By tomorrow we will be sleeping in our bed. Furniture will be roughly situated. Painting, prints and photos to be assigned their places. Some physical semblance of order will take shape. Internally there is no real order now as the rhythm of writing and thinking has been jarred loose from its moorings. All is repairable. A wide array of things to do, to be seen, to be tried out are lining up. One of them is to take a bus ride along the three mile strip, getting a sense of the casino/hotels for further investigation. I am beginning to sense the major avenues, parkways, streets and highways in and about our house, GPS free. I know the best car wash in town — unbelievable to observe; the nearby Walgreen’s for meds; the post office; the local Wells Fargo and so on. I recently got a decent haircut here from a barber who seemed as if he had just finished 10 years at prison. Some tradesmen who service our home are incompetent, coming on strong with their bull shit and others are able and only a few do a good day’s work. The state changes, human nature does not.
Writing these blogs only serves to lower the anxiety level as I try to acclimate to all these various environments I am being subjected to. Spock would say, “Live long and prosper.” It sounds better in Vulcan Yiddish. Jane, apparently, is in high spirits as she is working on her next book while sitting on her piano stool next to a kitchen desk. Writers write and dilettantes say they want to write. To those who waste my time by saying if only they could find the time to write a book I offer epoxy as a remedy, to glue their asses to the chair. Writing is commitment resting upon a need resting upon a slab of genetic urge to tell.
I will spend the next few months going over the Tetralogy for errors and typos and readying it for its second edition with a new cover for those upset with the sight of swastikas. Parallel to that, I look forward to those comfortable evenings hand editing my next work, line by line, so I get it as sharp as can be. Jane will edit the book in terms of helping to select stories and to arrange them in a reasonable reading experience. After that I have it printed and work on marketing it which means I will do no more than my best. I weary of marketing, capitalism, and this entire country. Perhaps a writer should become a hermit and die a hermit. I find nothing comforting out there in the book world and what I find especially distasteful are the wannabe writers selling their souls to be published. As I said in an earlier blog, when a Holocaust survivor works on Shoah business and views his being a survivor as an “occupation,” I am ready to puke. And just today I saw an ad in the local paper advertising his book and the kicker line that if you go to his website you can download lesson plans on the Holocaust. Oh, yeah, brain dead secondary school teachers who at the most give a day or two in social studies classes on the Holocaust and often poorly so, writing up lesson plans on the most horrific event on this planet since man stood up: “Remember, boys and girls, Ann’s belief in the goodness of human beings.” Interview the girl after she was put into a camp. That’s right, let a teenager sum up the Holocaust for all of us. And how sweet it was!
I will refrain from extensively commenting on Michael Jackson, our Peter Pan pedophile, who was so damaged by such a damaging family; but what can you really determine from pop sources of who he was and was not? However, we have reached a point in which the illusion is the fact and I feel free discussing him. Soon facts will disappear as the concrete atoms of evidence. In that light Jackson was entertaining — Astaire thought him one of the great dancers of our time; I think of him as dreck on toes. Touch one child and you are a goner with me. In this age everything is forgiveable. This culture has the memory of a gnat. Perhaps at the risk of offending, Christianity’s greatest distortion about human beings is forgiveness. Forgiveness is in. The more you forgive the more indulgences you will rack up, spending less time in hell. Forgiveness, in my eyes, is a rare coin, to be spent wisely and prudently. Enough of the twists and turns of religion, a worldwide mass delusion.
“Come the dawn” is a priceless dialogue card from the silent motion picture era. Something pleasantly arch and Victorian to it as if drawn by Beardsley.
Adieu.
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