THE SAME OLD ME WHEREVER

A pretty photo for your entertainment...

This will be a short one. The book American Poetry: twentieth century, Vol I is a marvelous and all inclusive accomplishment. Musicians are included and folk poetry, more black poets and women poets than probably few other collections of 20th Century poets have included, though I can't be certain of that fact, but it certainly represents a wide range of poetic forms and poets too. 

In my mind, my new bucket list includes the follow item — "to write as many good and true poems as I can in my 80s."  Today I finished another rewrite of the poetry ms of lüshi [a Chinese form of 8 line poetry employed by my current poet hero, Hanshan]. Here's one of them. The idea certainly isn't new, but it's my expression of the idea "wherever you go, there you find yourself."

LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION

After all my early tramping, Hanshan, you’d think I’d recall,

But the urge to get away always got in the way.

I’d hope a new hat rack might hold everything the old could not.

Off I’d go on a wing and a prayer, wearing my chapeau at a jaunty angle.

To hell with everything I left behind — wife, kids, the rental payment.

In those days, I never could afford a mortgage to nail my feet.

Of course the new hat rack functioned very much like the old,

And I’d find myself again, the same old me in the mirror behind the bar.

POETRY MADNESS CONTINUES BEATNIKING MY HEAD

Another poem has found a home just in time for Christmas vacation. It won't like young Mr. Scrooge be forced to stay at school over the holiday. This time a haiku that I think very highly of has found its way onto the internet pages of Haikuniverse:

quantum effects—
an electron
lost in space

After so much end of year success with poetry, what will happen to my bucket list? I don't know. Recently I recalled when a friend some long time ago told me that I was a natural poet. It's been on my mind to get busy on the rewrite of Ghoul World, but I'm having so much fun messing around with poetry.

CONTEST DEADLINE LOOMING AHEAD

This entry will be brief and to the point. I'm rewriting a screenplay in order to submit it to a contest recommended to the screenwriters at the NW Film Center by the Center. Deadline is May 31st. I'm hoping the Film Center's recommendation makes the contest authentic and safe. There is one big prize and several smaller ones. The size of the prizes suggest that many scripts will be sent in with fees. Thus I have to keep at the rewriting task and keep this short. At least Ghoul World is done for now. The screenplay is still untitled. Excuse me as I've got a script to tinker with. PS: Also notice alterations to my bucket list.

BEATNIK BELEAGUERED BY BOWEL MALFUNCTIONS

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Today I labored on the rewrite of Ghoul World, but I'm wondering if my sole bucket list item is receding from my grasp.Tuesday I went to see a biofeedback therapist to look into getting my bowels better under control. She was hopeful, and we also got into my frequent urination trips to the bathroom at night. Today, for example, I'm exhausted and it's only 1:00 in the afternoon. I try to go to bed at midnight every night and arise at 9:00. I get up about every one to two hours to pee and to experience a simultaneous hot flash. I don't know whether it's the hot flash or the urge to urinate that awakens me. In the last year, post-cancer, I've gone from being a vigorous pretty youthful old dude who walked an hour a day, 6 days a week, to a fretfully tired old codger whose thoughts are beleaguered by his incontinent bowels and his all too frequent trips to the pee-potty. Tiredness compounds my problems in that I must exert all my psychic strength to make myself exercise at all anymore, and of course, exercise helps in overcoming the other problems. I'm about to close up the rewrite shop for the day. I'm too tired to work effectively. For all I know, I'm creating more stylistic errors than I'm fixing when I work this tired. All in all, this is a down day. At least it's sunny outside right now and sunshine will hopefully stimulate me to walk outside. Hope for better tomorrow. 82 people looked in on this blog recently. Thank you. Some part of me feels hopeful about my bucket list item, i.e. to get someone other than myself to publish one of my novels, but I don't know why.

REMEMBERING A CHILDHOOD WITH TIGE IN THE BASEMENT

"That's My Dog Tige, He Lives In A Shoe. I'm Buster Brown, Look For Me in There Too" When I was a kid, I had to do chores in the basement frequently, and I listened to a radio show as I worked. Buster Brown shoes advertised on that show. Froggy the magic frog who twanged his "magic twanger" was also on that show. No double entendre intended. 

