Diary

Thursday, March 3 (cont'd)

What was it for,
the endless catalog of jobs
I got fired from, or worried about losing
until I quit, one step ahead of a shoeshine?
Why, for this, stupid: to spring to the easel
of a morning, nothing to do but write poems
in a Big Chief tablet, en route to a small press
conference in Tallahassee, my old college town:
Red Tape, Whited Sepulchers, and Blue-Nosed Chauvinism.

Red necks, white socks, and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.
Rosemary Daniell said she thought one of her early husbands
had an undiagnosed mental illness. All he wanted to do was fish, hunt,
raise dogs, trade knives, make white liquor, grow marijuana, and watch
stock car races on TV. Physician, heal thyself. He wasn't untreated,
he was self-medicated. Unpaid consultant to Dixie Outfitters.

BUKOWSKI NEVER DID THIS: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF AN UNDERGROUND WRITER AND HIS FAMILY. November 25 - December 29. 75,000 words. In-press.

DRAGGING UP: ART BREW GIVES HIMSELF AN LDA GRANT (LAST DITCH ATTEMPT). February 15 - March 3. 56,000 words. 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. Patrick Simonelli uses "Calliope," by Stone Riley, as a cover for Bukowski Never Did This, so I make Bryan Hand's painting the cover of DRAGGING UP.

POSTCARDS FROM POINT AND SHOOT: AN IMMOBILIZED HERO NOVEL. March 3 - _______. In progress. 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 go to a conference of literary magazines, independent publishers, and writers in Tallahassee, Other Words, sponsored by the Florida Literary Arts Coalition. Anhinga Press, University of Tampa Press, Fiction Collective 2. All three have rejected my books. I get a review copy of Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver's Rounder CD You Gotta Dig a Little Deeper. I buy Bukowski's Slouching Toward Nirvana. I use my painting of a fiddler crab, Uca rapax, on the cover of POSTCARDS FROM POINT AND SHOOT. Keep it in the family.

Q: So you snapped DRAGGING UP off.

A: Yes. To put the trip to Tallahassee in POSTCARDS FROM POINT AND SHOOT.

The last poem of DRAGGING UP explains.

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.

Q: You thought you were going to die?

A: I thought the book had ended.

Q: Well, you didn't need a grant to write it.

That is, you did, but you gave yourself the grant. You didn't depend on someone else to see how good you were.

A: Are. Am.

How good I am.

Q: The conference is when?

A: Tomorrow. March 4.

And March 5. I'll stay over, if there's any reason to.

Otherwise, I'll come home, and update my web site.

A woman took Bukowski to Catalina Island, and all he wanted to do was sit in the motel room in his shorts, drinking beer and writing poems.

Q: That's all I want to do.

A: Me too.

I'm in training, so I don't drink beer anymore.

But all I want to do is sit in my room and write poems.

I am an immobilized hero.

I have attained my goal.

I can sit in my room and write poems.

Q: You wrote DRAGGING UP in 17 days. It took Bukowski 21 days to write Post Office.

A: He had groupies to screw. I'm a happily married man.

When a turtle gets ahold of you,
you can cut his head off, and he won't
turn aloose until it thunders. Bukowski
just keeps churning out new poems,
like a Wurlitzer on storage batteries.
A computer on UPS (uninterruptible
power supply). A player piano with several
large rolls laid by. No more $35,000 car
and paid-for house, no more quarterly
tax payments of $20,000, no headstone that says,
"Don't try," with souvenirs on it, like Jim Morrison.
Just a book of poems every now and then.
From beyond the grave. How do you like it
now, gentlemen?