BEATNIK BOOMER CONTEMPLATES LIFE AS A DALAI LAMA

Wonderful day. Just completed 4 mile walk along the Columbia, the frisky breeze rumpling my hair. Notice the disarranged hairs on the hair line atop the bald football field of my head. I was going to say "bald spot", but, today, I eschew the ridiculous.

Who understands the mysteries of an unstable brain? Yesterday, and for a few days previously, despairing yet again, I gave up writing. I imagined myself throwing my consciousness into meditation 4 hours a day, becoming an ever-giving spirit. I imagined myself turning into a smiling Dalai Lama. I dreamed of becoming such a love-filled personage that I shit sweet-smelling begonias ten times a day. That's right! It wouldn't stink. Oh, it was a marvelous dream, filled with pain and wonderful highs after days of suffering. Then, today, I woke up, perfectly contented, and returned to work on the Manning novel as if there had been no yesterday and will be no tomorrow. 

I have no idea where my moods come from. Brooding thoughts of my mortality accompanied the writer's block. Negative thoughts about what a horrible husband, son, stepson, father, worker, intellect and friend I am. I don't know whether the negative thoughts produced the writer's block or whether the writer's block produced the negative thoughts. They come and go like ghosts in the outhouse on a cold winter's night in Southern Ohio or coastal Alabama. Much like the capricious moments that drive the newly sober Florida alcoholic to go back to searching for the elixir of life in the Fontainebleau of Life. 

BEATNICK SILENT DOZING ALONG WITH THE TUMBLING TUMBLEWEED

Not writing today. Too tired, and several implausible sections in the Manning novel have become obvious and must be changed or worked around, and, as I said, too tired for intellectual labor today. Why am I tired? Just couldn't make myself go to bed last night until 1:15 am. Then for some reason I awoke at 5:30 am and could not get back to sleep for worrying about ... guess what? The recent changes in format at the Portland newspaper, The Oregonian. They've gone from a broadsheet version to a tabloid version. Looks so crappy on the newsstand, I fear people won't buy it. It's folded so poorly the front pages overlap the back pages by 3/4s of an inch. Hard to open that way. 

What's that, you say? I don't live in Oregon and don't subscribe to the Oregonian? Why worry, you say? Well I now know the Oregonian is owned by back-East moguls who have dictated the changes the Oregonian is undergoing. A major US city without local control of its destiny. I see its eventual demise as it struggles to cheapen the product. I know two people who say the news is cut way back, and they've quit subscribing. The end of print journalism will be one of the great forces that destroys American democracy. OK! So I'm fearful about nothing? Probably right, but this morning I couldn't talk myself out of worrying ... when I wasn't busy dozing....

My solution will be to spend most of the day, walking around in the sunshine, hoping to push myself back to writing tomorrow.

Hard to open that way. 
What's that, you say?
Why worry, you say?
[Well, I did write a poem today.]

BEATNICK SILENT SPENDS A TRANSCENDENT AFTERNOON WITH JOHNNY DEPP

I know. This entry's long overdue. Writing going well the past couple of weeks. Had some bad days too. Some days, I feverishly hated writing. In the past that was never the case. Character-driven novels were easier to write. The writer can follow his characters along until they reach some  state of stasis, whereas plotting a mystery is difficult. When I feel I'm losing control of the plot is when I feel the most fear and want to quit. I'm haunted by the thought my brain will give out before I finish the novel. I'll feel the book is escaping me, and it's so damn clever, really. I truly want to complete it, see it made into a movie too, take the money and live out my final years in a condo by the Willamette River in Portland. 

Today, Mertie and I went to see Depp's Transcendence, an interesting film about neuroscience and the merging of neurology and computers. Imperfectly plotted and slow in places, at least it was better than all the Marvel Films full of bang-bang, crash and thunder with religious, choral music in the background they thundered at us in "Previews of Coming Attractions". Comic book action films are so out of date. Supposedly futuristic, their themes are as old as a cave man's brain with good and evil battling and choral music to stimulate feeling in the dull witted comic book brains of  illiterate youths. Nothing new. Nothing to learn that Fellini didn't teach us a way out of many decades ago. 

Life is ambivalent, ambiguous and paradoxical. Seriously, if we allow movie people to keep making bucks by playing on the good versus evil synaptic connections in our brains, we'll never escape duality into the technicolor world, the real world of human experience. At least, Tanscendence tried to escape the duality trap. Huzzah for Johnny Depp!

