BEANICK BOOMER FINISHES A TASK AND TALKS ABOUT INSANITY

Yesterday I finished the 7th rewrite of The Porn Writer, but the doubts are back, a swarm of squids on the sea floor of my imagination. Today I'm reading at the Black Rock on 164th Avenue, Vancouver. Twelve ounces of soy chai for $3.75. At Starbucks it's $4.39. I found a shiny dime on the floor just now. I'm making the mistake of reading Plimpton's book on Truman Capote: in which various friends, enemies, acquaintances and detractors recall his turbulent career. If you read it you'll conclude that you must be alcoholic or bat shit crazy to be creative. It's a picture of how I tried to behave and talk during my drinking years. I thought craziness equated to genius. At least two women in my past told me that the way I used language in those days was a sign of a mentally unbalanced mind. A psychologist who was leading a weekend group encounter session in the Huckleberry Mountains north of Spokane once told me I had a "quicksilver mind". I was quite proud of that, then he asked me if I was there to learn something. When I said, "Yes," he asked me to shut up and listen to what the others had to say. I kid you not, I fell over on my side and went immediately to sleep. That first session he'd put out bottles of wine to loosen us up. I was quickly very loose. The second time I showed up I'd quit drinking. During a walk down a mountain road, the psychologist told me he hadn't liked me very much that first weekend. He said I was now a very different person. I was, but for all my trying to behave like a creative person [my output is immense], I'm 78 [79 on October 20] and have little financial or public acclaim for my efforts. Sometimes I wish I could grasp even a fraction of the way my mind shot between metaphors and linked them in mad clusters of language when I drank. I can't even come close. 

BULL DOGGING A DISAPPEARING BULL

Another short story rejection this week from Boston. Missed that gol-dang bull again and, currently, I'm experiencing a

This photo may be better than words....

period of doubt. At my age, after a lifetime of doubt, why should it be any different today? 

Lately I've been dealing with several mental states or attitudes that are hard to describe. Picture the flying cowboy above. That's my inner state ever since I got the prostate cancer diagnosis; my psyche suspended in an emotionless state of peril. Ain't that photo something?

I realized lately that another mental state has altered in me when it comes to my writing. Always before when I was actually writing, a sort of indistinct futuristic attitude accompanied the writing effort, a wordless and unperceived sense of anticipation that I am only able to recognize now because of its absence. It kept me going. My current writing is neither accompanied nor relieved by that indistinct attitude of "something ahead in the future". It's not a wall exactly; it's a disquieting fog. The bull has disappeared from the photo I guess.

However, I am bound and determined to finish the 7th rewrite of The Porn Writer. After that, who knows? Back to algebra or continue the pursuit of my single bucket list item?

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!

BEATNIK IN THE ALLEYS OF LIFE

Okay. Three weeks to complete a rewrite of The Porn Writer. I wanted to run through it quickly so as to feel as if I'm just reading it for fun, for the first time. The book is loaded with pornography from beginning to end. It's meant to be a story about a man with sexual hangups. It's as if I wrote it to release him from pornographic ideas about relationships with the opposite sex by re-experiencing the fearful horniness itself that underlay his contacts with women all through his life. I might take a scene I wrote in another novel about a man puking in an alley—having an existential moment—and add it to the novel. I've already put it in in an abbreviated form. Perhaps, I'll open the novel with it, then write him back to that moment as the novel ends. I've such mixed feelings about the pornographic nature of the book. Who knows? In my old age, I don't much care what agents think. After all, it's my book as I wanted to write it when I wrote it. Who knows why? Why look at the motives that caused me to write it? People might enjoy it, be shocked or not by it, independently from my writing it. Some may only masturbate to it.