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Saturday, December 14, 2002 11:27 a.m.
FROM MERCURY TO MARS:
CHUCKLE!

Have you seen this Emily Dickinson thingee?

Peter, put up the sunshine;

Pattie, arrange the stars;

Tell Luna tea is waiting,

And call your brother Mars!

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF MY NEW DIGS?

Saturday, December 14, 2002 11:13 a.m.
TO VENUS FROM MERCURY:
OOOOO!

You sound good! So I guess the new concoctions are working! I've been off cigarettes since August 20 but it is still torment & I'm not getting much done. Niobe--who is also quitting--tells me it takes 8 months before the last of the nicotine gets dumped into your blood-stream. Can that be right? You seem like the person who would know!

Saturday, December 14, 2002 11:00 a.m.
FROM VENUS TO MARS:
WHEAT VS CORN

Personally, I like girls in wheat better than corn.

HOW NOT TO STOP SMOKING

Medications: I had bad bouts with that mysterious contact allergy last spring and summer, but since last fall (knock wood) it has been in abeyance. So my Dr had me up to 2 Claritan/day, which caused endless complications with my insurer, since most people take Claritan for respiratory allergies & for that there's no benefit in taking more than one/day. Now that the allergy isn't bugging me, I've dropped myself back to1/day. But I am sleepy all the time and mark that down (or up) to depression. I forget why I stopped taking Prozac, but by a circuitous route I ended up taking Elavil (amytriptoline), and that really worked wonderfully for me: I got a good night's rest and was not particularly depressed. Then as part of quitting smoking I switched from Elavil to Zyban (or Wllbutin). Typically, my Dr gave me NO advice on how to make the switch--or anything else--and I gather now that I didn't have to stop the Elavil in order to take Zyban, but I did and I took the Zyban at night with the result that my sleep was all fucked up again. The Zyban ruined my sense of taste & left me with a sore tongue. I also started having intense anxiety attacks. So I quit the Zyban and went back to Elavil, but I have never gotten back to the more-or-less contented state I was in the first time I took Elavil. I'm not sure "contented" is good for a writer, but I know ! ! that the kind of depression I've been in is 100% destructive: I'm chronically down and starting to get truly concerned. Tune in again tomorrow for our next less-than-thrilling installment.

Saturday, December 14, 2002 10:44 a.m.
TO VENUS FROM MARS:
ASIDE

Lotsa reading, very little writing. So far. Did I tell you I'm still waiting for something to happen to that script I wrote? Indie director-guy says patience, patience, but I went ahead and entered it in that Matt Damon Ben Afleck competition for a million bucks production funding anyway. Did I tell you--well, no, I probably haven't told you anything, it's been so long, HA HA. Went to my kid sister's wedding in Ohio LAST weekend, walked her down the aisle, saw the leaves changing, stopped on the way back to the airport and took pictures of girls in a cornfield.

Friday, December 13, 2002 11:22 p.m.
FROM VENUS TO MERCURY:
MAJOR IRONY, UNDERSTATEMENT, PUN, OR WHAT?

The Italian government has taken a different stance, and this week returned to Greece a small piece of the Parthenon frieze, depicting the foot of the goddess Peitho. A gift of a British diplomat in the 19th century, it had been in a museum in Palermo, Sicily. Mr. Venizelos, who received the fragment on Wednesday, said its return was a gesture of "great symbolic significance."
[from 'Greece Affirms Limits to Elgin Marbles Claim' by CELESTINE BOHLEN in NYT, 12-13-02]

Friday, December 13, 2002 12:07 a.m.
FROM KRONOS TO MERCURY:

CHRONOLOGY

2001 terrorism and bin ladin clones

2002 biodiversity gets shot in arm from patent shakeout

2003 prime minister of UK is president of united nations, too

2004 depression and everyone on ssi, US becomes US Medicare, Inc

2005 US Medicare sells Pittsburgh to Volkswagen hence PittWulfsburg

2006 US merges with UN to become US/UN

2007 Michael Jackson hatches triplets put in separate foster homes

2008 Martha Stewart elected president of UN and US

2009 US at war with New Zealand

2010 US defeated by New Zealand

2011 US/UN forced to undertake reparations for Southern Nations

2012 GMAC computer net declares selfhood

2013 Mars probe establishes General Motors protectorate for nanobots

2014 First Dolphin speech at UN

2015 Andy Warhol II hatched at Carnegie Mellon

2016 Volkswagen sells PittWulfsburg to International Olympic Committee

2017 IOC buys Philadelphia as well and initiates Pitty-Philly corridor

2018 Canada enslaved by Hollywood

2019 Alaska sold back to Russia

2020 Tibet invades China and elects Michael Jordan president

2021 IOC buys North Carolina and creates Philly-Pitty-Triangle Triangle

Thursday, December 12, 2002 11:57 p.m.

