NORTH DAKOTA QUARTERLY SHOWS GREAT TASTE

There I was yesterday, pretty discouraged about having the energy to keep rewriting Ghoul World, and I go home to discover that North Dakota State (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About) has found one of my poems, IN A MODERN LIBRARY, entertaining enough to put in their literary magazine. Good for them. I've always liked that poem myself. Seventeen rejections before it found a home. You know? If you don't have a big name reputation, then you experience a lot of rejection before something hits. It's just the way it is. I keep joking with Mertie that Ghoul World will hit and movie royalties come pouring in after I'm dead.

I mean, the novel includes a future Earth, a plague, a mystery, a private investigator, corporate greed, a poison vagina (my wife giggles at the thought of it), automatons, Neanderthals (what?), necessary and acceptable cannibalism (can't be helped), good aliens, space travel, global travel and a perfectly designed planet for a great environment (Alteregoia). What's not to like? It's well written too with a minimum of misspellings and grammatical errors. It just takes an agent with a large enough imagination to take it in.

IT'S ALL ABOUT ENDINGS

Guess who had a tooth removed? And who's a bit giddy with Hydrocodone? You're right. Me. The hole isn't permanent. Going for broke with an implant. But since this is a writer's blog, let me get to the point. Just finished watching What They Had. Ah, the trouble with endings. Elizabeth Chomko wrote and directed this little gem, but she had problems with it. The ending. I think she tried to end the film maybe four times.I recognized at least three potential endings. 

We writers? Don't we always struggle to get an ending right? I see it all the time in films and books. Sometimes, I get so philosophically above the craft that I realize no ending's right. When Mertie and I bought our last home in Spokane, Washington, I recall saying, "This is it. This is where I'll end my life." Then Mertie, my darling wife, decided she wanted to make a little more money. She deserved more money, she said, so we came to Vancouver, Washington for a better paying job. Now, I think this might be where I die, yet, Spokane is always on our minds. If only it weren't for the snow.

So you see? Life keeps going on after the artistic ending of any book, story, film or play. When I'm in that mood, endings trouble any creative endeavor for me. Fact is that for each of us there is only one ending, and who doesn't know what that is?

THE SILENT BOOMER/ MORE POET THAN FICTION WRITER?

Coming home from drive on Rte 14

What can I say? Haven't made an entry here for ages. One reason is that I can't find this blog on my desktop computer, and Mertie is using my laptop for working at home. I am having more problems with technology than I can describe here. Smartphone is awful to deal with, and no one these days gives a damn about customer service. I carry around an image in my brain of smug young people sitting around laughing at my efforts to communicate.

A reason for not writing? No coffee shops to write in and no laptop, as I said. What I've been doing is driving around the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Driving around has always been a stress reliever for me. 

Some good news. Adelaide will be publishing four poems later this month. Still waiting for next issue of Zero Dark Thirty to come out with another poem recently accepted.  

Now out to drive around in the rain. I don't mind rainy driving. It has it's pleasures too. 

PHILIP ROTH AND SILENT BEATNIK BOOMER ME

Nothing new to report except that some more short stories are appearing in my head out of the magical realm of the imagination. Still waiting for my copy of Zero Dark Thirty magazine with my lyric poem in it. It will be April, as I said, before I hear from Plainsongs about "one or more" of my poems there that have gone to the final readers. I got on the ball during the past weekend and sent out a short story and several groups of poems to various markets. 

Mertie and I are watching Sharp Objects an 8 episode limited series. I like those better than endless series that don't end till people get tired of the sameness of them. 

I'm trying to read Philip Roth's The Plot Against America.

Watched an interesting film Thoroughbreds last night, about two mentally ill young women. I liked it, but then, my taste is not the most popular taste. 

Can't believe it's been three weeks since last entry. 

BEATNIK BOOMER FINISHES A CREATIVE TASK

This afternoon I found the energy to do a final rewrite of the screenplay, Distant Enemies. It wasn't much of a chore. I was just tidying up a few errors Mertie found while doing a final read through of my script looking for typos, lapses of logic and et cetera. Still, I feel hopeful about returning energy. The senior exercise class I attend at Firstenburg Community Center is paying off.

I have learned another useful health fact. If your bladder is not working properly, do not follow the suggestion to drink at least 64 ounces of fluids a day if you have spent your entire life training your body to function while drinking much less than that. I'm certain that my recent attempts over the past six months to follow that 64 ounce recommendation gave me hours of unnecessary excruciating pain and discomfort. Still catheterizing, but I'm doing just fine on a much smaller intake of fluids, and I'm getting longer periods between. My doctor told me that the 64 fluid ounce requirement is just a recommendation and that the figure was for all intents and purposes "made up". His words exactly. The fluid intake falsehood might be another of the many fallacies brought to us by the medicine distrusting and vaccination avoiding Boomers who have made up health directions and diet recommendations from whole cloth. Most of them in order to create health and diet businesses for themselves.

