Hitting a Wall

 I left work early on Thursday. About 10 AM, my right foot started going numb. My 1  PM, my calf was numb. Not quite like when one's leg falls asleep and not quite like the feeling of circulation being cut off. Between leaving work and getting to the grocery, I felt a pain I had never felt without a bloodletting.

I did go to the grocery. I was out of supplies. I got a chicken and some macaroni and cheese.

Back in the room, I heated up the bag my sister left me. I fell asleep for about an hour. I tried getting caught up on my email. I listened to KDHX on the phone. I watched the start of the 1/6 committee's presentation - maybe  the people were paying attention. I tried getting through websites for my stories. I was tired and a bit of advice: do not submit manuscripts when you are having  trouble jeeping your eyes open. Pretty sure of three rejections. I put in 7 submissions.

Friday started off better than yesterday ended but it was still bad. Still had pain, but now in my back. An old problem, I think. A nerve pinched. Or my sciatica is going bad.  

I was ready to go - achy but ready - when I made my lunch of two peanut butter sandwiches. Thing is the bread was now moldy. I thought about going to McClure's to buy my lunch. Thing is I started submitting my stories, again. I missed the bus. I chose to catch the #17 at 11 AM. I walked down to McClure's. It was painful.

So, I did not go to work today. Not a good thing for my back or my bank account.

I walked to the office to pay rent and it felt like I had a knife in my lower back.

I feel asleep again with the TV on and the cpap machine off.

After I woke, I called the guy who is to do my polygraph. I got his voicemail. I left a message.

I tuned into WPRB for one show and stayed for another.

Again, I started up submitting my stories. I hit another 24.magazines. 

Among the magazines I poked into, one was The Capra Review. There I read Coda by Marion Lougheed. Which I liked for its simplicity. It is a short story, so give it a chance.

Over at Puritan, I read JASMINE’S BROWS AND CUTS by Rachel Lachmansingh. I found the story satisfied my curiosity - a bit Canadian, a bit ethnic, a whole of generational conflict and questions of failed ambitions. I never knew women had their brows waxed.

Shrimps over at Peatsmoke felt like deja vu: family conflicts, the protagonist feels the distance between talents/aspirations and opportunities, an ethnic protagonist. The differences are an American location, the ages and sexes of their respective protagonists, and diction. I liked the loose, almost colloquial diction favored by this story. How he expressed himself kept me reading as much as the stiry being told.

I should have gone down to Family Dollar for food. I heated up the bag, again. I am better. Still, I ordered a pizza from Greek's.

I read His Beatitude Metropolitan Tikhon issues statement on tragic school shooting in Texas. I want to share this part, since this is a Christian country:

Although the young man who committed this atrocious act seems to have acted alone, we must acknowledge that any manifestation of violence is also a product of a world which all too often cherishes violence in its many forms. As Christians, we must always oppose any and all forms of violence giving instead that example that our Lord Himself gives us; one of meekness, gentleness, self-sacrifice, love, and patience.

I find ironic how the Inspiration channel has only two types if programming:  religious and Westerns.

I listened to the radio and a little TV while I ate. MSNBC flogged last night's hearing on 1/6. I read Her body is a problem from Aeon. These paragraphs struck me:

The truth about our experiences as bodies is a material one that leaps off the page or the canvas to touch the viewer/reader: this reads to me as a feminist aesthetics of monstrosity, that braves dismissal to explore difficult truths. What might look like narcissism in the conventional sense of the term is an attempt to touch the other through imaging the self. Such images work towards a collapsing of the subject and the object, fiction and nonfiction. ‘What if,’ the artist Eleanor Antin asked in 1974, ‘the artist makes the leap from “the body” to “my body”?’ What happens then?

These questions were unresolved then and they’re still open today. What the feminists of the 1970s and the backlash of the ’80s tell us is that we have to be good lookers. We must keep looking consciously and with intention for the impossibly thin distance between what we see, and what it might begin to mean.

Maybe it is being aware of my too full belly but for some reason I see this as having a place in my"Chasing Ashes" novel.

The Truce Between Fabulism and Realism: On Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Modern Novel probably will not interest but one of my usual readers, and then only if he has time to read it (a ten minute read, fellah). But I will put in this quote just in case:

The great formal achievement of One Hundred Years of Solitude was that it treated the two positions not as antipodal but as dialectical. It satisfied the modernist commitment to narrative innovation in two ways, first in its compression and dilation of time — what would become the hallmark of magical realism — and second in its use of the fantastic, the twins who die at the same instant, the visitation of the ghosts, the glass city, Remedios being sublimated into heaven as she does the laundry.

Since he might now have a better understanding of my "Chasing Ashes" project. Meanwhile, for the rest of you, get your copy of  One Hundred Years of Solitude.

"Colonel Tom" chalked up another rejection:

Thank you so much for your interest in Cream City Review. We deeply value the trust that you put in our team to read your work, and your patience while we spent time with it. While we were unable to accept your work for publication, we do wish you the best of luck placing your work in this submission elsewhere.

Again, thank you for your time and for allowing us to read your work.

I meet with my typist tomorrow. I need get ready for that. Then some reading. I will be going nowhere else tonight. Count the residents of Muncie safe fir one more day.

"Death and a Kiss"  has hit 759 reads.

It is 9:05 PM and let this be the song of the day:

sch