(Phaysis)

My friend Maredith demands that I write something new, so I’m going to write about salad. Salad is pretty awesome. You can make it with lettuce, or with eggs, or with tuna. Salad is supposed to be eaten cold. When salad is made with lettuce, it’s great for digestion and elimination, because lettuce, as well as any other vegetable and fruit, is full of fiber. Fiber is the undigestable portion of your food, and is essential for helping carry water through your intestines and out to your colon where the extra water will help keep your stools from being too hard. Ultimately, the more fiber you eat, the healthier you will be. And so that’s why I eat salad.

You can use many different kinds of lettuce for your salad. Most boring Americans use iceberg lettuce, which contains a lot of water, is crispy as long as it’s kept cold and wet, and has large leaves (perfect for sandwiches and burgers, too), but iceberg contains very little flavor or nutrition. Nobody should eat iceberg lettuce if they have a better choice. Another lettuce you could use is romaine lettuce, which contains more flavor, a more wrinkled texture, and has smaller, crunchier leaves. I like romaine, personally. It’s pretty good on sandwiches, but just fine as a salad. A third kind of lettuce is called arugala, which is used a lot in a salad variety called “spring mix”. It has uniquely-shaped leaves, a thin, dark green color, and a ton of flavor and vitamin C. It’s good stuff, and sometimes it goes great on those high-falutin’ sandwiches you find at a deli in a white neighborhood.

I like to add extra vegetables to my salad. I always have green onions (shallots, to you yankees) on hand in the fridge, so I clip off the roots of two stalks, trim the leaf tips, and chop up the green ends of the stalks into little bits of diced onion. Those go on top of the salad. I eat the white part of the stalks between bites of salad or sandwich. I also like to add tomatos; cherry tomatos are my favorite (be sure to wash them first). Sometimes, I’ll have other veggies like baby corn, olives, palm hearts. So tasty.

What dressing you use is based on personal preference. I like lighter dressings, so most times I’ll get either French or Italian dressing, but on occasion I have been known to be a fat American and use ranch dressing. Something about that creamy dreamy manufactured texture sets my taste buds at ease. Ranch dressing also goes good on manufactured “baby carrots” as well as buffalo wings which are manufactured from the arms of tiny immature chickens. Tasty!

Ok, that’s all I know about salad. You should have a salad too. I make a unique salad, and you make a unique salad, too. It’s as individual as each of us. We should totally get together some time and eat each other’s salad for a bit of variety. Ok, bye.

So I’m getting feedback from three of my proofreaders regarding “Lost Carrier”, and it’s all some heavy stuff. They’ve provided me with a ton of ideas and a few pounds of problems to work through. They’re proving to me that no matter how “done” I think a thing is, there will always be more work necessary to get it polished.

The general feeling I’m getting is that the story needs more, that the world of the story needs more flesh on its bones. In the spirit of a noire story, I made most of my descriptions as sparse and dry as possible. But the instances where I rambled on, I provided too much detail, and they stand out as accidental focal points. So the solution is to either trim them back or backfill everything else.

I had set out to make this a short story, but with the number of named characters, scenes, and themes, it calls out to be a novella or a serial. This will require of me more time and attention — and more writing — so I will not be publishing as soon as I had hoped. Sorry, kids.

Again, I would like to thank my proofreaders Amy, Rachel, and Jana. Your notes and comments have been incredibly helpful. Fresh eyes see best. To the rest of my proofreaders, let me gently nudge at you for a bit. Nudge-nudge.

Apparently, the Texas Relays are in town, meaning downtown is supposed to be fucked up with traffic, cruising, and young adults hooping it up after competitions. Whoopty-shit. Hope I can park somewhere near the venue when I go see VNV Nation tomorrow night. Don’t care if I gotta pay ten bucks to do it.

Looking forward to the show. It’ll be a welcome reprieve from the long workdays, even though I’m taking my work home this weekend. It’s a rare thing that I can work from remote, but now I have the need. Fuck my life.

I was noticing that my blog didn’t have any spam in the queue waiting for deletion. “Hmm, maybe they’ve forgotten about my blog” or “Hmm, maybe that botnet got taken down.” No, the answer is more basic: it’s been over 14 days since my last blog post, past the open comments timeout. Sorry about that, comerades. My bad. Spam away.

Remember that short story I was talking about writing, “Lost Carrier”? Yeah, well something weird happened: I finished it. Really finished it. Compiled the first draft and grabbed a cadre of volunteers to copyedit for me and give me notes on what could use some more work. Sent out the draft to the first of the four volunteers three weeks ago. The last delivery was a week ago. So here’s what’s funny about that: I’ve heard nothing by way of feedback. I’m in an information vacuum. Maybe there’s a curse on the story that causes the reader to go deaf-mute.

Realistically, it’s a short time ago that I submitted the draft to my readers. I sincerely appreciate their free help, and I wouldn’t wish to rush their response for fear of getting poor feedback, but I’m anxious to hear something, anything on how I can make the story better. Y’know? I hope for closure on the feedback loop.