January, So Far
Awake at 2:30am. Can’t sleep so I go downstairs. 6F outside and 53F inside. I let the fire go out last night without realizing how cold it was going to get. Put coffee on, the Stanley French press, and gear up to split kindling. Mitts, boots, and trapper hat. Imagine I look a little like Ignatius Riley but feel more like Toole. Dark and brisk out, trying not to fall on the ice with the axe. Scolding myself for not preparing better yesterday. But it’s that part of winter when the days begin to feel repetitive. I don’t even know what day it is. Split a stack of inch-wide oak. Snow like diamonds in the flashlight beam. Back inside, use the first printed draft of On Restoration as tinder. I’ve kept this copy, edits in black ink, for the last five years. I thought it had a significance. A documentation of a two-year period where my depression peaked with a gun to my head. Get everything you want, only to realize it solves nothing. All it took was a cold morning for me to ball up the draft and set it on fire. A more practical use, I wouldn’t argue that. A little after 4am, a hot woodstove and a cup of coffee in hand. Kinz and the dogs are sleeping easily in the warming house. A moment I wouldn’t trade for anything.
I finished another draft last week. We Shall Catch Larks, my first attempt at a novel. A piece I’ve been working on and giving up on over the last seven years. Stubborn, if nothing else. I attempt to, though in a different way, use the Faulknerian exploit of bias and expectation. Setting the reader up for the obvious and pulling the rug out slowly. Hoping midway through the book there’s an absolute lack of solidity, feet dangling where the predictable ground once was. No real audience for this kind of work though. But still I want to feel proud, knowing I’ve done only what I was capable of. Want my best pitch?
Jay Stagbie is a fuck-up. After dropping out of college to chase his dream of becoming a writer, Jay encounters a pile-up of obstacles. From navigating his new job at a dying bookstore. Poorly battling an increasing alcohol dependency. Attempting to find meaning in the daily flood of information. To stumbling onto a cult of fate-deciding overlords, who just might be trying to keep Young Stagbie contained indefinitely. Told through varying voices and interruptions, and set against the gritty backdrop of Porchmyth, Ohio - a town rebounding in a post pill mill haze - We Shall Catch Larks forces readers to witness the collapse of the American Dream with eyes pried open. Ultimately asking the question – How do we break the cycle?
Something like that.
Midday and more snow. I put on the old recording of MacColl’s Dirty Old Town. I’ve listened to this song, all the various takes, for years now. But I’ve never heard the haunting original. I add the second verse as an epigraph to the novel draft.
I heard a siren from the docks saw a train set the night on fire smelled the spring on the smoky wind dirty old town, dirty old town
