POETICKS

Downhill am I going.  I did nothing productive.  Am continuing to have a good time with Louise and John, though (my sister and her husband).   Went to the mall with them–for lack of anything else to do: Port Charlotte has nothing of much interest to go to, nor do I have much to offer in the way of conversation, or games, or whateveer else most people have for visiting relatives.  Anyway, I bought a new pair of loafers that I needed, and groceries, and some allergy medicine, and sun glasses, them because for the first time in my life sunlight bothered me a week of so ago when I was playing tennis, and again the next time out.

I seem to be doing well in this round of Civilization I’m in although I’m still in last place.  I’m gaining on everyone, though, and at peace much stronger militarily than any of the other nations.  (Thanks to the little girl who has, without being asked, taken it upon herself to let me know when I make a typo, or forget to move an out-of-place sentence to the right place, as happened here, or something similar.  She’s fairly good on this kind of thing, although not good on colloquialisms–and worse than worthless on adult errors.  Too bad she feels compelled to spend time here when she could probably be helping people trying to write finished pieces rather than rough drafts of rough thinking, as I mostly do here).

I made it in the afternoon to a doctor’s appointment only to find out my doctor had decided to take a month off.  His office had tried to get ahold of me, but I’m near impossible to contact by phone since my computer connection to the Internet is dial-up, and I’m on the Internet a lot when home, even when off the computer since almost all telephone calls to me are junk calls I want to block.

Ate out.  Nice meal: pork chops, a baked potato with a lot of butter, rolls, with a lot of butter, and a salad.  Lemonade was my drink.  I rarely drink anything alcoholic–because I’ve never liked the taste and because my half-Irish father over-did the drinking.

I didn’t get home until about an hour ago.  Finally threw this together.  I hope to post a half-interesting entry before the end of the week, but who knows.   Louise and john will still be here tomorrow, and I have another doctor’s appointment.

. . . because my life is so dull; written, anyway, because I have nothing else for this.

Tennis went very well this morning although I only played one set followed by a short set because one of the players had to leave.  I sat out a middle round and there was no fourth round because several had other things to do, and there weren’t enough left for it.  The good news is that I played pretty well and moved pretty well.  I’ve now had three outings in a row during which my bad leg has been at about sixty or seventy percent, which is much better than it was for quite a while–so bad, almost had to drag it unless half-hopping directly forward.  I still have hopes of getting to eight percent or even better, with a shot of cortisone.

After tennis, I did some marketing.  The rest of the day has been mainly stupid e.mails to discussion groups arguing (1) in support of the validity of the intentional fallacy against two who won’t give up at a Shakespeare discussion group called the forest of Arden and (2) about colleges and formal education in general, in which I’ve been pushing my minority view of self-learning as superior to compulsory formal education, basically, and gotten in trouble at the Forest for speaking in less than admiring tones of the academic. James Shapiro; at the Forest, we must “respect” everybody, which means we must not be straight-forwardly candid in our assessment of anyone we have negative views of, but all kinds of insults that aren’t name-calling are permissible.  Difficult situation for me, because I find it hard to write when I have to think about the feelings of a bunch of hyper-offendibles.  Not that I don’t do quite a bit of it all the time, as when discussing religion.

Otherwise, I’m reading a science fantasy novel by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.  Not grippingly good but very readable.  As for the commercial thing I intended to start working on yesterday, I did a little work on it then, but none today.  Maybe tomorrow.  Yesterday, too, I slightly revised my review for the upcoming issue of The Pedestal after my editor, John Amen, sent it back for me to look over to okay a few changes he made and they seemed fine but I found something I felt I needed to add.  I also took care of a mini-essay (55 words in length) I was asked for by Bill DiMichele for his blog, Point of the Knife.  I have a long division  mathemaku ready to put together: that is, I have all five of its components in my computer, but I’m just not up, for some reason, to putting them together and printing out the result.  It’s not my greatest mathemaku but it’s not bad.  An homage to Shakespeare, possibly marketable–Ann Hathaway’s cottage is in it!

Amusing but not at all surprising how extremely rarely Literature Department academics enthusiastic about Whitman admire or even know the work of any contemporary poet as unmainstream as Whitman was in his time.

My little emperor-denuder is now exposing my “muddled-thinking” in multiple posts to HLAS, the Shakespeare-authorship discussion group I participate in.  He’s doing serious damage: my followers are leaving me in droves.  He’s has many targets, but I’m currently his primary one except for Melanie Sands, another HLAS participant, a writer/actress with a good sense of humor who’s fun for most of us but not for the verosopath.  He may be as stupid as Dan Schneider, but at least Schneider is just stupid, not verosopathic.  There,  that’s the last time you’ll here about him here.

Serious topic now: my consistent losses playing Civilization.   You’re given a city.  The object is to make more cities and defeat opponents with military units you also make.  You need to discover iron and horses to have a chance to win, and I rarely do.  When I do, so do my opponents.  And they’re always stronger militarily than I.  It’s hopeless.  Right now I’m in a game where I have both iron and horses, but I’m the sole civilization on a huge continent.  This means that the three other civilizations against me are probably on one island, able to trade with each other, which is a big advantage, and able to fight each other, which means that one of them will grow in power.  Moreover, my continent has just about no resources, so my nation is poor.  My only hope is that the other three will fight each other evenly, and their wars will keep them from growing while I cover my continent with cities, which will be very difficult because it’s so large, and my nation isn’t not wealthy.  I’ll try, though.  Then, I hope I’ll be able to quit.  The problem is that I play the game on my second computer whill my slow best computer is taking its time carrying out some instruction or other.  I should probably read instead of play Civilization, but I don’t like to read just short passage, then stop, and come back for another short passage.  What I really should do is work on writing.  Word processing usually goes fairly smoothly.

