Fizzle and Drizzle

1-25-96
-Here we go again. Page one of the new book which is actually at least page 91, and actually actually a much higher number than that. I felt lame today when I sensed that woman from the intern program thought my story fizzled. Fizzled. That's a good word, a good onomontpeaic word to describe the long slow fart that my story is. I feel lame today. Have all drizzly day. Actually, I had an enjoyable commute to Airtel Plaza in Van Nuys this morning, actually. The window cracked open, driving in the drizzly winter down Sherman Way, through the valley of strip malls, a rare route in rare weather and clean air; and then over Sepulveda to Kentwood in around El Segundo to my intern class. Victor told me about his astral projections over lunch at the BBQ Pit. A train circled the ceiling.
What about being more forward?
This is a 0.3 EXTRA Fine Point USA EXPRESSO (all rights reserved) pen I'm writing with. How zabout cursive? Chimelle went to the wrap party for California Dreams at the Granville at Santa Monica or something. I can't remember if I couldn't go, didn't want to go, or wasn't invited. One of those. Goldarn muffhugger. Should I watch the Super Bowl with my brother?  Bless our souls. What a lot of bunk, I think, would be anyone's reaction to what I write. Like the other day when I left this other journal I write in open on the kitchen table, and Shirelle had me trapped in the bedroom, and Cristina was waiting at the table, and when I came back out I was embarrassed to think she might have read it. It's already 10:30. I have to go to bed because there's school tomorrow. I'll get there early and score their tests. Then we'll do a portfolio review while they do their book reports. Library. Slient reading. Finish the portfolio assessment. Mr. Salinas can put borders on the backs of the paintings and mount the text. Choose a story to be typed on the computer. Work on bulletin board ideas. Call Andres. Now that's the kind of thing to write in an appointment book. No sense using up all of this valuable space her for what amounts to little more than a to-do list.

Nothing Here

1-24-96

My oh my here it is: the last entry for this journal. The pages are flying by. I sent a letter to Glimmer Train, kissing ass, asking for a $29 prescription, uh- subscription. I finished all my homework, too. Tomorrow I've got to go to some teacher's conference in Van Nuys. Still got envelopes to fill. That mutherfocking field trip has fallen through again. Still have to get that BCLAD sh!t figured.
_ "Shut up, you stupid fuck, or I'll throw you down the stairs and break your fuckin neck and say it was self-defense, and nobody around here will believe you more than they'll believe me."

Grolier's says Dylan Thomas' poetry is obscure.

The movie "Sphinx" is on television.

Smoked a joint on the toilet.

I wish I had some good picture to look at. Some of this footage of Egypt is cool, but it's interspersed with so much schmaltzy dialogue. "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" is on next. Isn't that the one where Bette Davis puts a rat on Lilian Gish's plate?

At school today the kids wrote stories about the Mad Doctor Suffix.

I missed the trivia game tonight. I'd like to draw something, but I don't have the right image.

