Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

Page After Page by Heather Sellers. A writer’s guide.

How do writers write no matter what? Even Stephen writes no matter what, and didn’t he get smashed by a car a few years ago?

Now I have to go and clean stuff up and haul things around. The moving scene. Gotta sell now or we’ll lose the equity. The fedpigs are tweaking interest rates and soon no ordinary person will get qualified. Gotta sell now and move into the unknown. I love this house. Oh well. Don’t get to play Donna Reed any more for awhile.

Listening to Pandora. My stations are all electronica except one. So far they are Paul Van Dyk, Paul Okenfold, Hybrid, and Ulrich Schnauss. Guess I sort of like Der Gerrrmans and the Brits.

Sites

Also fooling around on Stumble!, specifically writers’ sites, but sort of disapointed today. The best site I found today was a blog post called Life After Net Neutrality. It’s worth a read because it suggests that the Internet will only get stronger using Mesh networking and the telcos will be shooting themselves in the foot.

Books

Yesterday I bought yet another writer’s guidebook. My others are all packed away with the idea that I’m supposed to be moving. But everything is in limbo until we sell this house (which, by the way, I still love). Whenever I go to B&N I zoom right to the writer reference section to see what’s new. I recognize about half of the titles as being on my own shelf. But I rarely come away empty handed. This time I bought Page After Page by Heather Sellers. I like those near-pocket-size hardcovers written by colorful chics with arty covers. This book has artwork on the borders of every page and a ton of ideas on how to get past my own resistance.

Films

Then for nostalgia’s sake, I finally searched two old black and white European films I fell in love with years ago, then lost track of them. One is called The Cow and I (or The Cow and the Prisoner) about a Frenchman who escapes Germany during WWII by leading a cow through the countryside. The other is called Girl with a Suitcase with Claudia Cardinale. There is something so sexy-sweet-sad about that film. I have a weakness for subtitled films.

So, I’ve been sort of insanely wasting time today. Guess I’d better go do some writing exercises and look busy for a change.

“Nope. Belongs to someone who just boarded a plane. I think he forgot them.” And not by accident after all, I guessed.

“Halliburton. This is expensive grip. No identification tags,” he said as he circled the cart. I was about to repeat that it wasn’t mine when several more guards appeared and surrounded us. Even more blocked off the area. People stopped to gape. They knew something scary was happening, and they wanted to see.

“Everyone, move along now, through the front entrance and exit the terminal,” they commanded, sweeping their arms as if they herded a flock of geese. I wanted to go with the geese, but as soon as I took a step forward, two guards blocked my way.

Another one of those days when I wish I’d have stayed in bed another few minutes, next to Alana, sweet, beautiful Alana with the latte skin and hypnotic white overbite, fingers tangled in her sunbleached kinky hair while she slept. Those green agate eyes…Damn. I should have lingered on the bed and watch her sleep, then served her kiwi and cottage cheese on toast when she woke up. Sleepy, naked Alana wrapped in jasmine incense and sunset’s glow. If I’d have only stayed a little longer…

“Please come with us,” one of the guards said. He had a large mole on his neck.

My head felt like a pan of scrambled eggs.I was the stooge who didn’t leave the airport and left the luggage with the waiter guy. I had to remember the response to police harassment I’d read about on the Internet. The part about your rights. Okay…

If you are stopped by the police, ask them why. If they do not have a good reason for stopping you, or if you find yourself chatting for more than about a minute, ask, “Am I under arrest, or am I free to go.” If they do not state that you are under arrest, tell them that you do not wish to continue speaking with them and that you are going to go about your business. Then do so.

I looked him right in the eye. “Am I under arrest?” I had to do this right or it could backfire. It’s not easy to think nowadays, especially if some bored airport security cops detain you and there could be a bomb in some asshole’s suitcase nearby.

“What do you think, Pal?” That was the one frisking me now.