HO HUM, HO HUM, IT'S OFF TO REWRITE HO HUM I GO. I must admit that my writing energy is at low ebb. Part of the decline is because we were out of town over the Christmas holiday, and I'm trying to get myself back into harness, but it keeps slipping off my back. Some of my lack of interest is a hangover, I believe, from the cancer scare. For many months, I lived in a bag or sack, a psychic state of existence for sure. No certain future lay ahead for me.  

To compensate for my low energy, I'm enclosing a poem I wrote for the poetry chapbook Up Your Ass about my prostate cancer. Perhaps the last piece of original writing I've done. I'm not happy with it so it ends with an ellipsis that suggests future work? Perhaps also I need to rethink the title.

BEATNIK BOOMER FEELS HAPPILY BLAH

Yesterday my wife and I visited my radiation treatment doctor, and he declared, "Your body's free of cancer." My wife's ecstatic, but I continue in my present calm state of one day at a time. Now, all I've got to do is concentrate on my bucket list item, but, wouldn't you know? After several days not writing that included Thanksgiving's pleasant visit of my daughter, her husband and my youngest son to eat ham and everything else vegan and to play board games, I've lost the impulse to continue writing. Even the happy PSA reading hasn't brought a poem, and the poetry contained in Up Your Ass inspired by my prostate cancer seems dull and silly. I see no opening ahead, no light of inspiration streaming in through the tunnel walls I'm walking in. I'm 79 years old and, interestingly, a hand-written rejection note from Fiddlehead was penned on my October 20th birthday, a birthday gift I just received in yesterday's mail. Will this period of writer's block pass? Who knows. I'm getting old, but the bucket's over a distant hill now, and I've a far piece to walk ahead.

PEEING SITTING DOWN SILENT BEATNIK BOOMER

I'm having a difficult time writing for the past few days. Perhaps it's the election that didn't go my way. Last night I tried to meditate a bit and when I asked myself about the cause of my fear, I came up with the thought that I fear living in a heartless world. Well, I think that's a fair assumption, and my fear dovetails nicely into the prostate cancer I'm living with. Feeling death hovering in my consciousness does lead me to feel less powerful and less likely to survive a cruel and dog eat dog culture that I imagine will soon be coming our way. Actually the dog eat dog culture is already here, has always been here, looming just outside our conscious world. Ain't that the reason that all religions more or less begin with how to deal with human suffering and with fear of death that our conscious species must unconsciously live with? Talk about a cliche?

Also having to sit to pee is probably at a very deep place in my psyche troubling me. Diapers create the situation. There's no slip through to slip through, so I get to deal with the woman's toilet seat dilemma every time I pee out in the world so to speak. Happily I recently read that sitting down to pee fits quite nicely with our animal ancestors. The bladder is built to function best down on all four "legs".

So much for me today, sitting at a downtown Starbucks typing this, considering death and toilet seats while still questing to get someone other than myself to publish a novel of mine before I kick a bucket that seems a little bit closer than it did when I began this bucket list quest.

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. 

BEAT BOOMER'S BUCKET LIST BOGGED DOWN

In the last seven days I crapped my pants twice. Fortunately the accidents occurred at home as I rushed from my living room recliner to the bathroom. The accidents were distressing, and I've bought adult diapers. Aside from painful urination which I tolerate pretty well, the second side effect that troubles me most is fatigue, so much so as to soften my acuity and make writing nearly impossible at times. As a writer I tell myself I ought to be able to describe how these occurrences distress me, how they play on my mind and emotions. I finally summarized it to myself this afternoon as I drove to my radiation treatment. A month ago, I felt like a virile youthful—for 78—attractive male who still enjoyed sex with his wife and thought of himself as funny and comparably confident, happier than at any time in his life while looking forward to achieving his single bucket item. Yesterday, after the 2nd accident, I was badly deflated and imagined a much decreased enjoyment of my final years, however long that might be. It was a gloomy appraisal, one which I don't like and one I'm trying to resist. Just writing it down helps me a great deal.

