"And you shiver from the cold"

Writers, I am told, are extremely versatile people.

From the fantasies conjured up (you can almost see all those gnomes rising all around the fuzzy-eared guy on the keyboard)--to the detail work of structuring and copyediting, it seems you have to be clever besides being creative.
And the big boys and girls were certainly clever.
But then, looking up at the stars, you fall into wells. Immnuel Kant must have been driven mad by his sheer intelligence, for it is said that he shot himself in advanced old age.

How is it that Truman Capote, with a certified IQ of 200--almost off the scale!--would squeamishly resort to male prostitution and had to put up with Brokeback rednecks who would say, "Relax, I'm not going to cornhole you, old buddy." Mr. Capote does not go TMI on this in his memoirs, but you kind of shiver at the alternative.

This is the price of art?

There was this rich artist in old "Beverly Hillbillies", who had hired a contractor to install a swimming pool.

Says Jethro Bodine to the artist: "I know artists have to suffer, but are you ever going to suffer when you find out they dropped a load of cement right on top of your Porsche Spyder.

Ah suffering and art.

Van Gogh was thought mad, but he beat the camera to the most basic of visual nuances. And he could write--oh how he could write! if his letter to his brother Theo were any indication. But again, looking up into starry nights, falling into wells.

And yet, writers, if forced, can be extremely versatile. It took, oddly, a formerly fascist country like Mexico to realize this, as the entire civil service and cabinet posts were give to--of all things--to creative writers. How you could go from a Master work like The Labyrinth of Solitude to shuffling paper is beyond me, but old Octavio Paz and the poet Carlos Fuentes could do it.

So writers are versatile people.

Except for me.

I do have trouble with knots, tying shoelaces is a complete mystery to me, and when it comes to math, I can talk endlessy about it, but I can' t really do it.
Intuitive, all my ladies used to tell me."All this time I thought you were like my father, but you are more like my mother.
Puttery."

So I putter. Pick, pluck and pray, hoping I can edit it ll into something.

Being baffled by existence and your own woeful incompetence makes you something of a philosopher, and at this, I think, I have some aptitude.

"What does your wife think of your outrageous assumptions?"

But most philosophers had no wife...And it seems that I have lost mine as well.Ah well. Back to the drawing board.

"'Scribble, scribble, scribble,' eh Ivan"

Well, versatile or not, once I lost my poor wife as a patron, I had to fight my way to the feed trough all the same.

I do believe I tried every occupation known to man. Jack-of-all-trades department.

I early figured out that most jobs were role-playing. Appear like something, and you'll be it. Nothing like like wearing hip-hugger jeans, a tool belt wrapped around your waist, your ass hanging out when you bent down to fix something--voila! Apartment super.

And I could load bags and bags of peanuts, their yellow FDA stickers still hanging out into a huge tractor-trailer. Loading in Georgia.

But the artist thing still there.

Ah, suffering in Georgia.

Sleeping at night in the truck.

You can hear things.

Almost primeaval things.

The artist things.

"In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun never shines
And you shiver from the cold.

Versatile or not, it gives you a shiver.

World-Wide distribution--almost

England's founding genius of present-day science, Francis Bacon says a young man will give it all out to succeed on a project, drive the full bolt home.

And old man will putter around, and not generally go about driving the full bolt home.

Heh. I wonder if old Bacon was talking about my sex life.

In any event, I seem poised on some sort of victory, and being an old man, I can't seem to drive the full bolt home.
Egad. Could I put it in double?

But right now, when it comes to publishing, I have to drive the full bolt home, and what I'm asking here is if readers of this blog can hellp me out-- step on my sorry ass if you have to and help Ivan in a rather strange publishing gambit.

A British distributor, a big one, has picked up one of my books, originally published by my own Island Grove Press, which I had set up for my students and promising bloggers. I have published many of my studens at Seneca College, Toronto, and have also published, electronically, most of my Quarks, regular associates of this blog.

Well, this time I became an old dog-in-the-manger and published myself under Island Grove Press.

Sent it out into the ether, and guess what?

An important U.K. distrubutor has picked up this novel, titled The Fire in Bradford and is flogging it to all and sundry in Europe, Canada, ther U.S. and worldwide.

