On Saturday I was groggy and exhausted all day. (I think I wrote about it, but I might have been asleep at the time.) Darin and I played a lot of Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within, once Darin finally figured out how to stop most of the crashes in the game, which was to allocate the game some ridiculous quantity of memory. Sierra doesn't do testing; they just buy more RAM for their employees.
Anyhow, every time the game did crash, I tottered over to futon we have upstairs in the loft and lay down. Darin thought I was being silly, but I was stupid with exhaustion. We finally hit a stopping point in the game. I went to take the nap I'd been hankering after since I'd woken up, he went off to a Babylon 5 marathon showing (5 hours). After I woke up I watched Braveheart and then some stupid erotic thriller (yes, made-for-cable) until he came home. And then I got to go back to sleep.
Sunday I felt much better. Well, at least I felt much more awake. We went out to brunch with Darin's friend Nevin and afterwards the two of them played the Warcraft II demo. (As soon as Warcraft II for the Mac comes out, I know that Darin's not even going to notice I'm gone. I just know it.)
At about four Nevin had to take off, and I complained to Darin that I was too hot. It was over one hundred degrees outside and hotter in the house. So we went to a movie. We saw The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Darin and I were so appalled by The Lion King -- aka, the-divine-right-of-kings-is-all, personal-achievement-means-nothing movie -- that we vowed not to see Pocahontas, but we'd heard good things about The Hunchback.
And it is good, although darker than your average Disney flick. I was amazed -- and, dare I admit it, titillated -- by the level of sexual lust portrayed. (Esmerelda is quite the babe, let me tell you.) Of course Disney wimped out and made Frollo a judge instead of a cleric. Cleric displays paralyzing levels of lust! Quelle scandale!
The movie seems to have a message that beautiful people really are only going to be interested in other beautiful people, and outsiders like Quasimodo will never find anyone. Well, how true, but still -- do we need this kind of message being sent out?
After the movie we cruised by Tower Records in Palo Alto, and then picked up some grub at the Little Garden restaurant. When we got home we got a couple of phone messages from friends asking if we wanted to go to dinner with them! I was just as happy to spend the evening alone with Darin. We watched Babylon 5 and an MTV special on some upcoming indie films that look interesting: Trainspotting, which we already wanted to see, and Basquiat, the fact-based story of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York City in the early 80s.
The short piece on the film got me to thinking about art, being an artist, what I want from both. I did not come up with anything profound on these topics. But don't be at all surprised if I tear your ear off on something along these lines in the future.
Now I'm back at Coffee Society, which has both coffee and air conditioning and I have to pay for only one of the two. I have a Walkman so I can listen to NPR as I type away. In other words, the perfect writing environment.
I told myself I was going to write today. I have two stories I want to write: one to see if I can do it, the other to see where the story idea is leading me. (I usually have no idea where a story is going until I write it.) I realize I haven't written fiction in many weeks. I tend to think that story writing is like riding a bicycle, except that I'm out of shape and I don't have my bicycle pants and maybe I should see what's on television or on the Web instead.
I won't. That's why I'm here, away from home, typing away. Because sometimes I just have to force myself to get things done. As Arsenio used to say, "Let's get busy!" (What the heck ever happened to him, anyhow?)
Pres. Clinton is vowing to find child support cheats "through the Internet." Because the Internet can do everything. Will he do searches for them on Alta Vista?