There Will Be Beer

Today was in the upper 60s with cool breezes and generous sunshine. Because of this the city is full of grateful Chicagoans. Dogs and strollers were dusted off and put to good use, shorts could be spotted on just about everyone brave enough to display their fallow skin, whitened over the long winter months the way lichen dies during the winter, myself included, children sought pennies and lollipops with an extra bit of delight on their soot covered faces, and women, freed from the bondage of historical oppression displayed their arms and upper chests, delighting onlookers and passersby alike. The Cubs won. It's sandal season.

Although I don't wear sandals. Never have. Not as an adult at least. Just haven't been able to make the transition from sneakers. I think I enjoy too much the thrill of finding a pair of socks so small that they virtually disappear beneath the rim of my shoe. Ankle socks, amateurs call them.
Carwashes and flowers are in full bloom and will be for many months. One tree I had the pleasure of glimpsing was a twenty foot bouquet of white flowers, each a circle of five rounded petals, like propellers, a cloud of white stunt planes emerging from the center in all directions.

And now, I shower, in preparation to eat a friend's lasagna at her lasagna party. There will be beer and wine and laughs and probably peanuts.

the one of writing...

Well, my new life as a blogging blogger has become quite a challenge. This morning I awoke with nothing but the rosiest goggles, nothing but the highest hopes and honestest dreams. (sidenote: aren't all dream honest? I would think so. Only the truest of liars could lie in their dreams... *thinks*) This morning I pledged to update my blog more regularly, a promise I intend to keep. I awoke full of fantasies of disclosure. Brutal, self-censored disclosure... a slow drip of intended secrets, a sharing, an offering to the altar of word worshipers, a new source of frog shit upon the shore of the bog, noticeable only to the most alert of passing insects until absorbed by the Mud, evaporated by the Sun, or stepped on by The Man.

I woke with impulses of a familiar passion, the one of writing, the one where I sit and think and conjure and imagine and distract myself and scan the brain, flip through the rolodex of long-filed hopes, invoke the skeletons and the bowling balls and the racquetballs, the dictionaries and the shotgun shells, the oily rags and old shoes, the unfinished journals and finished magazines. The brutal realities of the past, the hopeful dalliances of the future and the incessant persistence of the present. The brightest corners of my mind, my brain, my trillion plus configuration of neurons and chemicals and electrons, full of more shadows than a collapsed building, but bursting with a hesitant light...

Ok, I've gotten off track. The purpose of this post was to post a cover letter I found on my computer while dredging up old, dusty files. It's a cover letter that I wrote at some erstwhile time to some erstworthy publication, hoping they might grant me the honor of ink upon their pages and the further honor of being read by dozens, possibly hundreds of people. Even though I'm still unpublished, I can't help but detect the odor of naiveté, the overly detailed taint of desperation, the unmistakable confusion of a writer in his early 20s behaving as such. It's several years old and a part of me hopes it wasn't sent in its saved form. I don't remember, so I'm posting it as is...

(perhaps someday I'll post the story the cover letter was covering for...)

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The Missouri Review
Address, Address
Address, Address

The Missouri Review:

I'm submitting the enclosed nonfiction piece for publication in the Missouri Review. It recounts the experiences I had during a summer spent crabbing on the docks of Seattle. Rather than look for work, which is what most unemployed people do, I used my time in pursuit of crabs, an activity people lucky enough to live near saltwater have the opportunity to do but one that few seem to know about. What started as an excuse to get out of the house became something I came to rely on in order to add meaning to my otherwise income-less existence. I got a lot more out of it than tasty crabs. I met an incredible array of people, people I would have never otherwise had the opportunity to meet. One need only visit the waterfront to get an idea what the textbooks mean when they talk about diversity. There are lessons to be learned out there and you need only interact with other human beings to learn them. Crabbing was an important chapter in my ongoing curriculum of life. The piece is bookended by the story of a seagull with good aim (it pooped on me) and a man I met later the same day who had cancer and was on an evening break from the hospital. Needless to say, he gave me some well-timed perspective on what it really means to get crapped on.

About me, I grew up in BLANK, Illinois, studied business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and have lived in the Seattle area for most of the last year. I've recently returned to Illinois and now live in Chicago where I clean fish tanks. I am a writer trapped in an unpublished writer's body.

The piece weighs in at 4700 words. I would be happy to accommodate an editor's suggestion concerning length or tone. I want nothing more than to uphold the high standards of writing readers have come to expect from the Chicago Reader. Thank you for your consideration and I look forward to hearing from you.

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The time has come

for more posting. It's been too long. I've neglected this poor blog for far too long. I've given it the houseplant treatment and it's done nothing but wait and wilt slowly over time, desperate for another watering. How long does it really take to spill out some thoughts? To tap out a phrase or four? To pour a cup of water into a bowl of dirt?

I'll stop imposing such a rigid filter on myself and simply get on here and write. All I need is a germ of an idea, a seed, water, sunlight and I've got all the makings of readable entry, not to mention of an overwrought analogy. I just need to write. I'm a writer.

My fan(s) deserves better.