I Refuse

I am writing this entry so it will feel like I've done something today.

I am listening to The Fall on headphones. The prince of candy put the mp3s of like ten albums on a CD for me. That was nice of him. I like The Fall. He is driving me to the train station next week so I don't have to deal with taking a bus to Boston. This is also nice of him. I'm spending the night at my brother's apartment, then flying out to Salt Lake City the next morning to go to the World Horror Convention. I do not write horror.

Today, I finished a book about King Arthur. I read it because my novella is now going to be a new version of the King Arthur myth. I liked the book a lot. The knights of the round table were totally insane. They loved to decapitate their enemies. I had a book on King Arthur when I was young. I really liked it. It was the censored version, I guess. There was no mention of Christ drinking and bleeding into a cup and the knights decapitating everybody that they met. It was nice to revisit the stories that I liked in my youth, but with added decapitations. The author of the King Arthur book also wrote a Robin Hood book. I want to read it.

I also read a bunch of Ann Beattie's Chilly Scenes of Winter. I liked it a lot when I first started it. I still like it, but now I'm a little tired of it. Reading it is starting to feel like a chore.

I hate my nights off. I like having them, because if I didn't, I would go insane. But they are awful in comparison to my days off when I had a normal job. I sort of prefer my work nights to my nights off. Besides the occasional interruptions from customers, I pretty much do the same exact thing. I like my work nights because this gives me an excuse for doing these things. I'm actually lazier during my days off. I am less productive in my writing. I need to start outlining my novella. I will do that tomorrow, probably. I am too lazy now. I took a nap and am groggy.

There is nowhere to go on my nights off. I just want to get out of the house. I live in a town which is supposed to be "the place to be" in my area, but there are no 24 hour dinners nearby. If I want to go to a dinner, I need to drive there and use up a little bit of very expensive gasoline. I don't have the money to do this all the time. There's that one dinner in Hadley, but that insane guy who makes me uncomfortable probably hangs out there and it costs like $10 for a burger. I can also drive to the Whately, but that is much further than the Hadley Dinner. Whenever I go to this places, I plan to stick around for a while to read and write, but I always change my mind after I finish my food. I try to read, but am distracted by moronic conversation. I feel uncomfortable about being out in public. I decide to go home. I think I might swear off leaving my tiny room, unless it's to meet a friend, go to work, or buy essentials. I'm supposed to meet Seth Schultz for breakfast this morning. I can't wait until the weather gets nicer and I can go to the park and read in the morning.

There are a lot of places to go right now, but it is just like any other work night. If I had worked last night, my shift would have ended around now. I wish I could do something to distinguish my nights off from work nights.

I am going to start Faulkner's Light in August soon. I read it a long time ago. I liked it. I tried reading it more recently. I had no patience for it. I couldn't get past the first few pages. I am going to give it more of a chance to help develop my voice for a story that I'm going to start working on soon. It's for an anthology of stories inspired by Nick Cave songs. I like Nick Cave's songs a lot, but I did not like Nick Cave's novel. He tried to write like Faulkner. This is not what I didn't like about it. I didn't like it because it wasn't very good.