BOOMING DAMN BRAIN DAMAGE!

Photo filched from the Black Rock website

Anymore, I don't think of it as writer's block. I now call it old age brain damage! Been several days since that last writing jag left me. This morning I sat in the Torque coffee shop in downtown Vancouver and had to write a letter to the editor just so I wouldn't feel so burned out. Then I ate a lunch of five sushi rolls and a banana while sitting by the Columbia River in my parked, beautiful as any horse to me, Yaris. Later a stroll along the river in the overcast chill of Vancouver perked me up. Now I've driven east and sit near my home and Costco (where I'll do a little shopping). I'm sitting in a Black Rock coffee shop which I enjoy very much. A chain...all in black and white it is. Feels alive to me here, like someplace in a modern city or in the future even. Yeah, in the future...that's what they've aimed at. The future. I'm hoping to live another 25 years and stay as alert as I feel now. Part of what has happened, I think, is I lost sight of my goal to write for Boomers, Silents and the last of the WWII generations. Then I start thinking GREATNESS again, and it all goes to hell in a hand basket. That picture above is a feel of what they're attempting. Couldn't find an interior for the place I now inhabit, typing this.

THE SILENT BOOMER AND FRIENDS

I used to think that for one to write well he (or she) must know himself extremely well, but then along comes Hemingway and other writers like him who was so lost he offed himself.

Ernie Shades McKnight

Maybe those who are busy knowing themselves well are the most romantic and self-observing types. They write one sort of literature and those who pay close attention to others write another type of literature which, of course, would be more objective and realistic. 

Geraldine

As the seasons turn, one type of writing rises to the top and next season the other sort of writing becomes popular again. Roughly you can see a progression like that from the Enlightenment to the Romantic and Transcendental Movement, followed by the Victorian Period which was followed by Realism and Naturalism. They in turn were edged out by the Existential writers who were followed by the Beats who were, if you ask me, romantics in their own way. Supposedly, we are now in the Post-Modern Era (since 1965), a cooler and more cerebral literature. I'm beginning not to care so much anymore if I understand anything about GREAT literature. The distinctions slip away and all one seems to care about is selling something, to stop suffering romantically and make a few dollars. Never mind if one's creations are literature or not.

Meet a couple of my friends who I think I know almost as well as I know myself.

THE SILENT BOOMER IN THE VANCOUVER VECTOR

Han-shan

Today the 2nd issue of the monthly, The Vancouver Vector, appeared on the newsstands and in the coffee shops of Vancouver, WA. On page 19, two poems from my book, Gray House By Cold Mountain, appeared (thank you Sara Newton). The book is available at Amazon.com as is the book of poems based on my MFA thesis of long ago called Tenderfoot. 

The poetry books may be found at:

The poems in The Vector for reasons of space have been broken into shorter lines than the 8 line form of the originals which take after the poetry of the legendary Han-shan (i.e. Cold Mountain) associated historically with the Tang Dynasty. 

The psychic intensity for poetry seems to escape me these days which is part of the reason I have crossed the imaginary border into the world of prose. Of course, prose also requires intensity to develop its rhythms. Somewhat crippled, I continue on. It's not as bad as I make it sound, but I enjoy the fact I now have a varicose right leg (I think of it as having one foot in the grave) and need hearing aids, and I have no idea why exactly that tickles me.

A MAN FROM MISSOURI

Back in the 1960s when I was drinking heavily and falling into ruin, I worked in this building in downtown Dayton, Ohio. I drank in the Magic Carpet Bar located on the first floor of the building. Occasionally, I drank in the alley behind this building with the stevedores who unloaded produce trucks in the district when much of the first floor was inhabited by small Italian-owned produce businesses. My experiences in and around that building will, from time to time, show up in what I write! The building is now called the St. Clair Lofts. It's been converted out of all recognition of my past life.

