I feel like the girl on the train or the girl in the window or the girl lurking inside a dank doorway waiting for a cab she never called. What I’m saying is I can’t seem to account for the time. What day is it? What time is it? When did I last check in? Where am I? Where are you? Is writing the least or most important thing? At the beginning of the pandemic I had three projects I was manically working on from one to the next. I bought new binders! Finally: time. For a week or so I thought I found the meaning to life: staying home, endless hours to write. Only now the projects are languishing and I can’t find my dick with my own hands.
What are you all up to? Healthy, I hope. xoxo
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Betsy Lerner 
Yes, thank you. The other night I asked myself how one is supposed to live these days (I mean the “live” in the gold-plated LIVE LOVE LAUGH necklace other girls wore and I never liked). If we’re at the end of days, why can I still shop online? I think everything’s normal now and everything’s nuts. Be well, all.
When my beard stubble is moveable, it’s time to take a bath. I catch myself going out to get the mail on Sundays: At the last second, when reality sets in, I pretend I am fixing the mailbox door. The only person who sees me is my next door neighbor who is a retired Methodist minister who wears a T-shirt and pajama bottoms (even before COVID) and sports a really bad hair piece that even he makes fun of – so, he does not count. I have started a list of important things I am doing so when friends call and ask what I am doing, I sound like I have it all together. When we are fixing lunch, my wife asks what I want to drink: “Wine,” I tell her and when she gives me that WTF look, I tell her, “Lemonade and iced tea are not appropriate combinations with fine cuisine.” She buys it and I have 2 glasses while we watch a movie over lunch. I also secretly throw in clean shirts, pants, underwear and socks into my laundry hamper that is nothing but 5 pairs of pajamas. I can boast, however, that I rise before my dogs – they are now sleeping in past 9:00. And for the first time, I have to worry about periodically starting up my car to make sure the battery doesn’t die. I do that when I put on my go-to-the-mailbox outfits – two sets of clothes that I alternate daily so the neighbors don’t think I am not hygiene conscious.
Love it! Especially the ‘go to the mailbox outfit’. I have 2 similar ones for my walk.
Totally laughed out loud at this, then sobered up at the reality I fit this except for the beard thing. And the wine. Can’t do wine.
I’m over here in beautiful downtown Brisbane, Aust. I’m currently tearing the apartment apart, rearranging furniture – all old and covered in dust – sorting through drawers I haven’t opened in 20 years. Finding ghastly things in the corners where the furniture’s been moved.
I tell myself it’s so I’ll be perfectly set up to finally get that Brisbane ’60s novel out there (it’s actually finished, only needs a copy-edit), but I don’t know … Whatever it is, I’m grateful for it. This kind of clearing out only hits me once in every 30 years.
Go safely, Betsy.
you made me laugh…thanks.
What am I up to? Expert expatiatory excrementalism (talking shit) mostly.
Clumsily continuing in that vein, I will say only this:
The usual problem when someone can’t find their dick with their own hands, is that they never had a dick to begin with. But we all know Betsy is possessed of a large and magnificent set of balls, so it seems almost certain she has a dick too. And dicks — while generally poorly behaved, selfish and thoughtless creatures, with an eye always searching for trouble — don’t usually travel far. Indeed, they rarely move more than a few inches in any direction, before suddenly retreating, then venturing forth once again; then back, then forward, ad infinitum, etcetera, again and again (though not usually for long).
The point — the point! — is that your dick is almost certainly right where you left it, dear Betsy. Therefore, I strongly suggest you check the ends of your arms — your hands are probably missing. Worn down all the way to the wrist, from furious typing, no doubt. Don’t worry, they always grow back, even if you don’t want them to.
Without my writing group I wrote nothing. Then decided to write a letter explaining to the recipient I was writing them in order to start writing.
So now I’m back to my old self. I’d usually write 4 or 5 things before I’d get up on stage and read it.
Yesterday I expressed to a friend a frustration that I needed an analogy. She had nothing. But describing around what I want to kinda say seemed to help. Any day now it will come to me.
Perfect is an enemy of good. Listened to Dr. Fauci today on twiv podcast saying that. Or something like that. Maybe besides applying to a miraculous fast test for Covid ill take it to heart. And post something.
I feel so much better writing. Now I didn’t say it is even good writing. Expression. That’s my main desire.
As for myself, I am beside myself. What does that even mean? That I am next to myself, out of my own skin, out of bounds, out of my mind, out-sourced, outdone, undone, overcome? All of the above? How is it that I walk a wide circle around fellow human beings with a fucking mask on as if they are contaminants? That, now back in CT for the summer months I am considered dangerous having flown in from FL, and can’t even kiss the little toes of my first grandchild? Where am I? What am I? I was going to write a poem a day. Ha. I re-read my 2/3 finished manuscript and it’s brilliant. There, I said it. Most likely it will never get done. Shall I quote Eliot? I grow old. Yet, I breathe. I get up. I still marvel at a sunset, the part of me that is still me.
