I'll stick around in the house of your mind

The dead leaf on a cobweb no longer hangs outside our shower window. I say "dead leaf on a cobweb" because that seemed the likeliest culprit: our shower window is plastered over with that kind of cloudy colorless contact paper that permits the passage of light but prevents your neighbors from having you proscribed for indecent exposure. So what we actually saw was a kind of trembling white blotch against vague blackness that periodically banged itself into the glass to the fitful rhythms of what we assumed but could not prove was the wind. It was M. R. Jamesian. In order to describe to spatch why I found it so uncanny, I resorted to John Bellairs. (Me, describing The Face in the Frost (1969): "It's this incredible blend of meta-comedy and nightmare fuel!") We saw it for two or three nights in a row; I started to feel weird about turning my back on it. It was never visible during the day. Tonight it was gone. In a reasonable universe, it got washed off in today's rain and is now lying behind the house in the part of the yard we don't have access to, since we don't live on the first floor. If it shows up at other windows, we move.

It's too close for comfort, it's too close to comfort me

My poem "Epic Cycle" has been accepted by Not One of Us. I wrote it for the centenary of Armistice Day. It's about war poetry as much as it is about war. I love this small black-and-white print 'zine, in case I have not mentioned lately; it's been around since 1986 and remains its essential weird self. It published my first fiction and I am still honored to have work in its pages. You should submit fiction and poetry of your own if you have it—I like having TOC-mates in print. It still feels more real to me.

(A moment to acknowledge the implosion of Tumblr, which I am on the outside of, but which I still don't enjoy watching. Its culture was not home to me, but I loved the history and art and discussion blogs and it did enable me for some time to keep track of the lives of friends who had drifted off LJ/DW or never been on them in the first place. Plus it made me learn to make aesthetic posts. And I am not in favor of moral panics anywhere.)

Otherwise I am sick and sick of it; it is no fun. I saw a doctor earlier this afternoon about the hellacious sore throat and since it looks as nasty as it feels but appears to be viral, there is nothing to do for it but the things I have been doing all week. I have limited energies and resources and am spending them on work rather than on any kind of writing because that is the necessary order of priorities in our economy, but it sucks, Harry, it sucks. I am feeling extraordinarily bitter about the demise of FilmStruck. There were a lot of movies on there I could have crashed in front of.

selkie made a remark about how on earth I function on the amount of sleep I don't get and I responded automatically, "With deftness born of long, sad practice, Fflewddur knotted up the broken string." She pointed out that under those circumstances I was owed a giant cat.



He has big paws.