Kaput

Tom was bored by Chiseltown. Theresa likewise rubbished Chiseltown, said it was beneath me. This is what happens when I write comedy. No one laughs. If I write about the drama of rough sex, I get pelted with curses and condemnation. Total silence from Alaska about The Executive Branch. Zero support from Objectivists. No books sold. That's the bottom line.

Hmph. So old and stupid that I tell the same anecdotes over and over, can't remember user names or phone numbers or passwords. When my laptop dies, I won't be able to open email or log on to Amazon, Audible, Lulu, or PayPal. Maybe it doesn't matter any more.

I can't find Clare or her pal Linda. For all I know, they're both dead. Di locked me out of the house and refuses to speak to me. My hands and feet are covered in painful scaly scar tissue, an incurable auto-immune disorder, I'm told. The power utility sent an email, didn't receive the check I sent and threatened to shut off my electricity in a cold tin barn. That's a lifetaker in winter. No light, no heat, no power to operate a laptop with a bad battery and twin screen cancer blobs, top and bottom. With or without electricity, I don't think I can write a 300-page novel, the next logical thing to do, months of focused concentration. All it seems I can do is listen to the radio and play solitaire, AM skip after nightfall, Des Moines, Chicago, Cincinnati. Saturday afternoons it's The Neon Beat and Seems Like Old Times on FM from Arkansas.

Nowhere to go, no money to go anywhere. I can't even feed myself. No car. No phone. I look like hell, missing teeth, itchy flaky forehead, scalp, and eyebrows. I've been trimming my hair with a scissors, looking in a mylar panel. My bathroom is a bucket in an unheated woodshed, my bed a plywood pallet that I share with a dog. Nice enough dog, elderly and affectionate. Needs eye surgery, heartworm pills, flea pills, and a rabies shot, none of which is going to happen. An evil growth on my forearm has to be excised soon, might involve chemo.

I lost count. Twenty something books, not including the anthologies. A million words. I have the distinct impression that it's over and out with sauerkraut. That's a gag line I gave God in my last book, Heaven, unpublished. I can't quite bring myself to upload it to Lulu or Kindle, fording two deep, fast running creeks in leaky rubber boots, walk a mile and a half to a nice neighbor who lets me use her wifi in exchange for stacking wood on her porch, a three mile round trip, 6000 footsteps in cold wet socks, to reach no readers. I don't want to do it.

If someone could have shown me the future ten or twenty years ago, I don't think it would have deterred me from writing fiction, good bad or ugly. My nonfiction doesn't matter. No one cares what I think. But I lived all the fictional stories I wrote, every page, every moment of life and love and cruelty and comedy, signature work that no one else could have done.

The future is dark and cold, powerless. I sleep about three hours a night. One last project, to format a book for publication, probably a bestseller, written by a sensitive and warmhearted ally. Easy job. A few keystrokes and a cover layout. Be gratifying to see him succeed.