A PITA Kind of a Day

And I do not mean a pita bread kind of day.

I did make to work on time and I survived until 3:30. Two ibuprofen and 2 Tylenol kept me going. I got sent over to the glass line, lifting vodka bottles from a pallet to a conveyor belt. The forearms and the wrists screamed before 9 am. Then I swallowed the ibuprofen. The team leader thought I was not moving fast enough, so I got moved to the ketchup line. There I snapped plastic collars onto pairs of ketchup bottles. That relieved the arms, but the left thumb became a problem. At lunch, I ate the Tylenol. Boring work, but it was less troublesome than the palletizing. 

I paid rent, walked over to Cheers, got a hamburger ordered, walked to McClure's for RC Cola, and back for my sandwich before coming back to the room for the night. It was a great mushroom Swiss burger.

Firefox kept crashing tonight. Which left me getting little done. I am not sure what the difficulty was, maybe my Wi-Fi connection and maybe one of my extensions. I did a little troubleshooting on the connection and removed the extension. All seems to be running well enough now. Some items from what I got done before the crashing follows.

I keep promising myself to read more of James Ellroy. I have not read anything of his in decades, and I think have missed one of the important writers of modern America. Reading interviews like Crime Hub's The Life and Legacy of James Ellroy only reinforce my opinion:

AN: How would you analyse Ellroy’s impact on the crime fiction genre? You write early on in Love Me Fierce in Danger that ‘Ellroy’s life is the great untold story of American literature’, which obviously infers that his influence goes far beyond a single genre. 

SP: Joyce Carol Oates described Ellroy as ‘the American Dostoevsky’. Ellroy was instrumental in bridging the gap between the crime genre and literary fiction. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett might be considered major figures in American literature now, but they never achieved that distinction in their lifetime: Ellroy has. Through his willingness to embrace experimentation in prose and plotting Ellroy created his own Ellrovian style which readers recognise, and authors emulate. His fierce competitiveness means he is still striving for greatness in his third act, even if it sometimes alienates his readers. Take a novel as divisive as Perfidia. Ellroy conducted a huge amount of research into the outlining and planning of this novel which portrays, in minute detail, day-to-day life in wartime Los Angeles. The result was both brilliant and challenging, some might say maddening, but unlike anything else I have read in modern American crime fiction.

And from The Paris Review: Love Songs: “Mississippi” .

There was another rejection of "Colonel Tom":

Thank you for your interest in Black Sun. While I appreciate the opportunity to consider your work, I'm sorry to say "Colonel Tom" is not what I'm looking for at this time. 

Sincerely,

Jared Daniel Fagen

Editor/Publisher, Black Sun Lit

KH feels stumped about the failure of this story, and I offer this from The Black Sun Lit About page as a possible explanation for the story's failure there, and maybe in general:

 We propose a renewed aestheticism that values beauty—not communication or identification—as the end of literature. Beauty is for us the experience of the limit, an autonomy beyond that of life itself. We search for it in all forms of extreme expression: whether in minimalism or maximalism, ultramodernism or neotraditionalism, in the experimental or in the archaic, in a desire that exceeds the body or in the longing for boredom. Beauty is the encounter between the saint and the hedonist, the prostitute and the Buddha: a truth that, like staring into the face of Medusa, petrifies the gaze into a contemplation of nothingness. We value beauty that can be discerned in the fragmentary and the sacred, the dysfunctional and the erotic, the derelict and the obsessive. While we surely have an audience in mind, we would like our contributors to be bold and less concerned with their potential public.

I got one post for here done before everything went haywire.

What I really wanted to do was work on “Road Tripping.” I made changes to the end of part I that I was thinking about last night. I did some meditating while at work and from that I made about 4 changes altogether. Furthermore, I caught a few stumbles in my typing, too. Jeez, I probably need to get those fixed, but then I am thinking the MS needs to be typed first.

Tomorrow I have a job interview, and I am calling it a night. 

sch