Water in Tennessee

Took the family back to visit my Mom & my brother's family a few years ago. My bears had never met their counterparts, my brothers' grandkids that were the same age. Big culture shock. We took DVDs of the twins performances at The Whiskey here in LA. We all went out for a picnic in the Smokeys and me and the bears ended up floating down the river on inner tubes. My brother came after us in the car and brought us back. My Mom looked on. It was fun. I realized that my grandparents were our age now when we were little, and how much has changed for those of us that have escaped where we came from. I'm not ready to be grandpa and sit on my front stoop and rock. I'm going backpacking tomorrow morning early. We walking along the north rim of Yosemite Valley.

I wanted to put up the video of my Bear's metal band, but I couldn't find it. You'll have to wait and settle for this See you in a week

The Water of West Texas

This is a painting by Frank Reaugh of a west Texas river. In the poem that follows, I did walk down to this river from the highway and felt the way I managed to write it. The water was surprisingly cold for a hot August day.
1976, boy- to be that young again.

STRANDED You want to know why I balk At west Texas; at working the rigs There another summer? You ever been stranded On the white shoulder Of a little highway, of a little town, And chatted with the boys Who’ve driven out from their cruising To discover where you’re going? You ever spent the night Rolled in the wet grass below And slept late because of the silence? You forget to think With the itch to go And you take a ride With a red-bearded rancher Who’s turning off in five miles. The beer he offered for breakfast Makes you steam like the dew rising Before the sun. Across the high dry concrete And the dust settling after, There was a brook running so Shallow and clear, it was ice in the sand. The water falling from your fingers Could be her cold tresses in the shower; The smooth sand, her hip beneath the sheet. But there was no need to recall her, I could soothe my throbbing scalp And fill my canteen In the frozen moment Where a breeze might seem like a wild desire Only dreamt of. You’ve never waited all day For the good ride, And when it finally comes (A moving van, pushing ninety, Through the rolling hills at dusk) You’ve not been made to explain To the driver, younger than yourself, Why you’ve left her. It couldn’t be the beer every evening, The long crying spells, Or that your friends wouldn’t come around Any more, But what could you say to a stranger? One that tells you, you’re wrong? You could get out at the next stop. Then alone, Wish to go back to where the water runs Like ice in your veins, For now you’ve recalled her And you must bow your head And hold out a thumb to get away from there.

Waters of the Delta

This is a painting from the 19th Century by William Henry Buck of the bayou country. I was wanting a vacation from the bookstore where I worked, but had no money and no car and was interested in someplace that I could go as a sort of a retreat to work on my book without interruptions. Cary, my boss, found a cabin out in the bayou that a friend owned that was miles from the nearest town, no TV, radio, no indoor plumbing and no cost. So I went for a week. Cary even drove me out and came to pick me up. The cabin was beside a stream where I bathed and washed my dishes. I wrote and wrote. There was mosquito netting and an outhouse that you had to make a mad dash for in the night so the bugs wouldn't catch you. I did hitchhike into the little town nearby one afternoon and had a beer in a bar and then hitchhiked back out- just because I was getting lonely. The guy that picked me up going in talked and talked and his Cajun was so thick I didn't understand a thing he said. He didn't seem to mind. The water in the little stream was wonderful during the day.

Avery Island is to the south of New Orleans, they make Tabasco Sauce there and they have a park and a bird sanctuary. You can't swim there because the alligators are abundant. I went with a couple I knew pretty well. The husband wanted to start a writer's commune and have us all live together and work on each others stuff and collaborate on things. It sounded intriguing at the time.

This is the beach over in Biloxi Miss. The couple and I went there too. All I remember was blowing sand, muggy weather and food sort of grainy from the beach. I think the couple was having martial meltdown and within the year they were separated. I tried to put it into a story, but it didn't go very far.

Waters of Indiana

Griffy Lake, in between town and where I used to live as a teenager north of Bloomington. We'd ride our dirt bikes around here. We used to buy Boones Farm Wine and come down to hang out and swim. It was illegal to swim in here in 1968. The locals would come to hopefully find naked coeds from the university out here in the spring skinny-dipping. They really did. A lot of us did back then.

Starve Hallow Lake, one of the places we would go camping before my parents divorced. I tried to walk around this lake and had to be rescued by a couple fishermen.

Lake Lemon, named after the mayor that got it built.

