I laugh at myself. This book is going to be one of those that is suddenly finished. I am far from that point but today I began to recognize the signs and decided to go with it. Write until it says stop. If there is a story I will find it in rewrite. I just spent hours putting the psychiatric community on the rack. It's not fair they have no defense and after some time your arms just get tired from hitting them at will for so long. I admit it is fun for the first few minutes.
I think I discovered one of the truths that run through this octopus of a thing and that is 'conformity'. How we do until we don't. It won't run deep but it is there just like throwing stones at organized religion in 'Maacland' and 'Magick'. In fact it has been there all along and I just didn't see it, all the way back to 'Four and a Half Hours'. Which means it has to predate Tofino and really I had moved to Vancouver only weeks before that. The suggestion is obvious.
'Dancing Bears' was a revelatory work dealing with my father's death. Fiction, I masked it as my best friend in the story, which was huge in implication and inference all by itself; book three in a five book series. Only in the NPR interview did I realize it was also my post-mortem for Dale Sherritt, my real best friend, really dead. It was 'life is like that' and the interview remains my favorite. The symbolism and life never larger it was a fresh breeze and boy did it feel good. It felt great! I treat the 'Dee Trilogy' as a gratuitous indulgence to myself and not a literary achievement which gives me a wide berth for lavish selfish affection. It was also a love song for Sharon (you know it, I've told you, stop blushing and enough protest) and was as perfect as I will likely ever get.
This 'one' has the potential to approach the meaningfulness of 'that'. I doubt whether I will be able to bring the honest truth out, my father's failings as the ridiculous yardstick I hold as the measure of my own life but it is a story I should tell; maybe just not yet but this could well be the cat out of the bag. It didn't seem such a joke in my youth or my prime but now that many decisions have been made and the results known it is easier to allow myself the vanity of acknowledging how deeply it affected me and the price of being right is often never worth it. The way I just exhaled and paused to pat my knees tells me yes that is it. Now what do I do? Mother is alive and what does that say to her now too late for her to interpret with anything but pain. For what and to what end? This too has been a struggle.
I knew I was on the right path today when I nailed 'silent killer'. Not as advertised but another one and not the least bit different than 'What is man?' and 'Who am I?' The genre may be 'existential angst' and that is why the 'romance' handle may weigh so heavily. Yes it is. Believe it or not this has been another circle. If I am correct in my assessment of 'Magick' as a 'sixties' retrospective (I am) then this 'one' is too or at least in the same vein (yesterday's 'veins popping').
'Sometimes a Great Notion' was Ken Kesey's second novel published in 1964. His first, from 1962 was "one Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'. Kesey described himself as the link between the 'Beat' generation and the 'Hippies'. 'Sometimes' has been voted number one on a list of the twelve essential Northwest works. I agree it is the quintessential work on the Northwest. That was my Tofino. Ken Kesey equals Tom Wolfe equals Jack Kerouac equals Timothy Leary equals everything I have written. 'Sometimes' is a 'never give an inch' story, union busting loggers in Oregon trying to make a buck and stay alive. The other day I posted something about 'nobility'; it is no accident, they all add up. The 'doll' part a stretch but not really and even 'Film Noir' hangs in the air.
Sometimes I am just in the zone.
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