My daughter was born on H.P. Lovecraft's birthday.

I am less than an amoeba.

I am without mobile phone for the forseeable. Hates it.

Don't text me.

Sad.

A daughter. I has it.

( Cut for lots of images )

There are nine days to baby day.

( View the trailer )

My cousin Richard has become a middle-aged hippy and is cycling for Charity and Peace and Reconciliation and tree-hugging. Now, I'm not generally in favour of 'forming a circle and killing it with love', but I am generally in favour of Richard. So, he's seeking sponsorship and if you've a spare coin then cough up, coz I know a lot of you are right-on hippies yourselves and people like you need your resources stripped from you sharpish. You'd only be spending it otherwise on hemp clothing and joss sticks.

Richard says,
"Basically I am doing this because Co-operation Ireland are the main body actively working on reconciliation projects in Northern Ireland. They are totally non-political (I would not get involved otherwise) and do some very unsung but vital work in building the peace in Northern Ireland. The terrorists have gone but the sectarian attitudes that underpinned the violence there still remains."

The URL for any donations is http://www.justgiving.com/richardlogue

I had a few short stories up at the start of this lj which, naturally, slid away into time. Inspired by fluffworld and her new columns at An Irishwoman Abroad, I've snatched them back from history and shifted them to a different site. Also there are some little picture stories which take seconds to consume and won't spoil your lunch.

If you haven't before and would like to read any of my short short stories, they're over at http://damokelly.blogspot.com

On many days, living in Donegal isn't a whole lot of fun, for a great number of reasons.

But today, sitting in the office reading, three windows surrounding me, and the sun shining...

( ...it's not too shabby. )

Off to Boston tomorrow. Gonna sit in Copps Hill on a lopsided gravestone, read 'Pickman's Model' and see if I can't finally get a Great Old One to pay the slightest bit of heed. They had a mega-storm hit the east coast last week and snow is expected at some, maybe all points during our stay, but I'm still going reading in the cemetery, dammit. And then, once pathdoc and her follows are done passing round the corpses, I might bring my unborn child to the Athenæm, see if we can't get a look at the deathbed confessions of James Allen, alias George Walton, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove-The Highwayman, bound in his own skin. They also serve tea. And if they raise a glass to Poe, 200 hundred years done and dusted, I will certainly imbibe, and if Dante and Longfellow meet as shades in Harvard Square, thanking each other for all the other has done for them, I will thank them too.

And if they sell Hershey's peanut cups or Rocky Mountain chocolates anywhere in my vicinity all the gothic horrors and literary finery in the world better get the hell outta this fat ass' way.
God bless Americana.

So, me and pathdoc are off to Boston in a week or so. She's gonna be at a conference much of the time and I need ideas for things to do with my time. I have a few - Lovecraftian locatios scouting and I'm sure there'll be Poe stuff and there's visiting Harvard - but I'm open to any and all other ideas for diversions. Food, drink, shopping, sightseeing - if you've been, or know someone who's been, help me out eh?

Thank you interwebs.

pathdoc complains that I never update this anymore. Seriously.

For those not in the know, I am married to pathdoc. I'm here when she leaves for work in the morning and still here when she makes it home at night. In between these times, I ring her at lunchtime, every day. I rarely leave the house. I live a very uninteresting life, day to day. I hardly ever fight crime or cure a disease, and when I do, I always tell her about it when I call her over lunch.
Every day.

There are folks on my friends list who do fight crime on a daily basis, or who make the interwebs work by digital magic, who insert genius into the craniums of willing drones or who can sing and juggle a flaming snowball while dressed in a full length ballgown if called upon to do so. Hell, pathdoc herself is essentially a character out of a pulp crime, but does she post at all? Not a word.

But I, I am at fault for not providing her with something interesting to read over coffee? Well shame on me.

Fine. A post for pathdoc then.

You're pregnant.

And I'm making an omelete this evening.

I am a bad lj-er, as I am a bad emailer, bad phoner, all round awful communicator. However, with the shadow of "Leave me alone, I'm psychotically obsessing about my utterly pointless degree!!" now waning for the year, I should get back into the habit of updating. And lo, blackcurrants tags me for a meme, which goes,

A) People who have been tagged are invited to write their answers on their blogs & replace any question that they dislike with a new question they’ve made up.

B) Tag 8 people to do this quiz, but understand that those who are tagged can decline if they so wish. Continue this game by sending it to other people.

( Meme within )

I do not tag people. Anyone who wants to pick this up again is very welcome to do so.

