Tag Archives: writing

Non-fiction

The Show Vs. Tell Madness

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All these books repeat the same thing regarding showing versus telling. Someone posted their writing for critique for a writers’ group on Facebook and wanted to know which sentence worked best.

First Sentence: It was fucking cold.

Second Sentence: My bones chattered from the howling winds through my frosty open bedroom window.

Third Sentence: The howling winds brushed against my chattering bones as the midnight air bit through my peeling skin in a thunderous collision of war.

I rarely post anything on there, but I was really tempted, so I wrote: The first sentence for sure. This show versus tell madness is getting out of hand.

Sometimes, all you have to write is: It was too fucking cold.

I never heard truer advice as when someone said, “Write like you talk.” His name is Jack Grapes. I implore you to watch his three-hour interview on YouTube. It’s better to avoid sentences that begin with a participial phrase, such as:

Standing at the window, I watched the car roll by.

That’s not how someone talks. Maybe in the nineteenth century they did when eloquence was key. But nowadays, modern speech isn’t the same.

If I was telling someone, I would effortlessly say, “It was fucking cold.” Or “I stood at the window and watched the car roll by.”

People just automatically speak in subject-verb-object sentences. So when I read a story where sentences begin with participial phrases, it reminds that I’m reading something rather than experiencing it. Oh, wait. Someone wrote this. The less attention you bring to yourself as a writer, the better. It’s like if you were watching a movie, and out of nowhere, the film crew entered the frame. The director yells “Cut! ” and the scene ends.

We’ve been taught at an early age to write like a writer. It’s hard to unlearn. Unlearning it takes years of practice.

I also read a heated debate about insensitive language. This is something I’m afraid I can’t help. A frustrated writer expressed his thoughts about someone calling him out for using the word “handicap” in his story. He cried censorship. People in the group posted accusatory comments and called him an “old man yelling at the wind.” So it’s a matter of older people not understanding the rules of younger people. And what’s wrong with older men? Isn’t that offensive? I can agree that I can’t keep up with what words are insensitive these days. It seems there’s a new word that is deemed derogatory every hour. I wanted to make a comment as well, but I held back. If I’m playing golf, what should I say instead of “handicap”?

The angry old man said he refused to be politically correct. Someone actually wrote, OMG, the term politically correct is so 1990s. I didn’t even know. So what’s the word they use these days instead?

Most of them told him he could write what he wanted, that no one was censoring him, but also that the readers had a right to hate his work, and that traditional publishers wouldn’t go near him. It was an all-out assault, but I understood his point. The appropriate words should align with the character. Euphemisms remove the poetry out of a poem. The purpose of one is to remove feeling from the meaning. If “handicap” is too offensive to use in literature, depending on the context of course, we’ll have to use “person with a disability.”

They said Stephen King had even apologized for his insensitive language in his past works. I wonder if someone forced him to apologize and if he really meant it, or if he internally rolled his eyes.

Non-fiction

bruxism and al bundy

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I sat in the waiting room of the dentist’s office early in the morning and fidgeted over mouth cancer while the office played “Jingle Bells.” To keep my mind distracted, I read post comments on Facebook. It had a writer’s group. Someone posted about a new AI technology that could critique your story. I had never used it before. Some people said it worked for them.

A hygiene assistant called my name and asked me to follow her to a room. She led the way and walked very slowly. When we got there, she asked me why I was visiting.

“I have a mouth sore that hasn’t healed for two months,” I said.

“Let me see,” she said.

I opened my mouth and showed her.

“I don’t see it,” she said.

“Your finger’s on it,” I said.

“Oh, I see it now. Please stand over here at this machine, so I can take your X-ray.”

It was a machine I had never seen. I stood in a chamber where I rested my chin. She left the room and flipped a switch several times while I wore a vest. She took pictures of the mouth sore and sent me to another room where the dentist would come.

Another hygenist came in with another.

“Good morning. I’m going to look at your teeth and gums.”

She sat over me while the other one sat at the computer monitor. The one over me checked each tooth and gave them numbers. Two and three were good. Four was bad. “Two, two, three, two, four, four, four, four…”

I began to sweat each time she said, “Four.”

