Today has been horrible.  Unequivocally.  From about hour two onward.  But I remembered what I was thinking last night.  Various little thoughts.  Moments in my life, memories that bring me pleasure.  And I remembered it today, thanks to Clowncar, when he said “gravy.”  I had a physics teacher who said that.  He was also my geometry teacher, and pre-calc teacher (he flunked me in that.)  He was really, really tough.  Called me unteachable at one point–and was probably right, as far as pure math goes, in physics I think I got a B+.  But he would scrawl so passionately on the board, following equations to their end result, and he was ecstatic with it.  I think most kids thought he was a little crazy for it, but it always made me happy to see him so happy.  The relationship he has with numbers is very much akin to mine with words, I think.  When he reached a certain point in the equation, once you’d narrowed things down, he’d say, “then it’s gravy.”  I always liked that.

I’ve considered myself lucky for about as long as I’ve had enough of a mind to really see how lucky I am.  Probably 18 or 19.  Around then I started reading up on Friedrich Nietzsche, most famously known for his theories of the Superman, bent toward ill by the Nazis.  He had a lesser known belief (seemed a little cobbled together, to be honest) called Eternal Recurrence.  Nothing more than a heaven for the Superman.  What it states is that at some point the world starts over from the beginning.  There is nothing else.  Just the world on infinite loop.  Since learning about this theory I’ve used it to judge my life.  Would I want to live through it again?  Yes.  I would.  Forever.  I don’t know that there are many people who feel the same.  You might want to change a breakup, take a little more time at the stop sign, that sort of thing.  Or you might not like your life at all.  Me?  Play it, Sam.  I want it all again.  I guess that means I’m pretty happy.  Even in the bad times.  And wouldn’t you know, between starting this post and finishing it, the night’s turned around.

For those of you who are counting:  2 1/2 weeks on the job with the third novel– 12,734 words.  8 days until Lindsay comes.  I’ll be pretty happy with myself if I can reach 20,000 before she gets here.  Hopefully some other writing news tomorrow or soon after.  And maybe I’ll get around to discussing something literary after that.

She made a 19 second video of herself, in her room, at the mirror.  All manner of disarray, bottles of all those mystifying things men have no use for–scarves(?), beads, makeup brushes.  There’s a nice song playing in the background.  I can see her chair, her desk, something on the mantel.  But it’s taken me a long time to see those things.  I have to force myself to look away from her.  Head cocked, curious.  Just that little gesture, perhaps the only personality you can glean from the clip.  And I’m entranced.  She’s beautiful.  Each time I see her, each new picture, she seems to change.  And in each she is beautiful.

She had the day off today, so we got to talk.  She helped me with some writing, we joked, we imagined, we quizzed each other on our futures.  I insisted on cows, chickens, pigs.  She would have none of it.  Well, okay, maybe chickens, because you don’t have to kill chickens.  I told her if she would bear with me these two years I would follow her anywhere.  We talked and talked and said goodbye three times and each time we came back.  She teased me about saying I love you.  I won’t say it until I meet her.  And that’s how we both want it.  But in the meantime it feels so natural to say, it’s been so long since I’ve said it.  After each part of our last goodbye it came, flitting in between, almost escaping.  She told me that she wants me to say it when she doesn’t expect it.  I thought, surely she won’t expect it now.  But of course I didn’t say it.

It’s a very childish thing, this.  When you don’t look at it sympathetically.  From inside it’s wonderful, and if you know how it feels it can be, from the outside, too.  That’s a very backwards way for me to acknowledge that this isn’t the sort of thing you’re probably coming around to read.  I promise more literary things are on their way.  I have more misadventures to share, and hopefully some good news following that.  In the meantime, a long-neglected meme from my friend, Clowncar.

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Fifteen books that will stick with you through life.  Whether by irritation, enlightenment, or pure enjoyment.  Feel free to add your own in the comments.

1. The Sun Also Rises ~ Ernest Hemingway
2. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West ~ Cormac McCarthy
3. All the Pretty Horses ~ Cormac McCarthy
4. Gilead ~ Marilynne Robinson
5. White Noise ~ Don Delillo
6. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle ~ Haruki Murakami
7. On the Beach ~ Nevil Shute
8. The Iliad ~ Homer
9. The Grapes of Wrath ~ John Steinbeck
10. Moby-Dick ~ Herman Melville
11. Paradise Lost ~ John Milton
12. The Antichrist ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
13. The Collected Works of Lord Byron ~ Lord Byron
14. The Executioner’s Song ~ Norman Mailer
15. Islands in the Stream/ The Garden of Eden ~ Ernest Hemingway

I cheated a little.  You’d get quite a litany of Hemingway and McCarthy up there if I didn’t throw in a little variation.  Honorable mentions go to Suttree, For Whom the Bell Tolls, No Country for Old Men, The Complete Plays of Sophocles, some Mencken, As I Lay Dying, aaand…let’s say a smattering of Bukowski and Yeats.  You see how I have to bend.

