Readers and writers blog

Thank you, Jerry Waxler, for your comment. I have posted it in the comments section for this entry, not for our previous entry, ‘Riddled by spam,’ which was where you sent it.

I have brought it forward because after reading hundreds of spam comments since our last post Dec. 7 — actually, about 7,500 spam comments, most of them unintelligible — I was delighted to receive yours and wanted to bring attention to it since it raises several issues worth discussing.

Thank you for your recommendation about a spam trapper, but I must confess that as I get better at scanning these conglomerations of self-promoting links and nutty messages, I’m getting somewhat fond of reading spam.

As a reporter, I always enjoyed the weirder side of society, and believe me, there’s nothing stranger than some of this electronic stuff.

Anyway, you have no doubt noticed that I did not file an entry for Dec. 14, 21, 28 or Jan. 4, despite our intention stated in the lefthand column here that we would try to post a new blog entry each Sunday.

The reason I haven’t filed since Dec. 7 is that, like some writers I know, I’m in one of those periods where I haven’t had anything to communicate. This wasn’t a problem in the years I wrote for newspapers as a reporter and editor because I was always responding as a reporter to some news or feature story or as an editor to some reporter’s story. But I did go into those periods of noncommunication when I wrote a book — Adrift in America, which is reprinted in our nonfiction section.

I started writing the book in late 1985 after I met a guy named Steve Lutes in Colorado during a cross-country trip, one of many I’d make in the next five years. During those years, I was living in a truck — actually, a micro-motor home with the barest of necessities — that allowed me to follow a minimalist lifestyle in which I could spend hours, days, sometimes weeks by myself in some remote part of this country, sometimes just thinking, sometimes just looking at the sky. At other times, I would write, sometimes furiously. And then I’d go back to thinking and skywatching. I finished the book in late 1992.

As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I don’t mind being by myself, cut off from the world, doing nothing, saying nothing. And I guess I’m still more or less in the dawdling mode.

But you, Jerry — I’m glad you’re not the same.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

The image above is the cover art for Incommunicado, a book by Margot Heller and Tom McCarthy, published by Hayward Publishing, available through the Cornerhouse website.

Jerry Waxler is author of the weblog Memory Writers Network, a site that discusses memoirs and how to write them.

I’ve been playing a lot more music these days and not paying as much attention to this website as I probably should. Spammers, on the other hand, have been increasingly attentive to R&W Blog.

We’re getting buried by spam postings in our comments section — hundreds of them a day.

We have a good library of offerings in our Works section — nonfiction, fiction and poetry — and we plan to leave this website up on the Internet for anyone who’d like to read them. Of course, for a website to remain healthy, it must stay active.

During my recent weeks of relative inactivity, R&W Blog’s general health has been slipping — from a Technorati authority of 27 and rank of 305,000th in March to an authority of 9 and rank of 632,000th this month.

That’s still not horrible. Considering that Technorati tracks more than 5 million blogs, a rank of 632,000 still puts us in the top 13 percent.

I’d like to think R&W Blog still has some shine as it sits in this vast cybersphere, much of it wasteland. But like anything that glitters in the desert, not really abandoned but not often visited, it invites vandals.

We’re like a shiny tin can that attracts bullet holes.

Well, I’m getting pretty good at dealing with these spam comments by the hundreds. I do have to scroll through them — I wouldn’t want to miss a legitimate comment from a reader. But I have quickly learned that any comment containing multiple links — they show up on my machine in blue — is spam.

And some of these spam comments are so strange, they’re almost amusing. For example, bad translation into English gives us this offering from newsesystem.com:

Hello! Our company plans creation of essentially new search system! We spend interrogations 3 months. It is important to us to know what search system from existing now on the Internet most to you it is pleasant — google or msn or yahoo. And also that it is pleasant to you and that is not pleasant in these search systems.

(Notice how the words ‘that it’ and ‘that’ in the last sentence are a mistranslation of the word ‘what’?)

Another spammer offers a free loophole to get a gold membership at Adult Friend Finder, a site for “sex without commitment.” I wonder what the silver membership promises — sex with less commitment?

