Dickenscratch

    This is while you're still swaddled under the warm curve of your mother's belly in Ohio, and I'm eight hundred miles away in South Philadelphia, locked out of two places at once in the middle of the night. Strange: This morning I woke up in my own bed next to Beanie's peaceful breathing and things were the way I was finally getting used to, just her and I and our apartment and our new cycle of small worries, like where the money will come from for the electric bill this month and where I left my Septa card this time. But now, fifteen hours later, Beanie has kicked me out of the apartment and I've locked my keys in the studio, where I intended to sleep tonight. And you exist and it is snowing like the sky has broken.

    So now I'm in a diner a few blocks from my inaccessible keys. I sat here for a while after realizing my mistake, drinking black coffee and staring at the empty side of the booth until that became intolerable. Normally I'd have a book with me in such a situation, but I could not have read even if I'd thought to bring one. My mind does not do two things at once - a handicap I've learned to live with by not driving a car or carrying on a conversation while paying for something - and it was already busy narrating today's list of unbelievable events and tomorrow's worries, which by then were accumulating as fast as the snow outside, burying my tracks. I kept getting lost, worrying in long, disappearing circles. I felt I had to write things down to know where I was. I left the diner and bought this yellow notepad from a drug store down the street and returned, and then I began writing what I was thinking, thoughts which suddenly I realized were addressed to you, of all the people in the world, to you, a fetus in Ohio, a fetus in Ohio that might not even be mine.

I should be writing, but I feel more like ruminating on my recent frustrations with it. There are a number (2?) of problems, which I'll try to outline:

1) There is so much required non-creative writing in my life that, by the time I've put in a good day of it - of interviews and articles for local magazines, of papers for school, of bios for friends' bands (OK, there is exactly one of these that I haven't actually put much effort into yet, due to the lack of a deadline - hint, hint, Adam and Dave), of emails (so many emails!), of lists - after all that how does one sit at the computer and write what is not required? (Perhaps the answer is to get a typewriter? Maybe blogging is only adding the the problem?)

2) I am afraid to settle on a thing. To have this thing be the thing. To say, in effect: This is the book I am writing. This will be the book. What a senseless fear! The one thing I know I want to do, and I don't do it because I'm afraid of it being finished! I'm afraid of the irreversible nature of the thing, the bound book, the reviewed book, the hardback cover that sandwiches four hundred pages of words I Cannot Ever Take Back. I'm afraid of succeeding, in short. Why settle on this plot and not another? Why this character when it could have (should have?) been that one? Why 3rd person instead of 1st? What if I'm wrong? What if I make a mistake! A silly dilemma. A real one.

boustrophedon

I'm reading this, left to right:

The Names

One

I knew of and once even met Lewis Duggibs in high school, in a town just North of here, where he was the very sincere founder and president of the official campus Richard Nixon Fan Club and where he wore a suit and tie to school most days. He was followed through the halls of Twiggy High by two girls who couldn't stop giggling when he was around, Elsi and Andrea, as unlikely candidates for Lewis' friends as I could then imagine, Elsi with black leather boots and argyle socks and sharp black hair, and Andy with floor-length floral thrift store skirts and a neck adorned with cheap beads, together or separately living vestiges of a kind of mishmash of punk rock and hippy subcultures that were, except as their memories lived on in Elsi and Andrea and a few others in the world, dead (but soon to be resuscitated the nation over by them and other boys and girls like them, or perhaps by kids who would only mimic them and other boys and girls like them, and sold in malls to slightly younger kids by slightly older kids, and all to the chronic irritation of those like Elsi and Andrea who, while they never would have taken credit for the invention of rebellious dress attire, would have at least, if asked, claimed the birthright, the sole legitimate right to the inheritance and true understanding of what it means to turn heads in a strictly defiant yet fashionable way). But even more unimaginable than the unlikely trio was the way that my own future would one day intersect with theirs, that Lewis and Elsi would one day be my landlords, my next door neighbors, my business partners, and eventually, at least on a level somehow a bit managerial and often motherly, my friends.

