Summertime likes to swallow the weeks. It's already Thursday and so far mostly what I have to show for it are some decor articles, a couple poems, and a new tattoo (this time some adorable mushrooms to round out the backside of my patchwork sleeve. ) The hum of the a/c is a strange beast. I am so used to hearing birdsong and passing traffic in the alley around the side. It's been quieter since they felled the tree in the courtyard (MY tree as I like to call it bitterly.) but still the shut windows feel like something I am getting used to, though I have to admit sleeping in the coolness is a delight, as is the ability to actually run the oven for anything but shorts bursts during summer, and in which now I am cooking a pork roast as I finish up the days assignments and sit down to write this blog as the sun dwindles to nothing.
Otherwise, we caught a couple movies--this which was a delight and then the late night Logan screening of possibly the most LGBTQ-coded horror movie in existence. A few years ago, I sat at a horror conference and listened the keynote speaker, its producer, talk about how they had no idea they were making such a queer film, which is why its on the docket for Pride month. At home, we were working our way through the first season of House of the Dragon (J's first, my second) and plunged into the second season's first couple of episodes which we'll be watching weekly henceforth. It was a little surreal to watch again the death of the king, which I watched just weeks before losing my own father in fall 2022, so close in fact that I kept telling myself that horrible last day in the hospital that if Rhaenyra could lose her father, give birth to stillborn by singlehandedly pulling it out herself, be crowned queen, have the title unfairly stolen, and lose her second child to the jaws of a giant dragon, my situation was not quite so dire or difficult as all that.
I was toggling back and forth between two writing projects last week, but have dug a bit more deeply into the carnival series. I'm thinking I may submit some of them, at least once, to some of my favorite journals, so am only posting snippets over on IG for those. This means I will probably move forward with the midnight garden later on. I was doing most of my drafting in the earlier part of my day (I don't dare say morning, since my mornings are usually happening around noon.) I've had a lot of new freelance work this week I am eager to get started with, so am writing in the dark of midnight more and more and always wonder if it makes much of a difference--those early day poems or the late night ones. If there is something different in the way my brain works or processes depending on how full or empty it is.
Next week, on the docket are a musical version of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil at the Goodman, then a short trip to Rockford for some 4th of July grilling action. We all know that the summer moves even swifter once the 4th passes, so we'll be holding on as fierce as we can.
