BEATNICK BREATHING THE WAFTING AIRS OF SUCCESS

Wouldn't it be nice?

Nothing is more mysterious than our emotional apparatus. Mine included. I've been experiencing continuous days of happiness, sometimes punctuated with ecstatic joy. I'm not spending thousands of dollars on stuff I don't need, not flying off to exotic vacations on Caribbean islands. It's not the manic phase of a bipolar swing. Maybe it's the screenwriting course I'm enjoying extravagantly. Maybe it's the increasing number of readers of this blog. Maybe it's the recognition and publication of my poem Legacy in WA129 [Sage Hill Press] and the concurrent invitation by Poet Laureate Tod Marshal to join him and Clark County Poet Laureate Chris Luna and his wife Toni Luna for a joint reading sponsored by the Washougal Library two weeks back. Very good to be included among them. Perhaps it's Tod's warm appreciation of other of my poems as well. Part of my joy has to be the steady sunshine of my wife's love for me that warms and nourishes me, and the love I feel for her that opposes the constant goads of ego that we all experience. I'm blossoming like a petunia in the corner of a rarely visited garden of the literary arts. Maybe it's Portland itself. Whatever it is, I'm standing at the window of World Cup Coffee at the corner of 18th and Glisan in Portland on a powerfully sunlit day and feeling as successful and rewarded as if I'd just won the Nobel Prize for literature. Can something be awaiting my lifelong efforts? Feels like it, but, then, the emotional apparatus of the human species is mysterious as hell. Isn't it? And as far as I can see, no actual gold laden Spanish galleon rides the horizon.

PETE SEEGER TICKY-TACK? NO MORE.

Just finished my walk. 85 degrees outside. Tomorrow, back into the 90s. Spent between 4 and 4 1/2 hours, as promised to myself, sending off 4 queries to agents this morning. Three went out for Programming Frank Singletary and one went out for Ghoul World. Even as I rewrite Ghoul World for the third time, I intend to send out the second version. It's good enough to go as is, I think, but another rewrite won't hurt. If someone likes the current version, that's all to the good. As a younger writer, I don't think I'd do it this way, but my age rushes me a bit. 
Part of my walk, as usual, was through an expensive neighborhood to the north. I look at those homes and would like to see us in one of the smaller, one story homes there [$500,000]. Of course, she might reject such a move, being the woman she is. When I was young, and city neighborhoods were Pete Seeger ticky-tack in my head, I could not entertain such an ambition. I was full of hate for the middle class, but my hate turned out to be my hate for my bourgeois self that I feared made me very ordinary and unable to achieve success in the creative world. Now, here I am, 77, and still striving. Speaking of success, my wife and I took along audio books to listen to during our drive to Yellowstone. We listened to a mystery by a woman author who shall go nameless. Not a name I recognized, but my wife has read other of her books. The writer was making stylistic "errors" that I've been upset at myself for making, yet, there her work was, on an audio tape. The story line was intriguing. I feel that Ghoul World has a solid story line. We'll see.

BEATNIKING A PATH TO SUCKCESS

My oft stated goal in writing the futuristic novel Manning (working title) is to see if before I die I can get someone other than myself to publish a book I've written. I'm talking success, here, with a capital, SUCK! For publisher, film maker and for me.

In The Moral Animal, author Robert Wright uses Charles Darwin's life to demonstrate that human animals share values with other species. He points out that good monkey Darwin, for all that his ideas shocked the world, was very careful about his approach to relationships and to expressing his ideas. Darwin held back for 20 years announcing the facts he'd gathered because he didn't want to destroy his wife's faith, and he was choosy about his friends. As Darwin's influence and friendships grew among the intellects of his time, he slowly dropped friendships with people who were not as well known as he. Darwin did not consciously reject them. It just happened. The more he was caught up in success, the less time he had for many old friends. (Recall Woody Allen's Stardust Memories when an old neighborhood pal comes up to Sandy Bates and asks Bates if Bates remembers him? Pow!) 

On occasion, I've been in the presence of writers of distinction and have felt out of place with them. It's as if their experiences with financial success put them automatically into an experiential realm I'm not acclimated to. My reticence created my half of those situations. Let me tell you, if I hadn't had to deal with my personal issues before I could tackle the world of success, my life would have gone swimmingly different. I can see the experience for writing a successful book getting strong in me just as age is slowing my mental reflexes and memory. Will I reach the other side or fall through a crack in time?

THE ANGST OF BECOMING KNOWN

Recently I submitted a piece of writing to a local paper. It was rejected. That's okay. Any writer gets used to that, but I had asked that if they used my piece would they please mention my blog and/or my publications at Amazon. The editor in an email said that the paper would not advertize my books or this blog if they ever did use a piece of writing by me. I have no argument with the editor, but a little recognition wouldn't hurt. 

What really bothers me about all of this is how I now feel SHAME that I should even have asked someone to give me a little help in my effort to sell a book before I die. It's my problem, of course, not that particular editor's, but I don't know how people can shamelessly advertize themselves or their work whereas I am unable to do it. I picture shame as partly genetic and it's a mechanism by which some of us monkeys hold back while others climb to the top of the heap.

My shame is difficult to deal with. I'm sure it's at the root of my hard drinking in the past. Why should anyone feel shame just because he wants to become known and sell a book? It certainly doesn't hold back the silver-back gorillas among us who do become known or rise to power. I also believe that shame is what causes some celebrities to act out so badly when they do achieve recognition. They feel they don't deserve it.

Perhaps I need to change the title of this blog to THE SHAMEFUL BOOMER!

3 AM IN THE DARKEST PART OF THE SOUL

Fitzgerald photo from NYTimes

It's midnight as I shut down the process of translating the second novel I ever wrote from typed pages to editable computer files. Only 70 more pages to go of 606 pages. "It's always three am in the darkest part of the soul." That's what F. Scott wrote in his autobiographical collection, The Crack Up. 

I used to feel like that all the time. It's an alcoholic's thing, but I'm free of that for a long time, but I'm amused by my continued striving to "make it" with my writing. At age 75, it's kind of silly, but...what?...I'm not alone in this striving? What writer stops before he drops dead or his mind gives out...if...he hasn't won any recognition? I mean, if he's seriously got the writing bug, if it's something he does almost in his sleep? The few times I stopped writing creatively, I went on letter writing binges and email bombastic adventures or filled journals. If I took all the hours I've sat with pencil and paper, or before a typewriter and, finally, a computer keyboard, I'd pretty near have an additional life...well...a short life, but at least a life of some kind, different from sitting down expressing thoughts and feelings that no one might ever read.

Jung wrote that a "man" was supposed to spend the first half or his life achieving his professional successes and the second half attending to his philosophical life. Well, I did finally do something to shore up my financial picture, but it wasn't doing what I thought I'd love to do every day of my life...writing. No, I did it as a machinist in a machine shop. Somehow, I think I'm trying to combine philosophizing and writing in this last phase of my life. I'm getting pretty philosophical about failure. If it wasn't for my successful and happy life with my wife, Mertie, I'd really be desperate. This is real joy, isn't it?