And really, spammers, if you’re going to claim to represent a legitimate business, try spelling it right — got that, Conney Island Pizza New York? And it’s hard to buy into any school that claims to be in western Pannsylvania, although this did purport to be a cooking school.

Another spam comment drew my attention to a ‘raw cooking school.’ What the hell is that?

Anyway, apart from stopping now and then at the loopy ones, I’ve developed a reasonably good speed at scrolling through all these spam comments. And our comments section has two buttons — ‘mark all as spam’ and ‘bulk moderate comments’ — that makes them quickly flushable.

So take your best shot, spammers. We like a little riddle now and then.

– Sid Leavitt

Steve Karmazenuk, the first author to entrust an entire book to R&W Blog, is looking for readers to check out his latest science fiction novel, The Darkness and the Stars.

Karmazenuk is appealing for ‘beta-readers,’ a computer-literate construct based on the term for the exploratory stage of software in which feedback is not only expected but welcomed.

And by the way, readers, however many of you are still out there, have you read the latest short story in our fiction section, ‘To Remember and To Forget’ by Luke Darbyshire?

Karmazenuk’s latest work, although it stands on its own, is an extension of the story line in the sci-fi novel he allowed us to serialize earlier this year, The Unearthing, also in our fiction section. Both novels originally were conceived under a seven-part outline, but that was a dozen years ago when he was planning a five-year television story arc that he later decided would work better as novels.

Anyway, he says, “I have been working on (The Darkness and the Stars) for five years, counting various abortive starts, revisions, reviews and rewrites . . .. I’ve finally completed what I feel is the ‘ready’ draft of the story. I am looking for people to read it — preferably people who have read Unearthing first — so that I can collect a little reader feedback before declaring it ‘complete’ and shipping it off to the publisher.”

If you can handle some beta-reading, email Karmazenuk at kspace@videotron.ca. And while you’re at it, check out his weblog, Kspace, where he discusses writing, life, politics and other subjects. A resident of Montreal, he also is author of the novel Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind (excerpts available through www.phyte.ca) and is a music journalist for Confront Magazine (http://www.confrontmagazine.com/).

And now, the Darbyshire short story. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re missing what one perceptive reviewer (me) described as “like James Joyce meets Raymond Chandler meets A Clockwork Orange.”

How can you pass that up?

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is an archival photo taken from the website of Frontier College, a Toronto-based organization that runs a variety of literacy programs across Canada. It seemed a fitting image for a blog entry about our Canadian writer friend Steve Karmazenuk.

What a pleasure it can be to read good writing, a pleasure I’ve received a number of times from works contributed to R&W Blog and one I’m glad to share from our latest contributor, a young Englishman named Luke Darbyshire.

It’s like James Joyce meets Raymond Chandler meets A Clockwork Orange.

Really, that’s how Darbyshire’s short story, ‘To Remember and To Forget,’ struck me. His tale of Bobby, a rather idiosyncratic young man, and how he deals with his father’s death, his mother’s toiletries, his friend Jim and their mutual love, Anna, has qualities of the dark poetry of Joyce, the mystery of Chandler and even that dystopian craziness found in the best-known work of Anthony Burgess.

In fact, a game Bobby plays while riding a double-decker bus reminds me of the ‘clockwork’ youth, Alex, in Burgess’ tale.

And consider Bobby’s observations of mourners after his father’s funeral:

He could hear (his mother’s) relatives in the kitchen, attendant at the makeshift counter bar: ‘Yes, I’ll take ice, and he’ll have a Guinness.’ Plastic cups. Paper plates. Sandwich quarters.

‘Never too early, never too late — that’s what I say!’ a rotund red-faced man said, guffawing crumbs and tuna mayonnaise down his black shirt as he struggled with a tumbler of cheap whisky and a plate of sausage rolls and warm quiche that, sat on cold porcelain at 3 a.m. the following morning, even redder in the face from burst blood vessels, spewing a red/brown mixture similar in consistency to poorly made risotto from a torn sphincter, he would dearly regret. ‘You hear that, eh?’