The Dunes up at Lake Michigan. My brother and I spend days out here body surfing and turning blue cause the water was so cold.

Swimming Part 2

This is the upper Kern River here in California. It was on a stretch like this that I watched a rattlesnake slide off into the water, raise its head to face up stream and whip its rear end like it was dancing and it sailed across the river like it had been doing just that for its entire life. It crossed and climbed out a little further down on the other side. You haven't lived until you've slipped your own feet and tail end into this water after a six mile hike with full pack.

Places I've Swimmed

This is what a limestone quarry in Southern Indiana looks like on a summer day. The water is always cold. This was at least twenty feet deep. There were cars on the bottom some said. The folklore was that a kid jumped in, came up screaming "Barbed Wire!" and then disappeared and when they recovered the body he was covered in snakebites. This was actually a cool place to come in the summertime in a hot August. Or a cool place to come at midnight after working a shift at the A & W in the greasy kitchen.

MOTORCYCLE RIDE TO THE QUARRY There’s a ride, they say, that takes A boy from the booths of red vinyl, And the girls in their white blouses, Away from the spatula scraped once more across the grill, And all the paper hats soaked gray with sweat. A ride in the summer night sky, Four miles along the two-lane To a turn off which weaves Through the ruins of a city yet to be: Great stones sliced and yanked and left On the rims of the black quarries. There were others before him, And whether he knows them or not, He’ll find them in the lantern’s glare with the bottle: The liquid clear and pure which catches The methane light. He dives And the searing glow in throat and belly Is pulled inside out by the pool Kept like ice in the jawbone of stone. He is a white angel in the dark mire, The pieces of the acrobat fallen, Or just a clean child swimming skyward. Breaking before where the remaining tower Of a forgotten crane reaches into the sea of stars, He is the lost child dizzy with dreams.

Philip Leslie Hale

Found this today looking for a new monitor background. I've decided to stare at it for the next month or two.
Isn't the modern world a cool place sometimes.

http://books.google.com/books?id=4ytXAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Philip+Leslie+Hale&source=bl&ots=aM495EaH3C&sig=dEe1Q25RUcX5RyGor2-X1OboN2o&hl=en&ei=DxhOTJKZMYb2tgPumM3VDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CDwQ6AEwCDgU#v=twopage&q&f=false

He wrote a book on Vermeer and ended up trying to paint like him. I'd imagine if one wanted to learn more about Vermeer, this would be a good place to start.

Catching up on my Reading

Well, it was a decently written book until the end. Distraught, our heroine gets drenched in a downpour and immediately dies of pneumonia. This is after we find out the real truth about her family background and she really isn't the illegitimate half-sister of the guy that has fallen in love with her and there is no longer anything to prevent them from consummating their love except that it might appear to society that it is incest. Stupid resolution, stupid unrealistic 19th century romantic potboiler. I was hoping for more. I started the Jeannette Gilder novel right away, and it's using her brother as the character so she can write about her desire to chase actresses. Should be good stuff.

"We first met Jeannette Gilder. She was then a young newspaper woman and wore semi-masculine dress,--, a melon hat, a high collar, a cravat, and a tailor-made coat, but under those manly garments was hidden an essentially womanly nature and a heart full of sympathy and kindness. She always seemed to me a wonderful combination of talent, work, enthusiasm, abnegation, and serenity. She possessed a wonderful recuperative power; after toiling almost to exhaustion, she would enjoy, in her moments of leisure, all the fun and pleasure of life with the buoyancy of a little girl. We met often in the seventies, and then we drifted away from each other, but neither space nor time count with her, for no matter how many years have elapsed since our last meeting, she always remains the same, Sempre la stessa... We were also welcomed by her brother, Richard W. Gilder. We spent many delightful hours in his house on Fifteenth Street, called the Studio, because the living room was arranged as an artist's atelier for his charming and gifted wife, Madame Helena de Kay Gilder, who painted there her portraits and sketches from life. I shall always remember the glorious evening spent in that artistic abode, where all that could be found best in art gathered around the madonna's tea table. In that house Clara Louise Kellogg sang, Salvini recited, Joe Jefferson was a frequent guest on his visits to New York. Poets, artists, sculptors, as well as people of the highest social position, found respite from the daily humdrum in that atmosphere of refinement. Amoung others, we met Clara Louise Kellogg, John La Farge, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and also Walt Whitman. I shall not easily forget the impression the latter made on me."
from "Memories and Impressions" by Helena Modjeska, big actress of the time.

