Category Archives: writing

Waking from Unsettling Dreams

In the first dream I was in and out of a bar that was headquarters for a violent motor cycle gang reminiscent of the Sons of Anarchy.   The tough men and women in there tolerated me, nobody seeming to even notice me.   I didn’t interact with anyone, I was just there, passing through.   I don’t know why I was there, I wasn’t drinking and rarely enter bars of any kind in real life.   I returned to the bar several times in the course of the dream.   

Around me fights got out of control, people were killed.  Some of the dead bodies were displayed outside the bar in grotesque positions, reminiscent of the crucified left as grim examples to others considering defiance of Rome.   At one point in our history crucified bodies were displayed in long lines, to the horizon.   It was a terrible dream, although I felt myself to be in no danger.   

In hindsight, the violence seemed virtually random, I could have been next, except that nobody paid any attention to my comings and goings.   The bar, I realize now, was set on curving, residential Marengo Street in Jamaica Estates, a place I visited often as a child.  

The second dream shook me up in a different way.   I’d invited a former good friend over, among a group of people I’d invited to my apartment that evening.  The former friend in question, I’ll call him Andy, had demonstrated to me in real life how little our friendship meant to him, how superior he felt to me and how illegitimate and pathetic he thought my feelings of hurt were.  During our last conversation he was unrepentant and even bullying, over the phone.  He may have been equally unrepentant in person, but I doubt he would have tried to bully me face to face.

This dream was unsettling to me for reasons unlike the couple of other bad dreams I’ve had where this guy shows up.   In those dreams I am shaken up afterwards by the palpable feeling of violence I experience.  He does something provocative and I react with anger, shove him, slap his face hard, kick him after knocking him down.   This shakes me up because I am dedicated to being as nonviolent as possible in word and deed (not that I’d meekly let someone attack me, don’t get any ideas).  In the most recent dream it was much different.

He’d set fire to some things in my kitchen and several of us struggled to put the flames out.   I knew at the time that this pyromania was a manifestation of his mental illness and not anything malicious directed at me.  Like with my often vicious father, I realized he could not help himself.   Others at the gathering reacted with anger, I didn’t.  When they began verbally attacking him I told them that I’d invited him and that he was my guest just like they were.   

As I was defending him he lit another fire and I took a cooking pot and banged it loudly on the wall next to his head.  I yelled at him.  I scared the shit out of him.  He disappeared.  We managed to put out the new fire.  Then I heard sirens, which grew closer and closer.  Somebody called out that someone had called the fire department. 

I opened the door and Andy was standing in the hallway, a shattered expression on his face.  He told me sheepishly that he’d called the fire department.  I took this as the best apology somebody as damaged as he is can offer.  I patted the side of his face and a fireman stepped through my front door.     I assured the fireman that the small kitchen fire was under control, he made a quick round of the apartment, signaled his colleague and they took off. 

This dream was fucked up in more ways than I can count.  

I was fairly wide awake, after very short sleep, and I succinctly recounted the dreams to Sekhnet, who was getting ready to go to work.   I mentioned to her that I had to find a new nephrologist, most likely, to follow up with the treatment of my kidney disease.   The need to find yet another new nephrologist is likely because my fucking health insurance changed in 2018.  She asked when I was going to make an appointment to see the Integrative Medicine doctor I’d spoken to months back, a man trained to view the body/mind/emotions as a holistic ecosystem [1]. 

My kidney disease, while eventually deadly, is not serious enough to inspire big pharmaceutical research dollars to be invested in it.  Its cause is unknown to science.  The specialists I’ve visited are blind men clutching the elephant’s tail, ear, leg, penis, promising the darts they throw in a dark room have a decent chance, as high as 30%, of curing what will eventually kill me, if not cured.

Maybe that’s all the unsettling dreams were supposed to do, wake me up and remind me to find a new nephrologist, take perhaps a thousand dollars and go visit this holistic doctor.   We are all heading toward death.  In my case, this kidney disease may not even be the thing that eventually kills me.   

Having this disease is enough to wake me up, though, and not want to waste time.   Writing something thoughtful every day, until I can figure out how to get some of this organized and read, and get some money for it, seems to be the most productive use of however many days or years I have remaining to me. 

