From Balloons to birthmarks...

What's up with me today? I can't stop blogging. I boxed up my novels last night for the move and its almost like...wow...I have lots of sentences that still need to hemmed, ploughed and water.
Hopefully I can get my BIG novel self-published next month. Considering paper and color illustartions, each printing costs me about $80 for about a limited run of ten that'll a give away to the people who compelled me to write it (its taken four years!!!!). Hopefully I'll have a copy or two left over so I can give it to that sexy middle-aged publisher at Random House who thinks I have potential if I can get my head out of the blog.

An aged-hippie just came in and bashed Bush for an hour before going off on Reagan's faux-pas antics. He then shook my hand and nodded at me, like I knew where he was coming from...

There's a short story by Donald Barthelme I've been thinking about today called The Balloon. "The Balloon, the exact location I cannot recall..." is how it starts. Its a really stupid story. It's about a New Yorker whose wife leaves him and, b/c he's so sad, he blows up a balloon. All of his sadness and everything that's inside his lungs feeds into the stretched rubber. The irony is, the balloon doesn't pop. It just keeps on growing and growing and eventually occupies most of New York City. Kids jump outta High Rises and flounce on the balloon like a trapoline. People get used to the balloon and eventually no one seems to mind that a giant clowns balloon has appropriated all of Lower Manhattan.

The irony is dual. New Yorkers everywhere are bouncing up and down on the narrator's exhaled sadness. Eventually, when the protagonist's wife comes back to him, the balloon becomes no big deal. No big deal at all. He poured everything that was inside of him into this permeable object and then, one day, pop..she's back, and her presence flitted perfectly inside his chest that place that had been huffing and puffing for all these months....

Started to think that maybe blogging has been my balloon and maybe all this writing is just a method of interior investigation. Where's my Dad? Who is crazy Mike? Who's the faceless femme with the bubble-gum name? What's up with all these crazy carousel rotations!

God I love every second of existence!!!!