When the dentist came in, she tested me for oral cancer. She held a device over my mouth. I said, “Ahh.” The device was round with blue lights and a handle. It looked like something at the checkout lane in a grocery store. I wondered how it worked. It might be outdated many years from now. She told me it didn’t find any cancers, and she didn’t even mind the sore.

After she left the room again, I waited for some time in the chair and read more Facebook. One of the group members asked if it was okay if his character complained about his wife to his friends. His son had told him it wasn’t funny. People in the comments mostly all agreed with his son. That character is a jerk. A lot of them said it was such an old trope. A few people claimed that most readers are between 18-30, and they didn’t like that sort of character: the husband who complained about his wife. A few of them compared him to Al Bundy, and some people even compared Al Bundy to Archie Bunker. At least the two characters shared the same initials. I used to love Married…With Children. It was one of my favorite sitcoms of all time. After all that negative feedback, I wondered what the writer could do with that character if he couldn’t complain about his wife.

I stopped reading that post. The dentist said my mouth looked pretty good before she told me everything that was wrong about it, and it was a listful. Most of it was dental terminology that only her staff would understand. But I found out I suffered from bruxism and would need to wear a mouth guard when I go to sleep. I have never worn a mouth guard. I’ll probably drool a lot.

They fitted me for it with a soft plaster. I bit down on it to form the mold. They said I would have to come in to pick it up next week. I also have to switch what kinds of toothpaste and stop brushing so hard. I had been using Colgate all those years but had to switch to Crest. The dentist had told me which Crest toothpaste to use, but I forgot what it was right after she’d told me. I left the office without a clue about which one to buy. Another doctor’s visit without any resolution.

Non-fiction

A Moveable Page

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I’ve followed my vast reading list and have forgotten how many years it has been–maybe two–since I’ve begun. Most of the novels have been hard to read because they were written at a time when the language was different, or they were translated from French or Russian or some other language.

I’ve made it to the writers with the last name that starts with H. One of those writers is Hemingway. I’ve read all of his novels, but I chose not to skip him for Henry James and opened A Moveable Feast for the first time since I was in my twenties. Some of the chapters came back to me, like the chapter when he visited a bookstore in France. It’s another novel that takes place in France. What is it about that country? I’ve never been there, but I plan to go before I die. He borrowed a bunch of books from the lady who owned the store, and he was in debt to her. She told him not to worry, to pay her when the time was right. I also remember the scenes with Gertrude Stein and a little about F. Scott Fitzgerald. This is the novel where Hemingway wrote his famous line about writing one true sentence. He also wrote that he would stop while he was ahead in the morning and never think about the story until the next day so his subconscious could figure it out. It sounded like a lot of superstition.

After reading many different writers and their styles, I wondered what made Hemingway influential. He would write a sentence such as “The wine was great.” Well, what was great about it? He would never expound.

I read too many books on writing in my years as an insecure writer. Most of those how-to books would point out how Hemingway’s sentence wouldn’t work, and I understood.

I’m in the middle of the book, and page after page, Hemingway mentions how something is beautiful or wonderful. Again, I wondered what was beautiful or wonderful about a person, place, or thing, just as if someone were to tell me.

In my twenties, a friend loaned me Stephen King’s On Writing.

“You gotta read this book if you’re a serious writer,” he said.

He got me excited, so I went home and read it.

In one chapter, King delved into a writer’s mechanics, namely grammar and style. I immersed myself in that chapter as if King would reveal a holy secret. He advised writers to write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs. The idea was new to me in the years I began to write stories. Pens explode. Jars salivate.

The same friend, a King fanatic, lent me another book. I think it was The Stand, a novel that was over a thousand pages. It intimidated me. How could I finish a book that long? How would it hold my attention? The paragraphs were littered with adjectives and adverbs. I had to put the book down and shoot it in the barn. Maybe he’d written The Stand and realized his errors before writing On Writing. Suppose he’d removed those adjectives and adverbs. The novel would’ve been fewer than five hundred pages, and maybe I would’ve finished the book. Even without them, his prose would’ve still been too golly-gee-whiz for me. I’ve noticed many of his stories took place in Maine, where I think he’s from. Is that how people act up there? I don’t know. All I knew was King wasn’t for me.

