Wednesday 2/3/21
I wrote a story about a woman who awakes in a seaside motel--it is not necessarily morning--and finds an imp on its head in a corner of her room. The woman stays in this room, away from her job. Her home. What we presume is her family. In the four corners she's scattered sand gathered from the beach on the one day she went there during a gale when no one was out, this sand being what represents the outside world. She has made an island of the bed, which she imagines has the power of locomotion. The imp resembles a dreidel, or shucked asparagus, if asparagus was something that could be shucked, and stands three feet tall. She's not surprised to see the imp. He eats cranberry muffins and thumbs through a volume of sea tales, while she reads a child's diary. There is a basketball tryout, an account of cassette tapes, an important artisanal mug, a lock of hair, and a trip to the coast, after the imp has been lent a bonnet. All of this is happening in the story, and yet it is simply a human story, and entirely a human story. There is nothing like it. It's called "My Driftwood Imp." And it is absolutely gutting and true. No one in publishing could handle newness like this.
Walked ten miles Monday, three yesterday, three today. Was supposed to run the stairs at BC on Monday but there were too many students on them. A strange time for me to be there--mid-morning on a weekday. The majority of my visits happen on weekends, but I'm usually there earlier, no matter the day of the week. I am exhausted, after what I've put myself through, how hard I've worked, over the last several weeks. I'll document what I can of that in a standalone entry, because it deserves to stand alone. Sunday marked 1687 days, or 241 weeks, without a drop of alcohol.
I got Valentine's Day cards for my two nieces, nephew, sister, mom. The kids aren't keen on Peanuts, which is my usual go-to. Normally it’d be some Snoopy rascality for you,” “a Linus aphorism for you,” “a Charlie Brown reminder to press on for you," but now I have to spend some time in the card aisle. My niece Lilah is the easiest to find a card for, because she likes princesses, and there is usually only one or two of those. My think is to write them notes in the cards. My sister saves them, so I write the notes to their future selves. Not because I intend to be dead or anything. What I intend is to have my house in Rockport and one in Cape Cod and for them to visit and us to do fun things. Hiking, or museums, or concerts.
This is last night's Downtown segment. The website remains on pause. I need to hire someone to help me out. I can't see a way around it. I'm not skilled enough to figure out what to do with the changes that have been made to how things like the lists of links are edited and added to--and I hope to Christ that they can be ported over to the implementation, because I cannot start over and upload the 1000 links that are there, plus the 1000 I have yet to get to, with more and more being added all of the time. Meatheads isn't even listed on the Books page. It's a disaster right now. People aren't getting their notifications when there's a new blog post. I am on the hook for so much work and words each day, that I am past the point of exhaustion, and well past the point of what any other human could do. As January's work total will show. Anyway, Downtown was fine. I would say it's not one of the better ones, but that's my criteria, and I judge myself as other people judge nothing else. My patience is diminishing. I just have no patience with stupidity, with watching people who know nothing, do nothing, offer nothing, get rewarded, paid, honored, all but sucked off by thousands, or millions, followed, worshiped. I have no patience with how easy people are on themselves, the orgy of complacency, how they delight in never thinking, hardly living. I'm just so sick of how low the bar is. How simple people are okay with being simple and experiencing so little and hating anything new. How no one ever wants to think at all. Just these zombies. And they're all the same. There's no intelligence, no effort, it's the same words, the same jokes, the same ineptitude, the same cliches, and everyone is fine with it. And because I'm not, I'm fucked, I'm paying the price, and I have so little hope because I'm not some lazy, useless, brain dead plonker bragging about how simple I am. I don't write this pretentious, unimaginative, repetitive, meaningless crap that is all you get, and because it's familiar, it's recognized, and awarded, and made a big fucking deal about, when it's just slop. But it's not about being anything else other than what one expects and has seen, and then connected, and just like the people the system prefers, with maximum mediocrity, and the right blood lines, and schools, and agent, and look, and often gender, and often skin color, because mediocrity is so non-threatening to insecure, weak people. I hear that frustration in my own voice as I listen to something like that segment. Not with Kimball. I'm not frustrated with Kimball. It's not him. Anyway, I don't even like mentioning what we discussed, because I know I'm better on the radio than anyone has ever been, I know I'm the all-time expert in every last thing I discuss, I back it up constantly, and I am getting nowhere, because no one wants that. They want idiocy and repetition of things that have been said a million times. But yeah, we discussed drama--as in, "I don't do drama"--and a witty radio episode from 1956 about a transsexual robot, Orson Welles's Voodoo Macbeth, a pre-fame recording by the Animals plus their BBC sessions, and Dustin Pedroia, who retired from baseball this week.
I don't want to write any more of this right now. It's supposed to be longer, because on here, too, there's so much to get to, and I'm behind, so I had to get some of it up, but everything feels joyless and soul-swallowing and pointless in that worst way, which is when something has potentially more of a point to it than anything else, but it's pointless because of how a situation stands and how a deck is stacked. I don't have solutions right now. Sometimes I seriously wonder lately if I'm producing so much, and so much matchless art, because I can take it with me when I die, and maybe I'll die soon, and that work I made in this world gets to come with me and make a difference where I actually belong. I don't like to thinking this way.
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