Good.

But they did not have my permission.

Hell, I should care? Ordinarily, I'd sell my grandmother to have anything out on this scale.

Whatever the case, I want to have a look at this development, but I fear to have a look because they might just pull the entire project back, since they listed me without my permission...Do not misunderstand: I would go down on somebody just to have had this kind of exposure. Bootleg away!

My first impulse was to write in to AbeBooks.co.uk and ask for a copy of The Fire in Bradford and see what kind of a job they did on it. They say it's hard cover. Hey!

But then hey would have realized it's me and maybe pull right back, and I would be out this kind of exposure.

So maybe I send an apprentice down to the well?

So I am here now indulging the graces of my readers and ask anybody out there with five minutes to spare, order The Fire In Bradford; I will personally reimburse the purchase amount, whatever it is.

Better form, in fact if somebody else buys the book instead of me.

As I say, I am sort of inveigling on you, dear readers.

Here's the plan.

Google Ivan Prokopchuk, novelist.

There will now be five references, the fifth line being AbeBook.co.uk., and there you will find:

Prokopchuk, Ivan
ISBN 10: 0969182945
ISBN 13: 9780969182948
Publisher: Island Grove Press
Publication Date: 1997
Binding: Hardcover

I almost failed Political Science while at Toronto's Ryerson U.

So when it comes to acts political, this may be another lead balloon project for Ivan.

But help me out if you can. Google Ivan Prokophuk, novelist, go down to lising number five, and find me.

Then order me.

I will pay you back. Honest.

Well, as honest as a writer can be.

##

Pictures of everyman. Or: Forty and f*cked.

The shock to a man from about the age of forty...

The sudden realization that you've been kicked off the bus of normal life, and from here on it's going to be hitchhiking, and catch as you can, you can't go home again, the past seems one hell of a lot more attractive than the future and and you wish the hell you were eighteen again and knew what you knew then.

You, who had sampled life and enjoyed some if its pleasures--are going to die. It's not an abstract.

Well, well, well.
Hoo Dat Callin".

Well, there are palliatives.
You are still young enough, attractive enough, maybe even talented enough to still function in what's left of your profession. You can be a randy prof, the writer of good books; perhaps a financier.

And so you go off half- cocked (sometimes literally) on all those projects, madly off in all directions;but forty is the deadline decade; if you hadn't made it by now, and even if you had made it, now you're the fool who will have to start over again, and after those starts, again and again; fucking -up all over again, till you get to where the hell you are supposed to go. And that takes decades.

Queen: Death on two legs

But hold.

You might have no idea how good life and love will ultimately get-- that it is really going to get rosy at the end; but then you can't push time and right now at forty, it's you and in the situation.

So you go through the small gains in your professional life, pick up he glamorous girlfriend, who builds up your ego to monstrous proportions; the mystique of writer makes you attractive to women, they all want to be in you books--you strain your brains out through the eye of your pathetic little ding-a-ling and life for a while gives you this terrific bang.

But by 44 it seem more like a Roman candle.

Strange dreams as you lie next to your lover, with those dear little veins in the inside or her knees. She is young, beautiful and she knows you love her...but something is wrong!

Your former wife trying to get the driveway paved, stronger now for having Dumped the Hunk, but she is scared now, for should the Hunk return he may yet rub her nose into it.

You dumped me, what I at least,in my spoilage had perceived in my own head to be beautiful me, for that bespectlacled spectacle sitting in my living room patting my dog?

Sweetie, with all you women's lib magazine propaganda, you believed it all and now you're in the house blowing a little dope.

Ah small matter. In any other society we would be stoned as adulterers. We are white, crazy and forty-one.

It takes money to have a mid-life crisis, oodles and oodles of it. And you and the former wife both need it.
She makes out your income tax, signs your name to it, poackets your old paycheques and collects the rebate. You, as he dog-in-the manger son, go to your family. It takes money to be the partier, the raconteur, the rat with women, for there is the intimaion that it's really all downhill from here, and you might as well have a good time.
You also know that you can die of a mid-life crisis, and you might not be the only guy to spend $40,000 and end up having AIDS.