We need adjectives at times. If there was a hit-and-run, and a cop asked me (no, wait, no, that’s an offense these days), if a policeman asked me (no, that’s an offense, too), if a police officer asked me what the color of the car was, I would need to tell him it was green. But if I said the car was great, he wouldn’t have anything to go by.

But I still enjoy Hemingway’s style for how direct it is. It’s hardly flowery compared to something by Flaubert. I can’t get over how Ernest described certain people in real life, such as how he described Fitzgerald when he met him in a bar, I think, in France. It was somewhat critical. He painted Fitzgerald out to be a pretty weasel. Would that be appropriate these days? Writers used to get away with that degree of criticism, but I don’t know about it now.

Non-fiction

The Same Old Expectations

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An old friend, who hadn’t reached out after two cold years, had actually texted me last week unexpectedly to check on me. Coming from him, it’s always been unexpected. And how was I doing? Well, not too good. But I didn’t tell him. Instead it was the usual: Oh, things are great. All I wrote was confirmation that what another friend I hadn’t talked to in years had said about me was true: that I’d gotten tired of LA and moved to Palm Springs in February.

Life is a whore, he wrote.

I didn’t argue against that. In all honesty, my heart leaped in surprise to hear from him. All that time, he’d written me off like most old friends had done. That’s how friendships work. People grow apart.

He’d written to me that another friend of ours, a woman whom I hadn’t thought about since probably 2007(?), had married a gay man, which didn’t make sense, but okay. For some reason, he’d brought her up.

In the summer, he’d announced on social media that his apartment had burned down, but he didn’t mention that to me in the text. All his fans, since he’s a quasi-celebrity, had written their condolences to him in the comments. I never wrote a thing. Like I said, he’d written me off, so we weren’t on the level of communication. But an inkling was still there that he would write to me at some point.

Well, he did. This week, he presented me with an opportunity after he’d been given money to open up a business. One of the arms of the business, as he called it, was publishing. He’s been looking for writers to send him short stories for a sci-fi/horror anthology. If my stories were good enough, he could make a collection of my own, and he would pass them on to an editor to polish them up.

When it comes to opportunity, I jump with joy, but also my nerves catch on fire. What if I can’t produce up to his standards? The pressure tightened around my throat. I even started to panic. That was Thursday night after the football game when I heard from him.

The next morning, I wrote him back before the sun rose and congratulated him. How cool it was that he’d been given that opportunity. I thanked him for reaching out to me. Even though horror and sci-fi aren’t in my wheelhouse, I said fuck it. I would give it a shot. If it sucked, he would let me know, and we would look for ways to improve it. What have I got to lose except more hope? You know what they say about expectations. Actually, I don’t know. What do they say? All I know is expectations are a real bitch. They get me in trouble and usually end in colossal disappointments. I expect the world out of my fortunes, and more often than not, they turn to shit in comparison.

He shared the titles of some of the stories he’d conceptualized. They sounded like Flaming Lips albums. If you’re familiar with that band, you would know one of their albums is called Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. I was filled with doubt after reading the ones he’d sent me. How could I accomplish writing anything near his standards with such epic titles? But again, what do I have to lose except hope?

Non-fiction

A Week Without a Brain

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I watched the game last night. The Atlanta Falcons played the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Atlanta celebrated their former quarterback Matt Ryan and inducted him into their ring of honor. He spoke to the crowd at halftime when his old team was trailing by seven.

But the second half told a different story. Just when I thought the Buccaneers were about to jump to a commanding lead, the Falcons came back somehow. I was sort of watching the game while scrolling through my phone. Not that offense bores me, but it gets too monotonous to see no defense. In the second half, both teams kept scoring. I like a little defense to add suspense.

Anyway, with around two minutes left, the Falcons were down 30-27 when their quarterback, Kirk Cousins, threw an interception to Buccaneers linebacker Devin White to seal the game, or so I thought. All the Buccaneers had to do to leave with the victory was drain the clock and force Atlanta to call all their timeouts.