BEATNICK SILENT WRESTLES WITH GRANDMA GYMNAST'S ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Grandma Gymnast Johanna Quass

I can't say it often enough. The question Who Knows What? is one of the most important questions when writing a whodunit. Repeatedly, I find myself having to make readjustments and plot alterations in order to keep myself and the story honest. What reader wants to find out at the end of a whodunit that they've been lied to by the writer and misled by certain dishonest details in the plot. It's getting tricky for an old brain like mine to keep things straight, in that Charley Manning, the PI in my tale, at this point seems not to know who he's working for. Neither does the reader. This plot complication is interesting to me, but keeping the question of Who Know What? straight in my head gets pretty twisty as I strive to achieve it. Read it when it comes out. You'll see what I mean. If that 87 year old grandma gymnast, Johanna Quass, can keep working the parallel bars at her age, I've got no excuse for not making my novel consistent and honest for those readers who read the novel that someone other than myself will publish. Then comes the movie. 

Nasty old guy that I am, I wonder if Johanna still has an active sex life? 

BEATNICK SILENTLY WELCOMES 20 YEARS OF TOGETHERNESS

Sitting at Torque Coffee in Vancouver, knowing I must put an entry in here before everyone forgets to come looking to see what's going on with the writer and his attempt to get someone other than himself to publish a book of his. Just finished Chapter 29. Also, not too far back, Mr. Charley Manning lost a little finger on his left hand to the henchmen of a ne·far·i·ous mystery man. Keep such events in mind when you wonder whether or not you'll buy the novel when someone [other than myself] publishes it. 

I'm reaching a point where I can't keep the reader in suspense about some of the mysterious goings on of the characters in the novel. We're reaching the first of the revealing incidents.

Nice thought is that last night I made vegetable soup for dinner tonight. I can stay away from home until dinner when my wife comes home from work. This ability to stay out as long as I want to is one of the reasons I've not been in favor of keeping a dog in a domicile without a lawn. Someone has to come home midday to let the little creatures out to do their duty to god and their country as they understand and are moved by that duty. 

Nothing to do with writing was my feeling, yesterday, during my daily walk that, being now 20 years with Mertie, I felt this powerful feeling of being an old married man and, instead of hating the thought, I was overcome with a positive and tear-making gush of glad feeling. So this is what 20 years together [Feburary, 2014] feels like? 

BEATNICK SILENTLY FEELS BEAT AGAIN

I'm writing this moment at the Cascade Park Public Library after putting in two hours of writing at the Torque coffee shop and getting my third parking ticket in downtown Vancouver. See photo of Van. library over my shoulder.

Three nights in a row, I slept 8 to 10 hours yet still woke tired and discouraged. I wasn't able to write those three days, and all that ton of self-despising I carry around, waiting for me to tire and drop my guard, came crashing down, and I nearly gave up on writing for the tenth or hundredth time? I can't tell you how hard it's been during much of my life to get out from under the self-hatred and take a breath of air. It's there even when it's not there. If you understand me, you understand a lot. 

Exhaustion always carries with it negative thinking, and negative thoughts are like magnets. One negative thought attracts another. They collect together inside my all too human head and, collectively, they weigh tons. I'll feel that unrewarded writing is useless and worthless. I'll feel foolish and tell myself I'm too old to still be pecking away on a computer keyboard, trying to produce something that'll make me a little money. "After all these years, stupid," I tell myself, "if money for your writing was going to happen, it would have happened by now." To try to explain this to someone, other than my wife, also feels foolish. No one can imagine how much needless suffering I've felt over this obsession with writing and lack of monetary reward for it. I've carried it around most of my life. It sounds stupid to some more happily adjusted people I have not a doubt. I must add, that the angst is much reduced and doesn't appear half so often as it did in the past. Sobriety and much psychological work helps, but it waits, there, in the darkness, for its chances to return.

Then, last night I put in another 9 hours of sleep and, this morning, woke magically refreshed. The cloud of doubt and self-despising lifted for no good reason I can think of, and the sunshine of good spirits filled me. So today, I'm back at it, looking at Manning and trying to figure out "what happens next"—the constant voice that leads the novelist within me on the haphazard process of plotting a novel.