I've just roughed out a character sketch of the man from the The Greatest Generation who owned the company I worked for in that building. I plan to write several stories about the men from his generation I met while working in this building. Following are three paragraphs from that character sketch:

Born and raised in rural Missouri, Bruce was mechanically brilliant, a tinkerer and inventor as good as Edison but never able to come up with his own “light bulb”. Like so many engineers, Bruce Roberts couldn’t spell cat. I asked my father one time how Bruce managed to get a college degree as ignorant of the English language as Bruce seemed to be. Roughly paraphrased (as is most of the dialogue reported in my reminiscences), my father responded, “He’s brighter than you might think. I don’t know exactly how he got accepted into college but he did. Someone must have seen his potential. It’s not a full four year degree, I don’t think. Earned himself a two year degree in engineering from a Polytechnic college. In Indiana I believe.”  
   My father told me about Bruce’s anti-gravity machine. Bruce spent years and unknown quantities of dough putting it together. With my father as his sole witness one evening, Bruce stepped onto a round metal platform, threw a switch and waited. After a few moments, he stepped back off the metal platform and with genuine bewilderment, arms akimbo, exclaimed quietly, “It should work!”

Bruce was more than a wild eyed dreamer. He invented a successful throttle for the static testing of jet engines and sold it to General Electric in Cincinnati. His throttle ran more than 100 hours before needing repair. The throttle it replaced needed repair every 5 hours. My educated guess is that Bruce’s throttle kept Central States afloat through the years I knew him and long after I left Central States and Ohio for good.

ONCE A LITTLE SILENT, NOW AN OLDER ONE

 There was a beginning to The Silent Boomer who would like to write one book that sells before he dies. When he was born, he was pronounced to be the largest baby born to the smallest woman in Miami Valley Hospital history. When he was one year old, he won a contest to decide the most beautiful baby. By the time he was 30, his life was disintegrating around his ears, his hopes and 

dreams dissolving before his blood shot eyes. During that time, he was declared to the biggest baby by his fellow graduate students at Southern Illinois University.

Now, many decades later, he stands before a couple of shelves of his collected writing, magazines and anthologies his work has appeared in, and books, chapbooks and microzines that his friends and acquaintances have appeared in. Happy enough, married at last to a woman he is actually present for nearly every day of his life, he peers out from the photo with a hopeful smile on his kisser.

THE SILENT BOOMER FINISHES A MAJOR PROJECT!

 Wahoo! It's nearly one o'clock in the morning and I just finished translating all 606 manuscript pages of my novel, Delinquent Lives, into editable files. Months and months of work. Now, all I gotta do is rewrite it. I hope it's interesting enough not to bore me. If it bores me, I'm sure it'll bore a reader. The following is a section of a scene right near the end when Jimmy, the youth, makes an important decision for his own well-being.

A smiling Happy Silent Boomer!

 “All right, Smally. You don’t remember. But I want to tell you something anyway.” Jimmy poked his forefinger into Smally’s chest, lightly.

Smally backed from the pointing, touching finger. “Well go ahead. Tell me. Don’t just keep talking stupid things.”

The flakes fell softly in the sunlight. They touched Jimmy with sharp, cold touches. One glanced from his nose. The barn down there stuck out really red. Then he began to notice the sparrows. Here one. Over there, another one under an evergreen, hopping and pecking the ground. He watched a third one flutter about at the edge of the road, not flying much.

Jimmy slid his hands into his Levi pockets again. “Look,” he said, “it won’t do no good if someone else does it for you. You got to do it yourself. I can’t do it, man. You can’t ask Norm or Meechum or anyone else to do it for you. It won’t do you no good, man.”

The sparrow near the road hopped, pecked, hopped and hopped, pecked twice again, three times rapidly.

“So what?” Smally said.

“Set it right between you and Leroy. Get him off your back.”

“Leroy’s my friend.”

“You dumb ass, Smally. Quit your fucking lying!”

“I ain’t lying,” Smally said. “Fuck you.”

Another sparrow moved along the edge of the road, hopping toward them.

“Shut up, Smally. I know and I saw, and you been trying to get someone to stop them for over a year, man.”

Smally pouted silently.

“Look. Like I say. It ain’t no good if someone does it for you. You got to take responsibility for yourself. You got to do it yourself. You got to get it together and go to staff yourself and tell them. You can’t go around and ask all these other dudes to do it for you. Staff is supposed to help you, but you got to go to them. I’m not going to go to them for you. No one else can do it for you. Everything will just get worse for you if you ask others to do it for you. You got to do it for yourself. Okay?”

