The Old Rollback
Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--President Bush got in and Heap was laid off.
Brenda was laid off too.
They knew it was coming. It was just the business
cycle.
They moved back to Florida and Heap went on early social security.
He was 62.
They were able to buy Brenda's old home place in Point and Shoot
from her brothers and sister. So they had a cheap place to live, and, what with social
security, ten weeks separation pay, 26 weeks of unemployment, and one 13-week extension,
Heap was able to give himself a sabbatical year, to stay at the house and write.
49 weeks.
Brenda didn't get any separation pay, and didn't have social security,
but she got 39 weeks off, too, after her job laid her off.
I started writing
a book called A SUMMING UP.
A SUMMING UP: WHAT I'VE DONE SO FAR, AND THE CONDITIONS I DID IT UNDER. May 14 - May 31. 40,000 words. How I created a body of work, my stack, and invented a form to present it in, daily typewriting, and became the most prolific anti-master I know about in American letters, perhaps world literature. I take the Greyhound bus to New Orleans to visit Larry and Hazel. Meet Aaron Neville at WWOZ. He has a book of poems he can't find a publisher for, but he doesn't worry about it because he has his music. I don't worry about publishing because I have my writing, and the publishers are finding me. As I said about Lost Writings, "They are not lost, they're buried in my stack. They're hidden in plain sight. Under cover of daylight." Larry and I go by Octavia Books and the owner shows me Vanishing Florida, by David Warner. When I get home I start writing OLD FOLKS AT HOME: A FLORIDA CRACKER'S SUNSET CRUISE. Put it aside. But I see what I will write after I finish writing A SUMMING UP. Pat Simonelli has a reading lined up at a bookstore in Philly, a booth at the zine fest, a reading in an underground bar, or cave, and a workshop on do-it-yourself publishing, at the zine fest. He rented a suite in a hotel and I made airline reservations for myself. Revising the catalogue raisonné of 33-Year Run, I make a list of the pamphlets, chapbooks, and four-page sheets I have self-published. 172 of them.