‘Hey, at least maintain we’re here out of respect,’ the red-faced man’s friend responded in a murmur. He glanced back at the bar, eyeing her sister who was stood beside it in determined resolve, focusing her entire essence into emptying each can into its glass and serving each slab of ice with subtlety sufficient to prevent the liquid from rising forth in response and, achieving height greater than that of the sides of the glass it had been placed in, forming alcoholic puddles across the counter. He hesitated for a second, studying her eyes, and continued, ‘Darling, could you give me a top up on this; it’s all head.’ She opened another black-and-white can — choking down a sob, all too noticeably — and tilted her head to inspect her work as she poured. She scanned the room self-aware from under her fringe before handing the glass back. ‘Thanks, dear. We were all so sorry to hear; you must be doing terrible,’ he dissimulated, tilting his head, narrowing his eyes and arching their brows in kind pity, noting who noticed in his peripheral vision. She nodded, and the corners of her mouth crept up her face, but the main stretch of pink tissue held flat, firm against her teeth, ‘Yes,’ and continued to gaze through the strands of her hair cast across her forehead.

Darbyshire currently is on a writing sabbatical after leaving the world of corporate finance and heading for studies at university, probably toward a career as an English teacher.

Finally today, as promised, another new short story from Hugh Yonn entitled ‘Me and the Good Ol’ IRS.’ If you’ve read Yonn’s first two contributions to us, you’ll guess there’s a certain amount of irony in his latest work.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image above is the Knight Bus, a fantasy triple-decker from the movie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

I’m close to surrendering to this blog. I try to escape it, but writers keep sending us their work. And I can’t resist reading it. Now the problem is to format it so that you can read it.

So I’m busy formatting the two latest contributions, both short stories, one by an Englishman named Luke Darbyshire and the other by our old friend Hugh Yonn. Each is intended as the first installment of a longer work.

I should have both up by next Sunday.

‘Short’ is a bit of an understatement for Darbyshire’s story, “To Remember and To Forget,” which runs about 11,000 words. But it’s full of similes and alliteration that I find reminiscent of classic detective stories, and so I’m now deep into it. Darbyshire tells us it’s intended as the first of a five-part collection he’s writing under the working title Short Stories to Read and Repeat.

Yonn’s latest tale, “Me and the Good Ol’ IRS,” involves run-ins with two ‘Mr. Somebodys’ at a local bank and a regional IRS office, none of which goes well. You may remember Yonn as a Florida entrepreneur who at one time was a bigtime marijuana dealer, then a federal prisoner. This latest story is to be continued with an installment called “And That’s How I Got in the Pot Bidness,” or, as Yonn adds, “something like that.”

Although his stories are drawn from personal experience, Yonn tells us they’re fictionalized, and so we’ve switched his first two contributions to us — ‘Going for the Gold’ and ‘Shoulda Robbed a Bank’ — from our nonfiction to our fiction section, which is where the latest also will go.

Meanwhile, as I click through these latest works, forging them into our page style — and ignoring the guitar and music stand that are sitting next to this computer and that I really should get to — I take breaks to ponder the following:

• Why are we getting so much spam lately in our comments section — hundreds per day? Could it be that Jeff Paul — you know, the infomercial guy who sets you up each month with 10 Internet sites that make you money around the clock, even though you barely know how to use email — is suckering in more people now that their personal economy has crashed along with the big one?

Let me tell you, folks, the Internet doesn’t work that way. But your spam is making it more difficult for me to find legitimate comments to our site. No, I’m not interested in nursing jobs in Alabama, medical degree programs in California or porn sites in Russian, especially the latter: Anyone familiar with the Greek alphabet can decipher the first two words in “порно фото: баба ебет мужика.” Yes, “porn photo.” The rest says, “grandma has sex with a guy.” Gimme a break.

• Why are so many Bush supporters angry — no, make that livid — that Barack Obama got elected? He won by eight million votes. An incumbent George W. Bush won in 2004 by only three million — and really only by 120,000 in Ohio, which was the deciding state — and in 2000 actually lost the popular vote by 543,000 before the U.S. Supreme Court in a party-line 5-4 vote made him the winner.

