At midday on Friday, June 19^th, 1987, while en route to a convention in Minnesota, Barb and I stopped in Clear Lake, Iowa. I had just started writing my second novel, Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede, and Clear Lake was a logical place to take some pictures and do a little research. It was the town where Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson had played their last concert on February 2, 1959.

At the Clear Lake Public Library, a helpful librarian told me a story about Buddy’s glasses. It seems that someone (the county coroner?) from Mason City (the county seat) had taken the glasses from the site of the plane crash . . . and as far as the librarian knew, they were still locked up in a desk at the courthouse. Buddy’s widow, Maria Elena Holly, had even asked for them – and had been refused. The county, for some odd reason, thought they should hang on to them . . .

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Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you — Mr. Jesse Hawkins and Mrs. Rachael Hawkins.

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They were married last Saturday afternoon in an outdoor amphitheatre at Brownwood State Park, to my delight and to the applause of approximately 45 friends and family.

This is the terrible loss that I suffered, mentioned in my previous post. I gave up my most beloved daughter – but gained both a wonderful son-in-law and a vast herd of cattle in payment.

More below the cut.

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Two Headed Baby played a special gig last weekend.

It was a good weekend for me, in many, many ways. I’m planning to post in more detail on that later today or perhaps tomorrow.

I set up a laptop to record the gig as best I could through a single mic off to the side, and seem to have caught about two-thirds of it on disk. I’ve just finished processing a couple of the songs, and thought you might enjoy listening to THB in full fury.

Rachael was there, and told me that we sounded awesome, but she was being especially kind to her Papa last weekend, because I was suffering a great loss. The audience danced their asses off, and didn’t throw anything sharp or too hard at us. I figure that we probably didn’t suck, much.

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Rockin’ In The Free World

Blues Medley

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As you may know, our old drummer got bored with just hitting things and wandered off to try to learn how to be another goddam dime-a-dozen guitar player. Bob Yeager, who still enjoys smashing the hell out of everything, has gracefully taken his place.

Caroline Spector on bass, cello, and vocals, Warren Spector on rhythm and lead guitar, Gilda Ginsel on vocals and keyboard, my nice friend Bradley Denton on vocals, harp, and rhythm and lead guitar. I was up there, too, mostly played rhythm guitar.

However, we made the mistake of allowing both GreyLion and Bulky Jones to sit in. And they wanked endlessly. Please forgive them.

I’ve whined repeatedly about the Loudness Wars, but – I smashed the hell out these recordings, just because it seemed the rock ‘n roll thing to do. Another mea culpa for that. I tried to leave a few dynamics in place.

This stuff is meant to be played loud, though, so you should turn the volume knob all the way to the right. I hope your neighbors don’t find it too painful to listen to.

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Pics credit to Cheryl Collum, who, incidentally, happens to be my baby sister.

Not Quite What I Was Planning is a collection of autobiographies in six words. The premise comes from the anecdote that Hemingway (perhaps to settle a bar bet?) wrote a short story in six words.

For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.

Several sf writers have written Sfnal versions of this for Wired.

It cost too much, staying human.
- Bruce Sterling

We kissed. She melted. Mop please!
- James Patrick Kelly

Then comes this book. Autobiography in six words. Online storytelling magazine SMITH asked readers to submit six-word memoirs and culled the best. Of course, now I lay in bed attempting to compose mine.

An observer; husband, son brought reality.

But in ten minutes I’ll decide that’s wrong.

I would like to give you the impression that my culinary life is one amazing adventure after another. The truth is that much of the time I eat pretty boring food. But when I do have a food experience that I think could conceivably give the impression that I am living the high food life, I like to blog it. For a Chowhound, the ultimate food experience is the unexpected, the hole in the wall that turns out to be great, the different.

Once in awhile it happens just like that.

Many months ago, Bob and I read an article about a restaurant called Little Thailand. The legend is that Dick was in Vietnam back in the day and married a Thai girl. He brought her back to the states. It didn’t work out. But somehow along the way he ended up marrying another Thai girl and building a restaurant/bar called Little Thailand. She cooks Thai and he makes the steaks and Hungarian Goulash and the hot sauce.

