Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly. ---- Harry Lime

Interesting review by Stephen King in the New York Times earlier this week of the new Raymond Carver bio.

Quick and dirty synopsis: Belligerent asshole while he was hitting the sauce – restless too, and mean to his wife – once Carver submitted himself to his Higher Power (for which read “editor Gordon Lish”) he found success, quickly becoming established as the Most Influential Writer of Short Stories in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century. Ah, but was the price he had to pay – about 30% of his word count – worth the prize?

I would say, Most definitely.

Great review, but clearly Stephen King – who, lemme tell ya, could have used a minimalizing editor throughout most of his career – has a dog in this particular fight.

The Carver-Lish relationship's been analyzed before. At least... I can recall reading passages from the original and the edited versions of some of these stories – in Playboy? ... in Esquire? somewhere – and thinking the edited versions were much, much better. I'd have to read the entire stories to sustain that verdict, of course.

That great artists are monsters in their personal lives should come as no surprise. Takes a certain relentless self-involvement to propel yourself to worldly success (absent forbearers thoughtful enough to spend their lives in dull but remunerative trade thereby generating stipends for their more creative descendents.) Your ego has to be as tough and impenetrable as elephant hide ‘cause you are gonna take a lot of hits. I suspect this is the reason why up until recently there’ve been fewer female creative geniuses – it’s not really a matter of talent or vision, it’s a matter of drive, and women are too indoctrinated in the importance of social cues to feel comfortable owning that drive. Or at least I am.

Yeah, sure there are cautionary tales, people like Emily Dickenson (laboring in obscurity) or Wallace Stevens (an insurance agent!) or even Harper Lee (a Capote amanuensis). But those, I think, are the footnotes, no?

Also most lay readers don’t realize the influence an editor has on a writer’s finished work. Too often writing is confused with “self-expression.” It’s not. Or rather – it is, but more importantly it’s communication. A good editor submits himself or herself as a proxy for a more generalized reading audience, working with raw footage that needs to be tweaked, that needs to be shaped. Shave three beats off the end of a scene and you turn mundane dialogue into something quite illuminating. Having fed this audience many times in the past, he or she presumably knows its appetites.

But I don’t care about the audience, sneers the writer. They’re mouth-breathers. Fuck ‘em!

Well, that’s fine. Write. There’s bound to be some literate masochists out there somewhere. Maybe you’ll hook up with them.

Or maybe you're that once-in-a-century phenomenon like Stephen King (and Charles Dickens before him) and you'll create your own audience. Odds are against it, but it could happen. Just don't get your tusks stuck on my furniture.

Huge fight w/B in a supermarket of all places – he wanted to buy two packs of El Cheapo cookies (made from equal parts sawdust, lye and lard); I wanted to buy flour, sugar, butter and baking powder. Almost degenerated into a shouting match.

But then I gave up, stalked out, went to the near-by Barnes & Noble where I read the first forty pages of the new A.S. Byatt novel (awful) and thought about how unhappy I am, and what if anything I can do to change that.

There must be something, no?

Job is iffier than was initially described to me in the interview – right now I’m only working halftime, and halftime is not enough to support a family. No low hanging fruit in the Ithaca area employment picture, so if I want a full-time job I’m really going to have to go out and hustle – i.e. march into various tech start-ups (lots of these in Ithaca), resume in hand, and bludgeon my way into HR; initiate a relentless campaign of call-backs for six weeks following.

I’ve gotten jobs this way before, but of course back then I was younger, cockier, had all my teeth. Now I feel like that homeless woman muttering to her pet aliens you passed on your way home from work yesterday. Would you hire her? Of course not! In fact, you zizagged fifteen feet out of your way so you wouldn’t have to hear the aliens were muttering back.

My self-confidence is at an all time low. I really don’t know what to do about that.

I’m lonesome. Want somebody to talk to.

B and I used to be able to talk, that was why I stuck it out all those years. With all the bad, there was one overweening good: we spoke the same language. Very few people speak my native tongue. But now I look at him and think, who are you? And have to remind myself: Robin’s father.

You make your bed, you lie in it, I suppose. The problem is you’re supposed to get up occasionally and function.

I think I might be close to the point where I literally can’t function. Then what?

Almost finished with the short story. It took off on its own when little telekinetic Petra met the ominous and mad Kelly Kaspar. Lots of dying oak trees and Spanish moss. Wish there was somebody who needed a writer or an editor hereabouts – those are two abilities I never question, two things I do spectacularly well.

Somebody’s gonna make a shitload of money off me when I’m dead.

Sorry, but the California Energy Commission is fucking insane. I look forward to that time in the not-too-distant future when pushers congregating on the corner of San Pablo & Ashby hiss, “Crack? Smack? Plasma TV’s?” Maybe HBO can get a series out of it.

I mean, come on. The way you regulate energy is by slapping a surcharge on excessive use. You don’t go all patronizing and paternalistic – it’s simply none of the government’s business what portion of its energy consumption a household chooses to use on electronics. All that does is provide fodder for right wing talk show radio hosts and encourage people to waste even more energy driving out of state to get their big screen TV needs met.

B and I went on a loo-oo-ong drive up to Oneida yesterday morning to take in upper Finger Lakes terroir and view the remains of one of those communitarian utopias I’ve been reading about in the Brodie bio.