Isn’t that the challenge of every human life?  Finding a meaning that gives beauty to the colors around us, music to the sounds we hear and excellent taste to the food we eat?   Satisfaction in our work, pleasure in our play.   A sense of connection to others that makes us cherish them as beings as precious as we ourselves are.

 

[1]  ho·lis·tic  (adjective)

PHILOSOPHY:  characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.

MEDICINE:  characterized by the treatment of the whole person, taking into account mental and social factors, rather than just the physical symptoms of a disease.

 

All I Want

I think I can put this simply and accurately: a dialogue.   What do I want that dialogue to be about?  That’s secondary.   

The main thing is that everything said is heard and digested and what is said back relates to that thing, expands the subject we’re talking about, leads to further understanding, even insight.   Too often the subject and the discussion are circumscribed by many factors. 

If a family member is in a cult, for example, a full discussion of that cult is impossible.  The family member may insist that it is not a cult at all, “cult” being an ignorant and pejorative label imposed by outsiders, but reality in its purest form.  A detailed and open dialogue on the subject is not in the cards, no matter how much mutual goodwill is present.   Often people join cults as a response to a need to be accepted that is not fulfillable anywhere else.   It is not productive to point something like this out to someone who follows a true path laid out by a superior being.

I can think of many situations where an honest conversation is not ever going to happen.  My best hope for that is often here, setting my thoughts and feelings out with as much clarity as I can muster.  Sad, in a way, this ongoing conversation with myself and an imaginary reader, and a great blessing in another way.  I will take the blessing any day. 

Sadness is part of every sentient being’s lot here, and so be it.   A blessing, my friend, is a blessing, and I will take a blessing every day of the week, including today, a day when I am late to get about my rounds.

So if you’ll please excuse me…

The Smartest Man in the Room

My old friend Andy was a very clever fellow.   Only he, Antonin Scalia and James Woods, for example, ever scored perfect 1600s on their Scholastic Aptitude Test.   He clearly had a facility for math and abstraction, demonstrated by his perfect 800 in Math, but his verbal skills were, clearly, equally well-developed.  He spoke well, wrote well, was a highly critical reader.  This was partly because much of what he read he could probably have written better. 

We used to joke about his red ginsu, the razor sharp one he used to parse, slice and vivisect paragraphs.  I don’t know that all of his corrections were for the best, although I know he felt unshakably certain about every one of them.  His occasional howls at the way a line was written were a giveaway, I always thought.   From time to time they’d lock him up in a ward somewhere until he calmed down, so there is also that.

The smartest man in the room, someone who takes the sketchy title seriously, is rarely impressed by other people’s cleverness, it seems to me.   If he is impressed, he keeps it to himself.   It’s as if he’s sure the clever remark is something he could have easily delivered better, he was simply thinking of more important things at the time.  I find myself mulling this over this on a frigid day, this cold trait of some very smart people I have known.    

I once knew a very bright professional writer, a former journalist.  He was a good storyteller and a true literary craftsman,  He also turned out to be loathe to compliment, or even comment on, writing that was not currently for sale.  He had a pragmatic orientation, for one thing.  Writing for oneself was just that, and no further commentary was necessary.  Writing for pay was a job, a craft, work, every sentence open to debate and revision by the buyer.  It was two different worlds to him, I surmise, presenting an idea for publication versus masturbating at length (or even succinctly) in the privacy of one’s own notebook. 

To increase the odds of having a piece published the writer must proceed pragmatically.   What subject will the publication want written about?  What kind of prose does the publication usually publish, what is their editorial point of view, what style do they prefer?  How much of the personal is acceptable in a personal piece and how much of the private is expected to be suggested with discretion?  What tone do they buy?   How many words? 

You take these factors into consideration, and the taste of the person who buys the pieces, if you are able to find out, and craft your piece accordingly.  All of this is sensible to keep in mind while writing for pay.   Follow these steps while writing as well as you can and you increase your chances of selling the piece.

