BEATNIKING IT ON THE ROAD

I'm still alive. You'd think I'd stay home and write my head off, but staying home feels like prison. No more coffee shops to write in. Have been getting out on the road and driving, listening to jazz, making videos. But, hit or miss, I have polished off two more short stories that I began months ago but set aside when they weren't going anywhere. So I'm happy enough, waiting for my poem to appear in Zero Dark Thirty.

Have weird feeling from time to time before I set out each day to drive or get a soy chai that no one is outside anymore, but, there they are at the Starbucks for "grab and go" service only. The Vancouver Mall is closed currently for at least two weeks. Some small businesses are really getting hurt. The potential for this Covid-19 is awful, but if too many people feel as I do—not very scared at all—then they'll be doing risky business for seniors like myself. What is only a cold for a young dancer in a bar is death for a guy at the supermarket. 

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THE HAPPY BEATNIK

Georgie Porgy nearing 82

Oh what a nightmare. We changed our internet from awful CenturyLink to Xfinity and lost our email address. In the midst of this wonderful late-in-life creative rush [now 27 stories], I'm fighting all the problems that come with new email addresses. The sign in problems. Password messes. You name it. I can't even explain some of the problems. Still? Creating like mad. Trusting my psyche, my imagination to lead me to the source. Anyhow... this is my check-in with those who follow my labors in the word arbor. I'm thinking I might do this. Since most lit mags won't accept any stories that have been "published" on the internet, I'm going to try this. I'm going to put my email address in here. Anyone who'd like to see one of my stories, email me with your email address. I'll pick one favorite story and send it as an attachment to anyone interested. You can judge how I'm doing. I'm very happy with what I'm finding in me to write about. I still need to pick one story. Waiting to get your emails: geomert.q.com@gmail.com The story I picked is less than a 1000 words.

Don't worry. I won't put you on a mailing list. I don't have one in the first place. And I'm so not a marketing whiz. 

LOTS OF WORK, LOTS AND LOTS

Jeez, Louise, 82 people looked in this morning. Thank you folks. Been awhile, I know, but I've been hard at work. Spent three days straightening out the file cards I keep on all my poetry. Things were in a mess, and I found I was sending out poems I'd self-published in my two poetry books, Gray House By Cold Mountain and Tenderfoot [available Amazon or AuthorHouse]. That's a no-no in the publishing world, even though the readership of those books is extremely small.

Just finished a few minutes ago writing another short story I love to pieces called "Lennie". I'm also rewriting the poetry ms about my prostate cancer, You Wake One Morning, Remembering. I'm altering it from second person singular to first person and it will have a new undecided title. The reason I began it second person was some sort of shame or shyness about using first person. Don't ask me why. I don't understand it myself. After all, it's my cancer, my dealing with it, the humor I find in my dealing with it. In fact, I wonder if it's not too humorous in places while in other places showing too much self-pity. It's a complicated book, unlike any other cancer poetry I've read. Lot's of references to movies and personalities in the news of my days.

BEATNIKING THROUGH LIFE WHILE RIDING THE MAX

FB tells me I haven't written in this writer's blog lately, but they always tell me that one or two days after my most recent entry. I put in a good day's work this afternoon on Memoir Of A Nobody. Spent several hours on no more than three paragraphs, writing and rewriting, fine tuning, trying to get the past emotions down just right.

My current emotions are running hot then cold the past two days. Yesterday, I took the Max into Portland, felt recognition of some sort for all my life's work was very near. Everything I've written has been brilliant... then this morning I awake filled with doubt and self-loathing, remembering all the people I've alienated, imagining how no one will come to my funeral. Of course not. I'm not going to have a funeral, no showing, nothing. Wife and I have both decided on how the end of our lives will be without fanfare—drop dead and off to the crematory. 

SILENT BOOMER BEATNIK'S LAST HURRAY................MAYBE

Ninety-nine people recently looked in. Thank you. Three of my haiku may be found on the website Better Than Starbucks. They also appear in a hard copy edition that can be found here.
 