Joseph Smith had actually been dead for a few years by the time John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida Community, but I like to think the same spirit moved them both (though Noyes’ guardian angels carried plans for silver and china factories, not gold plates.) The Oneidas practiced open marriage, gender equality, criticism/self criticism and other standard commune practices as well as something they called “male continence” i.e. they tried not to come when they did the dirty since semen, a magical substance, shouldn’t be wasted, should only be used for making babies. Logical outcrop of this philosophy was a eugenics program that reads like something out of Brave New World. Stirpiculture, it was called. Unfortunately this led to a wholesale decline in the sect’s population. You can still give their silver as a wedding gift though.

Since we were well out of range for the various NPR stations, I dialed up afore-mentioned right-wing talk show hosts. Glen Beck is really getting scary with his dire, wild-eyed and increasingly vague rantings about the Bad Thing That’s Coming. Rush Limbaugh, though...

True confession time: I have a great deal of affection for Rush Limbaugh. I mean, I don’t agree with 90% of what he says – example: when the mammogram diagnostic criteria were changed day before yesterday, the “experts” he had on were all MD’s who owned mammogram labs! C’mon, Rush! Of course they’re gonna be against changing the diagnostic criteria! It means fewer feathers in their pockets. But Limbaugh is really, really funny – much funnier than Jon Stewart (whose appeal, frankly, I don’t get) and I suspect underneath it all he doesn’t take himself all that seriously.

On the drive home, I started to get seriously sick. My throat ablaze, my head filling up with fluid like some kind of valve had lost its float.

Once home, went straight to bed. Felt horribly guilty – another lost day, another lost day – but what are ya gonna do? Made the mistake of taking that night-time Thera Flu stuff which got me completely wired so that I was up two-thirds of the night, lying there in bed with my eyes tightly shut, visions of lost utopian communities parading across the underside of my eyelids.

But this morning I feel purty good again. Go figure.

What I Wrote: Nada...

What I’m Reading: Halfway through the Joseph Smith bio which I highly recommend to anyone with an interest in 19th century American history.

What the rise of the great industrial capitalist fortunes in the latter half of that century obscure is that the first half of that century was a yeasty foment of communitarianism. You could call it “communism” and you’d be correct – there were literally dozens of movements actualizing the famous axiom “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” decades before Karl Marx committed it to paper.

Mostly these were religious movements, fueled by apocalyptic fervor: periods of rapid technological change always seem to be accompanied by end-time paranoia. (Don’t believe me? Set your browser to www.glenbeck.com.) Christ lived communally with his disciples, after all, and these communities modeled their rules after his, the better to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Most of these sects have long disappeared although a few remain, albeit in an altered form – Jehovah’s Witnesses, Disciples of Christ, and yes, the Latter Day Saints who under Joseph Smith lived collectively, ceding all personal wealth and property to the church from which it was redistributed according to apostlary zeal.

Suspect (though I’m much too lazy to do the research) that it was the Civil War that tipped the balance of populist sentiment towards capitalism.

Practical Shit I Accomplished: Well, I worked. Unfortunately I’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement. Too bad. That place is filled with bizarre people. Many stories swirling about that place like a mist of fine grey wraiths, but none of them will be told by me.

I filled out the paperwork for a replacement Social Security card without which the State of New York will not issue me a driver’s license.

And I sat in the Ithaca Free Clinic for a couple of hours till I could see an MD who would write me scripts for antibiotics and pain killers for the broken tooth. Antibiotics, si; painkillers, no. “Sorry, we don’t dispense narcotics,” said the pleasant, efficient MD with a smile. They’ve profiled their user population and determined we’re all junkies. Well, maybe we all are but in the meantime, before I can get back to shooting up for fun and profit, I’ve got this throbbing tooth, see? And it’s shooting great orange tendrils of pain up my right ear...

Dunno what I’m gonna do about that. I really can’t afford to see a doctor right now.
So you say you’re not in favor of Obama’s health care legislation, hmmmmm?

Bad Things That Happened: Well, nothing really. (Unless you count the Ithaca Free Clinic’s “No Narcotics” policy.) But, of course, that could change quickly. I fully expect it will.

###

“Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be,” Abraham Lincoln once said.

This is a particularly interesting observation given the fact that Lincoln himself was a famous depressive. Doesn’t make the observation any less true.

You soldier on because in the end this day-by-day shit proves to be irrelevant. Happiness is good; contentment, though – totally over-rated. What makes you content? Dr. Who on the idiot tube? Dollhouse? Survivor? (Well. I watch Survivor actually, and it truly is one of the great accomplishments of twentieth century culture so scratch that one.) Eating sushi at that trendy new fusion restaurant? A new pair of Jimmy Choo’s? A rich, satisfying bowel movement? Our nada who art in nada.

I suspect happiness is the ability to see the overview, to see how the bits and pieces of interlocking nada shimmer together into a vision of overwhelming beauty and pathos. But you know those interlocking bits of nada are essentially interchangeable. Like legos.

What I Wrote: Still hammering away at The Poltergeist.

Stegner people suspended their length requirements this year, also restrictions on so-called genre (no doubt in celebration of Stephen King’s ascension up the celestial New Yorker ladder, into the heavens of literary respectability.) Works for me – story should be about 4000 words when done. Has distinctly supernatural overtones.

I’m having some plotting problems.

We know that that the ending has to be Circus Owner & Petra in some kind of lurid Florida swamp clutch, w/him semi-throttling her – What do you see? What do you see?, her semi-crying. We know Chantal has to throw herself at Circus Owner. But whereas originally I was thinking of Circus Owner as a man in his forties, now I’m seeing him as a man in his sixties. He knew the girls’ grandfather.

