TIMEX AND PROSTATE CANCER THRILL THE SILENT BOOMER

The odds have just increased "against" achieving my oft stated goal to get someone other than myself to publish a novel of mine before I kick the bucket. At age 78, my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Early into his 80th year, it killed him. As he told me, sad regret in his voice, "I guess I got the aggressive kind." I'm 78 myself and on Monday April 18th, 2016, my primary doc felt a prostate nodule. Today, Monday April 25th, a urologist confirmed the lump on my prostate. He said, "I can always be wrong, but if I was a betting man, I'd say it's cancerous." After a stool sample is checked, I'm to go in for a biopsy. Going to be a lot of probing and sticking of things up my butt.

I don't understand all my emotions, but, driving away from the clinic, I was in some way energized by the thought of facing my own death. Don't know if inspiration will continue, but I've begun a book of poetry, called "Up Your Ass".  Here's the first poem in the series.

DIGITAL EXAM

Your doctor feels something,

Then you feel something.

After that, you and the grim reaper

Exchange cell phone numbers.

While your insurance company

Stands by for consultation, you

Hear your digital Timex ticking.

I can't help wondering how much more interested an agent and book publisher might be if I tell them they're racing against time to get me into print and the fact that more than 250 people—maybe more once the news gets out—are following my anticipated death? Will they race against my prostate cancer to see who wins? Will I have the balls to include this new fact in all my query letters to agents? After my publication and death, will all my fellow writers mourn, "Damn, I wish I had prostate cancer."

BEATNICKING MYSELF AROUND THE HEAD AND, WELL, FEELING FINE

Time as they say, whoever they are, flies, but I've never seen it fly nor, for that matter, have I seen a doggone dog. Still working away on my short fiction piece "The Acceptance of Jane". New things are happening to Jane and her friend during the rewrite, specially when he shoves Jane's wheelchair across the street while a drunken driver is.... 

Currently I'm alternating between the short stories of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Library of America editions. The Fitzgerald volume is much more care worm than the volume of James's stories. You can imagine what an exercise in contrast those stories are in my imagination. I've never felt better about my writing than I have in the past month. I don't know how I got here, finally, at age 78, but my new attitude is "this is the way I write and how I see the world. If others don't like it, that's okay with me." I'm doing it my way.  

Made big mistake tonight. I sent off a query and sample of a novel to an agent at Curtis Brown Ltd. only to discover I'd already sent a query to another of their agents a month and a half ago. Sent immediate retraction of query. Ah, well ... shucks.

BOOMER BEATNIK GETS A BOOST

FIND THIS IMAGE AT

Currently rewriting  a short story I first put on paper—yes, lined paper and pen—sometime during Fall of 1964 through February 1966 while floundering as a teaching assistant on the campus of Southern Illinois University—The Acceptance of Jane. The first version is very simplistic, almost childish, written in an emotional burst of high energy, and I more or less set it aside for 50 years. Now I'm trying to give it some depth. It's original impetus was okay, but I tried to make an image carry the story and the narrator lacks sufficient depth. Of course, the narrator is an older man, looking back on a moment in his high school life. Such a narrative offers technical difficulties. How much does any adult narrator truly know about his past life, eh?

On a good note, I received an immediate rejection of a story I sent off last week, BUT the editor said the story was well done but too long for her magazine. Could I send a shorty piece of writing, she asked. You bet I could, and the turn around time was less than 24 hours. The magazine is located in Philadelphia, and I forgot to say, "Go Philanova". Basketball fans will recognize the reference.