BS from my past

My very short career in the Boy Scouts as a kid was very fond memories of racing one of these. You would go out camping in a tent in the snow and then the next day there would be several of these sleds available and your patrol (acting as driver and dogs) would race the other patrols for the best time over a track.

Kids in the snow got this, it didn't bother us. I delivered newspapers through 4 foot high snowdrifts.
Sadly, my career in the Scouts ended quickly. The Troop disbanded, because none of the fathers would volunteer to help with anything. Mine included. My father's entire assistance to my childhood could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Not me. Except for a year or so when I was working two jobs, I've seen it all. There's something to be said for being a Southern California Scout.

Been out to Catalina Island three times for summer Scouting. Got to snorkel on deserted beaches, go for a mile swim in life jacket and snorkel gear through a jungle of seaweed to visit partially submerged caves, woke up to being sniffed by buffaloes, got to try scuba. (Got to throw up off the side of the canoe on the back side of the island- my claim to fame: I was the last one)

Getting Ready

We're going here for a week. I'm the organizer. I'm the guy that gets the food together, gets the permits and gets us all there. Menu should be a little easier this year- only six going. No prima donnas. No folks that can't carry their own weight. Hope we don't fall in.

Things We Redeem

Back in Grade School, there was a year in which me and a friend of mine were bat boys for the Indiana University Baseball Team. The playing field was across the road from his house, and only about six or seven from my house. They would give us for free all of their cracked bats and we would wrap wire around them and then tape and they were good. We played a lot of sandlot baseball in the summer. I could hit. I couldn't do anything else and never got on Little League because I threw lousy. During the year when one of my bears played Little League and we would go to the batting cages, I could still knock them out. Anyhow, those were the best bats I ever owned.
Just a few years ago, when my little sister died, I was talking to a guy at her service and he knew our home town and had played baseball for IU. We figured out that I must have ran after his bat a few times.
Did he remember the kid that was promoted to put up the scores on the manual scoreboard out at the end of the field and how he got mixed up and they had to send a runner out to get the score fixed in the middle of the game? He did. That was the last time I got that job.

Things We Had

The very last collection of toy soldiers I had were the combined remains of all the sets I got and all the sets my older brothers got. I had a little group which were all different, each from a different war and each a different color. I named them all individually and this was the last patrol. We trail blazed. I had heard the story of Braddock's march into the wilderness with his army in the French-Indian Wars and the last patrol and I got our wagons and spend the whole afternoon tearing out the grass to make a road across our back yard. One of them was Daniel Boone, a frontiersman. One was a Civil War Bugler named Johnny. There were a couple of WWII types, one with a bazooka I think. They were time travelers. We had this in our basement:

left over from the grocery store. The top screwed off so the patrol could get aboard and go to other planets. One of the patrol got trapped in the gum ball dispenser shoot and died a horrible death.

I can remember playing out little dramas in the bathroom with the toothpaste tube and aftershave bottles and mouthwash etc as sort-of people and animals. Toothpaste made a great alligator in the tub.

I graduated to making up comic book heroes with a friend of mine and we would draw them and act out stories on my grandmother's front porch. Spiderman had nothing on us.

I guess I've always had my imaginary friends

Caught In The Act Of Singing

What We Keep

Our poor children inherit our vices. I was home for five years and had a business going where I bought paperback books from thrift stores and garage sales and sold them mail order to a people who subscribed to my used paperback book of the month club. It was a good business plan and I broke even the first year, but didn't have any more capital to move forward. At one point I had stacks and stacks of paperback books in my studio. To get them I had to hit the thrift stores regular. My littlest was still home and then home half a day from kindergarten. She didn't approve of me spending a half hour a stop in the afternoon. I discovered I could bribe her. Stuffed animals in thrift stores were 25 cents. So she got to choose one for each stop. This was what her bedroom looked like after a year. She was a connoisseur. She had them all cataloged and named. She wrote a poem later about being mad and hiding in her bed behind her wall of stuffed animals. She still has some, but said she's not taking one to to college. I will forever remember that she brought two of them to me at the counter, one of them was filthy, with bad black grease stains on it and I didn't want to spend 25 cents on it and she cried and the guy at the corner gave it to her for free. It had a turn in the spa (the washing machine and came out clean- I was greatly surprised) I have not quite so many horses in my collection and the thousands of paperback boxes are gine, but I have easily this many books.

