TGif...

Late. Late, late, late. Furniture all over the lawn. Even the dirt that used to be lawn. Feels like Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance.” Big North End Garage Sale tomorrow. A chance to knock down the kitchen remodeling debt. Got word of something cool this morning, but can’t yet say what it is. Except to say it has something to do with work. 

Virgil never had it so good...

It’s one of those perfect, late-spring days. The kind that inspires you to pick up your tools and create while at the same time proffering a gentle admonishment to lay aside ambition and take your rest.

What an easy paradox to love.

Afraid of missing nature’s point (if she, indeed, had one in mind) and bungling on blindly in one direction or the other, I heeded both calls. This morning I wrote, this afternoon I put away my tools and took a long nap with the cats.

It was time well spent on both accounts. 

Out of the blue...

Warm temps today, with punchy little gusts of wind. A fire down in Gallup blew smoke this way, but the air isn’t bad—yet. Knocking wood, hoping it stays that way. Used to be summer here was just summer. Now you flinch whenever you see something unusual in the sky, and think, oh no, not again.

 The Yellowstone was the first. Then came the Hayman, Waldo Canyon, and the Black Forest. The big burns in the Jemez and the forests of Arizona. Waldo Canyon was the worst up close. The whole mountainside was afire, and you could stand out on the porch and watch the slurry planes and helicopters drop their loads. Sky was brown for days. The color of tea. Somebody even claimed to have a picture of a waterfall in the mountains pouring pure black into a pool below.

Got some good story material out of those times, but would trade it right now for the promise of no more burns. Ever. Anywhere. Here’s praying it’s a wet summer. The kind that used to come with the cooling afternoon showers, and sweet, smokeless starlit nights. Writing weather. Dreaming weather. 

Early to bed, early to rise...

Early to bed last night. 8:30 pm. Woke at 1:25 am to find an acceptance slip in my email. Couldn’t go back to sleep, so put in some time on another story. Things seem to be moving in slow motion these days, though I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the weather. Temps have been in the high 80s that last two days. More of the same to come.

There goes the neighborhood...

Cafe al fresco this morning.

In addition to the industrial dumper at the curb (teaming with the wretched-refuse of five weeks kitchen remodeling), the view from the front porch was reduced to a plastic gray port-a-potty on the front walk...the dry-waller’s pickup, parked in the middle of the street...and a massive green cherry picker lumbering down the alley in search of some disaster behind the Lutheran church.

You don’t expect to see those sorts of things in an historic neighborhood of century-old Victorian houses. Read about them, maybe—in stories by Edgar Allen Poe—but you don’t expect to see them.

The weekend’s HazMat crew? Please, don’t ask.

Look what the cats dragged in...

Father’s Day.

Cats got up before the crack of dawn and started high-tailing it around the house, chasing one another up and down the stairs, knocking each other off the bed. Must’ve been the cool weather that blew in that got them going. Good morning for writing once things settled down. Overhauled a short piece that’s been bugging me for some time, though until this weekend I hadn’t quite been able to put my finger on the problem. Think I got it now. Anyway, the revision went well and with any luck I’ll be able to get the piece back in circulation and see it published soon.

 In other news, exchanged a few nice words with friends and family.

Airborne toxic event...

Dodged the agrarian hordes of the Farmer’s Market on the way into the office where, despite an honest effort, I typed many fewer words than I’d hoped. Left the house early, looking to escape the hubbub of the previous night’s doings, but returned home in the early afternoon to find hazmat men in white jumpsuits and respirators stalking the property with industrial vacuum cleaners. Probably take a few days to see what sort of neighbor-on-neighbor ugliness the roofing boondoggle ultimately generates, but I’m laying bets it’ll be worth at least one good short story. 

A quiet Friday Evening at home...

Okay. So the neighbors demo their roof, the fire department shows up with a five-alarm hook and ladder, and two police black and whites follow. Whispers of mesothelioma permeate the neighborhood. There will be no forgiveness for those who ratted! I keep telling myself not to worry. It's all story material.

A Good Summer Read...

Coming to the close of a fascinating volume, gifted to me by a lovely woman of high style and impeccable taste. The book’s called Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, and it’s a terrific read in ways that are difficult to explain.

Poignant, funny, infuriating, thought-provoking, Letters contains an impressive list of personal missives composed by ordinary people of all walks--from ex-slaves and rock stars to movie legends and heads of state--regarding subjects both serious and slight. The book’s editor is Shaun Usher, who runs “Lists of Note” and “Letterheady.”

Wolf Skin...

A copy of Mary McMyne’s chapbook, Wolf Skin, was sent to me few days ago. Poems resurrecting the uneasy ghosts of Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood. I read the pieces with a wary eye, waiting for something to give. But every word held its own--each a stone in the castle wall.

 

A brush with eternity...

Spent the better part of the day painting the porch. Close to a hundred balusters. Haven't spend that much time behind bars since I don't know when. Should've been a Leadbelly song playing in the background, but there wasn't. That's just the way it goes, sometimes.

Sunday morning coming down...

Sky looks like hammered tin for the third day in a row. Was hoping the weather might clear enough that I could get some work done around the yard, but no dice. Rain’ll be rolling in off the mountains by early afternoon.