Here’s a harder part.   Suppose someone sends you chapters of an ambitious manuscript of a book he’s trying to write, a personal biographical project you have discussed with him at length.   It is unlike most straightforward memoirs you’ve read.   It would be hard to put it into a marketing slot, or imagine what shelf to put it on in a bookstore, if it did become a book.   It’s a kind of creative nonfiction, a reimagining of a difficult life, a sometimes poignant wrestling match between anger and acceptance, set against huge historical backdrops.  Some of it is, admittedly, moving, and it takes an occasional nice leap from apparent reality to pure conjecture, but in the end, what the fuck is it?   Best to say nothing.

The writer’s ex-wife will later angrily defend the writer’s continued silence on the several chapters of the ms. he was sent.   According to her, he was unable, or unwilling, to write that way, with the creative leaps and the wildly reimagined confrontations, the deeply personal stuff.  He simply wasn’t built that way, not in his writing, not in his personal life.   It was unfair, she said, to judge him harshly because he was not able to write that way.  Unfair to bring up that he’d expressed interest and offered feedback on the pages and then never sent any feedback.   “What do you fucking expect him to fucking say about something he himself couldn’t do, you fucking self-absorbed fuck?” she added, a bit gratuitously, I thought.   

Eventually, when the subject was gingerly raised and discussed between the writer and the would-be writer, the published author told the unpublished one that he had been raised, by a supremely successful grandfather, to always compete.   This was as close to a plausible explanation as the unpublished writer would ever get from the pro.   

I get to wondering about this, a man who no longer keeps a journal, outside of the words that find themselves here.  Maybe I delude myself, judgmental bastard that I also am, that I always try to nurture the creative efforts of people I encounter.   Somebody sends me a beautiful photo, I send back “beautiful”.   It takes a few seconds and it feels right.   Perhaps it means nothing to the other person, is like a single “like” on fucking Facebook. 

Maybe I’m largely the same way as these paragons I describe above, oblivious about the many times I don’t even send “well-done” when a virtual tear runs down my virtual cheek after reading something that moves me.  I mean, unless the writer is a needy, vain, weak person, why do they need me to tell them that what they wrote made an impression on me, right?

When I write now I scrutinize every sentence and the whole before I hit “publish”.   I’ve polished my style by this exercise of preparing these pages to be read by a stranger in Malaysia, or Saudi Arabia or, today, Slovakia.  I picture anyone in the world reading my words, and picturing this reader, I strive to make what I am saying as clear as possible.   

I read this top to bottom, numerous times, as I write, flashing my own ginsu over any word that casts a shadow over the clarity of its neighbors.   Writing clearly is a kind favor to the reader, and to ourselves.   We write to be understood, to express thoughts coherently, to make our feelings felt by others, to connect.   We strive to write without a thought for who is the smartest baboon in the room.  At least I think we do, though, it also must be noted, I am clearly not the smartest baboon in the room.

Joe Frank on the advantage, to a writer, of not avoiding pain

The late, great Joe Frank [1], who died recently at 79, was memorialized by radio superstar Terry Gross.   She played an interview she did with him in 1989.  You can hear the whole interview, illustrated with tasty slices of his radio shows, as well as read the transcript from which the following was clipped, here.  The entire twenty minutes you will spend to hear the whole episode is time well spent.  (IMHO, LOL!  ROTFLMAO!)

At one point Terry asks him a question that yields what struck me as profound answer.   The answer resonated with my experience, I guess is what I’m trying to say.   Those of us who work on writing thoughtfully about our condition here should have a look at Joe Frank’s answer about personal fears and insecurities. 

GROSS: You know, a lot of your more personal shows deal with fears and insecurities – ones that, you know, we can all relate to. But I wonder if when you take your own insecurities and put them in a kind of persona and make them into an hour radio program, if they’re easier to deal with than they are, say, when you’re lying awake alone in the middle of the night.

FRANK: Oh, yeah. As a matter of fact, by using those experiences for radio programs, you transcend them. You almost look for bad experiences or painful experiences. Whatever tragedies might befall you, you can always, right away, think, well, that would make a great story for radio. And so that whatever happens, even if it has a great negative content, even if it’s painful – because you can then tell it on the radio and share it with many listeners and move people or entertain people, it then takes on a positive value.

