Today's feel good story

Living in the kitchen

A cooking school of sorts this past week, learning the new indoor grill, learning using parchment paper, trying new complex dishes, great fun, lots of learning. Settling more into a routine ahead, and using the grill almost every day. Still baking, still stir frying, of course.

Brooding about REQUIEM during all of this and hope to write a scene today. Leisurely progress. How nice if I finish with timing to make it a literal requiem. Hence go slow ha ha!

Climate change

New York Town

Some decades ago I had the good fortune to spend several days with Elliott and interviewed him for Willamette Week. I asked him why he stopped playing harmonica. He said he got tired of being accused of copying Dylan! The very definition of musical, historical ignorance.

The Master

Made my day

An email from a vet soldier who was in Baumholder when I was, who very much liked my novel of those surreal times, Baumholder 1961.  I don't get a lot of mail from readers, so this was really nice, esp from someone "on the inside." Made my day. Week, month ha ha.

Dedicated to Monterey Marys everywhere 

1/ Sgt. Malinowski took several steps into the Enlisted Men’s Club and stopped. He had never seen the linguists of Processing Company this drunk, this loud or this disorderly. Everyone was yelling at once, small groups trying to make their conversations heard over their loud neighbors. Someone stood on a table, his pants dropped, mooning the universe (the sergeant didn’t recognize the buttocks) while other linguists clapped and yelled catcalls.  My God, thought Malinowski. May their mothers never learn about this, or recruiting into this man’s Army would crash to a standstill. What mother would send her son to a school of drunken debauchery?

Check it out.

Also in paperback format. 

New toy

As a homeowner, I did a lot of grilling out on the wonderful deck. SoCal roots and all that. Well, here they don't permit charcoal and rather than getting a gas grill, I got an electric indoor one. Just got it. Learning how to use it and loving it. First steak was first rate. Vegies on a skewer are great too. A keeper.

Bedrooms & Bars

Bedrooms & Bars

a play in two acts

by Charles Deemer

First performed at the Raindog Playwrights' Project in Portland, Oregon, on February 13, 1998. Directed by Charles Deemer.

Finalist for the 1998 Oregon Book Award.

THE CAST:

Quinn, a barfly, ex-teacher, 30s

Deadra, a barfly, 30s

Megan, Deadra's twin sister (played by same actress)

THE SETTING:

Table in a bar. Quinn's small studio apartment. A hospital bed. A ferry deck.

THE TIME:

The 1980s.

ACT ONE

1/ The Bar, Saturday Night. Early 1980's.

(AT RISE: QUINN and DEADRA sit at a table. Each has a fresh drink.)

QUINN: Thanks for the drink.

DEADRA: You're very welcome.

QUINN: I'm Quinn.

DEADRA: I know. Deadra

QUINN: I know. Cheers.

DEADRA: Cheers.

(They drink.)

QUINN: Where's what's-his-name?

DEADRA: I'm not sure who you mean.

QUINN: The guy I always see you with.

DEADRA: You'd think someone like that would ring a bell, wouldn't you? I have no idea who you mean.

QUINN: The guy you go with.

DEADRA: I don't go with anyone.

QUINN: You're in here a lot together. He's always betting on games.

DEADRA: George?

QUINN: George, right.

 DEADRA: He left town last week. He got a new job.

QUINN: You two aren't an item?

DEADRA: Heavens, no. We're just buddies.

QUINN: That's encouraging.

DEADRA: In what way?

QUINN: When you make your move on me, I can say yes without a guilty conscience.

DEADRA: You don't beat around the bush.

QUINN: Bullshit's not part of my nature.

DEADRA: Sorry to disappoint you, Quinn, but I won't be making a move on you.

QUINN: Win a few, lose a few.

DEADRA: Are you always so direct?

QUINN: Always.

Read it.

Turning on to REQUIEM

Am brooding and falling in love with the work in progress, REQUIEM, a novel I guess, or maybe a consciousness raising meditation in the form of a novel, with the theme that music is better than language at responding to the Big Questions of the human condition. A technical challenge as well! Distracts me from my knees ha ha.

Own worst enemy

Every time I try to feel sorry for myself, as I have these past few days, I run smack into the fact that I am one of the luckier dudes on the planet. An inside-out writer who survived doing my art! More or less. For half a century!! Quite amazing, in truth. So bitching about my knees and local irrelevance and such, well, just doesn't cut it.

Knee replacement surgery is not for me, though it was a great success with my wife, and I avoid pain pills as long as possible. So how can I bitch about pain?

Growing old

What I dislike most about aging is that I have outlived ALL my closest male friends. For over a decade now. These are the friends I vented with, shared with, listened with, who for decades knew me as well as anyone, who accepted me as myself. Have missed them for a long time now, and life is more solitary without them.

RIP Tom Clark

More info

Love (Abridged Edition)

A short film by Mariana Arevalo. I wrote the screenplay on her story.

Great photo of Harriet

Hypertext

This 1994 essay gave me a large number of unexpected benefits. I think it was the right message in the right place at the right time, posted online, free. First, it was translated into half a dozen languages. It was later anthologized.

But best, a librarian at the Univ of NC, starting a new online library, Ibiblio, read it and admired it so much she offered me free electronic space to archive my work, past and future, particularly helpful for video, which I was getting into. My archive still exists there, some twenty years later. A godsend, really. I owe a great debt to her.

 WHAT IS HYPERTEXT?

        On a winter day in 1985, I was sitting in front of

my CPM Kaypro 2x computer, staring at the blinking green

cursor, unable to begin writing.  I was not a writer who

had experienced "writer's block," and so this was a new

experience for me - and yet it wasn't really writer's block

that kept me from beginning.  It was a nagging question that

on the surface was embarrassingly ordinary.  How could I be

"stuck" over such a simple problem?

        But on this wintry day, as the green cursor blinked

on and on, the ordinary question sounded profound, baffling,

strange:

        How was I going to number the pages of this new

script I was about to begin?

Read it. 

Holy books

The variety of faiths in our new diverse Congress:

Peace

Pascal said all humanity's troubles stem from an inability to sit still in a room.