Big day for the lad yesterday:



He did good!



Has to watch those sweeping right hand gestures and tone down the "You know"s a bit. But he knows his stuff & held his own with the greybeards. So, I think he has a good shot at that Common Council seat.

###

Other than that, I am in a sour mood because I woke up in the middle of the night.

I did manage to fall back to sleep & Fitbit sez I even managed reasonable quality sleep, but when I wake up in the middle of the night, I think dark thoughts the following morning.

###

I fully believe that climate change is transforming the planet in such profound ways that the immigrant onslaughts we are seeing now on industrial (mostly temperate zone) nations are just the tiniest manifestation of what will be happening in a mere 10 years.

Drought is ravaging. Drought leads to famine. When people are starving, they go elsewhere. The only way to stop them is to provide them with food and the wherewithall to have a more sustainable existence. (Don't give a man a fish. Give him a fishing rod.) But resource allocation is a complicated game under capitalism.

What we are seeing now is a kind of scuttling to maintain a status quo that cannot possibly be maintained.

The revolution that is coming will be an extinction event.

Won't come in my lifetime. Almost certainly will come in my children's lifetime.

Against such inexorable global certainties, I weigh my own exceptionalism. (Because it's always about me-ee-eee.) In the close-up shot, I'm the pink cell standing out from the rest of the coral reef but move that camera back 10 feet, and the reef is completely yellow. My existence does not matter. It does not have the slightest effect on what is or what will be.

Ah, the mysteries of consciousness! What is the evolutionary advantage of consciousness, anyway?

Where's John Locke when you really need him?

###

Anyway, I must push all such gloomy thoughts aside. For it's time to write sprightly chick-lit dialogue!!

TITLE

Part 1: Grazia

Chapter 1

I drove up to Neal's house to say goodbye to Daria, who was red-eyeing it back to California.

GPS decided to take me on an exciting tour of the eastern Catskills. It was a lovely day, so not unpleasant.

Thing about GPS in the Catskills is that there is no cell coverage. Like nil, nada, niente. And the narrow roads have unexpected forks that GPS does not account for, and the unexpected forks always seem more attractive than the straight & narrow path—do we all see the metaphor here?—so it is very, very easy to get completely lost, especially for people like me who were born with no sense of direction.

When that happens, one must simply trust that GPS will make the necessary adjustments and that eventually, one will get where one wanted to go.

GPS, in other words, is a lot like the Judeo-Christian God.

###

( But wait! There's more! )

The novel writes itself when I'm in the shower. Or driving in my car. Places where it's not easy to take dictation.

###

One of my favorite literary anecdotes of all time comes from Michael Chabon, talking about a block he encountered while writing a major scene in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

At the time, Chabon was enrolled in an MFA program at U.C. Irvine. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was his master's thesis.

The novel is about a young man who simultaneously falls in love with a man and a woman—very gaspworthy at the time (1988).

Chabon was writing about the moment his protagonist & the male objet du désir first have sex.

He didn't want to make it porn. (And then he unzipped his pants & unveiled his massive trouser trout...)

He didn't want to make it funny. (Ditto.)

He didn't know what to write and was afraid the novel was going to end right there.

So, he decided to go for a walk. It was some time past midnight.

Now! Anyone who has ever spent time in Southern California knows that nobody ever walks in Southern California. And especially nobody ever walks after dark.

In the comic I'm imagining, Chabon's this very, very tall man with seraphic wings of long, long hair and an antiquated waistcoat, chiaroscura-ed against the monotonous, endless, vapor-lit expanse of empty Irvine Center Road (though actually, Chabon's shorter than I am and doesn't have a Victorian sartorial fixation).

Chabon walked and walked and walked. And finally after a couple of hours passed another human being—a man holding a wad of tissue to his nose because he was having a nosebleed.

Eureka!

The perfect detail to denote the loss of a particular kind of virginity.

I love this anecdote because it demonstrates so perfectly how the Universe is always willing to collaborate with you if only you can keep yourself porous enough to be open to its suggestions.

###

Meanwhile, I trotted off to a craft fair yesterday.

It was a very bad craft fair filled with uninspired stuff and very high price tags. Bad people-watching, too. I suppose nobody uses the slang term "yuppies" anymore—invented by my pal Alice Kahn! And my X-boss Lanny Jones invented "Boomers"!—but that's what these craft fair goers were.

I passed a mirror and saw reflected in it an older woman with large strained eyes and a sagging jawline—and ohmyGAWD, that woman was me!

I tried to explain my shock on the phone to Ichabod afterwards: "No, honestly, it wasn't vanity! It was, well... This is really the first time I've noticed that my chin is starting to go. I'm finally getting what Marybeth used to call 'crepe neck.' I can't pass anymore."

