I know. This entry's long overdue. Writing going well the past couple of weeks. Had some bad days too. Some days, I feverishly hated writing. In the past that was never the case. Character-driven novels were easier to write. The writer can follow his characters along until they reach some state of stasis, whereas plotting a mystery is difficult. When I feel I'm losing control of the plot is when I feel the most fear and want to quit. I'm haunted by the thought my brain will give out before I finish the novel. I'll feel the book is escaping me, and it's so damn clever, really. I truly want to complete it, see it made into a movie too, take the money and live out my final years in a condo by the Willamette River in Portland.
Today, Mertie and I went to see Depp's Transcendence, an interesting film about neuroscience and the merging of neurology and computers. Imperfectly plotted and slow in places, at least it was better than all the Marvel Films full of bang-bang, crash and thunder with religious, choral music in the background they thundered at us in "Previews of Coming Attractions". Comic book action films are so out of date. Supposedly futuristic, their themes are as old as a cave man's brain with good and evil battling and choral music to stimulate feeling in the dull witted comic book brains of illiterate youths. Nothing new. Nothing to learn that Fellini didn't teach us a way out of many decades ago.
Life is ambivalent, ambiguous and paradoxical. Seriously, if we allow movie people to keep making bucks by playing on the good versus evil synaptic connections in our brains, we'll never escape duality into the technicolor world, the real world of human experience. At least, Tanscendence tried to escape the duality trap. Huzzah for Johnny Depp!
Last year I took a course in blogging and self-publishing. Learned that one ought to make an entry every other day, keep it short and include a photo or picture to grab the attention of browsers. I'm perfect on the picture bit, far from perfect on frequency and not even close on length. I can only hope that reader interest substitutes for brevity.
I'm into the ninety-something in pages typed into the computer from the yellowed, hard copy of the The Man In The Mirror manuscript. Manning continues unabated and slow, and, tonight (throat irritant warning) I nearly gassed myself to death, making dinner. Made a skillet dish of seitan and cabbage to spoon over rice or potato. After browning the seitan in teaspoon of olive oil, I added two teaspoons of dried thyme, some garlic and red pepper flakes, but as soon as I dropped the thyme into the hot skillet, smoke ascended from the pan, and I began to cough. Am still coughing, hours later.
As I write Manning, more than ever, I see it in movie scenes. Nothing like my previous mss. Being a movie buff, I suppose the transformation was inevitable. I could easily do what is called a "treatment" in the movie business.
Speaking of movies, tonight, wife and I viewed Corpo Celeste. A brilliant Italian film with several references to the work of my favorite director, Federico Fellini. Like all my favorite movies from the 60s and 70s, the film ended in delightful ambiguity. Magnifico! Even more delightful, I have found myself discussing the evil/good false fantasy world of modern movies with several brilliant youths fully involved with the computer life. They give me hope, and I won't be around to feel it.
One morning when I was working from six pm to six am, seven days a week, as a machinist at Brown and Root in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, I awoke to just such a morning as the one depicted in this photo. The photo was posted on Facbook by my virtual friend, Thomas Gunn in Jacksonville, Florida.
I was in my 30s, the prime of my physical life. Looking out my efficiency apartment window, I asked myself what I really wanted to do that morning and decided I didn't want to work at Brown and Root on a hot day in a tin shed without air-conditioning, standing twelve hours on ground so unsteady that every piece of heavy equipment passing by made the tin shed shake, rattle and roll. I went to my foreman that morning and told him I was packing up and moving on. King Ray, that was his name, understood perfectly and sent me on my way with a smile and a recommendation for rehire should I ever return.
That morning was the closest I ever came to truly feeling like a free man who could choose his own destiny, but feelings are fleeting, and, of course, the money I'd saved didn't last long. Another woman appeared who I should never have married, and, soon, I was back in deep doodoo. Within the year, I was splitsville with that wife and on the road again. That's what I always think of as a Southern man's thinking, the sort of thoughts and behaviors that make up the vast majority of country-western songs—struggling, loving, fighting and moving on. An endless cycle. Of course, then I got sober and a lot changed, but a lot more remained the same. Ambivalence is, maybe, more universal than change.