I haven't written anything for days. I'm tired a lot. The memoir languishes. Poetry is hiding out in my synaptic self somewhere beyond my prefrontal cortex. I'm not certain, but I fear my writing days may be over. I have ideas but not energy to get to work. Only time will tell. I'm now reading The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. I took a course in Chaucer as an undergraduate and read the work in its original Middle English. 

My bathroom reading is Ray Carver's Will You Please Be Quiet Please. I met him once in a coffee shop at Eastern Washington University. When I asked him where his stories came from, he replied, "I don't know. I just hope they keep coming."

BEATNIKING A PATH TO UNDERSTANDING

Putting aside the memoir today. It's escaping me and that's discouraging. Trouble is the timeless connections within the unconscious. I'm working on Chapter 5: Cast Of Characters. I want to rough out limited bios of the people in my family who most affected me. But as I begin to write about my mother, thought leads to thought and emotion fires up emotion and soon enough the hidden connections between my mother and my ex-wives takes me to the moments in my marriages when I feel my mother in the images of my exes. I find myself

far off target, in a memory that belongs to another chapter. I mean, when you understand that the abuse your mother suffered as a child is connected to how you picked your wives, what chronology can contain that awareness? Where do you write it—when the twist was put, without your knowledge, into your psyche or when decades later you finally discovered it hidden there? When I understand my life, everything seems connected to everything else. I wonder if another structure is called for? One without a chronology of any sort, but, I've tried that too, and I can't imagine anyone reading it with any patience. Think I'll go home and pick up where I left off in my third read of Steinbeck's East Of Eden. Let me tell you about finding myself with James Dean in the movie East Of Eden, cold and lonely atop a freight car heading to Monterey to look for his whore mother—connection to connection to connection....

BEATING THE BEATNIK TO DEATH

It's 5:30 am, and I'm unable to sleep. Writing my Memoir Of A Nobody is turning out to be quite a disturbing task. Writing stirs up memories in me that won't go away and let me sleep. Several nights recently sleeplessness has overwhelmed me. It's a good thing I don't write every day or I'd be in awful shape. My life contains many disturbing events, many psychologically terrifying periods. Fortunately, I don't believe I normally realize what I've been through. I have so many tales to tell and many psychological insights that I've gotten from them and through counseling and reading in psychology, specially in evolutionary psychology. I truly have something to offer about the process of recovery from many emotional difficulties to find happiness and love. I spent four hours today writing and rewriting four paragraphs, trying to get the facts and feelings down as they truly happened. I'm writing about my experiences as a 19 year old with prostitutes in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In many ways those experiences foreshadowed the troubles I would later experience with all women. I've rewritten the opening sentences below too many times already. 

1. Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

I wonder if writing this memoir will be the death of me? Lit by a computer monitor, here I sit, age 81, at 1:52 am, naked except for white briefs, bent over a computer keyboard, driven out of bed by a restless memory to begin….

Somewhere within me my stepmother’s words are indelibly inscribed: “You’re selfish. You’re not like your father at all. You’re not a Thomas.”

    I’ve begun many times in 81 years to write this memoir, and every time I begin, I tell myself memoir writing is the most selfish task a person can try. I immediately begin to quibble with myself....


It's now 6:15 am as I finish this entry and still no sleep....

Now 2:43 pm as I add this entry. My lack of sleep has nothing to do with guilt. I'm long past that, but my mind just goes hyperactive sometimes. Thoughts run riot.

BEATNIK BASHED ON THE INNER EAR ROCKS

Facebook tells me on an irritatingly regular basis that readers of this blog are craving to hear from me. The memoir is coming along very slowly, nearly not at all. I have far too many dizzy days, and when those days are upon me, not a creative spark appears in my synaptic self, and he's the self who writes for me and which my conscious self recognizes after the fact. As no doubt you all know by now, if you keep up with evolutionary biology, the conscious self exists as about five or six constantly changing pieces of data which is all the human animal can retain in its consciousness at any one time. Consciousness is a flickering moment to moment existence at best, and when one is dizzy on a regular basis, consciousness becomes an even more fractured phenomenon.

