Archeological Field Worker

Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—When Scrib was let go by the Department of Commerce, he filed a grievance. He was blacklisted as a troublemaker. He couldn’t get a job as a writer in Tallahassee.

He got a job as an archeological field worker, out of town, at Andersonville Prison. Doing salvage archeology. For three months.

Then, back in town, for six months, he wrote a report, comparing civil war prisons, North and South, to append to the site report.

Also, not long before he got the job he was arrested for DWI, had to attend Drunk Driver School, and found out he was an alcoholic. He quit drinking.

This made a difference in how he handled things, how he got along with Brenda. He was even better able to hold a job. If he had a job.

The job at the Park Service was a temporary appointment. The clock ran out and he was unemployed again. But he had proved himself by staying sober, working for a crew chief, working with other crew members. He got hired for another salvage job, sinking potholes in the lawn of the Old Capitol.

This was the one where Governor Graham saw him in the snack bar of the New Capitol.

He put that incident in the screenplay he wrote, and entered in the Governor’s Screenwriting Competition, Goodbye to Archeology.

He might as well have said Goodbye to Writing Contests.

Goodbye to entering contests where you make fun of the contest.

Are you balmy? Are you daft?

Brenda had put the kids in kindergarten and nursery school and gone back to work in the state archeology lab.

When Scrib moved from the National Park Service to the Bureau of Historic Sites and Properties, she moved from the Bureau of Historic Sites and Properties to the National Park Service. Then she went into the field, surveying Big Cypress Swamp.

This was the dig where she looked like Meryl Streep and Scrib looked like Chris Cooper. Or maybe he looked like George Clooney and she looked like Tilda Swinton.

After that they moved back to Delray Beach and Scrib went to work in a bank and wrote screeds and John Bennett published Screed and Scrib’s career was launched.

Scrib just ordered Drive By: Shards & Poems from Amazon.com. Lummox Press, 2010, 140 pp.

That’s what Scrib Online was.

Shards and poems.

Screeds.

Scrib was writing Screed, only with more poems in it. More newspaper columns. More self-interviews.

Everything comes full circle.

Everything disappears up its own asshole.

Everything little looks big in a mist.

The radiant gists.

Sad days are these in Passaic. Percy Dovetonsils.

This was when he entered the state poet laureate contest by calling himself the poet pretender, and saying that the likely winner was an impostor, a counterfeit.

A fake. A dordil.

At least he is consistent.

So that was Scrib in the archeology department. What about Scrib in the small presses? Scrib online?

I see that Scrib Online is a book in three parts, SCRIB, CRITICAL FUDGE, and KNOCKING AROUND.

SCRIB introduces us to the hero, or antihero, CRITICAL FUDGE is about academia, and archeological field work, and KNOCKING AROUND is about the small press movement, mail art, and writing and publishing books and pamphlets on the worldwide web and as trade paperback books and self-published pamphlets.

No more column, I guess.

I showed I can do it.

It’s an artificial form. Constricting. I want to open up and breathe.

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