Tuesday 8/4/20
* This is a short story I wrote for JazzTimes called "The Day Louis Armstrong Lost His Color," which is the first work of fiction the magazine has published in its illustrious fifty-year history.
* Here is today's segment on Downtown, a twenty-minute conversation about inspiration. I don't believe one can find this level of honesty anywhere else.
* Read an account yesterday of a Bruins VP harassing the building commissioner and a builder in Cohasset. The subject was masks. I'm not about to get into masks. My thoughts on masks are, I am sure, quite a bit different than everyone else's, or at least any expressed or written thoughts that I have heard or seen. What was particularly galling about this VP's string of letters, though, was the tone. You know those people who are not very smart, who think they know what "big" words mean, but in reality have no clue? They had advantages in life, they often come from money, they have no idea what they don't know about the world, because all they do, all they have ever done, is stare at their navel, which is buried up their own ass. This Bruins person tried to degrade the builder with how he talked to him. Frankly, makes it hard to root for the Bruins, unless, I guess, you know that this kind of person is everywhere, so you try not to think about them. Every organization is stocked with people like this. You wouldn't like your favorite band chances are if you met the members. One keeps things separate. The funny and predictable thing was when the builder, who had been trying to appease this horrible man, showing huge amounts of patience, finally said "enough" and flipped things around on him, because, of course, he was smarter. He lives in the real world. When matters were flipped, the Bruins VP lost his mind with his rage.
* There was a time when unstable people gathered in Boston Common, across the street from the church, and talked out loud all day really to no one, but as would-be proselytizers. A bunch even had megaphones. You'd see the same ones every time you walked through. I don't have any friends or a life or anything, so I understand loneliness--I am always alone--but one needs constructive purpose, one needs at least the company of one's self, and for that, the self must be cared for, tended to, developed. I'd think how these people would be better off focusing on that. They weren't where they were to be agents of change. They were grasping for something. Their instability got the best of them. You might even say they gave in to it. It was in such settings that you'd encounter such people, but now those people--the version of this kind of person--is on Twitter. They're Davit Leavitt. Not the shitty, one-note plagiarist, discriminatory writer who teaches at Florida, edits Subtropics, and is at the very least tied for the spot of most boring author in the world. Twitter David Leavitt, the man who lies about being an award-winning writer--who has never published anything in his life--who works at Marshall's and has a blue check mark on Twitter on account of lying about his identity, where he says horrible things, does horrible things to people--look up "David Leavitt Target"--and makes vile jokes about murdered children, and vomits forth vitriol all day about Trump. Obsessed. Manic with the obsession. Steals the tweets of other people as well and passes them off as his own, not that they were smart or witty in the first place. An unstable, deranged person. With 250K followers. That's the appeal of Twitter for that crowd who otherwise would have been in the Common with a megaphone. These are the subterranean termites of society.
* I've written three beautiful works this week. They are so different from each other. Again, I get better each week. You feel it, you know it, you are it. They're not short--or two of them are not, anyway.
* I saw an ad on Facebook that would help you, the writer, do the impossible and write 2000 words a day. This course made it sound as if to do so would be a miracle, but you can realize the miracle. It is very simple to write 2000 words. It can be done, and the words can be all done, the work all done, even perfect, in less than the time it takes to watch a film. If 2000 words a day is a lot for you, you should be doing something else. Writers write. The best ones do so for the most purpose. That will have nothing to do with an MFA, a favor trade to get into a journal, being a literary citizen, being able to say that you have an agent, or so that you can have something upon which you hang the hat of your hoped-for identity, so that you have something that makes you "special," or you "you." It is none of these things.
* I've noticed that the people that I tend to like the most get up early. This is probably not especially surprising.
* I have also noticed that a lot of unstable women who self-identify as writers but seem to write and publish little or nothing also call themselves life coaches. I must have 150 FB friends like this. Do people pay these people to be their life coach? Does that really happen?
* Eh, I'll be your life coach. $50 an hour, minimum $500 a month. Fix you up hard and fast, and then help keep making you better. Problematic relationships? I'll help you with those. Dealing with tragedy? Having a hard time keeping going? Getting going? In a funk? Something worse than a funk? I'll also be your writing coach, too, if you'd like, for an additional fee. Life coach quote also includes art stuff--what to see, read, watch, listen to. I tailor to your needs.
* I don't automatically believe anyone. Life is far too complicated for that. I process. Often times I say that I don't know. Or that something is a part of this, a part of that, a part of many things. But often I do not know, I will not know, and I will certainly not know from a distance.
* It is true, I do not trust anyone right now, but that is a separate issue. I would like to trust someone again, but even when I do, or when I trust several people, the above point will still hold, because that is how life is, and people are. Calling either something else, and sloganeering, does not change the nature of existence, nor the role feelings play, the limits of perception, questions of motive, the influence of pain. One picks what one will answer to. I made the decision to answer to reality. It's my end all, be all. Reality dictates terms to me, not I to it, though I can also foster reality with what I create and make real, with the real character I put out into the world, my acceptance of truth and the choices I make in following. That can make matters tougher in various vogues of social fashion moments, but you don't lose yourself this way, you don't get left on the wayside, and I believe in time you get to the points most worth getting to. I have put the entirety of my faith in this belief. I've given myself to it wholly.
* I think someone may have fucked with my flowers. I got some sunflowers on Friday. They were fine in the hall yesterday in their vase. Today, they weren't just dead, it was like they had been visited upon by some Lovecraftian blight. They looked melted, and the water was almost black. I don't know if someone put some soda in there, or something. I don't have a lot in life right now, and I am going to be pissed if someone destroyed these.
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