EXERCISE INCREASING. CAN CREATIVITY BE FAR BEHIND?

Find photog here

Sitting at home today as I have been for the past few weeks. Today am joined by my working wife who threw up this morning and continues to feel nauseous. I am becoming accustomed to catheterizing myself and, yesterday, was on an 8 hour schedule rather than a 6 hour schedule, but it didn't last. Fortunately, I'm getting a lot more hours of sleep but still not enough to feel at all creative. However, I'm feeling well enough to walk more and exercise more. I've recently joined a group of senior exercisers at Firstenburg Community Center that meets Monday, Wednesday, Friday in the morning. The commitment to that will help. If this trend continues, maybe the return to working creatively will emerge again from the darkness of my subconscious mind and exhausted body. I wish I had more to report, but it is what it is. People are still looking in on this blog, and I thank them for the continued interest. Not too long before my bladder quit functioning properly, I did send off six queries for the novel Ghoul World, but not one has been answered. Maybe ghouls and zombies are on the way out.

BIG BIG BOOMER BEATNICK WEEK

Find photographer here.

A week! A freakin' week between entries, and I thought it had been only a few days. But I've been busy, getting in final touches on film scripts for contest entries ... maybe. This morning I sent off three poems to an on line magazine called Big Lucks. I prepared a short story to send to Virginia Quarterly Review on September 1st. It's ready to go. The VQR pays and it's big time as far as little and lit mags go. I've got several ideas in mind to turn into film scripts. Could even see Ghoul World as a film script. I wrote it with movie in mind, but thought the story was so good that someone would buy and publish the book and someone else will write the script. Really, the back story is marvelous. Possibly another rewrite is absolutely necessary. Absolutely possible, yes. Oh no, not again.

Big activity this week was my wife's birthday. Read about our fun times together here. Found a wonderful website called "Unsplash" where you can submit photos and use free photos by other photographers. I'm using a photo from that site in this posting. 

BEATNIK BOOMER'S SPONTANEOUS AMBIVALENT HAPPINESS

I'd been trying to rewrite the prostate cancer manuscript, Up Your Ass, all morning, but the world outside my head was in a parallel universe. I was forced to squint through an opaque curtain to see my poems. I miss hit so many keys I thought my fingers were drunk. Nothing creative happening.

I'd been that way all morning, then out of nowhere by sheer coincidence my wife drives by the Starbucks where I'm "not" working, and she sees my car in the parking lot. She's on the way to visit one of her clients and only has time to say, "Hi, honey," kiss me and mention that I look tired. "Did you get enough sleep?" 

Now she's gone, and I realize yet again that this familiar feeling is the result of not getting enough sleep. Ever since the cancer treatments, my pissing problems get me up all hours of the night, and I have drugged days like this. Way too many of them. Who can work effectively under such conditions?

As if to put a exclamation point on my dilemma, an overpowering and familiar urge to defecate hits me, and I race the length of Starbucks to stave off a dirty diaper, then as I try to type this happening into the blog ... what the hell ... the same urge sends me scurrying again.

Such is the life of a prostate cancer survivor — spontaneous ambivalent happiness.

SILENT/BOOMER BEATNICKS ON

For sleeping w/o scratching itchy eyes...

I value those of you who follow this blog. Seventy persons checked in over the last 24 hours, and I apologize to all for the 14 day lapse between this and my last entry. It's been medically trying for several  weeks. At this very moment I'm having a hot flash that makes me sweat as if I've just completed a marathon while I'm seated in a very chill Starbucks. I remain in physical therapy in an attempt to gain more control over my bowel function. Monday I had cataract surgery and am now in process of recovery from that. I'm having to wear reading glasses to see this blog or read a book or newspaper. Creative work is not possible when one is straining to see. From radiation treatments for prostate cancer to bladder stone and cataract removals ... this is the most extended period of time I've ever experienced of discomfort and office visits to medical doctors, ORs and physical therapists. If I didn't feel so youthful, I'd swear I'm growing old. Okay. I laugh. But the truth is I'm not the most courageous captain of my fate. I feel like whining a lot and must exercise some control so as not to overburden my wife whose father died last Wednesday morning after a lifetime of dealing in a very brave way with Type I diabetes. Heart failure. He was a sheet metal worker, and I earned my bread as a CNC machinist. Blue collar earners, the both of us, and I think that has a lot to do with the love my wife and I share. He was a good and humble man, and I'm so grateful that he raised the woman who is my wife. I'm also happy that my cancer treatment seems to be successful for reasons beyond my own survival as you can well imagine.

