I’m going to deliberate stay out of the deep waters of my tortured psyche and  skirt the shores of matters massive and weighty tonight in order to talk about my life and what has been going on in it.

I am doing this as a way to keep things fresh with a change that was, as it were, not in in the script. I am sure that, were I to go looking, I could find a densely packed plethora of Big Subjects and Deep Thoughts lying about in this capacious cranium of mine just waiting to be unleashes upon an unwitting (and uncaring) world, but I have grown weary of self-absorption and the augury of examining my own entrails, so tonight, it’s biographical update time.

The heavy shit will return shortly, I assure you.

The backlog is mindboggling.

Just got back from a trip to Shopper’s Drug Mart. That had not been my destination when I left the apartment.

My destination at that time was the drug store where I usually get my meds. It’s a branch of a chain of pharmacies called Medicine Shoppe, and it’s just a block from here so it is my go-to place for the hefty fistfuls of meds I take for my various infirmities.

But when I got there, it was closed, and a cheery sign on the door said “Gone to seminar! Thanks for your understanding!”.

This put me in a state formally known as “miffed”, and I chose to withhold my understanding and thus eschew the offered thanks.

“No, I do NOT understand. In fact, I reserve the right to resent both this inconvenience and the galling presumption that I would ‘understand’! I SAID GOOD DAY SIR!”

So I ended up going a block and change further to the Shopper’s Drug Mart. I don’t go there often, but when I do, it’s always for the same reason : my Medicine Shoppe is closed and I need my meds now, not when it’s next open.

Before now, that’s always meant that I needed my meds on the weekend. My Medicine Shoppe is only open from 10 am to 2 pm on Saturdays,. and not open at all on Sundays. so weekends and my medications don’t mix well on that level.

Because honestly, I don’t know about y’all,. but there only one thing that could get me to leave the house between 10 am and 2 pm on a Saturday and that’s brunch.  And it would have to be a good brunch too. A buffet brunch.

None of this “you can get a burger OR scrambled eggs so technically it’s brunch” type brunches. Fuck that noise.

And it turned out that the trip to Shoppers had some good points along with the bad.

The bad point was that it took them 40 minutes to fill my prescription, so I had 40 minutes of time to fill at the mall. Luckily, in a rare show of forethought, I had brought my current book, the Stephen King short story compilation Skeleton Crew,  with me.

So I just found a seat in the mall and read for half an hour.

The book is a factor in my recent mood that I forgot to mentioned in my recent speculations. Stephen King does not write happy stories and some of the stories in the collection are quite disturbing and unsettling and this may have played a part in my recent feelings of sadness.

I’d rather it wasn’t. After all, I am a writer, and surely I am too sophisticated and knowing to be emotionally unsettled by mere words on a page. After all, I know all about how the sausage is made.

That means eating it can’t possibly harm me. Right?

But no, of course it doesn’t work like that. If anything, being extremely verbal makes me especially sensitive to having my emotions manipulated by writing.

It just has to be good writing.  And despite his reputation for writing lurid trash,. King was a damned fine writer before he got all whiny and entitled and started doing one thing you absolutely cannot ever do if you are in the entertainment biz :

Show contempt for your audience.

That’s how he lost me as a fan. I thought some of his later books, like Needful Things,  while still well written on a technical level, had a kind of snotty disdain for the audience going on under the hood which really came to the fore via their sloppy, unsatisfying, clearly slapped on endings.

But before that era, everytghing he wrote was masterfully constructed and so well engineered that it carried you along seemingly effortlessly. As a wordsmith myself, I know how much writing and rewriting,. not to mentioned blood, sweat, and tears, and coffee, goes into making that happen, and I applaud it.

And the thing is, I haven’t read most of these short stories before. Which is strange. I could have sworn that I had read my mother (the horror fan)’s copy of Skeleton Crew several times as a child, and yet I don’t recognize most of the stories.

So either my current copy is from an expanded edition of the book, or I never actually read the whole thing .

The latter is quite plausible. I was easily distracted by new things as a kid, and it’s quite possible that I read some of the stories, like The Mist and The Raft (shudder) and Survivor Type (dark giggle) , then got bored and started reading something less heavy and more fun.

Or it could be that I read those stories I recognize  in other anthologies and that made me think I must have read this one. I dunno.

A lot of stuff I remember from my childhood does not quite add up when subjected to logical analysis today. Things that I remember clearly and yet cannot logically be true.

I guess that even a mind like mine is subject to memory degradation over time.

And I still remember science from Grade 7!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.