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April 16, 2008 The Near-Tragic Tale of An A Bunnies It seems like a weird title, but there is no singular form of the word bunnies at my house. When Sam was little, he called all rabbits, "A Bunnies." In honor of his long gone babyhood, we still call single rabbits "A Bunnies." Groups of rabbits are ALSO called A Bunnies, and the phrase is like FISH. It can be 1 A Bunnies or 75 A Bunnies, it is all still A Bunnies to us. A, you understand, is part of the proper name, not an article, so it is grammatically correct to say "Yesterday, we saw an A Bunnies in the yard." Or if more than one, you say, "We saw some A Bunnies in the yard." This is unusual, first because his brain is made of four separate cells that sit too far apart in the darkness of his skull cavity to ever be rubbed together, and I did not know the dog had the intellectual CAPACITY to lie. It was also surprising because Bagel is SUCH a diffident animal. He practically genuflects when my one-eyed massive pirate cat walks by, and he is SO submissive that when we FIRST brought him home, he had a healthy "SIR, YES SIR!" style respect for a large wrought iron pig that sits on the hearth by the fireplace. He would run through the den and as he passed the pig he would go all LOW BELLY and shoot it a worried glance as he slinked and bobbed past it. He wasn't sure if the pig was ALIVE, but just in case it decided it WAS, he wanted to make absolutely sure the pig understood its authority was not being challenged. But the KITTEN, Boggart the Dreadful, is another matter. The wrought iron pig has seniority, clearly, but Bagel was here BEFORE the kitten. He sees the kitten as a peer and they REALLYenjoy each other's youthful, sproingy company as they bound through the house and wear each other out playing fun games like "Let's Ruin All the Furniture" and "Can This Be Eaten? NOW he is about the size of Bagel's head, so he plays with Bagel as if the head were the entire dog. Sometimes he plays with Bagel as if the TAIL was the entire dog, but he doesn't ever try to take on all 50-some pounds worth of hound. Bagel, chock full of good stupid goodness, agrees to forget the existence of whatever portion of himself the cat is not using for the sake of not accidentally killing my kitten. Usually when Bagel needs to go to the bathroom, he creeps up to me sideways and, in a sorrowful and apologetic manner, makes the canine equivalent of a gentle throat clearing. It is a barely audible whispery "ahem" noise in the back of his throat, coupled with sad down-tilty hound eyes that telegraph how VERY sorry he is to be a bother. He repeats this endlessly until his bladder explodes and he dies, or until someone notices and takes him out to use the lawnly facilities. Last week, he came tearing up and LIED TO MY FACE that if I did nto take him to the bathroom IMMEDIATELY, me and my carpet would suffer many vile indignities. I was in the middle of drafting a scene in the new book, but he lied with SUCH vigor, threatening all manner of indoor biohazards, that I hit save and marched him forthwith to the backdoor. The NANOSECOND I cracked the door, he EXPLODED out of it, banging me out of the way and tearing down the deck stairs. It was a small brown A Bunnies, with its slump shouldered little back firmly toward us, eating up the long grass in the center of the yard. It heard the clatter of dog nails on the wood, and it looked behind it, and it saw 50 pounds of A Bunnies Destroying Befanged Evil bearing down upon it like a slavering train. ALL A Bunnies had to do was run under the back gate, not 20 feet away, but Alas! It took off in an entirely incorrect direction, trapping itself in a corner of the tall fence. I then lost my total crap, picturing my backyard as a R'abbitoir: I saw four of the world's most luck-free paws scattered to all the main points of the compass, a detached ear flopped into the azaleas, the head mysteriously golfed away or eaten, red entrails making a gruesome Christmas in the long green unmowed grasses that had called poor A Bunnies in the first place. I started screaming, "NO BAGEL NO BAGEL NO BAGEL NONONONONONO." Bagel was blind to all but an A Bunnies trapped in the corner. See, this is the world's most diffident dog, and he regularly plays with a kitten about the same size and shape of an A Bunnies. He basically scooped up an A Bunnies in his cavernous, maw, careful not to bite down, and joyfully SUCKED HIM LIKE A LOZENGE for a damp moment before gently rolling an A Bunnies across the lawn. There was a brief frozen moment where an A Bunnies, ABSOLUTELY SURE that he was dead, sat in a saliva-coated, unharmed heap. And then he realized he was FINE and he went leaping away, in the correct direction this time, and goozled under the back gate and was gone. Bagel came bounding back to me with fur breath and asked to go back inside. But by then he had already forgotten the whole thing and had NO idea what I was talking about. He also had NO idea why I took him inside and gave him and ENORMOUS lick of peanut butter off a spoon, but I know why.
Love, Insomniac A lot of people who READ as much as I do claim not to like TV. If I read at bedtime, I will be awake reading until I run out of book. Books wake my brain up, but TV---especially BAD TV---is a finger that pokes my brain's pause button.
the creepy green moth of happiness, coming to touch me with non-narcotic feet. I have seen the first ten minutes of just about every episode of Becker ever made. as fit as someone who likes dark chocolate covered cherries and melted cheese sammiches as much as I do can possibly be. An hour long drama, minus commercials, is 44 minutes, which is exactly how long I like to spend paddling my elliptical. Then I watch a 22 minutes sit com which is how long I can stand to lift weights. Becker has been on EVERY NIGHT to put me to sleep, but the WRETCHED WRITER'S STRIKE has RUINED TV this year. Every night has been nothing but REALITY SHOWS, 90% of which make me TWITCHY with despair for the fate of humanity, and the other 9% bore me so much they work like Becker.
LIFE It's about a cop who was wrongfully convicted of murder and spent 12 years in the federal pen where he got infested with equal parts rage, crazy and zen. Damian Lewis, who plays LAPD Detective Charlie Crews, is ackshully a Brit. He looks IRISH to me---he has the slitty mouth and pointy face with the weirdly flat, high cheekbones. Irish faces, to me, always look like they have extra BONES in them. It's a look that never fails to make my potato covered genomes flutter and make YUM noises. jpg I also like it that the romantic lead chick, not pictured (she plays Charlie's lawyer) has not had BOTOX. It's weird to see a woman on TV whose FOREHEAD moves when she raises her eyebrow. I will never understand why ACTORS, of all people, are willing to PARALYZE THEIR FACES. Anyway, she's gorgeous and as a bonus she HAS EXPRESSIONS, and I hope she doesn't cave and get pig botulism put in her face.
I was scared it would DIE because no one would realize it's greatness due to the strike, but YAY! I have SO MUCH TOUR still STUCK to my butt you better keep those chips where they are. I meant, of course, praise the Lord and pass the time on the elliptical.
NICE TO COME HOME TO,, enough to say so on the cover, on this blog, and recently in a bookstore to a browsing stranger. Rebecca very sweetly came out to an event while I was touring for THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING, and she was as delightful in person as her prose is on the page. jpg JJ: What writers influenced your work and how and why? RF: When I first decided to write a novel, I read something that saved my life. Some big important writer, like John Irving or someone like that, said, Don't try to reinvent the wheel, with your first novel. But you need a sort of road map to follow, your first time up at bat. I decided to try my hand at updating Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, mostly because Pride and Prejudice had been done to death. jpg I was interested in how two sisters with different approaches to life - she of the head and she of the heart - fall in love. Whereas the Dashwood sisters become "unmarriageab...
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