My Thanksgiving Post

Please read Why the Four Freedoms Matter Today 

 I slept terribly last night, my leg hurt too much to stand on, and I did not go to work. I have to admit, I cannot do the trampoline trucks. Too old.

So, if I cannot get to work, I still need to get to the Sheriff's. It is down to a must be out of here at 1:45 pm. That gets me to the 2:30 #17. 

Since I am not working, I need to do something useful. 

I checked out Abandon Magazine. After reading Climb The Highest Mountain by JP Vallières (a view of the afterlife for teenage suicides, which is inventive and brilliant, and not nearly as depressing as it may sound), and William Todd Seabrook's When Robin Hood Was Caught Dead To Rights  (What I would call an experimental story, but one that sure works as an adventure story, too - very amusing), I decided no way do I have anything to send here. Except there is this:

Abandon Journal exists to showcase writing and artwork that has been created with abandon.

That term is free to be interpreted liberally, but ideally it is the kind of work that takes risks, created in a space wherein the artist doesn’t care what anyone else thinks or what everyone else is doing. We’re open to hybrid work, genre, visual art, and more.

Each issue we showcase work that “abandons form,” and every other issue will be a variation on a theme of abandon.

And the theme is "Abandon Love." Okay, I sent them "Problem Solving." 

Adroit Journal also scared me.

We have published numerous United States Poets Laureate, MacArthur Fellows, and Pulitzer Prize winners, and our contributors are regularly recognized by the Best American Series, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowships, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Fellowships in Poetry and Fiction, the Whiting Foundation’s Whiting Awards, and many more organizations that offer industry-leading funding and support.

Uh huh, that sound like my kind of crowd, but then this is almost encouraging: 

We’re looking for work that’s bizarre, authentic, subtle, outrageous, indefinable, raw, paradoxical. We’ve got our eyes on the horizon. Send us writing that lives just between the land and the sky.

Luckily, they are closed to submissions.

 decomp journal sounds like a place for me, except it sounds a bit too earnest:

We traffic in ideas of social justice by publishing the works of a creative avante garde. We don't seek to hold reverence for an easily spotlighted, state-curated history of ourselves. We want to explore what it means to be marginalized within “the creative.” When the powerful and necessary act of writing the self has become consumable and isolating, we hold room for both rage and joy. We dare to be silly, to play with the discarded, the frivolous, whatever has fallen into disuse. We seek ways to recognize and reciprocate without consuming each other.

We take up the fight of being “anti” (anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-heteropatriarchal) through creating art that resists the injustices outside and inside ourselves and our communities. We seek to explore, interrogate, and think beyond spatial and temporal boundaries as well as the binaries of local vs global and inner vs outer. We acknowledge that solidarity that refuses borders and boundaries has always existed. The creative tools handed down to us, the instruments of resistance, have not been forgotten. They have only undergone decomposition. Rather than uplift isolating notions of community and struggle, we are committed to understanding the connections among structural forms of domination.

We recognize that reform does not equal justice, nor does a journal’s mission statement itself equal the constant radical practice that rethinks what art is, how it is valued, and by whom. When the majority begins to depart the anti-racist train, those who embody race will remain aboard. decomp is for those who keep moving. We believe justice means systemic upheaval and decolonization. decomp endeavours to cultivate the practice of solidarity while holding the tension of being and thinking beside others, enabled by communal and political difference.

So, I read “The Eulogist” by Kenneth Jakubas. Very good writing, first-person narrative by The Eulogist, but then I ran across the phrase "like pieces of propaganda doled out by an optimistic unitary state" which I found jarring. I know no one who would say "unitary state." Then came the conclusion:

After my classmates and those close to Austin in the community praised me for it, I developed conflicting feelings. I had trouble unseeing a connection I’d made but couldn’t publish: I couldn’t stop thinking of the kind of mess Austin may have left behind on the bed or the carpet or the bathroom, wherever he was when he overdosed. Connect this with his bedwetting as a child and it’s almost undeniable: there was a cult of waste going on, uniting Americans in their intrusive patterns, their sicknesses and terrible desires. Even in waste, there are connections to be made.          
Austin was victim to a system of terrible desires, hooked on the urge to expel without the choice of holding it back, hooked on an injection of the future with the needle of the now. After these tragedies, I ghosted the town and my friends and moved three hours away from it for college. I only come home for Christmas and death.

I understand his meaning, around here you can see it every day, but for me this feels didactic. I will admit a bias here: I have been too aware of my own predilection to be didactic and have tried to avoid it by leaving interpretation open to my readers. My one female reader of "Problem Solving" asked if she got the abortion or not when I was pushing at a different problem needing solved. I do not mind the difference, I do not think it reflects on me the writer. In other stories, the reader will know more than the characters because history did not go quite the way expected by the characters. I did this to point out the problems, the limitations, of our knowledge.

I will pass this journal by - unless I finally get around to doing my nonfiction in a forum other than this. 

By the way, Mr. Jakubas appears to be a Midwesterner, too.

Time to get ready to go.

It is now 9:18 PM.

I made the Sheriff's on time, then waited 90 minutes for the ride back to town. Before I left the station, I limped over to the post office and mailed my letters to Charlie G. and Ross F.

While out at the courthouse, I read two more stories of Torgny Lindgren (Merab's Beauty and Other Stories). I like them, they are rural and small town stories, they are Lutheran stories, some approach the mythical and the mystical, and the prose is charming in its simplicity and depth.

I got the 4:45 to Walmart after deciding not to wait on the bus to Payless. There I got the pie and a loaf of bread for tomorrow, as well as a few items for my dinner. Back down to the bus station to catch the 5:45 home. 

After dinner, I walked down to McClure's for a bottle of Coke and the Diet Pepsi for tomorrow.

"Psychotic Ape" was on my mind while I was out, so I tweaked it for an hour or so.

Then I watched a little TV before settling down to dispatch my email.

Clarkesworld had not yet rejected my story. I am now 46th in their queue. I assume the rejection will come by next Thursday.

Now, I have some reading to do, and I will submit "The Psychotic Ape."

Paul S. sent me a link to this video by The Silversun Pickups, I liked it, and so here you have it:

 Reading for the night included:

• Arin Arbus: The Core of the Play’s the Thing
• When Jews Become anti-Semites: Why Reading Sartre in 2020 Is More Relevant Than Ever 
• The Ache Girl and Aino Who Never Cried (a short story from Border Crossing Magazine, based on a Finnish myth that just a wondrous read - updated language and syntax, a heartbreaking story, lovely in a way that the time spent reading is forgotten)
• Closer Objects (also from Border Crossing Magazine; a slow start that takes a strange, almost scary turn, then a cheerful ending of newlyweds on their way to the honeymoon.)
  

That last story got me thinking of much of what I am seeing online, and what I am writing - there is a certain kind of lightheartedness I cannot muster.

I got an email from Wesley B. wishing me a happy Thanksgiving.

"The Psychotic Ape" went off to Asimov's.

It is 12:04 AM.

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