Sunday, January 18, 2009

how things go

This morning I slept in until 11 am. I had two glasses of water and got dressed. I went to the gym and spent 20 minutes on the elliptical at a mounting scale of resistance while watching "Mean Girls" on ABC Family. Wondered when 'bitchy' became a word appropriate to air on a television network aimed at family audiences. After sweating all over a series of leg muscle-oriented weights machines, I came home. I quickly made some black bean soup, showered and ate the soup while reading the Sunday Times. I chatted online with three friends and made plans to see each of them, then I relocated to Outpost Cafe to give K and B the house to themselves for the day. I read two stories from Raymond Carver's "Will You Be Quiet, Please?" and decided that I must have stolen from one of them for a short story I wrote in 2005. Had a cup of peppermint tea. Moved to a table near a power outlet in the back, had another cup of tea and an almond croissant, reformatted my resume, sent some e-mails, scoped the nearby movie listings.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

my dreams are always pitching

One of last night's dreams involved an American Idol contestant whose father was Walter Reade, who in this dream was not a movie theater mogul but a workmanlike film director of the 70s and 80s, perhaps like Walter Hill. The host of the show requested a stagehand play a DVD of Walter Reade's film "Big," which was not a Tom Hanks dramedy but a shaggy dog story featuring Walter Matthau (lots of riffs on 'Walter' here) as a large, lumbering and coarse police officer. Looked funny.