Coming Off Sabbatical (cont'd)

RUSTICATED: THE TESTIMONY OF A CORPORATE MALFEASANCE SURVIVOR, OR, A FEW LUCKY BREAKS. April 26 - May 23. 75,000 words. I am monetarily ineligible for unemployment. I write about all the jobs I have been cashiered from and look for work. That is, put my time at the house to good use. I think I may have a job, temp-to-perm, in DeFuniak Springs, a long commute. In an unreliable vehicle. Grant-writing. But if I can do it, there, I can do it, here, after I can do it. I sell $100 worth of pamphlets to a reader in Fort Walton Beach. An online chapbook publisher accepts Redacted Poems, and puts it up the day I send it to him. Thunder Sandwich. Is three the charm? I finish this book before my new job starts. Start a shorter book, of poems and prose vignettes. TRAVEL LOG. I'm going to try to apply myself, at work. Hold down on the writing until I am established as a 100%er at my job. I have a bad mark on my record to overcome.

TRAVEL LOG: A MONTH IN THE LIFE OF AN UNDERGROUND WRITER. May 20 - June 23. 45,000 words. Begin new job. Jot poems and prose vignettes in a Big Chief tablet on my commute. Art Brew is an adventure travel correspondent. He takes pictures of dune lakes with his point-and-shoot camera and sends them to National Geographic, like Robert Kincaid. Some of them turn into poems he sends to Bukowski Review. See that SCHOOL'S OUT, BACK TO SCHOOL is a book in two parts, rather than a series of two books. I complete my first grant application as a contractor, am given two more short ones to write. I watch Bubba Ho-Tep and start writing about What Would Bubba Po-Mo Do? (WWBP-MD). Owen, Jeannie, and Ella Blue come to the Davis Family Reunion, a Brown Family Pick-In at our house afterwards. Balder and Jennifer Steele sing together. They sound good. We fry 70 lb of mullet, cleaned, and 14 black snapper Owen caught on the dune-lake dock at the beach house they are renting. We go on a sunset cruise, in Destin, on a sailboat. Brenda and I go to see Jennifer Steele in Always... Patsy Cline. She sings 26 songs, some of them requiring quite a range. See that SCHOOL'S OUT, BACK TO SCHOOL is followed by TWO FOR BREW, and that they form A Mixed Bag: A Memoir, Some Poems, and Two Short, Two-Fisted Novels, taking me up to August 31, 2004. Jack Saunders Day. Hired permanent after my first grant application.

ART BREW'S SECRET LIFE: FROM PAMPHLETS TO THE INTERNET. June 24 - July 29. 70,000 words. Working as a grant writer. Looking back at 30 years of writing and working, at how they affected each other. Plan to go to my mother's for her 85th birthday and family reunion, in Redmond, Washington, Labor Day Weekend. Owen, Jeannie, Ella, Balder, and Jennifer Steele are going to go. I get sent to Tallahassee for training, for my new job. See what privatization and government support of faith-based organizations means. Also what the FCAT and the No-Child-Left-Behind Act have done to the schools. We win the first grant I wrote. Brew is writing about the other other Florida: The Covered Pedestrian Bridges of South Walton County meets The Golf Courses of Red Bay, Florida: Sandy Pines Home Sites and RV Park. Robert Kincaid takes photographs for National Geographic, Brew can't even make the National Lampoon. He goes to Ponce de Leon State Park, Seven Runs recreational area. Euchee Valley. Where the Indians rode their big trade canoes from Bruce Creek to the Choctawhatchee River, into the bay, all the way to The Narrows, and Pensacola. Brenda and I drive to Fort Walton Beach, but I don't write a pamphlet.

REPORT ON THE SUPPRESSION OF ART BREW'S WORK BY UNKNOWN FORCES. July 30 - August 31. In progress. Brew writes about reasons for 30-year rejection, reasons for eventual success. He gets health insurance at work and is eligible for Medicare on August 1. Brew sees that the books he has written in the last three years form themselves into three boxed sets of books. Year-long sets. Plus an additional four months, to the last set, to take him to 250 books, a significant milestone, and natural publicity hook. He names the three sets Sacked, At the House, and Coming Off Sabbatical, and names the three sets, together, American Original: An Underground Writer Saga. Brew attends a Clyde Bucher show at the Visual Arts Center, Living Waters: Florida's Aquatic Preserves, buys a video documentary, and a CD of the soundtrack by a Tallahassee composer and musician. The documentary was shot by a man in Blountstown. Brew writes a proposal, including an annotated table of contents, an introduction, and the first chapter, for a book called THE OTHER OTHER FLORIDA: A MEMOIR OF 38 YEARS OF GRACIOUS PANHANDLE LIVING. He changes the title to FLORIDA'S CO-OPTED COASTS, then THE SALVAGE ARCHEOLOGIST OF FLORIDA'S CO-OPTED COASTS, and keeps the subtitle, A MEMOIR OF 38 YEARS OF GRACIOUS PANHANDLE LIVING. The subtitle is ironic. They lived in trailers, they lived in hovels on the edge of historic colored town. They got by on grits and grunts. Trash-fish étouffée. Brew changes panhandle to cracker in the subtitle. A MEMOIR OF 38 YEARS OF GRACIOUS CRACKER LIVING. If you think gracious cracker living is an oxymoron, you are ethnocentric, or, as Brew calls it, xenophobic. You fear what you don't understand. Irrationally. REPORT ON THE SUPPRESSION OF ART BREW’S WORK BY UNKNOWN FORCES snaps itself off two weeks early. I need to get caught up at work. I decide to take two weeks off, apply myself at work, then start a new book, a self-contained book, the gracious cracker living book, let the paranoia book go, like a schizophrenic off his meds mumbling darkly to himself getting back on his meds, root doctor, heal thyself. 60 books in 36 months isn’t bad. 64 books in 40 months is crazy, just to hit some arbitrary milestone. I’m not on sabbatical anymore. I work.