That you, bunky, in the syph ward, your poor pecker just about falling off? Well, that's what she wished for the last time she saw you.
You got the ball rolling and got trapped undeneath it. Lizzie Borden adultery. And the Bible was right, and the sins of the fathers.....

Friggin' rollercoaster.

And it doesn't stop until the threescore and ten.

And then, when you get to where you were supposed to go, when it's time for you yourself to go--you migh finally larn somethin'.

##

A crapulent blog

Most of us ethnics find ethnic jokes funny, never mind the politically correct crowd..

And so many of my friends in Manitoba were Cree aboriginals. We bantered back and forth. I would say Louie was my faithful Indian companion. Louie would take a line out of a country song, and say things to me like "I love you for the little garlic snapper that you are."

So with a whiff of the old Ukrainian national flower, I will proceed witth an ethnic joke that really describes my condition right now.
I am very much like the fabled constipated Indian chief.

Blocked for seven days. Can't pass a thing. TMI, I know, but when my doctor talks of cat scans to see if they can find the obstruction, I get very worried.

So I go to ethnic humour. There is at least some relief there.

One day there was an Indian chief who was constipated. he sent one of his swarriors to the witch doctor to get some medicine.
The warrior says "Big Chief, no shit".

The doctor gave him 1 pill and told him that the chief should be fine tomorrow.

The warrior went back to the chief and gave him the pill.

The next morning, the warrior was sent back to the witch doctor with the information "big chief, no shit".

The doctor now gives him five pills and tells him to give them to the chief.

The next day the warrior appears at the witch doctor's house yet agains aying, "big chief, no shit".
The doctor gets annoyed and so gives thewarrior the whole bottle of pills to give to the chief. The next day the warrior goes back to the witch doctor (AGAIN):

"Big shit, no chief".



Ah, war always comes when you're not ready.

The maintenance guys are working on my bathroom.
Please, Mr. Custer. I don't want to go...And in any event, I can't even go.... But what if I have to, suddenly, and the plumber is bent over his plunger, his pants halfway down to expose a Jiggs The Plumber cheekiness...Well, plumber, If I have to go, you'll just have to get out of the way, cheekiness and all...and your cigarettes falling out of the short sleeve fold in your tee shirt....And I need not only a dump but cigarettes too.

I think very soon, this old big chief will shit, but I know not the time or the place.

Actually I worry about my condition. The doctor says, Big Chief better watch it. If this goes on for three more days, it's cat scan to see where the blockage is. Cat scan? There's radiation there. My relatves in Chernobyl already glow in the dark.

Please, Mr. Custer. I don't want to go.!
But if no shit, big chief here will have to go. Cat'll get your scan.

Kinda doing the Roadrunner Coyote here, me and the plumber on the edges of Cancer Gulch.

The answer is probably more prosaic.

Face it, one is full of it.

Where is Rabelais and his works, and his entreaty for communal relief?

I'd even take corollary relief, whatever the hell that means, or how you pronounce it. And I should know. I have been divorced. But now the King is really off his throne.

King Korol-- big chief-- no shit.

Scary when the undertaker's wife is sort of sizing you up on your way to the public john.

##


Note: I think my template has gone haywire. A number of comments did not make it in, including the latest from Midnight and Anonymous.

Jeez. When it rains, it pours.

101 uses for dead cats.

My first encounter with the man in the hoodie and scythe came thirty years ago.

I had picked up my children at my former wife's home, was going to Toronto wirth them, where I lived. Along was my knockout girlfriend from California, and whe wanted to go shopping witth the kids an all. She was good with them.

Well at first I said fine, fine, but then a sudden shiver seized me as I looked at the red Exit light over the subway doors.

In the doorway was the dude. He seemed to enter, robe flutterimg. scythe almost caught just under the exit sign overhead. "Scrooge come to collect, Motherf*cker."

The moment came, I suppose, when the noise of he car, the lights, the lit ads, the mammoth drinking and pill taking, had finally cumulated. Anxiety attack. And with the fatigue and the separation. Angst. "You've dug your last hole, mole!. You're under control!.
"Your death cometh as the end.

"The glamorous job, the women, the fancy f*cking.
"You're dead meat."