I'm going to have to break down I think and read the user's guides to some of these computer programs. I snaked a stapler.
~~~~I'm going to do an origami Godzilla. Should I stay or should I go from Sharp?
What the motherfick else? How about that Balanced Budget Amendment?

Here is the last page. I've barely been writing in here a little over a month. I should learn to play bridge and pinochle. I played a little pickless guitar today. I ate a double quarter pounder with cheese and dipped my super-sized french fries in mayo this morning. Urgh. My heart. Jupiter is probably a failed star. Lucky for us. Chick looks like a porn star. Brahms liked to write lullabies. I like my chances in that Glimmer Train contest. Scabs in my nose. The turquoise-green eye fell out of the Christ-fish bottle opener hanging on the doorjamb. I haven't had any hard alcohol in over ten days. I'll be getting sid Fri. on Chicago in Flor Campana. I wonder what novel to read next. Einstein's Dreams? Half-Asleep in Frog Pajamas? I haven't checked my e-mail today. I haven't done my sentences in a while. Haven't written in my school journal today. Haven't read from the Ultimate Baseball Book today. haha

The Cricket

1-23-96 Tues.

Too much plaid will warp people's perception of you; the criss-crossed lines confuse the neuro-receptors; the person you think you are transmitting will not be the person that reaches the senses of others.

Usin' the old Paper(logo of two hearts, one atop the other)Mate FLEXGRIP Retractable, a pen Made in Japan. Seems to write smoothly enough, but my teeth started aching and a cricket jumped over my left shoulder from out of that place behind me. Really--I'm sitting here at the desk and that cricket must have jumped four or five feet from the floor over my shoulder to land here on the desk right in front of me.
I eek!ed
He hoped around--and hopped around, too,--and I tried to catch him in a glad bag, but he hopped down between the desk and the wall where he is presumably hiding out.
My teeth stopped aching, but I'll still brush vigorously when I'm done here. Now I'm having one of those painful belching sessions that always goes along with these aching teeth, where for a half hour or more I have to burp repeatedly to relieve the pressure on my heart.
There's an Italian cook on TV. It looks fun. Why don't I cook anymore? I've been a cook at Barro's, at Brandywine Commons, at Mutt Lynch's. Humm
I won a free hour of America Online for coming in fifth in North America in the Prime Time competition of the National Trivia Network.
Clinton is going to give his State of the Union Address tonight. I bet a lot of people will be talking about it online. ~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~
It was a good speech.
Shirelle just offered me a fruitcup. Pineapple chunks, peach pieces, and oranges with whipped cream!
Someone's cooking broccoli somewhere. I haven't taken my walk yet tonight. What else? Still have those two envelopes. Still need to arrange to take that fuckin BCLAD. Still need to figure out where I'll work next year--Looks like I'll be able to stay at Sharp if I want. If I want.
Today at school we read The Elephant Sneezed and El Burrito Azul.
Gimme somethin' to write on man. Ms Bacchus keeps inviting me to Cabo and Rio, etc.
Where's been Marietti? Why didn't I call Cathy? Will Shell ever deepen? UghAghIckAgh Frigariggershicken Bob Dole was so antiquated. It hasn't even been a year since I wrecked my car. I need to do an Artist's Way exercise. Eeep op Orp Ah ah. I wish I had a treadmill. I wish I was smarter. I wish I had more time. I wish I wish I may I wish I might

Some Sh!t-Ass Nevada Nuclear Waste Town/UFO Hive

1-22-96 Mon.
Ah, 7:30 exactly. I hope to finish these three pages in 15 minutes exactly. First about the walk: The air was cold and wet; coming back in the house was like coming in from a swim in an icy lake. In a low, curvy part of the city a newspaper stretched and writhed like a playful cat. Under a lightpost, nattered palms dangled finger-like blades; their shadows sliced the street. The crescent moon arranged itself along the horizon in a grin, smarmy, like a scythe.

I read a story by John Updike, "Playing With Dynamite" in the '93 Best American Short Stories collection. I ought to reread it. Really it is a very good story that follows the changing complexions of a man's misimaginings and transgressions from childhood to old age. If the bathtub seems like a polar bear from the corner of your eye when you are a child or an old man it's o.k., but in middle age in the modern American nuclear family, imagination is not permitted for wage-earning family head. Succumbing to such pressure manifests itself in other sins of freedom, like adultery.

