Entry 451 — My Latest Idiocy
It’s not really important: I can ask Arnold for another copy. But that I lost it drives me almost mad with rage at my continuing stupidity. I feel like there’s just no sense in going on. Once again, you see, I’ve lost something. This time it was a copy of a long piece of . . . surrealistic mathematics, I guess. By someone French. Arnold Skemer was kind enough to send it to me, with the french text translated. I have the envelope it came in and the letter that came in that envelope with it. They are right where they should be, on the table to my right as I type this. Why the surrealistic mathematics isn’t with it, I JUST CAN’T understand.
But I do something like this at least monthly. More times than not, I find what was missing, sometimes in less than a couple of hours. I won’t find this. My house is less disorganized than it’s been in years, mainly because of the filing cabinet I freed up for current items–like this, or it should be. I recently did make a folder for just-answered snail mail, but not one for items like this. And I have several now–a letter from my Oakland poet friend Jody Offer; some great stuff just in from Marshall Hryciuk; Marton’s little booklet The Reader which I’ve had for two months and haven’t lost, who knows why; Arnold’s letter; a little packet of great stuff by himself Andrew Topel left with me during his visit a little while ago as well as wonderful full-color things his press published that he sent me a couple of months ago.
These are what are in plain view. Stored who knows where are many items like them previously in plain view. As I keep telling myself, I have to getmy house in better order. I’m sure I can, for I’m now able to chuck dead magazines–old copies of Discover or National Geographic, for instance. I proved that last year sometime when I threw out . . . I forget what, but it was a magazine I liked but hadn’t read all my issues of, which went back twenty years or more. I’m also ready to pack away old correspondence and zines and the like that I now have handy but never refer to. I may finally toss old paint brushes, broken crayons, and all kinds of painting supplies I once thought I could use to make masterpieces but never did.
Wish me luck. Before I started putting the house in order, I have to get my next column for Small Press Review done. Yesterday I finally finished a full draft of the two-chapter essay that will close my book on the Shakespeare authorship question that I wanted to finish before going to the hospital, so I can devote myself to the column during the next five days. Not today. Today I spend six killing hours at (1) my dentist’s spending $140 having another chipped tooth fixed (my teeth are crumbling at an alarming rate), (2) at the hospital where I’ll be getting operated on for a class in what to expect and pre-op filling out of forms and getting blood and an chest x-ray taken, and (3) at the supermarket getting bananas, milk and six bottles of Propel, the drink I’m trying to replace Mountain Dew with. It was too much for me.
Whee.