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. 

GABBY HAYES: A CREDIT TO HIS LANGUAGE

Still working on Chapter 26 of Manning novel, but when that's finished, Chapter 27 is already completed. Before I move on to Chapter (or segment) 28, I'll capsulize those two chapters, and when I capsulize segments of my work for outline, I always feel completed, the sense of something accomplished. 

Found photo here:

Wow! You heard me. Wow! Sixty-six degrees today for my afternoon walk. The first day of sunny Spring, I calculate, because the breeze carried no chill with it. First time for that since last Fall. What a wonderful walk. Trees budding their angry red penes, and pink and white flowers on other trees.

Gabby Hayes

Now, dadblast* it, I still have to leave the house and go to Costco. Old age attack. I meant to go to Costco after my daily walk, before I came home from Black Rock where I spent several hours writing this morning, but I was daydreaming all the way home about this marvelous Spring day. 

*Thanks to Gabby Hayes for the friendly curse word. Also dad-gum, gol-durn and shucks. Or must we credit the cowardly, tail-wringing Lion in The Wizard of Oz for shucks? Or will just any old super-religious person in the past do?