On a third down, after the Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield handed the ball off to his running back, there was a penalty against Tampa Bay that pushed them out of field goal range. With around a minute left, they had to punt on fourth down back to the Falcons, all because the referees completely missed a facemask penalty from one of the Falcons defenders that would’ve caused an automatic first down for the Buccaneers. All the Bucs would’ve had to do was kneel a few times until the clock turned to zero.

What ended up happening was Kirk Cousins received the ball again and had one more shot to tie the game, and that was exactly what he did after he marched his team to midfield. A strike to wide receiver Drake London put them in field goal range. With no timeouts, the offense rushed to the line of scrimmage and was able to spike the ball with only a second remaining.

But the kicking team wasted too much time to set up and suffered a delay of game penalty, which shoved them back five yards, making the field goal attempt harder. It was payback after getting away with the facemask penalty. Yet and still, Younghoe Koo booted the ball between the uprights and tied the game at 30. They went to overtime.

On the coin flip, Baker Mayfield called for tails, but it was heads. As you would’ve imagined, the Falcons defender elected to receive. So with all the momentum, Kirk Cousins marched his offense down the field again. Right after a big gain, receiver Drake London got hurt from a collision and had to be pulled out of the game. A backup with the last name of Hodge (I didn’t know his first name) so far had only one reception. On the very next play, Cousins, with his record-breaking five hundred-plus yards in the air, connected with Hodge down the middle. It was a simple ten-yard route. Hodge shook off his defender and jetted to the endzone. No one on that porous Buccaneers defense could catch up with him, so he scored the game-winning touchdown. The Falcons had come back and won, 36-30.

The teammates jumped all over Hodge and celebrated behind the endzone. In only the fifth week of the season, it was like they’d already won their Super Bowl. And in the locker room, they sprayed each other with what appeared to be champagne. It was like they were the Yankees after winning Game 7 of the MLB World Series. I believe it’s never a good sign for a team to celebrate this early when so much more football meeds to be played. It makes me worry about the Falcons. Will they be as competitive down the stretch? Something tells me no.

Non-fiction

Memorabilia

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I’ve kept a small corkboard for over twenty years with a paper on it that has withstood time. It’s a contract to myself that says, and I’ll paraphrase: I, Benjamin Talbot, shall write every day for the rest of my life until the day I die. And I signed it at the bottom with a black pen. It’s a miracle that the paper has remained on that corkboard with a thumbtack and that the paper hasn’t torn all the way throughout the years. But it has stains on it, wherever the stains had come from. They look like blood, sort of how dry blood would appear: a light brown blotch that I could’ve mistaken for coffee on the white paper. But how would I have spilled coffee on it in the same fluke as if I’d spilled blood on it?

The corkboard is in my apartment in Palm Springs. It’s in the kitchen next to my work desk, which I never sit at. It used to hang on one of the walls of my Hollywood apartment.

My friend at the time, in my twenties, came in one afternoon and saw it hanging there and said, “Wow. Look at this.”

I told him that it was a contract that I’d written to myself.

He read it and said, “You signed it?”

“Yessir. That’s my signature.”

“Where’s the date?” he said.

Oh shit. I’d never dated it. All signatures should come with a date. I didn’t even think of that. I smacked myself on the forehead. There’s no sense in composing a new contract now. I’ve signed it already. What’s done is done. How hastily I’d typed it out and printed it from my desktop computer back then, way back when printers actually worked and didn’t break down on me all the time. Oh well. At least the contract is still there, and it reminds me of my daily goals.

But it isn’t all that’s on the corkboard. I tacked a black-and-white photo of the one Ernest Hemingway above the contract. It’s of old Ernie, in about his fifties, standing in what appears to be the woods, grinning in a suit with both hands in his pockets. I hold that photograph near and dear after finding it in a Hemingway book that I’d bought from the Iliad Bookstore in North Hollywood. The book is called The Nick Adams Stories, which is a collection of shorts based on his character Nick Adams, who fancied fishing and camping. Most of the stories I’d read, you would guess, were of Nick Adams doing those things. The stories were pretty bland, very slow. Not much happened from beginning to end. Nevertheless, I respected his writing style enough to read his biography. How could anyone cram that much information about a person in one volume? Someone did. I found it interesting to find that photo in a book I’d bought for about two dollars, but I discovered a lot of incredible gems at that bookstore.