Find photographer here...

Why am I dizzy and what can be done about it? Decades ago, I consulted an eye ear nose guy, and he said the little hairs in my inner ear, awash in and reacting to the fluid sloshing around in there are getting flattened and worn down with age and inactivity. He said it would only get worse. He was right. 

I continue to send out pieces of writing and get regular rejections. I fear my work is out of date. I truly like my 8 line poetry, specially the simplest clearest expression of my thinking, but clarity is not in fashion. And that's okay. 

WRITING AT THE SAVONA

Writing at the Savona, sounds like a movie title or a song. I like this little place with stars covering all the lights. There's an abstract painting leaned against a wall behind a plant I can't identify. Five stuffed couches, a writing bar against a window facing on the Columbia River, two TVs without sound but with closed captions if you want to, ice cream, sandwiches, soups and what all. I ate a sinful cinnamon roll this morning when I first got here. I took a Miro art book out of the library yesterday and will go get another one today before I drive home. Writing was slow this morning. Awful tired after exercise class. It's 3:00. Time to go to the library and get another art book to look at. I used to take art library books out all the time back in Ohio, back when I was young and carefree.

THIS IS A MYTUBE PRODUCTION

Four times a day, I shove the red rubber foot and a quarter worm that I hold in my right  hand [that's right, my "right" hand], into my terwilliger until its snout says, "ur in." I then direct the "result" into a plastic pail to be quantified and logged in my "Daily Urination Log". That's right, I've joined the Urine Nation. Six, noon, six and midnight I do the deed. Often, I'm left with an uncomfortable sensation  — although the process is more uncomfortable than painful — that resembles an urge to urinate. This sensation keeps me awake when I'd rather be sleeping. I believe I'm living on 3 to 4 hours of sleep a day. Today I tried to go to the gym to exercise. I could only exercise about 20 minutes, but I did feel hale enough to go to the senior room where I attempted to play cribbage. I hesitated to join in playing cribbage because I suddenly feared I couldn't remember how to play cribbage after a lifetime of playing cribbage. I imagined at first that my mind was going, but I believe, now, that my exhaustion is so severe as to deprive me of my full mental capacity at times. If you think I can do much writing in this state of mind, you must be losing yours. My life resembles the life of someone in a railroad car where a terrorist bomb has just gone off. However, I am messing around with rewriting some very old poetry that I cannot do much damage to. I sent five of them off last night when I wasn't sleeping. I asked my urologist the other day, if I would be needing to do this "drilling" for the rest of my life. He didn't make any promises but suggested he has a few tricks up his sleeve. Meanwhile, for the next few months, I'll be trying to adjust my life to this daily boring process.

BLUEBERRIES ARE GOOD FOR WHAT AILS THE BEATNIK BOOMER

Find photog here:

Thanks all who have checked in here recently. My continuing exhaustion means that imaginative writing is still some distance in future, but I visited a new urologist today and, again, a scope was shoved up my little urethra. The good doctor found nothing abnormal in my bladder except the scar tissue one expects to find after the application of high doses of radiation aimed to defeat a "highly aggressive prostate cancer." Turns out the Flomax generic I've been taking does not treat the condition that's been depriving me of sleep and comfort for the past 5 to 6 weeks. Flomax only works when there's a blockage in the system. There appears to be no blockage, and my problem is nerve damage associated with the high doses of radiation that were needed to treat my prostate cancer. The new drug he prescribed will hopefully calm the nerves that are sending too frequent and intense messages from the nerves in my wounded bladder to my brain. Hopefully, the urgent and continuous need to pee will lessen, and I'll catch a few more winks per night. I was near tears with feelings of hope as we talked. I cry at the drop of a hat these days. Where did Mr. Masculinity disappear too? Somewhere between the doses of hormone, I suppose. Maybe by end of next month, I'll get back to the writing projects I've put on hold. 

WHERE'S MY BUTTERFLY? BEATS ME.

