EVERY LITTLE BEAT GOES ON

I had a cold recently. As a result I suffered with loose stools and crapped my Depends twice within a three day period. Once at home and once at a Yumm! restaurant. Yummy, eh?

See photographer here...

Now for some healthier news. My Memoir Of A Nobody is back on track. Three haiku will appear in the May issue of an online magazine Better Than Starbucks. Google a look if you'd like in May. An "Afterword" I wrote for Geoff Peterson's poetry book Archipelago is now available in his book at Amazon, Authorhouse or in any bookstore. Most bookstores will be glad to order books for you. Archipelago is a collection of  Peterson's earliest poetry. He wrote most of it before he entered the creative writing program at Eastern Washington University or during his early years there. My "Afterword" in Archipelago covers those early days and my arrival in Cheney Washington in April 1975 and our first encounters. We eventually both lived at Sutton Hall, the veteran's dorm at Eastern. He also became the poetry editor of Willow Springs Magazine that I co-founded with four other lit. majors. When I quit after a dispute over a couple of poems, he took over and—by the happy way—included the two disputed poems.

GEOFF PETERSON AND THE SILENT BEATNIK BOOMER

Geoff Peterson

Gray, gray Monday in Vancouver Washington. No news is good news from DAW Publishing, Iowa Review or Pittsburg Press. For a couple of weeks nothing creative has entered my thoughts, but my three kids and their loved ones came for Thanksgiving, and we played Golf card game or Splendor and talked up storms. My newly-married youngest son is in love. He and she were often absent while remaining in the room, whispering and giggling together. I loved the vision of their love, even though I distinctly felt their absence from the room from time to time. At times, the rest of us disappeared for them also, I think.

I've just finished a brief memoir about arriving in 1975 to Cheney, Washington. Friend and poet Geoff Peterson plans to include the essay at the end of his newest book Archipelago which arises from the poetry he wrote during that time when we both attended Eastern Washington University to earn MFA's in Poetry. Today, as usual, inspired by a final read through of his Archipelago, I've roughed out two lushis. His work almost always triggers my own imagination, even though our styles are distinctly different. You can find most all his books on Amazon. Click on his name under the photo, read one. You can't go wrong.

GOOD NEWS BAD NEWS, BOOMER BEATNIK

It's Monday. Two rejections of short stories came in last week. Bad news was mixed with good news. A scan of my abdominal region showed no traces of cancer in that region of my body. Interpreting those two news items according to my stated goal to get someone other than myself to publish a novel of mine before I kick the bucket, they cancel each other out. The failure to get another short story accepted and increasing the value of my bio is countered by good news as to potential life expectancy. 

My wife pointed out yesterday that my greatest success has come in getting poems published here and there over the decades. Speaking of poetry, I just finished rewriting a series of poems I want to put together into a book and enter into contests. Maybe will be called The Alcoholic Life or House Before the Meadow. They were written in a rickety old farmhouse seven miles outside Cheney Washington that I lived in for two years after my third divorce. As to "poet" or "novelist", I counter in my own thoughts with poet James Dickey's success with his novel Deliverance. I was certain my novel Ghoul World would deliver me from the middle class blues. How can a detective caper filled with a future world populated by people who suffer from Necrotising fasciitis fail? I'm thinking of its cinematic values.

Necrotising fasciitis

Six hours ago 108 people were reported to have checked into my Facebook page, "The Silent Boomer". The more people who do check into my blogspot blog, the stronger the appeal to an agent to handle a book of mine becomes. Thank each of you who is following this old writer's struggle in the fields of literature even as the number of fields we labor in shrink.

Tomorrow I go in for a full body bone scan.

SILENT OLD MEN AND THEIR RETIREMENT DREAMS

The writing goes well. As I continue my pursuit after a best selling novel, published by someone other than myself before my ashes are cast to the winds, I'm reminded of a friend I made in Cheney WA, a member of that quickly fading Greatest Generation. We were members in a local club. Chuck was ten years my senior, had made his living as a railroad telegrapher, a blue collar profession just as mine had been. He was one of the last at his profession. 

another old man's dream

Well over six feet, Chuck was rugged, round cheeked and nicely proportioned, handsome into his sixties and beyond. He'd been a writer too, often publishing humorous pieces in whatever local paper he was reading in whatever town he found himself working.

His retirement dream was to spend his time traveling the American back roads like a Charles Kuralt, then came the blow old timers fear—a crippling illness. Within months of his retirement, my friend came down with Ménière's disease, aka endolymphatic hydrops. Ménière's attacks the inner ear and leads to dizziness so severe that one can't stand upright and suffers nausea much like seasickness. Driving was impossible. Chuck's dream was dead, but he decided to try new operations that did reduce the severity of his attacks and took up painting, and he was good at it too. One of the things I most recall that Chuck told me was, "When I was in my 60s, I could still kid myself I was relatively young. In my 70s that's no longer possible." Approaching 77 myself, on some better days, I might argue with him about that.