Snow Day
Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—The
weatherman predicted snow today, for DeFuniak Springs, where Balder and
Jennifer live, and he predicted it might stick.
Scrib got a little snow, in Point and Shoot, but it didn’t stick. It melted right away.
He took the day off, though, to stay at home and write.
He had a job writing training courses for the unemployed. For a defense contractor.
Part of the economic-stimulus-package program.
He had security clearance issues at work.
No, wait. That job ran out, and Scrib was at the house. Unemployed.
He didn’t get unemployment compensation benefits because he had been unemployed a year before the temporary, defense-contractor job, and had used all his benefits up. They were exhausted. He was a discouraged worker, who didn’t count in the statistics anymore. It was presumed he had stopped looking for work.
He was looking for work, all right.
There wasn’t any work out there. Not for technical writers. Or not for technical writers like Scrib, who made fun of the governmemt, at his web page, The Daily By-Catch.
Brenda kept backyard chickens. You can see two of them in the photograph.
That’s actually shredded paper, from her work.
Scrib used to work at the same place Brenda works. He updated Edward Sapir’s essay, “Psychiatric and Cultural Pitfalls in the Business of Getting a Living.” Work makes you crazy.
Working as a defense contractor had made Scrib crazy.
The crazies from the crazy-place outbroken. Scrib was a crazy from the crazy-place outbroken.
He had broken free.
He was the custodian from the crazy-place outbroken.
Are you our custodian? Do you have a secret life?
Scrib had a secret life, but you couldn’t keep writing a secret if you posted what you wrote on the worldwide web and sold self-published pamphlets at Oktoberfest, booksALIVE, and the Gulf Coast Writers Conference.
It was go underground and come out in the open, erect, and fully exposed, fighting it out for the earthly vehicle of the writer, and they see-sawed back and forth.
Sometimes out in the open won.
Man, it was cold.
Scrib didn’t like the cold.
One reason to live in Point and Shoot was it didn’t stay cold long.
Chili today, hot tamale.
Jodi said there
was a Mexican restaurant in
Sometimes he ate lunch out.
There used to be
a hot tamale vendor in the neutral ground at Napoleon and
You didn’t need a
car in
You could take the trolley. Or ride a bike.
Scrib remembered
getting hot tamales with Jack Neff and Karol Ann at the Jolly Post Inn, at
They had a sad song on the jukebox called “Borrachos y Borrachinos.”
It reminded Scrib of Linda Ronstadt’s record, Canciones de Mi Padre.
He used to listen to it when he was writing.
He wondered where that record went.
He had a lot of records, he didn’t know where they went.
He must have given them away.
He gave his self-published pamphlets away.
His web page was free.
He gave away the books he had had published by independent presses, Bukowski Never Did This: One Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family and Postcards from Pottersville. Vol. 3, Adventures in the Underground.
He gave away Screed, Evil Genius, Open Book, and Forty. Now they were gone.