don't call it a comeback

The news out of New York Fashion Week is a return to the square toe.


The news out of Milan Fashion Week is a return to the plague, this time known as coronavirus. Everything Thomas Mann is new again.


The halls of this dormant account have not been darkened by literary shadow in say, over three years entirely through fault of my own. Can I still write? Do I have something to say? Is there enough oxygen in the room? Can you start and stop and start again?


As Dorothy Parker famously quipped, "someone was using the pencil." Or more accurately, to paraphrase Judy Garland, perhaps "I never left."


At some point telling the tale of not telling becomes the point; missed opportunities, missed vantage points, torn pages from a journal never to be recovered. Blame the inauspicious return on harrowing times as we head into a possible dystopian future that somehow needs accounting. The fall must be accounted. 


So here I sit cavalierly sipping coffee and ruminating on the Oxford comma when I should instead be actively following up on multiple digital applications in the corporate world far removed from the safe confines of these word-filled halls. Similarly, resumes quite like blogging are simple auditions; attempts at acceptance, connection, persuasion. Any role in the chorus will do.


It appears the royal "We" are here at this place again. I cannot promise to be faithful, a fear of commitment also extends to preventing bumper stickers on my car. But unlike the hermetically capped correspondence between Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, 'What There Is to Say We Have Said,' there is always another last word.

hash and eggs

I cannot tell a lie. I must tell several, in quick succession. And why not? What else am I supposed to do when faced with this... "assignment," for lack of a better term. ("Dilemma" was already being used.) I was given the task to go into my literary closet and resurrect the dead. Poems and prose alike, just hanging there lifeless on wire hangers no less. Outfits once destined for the Salvation Army had to be stitched into a passable frock for daytime wear -- and cocktails at 11am. Hemline above the knee, if you please.
How was I to bring new meaning to these works that had found themselves couched comfortably in the confines of a dark 3x5 cell awaiting word from my executors for the date and time of my estate sale? These are the items that would be placed in -- what do they call them? LOTS, oh yes. A fancy catch-all term for "everything in this box $1."
Anyways, this whole ordeal got me to thinking about my own mortality. And the fact that I'm half past due for a Manhattan. They say that when you have a photograph taken, that it takes away a part of your soul. Personally, I think they are getting "soul" and "salary" mixed up, but that's beside the point. What I'm trying to say is that we writers pour so much of ourselves onto the printed page, certainly we must sacrifice a little bit of our life energy to the written word. Believe you me, there's a small charge to be paid the Reaper for every split infinitive and dangling participle. A short story is all good and well. But, a novel will just about fuck you up in the worst way. Hell, cigarettes only chop 7 minutes off your life, but a serialized book will top that by a good half hour.
The way I see it, there really is no use in going back to revisit the past and find it inadequate to the memory of the present. You can't unscramble an egg. The stories are still there, in the shoebox of my mind... but the shoes are missing. There, I've gone and done it. I've ruined the assignment. Allow me a moment to collect my thoughts and punish myself with a thirst-quenching cocktail.