Still autistic

    I decided to go to Charleston this weekend. First I wanted to take the ferry out to Bull Island. But Paul and Ross couldn't go, and the weather forecast was highly discouraging. I didn't feel all that eager to get up at 6 am to drive two hours to pay $40 to get thundershowered on. So then I was just going to go down to lay lilies on my mom's grave, something I had wanted to do since last summer but couldn't. However, the forecast was the same, and Charleston was having the Bridge Run where the Cooper River Bridge is closed for people to run across it. Traffic snarls were a certainty.
    Common sense would have said to do it another day. There was nothing sacred about Saturday except that I had said I was going to do it today. So dammit I went. Rain proved minimal, as were traffic disruptions. Granted, I canceled the other goal of the trip, going to Whole Foods in Mount Pleasant for gluten-free cookies, due to the Cooper River Bridginess of that journey. But I got to see Rheta and her baby Thomas, and I got to see the Morris Island Lighthouse and what's become of Folly Beach after all these years. It was a lovely time, and maybe being a little autistic is OK.

The little man with the flashlight

    The little man with the flashlight who lives in the refrigerator and turns his light on every time you open the door seems to have some other jobs. I live mostly on stews and I cook enough for several days in advance. To reheat my stew, I usually need to add some fluid so the pan doesn't burn up. I like Kitchen Basics chicken broth best. I set the carton behind the large resealable containers that I keep the stews in.
    Every time I would put the stew container back in the fridge and grab the broth carton behind it, I made it a point to put the stew back where it had been sitting before. When I went back seconds later to put the broth back, the stew had invariably moved back to where the broth goes. (This sentence is a special Bulwer-Lytton award winner for most gratuitous use of the word "back.") Poltergeists! That little man with the flashlight! Gremlins!
    Of course, the stew was just getting knocked back by the closing refrigerator door. (There's that word again!) But it took months or maybe years for me to figure this out. (I thought I must have been putting it down in the wrong place and just wasn't noticing.) Moral of the story: I'm really dumb.

Fun with robots

    I'm the local host for Drinking Liberally until they find a better one. Through nobody's fault (at least on our side), the venue where we had been meeting became unsatisfactory. I eventually found a new venue due to useful suggestions from the membership, and yesterday made the move official. This required interacting with the robot software at the Drinking Liberally national site. After making the change, I got the message: "Because the event location/time has been changed for this chapter, all future regular events will be deleted and regenerated." I just went all Keanu and said, "Whoooa!"

Walked through waistdeep snow uphill both ways

    I already know what my generation will say to our young relations when we're crotchety old grandparents. (Or crotchety older-still grandparents.) "When I was young, we had to listen to music on big black long-player albums. You had to get up and go across the room to change the song. And you had to tote all those albums around wherever you went!" I was just remembering a time when I moved back from Philadelphia to Columbia via Amtrak with three or four big boxes of LPs. It was all kinds of no fun schlepping those boxes around, and even less so on retrospect realizing that today I could have put all those records on an iPod Nano. And I probably wouldn't have half-filled it.
    Also, you kids get off my lawn!

Truckload of nasty

    I saw a tractor-trailer labeled Cheerwine. The phrase "a truckload of nasty" popped into my head. Really, I don't have anything other than that, except for a certain disbelief that enough people anywhere drink Cheerwine to merit a tractor-trailer load.
    While we're kvetching about language, what's the deal with bridal veils and wedding dresses? Shouldn't the modifiers agree? Why not a bridal veil and gown, or a wedding veil and dress? Or, ya know, a wedding veil and bridal dress?
    Meanwhile, my nephew and his wife are about to have a daughter, making me a great-uncle. She will be my  grandniece. Again, shouldn't the modifiers agree? Why can't I be a grand-uncle instead? Wouldn't that be grand?

She KNOWS

    At this late date, I don't remember all that much from college. One thing I remember clearly was a party in the dorm at Penn. "Space Oddity" by David Bowie was playing. People were chatting and having a good time. Nobody much was singing along until one sequence: "'Tell my wife I love her very much'/ 'She knows.'" And everybody in the room was singing along.
    I don't really know what Bowie meant by those lines, if it's a commentary on the creepy omniscience of Ground Control or something else entirely. I always thought it was just a sweet thought. I have a feeling that everyone else in the room felt the same way.

Edit: It only took a year and half for me to notice I typed "life" instead of "wife"; continuing proof of my geniushood!:)

Unreliable

    I never actually took Creative Writing, so my only exposure to the concept of the Unreliable Narrator is in the horror novel "Ghost Story" by Peter Straub. In it, our hero (a writer and writing instructor) goes through various frightening doings while serving as a guest lecturer at Berkeley, I think it was. He notes that his output during this time could have been an exercise in the Unreliable Narrator.
    I thought it was Secret Creative Writing stuff, some kind of arcane plot device. And maybe it is. But one thing I've noticed in my listening to old-time radio is that there are a lot of unreliable, even flat untrustworthy narrators running around. And equally unreliable characters. Because the writers get to their twist endings by lying to the listener. The narrator or the character him/herself present the character who turns out to be the murderer as if he/she is pure as the driven snow. Agnes Moorehead, who of course killed her husband (it's Agnes Moorehead, for goodness' sake) instead tells the microphone (there's no one else to hear; it's internal monologue) that she loved her husband and is going to find out who killed him whatever the cost.
    This is cheating. I appreciate that the writer only had a half hour to work with and probably only had a week to work in. But still. They could at least throw a bone and say that the character had a split personality or something. I think it would be fun to write twist ending stories where every line has been vetted to make sure that it doesn't contradict the ending. I mean you can be ambiguous all day long, but when the character says to him/herself "I must find the killer" but then turns out to be the killer, the listener can't help but feel cheated. Narrators: you just can't trust 'em.