Poppy Z. Brite's Blog, page 106

More Black Swallowtail Adventures

One of the Black Swallowtail caterpillars appears to be pupating on my esperanza! (I love how everything they do sounds pornographic.)



If you look closely, you can see the little thread s/he has attached to the branch.









L-R: Thai eggplants, various cucumbers, purple cayenne peppers, Huge Lemon Oxheart yellow tomatoes.

New Orleans No-Fo

I just washed my God damn cell phone. As in, put it in the washer (in the pocket of my gardening pants) and started up the machine. The cycle had gone ten minutes before I missed it. I'm trying to dry it out, but I'm pretty sure it's dead. Ah, well, it was a prehistoric one anyway, the kind that flipped open and had a numeric keypad, and people have been telling me I should move into the 21st century. (On Sunday, my friend Harold showed me how his iPhone can say the rosary. I didn't even know a

Addendum: Swallowtails!

These guys are in the garden munching on my fennel. I'm pretty sure they are Black Swallowtail caterpillars, and as such, they're welcome to some fennel fronds. (I am not generally a soft-hearted gardener, but I am rather easily swayed by butterflies. I'm now seeing the Gulf Fritillaries whose larvae I allowed to eat my entire passionflower vine last fall, but I'm pretty sure the vine itself is not going to make a comeback.)

Too Much Fun

tjcrowley was in town this weekend, and I went out and had too much fun with him, and now I think I'm having a slight flu relapse. I'm not talking about flu in a bottle, either; the only thing I drank was about a third of a very nice bottle of Veuve Clicquot at Clancy's on Thursday night. Mostly I just wore myself out. Darren is one of those friends so dear and fun that he makes me forget I can no longer walk for miles and do as many exciting things as I want to without getting all crippled and

Brain Hurt of the Day

From someone's sig file on a message board:

"All things bright and beautiful; All creatures great and small; All things wise and wonderful; The good Lord made them all." -- James Herriot

This is unfortunately not an April Fool, but it's funnier to me than most of the attempts at April Fool's jokes I've seen so far, so I hope it will make you laugh too.

Livejournal Anthology

If you belong to prime_liquor or nextroundsonme, you may already know that I was asked to contribute to Livejournal's tenth-anniversary anthology. After some foolish angsting about how I wasn't going to get paid for something I do for free in the first place, I sent in my chosen five entries and promptly caught the superflu. When I was finally well enough to check my e-mail, I found that I'd made the final round but had blown the deadline to send back their contract. Happily, they seem to have f

Biography

Looking back at yesterday's entry, my review of Haunted Heart seems a little out of proportion, like using an ICBM on a mosquito (does that date me terribly? Do you young people even know what ICBMs are these days? I hope for your sake that you don't). It's true I did not like the book (and it turns out that I may have been right about the author's remembering a more "upbeat" movie ending to Thinner; again, this is unconscionable given that she was explicitly referring to the texts of the Bachma

Haunted Heart

Friends and neighbors, I was down for the count. Wheezing, lips turning blue, the works. I mean to tell you, I was so sick I took to rereading Stephen King again, because I thought I might not get another chance. As best I can recall, I read The Shining, Pet Sematary, Christine, The Dark Half, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Night Shift, and maybe one or two others last week. In the midst of that, I took time out to read the new biography Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King by Lisa

Update

I am alive. Got a bad case of Captain Trips. Will post more from Vegas Boulder if I live.

Headspace

Mine is not good right now. I'm not going to bore you with details, but I do want to say I'm sorry if I have seemed snotty to anyone lately. I don't feel particularly snotty (except in the literal sense; I am definitely a phlegm factory), but I do feel terse. For me, terseness means I am sick of the sound of my own voice (or the sight of my own words). To others, I know from experience, it can read as snottiness. I do not intend it as such.

Rhetorical question: Is it possible for a reasonably int