And I remember distinctly that – coming to that revelation a number of years ago when I realized that I no longer wanted to avoid pain – that I could use it in a way that was very productive so that it was easier to experience whatever suffering came my way.

 

[1]  

 

The Pleasure of Reading

Last night we visited Sekhnet’s aunt, the widow of Sekhnet’s father’s brother, on the occasion of the energetic aunt’s 98th birthday.   Aunt Lillian has always been a big reader and had several paperbacks on her coffee table. “You want this?” she asked me, holding up a book by Nelson DeMille.

I’d read a couple of DeMille’s books, given to me years ago by Sekhnet’s favorite cousin on her mother’ side.  He used to buy them in airports, read them on planes. He loved DeMille’s wiseass, macho narrator, a private eye with a dozen wisecracks ready for the bad guys who were about to torture him.   DeMille has a million or more fans, and has written many bestsellers. He is no slouch, a kind of heir to Elmore Leonard, even if sometimes without Leonard’s unfailing gift for understatement.

The book hadn’t been Aunt Lillian’s cup of tea, the wiseass, macho narrator no doubt had put her off, but she told me, in selling the book “he’s a good writer.”   He is.  He writes to engage the reader, to entertain and to sell books.  He is very good at all of these things.  Reading his book last night and today reminded me of why we love to read a good tale.   DeMille has gotten better with age, or maybe I’ve just forgotten how quickly each of his other books sucked me in.  I’ve snipped out a few examples, which I’ll share and then be on my way.

Of his narrator’s backstory, he says:  

FYI, I spent five years in the U.S. Army as an infantry officer and got blown up in Afghanistan.  That’s the short story of how I wound up here. The long story is a long story, and no one in Key West wants to hear long stories.

As a reader, I wanted to hug the guy when I read that.  Instead of wasting a paragraph, or several, on made up details, he gives us a punchline that reveals a lot about the narrator and heads right back to setting up his story.

About his father, the narrator says:

…my father was a man of few words.   If I’d gotten killed overseas and he had to put my obit in the Portland Press Herald at twenty dollars a word he’d be Yankee frugal and Maine taciturn, and just say:  Daniel MacCormick died.  If it had to be a six-word minimum he’d show his practical side and add: Car for Sale.  

Well, maybe I’m being hard on the old man.  He was proud of me when I joined the Army, and before my second deployment to Afghanistan he advised, “Come back.”  Well, I did, and he seemed pleased about that, but a bit concerned about my physical injuries, though not so much about the post-traumatic stress, which he doesn’t believe in.   He liked to say he came back from Vietnam the same as when he left, which, according to my mother, is unfortunately true.

Great shit, fun to read.  Even if the joke about the obit might be an elderly one, it is recycled deftly by the talented Mr. DeMille and serves the telling of the tale.

One last one before I make myself lunch and eat it while reading a few more short, tasty chapters of The Cuban Affair:  

(The narrator is a charter boat captain in Key West.  His first mate Jack is an ornery seventy year-old Viet Nam vet.  They are about to meet mysterious clients who have offered him millions for a dangerous mission.)

Jack always wore jeans and sneakers, never shorts or flip-flops, and today he’d chosen his favorite “I Kill People” T-shirt.  

I suggested, “The Maine T-shirt I gave you would be good tonight.”

“Yes, sir.”  

He doesn’t mean “yes,” and he doesn’t mean “sir.”  He means “Fuck you.” Sometimes he calls me “Captain,” and I never know if he’s using my former Army rank or my present title as licensed sea captain.  In either case he means “Asshole.”

 

 

 

An untenable life

I persist here almost every day, frequently encouraged by the previously adversarial voice of my dead father’s skeleton.  I write these pieces in spite of many sensible reasons not to spend so much of my time this way.   I’m often cheered by my appetite to set the words down, get my thoughts out clearly, express sometimes difficult feelings, in spite of the almost universal silence that greets this unpaid work.  Still, it is an untenable life.

I console myself: I write because I’m compelled to write, because it helps me, and may help someone else.   I assure myself that I’ll eventually sell some of this writing to support myself, however slightly, going forward.   I am better about not being pissed sitting in the middle of the almost universal silence that hisses around even my best efforts here, I remind myself.  Some days, like today, for example, it feels like an untenable life I am living.  A random page ripped senselessly out of Ecclesiastes.

