Reading

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Not a lemonade stand

This past weekend I was doing errands, and there were a bunch of kids, maybe four, ages about nine to twelve, at a T-junction of a road into a development and the more general-use road. They were waving and gesticulating at passing cars the way high school kids do when they're trying to get you to come to their fundraiser car wash, but there was no place to wash cars, and these kids were definitely younger than high school age.

So maybe they were selling lemonade? Or cookies? Or --?

I came back around and pulled into the smaller street and parked.

"Pokemon cards! Pokemon cards for sale!" they yelled, waving around exactly the sort of notebooks my kids stored their Pokemon cards in.

"Why are you selling your Pokemon cards?" I asked.

"We're bored," said one.

"We want money," said another.

"We're going to buy more Pokemon cards," said a third.

"This card here?" said one, stabbing one with his finger, "it's worth $600. I looked it up on eBay."

"I don't think anyone driving by is going to have $600 on them," I said.

"No but, no but: this one guy? On a bicycle? He bought one for $30!" said another.

"And another guy said he'd come back with $50!"

O_o

Okay, what do I know?

They proceeded to show me several others that they assured me were worth hundreds of dollars.

"Mmmokay, but that's out of my price range," I said. "Do you have any in the $5–$10 range? ... of Pikachu?" (Because I am boring and vanilla)

They showed me several and I got a cute one for $10.

Then I told them the story of the ninja girl, how she entered a contest to design a Pokemon starter card for a starter pack, and her Pikachu won and was included in the pack. As a prize, she got a $500 gift card to Target and 50 packs of the winning five cards. Those are now worth a couple thousand dollars, so we've been told. Uhhh, yup, just checked. Here's an example showing the ninja girl's Pikachu.

I mentioned this to the kids, and one nodded knowledgeably. "A creator pack," he said. "You should get your daughter to come here and look at our cards."

"She lives in Japan," I said.

"JaPAN?!" he wailed. "Lucky! Japan is the best place for Pokemon cards because, um. It was started there."

Afterward I told the ninja girl the story and showed her the Pikachu I bought.

"Oh!" she said. "A surfing Pikachu! So cute!"

I told her I'd send it to her.

a metallic-shiny pokemon card of Pikachu on a surfboard

a metallic-shiny pokemon card of Pikachu on a surfboard

Entry tags:

Staying the Course

My virtual tax instructor lists his hobbies as "horror movies" and "video games." So, I guess I'm in the right tax class.

I was surprised by how many of the other students had thick accents and names most mainstream Americans would find difficult to pronounce. I guess H&R Schlock employment is a well-known step on the ladder that leads to the dizzying heights of the American dream.

The class wasn't as bad as I feared it might be. Spying on those differently accented students was actually quite interesting. And Microsoft Teams turns out to be an efficient tool.

###

Afterwards, I met up with Belinda whom I mostly avoided all summer because she voted for Trump, and after Brian died, my tolerance in general went wayyyyyy down.

I informed Belinda that I would not be TaxBwana-ing this coming year.

And she said, "Well, then, I'll go to H&R Schlock and tell them I want you to do my taxes. I trust you."

Which I guess is flattering.

We had lunch at the falafel shop in Rhinebeck where all the movies stars go when they come to Rhinebeck. (A surprising number of movie stars come to Rhinebeck.)

And then we drove up to an apple stand just north of Valatie.

I'm not sure from whence comes Belinda's fixation on this particular apple stand; it is not remarkable in any way. But the drive through rural Dutchess & Columbia Counties, past fields of sunflowers and corn, and patches of scrub woods, was lovely. It was a crisp, sunny day, distinctly autumn. The leaves on the trees in those woods have not yet begun to turn—I guess because there was so much rain this year? The color changes of leaves is more related to tree hydration than to temperature changes.

There was a cunning little distillery in the corner of the apple stand, so multiple opportunities for ArtPhotos™!!!

That last photo is not an apple stand ArtPhoto™, but a photo from Italy sent me by the real-life Daria with the note, On our walks, four of ‘em, every time we saw a cat Brian would stop and snap a pic, “for Patrizia.”

It made me sad...

Though I must say, I am simply filled with admiration & awe for the real-life Daria for staying her mountain course, keeping to the adventure!