Jimmy bent closer to see into Smally’s face, to see if anything was sinking in. Smally glanced at him. His forehead wrinkled. His thumb came up and slid between his wet, slobbery lips. Jimmy thought Smally was going to cry.

He judged that he was watching Smally calmly. He realized if Smally cried, that would be okay, and if he didn’t cry, that would be okay too. Anything was okay. Smally was his own man. Jimmy knew he was going to let Smally go. Then, looking away from Smally’s twisted face, looking around himself, he felt the snowflakes still brilliantly touching his exposed skin and realized that the sky, the grass, the trees, the bushes, everything was lit by this clear winter light and that everywhere he looked was alive with the small, grey flutterers.

THE WRITER'S BRAIN

The one year I taught high school, I still recall Cameron S. coming up to me after class and saying, "Mr. Thomas, you know all the big stuff, but you miss all the little things." These days, I understand that her "big" and "little" could mean different things than I imagined they did at the time, but I had thought all along that my brain seemed to extract generalizations from reading and from experience but did not accurately recall the details. I recently tried to memorize the process by which DNA via RNA makes copies of itself. The step by step drawing of the process was so simple and mechanical, anybody could understand it, but I haven't retained the details. I kick myself for this failing, yet—in kindness to myself—I do understand that had I been a teacher who taught neuroscience every day, I'd probably be more familiar with terminology. 

the brain, high on life.

Of course, the way my brain functions creates my writing style far beyond any conscious control I imagine I have over the process. However, oddly, the following passages are the opening of the second novel I ever wrote and they are rife with tiny detail. Not a generalization to be found. I'm currently translating Delinquent Lives through OCR software from typed pages to editable files. The novel is stream of conscious and darts back and forth between an adult and a boy. The adult works in a home for emotionally disturbed boys, and the boy is an "inmate" there. The plot is an X pattern which I won't  reveal for fear that no one will buy the novel when I put it out (I think) on Amazon as an e-book:
 

    1

    The Zapruder Super-8 had been hand held and shaky. Specifically, Paul remembered how the blurry blowup caught the piece of skull, hairy on the one side and bloody on the other, and the eruption of blood and fluid blown out in the spray of death. Stupidly, he imagined the fragment’s underside to be a kind of mesh material, like the underside of a toupee, and the fragment itself to be tumbling forever through black and most infinite space.
    “Oh yes,” he imagined exclaiming to others, “I can see myself traveling to the loony bin and back on a piece of bone like that!”

     2

     They walked together on a yellow afternoon in the green, city park through the small, grey, hopping birds. She held his hand. In a paper sack, he carried dry bread broken into crumbs to give them.
     “Sparrows, Jimmy,” she said and pointed.

  He threw the dry, white crumbs to them and watched them gather to feed while the heavy balloon man came down the wide, cinder path under the tall, green, high-branched trees.
     “Those are elms and hickories. See?” she told him, pointing."
     Jimmy tilted his face to their far, green tops which blotted out whole pieces of the blue sky. Then, lowering his gaze, he watched the fat, round balloon man come. He watched the red balloons wave above the round balloon man. Oh! The balloons stretched their strings tight, trying to go up.
     Sunlight splashed on everything and made an eye-hurting dazzle of everything in sight. The sun poured on the tall trees, on a brown dog far away running, on the red balloon cherries in the blue, bright sky stretching their strings. The sun splashed on her yellow hair. The sun lit the long, white hairs on the balloon man’s ears. The sun jumped and leaped from the clear, brightly-ruffled wading pool surface in a dazzle bits of light.
     “Balloons,” she said and pointed.
     “Loon! Loon!” he said and pointed too.
     When she knelt to hand him the balloon string, he smelled the soap in the dish by the white tub at home which she used only. Then he held the balloon string and tilted back his head to stare at the bright ball of red she had given him. The wind moved it. It drifted and tugged. He felt it’s life through the string and he laughed.