Got home at 2 p.m. from work today and went to bed. Woke up at 10:30 p.m. Refreshed but have that speculative feeling one gets when having been displaced from the world for a time and returned in the middle of some darkness that seems metaphysical.
I'm watching a television program about the 1980s and buffering that with occasional smoke breaks outside in the cold. The 80s for me is a land of nostalgia, which some have said is a specified form of scurvy. I have scurvy then. Bring me orange juice, but not too much, because I like my current state of remembering Cheers and the championship Chicago Bears and Jimmy Carter and the credit-devouring Ronald Reagan because, yes, Carter negotiated the release of those hostages people and Reagan took credit in the first hour of his presidency. Believe it. And Carter stayed as quiet as fuck about it because he is and was the actual definition of a true patriot - a person who does the right thing, the hard thing, without concern for who gets credit and who gets an unfair amount of shit thrown in their face.
Ordered four books from Amazon today - Blake Butler's Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, Dennis Cooper's Frisk, The Best American Experimental Stories, and a book I lost in a storage locker back in the dark days of 2008, Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House.
Jesus, those dark days of 2008. I lost my vehicle to the repo man, my house to the mortgage company, a wife I needed to get rid of anyways to an ex-boyfriend who ultimately inherited a fine mess, and my sobriety to the beginnings of a battle with alcoholism that wouldn't end for another six years.
No real thread here, just some rambling.
Also, I really want to read Abraham Smith's book Hank.
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Tell it, Shel. I enjoy your work, some of which was probably 2008-ish-based. You are "back in the saddle" and your good stuff seems to be showing up all over.
ReplyDeleteThanks buddy...I hadn't submitted much over the course of several years while focusing on publishing journals and such. It feels good to be writing stories again. And I've even got a couple books I'm excited about in the works. To be honest, I'm beginning to feel a sense of urgency now that I'm 40 to write the things I need to write, read the things I want and need to read. I guess everybody starts feeling something like this when their mortality becomes clearly clearly visible.
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