I've started another screenplay, but it's not catching fire in my psyche yet. Based on the horrific story of actress Susan Cabot, the plot has some very intriguing possibilities. Then the rewrite of Ghoul World awaits. It has to be changed if it can have any chance of success. Got another rejection yesterday from Western Humanities Review. That's three rejections after an initial invitation to try again, and now they go into my file of disappeared magazines .

Find photog here...

The real story is how this past week has become another horror story of declining health, declining quality of life for me. I've got sciatica, and I slept very little for almost 5 nights. Honestly, I was near tears when my wife came home yesterday. Unable to write, unable to exercise, unable to sleep, I felt irrevocably old. Well of course. But I don't have to feel old just because I am old. Right? 

Fortunately, it's not degenerative bone disease or bone spurs. It's just situational and brought on by my declining ability to exercise because of fatigue which is a side effect of the hormone treatments and the real effect of the lack of sleep caused by having to get up nearly hourly to pee created by the radiation treatments that damaged my urinary tract. It's perfect storm of debilitating effects. When I'm in the worst of it, I imagine I'll never feel good again and will never write another decent sentence or bit of dialogue. It's not death I fear. It's being unable to move around and live a life of feeling and love and experience. Trapped ... I hate the thought of it.

BUSY AS A BEE-ATNICK WRITER

Do I look as tired as I feel?

This morning, I finally got around to doing something once more toward achieving the first item on my bucket list. I worked on another cover letter to send to potential agents for my novel Ghoul World.  I've put that off for much too long and have not been sending out agent queries for any of my novels. I foresee another rewrite of my novel The Porn Writer too.


I've also been working through a rewrite of the poetry that was inspired by my encounter with prostate cancer last year. I intend to send it around to small publishing houses and to various contests. The title may be morphing from Up Your Ass to Cancer Doesn't Sing ... a reference to the prosaic rather than lyric nature of the poetry. 


The sci fi film script I now call Distant Enemies has been sent its merry way along with 50 dollars via the internet to the BlueCat Screenwriting Contest and, now, I'm preparing to send the first 30 pages of the same script to the Willamette Writers Screenwriting Competition. Deadline is June 15. Fee 10 bucks. A man could grow poor with his writing, eh? Still if feels good to be sending stuff out.

Outside this Starbucks where I write, the sun is shining and the birds are singing and there is a presence in the air that hints of a return to rain and daytime temps in the 60s and nighttime lows in the 40s. Thank you to anyone looking in on these blog entries.

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 BEAT. WRITING SUFFERS. BUCKET LISTS TO PORT.

I'm staggering today, the result of the hormone injection and also Flomax [increases urine flow] that relaxes the smooth muscle walls of my vessels and arteries. Sometimes when I stand too fast or rush up a stairway, I get a stunned feeling and my temples feel pressure. First time I thought I was having a stroke. Now I stand still until the feeling passes.

The writing is not going all that well. I have many periods of fatigue, a side affect of radiation treatments when I feel completely uninterested in writing. All I want to do is sit and watch TV. Even reading seems too much effort. Still I get some writing done and exercise at the Firstenberg Community Center, and believe it or not, the effort seems to overcome fatigue for a time, but first I've got to overcome the fatigue and make myself get going. I've been craving McDonald's "Egg McMuffins" for lunch, and my vegan diet suffers, but I crave the feel of solid foods in my mouth. Chewy stuff. Something to get my teeth into. I still have banana, spinach, strawberry, apple with grape juice and soy milk smoothies for breakfast.  

At 3:15 I go into PeaceHealth for my 5th low dose radiation treatment. Not long after that, Mertie comes home from work, and we begin another weekend together. Long live weekends with my wife.

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!

BOOMER BEATNIK GETS A BOOST

FIND THIS IMAGE AT

Currently rewriting  a short story I first put on paper—yes, lined paper and pen—sometime during Fall of 1964 through February 1966 while floundering as a teaching assistant on the campus of Southern Illinois University—The Acceptance of Jane. The first version is very simplistic, almost childish, written in an emotional burst of high energy, and I more or less set it aside for 50 years. Now I'm trying to give it some depth. It's original impetus was okay, but I tried to make an image carry the story and the narrator lacks sufficient depth. Of course, the narrator is an older man, looking back on a moment in his high school life. Such a narrative offers technical difficulties. How much does any adult narrator truly know about his past life, eh?

