Bad Day At White Rock Artistic Temperament, lost parking space, returning wasps nests, oppressive deadlines on two novels, paintings sitting unfinished, books and movies sitting unreviewed, the vagaries of moments of aging memory, athletic injuries creeping up and making friends with the ancient ravages of polio in my early grammar school days in the 1940's, a column I'd worked on and off for two days, with which I was less than happy...
Whoa!
In the last few days my artistic temperament has been edging toward a grand finale'. I was struggling through a column on the need for prison reform and an end to corporate profiteering prison systems, and I finally got it online when a thorough reading discovered more typos and structural imperfections. I wanted to do yet more online editing but I knew that there is now a timeout feature, which limits how much time you can spend online editing. Therefore, I decided to rewrite, take the old one down and replace it with the new when I finished it, but I was tired of the story. The last several weeks had been a disaster, two family members down with a clinging pneumonia, ancient sports injuries nagging at me, my new glasses after months of struggling were still not correct, and back for what seemed endless remakes, my feet were hurting, I was coughing-allergies and there were hints that the Democrats, as some predicted but wanted to be wrong about, were going to cave in again (and later they did). I had called both my senators and asked them to "stay the course," with the Pullout timetable intact, be tough-they were out-toughed, however. If that wasn't bad enough, I was falling behind on the editing of two my new novels: The Universal Travelers And Why They Wouldn't Stay Home And Wash Their Dishes And A Working Title
The last one sold like radio-active manhole covers and I was determined to outdo it this time. I didn't even make enough for a solid lunch out on it. I am no editor, nor among my degrees do I have an English Major, but I did not like the editing on my last novel, so in a fit of artistic temperament, vowed to be more choosy on my next Publisher, and to do as much editing as I could before letting the manuscripts out of my sight. What a drudge! Also there sat several religious drawings, a couple of westerns, a bookcover, and four still life's, only one of which had any paint on them. We had gotten ill from eating out one night and were struggling with that when I felt an artistic temperament binge creeping up. The day before I had been aced out of a parking spot more than once, cut off twice and one guy passed me, cut me off and hit his brakes. Fortunately I was wide enough awake to avoid slamming into him, (thanks to two Dr. Pepper's, but he drove off darting back into the other lane sans turn signal and then cutting off the guy in front of me, brake slam again! Back again to the other lane and by now trapped behind a truck he was. I passed him, he sat very low in his seat, typical backward baseball cap on a guy who looked like he'd never been on the playing end of a baseball bat or glove-popular look, but there oughtta be a law about Baseball card collectors who've never played the sacred game being allowed able to buy, certainly not to wear, baseball caps at all, let alone backwards. (What is that backwards stuff all about? Are these guys frustrated catchers?) Anyway I ate breakfast at the computer, Italian bread toasted and slathered with butter and jam, with a mug of water, clicking away at correcting in Word, the article which I was not liking, when up came a happier Gmail comment placed, so I took a break and off I went to see the comment and had a complete artists temperamental moment. I did not truly read he comment, just skimmed it, saw that it seemed to repeat several versions of a story which connection to my article I failed to get. They weren't linked, but entirely copied. (Ahem, copywrite infringement.) Now this is not unusual for newcomers to do. They seem to lose their bearings in OPED's splendor, but this one, was not only long, it was in color (or was it my glasses acting up again) and it was almost as long as or longer than my article. The color was annoying me; it was a better draw than the staid black and white badly conceived article, which I wanted to redo. Now, though I confess to not having read much of the comment, and even that not very thoroughly, simply scanned it, trying in vain to find a name connecting it to what I wrote-and had not written well, I'll admit, when I came to the conclusion that the damned article had been upstaged, down-staged, out colored, diminished, Swift-boated and outshined, slanderized, by the glitzy colors of the comment-the same article I was unhappy with in the first place was now somehow diminished even further if possible, so I slammed away and deleted it vowing to rewrite ASAP, when it came to me-struck me like a bolt out of the blue! The last three or four months I was on a mission and the mission was scuttled by the pullout reversal, just as two of the last three elections had been, and I was behind on my deadlines, my paintings were sitting on easels undone or unfinished, my favorite teams all except the Bulls were losing, my back was hurting, I was hungry, the sweat sock on my left foot was crumpled and annoying my foot, I was worried about my family members with pneumonia and I hadn't completed a single book or movie review in weeks and we had no more DVD's of Seinfeld left. A very bad situation, to say the least. So, I dumped the article, may do it over, and may take a break to catch up on to finish my other obligations. Well, we went to bed very early last night, my wife because the last two days she got up very early to go to 6:30 mass on her way to the office, and I to catch up on stuff I needed to catch up on. I woke up early, getting my usual healthy 2-4 hours sleep, as I did when I was working on my novels and painting, and took a break and while I was sitting around watching an old episode of Murphy Brown, I started tapping away at the keys and this is what I produced, but such as it is it will have to last you a while because I am, determined to finish my contractual obligations with myself before I write another paragraph. Good Night and God Bless.