So, you wrote one book, and look at the cost of it, personally.  Why in God's name would you even think of writing another one?

Yet, writing is what your mind is on when you finish the work week.  Thus, to finally be excited (buy) by the time off. All the submerged that has waited patiently.  The personality freeing itself from distortion and physical toils of tending bar, working night shifts.  They were not easy shifts.  They never are.  Often left alone, the bistro's staff concentrating on the downstairs, the busboy floating through occasionally, but more to do his things, like cleaning silverware rather than help out directly, not taking care of the most urgent things in the rolling triage.

The old book you wrote--it largely added to the old scars, the old reconsiderations of what one should have better done, the old haunting hindsight that came in a more clearer and adult regard toward the misunderstandings of youth and the more difficult to read of the species on the one hand and the more confused and indisciplined of the species on the other, girl versus boy.

By the overly personal nature of the material, and by the anxiety inherent in attempting to "be a writer," I had developed some bad habits out of the ruts that had led to the writing of the first book anyway.

The interesting thing, perhaps, is what a perfect failure the first book was, the progenitor, the finger of God down to this Adam.  It is a black hole.  No light would escape from it, as far as any outsider might have made of it, beyond a very rare compliment.  "Solid effort," was the best I got, from friend.  Otherwise, no recognition of it whatsoever.

Of course, my father got it.  He understood it better than I did.

But recognition not what a writer craves anyway, beyond the satisfaction of creating a black hole, one of the greatest of dramatic phenomenons of nature, the black hole, I mean.  Black holes reveal something about the nature of everything.    First novels, romans a clef, do not, at least directly, but rather by their example, by their phenomenal existence, by their essence of showing "That Which Is."  The black hole is intruded upon, paparazzi-ed.  It was just being a black hole, as nature demanded of it.  And that might well be painful, a painful act of artistic creation and originality.


Black holes are in art as well as space.  No artist can know what his/her work can mean.  Rothko.  Shane MacGowan signing, "now this song is nearly over;  we may never find out what it means..."  All the plotless works of art and writing that youths give out to the world, flowers in their own right.



Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.  Stonewall Jackson.


The problem with a novel, with writing a book, is that it suggests that something else must come next.  And until one sits down--this is the problem, the monk's problem--and hashes that out, then one doesn't know what the hell to do with himself.  The mind haunts itself, buys trouble, dwells on all the personal mistakes, goes in a direction.   And all that needs to be controlled, disciplined, like a wayward soldier.  You have to put it to work.


This is the gift of Slaughterhouse Five, given by the species tulip, Mr. Kurt Vonnegut.  The amorphous inner dialogs of this writing business...  The true personas involved:  the soldiers, Billy Pilgrim;  the hack science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout;  the bleeding over of the fiction of Kilgore Trout and his remarkable insights into the reality of Tralfamaudorans.

"Discipline, my friend," my mind shouts at me now, all the time.  It is no answer that I am working, that I am dragging myself to work, there, or coming back from there, or recuperating, heavily, or in uneasy sleep and rest disturbed by the sounds of the modern world.  Everywhere.

Your  father is dying.  You are in the Safeway after a meeting at work.  The piece of fish you buy, going through the checkout line in disorientation, will be there later, in the fridge, when you return, a week later.

I am watching Ken Burns now, having dined finally in a state of relaxation with one of those Americana dishes of ground beef or buffalo in a tomato sauce with herbs, over rice, though pasta would be preferable, but for the weight gain of wheat.  It is now almost seven in the morning.