There’s an idea I came across while rereading The Crossing.  Briefly: if evil was not rewarded by the world, then people wouldn’t engage in it.  Since there is evil, it is rewarded.  Good, then, in its purest form, exists in spite of any recompense.  I have a hard time believing in altruism despite its popularity, but when expressed in such a way, I think I can understand it.  Good becomes work, rather than some ideal.  I can understand a world in which that’s how we’ve survived.  I guess it’s not a very cheery idea, but it fits into my worldview rather perfectly.  I can apply it to my life lately without flaw.

I led you in thinking this was gonna be fun, didn’t I? Senseless title, uncharacteristically upbeat song. A lot of drama since coming home, family and otherwise.  Good things though, too.  Threw a pool party that put everything I’ve seen in California to shame. Got through two major revisions of the third book–cut almost forty pages from it, tentatively.  Been working on ideas for CRATE; combing through submissions for Phantom Seed, another litmag I got attached to; and started working in a low capacity for the Los Angeles Review of Books, an endeavor that’s going to be damn huge when it launches.  So, yeah, don’t expect much out of me on here.  I’ll keep you abreast of everything else I’m doing.

Until I publish something new.

I had some intentions of writing about my life of late.  Suffice to say I’m very busy, five-day weekends exhausting me as much as the weekdays.  Odd thoughts about feeling adjusted to living here, about putting things on pause while I go home to Ohio.  Went to a barbecue in Irvine for Memorial Day*.  Irvine is a strange, strange town.  The apartment complex had stores and a coffee shop inside, a pool, grills, a fountain…odd.  Lying on the grass I thought about how, even being acclimated, I still find it strange to live here, to be here.  I thought things would be very different.  My life, California itself, Riverside.  The journey is half over.  I get the feeling, though, that what’s to come is going to be the meat of it.

*My eternal gratitude to all who serve.

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.

I’m very proud to be published alongside the likes of Dixie Salazar, Frank X. Gaspar, and am particularly proud to share a publication with Ricardo Zamorano Baez, a classmate of mine who is a phenomenal poet and, it would seem, an excellent writer as well.  Also in this issue is a short story by Robin Russin, a professor at UCR who is an all-around great guy.  I’m extremely happy with this, and will be reading from my excerpt in Long Beach tomorrow morning.

As an aside– things have been busy lately, but I fully intend to bring you all up to speed on my life as soon as I get a moment’s pause.

That song was stuck in my head while in Joshua Tree over the weekend.  For no particular reason, I don’t think.  It’s not apropos.  I’ve had Cash on my mind a lot lately.

I went to Joshua Tree with a group of poets from the university, camped for a couple nights.  Did a lot of hiking, a little wood-chopping.  Also chopped my foot, which I did, thankfully, while everyone was away.  And yet I confess it to you–something to think about.  I still have all my toes.  I rolled and took two hits from a cigarette rolled in a leaf, just something I felt I ought to do, since it was on hand.  What happened was, during my hiking, I found tobacco dropped by one of the poets who’d already left.  And I had some dry leaf around for tinder.  So, kinda had to.  Only two hits, though, as it was horrendous.

I love being out there.  I love being outside.  Coming back home and tying myself to the computer for work was a shock, and not one I like on any level.  Being out there with folks who didn’t know me…it’s always interesting, because I have a very obvious personality that I’ve cultivated–the hat, the garb–and none of it is false, but it’s not something I think about often, though it’s there ostensibly by choice, and this is quite the run-on, and the new folks are always the vocal ones about how I act, thus revealing me to myself.  If I wasn’t already the person I portray myself as, I am becoming him.  He’s quiet, and for a reason.  I forget that on the internet.  You have to talk to say something, if that makes any sense.  And I guess I rarely have that much to say, though I talk often enough.  So I’m signing off again.  No Twitter, no Facebook.  I’ve shut off comments on most of my posts, though that’s because of the infuriating amount of spam I get in a day.

On the cusp of my twenty-fifth year.  Maybe by the end of it I’ll be more comfortable thinking of myself as a man, an adult.  I’m already comfortable being a writer and being myself, but those are both internal efforts, and I want to do more for the world at large.  Around the campfire I told a few stories of myself, and one of the poets asked about my parents, what they do.  Father a firefighter and mother virtually in charge of a sheriff’s department.  Uncle war veteran, grandmother bastion of strength reaching back to the Great Depression.  She told me I didn’t have much of a choice, then, but to try to become some sort of mythic hero, in this case a cowboy.  Whether I believe that or not, I don’t know.  But it sure plucked some strings.

Doesn’t that kick ass?

I know I’ve been gone a while, and I won’t be coming back soon.  I waver between shunning the internet completely (nearly) again and accepting it.  Mostly I’m able to resist the urge to click things, sometimes.  I’d get more done if I went into exile again, I know.

I’ve been waiting to post until I have news, but news is a long time coming.  So in the meantime I thought I’d just bring you all up to speed as to what I’m doing.

