Dead City Scrolls

My New Year’s resolution is the same as last year’s: to read James Joyce’s Ulysses cover to cover.  God damnit.

I can do this!  Hal Jordan!

that the Devil loved Joan of Arc?

It was a dream I had.  The Devil saw the Maid of Orleans and tragedy ahead of her and he fell in love with her.  He tried to save her by teaching her about the ideals he held dearest, pure love and pacifism and atheism and the brotherhood of men and the uselessness of nations.

Her faith was strong and she resisted temptation, won battles, was burned for wearing men’s clothes, went to heaven, and the Devil was  alone.

Four.  Four breakfasts.

The mousses at Christmas dinner were too whipped cream flavored for the surprise to really hit anybody.  Everything else has been outstanding.  Tomorrow there will be soup made from goose stock  and bread and potatoes roasted in goose fat.

So there’s that.  Holiday blogbreak has ended.

Liquor has destroyed my brain.  It is a little ragged brown walnut sloshing around in a pool of 90 proof vomit inside my skull.  If any of you has any decency you’ll hire someone to finish the job that Jameson’s started.

I have a shiny high quality non stick pan that makes eggs and pancakes like no kind of motherfucker before.  It’s 10:55 and I am going to have as many breakfasts as I can before noon.

It is a goose!

The goose will be cooked slowly with orange and coffee beans and cinnamon and cloves inside of it.

The goose will be served with (home made) cranberry sauce and stuffing.

There will be mashed potatoes.  I am bridging the potatoes v. stuffing dispute and just having both.

There will be a dessert: pears poached in red wine and served with syrup made from the same wine.  A little drizzle of balsamic reduction will go around the pears.  There will also be two mousses with it: one orange and one mint.

The twist is this: the orange flavoured one will be faintly green coloured and the mint one will be faintly orange coloured.

Look out Shyamalan.

Routed by sandstorms into lands without direction. Holding impulse as a bare guiding light he pushed South until South and will dissolved in shimmering clouds of sand and the consuming sorcerous urge itself grew untrustworthy. He found South with the morning sun and stopped and sat dead where he was when the sand threatened trickery and found nonetheless that by evening he’d gone far adrift. Exhausted he abandoned South for wherever the great hand would shuffle him off to next and now he had just found the first trace of not sand in all the deep desert, a blasted smooth gargoyle like the desert had laid him a sinister egg to bake in the sand, or perhaps it would hatch and crack him open instead.

Nameless walks past the gargoyle and as he goes finds more cracked and stormsmooth ivory stonework like the beached debris of titan ocean ships. The ornaments of their bows faceless now.

Smooth stone in small waves. He climbs it and hops from stone to shaking stone sending some skidding down in miniature landslides. Over the crest of a wave he sees where the rubble ends against a standing fragment of white wall and between the broken and unbroken stone sand has accumulated higher than in the infinite desert to either side, ruby red silk chairs mostly buried there and an improbable child in an improbable black dress crouched on the balls of her feet elbows on knees palms up filled with draining sand. He watches sand washing away in the wind for a long time before he goes down and sits against a wall with his toes digging into the soft old silk. He closes his eyes and they sting, but opening them then only makes it worse. Sitting partially in the wall’s shadow, eyes shut, waiting for the stinging to subside.

“Why are you here?” he asks her.

“For you. She brought you back and I had to come.”

“What?” and then “Are you alone?” and “How long have you been here?”

“Then is here, but Now isn’t because you’re not allowed to have it.” She seems to take her time to think and to watch as he watches the unspooling of hourglass sand between her fingers. “I’ve been here for always,” with the certainty of Ogron, but she has no horns.

“Why did you say you’re here for me?”

Not a single response so far to the earlier call to Make Art.  It’s not that heavy duty, is it?  Max doesn’t get off so easy, he owes me nothing less than the word of god.

Not quite the same as the old boss.

So for a while I’ve had a wisdom tooth coming in and it’s only just gotten to the point where it’s very bitey. And you know what? This tooth is awesome. It is better than any other tooth I have for cracking nuts open.

In other news, I sent Cory Doctorow an email seeking information on how to distribute and advertise fiction under the Creative Commons banner. I hope he hops in his balloon and ties on his cape and comes to help me.

Addendum: Jesus.  He mailed me back in like, less than an hour.  I must have set off the fucking Doctorow signal or some shit.  Linked so some articles on more or less what I was asking about, wished me good luck and sent me on my way, but not with anything very concrete.  No websites dedicated to this, I suppose.  Maybe I should just give in and start looking for an agent and publisher.