Final Draft, Second Wind

I ran all the way home for that headline

Feels worth it right now but writing highs have a limited-time engagement and the doubt nudges in if you give it space so I type fast keep the old ball of illusion rolling because coming down from any high, not just the writing kind, is very anti-sparkling so at your expense and without your permission I’ll keep on 165wpmming it and come down later maybe around bedtime which would be handy.

While running I was singing for some reason in my head that Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo song – spellcheck just fainted – on top of my constant underneath song Danny Boy (Johnny Cash version) talk about opposites so thinking I may have resembled them both a little, half-baritoning and half-bumbling along like I was chasing my mind, Daisy trying to throw me off by imitating Christopher Walken like she does these days. I keep waiting for her to poop out a watch.

omg sorry

The pathway already has little flicks of orange on those suffering sycamore trees and the apples have already started to fall – smells wonderful now like a fall fair – but pretty soon it will be like after a party when you have to pour an inch of beer from every fucking bottle down the drain before you know it you’ve poured a mile, or as we in Canada say, a kilometre, which isn’t as true as the other thing we say which is drink up asshat.

It’s an ancient apple orchard we bumble through, all the trees are The Chrysalids gigantic and the apples so big and red and gorgeous and so so high high up up (just fucking with spellcheck) they are impossible to pick and you can’t eat the fallen ones but they’re fun to kick.

Anyway back to the writer’s high which is waning because now it’s only a pretty good headline bordering on good

I saw something on TV a while ago not sure what it was I could goggle (spellcheck getting back at me) but you know me I’d much rather speculate. Jerry Seinfeld and Carl Reiner and George Burns were a few of the people I remember and the bit I saw was comedians on ageing, not sure about the e there but since I just let a print ad go with lovable instead of loveable I’m gonna hang on to that e like shit to a blanket.

I remember Carl Reiner waxing about the good old Mel Brooks days and Dick Van Dyke, too, who looks like he exercises and goes to the dentist often although I would recommend yoga because he seems awfully stiff. Anyway, Jerry talked about he’s already booked Caesar’s Palace for his 90th birthday but it was the George Burns thing that got me, reminded me of my mom, the way he was drinking a coffee and he said this is the best coffee I’ve ever had.

My mom used to say that was the best dinner I ever had every night and I do it too about everything

Like every story I finish is the best I’ve ever written, every shirt I wear is my favourite, every walk swim bike hike the best ever, every grape and ex-grape if you catch my draft.

And I think you gotta just keep totally digging everything and try not to come down while conscious

I was recently told that I should be getting paid for my writing and she wouldn’t listen to my protests which were feeble and went something like but I write for the love of it she said this is a commercial world and you have to think of currency as energy it’s a give and take kind of thing and I think she’s right although I still think of cold hard cash rather than energy but whatev.

And I don’t know about telling you this next bit but it happened

For something, I can’t remember what or when, but I wanted to borrow an idea from my old unpublished novel you’ve heard me mostly lament about, The Whispering Gentlemen, and I left the file open because I am messy and lazy and busy and chaossy (I think spellcheck’s dead now) and just this morning, and it’s only 6:04am right now, I clicked somewhere and up it came and I started reading and you know what?

It’s the best thing I ever read

I mean I don’t know if it’s partly because of the coffee, which is the best coffee I’ve ever had, but I started reading at a wicked suspenseful part and holy fucking shit’s all I’m going to say so instead of a story, I am going to put the beginning of the novel here and I want to know what you think as in would you turn the page if there was one? because TODAY I am going to write a letter to the guy who reluctantly turned it down a couple of years ago because I didn’t have a social media presence and he couldn't convince his team to take it on. So I worked on my presence and I have one now and he, I googled the publishing company, has a new job and is now president of Dundurn Press where he used to be an editor so if this isn’t a case of opportunity knocking I don’t know what is especially considering his final words were: I really did like the novel, but I just couldn't get enough support from the board. Keep building your profile. Maybe we can revisit in the future! 

So I figured instead of posting a story today, here’s the opening chapter of said manuscript if you’re interested and here it isn’t if you’re not.