The law of falling bodies is thirty-two feet per second. Your stomach falls even faster than that when the cops get you in their power. “You didn’t answer my question. Am I under arrest?” I stuck to my rights. He had to answer, and until he did, I’d continue to ask the same question, over and over.

He backed off about a foot. “No.”

“Then I don’t want to continue talking to you. Am I free to go?”

He exchanged a piercing glance with his companion. “No.”

Now the earth rotates something like a thousand miles an hour on its axis, and a hundred thousand miles an hour around the sun. The whole damn solar system revolves around a motherfucking black hole at the center of the galaxy. The universe is expanding at the rate of millions of light years per second. And these guys could only focus on me.

Right.

“Then I want to see a lawyer,” I said.

In my little world, there’s no one coming round to make offers on the house; the handyman went on a binge today instead of coming to paint the walls (N. saw him at the liquor store a little while ago); some lady kept bugging me to show her my books and then she came over, ploughed through them, and came up with a stupid handful. I kept taking them from her and saying, “This should go to my friend; this isn’t a book, it’s a set of tapes, and this I’m asking $10 for because it’s rare, and this $5 same reason.” In disgust she said, “Well, it looks like you want them more than I do,” and she wheeled around and left in a huff. I didn’t care. I didn’t like her anyway.

And then there are the little mini bombs exploding all over the neighborhood because it’s nearly July 4th, and my dog freaks so much she pants and shakes and sheds, claws screen doors to shreds, and even jumps through windowpanes if no one is there to watch her. I hate July 4th because everyone has pretty much forgotten what it really means: freedom and constitutional rights and independence from fascism, slavery, feudalism, global government, etc. A quaint notion, nowadays, freedom. All it means to the working stiff is freedom to scare the shit out of neighborhood pets.

My diet sucks. I don’t eat junk, but I do eat strange things like chocolate and watermelon, loads of sprouted toast with organic soy spread, and whatnot.

I wish we could sell the house, but it’s a dead market. Higher interest rates will pop the housing price baloon, oh yeah. I wish I could get rid of all my shit, stuff that I’ve accumulated for 150 years, plus everyone else’s shit that they dump on me, store in my shed, move out or die and leave it for me to haul away. Crap.

And I’m fucking sick of Windows. I’m trying to apply my pathetic newbie brain to partition my hard drive and load Linux Ubuntu from the CD I burned. But there’s no “exe” file to get it going and I feel so fucking stupid. I don’t like using expletives because they’re for lazy people. When I get frustrated, I get lazy.

Then I’m trying to figure out other stuff, too, that I’m a century behind: CSS, Photoshop, Web 2.0, and a million little things that even the most rudimentary webster knows as well as brushing his or her teeth. Like tweaking blog templates, for example. Me=code lllllllllllllllllllllllloooser…

And then there’s the fact that I’m finding my way through to Chapter 3 of my rough draft and wondering if there’s anything meaningful in the first two chapters that can motivate me to write two more.

I guess I like the look or WordPress, but not so crazy about its functionality for the likes of me. I’ll stick with it, though, because something keeps pulling me back here. All in all, I’m freaked out, but beginning to make an effort to turn cool and calm, to take things slowly and remember the best things came about in geological time, not human time.

Everyone is conditioned to think that time = money. But in fact, there is no such thing as time. “Time” is a construct imposed on the human race by secret usurpers who have always ruled the world and built program for the “matrix” illusion. That proves that money is worthless.

Oh hell. Maybe I should be putting some of this in my rough drafts rather than in my Crappola category.The nice thing is that no one reads my blog, so I can write anything I want to write and no one will criticize or repremand, unlike my bloody school teachers who were all a part of the control machine.

I half wondered what made those two aluminum suitcases so heavy. I also noted that neither had any identification tag on them, so I had no way of getting them to Banning. I stood there in the busy corridor with the long, well-lit check-in counters ahead of me, airline names and logos splashed on the wall over them. Over to my right, stationed near a doorway I saw two airport security guards, and so I left the cart near the check-in line and made my way to the guards. Both stiffened at my approach, but allowed loose smiles to play between them, as if they’d been swapping sweaty locker room jokes. One wore a wedding band, the other didn’t.

