(Ellen took up with him again on a Thursday.  It was sudden.) 

Well, dolls.  There were cavities, six of them total, at the dentist’s today with the kids.  That means I’m awful.  My own mother turned out a perfectly toothed child, no cavities ever, never ever, her whole life.  Wait — that means A.’s awful.  I passed down the no-cavity gene, he fouled it.

The year 2000 was a leap year starting on Saturday.  It was also the Year of the Dragon and of Leo, too.  Scruffy’s underwear habit is insatiable.  Again, today, nothing of note. 

I’m working on timeline.  I’d left it loose, it’s time to nail it.  I hadn’t picked a year or a month in which to start, it changes page to page.  I’ve got Christmas right behind July 4th and ahead of Easter, I’ve got nighttime things happening in the day.  There’s 2001 always to deal with, too — an elephant if your story’s within 5 years on either side.  I’m leaning toward 2000, re: Where to start.

By the way, and this has nothing to do with that, but I’ve decided, finally, how to make peace with A.’s subway tattoo. I’m going to get one myself.  Either this.  Or this.  Lower back. 

(And psst — I’ll be here all week.)

A. has a new web site at work, I’ll give it to you when it’s up.  We’ll have a launch party, we’ll all wear toner. 

“Listening is an effort that ages the face, makes the neck muscles ache, and stiffens the eyelids looking fixedly at the speaker.  It is a kind of studied debauch … the elevating to its secret meaning a litany of dull words …”

Collette said that.  Curiously, A. keeps looking younger and his eyelids are remarkably lithe.  It’s paid off, his vow of abstinence from the litany of my dull words. 

Today I’m working in Garamond and eating cantaloupe and writing of monkeys.  Ellen’s lover, Reed, lives at the Sunnyside Terrace home in a “persistent vegetative state” and rooms with a monkey, a Capuchin.  Capuchins are small and affectionate and good at getting lids off of jars.  Ellen has issues with intimacy. 

Scruffy is making a sloppy, lip-sucking sound that makes it extremely difficult to work.  I bet monkeys don’t do that.  Maybe I’ll trade him for one. 

I linked to Collette, by the way, so you could read about her lovers.  Including but not limited to her stepson. 

I’m up to get coffee and move Scruffy; if you need to interrupt me, now’s the time.  (If you’d like to leave hot soup at my door, to surprise me for lunch, you may do that now, too.)

I’m slipping, don’t think I don’t know it.  My prose has been shoddy, “The Human Comedy“ has languished, my posts are full of typos and misspells and sometimes entire misposts. 

I forgot to put books on the tables this morning at library, hid out back before Holly or Jennifer could ask for the broom, got in a fight with Chiquita, and am now here alone with my words.  Words, words, words and all of them bad.  So many to choose from and yet I chose, just now, these:

“I slept well the night I gave June the key, as often happens with mistakes.”

Hmm.  Well, technically, I didn’t choose those, Nell Freudenberger did and she put them in The Dissident.  It kind of makes me mad, though, because I had been just about to choose them, I swear, right before she did and now I’m left to choose others.  Such as these:

“Elizabeth David Night fell flat and Ellen tottered eerily before the unopened door resembling Carrie at the prom just after they’d doused her in blood.”

Menza menz.  Also these:

“Howard found her swaying like this, bent toward the scattering leaves, and plucked her at the stem like a poppy.”

What do they mean?  I don’t know, they’re just words.  Here’s more:

“Ellen eventually discovered, not to her liking, that Howard looked at everyone in that same gauzy way, in the same way he looked at her.  Bankers, babies, the girl at the information desk at Barnes and Noble; even the guys at the Jiffy Lube.   where he dropped his car every 3,000 miles.”

I’m not crazy about that passage.  I don’t think “gauzy” conveys what I want, nor does it mesh well with the miles – there’s a certain charm about Howard that your “3,000 miles” Joe lacks, but I needed a detail.  The detail I actually need is his car, the kind of car Howard drives, but I don’t know it.  I should know what he drives, but I don’t.  Let’s move on:

“It’s not us, Ellen said out loud one day, three months into their seventh year.  It’s the great room that got small.”

