early early

i'm having a lot of trouble killing time right now. i haven't even been at the coffee shop for an hour yet. i woke up at about 9:30 this morning. it was too hot for me to sleep in the bedroom last night and i was mr. cranky-pants so i went ahead and slept on the floor in the living room with the ac on. tilly kept waking me up. at one point i think that she slept right next to me on the futon though- which was kind of nice actually. i woke up at 8:30 because i stretched out my leg and my foot hit robin's leg because he was sleeping at the foot of the futon on his back. i never talk about my cats on here- i guess that i'm just that used to them being around. anyway, yeah, i have two cats- one is tilly, she's female and a tortoise-shell colour and robin is the other- he is male and grey. robin sleeps on his back a lot. he also snores and makes groaning noises when he's in the litter box trying to poop. pretty funny to hear.
so the dog days are officially upon us. they are getting more frequent and closer together it seems. *sigh*. i actually tried to alert my co-workers of the fact that as the temperatures rise i will become more and more irritable and touchy. i said it kind of as a pre-emptive apology and also in the hopes that they will respect this and go easier on me on really hot days. i severely doubt that the latter will occur. no siree.
i tracked the 'down to sleep' cd. it's in portland right now. the estimated delivery date is july 23rd. it would be infinitely hilarious if i get my order from cdman before my spiritualized- 'songs in a & e' green vinyl. i suspect that the production of the vinyl has been delayed and no one has notified us or that they didn't go out in the mail until the fourth of july which would put the delivery of said artifact probably in the neighborhood of today. that is if rough trade actually did get the vinyl in stock on the fourth of july, which i suspect is not the case. there is a sign on the ordering page that still says that they will come in stock on that date. it's been there for a while.
i listened to nearly all of the black angels album on vinyl. it's pretty nice- it sounds really awersome. i believe that my theory about the two extra tracks was correct- that i already had them on the tour ep that i bought at the show. one i'm sure is (that really awesome 'surf city revisited' song- which i think is the bee's knees now) and the other i suspect is. i've only listened to the ep once to be brutally honest. i'm wishing more and more now that the show recording had come out better as i am just dying to listen to it now, naturally, but that's how it goes kiddo. hopefully luck will be a little better this weekend and in the future. mike told me that at the record bar they can do decent recordings of live sets and he advised me to ask them to record our set.
speaking of mike i asked mpshows to add us to the ad astra show at the bottom lounge in mid-august. it would be really nice if that worked out, but i'm definitely not holding my breathe that's for sure. if that happens people from work could come see us play before the big show in october (that i haven't even looked into booking yet).
on a completely unrelated note the writing monster has reared it's ugly head. i was going through a bunch of storage bins the other night looking for my old notebooks from pre-2000- i used to fill these gigantic spiral bound blue notebooks with songs starting with when i was at columbia and on until i was at umkc and started switching to those composition books. basically there are boxes and boxes of notebooks that i've filled throughout our entire apartment. i couldn't find the blue notebooks, which is a bit worrisome as there are a few songs in them that i am beginning the process of reworking and adapting for the seventh album. since i couldn't find them i had to refer to an old 4-track tape of a song and figure the keyboard part out on a guitar and then rearrange it to be played by strings. while i was trying to find my notebooks i found a bunch of my later umkc notebooks. i kept some of the ones that i wrote my class notes in because sometimes i would scribble things down for songs in them while i was in class if it was a boring day or whatever. a good chunk of the 'blue-eyed' artwork came out of the notebook i kept for my poetry class because the teacher was such a boring, unengaging snore that it caused me to start drawing again. kind of a miracle as i hadn't done it since i was about 14 or something like that. i found my notebook for my senior project- which was my creative writing assignment- i had to write a 60-page piece and for that i tried to rework a novel that i wrote when i was 18. i was reading through it a bit and i was actually really impressed with how good the writing was. i'd always thought that it was too meandering and flowery, but at that point i had gotten it to be so focused and incisive and it's really a shame i didn't keep at it. i've always had problems writing anything longer than a short story because as i was making things up i kept having problems getting them to resolve in an organic, realistic way and that would usually cause me to hit a wall. i noticed that if i based it on my experiences more and coloured a bit outside the lines that things flowed so well and i could really churn something out that was really impressive. i gave up on reworking the novel because the way that the original novel had resolved was just so unrealistic. i still kind of am at a loss for how to do such a story- it just doesn't seem like it could be done in a realistic way but it's such a shame because i actually can write. or at least i could back then.
my creative writing teacher was always a huge help, i must say. when you'd write a story for his class he would do something called the cut draft where he'd take your story and cross out everything he thought was unnecessary to the story and you'd be forced to look at it with the bare bones and decide if you wanted it that streamlined and it really really helped me cut all of the fat and it just made everything i wrote about 2,000% better. after a while of him doing this i figured out ways to do it on my own and i noticed that the more stories i'd turn in the less cuts he'd make until he'd barely make any and that was when i felt like things were absolutely at their best. it was also after reading joan didion's 'play it as it lays.' i started kind of reformulating a new style that was seeming to work. or so i thought. when i was in portland i tried to write another novel and the same thing happened with that. i have about fifty pages of it left over in a few notebooks and that was sort of going in an interesting direction but it kind of fell flat on its face after i started introducing all of these new elements that just didn't work at all and by the time i'd worked them in and they'd become kind of essential the whole thing just lost all of its power because it was so clear what i'd really been through and what i absolutely hadn't. the other problem was that for some reason i tried to make it such that the narrator had made up the part that i'd actually experienced and that the part that i (as the writer) had made up was the real part. as you can imagine since it was switched like that and the made up part seemed incredibly fake why the thing fell flat on its face.
fuck, i got up too early today- what the fuck am i going to do with the rest of my day? i have some cleaning to do- my weekly chores and what have you. i've already done some pre-cleaning and such. stefanie's giving a massage in our apartment on saturday and when she does that she likes to clean it up a bit more than it normally is. i just don't want to go home where it's going to be all hot and sticky. ugh.