Paintings of Polaroid pictures of thoughts in our heads

I perhaps overexerted myself over the course of my first day out in the wild with sufficient voice and stamina to attend an evening rehearsal rather than survive a doctor's appointment and am therefore second-guessing every single one of my interactions with other human beings and feeling generally terrible about myself and my prospects. For this reason I am repeat-listening to Alice Donut's "Where Is My Mind?" It is a thoroughly punk and entirely instrumental cover of the Pixies song in which the part of Black Francis is played by a trombone. I adore it. It's so doleful. It sounds like it's looking under the couch cushions.

yhlee did a one-card reading for me from the Shadowscapes Tarot and it came out the Ace of Pentacles. "This points to the possibility of prosperity, security, and abundance, and seeing rewards for hard work; energy spent will see returns. Good fortune and wisdom." It looks like a suit full of chameleons, dragons, and trees. Here's hoping.

(Subject header and music supplied by the previous song I was repeat-listening to, until I realized it was maybe not a good idea.)

Half the days are mine remembering friends from the earth

From the front lines of the lurgi: I woke up coughing in the middle of the night, have a spiking headache, have appointments I can't miss this afternoon [edit: THE MBTA DECREED OTHERWISE]. I had to check when I got up that there was not really a Cambridge-area writer named Sandrine Aday who had written an unfinished sequence of intense, dreamlike, anthropomorphic animal fantasies from the early '80's through the early '90's before dying under still-mysterious circumstances having to do with a holdup and her daughter being in jail. In the dream I had grown up reading her, as had several but not all of my friends; she had the kind of not quite cult fandom of Meredith Ann Pierce, pre-Baen P.C. Hodgell, pre-Firebird Clare Bell. "Like Redwall, but earlier, and only the weird bits," I remember describing her work to someone who had never heard of her. She had never been reprinted. That was changing, I really want to say because Small Beer Press had waded through the rights hell that was the remains of her estate; a previously unpublished story of hers was the centerpiece of one of their upcoming anthologies. I had work in it; so did Greer Gilman; so did Ruthanna Emyrs. The Aday story had herons and a sacrifice headland, which ties it to one of the oldest dreams I can remember. I was reading the galleys in a boathouse. I really resent this anthology not existing.

P.S. I rated an end-of-year recommendation in the same company as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Audre Lorde, and Dorothy B. Hughes. I'll take it!

P.P.S. And TCM is running Van Heflin movies for his birthday. I have already reviewed Act of Violence (1948) and The Prowler (1951); I have never seen Patterns (1956); I made it halfway through Tennessee Johnson (1942) once. I guess I have a plan? I've been so sick, I haven't even been watching movies.