Synopsis of Sacked (con't)

A COUPLE OF HEATHERNS. March 19 - March 31. 55,000 words. A screenplay, a short novel, and a journal, written in real time, in the sequence they were written in. The short novel contains two pamphlets of poems (Potter's Ashes and Taint), a nonfiction account of visiting Glamourcon '99 (I Only Read It for the Ads), and Scenes From the Cube Maze, a short script about my life at work. The heatherns are me and Potter (or Pancho and Lefty, or Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, or Owen and Balder). Is it bad luck to write about your own death? I didn't die. Although the book was fairly badly botched. Reading I Was Looking for a Street and Something About a Soldier gave me the idea to write two memoirs, which will take me to 200 books, next.

TALENT UNREWARDED. April 1 - April 19. 50,000 words. Growing up, high school, USAF, Palm Beach Junior College, USAF, Florida State University, Tulane University, dropping out of graduate school to live poor and write. I take a week of vacation for the April plant shutdown.

UNPUBLISHED PLAY. April 19 - May 4. 60,000 words. Stealing the last year of my NDEA fellowship in anthropology to teach myself to write. Penland, Winston-Salem, Fort Walton Beach, Tallahassee, Delray Beach, Panama City, Atlanta. Completion of the big 200, without selling a book to New York or Hollywood. Birth of children, death of parents, the sack, bankruptcy, rallying, until the next rollback. I go to see After the Scream: The Late Paintings of Edvard Munch, and learn about his horse-cure (hestekur), where he painted outside, in the snow, and exposed canvases to the weather.

KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK. May 5 - May 27. 46,000 words. OFÉ announces further layoffs, before the end of May. Will I dodge the bullet, or will I be a post-9-1-1 casualty? A foot solider in the War on Totemism? A yardbird, whittle me a pecker and peck shit with the chickens? I pass a physical. I could stand to lose a little weight. And give up coffee. I get a computer virus, but manage to get rid of it, by buying antivirus software. Waiting to hear about my job. Writing up a storm. Keep up the good work. How? SAGA-NOVEL is rejected. I write a proposal for TALENT UNREWARDED and UNPUBLISHED PLAY. Publishers and agents are not interested in seeing them. See that the next book, AT LOOSE ENDS (working title), will be a picaresque. See that KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK and AT LOOSE ENDS, plus JULY 2002 and AUGUST 2002 (working titles), form Stinking Badges, a series of online journals. Owen visits, takes two hens and a rooster back to Tennessee with him. One of Brenda's hens has baby chicks. The hummingbirds return. Owen leaves a copy of James King's Thirty Years of Farming, which he does some good fiddling on.

ART BREW: RECENT WORKS ON THE WORLDWIDE WEB. May 27 - June 12. 35,000 words. The deadline for announcing who will be laid off, and who retained, is extended. In limbo. Go off coffee and on a diet and cut out the jelly donuts, Elvis. Brenda and I drive to Parker for the Davis family reunion, discuss family business. Go to Grayton Beach to hear Balder play at Eden State Park, in Point Washington, at the first annual Bayou Americana music festival, and at Fermentations, in Seaside. We go by Toulouse Women Studio and see Margo Russell: Recent Works On Paper. Margo paints Balder picking on the porch with friends, at the opening. How's it going to end? Fame? Neglect? Revival? C-SPAN's American Writers has Jack Kerouac. We get back from Florida, I go in to work, and am laid off. I sign up for Career Transition classes with an outplacing services consultant. "Welcome to Wal Mart." "Would you like fries with that?"