Makes me want to forgive my father.

I also read a story "The Girl on the Plane", but I don't remember the author and the book is in the other room. A woman writes from a man's point of view, a flashback to a party gang rape, provocativly written--I feel like it's set up for me to misinterpret as a man--It reminds me of that movie "The Accused" that I don't want to see--This story, though, does have a touch of the Ancient Mariner in the traveler's compulsion to confess his sin. What's effective about this story is that no one is free of guilt, the men alone aren't to blame, it has a moral balance, the culpability is equally distributed. But there so much of it. There's nothing to hope (Is there in the Updike story that I liked?), so even though it's well-crafted it's unenjoyable. Maybe that's the author's intent. No fun for me the reader, though, other than to admire the technique, I guess. I feel just as offended as the listener on the plane who was disgusted by the man's story.

I like my chances for the the thousand-dollar prize for the Glimmer Train Press's short story contest for new writers. I have two more manila envelopes, so I'll send out two more copies, one to a contest and one to a magazine. Then I'll put a copy in a drawer and leave it while I begin the Jim Crack story.

Peachtree invited me to Vegas on his plane ticket. Forget Vegas, I say. The next time I go gambling it will be on a Mississippi steamboat or an Indian reservation or at least some shit-ass Nevada nuclear waste town/UFO hive. Or maybe there's a cool place at Lake Mead.

Denny's Hair

1-21-96 Sunday
2:54 PM Here we go! Three pretty young women in the living room chatter while I write. It's raining today. We could see the wall of the storm approaching far off through the window.

Shall I stop to take a piss? They're talking about Denny's hair. At first I'm wondering, who's Denny? Then I realize that Denny's hair is how your hair looks when you go to Denny's for breakfast after you wake up after a night of partying.

A front page story about Bigfoot in the LA Times this morning.

The days are based on the moon, the years on the sun.

I copied some Old Testament verses detailing the wrath of God.

The girls speak of Jaegermeister in Seattle, black lace and heels, Spud McKenzie girls. Wow.

The girls have left. It seems as if any female younger than me is a girl.

This mandatory journal writing has become a stumbling block to getting on with my day. Although I'm not sure what I'll do when I'm done. My first impulse is to do the fifteen minutes. Three pages plus fifteen more minutes of writing every day equals four daily pages of utter babble. Goal: finish the three pages in thirty minutes. Aren't the pauses as necessary and important as the writing?
What if I do one page every five minutes for thirty minutes? Yeah, right. I ought to switch the fifteen minutes and three pages back and forth between paper and computer. So far I only write three pages in this book and fifteen on the computer, but maybe tomorrow I'll do fifteen minutes in this book and three pages on the computer. There's a difference between handwriting and typing in the way the language comes. The kinds of ideas that get recorded are different, too, when you have a page limit as opposed to a time limit.
Shirelle's going up to Dina's. There's a program on TV with some scholars discussing the existence or lack of Satan.
Inaccuracies
Whoa, man. I was having a Robbie the Robot Danger Alert Warning there.

Last night I read Dylan Thomas poems to my little tape recorder. I was awake til 5:00 AM. I'd been slipped a mickey around noon that day and I had not emerged from oblivion until six that evening.

Bebop a lu la she's my baby Then I'll strum the guitar for a half hour. Then I'll write a song for 15 minutes. Then I'll do five sentences. Then I'll read some of the baseball book. I shall be taking that Oakley Hall book off the shelf. Why do I think it'll a suck?

I mailed a story to the Glimmer Train short fiction contest.

1-19-96

Winter even in Los Angeles

incredible a guitar string plucked itself

The Elvis clock's hips-pendulum
sways slower. The wind blows, the
house creaks, the tv pops off
by itself. The seconds hand ticks on.

restless energies roam the world~~~~and~~~beyond
_________
Howrad called. We talked about doing something together tonight, but I told her I had Peachtree's poker game to go to in Pasadena. How could I be so stupid?
The pencil springs in my hand.
__

A History of Playing Cards

52 Plus Joker
Clear The Decks Way
204 Gorham Ave
Hamdon, CT 06514
Rhonda Haws (sec.)