Dead meat indeed, as I faced my glamorous, almost innocent girlfriend, who wanted to go shopping. Us and the kids.
I was immobilized. Face a mask. Who am I?...And a few moment afterwards, Loren indeed asks, "Who are you?"

I did not know.

The hooded guy could have come frrom a recruiting poster, out of Russia or America, or England.
"You!"

Cripes.This was serious businesss. I would have to take Loren and the children to the home of friend. He too had kids and would be glad to have us, since his own kids would like the compny of my tykes.

He was also my unofficial analyst.

"It'll never be over. The guilt, the self-loathing.
"Believer me, I know. I too took the suitcase and walked, sort of walked to New Orleands, away from my wife, like Fats Domino in the song."


The kids play in Morris' yard. Morris' second wife and Loren are talking together.

Morris and I are talking together.

"It may have just been an anxiety atack after all the storm and stress.

I relaxed a little.
"That or it may indeed be the man with the scythe. You can die of a midlife crisis."

"Thanks, pal."

There is a pause.

" But it was death. Death, man. Death come callin'

"But then you and I are about the same. Romantics to the end In a wheel chair, wondering, ideating, what it's all about. Does the universe vibrate in A-minor?
To the end."



Well, this morning I felt the robed guy's bad breath again.

He come callin'.

What's it for t for this time? I have repented.I have become as a monk. There is no more guilt.

"You think your paltry repentance will do? it is all nirvana. It is universal. Nirvana. It blows."

" But my visit was meant for you."


But then his cell phone rang. Death with a cellphone?

"Yes?" He put the cell down.

"You are one lucky MoFo.

"Mistaken identity.

He saw me sigh with relief.

"But I'll get you next time, Mother*ucker

As I know he will.


We get these warnings, these personal symbols.

Ad what do they mean?

Nirvana. It blows.

##

Gregor Samsa: Trade you a claw for a piece of tail

There is power in a vacuum.

Scientists know it.

Hey, even the Hoover folk!

Lovers know it. Makes the heart grow fonder (Trouble is, usually for somebody else)

There is power in a vacuum.

Sartre wrote an essay on it.

And some earlier European writers were only too aware of the Baumm! that wafts up from the void. Contact with Buddhism. Yes, this Buddh's for you.
But not for some Europeans.

Europeans are usually white, tending to shiver, and quite crazy. Not the for them the l20 F heat and flies every day that brings the Oh Gawd resignation of the Buddhist, the passive philosophy, the helplessness in the face of the IT.

They wanna fight. Fight anything, fight each other, even try to fight the IT, the IT being the reality, micro and macro.
Do not go gently into that cold night.
Death does not hurt. We can fight till the end And continue our inquiry into the ultimate reality.

It is said Socrates was one mean MoFo in a battle. Cut your heart out, you bastard.
Life was harder then.
Philosophers took part in wars, suffered, starved. Not for them the way of the Buddha, Siddhartha being his latest incarnation at about their time.
White men are crazy. They start world wars. Their science brings the H-bomb. And this gets them closer to the sense of the Void. Nihilism. Resignation. Dark nightmares.

And in literature, the nightmare is fully rendered, and some sensitive readers, aware that a terrible time was coming, suicided straigh off. Certainly if a genius like Kafka can predict the rise of the Nazis and the horrors that would come with it.

So it was no accident that Kafka, never published, instruced his agent, Max Brod, to never print his Metamorphosis, not even after his death.

But Max Brod did publish the work, one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature.

There are things in life writers rarely touch. The world is an insecure and dangerous place, and it seems that only through a series of lucky passages that we get through at all.
Like one day, you might wake up as a bug.
This is a powerful metaphor.
How many times have you been hurt, possibly in an accident, the fear the helplessness as all normalcy sudenly seems abstract. Lying there on floor, unable to get up. Checking out your limbs, which have become like claws, and suddenly you're down all the days and everybody wants to sweep you out of the way. And with force.

Small wonder that Kafka wouldn't want readers to dwell with this existential reality. That any day, all you have could be taken away from you, home, hearth, family, and maybe just your sister pitching in to feed and conmfort you every day.

In word from Forrest Gump, shit happens.

Dostoevsky knew it, Kafka knew it. Forrest Gump knew it.

