THE SILENT BOOMER AND BILL MURRAY ON THE SAME PAGE

Wonderful Friday night, my wife's home from work, and we just watched Bill Murray being awarded the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Award, and isn't it funny to watch an old dude like Bill and wonder how he grew so old while you remain so young? Speaking of which, I turned 79 this month on the 20th, and I'm still pursuing my goal fiercely, when I'm not weeping for myself, to get someone other than myself to publish a novel I've written. 


I'm slowly rewriting a short story from a first person narrative into a combined third person/omniscient pov, and I've even sent off a couple of haikus to haiku magazines. I've got a hundred of them at least. These last two days I've been working on another prostate cancer poem for Up Your Ass, and I'm beginning to understand what I'm trying to do. I'm layering in historical personages, friends, details from my own and others lives and historical moments and surrounding them with my mortality and letting them sit side by side to percolate together, hoping that something enticing will show up to stimulate a reader's mind. I no longer experience those powerful moments when words are summoned from out of nowhere by emotion and bonded in metaphor to mean something else. I guess imagination still works, but much more gently. Why else would Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Gabby Hayes, Nancy and her "Ronnie" Reagan appear together in the poem I'm working on? The inspiration is still there, but it doesn't torture me so much. 

SILENT MAN'S SILENCE IS TROUBLING

It looks black when nothing inspires me.......

I'm sorry I've neglected this blog for so many days, but a couple of days I was in Spokane watching my youngest son, Patrick, perform with his improv group at the Bartlett. Sold out, lots of laughter. The Bartlett is an interesting venue. A bar, an espresso joint and a performance room in the back are interconnected. Later we walked Spokane's downtown streets, and it is a jumping place nowadays, people spilling out on the sidewalks. We couldn't find a quiet bar where we could talk so we ended up at the Onion where I got myself a bowl of their forever great onion soup. So delicious. My oldest son Sean and my daughter-in-law Sheila are coming over to visit, and Mertie and I are looking forward to visiting and maybe playing some board games.
 
On the other hand, many days these days, doldrums set in and nothing creative goes on in my head—"NOTHING," he shouts—and it's scary. These days I have to have a particularly sharp day in order to work at something. My inspiration is weak and faltering. I ask myself if it will completely disappear someday soon. 

On yet a third hand, I do sit down and submit poetry, short stories to magazines and queries to agents for the novel. Working at that does give me a sense of accomplishment. Currently, I have between 15 and 20 submissions out.

ECSTATIC SILENT BEATNIC BOOMER SYMPHONIZES

So many projects this morning, my head is full. 

Reading the THE COMPLETE STORIES OF TRUMAN CAPOTE which I must soon return to Clark College library. 

A collection of my selected poems altered from third and first person to second person "you" entitled THE WORLD OUTSIDE MYSELF or ... OUTSIDE MY HEAD. 

At least two stories I want to alter from first person narrator to a third person point of view or an omniscient pov. 

Finish the rewrites of stories for collection into a book MANY VOICES, ONE HEAD. 

Create a very sotto voce symphony based on the silent communication and states of people texting or Facebooking. Of course, I can't write music, but I see all these people in my head silently staring at screens in the middle of noisy confusion and how a symphonic passage expressing that situation might sound. Is this because wife and I have bought season tickets to VSO the past three seasons?

Start and finish another poem for my poetry book UP YOUR ASS that might begin with:

The word came through on Facebook that Ray is dead at 84. 
His prostate cancer finally took him away. 
You feel certain you're not going to live much longer yourself. 
Why is that you wonder? It's raining today, a fitting state...
the world coming down to celebrate your state of mind....  
et cetera and something along those lines but made more poetic by arrangement and stress.

Ah...where to begin? Decided to work on the rewrite of another story for the collection of fiction MANY VOICES, ONE HEAD.