Side Trips
Some day, Brew would like to drive from Key West to the Yucatan,
like Frederick
Turner did, in A Border of Blue, or at least drive around the state,
in
a 1964 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 Alex Shoumatoff paid $200 for, and sold
to a tow-truck
operator for a Coke when she gave out on the interstate.
Write a book about his
trip called Florida Ramble, after Hazel and
the Delta Ramblers, a bluegrass
and old-time country music band.
Maybe a side trip to New Orleans to eat oysters
at Felix's on Iberville Street.
Would you settle for a side trip to Wakulla Springs
for Creaturefest?
A seafood platter at Julia Mae's in Carrabelle? Maybe visit
the Worm Gruntin' Festival in Sopchoppy, Possum Day in Wausau?
The booksALIVE
2005! celebration at Gulf Coast Community College?
And the Oscar goes to....
Charlie Kaufman, for original screenplay.
I liked Adaptation, but I couldn't
stand Being John Malkovich,
and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
left me dissatisfied.
Maybe I identified with Brenda slogging around in Big Cypress
Swamp,
or me on the boardwalk at Fackahatchee Strand, seeing the bee-tree.
Albino
Grizzly. Chris Cooper, character actor, and Meryl Streep, movie star.
So you
want to be a writer. Then go home and write. What are you doing at
a small press
conference with the 10,000 sneering college writing instructors
who killed Jack
Kerouac? Take out, or don't put in, the longing and regret.
Nobody wants to hear
about your unpublished play.
If I Died Right Here
If I died right here, you could just put THE END
at the last page of the manuscript,
where it dribbles off,
or if I live, I could put my trip to Tallahassee in the
next book,
which will take up where this one ends. There is an overall design,
but
the actual shape of the book is contingent and variable, depending on
the vagaries
of fate, chance, stochastic processes we don't control,
the price of tea in China.
It's really the 3rd of March, and I wrote
DRAGGING UP in 17 days. Bukowski got
an allowance to write
Post Office. I gave myself a grant to resurrect
myself.
Writing was just the instrument.