I’ve written more here since I’ve gotten the blog together than I wrote in a month at My Heart’s Porch.  May be something you’ll have to get used to.

The above is Modest Mouse, a band I could go on and on about.  They’re great.  We’ll leave it at that.  The first post here, “The Blog That Ate Itself,” is a riff on one of their albums.

I’ve been skipping over an important part of my life here.  It could be that I’m trying to rein myself in a bit, make this place more formal.  But that’s dishonest to the purpose of this blog, if not the site, and I’ll never be able to confuse my writing with my blogging, try as I might to blur the lines on here at times.  So, without further distraction: I’ve got this lady friend.  We’re counting down the days until we get to see each other–we’ve never met, see.  But we’ve talked for what seems like ages.  We have all the inside jokes of a couple and we complete each other’s sentences and we have trouble sleeping or doing pretty much anything without hearing the other’s voice.  It’s not perfect, but I’m finding it’s much closer to than I’ve ever been before.  We both write.  On opposite ends of the spectrum.  She’s masterful at delving into the mind, digging up pieces of heart, laying things bare.  I…write dirt good.  Which isn’t trying to sell myself short, but sometimes I’m in awe of her ability.  I wouldn’t even know where to begin.  That’s the craft.  And that’s her.  I don’t think I can do much better.  And if I can I don’t want anyone to tell me.  Have I mentioned she’s pretty as the stars at evening?

I made good on my vow and got through 2,000+ words.  The count is up to 8,386.  I couldn’t tell you the last time I wrote so much in a day.  What’s more, I finished off with a really decent scene, ended up surprising myself, tying things in where I didn’t know I could.  I love the work–now if I could just get paid for it.

Which brings me, sort’ve, to my last point of the evening.  I fired off a quick thanks to the editor of The Collagist for the encouragement, and he sent a reply right back.  I’ve had some dealings with editors before, and publishers, and agents.  And they do a good job of making me seem little even when they’re apologizing for half-year delays.  But Mr. Matt Bell has proven to be cut from a different cloth.  So, if I seemed halfhearted in my endorsement of the journal before, let me put that to bed.  Not only is The Collagist a tight piece of work, it’s also run by a damn nice fellow.  Can I cram any down home sayings into this paragraph?  No?  Then I guess we’re done.  Go take a look.

While I’ve got you on the horn, have I mentioned Circumlocution to you?  They’re in need of fiction submissions.  And I can vouch for one of the editors as being something like a saint.  I wouldn’t be sitting here today without his help.

Is this what the lotus does to you?  It’s not quite so soothing as I thought it would be.  Maybe I’m too far from the ocean.

So, I wake up this morning, yeah?  Had made plans to write 2,000 words today, since I’ve slacked the past few.  So, I’m trucking along, plow through a thousand in two hours.  I break for food and some real world stuff (starting off pretty great, too, like the writing) and as I finish eating I get an email.  Long awaited.  But not long for this business.  It’s from the editor of The Collagist.

The backstory to this is that I sent in my one (1 (single(only))) short story to The Collagist in late July.  To my surprise, I got an email back from the editor after little more than a week, during my first few days here in Riverside.  He asked me to resend the story, as I’d lopped some of it off in the sending.  A good sign, no?  So I resend.  And today–of all days, seriously, Sunday?– I get an email back rejecting it.  The good news is that he said there was good writing in it, and he looked forward to more of my work.  Which is honestly a pretty good silver lining.  But dammit, man.  You just had to wreck my momentum.  So, I blog.  I’m reclined on a couch.  Are you, collectively, putting pens to your lips, saying “hm”?

The wordcount now is 7,658.  In the whole of the text there are 114 commas.  I’m not about to go through 18 pages and see how many of those are contained in dialogue.  But.  That’s not so bad, yeah?  I’m nearly through my designated 2,000 words, and I’m gonna shoot for 3, but we’ll see how well that goes.  I might just sulk and watch The Venture Brothers.   Rejection’s part of this industry, and as far as skin goes mine’s pretty thick.  But the first issue of the journal came out and some decent-sized names are in it.  Would’ve gone a long way for things.  Back on the horse–truck.

