Did you miss me? I made the executive decision (I consider all decisions pertaining to and made by me executive because, really, it’s my life and—okay, this aside has become tremendously silly. I’ll end it here because I don’t think in my current state I can redeem it) to not write yesterday. When I woke up yesterday morning, I felt decent after a good sleep. But as the day wore on, my travels caught up with me, and my mental health decreased until pathological yawning and a sleepiness-induced headache overtook me. I left early from work yesterday, drove home, slept, ate, talked to Doolies, played video games, and slept.

That was yesterday. Today, I have the pleasure of reporting, I felt well enough to go to the gym. Yes, you read that correctly. I went to the gym with a colleague who might turn into my next workout buddy. My original workout buddy, a classmate from graduate school, turned out to be a flop. During my first two months in Seattle, we commuted to work together and went to the gym three times a week. Afterwards it became apparent that I was destined to (a) drive through traffic in the non-HOV lanes; and (b) lose fifteen pounds of hard-earned muscles. While my potential, new workout buddy lives on the other side of the pond (that’s someone who lives across the lake in the Redmond/Kirkland/Bellevue area outside of Seattle), he seems more reliable than my original workout buddy. I’ll let you know how this goes. Although I’m tired (you can probably tell by this barely intelligible entry), my body feels good, and the fatigue is more of a muscle weariness instead of my more usual bone weariness.

This is the first weekend that I have to myself in a while. While I’ve enjoyed my travels over the last four or so weekends, it was past time for an idle, David-time weekend. I’m hoping to hit the coffee houses and write, sleep in, and renew my oomph. A fire is burning cheerily in the fireplace after a slow start. The papers I use for kindling lit only the right side of the log and it took 15 minutes for the fire to spread to the rest of the logs. This is the first fire I’ve had in a while. Today has been a bit cool, and when I came downstairs to my living room to stretch out and throw some words against the wall, it was a bit chilly, which got me thinking about the fire. It’s now toasty in here. If I only had an apple, it would be like old times: me, sitting by the fire, writing, eating an apple.

I’m hungry now, stupid apple thoughts. I think I’ve almost won in Castle verse ant battle. I found one dead proto-queen ant and one crawling worker ant on the third floor today, but the frequency is certainly decreasing. I expect a zero- ant day soon. I’ll miss the little buggers when there’s no more of them. At least I’ll have their family members trapped in my vacuum cleaner until next Wednesday night. Look at the new David, always looking on the bright side.

I thought this entry was already much longer than it is.

Some notes on the Wailing Baby story: The name of the woman is Annie. She’s a renowned therapist with issues, which ties in with my theory about mental health professionals: it takes a certain sickness to want to hear about other people’s problems. I believe people who have serious issues seek others like them to help them in the hopes that they won’t have to face their own problems. Ain’t I full of great theories?) I want to write a short vignette about Annie and her history. I’m thinking of dropping the neighbor I put in at the end of the story. I have a few ideas for where to take the story, but we’ll see what happens when I flesh out Annie.

I based Annie on a woman that sat in front of me on my flight from Newark to Seattle. Before the plane finished taxiing, she pushed her seat all the way back, and she didn’t put the seat in its upright position until a flight attendant asked her to in preparation for landing. I half expected her to lean back after all the attendants sat down (I had one guy do just that). I’ve explained before my feelings on people who lean their chair all the way back. Luckily, Continental, a much better airline than Alaska, has more room in its coach chairs and I was able to write most of the Wailing Baby story on the airplane. The only thing I could see of the woman in front of me was her frizzy hair, which she kept puffing with her hands. I wished her all sorts of illnesses, and then figured I might as well memorialize her in my story. (She fit the character: someone who didn’t care about what her neighbors thought or felt.) The idea for the story, of course, came from my sleepless nights in NYC when my neighbor’s baby cried most of the night. During my sleep-induced hallucinations, I imagined that it wasn’t a baby crying, but a tape recorder. This is just an example of the strange things that go through my head.