I'm going to try to forget about structure, about build, a plan, a scheme. I'll get an idea down, a piece of an idea, a sentence, a fragment. Just get it down, and as soon as I get stuck or my mind wanders I'll type on that and get as much of that down until something else starts climbing out of my fingertips.

Can I get more control by letting more thoughts out than by shaping a few of them (sculpting) just right? Control isn't the word. Power. Can I let out the power of my thoughts, give up repression over them? Trade structure for volume. A sculpture for water over the dam. damn. a hell of a lot of water. damned water. to hell. Silly connection games. Free Association, only 25cents.

look at mail, news, whatever, wander back here again

I read mollusc's life, what she shares of it. Chooses to share of it, in that time and place. Sometimes I think my god she's got it so much worse than I do. Sometimes I think if she knew she'd think I've got it so much worse than she does.

I'm still spinning off five ideas for every one I put down. So many different directions to go. The more I shorthand it, the less sense it will make, the less relief (?) release (?) satisfaction (?) I'll get out of it.

Competition. Who can out misery who. That's not it. Why ask for help when something can't be helped. There's nothing anyone can do to make it better. People feel bad knowing someone else feels bad and there's nothing you can do to help besides say I'm sorry, I feel your pain.

My quit line from mirc is the final line I stole from a story in F&SF. The story is the life of a boxing fan who was so absorbed by the action on his tv that it was as if he could feel the blows, as if he were there in the ring. A particularly vivid and hard fought match comes on tv, an extraordinary boxing match, and after it the guy is found dead, horribly beaten up and bruised, as if all the punches thrown in the match had hit him. The neighbor who finds him thinks the guy was beaten by some burglar or thug.

"Poor bastard. I hope he gave as good as he got."

So that's what people see whenever I /quit from IRC. That's my epitaph.

Mollusc gave me a hell of a compliment one day. It took me years to find out that it was not just a nice thing to say, but the compliment of an expert. I am wasting (?) spending (?) a lot of time trying to make this paragraph come out right in my head, and I don't want to do that. I'll run out of steam with too much left unsaid.

"Down here in the salt mines I've got a log jam to break." Theodore Sturgeon started a story off that way, fully aware of the contradiction of the juxtaposition of cliches. Logs jam in rivers, when loggers float them downstream to market. There aren't log jams in salt mines. The story was about an artist with writer's block. A fan thought she could make the block go away by throwing a ton of money at him. Sturgeon went through long blocked periods himself.

My whole life is one of unrealized potential. I am not what I could have been, not what I was expected to be, I have greatness in me that is more than just pride and illusion. I could have been a contender.

I threw away my first wife because I was too depressed to withstand her depression. I couldn't give her the help and support she needed to become strong enough to give me the help and support I needed.

Now my second wife is suffering from troubles that can drag all three of us under. (Our son is the third.) My psychiatrist thinks I don't need to be on medication any longer. As far as he can see, I'm fine, I'm healthy, I'm past it. I'm not disabled any more. Everyone thinks so.

We're a money pit. I make $9 hour entering invoices into a computer. The benefits package is very generous. Truly. Take home is $1000/month, we're spending $2500 month.

There is money from my father. Uncountable dollars of support from him. School tuition from grade 7 on. College tuition and room and board and the years I started and couldn't continue, the extra years of college costs. Medical insurance and hospital bills and the mental illness group home that wasn't covered by any policy and paying my living expenses when I lived alone and couldn't work.

Or wouldn't work. If there was a job that appeared, if someone said "report at nine o'clock and type invoices all day" I think I would have done that and managed okay. What I couldn't do at all at all was look for work.

My father went to Yale and then medical school and then back home where he joined his father's practice. My grandfather went to Yale and then medical school and then back home where he set up his own practice, and was eventually joined by his son. My grandfather was born in Lithuania, his parents immigrated when he was three. I think three. I've never taken notes on the family stories.

There was supposed to be an uncle of his, I'm not sure of the connection, but someone a generation up and off to the side slightly who also went to Yale, which made me 4th generation legacy. But only 3rd generation doctor to be.

Poor little whining elitist rich doctor's son. Such a tragedy, to be born into money and education.

John Dean, one of that old President's men, wrote a column for the www.findlaw.com site that was picked up by CNN. He argues that the current President's lies about WMD, the lies that carried us into war, are indictable and a worse scandal than Watergate. But who will be convinced? Will anyone read this and say "Son of a bitch, I was wrong to believe that man, I was wrong to support the war?" http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/06/06/findlaw.analysis.dean.wmd/

I'm reading books and making connections.

I can borrow from the Mizzou library. I go into the stacks, into the fiction section (some of the fiction sections) and browse. I took out a James M. Cain novel, The Moth. Cain's books were made into great film noir, some of which were remade in the past decade or two and so he is not entirely unknown today … or at least there are people who will recognize the film titles that were made from his books. The Postman Always Rings Twice. But even the remake is older than I want to think about. Double Indemnity. With that guy from My Three Sons, which already puts me at least one generation out of date, a reference that will mean nothing to very many many people. I don't think My Three Sons has been on TVLand or Nick at Nite. I don't know.

Hard to get over the dissonance of the nice dad from the tv show playing a villain.

I don't think that's a spoiler.

And reading The Moth makes me want to write a paper. "Robert Heinlein and James M. Cain: Two Takes on the Young Engineer as Hero". Heinlein and Cain were very much contemporaries. Cain's protagonist frequently stops to work out how a piece of technology works, then gets dirty and fixes it or improves it. Towards the end of his book he makes riches by building astronomical observatories into the restrooms of a chain of gas stations, so all the people who want to look at the stars will come to gas up at night at his chain. I kid you not.

He also falls in romantic/erotic love with a 12 year old girl he can't have, because he's an adult. Heinlein put a protagonist in that position, but manages to put the couple together, legally and ethically, by the use of a science fiction device. I don't think Cain's hero (antihero?) will get the girl at the end, but I still have a few chapters to go.

I took out a Joan Didion novel, A Book of Common Prayer. It makes me want to write a paper comparing it to Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Dysfunctional families in power struggles over a tiny Central American nation.

One day I spelled "dalmatians" as "dalmations" in the process of a conversation in an IRC channel. Mollusc messaged to let me know of the misspelling, and told me that the only reason she was letting me know was that because she almost never saw me get a spelling wrong. That was the enormous compliment. I didn't know then that she has worked professionally as a copy editor. I didn't know then, as I do from reading her life, that words on the page are very important to her. She cares about grammar, she cares about syntax, she cares about vocabulary, she cares about etymology, she cares about fortuitous malapropisms.

And she took the time to tell me she noticed I was doing something well.

And maybe I will add to this later. It will be nice if I can sit down and write some more. I could have been a contender.

I am, at the same time, wasting time. I could be seeing how much money is left in the account, then buying a new wheel for the car, and the tires we need. I need to use the money we have left to pay for the things we never have money to pay for.