Mapping the Desert

Where to start?

Classes are nearly over for the quarter–I’ll be back in Ohio in less than a month.  I’ve been so busy I’ve actually had to use a calendar to keep track of everything.  Today was a potluck; baked a cake, talked with graduates of the program, a professor’s ex-husband– an odd, rich dynamic.  Good guy.  Yesterday was a party; had to keep the Chauffeur from killing some punk.  Got a girl’s phone number before we left, and that is, I think, the first time I’ve ever done that.  Weird, yeah?  But not so for me, I guess.  The day before that was a reading at the Riverside Art Museum; gave a homeless man five dollars and it was the strangest experience–one of the new fives, purple, all wonky, you know? and he asked “what is this?” and I said, “a five.”  He didn’t know.  Legitimately.  He asked to shake my hand.  Passed a homeless man today and wished I could repeat the event, felt bad that I didn’t.

Back to reverse-chronological order.  The day before that was drunken shenanigans: bush pizza, a puppy with the middle name of Queequeg, an Indian working at Rite-Aid who got my last name right.  My memory fades beyond that, but more whiskey, writing, readings, etc.  Strange dreams, lately.  Saw the dark side of the moon from the Pacific, and it was green and covered in lakes, hanging in a purple sky.  Another dream involved nukes, aliens, tornadoes.

Finished the novella.  Will start editing after workshop this Wednesday.  Starting a short story set on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona.  A poet classmate told me today that he was talking about me to some of the undergrads, myth-like, about my productivity.  He said “he writes like several thousand words a month”, something like that, and they were impressed.  I had to let him know he low-balled it by quite a lot.  Looking back on my time here so far…it is impressive.  A novel, a novella, two short stories, many poems, and a scholarly paper.  All in ten months.  Something like 134,000 words (450+ pages, I think).  Helps to have nothing else you want to do.

Tomorrow I go to the Salton Sea with that group of poets.  Our project is called Mapping the Desert,  and the more I think about it the more fitting it becomes for me.  We were in workshop with local artists a week or two ago, and the question was asked, “what does the desert mean for you?” and I wasn’t sure.  I know I love its beauty, its desolation.  But aside from that being my aesthetic, I don’t know why, and I don’t really know what it means.  Solitude, I suppose.  In part.  Its mythos.  I’ve lived here long enough to see the seasons swing back–what seasons these are– to see the hills turn back to brown, the ground dry out.  I guess what’s happening is that, while this isn’t home, it is where I live.  I’m used to it.  I will leave here taking some of it.  Which is good, because the place surely has some of me.

Eager to be home.  Eager to move on.  To write more.  Might rewrite the first novel (I know I talk about that all the time).  May be the thing to do, though.  The next novel isn’t nearly ready yet, won’t be by the time I’m done editing the third.

Been thinking of writing an essay about our generation and the apocalypse.  To put it simply.  Something to look into.  Louise Erdrich wrote about how, roughly, the whites write always about losing America, losing land.  It’s true of me.  True of a lot of us.  Maybe because we don’t have anywhere else to go.  Down, or away.  Not that I think that’s necessarily a bad thing.