“What day is it?”
It is a day ending in Y.
“What time is it?”
It is now. It is never not.
“When did I last check in?”
Now.
“Where am I?”
You are here.
“Where are you?”
I am in some other here.
“Is writing the least or most important thing?”
Yes.
“At the beginning of the pandemic I had three projects I was manically working on from one to the next. I bought new binders! Finally: time. For a week or so I thought I found the meaning to life: staying home, endless hours to write. Only now the projects are languishing and I can’t find my dick with my own hands.”
I began the fabrication of the latest in my interminable series of unpublished book-length contraptions in the middle of February. It has nothing to do with pandemic, but pandemic don’t care. And pandemic — and economic collapse, and civil unrest, and political chicanery, and swallows along the lakefront, and soap scum slowly building on the shower stall — these have all intruded as distractions; none the less, or nonetheless, I write on, through fogs of despair and Saharan sand. As for my own dick, it is still where I left it, and where it left me — yet another distraction, useful in its way.
“What are you all up to? Healthy, I hope. xoxo”
I am healthy enough to abjure complaint, and healthy of hope I yet remain, despite the dismal course life follows in both its particular and general ways. xoxo
Time is a flat circle, or something.
Occasionally I think writing is the most important thing. Then I read my own stuff and realize it’s not. I’ve taken to collecting houseplants and now I think they’re the most important, though last month it was banana bread. If I had a dick it would be a game changer. My husband has offered to lend me his for entertainment purposes—he’s never needed two hands to find it—though I can’t say it’s any more fascinating than a Monstera adonsonii’s unfurling leaf. Don’t tell him I said so.
I have been watching a lot of thriller/crime shows where the main character has blackouts and wakes up somewhere weird, usually with blood on their hands. So I figure I must be in a fuge state and when I wake up I’ll be surrounded by Amazon boxes, gained 20 pounds, have an impossible amount straggly grey hair and there’ll be salsa and raw cookie dough on my hands.
Is it chocolate chip cookie dough?
Of course!
Oh, yeah! Cookie dough, Peggy Lawton chocolate cookies, Klondike bars, bagels piled with cream cheese, those little caramel disks with cream in the middle, steak bombs, etc, etc. all washed down with Diet Coke or wine. I haven’t eaten this shitty since college and I’ve lost 7 lbs. Go figure. Covid cannot have my forbidden delights, or my writing. Go die, Covid! Enough already.
Healthy – and writing. 103K and counting. Goals, goals.
I can’t remember stupid things. I placed a to go order on my cell phone, and ten mins later, couldn’t find it. Forgot the last time I used it (ten mins before). Hubby went to get the food, and that’s when it dawned on me, “oh yeah. I ordered the food with it.” Geez. Should I admit that here?
I was going to say, you can’t find your dick b/c you don’t have one, except that sounds a bit like a smartass, and given my cell phone thing, that, I am not.
I feel like everyone has sunk to my level: working at home, existential despair, pjs, forgetfulness, and social anxiety.
I’m up to my eyes in copy edits for my novel but I will never complain about that. But yes, I never seem to know what day (month?) it is. xo
Out on the trail and in the woods . The waters are calling out to me. My new favorite spot is a masterfully constructed beaver pond. It’s about an acre of flooded grassland with a steady trickle seeping out through a dam of intertwined sticks and mud. There’s a three foot drop off, about the height of a kitchen table,and numerous small streams flow into one main stream that flows rapidly downhill. The water speaks in code and frogs provide the rubber band bass (I saw a friend out birding one morning and he later told me he counted 75 different birds that day). My dream image is of being in a bathtub size boat and lazily floating along enjoying joints and a cold six pack.
The world is on fire and I’m surrounded by dark, cool water.
Not counting my chronic anger and frustration at all the local covidiocies, I may qualify as healthy. However, despite all these SAH mandates, crime has not taken a holiday. My latest project was making a voodoo doll for the thief who took something off my porch. A shard of glass, pins and a rusty nail were all used in the design. It presently is squashed, upside down, on a bookshelf. Quite satisfying.
PS: so glad to read all the earlier posts. Have missed everyone.
Dear Bette: No Cat “Salman Rushdie Must Die” Stevens Quotes, Please! If You Have A Line On Any Jim Carroll Projects, That Would Be Most Welcome. He Used His Stay Home Time To Good Effect! Go Easy On Your Self, Sean Andrew Heaney