Onward

I want a presidential candidate who has worked for a living.  Not someone who just had a job–they all manage that at some point.  I want someone who, dog-tired and sick as one too, dragged his or her ass to work because one more day in bed would mean not having the money to pay the mortgage.

How about a candidate who has faced the choice of buying food or medicine?

I’m tired of hearing from candidates who “understand my concerns.”  I want one who’s been there and has the t-shirt to prove it.

Because, really?  They don’t get it at all.

Just stumbled on this as I checked my email:

If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough - Mario Andretti

Heh. Eat my dust, world.

Not that one. The one from the A-Team. You remember.

“I love it when a plan comes together.”

Yeah. ‘Cause mine tend to fall the hell apart.

This post is so hard to write. I’m refusing to allow myself to crawl into a hole (there’s no time and it doesn’t help anyway) but knowing that doesn’t make facing this any easier.

So. The Ohio plan fell apart. We will not be renting Bly’s mom’s house. Bly is returning to Ohio and getting a place of her own. I am still hoping to go as well and split the moving costs, but that’s going to depend on a lot of things, that all boil down to one question:

Can I find a way to move across the country with no home, car, or job waiting for me when I arrive, or find a way to acquire at least the first the moment I arrive, and the other two very quickly afterwards?

Fascinating question, isn’t it?

I want to go. I want to go home, only not home. I want to be right between Dad and Jeff, and in a new and lovely place near Bly. I have been in Arizona twenty years, and while it’s beautiful and fascinating and culturally rich and all, it will never be home. But how the hell do I make it work?

Not just any book, this book: The Starving Artists Survival Guide

So what if I’m not exactly starving? It doesn’t have a single recipe for spicing up a seven-cent package of ramen with a bit of fresh-caught alley cat. No, this is a book for the rejected artist, and I am most certainly numbered in that crowd.

This book has instructions for Fun With Rejection Letters! (Try a toilet paper effigy!) It has Rejection Haiku! (Skipping to mailbox/find my own SASE/rot, editor, rot.) It has reassurance (Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass, then wrote a glowing review under a pen name. Dustin Hoffman was a janitor, Whoopi Goldberg a corpse beautician.) It has encouragement (Louisa May Alcott wrote as many as fourteen hours a day. Charles Dickens regularly got up at seven a.m., took a bath in cold water, then began writing.) Compassion (Ten Good Reasons to Keep Your Head Out of the Oven) and even a good swift kick in the pants (Think you’ve got it bad? Poe was an orphan before he was two, watched his wife spend six years dying of tuberculosis, was so poor he lived on molasses and bread for weeks at a time, and died at forty from inflammation of the brain.)

Also included are discussions of the Housing Situation (Lofts aren’t easy to come by, and mom’s basement means your sex life is doomed), interior decorating on an artist’s income (bean cans are surprisingly versatile!), and The Artist as Social Animal (When the concept of “a nice little vacation” is suggested…)

Described as “A Blackened Chicken Soup for the Artistic Soul,” this book lives up to its name. It brings hope and a much needed snicker or six.

And when all else fails, remember: When someone once robbed Picasso’s garret, they took everything but his art.

He who laughs last, my friend.

It’s been difficult to do anything else since this new story hit me. Fi and his universe are so utterly fascinating…

Also, I’d forgotten–if I ever noticed–what work creating a new world can be. I’m starting from scratch, below scratch, here. There are things in the Real World ™ that resemble what I’m creating. So I’ve got to know enough about them to make my stuff different enough…I don’t want to change things before I know why they are the way they are. Institutions evolve (somewhat) logically; what if I screw it all up?

Ooh, just got hit with an idea for a major change… *ponders for a bit*

No. That change would take my story in a direction I don’t want it to go. I think.

*ponders further*

Well, if you must know, so far the story is set in a Catholic mission. I need to tweak the rules a bit to make it work, though, and I’m not really comfortable with that. I don’t want to be disrespectful. But if I make it a completely different religion just to differentiate it from the Catholic Church of here and now…I lose the symbols and a great deal of the atmosphere.

What I need to do is change one or two things in the past of my Catholic Church to make the differences I need appear sensible. And I’ll just have to risk offending the real Catholic Church.

Now to find those one or two things that didn’t happen the way history records them.

(BTW, talk about hyper-focused…Fidelis)