But see, while seventeen year old girls may throw themselves occasionally at guys in their forties, they never throw themselves at guys in their sixties.

So this is a problemo...

What I’m Reading: Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith. Actually a pretty affectionate bio, but no, she doesn’t believe their were gold plates or Moronic angels, and she doesn’t think you should believe it either.

Brodie described losing her LDS faith (several years before she began writing the biography) as “taking a hot coat off in the summertime.” A year after the biography was published, she was excommunicated.

I’m only surprised the Mormons didn’t try to assassinate her. It’s a very subversive book if you’re one of the faithful.

Practical Shit I Accomplished: Got a library card. Hiked up the hill on E. Seneca Street to stare at Nabokov’s rental unit.

Bad Things That Happened: Broke a tooth. Cannot afford to go to a dentist. Tooth is a molar, not really visible. But dental hygiene is the thing that divides the Haves from the Have Not’s in this society. Now I really am one of those ugly old women you don’t want to sit down next to on the back of the bus, an official member of the underclass. Downward mobility. Sigh...

I’m thinking of Nabokov, of course. Of index cards and diaspora. Imagining one afternoon at 802 E. Seneca Street in the early 1950’s... Early spring because I can’t remember the exact story, and in any event it’s probably apocryphal: Nabokov was burning the manuscript of Lolita.

In photographs Nabokov looks more like a carpet salesman than the suave expatriate Humbert Humbert. He’s rumpled, disheveled. Has that English bulldog/Winston Churchill thing going on with his chin, a receding hairline. His eyes are not particularly magnetic. He looks tired, very tired.

He is burning the manuscript of Lolita, but I’m not sure how exactly – surely people didn’t barbecue in 1950. Was he burning it with raked leaves and other assorted yard detritus? There goes my theory about early spring...

But wait! Nabokov’s wife, the long-suffering Vera, dashes from the house and plucks the manuscript from the flame!

Certain creation myths abound in the legends of Great Men. The Amazing Manuscript Saved From Self-Destruction is one that attaches itself to important literary figures. Personally I prefer the other, The Perfect Work of [your genre goes here] Interrupted At the Precise Moment of Its Revelation (cf. Coleridge). Probably that’s because I’m an underachiever.

I do love me some Lolita. And Ada. And Speak Memory. And the one about the poor Mishkin-esque chess player.

###

So anyway, finishing up the various circus backstories...

CJ, the concession guy, was the heart and soul of Fellini & Prentergass. First guy hired by Ginger Jackson and Curtis McCoy when they broke away from Floyd Danziger show after one of his tigers took out Floyd. They had just enough money to buy one truck. Curtis had a dog he’d trained to do a garbage routine; CJ was the clown.

Plan was they’d do the school auditorium circuit. Busk on street corners if they had to.

CJ had grown up in Ohio. Father was a Teamster of French Canadian origin, migrated to the States when things got tough during the Depression. CJ’s dad was also an armchair philosopher, a species that’s just about died out with the advent of multi-channel TV: why think it when you can watch a special on the Discovery Channel about it?

CJ went to college at Kent State – and here the timeline grows murky for me: CJ claims the shootings at Kent State upset him so much that he dropped out of college, signed on for the Ringling Clown Circus instead. But can that be true? In any event, CJ became a clown, reluctantly went back to Ohio when Ringling decided not to hire him – and was saved by a phone call one week later: Big John Strong needed a clown.

Fellini & Prentergass prospered for its first fifteen years. Every cent that it made less operating costs Ginger Jackson ploughed right back into the show. It was the prettiest show on the road. Of course liquidity is always an issue for a performance venue, and Ginger Jackson had one, inviolable rule in this regard: he would never borrow more than he could pay back in a single year.

The year he found himself $40,000 in debt at the end of the season was the year he decided to get out of the circus biz.

So Chance Van Zandt bought it from him. Took out an SBA loan and everything. Was the price $200,000? Moot point – he stiffed Ginger Jackson for a large portion of the sum.

Chance Van Zandt had been a front office guy with Creely Stiller; he had his own interesting history. Known as a bitter, somewhat reclusive guy with a chip on his shoulder – he’d gone to Brown! Majored in Philosophy! Hung out with John-John! – it’s hard to imagine why he wanted to own a circus. Maybe he thought he could make money out of it.

He fired all of Ginger Jackson’s employees except for CJ. And established a policy of skimming all profit from the top, sinking nothing back into the show. Today the tent is an embarrassment, full of holes, dingy; the truck fleet is falling apart.

By then CJ was no longer a clown. He doubled as the ringmaster and the concession manager. Concessions were where the real money was made, since circuses split the door take with their sponsors, and circus food comes from cheap raw materials. Sprinkle a bunch of salt on the popcorn and they’ll want a drink. Strike a deal with an impoverished Southern distributor for cheap peanuts; slip a coupon in every 100 bags for a free balloon novelty and hawk the shit out of them while the Mexican are taking down the jungle cat caging and setting up for the trapeze. Spin big fluffs of cotton candy out of two and a half cents worth of sugar, sell it for a buck.

CJ was totally miserable in Chance Van Zandt’s circus. He grew pallid and fat. Made his rounds in the morning, route slips on the windows of the trucks, RV’s and vans that made up the village on wheels; drove the hulking concession truck expertly (except for the time he hit a deer); did what he was supposed to do for the two shows. The rest of the time he hid out in the concession truck’s cab which was fitted up with bunk beds, a desk and his computer. Made odd little Photoshop compositions. Played video poker. Refused to touch Wren’s cookhouse grub, subsisted entirely on a diet of canned Hormel chili and beer.

