What Did I Just Say?

January 8, 2012
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Acid Art ca. 1976
1. scribble scrabble 7 up, 4 down
From ‘to scribble.’ A young child’s lack of drawing skills, when a person, usually a child, scribbles all over a sheet of paper randomly.
Not coloring in the lines
The teacher said, “Try to color your picture nicely, don’t scribble scrabble.”
 A snatch from the Urban.
No sooner had I had the thought, that there was a huge pile just up ahead and directly underfoot, did my foot come down in it and smoosh. Huge fight. And when we fight, and when we’re drunk, the fur really flies. No freakin’ housework gets done. The cats cower. 
What set us off?
It wasn’t words. It was actions (not taken). Sins of omission.
Among the accusations (which are private and can’t be shared, since we’re bare-assed naked here on this thing) was one particularly galling riff about fiction not really working as a form of marital communication. Ouchitude of a certain magnitude.
So in the morning when the booze had worked its way back out of our systems, I did not hesitate to get back to the task at hand, ie., to shop that fiction. It will not do to just let yet another piece of mine sit around in a folder unread. So with my un-communicated with wife sitting on the catacornered couch, I worked on a query for various known markets and agents. (Read: old friends of mine. People actually modeling for that fiction. Check legal.) Because in the unlikely event I sell this work, and in the unlikely event it has a life in the market, this might reasonably alter our lives to a certain extent. Not that I’m giving up any of the day jobs. I read my queries out loud to Del.
Here are few outtakes:
I have a thick enough skin and enough awareness of my transgressions in this work, especially in the legal sense, to be willing to swallow whole the bitter fact that this may be an un-publishable work. If you do read this book, do not hesitate to express this opinion.
and:

Silence I will, of course, understand.
The missive I sent was businesslike and to the point. My old friends are (as I’ve noted here) a gifted and talented bunch. They can tell the shit from the shinola without prompting from me.
Then, by way of a firm demurral, one such model/old friend/writer/editor/publisher asked,
“So Who’s going to play Azu in the movie version?”
Why Zooey Deschanel, of course! 
The blogged edition, as well as any possible print form needs to be tricked out with illustrations and musical examples, both written out and in recorded form for those that can’t (you know, like we the trained) pick up a score and hear it in their heads.
The text needs to repose amid its environment, the coloring outside the lines, the scribble scrabble.
Plan for Mvt III, section ii, Symphony 1, Ken Beck 1976
As an afterthought, I see that the text I wrote is almost unnecessary when you consider that everything it tells of was once a picture of some kind. Just look at all the pictures, and the story is told. In the proverbial ‘thousands’ of words. Shit. What did I just say? I stepped in the shit. Big time. Time to try communicating with my wife, since she’s gotten down to bitch-slapping me but good.
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