It's been a long day. My leg is a mess. I want to write a story now about a very unhappy person who owns something valuable, something most of us could never imagining purchasing. Perhaps she inherited a lot of money; maybe she was just using money from a trust fund; maybe worse, she took out some kind of loan to purchase this business, but the point is she is dying inside and terribly lonely and wears this, all of it, not in weariness, but in a perpetual nervous state of agitation. She snaps and yells and her lips purse and her cheeks puff before it seems she'll blow the entire neighborhood down. It's the same nervous agitation a middle-aged fairly successful writer had before he hung himself in his garage. She has a shadow of a slight beard, which makes things worse for her, not the writer, but the business owner.

I could imagine her dialogue very clearly, so clearly the words are imprinted in my mind. I just have to find the time to write down the story even though I don't know how it begins or ends or even how it climaxes and resolves or never resolves itself.

I can imagine the tension in the story. It's the color of white-washed walls, the color of bleach. It's the kind of tension you get when your muscles ache.


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I still haven't written the review. Nobody really cares but me and perhaps the writer who surely doesn't read this blog as few do, but I sense I'll write it this week before the Monday morning deadline. Let's hope so.

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One of my favorite writers is Johnathan Franzen. I've only read his essays, but I love them. I picked up this book called THE DISCOMFORT ZONE for a dollar at the dollar store by him. Pretty cool.

I am still reading John Ashbery and astounded. It's the kind of astonishment that comes rarely to me when I read something. He's very good! I find his work very, very, very different and sense he is of a higher socio-economic class even though he says or said his work is rooted in American colloquialisms or "American". Well, it's certainly not the kind of colloquialism I was raised with on the U.S./Mexico border. I wonder if a lot of people jump on the Ashbery bandwagon for other reasons. I mean of course his language is one reason, but there's something else there, a sense of irony, a sense of disgust, and of course the humor. I'd be curious to know why specifically people like him. I love the poems in Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
I went to grad school with a real a-hole. I mean this guy thought he was God's gift to poetry. Ugh. Well I hear nothing now from him or about him. In any case he'd done time, literal time and when he told me about this book, I thought he was saying "Portrait in a Convict's Mirror." Ha!

Oh well.

You know, I didn't go to Iowa so I can't write! It's true!

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Have a most excellent evening.