Sunday 8/21/22
I tidied up the op-ed I wrote yesterday on Charles Schulz and Peanuts for Schulz's centennial in late November. I made what may be a final decision on what this horror film book could be. I should know more tomorrow depending on this thing I plan to do. I finished "The Horse Crossing," which is as good as fiction could be, and can go into Longer on the Inside: Very Short Fictions of Infinitely Human Lives. I worked more on the short story "Carlyle." Yesterday I wrote the first 2500 words of a film piece for Halloween.
I ran 5000 stairs today and did 100 push-ups. Today marks 2240 days, or 340 weeks, without a drink. That was also something I did while everything was like this, which I wrote about earlier. "You're one of the strongest people I know." Again, one can see why that line--the need to scale back, because it is me--bothers me. One of them, huh? Really? Like what? Top five? God I hate that. You know how people say "Go real or go home?" Well, what I say is "come real or don't come at all." Don't give me the mouse-y bollocks and the intentional dimunitions.
I'm ready to do what I need to do this week in terms of exposing these people on here. One thing that is hard is having to do everything. I have to do everything right now. Every kind of writing. Keep up these pages. Work on books. I have to do each thing better than anyone else could dream of, and I have to do more of each of those things than the people who just do that thing will do in their lives. It is constant and it is exhausting. There was a list from about three or four weeks ago, with the likes of Sarah Gorham from Sarabande. I haven't forgotten. I don't forget. It just got moved back as I create endlessly. I will proceed at a steady, inexorable pace, and take them down person by person, venue by venue, with unrelenting precision and truth. Let them deal with that, or try to explain it away. You know the expression "burn the boats?" It means there's no going back. Burn the boats of retreat. One is said to do this one's self, as a spurring, but I did not burn my boats, in the instance of the publishing industry. These people burned them, like cowards in the night, without my consent, hoping I would then lie down and give up. And that left me one choice: to take them on. I guess I should say that my other choice was to die in poverty and anonymity, and with the world never getting to have this work. That wasn't an option for me. So no matter how unpleasant the remaining option is, it is what I am fully committed to.
I got fruit, vegetables, bread, Swiss cheese, the only cheese I'll eat, because it's low in sodium, unless I have pizza. I drank a lot of hibiscus and green tea for my blood pressure. The feast has been outside since Thursday. It's the Italian marching band going up and down the street non-stop, and all of the food stands and their larded up, fried goodies, and drunken idiots, music blaring, people shouting. Was weird to hear the strains of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" wafting in from a couple blocks away. There was a guy with a microphone who kept walking the street lecturing about Jesus and being saved, how he was saved, and all of these people weren't living the true life and word of Christ. The things people do with their time. So much noise. Low class, low rent, out of tune noise. I remember coming to this feast as a kid with a friend and his family when we lived in Mansfield. I was probably ten. And I was dumbfounded at the sight of this woman, who struck me as being the size of half a car. I had never seen anyone that large. She was sitting on something in the street, but it couldn't have been a chair, and at the time I was certain it was a wheelbarrow, titled at an angle. It may have been. Her legs were as round as the bottom of a pylon. And you know what? That could have happened right outside my window now. I wonder what year she ended up making it to. Did she see the 1990s? The next century? How many more feasts were there for her in what may or may not have been a wheelbarrow? She must have relatives that have been outside the whole time since Thursday. There are lots of people named Sal. It's not exactly a fitness convention, either. My grandmother used to say, "Oh dear, bread and beer," and she'd sigh. It was one of those sayings that had no exact meaning, but you knew precisely what it meant. I feel like saying it right now.
There are now dueling marching bands playing twenty yards from each other--simultaneously. It is a horrible cacophony in here. What the hell is it with these people? Go to Concord. Have a hike. Get some fresh air. Learn something. Spot a woodpecker. It's an endless succession of double negatives, too, this slaughter of the English language, with the thickest Boston accents one has ever heard.
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