August. The month of my birth. The month of Helter SKelter. The month Jerry died. Guess who’s elevating? August, the beloved curmudgeon, cursing out some feckless bank teller. Vivian, creative genius pottering. Stacy Horn back to press. SSS on it. What was the world we had? Slipped away. Came back when most expected. Least longed for or the other way around. I am waiting for a kiss. A sweet embrace against a brick wall where we made out in 1985 and 1986 and then broke up and I wrote four last songs. What about two solid weeks to revise the document I call Fuckmedead. What about a dog’s leg resting in the crook of your arm? When did wheelhouse come into  the parlay? Not in my mental house. Not in this physical body. I have lost the thread. So what? The thread lost me.

Are lost, lonely, bitter, broken? Are you a real  writer?

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I didn’t know David Rakoff well, but that didn’t matter. Whenever I ran into him, always in the Village, he made me feel like a long lost friend. That was just one of his great gifts. And when we promised we would get together, have lunch, in that beautifully insincere New York way, that was okay, too. Because David made you feel so good and laugh so hard in those ten or so minutes that you chatted, you felt this crazy love and inexplicable closeness to someone you later realized you didn’t know all that well. Once, when I asked how his writing was going, he said it like pulling pulling teeth, then his famously arched eyebrow preparing the punchline: out of his dick. I thought he said this spontaneously, just to me. Later, I would learn that this was one of his signature lines. Author, actor, mime, wit, clown, deeply subversive, elegant, and though he would hate to hear me say it because it sounds so pretentious, profound.

This morning I read this article about him and I couldn’t stop crying. He died a year ago, on my birthday. There is no connection in that tragic coincidence. And yet I grasp for anything, astonished that we are mourning him at 47. That his greatest work is being published posthumously.  So when I cry and whimper about how poorly my own work is going, at least for now I will try to remember that I have the opportunity to try harder, that I have life in me, and health. That every mundane task is something I can appreciate, like this morning, doing the laundry, separating the dark from the light.

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CONGRATULATIONS TO STACY HORN ON HER PUBLICATION DATE

SHE HAS GRACIOUSLY ANSWERED MY OBNOXIOUS QUESTIONS BELOW IN

AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW FOR BETSY’S BLOG FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE

1)      Do singing and writing have anything in common?

Both give me moments of panic where I think: who am I kidding, I can’t do this! I suck.  And then I write and sing anyway and feel sheer bliss as a result.

2)      How do you know when an idea can become a book, like singing in the choir?

When my agent tells me it can. Also, it has to be a subject that I know will consume me for a couple of years. To the point where I have to tear myself away to sleep, eat, or pet a cat. If I can get like that about a book I know I will do a decent job.

3)      Do you think writers would be happier if they wrote together?

A vision of the apocalypse just went through my head.

4)      What do hate most about the publishing process?

Oh god the answer to this is SO easy: self-promotion.  I was raised to believe this kind of behavior is unseemly and in very bad taste. I accept that I must do what I can and I do, believe me, but afterwards, like TODAY, I collapse into the most intense self-loathing.

5)      Do you  have good agent?

I have the best agent.  And the smartest agent.  And the prettiest agent. In fact, I should go all Misery on her ass and not let anyone else have her!!  Best part is her editing advice.

Contest (top three winners will receive a free copy of Imperfect Harmony): If singing is close to god, what is writing close to?

p.s. I know I owe the Nine Years Under books to winner — sorry for delay.

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