But perhaps for Siddharha, well, it was Nirvana. It blows. Blows like Kurt Cobain.


Dark thoughts. Dark musings.
As I lie here on my back on the floor. I have, I think, slipped a disk.
I am no longer eighteen. I can not clean and jerk 120 lbs over my head.
Shoudn't even have tried.
I can now not get up.
The familiarity of the mat, the furniture, the heretofore comforting sounds of the house...what are they now?

Staring up, looking at the tiles on the ceiling. I see Gregor Samsa doing his thing, hanging from the wall.

Jesus, Franz. No wonder you didn't want the thing published.

But I'm glad you did.

It was certainly a warning.

And the strange sense of a power in the vacuum.

And the intimation that intellectuality itself is something you only arrive at while helpless.

The dead hand of intellectuality.

Yet always, there is the gallows humour that comes with revelation.

...Trade you a claw for a piece of tail.

Laughing gods come.

##

Overlay in writing? I can't even get laid.

Overlay in writing.
Same as with painting.

The profusion of detail, the details of a tree branch, the strokes apparently random, but there it appears, the full green tree, in its every detail , real or imagined, somewhere rampant in the painting.

I worry about overlay. My style might be too facile. I hate to bore people, so I try to get to the heart of the matter right away. And like most ambitious types, I try to make every workd count (" fer to come and collect their pay" as Lewis Carroll might say).

And brevity throughout the text.

But writin' long ain't necessariy writin' good.

Overlay.

Something you seem to discover only after years and years of writing.

The best example is in any novel by Stanislaw Lem, especially in the masterpice Solaris, but I can't find that book right now, so I'll go to another, a new one Borderliners by a youngish Danish genius named Peter Hoeg.

Kids in an opressive, abusive boarding shcool. Some of you may have gone to one, espcially if aboriginal.

But if you want to begin with the type of novel everybody else seems, to be writing. these days, let the very first sentence hook the reader.
And then with the overlay, you get her full attention.


Mr Hoeg begins this way:

"What is time?"

We ascended toward the light, five floors up and split into thirteen rows facing a god who unlocks the gates of the morning. Then there was a pause, and then in came Biel.
Why the pause?

When asked straight out about this pause by one of the bright girls, Biel had first gone absolutely still. Then he, who normally referred to himself as "I"--then he saild slowly, and with gravity, as is he was surprised by the question, and perhaps even with his own reply, "When I speak, you should first and foremost pay attention to my pauses. They speak louder than words."

Gad. What an SOB.

I have met so many of these martinets in education. And this kind of guy will practicse it on his fellow-teachrs too.
A prick.

But it takes some force of character to be a prick.

And we get mad at him.

And we move into the novel.

Even if it's about a prick and his helpless young charges at the boarding school.

Yes, yes. The story is sraight out of the headlines.
But it takes a master to make a novel of it.

My former wife used to sing "It's a strange, strange world we live it, Master Jack."

But I wasn't a master then, just some sort of fabulist.

And like I told a 70-year old editor who said he still didn't know enough about journallism, "Do you think you're ever going to get it?

Jesus.

Will I ever get it?

Ah well. As I tell all and sundry. "I ain't deep, but I'm fancy. :)

Lost my blog. Lost my mind. Here it comes from swiss-cheese memory.

I think it's the way I type.

Hit the wrong key and lost the entire blog. Not only that, but my compute has crashed.

So here is all you get, from memory, and I can hardly stomach the drivel myself. Not time to edit. I am frustrated annoyed and now thirsty. Don't you hate it when you get that way?

What I remember of the blog:



I thought I would be a fancier of cheese, that is to say, sort of crafty. I have lost alll my photo images from my file, but it seems that some of the gif numbers can still be accessed. Where there might be numbers there might still be pictures? Just as I get this flash, my computer crashes. Well, one has to stay uh, Krafty.

I would now have to go to the library, try to remember the image I wanted through my recollection of the gif numbers on my picture file; I would remember the image I wanted up on this blog and then go to the library computer and put it up on blog....Yeah, yeah. You are probably wondering how it is that I think. I used to have something like a phtographic memory, but after a bout of hippiedom, it's sort of like Cheech and Chong's "Daves not home."