On a good note, I received an immediate rejection of a story I sent off last week, BUT the editor said the story was well done but too long for her magazine. Could I send a shorty piece of writing, she asked. You bet I could, and the turn around time was less than 24 hours. The magazine is located in Philadelphia, and I forgot to say, "Go Philanova". Basketball fans will recognize the reference. 

AUTO WRECK BOOMERANG WRECKS SILENT BOOMER P.O.M.

It's been a damn long time since I made an entry here. Hate that, but first I had a lot of things to attend to, insurance and what not, about Mertie's wrecked Echo. So I was strung out as long gaps in time interrupt the flow of writing, and my memory also fails to recall all that went before in the plot. Lots of work to get back up to running speed. I haven't yet gotten back to sending out query letters, and for a spell I considered suspending any more writing and going back to doing algebra in the mornings. I worked algebra problems and monitored algebra classes for free in Washington university system during the first years after retirement, but, at last, I'm back to scribbling on my sci fi screen play which still is working out nicely. Still nameless too. No working title even. Hope to get more regular now that the insurance is all worked out...about 400 dollar increase in our premium, but I went down this morning and cut back on some of the Cadillac auto insurance I'd been conned into by a fast talking auto insurance man. I'm a sucker at heart, I fear. 

GALLERY 360 BOOK FAIR A TRIUMPH

They bought my book, Tenderfoot

I sold four books at the Gallery 360 Book Fair put together by Peggy Bird and promoted strongly by Clark County Poet Laureate Chris Luna. Mertie came down to Gallery 360 to take a look and bought 9 books from one of the other book sellers...children's books for her nieces and nephews in Spokane. We're losing money, but who cares, as long as writers and poets get the money. We're heading to Spokane during whatever week of July holds the 13th... Mertie's birthday. 

The young man, above, opened Tenderfoot and began to read the following poem: 

SKATING THIN ICE

 

Stepping from the landlocked trees to ice,

On thin, steel blades, the skater leaves

His two sure feet and sails;

     He skims the grey-smooth ice on out

To places where the firmness softens and water's deep.

There, black holes gape and bubbles rise

Through thick, black water like thoughts of gods.

     That far out on flying edges,

The skater's body quails with soaring fear,

And shore fires cast a fitful light

On small musings that freeze like cubes of ice;

     That far out

The rugged shore and threadbare trees

Seem dreams that edge a frozen universe

Where bubble thoughts drift up through thick

Black air on spumes of mist to burst away,

     And water's deep.

I told him I thought the poem was about taking intellectual risks, about thinking like an atheist...or something like one. 

Still no news on the novels and short stories I have in circulation. Down to two chapters on the rewrite of the novel Programming Frank Singletary that was once upon a time called The Porno Writer.

SILENT BOOMER FEELING BEAT SLOGS ON

The first rejection of a query letter has arrived for Ghoul World. Last night, before I went to bed, I checked my email account and, there it was, my first rejection. It was not the rejection that was so bad, but what the rejection suggested. My single page blurb did catch the agent's attention. She liked the story idea, but she said she was disappointed. What she read didn't keep her interest. That would be the five page sample of the novel. Then, of course, I read the 5 pages, and I agree with her. I see all sorts of errors or better ways to write those five pages. I catch the blunder of using the same word in two successive sentences to describe an action. I see too many adjectives. Man oh man! What a let down. Before the rejection arrived, I did begin talking to my wife about some short comings I feared were in the novel. Not enough tension, maybe, and how do I fix that? I don't see my way clear to do one more rewrite. I don't. The fun has gone out of writing for me, I fear. Anyway, I'm going to finish the rewrite of The Porn Writer, and begin to send that around while I commence another run through of Ghoul World to see if I can tighten it up, even as I continue to send it around. Damn it all to hell!