Category: Landmarks

Harder Better Fitter Stronger

Oh yeah! I got a car! It’s a little black Honda Fit (yes, I know you’ve never heard of it) and, three hundred miles in, I love it more than I will ever love my children. My children, for instance, will not get thirty-five miles to the gallon on mostly-vertical Garrard County roads. They’ll be lucky to get ten.

I told this to my uncle Dennis, who reads this blog, and he immediately asked whether I had painted a big “FUCK YOU” on the side of it. I said: not yet!

The insignificance of numbers

Today I posted the 1001st story in Anacrusis, and I wanted to do something a little different for the occasion: an audio story, read aloud by a startling array of generous people. I thought the hardest part would be actually asking them to read the silly little thing without cringing, and the next-hardest would be the actual mixing process. It turns out that the hard part is not being able to use all the material from everyone for the whole thing. They were all so good!

Thanks to Robert Baker-Self, Maria Barnes, Amanda and Jon Brasfield, David Clark, Amanda Dale, Kevan Davis, John Dixon, Holly Gramazio, Josh Hadley, Sumana Harihareswara, Stephen Heintz, Catriona Mackay, William O’Neil, Leonard Richardson, Kristofer Straub, and everyone who’s had a kind or critical word to say about Anacrusis. Let’s do this again when we hit 10,201.

Brenna

The animal turned one year old on Tuesday; there was a party with cake and everything, which I got to attend via webcam. We live in the future.

Wednesday night (or Thursday morning) I was too exhausted to write another story for the Anacrusis queue, so Maria wrote one for me. You probably cannot guess what it is about.

Once there was the puppiest chomper in all the land. She woke up in
her chompy bed scratching her chompy head. Today was an especially chompy day.

She climbed into all the windows and looked out. She took all the
socks from the hamper and hid them. She sniffed.

Something was off.

The chomper followed Person to the car. They went adventuring!
Person bought a large box.

They got home. All of the chomper’s friends sang songs to her and
gave her stuff and there was a cake with her name on it!

It was the chompiest. She went to sleep.

Brenna is concerned about the cake.

I’ve been here for a week! This morning Holly made baby pancakes (which she called something much nicer that I can’t remember) and we ate them on the back porch, and the rest of the house failed to vote me out. I’m glad. This is a pretty great house!

I’ve been to Battersea Park repeatedly, and to the Science and Natural History Museums, and on a Tube Walk (pictures), and today I tried to go to a scheduled pickup Frisbee game at Hyde Park but it turned out not to exist. But still! I navigated to Hyde Park and back all by myself! I also managed to get to Victoria Station and back, twice, to pick up and drop off Caitlan when she visited.

Keen-eyed readers of this blog will note that normally I don’t go outside that much in a month, and will probably guess further that I am deliberately overcompensating to fight culture shock / homesickness / loneliness et cetera. Good guess, keen readers. But it’s working! And given my only other experience outside the country, I think overcompensation is entirely in order.

London is awfully big, but awfully neat too.

Update 03.07.2007 1243 hrs: Pikelets! They were called pikelets.

Tonight I got an email from Mr. Munson. He’s teaching his first Creative Writing course this semester, and he wants to use Anacrusis as a (positive) example.

Maybe someday I’ll sell a story or a novel and be inducted into the ranks of the print-published; maybe not. Either way I’m going to look back at January 5, 2007, as the day I Made It.