September 7, 2010

The doctor warned me that the gout medicine would affect the digestive tract, and so it does.

Dry, dry, dry. I stand with hose aimed at withering flowers, and they drink it in for as long as I can stand there, and they are still not satisfied. None of the hurricanes had steam enough to reach this far into the mountains.

Bought passage to London for the end of this month. I am excited. I am excited about seeing Steve. I am excited about being able to squat down at leisure in London and penetrate past the main avenues. I want to have a favorite pub. I want to sit in a park until a Peeler moves me on.

Writing at a pace I have never experienced before. It’s prose now, new stories pouring out of me, the latest my first serious attempt at writing about Asheville. The pages I have so far are going to irritate some people, but we are all threads being woven into somebody’s fabric. The bugbear of this activity is that the proportion of typos has skyrocketed along with the mass of print. In one sentence there can be three or four. I spend 1/3 of my time hunting and correcting them, and I’m sure they’re still not all found. Speed may be a factor, but my own explanation is that a demon possesses the keyboard and strikes the wrong key when I strike the right one, strikes two when I strike one.

Painting, too. Painting insects this week, whatever that might mean. Gave keys to the studio to Matthew the Barista, because he despairs of finding a quiet place to write. I told him I am almost never there at night.

Dream last night of a machine– well, so preposterous, so unlike me that it but confirms my suspicion that our subconscious imagination is not merely unknown to our conscious, but totally, bewilderingly unlike it. We are two totally different people, at least. My conscious scrutiny must explore and reason out my unconscious as though it were a distant planet. Luckily, these two selves enjoy each other.

Reading two books. One is by Patti Smith, in which she reveals how she falls in with Robert Mapplethorpe, Janis Joplin, Jim Carroll, Sam Shepherd, and the like by pretty much sitting on her stoop and letting them trip over her. The other is The Eternal Lover by Edgar Rice Burroughs, in which a stone age warrior gets imprisoned in a cave during an earthquake and wakes after another earthquake, not only in Tarzan’s back yard, but within sniffing distance of his former girlfriend, like him miraculously transported through time. I have to say that these two works are equally fantastic to me. Fictions of equal remoteness. I have never happened upon anyone famous who had an instant desire to do me good. Doing so is, in my reality, no less preposterous than sleeping half a million years in a cave and waking in my girlfriend’s arms.