Sure, we moaned and groaned for eight years, and he and his screwups gave us plenty of reason for it. In fact, he’s a major reason Obama got elected. I think most of us just wanted somebody smarter than us to run the country. But none of us rushed to buy guns or make threats against the president’s life, both of which apparently are happening in record numbers now that Obama is our president-elect.

What a country. Not only do we have to worry about the fundamentalists overseas, but they’re threatening to run amok here, too.

Talk to you next week, I guess.

– Sid Leavitt

I might as well call this site the Brokeback Blog because, as much as I try to veer away to other activities, I don’t know how to quit it.¹ We keep getting contributors — the latest, a Texas musician who has a different sense of gospel and a Florida man who got an associate degree in federal prison.

The works by Joel Melton and Hugh Yonn aren’t long ones, which is good because we’re not taking on any new books for a while. And we found their contributions interesting.

Melton, a first-timer at R&W Blog, submitted three essays in OpenOffice text files that each began with the word ‘gospel.’ I usually associate ‘gospel’ with fundamentalist Christians, but reading Melton’s essays reminded me that its Old English root comes from not from ‘God’ but from ‘good,’ as in ‘good news’ or ‘good story.’

Melton’s essays — subtitled ‘Beauty,’ ‘A Lesson’ and ‘Son and Father’ — are drawn from his life growing up in Oklahoma on a farm with a strict mother and a story-telling father. Melton now lives in Austin, Texas, where he’s produced his fifth studio album of songs he’s composed and performed. You can listen to those and other songs at his home page, Joel Melton: Kick Ass Texas Music. He also is a filmmaker.

Yonn, an entrepreneur with various business interests in Florida, is a second-time contributor to R&W Blog. His initial short story, ‘Shoulda Robbed a Bank,’ was based on his experiences some years ago as a big-time marijuana dealer and later a federal prisoner for five years. His latest, ‘Going for the Gold,’ tells of a friend whose attempt at minor glory is literally a flop.

And now I’ve just got to get to all those extra singalongs I’m planning to schedule at area nursing homes and senior residences. We’re still doing the Sunday sessions at the home just around the corner, but I want to add three during the week at other places, several that I’ve played before in the past dozen or so years.

But no, I still haven’t made the phone calls (although the numbers are right here in my notebook). I did make a little progress this week. I transcribed the theme song for the TV cartoon show SpongeBob SquarePants. There’s a kid who comes to our Sunday sessions to visit his grandfather and likes the song, especially the part about “drop on the deck and flop like a fish.”

No, we’re not dealing with Mozart here. But it’s fun.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. For those readers who didn’t see the movie Brokeback Mountain, it’s about two ranch hands who fall in love while herding sheep on a mountain. The exact quote spoken by Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) to Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) is “I wish I knew how to quit you.” Actually, I didn’t see the movie, either. I looked up the quote on Google.

2. The image above is a fractal from the image gallery of the website Creativity Software Inc.

Since I last posted a week ago, I haven’t done a goddamned thing. This election is driving me crazy.

Well, I have done one thing — new poetry from Joel Phipps, our songwriting, guitar-playing, kilt-wearing bard in southwestern Ohio.

But other than getting that new poetry formatted and posted for today, I’ve spent the past week glued to TV and Internet polls, watching the latest predictions from Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, Ohio, even North Carolina and Indiana, from early morning until late at night.

Because I can’t spend another four years like I’ve spent the last eight.

After long days of poll-tending and short nights of fitful sleep, I’m up early to check on the stock market futures. Because they make a difference, too. That’s right. The worse the economy, the better for Democrats. And so I shamefully admit that I hope the stock market stays in the tank — but just for two more days.

I worried about the World Series because Wednesday night’s broadcast of Game 6 would have to be delayed eight minutes by Barack Obama’s half-hour political ad on that network. Would that cost him the votes of some baseball fans? To avoid that, I wanted the series to end at Game 5, long before Wednesday night, no matter who won, Philadelphia or Tampa Bay. And so I was rooting for the Phillies, who were ahead 3-1 in games, when Game 5 began. Turns out, it was delayed two nights by rain and ended up on Wednesday night, anyway.