My two favorite CJ memories:

One day Chance announced that he wasn’t paying CJ extra for ringmastering anymore. Fine, said CJ. Then I’m not putting on a tuxedo and going up into the ring. I’ll do the announcing from the sidelines.

Opening patter of course includes the line about, No smoking under the Big Top. CJ frequently held a lit cigarette between his fingers while he delivered it.

Patter also includes extravagant thanks for the props crew. Props crew, of course, are the disaffected Mexican roustabouts who could give a shit. So instead of thanking them, CJ would always turn to whoever was sitting next to him, hiss, “Quick! Give me the name of your favorite rock group –“

After he got his reply, CJ’s mellifluous baritone floated out into the arena, And can we please have a shout out for the people without whom this performance could not take place! I refer, of course, to our props crew! Please! A big round of applause for John, Paul, George and Ringo!

###

CJ traditionally spent his winters mostly in Hugo, holed up in his truck cab. He had a lot of pals in Hugo so his social life was more varied. Just before Thanksgiving he would fly to Arizona where his folks and Ginger Jackson had resettled (not together.) He’d spend a month there, fly to Vegas a few times – he was an expert poker player, could easily pick up $10,000 bucks here, $10,000 there in live play.

But this year he spent less than 24 hours in Hugo. He couldn’t wait to get the hell out.

His old hustler friend Larry Fixe – who’s got a pretty entertaining backstory of his own – hit him up to manage an ice cream store Fixe was opening in Goree, Texas. One wonders why Goree, Texas – population 65 – needed to open an ice cream store in the dead of winter. I suspect Larry saw how messed up his old pal CJ had become, and was throwing him a lifeline. Among Larry’s myriad scams is real estate: he’d bought up a bunch of elegant, late 19th century mansions dirt cheap, left over from the days when Goree was a boom down and gave one to CJ to live rent free. Little more room for the Photoshop operations.

I’d be surprised if CJ ever came back.

Got the job.

V. good.

What I Wrote. First coda of Poltergeist. Prose feels pedestrian – it was exactly like solving an algorithm: X amount of information needs to be revealed in X number of words. But though I’m insecure about everything else in my life right now, the one thing I’m absolutely sure about, damn it, is I write good. Feeling it is a perk, a tiptoe through the tulips. But honestly? Doesn’t matter if I feel it or not. I’ve reached that plateau in my (get out your fans and flutter now) craft where I can fake it to look like I feel it.

What I Read. Reread actually: The Grapes of Wrath. Spent half an hour or so afterwards wondering what happens next to the Joads. I’m pretty sure their great grandson is cooking meth out of a trailer somewhere on the outskirts of King City, and that their great granddaughter is a prison guard at Salinas Valley State Prison. But what about all those intervening generations?

Practical Shit I Accomplished: Went food shopping. (Say what you will about Walmart, it does stretch that dollar.) Made To Do list. Verified that I’m eligible for unemployment.

Fantasized about attending AA meetings to network for employment opportunities. I’m not an alcoholic or a drug addict. But would it be so wrong to pretend I’m one? I mean, damn, there must be some Cornell HR personnel who are contemplating going back on the bottle, right? Or maybe the owner of an upscale Internet advertising agency looking for a project manager. How unethical would that be anyway?

RTT caught B’s cold. B is still sick as a dog. I’m just praying the cold doesn’t catch me – can’t afford to be out of commission right now. Miles to go, miles to go, and all of them slogging through garbage...

So anyway, I’ve been on an old movie binge. Movies, even bad movies, put me in a fugue state. Easiest conduit to egolessness. Egolessness works a whole lot better than Prozac or Welbutrin on depression.

The old movies I’ve been watching are good movies: Sunset Boulevard, Smoke, Double Indemnity, Chinatown, Il Giardino dei Fitzi-Continis and this morning, The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovitch’s adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s novel. I reread the novel late this summer in the public library of a town called Hooker, Oklahoma.

My love for Larry McMurtry is deep, abiding and true. That the movie is not as good as the novel is mostly due to Timothy Bottoms who confused acting with wandering around looking dazed. The other members of the cast are strong enough to carry the film for the most part.

The novel is a heartbreaker.

An interesting sidebar: McMurtry went back and wrote two sequels to it, both comedies. Fascinating authorial choice to say the least.

Good news is that we found a place. That’s exactly what it is too, a place. Inexpensive (will cost a fortune to heat). Takes pets. Pleasant landlord was so relieved to get the place rented that he didn’t ask a lot of questions. It’s in Freeville, very close to central Ithaca. Half a house.

I see it as The Transition. I gave the pleasant landlord my word of honor that we would stay at least until summer to give him a better shot at rerenting. It’s not a very attractive place. I believe the word Ben would use to describe it is “utilitarian.”

I’m relieved to have it though. Job search is impossible without a local address.

On Monday we’d all loaded up in the car – by “all” I mean Ben, RTT, myself, the two dogs and the turtle (leaving the cat to fend for herself with Friskies and water) – and cruised on up from Edinboro (just outside Erie) to Ithaca. If the Joads had driven a red VW bug, that’s what we would have looked like. Goal was to look at houses and for me to sign up with temp agencies.