Things We Collect

This is a plaster copy of a Ancient Greek Children's Toy Horse. It was a birthday present in San Francisco in 1980 or so. We were out walking about with the stroller and just looking (long ago. I had read about Freud's prediction for desk ornaments in the form of icons of ancient sculpture or iconic archetypes -this is a Jung joke- and that impressed me as cool for some reason.) So this was my first. You can find photos of Freud's desk out there, if anyone is interested. Ir sat on my desk in San Francisco along with my live cat named Herbie (Herbert Gold- SF Writer- wrote "The Man Who Was Not With It" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Gold - as good as anything the Nelson Algren wrote). The horse came to Arizona along with the cat, and then to LA. I lost Herbie in west LA, but this sat on my desk through a divorce and sat alone on in Oakwood. It sat on my desk in Venice and the twins broke it maybe three or four times and I glued it back together and painted its cracks with nail polish. It has become part of a horse collection based on it's size. A friend who became aware of the horse sent me a little bronze horse from Tennessee, and while it remains on important display, it was never comparable size and never quite got the same status. Then in the early 90s after the twins were born and we were earning of money, I discovered this:

This is a Matisse horse. The photo does not do it justice. He sculpted for a little while. The sculptures are amazing. It was expensive at the time, a hundred or so. He sits on my desk now. The rest of the horses are on  the fireplace mantel, except one other that sits out in my studio which was made in India out of scrap metal.
I painted horses in Utah for a short time because I discovered that all of our friends loved having their mounts depicted in oil.

My Secret Job

I've had reoccurring dreams over the years of a job that I had, that I've forgotten that I had and then I go to the office (in my dreams) and there's a desk for me and work waiting for me. The Office is somewhere downtown LA in a large building, but its not quite like the Bonaventure Hotel (where I did work once) but in a large building nearby there that reminds one of a bank building. My boss is a lady that I worked for at VOA and who I followed to CSLA, but she is never in the dream. Last night there was a sign on the computer sitting on my desk that said "Missing." I made myself at home and started to try to figure out what I was supposed to be doing. People around me all acted as if I belonged there, but no one spoke to me. It looked like the office staff had used my desk for a birthday party -there was remains of cake crumbs and glitter. It was a little scary, because I wasn't sure of what I was supposed to be doing.

It must be similar to that dream everyone has had about a test that they forgot to study for.

It's nice to know that I will always have a job to go to.

Then again, perhaps these are dreams of the afterlife.

Machado De Assis

Reading "Helena" right now. Nice little book. Written/ published in 1876 - De Assis is Brazilian. Story of a son of a well to do family meeting his illegitimate half-sister upon his father's death. He and his aunt take her in and treat her as family- the only problem is that she and her half brother fall in love with each other. Easy read.
http://books.google.com/books?id=kZ0YZH8ddzAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=helena+machado+de+assis&source=bl&ots=qiRuAaAOKX&sig=IIrQmiFsrgQke0FDSAmxmgdFGhM&hl=en&ei=Z1M_TN7dOpOCsQPb4bj2CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEAQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Long link, but it will let you look at the book.

The Fishbowl Tapes

I've written about the studio apartment on Louisiana Avenue in Nawlins that was just all windows and had two big walk through windows out to the front porch. (It wasn't as fancy as the above, but if you imagine the two big walk through windows to the right, you get the idea) I had some boards and bricks and the Bookstore gave me free books every week. I had a big desk built from a door and some add-on legs and a chair that wasn't tall enough so I stacked the seat with a layer of books and put a pillow on top of that. I had a thick white carpet that slept on. I had picked a little turntable console somewhere for cheap and was buying LPs second hand. I found Judy Mayhan and Tom T. Hall albums and I almost forgot BB King.
These were the songs played before I would sit and write. (1975ish or so) I was all over the map as usual

