WRITER'S BLOCK AND THOMAS JEFFERSONS

Last time, I reported twenty dollars were on their way for two poems. Instead, the amount will be 30 dollars. They await me in Paypal for three poems appearing in the current issue of Teach. Write. Literary Magazine. One of the poems was rejected 18 times over several decades before finding a nest to nestle in. As editors constantly report, "Thank you for sending us your work. Sorry, these do not fit our needs. Perhaps they will be a better fit elsewhere." Of course, I fine tune my poetry every time I send it out, and so it goes. Sometimes, I'll see a revision that totally alters the poem, its arrangement on the page, even its underlying analogy.

I've reported writer's block several times in this blog. Now I'm dealing with a different type of writer's block. Some of the drugs I take, now, to delay my death by a high risk form of prostate cancer create fatigue, prednisone for one. This morning, as I sit at my local Starbucks, I can barely concentrate. I'm working on a rewrite of a story that includes brothers, sisters, friends and brothers and sisters-in-law. For the life of me, I can't keep them straight in my head. It's impossible to write when my brain is dazed like this. At least, it's not a hangover these days. 

Keep at it my friends. I've had more success this year than at any time in my life, and I'll be 84 the 20th of this month. Still, three more sarcastic poems to come out in Sequestrum. I like the company I'll appear with in that fine magazine.

BEATNICKING ALONG THE BEAT ROAD

Thirty stories now completed. Have been working today on my ms You Wake One Morning, Remembering. Rearranging the contents. I want to enter it into contests. Nearly 50 poems based on my dance with prostate cancer—it's discovery, treatment with radiation and hormone therapy and semi-recovery. The cancer's still there. Much reduced. My urologist says I'll die of something other than prostate cancer. Only time will tell. He's the one who likes to say, "Everyone's got to die someday."

Lately my rejections have been accompanied by requests to resubmit. Either editors are becoming kinder with their rejection letters, or I'm getting closer. I'm reading Hemingway's short stories recently, having finished Raymond Carver's. It's been a half year since a poem of mine was included in Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro's project, Washington Poetry Map. It's there near Huckleberry Mountain just north of Interstate 90. My record is pretty consistent—one or two publications a year. Nothing spectacular. Not bad for a writer who is a stranger to most, if not all, editors of literary magazines, internet as well as hard copy.

The recent photo reveals the fact I'm letting my hair grow long on the top. On top that is.

CLEAN AIR AND SHORT STORIES

I feel the necessity to comment even though demand is

photo by Greg Moser

down. Since May 9, I have created 24 stories, beginning with "The Line Ahead". I just finished the 24th story, "The Phone Call". All this began when I picked up an old collection of Ray Carver's tales Will You Please Be Quiet Please that was yellowing on a bookshelf in the office. So he was influenced by Hemingway and Chekhov? Now I'm influenced by his writing. I also doted on Hemingway and Chekhov back in the 1960s. I believe a line can be drawn through the connections. What a bitch that Carver died at age 50 of lung cancer. He was a smoker. Now e-cigarettes are killing people with lung ailments. Drawing anything but air into our lungs is risky. Thus the need [political opinion follows] for protection of our atmosphere. Clean air is a necessity for the human species. For all mammals to be exact. Even fish need oxygen. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOGvQsWW1As

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.

WHO'S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD AGENT?

One of the agents I send my work to.

The past few days have proven to be worrisome. Several times I thought I was ready to let go of the insanity of continuing to seek publication of a novel or to send out poetry and short stories to lit. mags, then, yesterday while walking in a beautiful local park and having cancer on my mind, I told myself, "One day at a time, dude. Stay in today. Today you're alive and well. Let that be enough." Then this morning, the fog and gloom lifted, and I'm ready to get back to reworking the stories I hope to collect together under the title Many Voices, One Head. I get it that when a writer is sending stuff out and hoping for one of his novels to land an agent, he or she is living always in hope of a future event. When stuff starts trickling back from the outside world, rejections mostly,  an ominous sense of futility begins to bite one's ass. It has always been so, but staying in the now, the writing gets to be fun again.