"Pass as what?" Ichabod asked.

He loves me but finds me vaguely irritating—as the offspring of all parents with over-sized personalities do.

Pass as somebody younger? No, that's not it. I've never dissembled about my age.

"Pass as somebody who's not a caricature of themselves," is the best way I can describe it.

###

On the Work of Progress front: I have indeed come up with some very obnoxious behavior for Mimi. In fact, it may be too over the top for a chick lit novel. I blame David Foster Wallace.

But anyway, I can see the end of Chapter 1. Though I may not be able to finish it today because Remuneration.

Only, I did go tromping. It was too beautiful a day to stay inside. I laced my hiking boots very tightly.



My knee isn't hurting, but it is making a weird clicking sound when it articulates, so, yeah—something's out of alignment.

###

I Remunerated—1,500 words. I had somehow gotten it into my head that magically I would be able to crank out 4,000 Remunerative words, which would buy me a couple of days to give the Work in Progress my undiluted attention. But that ain't gonna happen, and when I got back from tromping, I was thinking too hard about David Foster Wallace to continue the Neal-Palooza scene.

###

The three great Post-Modernists whose works I've never had any great interest in cracking are David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.

Well. I did read The Crying of Lot 49. And I didn't dislike it! But neither did it fill me with any great desire to read anything else by Pynchon. Authors who saddle characters with names like "Oedipa Maas" are not my cup of tea.

And I have read a couple of Wallace's short stories and non-fiction. I was mildly impressed. Also, I'm a big fan of Wallace's protege and self-styled BFF, Jonathan Franzen.

Plus I've read Wallace's biography, the evocatively titled Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. (In general, I am more interested in Great Writers' bios than their actual books. Not sure what that sez about me.) In it, Wallace comes across as someone who was hideously depressed by his own physical repulsiveness. Like if some doctor had only prescribed him Botox for those overactive sweat glands and a really effective acne medication, he wouldn't have needed all those antidepressants. Caliban would have metamorphosed into Ariel!

All of this is by way of a preamble: I've decided to read Infinite Jest.

To try to read Infinite Jest!

Like I'll commit to reading the first 200 pages, and if I don't like it, I'll stop.

Reading is what I do. I spend at least two hours a day reading. And it's unrealistic to ban fiction entirely during the next six months—which, reasonably, is about the time it will take me to knock out a first draft of the Work in Progress. Assuming I keep up with it: I'm a true Aries in the sense that I'm great at starting things, not so great at finishing things.

The trick will be to read fiction that is sufficiently unlike my own writerly voice that I'm not unconsciously plagiarizing from it.

I don't write anything like David Foster Wallace!

###

The Neal-Palooza scene is mostly written except for a couple of speeches & some character business. So next, I have to wrap up the chapter with Mimi being obnoxious on the porch.

Kinda at a loss, though, at coming up with suitably obnoxious action & dialogue.

I suppose I could always type in red font: Mimi is obnoxious.

Move on to Chapter 2.

Fill in the details of Mimi's obnoxiousness when I do the second draft.

Mostly yesterday I wrote.

In the afternoon, I toddled off to the gym & did something to my peroneal tendons on the right side. So that last night, I started to have one of those weird cramping episodes that start off in the lateral malleolus—which is that little thing on the side of your ankle you can flex and is actually your fibula—and travel up your leg into your knee. Excruciatingly painful. But I managed to head it off at the pass by tramping down hard & doing some stretching exercises.

Still. Probably wise to lay off the exercise today.

###

The weather has turned cool. There was a frost warning last night on the other side of the Poconos. Two mountain ranges off, but you know—low mountains.

I have yet to see any yellow in the trees but the sumac is all shades of scarlet.

Where did this summer go?

Honestly, I don't know.

I suppose it all went to Brian being dead. And panicking about money—although I could have done that easily enough when Brian wasn't dead. I just didn't.

###

Word count on the Work in Progress is hovering just below the 5,000-word mark, which will be the end of Chapter 1. Still need to write one more Ain't-Mimi-awful section, but must be careful it doesn't descend into parody: Mimi needs to make a suicide attempt in Chapter 9, and the reader must be sympathetic.

###

But today I must do some Remuneration. This month's bills are paid, but more bills will come next month.

It's hard to go back & forth between Remuneration & fiction-writing. They use different parts of my brain, & they both are quite exhausting in their own way (though creative effort also brings that little rush of exhilaration. It would be cool to see what neurotransmitters are involved.)

But somehow I gotta figure out a way to do it.