I’ve been exhausted most of the weekend. There’s no reason for me to be particularly tired but I still slept ten hours Friday night, required a two hour nap Saturday afternoon, slept another eight hours last night and napped again today. It reminds me of coming home from college for vacation. I’d do little but sleep as my body unwound from the stress of the previous quarter and prepared for the stress of the upcoming quarter. I’m not sure if this is about the receding of Covid and political stressors or if my body knows on some level that there’s more to come and making me slow down and store energy for the next round. All I know is I’m not proceeding terribly quickly on my next few projects. Fortunately, they aren’t things with specific deadlines attached so if I keep losing time to naps, I’ll still be OK. If nothing else, the cats seem very taken with my predeliction for falling asleep and snuggle up to do the same.
Covidland is relatively quiet. The number of US deaths has dropped below 300 a day, despite the spread of the delta variant. Whether this is now the new normal or the calm before the storm of an exponential rise in cases in states with low rates of vaccination remains to be seen. The problem with exponential numbers is that everything seem placid and calm and then all of a sudden things are everywhere seemingly out of the blue so it’s entirely possible that there will be a relatively rapid rise in cases to be followed by increased mortality later this summer. We shall see what we shall see. In the meantime, I’m taking advantage of a more open social life as the theater folk are starting to get back together as we have all been vaccinated. There was a very nice backyard gathering last night where I saw many folk I have not seen for the last year and a half.
The book is essentially finished. After much consultation with my editor/publisher we’ll be running a couple of preliminary copies next week to go over with a fine tooth comb to make sure all the errors have been caught and that all of the art/titles are correct. Advance copies should come out the second week of July to send to people to try and garner some positive buzz and reviews and then it should go on general sale at the end of July. I’ll be working on setting up some readings/signings locally. It still seems very dreamlike, as if I’m discussing someone else’s work and I don’t know if it will seem real until I have actual physical copies in my hands. Even then, it might not seem real. I don’t know if it’s my impostor syndrome or my underlying Eyore personality that makes me feel like it’s always someone else’s story anytime I have a significant accomplishment.
As I don’t really have much to say this evening, I suppose it’s story time. This one is from many decades ago, back when Steve and I were first together. As I related in my last post, I have a bit of an odd GI tract that does weird things. One of the things that it does is react strangely to local water systems. I figured this out years and years ago when every time I would visit LA, I would have an upset stomach that would go away as soon as I returned to Seattle or Northern California. I don’t know what it is about LA but I assume it has something to do with the mineral content of the water or how it’s treated. Anyway, Steve was an LA boy who had only moved up to the Sacramento area about a year before we got together so most of his friends remained in LA. We therefore drove down a couple times a year to see some of his old friends and visit his old haunts. The run from Sacramento to LA down I-5 was about seven hours so we could even bop down for a long weekend, especially with two drivers.
One visit, early in our relationship, we decided to go to Universal Studios – neither of us had been for at least a decade and we thought it might be fun. We got up early to get to the gates before things opened so we wouldn’t have to wait in line. My upper GI tract was bothering me, as it usually did in LA, so I hadn’t had any breakfast and really wasn’t interested in eating anything. Steve was having none of it so he went over to the snack kiosk and bought me a banana and stood over me forcing me to eat it. Ten minutes later, my stomach rebelled and the banana was going to reappear. We were in the middle of the plaza in front of the gates with no convenient rest room so I did the only thing I could do and leaned over the rail at the edge of the plaza. There was a drop of some forty feet down to a flower bed which the regurgitated banana sailed down, to the consternation of the tourists marching up the drive. Steve was mortified. I felt much better and we ended up having a great time on the tour. Steve learned his lesson. Ever after, if I told him I wasn’t hungry or didn’t want to eat something, he took me at my word. And to this day, I do not eat bananas other than the occasional slice in a fruit salad. And don’t get me started on banana pudding which is constantly offered but always politely refused.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 