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Wednesday various

Bloody heck

I lead such an exciting life that I fell asleep yesterday evening before I could write anything about my day here. Which is maybe just as well, since nothing much happened yesterday. Looking back on it, I can’t think of a single thing that separated it from any of a dozen other days.

Today was a little different. First I mailed some packages that needed mailing at the post office, and then I drove to a local mall to donate blood. I’m a semi-regular donor, so I get e-mails about the blood drives in my area, and apparently there’s an increased need for A+ blood, which is what I happen to have. I’m always happy to help when I can, and when it’s relatively convenient, so I drove over as a walk-in.

They were still in the process of setting up, inside an abandoned nail salon on the mall’s first floor, but despite the line of people already there (around 11 o’clock) I wasn’t waiting too long. In retrospect, I probably should have used the time I was waiting to do something productive, like take in some more fluids.

I wasn’t at all dehydrated, and I’d had breakfast. Like I said, I’ve given blood before and I know the drill. But I could have used more fluids. Because, for one, my blood just wasn’t coming out. The nurse technician spent a lot of time adjusting my arm, asking me to make a fist, release, and re-adjusting the needle. Which, honestly, was not fun. I’m not especially squeamish, but anything that reminds me there’s a large needle sticking into my arm — like looking at the blood circling out or a woman pulling the needle out, pushing it back in — is going to get to me.

After a while, it started to hurt, but it was bearable, and we seemed to have hit upon an arm placement that worked for getting the blood out of it.

And then I got to feeling light-headed, and that was all she wrote.

A few minutes earlier, the woman behind me had passed out. I couldn’t see it happen, but I heard them reviving her and calling her name. She seemed fine after, and it’s apparently not at all an uncommon occurrence — I’ve seen it happen a few times myself, including the very first time I gave blood, back in high school — but everyone was on heightened alert. They immediately put my feet up and my head back, put ice behind my head, and had me relax my arm.

If you tell them at a blood drive that you feel light-headed, they take that very seriously. I remember once, in college, I said, after donating, that I maybe felt a little dizzy. Like, maybe just enough that I wanted someone to hold my arm as we walked over to the juice and cookies, rather than going it alone. I didn’t feel really woozy. I did today, so I’m glad I said something. I felt better laying back, and apparently that’s all my arm needed to start giving up the blood. The tech joked that I didn’t want to do any work except lying down with my feet up, but it did seem to work.

After, I had some of the juice and pretzels provided, and then a bottle of water from the vending machine on my way out of the mall. They tell you to drink plenty of fluids. I didn’t drink enough going in; I didn’t want to repeat that mistake going out.

Beyond that, the day has actually been surprisingly uneventful. I watched an okay (but not amazing) movie called Criminal, and I watched some episodes of Cheers and Community. Yep, real exciting.

Falling back

I made almost no use of the extra hour the return to Daylight Savings Time afforded me today. I certainly didn’t use it to sleep in, which is unfortunate. I worked on the Sunday crossword, which I didn’t like, and which I didn’t finish. And I did finally get around to watching the end of Torchwood: Miracle Day, when I noticed it was now available on Netflix streaming.

And I was reminded why I haven’t gone out of my way these past few months to finish it. The series started off okay, got rather bad, rallied for one genuinely very good episode, and then sunk back into awfulness, ending on a very weird note and all but screaming “there’s a sequel a’comin’!” It’s almost a master class in how not to write a television series…which is even more a shame considering that it comes from several people who up til now I thought were pretty good at that sort of thing. (Even Davies, who has some bad habits he can sometimes fall back on.) And I’m just talking at a basic level here: heavy exposition that explains everything and yet nothing, idiot characters we care nothing about, guest stars with half a scene of screen time, laughably terrible characters from other guest stars — seriously, Marc Vann has never been worse — and terrible, terrible dialogue. It rallied just a little near the end, rising with a few good ideas to a level of mediocrity, but ultimately the show was a huge disappointment, worse even than the often quite dire first season.

