Breathe, breathe, it won't be long now.

Words can't really do justice for last night's activity, so just go to mintwaster's journal entry for more details and pictures.

I woke up with my head congested with allergies but my body was fairly awake. Now I'm breathing clearly, I'm showered, dressed, eaten, but can't get motivated to take the next steps. I have a vague to-do list in my head that I should probably commit to paper, to make sure everything gets done before the trip (and during the trip, since I plan on writing while I'm in NOLA). But part of me isn't really stressing at all. I can leave whenever I want, take whatever route I want, eat whatever I want, listen to whatever I want, arrive most anytime I want because it's thebrownhornet and even if I pull him out of bed at 3 am to let me in, I'll make it up to him in hurricanes.

The general plan now is pick up the car at noon on Friday, come back home to pack up the car, including Sophie, pick up a few supplies, and at some point head out of town. Drive south. Maybe stay near Memphis. Maybe not. Maybe I'll drive all on state highways, not interstates. I suspect I might try to get to Louisiana as fast as possible though, and save my meandering for the trip home, next weekend. But who knows. I was thinking of seeing some family outside Memphis, but I haven't heard from them yet. Another old friend in St. Louis I might call up. Maybe I'll just do the Motel 6 circuit. I seem to have a pretty good track record of getting lots of writing done in hotels.

One of the items on my to-do list is to call Educating Esme and find out if we're doing this road trip in September together, out to California. It's a Highway Summer.

Oh Dick, I want to be an intellectual like you.

I haven't written in 5 days. I just wrote 200 words that maybe don't suck but I'm just not feeling my character right now. Any of them. Well, maybe 2 of them, but not the 2 who need the most attention from me.

So let's talk about what I'm reading. Last night I finished I Love Dick by Chris Klein and the subject line comes from the book near the end and it also featured on the back of the book and I kinda want a t-shirt that says it. I'm not sure why I love it so much. Anyway, this book is kind of this epistolary novel mixed with documentation of a quasi-performance piece on obsession and fixation and transformation and women artists in the 90s (and always) being shut out by men and intellectuals in general in the art world. This woman gets a crush on this guy Dick and decides to start an affair, but she starts it without telling him first, essentially, and writes and writes and writes to him along with her husband, then they tell him about it, then she ends up leaving her husband and then she sleeps with Dick and then it ends. And it's not so much fictional as just purely subjective and ethically murky in how she uses the experience. At times reading the book was too much, too overwhelming, stuck inside the head of someone acting out her anxiety and existential crises with which I could completely empathize and sympathize. But I liked she was able to get under my skin that much. When the book ended, it ended so perfectly I couldn't figure out to laugh or cry and mostly I felt a little confused, a kind of "what the hell just happened?"

This is not a terribly good book review. But it's a strange book to tackle. And had some really interesting things to say about Western ideas of art and talking about art which was unexpected since I thought the book was about her being a stalker.

And it was a perfect companion piece in some ways to the book I read before, My Name is Asher Lev, though you wouldn't guess it. But that book is about a painter who is also a Hasidic Jew, who was born in the mid 1940s in Brooklyn, who pursues a life of painting despite it requiring venturing into the world of gentiles, and the conflict of culture and heritage, tradition and truth, and how in the end, as an artist, you can't help but see the world in that way, no matter how much you "know better" or are told you are supposed to know better.

And now I have to finish reading Paying For It: A Guide By Sex Workers for their Clients and I better sharpen those review skills because I need to write 500 words about it for a magazine, not just my livejournal.