Bon Morte

I thought John Barth was dead, and that I had simply missed his obituary in passing, but his jabbing narrative voice is exactly the same as when he was still writing about being middle aged and married to his graduate student wife, only he is 85 or so, and empty as a bramble, or so he says. It turns out Mr. Harper died and I did not know. Typical Philadelphia black man, simple as a mousse, limping down Race Street after some scandal with resident council funds. "You have no choice," this is what he told me around 2010 when Brian got his manual wheelchair caught in the tracks outside my window, the engine flattening the poor traumatic brain injury bastard like a scrap of tin, no choice for me not to participate in Presbyterian Homes religious activities. I never do. I find Ann Beattie's anecdotes cruel and doubt her veracity, and yet her essay didn't-- oh how can I convey this, tired and scuzzy?-- her acerbic sensibility about her social set meshed into my rage, life long, about not being in it too with every franchise author of repute. I am still up, brush burning tail bone, contemplating a complicated essay on systems that I probably cannot do without investigating endless regulations and human processes being overwhelmed by them, the latest VA scandal symptomatic of the fact that civilization is invariably going to collapse if we keep this up. I haven't found my voice for it, as I usually do, however. This may take me some time, and yet my productivity is challenged because my enthusiasm ebbs. I get tired of authors, the industry, the pretensions. A young minority felt touched by the dismay in one of my Linked In posts, and he reached out to me. What the hell could I tell him? That my poverty is an acid vat and he was being kind to an angry fascist, coiled in her bitterness and terror of the swallowing to come?

I told him something in the futile poignancy of his desire to be supportive. It was courteous and emblematic enough of doomed circumstance, while Beattie had cutting edge collegiate sex with an instructor I had to relegate to a cocaine addict who cut me by bragging about his black girlfriend. Like Ann, I have the familiarity of a Chinese outlet when I desire the comfort of fried rice. Recognized it in the success of her reputation, my aggrandized failure.

I am not going to beat Pennsylvania's social services paradigm. If veterans are a vast post service entitlement class constantly straining resources, my vitriol, to use the poet Amy Holman's justified scolding of my uncouth temper many years ago, has to be taken in context. Soldiers serve their countries and become expendable unless they stay in the hierarchy. I lost my caste, basically in 97, and then caught a few minor breaks. Not major or even lucky ones: Mother died and left the kids a lump split by a third, and I made about six months of my entitlement benefits on commission, roughly. Since the tap dried and 50 cents per word went poof, I did not rush to the IRS ever popular kiss and tell rubric. I would have had I become established. I didn't. This is a difficult industry in which to achieve that, and I'm not a novelist. Not a competitive scholar-- not that I fear academic journals; I'm simply not superwoman.

Sneezed, needed a napkin. Even to get away, a little while, away from my antagonism toward Jimmi Shrode, his partner. I used to go to Wildwood, but that was long ago and would now be a logistical inconvenience, much like getting along with fans. Sigh.