"Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency … to get the book written."

(quote: Faulkner, video: Chimpanzee Problem Solving")



The woman that lives next door to me sometimes goes out on her back porch and screams. She screams at god, her children who do nothing for her, some entity that strikes me as The Man but she probably understands as misfortune. Today I was in the backyard enjoying the sunset, sitting on a cooler, having a smoke and a beer, reading. I heard her sliding door creak open, watched through the slats of our privacy fence as she sat down on her step. Heard her beer crack open. And for a moment we just drank together. I read a page of my book. And then she starts to cry. A stifled cry like a war widow. And then the vibrato of sob pooled, where the cry starts to make a whining sound. And then she says something. Then says it louder. Then yells "Why doesn't it work?". The question Camus would have asked had he been an Engineer. And then she scolded her grown gone children, they never help. And then she demanded of god to know why he did this to her. And then she cried, the way we don't think people cry; with that 'huh-uh .. uh-oh" getting loud in the black trees and pink darkening sky. Her shouts lasted longer than my tolerance. I went back inside. Finished my beer. Cracked the window open so I could just hear her. That inconsolable grief. I don't know what a person is to do with that.

Reclusive as the days get longer. Habits developed in winter now wincing at the sun, now demanding some middling interval. Punctuation that let's me breathe. Dwindling social interaction somehow makes every one of them more valuable. But it's only half on purpose, the other part the circumstances of grinding. I've got these two classes that demand a novel of reading and two days of writing per week. And my every opinion in them is contrarian, apparently.

I've been rejected by the University of Pittsburgh. I think that if I get rejected ubiquitous, I'm going to take the survival money I've socked away for grad school and move back east. Not Michigan, but closer; somewhere I don't know anyone. Get a job there working part-time (as much to meet new people as anything. Something physically demanding.) and write. Take two years working on the thing that I plan on doing as my thesis. The Ex Nihilo Creative Writing Program. Sign up now.