Multi-part

(from something I left in ginny_t's journal, as she was looking for character backstory:)

Mikhail Petrovitch was technically a lackey, but it was more through intense admiration than anything akin to a need to serve. He had learned early in life that hitching yourself to someone destined for greatness was a lot easier if you did it on the way up - loyalty and forward momentum were able to carry you through the rough patches that way.
So Mik fetched the slurpees and drove Schuyler home after one too many scotches made him surrender the keys to his precious little Fiat and watched in admiration as Schuyler cut reel after reel of utterly brilliant film. He put orange juice in the slurpees to ward off malnutrition (which Schuyler then turned around and spiked with vodka) and dealt with the mundanities of ordering pizza and paying rent and tried to swallow the worry in the back of his throat that said that maybe his beloved boss-man shouldn't be drinking so many scotches - telling himself that boss-man was a genius. That was what geniuses did, after all - look at Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Kubrick.
And it worked, for a little while, anyway.

---

I have about five minutes to finish this and my coffee and get ready to go to Teh Evil Group Thing. Fortunately this is the second last Evil Group Thing, as they managed to get everything more or less squared away to start Sean in the twice-per-week-group starting the last week of September. And we will definitely say 'yay'.
Longer letter later. Or somethin'.

Nostalgia Street

When I was younger, before most of you fine people knew I existed, (back in high school; anndrag and raventyde likely recall) I had a strange and inexplicable affinity for rubber chickens.
I love them. I still do. I have a small model one; I have one on a keychain. I'd buy just about anything if it had rubber chickens on it. You know the kind; yellow, feet stretched out, little stubby wings folded in? Yeah.
Fast forward to the present. Today in my mailbox I find a large and squishy parcel that ... squawks?
And therein lives ... yes, a rubber chicken. raventyde sent it to me; it is yellow and squishy and has a squawk that she compared in her letter to that of a dying yak.
It's fantastic. I'm sitting here grinning like an idiot over the thing.
The moral: not all parts of the past deserve to be buried. Apparently that's this week's lesson.
Thank you, drive through.

What Would Butch Cassidy Do If He Were Here Right Now? (crossposted to non_plot)

This, for some reason, was inspired by a few Kevin Smith movies. Schuyler and Kismet are only half-siblings; they have the same mother, different fathers - they're three years apart in age, which is (from my own observations) about the amount of time most likely to cause hideous sibling rivalries. Juanita is Schuyler's beloved 1981 Fiat Spider, which he has enough of an attatchment to that it should really be listed as a character.
( Butch Cassidy never had days like this one. )