My idiopathic life-threatening disease is as vague and slow-unfolding as my life itself.  Norton Juster had a character in The Phantom Tollbooth who reminds me of myself in regard to my writing life.   “Worlds tallest midget” said the sign, and a man of average height opened the door.  Around the corner was the “World’s smallest giant”, same guy.   If I wrote half as well as I do, but had twice the ambition, twice the marketing and branding skills, I’d probably be able to make a living.   If I wrote a third as well, and had ten times the marketing and branding smarts, and the unquenchable drive, I’d be a wealthy man by now.   But who am I fucking kidding?  My life is untenable.  

Look, all of our lives are untenable in the end.   Fuck– look at this guy, his lungs just went kaput.   She could have lived to be a hundred, if not for that drunk driver.    Nobody knows how this one died, put “WTF?” for cause of death.   In those last moments, given the chance to take stock of one’s life, how many take consolation in the many good business deals they made?  I have no idea, having almost never made a good business deal.

It seems to me that, except in the case of monsters, those last moments are probably spent thinking about love, shining forth from the world we are about to lose.  The thought of being loved could be a comfort, or it could be unbearable, smothering, I suppose.   That was one reason my father sent his family away right before he died.  How do you die with a small audience of people desperate not to lose you looking on?   The nurses told me afterwards that many men do this, send wives and children away before they breathe their last.  

It’s not the thought of my eventual death that bothers me now, it’s thoughts of my untenable life, a life I must continue to live today.   You can be a moral person, strive to be kind, and mild, to listen, to be responsive, use a gentle phrase to turn aside wrath.   With that orientation to the world, if you have a metrocard with a ride left on it, you can get on a bus, and probably you will be one of the nicest kids on the bus.

Years ago, as I was caring for my dying mother long distance with long daily phone calls, a literary agent was blown away by a long, convoluted story that spilled out when I arrived, soaked and dehydrated, at a party.  “If you can write that down just the way you told it, I can sell it!” she assured me with great confidence.  It was an exciting assurance.  At the time I had no clue how to write it down just the way I’d told it.  I sent her what I thought was my best effort and she responded that I was a very nice guy and that she’d like to take me to lunch at the Harvard Club, where she took her professional clients.   I never called her to arrange that lunch, nice fucking guy that I am.    

These days, having the time, patience and solitude to concentrate, I have a pretty good idea how to go about writing it all down.  Little idea how to organize it, or even review, say, the 1,200 pages of a first draft, but a much better sense that I am hitting the target pretty consistently when I sit down to write.  Nonetheless, the life I am currently waking up to is untenable. Today it is about 2,000 pounds of untenable.  

Wrestling with my themes every day, I’ve developed muscles that most people I know, people much more muscled and capable than I am in most other ways, are not aware they even have.   Today this rippling musculature mocks me, feels like an even shittier consolation prize than it does most other days.   I turn the goddamn thing I am looking at five different ways before setting it in final form.   There are subtle details that must be lit just so.  Impossible to show these things, unless you take pains to set them at the right angle, against the right backdrop, light them correctly.  Leave out a step and you might as well piss in the ocean from a high cliff.

“Schmuck,” I can hear the voice, “instead of writing about what a good writer you are, why don’t you write a great letter to a top literary agent and see what you can get them to do for you and your untenable life?  Nobody gives a rat’s toned and sculpted cuisse for your self-regarding opinions about your fucking untenable life.   Live a tenable life or die — your choice, bitch.”

Leonardo, looking for a patron, once wrote a remarkable letter to some rich guy, maybe the King of France (see letter to the Duke of Milan).  He boldly set out a highly improbable list of many things, in a dozen disparate fields, he could do for this rich guy.  The rich guy was impressed, gave the prototypical Renaissance man a lifetime stipend to live in a villa and conduct his life of contemplation, exploration and the pursuit of knowledge and excellence.   It may have been some other rich guy who eventually gave him the lifetime stipend, his letter may have had no greater effect than being a wonderful example of self-confidence and seeming hyperbole that is actually, possibly, understatement. 