Signing up with temp agencies was certainly an exercise in humility. Leslie at Kelly clearly hated her job and did my intake with the snarling indifference an SS officer might show a new Auschwitz recruit. I had to take a bunch of computer tests – I am merely “basic” at MS Word (which shocked me) but I’m “intermediate” at Excel (at which I’m actually pretty mediocre.) When Leslie announced she was giving me a typing test, my hands started to flutter – not shake, but actual palsy. Why are you so fucking nervous? I chided myself. Like who fucking cares about this? But I couldn’t help it. Overweight Leslie with her bright red lipstick and her shapeless black sweater dress held me in such obvious scorn that I felt like a non-person. I was only able to type 38 words per minute; I usually type 55.

The people at Manpower were much, much nicer, did an actual interview at the end of which the branch manager gave me two post-its. “We don’t have anything here that’s a match for your skills, I’m afraid,” she said. “I mean I’m not going to send you out on an assignment as a temporary dishwasher in the Cornell dormitory. I am going to forward your resume to our professional division – they do more headhunter, executive recruiting kind of stuff. And this is the name of an associate of mine who owns a digital advertising boutique – it seems most of your work experience has been Internet-related, so that’s really where you should be looking. Call her up, use my name – talk to her, she may have some leads or advice. And here’s the address of Ithaca’s Chamber of Commerce – they have their fingers in a lot of pies, they may be able to help you as well.”

“This is awfully kind of you,” I stammered, taking the post-it’s.”

She smiled gently. “Hey! It’s my job. Good luck.”

###

Ben and Robin had been waiting for me all this time in the Wal-Mart parking lot. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t have waited for me in the wonderful Tomkins County Public Library or one of Ithaca’s many pleasant parks (where the dogs could have had some fun) or even in a coffee house, but no, Ben was determined to have the full-press Untouchable (Indian caste, not Elliott Ness) experience.

Yes, Ithaca has a Walmart now. I was shocked. And more than a little appalled. If Ithaca let Walmart in, then there’s no stopping it. All small business owners should simply buy a gun and shoot themselves in the head right now – there’s no sense in their leaving an even bigger carbon footprint if their economic value is nil, right?

We sought lodging for the night in the seedy little village of Watkins Glen. For years Watkins Glen was famous as the Mecca of Grande Prix racing in America but with the rise of Nascar, nobody actually cares about Grande Prix racing anymore, and the Glen’s makeover into Finger Lakes’ wine region capitol has not been a raging success. Naturally we picked the oldest and most dilapidated of all the motel options available to us – a rotting Georgian mansion fronting a sleazy motor court. But we lucked out! The oddly congenial Mr. Lin, an Oriental gentleman who looked to be in his late seventies and was absolutely delighted to see us, ran the place. We were probably the first paying customers he’d had in many days. And he lo-o-o-oved doggies! “You have dog, yes? Two dog? I knock five dorrar off price!”

Wait a minute, I thought. Shouldn’t you be a Patel? But, hey! Don’t count a gift horse’s fillings etc, etc. The room was cheap, warm, had a serviceable shower, high-speed Internet and a television that picked up Turner Classic Movies. At 3am when I woke up – insomnia has returned, alas! – Il Conformista was playing, one of my favorite movies of all times. I wept as though for the very first time when I saw Dominique Sanda assassinated even though I’d seen her assassinated at least forty times before – after all, thirty-nine of those times had been thirty years ago.

###

Bad news is that as soon as we got back to the RV and Edinboro, Ben fell horribly ill. I'm hoping it's not the flu -- he's feverish, coughing, has a sinus headache that's spread into his neck. No way he's going to be able to drive the RV two-hundred and fifty miles today on a merry little odyssey of relocation. So I am driving up to Freeville alone to do the paperwork and hand over the money to the landlord. B's brother Lew kindly loaned me an air mattress and a sleeping bag in case I don't want to immediately turn around and make the 250 mile drive back. We shall see... It's always something.

In a purt-y bad way here in the far frozen North – well, not so far North and the temperature is still in the upper forties: that part is hyperbole. But I am down, really down. Close to despair one might say. Not sure I have enough pluck in the reserve tank to recontexturalize myself out of this quagmire although God knows I’ve gotten myself through as bad or worse in the past. Difference now is that I’m old. Fairly flexible for a hag but still... Old.

Fought on and off with Ben and RTT all day. Yesterday I was giving pep talks – “If all we have is each other, we have to keep upbeat and positive for each other.” But as it was raining hard this morning and Ben had not made phone contact with the friends on whose property he was intending to park the RV, I absolutely refused to leave Edinboro – which pissed off RTT who had some crazy notion that when we arrived in Ithaca, he would instantly hook up with his pals, maybe see us again in the spring.

“You’ve ruined my Halloween!” he kept saying.

And I thought: it’s probably good that he’s focusing on that rather than, “When are my deadbeat parents going to find a real place to live?” which not surprisingly is the issue that’s concerning me.

We have some money. Not a huge amount. But some.

But I’ll have to find a job almost immediately because I’d prefer to keep that in reserve, and I’m not really sure that even if this were a boom economy – employers begging random strangers on street corners, Please! I beg you! Work for me! – that I could get a job. The wound the failure of the Little Store left in me hasn’t healed even a little, I have absolutely no self-confidence, I see my skills as a deficit to any and every enterprise. Can’t sell myself because my gut feeling is that while the world wouldn’t necessarily be a better place if I weren’t in it, it wouldn’t be a worse place either – well. For Max and RTT it would be a worse place, which is why I don’t indulge in suicidal ideation. But there’s no denying my head is in a bleak place right now.

I’ve been trying to write...

It’s that Stegner Fellowship time of year.