Today I re-discovered croutons, as a delicious afternoon snack!

I read the chapter Chris left in my mailbox. It was supposed to be about the time period after I left Bob Jones University a semester early and began driving around the country selling things at flea markets. It was all wrong, though, so I called him.
    "I have some suggestions for your latest chapter," I said.
    "Um, OK," he says. He thinks my suggestions will not be valid.
    "Well, first of all, it's inconsistent. The character is inconsistent."
    "I know. I'm not...it's not..."
    "If he's the kind of guy he is in Chapter One, then he's not going to have neatly stacked boxes in the van."
    "True. I know...but..."
    "He might have interestingly stacked boxes, but not neatly stacked boxes. Or he might have an interesting system in mind, but would probably never implement it, being an INTP, which is what I am. You know I'm an INTP, right?"
    "Yes."
    "Maybe I should send you a link where you can read about the personality types some more."
    "That's OK, I'll..."
    "I'm sending it now. Tell me if you get it."
    "OK."
    "Did you get it?"
    "No."
    "Have you seen that Google Maps has added our neighborhood in high definition?  I can see the van parked in the back. Oh, and I don't like the word 'rusting.' Maybe you should say..."
    "I have to go, Jack."
    "You know, this dialogue sounds nothing like me."
    "I know. I don't have enough time to write it properly."
    "Because of school?"
    "Yes."
    "Why are you writing it then?"
    "Because I feel obligated. To the blog. I've started this thing, you know. But I think you should stop thinking of the character as you. It's based on you, very loosely."
    "I have to go."
    "I already said that. I had to go first."
    "No one is holding a toy gun to your head."
    "OK."
    "My dad called and asked me if I really kept a toy gun under my seat. He read the blog."
    "Interesting."
    "Are you going to fix this dialogue? You're making me sound like someone else."
    "Yes."
    "And the toy gun thing? And the rusting and the boxes?"
    "Yes."
   

Chapter Three

    In a rusting white Ford Econoline van Jack drives the highways of those ambiguous boxy states West of the arch and East of the canyon - the ones his boy, much later, will enjoy shaping out of saltines while sitting in his high chair. In the back rides a neat stack of boxes containing bound strings of leather, metal hooks, cheap all-in-one screwdrivers, and the like, anything that might sell for a few bucks at a flea market table like the one that is folded neatly and wedged between the side door and the boxes. Under his seat is a plastic grocery bag of cash equalling roughly three thousand dollars, and next to that a toy gun that looks sort of real if it is dark and its wielder convincing enough. Or so Jack hopes when he considers the bag of cash, the van doors that don't lock properly, and his encouraging five-five stature.

Every morning, every single morning, I spill coffee while pouring it into my cup. It's not that I'm clumsy (I am, though), but that I cannot pour coffee from my coffee pot without leaving a small black puddle next to my cup. What's just as frustrating is that I can't even catch it happening. I've never seen the coffee spilling, or dripping, or jumping onto the counter. I only see it there, a small morning mess to wipe up.  Am I pouring wrong, somehow? Is this a design flaw? I've tried things, but nothing works. I've mimicked the motions of diner servers. I've held at all angles. I've positioned the cup at different angles to the coffee pot. I've opened my copy of Isaac Asimov's Understanding Physics for clues. But still, the puddles.

Yesterday I made a breakthrough in the plot for my new novel attempt, tentatively titled Understanding Physics. I've furthered clarified my intentions and plans, not necessarily to make the story a better one, but to facilitate the kind of thing I won' t lose interest in five chapters deep. I changed perspectives yesterday, as I had found that the I of my novel was too close to being the same I that stands in my own kitchen every morning and wonders, "Why do I always spill coffee?" Not that one can't write a very good novel that is, as Mathilde so eloquently calls it, "self-centered thinly veiled autobiogrphical sh*t." One certainly can write convincing and interesting thinly-veiled shit, and I've maybe even seen it done. But for me, lately, writing is only possible as an escape from the I that blogs and spills coffee every morning and writes novels. Of course all of those elements can be present and be the elements of a completely different I, and many pieces of my own life will make an appearance in the story. How could they not?

