Note to Self...

Write a best selling book called "Marked Down," thereby guaranteeing endless variations of the following conversation will take place in bookstores across the country...

Customer: Is this book Marked Down?

Salesman: Yes it is.

Customer: How much is it?

Salesman: Twenty dollars.

Customer: That's what it says on the cover.

Salesman: That's what it costs.

Customer: I thought you said it was marked down?

Salesman: It is Marked Down.

Customer: No it's not.

Salesman: Yes it is.

Customer: No it's not. You're charging full price.

Salesman: This isn't a used book store. We charge full price.

Customer: Even if it's marked down?

etc.

Yes, that's "Marked Down," by Michael Dare. Specifically designed to be read. If this book doesn't make you laugh, you probably shouldn't have bought it.

Then again, my next novel will be called "My Next Novel," though it's neck and neck in the title derby with "The Arbitrareum," "The Fallback Position," "Mango Overboard," "The Clown," "The Man Who Didn't Vote for Obama," and "Please Don't Write Me," about a writer who pulls out all the stops, cranks it out like it's never been cranked out before, and ventures into unfettered territory heretofore only explored by those armed with drugs and a keyboard missing a period.

Let's say this is an autobiography of a fictional character who bears more than a passing resemblance to me. One can't be too careful these days. Not only are "non-fiction" writers being accused of leaving out the "non" by admitting to childhoods they never had, but "fiction" writers are having their novels used against them in courts of law as evidence of their propinquity towards violence. So what the hell do you do when you've got to vent but the ducts are plugged with maniacs who can't stand the truth unless it's disguised as non-fiction disguised as fiction? Since fiction is only non-fiction written in the third person, when you write about yourself and exaggerate, you've got to trust the words, whatever comes out, start with the facts and go from there, wherever the words lead you. You decide to invent a plot so you can justify calling it more than a blog but less than a novel, but who knows what it is, a deconstruction of deconvention, manipulating the keyboard to do your bidding. A diary.

Here are some facts from my past that are just coming out this week, written in the first person but changed to the third to make it more novelistic.

Noah once came home to find it had been broken into. Nothing was missing. Everything was just in a different place. The spoons were where the forks used to be. The toilet paper that came from the top now came from the bottom. Most mysteriously, Noah's box spring was on top of his mattress with the bed made perfectly. Who would do such a thing to poor Noah?

Noah found out it was Scott and they had a big laugh, but things like that have kept happening to Noah ever since, even when he's miles away from Scott, in another state, Noah leaves, he comes back, and things are different. Noah can't always put his finger on the specifics, but whenever he changes location, or returns to somewhere he's already been, he's absolutely positive this isn't how he left it.

All of which probably means my next novel should be called "Noah's Syndrome," in which Scott tries to kill Noah because he thinks it should be called "Scott's Syndrome."

You've got to write about yourself in the third person because it's too damn easy to be on your own side. You don't have to do anything and there you are. That's why Hunter S. Thompson invented Raoul Duke, though I now hate Hunter S. Thompson because he's the man who shot Hunter S. Thompson.

Can't be on two sides at once when it's you vs. everyone else. Will mankind benefit from your having written a best selling novel or will it just buy you a more efficient bong? Maybe a maniac will read something in chapter 27 that will inspire them to invent a car that runs on Republicans and emits truffles. On the other hand, that scene in chapter 6 in the kitchen of the French restaurant could encourage a maniac to hit a perfect stranger over the head with a wok. Take full responsibility for the ripple effect and you will go mad, never creating another thing in fear of what a maniac might make of it.

I, on the other hand, don't do that. Maniacs can make of this what they will, and if someone hits you over the head with a wok, don't blame me. I didn't know you were perfect.

Chapter Two: The History of Incompetence

Someone should really write a History of Incompetence but it won't be me, I can assure you. I'm not really the least bit interested in Incompetence or any of its children like Idiocy or Moronitude. These are things I try to avoid but which I can't help writing about when I stumble across them, like that guy in the freecreditreport.com ad who somehow got a job playing electric guitar at a Renaissance Faire because someone stole his identity.

