Notes on The Summer So Far

It's been a while, n'est-ce pas?  What can I say?

I am in recovery mode -- recovery from last semester's Foundations of Mathematics class, from the greater than usual marital strife, from a winter spent in the arms of a physical therapist.  And now it's summer.  That season I hate where my feet, encased in rubber bands -- or at least that's what it feels like to my nerve endings -- proceed to swell.  I can smell again:  With this much moisture in the air all the globules of matter from sweat, toilets, the kitchen's compost bucket, perfumes, and cooked food attached to the water molecules and travel up my nose.  I've started counting the days until September.

Here's the thing:  if I don't get the tough work done in the morning, it simply doesn't get done.  And by that I mean the writing.  I'm working on a story, "For Those Who Think Young", and am at what I'll call the molding and paring stage.    I start with the knife and carve off pages.  I take off words and paragraphs here, add words and paragraphs there.  I pinched a scene off and attach it to another part.  I walk around the creation, still dissatisfied, but not dissatisfied enough to punch the damn thing into a mound, pour water (totally new ideas) over it and start the wheel again.  It's an exercise in finding the essence of the story.  Two things I know about writing fiction:  1) there's the story you think you want to tell and 2) there's the story that emerges as you struggle to do 1).  On a few rare days the work goes well.  I am here in the office ignoring my surroundings.  It's just me, the paper and my favorite purple-inked pen.  Other days, the more common ones, I'd rather be doing almost anything else than writing.  A root canal without anesthesia?  Where do I go for that!?  How about a colonoscopy???  Sign me up, please!  Or a stint as a short-order cook at TGIF's?  Can't wait to begin!!!!  Just don't make me write.

Two things I am doing this summer that are different than last.  I am going to the gym.  I've grown to look forward to it.  I'm not fooled; there's always a honeymoon phase.  For now, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I have a date with strength training.  I can see the difference in my body.  I even attribute the work to keeping my blood pressure shockingly low (at least for me), so much so that next time I see my internist I'll ask him to start tapering me off the meds.  And although my feet are permanently swollen these days they are are not nearly as huge as the watermelons of the Summer of 2012.  Don't get me wrong, my f(@#(#ked up back is still fckd up, my right hip still feels like someone stabbed me with a long needle, and I'm not too proud to ask for help to turn over, but still, things are much better.  I am stronger, nimbler and my arms don't look like cottage cheese dipped in chocolate fondue.

And I'm gardening again.  The peace treaty hammered out with Cuthbert left me with the front yard as my domain.  After hiring help to move raised beds, and turn the soil, I called on local gardener friends and pals and have planted a crazy quilt of hostas, echinacea, fewerfew, daisies, strawberry's, ferns, and who the hell remembers what that green thing is called.  Some of the transplants went into shock, but gardeners are patient animals, and I just whacked them back and sit in the dining room window with the day's first cup of coffee and imagine what next spring will look like. I think all this working out is so that I can get down on bended knee in the fall and plant some bulbs.

Saturday Poetry: Girls At the End of the Month

On Saturday, no less!  Were my computer a car it would have been stranded on I-95 yesterday evening with the hood up and steam blasting out of the radiator.  The PC had been on for most of the day and around 6 pm it was oh.  so.  slow.  (I almost resorted to banging my fist on the CPU, and I know better.)  Effing viruses, I started swearing, now I'm gonna have to take this thing in.  Bitch bitch bitch.  Moany moan moan ... Once I realized that the CPU's fan was turning on every few minutes while simultaneously realizing that sweat was pouring down my chest, I figured it out.  Even a PC can get overheated.  (I don't have air conditioning in my office.  Don't want it.  And, most days of the year don't need it.  So, if Husband No. 1 is reading this please wipe that smirk off your face.  Or, as any formidable no-nonsense parochial schoolteacher would say, I'll wipe it off fer ya.)

Well, that's it, I decided.  Workday's over.  Let me go fix a drink and watch a DVD.  I'm currently doing a marathon viewing of Homicide:  Life on the Street.  I didn't have television when the series ran so I knew little or nothing about it.  Having been mesmerized by The Wire, I needed to see David Simon's earlier work.  You can track, just as one would with a fiction writer, the metamorphosis of his ideas and themes, not to mention the actors who moved with him to The Wire.  No. 1 Niece had other ideas.  As any of you who live with children know, you have a Hobbesian Choice:  either make them watch what you're watching and explain why that man and that man and that man is lying on the ground with red red blood fanning out beneath them (this is Homicide, after all) or give it up and watch Coraline for the 20th time.  Too tired to explain the exigencies of street justice, I let her choose a movie.  She chose Dreamworks' Rango.

What a treat!  Dreamworks' films are like Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons.  The writers only pretend that they're writing for kids.  My favorite scene among many is when Rango, who's a chameleon, arrives in Dirt and mimics the other animals' walks.  It's a sly homage to the American western's a-stranger-comes-to-town setup with its stock characters, Gunsmoke's Chester --  Marshal Dillon!  Marshal Dillon! -- and Agnes DeMille's choreography for Copland's ballet, Rodeo.

Apropos of nothing, here's today's poem:

I love this easy work for which

I get paid on the fourth Friday

unlike the men.

Every week, they preen with their money

plans already made to spend it on a couple drinks

a carburetor a girlfriend.

On the way back to the G

I think of what I’ll do

when there she is:

So young black fat from babies

leaning on a streetlight at the corner

the heat of the day still scolding us all.

No pool for her, no cooling soda.

She is glued to the light, craning her neck.

Sweat glistening shorts

cutting into varicose thighs

Ooh, it’s hot she says to nobody at all

and pulls off her shirt.

I am attacked by whiteness

a tattered brassiere against her black

skin exposed in the street

like getting undressed for a bath.

I turn ashamed.

Slowing down, a swaybacked station wagon.

Inside a sober man

whose side locks graze an oily steering wheel

While his eyes swivel like a lighthouse beacon.

He honks the summons.