The Empire of Desire

So I'm finally diving headfirst into a Pandora's box that I've been avoiding for a few years. Why have I been avoiding it? Simply because I've been too busy with my own writing to really help out with a project of this magnitude. Now I'm finally taking a hard look at The Empire of Desire, a novel that has been collecting dust on my dad's desk.

Well, not really collecting dust. He does dust it off frequently.

It's 550 pages of baby boomer epic, or at least, it was. Today we got it down to 430 pages, and I think we can shave it down a bit more. Now I'm excited to help him with it, and even to do my best to find an agent to represent him.

When I was in high school, I wanted nothing to do with this novel. I remember sitting in the kitchen, Coltrane or Sibelius playing in the background, the savory smells of my father's cooking filling the room.

"How was your day at school?" he'd ask.
"Oh, it was all right."
And then he'd put the tureen back in the copper pot, suddenly distracted from one of the many timing-related cooking things he did, and said:
"That reminds me of a scene from my novel." He'd take out his boxed manuscript, heavy enough to be a murder weapon, and insist on reading scenes aloud to me.
"Hey, wait a minute Dad, I'm deaf," I'd say, but nobody who knows me falls for that trick.

I understand that heady feeling of giving birth to a literary baby and wanting to show it to everybody, but for a few years everything reminded him of that novel. Then again, though, life had already taken on novelistic turns for both of us. We were living out our epics, building fictional trajectories. Maybe it's in the blood-- born escapists.

I imagine that one of the great writing epiphanies of his life, the kind that writers dream of, was the week he spent in the north woods in a frenzy of writing the finale of that novel, days in which he spent 14 hours writing and the rest of his waking hours cooking feasts for one over an open flame.

And I imagine too that feeling of delirious tangibility he must have had, that all of us writers have when we soar out of our doubts into moments of absolute faith about what we're doing. Yes, this will make it, we tell ourselves, it really will.

I've thought many times how this dream came to crosshairs with his life, with his resulting brain tumor, surgery and aphasia. A bloom of too many words, they were birthed in their season, but now it is the winter of his life. Not that the snow drifts aren't lovely, but they do tend to cover everything, to make our wheels spin out.

Which brings me to the present moment. I hope we can make this happen.

6.66 and eggnog

So I'm done with the semester and most of my 'colleagues' have gone home for the holidays. I'll be taking the train back to the midwest tomorrow.

I figured I would send out a new round of manuscripts because I kinda like collecting rejection slips. Some of them even use different fonts. But anyway, six manuscripts at $1.11 each for postage came out to $6.66. I was hoping for something auspicious, but this? Was there some Faustian pact involved? Probably not but the lady at the post office gave me the raised-eyebrow look, asked me if I needed anything else.
"Well, uh, I think I better get some stamps."
And the look and smile she gave me seemed to say, you done been saved.

Which brings me to a totally irrelevant topic: eggnog, which is a delicious, creamy, and thoroughly unhealthy beverage. Yesterday I did the math and discovered I had consumed 1500 calories of eggnog alone. Happy holidays.

It's All Over

For the semester, that is. Kind of over, anyway. I suppose I should be grading these final portfolios but instead I'm staring dreamlike at a stained glass unicorn in the Gilman Reading Room at Hopkins. What was simply a pulsing, existential hangover yesterday has turned into a pleasant melancholy, enough brainflip to think back over the last four months in Bmore. It's been aight, hon. I like it here now.

Friday night the Writing Sems had an end of semester celebration at the Hopkins Club, with a free open bar and Andre 3000 (his name was actually Chad but damn he looked like Andre 3000) serving up strong Cosmos and Chocolate Eggnog martinis. By the end of the night we basically just told him to pour whatever he wanted to into a martini glass.

I ate as much shrimp and crab and salmon and prime rib and mini tortes as I could, just like any boho grad student would, figuring it would take the edge off any hangover. We went to the Mount Royal afterwards, a MICA haunt (so this is where all the cute art students hang out-- damn, I'll be back here soon).

I'm feeling pretty good about things right now. A few weeks ago I had a little epiphany and was just about ready to get down on my hands and knees and say, "I want the machine!" Drill a hole in my head and give me lotsa Vicodin and maybe some old video games to play for a few weeks. Everything just opened up. Suddenly I realized who the %$&#^ cares if I have an implant or not? When it comes down to it, I'm going to hear better, be more social and be more myself than perhaps I've ever been. Am I going to be a freak with an electronic fridge magnet stuck to the side of my head? Yes, I will be a freak, but I already am a freak. Note for all fetishists out there, if you want to get it on with a Lobot, I'll be waiting for you.