• Writing a novella.  As I Lay Dying meets Antigone meets me.
• Editing the third book.
• Working on semi-experimental poetry. For me, that is.  Which is still pretty stiff.
• Realizing how damned insular and irrelevant an English class can be.  Interesting topic, boring friggin’ students.  First day of class not a word was spoken that would matter to the outside world.  Everything they put forth will only go so far as another university.  That drives me up a wall.

I rode a horse a few Sundays back, had a good time with that.  Went to Joshua Tree with a friend of mine from Ohio, Coffee, for you old-time blog readers.  Had some baked beans over a campfire and ate them with my bowie knife, since I forgot spoons (among other things).  A great experience, though, eating beans at a campfire.  I’m going back in a week or so, as part of a group of poets.  We’re gonna be writing about the desert, presenting it at an opening art center in Riverside.  Read a bunch of books over Spring Break.  Gonna try to write a review of one, get it up on The Rumpus.  So, see, I’m a busy guy.

Should have that novel excerpt out for you to read soon.  I’ve got some short stories floating in the ether right now, hopefully they’ll get published soon.

Anyway.  I’m alive.  Will continue to be for the foreseeable future.  Hope you’ll be, too.

1. Justified.  A really kickass show starring  Timothy Olyphant.  He plays a US Marshal named Raylan Givens who gets reassigned to his homestate of Kentucky after shooting a gunrunner in Florida “justified”, he says, because the man drew first.  Givens is an old style lawman, throwing down what the Chauffeur and I call Prairie Justice.

2.  The end of Winter Quarter.

3.  #sexbyauthor.  A fun, rude thing to think up.

4.  A glass of Coke with ice.  I don’t drink pop very often, but I did today, and it was marvelous.  Quit some luxuries for a while, you’ll come to appreciate them more when you take them up again.

5.  My novel excerpt in Verdad Magazine/blurting out something of a short story in one evening.

6.  My assumptions about the world being proven true again.

7. Poets & Beer Night.

8.  Robert Johnson (and the blues as a whole. But mostly Robert Johnson).

My exile has done me a lot of good.  And a lot has happened.  Chief among these things is that I just finished my third book.  It came in at 102,128 words.  Shorter than I anticipated, but I expect a little expansion in revision.  That’s 102k in 7 months.  The quickest I’ve ever finished a book, and it rivals my first in size (pre-cuts).  This past Monday I wrote over 4,500 words in a night.  That’s some kind of record, I think.  For those not word-savvy, that’s about twenty pages.  My pace increased quite a lot once I put myself off the internet, and I don’t think I’d be as far as I am if I hadn’t.

But wait, there’s more good news.  The third book–have I mentioned? it’s called Above All Men– is going to be excerpted in Verdad Magazine.  On top of that, myself and Clowncar are in the next round in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award Contest.  On top of that, I’ve got a poetry gig coming up that’s gonna pay out a little bit, and let me write about Joshua Tree.  On top of that, I’m going to be Editor-in-chief of CRATE Literary Magazine next year.  On top of that, I’ve been hanging out with a few poets, one of which is, I shit you not, going to be the next Lorca or Neruda or pick-your-favored-poet-that-changed-what-being-a-poet-means, hopefully minus untimely death; and the other is a Tom Waits and No Country for Old Men-loving punk rocker who enjoys her (my) whiskey and is currently reading my copy of All the Pretty Horses.  Her favorite Tom Waits album is Real Gone.  You can’t get more legitimate than that.  And both of these two are much, much better poets than I am.  Not that that’s particularly high praise.

So, life has been pretty good since I left you.  There’s a lot of work to do down the pike, and I won’t really be back until after that, if then.  But I’m thinking of you, and I hope you’re well.  I haven’t gotten any letters from you.  Don’t think I haven’t noticed.

It’s a long road to the summer.  It’s a long way back to Ohio and what joys I might find there.  The writing is easier than ever but I’m afraid I don’t have enough words to fill the distance.  I don’t, in fact.  This book will be done in a few months–two is the projection– and then editing, and it will all be faster than anything I’ve done before, and better, but it’s the Word of God alone and I need the bread, too.

This is all rather melodramatic, and I’ll be back inevitably, if I do leave.  But I am bothered by these things, and not just emotionally, but by what they mean, what they’re doing to me and taking away from me as a writer.  I’d miss the updates about Iran and Morocco more than anything.  The rest is just egotism.  So I’m going to try this, for a while.  Be an internet ascetic.  I’ll have email, of course, and I still love you all and want to know how you are.  So if you don’t have my email, drop me a line here and I’ll get to you.  You know what would be even better?  Real mail.  Let’s do that.

Janet Fitch was on campus yesterday as the keynote speaker for Writers Week.  I’m not big on her writing, but from what she said I know she’s got it  together and I have a lot of respect for her.  She said she doesn’t know how she feels about something until she writes about it.  And I figure that’s true for me, too.  My books thus far are mostly a 800+ page wrestle with what it means to be a moral being in an immoral world.  We’ll see what comes out of me next.  Probably more of the same.  I haven’t found an answer, yet.

From the Land of the Lotus Eaters, take care.  I’ll be emblazoning the Crane on my eyelids, and thinking of you.