--CAN YOU HEAR THAT?

…People are coming to my house tonight.  Many people.  One will play guitar and sing.  Some will drink too much.  Hopefully there will be plenty of laughter.

…Next week I go to Portland again.  Like a dolt, I’ve signed up to be part of a Fantasy Football League.  The rule book is 19 pages long.  Plus there’s a handbook of several pages.  I don’t know very much about football, so this will be like setting a pile of money on fire.  But hopefully it will be fun.

…I am slogging through my novel edits.  It’s a horrible process.  I don’t understand people who enjoy tinkering.  I just like to write.  But it’s hard to complain, right?  It’s not like I’m stuck in the blistering sun digging ditches.

…Someone nearby just said, “No good deed goes unpunished.”  I don’t understand a lot of those platitudes.  What does “No good deed goes unpunished” even mean?

…DNA is an interesting thing.  For instance, when I’m at Starbucks and it’s crowded I’ll see couples waiting in line with their kids.  Some of those kids will sharply resemble one parent, sometimes both, sometimes neither.

I guess a lot of it has to do with timing, if you know what I mean.

…I’m slowing making my way through Nick McDonell’s book, “The Third Brother.”  I’m reading it slowly because it’s written in first person, present tense, same as my novel.  It helps me stay in the right frame of mind while editing.  Nick also wrote “Twelve” when he was but 17 years old.  He’s a very talented writer and you’d be glad to read either of his novels.  He has a spare, dead-on style of writing. 

I’d like to meet him some day.

…Here are some things to ponder for the weekend:

-“Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out.”

-“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
-“What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself.”
-“Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.”
-“If you want to work on your art, work on your life.”
-“When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief a background against which it stands out in greater relief.”
-“There is nothing new in art except talent.”
--Anton Chekhov

-"We are all invincible until the first heart attack."

-"It's always too early for dread."
-"You are your own story."
-"You can't erase the past, but you can live with it."
--Nick Donell, "The Third Brother

"When we are mindful of every nuance of our natural world, we finally get the picture: that we are only given one dazzling moment of life here on Earth, and we must stand before that reality both humbled and elevated, subject to every law of our universe and grateful for our brief but intrinsic participation with it." Elizabeth Gilbert

"Will and I could hardly wait for the morning, to be able to get at something that interested us. That's happiness." Orville Wright, co-inventor of the airplane

"The most violent element in society is ignorance." Emma Goldman

"How can we know the dancer from the dance?" Yeats