Househusband:  The Diary of an Internet Poet

 

 

NO END:  SCHOOL, MILITARY SERVICE, WORK, RETIREMENT.  March 12 – March 20.  20,000 words.    Brenda and I watch Up in the Air.  George Clooney gets his Ten Million Mile pin.  The Dude abides.  The Big Lebowski has become a corporate destaffer.  I am a corporate destaffee.  Am I having an acid flashback?  Didn’t this already happen to me?  When Nixon was president?  Slippery Dick versus Woodstock?  Punish the hippies?  We watch Capitalism:  A Love Story.  Michael Moore asked Wall Street for advice.  “Quit making movies.”  Ends up with him wrapping Crime Scene tape around a skyscraper, making a citizen’s arrest with a bullhorn.  I be damn if I’m crazy.  I read Lies My Mother Never Told Me, by Kaylie Jones, daughter of James Jones and Gloria Jones.  Brenda and I watch Precious.  Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.  I didn’t laugh.  It was moving.  Those poor people.  It’s like Haiti.  What can I do?  It’s like Africa.  We are slipping into darkness.

 

BETWEEN THE HOUSE AND THE CHICKEN YARD.  March 21 – March 27.  11,000 words.  I pitch NO END to Raindog, Lummox Press.  I start writing BETWEEN THE HOUSE AND THE CHICKEN YARD.  I see that “No End” and “Between the House and the Chicken Yard” are parts of a two-part book, BLACK IS THE COLOR OF MY MUSE’S HEART:  COMBINING WRITING, WORK, AND FAMILY FOR 38½ YEARS.  We see Jennifer and Teance in Always…Patsy Cline at Seaside Rep.  Balder comes to see us.  I read Flannery:  A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch, and Into Eternity:  The Life of James Jones American Writer, by Frank MacShane.  I change the title of BLACK IS THE COLOR OF MY MUSE’S HEART to NORTHWEST FLORIDA NOIR.  I watch A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, with Kris Kristofferson.  It’s like watching the Warren Oates featurette on the end of Cockfighter, Across the Border.  You’re not a soldier, you’re a writer.  NORTHWEST FLORIDA NOIR turned out to be only 31,000 words.  But Animal Farm was 30,000 words, and The Old Man and the Sea was 22,500 words.  A double-issue of Life magazine.  Remember Life magazine?  They photographed William Carlos Williams in a white lab coast, even though he didn’t wear one, for authenticity.  Lotta bastards out there, Williams told Allen Ginsberg.  Sad days are these in Passaic.  Write Paterson.  Write Parker, Florida.  No, that book’s next.

 

PARKER, FLORIDA.  March 28 – March 30.  4,000 words.  I go to the Marina Civic Center to see Beach Blanket Bingo.  I have a pop-culture phobia freak-out and start raving about, “Help Underserved Arts Communities (HUAC)—or I’ll Kill You.  No, that’s Help Mental Health.”  I’m flashing on Nixon and the pumpkin tapes.  It goes even further back than Watergate.  It goes back to the Army-McCarthy hearings.  I change the title of NORTHWEST FLORIDA NOIR to HOUSEHSUBAND and drop the subtitle.  Having a place to stay, and being able to earn my keep, at home, while Brenda earned a paycheck, and had benefits, allowed me to create a body of work, my stack, invent a form to present it in, daily typewriting, and discover a means to get it out to my coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult, to, a web site on the Internet and self-published pamphlets.  This is as much as I’m going to get.  It’s kind of inelastic, but if nothing bad don’t happen, it’s enough.  How much do you have, Gentle Skimmer?  Charles Willeford going on about Samuel Beckett going on about hats.  I go on about houses.  I deal in herds of cattle to get my shoelaces.  Henry David Thoreau.

 

I’LL REMEMBER APRIL.  March 31 – April 4.  7,000 words.  I start a new book, I’LL REMEMBER APRIL, but see it goes on the end of HOUSEHUSBAND.  My days in Waco, Texas, 1957-1958.  Then I see the next book, MAYDAY, is part of HOUSEHSUBAND too.  So HOUSEHUSBAND is in five parts, not three.

 

MAYDAY.  April 5 – April 8.  4,000 words.  Okinawa, 1959-1960.  I get out of the Air Force the day before my 21st birthday, unable to drink, legally, a daily drinker and sometime blackout drinker.  I decide to give HOUSEHUSBAND the subtitle AN UNDERGROUND WRITER AND HIS FAMILY.  Then I change the subtitle to SWISS FAMILY BEET POET.

 

old.  April 9 – April 17.  10,000 words.  I start a new book, OLD, but it adds itself to HOUSEHUSBAND:  SWISS FAMILY BEET POET.  I go to a Professional Job Expo with my resume to look for a job.  Like Bukowski asking to be reinstated at the Post Office after quitting for reasons of ill health.  I feel like I have a scarlet letter tattooed on my forehead.  A.  For Anthropologist-in-Residence (AIR).  They know I’m going to write about them.  I’m going to reveal the tribal secrets.  It’ll be Peyton Place revisited.  Shades of Grace Metalious.  The Sex Life of the Working Stiff.

 

THE SEX LIFE OF THE WORKING STIFF.  April 18 – April 20.  4,000 words.  I see that THE SEX LIFE OF THE WORKING STIFF completes HOUSEHUSBAND:  SWISS FAMILY BEET POET SEPTET.  What to write next?  A road novel, The Anthropology Major.  A writer’s wife dies and leaves him homeless.  He goes on a trip, the inflatable sex-doll whisperer, like the guy with the woman and the ventriloquist’s dummy touring the ruins of Scotland in 69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess.  I decide to call the book HOUSEHUSBAND.  Nobody cares how many parts it’s in.  The reader will find out when he reads the book.  If you teach the book, make it a test question.

 

SHORT.  April 21 – April 22.  2,000 words.  I see that SHORT goes on the end of HOUSEHUSBAND.  What genre is it?  818.5203.  Literature written between 1900-1945:  Diaries, journals, notebooks, reminiscences.  Same as Bukowski Never Did This:  One Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family.  Another day, another dollar.  How many books is that?  393.  But some of them were short.  I give HOUSEHUSBAND the subtitle THE DIARY OF AN INTERNET POET.

 

AN ARTIST, A MAN, A FAILURE MUST PROCEED.  April 23 – April 24.  2,500 words.  I see that AN ARTIST, A MAN, A FAILURE MUST PROCEED goes on the end of HOUSEHUSBAND:  THE DIARY OF AN INTERNET POET.  The book is a nonet, not an octet.  It ends the way it began.  “Am I crazy?”  Brenda and I watch Crazy Heart.  Didn’t the person who wrote the movie read the book?

 

 

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