So I am a space cowboy, imageless in Gaza, very nearly a blogless serf. Oh. Whoops. Here comes something. It's Cleopatra. Well, what the hell. I'll take the image. Any image. What can you do?

"What can you do when you live in a shoe?" I ask my friend the drug dealer.
"Button it up and get laced," he says.

"Goddamn jailbird. No-account. Ne'er do well!"
"Yeah, but didn't I meet you at the halfway house?" he laughed.

Oh what the hell. I am a novelist. Well, at least a novelist-manque'. Wannabee- had- to- be. Looking up at the stars. Falling into wells and cesspits. And halfway houses.

Among the filthy, filthy too.


My intention in life was to have been lucky and wonderful.
The way it turned out, I was Ethelred the Unready,one of the dumbest kings of England.

Ah well. My pretentions to royalty had to be scaled down.

Perhaps I could be a writer of doggerel.

"He was dirty and lousy, and full of fleas
"But he had his women by twos and threes
"God bless the bastard king of En-gel-and."

Well the dirty and lousy and full of fleas part is true right now. Something is seriously eaing away at me, probably because they have turned off the water in my builking for two days becaue of a boiler blow-up.

I think I have blown my own stack.

I swear Microsoft is designed to make you go mad. Or maybe take the next step and buy a Mac.
...It's all done with economic mirrors, it seems and not windows.

"You got your health," says my former dentis friend.
Yeah? And where are my teeth?

Usually, when my professional friends say "You got your health", you are fubar, beyond help.

Actually, at the time, I was free, white and 51, no spring chicken.
And a nightclub singer to largely black audiences.

"Play that funky music, white boy." Had everything but melanin. "Rock star with frequent trips to the washroom, as is the way of seniors. Lol.


We go through life in a dream, like automatons, somewhow. The talent seems to come from way out there somewhere. All things come from God. First tenet of the Kaballah; no wonder Madonna is so enamored with it.

Yeah, but Madonna's got talent.


Well, anyway, here am I peacfully ratscrabbing away in the library.

"Can I have more computer time?"
"You'll have to show me your library card."

"But I've got enough notoriety not to need one...Like the lady at the opera said, 'I have a special box.'"

"What was that?"

"Nothing, nothing. I just thought I had enough notoriety not to need a lirary card."

"You've got the notoriety, all right. Now show me your library card."


I have a friend whose credit rating and personal reputation is so bad that he had to go to a lawyer to get back his library card...Now that's a persona non grata. Needed a lawyer. I'd hate to look up his credit rating.

There was a time when I'd walk into a library and everybody would almost salute.

I was published all over.

Nowadays, it's more like Tom Swift and his electric vibrator... Yeah. I go out with the stragest women..

Nowadays more like Alexander Pornoy.

And in some sort of time warp.

I am back in a l938 world of Tom Swift and his Silent Airplane.

Silent all right. Haven't published a thing in years, save maybe for some journalism.

The librarian knows I have acquired the look of a loser.


"Are you sure you have a library card, or something with your name on it?"

So I gave the librarian my Air Miles card. Then my receipt for somethin nasty and off-colour from Wal-Mart. "No. try again."

I fumble and find only a rejection slip from House of Anansi Press.

I have obviously lost the culture derby. Now comes the short-hair count.

"Driver's licence?
An envelope with your name on it?"

Well, the rejection letter was sent to my address.

And I did have an expired driver's licence.

Cop told me to renew it. Told cop I didn't have the eighty bucks.

"These things are sent to try us," said P.C. Murphy, and let me drive on, since there were no demerit poins on his file, where the licence showed clear on the computer.

Lately, I have been fancying myself as Irish, since they are so much like me. A little spacey, and tending to drink.

The librarian finally issued me a card.

"You're losing your poetic licence, " she winked.


"I know."

Clutching at straws, clutching at straws...And finally, Martini straws

Ever get that way?

In the middle of a novel and clutching at straws, clutching at straws.

Central, for some reason, is the quote by a character in another novel, written by a white Bahamian , and I can't find the author's name, nor the book. I used to have a tight memory, but it's gone.

It's very hard to find book about the Bahamas and the Bay Street Boys-- robber Barons who took over Bahamian finance, just (as it seems to me) our own boys on Bay Street in Toronto. And certainly on Wall Street.

