Wade’s tanks we would have turned around and gone home but returning rented tanks full of air is just a sin. We geared up and headed down to the dive hole. Hitting that water takes my breath away every time. It’s cold and it’s deep but it’s also that exhilaration that tells me that we’re diving again. I’ll never get tired of that feeling. Some say that diving the springs is boring and I understand why they say that. This dive was 30 minutes with a max depth of 68 feet in a 40 foot wide sink hole. In this situation, that’s about 20 minutes too long. There was nothing to see, nothing to do but I never noticed that. I never experienced the boredom that most people feel from a dive like this. I was elated the entire time and having fun just being under the water and breathing. I’m like a fanboy meeting the singer in his favorite band. I just giggled and grinned the whole time. Maybe after a few hundred dives I’ll be bored with the springs but right now I don’t see how anyone can ever get tired of floating ‘weightless’ through the water and seeing the bottom of a spring. Rolling over on your back and falling to the bottom while looking up at the sun filtering in through the water. The outline of the spring walls so clearly defined in that shimmer of light and dark. It is magical to me every time, even on an admittedly dull dive like this one. We swam around looking into every dark crevice and sticking our heads as low into the output flow as we could. After 30 minutes of that, you’re ready to be done with the dive. I practiced my buoyancy and although I am getting better about staying neutral enough to stay off of the bottom (most of the time) I still need to work on staying horizontal instead of vertical. I need to practice a LOT! On the way back up it was cool to see the swimmers diving into the spring and bobbing back up to the surface. 60 feet doesn’t seem so deep until you look up and see the perspective of someone at the surface. So we had fun and when we got home we cleaned up the dive gear and laid it out to dry.
We laid the gear out on my new trailer. I bought (in the process of buying) a trailer from Wade and Dianne. It is an old pop-up camper type and they decided it was going to be impractical to repair/rebuild it like they intended. The canvas was the straw that broke the camel’s back. So, he’s going to get another one that is in good shape and I am buying this one to use strictly for transport and storage. I can fit all of the camping gear (including Teresa’s bed) in this thing and I think I’ll have a small amount of room left over. I just need to put a trailer hitch on Teresa’s truck and replace some of the plywood on the bottom. The top cranks up nicely and will keep our gear safe and dry so that I can keep it in the trailer year round instead of loading it back and forth into the storage unit. As soon as I get the hitch installed I’m going to pick it up and start the minor work it needs, like a coat of black paint and a few skulls painted on it…
Let’s talk movies. I have been watching a lot of movies recently but very few new ones. I was called out for it this weekend about how my movie reviews have come to a stop recently. Well, I don’t write up movies I’ve seen over and over. I just watched the Godfather Part 2 and I just finished watching the commentary tracks on the original Star Wars trilogy.
Quick aside: It is always an argument that Luca$ had written out every detail of the 6 (9?) movies before he filmed the first one. Some people defend the shitty new movies and wave away the glaring flaws by saying that they were planned in Luca$’ mind all along and therefore are not flaws. I submit to you, the commentary track for “The Empire Strikes Back” in which Luca$ says he had to invent the Yoda character because he didn’t realize how important the ObiWan Kenobi character was going to be and that he shouldn’t have killed him off so quickly. If this is true, then he didn’t conceive Yoda until he started writing Empire and he was not a major character in the prequel series. I have serious doubts that he wrote anything more than a basic outline for the plot and that’s about it. That’s not a problem until you get “VaderFan” on line arguing with you that Luca$ is the omnipotent God of the SW universe and that he had the entire story written “as is” even before he started filming any of it. I don’t believe in ANY omniscient being and if I did, I would say that Luca$ is phoning-in his God duties. Ok, enough of this…
So, I have watched some new movies recently. I have to write up reviews for them so they are coming. I watched/dozed through “Phat Girlz” yesterday because I was flipping through the channels, saw the end of “Entrapment” and while I dozed off, the remote fell off the bed and tumbled out of reach. I awoke to the “Next on HBO” music and decided it was too much to get up and find the remote so I actually suffered through “Phat Girlz” while trying unsuccessfully to get back to sleep. You won’t see a review of “Entrapment” because I’ve seen it a few times already. You should see a review of “Phat Girlz” because it was new to me but you won’t. I have blocked it from my memory. I’m sure that the new “Back To School” remake will be just as promising as the “Honeymooners” remake was. Here’s as racist and bigoted as I get: Why do they think that sticking a black actor in a white actor’s role will sell movies? Jackie Gleason and Rodney Dangerfield are fat white men. Replacing them with fat black men makes it funny? I don’t get it. So will it work if we remake “Roots” with Jerry Seinfeld as Kunte Kinte? What about “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?” with Ashton Kutcher in place of Sidney Poitier? Oh wait, that’s been done… AND IT WASN’T VERY GOOD WAS IT!?!?! The shock of dropping in a race reversal isn’t very funny. Come up with some good ideas of your own and stop robbing the graves of those that came before you. I’m always simplifying movies down to their basics. I am a writer that is well aware of the basic plots and the fact that nothing is new BUT, a good writer should be able to tell the same story a hundred different ways. Tell your version but don’t trample on what came before you by spewing out the same old tired bits with the novelty of having a black man where we are used to seeing a white man. It doesn’t work. A lot of these early movies that I cherish are crap. They were the right movie at the right age and I love them now. “Back to School” sucked. Even with Sam Kinison as Professor Turgeson, it was by no means a great film BUT, I saw it at the right time when I really got a kick out of simple movies like that. And someone else must have felt the same way or they wouldn’t try to do a remake of it, no matter how ill-conceived I think it is…
Paris Hilton is the news this week. I saw a headline during her release that said, “Paris Hilton is free at last.” Like she’s Nelson fucking Mandela or the plight of an entire race or something. “Free at last, free at last. Thank Lee Baca she’s free at last.” That’s about all I’ve got on that. She’s already eaten up way too much of my time by my even mentioning her. I was going to work in some kind of semi-witty comment about the occupation of France and the liberation of Paris but she’s not even worth the effort.
I had to replace the bass drum head on my set this weekend. It developed a flaw in the skin a while back so I wasn’t upset, just surprised when it went. It died on me during the rare time I get to play and too late to get to the music store. Dammit!
So I screwed around on YouTube. I saw a video someone put together of all the Dr. Who re-generations. It was kind of cool but I’m ignorant of most of the Dr. Who series. I only watched some of the show during the 4th doctor who appears to have been the most popular doctor by what I read on-line.
I also found a clip of “Downfall” that has a funny over dub. It was the bunker scene where they tell Hitler that the Allies have broken through and will soon roll in to Berlin. Hitler goes spastic and eventually plans his suicide/death. The while scene was in German but the English sub-titles was about Microsoft banning Hitler’s X-Box for being a modified console and he can never play on-line again. He goes spastic and really gets upset when one of his guys suggests buying a Nintendo Wii. “OH that would go over well, Hitler gives up and decides to play with his Wii. That would be a great headline for the enemy!!!” It was funny.
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