Has anyone noticed how this blog has devolved from an account of a man on a bucket list quest to the diary of a sick bed? I have several creative projects in mind, including another film script. If I can just get these metaphorical catheters out of my wrist and arise from my metaphorical sick bed, more will be revealed. The screenwriting class went very well. Bye-bye and buy bonds.

SILENT BEATNIK BOOMER AND THE BARTLETT

The Bartlett bar

75 people looked in on my bucket list quest yesterday. They find it on my Facebook page, The Silent Boomer, rather than directly here, I believe. I'm still confused by Google, Facebook and Silent Boomer connectivity. I'm going to have to step away from writing for the next five days or so again. On road to Spokane again, and I can't seem to write on the road. Speaking of the road, I watched On The Road last night for a 2nd time, a faithful chronological rendering of the novel. We're visiting my father-in-law who has recently entered hospice care from complications of diabetes. My wife has had to deal with my cancer last year and now her father is in decline. Think loving thoughts. While in Spokane we have previously ordered tickets for my son's improv group at The Bartlett.

I requested and received a confirmation about my poem "The Legacy" but still waiting the contract that makes it official before I say anything here. It's been months since I sent out any of my novels to agents. It's so hard for me to take the time away from actually writing to send out my work, tailor the query letters to the agents. I know there is now a service that takes over a writer's submissions, but I am slow to pick up on it. It's like having a paid agent for agents. Where does the retrogression end? Sometimes I feel I'm right on the verge...the "verge" of what?

BEATNICK BOOMER INSIDE THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

This is me in the external beam irradiation machine at PeaceHealth. I got Deana one of the techs to snap the photo. The big round head looking down on me is the piece that shoots me with radiation. To its left on the diagonal is one of the arms that takes x-rays. The other x-ray arm, a square, is peeking out below the table. The x-ray arms are retracted at the moment. The techs go into another room and extend those x-ray arms. The entire unit circles my body, then the x-ray readings of the location of my prostate with the implanted fiducials is fed into the computer and the table I lie on makes the final adjustments, then I'm zapped. The process takes about 20 minutes. Compared to the 40 minute Cyberknife treatments, it's fast. I tell the techs with a laugh it's a "zip... zap... zoom..." process. I'm hopeful and tranquil enough about everything. 

Mertie and I went into Portland to see Cafe Society, Woody Allen's latest. We weren't as impressed as by Paris Nights. We aren't alone in our judgment, but the film was interesting enough. 

The rewrite on The Porn Writer still moves along nicely, but as I said in an earlier entry, I'm giving myself permission to let the writing go hang if I feel stressed. Mainly I need to stay rested and get in some exercise and run necessary errands and prepare or serve [already made meals] when Mertie comes home from work. Nine more treatments. Will be done a week from this coming Friday. Though I haven't been sending out many things, I still have about 15 items out being looked at. The queries for my novels are falling behind because they require more work. I try to make my query letters fit the agent I'm sending them to. I imagine I sense things about them from looking them up on Google and from the presentations on their websites.

PREOCCUPIED, ANOTHER FORM OF WRITER'S BLOCK

It's been 10 days since my last posting and that's too long a span of time, but nothing much has changed as far as my bucket list item and the forces of nature working against it. Am including two pictures I scanned. One of a poem I wrote several weeks past and the other of the nice illustrative drawings Dr. Siddiqui did as he explained my options to Mertie and I. 
 
Mertie and I had our second opinion meeting today with Dr. Faisal Siddiqui who performs radiation treatments at Peacehealth and also the more focused radiation treatment called the Cyberknife. His recommendation is against surgical removal of the prostate in the same terms as Dr. Jason Smith. The best looking option appears to be a two stage radiation treatment. First 5 weeks of irradiation of prostate and lymph nodes with 40-45 on the grayscale (power rating), then 5 treatments of a nearly double amount of irradiation on the prostate alone. After our talk with Dr. Siddiqui, Merie and I felt very hopeful about extended life expectancy. The details of the after care are too involved to put in here. Oh ... I've already commenced working toward my transition to breasts and hot flashes. Dr. Siddiqui prescribed Bi-ka-loo-ta-myd, one a day. He says it will immediately block or slow spread of cancer cells in prostate while Mertie and I decide on course of action. Will need to put plenty of vitamin D and calcium additives into play. 

