AS I PLEASE XVIII: BLOGUS INTERRUPTUS

As I sit here (very) belatedly writing this, rain is falling, and my cat Spike is perched on my shoulder, making hitting the correct keys very awkward indeed. I am in somewhat of a temper generally, and have decided to begin the process of getting this blog back on its regularly scheduled programming with an As I Please which will perhaps explain why -- why I haven't been blogging as much of late, and why I'm a grumpy sonofabitch today.

* I recently gave a lecture in these very pages about consistency. I was feeling rather smug that in addition to everything else I do, I was able to put out two blogs a week, and on specific dates (Wednesday and Saturday). Lately I have fallen away from that. I want to make excuses, blame my schedule, etc., etc., but the truth is, when it comes to blogging, I would rather publish nothing at all than a blog for the sake of blogging. Maybe that, too, is an excuse, but I don't mean it that way. What I'm driving at here is that while these posts are often fairly raw in their execution, I don't view them as mere content. I flatter myself that I do not produce mere content, but always strive to have something to say, however silly or disagreeable it might be. The actor Rick Moranis once mocked the very idea of blogging as people spewing unedited first drafts of their thoughts onto the internet, and this criticism is frankly quite valid, but I think it an incomplete assessment. Blogs are not meant to be graduate school essays, capable of withstanding academic scrutinty. They are a method somewhat akin to journaling, free-form poetry, etc. by which people can informally tackle topics that interest or concern them. That, however, is not a license to produce crap. So when I don't have a good topic, or don't have the time or the energy to address one properly, I'd just as soon stay silent. This is still an excuse, but I hope one that shades more toward the side of explanation. I will try to get back on track for a twice-weekly production of Stone Cold Prose, but if it proves too much I will surrender and resume a consistent once-a-week schedule. Honest.

* I am grumpy this rainy Sunday morning because the 200 year-old building in which I live has a wonky alarm system which tends to go off, at eardrum-destroying, nerve-shredding volume, whenever water leaks into the structure and touches the wiring. This hideous alarm, far worse than that of a crash-diving submarine or an imperiled Death Star, can only be shut off by the fire department, and because it always strikes during inclement weather, makes evacuating the building (just to get away from the damned noise) extremely unpleasant, especially when it strikes at, say, 330 AM. This vile alarm ruined a much-needed ten-day vacation of mine over the winter holidays of 2022-2023 and drove me to consult my colleagues (prosecutors all) as to whether I could criminally charge my landlord. They responded that I could. However, that very day the problem was -- I thought at the time -- finally solved and after a brief trauma-period in which I spent part of every night waiting for it to go off and thus lost a lot of additional sleep, I gradually forgot about it. Today, around 830 AM, as I sat here in sweats and a T-shirt, trying to write, it reintroduced itself to my eardrums. The old rituals took place: dialing 911, standing outside in the rain in my slippers waiting for the fire department, and fantasizing about tying my landlord to the alarm system so they can experience the full glory of its rich, full-throated song.

* Because I do not want to be grumpy on a Sunday, I will relate a story people who tune into Goodreads will find enjoyable. Yesterday it was also raining, and I took my copy of Evelyn Waugh's MEN AT ARMS to the coffee shop around the corner, sat in their courtyard beneath an awning next to a blazing old outdoor stove of orange clay, and spent the next two hours drinking coffee and reading to the sounds of the falling rain and the crackling flames. A strong smell of woodsmoke (which permeated my clothes) added to the delightful atmosphere. In one of my favorite novels, COMING UP FOR AIR, George Orwell's protagonist, George Bowling, likens the experience of being alone and losing yourself in a novel to "bliss, pure bliss." I cannot disagree. You either understand the feeling I'm talking about, or you don't, and I pity those who don't: but if you're reading this, you almost certainly do, and congratulations and bless you for it. In the world we live in, the ability to escape is more necessary than it has ever been, and we should all remind ourselves periodically that this relief is no farther away than your nearest book.