“Yes, that’s what you do, write that understated, hyperbolic letter and send it to everyone you can find who might be an advocate in getting you some rich people’s money.  The people you know can’t help you, and, more to the point, cannot stand to hear about your untenable, if also highly fortunate, life.  You want silence?  You’ve got it now.”  

I’m all ears.

On Writing

My nephew, a young man of few words, is an excellent writer.  In speaking he doesn’t waste words, neither does he waste them when he writes.   It is a rare gift, saying exactly what needs to be said and not saying everything else.

I tend to talk too much.  I speak in long, implausibly complicated sentences.  When I write I’m able to compose and compress my thoughts, refine my feelings, comb through and untangle my sometimes challenging syntax.  It is like anything else one loves to do.  You practice it every day, and after thousands of hours, doing a thing you love, it becomes more graceful.   It also never feels like work to work at improving your skills, it is a pleasure to do because we love the thing itself.

Not that we can master everything we love to do, but the regular doing is essential in any case.   Like calligraphy, which I attempt intermittently but without enough commitment to do gracefully.  I love the flow of ink on paper, and the look of beautiful writing, but my attempts at calligraphy are clumsy, endearingly, idiosyncratically clumsy, if you like, but lacking the flowing grace of masterful calligraphy.  In lettering beautifully the practiced hand must dance lightly, in perfect harmony with the ink and the paper.  My hand is heavy, jerky, my loops quirky, but so be it, I don’t practice the fundamental strokes of calligraphy every day, with enough devotion.

I’ll say only this about writing.   If you do it carefully, and seriously, without taking yourself too seriously (as I am right now, taking myself too seriously) you’ll find it easier and easier to write well.   Hah! Look at me.  Took a perfectly beautiful piece of paper and made an unartful blotch at the bottom, while giving a pert little lecture on the ineffable harmony between ink and page.  I don’t crumble it up, though it would be easy enough here to select this offending paragraph and hit “delete”.

Whatever else you can say about writing, and it is a beautiful and rare thing to be able to go back over and over and fix your mistakes until the words fit together as clearly as you can assemble them, it is far, far better to be able to write, and set things out coherently, than most of the alternatives available when you are faced with a thing that could otherwise choke you to death.

When I turned sixty I assembled those near and dear to me and told Sekhnet I wanted to celebrate by “holding forth”.  She was filled with dread at the prospect.  Her fears were in vain.  In the end, between the two sessions of my improvised stories (they demanded a fucking intermission) I’d only insulted a small handful of old friends.  I’d told a few endearing tales about people in the room, trying to keep them concise, but you know how these things go.

I recall thinking, at one point, that some of my friends must have been thinking (or maybe all of them were, at one point or another during my long holding forth) “who the fuck does he fucking think he is, holding forth this way, like his life is… why, I oughta…..”  I quickly put the thought out of mind, it was distracting.   

Better to hear poems about me recited by friends?  I thought not.  And, anyway, my bumpy life makes little sense to any would-be poet trying to put a few stanzas together to commemorate my life achievements.   Thought it better to attempt it myself, by saluting those I’d chosen as my lifelong friends, than leave that pressure on befuddled loved ones.   I don’t know if it’s related to my long birthday lecture or not, but I’ve seen relatively few of the assembled nearest and dearest since that day a year and a half ago.

Sixty years from now, I will hold forth again, if time permits.  In the meantime, I refine the best of myself here, in carefully selected words, in the manner of my nephew.  I have to say, I love this shit very much, writing.  It comes with an added bonus.   If I do my work properly I will get a “like” from none other than Tetiana Aleksina herself.  She has a knack for picking the ones I would pick myself.   Hello, my dear, you have excellent taste.

Crank

What do you call a person who sits at a computer for hours at a time opining into the invisible wind?   A crank.   If their main purpose is not to wrestle with difficult issues, making rational arguments and citing sources for any facts they refer to, but to rile up those they hate, you can call this peevish type a troll. 