A framed review on the wall calls Little Thailand ‘a trailer park temple to authentic Thai food’ and that’s probably as good a description as any. The restaurant is in the front of a low ceilinged building out past the airport. We drove into the Texas dark, out into country where Austin has not yet become cool and found it under the Garfield water tower as promised. It’s the kind of place that has handwritten signs stuck on the wall that say things like “Killer Thai Bloody Mary’s Awesome and Lip Smacking.” Bob orders one.

It is the spiciest-hot Bloody Mary either of us have ever tasted. It is the first time I have ever had a drink that required a glass of water to go with it. Read More »

(This is a reprint of an essay I did for Small Beer Press–I’m headed to the airport and pressed for time. Next week, I promise, back to stuff about food, dogs, and TV.)

When I was in Mr. Fish’s class in fourth grade class at St. Columban, we had a mock election for President and I voted for Nixon. He won by a landslide. Granted, that was the year Nixon was re-elected in a landslide, but I proffer this bit of personal information as evidence that I am, at heart, a rather conservative person. I don’t want to be a conservative person. Studying literature and art, it becomes very clear that the really good writers and artists, the really important ones, are not conservative people. They are the people who institute change. Who make us see and think in different ways. So much of my life has been an effort to somehow convert myself from a mildly anxious, essentially conservative Catholic school girl into a radical, free-thinking writer. Read More »

I’m not by nature a nostalgic person. I think of my childhood as primarily a time when other people told me what to do, where to go, what to eat, when to go to bed, what to wear, and when my options were limited by my lack of resources. Sure, someone took care of me, fed me, bought my clothes, loved me, but for example, I was on a rural bus route that took an hour and I get motion sick. The doctor prescribed medication so I wouldn’t throw up every morning, but no one ever offered me any options other than fly out the door at 6:15 every morning for a dull and mildly nauseating hour. That, as far as I am concerned, summed up a lot of childhood. You make the best of it.

Bob has been consumed by nostalgia lately. He’s reading about Ghoulardi, a kind of cult TV personality who was big in Cleveland when he was growing up. I’m painting a bedroom and I bought some photographs off Etsy to have framed and hung. Then I thought about how all those decorating shows tell you to frame your own photographs so I dug out my box of photos from China and started going through them. I discovered two things. I’m not a good photographer. And I am deeply nostalgic about the girl in those photographs.

I was 28 when I went to China. I had a sense of what my life could be that was very different (of course) from how it turned out. I like how it turned out, mostly because of Bob. But I…regret is too strong a word…I have some wistfulness about the other life, which involved a great deal more travel. The road not taken, so to speak. I wanted to speak another language, live in another country again.

Of course, what I forget about that girl is that she was unpublished and felt a tremendous weight of anxiety. When I was 28 I had a life of rented rooms. I had never owned a couch, which seemed to me at the time symbolic of some sort of rootlessness and lack of seriousness. I had spent several years chasing the dream of being a writer. For some of those years I didn’t have a job or health insurance or a car or a boyfriend or a television. No dog, of course. I felt as if I was falling farther and farther behind in life. I wasn’t sure that I would ever be a writer. Or that I would ever be anything other than marginal.

Of course, being marginal was what gave me the freedom to up and go to China. Now, painting and decorating a room in my very nice house, living as a writer, I know that I wasn’t in fact falling behind. I forget all that. I see that girl and I forget all the anxiety of being young and uncertain. I see China. I see a time when who I was seemed more malleable. It’s a middle-aged kind of nostalgia. One I have no patience for in other people, and swore I would never indulge.

Indulge me?

Three graphics designers, some costumes, and four days of shooting.

Bob hates reality TV. What he really hates is the elimination at the end of so many reality shows, where someone is ritually exiled from the group, their torch is put out, the supermodel tells them they’re ‘out’, they are fired, or they are told to pack their knives and go. Which may explain part of the appeal of the show that has snagged Bob. Folding laundry one night, searching the TV for something to distract him, he came across The Real Housewives of Orange County. And now he’s a fan.

The Real Housewives follows six white, upper-class straight women who live in Orange County. They depict the Orange County lifestyle, which according to the show is gated communities of McMansions, Republicanism, rampant materialism and boob jobs. Cameras follow them around to catch them at their most entertaining worst. We are there when one of them goes to a consultation with a plastic surgeon to get her breast implants removed because her doctor says her DD’s are the cause of her back issues and her husband complains that he doesn’t want her to go too small.