Story I’m working on is about Petra, the third Galen daughter. The owner of a small central Florida circus becomes obsessed with Petra. Her sister June thinks the owner’s interest is sexual but it’s not: the owner believes in ghosts and conventional wisdom among people who believe in paranormal phenomena is that young teenage girls make the best sensitives. Title of the story: The Poltergeist. Writing has been tough going today – partly my mood, partly the fact that I keep seguing off into 500 word descriptions of dog acts, well-written, vastly entertaining, but a real impediment when a submission is supposed to 2000 words or less.

I knew it was fall, but didn’t know it was fall till we broke down in Mt. Gilead, Ohio. Main street in that forlorn little town was adrift under dying orange leaves. There are no seasons in California – oh, sure, CA die-hards will natter about Mediterranean climate and November rainstorms, but really that’s atmosphere, not season. In the west, there’s no sense of Nature dying. No real excuse to layer your clothes like a potato digger and walk around muttering Gerard Manly Hopkins under your breath: Margaret, are you grieving over golden grove unleaving?... It is the blight that man was born for, it is Margaret you mourn for.

We were averaging one breakdown a day. In Arkansas it was that throttle thing; in Missouri, a bolt fell out of the alternator. Ohio seemed more serious – the engine had some kind of arrhythmia, it was missing beats.

“Sounds like a bad spark plug,” I said. But of course I know nothing about cars.

“Well, it could be a bad spark plug,” said Ben wildly, ruffling what’s left of his hair. “Or the points. Or a cylinder could be cracked, or maybe the block.”

What the fuck is a block? I wondered. Never mind, it was something bad. My boon companion this trip has been a relentless sense of premonition and doom; even though my car drives much faster, I’d been trailing the RV at a 250 foot distance so that when it exploded I could rescue my kid, my cat, the dogs and the turtle. Ben, I figured, could fend for himself.

It appeared that we would be broken down in Mt. Gilead for a long time – if not forever, than at least until the Auto Zone opened. I took Milo for a walk. I have a long history of dealing with dread, legacy of being raised by a crazy woman who would have been first in line to sign up for Joan Crawford’s parenting class if self-help back then had been the big deal it is today. Basically I disassociate.

In Mt Gilead I disassociated and began to imagine what it would be like to live in that empty, pretty little town, so rich in sense of place – what I like to call terroir.

Halloween is very big in Mt Gilead. Every other house has this elaborate Halloween pageant going – it can’t all be Walmart marketing, can it? No. This is still the heart of the farm belt, what one might call prime Golden Bough territory – what these people are celebrating, whether they know it or not, is the death of the Hollow Man, the Corn King, whatever they want to call it, and their own sublimated hopes for renewal the following spring. It’s a celebration as old as the Druids and to find it in this odd little backroad town that history has forgotten all about – once it was a seat of the Underground Railroad, now what is it? Nothing. A place the three teenagers walking across the street from me, carrying on a loud conversation about bitches and tattoos could hardly wait to leave – to find the old ceremony here was particularly poignant.

And slowly as I walked that thing that happens to me sometimes when I’m particularly dissociated began to happen. Things changed. The warp of the present tense grew transparent and it was as though I was walking through the village streets a hundred and twenty years ago, at the height of its prosperity – ghost horses trotted through the streets drawing carriages, a gentleman raised his hat to a lady in front one of those ornate building blocks – and all the while I could see the scene both in its past and present incarnations, know what happened to that gentleman – he died of tuberculosis, not long afterwards – know what happened to that lady – she lived to see V Day and the end of World War II. Very odd...

Back at the RV Ben had finished changing the spark plugs and wires. “I don’t think this is going to accomplish anything,” he announced glumly. “But it was the obvious first diagnostic step.”

He started the engine.

“Sounds better to me,” I said.

“Not to me,” he said.

But he got inside anyway and began to drive: two hundred forty miles later here we are at Lew’s in Edinboro. So I imagine it was the sparkplugs after all.

For the first time in months the RV broke down yesterday, this time somewhere on a freeway that cuts through the Ozark wilderness between Fort Smith and Fayette. Ben skidded to a stop on the shoulder of the road, I pulled in my car in back of him. My heart was racing two hundred beats per minute: I really, really did not want to deal with car trouble though I suppose it’s inevitable when you’re pushing a forty-five year old vehicle fifteen hundred miles in four days.

“So what’s the verdict?” I asked.

He sighed. “There’s no pressure when I push down on the gas pedal.”

Turned out there was a hole in some cable that does something important. It throttles maybe.

So Ben duck taped it. Or should that be, “Ben duct taped it?”

Purty clever, channeling his inner MacGyver like that.

We’ve driven another two hundred fifty miles since and I’m thinking he should stop in at Auto Zone and buy the actual part – the Fates were kind but they don’t like to be flouted. Fix the damn part!

In the middle of all this, the cat wandered out of the RV and took off for the freeway. I figured she was offering herself up to be the sacrifice that would get us safely to New York.

Fortunately I was able to lure her back before some semi turned her into a Meezer pancake, but it was hard on my nerves – four hours later, I was still shaking.

Picture is of some Wild West reenactors in Fort Smith. Lousy photo, but I’m tickled I snapped it at the exact milisecond the gun was firing.

JUMP: Hugo, OK --> Fort Smith, Arkansas: approx. 210 miles

Every Greyhound bus station in America is on 7th Street, right next to the old post office. Or used to be, back in the days when there were Greyhound bus stations and 7th Streets – now, of course, small cities are attempting to jumpstart their economies by revitalizing their downtowns, and that means a lot of civic buildings and dead ends.

