"I've always been the coward."

[greygirlbeast]

I awoke about nine p.m., hot and sweaty and sick from having taken a Valium and two Sonata, but then only slept five hours. I awoke to relive, it seems, an especially grotesque day from October 1990.

It's just me, or it's everyone, or it's only some people, but even after forty-seven years, I've no idea whatsoever.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,236 words on a new vignette, "The Granting Cabinet."

I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to keep up these journal entries during Readercon. Back in March, I promised myself I'd make an entry every day for six months. But I'm not about to pay the hotel's exorbitant charge for internet access, so I really have no idea how I'm going to make it happen. Not that anyone much still reads LJ – they're all too busy with the easy, instant gratification and minimal compositional prerequisites of Twitter and Facebook – but it's important to me, if only because it's a promise I made to me.

Maybe I'll spend the day lying on the kitchen floor. The view from there isn't so bad.

Here are the photos from Saturday that I'd wanted to post yesterday.





View to the north from Beavertail. A couple of the aforementioned students on the right.



A dog belonging to the students.



The sea churning below where we'd stretched our blanket.



A shot Sonya took while wading. View to the southwest, towards Narragansett.



Spooky and I, in the sun. View to the northwest.



Sonya and fishermen (who caught nothing but seaweed). View to the southwest.



A very wonderful beetle that we found crawling on Spooky's foot.



As we left, Sonya spotted this very cool book on the dashboard of the car parked next to ours.

All photographs Copyright © 2011 by Caitlín R. Kiernan, Kathryn A. Pollnac, and Sonya Taaffe.

Comments

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

(left out of the entrance to the hotel, on the right, about a third of a mile. Starbucks?).

Oh, gods. Starbucks. I think I was banned from there for telling them their coffee and diarrhea were pretty much the same thing. Except diarrhea's free.

It is a miserable non-solution, but, should you have need, and barring the vicissitudes of schedule, I, my vehicle, laptop and questionable navigational skills are at your service.

It is a kind offer. Let's not hope it comes to that.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

I learned to drink coffee on boiled-down dregs at my first office job, which has made my palate pretty much indifferent to coffee, good or bad (though I did get a sip of the coffee that civet cats shit, and they shit coffee good enough that I could notice), but yeah, Starbucks' various practices rankle my principles and their everything else rankles my ... everything else.

Let's not hope it comes to that.

I hope this as well, but the offer stands, if it is needed.

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

Starbucks' various practices rankle my principles and their everything else rankles my ... everything else.

Yerp. Then there are the prices.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

This fact reminds me that a often overlooked benefit of the day job is that they just give me coffee, any time I want, as much as I need. This does not make up for the ever-increasing relative inequality of value in my employment contract, but it is something.

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

It's hot water filtered through pulverized people. The way people behave, you'd think the stuff were gold (coffee, in general, not just the swill at Starbucks).

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

True. And administered as a stimulant to the pulverizers. Very easy to ignore, very difficult to escape. Which excuses nothing, but there it is.