85 degrees outside and it's only April 7th. tooth still hurts (or absence thereof). just came from workshopping a story with the fabulous Emily. her story was wonderful. mine? a mess. trying to write about seattle & it's always tough going. had weird dreams about seattle friends the last 2-3 nights & then found out today another seattle fixture's gone. I think there should be a moratorium on young talented people from the PNW dying early. and that's all I'm going to say about that. I'm hoping this story gets itself together enough to be sent out into the world. but who knows. still doing the poem-a-day thing with MES. so far I haven't been able to come up with a happy spring is here poem - just lots of other kinds of poems. MES says they're good & I like a couple of them. maybe enough to send them out too. watching Criminal Minds. it used to be an intelligent crime show. now it's just formulaic torture porn. or maybe I'm just getting old. went to scratcher again tonight - they sure need to get a.c. It was like a sauna in there which made it hard to want to drink anything but cranberry/seltzer/lime over ice. I tried a beer & it tasted like gasoline. hate when that happens. this weekend's the tartan day parade. going with a couple of friends & then maybe we'll try out the Highlands Pub or maybe some place I wanna go (like a midtown dive). too bad St. Andrew's sucks these days. maybe I should write an essay, "when good bars turn bad" - though someone who drinks far more than I do probably already has. * plowing through more mss for BLPress. there's some good writing out there & some not good writing out there. I wish there was more good writing but I guess we can't publish everything, right? onwards. *