Fort Smith, Arkansas is one such city. Seventh Street runs into the new State Building. No old post office. Though the bus station is still there.

Pretty little city, Fort Smith. Somebody there does rather amazing retro-neon – the gentrified Oldtown is filled with it.

Fort Smith spent half the Civil War in Confederate hands. After the Union took control late in the war, it became a kind of Mecca for runaway slaves and Union sympathizers, burned out by the ferocious Bushwackers versus Jayhawk action elsewhere in the border states. Twenty years later, it was the federal seat administering the Oklahoma Indian territories, presided over by the infamous “Hanging Judge,” Isaac Parker. His ghost may be seen occasionally on the grounds of the old courthouse chatting amiably with the spirits of some of the outlaws he hanged. (Oddly enough Judge Parker didn’t personally approve of the death penalty. But he’d vowed to uphold the letter of the law.)

There was an odd dualism about Fort Smith for much of its history then – on the one hand it was a real Wild West town filled with brothels, saloons, rapists, murderers and assorted lesser outlaws; on the other, it was a genteel Southern riverboat town, the Belle Pointe on the convergence of the Arkansas and Poteau Rivers, its streets lined with gracious mansions under spreading trees.

Fort Smith’s far enough off the beaten track that much of that architecture remains – and would be a nice place to spend a Sunday except like all towns in the Bible Belt, no museums are open, and no stores either except for Walmart and McDonald’s.

We are heading into our (ulp) eleventh day at Winter Quarters a/k/a the burned out husk of JDK's broken dreams, and I must say I am not happy with the situation. Although since there is absolutely nothing else to do, I have been writing like a little angel – no not the stuff in here which falls under the general subheading of Typing Exercises, but serious progress on The Book.

Still...

Not happy.

I understand now why I made all the decisions for the first fifteen years of this marriage: Ben is simply incapable of it. We’re still here because Chance didn’t find a winter home for the jungle cats.

“It’s not your problem,” I told Ben.

He looked anxious. “But it’s my job.”

“Actually, it’s not your job. The season is over.”

Chance himself is sick, very sick, with some kind of lung inflammation that came on very suddenly when he canceled the last two dates of the season – I like to think of it as supernatural retribution. On Monday he made Ben an offer – help me this week with the cats and I’ll pay you.

God knows we can use the money.

“How much will he pay you?” I asked this morning.

“We didn’t discuss it –“

“You didn’t discuss it?”

“Well, I assume a few hundred dollars –“

What kind of idiot doesn’t pin down the terms of the compensation when negotiating a labor contract?

I’m angry.

If I’d known we were going to be here this long I would have arranged to have my mail forwarded which means I would have had access to my bank card and my own money. There are no Wells Fargo banks in Oklahoma, remember? Right now he doles money out to me as if I were a teenager on an allowance, does all the shopping – insists on going to Dollar General rather than Wal-Mart because prices are cheaper. “But the things break,” I pointed out. “Almost immediately. You get one or two uses out of them and that’s it. It’s a false economy.”

He just looked at me.

Yesterday he told me that _____ ______ had offered him a job for next year, and that the job started in February.

That’s his solution to this situation.

My turn to look at him.

He doesn’t get it that it’s all about Robin now, Robin who was uprooted, Robin who needs a secure home with proper discipline for the next three years. He’s essentially telling me I’m going to be a single mother for that time because there’s no way I would go out on the road again – I enjoyed it, yes, but Robin didn’t and it’s all about Robin now.

First thing I’m going to do when we hit Ithaca is join the reform synagogue. I need to start talking my own language again. This is fucking ridiculous.

We are supposed to be out of here tomorrow. Although knowing Ben, I wouldn’t be surprised if he found some excuse to stay longer.

Chance cut it short. Canceled the last two dates of the season. Claimed it was on account of the lousy weather but I think it was because he was tired, dead tired. Tired of the ugly towns we’d been playing, tired of the lousy turnouts. Tired of chasing the Fisher King in his cheap clown suit long after the summer was through. He was losing money too, of course. But it was more about being tired.

Last date the Little Circus played was Alvarado, twenty-five to the hour on the big highway clock circling Dallas/Fort Worth. Sand lot on I-35. Ugly as sin. It was raining again, been raining pretty steadily since that humid, brown hazy day in the lost little town of Pilot Point. Chance cancelled that show too.

Big blow out w/RTT night before in Palmer, proximal cause lost to the sands of time. But I remember RTT kept screaming, “You lied to me,” over something very trivial. The accusation went deeper than that, of course and I was racked with guilt even while I wanted to slap him. Robin has had it the worst: what 15 year kid – at the time of his life when it’s all about being normal, about fitting in? – wants to hit the road with his two derelict parents in a forty-year-old RV?

I’d managed to hold my own anomie, rootlessness, insanity – whatever you want to call it – in check while Max was growing up but then lost it entirely when RTT turned teenager. Not a good situation for a kid to be living in, this vagrancy, this insecurity – I guess we’re officially homeless till we find a place to rent in Ithaca – and I can’t shield him from it. We really, really, really should have taken Lucinda up on her offer, and I knew it at the time, but was too beaten down psychologically to fight for it.

“I don’t want to go to Eastridge!” Robin scowled when I approached him with the suggestion. “It’s a ghetto school.”

“No, it’s not,” I said. “I researched it. It was on Newsweek’s list of the hundred best high schools. It’s seventy percent white. And even if it wasn’t, why should that matter?”

“It matters,” Ben said. “And I don’t want to live in Rochester.”