Mysterious Frame Breakings

It's not as bad as this. I fix things. When I started at the new job, there were some pictures in the office hallways that were broken or had the glass cracked. I had them fixed. There was a phone list in a plastic sheet protector taped to the wall above the elevator lobby phone. I asked our facilities department to put up something that looked better. I waited a month and they never did anything. I bought a frame, redid the list and hung it up instead of the plastic sheet protector. A couple of weeks went by and I come in the morning to find it laying on the floor broken. I bought another one, in a week it was broken. I bought a real cheap plastic one, thinking that if they knock it off, it wouldn't break, but they managed to break it. I left that one on my waste basket with a yellow post-it note asking them not to break any more of them. The next morning I came in and found that they had laid it aside with the note intact and emptied my wastebasket. I put up another one. They broke it again. The next one, I wired it to the hook so it could not be knocked off the hook. Today I found it hanging there barely- the hook had been almost completely ripped off, one little piece was holding it there. This one wasn't broken at least. The boss and the guys were on their way out to lunch and noticed and I had to explain my war against the frame breakers of the world.

Tomorrow I am buying a giant railroad spike and hammering it into the wall there and then welding a stainless steel frame made with rivets and bulletproof glass on to it. And a big sign saying, if you touch this you die!

The Day Of The Dead Band

Well, I got a call tonight and our mandolin player is dropping out. The piano player can come practice, but she can't perform with us. The ukulele player I recruited can't make it. The three that were originally in the group have all faded. The new banjo guy can, so we carry on, to see what we come up with. The meetup group in Orange County have a few retired folk in it, so maybe I recruit from there. Offered my daughter money, if she would fill in on piano for us, she said sure.

Esotera

Just got it today. Jeannette was the sister in law of woman I'm still researching. Jeannette was a gay journalist and editor in NYC, living near her in-laws. Already read "The Autobiography of a Tom-Boy" and "The Tom-Boy at Work" which were non-fiction accounts of her life and some about her family. She was a drama critic which brought a lot of actresses into the Gilders' circle, since Jeannette was perpetually emotionally worked up by these women.

Me thinks she probably smiled and laughed more than this picture shows. The other two books were funny and entertaining. 

What is very cool is the publisher: http://www.kessinger.net/ Kessinger Publishing. They scan old books and set them up on print-on-demand so strange people like me can find things that can't be found. The first one I got was a autobiography of the British Consel in Samoa around the 1880s-1890s which had some good stuff in it for my Joe Strong book.

So dream on, ye obscure toilers,

5:30 AM

It's Saturday morning. The dog is howling at me because she wants go out and get the paper and then eat her treat while I have coffee. She wants to know why I'm sitting here. This is a wonderful song that sneaks up on you and then never leaves. The lady singing, wrote it.

Dog Advice

I have a Bear Child that is the grace of Humanity. He asked, Well, What do think of professionals that work 60 hour weeks? (His boss was being paid well, but he discovered he was working his ass off.) I explained that I've done both. I worked 60 hour weeks because I had to, and didn't love it. I have worked my  fair share and that was ok. I've worked 60 hour weeks at the real world job, because I was into it and that was fine. (But the real truth is: I've been working 80 hour weeks my whole life: I work and then come home and write novels and paint and now, play the banjo. I write a blog, I take pictures, I ride my bike, I do Yoga, I read every chance I get. I do home repair. I take children wherever they want to go. I wander LA and haunt thrift stores looking for forgotten treasures. I communicate to my friends. I try to sell my latest finished project to publishers and agents. And I look for down time (believe it or not) - hours in front of the TV- futzing on the computer.

I've been blessed with a wonderful wife- and a long long time of realizing that most folks don't do this.

I completely understand dogs. Mine and I know what we need to do.

Having Written About It Once- The Last of the Dark Side

http://www.amazon.com/Knows-You-No-Other-Name/dp/0595475965

All of the physical and emotional stuff in the book is true until the last third of the book. I will probably not try to write about it again,

Finding Darth Vader in the Corn

So in August, two years later, after going to IU and getting married and going to Utah State and getting divorced and coming back to Bloomington and dropping out of school, I decided to go see him. I must have had his address. I had no car. The Studebaker I had driven back from Utah had died upon arrival and I sold it to a guy who wanted it for parts. I was trying to save some money, because I wanted to travel, so I didn't have transportation. So I hitchhiked over and was wandering toward his address in downtown Paris, Illinois when he spotted me and picked me up. He took me to his apartment and introduced me to his new wife. We had dinner. He took me over to visit my Great Grandmother and my Great Aunt who were living in town in an old house. My Great Grandmother was 97 and bedridden and partially deaf and partially blind. The Aunt (who was my Grandfather's sister) had taken care of her mother her whole life and never married and never worked. They hired folks to sharecrop their half of the family land- that was enough to live on I guess.