One mothergrabber of an institutional novel, but I can't find the book I'm looking for for research and a pertinent quote.

The quote goes someting like this: "Unlike Will Rogers, X has never met a man he really liked."

Well, I'm sure it's in my memory fonts somewhere. Who was that Bahamian author? I checked with the Bahamian Embassy and they have no idea either.

The book has a lot of boat chases in open water, and was written at arond l970.

Oh jog, memory, jog.

Or maybe I'm just in a snit.

Fact is, the unnamed novel could be a template for the kind of book I want to do.

Ah, too many house moves. Lost an entire library.

Well, maybe in 2008, the computer can help.

Damn. For want of a nail.

I can't finish the chapter.

I'm sure you've all been at this impasse. Like looking for a word or a phrase, only that word or phrase.

Or maybe one is just stuck.

Me stuck? Hell I'm supposed to be a pro.

Standing outside the work, watching the pitching and tossing of my brain.

Time to get the Martini stirrer, I guess.

Drink it through a straw. *

##

* Oh damn. I think I's just found my author. He is Desmond Bagley, A Brit and not a Bahamian. Wrote "Bahamas Crisis". He is reputed to be sort of a first cousin of Alistair McLean.

Now what was that all about?

Well. Maybe I was looking up the wrong author.

Here is MacLean:

"Gangsters and hoodlums are notoriously the world's worst marksmen, their usual method being to come within a couple of yards before firing or spraying the landscape with a sufficient hail of bullets to make the law of averages work for them and I had heard a hundred times that those boys couldn't hit a barn door at ten paces. But maybe Larry had never heard of this, or maybe the rule applied only to barn doors." (from Fear Is the Key, 1961)

Well. I keep googling, googling, googling.
Not getting too much writing done.

...Now I wonder if I put up those storm winddow. And the walls need paint.. :)

Some buffoon once asked me: "Ivan, can you speak Italian. I said yes, a little.

"What do they mean when thes say 'f*ck dog?'"

Ain't no drag. Lorne Michaels has a brand new bag....And Tina Fey ain't no hag.

The portrayal of Senator Sarah Palin by Tina Fey as a dipsy airhead last Saturday was jut too precious. It was a reprise performance after the previous Saturday's almost flukey, but hilarious performance by Fey as Palin.

If nothing else, it shows you can always get back to where you were before if the stars are right and you are a look-alike for a contentious somebody.

This time around,Amy Poehler played CBS's Katie Couric, parodying the interview with Palin just a scant few days before. Poehler, mostly played straight man to Fey, who ratcheted up her performance of Palin running by satirizing her foreign affairs experience.

When Poehler's Couric pushed Fey's Palin to specifically discuss how she would help facilitate democracy abroad, Fey gave in: "Katie, I'd like to use one of my lifelines. ... I want to phone a friend."

When a confused Poehler informed her that that wasn't how the interview worked, Fey's Palin responded waving index finger i n the air,"Well, in that case, I'm just gonna have to get back to ya.

I think I peed my pants laughing.

This skit will be in the minds of many Americans tonight as the Palin-Biden debate starts.
And, unfortunately,Canada's Federal hopefuls will be on at precisele the same time frame. Good old CBC with "The Canadian Perspective."--But I think everybody up here will stay mostly tuned to the vice-Presidetial debate down south.
And one mistake by Sens Palin or Joe Biden can blow the charts. Sen Biden will have to be very careful not to be patronizine, while staying with the issues. And Sarah
Dare not go into a snit or, like a high-profile Canadian (Kim Campbell?) choke.

But SNL. I Seem to be getting all my political information from the likes of SNL and The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart. Out-front questions to politicians: "Why are you such a dick?"

But this is about SNL.

Oh SNL. Just when we thought something had hung you up, we almost offer a cheer to producer Lorne Michaels.

Talk about showing a hot hand.

I think SNL's decade-long dry spell is over.

Ain't no funk.

Ain't no drag.

Poppa Michaels has a brand new new bag.

And Tina Fey no bag.

And who would throw Amy Poehler out of bed.

"Katie Kouric", come on over and cuddle me.

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