* Speaking of nearest books: my third CAGE LIFE novel, now renamed DARK TRADE, is at 62,000 words, or roughly 3/4 of the way through its first draft. I began this novel on June 15, and if I can maintain this pace -- always an open question, to say the least -- I'll be done with it by Halloween. I would be lying if I didn't say I was overjoyed by this prospect. Probably the hardest of all the many battles I've had to fight as a writer, either with myself or with others, is the battle against the open-ended project that drags on interminably, month after month, year after year, seemingly without hope of resolution, testing my own resolve to see it through. Indeed, the half-finished or quarter-finished writing project, never to be finished, was the bane of my literary existence for most of my life. I published my first short story at the age of seventeen in a Canadian literary magazine called Green's. I published my second short story in a university magazine called Eye Contact when I was thirty-seven. In the twenty year gap between those two events my sole publications consisted of two letters to the editors of boxing magazines, and I finished exactly one novel and perhaps four or five short stories at the absolute maximum. Like many writers, I was unable to maintain the blaze of enthusiasm I always had at the beginning of a story, and once I went cold, was unable to force myself to finish on sheer determination. Overcoming this tendency, this pathology of failure by virtue of incompletion, was the most difficult of all the tasks I have yet been assigned in life, and it did not happen all at once, but in stages themselves taking years. And even then, when the demon was slain and buried, I came to understand that for the real demons that haunt us, death is but a sleep easily interrupted. Complacency can revive them at any time.

* I am now readying myself for a hike in the rain. It will be muddy and laborious and I will come back soaked to the skin, but my coat smells like woodsmoke from yesterday's fire, I am soon to finish MEN AT ARMS and thus edge a little closer to meeting my (modest) yearly goal in the Goodreads Challenge for the first time in forever, and in my downtime from this downtime, I still have two more MURDER, SHE WROTE television movies to watch left on the DVD four-pack I purchased for a song on Amazon. By the standards of my younger self, this is not much to get excited about, but hey, I'm not my younger self, a fact of which I am continually reminded by photographs, mirrors, and my increasing desire to spend free time watching the television shows of my youth. Youth itself is not nostalgic, it is impatient for the future. Middle age knows the future will arrive far too soon as it is.

*...I have now returned. It was quite the excursion. The woods were entirely empty, and the rain grew more rather than less intense as I tramped through mud and ankle-deep puddles in my decidedly uncomfortable winter boots. While I marched along, I listened to Orson Welles' Mercury Theater Company adaptation of "Dracula" which was originally broadcast on July 11, 1938. It is quite good, especially considering the difficulties presented by such a sprawling story. I particularly appreciated the final sound effect, whose provenance I dug up on Wikipedia: [In a 1940 article for The New Yorker, Lucille Fletcher wrote that "his programs called for all sorts of unheard-of effects, and he could be satisfied with nothing short of perfection." For "Dracula", the CBS sound team searched for the perfect sound of a stake being driven through the heart of the vampire. They first presented a savoy cabbage and a sharpened broomstick for Welles's approval. "Much too leafy," Welles concluded. "Drill a hole in the cabbage and fill it with water. We need blood." When that sound experiment also failed to satisfy Welles, he considered a while—and asked for a watermelon. Fletcher recalled the effect: "Welles stepped from the control booth, seized a hammer, and took a crack at the melon. Even the studio audience shuddered at the sound. That night, on a coast-to-coast network, he gave millions of listeners nightmares with what, even though it be produced with a melon and hammer, is indubitably the sound a stake would make piercing the heart of an undead body.

Well. Now that I have returned and dried myself off, I must continue my middle-aged Sunday in middle-aged fashion: feed the cat, feed myself, finish MEN AT ARMS, and then decide whether to write more or lose myself in yet another MURDER, SHE WROTE television movie. Such is middle-aged life on a rainy Sunday. I guess it ain't so bad. Now if only that goddamned alarm stays silent.