I am mostly satisfied with the way ITLOTLE looks. I am entirely satisfied with how the acronym for my blog resembles Nahuatl, the name for a collection of Mayan languages. (Yolteotl means heart of God, for instance, and ixtli means face).

But!  I thought I’d ask what you folks would like to see.  Maybe a sidebar picture of me with some witty quote.  I’m thinking of putting in some virtual bookcase, or something to that effect.  How about music?  I know Lindsay wants an audio excerpt of me reading from my second novel.

In other news, here in brief is a list of some misadventures in Riverside thus far:

1. Befriended a Jehovah’s Witness outside the UCR library.  He had long, dirty fingernails and smelled like dill.  He mentioned that Jesus was in Hell.  I promised him I’d look into the JWs, and I will.  We say hi now when we see each other.
2. Neglected to get the power put in my name quick enough–had power shut off for two days.  Managed to save all of our food by buying ice off of a six year old.
3. Fought with the cable company, which surreptitiously gave me some package that I didn’t want that doubled my bill.  The short version is that I sound like a grizzled old axman when I want, and I was angry at the time.  Apologies abounded.
4. Got suckered into riding the RTA line with Gavin, my Viking-ly housemate, to the Galleria.  He thought he knew what he was doing, and instead wound us up at the end of the line, as far away from home as possible.  We spent four hours on or waiting for a bus, and about one hour at the mall and Barnes & Noble.  Never doing that again.

More to come, surely.

The day before I left one of my best friends came into town to see me off.  She gave me a small glass bottle, and I knew immediately what was in it.  Ohio earth, “with some from Chimayo sprinkled in for the hell of it.”  It was with her that I’d first gone west, first driven down Route 66.  By the time I made this journey, settling here in California, 70 to St. Louis, 55 to 44, 44 to 40, 40 to Amarillo, and on out– those roads had become familiar.

Sitting here now, on the couch in the living room.  Typing away at what feels like an ungodly hour.  I slept poorly last night and I’m on Central time, at best.  I’m subverting writer’s block by writing here.  5,504 words into the third novel.  A week and a day writing it.  It’s been a rough day and a bad night.

About the picture: This was at the end of our

second day traveling.  We’d made it only as far as Missouri the first night, and all through the day I was waiting on the land to turn into this mythic realm I’d been waiting for.  It turned into that very realm about an hour outside of Amarillo.  The land had long been flat but now there were minute valleys carved into the earth and it was ranchland as far as you could see.  We pulled off the side of the road for a minute so I could just look, take it in, and it wasn’t enough.  We took the next exit, one direction of which emptied immediately onto a dirt road.  Took that and stopped in the middle and I looked out at the sun going down and at a nearby windmill.  That night there was a lunar eclipse and I got up at 5:00am to see it from the hotel balcony.  During that trip I continued a trend– bring and read Blood Meridian wherever I went.  The start of that comes from a time that I ran away from home (at the age of 21) and found myself in Nebraska.  But that’s another tale entirely.  As if I haven’t gone off a narrative path already.

I’ve been avoiding certain subjects for weeks now.  Before leaving Ohio my uncle died of cancer.  I was there when he passed and up until that point I’d largely been sheltered from the death of loved ones.  Without him I would have no recognizable writing.  If I had gotten anything written it would have been something else entirely from what it is now.  He was  a Vietnam vet, a combat medic.  He beat his initial prognosis by over a year.  Time and again we were called in to begin our goodbyes and he’d turn around.  Between him and my father–a firefighter for 24 years– I’ve been convinced of a familial disposition toward immortality, now of course diluted to a more human damned toughness.  Besides that, I’ve never lived but 20 minutes from my family.  There is a lot I left behind.  A lot that the death of my uncle forged.  A lot that I’ll miss beyond that, even.  Rooted in place, in home, in Ohio.

Place counts a lot for me, and being here after everything has put me somewhere between a state of shock and detached sensitivity (yeah, figure that out.  I’m full of contradictions lately).  I love looking east and seeing the squat mountains, pale with haze in the mornings.  I love walking to the house in the evenings, looking at those same mountains.  The palm trees I’m ambivalent toward.  So different, so picturesque.  At night I always think it’s raining, and I’ve come to realize it’s the sound of the palms in the breeze.

I’d like to bring that bottle of dirt with me to a few other places.  Monument Valley, White Sands, to Nebraska.  Places that are important to me.  The largest portion will always be Ohio.  But hopefully by the time I leave here I can do so with a little of it with me.