Fond of rumpots, crackpots, and how are you, Mr. Wilson?

Mrff. Hard forcing myself to engage online lately. Last week I can blame on project brain (two YouTube videos posted in less than a week, which never happens), but this week I can only chalk up to a combination of inertia and lack of an emotional gas pedal. I did get some good in-person interactions, heading to Boston to hang with felisdemens et al (man, I've forgotten frickin' everybody's username). A wonderful time had with folks I'd not seen in a while, but after an evening of full-bore large-group socializing on Friday I got as far as lunchtime on Saturday before I was requesting living room squatting with as few expectations as possible. Very much worth it. Friday had a fire pit.

Yesterday's adventure was a drive 35 minutes away for an MRI, because no week is complete without sticking your head in a dishwasher and trying not to anxiety-twitch. This was at the request of the neurologist my GP sent me to after I asked about the head-spinny events that have picked up again. Quick recap: I sometimes experience random dizziness, ranging from lightheadedness to Tilt-a-Whirl level, "Could someone please help me to the bedroom to lie down because I'm going to hit the door frame if I try it solo?" type of attacks. These are nothing new, but they've been gaining frequency; going theory is that they're probably anxiety-related (see above agoraphobia) but I made an appointment Just In Case. My GP (or rather, the doctor filling in until my relocated GP has been replaced) checked me out, said it's probably anxiety but ordered blood work and a neuro consult Just In Case. Blood work was fine; neuro gave me the ol' stand-on-one-leg-and-touch-your-nose business, said that he couldn't see any major issues and it's probably anxiety but ordered an MRI Just In Case. Fun.

If you're asking, yes, I'm a fight-or-flight claustrophobe most of the time, but I'd had an MRI before and know the drill: breathe, keep your eyes shut, think of England. Also, hypnagogie offered to come with for moral support and also to drive because of the Ativan I took in advance. Things went smoothly enough, although there were a lot fewer check-ins from the lab techs as we went along, which meant rather more jump scares than I want in a medical procedure. The variety of skull-rattling rhythmic machine noises was diverse and unpredictable, though, so it helped to imagine I was back on felisdemens's couch listening to a lightly-baked German EDM DJ's Twitch stream. We should hear back by tomorrow, assuming all goes well, which I have no reason to believe it won't.

It's garbage night. I should take out the recycling. I do not feel any particular hankering to do so.

I've been away from the blogging game for so long, I'd forgotten that "so much to say, so little brain to say it" sensation that pops up after 10 pm. on the Friday of a chock-full-o'-nuts week of wonders. It's worse knowing that since I have been away for so long, I feel like I have to back-story everything so much that it hardly seems worth the trouble. As a storyteller, I make up for my lack of ninja fights and opium soirées with a matching lack of narrative brevity. This is why I can't open with something simple like, "I'm sitting in Brunswick, Maine with hypnagogie right now," without feeling it necessary to explain that I still live in Providence while she's in Maine finishing her post doc and I see her every other weekend and and and. Just because I sometimes live in perpetual nested flashbacks doesn't mean I need to splatter them all over my journal and expect the world to keep up.

So let me cut to the chase: Birthday week! Yes, mine! 48, if you must know, but I don't feel a day over...well, over 62 at the moment, for reasons that will become apparent in a bit. Birthday proper was Monday, which is almost as much of a drag as a birthday less than two weeks after Christmas, but I treated myself better than Mondays usually warrant, which was enough for the time. The real celebrations came later:

Wednesday: blissmorgan shares a birthday with me, and for years we've been swearing that this will be the year we get together and celebrate somehow, followed by hemming and hawing against the background drone of mildly annoyed crickets. But this year I think we were both feeling an exceptionally focused need to get the hell out of our respective houses and into good company, so we not only made actual plans, but we actually followed through. We settled on bowling at a place halfway between Bliss!House and Adam!House, which we quickly discovered serves up a light show and either disco or '90s alternative depending on who's controlling the knobs, so it made it harder to concentrate but much easier not to care that we were bowling solidly two-digit totals. (Neither of us had done this in years, which explains not only the "are you sure this isn't golf?" scores we were nailing, but also the fact that we are hurting in places we weren't aware we had places two days later. I'm not convinced I didn't throw out my first hip, hence the "day over 62" crack back there. From there we sought food at the kind of local restaurant that serves Reubens and liver & onions and burgers named after regular customers from the '50s, where we ate well and adored our waitress and had the most amazing conversation that led directly to me opening this DW account. Bliss wrote up the event far better than I ever could on her own journal (complete with snappy bowling ball glamour shots), so do pop over there, but suffice it to say that it was precisely what I needed in so many more ways than one. Thanks again, Bliss, and let's not wait so long next time.