The upshot of what I'm getting at is that until treatment is over on August 31, I will not push myself to write but will concentrate on limited exercise, diet and pampering myself, plus meeting my responsibilities at home. I will be drifting sideways and making little progress on my goal to get someone other than myself to publish a novel of mine before I kick the bucket. I'll write only when strongly moved and in a fairly alert state of mind. Following is a list of potential side effects of radiation treatment. Ain't they a kick in the pants?

• Frequent urination
• Difficult or painful urination
• Blood in the urine
• Urinary leakage
• Abdominal cramping
• Diarrhea
• Painful bowel movements
• Rectal bleeding
• Rectal leaking
• Fatigue
• Sexual dysfunction, including diminished erectile function or decrease in the volume of semen
• Skin reactions (similar to a sunburn)
• Secondary cancers in the region of the radiation

THE ODDS AGAINST THIS BEATNIK'S BUCKET LIST ARE PRETTY HIGH

After reading the news....

My bucket list item–to get someone other than myself to publish a novel of mine before I kick the bucket—just fell into a low range of my concerns. The biopsy is in. It's cancer for sure, and there's perineural invasion indicated which means it's likely to have spread into other areas of my body.  Sounds like a death sentence to me, but I still haven't talked to the urologist. I got this wonderful news via the internet and The Vancouver Clinic's website. How wonderful is the modern world, eh? A piece of flash fiction follows.

1. Prostate, left base, core biopsy:
Prostatic adenocarcinoma, Gleason score 4+3=7 (Grade Group III),
involving 60% of the smallest core and 40% and 30% of the larger
cores, total three of three cores.
Positive for perineural invasion. 
/
2. Prostate, left mid, core biopsy:
Prostatic adenocarcinoma, Gleason score 4+3=7 (Grade Group III),
involving 50% of the largest core and 60% of the smallest core.
Negative for perineural invasion.
 /
3. Prostate, left apex, core biopsy:
Prostatic adenocarcinoma, Gleason score 4+3=7 (Grade Group III),
involving 20% of one of two cores.
Negative for perineural invasion.  
/
4. Prostate, right base, core biopsy:
Prostatic adenocarcinoma, Gleason score 4+5=9 (Grade Group V),
with necrosis, involving at least 50% of the fragmented core
tissue.
Negative for perineural invasion.
 /
5. Prostate, right mid, core biopsy:
Prostatic adenocarcinoma, Gleason score 4+5=9 (Grade Group V),
with necrosis, involving 80% of two of two cores.
Positive for perineural invasion.
 /
6. Prostate, right apex, core biopsy:
Prostatic adenocarcinoma, Gleason score 4+5=9 (Grade Group V),
with necrosis, involving 80% and 70% of two of two cores.
Positive for perineural invasion.

SILENT BEATNIK BOOMER BANGS ALONG ON ALL THREE CYLINDERS

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Currently reading The Moral Animal by Robert Wright for a second time while plowing ahead on my untitled sci fi screenplay. Nearly finished with first draft, I'm enjoying the process a great deal, and, I already have another idea for a film script. This is an odd trajectory because it's even harder to find an agent for a film script than a novel. 

A couple of days ago, I sent off a query for my novel, Angie's Choice, to a New York agency. But the interesting thing was how I felt about the query process since it was an old fashioned agency and wanted a hard copy query in the U.S. mail service. As I took out the two pages of auto bio and 20 pages of manuscript and tapped them on the desk to align their edges, I experienced a bodily sensation that returned me to the years when all queries and manuscripts were sent through the U.S. mail. I recalled putting together and sending out whole manuscripts, boxed up and carried to the local post office. I felt connected to all the past writers of the world, through all the most recent centuries of the world when manuscripts were ink on paper. 

My children, now all grown up beings in the world, suggested I ought to begin to make these "Silent Boomer" blog entries as videos. They say that many people have found multitudinous followers by doing blogs as video presentations. My oldest boy says that it seems the more awkward and unprofessional the video is, the better followers seem to like them. I'm intrigued and think about it from time to time. I ask myself if that would really help me to achieve the one item on my bucket list: to get someone other than myself to publish one of my novels before I kick it. 

Addendum: Or film script.