Oh, dear, I’m afraid I have to go.  I just had an episode with the broom that’s left me rattled.  Holly hunted me down and demanded to know where it was.  I stalled, I stymied hemmed and hawed, and eventually I led her to the exact spot of the broom.  (Brilliant luck!)  And with a slight degree of authority, I might add.  I think she thought it was there because it’s where I’d last used it.  That’s the attitude I took, anyway.

Still, I wasn’t prepared for all of that so I have to lie down now and rest.

If you’ve got words of your own to send me, please do. 

[Anne Snow turned 40 two days ago.  E. will, very shortly, write a poem.]

I’ve moved to the living room now, which is not where I planned to work today, but Tony’s coming and I can’t hear him when I’m out back and I didn’t want to just wait, lingering, with nothing to do, so I brought it all – PC, Dumas, Yates, the whole thing.  And picking up Yates again, it hits me what I’ve known all along but haven’t done — The Good Wife must tell it from Howard’s view as well.  Right now it is, for the most part, Ellen’s tale, and the protracted trials and small insults that are her life, but Howard must have his voice, too.  He has also suffered the wearying trivial routine, the day-after-day that tries a man’s soul, makes his back hurt.

I just moments ago returned from the back room.  I ran there to hide because I saw the church girls with notebooks at the door across the street — it was unnecessary, they never came.  Perhaps they saw me run, or maybe they skipped me and went to Ned’s.  Or Ty’s.  Is it Ned and Ty?  They’re our nice-enough neighbors around the corner, last house on the dead end.  Though they run a rental on our other side that leaks trash and front-porch tv screens and sometimes old gutted cars.  We’d prefer it wasn’t there, but it is, and the irritation it creates has caused me to insult them (Ned and Ty), I think, twice. 

First I didn’t invite them at Christmas.  Then I stopped either Ned or Ty outside recently and was snide about the new renters.  He seemed impatient. 

Since then, the renters have scrammed.  In the middle of the night leaving bicycles and shoes on the porch and it’s haunted me. I behaved poorly.  I sneered at them, I talked behind their backs, I picked their trash up off the lawn and then glared at them when they cursed too loud.  But who am I?  It’s well-known that I sometimes curse loud and I leave all sorts of things around the house in places they don’t belong.

I should photograph the bikes and the shoes to show you.  You’ll be disappointed in me.  I should have brought them a cake instead of worrying about the trash. 

That all seems to have little to do with Ned (or Howard and Ellen, for that matter) except that when I think of Ned or his house, which I did when the church girls disappeared, I think of how I behaved to the neighbors and how they left in the night without their shoes. 

A number of things have happened and it’s not even 9:00.  First, A. has sent me a penis.  Not a real one, just a picture, and not a photo, it was drawn, and not by him.  Also, in A.’s defense, the artist intended for the penis to be scissors.  Still.  Inappropriate for a Monday, don’t you think?  I’m going to tell his mother. 

Second, Scruffy has developed an insatiable taste for underwear.  We knew that it lurked but it used to be infrequent.  Now three pair in shreds since yesterday, I’m not telling whose.  Just please don’t bring underwear to Bills Street, it isn’t safe.

I had minestrone today for breakfast because minestrone is in abundance, I have it coming out the walls.  It was for soup club and I must’ve had it in my head there were 20 of us instead of three.  If 17 of you would like to come for soup, please do.  (But remember, no underwear.)

My thoughts are completely out of order.  Before the minestrone, for instance, I went looking for Revolutionary Road.  I have a battered paper copy and refer to it occasionally, to keep myself on track.  (I sometimes refer to The Good Wife, as you may recall, as “Revolutionary Road with sight gags.”  It’s my pitch.  Sincere apologies Mr. Yates, just trying to make a buck.) 

Anyway, before I found it, I glimpsed Dumas on Food a wonderful little book I picked up at the beach.  Dumas on Food made me think of minestrone, which led to my breakfast.  It also made me think of someone either in real life or on TV once pronouncing Dumas as ”Dumb-ass.”  I’m picturing a character on Friends or Anna though I’m sure it was neither. 

