I’m still wondering what I might write next. How about two hundred thousand words of kvetching about my life—not. The memoir plan, I dunno, it’s not gelling for me. It feels like work instead of like fun.

Today I’m leaning towards a simple and crystalline SF novel. Something light and irresponsible. How about a UFO novel in the Young Adult mode. I’m imagining a scene with a bad kid, call him Denny Allaway, frantically humping a chunk of cow liver, imagining that it’s Weena Wesson, the Hollywood love goddess. Cute Sue Pohler is laughing at Denny. Our hero, Tim Bruno, helps Denny out of the saucer, shielding him from Sue’s ridicule.

It’s like an after-school special. They learn that the President of the U. S. has sold us out. So they set out to kill him—but are spared the karmic onus of the assassination when Tim reforms the Prez by talking sense to him—that would be a very after-school-special touch. As if you could teach a President anything by talking to him. But in YA-land, you can!

Or a book where a kid goes to visit his dead father in Heaven. I remember a radio play—maybe it was by Norman Corwin, “The Odyssey of Runyon Jones”—about a kid who goes to look for his dead dog in “curgatory,” first broadcast in 1941, I might have heard it as a re-broadcast around 1954. It’s available as part of an out-of-print CD set called Thirteen By Corwin, I’d dig hearing that if I can find it for free online.

I’m really starting to feel like myself again. I keep saying that, and then a week later, I realize I was only kidding myself the week before. Maybe I’m still kidding myself. How can you really tell when you feel like yourself, after all? It’s so subjective.

Writing this particular paragraph that’s magpied into this blog post, I’m sitting on the deck outside Borders Books, one of my favorite spots in Los Gatos—although it’s slightly tainted by the infernal noise of ventilation fans. I have a great view from under a huge live oak of a high, virgin, wooded hill called perhaps Monte Sereno. The shapes of the trees and shrubs along the ridge-line always make me think of the border of a cubic Mandelbrot set.

In this connection, I think of a guy I met at the Almaden IBM research lab near San Jose, around 1988, and we’d been in his office talking, and then we walked outside together and were looking at a wooded ridge-line similar to this one, and he was telling me that the patterns were—I don’t remember exactly what—some manifestation of a type of fractal or Fourier series that he was studying. He thought everything in the world was a reflection of what he was doing in his lab. But he was thinking this with a complete lack of irony, which is dangerous. I wonder what ever became of him.

I gave a great Christmas talk on cellular automata at that same IBM lab, also around 1988. I’d just gotten a CAM-6 cellular automata accelerator card, and I shoe-horned it into an early IBM PC and connected it to this monster projector they had in the lab. Nobody had projectors like this back then, so it was incredibly exciting to be projecting the enormous images.

When I was in the choir at St. Francis in the Fields Church in Louisville, around 1959, this funny boy, Roger, would sometimes sit next to me at rehearsal. He was a real 1950s type, with a burr haircut, heavy glasses frames, and a cocky attitude. His father was, I think, a real estate scam artist, physically resembling the then-famous con-man Billy Sol Estes whom I’d seen on the cover of Time magazine. There was this one hymn we were rehearsing, with the chorus, “Jesus loves you, why not serve him?” And Roger would make his voice sweet and gentle, and sing an obscene variant of the line. What a witty guy.

My wife and I spent the day in Santa Cruz today. It was really nice to be out seeing different stuff. The ocean was a nice aqua color. We ate some nice food, looked at bookstores. I bought a nice sweater on sale. I’m exhausted now, but in a nice way. Lying on the couch with my laptop.

This morning, as soon as I woke up, I felt good. The world outside is so green and lively. I recall a feeling I sometimes have when I’m flustered—less so now than when I was younger—of being in a tunnel, caught up in my worries, deaf and blind to the outer world. It’s all a matter of the attention that you’re able to pay.

The world runs itself without me. It used to baffle me that the world would go on after I die. I understand this better now. It’s like I’m just one particular monitor displaying the reality crunch. The interesting thing is the world itself—as opposed to the interesting thing being my individual mind. This is in some sense obvious, but somehow it’s not a fact that I really internalized until I was older.

