April 8, 2021

Denied the Guggenheim. I thought my project was pretty interesting. My brain is thinking it’s no matter, but my stomach feels the way it does when you’ve cried a long time. 

Sweetboi trying to screech over the sound of Tony’s mower.

Center stage at the bird feeder now is my pair of brown thrashers, returning from last year, sleek and confident and, apparently, very hungry for suet.  

Three days of planting finally finished today. Watered thoroughly, though the forecasts tease about rain. 

Zach finds deep scratches on my back, I try to reach the place with my fingers and cannot. We decide I was attacked by a succubus in my sleep. 

Ann and my dance gets more precise as she explains why I’m doing certain things. When just waving your hands in the air becomes, “honoring three point on the horizon,” it gets exponentially better.

Finished watching Ken Burns’ Hemingway last night. Did he know when he was a handsome, eager kid that he was going to bitch nearly everything he touched? I remember, in my Hemingway phase, admiring his style, but the excerpts read in the film sounded almost like parody. I wrote a paragraph. The words were fine. Honest. True. It was a good paragraph. Would his fame have been possible without the sentimental, boyish masculinity pervading between the wars? The ungracious, un-shareable thought I was thinking when I got up to make a cocktail was “I am a better writer than he, and have done infinitely less harm.” My Hemingway is at the river office. I need to pick it up and read, see what still coheres.