Friday: I left for Maine straight from work, a 2 1/2-hour drive that's 2 1/4 hours longer than my bowling-ravaged joints were prepared for, but it was so very worth it as hypnagogie and I convened at the Brunswick Tavern for my official birthday meal. Their head chef has a contract out with someone from the demon realm, because good Lord. Pork belly with applesauce, steamed mussels, an amazing lamb shank for me and a steak for her that was so tender you could plant tulip bulbs in it without benefit of a trowel. We topped it all off with a bourbon-butternut cheesecake the consistency of gentle sleep that she described as "if pumpkin pie were made of God." I could go on at great length about the food and the connectedness that an exceptional meal shared can create, but I want to skip ahead to where she gave me the present she'd been dying to give me for weeks: she got me a smoking jacket, people. A SMOKING JACKET. Black velour with silver-and-black piping, perfectly lined and pocketed, and it even goes perfectly with the purple Thai fisherman's pants that are my new pajama bottoms. Ladies and gentlemen, I no longer sit—I lounge. Sybaritically, with a rake's practiced moue and a leisurely eye-fuck gaze that coos, "Hello, dahling, don't be shy. Welcome to Raymundo." It's perfect in every way. Thank you again, hon. A++++, would marry the hell out of again. (And yes, I'm bringing it to Arisia, and yes, I'm wearing it to the con suite at one in the morning.)

....

Remind me, how do you end blog posts again? It's like this, isn't it? Just kind of trailing off when you don't feel like typing any more?

Why is it that my pants not only routinely split straight up the crotch, but consistently do so only at major crowded social events? At Readercon, I went to say hi to issendai (who I hadn't seen in four years or so) and ookpik, and going in for a hug I went down on one knee and felt fabric giving way in the Delicate Giblet region. Swell. Luckily I was wearing the green striped boxers, so at least I had sartorial panache going for me.

Another trend: I only ever go to Readercon to have Murder Ballads band meetings/rehearsals with cluegirl, and this was no exception. After the business portion of the evening, she and aquila_dominus were kind enough to take me and my now-crotchless carpenter pants to dinner, which was my first trip to Rainforest Cafe. The decor is what you'd get if Busch Gardens yarked on an Outback Steakhouse, but it was a fun time, and the guacamole burger was damn good.

Speaking of crotchless pants, for last week's date night rain_herself and I went to see Magic Mike XXL. She'd seen it already, but she had been blown away by the degree to which it subverts tropes and expectations and she wanted to share it with me. I think there's a full entry in the wings on this one, but she's absolutely right: cultural expectations about masculinity, male and female sexuality, homophobia, body image, race, competition, and even basic notions of screenwriting and dancing itself get inverted and reframed. That, and holy flaming goat balls can Channing Tatum move....

Let's see, what else has been going on? Songwriting out the proverbial wazoo, hanging out pre-Readercon-adjacency with new-friend ourika, a return to KoL for reasons unknown, a frightening first experience with duck eggs (whose yolks should not be that color and consistency, and probably shouldn't smell like sea bass, I'm guessing), and an overdependence on air conditioning, mostly. Andrea's been in NYC this week, which means me having to relearn how to sleep alone (a skill I tend to misplace), but she'll be back on Saturday, which I'm hugely looking forward to. Meanwhile I'm realizing I haven't really gone out all week aside from work—hey, Bostonians, anything going on Friday night that I should know about?

Since my last missive regarding the quasi-open mic performance on the Thursday before last, here's what I've been up to:

Friday: Drove out to Troy for aquila_dominus's last-minute birthday song circle, wherein a great deal of creepy stuff saw the light of day in honor of the season, along with a medley of penis songs and every Jonathan Coulton everything. cluegirl and I did a bang-out-of-the-park version of "Strowler's Song" by request, as well as "Dead Egyptian Blues"; as a soloist, I premiered a New One called "Peaks of Forty-One" after cranking out a Monkees cover. Good times.

