You’re Shooting Stars

I’ve been writing a lot of emails, and thinking about them in the sense of correspondence–that is, something that could someday be seen by others.  Letters that people will file away with notes on my books and rough drafts and scraps of paper.  In them I find my philosophy becoming quite solid and my stance firm.  The world is going to get worse or less worse.  There is no better.  You may not even call it less worse.  You would just scale the evil down.  To me we’re either screaming toward a bloody end the whole lot of us or there’ll be a minor armageddon, an apocalyptic hiccup, and, say, the world will be halved.  And for a time the world will be “less worse” because there’ll be fewer of us to do evil.  But, it’s just occurred to me, that doesn’t make sense either.  You have to assume we all die in even portions, the good and the bad.  And ultimately the world doesn’t care for numbers–the world doesn’t care at all.  It’s us, and our percentages stand.

I am a riot at parties.

I’ve been back in Riverside for more than a month.  I’ve started teaching.  I’ve been kept busy.  The past two days the mornings have started off thick gray and hazy and when the California sun finally burns through the sky remains gray, a drop of blue in a bucket of neutral.  It’s the marine layer, I think, though I’ve never known it to reach so far inland.  It’s as though a sheet of waxpaper has been thrown over the world and we view the sun through the blear.  I live at the edge of town now, the foot of the Box Spring Mountains.  The glow of the city is a little weaker and there are stars, sometimes.  At night you hear coyotes.

The fourth book isn’t ready to be written just yet, so in the meantime I’ve been rewriting the first.  I don’t know that it’ll ever see the light of day, but I’m okay with that.  The third book makes a fine first.  I sent a slew of submissions out a few weeks ago, short stories and the novella from spring.  There’s a publishing house called Switchgrass that puts out exclusively Midwestern content–either by author or writing.  After I get word from a professor or two I may send the third book out as soon as December, right around when I plan to start on the fourth.

Hard to believe it’s been more than a year.  I was talking with the Chauffeur last night and we were both mildly scared at how fast our lives are moving, and knowing that will only speed up.  A year means less, I guess, but it still holds the same number of moments.  There’s a lot of odd math in this post.  It’s going to be a better year, though.  I know it is.  It may even be a good one.  I guess I’m just reluctant to close the calendar on some things.  As fast as my life has been going, that’s how fast yours is, too.  All that time has passed for you.  All that time I haven’t been in.

Riverside is domed in.  The sky a textureless wall, the lamp upset and shining.  And we are all drunk on the lotus, watching from our backs as if the wall might change, the lamp blink out.