The conversation was about how my dead grandmother (my father's mother) was a dope head and the ruin of my grandfather- an interesting perception. The said grandfather was a drunk and suicidal off and on throughout his life.

Anyway, I spent the night with them rather than at my father's. The nightmares were relentless and non-stop most of the night. He was coming up the stairs, he was in the room with the gun drawn. He shot and killed me and I was dead.

In the morning, he came and got me and we went to breakfast and I got to see the old Glen I knew from my childhood. He sat at the window watching his car, he tried to sell a cemetery plot (is breakfast a good time to approach people about their final resting place?) and didn't really talk to anyone.

Then he was going to drive me back over, since I had to be back at work the next day. On the way back, we really talked. He told me about the people that had been following him for years and he could show me the windshield with the bullet hole that he had kept for proof. And how they were watching him all the time, because after all he had been Army Intelligence and there are some secrets that never go away. And how it was important to check into people's backgrounds because the spies might have got to them the way they had gotten to my mother and he knew for years that they were paying her to try to kill him and he had to be on his toes all the time and my older brother who fell from the tree had been pushed and he was still trying to find the man that had climbed up there and killed his oldest. And what was the name of the girl I was seeing again and where were her family? I started making up fake names at this point.

He was convinced the his father hadn't really set his own body shop on fire and had tried to blow his own brains out. It was those people that had been after him. And of course they finally got him fired from Eli Lilly.

On and on. I just listened in those days and nodded my head. People would tell me amazing things. Generally, I wasn't very judgmental. He let me out at my boarding house. And he promised to come over to see me and wanted me to come visit again.

My brother, who was older and married with a couple of kids, had already told him not to come around any more, he didn't want him around his kids. My sister refused to see him.

I didn't see him again until San Francisco. I ran into a friend from the hometown on Bourbon Street out of the blue, and he said ole Glen showed up looking for me and was told I had left town. He looked disappointed I was told.

How it started as a semi-adult (more of the dark side)

I was graduating from High School. Did the gown and the hat and the whole thing. I was accepted to Indiana University for the fall. Had an older girl friend. My mom and her new husband were there in the audience and came to take pictures and congratulate me. The girl friend couldn't come for some reason. Ole Glen appears. I had not seen him since I was 12. No communication, no letters, no cards, no money, no presents, ziltch. The step father fades immediately and my mom goes with him. They left me there with him. I tried to be civilized. He gave me a present and then left. Something like the above was in the box. They used to sell these kind of things at roadside tourist gift shops, so I'm sure he picked it up on the way over in the car from Paris, Illinois.

It was ugly. So I spent an entire afternoon in my boarding house room (I had moved out of the house at the beginning of my Senior year, because I had a job and could pay rent and wanted to sleep with the girl friend when I wanted to)  painting it with oil paint, melting the wax down from the candle and dripping it all over the thing and then painting it it again. It ended up looking like a LSD bad dream. I'm still not sure, but I think I was trying to destroy it by recreating it as bad art. The girl friend told me I was sick. I finally threw the fucking thing in the trash.

Every time ole Glen had showed up in my life, from 12 until he died, I had these incredibly bad nightmares about being killed by him. This time was no different.

So I didn't see him again until I hitchhiked over to see him a couple of years later. It was time to face my demons. I was a man. - at 20. I was also six inches taller than he was.

I was also very aware that my mom had to go get a lien on his salary to get him to pay child support for the last several years, so he was not interested in helping me and mine in any monetary way.

But he gives me a candle.

Giving away the cemetary

Paris Illinois main drag. The place smelled like popcorn because of the cereal factory. Anyway, we sold everything off, paid off everything and what was left was this cemetery. I found the three big cemetery chains in the state and offered it to them. They didn't want it. I offered it a couple of the churches in town. There was a Mortuary owner that wanted his church to take and he would run it for them, but the church backed out. I talked to the town newspaper (I used to read it as kid, my father had subscribed when he decided he wanted Uncle Alec to leave everything to him. It came by mail- I was the only one that read it.}

and they ran an article on their front page, telling everyone we wanted to donate the cemetery to some kind of non-profit. The only call I got was from a clown (a real professional clown) who did anti-drug shows for Illinois schools and had a retarded son that he thought keeping up the grounds was something that he could do as a livelihood. The trouble was his clown program wasn't set up a non-profit, so we couldn't get any tax benefit from just giving to him. He didn't want to pay us for it. 