I gave my new painting “Collaborators” yet another layer today, July 24, 2008. Draft 3, call it final and move on. Daughter Isabel said their mouths should be open so they look more hyper. I think it’s done now.

[“Collaborators,” Draft 3, probably final, July 24, 2008.]

On July 22, I painted Draft 2. As you can see, the picture shows two guys sitting on the ground, with unnaturally long, insect-like arms, choking each other. It’s meant to be an image of the collaboration style of two co-authors who argue a lot.

To enhance how the foreground pops out from the background, I moved towards cool desaturated colors in back, and warm saturated colors in front.

July 21’s Draft 1 was more primitive, which is, in its own way, charming, but I had that usual yen to polish it some more. Over the versions, I made their faces better, and clarified the choking hands. But, yeah, it still looks something a guy might have drawn in a rehab program run in a church basement. Not such an easy effect to achieve! 🙂

These wires are sort of the same as the the limbs of the two Collaborators…

I was idly thinking about working the Oinkness idea into a story. Not that it’s such an incredibly wonderful idea, but I have nothing better to think about. I sit around the house all day doing nothing, occasionally taking a nap. The email’s been slow.

Today started out all gray and fogged over, but now the sky has a clear, blue, California-summer quality. There’s been fires—a big one in Big Sur in particular—that were overcasting us, but finally they’re dying down. The Big Sur fire is 70% contained as of today.

HIgh Voltage! The pole transformer is a kind of electromechanical pig.

This just in: Bertram Niessen’s interview with me in the Italian ezine Digimag. (They posted an Italian language version as well.)

It’s mattering less to me if I actually do write a memoir. All that matters is that I’m writing up notes for—something. My fingers work, my brain, my word-circuits. It might really be more reasonable to write another novel. Or maybe just a couple of stories first. There’s such a powerful “why bother” haze surrounding any plan for a memoir.

“Wiseacring for the swing of thought” is a phrase used by G. I. Gurdjieff in Meetings With Remarkable Men. He used the word wiseacring a lot, meaning something like free intellectual play. Some people spell it as “wiseacreing,” by the way, but “wiseacring” seems to be more common.

Today I actually got a thousand words done on a new story I plan to write with Paul Di Filippo. Working title: “To See Infinity Bare.” It wasn’t too hard. The writing felt good.

I’m in the Los Gatos Coffee Roaster again. On my own. It’s so terrible when people have words appliquéd onto the butts of their sweat pants. Like the back of a van. Like the woman I’m looking at right now. Pale blue sweat pants with “H O L L I S T E R,” in an arc, the name of a small town south of here. But of course, to her, the pants aren’t terrible, they’re cool fashion. All a matter of convention.

If I weren’t going to write a nonfiction memoir, what might I write instead? I could scootch just a bit away from that, and write a novel that’s close to my actual life. A transreal SF memoir, in other words. Go with my fantasies and fears about nuclear fallout as a boy in 1959 at a German boarding school, for instance. And then follow my character back to the US and, whoah, NYC and/or DC are gone. Especially Texas could be gone.

A frikkin’ Texas-shaped hole in the surface of the globe, a thousand-mile deep shaft with a giant orange blup-blup lava lake at the bottom. A fence around the edge, and you can buy little baskets of bread and throw in the Texas-shaped crumbs for the Texas gnomes. Tiny cowhand gnomes down there in half-pint hats, shooting cap pistols. You can rent time on an ion-beam destruction ray and fry the Texas gnomes that you’ve lured out with the Texas-shaped bread crumbs. Gnome cracklins drift up and people munch ‘em down. “Yaar!”

[Yes, yes, I know there are many fine people in Texas, just having a little fun here. I could always change the victimized state to my old home of Kentucky.]

Am I writing crazier than usual? Or is just that this week I give less of a squat? The numerical fact that Hylozoic was my thirtieth book, sets me to thinking about trying something new for #31.

On the other hand, why not another novel. It might be nice to write a really easy novel. Something first person and transreal, like Mathematicians in Love.