So, to solve the problem of the I being the I, if you follow me, I made the I one house over. But then as I (my I) lay in bed this morning I realized that I was only moving the problem one house over, which is a bit like sweeping the dirt under the rug, or even like sweeping it under your neighbor's rug, which I would never want to do in a literal or metaphorical way to my neighbors, who I like very much. Now, I never intended to write characters that would be exactly like anyone in my real life, including myself, but I realized this morning that if I am to keep interest in this story at all, it will have to be mostly imaginary, a thing I am continually inventing. The story will have to surprise me as much as it surprises the hopeful reader. I cannot write about myself, this yard, these houses, those neighbors, these same puddles of coffee. But I can start there, and see where it takes us.

Understanding Physics, Volume I: Motion, Sound and Heat

It's almost nine o'clock, but I've been up for three hours. I couldn't sleep, and I went with it. I made coffee and decided to write some, to work on the novel, to see where I'd been going wrong and to correct it.

I stared at Microsoft Word for a while, sipping coffee. I paced. Two red cardinals outside my window chirped aggressively at each other. I walked to my bookshelf and picked up various books, turning them over in my hand, sipping coffee. I decided I needed a new approach, a new aesthetic for the process of writing, something less busy and distracting than the convoluted Word interface. That was my problem, maybe. I clicked View, then Full Screen. Ah, that's nice. A big blank screen. I used the keyboard shortcut  for centering a paragraph (Ctrl E) and typed "Chapter Five." It looked nice this way, in full screen view, not at all like previous attempts at Chapter Five.

But something still bothered me: a small button that allowed the option for returning to the toolbar-cluttered mode floated there, like a hungry insect. A nuisance, this button. A Microsoft nuisance. Surely I could get rid of it. But no, it's the one thing it would not allow me to rid the "full screen" of when I chose "add or remove buttons." A checked box beside it, as if one could un-check it, but one could not un-check it. It could not be un-checked, this option. Microsoft was looking out for us: how else could they get back to normal screen mode? They must have a way out!

I opened the OpenOffice.org Writer program. It's a free, open-source program that I'd stopped using for the simple reason that I could never remember to save in a Word friendly format before leaving for school last semester, so I'd end up in the computer lab with an un-openable file. But now I wondered if it might be the solution.

It was. A true full-screen mode, a large blank canvas. The program allows me to remove all buttons, even the button for returning to normal mode, which I can do easily with a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl Shift J). Beautiful. Now I could write. "Chapter Five" I typed, in the center, and it really resembled the page of a book.But first more coffee.

I could not write after more coffee. Something was still wrong. I was bored. Bored with the story, with the character. Why? What could I do to make him better, more interesting, more fun to write? Why had I so quickly lost interest? Was I ever truly interested in him? Who is he anyway?

I ran down the list:

• He lives in a house, like mine
• with a view, like mine
• with a neighbor, like mine
• with problems, like mine
• with a diet, like mine
• with thoughts, like mine

So I started over. Ctrl E.

Semester starts Monday. It is the one in which I:

• become Assistant Editor for the Southern Indiana Review
• take my first math class in 13 years (algebra, intermediate)
  
• take my first art class (Drawing) in 12 years
• teach a class, sort of, as part of my position as Assistant Editor, although really its just keeping a few interns busy

Three different businesses owe me checks, for different amounts and for different services, and as they lolligag, I spread my last four dollars over my weekend like the last of the peanut butter over too much toast.

Vacation is beginning to feel like a bad marriage.
Ready to be doing things. Writing, editing, even calculating.