My Third Book

The city put a sticker on my 2005 Toyota Corolla, which has been parked on the street in front of my apartment, undriven for several months now, rusting, lying in weeds and spiderwebs, under fallen branches and leaves, absorbing rounds of bird shit and sap and whirligigs and bug husks, leaking noxious fluids, factory corrosives, engine burning radioactive swill staining the asphalt and then washed by flaming rains into city drinking water, the interior an archeological site of a man’s wasted years, his long thoughtless days of abundant trashy acts, a modern art exhibit of accelerating indulgence, a car that, by its inertia, its grim fixity, offers a window into the creep of time, earth’s time, the implacable trudging ground coming to swallow all zooming motoring zipping figures, massive and puny alike, from the most active to the least, from pistons to bowls of pudding, whether organic or not, intended to last or designed to die on a tight schedule, a time at our heels and also cracking underfoot, a rotting time that sprouts from within, from a soil our spades never reach, the time of our undoing we can never uproot; a sticker informing the owner along with all curious onlookers and concerned neighbors and caustic mocking wildlife that if the car doesn’t move in seventy two hours, it will be towed and expenses will be incurred.  

A man gets away with all manner of appearances, lugging a body in shambles, all his flesh a glaring reminder of neglect and decay, an affront to the image of God, a spiteful finger in the eye of his fellows; he explodes with sickening gasses, spills parasites and pests from his half open drawers, rages with dull ideas, and is admitted everywhere, politely ignored or sanctimoniously welcomed. It would be considered hateful, in the most pious circles, to condemn someone for presenting a disgusting image, for displaying a slovenly, distorted and badly maintained body, habitually exposing himself and others to infections and accidents. But a car has to be kept up. Its deterioration threatens the planet and upsets old ladies looking on the neighborhood from their heritage mansions.  

(Well, to be pedantically accurate, no man can sit or stand too long anywhere in public view. People and their things must lock into familiar patterns of rest and movement to be deemed vital and decorous.) 

Lately I’ve been on a roll with going nowhere; losing contests and grants, incorrectly filling out forms, disqualifying myself from state taxpayer money, foundation laundered money; I’m not eligible for twelve thousand dollars because I make most of my income from cleaning toilets and doing dishes, I need to be a professional artist to deserve a break. The creative renewal arts fellowship program, courtesy of Eli Lily, filthy pharmaceutical money. I whiffed on the passage prize contest, fifteen hundred dollars. Can’t get right-wing idiots or left-wing freaks to give me money. I’m working in the torched rectal cavity of a formerly successful third space, but what is success in a time of warp-speed business and news cycles within a life that moves toward death slower than a slug, with peaks smaller than a needle point, where achievement invites entitlement and resentment and the oblivion of forgetting, where syrup salesmen re-enter the entry level position of the shops they used to own, where people ask what you’re doing next before you’re finished with what’s in front of you.  

I didn’t even make the short list in a published fiction contest in my home state, where I’ve lived all the years of my life except two; every other book written by professors at state universities, media personalities, established names, some not even living in Indiana, their books having already won national book awards, accrued hysterical praise; they surely need the locally sourced five thousand dollars more than me, the additional publicity, the speaking opportunities. I’m not poor enough to win need-based contests, not ideologically blinkered enough to win the support of a movement and I’m not comfortable and connected enough to win industry slush prizes.  

The foot stool psychologists will say I’m projecting self-hatred, but I struggle to contain the inner tide of contempt for my working environment. The unbearable atmosphere of hollow solemnity, a churchy silence in service to digital demon worship, the bulk of the customers sitting on laptops for hours like stiff geriatrics in stale pews, in satanic repudiation of their surroundings, sacrificing the spirit of community while invoking its dead letter, unaware of the deal they’ve made on their lives, seeing themselves much more frivolously, as contemporary urban professionals, not exactly upwardly mobile, but bobbing on choppy waters, heads above and below the line, with clerical roles and leisurely pursuits, playing games of electronic ping pong with gnomes on the moon, bringing with them rucksacks of recreational survival gear, giant water bottles like dug-up cisterns, pitching tents above and under the table, lighting fires, taking calls and pacing about, looking at me without looking at me, thousand galaxy stares, black holes boring into my chest. A person working remotely in a coffee shop is a skin tag of machine intelligence.  

So am I. My own body could just as well be in the sky right now, clutched by the talons of a mythic bird, an avenging fury, and I wouldn’t feel it, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Alienated not only from others, but from my own bones. People speak of comfort in one's skin, but the problem is deeper; my skeleton shudders at the thought of what’s around it. All those years of odd slanting and crooked posturing. I don’t need a masseuse, I need a blacksmith, a hammering into something else.  

But I do have a book coming out soon. Tentatively the 18^th of September. It’s called Hardly Working and my publisher and I classify it as semi-autofiction; it’s about the last seven or eight years of my working life, medical problems, sexual and romantic peregrinations, spiritual anguish, reverse engineering the need for religion in a godforsaken world. This book should attract critical attention from those who go on about autofiction, the characteristic self-absorption of contemporary writers, and masculinity in literature; I routinely exhibit harmful views of women and people weaker than me, but also of people much stronger, and myself, so there should be plenty to discuss for those who like to waste their time that way.   

On the surface the book appears as a series of loosely related, interchangeable vignettes charged with bitterness and black humor, (call them vinegarettes) but the work does form a cyclical narrative structure that expresses a strongly held classical pessimistic outlook, a restatement of the dominant themes of Ecclesiastes. Some of the chapters have appeared online, but they’ve all been reworked, edited, formatted to fit a book instead of a screen. I can’t wait to send review copies to people I’ll never hear from again.