Journal

By the time you read this, I will be on the doorstep of my local computer repair place, anxiously waiting for them to open so I can picking up goddamn laptop.

They assure me it is fixed. And only two days outside their initial projections, which is something of a miracle given the way technology fails tend to creep up on me. Assuming they are right about the fix – please, gods, let them be right – I will give them money and cart the laptop to Write Club where I will promptly WRITE ALL THE GODDAMN THINGS.

I do not like it when my technology fails me. It will be good to be back.

In the event this proves to be a cruel taunt on the part of the fates…well, we shan’t consider that.

I turn thirty-nine today. As is traditional, I am posting the first-thing-I-Do-On-My-Birthday-Ugly-Selfie, because no birthday is complete until my parents ring wondering why in hell I would put such a thing on the internet. This year, we celebrate the new reality of me and sleep:

Occasionally, just for the hell of it, I will wake up and say Luke, I am your Father, just ’cause the breathing effects are right.

It was about this point, last year, that I fell asleep while driving and finally got to the point that my doctor to thought hmmm, maybe sleep apnea? We should send you for tests. It took a really long time to get to that point, but I’m incredibly happy that shit got sorted out. Years of feeling like I was somehow broken, and suddenly there was a fix.

Thirty-eight was a pretty good year, as a result. I look forward to thirty-nine.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I shall go and celebrate my birthday the best way I know how: breakfast at my local cafe, write club, avoiding Facebook until the deluge of birthday well-wishers has subsided, and crossing my fingers that I’ll get a phone call from the repair place letting me know I can come pick up my laptop.

There is a line in Joe R. Lansdale’s novella, Briar Patch Boogie, that took my breath away when I read it. It goes a little something like this:

It was still raining and you could hear the drops falling into the water like plums falling off trees.

It’s a good line, in isolation. A clear, beautiful image and a nice cadence to it. It’s a great line within the context of the story, where it tells us all sorts of things about the narrator and the things they notice and the contrast between his internal life and the way he presents to the world around him.

Nothing terribly surprising about that; Lansdale is fucking incredible at this stuff. He’s one of those writers who is utterly in control of every aspect of his work, building scenes and characters and stories with incredible precision. A man who loves the language and the character, the sound of the words on the page and on the tongue.

I’ll be taking a whole bunch of Lansdale short stories away with me, when I hit Gladstone this weekend. More than I would usually take, for a quick trip away, because I’m now travelling without my poor, broken laptop and need something to fill the hours when I’m not taking workshops.

Were it not for the inconvenience when it comes to work matters, I could quite get used to being computer-free around the house.