Non-fiction

What a Fortune

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I used to use Tarot cards for writing. I heard Stephen King did the same thing for his books, but that could be a lie. Tarot cards are good for writing because of the imagery in the illustrations on each card. Each card has meaning, whether you pick up the Three of Cups or the King of Swords.

I remember reading a book about the Tarot and how you can formulate scenes by using the deck of cards. The four different symbols represent something different. Cups, which can hold water, represent emotion. Swords, which are sharp, represent intellect. Wands represent the arts and creativity. And, finally, the coins, as you would guess, represent money and fortune. So, if someone pulls out a Two of Coins, a King of Wands, and an Ace of Cups, you could say that character is poor because you drew only the Two of Coins from the deck, but he’s also massively creative because you drew the King of Wands, and can also handle his emotions because you drew the Ace of Cups. How would that translate in a scene? Suppose he gets into an argument with his spouse about money. He doesn’t have much, which spawns a fight. But he can handle it because he can manage his emotions, and he controls the argument in an artful way. That might be a poor example because I just thought of it, but it’s something to try if a writer feels stuck in a scene or what to write about if he wants to write a story.

I would write a scene using a single Tarot card. For instance, the Moon. There’s a Moon card. I don’t know right off to bat what the Moon card represents, nor the Tower card.

A friend of mine wanted me to give his fortune over the phone a long time ago. I did my best, and I remember I drew the Tower from the deck, and I had to read the meaning from the little book that came with it. The Tower card shows a fire at the tower, with people falling off of it. So you know it represents something dark and foreboding, something my friend didn’t want to hear. I read what the book said, and his exuberance fell off like the people on the tower. He didn’t want his fortune read any longer. I didn’t know what he was expecting.

The Tarot isn’t full of just happiness and good fortune. It could draw something completely dark. For example, let’s say you pull three cards, and they’re all lower cards such as the Two of Cups, the Three of Wands, and the Four of Swords. If you’re doing a character study, that’s a weak character. His intellect is low. He can’t handle his emotions. And he’s not very inspired. That’s all for the moment though. If you’re writing a scene with those cards, the character might make a dumb decision and lose control of his anger and isn’t motivated enough to fix the situation. Maybe he robs a bank, and he starts shooting people because his anger takes over after his plans are ruined, and he even shoots at the cops when they show up. I just thought of that example. I’m sure you can think of something better. My point is the possibilities are endless with the use of Tarot cards. I recommend them to anyone who wants to jumpstart a story or a character study, anything to get into a rhythm.

Non-fiction

What Excuses?

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I’ve heard people say that they don’t have time to write, or that they’ve found time to write, finally, now that school is over or their kids have gone off to college when they could’ve started much earlier. I’ve heard people say that they don’t have time to write because their jobs have bogged them down. If they just had time, they would begin writing that novel they’ve been thinking about every day for ten years.

The days are long, so long that I find myself trying to do something with my free time. I go for walks, but I can only walk so far before I get bored and tired. And yet my free time is still available. Maybe that’s just me, and other people really don’t have free time. But they complain that they don’t have the time to create, and I tell them to find time, whether it’s at one in the afternoon or one in the morning. They’ll find themselves with nothing to do. And what do they do with that time? They watch television, the devil’s invention, because they’re too tired from work or parenting or both, or they were out too late last night partying, and they’re trying to recuperate.

Meanwhile, time keeps passing by, collecting seconds and minutes and hours. Just a little each day goes far: one hour today, one hour tomorrow, two hours the next day and so on. It’s up to them what they choose to do with their time. And yes, things take a while to develop. It took me seven years to write my first manuscript. It didn’t go anywhere. It’s still on my shelf, and I don’t plan to do anything with it because it was really my first crack at a novel. My first actual manuscript was really a draft. It was never finished. It needed several subsequent drafts for me to really develop. That took me like a year if I can remember. That was over fifteen years ago.

