Who and What I Am, Part 2


ALMOST EVERYTHING THAT’S WRONG WITH ME

Called Part 2, because there was a Part 1.

I’m two-thirds of a century old now. Deep down, part of me still believes I should have died after The Boomer Bible hit the shelves. I’d be a literary hero by now. The whistleblower from hell.

Why was I vouchsafed to continue living? For Pat? She does not roam among my writings. She is bored by the constant writer. She likes it when I’m entertaining, which I work at all the time.

Sitting on a pile of books. Heaps and heaps of writing I don’t finish. I’m not done. I just haven’t finished 50 percent of what I started. Is that failure? Yes.

I’d have to live to be 90 to finish what I started. And these days, I’m drunk less than half the time. The sober 60 percent doesn’t fucking care what happens. He’s already in Hadleyburg with Twain and Leonardo. Already in the grave with Poe and Mozart. Does not care.

My wife has been keeping me alive these last fifteen years.

And she’s mad as hell at me about it.

She thinks, I wrote 20+ genius books already (only about 5 or 6 really). I should just relax. Everybody I ever knew is already dead, in fact, lost forever, or soul dead in place. Without Pat, I am entirely alone. And she is mad at me. Forever it seems. “We have stacks of paper around us, nobody to help. He [meaning me, of course] is out of control.“

Yes. I am the world’s worst husband. But I suspect, and hope, she still loves me. She doesn’t want to write the ‘Introduction’ to the early stories called “The Reckless Twenties,” a time when she actually knew me.

Not the worst husband, really. I don’t cheat, I don’t hit. But I do yell. Why, after 50 years of fighting I saw as a freshman/sophomore at Mercersburg and Harvard, I would become a soldier she still doesn’t quite get. Anomaly. Mistake. Failure. Twenty-five books aren’t nearly enough if nobody buys them.

They don’t, oh so sorry. Should have been hit by a truck after TBB. Pat would have been happier, no matter what she says now. Sad sad sad.




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