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."

THE HAUNTED BEATNIK WALKS THE COLUMBIA RIVER

Walked by the Columbia River this afternoon, a golden time, the sun slanting low toward the horizon and long shadows spilled across the grass. 

only 3:30 and looks eveningish

An old phantom came to haunt my morning as I was writing at the Torque. How do I explain it? It's a destructive little snot. I've no idea how to explain why it comes nor where it comes from. It appears in my consciousness unasked and carries with it a troubling sensation. The sum total of the sensation is that I don't feel like a writer. The sensation says: "Hey, who do you think you are, trying to write a novel? You're not a writer, silly goose." I deeply experience this sensation, so deeply that it convinces me momentarily of its undeniable truth. 

My father seems to haunt the edges of it when it comes. Could be that when I sent him a bound copy of my MFA poetry thesis, he told me he hadn't read it because he didn't understand it. Maybe that's why his image is always a part of the sensation that materializes within the synapses of my brain. The thoughts that become clear when I'm feeling this sensation is my middle class, working class background and my wage earning dad who, actually, was a self-taught tool designer, a pretty technically difficult job that he learned on the job. Anyway, I put my head down and kept at, and, finally, had a pretty good morning and early afternoon of writing.

IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED, TRY AGAIN, DAMN IT

Father & Marie

Today, it dawned on the Silent Boomer that I'd have to pick up my marbles and go back to start. Charley Manning can't be a detective at the Portland Police Bureau. The conspiracy he's investigating might go as high as D.C. and as far as China. He's definitely (probably) got to look into some happenings in Vietnam. Cohorts in a writer's meetup once remarked that you had to have your plot down firm before you began or you'd be lost. I can't pin my plot down yet. I know how it ends, but I'm not sure how to get there. Too many interesting angles to explore.   

Tyrone Power

Today, Manning was reborn as a "soldier of fortune," something along the line of a black ops Captain From Castile, a novel by Samuel Shellabarger, originally published in 1945 and made into a movie with Tyrone Power in 1947. My father was never much of a reader, but he said that Shellabarger's novels were his favorites. I found that novel on his shelves and read it while still living at home. [Holy cow, a paperback edition of that novel starts at $72.88 at Amazon!] 

In '47 I'd be ten, just about right for loving a filmed adventure like "Captain From Castile" with Tyrone Power. Liked him specially in "The Razor's Edge" based on Somerset Maugham's novel. I fancied myself a Larry Darrell, searching for meaning in life, but I never went to India. Suddenly, nostalgia just seized me by the throat and choked me up.