I wrote a book called OLD FOLKS AT HOME. Part of a series of three books I called Overtaken by Events (OBE).

Old Folks, White Folks, Old Fart.

Book I. Florida's Forgotten Coast. May 18 - June 10. 34,000 words. A travel book, a restaurant guide, with hints on ecotourism. A wine tour of Northwest Florida, like Sideways. A trip down Memory Lane. Longing for the old plantation. The darkeys in the song didn't long for the plantation, they longed for the old folks at home, on the plantation. They longed for kith and kin. Compare uncouth. Uncultured, crude, boorish. White folks ain't like us. Book I is a cultural ecology of the mullet culture, in which I visit Indian sites I dug, places I worked, applied for a job at, was let go from. Retired to.

Book II. Florida's Emerald Coast. June 11 - June 16. 10,000 words. I see that Book II is about the corporate cubicle dot-com culture, which I contrast with the mullet culture. I worked in the corporate cubicle dot-com culture, and most of the people who are moving to Florida's Emerald Coast, or come on a visit, work in it.

Book III. Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park. June 17 - June 28. 27,500. The relation between, or among, Americana, or roots music, folk, or self-taught art, and vernacular writing. Also more about the corporate cubicle dot-com culture's relation to affirmative action. Nobody working for a living ever owned a plantation. A dead horse isn't being flogged, the wrong horse is being flogged. This is Nixon's Southern Strategy, and it still works.

Book I. Inside Underground Writing: Two Zine Fests, a Hootenanny, and a Side-Trip To Paradise Garden, With a Death in the Family, in Between. June 28 to August 2. 50,000 words. Brenda and I go Hurricane Dennis evac to Tallahassee; I write an essay on the creative writing program industry; my first book-length book in 18 years, Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family, is published by LitVision Press; I fly to Philadelphia for a book release party at the Medusa Lounge, sponsored by the Underground Literary Alliance (ULA), who hope the event will be like the reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg first read "Howl;" I give a workshop on DIY publishing at Philly Zine Fest 2005; my mother dies, and I fly to Seattle, where I deliver the eulogy at her funeral; Brenda and I drive to Atlanta for Zine-A-Polooza 2005, where I am on a panel on Marketing, Promotion, and Distribution and I am interviewed for a short documentary on the underground zine, comics, and indy-prod music scene; we go by the Everett Brothers Music Barn, in Suwanee, to see Owen play fiddle with David Davis and the Warrior River Boys; we stay with our neighbor Jodi and her mother Meggie and her sister Lisa in Dahlonega (Jodi and Meggie went to Everett's Barn with us); we go by Paradise Garden on the way home, where the chairman and chaplain of the foundation to renovate the park, Rev. Col. Tommy Littleton, meets us, lets us in, and gives us a tour. As I was on the road so much, the book contains a lot of poems, journal entries, prose vignettes, and letters to people about the logistics of a career as an underground writer: how to get from here to there on a shoestring budget. You deal in herds of cattle, as Thoreau said. However, anything you have to do, as Rahsaan Roland Kirk said, you have to go on and do yourself. Or, as William S. Burroughs told Jesse Bernstein, "Keep it in the family. Stick with your friends." We see the book take shape, as it finds its keel, tacks, and takes off up Harrison Avenue like a new sheet of canvas, tearing, or the fart of a fisherman who was becalmed in the horse latitudes and had to eat dried beans for two weeks.

Book II. The College of Hard Knocks. August 2 to September 26. 127,000 words. I start out writing UNDERGROUND WRITER: A LIFE OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM and JOURNAL OF A MEMOIR concurrently, like John Steinbeck writing East of Eden and Journal of a Novel, concurrently, but as separate books. Then, about halfway through, I combine them, name the book IN ORDER OF COMPOSITION, WITH NOTHING LEFT OUT, and alternate sections "Memoir" and "Journal." Writing a memoir and a journal of a memoir isn't new, but posting them on the worldwide web, daily, as you write them, is. So fresh it smokes, as Uncle Warren said of the turkey shit. I attend Folk Fest 2005 in Atlanta and sell Root Doctor and Dread Clampitt at the booth of Big Chief, Spirit of the Ya Ya Ya. And I reserve a table to sell books at Oktoberfest, downtown, on main street, Harrison Avenue, in Panama City, September 30 - October 1. Balder and Jennifer buy a house in the historic district of DeFuniak Springs. Gerald and Del come stay with us during Hurricane Katrina. They can't find out about how bad their neighborhood in Slidell was hit because no one can get word in or out, but it looks like there was flooding. They are both a mess, psychologically, and we wonder about Larry and Hazel, who are incommunicado. We think they stayed put. I buy the video D. I. Y. or Die: How To Survive as an Independent Artist and the book $30 Film School, by Michael Dean, and think about going into desktop filmmaking next, after I finish writing IN ORDER OF COMPOSITION, WITH NOTHING LEFT OUT. That is, I see the relation between underground writing, Americana, or roots music, folk, or outsider art, and independent filmmaking. I am part of a do-it-yourself subculture. A 34-year veteran of it, in fact. A master, you might even say. Emerson called Thoreau "the Captain of a Huckleberry Party." The ant's a centaur in his dragon world. I am a presenter at the Gulf Coast Writers and Storytellers Conference, on the subject of "The Literary Novel as an Experimental Form, Combining Genres." I sit on a panel with an agent and two other independent publishers. Answer questions on alternate ways to publication. I change the name of IN ORDER OF COMPOSITION to THE COLLEGE OF HARD KNOCKS, with an epigraph from Scott Nearing. "In the College of Hard Knocks, an expulsion is often a promotion." Owen comes down to play fiddle on a track on Dread Clampitt's new album. He asks me to sell his paintings at the next outdoor art show I do. The Saunders Family: Folk Art, Roots Music, Vernacular Writing. The Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Tradition. Make Your Own Beer. Corn Your Own Grouper. Write Your Own Book About It. I read Pat Walsh's 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published & 14 Reasons Why It Just Might and write him a five-page, single-spaced, response.

OLD FART IN SPACE. September 28 - October 31. 34,000 words. I order Ron Androla's Poet Head: Selected Poems, 2001-2005. 250 8½ x 11" pages, single-spaced. Very impressive. I assemble COMING OFF, THEN GOING BACK ON SABBATICAL: POEMS FROM THE DAILY BULLETIN, SEPTEMBER 2003 TO SEPTEMBER 2005. 400 8½ x 11" pages, single-spaced. Equally impressive. I do Oktoberfest. The Northwest Regional Library System Director, George Vickery, asks me if they have all my books. I say, "No, sir." He says, "Bring them by," so I compile a bibliography, and take him what I have. I pitch THE SALVAGE ARCHEOLOGIST OF FLORIDA'S CO-OPTED COASTS: 38 YEARS OF GRACIOUS CRACKER LIVING to Mike Lister, Pottersville Press. I start pitching THE COLLEGE OF HARD KNOCKS to literary agents as the book that's going to break me out of the underground and cross me over to the mainstream. The library classifies Bukowski Never Did This as 818.5203. Literature written between 1900-1945: Diaries, journals, notebooks, reminiscences. I see that WHITE FOLKS is a book in two parts, rather than two books. I had been calling them A Birthday Present to Myself: A Pair of Books About the Writing Life.

Now, that's an impressive series of books. As impressive a three-book series as I can think of.

But one thing I couldn't think of was where to sell it, or how to find an agent who would represent me in its sale.

I might as well have been writing for the desk drawer.

Old Folks? White Folks? Old Fart?

Was I crazy?