So that was that apparently. Turns out the state of California offers an online school option for state residents and since we have no real address (other than a post office in Palo Alto) we’re still residents. So we signed RTT up. For a few hours every day he studies – or pretends to study – chemistry, geometry, history. He had his first geometry test yesterday and managed to get a B on it (better than I ever did in high school geometry.) So I guess he’s learning something.

At the height of the blowout, Robin dashed out of the RV head-on into a thunderstorm. Lightening! Thunder. I got into my car and set out looking for him. It was around 1:30am; call was at five. Of course I had no idea where to look for him and every time I tried him on his cell, he would answer crying incoherently – pretending to cry? – refusing to tell me where he was. So I kept driving. Up the dark highway and back down again. Up and then back. Repeat! After a while I got into the rhythm of it. Life as a series of dark straightedge roads, illuminated at unexpected intervals by sudden flashes of uncomfortably bright light – so very Louis Ferdinand Celine.

Why do I have to go back? I wondered. Why can’t I just take off, cut them all off – everyone I know. Never see them or talk to them again. Emerge like newborn Athena from Zeus’ head into a new life that would involve – exactly what?

Experimentally I tapped into my phone: I’m not coming back either. Coded in Ben’s phone number. Hit send.

He called back. “Oh, please don’t do this. I told him what you messaged and he came back immediately. He’s soaked. I’ll stay up all night worrying about you if you don’t come back –“

What were my options? The Pat O’Neill role in Hud? Because God knows I was old now, nobody was going to marry me for my beauty. And my interesting personality was actually something of a liability. Face it: I didn’t really have all that much else going for me.

So I went back.

I’d never really intended to go.

###

In Alvarado I was more-or-less a zombie so I spent the day composing a column on healthcare for the Washington Post’s You Too Can Be A Newspaper Columnist! contest. I didn’t expect to win. Had fun with my bio though:

When Patrizia DiLucchio’s retail business went belly-up, DiLucchio did what many people only dream of doing – she ran away with the circus. Loading two dogs, one cat, one husband and one fifteen-year-old son into a forty-year-old RV with alternator issues, she went off in search of the real America. Does Main Street still exist under the big box franchises, relentless concrete sprawl and other ephemera of modern day life? DiLucchio’s answer: a resounding YES! DiLucchio has seen this country from the ground up. Think of her as the missing link between Australopithecus Glennbecki and true Homo Sapiens.

Otherwise it was a horrible day. Ron, the patriarch of America’s Foremost Unicycling Family fell off the high cycle and fractured his ankle; June and Lisette got into a terrible fight over the sideshow banner June had been working on ever since Iowa and refused to pay her.

It was a good banner, I thought. Lisette and Lonnie augmented the income they made off his tent crew duties and high wire act by providing photo opportunities with a twenty-foot long albino boa constrictor during the show’s intermission. The banner was a picture of the snake, done American Primitive style – a kind of carnival Grandma Moses.

“You know, you could probably get a whole lot more for that thing on EBay,” I told June. “Sideshow banners go for a lot – maybe five hundred dollars.”

“Oh, I just gave her the fucking thing,” said June.

“Gave it to her! But why?”

“Oh, she was just being a bitch about the whole thing. Telling me I did a bad job –“

“You did a great job –“

“I know I did! I’m an artist. And you know at some point it’s just not worth the hassle. Now the karma’s on her. I’m so over it –“

Right. Sometimes I forget June’s only seventeen.

###

Next day’s town was Justin, home of the world-famous Justin Boot Factory. I overslept the 5am alarm – that’s how tired I was. Barely processed the heavy commute traffic around Fort Worth as the little Veedub slogged along I-35 in the heavy rain, in and out of standing pools of water two feet deep.

Arrived in Justin ready to begin closure – only two more days – when Harrison the portly Advance Man leaned into my open window: “Don’t unpack nothing. That’s it.”

“Huh?”

“Chance says it’s too wet to play and he’s closing the whole thing down. We’re leaving for winter quarters in twenty minutes soon as Lisette and Lonnie pull in –“

“Winter quarters?”

“Hugo.”

And just like that it was over. Poof!

How did I miss last weekend’s Balloon Boy mishegaas? Just lucky, I guess. Maybe if I pretended to push RTT into the lion cage, I could interest TLC – or even Mark Burnett! – into producing a reality show starring ME ME ME ME and that secondary cast of thousands who wanna be my friends on Facebook.

Speaking of RTT – today’s his fifteenth birthday. Happy birthday, Robin! I love you more than my own heart beat.

In the piney woods behind the Carson & Barnes elephant sanctuary (100 acres, 24 elephants) Milo sniffed out an old box turtle. I would have left him there, but Ben – ever the reptile freak – promptly pocketed him and brought him home to show Robin. He’s been here ever since, seemingly happily esconced in a newspaper-lined box nibbling on bits of banana and green apple. Robin named him “Nimoy” which I guess means he’s now officially a member of the household.

Box turtles aren’t aquatic animals but they’re still true turtles, not tortoises, a determination you make strictly on the shape of the shell. Judging from his size, Nimoy looks to be around 40 years old. He was probably looking for a place to hibernate when Milo discovered him. He should live another fifty or sixty years. He’s a survivor – you can’t see it in the photo above, but there’s a big scar on his shell from where he probably got hit by a car ten or twenty years ago.

The giant Galapagos land turtle given to Captain Cook by the Queen of Tonga in 1777 didn’t go to that animal sanctuary in the sky until 1966. Nimoy could easily outlast me and all my F1 descendents.

I thought this was funny.

I know. I'm a bad human being.