Part of it is the unsparing but uninsightful eye of the camera. We see what the women do and what they say, but other than superficial commentary from the women themselves, we never get any real insight into why, for example, Vicki is so driven and controlling in her business and with her children, or why she drinks so hard at parties. (“They say I did a ‘woo-woo’ shot with the bartender,” she says, “but I don’t remember it.” A pause. “I don’t!” And then we see her on film, doing a shot with the bartender and shrieking ‘woo-woo!’ with him.) There is an old saying that people who marry for money earn every dime. The same might be said for these women, who may not have married for money, per se, but who certainly pay a price for their devotion to what they call ‘the OC lifestyle.’ Many have been married a couple of times, several have difficult issues with children, all of them have issues with their bodies. Read More »

To those of you who might have already read my posts about getting a dog in my blog, my apologies. But you know, I’m kinda excited and preoccupied, so:

We’re getting a new dog. We’re getting a rescue from a local Golden Retriever Rescue group. Our son is grown and out of the house. We have some disposable income. This whole exercise is clearly some sort of surrogate adoption experience.

It started with the adoption procedures. (That’s what the rescue group refers to it as, ‘adoption.’ Giving them a dog is called a ‘surrender.’) I filed an application and paid a fee. That was followed by a phone interview. And then a house visit, where we wre again interviewed and our home was inspected for suitability. We discussed what kind of food we would give the dog, where the dog would sleep, and promised to repair a couple of places in our fence.

Then we got a call asking us if we would foster a dog with option to adopt. That’s Hudson, the doofus pictured above. He’s 2 years old and was found running alongside the highway. The woman who rescued him has a child under two and another on the way and although Hudson is really good with her child, well, he’s a dog. And he is more than she can handle. Could we take him? Absolutely.

Yesterday I got the stuff for the nursery ready for him to come and live with us. Because we already have the world’s most annoying mini dachshund, we put up the old giant dog crate in our bedroom where Hudson could retreat to safety. But he needed a mat for the crate, of course. So I went and bought a mice comfy foam mat with a cover that fits in his crate. And he needed a new leash, and Shelly’s food is for Senior dogs and he’s not senior…well, you get the idea.

We’ll pick Hudson up on Friday.

At least there’s no baby shower in the offing.

There’s a commercial for a service that allegedly protects against identity theft. In it a guy sings about why he is wearing a pirate costume serving tourists in a restaurant. (It’s because he was bankrupted when his identity was stolen.) When I think of restaurants that set out to entertain, that’s the first image that comes to mind. The theme restaurant. Mariachi guys serenading over bad fajitas. Chuck E Cheese, where your kids will be distracted enough you might get a moment to just sit and watch them spend your money on games, or it’s adult incarnation, Damon’s, where you can play a quiz using the electronic quiz thingy on your table and play, not only against the other geniuses in your particular restaurant, but against people all over the country eating at Damon’s and ignoring their food just like you are. And although Damon’s food is not horrible, it isn’t exactly a crime to ignore it, either.

There’s been a kind of an upsurge of food as fun for people who might even like to eat. Probably the bottom feeder of this is The Melting Pot, which is fondue. Fondue is a license to officially play with your food. But it isn’t particularly great food. I mean, any time you let the customers cook for themselves, the point is really not cooking technique. I like fondue, but mostly I like it sitting around with friends, getting drunk and threatening each other with the little forks—in other words, I like fondue the way it was done in the fifties, when everyone got a fondue set as a wedding present. The idea of opening a restaurant where I let non-professionals anywhere near hot oil for cooking seems rather scary to me.

My kid, Adam, is a meat eater. He, like me, would really like to be a vegetarian. But the fact is, if we were vegetarians, we’d have to give up meat. I’ve tried. I’ve failed. Now I cook with duck fat and constrain myself to a kind of low level sniping at vegetarians who I resent because I consider them morally superior to me. Texas is a meat lovers paradise and Adam is a fan of BBQ. But I found a restaurant recently that pretty much nailed the food as amusement thing, the Brazilian Steakhouse. I’ve actually eaten steak in Brazil and it’s very good. Brazil happens to be geographically sitting next to Argentina, where cattle is king. But when I was in Brazil, I never ate at anything like Fogo de Chao. First of all, the entire wait staff is wearing gaucho attire—shirts, short pants, black shiny gaucho boots. I said to Adam that at least they weren’t wearing pirate costumes and he gave me a withering glance. He was right, this wasn’t exactly an improvement.

