Biding Our Time: Thursday, September 2nd, 2021: The Twisties Vs The Jippers
Writing Fiction: I completed and posted (and Kindled) “See Emily Play” yesterday and have a new story jittering in my mind, though I haven’t quite decided on a title: either “The Jippers” which is urban slang for getting cross faded and feeling good -or “The Twisties” and I will let Simone Biles tell you what that is, “Literally can not tell up from down. It’s the craziest feeling ever. Not having an inch of control over your body. What’s even scarier is since I have no idea where I am in the air I also have NO idea how I am going to land. Or what I am going to land on. Head/hands/feet back…” Either title it will be the same story. I would claim that 95% of the time I don’t write about myself, my first nover, in 1986, “A Shadow Walks” is about Lebanon and its lead character is me plus a friend of mine added together, and my third novel, back in 1993, “Six Foot One” about a man who thinks up stories as a coping mechanism for the things that happen to him is autobiographical, and my novella from 2007, “Me In Honey” is about a disastrous romance I had. Otherwise, I haven’t had a stand in at all. But I might do for the new story. I have two ideas, my old boarding school in a Lebanon that didn’t have a civil war and an image I used at the end of “Swimming Pools” -a man holding his infant daughter in the middle of the night. My friend Mike Dee, who is so cute with his children, inspired me to return to the image, that and Kobe Bryant’s Girl Dad. Anyway, I don’t have it at all yet and am still doing active daydreaming… who knows what will happen?
20 Years On: I really can’t see what options Biden (or for that matter Trump) had but to get out of Afghanistan, the Taliban won, the US lost, next. The problem wasn’t really the US but how the US failed to make the Afghanistani’s feel like anything more than civilians facing an invading army. If the Afghans found they were anything more than collateral damage, that the US was fighting to save them from the Taliban’s brutal Islamic extremism, they would have fought to push back the Taliban. That was the failure and Biden did exactly what had to be done: he gave up.
Donda: I’ll admit that after listening to Kanye West (aka Ye) for over fifteen years, I am very attuned to how he makes songs. So maybe I’m partial. However, Donda is one of the top three albums of the year. I think it will go like this:
Olivia Rodrigo
Kanye West
Regina Bonelli (that one will be dropping in October I believe)
The Yanks: After winning 13 games in a row, they’ve lost four of their last five
Aretha Franklin: I have a big Aretha album waiting for me to write it, and now that “Aretha” the movie is available for renting, I am probably gonna rent that soon as well…
Marshall Crenshaw: somebody tell Spotify that Al Green and Teenie Hodges wrote and not Marshall, his excellent cover of “Here I Am”