Has anyone else read Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club? Having just finished my mate Brian's Gallow's Lane and intent on going through John Connolly's Charlie "Bird" Parker supernatural crime series (coz his short stories were excellent, as was the YA The Book of Lost Things), I figured the gothic structures of Civil War Boston and the Inferno overtones would make for a nice stepping stone back into the borders of genre. Plus, with its focus on the American poets, I could pretend I was studying at the same time. Anyway, it's a real class act, a thoroughly engaging portrait of a fledgling nation torn apart from within and fearful of the outer world, a love letter to the poets it transforms into reluctant detectives and a really compelling murder mystery with the creeps level turned way up past ten (the very champagne of gore! I defy anyone reading it not to feel things under your skin the next time a fly passes your ear). Has anyone else read it? Has anyone read any more of Pearl?

I need to be reading for the good of my soul again and not just for the good of my assignment marks. When I began, back in 2006, I was enthusiastic and the topics were interesting and my marks were a bit above average. Then I took it into my head that I could genuinely fail because of the OU's system of matching your final course grade to the lower of your two marks from exam and coursework, and I'd not taken an exam in a very long time. So I spent the last months of the first course consuming all details and tearing the problems apart. And from an above average display in the coursework I took a first from the course as a whole. And now I'm possessed. I have to get firsts or they don't count. I've taken a single drop in grade for a single piece of coursework in the last two years now and I was an Antichrist as a result on one of the few holidays pathdoc and I ever get together. I don't even think I enjoy the reading, it's all just problem spaces to be deconstructed and overcome. This process leaves no room for pleasure reading either, as I avoid all reading outside the course texts entirely, so I don't feel as guilty for not reading them every minute of every day. I was a really crap student when I was at university in Belfast, I mean pathologically lazy at worst and skin-of-the-teeth passing-grade-comprehension at my most competent. I took my 2:1 in psychology out of a silk hat with a white rabbit, my masters degree by dint of charm and mother's money and my demonstrator's post at Queen's purely for the incredible irony of being the blind leading the blind. But I was 17 when I went to university and never took it seriously, so this time I really, really want to take it seriously. Still, I disliked psychology, I wasn't very good at it and I ended up happily teaching it. I love English, I'm actually good at it and I'm no longer even sure why I'm doing it. I just know I have to do it. Still, Pearl's book was like all the brain chocolate in the world at once this week; not that it isn't complex and highly poetic in its language, it just made all the silly linguistics models go away. I'd half started it a dozen times before my last project was submitted, reading at the inhumanly slow pace I read everything. I hate people who go on about how they read a couple of books a week: any book, good or bad, takes me weeks to complete at the best of times. But from page 70 on Saturday to 370 yesterday evening, Pearl was like alcopop to my inner teenage slapper. So now I'm looking at his The Poe Shadow. I mean who in their right mind doesn't want to read about Poe? So, one more time, has anyone read him?

Last night at 2am I found myself hanging from the feet of a catholic priest, naked apart from his surgical robe, while he in turn dangled from the runner of a helicopter tilting 20 feet above a hospital roof, its inhabitants engaged in a gun battle, while a crowd of zombies crowded beneath me to catch whatever might fall from the master's table. And the priest needed to pee.

Praise the Lord, I'm gaming again!

We'd had a more than trying week. And then yesterday...

Over lunch, while trying to teach out little lad the meaning of the word 'recognition', the conversation moved to people we don't recognise, and from there to strangers. So we wordlessly decided to try and talk to him about them.
By the end, after a lifetime of being drilled in good manners towards grown-ups and doing the right thing when asked to, he was so confused and upset about being told to be so naughty towards someone being nice to him, about raising his voice and being cheeky, that he burst into tears.
"Is this a joke?" he asked us half way through. "You'tre telling me a joke."
And when we weren't he wanted to cry, only by this point he was so undermined and turned about, that he thought he'd be in trouble for crying and tried to stop it with this huge unnatural grin, as his face turned redder and redder and the tears slid out.
And all we could say to repair it, to comfort and explain, was that we didn't want bad people to get him, confirming that they were out there.

I have never hated this world so much as I did in that moment.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

When the tears subsided, he showed us the octopus puppet he'd made during the week at school. I asked if he knew what an octopus sounded like.
"No, I don't know anything about octopusses."
"Octopi," I corrected.
"What's an octopi?"
"One octopus. Many octopi."
"Like naevus," his mother added. "One naevus, many - "
"Naevi," answered the pathologist's son, confidently, on firmer ground here.
"One hippopotamus, many - " I continued.
"Hippos," said Dan.
"Well - "
"Oh!" he cut in. "Hippi."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dressing him for his cousin's birthday party after lunch, pathdoc tells him,
"Put these Levis on for me, please."
"No, mummy," he chides gently. "One Levus, many Levi."
"You're funny," she tells him.
"I'm not funny," he repies. "I am hilarious."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Smoking in my sister-in-law's garage mid party, pathdoc tells me excitedly how they've found ice on Mars. Had to hug her in eternal thanks for being with someone forever who is as pragmatic and girly as she is, but is alsot he kind of person who will tell me how excited she is that there's ice on Mars. She regrets, she told me, that she won't live to see the "Evacuation of Earth!"
How I loved you then.
Had split second worry that she might only be excited to please me. Then realised how that could only make her more of a treasure to me, not less.
We're together 13 years this year.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

It rained so hard in the morning, but was sunny and clear as we drove home last night.