I mean, these are the things that have possessed me this week. Really, I was supposed to be calling area nursing homes and senior residences to set up the first of three weekday singalongs I’d like to lead as a volunteer each week. I got the phone numbers written down in a notebook. That’s it. And I’m supposed to be practicing the guitar that’s sitting beside this computer. Still sitting there.

Because the polls, the polls are calling.

The George W. Bush years have been worse than even the Richard Nixon years. At least Nixon managed some foreign policy successes with China and the Soviet Union before his creepy domestic activities caught up with him. I liked the elder Bush, George H.W., who I thought was a capable, honorable man. But Junior — lazy, incurious and, frankly, just plain snotty — has made me and a lot of other Americans ashamed of our country.

I’m not much more impressed with the latest Republican ticket, not so much because of John McCain, whom I consider an American hero but, unfortunately, way out of date. I was in the Army during the Vietnam War — I served in the Middle East, which had its own dangers even then, but certainly not like Vietnam — and I think it’s time we get over that war. Hell, I think it’s time we get over the Civil War.

But Sarah Palin. Jesus. Some people thought TV anchorman Charles Gibson was unfair to ask her about the Bush Doctrine. Granted, I may be the only one on my block who understood what he was talking about, but someone who seeks to be our backup president should know he was talking about the U.S. waging preemptive war. And anyone seeking to be vice president should know the constitutional duties of the office, which do not include “running the Senate.”

By the way, when she promised special needs families she’d be their “advocate in the White House,” I wonder what she was thinking. I know, the vice president has an office in the White House, but I wonder if she was under the impression she’d be living there, too. I wonder if she knows the vice president lives at the Naval Observatory.

Choosing her as his running mate was not the act of a steady statesman but that of a risky pilot. And I don’t want to be in his plane.

So let’s vote, already. Let’s get it over. I can’t take this much longer.

This week’s new offerings in Poetry:

• Four poems by Joel Phipps — ‘The Convenience Store,’ ‘Public Service Announcement,’ ‘Writersville, U.S.A.’ and ‘December Rains.’

– Sid Leavitt

p.s. You know, for a guy who’s supposed to be taking a break from blogging, I still seem to be blogging. Go figure.

Actually, my desk already is clean. It always has been. Even during the years I was a newspaper reporter and later an editor. I used to spread my notebook pages out on the desk, write the story and then throw the notes away. For files, I clipped my stories out of the paper and stapled them to note cards that I then stored by subject and date in a desk drawer.

Too Felix Unger? Maybe, but it makes life easier for me.

These days, it’s all electronic files, and I’ve got a few remaining in this computer that I’d like to share with you:

• A complete rewrite of Jeri Cafesin’s novel Disconnected, a cinematically drawn story of a woman who struggles with her skeptical intuition as she tries to find a meaningful relationship in life at the edge of Hollywood. The new version has been expanded from five to nine chapters, with epilogue, and Cafesin has plans to make it the first book in a trilogy.

• The remaining nine chapters of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow, a story of children and teenagers fending for themselves in a world left without adults by a global virus that continues to kill humans as they approach adulthood. Yes, it’s a fanciful premise but so well written that disbelief quickly suspends.

• A new poem by Laura Elliott, our contributor from the United Kingdom. Her new offering, ‘And Don’t Ya Know. . .?,’ throws us a lifeline at a moment of darkness.

• And, oh yeah, a note from a blogger in, of all places, Tasmania, bringing to our attention an entry she wrote about a border collie who herds sheep. Now that’s not so unusual, but the Oct. 21 entry by Fiona Stocker in her blog, Treechange Tasmania, gives the rest of us in the English-speaking world a chance to read some of the vernacular used in the island state south of Australia. Not just metric terms like ’square metreage’ but vehicular terms like ‘four-wheel-drive utes’ and farm talk of ‘tussocks’ and ‘chooks.’ Thanks, Fiona, and good luck.

