The past few months…

…have been a bitch and a half. This semester isn’t going as well as I had hoped. The sheer amount of work (reading, writing–fortunately, no arithmetic), coupled with things going on at work and at home, have made blogging fall way down on the list of priorities.

So, updates:

• I will try to blog more (for reals this time!). I even have a 75% compeleted post that has nothing to do with comics.

• I adopted another dog. He had been thrown off the back of a truck in rural Virginia, and they were scheduled to put him down because he had mange and a secondary skin infection. So, I drove home with this:

And now have this:

• Classic movie fans: A relatively hard-to-come-by film is airing on Turner Classic Movies Thursday, November 15th at 10PM on the East Coast: Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. Just a friendly FYI.

• Comics! I haven’t been reading much–hell, most of my MoCCA pile is still untouched, and I stopped by the comics shop and picked up four issues of The Comics Journal that I had missed. I don’t expect to be talking about them much in the next few weeks, because…

• I signed up for National Novel Writing Month. I know, I know–I don’t have time to blog, so why would I have time to do this? The answer is–I don’t. And that’s kind of why I am doing it–it’s going to free me up from my “internal editor,” knowing that I have to get through 50,000 words in 30 days on top of everything else going on in my life. It officially kicked off today, and I started what I’m currently calling “The Critical Approach” on my lunchbreak. I didn’t meet my target wordcount for the day yet, but about 500 words in a half-hour (hey, I had to eat first) isn’t a bad start, I suppose.

If anyone’s curious, here’s what I tossed out:

Vijay Patel’s bodega hummed with the vibrations of coolers filled with soda, milk, and energy drinks. The tiny television behind the counter buzzed in a slightly higher tone–the poorly remanufactured off-brand set’s inner workings were audible even over the Sale of the Century remake WWOR was airing in the afternoons. The few other post-lunch customers weren’t talking either–not to themselves, and not to the other customers, either. And no one was speaking to the crazy brother with the gun; if they did that, he might stop pointing the gun at the back of my head and start pointing it at one of them.

Vijay loved shitty syndicated daytime game shows, which is why I swung by at 1PM instead of 2PM–I knew I’d get the regular discount if I didn’t interrupt Family Feud. Something about how it reminded him of the gambles he played, he told me once–moving to America, starting his first store, opening his new store outside of the Indian storefronts of what gets referred to in Jersey City as “Patel Street.” At least, that’s what I think he was saying–even though we’d shoot the shit as I drank his coffee and buy my Camel Lights, I usually only picked up about two-thirds of what he was saying. If his accent didn’t trip me up, whatever bit of candy he was gnawing at did. Still, I got the gist of it–any new venture, planned or not, is a gamble.

Vijay learned from his gambles, though. A few robberies left him shaken, and scared him enough to install one of those silent alarm systems that runs through the phone line and alerts the authorities. “Next time,” he told me, “none of those fucks are going to be getting off with any of my money again.” At least, that’s what I thought he had said–something like that, at least. The point was, he had a new system and he was dying to use it at the right time.

Vijay had been on the business end of a gun a few times, but not enough times, and definitely not enough times to know that this wasn’t the right time. This was the wrong time–the worst time. The brother was twitchy. Twitchy, big, and young—drugs, probably. And if he was big twitchy, and not scrawny little shit twitchy, it meant he wasn’t used to working on hype or dust or whatever the fuck he took before he walked in and pulled his piece out. It meant that he had narcotic-fueled anxiety on top of all the other anxieties that come when a stick up kid pulls a job.

It meant Vijay should not have given me that look, that cocky look someone gets when he pulls a straight flush on the river or the chance to land “quixotic” in Scrabble on the triple-word score. That “Don’t worry, Harris, my secret will save us all” look.

It meant Vijay should not have pushed that fucking button.

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Hopefully, this will give me reason to blog some more, despite not having time for comics, movies, or anything else, really.