Under similar circumstances, I probably would have hopped the next train to London, spent my remaining days abroad huddling inside the British Museum, ruminating on what a hideous failure I am.

###

Speaking of cats, the kiskas brought me the corpse of a very large mouse this morning.

They were very proud!

I showed the corpse to Icky who stared at me like, What do you expect me to do about it?

Well, you're the fucking landlord, Icky. Figure it out!

Finally, he mumbled, "I guess I should start setting traps in the basement again."

I guess you should!

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Vision Quests

The real-life Daria texted yesterday: You are Grazia and _______ is Flavia?

And you’re Daria, and ____ is Mimi, I texted back. First chapter’s finished and I’m halfway through the second.

Daria: OMG! Send it! I’m sorry I haven’t written, I was sure I had answered your last message, giving you my blessing, as long as Daria is beautiful and brilliant!

In real life, as on the page, Daria is beautiful & brilliant.

###

The real-life Daria is in Switzerland. This was an adventure that Brian, Daria, & the real-life Flavia were all going to go on together; after Brian died, Flavia backed out. So, Daria conscripted her friend Carlos.

On our tromp around the Ukrainian summer camp, Daria had told me all about her friend Carlos. He's an artist; every other word out of his mouth was how much he didn't want to sleep with her.

"You do realize that's a strategy to get you to make the first moves, right?" I said.

"Oh, no, no, no, no. Nothing like that. It removes the pressure, you know? We're friends."

###

Daria: On the 4th I arrived in Paris with Carlos. We were going to walk around a mountain in Switzerland called the Bernina. Brian planned it and I wanted to still do it. But a couple of days later, at the base of a snowy peak, after a couple of days in his company and sleeping in the same room, I decided I couldn’t go through with it with him. He was too controlling. My tolerance for that has gone way down. I am alone now, at a lovely hotel in Maloja Pass, and will cross into Italy tomorrow. 9 miles.

Me: I am so IMPRESSED that you have continued on with the adventure.

Daria: Brian would have been so proud of me for doing this alone. I cry a bunch of times every day and my contact lenses get all dirty. Can’t cry tomorrow! 😬

Vision quest alert!

She sent me many heartstoppingly beautiful photos with the note, Mahler and Nietzsche loved walking around here.

Other than that, I played around with the Work in Progress & watched Black Chicken interacting with her new posse.

We've been keeping the coop door open, but the two adolescent chickens don't seem to want to leave.

And the two chicks are so young that they need to be segregated:

Black Chicken leaves the coop, but she doesn't range far!

She is quite obviously thrilled at the prospect of being Boss of her very own crew & can hardly wait to establish a pecking order.

###

In WiP news: For simplicity in continuity, I've transposed all Brian's & my tromps through the decaying landscapes of Brooklyn into tromps through the decaying landscapes of Kingston. The problem with this is that I don't actually know the decaying landscapes of Kingston, and may need to take a research jaunt later this week.

I'm a bit ambivalent here: Readers don't actually tend to read landscape descriptions. Landscape descriptions are the part of the book most readers skip.

But the whole "economic geography" motif is so essential to this particular story, that I feel I have to give it attention.

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Proximal Causes

Dreamed I was in magic school, taking an exam.

The first question on the exam was absolutely incomprehensible: You were supposed to figure out the nature of a quality floating around a girl from the absence of other qualities floating around her sister. A very strange mathematical equation with odd coefficients floating in space, & I could not solve it!

Go on to the next question, I told myself. Forget the math! Do the language problems! You'll get all the language problems right!

But I would not let that first question go! I kept trying & trying to solve it!

Two girls who were also taking the test began talking & laughing in loud voices.

Stop talking! I yelled at them. You're breaking my concentration!

One of the girls began to cry. She was kind of an amalgamation of the two girls who represent careless youth at its prettiest to me right now, A________ & H_____ (though A________ must be close to 40 these days, come to think of it.)

I finished the exam an hour early, sniffed the crying girl. And it's unfair to just make me sit here doing nothing—

Fine, I said. Don't.

And slammed my exam book shut. Hurled it at the proctor.

I'm not doing this shit anymore, I announced.

And began to stalk off.

Knowing full well the proctor would come after me!

Because everyone thought I was so immensely talented.

