Dey Blogs - #1

It is important not to confuse ‘blog’ with ‘blag’ which is a ‘robbery, esp. with violence.’

Once you have written your book, you can become anything: merchant, murderess, inn keeper - for your life as a novelist has been secured, if only in this single iteration. You can glue a dusty moustache to your face and rename your pets. You can declare I hate Scotch and will drink only Zywiec. You can drive out to the airport and say one way to Arizona will the desert flowers be in bloom? You can become a shouter, a brawler, even a blagger. You can undertake a whole new set of skills. Please, my garden. Here, my window dressing. There, a rhubarb pie. Forgive me, your spleen. As the writer is constantly spying on those they love and those they love less; as the writer takes dutiful notes and spits and howls for Faulkner and Mann and Woolf; now, the writer can abandon all of these slave-like habits and adopt new ones. Medical school! Circus school! A silent protest. Call me Palomino.

It is a particular afterlife, the afterlife of making a book. There are no harps. No persistent light. Instead, it is populated. Populated by people with questions. There is more time in cars. There is less muttering. There is more proper attire. There is less scrawling across grocery lists: his hands were hard as branches. The obsessions are different.

In my office today, as we approach noon and somewhere horses are sleeping standing up, I have books behind me. Piled on the shelves. Notebooks. Black ones. How their stacks are headstones. How ‘Stunt’ came of them. How one hundred notebooks make a single book.

Yesterday, I went to the art store and I bought more notebooks. Black ones. Four of them. 9 by 12 with a ringed sleeve so that the page lays flat and open. In my arms they were a reunion. High heels in the wet grass of a cemetery. They were on sale. Something is taking shape in my mind and like the familiar tug of illness, it is pulling me away from all those other things I might have been. A flight attendant, a lecturer, a fetishist. Even though I wear my pilot goggles and my knapsack full of water to combat the forest fires, even though I drink Zywiec and want Arizona and call the cat Fool, I cannot deny the dark seed starting to define itself. Again.

When I stall in some habit of reverie before paying for the notebooks, the art cashier says, ‘Are you finding everything you need?’