Mild Burning Symptoms is now live, and we’ve had our first sale. This has shown me how much more code I need to write.

I spent last weekend in Sarasota, at the Number Two Surrogate Daughter’s graduation from New College. After seeing that graduating class, I have some small hope for the future. These are the best and the brightest of their generation, and I hope that they will live up to their promise and change the world. Maybe my generation did their part by raising these kids. Maybe we totally fucked up and are leaving them even more of a mess than we inherited from the generation before us. These young men and women are fascinated by the 60s and 70s, and what I did in my twenties, and what I really don’t think of as all that boho, or dangerous or even edgy, they love to hear about. Let Miz Shoes assure her readers that I played up my role as an antedilluvian Auntie Mame to the best of my ability, swishing my hot pink glow stick around like a fan, and trying not to scare the children when I joined them in the rave room.

I joke, but being with her and her friends, no, being included with her friends at that last party of their undergraduate careers was a gift that she gave to me, and it will carry me along through many dark days.

I’ve decided to start exercising every morning, doing a little workout in the pool, and although the spirit is willing, the flesh has decided that every other day is enough, thank you.

I have also joined the evil empire that is Facebook, although not entirely willingly. I keep telling people that I have a blog, you know. And I Twitter. Really, anything you want to know about what I’m up to can be gleaned from either of those two sources. But still, here I am, updating my status when I should be reading about how to automatically take posts down when the item sells. Or how to incorporate an actual blog page into MBS, so that we can have a little more of a dialog.

Feh. Enough of this idle frivolity. I’m off to make myself a martini and enjoy the fact that the RLA is out with his friend for the evening. Mmmmm, mud mask and fuzzy bathrobe, here I come.

Someone found this blog today by searching for a specific quote from Thom McGuane. I forget how much I love this passage. It’s been at least four years since I last posted it, so I give it to you again. One of the greatest soliloquies ever written, in my opinion. YMMV.

From “The Bushwhacked Piano” by Thomas McGuane copyright 1971.

“What I believe in? I believe in happiness, birth control, generosity, fast cars, environmental sanity, Coor’s beer, Merle Haggard, upland game birds, expensive optics, helmets for prizefighters, canoes, skiffs and sloops, horses that will not allow themselves to be ridden, speeches made under duress; I believe in metal fatigue and the immortality of the bristlecone pine. I believe in the Virgin Mary and others of that ilk. Even her son whom civilization accuses of sleeping at the switch.”

Missus Fitzgerald was seen to leave the room, Ann to gaze into her lap.

“I believe that I am a molecular swerve not to be put off by the zippy diversions of the cheap-minded. I believe in the ultimate rule of men who are sleeping. I believe in the cargo of torpor which is the historically registered bequest of politics. I believe in Kate Smith and Hammond Home Organs. I believe in ramps and drop-offs.”

Fitzgerald got out too, leaving only Payne and Ann; she, in the banishing of her agony and feeling she was possibly close to Something, raised adoring eyes to the madman.

“I believe in spare tires and emergency repairs. I believe in the final possum. I believe in little eggs of light falling from outer space and the bombardment of the poles by free electrons. I believe in tintypes, rotogravures and parked cars, all in their places. I believe in roast spring lamb with boiled potatoes. I believe in spinach with bacon and onion. I believe in canyons lost under the feet of waterskiers. I believe that we are necessary and will rise agian. I believe in words on paper, pictures on rock, intergalactic hellos. I believe in fraud. I believe that in pretending to be something you aren’t you have your only crack at release from the bondage of time. I believe in my own dead more than I do in yours. What’s more, credo in unum deum, I believe in one God. He’s up there. He’s mine. And he’s smart as a whip.”

“Anyway,” he said melifluously and with a shabbily urbane gesture, “you get the drift. I hate to flop the old philosophy on the table like so much pig’s guts. And I left out a lot. But, well, there she is.” And it was too. Now and again, you have to check the bread in the oven.”

It took two years of coding on the weekends. It took a major fight with the RLA. It took more time and more sweat and more tears than I ever imagined, and I’m still tweaking the code. But today, not ten minutes ago, I threw the switch on our virtual garage sale. One box of crap at a time, we’re clearing away the excess of our lives. I give to you: MILD BURNING SYMPTOMS. Stock up, babies, because when it’s gone, it’s gone.

I’m just testing the code here. We seem to have a glitch in Mild Burning Symptoms. It’s minor, and as soon as I figure out what is wrong, we’ll be live and selling off our worldly possessions, or as much of them as we can. This lovely portrait of someone you don’t know can be an iconic (or ironic) beach painting on YOUR wall. Stay tuned.

Today I went back to the canal with the Nikon and the short telephoto and took pictures of the guardian and his flock. Came home and proceeded to not find him in the Audubon Guide to Birds of North America. Did not find him on Ducks Unlimited. Finally, though using the Google-fu, of which Miz Shoes is justifiably proud, I discover what was at the local watering hole: I present to you the Egyptian Goose. Is he not lovely? Is his flock not beautiful? What they are doing in South Florida is a mystery, but probably just another story of an illegal alien who found the weather to their liking and a mate from the same long way away.

Last night, as we were coming home from the grocery store, I saw a clutch of ducks at the pond that I’d never seen before. They had blue? bills and red? eyes and were buff brown and darker brown. The RLA refused to make a detour for me, but this morning on the way to work, we pulled through. I only managed one blurry photo on the i-phone, but I think, possibly, this is a ruddy duck. Something new for my life list. But IS it a ruddy duck? Can anyone out there recognize this fellow?

And on another note entirely, is anybody out there surprised to find Halliburton’s dirty fingers in the oil rig disaster in the Gulf? I thought not.