###

In other news, did 1,500 words of Remuneration and 2,000 words on the Work in Progress (when it flows, it flows), and somehow managed to fuck up my left knee. Who knows how? I did tromp—in between rain storms—and tromping was effortless. But my left knee and my left soleus are sore today—

This is the worst thing about being old. Things hurt without proximal cause!

###

Also, Ichabod texted me just after I went to bed. Venting! he said. We'd talked on the phone earlier in the day as he was driving up to San Francisco on the way to judge some local law schools' Battle of the Mock Court.

So, I locked my keys in my car!

Triple A had had to open his car for him.

I was seized with anxiety: When you're in the type of mood where you lock your keys in your car, you're also in the mood when you get into an automobile accident, and I kept picturing Ichabod lying in a ditch somewhere near Morgan Hill.

Maternity!

Not for the faint of heart.

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Joyce Carol Thomas

I just found out that Joyce Carol Thomas, the author of Journey, which I just finished reading thanks to

rachelmanija's review, is no longer with us! This is too bad because I wanted to write her a note telling her how much I loved her use of language and that she includes so many beings and perspectives beyond the human, and one very sweet interaction between the protagonist and a boy who likes her.

It was a kind of a strange story--there were a lot of observations from different characters' points of view, plus authorial observations, and various problems of life were glancingly or directly looked at, but then there was this suspense-novel plotline! But I really loved reading it, I think because I liked all those observations. I just liked spending time with the author as she told this story. (I wasn't actually so into the suspense-novel plotline, but I didn't mind it either; I was able to just go along with it.)

And the language, just great. I quoted some last time I talked about the book, but here's a little more. Here, for instance, is what I mean about all the living creatures in the world being present and part of the world in a way you don't often get (and that I love):

And [the teens] started running, like the deer who lived in the forest, but the deer bending over Eucalyptus Lake looked at the teenagers out of the corners of their velvet eyes and wondered at the young folks looking a little like trees and shrubs moving so resolutely down the hill, going into the town the deer visited more and more to get away from the evil that the lake had warned them about. (p. 109)

Or how about this, about lightning:

From her window Meggie watched the dance of lighting on Inspiration Mountain.

A configuration of white sticks clashing.

Far off a rumble smothered in a smokeless smoky sky.

A white leap of lightning overhead. White hot to the eyes.

A long-legged acrobat strutted, hissing between the sky and earth.

How lighting danced.

The hide-and-seek show changed everything to shadow; lightning, jealous of the light, left the red-leafed trees looking like a negative on a photograph. (p. 110)

It's not just the beauty of the images, it's that Thomas says the lightning is jealous of the light--it's that living-ness of everything. Just adore it. ... And mind you, she put this in a story of [rot13 for spoilers] grraf orvat noqhpgrq fb gurl pna or fnpevsvprq gb erwhirangr anfgl byq zra. I'm so glad she did! And so glad this story got published!

One more, when a boy who's been teasing her asks her why she doesn't like him:

Meggie suspected that past the despairing eyes, down, down into the depths of this person was an inquiring soul searching for his own blue quality of light. (p. 63)

His own blue quality of light. Did you know that that's what people seek? It feels so right.

I thought Thomas must be about my age, but no: she was my mother's age. She's a whole generation above me.

From Wikipedia:

Thomas was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, the fifth of nine children in a family of cotton pickers. In 1948 they moved to Tracy, California, to pick vegetables. She learned Spanish from Mexican migrant workers and earned a B.A. in Spanish from San Jose State University. She took night classes in education at Stanford University, while raising four children, and received the master's degree in 1967.

Well thank you for everything Ms. Thomas. I really admire your outlook, your observations, and your writing, and appreciate what you gave to the world.

Entry tags:

quotidian,
robin

Quotidian

RTT got a terrific write-up in The Ithaca Voice.

And I have been scribbling, Remunerating, & avoiding Icky as much as I possibly can.

I'm isolated but not unhappy about it. It's as though the characters in my head are providing me with as much company as I could possibly need. I don't know whether that's creative inspiration or mental dysfunction. Maybe a little of both?

The Patrizia-torium is messy & disorganized, and I should probably do something about that because as Without, so Within.

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In Which Black Chicken Becomes Boss Chicken!!!!

Awakened again in the middle of the night. What's up with that?