I remember around then I was writing short stories and wasn’t planning to take them anywhere. A friend hooked me up with an editor when I was in my early thirties. She looked at the copy and refused to work on it because she was afraid she would charge me too much. That was how much work was needed to be done with it. She said it was too raw and gave me the ten-thousand-hour speech. I’d already heard about the ten thousand hours. I think I’ve exceeded them by now. But anyway, it deprressed me to hear her say that, but it didn’t discourage me from continuing. I kept writing after that rejection, and eventually I got started on that first manuscript.

I sent it out to about forty-nine agents, and several of them rejected me. Actually, all of them rejected me because when I didn’t hear back from them, it might as well have been qualified as a rejection. It depressed me, but I could at least say I did it. This was after my psychiatrist yelled at me for not going out there and doing the hard work myself, because a family friend said he would help me, but he never did.

“He doesn’t care about you,” my psychiatrist said, and that was true. The family friend really didn’t. Otherwise, he would’ve really helped me. The point my psychiatrist was trying to make was that I would have to do all the heavy lifting, and no one was going to help, no matter how close that person was to my family.

I think a lot of people are afraid of that sort of pain, so they make excuses so as not to work toward their artistic visions. Therefore, they let themselves off the hook and blame other factors, even other people. In the end, the blame takes them nowhere. All the time they’d spent making excuses could’ve been more time spent creating. I could be wrong in all of this, but I think I’m right.

Non-fiction

A Deep Cleaning

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It’s Tuesday, so it means I’m back to work after a day off yesterday. I went to the dentist for what I thought would be a filling replacement, but it turned out to be a deep cleaning.

I can say that I’ve never heard of one of those before. I mean I get a cleaning every six months, but I wasn’t prepared for a deep cleaning.

They shot me with novocaine on the whole right side of my mouth, which puzzled me because I’ve never had my gums numbed for just a cleaning. The needle injection hurt, so she told me to relax and breathe, which didn’t help the pain of the needle inserted into me. She told me to wait for five minutes for the numbness to take effect. In dentist time, that equates to about thirty minutes, so I lay in the dentist’s chair, feeling the right side of my mouth growing number and number while I was waiting for her to come back. I didn’t want to spend all day in there. It was already one o’clock in the afternoon, and my appointment was at twelve o’clock.

When she came in again, she told me they were ready for the cleaning. I thought it would take about a half hour for them to scrape my teeth and polish them and my gums, but it didn’t take more than five minutes.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“That’s it,” she said.

I wondered why she had numbed my mouth after such a disappointing operation as that.

I followed the nurse to the receptionist desk to schedule the next cleaning. I assume the dentist will do the same thing to the whole left side of my mouth. We scheduled me to come back in two weeks.

“Which day of the week is that?” I asked.

“The doctor only works on Mondays.”

No wonder the place is always crowded. At least I would miss another day of work. I get to look forward to that.

I opened the door back outside to the blazing heat. It was 116 degrees yesterday. I walked an entire mile to my apartment. By the time I returned, the back of my shorts was covered in sweat. It appeared as if I had made an accident. I had to cover it with my shirt. Otherwise, people might judge me, but they judge me anyway. I went back outside because I had no other shorts that matched my shirt. It was navy blue, and my shorts were baby blue. Why do they call it baby blue? Babies aren’t blue. It says online that baby blue suggests tranquility or what is needed to calm a baby in a nursery. That makes sense.

Anyway, I wore the same shorts at the coffee shop. It was crowded as usual on a Monday afternoon, with the temperature the way it was. A lot of tourists had shown up for coffee, not necessarily coffee but juices. It’s too hot to drink coffee. Coffee is dehydrating. People would rather stay hydrated.

I went outside to take a break, and a guy stood on top of a rock and started doing what looked like Tai Chi. I thought he was going to fall off. I just watched him, waiting for it to happen, but he never did. He was lucky. I guess people are going insane from the heat.

I finished editing my manuscript and sent it off to my editor. By then, my mouth had lost its numbness, which was good because I couldn’t drink with half of my mouth numb. The juice spilled onto my shirt.

