Diary

Sunday, February 27 (cont'd)

It's Friday.

I'm a little ahead on my writing. Also, I got up at 4:00 a.m., and wrote until 6:00.

I can take the morning off to do housework.

Someone wants to buy the trailer in Wewa.

If that goes through, Brenda can pay off the house, here, with the proceeds.

That would be $600 less a month I have to bring in.

I could work just long enough to pay our bank credit cards down, then live on my social security and Medicare. A year more of working for wages, tops.

Also, if I die, now, Brenda will have enough life insurance--I have a $20,000 term life insurance policy--to pay the house off, and she could use my annuity, and the proceeds from the sale of the trailer, to pay her bills off and live debt-free. Although there might not be enough money to blow my ashes out of a cannon.

So this takes some of the pressure off me to provide for my wife and family.

I have provided.

I helped Brenda buy the trailer in Wewa, I helped her pay for my life insurance policy, I worked for Lucent to get the annuity. And I paid enough social security in to draw a pension of $1,000 a month.

I'll help her buy this house. One way or the other. And pay down the bills.

After that, if any money from my books comes in, it's lagniappe.

I always thought of my stack as an annuity. As something that would be worth money 15 years after my death. Like Jim Thompson.

And that doesn't count any money I might inherit from my mother when she dies.

DRAGGING UP: ART BREW GIVES HIMSELF AN LDA GRANT (LAST DITCH ATTEMPT). February 15 - _________. In progress. I attend booksALIVE 2005! and sign books in the Gulf Coast Community College Conference Center. We fire the maid and I do the housework. The old rollback, or collateral damage, got her. I am invited to give a presentation to the Panama City Writers Association and to participate in the fall book festival held by the Panhandle Writers Guild. Dreamcatcher Press, in Mexico Beach, asks to see SALVAGE ARCHEOLOGIST. Bryan Hand paints Art Brew rescuing Miss Weekiwachee from the Creature from the Black Lagoon for the cover of BUKOWSKI NEVER DID THIS. I send it to LitVision Press. He's not sure yet whether to use it or not. If not, I'll use it for this book, or the next one. It looks like an antique Florida postcard. Brenda may have sold the trailer in Wewa, near the prison. I go in training, and stop drinking coffee, and beer. Hunter S. Thompson commits suicide. Bukowski went on a drunk between his last two chemotherapies. Michael Montfort sold his Bukowski archive and moved to Prague, but then had a stoke, and isn't doing too well. We're all getting long in the tooth. Hunter S. Thompson with a broken hip? I finish reading Sideways. I liked the movie better. I read Visceral Bukowski: Inside the Sniper Landscape of L. A. Writers. I read de Kooning: An American Master. Val Kilmer played de Kooning in Pollock. A small part. Pollock left Lee Krasner okay. The Springs is now a National Historic Landmark.

POSTCARDS FROM POINT AND SHOOT. Projected. About the fate of BUKOWSKI NEVER DID THIS and DRAGGING UP in the world. Like Forty, my 40th book, was about the fate of Evil Genius and Open Book.

I looked up Pollock in IMDb and it said it was a biopic about an alcoholic wrestling with fame. I'd say it was about a painter wrestling with alcohol. He wasn't famous for most of the movie. But he was alcoholic.

Many writers are alcoholics.

Are they alcoholics wrestling with fame (or obscurity), or writers wrestling with alcohol? Through obscurity and fame?

Alcohol interfered with getting the work done, at the end. But did it aid them, in the beginning? Could they not have done what they did without it?

Did it turn on them? Was it too big a price to pay? Who can say?

An open-ended saga, if I die tomorrow, just type The End where I left off.

That's the end. When I die.

Until then one beats on, against the current.