Saturday: Stuck around in Troy long enough for cluegirl and I to rehearse together for our Not So Sekrit Music Project, which we only get to do once every couple of months. Hightailed it home in time for Skype date with belgatherial, which is always a joy.

Sunday: Blissful and sweet general hanging-out with figmentj, which conflicting work schedules has made all the more precious. The scoping out of the local diner for Sunday breakfast was less than successful (undercooked pancakes for the bleach), but we did some of our own music-making, rehearsing some Rebecca Loebe and Glen Hansard covers until my guitar string snapped in two. Boooo.

Monday: Worked. Weekly pizza and TV night with figmentj.

Tuesday: Worked. Restrung the guitar.

Wednesday: Worked. Came home early in excruciating pain, ongoing evidence that I am not managing work stress very well. The radio show went swimmingly, however.

Thursday: Worked. Bought groceries.

Friday: Worked, dammit. Celebrated the Fridayness of it all. Heard from the manager that not only are they keeping me on longer, but they're upgrading my position, which translates out to "bargaining chip for a better paycheck." Woohoo!

Saturday: Slow waking-up morning, with plenty of good talk and good snuggling with a warm and sleepy figmentj, then a drive by myself (J had to work) down to the old Watertown stompin' grounds for some October recharging. Gallivanted around Harvard Square by myself a while, then returned to crash with shadesong, sindrian and yendi, including homemade pizza, Dominion and emilytheslayer and sairaali coming by for fiber-spinning and splendid conversation. Collected hugs and mp3s in quantity.

Today: Slept later than intended. Met mgrasso and ultra_lilac for Panera, then ran a mission of mercy to Whole Foods and Trader Joe's for staples unavailable in the wilds of New Hampshire. Currently relaxing in anticipation of dinner and a movie to celebrate the anniversary of the Momentous First Date with figmentj way back when (that would be 2010).

There were a good four or five long-form, ostensibly interesting posts I had in mind based on the above material, until the Idontwanna!Beast robbed me of any online-focused initiative for the entire damn week. Please, be a dear and pretend I was scintillating and clever, if you don't mind. Thanks much.

fiddle_dragon and zeyr's wedding: Today! I am, in no particular order, slightly anxious over the fact that I'm doing the music for the ceremony (as I'm improvising on the fly), interested to see their outfits (as they've gone with a steampunk theme), wondering which gods to honor to stave off the rain and oppressive heat (as it's an outdoor ceremony, again with those outfits), and ridiculously joyful (as they're a wonderful couple whose happiness together makes me happy).

Visit from the kids: Picking them up Sunday, taking them home Thursday. Confining all that adolescent and pre-adolescent sturm und drang in a log cabin in the New Hampshire woods will either have a calming, healing effect, leading to happier and better-adjusted kids, or it'll leave a log cabin-sized crater in the New Hampshire woods. Let's hope for the former.

Radio show: Still ongoing, every Thursday night from 7 to 9 Eastern time. I completely forgot to plug last weeks show; the archive seems to be bollixed up at the moment so they're not there, but you can usually download podcasts of all of the station's shows (including mine, once they fix it) at their podcasts page.

figmentj's birthday: Next weekend! There will be a trip down to NYC to do dinner with Chaos and a Glen Hansard show, so it promises to be a grand time.

Visit from belgatherial: Oh. My. Gods. This is deserving of a post all its own. She and her son will be arriving from New Zealand for an entire month, getting here on the 4th of July, and...gahh, I don't have words for this one. As I said, deserving of its own post, and it shall get one. Suffice to say, though, I. Cannot. Wait.

So I was going to post to get caught up with everything that's been happening, but there's so much going on that it's going to take half this post to share what hasn't even happened yet:

* TOTALLY GETTING MARRIED IN A FEW DAYS ZOMIGOD I'M HYPERVENTILATING
* figmentj's acceptance into Antioch University today (squeeee! ) with a merit scholarship (SQUEEEE!), which means preparing for a move to southern New Hampshire in a matter of months
* grand plans afoot with belgatherial
* a chapter and an epilogue away from being done with the rough draft of The Noise of Endless Wars, only three years behind schedule
* the job that I still haven't found but will, gol dag nabbit by gum

This means that most of what I've been doing lately has been toward one of the goals above:

* trying to get the proverbial ducks in a row before the wedding
* perfect bachelor/ette party/ies hosted by zeyr and fiddle_dragon, complete with games, Cameron Crowe movies, English cuisine and a dancing sindrian
* job hunting job hunting job hunting oh gods my brain job hunting
* writing like crazy
* heading up to NH for the interview that led to the aforementioned grad school acceptance

