The Absinthe Drinkers

Ah shit. I've been seriously remiss in my blogging duties over the past week. Mostly because I've been spending evenings at home, getting actual work done on short stories and on that novel that's been sitting around on my hard drive, twiddling its thumbs for the past--oh--six months. It sits there, taunting me. Actually, it sits there, telling me to get off my literary ass and write the fucking thing. Because I know how it ends! At least, I think I do. As I've been writing, I wonder if it actually ends the way I think it ends. Anyway. Point is, I haven't been going out and pretending to work while actually perusing the Internet quite as much as I used to do.

But I sat down and blocked out where the novel has been these past couple of chapters and where chapter five might be going. Which is good. Chapter five has felt a bit aimless to me, which is generally what frustrates me and makes me stop writing it.

Finished the medical story. Have started another.

Oh, and I bought an absinthe kit from this guy (I find it disconcerting that the first part of his URL is "deadflesh.fear"), which arrived in a timely five days. I began to macerate it on Sunday, and so I now have a decanter full of 151 rum and wormwood macerating in my linen closet, slowly turning into a familiar forest green. A few people have wondered, "Why are you making absinthe? Doesn't that make people go mad?" And the answer is no. Absinthe doesn't contain enough of its active ingredients to make people go mad. Wikipedia has a good article on absinthe, which describes some of the conditions that caused absithe to eventually become illegal and some of the reasons why some brands were so dangerous (competitors of Pernod absinthe added industrial-grade alcohol and other horrible things to their blends to cut corners and add color).

In my experience with the drink, absinthe has little of the effect that people ascribe to it. It's just a nice warm sort of drunk. With some synaesthesia to top it all off. Very nice.

So that's all. I started a new story in a sort of Decadence style. About a pig.
Oh...and as nearly as I can tell from this post in Jeff Vandermeer's blog, there is further evidence that I'm a medium for the zeitgeist. A story about a stripper stripping her epidermis? This sounds almost exactly like my story "Pornography," in which a boy can't get off with his woman unless she strips her skin off (because his first experiences masturbating was to Gray's Anatomy).

Happy Holidays, if I don't blog before then.