Thursday 7/1/21
* Sent "The Ghost Grew Legs" to The Atlantic and The New Yorker.
* Talked to the guy who owns the unit upstairs for a half hour about what to do with the leak situation.
* Sat on a lawn and just stared into the distance for another half hour. Wept. Stared some more.
* Picked up work for minimal compensation writing about Scott LaFaro away from the Bill Evans trio and Miles Davis's best live recordings.
* I'm pretty much at the lowest point I've ever been. When I go through the email, I'll reach it. Asked someone to pray for me. They told me it is all going to work in the end. Wanted to ask them if I had to die first. Didn't. Do I have to be dead for four centuries?
* Said to them that this is just more than what can be endured. Even for me. The Molly thing alone would have been. But that wasn't even a beginning. It was like the epigram. A frontispiece.
* Sent an op-ed to The Wall Street Journal.
* Also sent an op-ed to the LA Times, USA Today, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune as well. And The Atlantic Ideas guy..
* Wrote Kimball about what to talk about next Tuesday. Double-play combos. The Golden Girls. Laurel and Hardy's Sons of the Desert. Dave Kingman and the modern baseball game. A five-part Johnny Dollar episode that went out over the airwaves sixty-five years ago next week.
* Did more planning for two of the new books. The Ghost Grew Legs: Stories of the Dead for the More or Less Living and There Is No Doubt: Storied Humanness. These books, along with Longer on the Inside: Very Short Fictions of Infinitely Human Lives, are being made almost exclusively from the material written over the last three years, as is the case with Become Your Own (Super) Hero: Modern Fiction in Twenty Easy Steps (Stories). Though the twenty steps might be becoming thirty steps.
* Regarding There Is No Doubt: Storied Humanness. I'm getting close to all in at this point on committing to every story featuring female narrators and/or protagonists. I can't think of another male writer who has done this. There are a couple works where there is no clear-cut protagonist: "Transitionings," for example, and "Head to Give." Duo works, or ensemble works. The stories are longer. The book will begin with "Fitty." I think "Fitty" is the most important story ever written. I wrote it two Julys ago, and they won't let the world have it. They won't let the world see it.
* Certain stories like "Big Bob and Little Bob," "The Wad," "Dead Thomas," and "Post-Fletcher" were just too good to leave out, but now I have other books for them. "Dead Thomas" is really about a girl, I would say, though, rather than the title character. But it will go in The Ghost Grew Legs.
* It feels like what I am is far too big for anyone to understand. Or for someone to accept, should they be able to understand. And that leaves a very small group of people who can process, and accept what I think is so obvious, paradoxically. It's the scope, the enormity, and the uniqueness--the sheer impossibility that there could be such a person and artist--that is obscuring the obviousness.
*But listen to me. You have to try and find a way to keep going.
* I need a lot of things. I need for this to change. I need to get out of here. I need my house back. I need money. I need what I deserve. I need a rest. But right now I especially really just need something good to happen.
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