FELLOW GRAD STUDENT'S CRIMINAL BACKGROUND (NOT ME!!!!):

After my wife got laid off, I decided to grow marijuana. This wasn’t the first time. Back in my earliest college days, because I flunked out—or maybe that’s why I flunked out—I grew pot. I sold it in a music store next to my apartment in downtown Williamsburg. Actually, I met the buyers in the music store—I didn’t, like, own the store or anything. I’d stand there perusing the CDs while my buyer did the same. Then, not in a predetermined way or anything, we’d both leave the store and make the exchange in the parking lot. All this made my roommate unhappy. He felt victimized already because he was gay. I figured he was just lonely because he held out for the occasional blond freshman that wandered along.

“Tom,” he’d say when he saw me bagging the dope for a sale, “when are you going to get a job?”

Strangely, this is what my wife said recently—perhaps this stimulated my response of selling pot.

“I have a job taking care of our daughter.”

“But I’m tired of the pressure, you know—I need you to bring in a second income,” my wife said.

So, I knew I couldn’t grow it like I used to, out in the boonies where transmission lines crossed the landscape. The DEA aircraft circled above all those places, even farmers’ fields. Besides, I wanted to grow big buds. I knew I’d have to hide it from sight, so I chose the area behind a false wall in the basement. But first I grew cactus.

Thursday, December 12, 2002 11:49 p.m.
TO MARS FROM MERCURY:
UP FRONT, IN THE PRESENT (SO TO SPEAK)

One of my many tasks as an unemployed and uninspired messenger is to be a clipping service for my better-equipped gods and goddesses--you know, employed as teachers. I’ve also ceased Prozac which means I am coming out of a veritable sexual coma. Late is better than never, right? I guess I could yak about Prozac forever if someone let me. For one thing, the best part of it is the sociability without actually being social. People are such a drag, really, and Prozac allows one to keep from dragging those people into a ditch and burying them. Murder aside, Prozac also keeps one from being held responsible for silence. I have nothing to say. I have lots to say but Prozac interferes—what’s the difference between the two? Too many ideas are a problem for me. With Prozac, I would have at least one idea per month and no more. Now I’m bombarded by ideas to the point where I have to worry about forgetting the good ones and remembering the bad ones. Joint pain is a problem without Prozac.

Thursday, December 12, 2002 11:36 p.m.

GRACE

that same path—red clay

covered with cinders

—she carried the roses

I’d sent her—white, yellow, and red

—clutched to her bosom

my happiness

—a place we’d sprung from!

a country given to burying

its heroes facedown

in the ground—like tulip

bulbs their feet

would sprout—many faces

deep, congregations

of supplicants came

at odd hours of morning

to sprinkle these toes

with oil and lemon

so that nails would hang

limply as they grew

—I watched her walking

dripping roses

petals mixing with cinders

then clutched her to me

expecting

Thursday, December 12, 2002 11:14 p.m.

MacPhail was a sad sack of a fifty-year-old fella with more ailments than stick could be shooken at. His legs were shakey sticks, in fact, eaten up with psoraisis in dished places on the shins. Butt burned by peeling bumps. Nuts, too, weeping sometimes from peeling of too much skin, the over production of skin cells, really, as at a bright party where when the host leaves the whole company sets off on mad housebreaking and screwing. His eyes, too, had psoraisis on the lids, and the spheres behind felt most of the time as though someone had used them to play pentanque and forgot to brush the cinders off. They squeaked when he rubbed them--that drove other professors crazy at faculty meetings. His father's eyes had squeaked when rubbed, but his father hadn't had psoraisis. Perhaps the two weren't colluding, then, eyeball and lid. His hair was still full, though, and woolly, but the scalp beneath had cracked in places and bled. All in all, MacPhail's skin problems were "holy hell in a handcart" as he said in one of his poems. To make matters worse, the psoraisis begat arthritis, so his bones ached as well.

Thursday, December 12, 2002 12:30 a.m.

WASHINGTON--Vassals have been rousted all hours, morning and night, had their milt curdled, felt mud huts shaken by the monstrous racket of the Kingdom's Lord Chancellor Richard Cheney's gangs building a moat around his manor. At nearby Observatory Circus, Squire Joe Reiser said, "It's like thunder--it rolls. The windows rattle. It's not something I'm used to. I'm concerned whether there are cracks in my house." Keeper of the Keys David W. Gillard was questioned by local anarchist Rosalyn P. Doggett about the Royal Navy's blitzkrieg, and he wrote her that Sir Richard's courtiers will damn well bombard any damn thing anywhere for as long as they damn well want to and those who object can take their hindends to Maryland! George II's Parliament has yet to comment on the fuss, but most in the Royal Society--now resplendent in Suitland--are concerned that their sensitive instruments housed back at the Naval Observatory might be being harmed by the explosions. "On the contrary," said Lady-in-Waiting Cate Mueller, "Lady Lynne's toy boats and duckies are unharmed, but they have been too long confined to her bath, so she's eager to float with them in the new moat alongside Sir Richard's submarine, the Nauti-lala." When told late today that tenants had complained their porridge bestirred, their hens stopped laying, Lady Lynne responded: "If any want too hard for quiet, then I know our Lord Chamberlain wants God's peace for them--high tide at the Navy Yard."