TRANSITION. June 12 - June 26. 42,000 words. Brew is sacked. Or laid off for lack of work, with a severance package of ten weeks pay and the use of an outplacement services consulting firm. He begins working with Si'ne Di'e, in Atlanta. Gerald and Lowell talk Brenda into living in the old home place for seven years, when the deed will mature. She will sign an unrecorded deed, deeding it back to her siblings. We start thinking about moving to Parker and fixing up Granny Brown's house, saving up to buy it from her brothers and sister when the title is clear. Looking for jobs in Panama City. Brew meets with a counselor, takes a Resource Center orientation, to learn how to use job-search databases on CD, and takes two Core Competency classes, learning how to write a resume, interview for a job, negotiate a job offer. He networks with former OFÉ employees, wandering around with a 1,000-yard stare, lost as a haint. Brew does a career-focus, self-assessment inventory tool and realizes he does not want to jump back into the corporate rat-race as a senior information development specialist (technical writer), but might prefer to lower his standard of living and relax. He and Brenda discuss this, as they move forward, Team WUPPIE (willfully underemployed professional), moving (transitioning) into the next phase of their life, a kind of a pre-, or semi-retirement, full-time temporary, part-time permanent jakeleg, for-the-nonce bricolage type-deal, Swiss Family knacker-in-an-abattoir. Brew finds this liberating, and might even lighten up, man, lighten up, in his writing. Brew casts back over their life together as he summarizes his employment history, strengths and liabilities, wants, needs, and desires for his job search, and interviews with the counselor, to whom Brew is off the scale. A tough case. I continue to write YU News Service parody news and disiniformation syndicate bulletins from Slap Out, Alabama, making fun of the Bush Administration's War on Totemism, and posting them at The Daily Bugle. Brew is the YU News Miami Bureau Chief. Why you, why me, why anyone? Nobody knows the mind of an empty beer can but Jesus. I see parallels between my situation as a displaced employee and as an unpublished writer, and try to use the lessons of my consulting firm to help me find a publisher for TRANSITION. Begin writing FLORIDA BOY, but see that "Week One" of FLORIDA BOY is "Week Three" of TRANSITION and that Stinking Badges: Four Books About Art Brew is Stinking Badges: Three Books About Art Brew and Stinking Badges Revisited: A Book by Jack Saunders.

FLORIDA BOY. June 26 - August 8. 40,000 words. The stage went over the cliff. I jumped out in time. Still, it's a long way to the ranch. I guess that's the plot of The Odyssey. Prepare to move to Parker, Florida, go on social security, and write. Leo Frank called his daughter's book The Diary of a Young Girl. I guess FLORIDA BOY is the autobiography of an old man. A straight white male, from the South, of a certain age.

STEALTH NOVEL. June 27 - August 8. 22,000 words. Art Brew shuts down The Daily Bugle and opens a new web site, roman-feuilleton.com, in Parker. Don't put new wine in old bottles. Combine "Florida Boy" and "Stealth Novel" into BUSHED: A WAGE-SLAVE NARRATIVE. Man, I'm bushed. We're all bushed. All wage-slaves. Brew's not a vernacular writer, he's a funicular writer. All funiculus means is cord. A swinette picker will make do. Get by on grits and grunts. Brew has surgery on his left eye, to remove a cataract and implant a lens.

TRAVEL WRITER. August 8 - August 31. 43,000 words. Brew begins "The Golden Years" and "Walkabout: A Wine Tour of Parker, Florida." "Droll Tales" adds itself on, during a trip back from Seattle, to visit his mother, who will be 83 next month, and interview her for his book. He sees that TRAVEL WRITER is the third "novel or novella" of his 20-book year, adds it to Bushed: A Wage-Slave Narrative, starts posting TRAVEL WRITER at roman-feuilleton.com. Gets new eyeglasses made. Mein Fuhrer, I can see! I'm going to finish this series if it hare-lips everybody on Bear Creek. What a motingator it is, though. Bush calls the War on Totemism the War on Totoism, but we know what he means. Run, Toto, run. Brenda and I go to see Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence at the High Museum, downtown. Beneath the Jazz Musician: The Art and Life of Art Brew. I'm not whining, I'm Charles Bukowski telling Sheri Martinelli what happened when he told some men in a skidrow bar he was a writer. I drive back down to Parker, through Malone, and Two Egg, and finish writing my book.