###

Went downstairs to make coffee and discovered Icky (freshly arrived) had acquired four new chickens! Two half-grown chickens and two half-grown chicks.

He'd put the half-grown chickens in the coop with Black Chicken. We wandered out to check in on them. Black Chicken seems ecstatic! She will be Boss Chicken! And no, that's not entirely anthropomorphism: Chickens actually have very complex emotional & social lives.

Icky took this opportunity to interrogate me about the peach tree from which nearly all the peaches had fallen.

"Yeah, I baked a pie with them," I said. "Pity they don't stay on the tree to ripen more—"

Icky scowled. "What are you talking about? They're ripe! That's why they fall off the tree."

"You think? They taste good when they fall off the tree, but they're so small & pale. At the pick-your-own places, they stay on the tree till they're larger & more golden—"

"So, you have made up this complex theory to disguise the fact that you're just wrong—"

I stared at him, incredulous. "Iggy, I don't give a fuck. I am just talking to be polite and pleasant. My ego is not invested in this conversation. Believe whatever you want to believe. I truly do not care."

That shut him up.

###

The two half-grown chicks are currently hopping around downstairs as they are too young to be introduced into the coop. Black Chicken would lead her newly assembled merry band to peck them to death.

I personally would not want half-grown chicks, however adorable, running around through my house. Half-grown chicks shit, & chicken shit is icky. But Iggy is Icky, as we all know, so maybe it's a matter of kindred substances finding each other.

The kiskas are confined to quarters until the chicks find housing elsewhere.

####

Other than that, yesterday was kind of a wash.

The sentences aren't quite condensing.

Meaning I can kind of hear their rhythmn and intuit their layout on the printed page, but the individual words aren't coming.

I tell myself that this will all get resolved in the second draft, but I'm not entirely convinced.

Still. I've got to stick with the schedule I've developed for myself. Next week, I start tax classes, & that means I'll be juggling three balls in the air. Three balls is a lot.

Entry tags:

philosophy,
robin

The Ballad of the Pink Coral Cell

Big day for the lad yesterday:

He did good!

Has to watch those sweeping right hand gestures and tone down the "You know"s a bit. But he knows his stuff & held his own with the greybeards. So, I think he has a good shot at that Common Council seat.

###

Other than that, I am in a sour mood because I woke up in the middle of the night.

I did manage to fall back to sleep & Fitbit sez I even managed reasonable quality sleep, but when I wake up in the middle of the night, I think dark thoughts the following morning.

###

I fully believe that climate change is transforming the planet in such profound ways that the immigrant onslaughts we are seeing now on industrial (mostly temperate zone) nations are just the tiniest manifestation of what will be happening in a mere 10 years.

Drought is ravaging. Drought leads to famine. When people are starving, they go elsewhere. The only way to stop them is to provide them with food and the wherewithall to have a more sustainable existence. (Don't give a man a fish. Give him a fishing rod.) But resource allocation is a complicated game under capitalism.

What we are seeing now is a kind of scuttling to maintain a status quo that cannot possibly be maintained.

The revolution that is coming will be an extinction event.

Won't come in my lifetime. Almost certainly will come in my children's lifetime.

Against such inexorable global certainties, I weigh my own exceptionalism. (Because it's always about me-ee-eee.) In the close-up shot, I'm the pink cell standing out from the rest of the coral reef but move that camera back 10 feet, and the reef is completely yellow. My existence does not matter. It does not have the slightest effect on what is or what will be.

Ah, the mysteries of consciousness! What is the evolutionary advantage of consciousness, anyway?

Where's John Locke when you really need him?

###

Anyway, I must push all such gloomy thoughts aside. For it's time to write sprightly chick-lit dialogue!!

Entry tags:

writing

The Come-to-Kali-the-Destroyer Moment

Finished the first draft of Chapter 1 and stashed it in the usual online places so it won't disappear if my computer decides to self-destruct or if human civilization vanishes & sentient cockroaches need a Rosetta Stone.

Chapter 2 should be relatively easy to write since it will mostly be the Amazing Adventures of Grazia & Neal, lifted with a bit of embellishment from my copious diaries.

So, I am actually thinking more about Chapter 3, in which Neal has to save Grazia in some way.