My thoughts line up pretty much with Zack Handlen’s review:

I had high hopes for Miracle Day, which quickly became hopes, before finally evaporating into long, aggravated sighs. I suppose the odds were against the series from the start; no matter how good Children Of Earth was, it didn’t suddenly mean that Davies had mastered the tics which are such a distinctive part of his style. Miracle Day was full of Big Moments, and attempts to yank on the heart strings, as well as attempts to shock us with sudden darkness. Sometimes these attempts were successful, but most weren’t, and without any strong sense of purpose, those failed moments led to a permanent impression of emptiness. Great shows—great art—can convince us there’s more than what we see; but all I got from this Torchwood was less, and less, and less.

I’m still quite fond of the second, and Children of Earth is terrific. So, try as they might, they can’t take that away.

And that was pretty much my Sunday. Oh, and I wrote this:

If truth be told, Father Gregory had not believed in ghosts, nor in witches or devils, but there was no use denying that what stood before him now was some mixture of all three. Faith in God is all-important, Father Aleph might have said, but His enemies depend on no such faith for their existence. What Gregory did or did not believe was beside the point. Demons and wraiths were deadly all the same.

“You forget your catechism,” Aleph did say now. “A novice such as yourself has no business conjuring up a quantum summoning. But I suppose in your pride — ”

“It wasn’t pride,” said Gregory. “I — they shouldn’t exist. The Church erradicated them all centuries ago. I thought — ”

“And I suppose you don’t believe in time travel either,” said Aleph. “When that’s clearly what the quantum summoning is. When without it our faith would be nothing.”

He stared at the machine, the dark host shimmering in its still open field. “It’s a useful tool,” Aleph said. “The machine. Useful for historians, hunters. You don’t think ALL the dread beast’s minions have been destroyed, do you?”

“I didn’t think — ” said Gregory.

“Unplug the machine,” said Aleph with a sigh. “And then run the standard exorcism rites. These…things will get put back where, and when they belong.”

Was it really that simple? wondered Gregory. Demons ripped from the distant past, the twenty-first century if the flashing read-outs on the machine could be believed, and all of it undone with a simple reboot?

“Just be glad you didn’t accidentally summon the Dark Lord himself,” said Aleph. “I’ve seen more than one novice, and even a few adepts, ripped apart by the horrors that can bring forth. If it was up to me, you certainly wouldn’t have access to the machine.”

Again he sighed. “But His Holiness wants all of you trained in the rudiments of time travel, for the war, and that’s what I’ll do. Just — don’t touch anything without asking me first, all right?”

Not quite sure what’s going on there, or what to do with it, but…well, there it is.

“This is too much madness to fit into one text!”

Let’s see, what did I do today?

I got a haircut. My standard practice of just letting it grow until it gets annoying stands. I could be wrong — I wasn’t wearing my glasses and didn’t do a thorough inspection — but I may have spotted some small amount of gray in the clippings. Hairs of dubious shades show up in my beard all the time, but I can never quite tell if what I’m looking at is some weird anomaly or a precursor of aging to come. Going gray doesn’t bother me — not quite, but almost, the opposite. Going bald, on the other hand, which I think is probably also in the cards for me — if I take an honest look at both family history and my existing hairline — well, I have to admit, the little bit of vanity I have towards my hair gets a little twinge at the thought. But I’m not quite there yet, and the mop I do have was in need of a trim.

So I did that. And I mailed several dozen copies of Kaleidotrope to contributors and subscribers. You really don’t want to know how much that sort of thing costs. Mailing to Canada is relatively cheap; mailing to the UK is remarkably not so. If you’d like to support the zine, and you’d like a copy of the current issue, can I suggest the slightly cheaper (for all of us) e-book copy? It’s a no-frills PDF, but for $2.99 you get almost 100 pages of fantasy and science fiction stories and poems. You can check out the table of contents, along with the cover art and story samples, here. And all the money goes to keeping me from going bankrupt in 2012…when everything I save by not photocopying and not mailing may just get eaten back up by the one cent a word I’m paying contributors.

I also bought some pants. Sometimes, you need pants.

I went for a walk. I watched the latest episode of Fringe. And tonight I watched Attack the Block, a genuinely entertaining monsters-from-outer-space movie.

And that was Saturday, in a nutshell.

Wednesday various