And now, right beside my clean desk and its computer with now-clean files, a music stand holding a notebook of old songs, most transcribed onto staff paper in my neat hand, beckons to me to pick up an acoustic guitar sitting in its own stand just to the right of the music. Practice me, the music says.

I hope to arrange at least three sessions a week playing singalongs at nursing homes and senior residences in our area besides the Sunday sessions that our little band — my wife, Bonnie, her parents, Glenn and Virginia, and I — play at a senior residence just around the corner from our home. Glenn and Virginia say they’ll join my weekday sessions whenever they can, and Bonnie, when she retires next year or so, may join in, too.

But I’ll still be around at R&W Blog, certainly reading our blogroll colleagues and filing an entry every now and then.

Meanwhile, watch out for those chooks.

– Sid Leavitt

I’ve gotten to know Tess Dyer pretty well in the past five months, and I’m going to miss reading more about her and her lover, Brian LaChance, as well as their friends Jeff and Laura Burke and their daughter Cassidy, Tess’ brother Dave and his wife, Kim, ex-husband Jason, Zeke the gay bartender and other denizens of small-town Maine.

Today we present the final two chapters of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring, and I’ll miss it. We’ll still have installments of another book, Ann M. Pino’s Steal Tomorrow, but I’m sure when we’ve posted the remaining chapters, I’ll miss that one, too.

And sadly, we won’t be accepting any new books for a while.

I’ll be taking a break, probably after my next post Oct. 26, for an indefinite period while I give more of my free time to other pursuits — mostly music, much of it as a volunteer in area nursing homes and senior residences. Hell, I’m pushing 70, and I can’t think of a better way to spend some of my remaining years. But don’t think I’m being noble. Because a large share of that time still will be spent, as usual, sleeping late and lollygagging. And — oh, all right — some more exercise and other healthy stuff.

Meanwhile, R&W Blog isn’t going anywhere. We don’t have a huge library of works, but what we have is pretty good reading and should remain on the Internet for those who haven’t seen it — or, as in my case, would like to read it again.

I know I’ll be reading Waiting for Spring again. Anyway, here are the summaries for its last two chapters:

Chapter 42: Winter is approaching, and Tess, still missing Brian after their breakup in April, learns he has torn down the house they once shared. She visits a spot they also once shared at a local lake, then drives on to the site of a house he plans to build in the spring. As luck would have it, he also shows up. They talk. They make love. She says she wants the rest of his life. He says it’s hers — and always has been.

Epilogue: It’s May, nearly two and a half years since Brian’s younger sister Rachel died. He and Tess still hurt about that, but they also have cause for happiness — their first wedding anniversary. Oh, and something else. In a week and two days, their daughter is due. And they’ve already chosen a name for her. You’ll never guess it.

Next week, we’ll be offering not a new book but a new version of Jeri Cafesin’s Disconnected, an e-book-in-progress currently in our Works section as five chapters and an epilogue. The newly edited version will be complete at nine chapters, with epilogue, although Cafesin tells us she intends to make the novel part of a trilogy with this as its first book.

Also next week, we’ll have a new poem by Laura Elliott. We’ll also post the remaining chapters of Steal Tomorrow. And whatever else happens along. Then it’ll be so long. For a while.

Also now in Works:

• Chapters 18 and 19 of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow:

Chapter 18: On a trip to a library, Cassie hears a rumor that she rushes back to report to her fellow Regents gang members — sightings of adults who apparently survived a viral pandemic that was believed to have killed everyone in the world but teenagers and children. If adults survived, the Regents leadership concludes, they must be scientists either with or close to a cure for the virus.

Chapter 19: Cassie learns that Galahad, the boy she loves, may have killed his previous girlfriend when he was a member of a death-squad gang called the Kevorks. When she confronts him about this, he says his memory is hazy about the killing, but he assures Cassie his love for her is true. She rejects this — and him. Frightened and angry, she begins training as a warrior.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is based on one found at Inmagine, a digital photography and photo processing website.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is an abridged version of ‘The Big House,’ Chapter 18 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Las Cruces, New Mexico. September 1985.

