November 28, 2010. Sunday.
Situation: Work all day today, come home after dark. No walk for Mway from me today. Last night Moi told me she found out whose McMansion has been sheriffed (she had read a few weeks ago that one was going up for sheriff’s sale). It turns out to be the house right next to us, the one that backs up to our driveway and unusable shed and is closest to our back yard. We seldom saw the people who had been living there. They never went in their back yard. Their kids’ outdoor play equipment spilled out no further than the driveway. And though their grass was kept trim, I only saw or heard them mow their lawn once or twice, if that. It’s too bad they have gone. They were almost as good neighbors as the soybean and corn that at one time were the only things around us.
3 comments:
I remind you -- deadline tomorrow. What do you expect from me today?
Thanks for the reminder. Yes, I’ll probably be working all day today and tonight, and undoubtedly into the wee hours of morning. You might throw me all your remaining pencils and set out another ream of paper (now’s not the time to be niggardly, stingy, cheap – however you want to put it). Other than that, just stay out of my hair (and don’t go telling me this is another of Moi’s pet phrases). Eventually, sometime before you make your post tomorrow morning, you should pull out all the papers of my first three chapters – they should be under and around the armchair of your office – and stack them somewhere here by the computer. Over time you can gather up the pages of my remaining chapters in the music room and set them here. One last thing I expect of you. Once the novel appears, the artist disappears, silent, indifferent, bent over nibbling the fleas in her thighs. That means we shouldn’t be making any comments back and forth as we’ve been doing all this time. Nothing should appear on the page but your journal followed by my novel – that is, your pedestrian scrawl as wallpaper against which shines the near blinding brilliance of my lapidary prose. MM.
I feel like I should say something – one more thing, as my present self. Say something more about my gig with Moi, clarify my feelings about Wade’s drumming, bring up-to-date the latest news about Jazz and the Boy, mention what we’ve finally decided about getting another car. Feels like these are my dying words – and my journal’s an overblown allegory of a wrecked respiratory and circulatory system.
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