Already one step ahead

I already thought about what Michael's reaction might be to Susan Schneider's announcement about Williams being in the early stages of Parkinson's, and I pissed and moaned over the sink, not that I have any brief over Fox, he is likable enough and unlike the wizened Hank Stuever-- how in the name of Christ do professional critics like him earn a living?-- the humor in Michael's canceled show spoke to me; it may have been too deadpan for Michael's viewing spectrum, but it was funny, subversively so-- and Yahoo probably had this fucking piece in process while I drolly sighed over France 2 Frank Riva.

I have no desire to talk to Fox, nor identify with him, but I can imagine that Michael had wished upon Schneider slightly more tact before her damage control efforts. 

Robin is dead. Michael went into a self-pitying alcoholic binge and then became a point man for motor degenerative studies, and I remind myself on a daily basis that killing my former supervisor in no way buries the scars she permanently inflicted on me, and there are not enough hours in the day to plow through Philadelphia's social paralysis toward justice. I am reconsidering that move to Texas while I consider talking to you about the subterranean obsession of every living writer: getting into The Atlantic Monthly. The one really envious divide between Robert Thomas and myself despite our rarefied civil poetic rivalry: he has had poetry accepted by The Atlantic, which, unknown to him, is a mortal wound to my ego. I think Thursday's rejection of my query on an article counts as my second personal response in twenty years. If I have to buy James Bennet a power chair that climbs its own steps, before I am dead-- writers do actually generate articles for other outlets about the impregnable defenses of this periodical toward any strategism known to man, or even Stephen Glass, for that matter. 

I never obsessed over Williams in his life. Liked the work more than not, but this is not one of my pretensions. His suicide hurts. It does, and I tell myself I'm allowed to be mad.