Today's Keyboard Smash

My dog is okay, within the anticipated parameters of allergy-induced skin infection. She's fine. Therefore, everything else will also be fine.

Everything else constitutes: the truck has something major wrong with the engine and needs new tires; my car needs new brake pads; the other car has a short in the wiring somewhere and thus has no brake lights; the bill for my dog was r a t h e r robust...basically, money is finite and troubles are not.

Oh, and the place I just submitted a story to is closing up shop after the event to which I submitted. Which is still better than folding before getting my stuff to print, which has happened. And I'm aware that it has nothing to do with me or my work, that it is some mix of confirmation bias, bad luck, and the unstable nature of the (small end of the) publishing world. But goddamn, does it feel like I have the ability to kill story markets just by sending them my work.

But I got three great songs in a row as soon as I turned on the radio driving home, and my dog is fine. I can work with the rest of it.

Lake Lewisia #588

His mother liked to tell how, as a young child, he had become obsessed overnight with drumming, waking from a dream into a world where every object had to be patted with little hands in search of rhythm. Later, he crafted drums from wood and hide, buckets and barrels, things to strike with sticks and hands and hammers and branches. He built them larger and larger, drums big enough to live in, always trying to recapture that old dream: the rhythm of a heartbeat larger than worlds.

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LL#588