What Did You Do Today?
Q: What did you do today?
A: This weekend, you mean? Today is Sunday.
Q: Why are you writing Tuesday's entry on Sunday?
A: I post Monday's entry Sunday afternoon, or evening.
So I'm writing
Tuesday's entry. To post Monday afternoon, or evening.
The clock never stops
ticking.
Q: That must get onerous. Burdensome.
A: No, I spring to the easel in the morning. I wake up, thinking about
the writing.
I take it up where I left off. I go to sleep thinking about
the writing.
What's burdensome is having to shut it off to work for wages.
When I have a job.
I'm like a pig in slop, being able to write full-time,
without having to sneak and hide, at work.
I have a call.
It isn't
work if you have a call.
Q: So what did you do this weekend.
A: I drove to Tallahassee, Friday. Wrote in a composition book.
Got home in time to cook supper.
Made a fried oyster po boy with Cole slaw
for me and Brenda. We watched Code 46. A rented DVD disc.
No, I watched
a fight. On TV. We watched Code 46 the night before.
Saturday morning
I got up and started writing.
I remembered that Big Chief Visions had invited
me to a homegrown powwow at his place in March, but I didn't remember the date, so
I looked it up, and browsing around his web site, I saw a painting called Root
Doctor.
I realized that I had ordered some more copies of Root Doctor
when I gave myself the LDA grant, and would have them to sell at the powwow.
This was energizing. It also started me to thinking about the relation between, or
among, music, art, and writing, particularly Americana music, folk art, and vernacular
writing, which are, not only outside the mainstream, but apart from academia, the
critical establishment--even from a vocabulary to discuss itself in. A language.
They are oral traditions, passed down from practitioner to practitioner, not studied
formally, in a conservatory.
That was the subject or Root Doctor.
How the different folk traditions are close, and separate from classical, or formal
traditions.
Saturday afternoon, Brenda and I went to the Bay County Public
Library, where she checked out some books on gardening and I got a used gourmet cooking
magazine, to give myself recipe ideas, for meal preparation during the week.
Last night, she watched Imus shows she'd taped and I cooked ribs, drank beer, and
wrote, in my room.
This morning I made French toast, with French bread and
yard eggs. She had tupelo honey on hers and I had maple syrup on mine.
We're
not going to The Red Bar today, because Dread Clampitt are on the road. This weekend
they played Lafayette, Louisiana, Baton Rouge, and Gulfport, Mississippi.
We may go over to Howard's Creek and get some roofing tin, from Melvin and Wanda.
He works construction and brings home scrap. He's a general contractor.
I
bought some pole bean seeds at Bubba's last week. I Drive to Wewa. We might
plant those.
Work in the yard. It's like Spring.
Q: Do you like the weekends?
A: I don't like holidays, because the post office and the library are closed.
Weekends are okay. I enjoy doing things with Brenda. Going to see Balder 'n' Them.
Our friends at The Red Bar. Democrats.
We're surrounded by Republicans, here.
Rhythmning. Thelonious Monk.
One word. Baldernthem.
Like Daddy and Them.
I really like Monday, when Brenda goes back
to work and I have the house to myself all day.
Q: If you write DRAGGING UP (17 days) and POSTCARDS FROM POINT AND SHOOT (19 days) in 36 days, what are you going to do then?
A: I was going to write about touring with Bukowski Never Did This,
but I'll be done before the book gets back from the printer.
Just keep writing,
I guess.
I like the way the writing's going.
I would like reading
it, on the web, daily, as it's written.
I'll just write it and post it at
The Daily Bulletin and see what happens next.
Q: You seem upbeat.
Usually things like that book fair make you
feel left out. Excluded.
A: They can't exclude me because I don't depend on them, to do what I'm
doing.
I'm writing books a publisher will publish and readers will buy, because
they're good, and outspoken, and funny.
They aren't watered-down or tarted-up.
You can't find books like that just anywhere.
If I can't sell enough of them
to quit working and write full-time, I'll go back to work, and write them before
and after work. As I did for years.
That seems like a misuse of resources,
to me.
My books aren't non-commercial, they are anti-commercial, and that's
often commercial.
They aren't beneath belles-lettres, they are against
belles-lettres. La-di-da.
Think of Diane Keaton putting down all those
great artists as the "Academy of the Overrated," in Manhattan, and
Woody Allen saying, "What do you mean, those people are all great."
I make fun of snobs.
But I make fun of myself, too.
Bubba Po-Mo.
Minor Poet.
Henry Chinaski, Minor Poet, Found Dead in Utah Woods.
I call Art Brew a PSI Fellow. A senior fellow at the prestigious left-wing think-tank
Point and Shoot Institute (PSI).
Writing A Wine Tour of Point and Shoot.
A screw-top jug-wine tour. You have here your reds, your whites, your rosés.... White
port and lemon juice. Shake-em-up.
Your spit jar. Miles turning it over on
himself, in Sideways.
That's like me turning over my snuff cup, at
Tulane.
Her first apartment. Did your daddy buy you that?
Are these
your own words?
I call what I'm writing crank-lettres.