Plus, one of the (unexpected) things that came out in Chapter 1 is that Grazia is religious in a weird way—this is a prime example of how characters sometimes run away with their own story arcs—so Chapter 3 will have to include Grazia's Come-to-Jesus or Come-to-Bodhisattva or Come-to-Kali-the-Destroyer moment, and optimally, it will involve some colorful locale far from Ulster County, New York, because the fourth part of the novel will be a third-person description of the three women, Grazia, Daria, & Flavia, scattering Neal's ashes in various colorful locations, and it would be good to foreshadow those locations.

Chapters 4, 5, & 6 will be first-person Daria's POV and will have to contain an analagous Neal-rescues-the-gurl scene—hey! this is chick lit, where politically correct empowerment plays second fiddle to romantic fantasy—as well as some colorful locale.

Chapters 7, 8, & 9 will be first-person Flavia POV—where in addition to above, we have to stage a Mimi suicide attempt. This will come about when Flavia evicts Mimi from Neal's cabin.

Chapters 10, 11, & 12 will be the road trip & I have no ideas what to write for that beyond a vague impulse to set part of it at Wall Drugs in South Dakota. Which would just be so wrong on so many levels.

###

Anyway.

I won't be writing any fiction today because today I must Remunerate.

I finally realized there is absolutely no way I can go back and forth between economic analyses and light fiction writing on the same day. The brain is bicameral for a reason!!!

So, I'm gonna try out an every-other-day schedule.

Entry tags:

chick lit novel

Untitled Chick Lit Novel

TITLE

Part 1: Grazia

Chapter 1

I drove up to Neal's house to say goodbye to Daria, who was red-eyeing it back to California.

GPS decided to take me on an exciting tour of the eastern Catskills. It was a lovely day, so not unpleasant.

Thing about GPS in the Catskills is that there is no cell coverage. Like nil, nada, niente. And the narrow roads have unexpected forks that GPS does not account for, and the unexpected forks always seem more attractive than the straight & narrow path—do we all see the metaphor here?—so it is very, very easy to get completely lost, especially for people like me who were born with no sense of direction.

When that happens, one must simply trust that GPS will make the necessary adjustments and that eventually, one will get where one wanted to go.

GPS, in other words, is a lot like the Judeo-Christian God.

###

( But wait! There's more! )

Where houses used to be

What I may learn is bigger than me or you and wraps itself around the pounding in my chest.
I cannot re-write history or even a now -- so it is best to listen with the great fortune I've found until my heart stops coursing.
It's just our lives that are short and testified to, by flowers that grow in places where houses used to be.

Entry tags:

Calycanthus ATC

Another botanical ATC (6,4 x 8,9 cm), and the first attempt to actually use my new selfmade watercolors. Turns out they work as expected, with textures and everything, which is a relief, because otherwise I'd be stuck with a year's supply or so of green paint I hate. XD Of course, I had to use some other (store-bought) greens on this as well, but that's okay. (It's perfectly clear that only two greens are not nearly enough.) I'm just glad I didn't botch things.

Used watercolors:
Michael Harding: Titanium White, Pyrrole Red, Bright Green Lake, Phthalocyanine Green Lake, Dark Morellone Earth
Schmincke Horadam: Dunkelrot
Isaro: Magenta
Nila Colori: Ocra Violetta Armena
My own paints: Living Tree, Living Forest

farben-mini

I didn't need the blue and the brown for this picture (come to think of it, I almost never need blue), but test paintings with those (and, ugh, they really look nicer than in this photo; sorry, bad lighting here) will follow soon.

Entry tags:

Porous

The novel writes itself when I'm in the shower. Or driving in my car. Places where it's not easy to take dictation.

###

One of my favorite literary anecdotes of all time comes from Michael Chabon, talking about a block he encountered while writing a major scene in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

At the time, Chabon was enrolled in an MFA program at U.C. Irvine. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was his master's thesis.

The novel is about a young man who simultaneously falls in love with a man and a woman—very gaspworthy at the time (1988).

Chabon was writing about the moment his protagonist & the male objet du désir first have sex.

He didn't want to make it porn. (And then he unzipped his pants & unveiled his massive trouser trout...)

He didn't want to make it funny. (Ditto.)

He didn't know what to write and was afraid the novel was going to end right there.

So, he decided to go for a walk. It was some time past midnight.

