Nick Flynn

Wow, the blog is working again! It was broken for so long I was beginning to despair. I had accumulated lots of things to say, but for now I’ll just give you an excellent book to read: Nick Flynn, The Ticking is the Bomb.

I’m a fan of Flynn’s from back in 2003 when I found his Blind Huber in my bedroom at the Anderson Center. He is so freakin smart & courageous & has a wonderful voice. Isn’t that the recipe for a good writer, right there?

In this new book I especially appreciate the reminder about Proteus, who I haven’t thought of in decades. When I was a kid learning Greek mythology, I just thought they were cool stories. What a trip it is to grow older & really get (as in need, as in lean on & find comfort in) how they are all about how life actually is.

I have put myself under lockdown. Quarantine. Whatever it takes. I am not leaving the fucking house until & unless I feel well enough to go swimming. I’ve had it with these ridiculous relapses.

However, as a result, I am stircrazy enough to come in here & wanna mess with my blog. For one thing, I’ve had to admit that I blog about salad other things much more than I blog about Chinese restaurants; hence the desire to change ye olde blog title into something totally open-ended.

As for Indigo Schmindigo? That actually came from a long fight I had with a certain dental insurance company (let’s just call them Schmelta Schmental) a few years back, in which they refused to get my name right—& if the name doesn’t match up, well then they can’t pay for shit, of course. We went back & forth about 5 or 6 times while they scrambled & rescrambled my name into every possible permutation (Indigo Somindigo, Som Indigo, Indigo Chihlien, &c.) except the right one, until finally they sent me a postcard saying, per your request we have corrected your name to: INDIGO SCHMINDIGO. Remember, this is a true story. I called my dentist’s office in a fit. The insurance wrangler there could not believe it either, but she agreed that this was more than I should have to handle on my own, so intervened on my behalf & got it all worked out. I don’t know what she had to do, but I surely had new respect for her after that. She still likes to call me Indigo Schmindigo, which is fine with me as long as I’m not catching no grief from no insurance smartasses.

So I don’t know if you’d file this under reappropriation or making lemonade out of lemons or what, but at the very least I hope it’ll keep me (& you too) from taking my blog—& myself—too seriously. Not that there was any real danger of that, heh.

Hey, how do ya like my new look? We should see some improvement in functionality around here now, which was the main instigation for the change (some odd things started to happen after Blogger migrated to Google), but of course I couldn’t resist cooking up a new color scheme while I was at it. Don’t hold your breath for the rest of the site, though. Other than that whole frozen in time thing, it’s still working. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Also, I will be gradually adding more links, so don’t go feeling neglected prematurely!

fyi… this website, & my email, will go on a little overnight vacation this weekend.

Here’s the notice I got about it: Beginning this Saturday, November 10th at 6pm Pacific Time, The WELL will be moving our servers to a more modern and disaster-resistant colocation site. All servers will be powered down, moved, and brought back up at the new location. Barring unforeseen difficulties, we expect to have everything back before noon Sunday.

Modern & disaster-resistant? Quite intriguing!

technical difficulties

I've gotten some reports that the survey is having issues. Crashing, not working, &c. I'm sorry I don't know how to fix this. Maybe too many enthusiastic Times readers are trying to fill it out at once? If it's not working for you, please, pretty please, come back later & try again. Thank you. I am humbled by the awesome power of one little paragraph in the Dining section!