It is my seventh wedding anniversary today. We got married on cross-quarters so that the date would move around and confound our relatives. The anniversary often coincides with Cinco de Mayo which is amusing, but today it's the day before.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I have developed another old man obsession borne out of lucky internet searches and stupidity. Long have I been overly-interested in mechanical clocks. I thought I was interested in wooden ones but wood is a piss-poor engineering material and makes for a really shitty clock, at least as far as accuracy goes. This obsession was exacerbated by the fact that longcase/grandfather clocks are tackily ornate and most of them have quartz movements anyway so what's the fucking point? Turns out I'm just not spending enough money by a handful of zeros.

As it turns out, perfectly elegant, perfectly accurate, perfectly lovely clocks can be had for roughly the price of a BMW 7-series. Unless you want something particularly impressive, in which case you should expect to spend about as much as you would on a McLaren MP4-12C.

For that price, of course, they include a ladder so you can wind the thing. They do not include a well-heeled Romanian manservant to do it for you, however.

They have, in their magnanimousness, provided a pathway to ownership for the rubes among us. For a mere eight thousand euros you can build your own regulator using pimpin' german parts. Of course if you want things like the dual anemometer compensator that's another thousand euros, or 250 euros for polished screws.

I would have a really hard time spending a thousand dollars on a watch. For some reason, however, I stroke my chin and nod at the idea of putting someone else's clock parts together for ten grand. Which is pretty much priming in a nutshell - "but it's a small fraction of the $250k their real clocks cost! What a bargain!" without really internalizing that I've spent less than that on a hyperexotic italian motorcycle capable of dusting an F430 Scuderia on the straights.

So instead of enriching the krauts for a bunch of brass and pianoblack I probably oughtta buy a book on movements for $20 and focus on shit that interests more than the polo crowd. I mean, look at this choad.

So I'm also busy loathing myself for liking clocks because they're intricate mechanical objects of precision beauty but, unlike guns, they don't kill anyone and you can use them all day long without your hands smelling like smokeless.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

And "loathing myself" is a comfortable position as I've finished the book. It's been less than 24 hours, and I've finished it for the third time now, the first time to get it up to like 200,000 pages, the second time to get it down to 176,000 and the third time to reuse maybe 8 paragraphs of that 176,000 words and start over with another 87,000.

One way to look at it is to say I cut the book more than in half. A more accurate way to look at it is that I retold the story in an entirely new way using half as many words. I'm sick to fucking death of the story, unsatisfied with the ending and generally disgusted with the written word but I also must acknowledge that it's better than it was, and it was good enough to get me one hell of an agent.

An agent I haven't talked to in a year.

So now I need to start that bullshit back up again. Meanwhile there's at least two chapters I know of that I need to rewrite because I've decided that my "never scenes in restaurants" rule did not in fact have exceptions, and even if it did, those exceptions are not in this book.

I tell myself this is the part that separates dilettantes from professionals - the willingness to beat the shit out of it until it's right. At the same time I recognize that I had to let Google spell "dilettantes" for me and that spending three years and 300,000 words on a book no one will ever read is the very definition of "dilettante."

One of my earliest, most brutal, most unintentional fights on Hubski was over the nature of artistry. I've always found it disingenuous that the man who tried twenty two titles on A Farewell to Arms would say something as fatuous as "there's nothing to writing - you just sit at the typewriter and bleed." You DON'T. You take a living idea and you strangle it and torture it until people you will never meet, people who would actively hate you, people who would reject everything you stand for would enjoy reading it.

But then, I write because people tell me I'm good at it, not because I enjoy it. Times like this I hate them for it.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A rat got into the house night before last. Came in through the hole left in the wall when we replaced the subfloor under the en fuego dishwasher. Took the little fucker four months to find his way in but once he did he ate a fist-sized hole in the side of a watermelon then made it into the pantry and snacked down on a container of pancake mix. Thought it was a squirrel at first and that I'd left the screen door open. But last night we heard the fucker while watching TV.

I grew up with rats and mice. There was never any hope of actually keeping them out of the house, so you just kept your room clean enough that when they wandered in, you could catch them, toss them in a ziplock, step on them (usually in bare feet) and throw them in the garbage because the garbage disposal would wake up mommy. So I went on a rat hunt - put on my gloves 'cuz the little fuckers can bite and proceeded to attempt to catch the little shit. My wife, who did not grow up with vermin, had a better idea - box the little shit in so that he couldn't get away. Of course we both failed and as soon as he was behind the fridge he was back down under the house, but at least it led me to his hole, which I plugged up with one of the few pieces of scrap wood left after I put 8 loads through the chipper two days ago.

He gnawed at that plank until 5am.

My daughter woke up at one point - I heard her saying "come in!" at 3am and had to go in and explain that there was a critter trying to get into the kitchen to get food. She saw no reason our kitchen couldn't accommodate a "creature" since it was cold outside and we had a lot of food. I then had to explain that outside animals are better outside. She seemed to buy it, but this morning she had created an entire cosmology about the creature that knocks on the door at night.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

My daughter will not grow up with vermin. She will not have rodents that bite coming into her room. She will consider it deviant to crush animals to death because the cat's too lazy to eat them. She will not lose classmates to plague spread by squirrels, she will not have siblings nearly killed by hantavirus because her parents are too drunk to deal with the squalor. She will not fear running the garbage disposal at 3am; she will not have reason to run the garbage disposal at 3am. And that is something worth drinking to. That is something that outweighs the obsession with poncy German clocks, that outweighs the life wasted in pursuit of words never read.

I'm doing a better job than my parents did, so it hasn't been a total waste.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

The number of words above, added to the book I wrote yesterday, would equal exactly half the book I wrote last year. It took me 35 minutes to write that.

If only everything could happen so quickly.