Just go to sleep, I think. Nothing left for you tonight but a late start tomorrow.
It is 1:26 AM on my mother’s birthday, and it is another night in North Texas with temperatures below freezing. As it is February, that may not seem like remarkable, but it has been a cold new year so far by local standards. It was sleeting in Fort Worth earlier, and on Thursday it will snow for what must be the third time this year, with two other snow days trailing back into the late days of 2009.
I turned 30 last year, in the middle of what has become a year and a half without a day job. I have freelanced and with both regular contract work and the occasional freelance article, there have been few days when I haven’t worked during that time. I wrote my first travel essay about Obama’s inauguration on commission for my friend Harvey Kronberg a little over a year ago. I even had my first cover story, a happy milestone that was borne from a long month of writing and pitching and resolved with the publication of a feature in June’s Texas Observer.
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Got this back on the Rejection Express today. I think I’m just not getting the tone quite right, even though I think the lists I’m submitting are funny at an appropriately advanced level.
Failed Massively Multiplayer Roleplaying Games
By Josh Berthume
Rappers of the Caribbean – Errrbody on the Boat Gettin’ Scurrrvy
Bob Saget’s Entourage Online
The Aristocrats
Suge Knights of the Round Table
Leverquest
Reconstruction: Tetanus Adventures EX
Making Ends Meat
Oregon Trail 2.0
Air Quotes Marauder
12:57 PM me: happy birthday honger
Are you still in the savage lands?
12:58 PM Joe: No, back in NYC.
How goes it?
me: Compared to what?
12:59 PM Joe: I don’t know. Penury, disgrace?
me: Not bad at all.
I learned a new word while writing a small story for Texas Observer and then didn’t get the chance to use it in the story
1:00 PM Yonic: describing or alluding to the vaginal, the womb. Counterpoint to phallic.
Joe: Lousy word. No onomatopoeia.
me: hahaha
1:01 PM Joe: Only William Buckley could pull that word off.
And he’s dead.
me: That sounds like a challenge.
I got away with ’surfeit’.
1:02 PM Joe: Surfeit is a good word.
me: “Sudden surfeit of earthquakes,” no less
1:03 PM Joe: Thats no good. Too many S’s, for one. Plus it’s not like you can have an accumulation of earthquakes. They’re not like pies. You can have a surfeit of pies.
Spate of earthquakes? Series? String?
1:04 PM Surge?
1:06 PM me: I think, considering surfeit’s root and usage to mean overabundance, you can have a surfeit of earthquakes in some cases, like 5 over seven days centered on a town that had never had seismic activity at all prior to those
Joe: It’s wrong and you know it.
me: and since when is alliteration undesirable? I think it is a lost art
goddammit
Joe: You can’t have an overabundance of earthquakes. One is too much.
One earthquake is an overabundance.
1:07 PM me: But they are tiny adorable earthquakes!
Joe: And earthquakes don’t abound.
I don’t think you can have an overabundance of anything that isn’t a physical thing.
Can you have a surfeit of wind?
ANSWER ME THAT MOTHERFUCKER
1:08 PM me: The crab fishermen on the Bering Sea would say yes
Do you hate America now?
Joe: If they’re illiterate they would.
me: <— lolz
okay fine, I’ll change it
Joe: You went to college so you wouldn’t have to be a crab fisherman.
1:09 PM me: I dislike overabundances of wind
Joe: String of earthquakes works.
Use that.
me: no, I’m going to use spate
Joe: String of intensifying earthquakes? That “ten” sound in the middle really propels it.
me: so you know how emasculated I am
Joe: Feel that rhythm.
1:10 PMAnd there’s a hint of alliteration.
Don’t be emasculated. Just don’t use words incorrectly.
fucker
1:12 PM me: fair enough.
( I have rescued the first two paragraphs of this from something I wrote last summer, something begun and never finished. The rest is likewise not a real narrative but rather a collection of stuff, much of which is from a notebook I’ve been writing tiny bits in since last century. It is leather-bound and has some sort of Celtic design on the cover. I have always liked the book but the punchline is that I am a terrible diarist.)
It is hot these days. It is the kind of heat that immediately stupefies you, that displaces you from your regularly ordered senses, that makes you wonder where the time went or what that buzzing sound is in your ears. If this heat were sweetness, it would be cloying. If it were fear, we would all be nightmare-paralyzed from the waist down. If it were love, it would be suffocating.
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(I don’t normally write poetry that a) rhymes; and b) isn’t funny. Here is an example of a poem that breaks both rules.)
Frayed bends of pages
shuffle from between
the ends of ages:
a notebook, seen
through many years
of a young man’s life;
While you shifted gears
from girlfriend to wife
and watched me grasp
the bare, stripped ends
of a wish by the wires, clasped
and burning in my hands,
what you must know now.
After fifteen years in,
what you must know now.