BOOMING BEATNIK'S MIND COMES AND GOES

Twelve more days of radiation treatments under this machine to go. Dr. Siddiqui tells me we'll wait three more months [time for the prostate to normalize] to take a PSA test and find out where we stand, i.e. did we get it in time before the cancer spread elsewhere in my body? A PSA of zero would be great, a 2 is not so bad. 

I wrote a new cancer poem yesterday, "Tabled Memories", and I've had three good days of work on the 7th rewrite of The Porn Writer. From time to time the fatigue caused by the radiation treatments make my mind feel like a pool full of slugs. Everything I write during those times seems awful, then a light comes on, the slugs slip away, and I know I write as well as many others who have been published. This morning I'm awfully tired again and uninspired, but I want to finish this last rewrite of The Porn Writer so I can get queries about it into circulation once more among the agents. Of course, it's been some time since I sent any of my novels out on query status. I'm starting to feel guilty again when I walk into the office where file cards are strewn about on a card table next to the outdated 2013 Writers' Markets book. 

Lastly I had a moment of self awareness yesterday while lying on that narrow table above, waiting for my irradiation to begin. The kind of moment when you see beneath the obvious and get a glimpse of some synaptic setting that underpins your personality at a fundamental level. The techs had stopped the process because one of the computers fell asleep and had to be reawakened. They requested, as they always do, that I lie very still. As I lay there clutching the ring they give us to hold so that our elbows don't fall off the table edge and ruin the process, I caught myself feeling quite proud to be lying so still and proper for them, the obedient little boy part of me. Smug it was and proud as proud can be. I didn't necessarily like what I saw, but our deepest selves, our un-mirrored selves, are just the sort of things that trip us up. I was watching a documentary tonight about Richard Nixon. I just realized he was like me too in his deepest self.

WRITING UNDER THE CYBERKNIFE

Today in a couple of hours, I get my first treatment with the Cyberknife. Exercised early today at Firstenberg Center and have tried for several hours to get some writing done on poetry collection Up Your Ass and later on my novel about dysfunctional relationships The Porn Writer. I see that I'm unable to concentrate very well so I'll just go home and get a shower and take it easy until I have to set off for PeaceHealth Hospital in Vancouver. I'm told I will have to lie perfectly motionless for half an hour while the procedure is completed, but, even if I do move, the roboticized arm stops and recalculates the position of my prostate in order to continue to treat the cancer with high doses of radiation. I recall when we Americans were all in a tizzy about Strontium 90 drifting into America from Chinese atom bomb testing. Now, I'm hoping that radiation will kill the cancer cells that threaten to kill me. Nothing ever changes except change.

BEATNIK BUMBLES UPON A BEAUT OF A TALE

Find this photo here....

I hope this is short. A biopsy is scheduled for the 11th this merry month of May. Then two weeks following we'll see how aggressive the cancer is. However, more importantly, as it comes to this blog about a writer who is trying to get someone other than himself to publish a novel of his before he kicks the bucket, I'm suddenly smacked between the eyes with a potentially new novel. As you know, I've been rewriting some of my short stories lately with the purpose of putting a collection together to self-publish and to send out individually to see if I can find markets to publish one or two of them and, thus, strengthen the bio that goes out with query letters to potential agents for my novels. Well, I came across this 10,000 word incomplete tale of mine, "Personal", about a frustrated religious woman who responds to a personal ad in a tabloid. The writing is probably some of the best writing I've produced, and, as I've worked through it to get to an ending not yet imagined, I realize it's a potential novel. A novel with rewrites is a two year process, one if rushed. My father had two years from the time his prostate cancer was discovered before he died. I've got to work faster or achieve a better cancer result than my father got. I don't know what to make of my teasing myself about death. I really don't. I'm hoping that under it all is the motive to beat this damn thing and find more time to do the writing I so love to do. And get published to boot!