Getting My Groove Back
Brenda's truck wouldn't go into gear this morning, so I drove her to work.
I have been cranky since we got home, trying to get back into my rhythm.
First, we were gone, then she was at home, yesterday, underfoot. I had things to
do, like unpacking, cleaning up. Answering email. I need time by myself, large
chunks of time by myself, and when I don't get it, I am cross. Vexed. So hateful
I can't stand myself.
Finally, this morning, she went off to work, and her
truck needs attention. It's broke. One more broken shoelace to fly into a rage
over.
* * *
I got her to work, came home, wrote some, outlined some things I want to
cover, kept adding to my outline.
It's not easy to write about four days
of intense impressions/conversations without leaving something out or getting the
subtleties awry, not quite capturing the pitch.
One panics.
* * *
At lunch, I saw George Vickery, the director of the library.
He said
he was reading Frederick Busch, who died recently.
I looked Busch up in Google.
His obituary in the Washington Post said he was "a writer whose novels
and short stories were esteemed by critics but never quite found a following with
the general public," who "came to be known, perhaps in sympathy with his
middling sales, as a `writer's writer.'"
He published 27 books.
He said, "I'd like to be remembered as a really honest, minor writer of the
20th century," and, "money is a letter from the world to an author about
his work."
The letter from the world to me is, "Your shoes are
garbage."
I don't take that personal.
The world has other priorities,
priorities which I don't share. Priorities which I mock and put down the holders
of. Why wouldn't the world tell me to kiss its ass?
They're not thinking
about the same things I am thinking about.
They're thinking about how to
move up to the next level.
They're thinking about money.
I look up
an interview with Busch by Robert Birnbaum.
Busch says,
The job is to pay off the Saab so that you can step up to a Lexus or something and get thinner and have a better health club membership. It's quite scary. And we are herding the young in that direction so that they are not sitting still and contemplating, Goddamn it, a page of exquisite prose by Charles Dickens, which is filled with rage about poverty and the need of a household to survive. That's not in the table for consideration now. And people don't understand that beautiful rage of Dickens because they don't share it. They haven't got time to worry about an oppressed culture, a subclass. They are worrying about the Lexus: "Wonder if I can step up to an Infiniti?" or whatever comes next. You have me pontificating. You have to get me off this (http://www.identitytheory.com/ interviews/birnbaum163.php).