I told them about the luggage. One asked me to step over near the counter, the other began to speak into his shoulder phone as he hurried toward the silver luggage and pulled it toward the security door as if Armageddon had begun. In other words, I was in deep shit. All I had wanted to do was to get the hell out of there after I saw Banning off. Now my whole life passed before me and my underarms took on a Miami summer kind of drenching. And this was only Los Angeles.

I ask myself, Shouldn’t I be doing something in the real world, something meaningful and loving and true? What good is it to the Earth for me to write symbols on a white screen? What’s my purpose?
I know that fiction can change lives.
I know that fiction is a long poem that emulates truth. I know that the writer and the person reading it connect regardless of time or distance. Therefore great fiction is timeless and placeless. It is about being human.

I want to write a really good piece of fiction. I have made hundreds of false starts. I can’t seem to get beyond false starts. The start below is also false. What do I mean by “false”? I mean I think my idea will go nowhere except in the trash because it’s sucky. I fail to get my own interest going and momentum building, so I fall back down the hill.

I guess I need someone who’s been there to leave a comment on how to get past this hurdle. And a huge hurdle it is for me.

The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right. Mark Twain

We sat in the restaurant at the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank waiting for his flight to Houston. I'd only met him the day before, this Banning Driscoll, a real estate agent who had too much to say and never stopped saying it. He'd coerced me into the hour-long ride by filling my tank and pressing a gold Iranian coin into my hand. I helped him lift two heavy suitcases into my trunk.

I only half listened to him, my attention drawn between my plate of french fries smothered in ketchup and the clock in the gift shop I could just see if I moved a little in my plastic chair. His flight would leave in about twenty three minutes. I could take a deep breath and get the hell out of there. But he had pressed another gold Iranian coin into my hand to keep me captive as his audience until he walked through the security scanner.

"I went to Starbucks at the airport on my connecting flight," he was saying, "where coffee is $79 a cup. I stood in line, and when it was my turn I guess I looked bewildered. I asked for a cup of coffee. The barista said, Latte? Mocha? Espresso? Cappuccino? Sumatran? Arabica? and so on. I said, 'I just want a cup of coffee. I was remembering when you could get one for ten cents."

I shifted in my chair and shoved a cold french fry into my mouth. I didn't taste it. I wasn't hungry.

"It's like technology," he continued. Cell phones have everything now. I even saw a rotary cell yesterday, can you believe it?"

I knew he was full of crap, but I smiled politely because he'd bought me off, and you don't offend people who own you until after you're paid as much as you can get from them. If he'd have bought me a ticket to Brazil, I'd have ridden to Houston with him.

How do you tell a person you hardly know that they have unwiped mayonaise on their lip? I tried not to look at his face while he talked. I counted backward from a hundred and studied the shoes of people who passed by rolling their luggage behind them.

After he finished his hamburger, he mercifully wiped his mouth and removed the mayonaise. Then he paid for the meal and collected his briefcase. We ambled down the corridor toward his terminal while he talked wistfully about his third wife Maxine. Apparently she was loaded and wanted her ashes to be shot into space after she died. He had moved on to wife number four, but he said he still loved Maxine the best of all of his wives.

He shook my hand and thanked me, smooth as melted chocolate, and I watched him drop his briefcase onto the conveyor belt, remove his shoes and belt and whatever else they made him do, which I didn't wait around to see. I beat it back up the corridor to get the hell out of there. That's when the waiter who had served us nearly ran into me.

"Oh, I'm glad you haven't left yet. You left your luggage there under the table. I was just about to get security to take it to lost and found."

"But I don't have any luggage," I said.

"It's there under the table where you were sitting. Does it belong to the gentleman?"

I could see it. The two suitcases we had hauled in my car and into the airport. How could we have forgotten it? Now it was up to me to rush it somehow to baggage, but I had no authority to check it with the airline.