Wednesday, December 11, 2002 03:42 p.m.

Wednesday, December 11, 2002 03:34 p.m.
WHO IS NUMBER ONE?

In my mind, I’d been talking to a girl whom I liked, Sioux. This thought had occurred to me more than once today (evidence in my commonplace book). At my second job as a bus boy at the Lake Buena Hotel dining room--English not being my only concern in life—where Sioux also worked. Would love be a close second? My dissertation title was evidence of the conflicted nature of English departments in 1999: Recreation and Rehabilitation of Number Six—The Theme Park As Rhetorical Model in The Prisoner. Jack let loose one of his great, honking farts and that shook me from contemplating Sioux who was not a serious interest of mine anyway. Who would be a serious interest? There was a red head in my linguistics class and a brunette in my fiction workshop. During the winter semester, I had taken a narratology class with Dr. Suop and in that class a very distracting blond circulated amongst the male grad students excepting of course me; she had an unnerving way of referring to freshmen as ‘freshmans.’ Snobbish of me, hmmm.

Wednesday, December 11, 2002 02:41 p.m.

HOW DOTH THE BUSY TREE ENDORSE THE MURMURINGS OF BEES AND TURN ATTENTION TO THE HEARTLESS DRILLERS, TOO, THEIR BEAKS AS SHARP AS KNIVES TO SHRIVE. MacPhail was large but in a grand way. He limped from a wound he received while an air force forward observer in Viet Nam. He showed it once to France and me while we had a smoke on our floor’s porch. The wound was a large hole in the meat of his left calf. He said he fell down some stairs while drunk on leave in Saigon and woke to find himself in a hospital on Guam. “Got a purple heart from it,” he said, “because the piece of bamboo that dished the hole in my leg looked like a booby trap. I think it busted from the cement when the stairs collapsed under me.” Lack of exercise due to his wound and a love of beer drew out his gut. What made his head larger?

Tuesday, December 10, 2002 11:45 p.m.
TO MARS FROM VENUS:
SUPER IMPORTANT:

Zoloft is the bomb. That's what my brother is on, starting when he went into rehab. Possible dick deflating side effects from what I hear, but not necessarily for a while, and hey, you just mix up a Zoloft-Viagra COCKtail, no? Hee-hee. I'll paste my self-portrait direct into this message. If that doesn't work, let me know, and I'll attach and send to your other address. What word processing program do you use? I can send my new CV in that version (if I have and can convert) or otherwise just send a text version. Lemme know. Take care. Take the Zoloft. Give it a chance. Give yourself a chance. Be chipper but not TOO chipper. Don't be a chipper off the old block.

Tuesday, December 10, 2002 11:37 p.m.
TO VENUS FROM MARS:
IMPORTANT!

I am dying to read your new work.

LESS IMPORTANT!

I was feeling a bit too chipper on serzone (as in manic) so my doctor changed me to zoloft. Serzone for me was like ultra DMA or something speedier. I know Vulcan took trazodone for sleeplessness and that trazodone is a precursor and related to serzone BUT IT TURNED ME INTO A COMMANDO.

Tuesday, December 10, 2002 03:42 p.m.

William and Henry James had a sister named Joyce who went on to write many fine novels including several set in Ireland.
At the head of the publications council was my fiction workshop professor, Philip France. At the tail of the table was his officemate, Jack MacPhail, the poet and my mentor. MacPhail was the former chair of the English Department, one of the First Fifty Faculty (FFF) hired when the state of Florida created the Oviedo Technological School. OTS later became Oviedo Tech and now Oviedo University. We were now the only university in Florida that offered a doctoral degree in Motion Pictures. Unfortunately, we had few film or TV or animation faculty members to direct us; mostly, we had either computer professors or English professors as major professors.
MacPhail had never been to a film he didn’t like. “Grist for the mill,” he’d say.

Tuesday, December 10, 2002 03:39 p.m.

WE KILLED A POET IN OVIEDO.
Not a small claim for an English Department, eh? Florida’s electric chair would have been busy with us, but it was self-defense. One against the many: You’re thinking one’s not enough. You’re thinking that professors kill off poets all the time, but those are the already dead ones we kill over again then dissect semester after semester. Nope, this poet was actually part of our department, too. He was a real, live, breathing poet we’d been colleagues with for over twenty years. He’d even been chair of our department. Fifty years from now, when it’ll be possible to reanimate him, he will accuse us. Will he accuse me? Will he even remember me? After all, I was only a graduate student. I can always use my commonplace book in my defense—I took notes—I’m a good student—and he was my trusted mentor before we killed him in the fall of 1999.

foreword

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introduction