There are Brazilian gauchos, but gauchos and gaucho cuisine—beef roasted over a fire and a drink called mate—are really Argentinian. I don’t know why Fogo de Chao isn’t an Argentinian steakhouse. But I am quibbling. And Brazil is a big country with a number of different cuisines, including Bahian—which figures big in Jorge Amado’s luscious novel, Dona Flora and Her Two Husbands. Maybe in the south, where the jungle gives way pampas, there are Brazilian steakhouses. Read More »

When I first saw this photo I thought it was CGI–wonderful, mechanical-biological CGI but like a lot of the CGI in films. But it’s not. These are real machines on exhibit in Nantes, France. Extraordinary machines that move and, some of them, walk. This speaks to the same impulses in us that make us want to climb the steps inside the Statue of Liberty and look out of her crown. This is the desire that is behind Da Vinci’s drawing of the flying machine. This is somehow wired deeply to the part of my brain that says, ‘Cool Toy!’  This is sensa-wonder territory–which means that for me it’s science fiction.

I’d love to go to Nantes and see this.  But even more, I’d love to ride one down the street.

(via Mysdirection.)

You don’t have to have gotten married at the New Year to be a Brainiac, but apparently it helps. Bob and I got married on January 2. (We wanted to get married on January 1, but the mayor was busy. Our suspicion was that it had to do with sports on TV.) I had ideas about marriage being a contract rooted in capitalist obsessions with property and was deeply ambivalent about the whole thing. On the other hand, I had (and have) a sincere appreciation for the importance of ritual in the human psyche and you don’t have many more fraught opportunities for ritual than a wedding. Bob just asked me to wear something other than blue jeans. He said he was wearing a suit. So I broke down and bought a cream colored suit which I subsequently wore to work.

It was, in fact, a contract rooted in capitalist obsessions with property.

But it was also a ritual of extreme importance. When the mayor spoke the vows, I had the sense of something deeply irrevocable happening. Not that I didn’t know of lots of people who got divorced. Not that I wasn’t aware of the utter fragility of those vows. But they were vows, and somehow that meant that this moment would leave a mark, would be scored on us in someway. Tribal scars of the psyche. It was a test of our optimism, I guess. I am not, by nature, an optimistic person. It was like playing a high stakes table and putting money down. Win or lose, you’re putting it on the table.

Tonight we went out with the boys to celebrate. It’s our fifteenth. Which is crystal. (Not as fun perhaps as the 3rd Anniversary, which is leather. But better than the 7th, which is wool. Or, if you’re modern, desk sets. Who is in charge of that, anyway?) There are things no one can tell you about marriage. When it works, mysterious partnership, there is the utter pleasure of being an expert at this one thing, being with each other. Knowing the rhythms of another as you know yourself. The sound of breathing, the physical cadence of a heartbeat. I know Bob across the room without my glasses. I know the way his shirts fit across his shoulders, and what it is like to touch the back of his shirt with my fingertips.

I’ve seen how awful a bad marriage is. There is nothing more lonely than being alone in a marriage, I think. But we are made for this pairing, however imperfectly we do it. However much biology says we are also made to push at it’s boundaries. It is something that suits me better and better with age. And I am grateful.

Barb and I are continuing our world* tour this week . . . and so far, the only mystery is how a postcard can receive an Oklahoma City postmark when it was mailed from the post office in Prague:

Oh, well.  Here’s hoping for better luck in St. Louis:

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*If by “World” you mean that long stretch between Austin and Kansas City.

I posted last week about an Ebay auction and low and behold, this week I received the following:

I have some vague idea who might have sent such a thing–it has a US stamp and an Oklahoma postmark. And so I deduce that it might be in Czech. The only words I know in Czech are…well, I don’t know any words in Czech. But I went to grad school, dammit, and I had a language requirement, and if that taught me anything, it taught me how to make a half-assed translation in a language I didn’t know. As best I can figure, the postcard reads:

I cannot resist. Muzete me this translate? “give me spout within beer.”

Much obliged!

And give my kind regards to the French Bean!*

I owe you a beer, Denton. Preferably at the Klášterní pivovar Strahov.

(Actually, it says ‘Give my regards to Bob’ but one translation software came back with this, and how could I not prefer ‘the French Bean?’)