Yesterday.

I am about to leave for my first ever driving lesson. If I don't return, I loved you all. I was 33 and 1/2.

I can't have made this up.

I mean I can, but I'd like to think I apply my creative faculties more usefully.

Irish contingent - when I was little I was told that if it was dry on St. Paddy's, then we'd have a wet summer, and vice versa. Has anyone else heard this?

Please do not wibble back about St. Swithens to me - there was no St. Swithens when I was wee. I was old and grey before I ever heard that name. When I was wee there was only St. Paddy.

Someone else has heard this. You have the whole internets of people at your disposal. Find them.

Did you make mix tapes for others?

I'm reckoning my friends pool is all of that certain age that the question still makes sense.

I know that my friends are all notable for their fluency with advancing technology, that you've probably been assembling music selections without a second thought for years. I imagine you, as a sample population, might be notable for the extent to which putting together a soundtrack to your day is a matter of daily course. And you doubtless expose these selections not just to others, but potentially millions of others all the time. I'm not asking any of this. You're old enough to remember - making a mix tape for someone else.

Making mix tapes is, as Nick Hornby's Rob Gordon said, "hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem." I had a limited double tape deck with which to make mine, and an even more limited selection of music from which to draw them. So making such a thing was no minor undertaking, one that I might readily double task with watching TV, or reading or whatever else I would do for myself. It was a task devoted completely to the other. Meditative, midnight work, selfless but utterly self-referent. A gift that gives away some of the dearest things to you but costs you none of them.

I never had luck giving mix tapes to girls. My taste straddled the cultures of mass adherence and mass rejection that you are supposed to choose between, if you want to get girls. But that wasn't the real problem. The real problem is that I made mix tapes that I wanted to listen to. I'd almost go out of my way to leave out anything I thought she might recognise or like, thinking that this would be how I'd bring us closer together, providing her with examples of the kinds of things she might like to "get into," widening our sphere of common interests, giving us more to talk about.

Have we met? Have you been briefed on the smug yet?

So, yeah. Girls hated my mix tapes. And I'd spent so flipping long on them! What the hell was up with that?
I packed it in as a bad job. Quicker with liquor.

Poor pathdoc. She never got a mix tape, times and technologies having left them behind. She never got a mix CD, she never got a mix playlist for her iPod. She got all the equivalents, however. She got "get into roleplaying" and, gods love her, she did. She got "get into drama" and to her eternal credit she made costumes and ran lines and taught pretentious prima donnas in waiting to knit, she learned to rig lights, handle sound desk, put up with piss artists who thought they were DeNiro. She read the books as best she could, watched the genre TV, bought some figures, befriended the comic store guy. And though she never got the mix tape, she had the music pressed on her. She drove the car so I could drive the stereo unfettered.

Pathdoc is in America. She got a nice new Nokia N95 8GB to take with her for contact and music and movies alike, and she asked me to fill it for her.

So I made pathdoc a mix tape. Of stuff, I hope, that she likes. There's some stuff on there makes my ears bleed, personally. And there's some that I really like but has been selected because it's like stuff I know that she likes. It took 2 days, completely taking up the first and about half of the second. It only amounts to four hours of music, under sixty songs in total, but that far outstrips any previous mix tape marathon.

I made the pathdoc a mix tape, to quote Rob again, "Full of stuff she likes. Full of stuff that make her happy. For the first time I can sort of see how that is done." Such are the benefits of true love, true believers.

So, you who love and are loved, you who are looking for love - when did you last make a mix tape for someone? Not give them an album, not share a song you've come across with them, not show them your collection and the clever playlists you've carved it up into, not drag and drop a pile of mp3s onto a device or disk because they need something to listen to in the car, not because you've gotten them the player and you need something on it to show that it works, not music that *you* like. A mix tape.

Why don't you drop whatever you can, as soon as you can and go make someone else a mix tape of stuff that they will like.

Coz it was great.

Have fun in Denver, pathdoc. Miss you.
X

Merry Christmas to each of you, with my undying love and friendship. You're stars, every one. May you never lack, this year or the next.

Damo.

p.s. This is a meme, internet not required. xxx

My brother's new phone has an application called MobileDJ where any chimp with an opposable thumb can overlay samples and waste otherwise productive hours making an object that one hates for going Beep! go Beep! even more. I was at it for a long time. Evil little creep sent me the mp3 file I made in the middle of last night and I've had it on loop for an hour now while I worked.

Have just realised I have what can only be described as the theme tune to a particularly poor daytime medical drama from New Zealand playing permanently in my head.

We hates technology. We hates it to pieces.