Well, I didn't sub today, but that's just as well...I can use the break after yesterday, which was the worst day of subbing ever. I was subbing for a 6th grade assistant teacher at the Mid-Michigan Leadership Academy, a uniform-wearing, discipline-obsessed charter school in Lansing where the cirriculum largely consists of sitting down and shutting up...and, predictably given that focus, the students are very bad at it. Ugh.

In any case, today was good. I had a full drink card at Cappocino Cafe, a place that despite an *extremely* yuppified atmosphere has an excellent concoction--the "mocha nudge"--whose exact contents are kept secret, and which I enjoy tremendously. How often I go there can be gaged by the fact that the punch card I turned in for my free drink today referenced not only the Lake Lansing location (the one I was at, and the only one that still exists) but also an Okemos location that has been out of business for about three years.

Anyway, I got a double Mocha Nudge, even got them to give it to me in a glass (the phrase "for here" has to be repeated a couple of times and in a couple of ways at some of these places for them to process that you don't want it in a cardboard cup) and sat down and wrote the first thousand or so words of a new short story, "The Great White North," which so far features giant, man-sized bats threatening travellers on the back roads of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I'm enjoying it.

I also finished reading "The Futurians," Damon Knight's memoir (written in the late 70s) of science fiction in the 1940's. A deeply entertaining book, especially in combination with Fred Pohl's similar book "The Way the Future Was," which I read in the fall and which covers a lot of the same ground. Both books, as one reviewer of the Pohl book put it, do a great job of making the reader nostalgic for something they never actually experienced.

The Pohl books is much better written, but I think the Knight book has even more interesting information in it, some of which sounds like a great basis for a science fiction novel of it's own, replete with sex, violence and a built-in speculative element that would only have to be slightly exaggerated and taken seriously: "the five," five writers (including Knight) who bonded in a way that some of them semi-seriously, semi-whimsically considered quasi-telepathic or hive mind-like after one of them, who considered herself to be a witch, went into a spontaneous trance during the first Milford writing conference in the presence of the other four.