March 26, 2022

Fatboi returns to his den under the tool shed. 

Mother has been dead, from this day so long ago, 48 years. It’s impossible. Absurd. One more year and she will have been dead as long as she was alive. It cannot be thought of. 

I bought online a glass starburst pitcher with a star on the bottom, because it was exactly the pitcher mother poured my orange juice from when I was a kid. It is, conceivably though not very likely, the VERY one. When I look around at my possessions, the ones I notice are the ones that mean something to me, that were a gift or came from my childhood home or have some story connected to them. When I die, those stories disappear and they’re all so much junk. I have the kind of imagination that allows me to wonder if they’ll feel bereft or lost then, wondering why they are no longer cherished.

Late morning pulling vines and digging privet.

Finished reading short plays for the Magnetic festival. Realized my central criterion was that the piece be conceived as a ten minute play and not be whittled down from some vaster conception. There should be some modesty, some quick wit in the conception.  Read the reader’s analysis of my submission. It’s in. 

Tried to read RG’s novel. It’s unreadable. All clabber-guzzling fluttery Southern grotesques going on about how unusual their lives are, and do you remember that time Auntie Petunia found the skeleton under the chinaberry bush? Picked it up, tried entering at several places, was repelled each time.  Flannery and Eudora are dead; let them rest in peace.