My envelope in the big house in Biddeford has been getting emptier for years, but I don’t really feel the emptiness until the trip to the Southwest. Somewhere on the road, the feeling takes hold. After I leave off Steve Lutes in Las Cruces, I find myself wanting to just keep going.

Driving through El Paso to the Mexican border, I think of Jack Kerouac and his friends roaring in an old Ford jalopy into Mexico, smoking marijuana the size of cigars, copulating with a harem of dark-skinned women in a small-town whorehouse, penetrating so deeply into the central Mexican jungle that they become part of it, swooning into it with their bodies caked with dead bugs and sweat, their breath mingling with the humid exhalation of trees and swamp.

I get lost in Ciudad Juarez looking for a post office to mail bullfight postcards back home. I stop a group of teenage girls to ask directions to el correo. One of them says something like, ‘Vaya por esta calle dos cuadras, luego la calle a la izquierda . . .,’ but it is hard to follow her Spanish and gaze upon her black eyes, cashmere beige skin and sparkling teeth as white as the blouse of her school uniform.

The wrong number of izquierdas later, I am sitting at the bar of a large hotel, drinking beer before noon and acknowledging that I am a dirty middle-age man getting older and no cleaner. I leaf through the postcards. Back home. What a joke. The postcards are to my co-workers, most of whom live in other towns, to an ex-wife, also in another town, and to my mother and grandmother, both in another state. Even the cats are in another town with a veterinarian who is showing them more attention than I have. There is no one back home.

I am drinking the fourth or fifth of a long list of unfamiliar Mexican beers the hotel serves when reality washes back in. I become aware that people are crowding around a television set in the lobby just through the door. I keep hearing a word that sounds strange even in my unpracticed college Spanish. Terremoto . . . terre moto . . . te rre mo to. Earthquake.

People are watching the screen with their hands at their faces. Some are weeping. Early reports are incomplete, but the immensity of the disaster is apparent. I feel like a spectator at a bad traffic accident, unable to help anyone but unwilling to leave without a long gape at the bleeding victims of the Mexico City earthquake.

I find the post office, mail the postcards, head back for El Paso.

Back in the house a few days later, I sit at the kitchen table and look out at the ‘77-78 Datsun in the driveway. I could have just kept going, I tell myself. I look down at Killer, a fat orange cat who twitches his tail at me in anticipation of being fed. Killer’s adopted sister, a tiny gray cat named Mouse, sits purring in my lap. How could I have left them? Bonzo is off in another room, probably in a corner, looking at the walls. He isn’t as easily won back. He knows why I am looking at that car.

That car carried nearly everything I needed for a month on the road. If only it had been bigger. But not too big.

Listen, I have to go back to work tomorrow.

OK, so what size would a vehicle have to be to contain my already meager possessions? And would I really need all of them?

I will have to think about it.

This week’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapters 40 and 41 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring:

Chapter 40: Tess meets her ex-husband, Jason, at a diner for a conversation filled with mutual confessions that she wishes they’d had when they were married. Maybe they would have made it, they agree. Tess goes on to visit her father, recently separated from her mother, and finds he has a new ‘friend’ that she thinks he has long deserved.

Chapter 41: Still missing Brian since their breakup, Tess goes on with her cleaning business, getting a new computer and taking on help that allows her to become an administrator rather than a worker. And then one day, she runs into Brian at the grocery store. She can hardly speak, and he can’t at all. She walks away quickly.

• Chapters 16 and 17 of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow:

Chapter 16: Cassie fends off a couple of thugs searching the clinic run by her fellow Regents, a gang trying to survive in a world left without adults by a global virus epidemic. The intruders, members of another gang of teenagers and children called the Pharms, were looking for a research computer that may have clues about curing the virus.

Chapter 17: Cassie helps deliver a baby at the clinic, but the mother dies, and she is the girlfriend of the gang leader. Besides worrying about repercussions from him, the clinic staff now must help a newborn survive without mother’s milk. The gang arranges a trade with some rivals to get a goat and then struggles with how to milk it.

– Sid Leavitt