The crank may call itself a citizen journalist, if he bellyaches about current events, or by some other high-minded title, depending on the object of her crankiness.  The fact remains, unless they are employed by reputable journals, and paid well for their opinions, they are, as a general rule, merely cranks.   Trolls, on the other hand, need no introduction.  Their only purpose is to wind people up.

You can find some beautiful music on youtube, whatever your taste.  Listen to some that moves you and then read the comments below.  There will almost always be trolls.   They will tell you why the beautiful thing you just enjoyed was a fraud, a hack job, theft, ham-fisted, dick-fingered.  Count on a troll to tell you the many ways you suck, your taste sucks, people who like the things you like suck.   They have troll farms, I understand.  Dark forces have unleashed mechanized armies of these energetic attack creatures, troll bots, robots programmed to troll.   When the cyber-world is a popularity contest where value is determined by likes and shares, trolls play an outsized role.

But I came here not to speak of trolls.  I am speaking of cranks.  A well-spoken crank, well, so much the worse for him.   The world is complicated, threatening, it comes at you fast, can fuck you up from multiple angles.  The forces of greed and repression are on the rise in the world today, as the tide of hopelessness rises proportionately.  Hard fought century-long battles for things like clean air, clean water, safe working conditions, the right to fair pay, and reasonable work hours, and to a pension, and a social safety net are being undone here in the US by the wealthy appointees of a spoiled billionaire of limited concern for anything but his own misguided quest for glory.

Our dysfunctional political system has produced enough despair to drive masses of people to a feeling of hopelessness.  Our economic system serves only the very wealthy, everyone else is on a treadmill of insecurity.   At any moment those who are not very wealthy can lose most of their life savings on a few bad turns of the roulette wheel everyone must keep their money on these days, since banks no longer pay interest on savings.   What would you rather do, sit around pondering these fearful things or dash off to work to make sure you can pay for your hospitalization after your stroke?   

Most people don’t have the luxury to sit around being full-time cranks.  Even if they did, most people would still rather do many other things.  I myself, in many ways the prototype crank these days, would rather be writing of the wonders of this miraculous world than the slops that get dashed in our faces every day.  Or at least finishing the first draft of the memoir of my father’s life, a massive work of creative non-fiction.

The essence of the crank is isolation, I think.   This is also the essence of the writer’s life, I suppose.   A writer needs large tracts of time accountable only to the ideas they are trying to set down.    Setting out ideas as clearly and vividly as possible takes as much time as we can give it.   

We know the world through stories and framing these stories can be thirsty work.  People are doing it brilliantly every day.  We live in a golden age of television drama, for example.  There are so many well written serials these days it’s like the art itself underwent a renaissance recently.   Not everybody has stories they want to tell, just like not everyone dreams of painting, or singing, or dancing like Fred Astaire.

I’d love to ask somebody like Charles or David Koch what they really love to do, what they dream of doing.   I imagine it would be something like seeing the greatest living cellist play a command performance, surrounded by precious art treasures, and then, going into another room and counting all the money in the world.  Rolling naked in all the money in the world, I suppose.  These two are eighty years old and they have more money than the Catholic church, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia combined.  What is it they really love?  Nobody is calling them cranks, but then again, they have very important work to do every day and they are very, very successful at it.

Taking notes from a friend

One of my oldest friends, an indispensable one, took a moment to tell me he liked the improvised intro I wrote yesterday for the anaconda of a ms. I am wrestling with.   It was good, he wrote:

until you began to spit at the ones who will …what did you call it… “pony up”…..cooperating while not being disgusted is not an impossible goal. especially now that you have the wind at your back.

I took his notes to heart and took the lever to a few descriptions in the objectionable paragraph.  You can be the judge of whether, with the revisions, I’ve succeeded in not spitting at the corporate fucks whose smug faces I originally took careless aim at (oops, sorry about your Jerry Garcia tie, man). The revised version is immediately below.   The original graf my friend commented on is below that, for comparison.

new:

Beyond that, of course, the challenge is to turn the story into a winning book proposal, something to convince a corporate type to give an unknown sixty-one year old author an advance to finish writing the book.  I know, I know, with that attitude what self-respecting corporate shill is going to pony up anything for my book?  I know.   My biggest challenge, outside of learning how to charm this indispensable type, will be to write the blurb, a 30 word masterpiece of copywriting that will sell the ambitious book I have been wrestling with for a year and a half now.  Or at least get me into the decider’s office.