I had another SF vision today, of what you might call Oinkness. An alternate world or mindscape that’s made of pig. It’s not like encountering a single pig, it’s pure pigness. Pink skin, ears, perhaps an eye here and there, the stench, the squeal, layer upon layer of skin and meat, an endlessly cloned pig surface, folding back on itself.

Or maybe combine the sunken state with the Oinkness thing, and sure, have the sunken state be my Olde Kentucky Home. It’s the land of Oinkness down there. The older boys are down there wallowing with the pigs. (Note the highlighted rat in the motel swimming pool.)

German fallout, sunken Kentucky, Oinkness in the pit, J. Edgar Hoover attempts to arrest the hero, that is, young Russ, but Russ calls on the force of Oinkness to protect him.

[Image from Wikipedia.]

Wiseacring for the swing of thought.

Where to go with the autobio? Can I imagine being a woman? A businessman? A teenager? Buddha? A terrorist? A track coach? A tree? An ant hill? A marathoner? A puppy?

Probably only my real memories are worth writing, otherwise I’m just recycling received or second-hand ideas.

Coming back to the Dylan Memoir Model, I’m thinking it might be best to pick, say, five limited time periods, and to delve into each of these fairly deeply.

(1) Larva. A chapter during my year (age 12) in Germany where I realized I wasn’t weak or dull. I learned to cope on my own. Imagining the pine pollen in the rain puddles in Germany to be fallout from an atomic war. Worrying that I had worms. Painting myself brown with cocoa to play the black boy in the Huck Finn skit. The annoyingly insistent carpentry teacher, Brueder Rezas, wanting me to be licking the cocoa off my skin, urging me, “Ami: schlecken!” (“American: lick yourself!”)

(2) Artist. The marriage to Sylvia, our dual view. The grad school years. Discovering math, Zap Comix, Pynchon, hippiedom. Gödel. The night that Zappa record Chunga’s Revenge seemed to speak to me, 1971. Hearing whole Zappa songs in my head the car, no harder than understanding set theory. Creating Wheelie Willie.

(3) Transrealist. Isabel’s birth, relating to the fourth dimension and synchronicity—although I wrote about this birth already in All the Visions. Maybe a fresher fatherhood memory, something I haven’t written about. Or about transrealism. Life and science into fiction and fact. Back-to-back in Heidelberg: seminal works in two new SF subgenres: White Light (transreal), and Software (cyberpunk). And don’t forget Infinity and the Mind. My dream of finding crystals in the shale on the mountain slope I was climbing.

(4) Cyberpunk. Writer in Lynchburg, 1983 – 1986. Roland, the Vaughans, my career starting to happen, the birth of cyberpunk. The boat race, poling from L’burg towards Richmond. Talking in a field to that ex-MP guy John— what was his last name? Those kids from Richmond coming to see me, as if sent by Eddie Poe. The trip out West, effectively in telepathic contact with Sylvia as, over and over, we were able to find each other.

(5) Wizard. Retooling in Silicon Valley, getting up to speed, working three jobs, the Cyberthon. Falling in with the Mondo crew. 1986. Figuring out what computation means. Grasping the gnarl of natural life.

[Preying mantis face produced by sucking in my cheeks.]

But—why bother writing an autobio note at all? What am I supposed to get out of it? Self-knowledge. Bragging pleasure. Guidance. Publicity.

Working on these notes in the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting cafe. The guy at the next table has an ascetically shaved head, and he’s eating an abstemious salad of greens and goat cheese. Thoroughly, carefully, he chews a single wafer-thin slice of tomato.

It’s foggy every day in San Francisco this July, Sylvia reports, studying the paper.

A young woman at another table shakes her head, smiling. No health problems for her, not yet. I used to feel that way. Potentially immortal.

Who would really want to read a memoir by me, after all? It’s not like I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people who read the Contemporary Authors autobio note, which is online.

There should be some riddle whose answer I’m seeking by writing the memoir. What is reality? What’s the point of my life? How can I be happy? What did I learn by writing thirty books? What’s the missing book that I need to write?