After I was done editing, I returned to a short story I had been working on for several months about sexual relationships. I’ll be done with that in about a day before I send it to my beta readers for critiques. Then I’ll begin a new story. I have no idea what it’s about. The short I’m working on is beyond ready. I just quit working on it to focus on my manuscript. The last time I touched the short was about two months ago. My manuscript is over two hundred and fifty pages with over ten short stories. They’re not very long compared to most short stories, and so it can afford to have twenty of them.

That was Monday. I get to live through another short week before next week, which will be another long five days. At least I’m not living in Greece, where they’ve introduced the six-day workweek. The workers will work 6.5 hours a day. It still doesn’t eliminate the fact that citizens of Greece will only get one day off a week.

Non-fiction

124 Degrees

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The Coachella valley reached a record high this week of 124 degrees. I sweated all over when I went for a walk, and it stung my eyes. I couldn’t see where I was going along the sidewalk on my way back home. Supposedly the heat will last for weeks. July is meant to be that way. How will I make it to September when it will cool down? At least that’s what I expect. My parents said it’s usually the case.

Another Sunday has me feeling bored. I don’t know what to do with time. Perhaps I’ll wash my clothes. It doesn’t matter what I do. I still must see the dentist in the afternoon tomorrow, but at least I’ll miss work, the last place I want to be. My boss joked about me preferring to get my teeth pulled over having to go back to work. I didn’t laugh with him. I took his words seriously. So yes, I would rather have a root canal than go to work any day this week, or any week it seems because my job is torture. Angry people on the phone are constantly complaining, cursing, too, as if the problem must be me, not them.

I miss vacation time. I won’t go on another one until September since I like to break it up into every three months to keep my sanity. Imagine if I didn’t take those days off. I would be a wreck come Thanksgiving. Who am I fooling? I’m already a wreck. Work has kicked and slapped me. It’s hard to focus on anything else. I carry work with me after my shift when I take my walks. Does that make me a workaholic? I guess so.

Anyway, the summer is too long these days. It used to be short when I was a kid who played in the backyard. Now I don’t even have a backyard, just a pool that I share with all the other tenants.

I’m at the coffee shop, and a guy keeps turning around and looking back at me from his table. He’s watching horseracing on his iPad. I know because I peeked at it. He’s getting on my nerves. Thank God he just left.

A lot of tourists have entered today. It’s 10:30 a.m. The busy crowd has left the store. Now it’s just us regulars and a family of tourists at a long table.

I stare out the window and see the different shops across the street: Sinfulicious Body Care, Balboa Candy, Crazy Shirts. I’ve been inside the candy store before but never bought anything.

It has been quiet in downtown Palm Springs because of the heat. No one wants to go outside except for me. I can handle the heat.

I’m going through a crisis with this writer’s block. We all go through it as writers. No one is immune to it. We run out of important things to say. Otherwise we’re just repeating stories or ideas. Richard Hugo said to write about our obsessions. I’m obsessed over several things. He also said to focus on the subject that isn’t the subject. For instance, if I was writing about knives, the real subject wouldn’t be the knives but something else. I don’t know what that something else is. I guess it comes to me naturally after I’ve been writing for a while. I don’t know a single writer right now.

I knew a few screenwriters when I lived in Hollywood. Some of them were moderately successful. One of them moved to Texas a long long time ago. I wonder whatever happened to Michael. He was a sweet man. I also met screenwriters who never wrote. They called themselves screenwriters I guess to adapt. Michael was working with several producers at the time I knew him. I was in my late twenties or early thirties. I can’t quite remember. He always sat outside of the coffee shop and stared off into space when he wasn’t waving at people. He would tip his fedora at the ladies. His mouth was crooked. Something awful had happened to him, but I never asked him what or why. We would smoke cigarettes together in the coffee shop patio back when that was allowed. Now I don’t think people can even sit and hang out at that coffee shop anymore. I never thought it would come to that, but it’s here. I hope Michael is doing okay for himself in Texas. He belongs in a better place. Anyway, I’m wishing for the best this Sunday, but I don’t have high hopes, and I’m wishing for the best this week. I hope it doesn’t kick my ass too much.