Here's my problem. What you're reading right now was written before the piece above it in the blog, the one visitors to The Diaries read first. This makes corporeal adherence impossible. You can't write a novel in a blog because you'd have to write the last chapter first, and if you're trying to throw some Capote into the mix by writing non-fiction in a fictional manner, particularly as a personal diary, you're stuck out of time, like Billy Pilgrim, forced to add a modicum of Vonnegut, whether you like it or not, every blog is a Chrono-Synclastic Infindibulum. Thus deprived of the structural necessities of the novel, things like plot, motivation, and arcs, lots of arcs, what can you do with a form that makes you write your punchlines before your setups?

There are all kinds of things down below and up above that took place both before and after what I'm about to tell you. It is unfair to judge this blog based upon just this post. One must read some of the rest in random order, that is to say the order they're currently in anyway, to get a full picture. There are things on the blog I haven't sent out in email, though there is nothing in email I haven't posted to the blog except this one, and I might be lying.

Diaries are supposed to be filled with minutia

A random display case that sneaks up to goose yuh

so here's something trivial, short but intense

just don't expect it to make any sense

I got up, made coffee, read the Times, took note of the current political situation, looked for something to write about worth submitting somewhere, combed the classifieds for any furnished two-bedroom apartments for under $400 a month, all I could afford, which was as fruitless as combing the comics for anything funny. Cleaned the house in preparation for my weekly visit from Solid Ground to make sure everything's on the up and up, ship shape, on schedule. They had given me a list of all the cheap landlords and organizations (such as their own) that helped such as I, single parents without an income, rise from the street to the conventional, a place to call our own while my son finishes high school. The land line I've been supplied only covers local calls and there's no time on my pay-as-you-go cell phone, so I'm stuck with calling numbers with the local prefix only, which is still quite a few. More than 25 phone calls revealed answer machines where I left messages, secretaries who pointed me to online submission systems, and one solitary landlord who didn't have any vacancies and didn't really keep a "list" as such but she'd be glad to take my number anyway and I should keep calling back and perhaps, if I amused her enough, she'd really take note and offer me a hallowed interrogation.

Here, in all its glory, is how I have deciphered my scrawls from the Solid Ground crib sheet…

King County Housing Authority – Submitted application

Housing Resources Group – Called, no evictions

CADA – called and visited website, no evictions

LATCH – called, put on list, submitted application

CHHIP – called, left message

LIHI – called and visited website, not accepting applications

Delridge Neighborhood Development Association – number no good

SEED – called, left message

Mt. Baker Housing Association – called, left message, put on list for Starliter

YWCA – called, closed for applications

Archdiocesan Housing Authority – called, visited website, left message

Capital Hill Housing – called, left message

Housing Resources Group – called, visited website, no evictions

Mercyhousing.org – called, visited website, nothing available in Seattle

Pike Place Market PDA – left message for La Salle, others 62+

Pioneer Human Services – called, clean and sober program only

Plymouth Housing Group – called, visited website, left message

All this duly noted on the information sheet from Solid Ground, full of checks and underlines and numbers and arrows and code, M means I left a message, A means asked for application, etc., but it wasn't good enough for Solid Ground, who wanted a separate list they could take back to the office and verify everything on the list, that I actually DID contact all those places, that I wasn't just LYING about it, which in this case would have meant they would have left ten messages on the ten message machines I left my messages on asking to verify that I left a previous message.

Wow. Never would have occurred to me. What if they respond to me but not to her, or worse, vice versa and I'm left homeless because an overworked secretary at an overworked agency trying to provide shelter to the poor makes a mistake taking notes from an answer machine that gets 100 messages a day?

Two steps forward, one step back, one step forward, two steps back. The dance of the new millennium.