Tuesday 6/21/22
I've written the shortest story of my career, but is it really very short? In terms of the word count, it is 154 words long. I think it's terrifying in its implications. But not just its implications. In its whiteness of the page, and in the blackness of the page. I believe that when you're writing as well as one can write, you're also writing with the white part of the page. Sure, one writes with the black part--but to write with the white part as well is to really be doing something. The story is called "The Bean Pole." I came up with it yesterday as I neared the steps for my workout. I ran up them a couple times, and then on the third time, I pulled out my phone, and jotted down some of the words and phrases, then I let them sit, have a day in my mind. Today I came to the white page ready to go, with the last of yesterday's coffee, knowing how I'd use parts of that whiteness. It is very good. I feel like I've just left so much behind. Everything is back in the distance, way down the road I've already traveled. I will wonder if work I am creating leaves people behind, if it's just so advanced, and that is a concern, but then I also look at the work, and I don't think it's doing that. I just think it's so different from everything else out there. Publishing people, meanwhile, even when it's not all about the bigotry, are looking for, are trained to look for, and can do nothing but look for, shit that is like other shit.
Someone asked me to be on some show, and I saw the note late, because I just don't see things, right now, on time, or quickly. For various reasons. Eventually I will. I said sure, but there is something that needs to be cleared up. I was told I'd be a mystery guest. Why? I am not taking any second billing, and I may be mistaken, but that's kind of what that sounds like to me. Maybe I'm not understanding. Mystery guest. I don't like that. Like I'm some curio? I don't feature in the "on this weeks' show we're joined by her, him, and her" online stuff? I don't get billing? I'm sprung on viewers as some random oddity with a cool subject--Judy Garland, I think--to discuss? That is not going to work for me. My rock hard member can be the mystery guest! No. My bad. That was wrong. The member will not be a guest. But still. Something seems off.
The adamantine!
Moving on. I have worked more on the Fisk essay this morning. Now I will run stairs and do push-ups.
Addendum: The piece on McCartney's "I'm Down" has now been inserted into Just Like Them: A Piece by Piece Guide to Becoming the Ultimate Thinking Person's Beatles Fan. Said piece is positioned after one on the home recordings the Beatles--then the Quarrymen--made in 1960, and one about their time in India. The book stands at 65,000 words.
Addendum II: Spoke to show fellow. Nice enough man, but I don't think this is for me. Everyone on Friday is a mystery guest--I guess that's just how it goes--and it'd be a panel of five to ten people talking for an hour. There's no money, and that's a lot of people and not a lot of time, so I can't really see how it'd help in what I'm trying to do.
Enough delay. To the stairs! Then back to Fisk, and then on to the radio tonight to discuss lots of Sherlock Holmes things that people don't talk about. Or at least, outside of hardcore Sherlockian societies.
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