Day 10 Nanowrimo

Yesterday was a cleaning up guts, going to a sketchbooking class, a green Door lunch with an old friend. walking dogs, spending an hour on the phone with a magma techie called Christian day ... so not much got written. This is what really was written yesterday.


November 10, 2009
Day 10 By the end of today I should have produced over 17000 words ... that means that to get on track I need to write over 5000 today ... hmmn!

Not likely, not with this to-do list looming:

Get rid of the deer's offal
Take the dogs for a long walk
Leave for sketcbooking class at 9:30
Return around 2:30

Call Magma to get my email running again
And eric to find out where the hell my lamp base is
And Bill re money and Montreal trip
And Jean-Marc about a language exchange idea of his

I have a sketch I want to do for Le Hibou

And I have to write 3-4000 words ...

as well as eat and dress and dry clothes and feed and walk dogs a couple more times ...

I need more strength, not longer days.


What do I want to include today? I want to get Grandpa's plot moving forward ... and perhaps incorporate today's events into the narrator's plot ... Mark and Jean-Marc? ...

And I have to call Nolan to find out how Pat is doing.

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Have you any idea how heavy the guts of a deer are??? I had to really wrestle them around to get them into a pail in a garbage bag and then double wrap and get the whole mess into a real garbage pail. And that is when I remembered that a deer's guts contain excrement ... green excrement. I held my breath all the way home. The shovel and bin were in the trunk but my hands were in the car with me. Yecch!

I ripped off the clothing the dogs found so fascinating and scrubbed every inch of me under a blasting shower until I could no longer remember the stench.

I still have to walk the dogs and pour javex on the offending shovel and grassy spot ... I hope that will be enough to deter the dogs. I don't want to have to keep them leashed or in the house for the next week. I really wish David and Leonard had left their mess a lot further away.

After my class, I poured vinegar all over the area where the offending offal had been lying, and walked the dogs over to the mailboxes. They were still very interested in the deer gutting site, and it will likely take a good rainstorm to wash away the memory for good, but at least now they have nothing but vinegar to roll in or eat.

The class was a bit of a disappointment but not a total waste of time, and Liz and I had lunch together at the Green Door. She's being tested for a small stroke or seizure ... a TIA.

Goddamn ... we are all getting old suddenly.

On my drive home I composed an email I will likely not send. It was far too honest to actually write, and besides, email is a terrible medium for telling people what you think of them ... good or bad.

Dear Mark, it began ... I don't know quite how to say this, but I could have loved you ... indeed I was beginning to ... but now all your fine qualities that I love are being subsumed by your cowardice ... and when I think of you these days ... it is not love I feel but contempt.

When you told me about staying in a terrible job for twelve years because you were too afraid to quit I knew I could never have done that and couldn't understand how or why you would have thrown away twelve years of your life. But now you are about to do the same thing again. Different situation. But still you are willing to settle for a half life because you haven't the courage or strength to take a chance on happiness.

I hadn't realized how important courage was to me till now.

Danny's face floated before me ... a reminder of how I had loved his courage. He hadn't just saved me from rollerblading accidents; he'd stood up for me when a principle was at stake. Like my lovely Norwegian, principles mattered to Danny.

One night in a Norwegian cafe we drank beer and listened to a live band. At the next table a young woman celebrated her last night of unmarried freedom by dancing on the table at her stag. A drunk at the next table began to harass them, and his hand snaked up the length of her leg to her panty line. Kjell stood up and very quietly put an end to it. Danny would have created a scene. Kjell was quietly courageous and bound by his principles.

Andrew wouldn't have made a fuss either. He'd have left the scene, left the girl dancing on the table to fend for herself. And I knew that when push came to shove, Andrew would leave me to fend for myself too. Andrew is a coward ... unwilling to stand up for himself let alone someone he loves.

725 words ... 1/7 of what I needed to write today ...

The dogs are squabbling all over my den... good ... I hope they wear themselves out so I don't need to walk them again. I think Kenya returned to the scene of the murder but Remi hung out with me so he hasn't had enough exercise today.

I gave Peter a recipe for Greek pasta sauce and all the missing ingredients he needed ... and then settled in to watch a movie he'd recommended ... about Yugoslavia ... and the civil war ... so sad he had to take breaks. I did too.

Jean-Marc wants to talk to me about a language exchange idea of his ... Peter and I discuss movies, travel, food and dogs .... there are few things we disagree about ... so why do I continue to hope that Mark will smarten up?

Surely to god I am smart enough to realize that stripes don't change after 60. A coward will always run scared.

Remi and I are good bed partners -- like people who have been married a long time and fit well together, we move in harmony at night. Kenya is bed hog who is not totally comfortable sleeping that high off the ground, but Remi adjust himself to my body shape.

The first night Mark spent here I had to go to my own bed, and I thought I had become, really and truly now, an old crone, a hermit. But when he returned a month or so later, we fit together just fine, and I realized I still had blood running through my veins, and that I was still flexible enough to curl around and within the curves of another human body; that I needn't assume that my only bed partners from now on would be dogs.

But that was before the only man I've been really attracted to in years -- in all ways -- revealed the yellow streak running down his back.

And cowards really are cruel; they really cannot be friends.