POET, SILENT BOOMER AT GALLERY 360 IN VANCOUVER

Putting on my poet hat in 16 days. On Saturday, June 20th, from noon to 3, I [and several other writers] will be at Gallery 360, right next to the Farmer's Market, hopefully selling one or two of my books of poetry, during the book fair put together by Peggy Bird. Thank you, Peggy Bird. Come down, sample a locally grown tomato and pick up a book from any of the writers at the fair. Click on Gallery 360, above, and the complete list of participating writers is there, down the page a little ways. 

My books will be in two piles. Gray House By Cold Mountain will be marked "MUST BE 21". It's sexually explicit in the latter half. The other, Tenderfoot, is a collection of my poetry from my thesis that found their way into print here and there through the years.

Today was a frustrating novel day. I discovered I'd lost all the work I'd done on Wednesday and, after 4 hours of slogging away, I was right back where I finished on Wednesday. I lost some pretty good writing too.

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.

THE HAUNTED BEATNIK WALKS THE COLUMBIA RIVER

Walked by the Columbia River this afternoon, a golden time, the sun slanting low toward the horizon and long shadows spilled across the grass. 

only 3:30 and looks eveningish

An old phantom came to haunt my morning as I was writing at the Torque. How do I explain it? It's a destructive little snot. I've no idea how to explain why it comes nor where it comes from. It appears in my consciousness unasked and carries with it a troubling sensation. The sum total of the sensation is that I don't feel like a writer. The sensation says: "Hey, who do you think you are, trying to write a novel? You're not a writer, silly goose." I deeply experience this sensation, so deeply that it convinces me momentarily of its undeniable truth. 

My father seems to haunt the edges of it when it comes. Could be that when I sent him a bound copy of my MFA poetry thesis, he told me he hadn't read it because he didn't understand it. Maybe that's why his image is always a part of the sensation that materializes within the synapses of my brain. The thoughts that become clear when I'm feeling this sensation is my middle class, working class background and my wage earning dad who, actually, was a self-taught tool designer, a pretty technically difficult job that he learned on the job. Anyway, I put my head down and kept at, and, finally, had a pretty good morning and early afternoon of writing.

SILENT OLD MEN AND THEIR RETIREMENT DREAMS

The writing goes well. As I continue my pursuit after a best selling novel, published by someone other than myself before my ashes are cast to the winds, I'm reminded of a friend I made in Cheney WA, a member of that quickly fading Greatest Generation. We were members in a local club. Chuck was ten years my senior, had made his living as a railroad telegrapher, a blue collar profession just as mine had been. He was one of the last at his profession. 

another old man's dream

Well over six feet, Chuck was rugged, round cheeked and nicely proportioned, handsome into his sixties and beyond. He'd been a writer too, often publishing humorous pieces in whatever local paper he was reading in whatever town he found himself working.

His retirement dream was to spend his time traveling the American back roads like a Charles Kuralt, then came the blow old timers fear—a crippling illness. Within months of his retirement, my friend came down with Ménière's disease, aka endolymphatic hydrops. Ménière's attacks the inner ear and leads to dizziness so severe that one can't stand upright and suffers nausea much like seasickness. Driving was impossible. Chuck's dream was dead, but he decided to try new operations that did reduce the severity of his attacks and took up painting, and he was good at it too. One of the things I most recall that Chuck told me was, "When I was in my 60s, I could still kid myself I was relatively young. In my 70s that's no longer possible." Approaching 77 myself, on some better days, I might argue with him about that.

BEATNIKING THROUGH A SILENT'S WALL

This morning's entry will be brief unless during the course of the writing, new ideas appear. They often do. Yesterday, in Facebook discussion, the idea came up that people who write almost always are discovering what they know and feel in the process of writing. If it's true that the human animal is an electrochemical robot, that idea makes sense. As words arise from a writer's unconscious to appear on the page, they become very aware of what is in their unconscious, and they have an extensive record of themselves on the page. Writers and readers are, by and large, much more self-conscious than those who read little and, thus, know little about themselves. (I don't know if that last sentence is true. Today, I seem to question everything I try to generalize about.) At this moment, if I were being honest, I'd say that even writers don't know themselves. 

The picture, you ask? What about the bloody picture? Yesterday I made a pretty significant breakthrough in the Manning (working title) novel. I discovered a good way to bring in the corporate elements in the novel who are aligned, unknown to him, against Manning's investigation. Will Wile E. Coyote get to the other side of the wall is another question. This is a good metaphor (I just realized—see above) for writing. The road running bird (writer's unconscious written down) leads the way, with the coyote learning about himself as he follows it. Sometimes BLAM into a wall. 

PS: Many things did appear out of nowhere in this brief account.

A MACHINIST WRITER'S BEAT LIFE IS UNIVERSALLY AMBIVALENT

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.