Tallulah, I just like that word.

SO, the other day, I'm sitting at breakfast when N drops a year-old issue of 'Writer's Digest' in front of me. I've never really been a huge fan of said publication, never really found it too helpful, somewhere between a well-intentioned trade mag. and a ploy to get would-be writers (note: as a child, I was a would-be firefighter, astronaut, superhero -- today I am a would-be porno star, tv pundit, superhero ...) to shell out $4/mo. to read a bunch of information useless to them and, perhaps, to succumb to one or two of the myriad ads for phony lit agents, poetry contests or set-your-pomes-to-music schemes advertised in the back. I mean, there are some alright items inside, but the publication exists merely as a marketing tool for its own books. Given the cover price, it's not even free advertising. Who am I to complain, as mayhaps I use this blog to plug my own more expensive literary endeavours?

The other night on TV I heard that 10-year-old Mazzy Star tune, the slow D-A-G one with the really cool, spooky echo. Don't ask me the name of the song, but it was playing again today when I went for tea. I like that song. I associate it with the cold, wet spring of 1996, which was perhaps the strangest season of my life and which I won't get into here and now. Let's just say it was a time defined by my late dad's old navy blue London Fog trench coat I wore then. Maurice told me it made me resemble George Harrison, circa. 1965, and I thought that was pretty cool, so I wore it quite a bit, in spite of it being a size too small. I wore it until this woman I was seeing at the time told me "you know, you kind of look like Paddington Bear in that coat." Things weren't quite the same afterward.