original (and extra crispy) version:

Beyond that, of course, the challenge is to turn the story into a winning book proposal, something to convince a corporate fuck I wouldn’t so much as shit on to give an unknown sixty-one year old author an advance to finish writing the book.  I know, I know, with that attitude what self-respecting corporate cocksucker is going to pony up anything for my book?  I know.   My biggest challenge, outside of learning how to charm this (I forget how I originally referred to the despicable sell-out), will be to write the blurb, a 30 word masterpiece of copywriting that will sell the ambitious book I have been wrestling with for a year and a half now.  Or at least get me into the piece of shit’s office.

NOTE:  Of course, neither version of the paragraph would go in the actual intro to a published book.  The challenge it mentions would have already been surmounted and only a petty and self-destructive baby would seek to make mention of it in the actual published book the reader is holding in her hands.  In its place I’d have a nod of thanks to the corporate cocksuckers who showed confidence in the marketability of my work, gave me the generous payment and put the thing out for public consumption.  I would, of course, call them neither corporate nor cocksuckers in that grateful nod.

That said, I don’t think the paragraph suffers at all from the revisions.  Then again, I’m not a supremely over-sensitive fucking corporate shill… Reading them over now side by side, I don’t know.  The rewrite seems to lack a bit of integrity, somehow.  What do YOO think?

Why the fuck am I keeping this on-line journal?

Good question, even as I have to jet out of here in a moment.  I write here, as often as I can, mainly for the feeling of being in control of things we humans have little or no control over.  It makes me feel good to write.   I write here to make sense of things as they happen, to the extent I can.  I find it helpful and hope that what I write is sometimes also helpful to someone reading it.    

I also like to keep the old writing pencil sharp, because I love the craft of writing.  It is very satisfying to see words lined up to bring something into focus.  I also hope, one day soon, to sell these little darlings like the adorable hookers they’re supposed to be, in the Free Market.  After all, any craft unsold is just a fucking hobby (he added, with gratuitous bitterness).

Today I made an appointment for screening of my skin for more possible cancer, long overdue in part because I’ve had to find three new sets of doctors in the last three years thanks to my man Obama’s beautiful compromise with the perfect, which disabled my ability to see the dermatologist I’d been seeing for years, a doctor I liked.  The earliest appointment for a new patient I could get today is for August 31, at 2:30 pm.  I took it.  I’m also on the waiting list for any earlier appointment that might pop up.  If I’d done this three months ago, instead of being discouraged when nobody I called accepted my new Silver level insurance, I’d have an appointment for next week.  Of course, I’m free to call as many other dermatologists as are on my insurance company’s list, in the meantime. This is America, after all.  In the meantime, I fucking write.

I’m being pressured to begin immunosuppressive therapy for my kidney disease.   This therapy includes three months of steroid treatment, in alternating months (chemotherapy type agents are administered every other month) each month beginning with three days of IV infusion of steroids.   I am trying to educate myself about the disease before committing to this pharmaceutical blunderbuss approach.   I read this just now, from the Mayo Clinic:

Membranous nephropathy (MEM-bruh-nus nuh-FROP-uh-thee) occurs when the small blood vessels in the kidney (glomeruli), which filter wastes from the blood, become inflamed and thickened. As a result, proteins leak from the damaged blood vessels into the urine (proteinuria). For many, loss of these proteins eventually causes signs and symptoms known as nephrotic syndrome.

In mild cases, membranous nephropathy may get better on its own, without any treatment. As protein leakage increases, so does the risk of long-term kidney damage. In many, the disease ultimately leads to kidney failure. There’s no absolute cure for membranous nephropathy, but successful treatment can lead to remission of proteinuria and a good long-term outlook.

You have to admire the candor of “in many, the disease ultimately leads to kidney failure.”   Regardless, I have my life to live, and a nice box of chocolates to buy for a 95 year-old birthday girl, who I have to dash off to see after a shave and a shower.    

I feel so much better having taken this little break to practice my word arrangement.  Thank you, Diary Dear.