Is not bad.

There is nothing wrong here.

All day yesterday and all of today my brain has enjoyed a remarkable void.  My thoughts are short and quick to the point, without remorse or shame.  I find myself questioning my self less and less with every hour.  There is nothing wrong here.  This may turn out to be a really short post.

El Caudillo is being really good to me right now.  I can see that he is very happy.  Shawn turned 32 last night and we drank a lot of wine.  He gave a speech on the topic of ‘love.’  Just one more year and we can cruxify him.

JD has disappeared again, as is his wont.

Plans for my own birthday are moving forward with velocity.  I’ve got the house and the caterer, and I will have a special mix in my iPod just for that night.  El Caudillo was kind enough to purchase a case of two-buck Chuck.  John Brady promised to come home from Thailand early, just to join the party.  I cannot wait to be thirty.  Maybe now I can begin my ministry in the desert.

The novel-writing is going well, better than the navel-gazing, though not according to schedule.  I had meant to do homework this afternoon before launching into a quick draft of MIchelle’s chapter six.  Then I discovered that the university’s website (which has the instructions I need to do my homework) is down for system upgrade whatevers.  They promised to have it back by six pm.  Now it is 7:20, I check the website — no, so sorry, come back tomorrow.  So now my homework has been postponed until after the office tomorrow night.  And I am not upset.  I am unfazed.  There is nothing wrong here.

The great news is that after much planning and sketching and invention I had a good solid detailed sketch that specifies exactly everything that happens across the next three chapters, Michelle’s chapters of my novel.  Now I just have to follow the map I’ve traced for myself.  I will have hit page 100 by the time I’m done.  And I already know what happens after that — Chapter 9, the embassy.  The pathway is right before me and I can see my way forward.  This is going to be easy.

I wonder if I could get away with calling in sick one day this week and just stay home and type this bitch.

Life is a glassy lake.  Sundays are haiku.  Peace peace peace.  There is nothing wrong here.

So I did not blog the entire time I was in Portland.  Sorry.  I figured my time would be better spent writing the novel and living my life.  It was sheer heaven.  I will write up a summary of what I did on my autumn vacation and post it here, complete with photos of the evil victorian we stayed in, soon.

Till then, here is a list of books purchased at Powell’s:

– The Verificationist, by Donald Antrim

– Eclipse, by John Banville (hardcover, second edition, only eight bucks!)

– Make Loneliness, by J. Reuben Appelman

– Immediatism, by Hakim Bey

– Little, Big, by John Crowley

– Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo

– An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, by Cesar Aira

– Granta issue #63, “Beasts,” including stories by Paul Auster, John Barth, and Martin Amis

– Granta issue #43, “Best of Young British Novelists 2,” including stories by Kazuo Ishiguro, Will Self, and Iain Banks

And so forth.  Also got to see Bernard Henri-Levi speak about his new book.  My ten-second take on Henri-Levi: an upstanding advocate for human rights, a very sharp apologist for liberalism, a decent writer, and a completely self-absorbed, arrogant bastard when it comes to speaking in front of an audience.  A bad specemin of a Eurotrash stereotype.  Maybe I was just exhausted after six hours on my feet searching the stacks, but god that man can digress, especially when talking about his good friends in the elite.

El Caudillo is in Los Angeles with his fellow leaders, taking a stand for the transformation of what it means to be human.  He left me the laptop, so I am at home alone drinking coffee and listening to ABBA while my iPod recharges and I begin my preparations to write.  I am typing now to get out the crap that I need to clear before I go into that other place in my head where my characters live and suffer.  After two weeks stuck, unsure how to jimmy up three chapters worth of incident and conflict, just enough plot to carry my protag from the hospital to the grassy riverside, I experienced a brilliant flash of inspiration.  I’m going to leave my protag for a little while, and let him roam around Spain on his own.  Instead I’m going to dive into the character of his wife.  We’re going to have some quality time together.  After all, I’m always better at communicating the personae of female characters.  I don’t know why, but somehow they’re just easier to inhabit, just more natural I guess.  Male characters tend to veer too close to some version of myself or my father.  But female characters are just so weird.  There’s more there there.

So Mrs. Michelle Bielo and I will become best friends this weekend. 

I imagine her with a lot of that tightly-curled hair that just flourishes in every direction out from her head.  She doesn’t quite realize how pale she looks with that makeup.  Her ex-coworkers tease her for being a ‘couger,’ when in fact she lost interest in sex years ago.  There was a time when Michelle was the most significant person her friends knew.  She liked herself better then.

There you have it.  I’ll take it from there.

The song that just now shuffled onto my iPod is “There There.”