I’m always junking my coinages.  The latest to go is “almbsolute” for “as close to absolute as you can get without being absolute.”  Its replacement is “maxolute.”  But I may not need that word, because before I coined it, I coined “maxobjective” for “as close to being 100% objective as possible without being 100% objective,” or “objective enough to be taken by any rational person as effectively wholly objective.”  Which may be a synonym for “maxolute,” particularly in the phrase, “maxobjectively true.”

With that out of the way, I’m going to use the rest of this entry as my diary, having stopped keeping a diary over a year ago when I decided my life wasn’t worth recording, after all.  No, what I decided was that I was too tired to record anything about me that wasn’t clearly important, as nothing had been for years.  At least, not in a formal diary.  But I didn’t quite lose my belief that anybody’s recorded life should be useful in some way to future anthropologists.  And, if nothing else, mine has been an unusual life.

Anyway, today I feel the need to report that my hip is ailing me again after seeming well on the way toward near-normalcy for three days in a row last Saturday.  I was very gimpy playing tennis this morning, and am doing no better now.  I don’t expect to get anything of consequence done the rest of the day, although I don’t feel quite as lethargic as usual, for I’m off to a meeting of the local writers’ center scheduled for 4:30 until 7:30.  I’ll be leaving for it on my bike at three and probably won’t get back until near ten.  It’ll be nice to see a few friends, but I’m also doing it for the political reason of strengthening ties with the center and its executive secretary–because I like her and the center is an attempt to do good for literature, but also because I may get some career help from it–like the exhibition at Edison College of some of my poems during National Poetry Month next year I’m hoping for.  Who knows, that could get me noticed enough to set up other opportunities to get noticed that might eventually lead to my being usefully noticed–by a patron, say.  Okay, wishful thinking, but what else have I?

Five or more days ago, I wrote, “I’ve hit a dead end in my investigation of the evolution of intelligence.  This pleases me, for I think I now know pretty exactly what I don’t know and need to know–the biology of the cell.  I pulled out an old textbook a nursing student gave me after she became an RN called Introduction to the Chemistry of Life. It’s pretty simple.  I only spent fifteen minutes with it earlier and got to page 59.  I am hoping it will quickly help me retrieve the knowledge I need to give cell biology a serious shot.  I have a text on the neuron.  I hope I have one on cells.  If not, I’ll have to buy one.

“My main problem is providing a scientific basis for my belief that one organelle can cause another to be sensitive to neurotransmitters the first organelle emits and no others.  Certainly neurons can determine what passes through, what is blocked by, its membrane.  Why shouldn’t an organelle do likewise?”

I pushed on, though, and perhaps would have gone farther.  However, two credit card statements arrived today (which is 9/11).  When I studied them, I saw that I would soon–within two months (or less)–I would not be able to make all my credit card payments.  I have to try to do something I can get paid for.  I have a commission for a a hangable mathemaku–actually now a triptych–that will get me enough to keep my head above water for an extra month.  It’s all done except for the paste-up, which I’ve been neurotically avoiding doing.  That should not take me more than two days.  There’s also my children’s book.  I’ve been neurotically avoiding doing that.  I know what I have to do.  The only uncertainty are four or five new illustrations I have to do for it.  I’m sure I can take care of them although I haven’t done any cartooning for maybe ten years.  I’m talking about my A StrayngeBook, one basic idea of which is that its drarinks iz crazy, so I can draw anything, or collage.   Should be fun.

I have two review deadlines to meet before I’ll feel free to tackle either job.  Two books of poetry I’ve read and liked and shouldn’t have too much trouble with.  I was going to start one of them today.  I may yet, but I doubt it.  I have been a good boy today, though: I got my blog entry done before seven, even though it required one or two new paragraphs that I had to think about and a little editing.  And I finished mowing my lawn, which took an hour-and-a-half in midday Florida heat, which is when the mood to do it struck.  And I’ve done some reading I have to get out of the way, because its of a borrowed book its owner wants back Monday.  A silly fairies/vampires/wizards/etc. thriller detective story, but it’s snared me.  Jim Butcher: Proven Guilty, (2006).  I approve of the title; for a while I got to thinking I was the only writer who used “proven” instead of “proved,” anymore.  I like the old “en” participles like “given.”  There are quite a few.  I like “dove” instead of “dived,” too.  Can’t think of all of them.  It’d be nice to have a little booklet of them.  Probably there’s one on the Internet, but I’m too lazy to try to find it.

Okay, another task out of the way.  I can avoid starting one of my reviews without too much guilt.  I must get at least a halfway-decent rough draft of one of them done before going to bed tomorrow, though.

Late-breaking development: a literary agent who’d chimed in for a while at one of my Shakespeare authorship discussion grounds on the Internet a number of years ago, showed up there again after I wrote the above to let us know about a Shakespeare play being telecast.  I’d been thinking of my one possibly-commercial play, Arborations, of late because of my need for some kind of income, so I immediately queried him about that.  He was into other things, he said, but was looking for a book on the Shakespeare Authorship Question.  When I e.mailed him about Shakespeare and the Rigidniks, he said he’d be glad to give it a look.  So I’m going to spend today updating, correcting and polishing it a bit, and reworking the rigidnik angle.   Dare I hope I can now finally break into commerciality?

Note: this entry was supposed to appear Sunday, but I forgot to change the private setting it had to public.