ASSAILED NO MORE

FIND PHOTOGRAPHER HERE

Nothing new to report. Still working my way through algebra problems, specially troubled by the horrid word problems. No different than when I was a kid in school. I wrote a poem, a lushi, yesterday about aging and how my perceptions no longer elicit immediate emotional responses within me. I recall when I could not walk down a city street without being assailed by numerous often troubling and illusive emotions. Is this a blessing or a curse of age, I have to ask myself. My novel is still out there and a poetry ms at Iowa. I have little hope of success.

BEATNICK BOOMER COMES CLEAN IN THE END

Can't believe how my mind bonks around from one pinball bumper to another. I haven't begun the novel that I foresaw while rewriting the short story, "Personal". That tale, novel or short story, is still dangling in space. Instead, in hopes of preparing a novel more quickly in my effort to get someone other than myself to publish a novel of mine before I kick the bucket, I'm now four chapters into a fourth [or fifth?] rewrite of my novel, The Porn Writer. I realized that I'd buried the first meeting between the two protagonists in chapter three, using the first two chapters to introduce the male of the dynamic duo—I thought cleverly—but in a novel about a relationship, the two "lovers" or "protagonists" ought to be introduced pretty quickly, don't you agree? "Yes, I do agree," I say to myself in a literary aside.  

So much to learn and so little time, I think. You might ask, "Why did you wait so long to learn these lessons?" And I tell you that it wasn't until I was deeply into old age that I grew the maturity to rewrite any long work four or five times to get it right. Thus, I never treated any novel as a process of learning. I was just rushing through, being as "cleverly brilliant" as I thought I was when I was too young to know better.

The biopsy of my prostate takes place Wednesday morning. If you've a mind to keep me in your thoughts as I lie face down while yet another thing is put behind me. I've had several days of moping about the possible cancer. Today is a little better.