Instead

Instead of writing, really writing, I mean, I'm doing what I think is the literary equivalent of moving the deck chairs on the Titanic. That is, so far I've deleted one word, I've put "placemarkers" at the beginning where I think I'm going to add at least two chapters, one for each of Gordon's first two wives--but I have no idea if that will work or not, but I can't say until I've actually written them--and I've emailed a friend to find out the name of her ex-employer's rival 20 years ago, so I don't accidentally use their name for Gordon's employer.

I suppose this is better than nothing. How's that for a pat on the back?

I did some writing earlier, though. I wrote a letter to my brother, Robert, who is in jail in Wisconsin. But I only did this because he wrote me a letter that I got a week ago. It's very hard to know what to say. He's in there for a particularly awful crime (which he swears he didn't do), so you know he can't be having an easy time of it. The other part that's difficult is that I hardly know the guy. He's really my half-brother and I didn't grow up with him. As a child, I spent the equivalent of about 5 or 6 weeks, total, with my father and his second family. At least his letter seemed fairly literate--it's possible that he's been getting classes or something while he's been in there. Anyway, it'd been years since I'd heard from him and years since I'd sent him a letter myself, of which I am decidedly not proud.

Man, my family. There's so much that goes on and I hear little bits and pieces of it. I feel rather impotent to do much, but then there's my--well, I'll say "natural" tendency to avoid getting involved in things, I'm so very, very good at denial and detachment. I found myself thinking about a couple of ex-lovers today and wondering if I ran into them again, or (gasp!) if I were to meet somebody new to try to love, would I be any better at being a good partner/lover? I wonder how good a friend I am.

I guess what led me to that train of thought was noticing once again that I seem to have two copies of Ann Patchett's "Truth and Beauty" and I'm pretty sure I only need one. I can't seem to get past the way in which this talented, but flawed woman who was incredibly self-destructive and needy still managed to find and hold such close and devoted friends. And I can't help feeling they were just enablers, even though I'm pretty sure that's not all they were and that that certainly wasn't Patchett's intent in writing the book. It's probably not even the message that most people get from it, either. But maybe it's all right for me to question these things, they're important things to think about and there's probably not just one answer to them and even more probably not just one right answer.

I've also been thinking about all the things I want and need to do with my money over the next few months. I think I am being, once again, overly ambitious. There's two things I must do:
buy a new computer and redo/update my website. I also want to go to California in December and Florida and South Carolina in January. I have been fantasizing about how I could arrange these things and at this point, I think I need to sit down and be realistic about it all.

Yeah, okay, I've just run out of steam. I'm going to go take another look at the novel, which is still open, see if there's anything I could take a stab at writing. Even if it's just fleshing out a scene that I refer to in a flashback, take it out of flashback.

I wish to hell I knew what the fuck I was doing.