Banged out a few hundred words this morning while listening to the neighbor's dog bark a sad little arpeggio. Revisions weren't feeling as sharp as they should have, so I moved on, composing something new. Got a lot of stuff in the hopper at the moment. Some with potential. But you can only push so hard, you know?  It comes when it comes.

 

Same old, same old...

Thumbed through the current issue of [REDACTED] yesterday. All five of the prose pieces were first person narratives, and the similarities (for better or worse) didn’t end there. I don’t know. Maybe I’m missing a trend. Or, then again, maybe I’m setting one. Guess I’ll just have to keep plugging away and wait to find out.

A landmark day...

Copies of the Hawai’i Review arrived late yesterday. Two separate packages taped up in manila envelopes, marked Priority Mail. Issue 80, themed: Voyages.

The editors’ note in the front matter asks, “Where does the desire for voyage begin, burn, and end? What do we have left after we have gone?”

I tried to answer those questions in my story “Wagon Mound” (page 111) which, coincidentally, came to me as I was driving the isolated stretch of New Mexico Interstate that skirts the curious landmark.

The particulars of the story have a footing in real-life events, though I’m not inclined to divulge which ones. Leave it at this: If I ever find myself needful of a cat wrangler, I’ll know exactly where to look. 

Three out of three ain't bad...

A friend stopped by today, and our conversation drifted to John Dos Passos and his U.S.A. trilogy. We were both English majors in college, but neither of us had been obliged to do much more than sample Dos Passos while in school, so we agreed it was something of a surprise to discover, late in life, what a skillful (not to mention entertaining) writer he was.

Yeah, the politics in U.S.A. feels a little quaint. But preachy or not, you can’t deny the story’s passion. The narrative rolls along like a freight train, and those “Camera Eye” stream-of-consciousness fragments feel as fresh and immediate as anything on the table today. The Newsreels? They're like the stuff Joyce was doing in Ulysses.

A Class act...

I mentioned Tobias Wolff in yesterday’s journal entry. As coincidence had it, I happened to hear David Sedaris read from his works just a few weeks after I’d seen Wolff.

Wolff, as I’d noted, appeared at a local college, where admission was free, the event open to the public. Sedaris, on the other hand, performed at the Pikes Peak Center—a large venue, home to the Colorado Springs Philharmonic—with tickets averaging a hefty $45.

Wolff’s performance had attracted a tidy crowd of perhaps 150 people—academics, mostly, and literary types—while Sedaris’s reading drew a packed house (an astonishing 2000 listeners) composed not only of book bums like myself, but jewelry-rattling socialites from The Broadmoor.

Both performances were remarkable. But what made Sedaris’s performance more remarkable than Wolff’s (bear with me here), was that, near the end of the reading, after thanking the audience for their interest, the young humorist raised Wolff’s name—out of nowhere—proclaiming him the truer master of the short story form, and a writer whose books deserved their attention.

I’ve often wondered if Wolff ever got world of Sedaris’s generosity.

 

Story mechanics...

I heard Tobias Wolff read his famous story, “Bullet in the Brain,” at a local college not long ago. Only it wasn’t the old familiar version that’s been collected and anthologized. Wolff abridged the piece—presumably, so his lecture wouldn’t run long—and presented it without making mention of the edits.

I knew the work had been tinkered with, and I’m sure there were others in the audience who recognized the cuts as well and were no doubt as surprised as I was with the omissions.

It's been said a well-made short story is a vehicle composed of many moving parts. A machine whose tolerances are so precisely calibrated that no word or mark of punctuation can be added or subtracted without detracting from its performance.

Which is true.

But even so, you know. There he was in his dark suit and gray turtleneck, the master mechanic—the chop-shop genius—turning a Ferrari into a Bugatti. Right before our eyes. He never broke a sweat, never lost step, never took his foot off the gas. It was cool beans, as a friend used to say. Very cool beans.

 

 

It's the little differences...

Sun, blue skies. Temps approaching 80 degrees.

Fish and game department sent a notice in the mail saying I can renew my license online. Gotta do it. This week. Summer might not be here officially, but you can’t tell that to the river. Water levels are cresting, so it won’t be long before the runoff subsides, the current stabilizes, and the hatches begin. Time to toss the fly gear in the truck and leave it there—ready for the quick escape.

Years back, when I lived in the Midwest, I used to fish the Mississippi. Nowadays, it’s the Platte, Arkansas, Yampa, Tarryall, Conejos, and others.

Things I’ve caught while fishing the Mississippi: Small mouth and bigmouth bass, bluegill, a seat cushion off a pontoon boat, yellow perch, old tires, walleye, sturgeon, catfish, tennis shoes, stripers, snapping turtles, a window awning, gar, eels, a bicycle frame, crayfish, a steering wheel, carp, other guys’ fishing gear, clams, northern, crappie, sheephead, rock rollers...

Things I’ve caught while fishing the Platte: Trout

A new day...

Small hailstorm yesterday. Today the sky came on like, What? You got a problem? The morning was blue and clear, patched-over with clouds that didn’t have the smallest bit of bully in them. Which was nice. Spent the early hours in front of the window, finishing a new story. A draft, anyway. Fifteen revisions into it, I’d like to believe I’m close.