Two more things and then I’ll go.  Tony is coming around 10, to pick up a check.  Tony did the built-ins in the study but you don’t need to remember it, there won’t be a quiz.  I’m a bit peeved, though, about his coming at 10 because it will interrupt my work.  Which I don’t like to do.  Which I am sensitive about.  But that’s not the “two more things” they’re just related to it.  Here they are: 

1.  I couldn’t find the checks.  A. has moved them to his drawer in the built-in.  (We each have a drawer, there are four.)  I knew this but for so long I’ve been going to the messy drawer in the kitchen for checks that it’s automatic.  Now I had to consciously think of where the checks are and I don’t like to do that either. 

2.  I don’t ever want my laptop cord put through the little hole in the top of the desk again.  I realize the hole is made for that but I need to feel free and loose with my computer.  I need to know I can leave whenever I like and when the cord is dropped and looped through holes and cabinets and hidden away and not easy to get out, I feel trapped.  My creativity suffers and real things like kitchen ants and animal waste creep into the picture and foul my mood.

There it is.  My Monday before nine.

Here is some book copy from Rev Road:

“It’s the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple who have lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner.  With heartbreaking conpasion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.” 

From Gawker, an excerpt of The Financial Times’ profile of literary critic James Wood.  Who I totally heart, it turns out, for the exact same reasons Gawker does.  For one, he gets fact-checkers dead on: 

“I find it isn’t the editors who put the qualification in,” he says.  “It’s the fact-checkers.  They have to be resisted because they want to water down unproveable assertions.  So you say: ‘There is great disagreement about Cormac McCarthy’s status — this was a piece I wrote a couple of years ago when No Country For Old Men came out — and they’ll say to you:  ‘Well, I’ve been on the internet and I haven’t found much disagreement actually.’  So you say:  ‘Well, for instance, Ian McKewan thinks he’s complete shit.’  ‘Yeah, but we’ll have to say, then, there’s “some” disagreement.’  And already it’s getting wimpish.”

Also, he loves semi-colons.  Me too, James!; Me, too;!

It turns out renting space with a bunch of writers and giving it a name, doesn’t hurt. 

So I’m renting an office downtown, above the Army Recruiter, and calling it “List of Collective Nouns by Subject.”  If you write, I’ll let you in.  We’ll offer classes — “Re-ordering Your Netflix Queue”, “Watching Raindrops Splatter the Pool Every Single Day for Three Months”, and “Mistaking Every Piece of Debris for Really Big Scary Bugs”.

I expect Richard Pine’s call any minute. 

I feel guilty, I have to come clean.  I spent time this morning (you do not need to know how much) reading this, and this.  When I meant to be re-reading this. 

Yesterday, though, I started the late psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis’ very-hard-to-find memoir, “The Listener”.  (For the record, A., I didn’t pay anywhere near the $100 they’re hawking it for on Amazon.  I’m savvy.  I found it new and cheap.)  This opening passage inspired me to rewrite one particular book’s beginning.

“When I pick up a novel, I look first for the sexual passages.  I want to know what this author thinks can happen between a man and a woman.  I discover the girl undressing, examine her undergarments, see her twisting and moaning under her lover … Before learning whether it’s safe for her even to have coffee with this guy or to go for a walk, I have her skirt up, her legs spread wide.”

So now, one particular book, I might as well make it two, will not require you to waste valuable time thumbing the pages; the girl’s got her skirt up in the very first scene.  Someone just called me.  I ignored it because the phone’s in another room.  Was it you?  Next time call when the phone’s closer.  Thanks. 

First spiders in our ears, now prozac in our water. I’d like to add that there are also ants in the guest house, and I’m not talking about my mother’s sisters. Obviously the world is ending.

(Still, the Times published my letter. But M. was there first.)

I thought they were supposed to tell me when they used my letter. (A., click on the link. Scroll down.) I had to Google myself! Good God, who knows where else I’ve been published, is nothing sacred anymore?

Mine is fourth one down, best for last. Though they cut my first line, “Has ‘green’ jumped the shark?” Changes everything.

So it’s Monday and on Mondays A&E replays its Wednesday night Sopranos. They’re in season one, I think, maybe two, and I’ve seen all these shows already, but with the curse words. Doesn’t matter. I stay up on Monday to re-watch Wednesday, which I’ve already seen, and then I can’t go to sleep. Ralphie killed his girlfriend tonight and then Tony beat him up. They express themselves, these boys, I like that.

Don’t mess with me. Right now.