I’m going to wish you the best weekend ever and post this now before I come down

from The Whispering Gentlemen by Sherry Cassells

       “Do promises wear out?” Claire asks.
       My daughter, who is eleven, is in bed and I am folding her shirt which I picked up from the floor. I notice there is dirt on her face – not simply that she is dirty – but that there are streaks of actual dirt on her cheeks which make her look like a warrior. When my wife kisses that beautiful face goodnight, which she will do, something might start. You never know.
       I, too, have been wondering whether promises expire, and as the moonlight falls through the window onto my busy white hands, I share my thoughtful conclusion: “I don’t know.”
       I back out of the room – exude love – and do not say anything more.
      But the light is not from the moon. Headlights slide over me and I feel heat or something similar: Kate is home. I snap on the TV, wish that I had made popcorn because its smell reassures my wife, pose on the couch, sing hellooo.
       “What’s that?” she asks, indicating my lap.
       Claire’s shirt, twisted. Wrung. Fuck.
       I wake with a sentence in the air, exhale, and another sentence comes.
       Maybe Kate is right.
       “Go back,” she said. “Write it all down. It might save you.”
       She did not say anything else but I know there were more words because of the way her mouth moved to stop them, and the way her eyes hit the floor.

       My wife and daughter give me things which I carefully place in the trunk of the small car. Pistachios, a jar of green olives, shoelaces of all things, the first bright clementines of the season, three bags of coffee. I notice a small fold of camo fabric poking out of my suitcase so I rearrange the trunk before Kate sees the tiny sleeve. Not that she’d say anything. I just don’t need her to know I’m bringing the puppet I’ve hand since I was a kid.
       Kate hands me my pills, a folded prescription which she watches me put into my wallet.
       Our daughter is concerned. Part of her believes this is the way her parents have chosen to break up and both Kate and I know what she’s thinking, so we offer one another slightly too much affection and our insincerity frightens Claire further. She wanders off when her mother and I say goodbye and I wish she was there because that’s when Kate and I get real, but she’s been in the shed, runs out from between the houses like a pole vaulter with the tube that contains my fishing rod, waits for me to let go of her mother, hands me my rod and tackle box.
       That’s my girl.
       I drive through the lower reaches of Algonquin. Leaves are falling. Rain comes very hard and I get used to the slamming sound, am startled by the momentary silences when I fly under bridges. I love the dark grey sky, the way clouds bloom along the horizon, the occasional leaf smacking flat on my windshield, this slightly giddy feeling. My possessions rumble in the trunk. My laptop on the passenger’s seat keeps me tethered – as do Claire’s texts – I love the dark grey sky, she blooms.
       I feel as if I could drive forever, but when it’s dark I pull into a motel, roll beneath willow branches so heavy with rain it’s like a car wash. I text Claire when I get to my room and tell her my lips are red as Lady Gaga’s from eating the pistachios all day hahahaa.
       I wake in the night with more sentences, an image of the strange house to which I am returning, the three big rocks we put in the river when we were kids.
       Next night I sleep in a bed parallel to the Saint Lawrence Seaway, my feet toward the ocean. The storm is fierce with thunder, waves, my roaring heart, a slew of sentences – this time they feel urgent – and the image of my sister Jane when she was 11, same eyes as Claire. I understand in a flash that I love my daughter so generously because she gets my love for Jane, too.
      Third day I walk from my motel room and say to the storm, come on let’s go.
       I slide into New Brunswick, swoop to the coast where the rain is replaced, bit by bit, with gobs of darkness. I pull over and walk through the forest to the beach, stacks of waves glowing in the moonlight, clouds flying right through me.
       This is where I grew up and everything means something.
       no more texts, darlings
       Claire sends me a heart that lifts from the screen, enters my chest through my throat. Kate sends me a tiny smiling face, hopeful in spite of clenched teeth.
       I get in the car beneath the Van Gogh sky and follow the river home.

       We put the three big rocks in the river when we were kids. I remember how strange they looked at first, the way they intruded into the familiar curves, introduced new waterbraids and whirlpools.
       “They look like tombstones,” my mother said, but they became The Whispering Gentlemen because that’s what my sister Jane said the year before Krikey Macilroy killed her.
       Now the three rocks belong as much as any other. The banks have adapted to them and the river has accepted them, widened around them, and their bare heads rest easy on my eye.
       I have come back to the house by the river to write this book and make good on a promise I made to five young men more than forty years ago: This is their story.

       The Whispering Gentlemen lean together in the cold, fast river as the night gathers round them and for all the times I watched them before, I watch them again, interpret their congregation as a fine acquiescence, and with their blessing, I begin.