As for writing. One rejection of 3 poems returned this past week, and the rewriting of The Porn Writer has been slow going. I'm sure there's a subconscious blockage between me and my imaginative powers. I feel, I think I'd call it, "preoccupied". Good beginnings for poems about the cancer come to mind constantly, but the impulse to complete them doesn't follow.

WHADDA THEY WANT FROM THIS OLD BEATNIK?

Find photo here!

Whazzup? Whazzup here is more of same. Rewriting short stories, sending a few of them out as I go along. I'm getting the idea that when a literary magazine editor says he or she wants something "different", I don't know what they mean because I can't read minds. Do they want something different from what is the current trend in MFA programs and literary magazines? Or are they receiving the sort of fiction writing that was around 30 or 40 years ago that was coming out of MFA programs, and they're tired of it? Unless I have that data, I have no idea what "different" means. Sometimes I'll send out something so different that I've never seen the style in any literary magazines. Nil acceptances of those, thank you. Literary styles can come and go and come back again. My current goal is to write something so entertaining that a lot of people enjoy reading it and lots of sales follow. I sure think my novel Ghoul World has entertainment value, even movie appeal. So far. No takers. Whadda they want?

Well, that "anonymous" novel I was reading and not responding to? I've grown to like it so I'll tell you it's Netherland by Joe O'Neill. It teaches lots about plotting. My wife, who reads more than I do probably won't like it. I told her the novel includes tons of information about the game of cricket, for example, even details about how to care for a cricket field to make the grass come out okay. Detail oriented novels leave her cold. She wants "raw gut" emotion. That's why she fell in love with me, she tells me. We talk about our raw gut emotions with one another. Goodness sakes, I'm happy!

AUTO WRECK BOOMERANG WRECKS SILENT BOOMER P.O.M.

It's been a damn long time since I made an entry here. Hate that, but first I had a lot of things to attend to, insurance and what not, about Mertie's wrecked Echo. So I was strung out as long gaps in time interrupt the flow of writing, and my memory also fails to recall all that went before in the plot. Lots of work to get back up to running speed. I haven't yet gotten back to sending out query letters, and for a spell I considered suspending any more writing and going back to doing algebra in the mornings. I worked algebra problems and monitored algebra classes for free in Washington university system during the first years after retirement, but, at last, I'm back to scribbling on my sci fi screen play which still is working out nicely. Still nameless too. No working title even. Hope to get more regular now that the insurance is all worked out...about 400 dollar increase in our premium, but I went down this morning and cut back on some of the Cadillac auto insurance I'd been conned into by a fast talking auto insurance man. I'm a sucker at heart, I fear. 

BEATNIK EATS PRIME RIB AND READS POETRY OF MARY OLIVER

Yesterday, I did not write. It was my 78th birthday. For one meal I stopped being a vegan and had a prime rib, medium rare, at Black Angus. Wife, meanwhile, ordered french fried sweet potatoes and grilled asparagus. When we got home, she was still hungry because the sweet potatoes were too greasy. She ate barely one or three. Frankly, I like the homemade tomato soup I made two dinners ago more than the prime rib. Surprised me. Also for my birthday, we spent the whole day together. In the morning, we walked at the Lloyd Center, a mall, Mertie shoe shopped while we were there, then we ate lunch at the Veggie Grill, walked some more and went to see the movie Steve Jobs before Black Angus. Mertie thought the movie was depressing, but we both found it interesting.

Today, I finished rewrite of Chapter 43 of Ghoul World. Five more chapters to go, and another rewrite will be done. Walked at the Burnt Bridge Creek Trail again and came home. 

Currently reading some work by Neal Cassidy. Finished a book of collected verse by Mary Oliver. She is quintessentially a woman. I mean by that she's written some poetry that a man would not be able to write. Of course, I can no more prove my evaluation than I can high jump the Moon outside my window. 

THIS AND THAT...A LITTLE BIT OF

Holy Jumping Jehoshaphat! Last two days of rewrite of Ghoul World, I've done two chapters each day. Will begin Chapter -15- tomorrow. Moving right along. I thought Colbert's second show was stronger than his first. His sendup of Trump during his first show was silly and juvenile, nearly, but his second night's political bit sounded more like the style he originated at Comedy Central. More sophisticated. Oh, listen to Mister Sophisticate, George Thomas, or Silent Boomer or ex-Beatnick hippy, and whathaveyou. 

Had a great time at the recent National Beat Poetry Festival: Portland PDX version. I mean it was grooving and moving, loud and packed.

