Third Book

Working with the editors at Wheatmark we have finally reached the point after some 50 minor emendations and corrections and rephrasings and deletions and capitalizations and word choice that
“This Mobius Strip of Ifs” is close to publication — perhaps the third week of January. In the meantime I am compiling lists of bloggers, personal friends and acquaintances, Amazon reviewers, and giveaways just for the heck of it in preparation for the birth of my third book in five years. The cover (a mobius strip) is striking and we have the rights to this stunning drawing of a mobius strip, using the mathematical model as a thematic motif throughout the book and the binding itself. I’m already vaingloriously thinking of a Mobius Redux.

While this is proceeding according to plan, I’ve submitted the manuscript to a major contest in document form. I usually do this with all my work. In fact, “I Truly Lament,” a collection of short stories about the Holocaust is up and running as well and has also been submitted to a major contest. This book needs coddling which essentially means that I will try to have it published rather than self-published, spending the next year submitting it to publishers; if there is no luck, I will self-publish it as well. I am saturated with merriment because ten stories from the collection have already been published in fairly respectable magazines.

So it is a good moment this 14th day of December. The idea that I will have four books published during the latter decades of my life gives me pleasure; like a rolling stone I get no satisfaction, for that is always delayed in life, but I do feel something akin to the young boy who turns with his thumb on his nose and his tongue sticking out at all the waste of time, misdirection, pitfalls, gross errors, miscalculations of my own life, for having accomplished personal wants or needs rather than being demolished by self and society. Who knew that “Matty, I was called that for most of my young life, would grow up to become a writer of a kind; the horizons in my life, given my lower middle class upbringing and surroundings (housing projects) and quite ignorant father and mother, were dark. Very low flying scud devoured whatever awareness I could attain for myself, for I was asleep in life, conditioned, as we all are. I had no goals nor a sense of determination, dead to my self, inordinately shy and inhibited with girls, out of touch, unknown and I shudder at what I was, much like that foot that falls asleep in the movie theater, totally unrecognizable or sensed or even felt by the rest of one’s body. In the Fifties numb was good.

If I met a fellow alum from 1958 from Jamaica High School in Queens he or she would not recognize me, for the change in personality has been enormous. I am much, much more out there, in the open, scouting out the next day’s camp site, talkative, flashy, annoyingly vital, testy, alive and letting you know that it is great to be vitally alive and not dead. In the opening scenes of “Spartacus,” Kirk Douglas gets himself a good beating because he grabs his overseer and bites ferociously into his ankle; I associate to that when I think of how I learned to take a big juicy bite out of life’s ass in the best ways I could, that is, to live and add elan vital to my  life, to write as it counts and it does to me, not so much in perfecting my craft as to shouting out what I have to say, craft being a secondary thing with me.

So here I am Jewboy in Nevada, sterling silver mogen david stars for spurs, a saddle horn made out of ram’s horn, a palominsky for a horse, riding into the Vegas strip in search of kreplach or pirogi. Out of place, wondering if this is the right state to croak in, a decidedly non-kosher environment, even the Jews here reek of assimilation. I miss a bagel and shmear and a good argument with brethren. It is a winding down, I see it, so I feel it. I wake up grateful for that one more day in which I can write or do something in that direction. I see it in the distance, I hear the knell of the bell, and what wisdom my years have given me amounts only to a pinch of salt — even the end is new. Or better still, even the end is: nu?