Now! Anyone who has ever spent time in Southern California knows that nobody ever walks in Southern California. And especially nobody ever walks after dark.

In the comic I'm imagining, Chabon's this very, very tall man with seraphic wings of long, long hair and an antiquated waistcoat, chiaroscura-ed against the monotonous, endless, vapor-lit expanse of empty Irvine Center Road (though actually, Chabon's shorter than I am and doesn't have a Victorian sartorial fixation).

Chabon walked and walked and walked. And finally after a couple of hours passed another human being—a man holding a wad of tissue to his nose because he was having a nosebleed.

Eureka!

The perfect detail to denote the loss of a particular kind of virginity.

I love this anecdote because it demonstrates so perfectly how the Universe is always willing to collaborate with you if only you can keep yourself porous enough to be open to its suggestions.

###

Meanwhile, I trotted off to a craft fair yesterday.

It was a very bad craft fair filled with uninspired stuff and very high price tags. Bad people-watching, too. I suppose nobody uses the slang term "yuppies" anymore—invented by my pal Alice Kahn! And my X-boss Lanny Jones invented "Boomers"!—but that's what these craft fair goers were.

I passed a mirror and saw reflected in it an older woman with large strained eyes and a sagging jawline—and ohmyGAWD, that woman was me!

I tried to explain my shock on the phone to Ichabod afterwards: "No, honestly, it wasn't vanity! It was, well... This is really the first time I've noticed that my chin is starting to go. I'm finally getting what Marybeth used to call 'crepe neck.' I can't pass anymore."

"Pass as what?" Ichabod asked.

He loves me but finds me vaguely irritating—as the offspring of all parents with over-sized personalities do.

Pass as somebody younger? No, that's not it. I've never dissembled about my age.

"Pass as somebody who's not a caricature of themselves," is the best way I can describe it.

###

On the Work of Progress front: I have indeed come up with some very obnoxious behavior for Mimi. In fact, it may be too over the top for a chick lit novel. I blame David Foster Wallace.

But anyway, I can see the end of Chapter 1. Though I may not be able to finish it today because Remuneration.

Current Music: Biomigrant & El Monte Adentro: "Voz emplumada del monte"

Entry tags:

The cardinals' tea party

There is a cardinal pair in our yard, and I love them very much. I drew them having a cup of tea.

female and male northern cardinal with blue and white teapot and cups of tea

female and male northern cardinal with blue and white teapot and cups of tea

female and male northern cardinal on either side of a blue and white teapot

A mi me enseño a cantar la calandria y el cenzontle,
la calandría y el cenzontle y el pájaro cardenal
la calandría y el cenzontle y el pájaro cardenal

--Biomigrant & El Monte Adentro: "Voz emplumada del monte"
calandría = chalk-browed mockingbird (Mimus saturninus)
cenzontle = northern mockingbird (Mimus polyglottus)
pájaro cardenal = northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis)

Where

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything.
The person of synthetic¹ or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.
~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I often wonder where I fall in that spectrum of intellect. I believe that perhaps Goethe's words were not meant as a laudatory statement of either, in the extreme.

but.......

I realize it has been far too easy for me to be overly critical of people and their expressions - enslaved by a quest to find imperfection or fault.

Bah.....I just don't want miss the good things.

¹ In my eyes, the term 'synthetic' used by Goethe isn't a reference to hipocrisy or 'fakeness' - rather to a quality of creative induction.

Entry tags:

Art on Pottery

(reposted from an art forum so as not to keep all my eggs in one basket)

I wanted to have a painting to share, but the brushes and oils are still gathering dust on the shelf. Instead, I did a bit of scraffito on some tumbers that I really liked.

Since it was so much fun, I made a couple more in local clay and then covered them in stoneware slip. They haven't been bisque-fired yet, though.

I also successfully made another "sea bowl" after my first one fused to the kiln shelf and cracked. So glad this one made it.

My next post will involve more "traditional" art, but still illustrative because the kiddos and I have restarted our Art Prompts again (at the kids' request, which feels great!).

(For some strange reason, there was a glitch when I posted this that put the date at Aug 1 instead of Sept 1. Has that happened to anyone else?)

Entry tags:

First Draft Problems

Only, I did go tromping. It was too beautiful a day to stay inside. I laced my hiking boots very tightly.