Things not related to the above goals:

* banging my head against some crosswords for potential publication
* recording poetry readings by shadesong and sindrian for an online magazine
* catching the Kills live in the Boston theatre district (going several weeks back with that one)
* helping the good citizens of Gojirawitziev up and move
* intermittently hanging out with the young'uns
* trying to get back in touch with society without mucking up my sleep cycle any more than I already have
* making music when I can

Finally, I've been doing some early prep work on a mark-your-calendars-now item: it has been declared that The First Annual Bastille Day Scavenger Hunt will take place all day on July 14, 2012 (that's a Saturday), to be headquartered in Watertown but stretching for as far as folks are willing to travel to Gather Stuff. The list is ready to go. It's as mad a tea party as you think it'll be. Save the date, all.

[this space reserved for clever tag line TBD]

* It'd been a while since I'd last stayed up until daylight. A good cause, though.

* wired_lizard, mllelaurel, and nevacaruso all willingly allowed me to inflict The Room upon them. The official verdict, and allow me to quote: "Best. Movie. EVER." I adore my friends.

* Walking back from the bus stop last night, I was passed by two guys on Segways. I also adore Watertown.

* figmentj let me have more than half of her Cardullo's gift certificate. I totally adore her.

One of the great joys of interacting with loved ones? Instilling them with soul-crushing addictions that will haunt them for the remainders of their anguished lives. To wit:

* While on Kid Patrol for the weekend, Girl-child started humming a tune that sounded remarkably like Sousa's "Liberty Bell March," a.k.a. the "Monty Python's Flying Circus Theme Song." Naturally I joined in, which got me an odd stare, especially when I got to the foot-squish raspberry bit at the end. Turned out that she was in fact making it up as she went, and just happened to ITM a reasonable facsimile to the march (where "ITM" = "Infinite Typing Monkeys"). So being a geek father, I sat the kidlings down with the opening credits, followed by Parrot Sketch, then Ministry of Silly Walks, then Restaurant Sketch.... I know, I know, bad parental influence, but really, this part of their education should have started in infancy, which leaves me doing cleanup now.

* On Saturday, with kids still in tow, I showed up at the Game and Craft Day hosted by fiddle_dragon, zeyr and wired_lizard. The kids, having roughly the attention span of a Chihuahua on a double mocha java, soon found themselves bored, at which point fiddle_dragon came to the rescue with an offer to teach them how to sew a pillow. Girl-child finished hers in no time, then demanded a Ben Franklin's run for more fabric and batting, managing to kill off a second pillow by bedtime, which she immediately slept with. It's all downhill from here.

* Speaking of Game and Craft Day, I finally managed to bully talk figmentj into sitting in on a game of Dominion. Conventional wisdom said that she'd play a game, maybe not be too bored with it, but most importantly put my cajoling to rest once and for all. Instead, halfway through her game (we had enough cards for two simultaneous rounds), she wheeled around to glare at me with malice and implied stabby threats. An accusatory finger pointed in my direction. "By the way? I hate you."

It took me a moment to understand what she meant. "Ohhh, you're totally hooked, aren't you?"

"HATE. Haaaaaate." At which point she reshuffled and carried on. Ah, love, believe me, I know. Been there.

* On Saturday night, I showed the kidlings a few episodes of The Muppet Show. On Sunday afternoon, we ate dinner while Girl-Child punched up every Swedish Chef clip she could find on YouTube, one after the other. I've created a monster.

* In a decidedly more down mood today, for reasons unknown.

* Magnificent weekend, highlighted by music with cluegirl and aquila_dominus, along with a passel of others. It would seem that "Strowler's Song" is turning into my new Greatest Hit, which I'm quite comfortable with.

* Speaking of cluegirl: Costuming plans afoot. Ooh, yes, indeed.

* So to go along with the aforementioned Voorhees Center, CuJo Adult Family Home and Cape Fear Assisted Living, we can now add the Transylvania Living Center *cough*, as well as Sa[u]ron Adult Family Care and (for all you Thomas Tryon fans out there) Harvest Home Adult Care, which is just wrong. On the other hand, we also have The Shire, as well as (for all you John Crowley fans out there) Edgewood Assisted Living.

* I still think I'm allergic to business casual.