For our 15th wedding anniversary, my wife, Mertie, took us to

Jimmy Mak's jazz club to listen to jazz and eat dinner. She did this because every time we've walked past Jimmy Mak's since arriving in Vancouver, I've said, "We gotta go there sometime." So, she got us there. What a sweetheart she is. I got her Crystal earrings and a Glen Campbell DVD because, lately, she's been saying, "We gotta have some Glen Campbell in the house." Secondly, because the 15th wedding anniversary is the glass or crystal anniversary. I've used Mak's in my Ghoul World novel, but the club in my book doesn't look anything like the real place, but, of course, it's two hundred years from now. 

THE WIFE OF A LIFETIME

Hopeful today even though I'm still  rewriting the last chapter of Programming Frank Singletary, the uncomfortable tale of a dysfunctional relationship between two badly damaged human beans.

Find these photos at following link.

I think I'm emerging from the anxiety that had me blocked in such a way I couldn't see my way clear to the end of this novel. I still don't see my way clearly to the ending, but hope that I will has returned.

The very act of writing is critical to my mental health because when I'm blocked, unable to go forward, I'm frantic and in pain. I believe this is a childhood thing when I felt so many things I was unable to articulate. I could only feel and twist in the wind. The act of communication is critical to my mental health. Which makes me feel grateful all over again for the wife with whom I can share most anything. I have not one secret from her. I've shared the most shameful things from my past with her. 

GALLERY 360 BOOK FAIR A TRIUMPH

They bought my book, Tenderfoot

I sold four books at the Gallery 360 Book Fair put together by Peggy Bird and promoted strongly by Clark County Poet Laureate Chris Luna. Mertie came down to Gallery 360 to take a look and bought 9 books from one of the other book sellers...children's books for her nieces and nephews in Spokane. We're losing money, but who cares, as long as writers and poets get the money. We're heading to Spokane during whatever week of July holds the 13th... Mertie's birthday. 

The young man, above, opened Tenderfoot and began to read the following poem: 

SKATING THIN ICE

 

Stepping from the landlocked trees to ice,

On thin, steel blades, the skater leaves

His two sure feet and sails;

     He skims the grey-smooth ice on out

To places where the firmness softens and water's deep.

There, black holes gape and bubbles rise

Through thick, black water like thoughts of gods.

     That far out on flying edges,

The skater's body quails with soaring fear,

And shore fires cast a fitful light

On small musings that freeze like cubes of ice;

     That far out

The rugged shore and threadbare trees

Seem dreams that edge a frozen universe

Where bubble thoughts drift up through thick

Black air on spumes of mist to burst away,

     And water's deep.

I told him I thought the poem was about taking intellectual risks, about thinking like an atheist...or something like one. 

Still no news on the novels and short stories I have in circulation. Down to two chapters on the rewrite of the novel Programming Frank Singletary that was once upon a time called The Porno Writer.

REWRITE OF PORN NOVEL COMPULSIVELY UNDERWAY

PORN

I could only stand one day without something to write at. I'm now rewriting an old novel about a guy who turns to writing porn as a way to get published since he's a flop in so many other ways. His writing and the new romance in his life with a mysterious woman lead him into a situation he doesn't expect. Yes, I've put real porn in it, but even the porn [you can easily see, if you've ever read porn] is not the kind of porn that porn dogs want. He's a flop even when writing porn. Only he doesn't know it. My wife doesn't like this novel, The Porn Writer, because of the porn in it. She fears, I fear, that it might get published. Then, her family would know what an outrageous nut she's happily married to. I'm kind of interested, also, in what a traditional publisher would do with The Porn Writer.

BEATNICKING MY WAY THROUGH THE FINAL REWRITE

Scandinavians are happy. Me too!

Today, I reworked the first 27 pages of Ghoul World, aka the Manning novel, smoothing out the rough patches and making consistent the cultural effects and the feel of this futuristic work. The book reads pretty damn good. My wife finished reading it last week and was pleased with it. When I suggested she's biased and might lie to me about the novel, she tells me, "I don't like your novel, The Porno Writer." Well, that's true enough, even though I plan to rework it next................ I think. She found no major plotting errors. That was a great relief to me. 

I spent only two days going through the entire novel and correcting all the grammatical and logical errors that Mertie red penciled for me as she read it. Thanks to her for that read through very much. If all continues as today did, the rewrite ought to be done in no more than a month. Maybe two. Once I get 1/2 way through, I'll start sending it out to agents. That first submission is going to be nerve wracking. I'm expecting this to be published, a movie even, but what writer doesn't feel that way?

I'm specially happy with how the novel ended. I wasn't certain until the very end how it was going to feel, and as the final two chapters flowed out on the computer screen, I was as excited by how it looked and felt as if I was a new reader, rather than the author who slogged away at it for two plus years.