We were going through the books with the State so they knew everything was up to stuff. They came back and said an audit would have be performed and, oh by the way, it was illegal to run the cemetery from California and the records couldn't leave the state. We wrote an official letter to the State of Illinois, deserting the cemetery. I shipped all the records back to a trustee that had been appointed to handle it. 

I discovered we could claim the value of it as a business loss, a max of 3K a year until the entire amount was used up. I did my share every year until my third was used up. Then a couple of years later I found out that my brother and sister never used it and neglected to tell me so I could use it. 

I shoulda given it to the clown.

What I did for a year (more dark side)

I was writing a novel at the time of my father's death all about the nightmare part of when I was 12-13 in my hometown just before my parents separated. Plug for book: www.murdernovel.com
When he died, the force of the writing process sort of fizzled and I stopped short of finishing the first draft by only twenty pages or so. It sat for the next five years. I saw the estate and a way to get us some money. The real problem of the estate was the thing represented above. (This is not the real map of the cemetery, but this gives you the idea) I had a similar map on the wall of my studio for a year. I had the lawyer in Illinois ship me all of the records. Glen's records were a mess, notes written on restaurant napkins, receipts which might have been real or not. He sold markers and burial vaults he didn't have. It was unclear who owned what plots.  In analysis, his entire set-up was losing $10,000 a year- had been for at least 5 years. The smell of what he was doing was there- but I had to verify and document it. I reconciled the cemetery, it took about a year. I entered into a contract with a marker  and vault company to provide them when we needed them. The greasy business partner did the opening and closing of the graves and kept the grounds up and we paid him a salary.
It became very clear very quickly that this was serious concern to the families that owned plots there. All these little old ladies were expecting to join their husbands there. I took care of them. Glen had removed a marker because one widow wasn't paying her fees. It amounted to about $150.00. We forgave the debt and put the marker back on her husband's grave. You are expected to put a percentage of the plot sale value into a trust account for perpetual care. It's the law. (State by state will differ, but they all have similar laws) Ole Glen was stealing from that account. When I finished, it was very clear that the fund was short $50,000.00, exactly what he was short the last five years.

When we sold the farm land, we put that 50K back into that account. When we finally gave up the cemetery to the Illinois, we gave all that to them along with my year's worth of reconciliation, in hard copy and computer data. 

Toward the end, the sleazy business partner called and told me that folks were getting concerned that there was no marker on Glen's grave. I told him, I was planning to order it when I finished the reconciliation. I wanted to make sure we had the money to pay for it. You could have heard a pin drop. I told him it would be there next week. And I did order it.

I've said several times to those close to me that this was my act of erasing my father from the face of the earth.  
The earth swallows its mistakes.

God save us, if our children feel this way.

The Estate

Well, we spent a week there. It was a mess. An apartment building that was taking in less money than its mortgage, a deserted house in town that my Great grandmother and Great Aunt had lived in but had sat empty and closed up for years. A ten-acre plot out in the middle of nowhere that Glen had held on to because he had tried to drill a crooked well there into someone else's oil field under the nearby property. A privately run cemetery, a big piece of very good farm land that was being share-cropped. A lot of unrecorded stuff. Property that he had owned that was not his any more. The big house in town that was part of the trust that my Uncle Alec had owned was gone, and the land was sold and a few cents were put into a bank account as part of the trust. Glen was a frigging idiot. He always thought he was smarter than the rest of the world. I took this opportunity to find out the truth. The records were all there. The story was that he had quit school to enlist during the war. The truth was that he flunked out, and then enlisted in the army, tried for Army Intelligence, flunked that and was mustered out for weak eardrums and he re-enlisted for a little tour with the Air Force and the war ended before he actually went anywhere or did anything. He went to work for Eli Lilly and was there into his forties when Uncle Alec died. To this day I do not know what he did there for 20 years. He was probably a bean counter or a shipping guy. Don't know. I should ask my mother.

Anyway, he could have sold off the trust and we would have gotten the trust and found nothing in it. Like duh. I could've been a better criminal than my old man who thought he was the con man of all time. (Come to think of it, I probably have been.) I'm basically an honest sort- want to do the right thing, but when those around you are miserable people, who gives a fuck if you do the right thing.

