Once in a while, I get a wild hair and decide to try something new. Tonight, I decided to try publishing to my web site with MS Front Page instead of the online wysiwyg tool my site host provides. I’ve never used Front Page before. I’ve used Dreamweaver at work, to build an Intranet site for my department, and that’s quite different.

I built a new page – very simple – to host my novel-in-process. The plan is to use this instead of the separate blog I set up. Seems to make more sense to me. So now I can learn Front Page, which will be interesting. Though after an hour of checking out the basics, my hunch is that Dreamweaver blows it away.

Just something I’ve been meaning to mention:

Pull your pants up! You look like an idiot. Oh, and that thing that sticks out from your hat is called the bill. It goes in front, to keep the sun off your face. Tanning is actually capillary damage. Unless you want malignant melanoma to eat your face off and maybe kill you when you get to be my age … whatevah.

Hey, all you grownups have been dying to bring it up. I just got around to it. I love checking stuff off my list.

My fellow dog lovers will enjoy this.

Yeah, I read Hunter Thompson’s books, several of them, when I was in college. His stuff wasn’t assigned reading, but I was a reading machine. And I thought humor could be found in wildness, in gonzo, in extremely high tire pressure … Look at the Bats, man! I thought it was funny, before I came to see that drugs and alcoholism are a thick mist of dripping death that seeps and blows at every unguarded door and cracked windowglass of human life.

I don’t think gonzo journalism is amusing anymore, with the conspicuous exception of The Daily Show. I think it’s sad. Though I’ve retained a vague feeling of romance for the idea of the reclusive writer’s compound in the woods, for the thought of shooting the fax machine when the editor gets pushy.

And I don’t think Thompson was right about The Swine or The Doomed. I think he found in us what he wanted not to find in himself. And ultimately, he proved me right. Hopeless is as hopeless does.

Hunter S. Thompson, journalist who took no guff from the swine, has taken his own life at home in Colorado tonight.

It’s raining here like crazy tonight, just a few miles from La Conchita. Some news reports say that the town is basically deserted; I can’t confirm this. Nobody wants to see the people there suffer any more, but I think the risk of more slides is very great. I drove by La Conchita recently, and it looks risky to me.

Thank God tomorrow is a holiday, so at least traffic will be lighter than usual.

So last night I took Tasha and went to Viola Fields, a recreational area on the bluffs above the ocean, across the freeway from where we live. It was a beautiful dusk, with great reefs of storm clouds hanging, and rain falling in the west.

click to enlarge

BETWEEN STORMS

Sad, how the clouds gather again
against the small hills
for reasons I cannot comprehend,
and how I stand here watching
the last boat carrying men
from oil rigs in the cast iron sea.

Sad, how all the gulls are home
asleep, having eaten all day,
how I see the shadow of the clock
on the water, its hands turning
from island to harbor
to the tender sand beneath my feet.

So sad, how finally I am rising up,
falling in a long arc
into the mountains of darkness.

Kyle Kimberlin
copyright

This is how things get built. Thank goodness for people with ideas.

Couple Build Startup Into Blog Powerhouse

“I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark-it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come… Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.”

– Toni Morrison

Right, that’s how it’s done. I know this from experience but in my vast sloth I don’t do it. I stay in bed until my head is clear and I can admit the world is up and probably means me no immediate harm.

This news story, in which two women caretakers are suiing for harassment and hostile workplace, just goes to show a variation on Gonzo truth: When the going gets weird, the weird will litigate.

Oh man, this is so funny. I chuckle at Get Fuzzy every day, but this one is just too good not to share.

If you have Bloglines like me (see right column) you can subscribe to Get Fuzzy by RSS and have it deliver right to your PC in time for your morning coffee. There are other aggregators, but I like Bloglines. So there.

“I don’t think there’s anybody back there.”