August 11, 2020

Amazing productivity yesterday, writing till I was nearly blind. Still not sending any of the written items out. Heroes All in Cloth of Rose stands resurrected from long ago. At Distance is a group of playlets that can be performed in today’s quarantined theater.  SS moves swiftly forward on the publication of Washington Place. Another book, of Christly aphorisms-- I don’t know how it will turn out. 

Have resolved today to clean the porch. 

 

August 10, 2020

My bear turned and whuffed at me last evening . I was following too close. I launched an attack with my shoe brandished as a weapon, wanting him never to have the upper hand, and he fled. Later in the evening I felt the way you do after a quarrel. Only after thinking back did I realize it was with a bear. Something inside me interprets him as a person. 

 

August 9, 2020

Woke to earthquake this morning, the bed shaking, the water in the toilet sloshing about. An interesting sensation. I went to the Internet and found that it was true, the quake centered under DJ’s hometown in Sparta. 

Realize I haven’t seen TD in months. He was the center of my life for years. The last time we met it was so he could manipulate me into doing a favor for an old girlfriend, which she turns out not to have needed. You sit and wonder about such things. The missing is, now, intellectual rather than emotional, so I suppose it’s right to contemplate, to wonder how to do it better next time. . . except that most souls are so covert you cannot possibly guess what’s going on in them, and, if you have to ask, something ineffable is ruined.

August 7, 2020

Eight phone calls get a health insurance snafu ironed out. I’m told this is below average, though we’ll see if it’s actually ironed out. 

Downpour last night and tonight watered my new plantings. 

This afternoon I “finished” Knight of the Flowers, though tinkering and revision are inevitable.

August 6, 2020

The cleaning lady climbed to the study today, as she almost never does. It is cleaner, but also plugs were loosened from outlets, and when I sat down at my computer, it was dead, the screen was dead. I did not quite panic, but I considered it. 

Wearing the T-shirt a student at Classic Hill gave me in 1983, in trade for a copy of The Glacier’s Daughters. I meant the book to be a gift, I had such a crush on him. No gesture of love I have ever made has hit exactly, or even nearly, the way I intended it. 

Bear returns. I tell him as he approaches the empty trash bin, “that’s empty,” and he moves on without trying it. He is startled by the cry of a jay.

Drove to Reems Creek for stragglers, bring home pink hibiscus and joe-pye. Will need to water if God doesn’t.

Sit by the French Broad and write the last necessary scene of Knight. Battalions of geese fly low along the river as if it were a road. 

Have a commission to co-write a music video and a one-man musical. Feeling employed again. 

I would like to strike a bargain with God vis a vis my career as a writer: one acceptance for every rejection. Since I feel there should be no rejections, this is meant as generous compromise. 

August 2, 2020

Rose early to walk downtown before full light. The primary denizens of that hour are people walking their dogs and the homeless, some of them up and scrounging, some of them still asleep beside the fountain or in alleys. One approached me looking for cigarettes or a handout. I had neither. He had colored his beard green. We chatted for a moment when he mentioned someone who had been “talking shit on the radio,” by which he apparently meant a CB. He said, “If you’re part of the Brotherhood you’ll know him. Tell him Bubba was listening and he’d better watch his back.” I promised to convey the message. Google was not helpful on what “the Brotherhood” might be. It is astonishing how much life the street has, that has evidently nowhere else to go. Men use Pritchard Park as a living room before the rest of the city stirs.

August 1, 2020

Short walk through the neighborhood.

Blue heron taking off from Beaver Lake, looking ancient and gigantic.

Studying Gilgamesh and Zoroaster, putting things together as I not had before, thinking what a shame I will not have a class with which to share the insights. But I have a feeling the time for those sorts of insights has passed at UNCA, where exploration is not wanted, but confirmation.