Playing Card Museum
Marjorie Griffith, Dir.
Park and Beech St.
Cin. OH 45212

"I'm spoasta play poker tonight." I really told her that.

Nowhere near three pages two hours later
Phone call stupidity
The PTA Geranium Chairman
Bebopalula
___

1-20-96
Walked into the bathroom and thought to take a shower but just stood there making faces in the mirror. Did his best Maori warrior, a little Cagney.

I'm going to just try to get this out of the way ASAP. I already stopped once to scratch my wrist and after I write about scraching my wrist it'll be a dead end cuz I don't have anything else to say unless I start writing about what's on TV. Or what if I practice my cursive? My eyes feel eviscerated. I want to put on these sunglasses here in the house to shade against the radiation of the computer that's on while I handwrite in this book. There was a skit on Saturday Night Live right now lampooning Joe Pesci/Robert DeNiro movie violence. Pesci beat Brad Pitt in the head with a baseball bat on a mock talk show.
Ho ho the missle toe I drew a picture of a foot with an ICBM where the big digit should be. Now they're making fun of these Jane Austen manners novels that are garnering a media resurgence lately. Would she condemn today's culture? What would she think of Butthole? What would she think of Lou Condo? When I get to the bottom of this page I can go in and eat some fish wedgies. My poor lame little story seems so frail today.Outtahere!

The Devil's Toilet

The cleft deepened in the end of his nose, the cartilage elongating and curving slightly downward on the one side of the septum, off center, painful to the touch.

Urg. Kay Well it's now 10:07, some two hours after I first sat down to begin these three pages.

Don't you just wince at things you've said? My brain is the devil's toilet. When it needs to flushed the shit comes out of my mouth. Or pen.

In my class we had to say a little about ourselves and something postive about a teacher we'd once had...
Oh, my aching back.
Whatawhatawhatawhat
Just talked to Bernie. She called me at three AM the other night to come rescue her from the house of a friend who was doing some lesbian experimentations with another friend. "Dyking off," I called it. I said they were just having a little fun, but she was uncomfortable and wanted to leave, so I went and got her. Then I had to take her down to Orange County, though Gip drove. Blizzards in the North, hundred mile per hour winds. I've got a week-old sore throat. We talked about gravity at school today. I wish I could get the VCR to work. Ah, jeez I can't do this.

Meanwhile, Back at the Outhouse...

p.m.

Have I mentioned Ring Lardner's "Haircut"? It was written in 1926 and smacks of that era. Lardner tells the story of 'Card' and would-be rapist, Jim Lidwell, through the voice of a small-town barber whose admiration of hooligan Lidwell colors his telling of the story, but does not impede the interpretation that Lidwell is a dangerous asshole.
The reader is enveloped into an authentic-feeling air of the small-town 20's, a simpler time where the good doctor is good, the helpless damsel is the epitome of femininity, and the bad guy is bad, through-and-through. Lardner sits the reader right in the barber's chair. His feat is in his ability to have the "truth" of the story evident beneath the narrator's prejudice.
In the end the bad guy gets killed by a slow-witted man he had been tormenting for years. The barber says it "probably served him right"--Probably, which leaves us to wonder if small-town mentalities are truly capable of administering justice legally.

1-18-96

Meanwhile back at the outhouse...
The shit is avalanching, it starts with a little homework assignment, then a meeting to attend, on top of a project to finish, a parent to meet, a letter to write, a friend to call, and I just know I'm forgetting a few things.

Oh, well. BrpBrap There ain't nothing here. It's like Al Capone's vault when Geraldo opened it. Empty. M T burn burn burn I wonder how fast I can crank out this muffhugger. I wonder if I've ever written anything worthwhile.
There's that creak in the house, always from the same spot above and beyond my shoulders behind my neck, west southwest of here.

Deciding the order of things, that may be the first step. I bleeve I ordered three pages of letters, so I'll just fullfull that obligation first.
Creation, Creation, the idea of it as good and beautiful and Godlike...
Yahweh : I made fun of my sister for mispronouncing it (She said, "Yahoo.") during an invocation at my stepsister's wedding. As if I, or anyone, really, know the correct spelling and pronounciation and language of the name of that which we call God.