My knee isn't hurting, but it is making a weird clicking sound when it articulates, so, yeah—something's out of alignment.

###

I Remunerated—1,500 words. I had somehow gotten it into my head that magically I would be able to crank out 4,000 Remunerative words, which would buy me a couple of days to give the Work in Progress my undiluted attention. But that ain't gonna happen, and when I got back from tromping, I was thinking too hard about David Foster Wallace to continue the Neal-Palooza scene.

###

The three great Post-Modernists whose works I've never had any great interest in cracking are David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.

Well. I did read The Crying of Lot 49. And I didn't dislike it! But neither did it fill me with any great desire to read anything else by Pynchon. Authors who saddle characters with names like "Oedipa Maas" are not my cup of tea.

And I have read a couple of Wallace's short stories and non-fiction. I was mildly impressed. Also, I'm a big fan of Wallace's protege and self-styled BFF, Jonathan Franzen.

Plus I've read Wallace's biography, the evocatively titled Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. (In general, I am more interested in Great Writers' bios than their actual books. Not sure what that sez about me.) In it, Wallace comes across as someone who was hideously depressed by his own physical repulsiveness. Like if some doctor had only prescribed him Botox for those overactive sweat glands and a really effective acne medication, he wouldn't have needed all those antidepressants. Caliban would have metamorphosed into Ariel!

All of this is by way of a preamble: I've decided to read Infinite Jest.

To try to read Infinite Jest!

Like I'll commit to reading the first 200 pages, and if I don't like it, I'll stop.

Reading is what I do. I spend at least two hours a day reading. And it's unrealistic to ban fiction entirely during the next six months—which, reasonably, is about the time it will take me to knock out a first draft of the Work in Progress. Assuming I keep up with it: I'm a true Aries in the sense that I'm great at starting things, not so great at finishing things.

The trick will be to read fiction that is sufficiently unlike my own writerly voice that I'm not unconsciously plagiarizing from it.

I don't write anything like David Foster Wallace!

###

The Neal-Palooza scene is mostly written except for a couple of speeches & some character business. So next, I have to wrap up the chapter with Mimi being obnoxious on the porch.

Kinda at a loss, though, at coming up with suitably obnoxious action & dialogue.

I suppose I could always type in red font: Mimi is obnoxious.

Move on to Chapter 2.

Fill in the details of Mimi's obnoxiousness when I do the second draft.

Entry tags:

Scarlet Sumac; Green Trees

Mostly yesterday I wrote.

In the afternoon, I toddled off to the gym & did something to my peroneal tendons on the right side. So that last night, I started to have one of those weird cramping episodes that start off in the lateral malleolus—which is that little thing on the side of your ankle you can flex and is actually your fibula—and travel up your leg into your knee. Excruciatingly painful. But I managed to head it off at the pass by tramping down hard & doing some stretching exercises.

Still. Probably wise to lay off the exercise today.

###

The weather has turned cool. There was a frost warning last night on the other side of the Poconos. Two mountain ranges off, but you know—low mountains.

I have yet to see any yellow in the trees but the sumac is all shades of scarlet.

Where did this summer go?

Honestly, I don't know.

I suppose it all went to Brian being dead. And panicking about money—although I could have done that easily enough when Brian wasn't dead. I just didn't.

###

Word count on the Work in Progress is hovering just below the 5,000-word mark, which will be the end of Chapter 1. Still need to write one more Ain't-Mimi-awful section, but must be careful it doesn't descend into parody: Mimi needs to make a suicide attempt in Chapter 9, and the reader must be sympathetic.

###

But today I must do some Remuneration. This month's bills are paid, but more bills will come next month.

It's hard to go back & forth between Remuneration & fiction-writing. They use different parts of my brain, & they both are quite exhausting in their own way (though creative effort also brings that little rush of exhilaration. It would be cool to see what neurotransmitters are involved.)

But somehow I gotta figure out a way to do it.

Entry tags:

Local Politics & Burned Crusts

Went out canvassing with Adrienne yesterday.

Up the porch steps & down the porch steps. Up the porch steps & down the porch steps. I must have done the equivalent of half an hour on the Stairmaster.

It was a gorgeous day, & we found plenty of people who would talk to us, listen to Adrienne's spiel. Some people took her seriously, some people thought she was an endearing but batty grandmother, but the overall reaction was positive. Her stump speech includes medical scarcity, food deserts, a farmer's market.

