BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Relax. It’s all good.

Having been in other parts of the country while on tour, settling in to my hotel room and grabbing a quick look at the news before crashing, I know that things can get blown out of proportion by the national news. Like, the time they were reporting killer storms all but leveling Saint Louis when I was on the east coast. When I called my wife to check on her and the munchkin’s safety, I was met with, “What? It sprinkled here for a bit. Minor shower, but that’s about it.” (This is not to say we’ve never had killer storms, as we certainly have…remember that power outage a couple of years back? And the flood of ’93? Well those were certainly real…)

My point is, you can’t always believe what you hear on the news, so if you are in some part of the country, looking at some talking head on the tube who is telling you that Saint Louis has come to a standstill because of a massive blizzard burying the city…Well, change the channels.

Yes, we did get a healthy snowstorm here. It started yesterday afternoon and ended around 4:30 – 5:00 AM today…At times it was heavy… Up to 1.5 inches per hour… But, when all was said and done we only got hit with a little over 8 inches of the white stuff. Minor inconvenience. Not a citywide emergency by any stretch of the imagination.

Anywho, here are some pictures to prove that everything is okay here and that we aren’t really buried forever, never to thaw…

There…Now EK can go to work and make money to support me in the style to which I am accustomed… (Grin)

I started shoveling around 5:45AM…Only took about a half hour. The worst part was the end of the driveway where the street department had plowed and deposited a substantial snowbank…

From the front porch…

Gotta get the hedge trimmers hold of those shrubs this spring. They never got their final 2007 “haircut” last fall and they grow like nobody’s business.

Do, Do, Do, Lookin’ Out My Back Door…

Yeah…The neighbors are too damn close here in the burbs… But, EK doesn’t want to move to the country.

In the 1986 Michael Mann film, Manhunter, based on Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon, there is a scene where a sting operation is being set up and one of the FBI agents says to Investigator Will Graham, “Let’s walk the route…” Basically, the idea was for them to walk the path Graham would be taking during the sting in order that he be familiar with it and hopefully not get himself killed.

Well, I walked the route last night… Not the route Will Graham (William Petersen) walked in the movie…No, I walked the route Special Agent Constance Mandalay walked in the last pages of The End Of Desire. I’ll try not to give away too much, as I know some readers of my blog have yet to get their hands on TEOD, and are hoping it will be in their Yule stocking (Good luck to you on that – I’m pulling for you!)… Suffice it to say, I “walked the route.”

The Saint Louis Zoo does in fact have a special light display every year at this time. It is called “Wild Lights”. And, each year as a family we go there, pay our modest admission, and wander around the zoo in the dark looking at all the wonderous displays. Hence, the reason (with some minor name changes) it was featured as part of the climax in The End Of Desire.

Anyway, last night was our annual pilgrimage, and it was the first time I had been back to the display since writing TEOD (naturally). So, I walked Mandalay’s route…There was a crowd of folks, as usual, enjoying hot chocolate and the various light displays…But, for me, it was like moving slowly through a dream. The fictional scene replayed in my head, projecting itself onto the canvas of reality before me. Non-existent players in this world were suddenly very tangible, if only to my eyes and no one else’s.

For a scant 30 minutes, fiction became reality in my own personal world.

It was, to say the least, an interesting experience… Of course, we know that my characters talk to me all the time, so I suppose I should have expected it.

Yeah, I’m pretty disturbed. But we already knew that, didn’t we? 

More to come…

Murv