personal

Which day? Wednesday.

Another day of not a whole lot. I’m enjoying these days off, but I’m starting to feel like I should be using them a little more productively. The most interesting thing I did today was watch Joan Rivers: A Piece of a Work on Netflix. I’m not exactly a Rivers fan, but the documentary is brutally honest and often very funny despite the current of sadness that runs through her career and life.

Maybe I’ll do something more interesting tomorrow.

Whose day? Tuesday.

Today managed to be even less eventful than yesterday, which is almost impressive in and of itself. I wrapped Christmas presents, I read a little bit, I watched Ink. I liked doing all of those things. That is all.

I didn’t like so much when my kneeling chair suddenly broke; I banged it against the wall, and the not very high-quality wood it’s made of splintered at the base of one wheel. There’s a cardboard box sitting underneath it now, keeping it level, and so it’s still about as useful as it ever was. But it’s not remotely portable. And it looks like a broken chair with a box under one side. I knew it wasn’t the greatest kneeling chair on the market, but I didn’t expect its legs to snap in half less than a year after I bought it.

A vacationary tale

I spent the day hanging around the house, in part waiting for a UPS delivery that didn’t show up until almost 8 p.m. And then, when it did show up, I had to do some quick work to keep it hidden, so as not to spoil a Christmas surprise.

But that’s okay, I had the day off, and it’s unlikely I would have done a whole lot more with it if I wasn’t expecting the delivery. I spent the doing a little reading, refilling the bird feeders in the yard, and watching Exit Through the Gift Shop, a fascinating documentary…or art project…or hoax. I think I agree with Roger Ebert on the question of the film’s authenticity: if it’s a hoax, it’s a ridiculously elaborate one, even by Banksy‘s standards, and to what end?

Last night, I watched a very different movie, the Canadian horror film Pontypool. As I wrote on Twitter directly afterward, the movie takes a weird and very unexpected turn maybe midway through, but I liked it a whole lot. It’s quite creepy and perfectly claustrophobic. I’m looking forward to listening to the radio drama, which was apparently commissioned at the same time, and maybe the original novel. (Though I’m seeing some suggestion the book is the second in a loose trilogy.) The movie was equal parts terrifying, thought-provoking, and strange — all things Canadian to a T.

But I kid!

And so it was Sunday

Today was day two of my two-week vacation, though as it’s still the weekend, I’m not sure how much it should count. Mostly all I did today was join my weekly writing group, where, with a little prompt, I came up with this:

The vampire loved going to the mall during the Christmas holidays. Not for the reasons you might expect, since he had given up on human blood almost a century earlier, when there was just an open field where the mall now stood, and he found no joy in the thought of so many warm morsels pushed together, jostling for the holiday sales and reeking of the iron tang his taste buds knew so well. In his youth, when he was more enamored with the hunt, or in that dark, dry period in Madrid several hundred years later, when he would have died for even a small sip of pulsing red — then this mass of people, such easy pickings, like low-hanging fruit, might have warmed his unbeating heart. But none of that was what drew him here now. He loved this time of year, and at the crowded mall especially, simply because it reminded him of Magnus, the vampire who had sired him, and it allowed him a few small moments when he might almost convince himself that the other man was still alive.

He had no real confirmation that Magnus was dead, it was true, and indeed Magnus himself would have disputed the claim even if someone had been able to produce a body. “When you’ve seen death cheated as many times as I have,” he might have said, “you start to doubt it at every turn.”

But the vampire knew what he had seen, and he had not seen Magnus alive since that day.

Christmas Eve, 1857, Sarajevo. Not an especially auspicious year, but nor as dire as some that he and the rest of his kind had endured over the centuries. Only that summer he, Magnus, and a woman whose name he could no longer remember — Isabelle? — had been hunted across half of Europe. He had only narrowly avoided the stake himself one foggy night in Budapest. But now they had escaped, achieved a brief moment of calm and respite on this snowy evening, and Magnus was enthralling them beside the fireplace with details of his newly hatched Grand Scheme.

“I at last understand the secret of true happiness,” he told them both — and, in his clearly drunken state, to anyone else in the tavern who wandered into his orbit. “But the only path that leads to it also rounds past death. So it would take a madman to make such an attempt.”

Magnus was, it would soon be clear, such a madman.

I’m not entirely sure where it’s headed, but I had fun writing this much.