I, and my god-fearing brother, who I love like the dickens, did the right thing in Paris Illinois.

This is an literary agent

Just had a revelation. This is your run of the mill literary agent. It's an absurdity, trying to sell to the salesman.
Can't be done.

And Then He Died (More Dark Side)

My father that is. My brother was named executor in the will. I was not mentioned (He never really believed I was his son anyway- even though I'm the one that looks like him the most). I was tiling my front porch on our little house in Venice (with blue grout). I decided I had to go- I didn't think my brother could figure out the estate and I didn't trust him to do it right. Good thing too, he would have just handed the whole thing over to a lawyer and we would have gotten really screwed as opposed to a little screwed. (If I thought he would read this, I wouldn't have written it here) So we went. The ex son-in-law of the woman he killed, turned out to be our share cropper and was close and believed everything ole Dad told him. The ex-wife daughter of the dead woman hated Dad and was surprised when we invited her over to take anything she wanted of her mother's from the apartment.

I missed the funeral thankfully because I woulda whipped it out and peed on the mound in front of everyone.
There was a very greasy guy that was ole Dad's sort of business partner and we set him up doing the grounds work on the cemetery we inherited as part of the estate. And there was a friendly old guy who was nice and had lots of gossip to share 

The old man told me where Dad (I can't really use that word in regards to him- his name was Glen) Glen probably buried his stash of drugs and pharmacy stuff he ripped off from Eli Lilly over the 20 years he worked for them. I don't know if he was using or not, or just had weird fantasies connected with the stolen drugs. When we were kids he was trying to invent a wonder drug and was selling the stuff to others for money.

The story was that Glen and his wife had a fight and she took her jewelry box and left, in her nightgown, and was found later murdered in a corn field. Her jewelry box was missing. The sleaze ball lawyer we talked to that he hired for defense said the woman probably had it coming and that Glen had brought him evidence -either the murder weapon or the jewelry box- and then took it away again.

The drugs were buried out behind the cemetery, the friendly old man told us. I'm sure the evidence is buried there too.

Another Odd Rejection

 She has friends, though I'm not in that number.

(I'm polite these days- she at least didn't reject it on the basis of my postmark)

(Hmm, USC.Edu  might not be working for me)

Ms. Posner,

I didn't find any instructions about how you wanted queries presented. I assumed the short query letter was acceptable and that, if you were interested, you would ask for more and an outline. The link was included and intended as a convenience. I was rejected a few months ago because the book 'might be boring.' I'll add you to that pile. The journal structure is similar to Dracula's, which I used as a model.

Dan McNay

Marcy Posner wrote:

Dear Dan,

Thank you for your query. Unfortunately I just don’t love stories told in journal entries. Also your job is to make me want to read this. Asking me to go to your website instead of providing the reading material in your email does not seem the best way to accomplish your task. Others will I am sure feel differently and I wish you the best of luck with this,

Marcy Posner

From: Dan McNay [mailto:mcnay@mosis.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 7:53 PM
To: marcy@foliolit.com
Subject: Query for my novel "The Truth About Treasure Island"

Dear Ms. Posner,

I've become aware you from the ads for the upcoming Historical Fiction Conference. Your experience and background are quite impressive. I'd like to submit my query for your consideration. The novel is completed and a year of workshops with it has made me sure its a good read. A recent comment from a professional editor that I know, was that she fell in love with my Joe Strong.

Thanks for your time

Query for “The Truth About Treasure Island” by Dan McNay

The First and Last Christmas Card Ever

I had gotten involved with a group of people that were interested in starting an Arts Magazine in West LA and we were trying to put it together, we had editors and writers and photographers and a marketing guy and some money and some advertisers. I wrote my father a short letter in '85, offering to sell him my share of the trust. I got the only Christmas Card I ever received from him at Christmas with a little scribbled note in it, that "the interest rates are too high and property values were too low" - nothing else- not even a signature.

July 1st and all is quite the usual

I think I liked the rejection from the mail clerk at William Morris UK better. This is where they are supposed to be. It looks about the same at the rejection slip. I don't think anybody's home. From the looks of their latest promo for the author of Carpool Diem, me thinks they just cash checks here. Is that the cash cab I see?