Another chapter done, and up to 888 ms pages.

A pleasant rainstorm going on outside the window. About to go out into it. Think I'll stamp in some puddles.

How can one resist a bubble-gum singer who not only writes her own tunes but tosses in a references to shit like Möbius strips too?

Let us observe a moment of silence in remembrance of the first and last issue of The Infinite Matrix. Ah, we hardly knew ye.

Okay, so I have terrible credit. So what?

I'll tell you what. It means that most banks in the New York metro area won't even give me a checking account. Forget loans. I can't get a bloody checking account, and it's tough to get by without a checking account.

I solved this problem six years ago by tacking my name onto a joint checking account that my then-girlfriend opened at the Bank of East New York. After she moved out a couple of years later, I tried unsuccessfully to open my own account elsewhere—one of the big banks, like Citibank or Chase, that let you do online banking and had ATMs all over the city.

At last I realized that I could probably walk into M&T Bank (which had by then absorbed East New York), state that I had one account there already, and open an individual account without undergoing a credit check. This worked.

Now that Laura and I are married, we've opened a joint checking account and a money market account at Citibank, where she already had her own accounts. Then, a few weeks later, I walked into the branch at Amsterdam and 68th and opened individual accounts for myself that linked to the joint account. I walked out with a box of checks for my very own Citibank checking account.

This was less than a month ago. On Monday I received a familiar letter from Citibank: "We're sorry, Mr. Shunn, but your application for a checking account has been turned down because of the following reasons, blah blah blah."

Sorry, guys. Too late. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, because I've already been using that denied checking account for three weeks. I beat you at your own game, you fuckers. Ha!

Well, Laura and I both did, together.

I had my first acupuncture treatment today. Interesting experience. I'll have to write about it; this is a placeholder note so I don't forget. Very cool while it was happening, but the headache relief I was seeking pretty much ended as I walked out of the acupuncturist's office. I also felt mildly stoned much of the evening.

Fortunately, Laura was there to walk me gently to a fine Ethiopian meal with Ellie and Honey Bunny. Of course, the waitress returned to our table after we ordered a bottle of pinot grigio to ask whether that was the white or the red, but this did not affect the quality of the food. (I guzzled water as well, my acupuncturist having pointed out in the medical-history portion of my visit that my responses to her questions indicated chronic thirst.) After that, we had drinks at a swanky bar on 10th Avenue called XTH AVE. The bathroom was very clean and splendid, with its opposed mirrors and giant floral arrangement creating the illusion of a vast jungle space. I had a whiskey sour, and everyone else drank cosmos. A fine time was had by all.

Hey, I'm back in the game, and back up to 870 ms pages. Woo-hoo!

Wedding pics now available!

http://www.shunn.net/vitae/vegas

There are no captions yet, but most of the pictures speak for themselves.

By the way, in the process of editing down my memoir for my agent to send it out again in May, I compressed four chapters dealing with my stint at the Clarion workshop down to one. The original four chapters are now posted on my site at:

http://www.shunn.net/writing/clarion

The excerpt deals more with the experience of being a Mormon among gentiles for the first time than it does with the mechanics of the workshop itself.

[from Missionary Man, a memoir still in progress]

I had a very stupid argument once with my girlfriend Bertha, back when we were still living together. (Actually we had a lot of very stupid arguments, but I only plan to consider one here.) This was 1995, and we were at a small club in Seattle waiting for Barenaked Ladies to take the stage. We had both enjoyed the opening band, an act which managed the impressive feat of playing tunes in tricky time signatures without ever alienating the audience.

"How would you count that last song they did?" Bertha asked me. She had taken a class in music theory in college, coming away with just enough knowledge to make her a danger to herself and those around her. "It didn't sound like you could count it like a normal song."

This was her way of asking the number of beats per measure. "It was in five," I said.

"Five?" She shook her head and looked at me with the rapacious smile that indicated (in this instance) I was saying something too insultingly moronic to let slide. (Only things she didn't understand struck her as that insultingly moronic.) "What do you mean by that?"

"I mean exactly what I said. You count the song in five. Five beats to a measure."

"But how do you know?" she pressed. "How can you tell?"

"It's obvious. You can just tell," I said—though when her eyes began to blaze above her mad grin I quickly amended, "If you've had enough practice listening, I mean."

"That's not an answer," she said.

I sighed—condescendingly, I'm sure. "Look," I said, "the basic rhythm went like this." I counted to five while I clapped out a complicated beat with my hands. "See?"

She shook her head, settling into what I thought of as her bulldog stance. "That doesn't prove anything. You could have counted up to any number while you did that."

"Not easily, and my counts wouldn't have fallen on the beats."

"Your counts didn't fall on the beats."

"They did too! They didn't always fall on the claps, but they fell on the beats. That's what syncopation is."

She folded her arms, squaring up to me like a limbless pugilist, and I knew I had awakened one of the most vindictive of all Bertha angers: I had claimed to know something that, not partaking of her passing acquaintance with the subject, must therefore be inherently unknowable.

Well, she tried to get me to admit that I couldn't be one-hundred-percent certain the song was in five, while I averred that I'd stake my life on that very proposition, and the argument degenerated from there into one of our more memorably awful dustups. But that isn't really the point of the story. The point of the story is that, to Bertha's less musically practiced ears, a pattern that seemed perfectly straightforward and intelligible to me hovered just beyond the reach of comprehension. Another musician would have grasped the cadence immediately, and, had I casually mentioned to him that the tune was in five, he would have replied, "You got that right, man. Are these motherfuckers righteous or what? Dig the augmented elevenths that keyboard's layin' down."

(And then it would be my turn to feel stupid and pissed off, and I wouldn't tell this story with quite the same relish. But that's not the point, either.)

I must have told the story of my arrest—greatly abbreviated, of course—a hundred times in the past fifteen years (usually at the urging of some friend who says to someone else, "What? You never heard Shunn's missionary story? Hey, Shunn, get over here and tell this guy why they won't let you back into Canada! Dude, you gotta hear this. You're gonna pee yourself"). If I've learned one thing from all those tellings, it's that different audiences require different narrative approaches. If I tell another Mormon, for instance, that I phoned in a bomb threat to keep my companion from leaving his mission, he's with me immediately. He understands. He may not know the details yet, but at a gut level he grasps the urgency and desperation that would lead to such an act. He may even be able to imagine himself doing the same thing. A gentile, however, needs a little more background before I hit him with the money line. He needs a foundation laid for him first. Otherwise I just come across as dangerously unstable.

Another interesting characteristic of the LDS listener is that, like as not, he'll allow that I did a clever thing, a brave thing, an admirable thing. He may go so far as to call it inspired.

But even the truest-blue Mormon will smack his head and groan when I tell him what I did twenty minutes later.