The question is: How can we translate these benign reactions into votes?

People don't take local elections very seriously. The extra half hour it takes to drive to the firehouse in a non-Presidential year is just not a priority.

I was pleased to see, though, that Adrienne is taking my advice and downplaying the Democrat affiliation. "Don't wear blue!" she told me.

A Democrat is not going to win an election in Wallkill.

A friendly, civic-minded lady who schmoozes well & just happens to belong to the Democratic party might win an election in Wallkill.

###

Came home. Baked tomato pies.

Once again was foiled by Icky's malfunctioning oven:

Oh, well. They actually taste okay. But no blue ribbon from the county fair for me!

###

Icky was out while I was baking, but came home while the pies were cooling. "Well, obviously, you are leaving them in too long or you have the oven temperature turned up too high," he told me.

If you say so, Icky. Of course, I have only made this particular recipe eight billion times before, and it has always come out perfectly except in your fucking oven. But hey! What do I know?

Icky was dressed to the nines. "I just took Gus out to dinner," he told me. "To a really good restaurant. It's his birthday."

I hadn't asked.

"Now, I'm going over to his mom's house. For cake."

###

When I woke up this morning, Icky had packed up and gone.

He left two days early.

No complaints from me!

I figure something must have gone down at Christine's house. Probably nothing more than Gus allowing himself to be doted upon by Christine in a way he doesn't allow himself to be doted upon by Icky. Icky is easily aggrieved.

Get used to that outsider feeling, Icky! Your kids love you. Hey! I loved my mother. Even though by any definition that doesn't include juvenile corpses shoved into dumpsters, she was a terrible mother. But they don't like you. And as teenagers mature into young adults, like becomes more important than love.

###

On the Work in Progress front: I am about a third of the way into the memorial scene. I just have to think of a few more rousing speeches from Neal's eclectic assortment of pals.

Plus status detail—I'm setting the memorial in Newburgh (Must QUASH impulse to include 5,000 words on the history of Newburgh, which is actually very interesting because Newburgh went from being the playground of the very rich to Amerika's murder capital in the space of about 100 years, and has some very beautiful architecture).

It can't be at a bar—Neal-cum-Brian doesn't drink; he smokes massive quantities of dope.

So... a hookah shop? A VFW canteen? What?

We'll still have Vinnie listening to the speeches, obviously moved.

And Grazia will put together a photo montage, leading to a disproportionate number of photos of her & Neal being inserted into the montage, so there can be some comic business where Neal's professional colleagues who didn't know about the polyamory can ignore the other sister wives & tell Grazi, I'm so sorry for your loss.

From there, we segue into a brief section about Neal-cum-Brian's ocular migraines. And reveal he died of a brain aneurism. (In real life, Brian had a heart attack. But that's not gonna fly now that I've downshifted everyone's ages 30 years.)

And then we're back out on the porch for some more obnoxious Mimi business, and the chapter ends!

Chapter 2 should be easier to write since I can crib more from my diary.

Entry tags:

books,
writing

Anyone Got a Funny Public Defender Story?

Cash infusion made me merry & lazy. Though I did tromp: The weather could not be more perfect. As is my wont, I am simultaneously reading and books-on-taping. The work is Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin biography. (It's nonfiction for me until I either hammer out or give up on this first draft.)

Benjamin Franklin does remind me a bit of Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; he had a surprisingly 20th-century mind for an 18th-century-er.

###

Viz that first draft: The next section will be 1,000 words or so on the Memorial.

I have morphed the dead guy sufficiently from Brian so that I can't just use my own recollections of Brian's memorial.

I figured nobody wants to read about the Romantic Life of an Old Guy, so I shifted everybody's age down 30 years. All the characters are now in their early 40s, and that means they all have to have jobs—Brian-cum-Neal is a public defender! 😀—and some people from Neal's job have to turn up at the memorial.

I am thinking one of those people could provide comic relief by being one of Neal's disreputable clients that he saved from a 20-year prison sentence or something.

But, of course, I need a backstory on that one—in addition to the usual peerless prose and scintillating dialogue.

Ichabod takes client confidentiality very seriously, so I can't ask him for public defender backstories.