To the seats with the clearest view

Right; I have a life somewhere around here. Where did I leave it?

Most of yesterday was spent in the company of fleurdelis28, with whom I have spent far too little real-world time lately. As is traditional, we met in front of the Coop in Harvard Square and then didn't leave for hours—only hunger drove us from our respective contemplation of Dorothy Sayers and Robert van Gulik to Cafe of India, which delighted me by including goat curry in its buffet. (grailquestion, I still maintain this is your fault.) After which we repaired back to the Coop; I got her The Nine Tailors as an only mildly belated birthday present, we agreed that there are too many good books in the world and not enough disposable income, and we were both slightly disturbed by the existence of a children's novelization of Dead Man's Chest. Probably this sparked the conversation that, hours later, led to our Odyssean quest with muchabstracted for a video store that carried Curse of the Black Pearl on VHS, so that we could watch it on the actual television rather than fleurdelis28's laptop. You'd think that with a sequel out this summer, stores would carry multiple copies of the first movie and thereby make a killing, yes? Apparently this is not the Blockbuster way. Thank God for weird independent video stores.

It was drizzling the whole time, somewhere between mist and real rain, so that I kept opening my umbrella only to find that I didn't need it after all; but the moment I closed it up, the rain would pick up again. The streets were full of hazy reflection from the streetlights and wherever we walked, fleurdelis28's apartment seemed still to lie in the same direction like a sort of moveable north. (Or it doesn't want to be found: when we came down on the subway that afternoon, we were too busy talking about Disney's Beauty and the Beast to get off at the right stop; and as we made our way back from the wrong stop, we were so involved in analyzing Javert from Les Misérables that we walked right past her street.) More than once, one of us remarked that we were either in a David Lynch movie or the kind of plotless indie film in which lots of aimless conversation itself comments on the human condition. We traded horrifying landlord stories. I left my umbrella in the weird independent video store and one of the clerks actually ran out into the night after me. This was the kind of excursion where people decide halfway home that Thai food sounds like a good idea, and then someone detours into Whole Foods instead, and the next thing you know it's chips and sushi and macaroni and cheese eaten on the floor in front of the couch while kitchen-cleaning housemates in the other room necessitate cranking the television up to surround-sound volumes and anyway you're dissecting plot and character during the action scenes . . . It was awesome. I need more random nights like this in my life. Also to see fleurdelis28 and muchabstracted in person more than, oh, once every three years. We're living in the same city. This is ridiculous.

Continuing my downward slide into online publication, my poem "Bonny Fisher Boy" has been accepted by Scheherezade's Bequest. It's drawn from Eliza Carthy's "Fisher Boy" and it was written for amphibiouswords. And when I get done with my current story, perhaps I will write something that is not about the sea.

Lastly, I nicked this from tithenai. Silly me, I thought it was going to be a meme in Latin . . .*
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*Incidentally, lux sit does mean literally "let there be light," but Jerome's Vulgate uses fiat lux—let light come into being. This message has been brought to you by the letter Pedantry.