Rambling

Madness. I don't want to leave a cranky post like the one below on the top of the blog, and I still feel like writing a little more. But madness! July has been for seven years now the month of complete madness in my life. I am going to take Saturday off work to get my hair cut, but other than that I will probably have no more than one more complete day to myself between now and August 5 ... that is the big day, the day I do not go to bed before my publication, that massive 736-or-more page catalog, has also gone to bed.

Stress. We all complain about it but there is something that is not entirely unpleasurable about it. At the end of a long day of manipulating copy, my mind is buzzing, quite literally. At dinner tonight, RL saw me staring into space and asked if I was in "Bulletin-world" ... my book is called the Bulletin. Yes, I was thinking about how today I bounced a course description in which an instructor had insisted I include the word "fast-paced" notwithstanding that the title included the word "Accelerated." Who cares! Well, alas, I professionally care. I find it impossible to draw a line below which some error does not matter. That, of course, serves to double up the stress.

But, again, all of this is not entirely unpleasant. Maybe that is the great American secret ...we like the grind. 12 hours of work leads to a sense of ...not accomplishment, nor gratification ... just sheer bloody-minded survival. I done did it, dad! I done it, and I'm gonna do it again tomorrow.


Eventually the book will be done ... that will be the morning of August 6 when I sleep till I cannot help but wake, and then take myself to breakfast at Boogaloos, above. After the book is done, there are the two weeks of terrible waiting, wondering if there is some horrible typo. And then the great satisfaction of the product in the hand. Jumping for joy.


I think I have run out of steam. Over the next month, I am going to try to continue writing at the pace I have done over the last two months in this period of non-stop work. There will no doubt be a little less of the lit crit and historical stuff, and more of the mad-mind-outpouring stuff. But blogging is like having a dog ... you gotta walk the dog, you gotta write the blog.

Photos by Arod.