WORK CONTINUES on . . .
GRITT CALHOON
and the
[WHATEVER]
or, INTO THE EARTHEN BUTTHOLE
I have narrowed down the title to these six. Whichever ones I don’t choose for the title will be chapter titles. I have a bunch of good ones now. No matter the title I choose, it will carry the subtitle “or, INTO THE EARTHEN BUTTHOLE” in the manner of ‘MOBY-DICK or, THE WHALE’. The story involves Gritt descending into a big-ass hole in the ground for reasons that will compel you to read it once it is finished. I don’t want to give too much away just yet, so I won’t spoil the meat of the story by explaining what this all means.
However: I did post the epigraph the other day, which is from the Book of Revelation. To wit:
¹And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.
²And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.
That’s the only clue I’ll give you for now!
I have been asking my friends which title they like best, and the consensus seems to be ANGEL OF THE ABYSS followed by TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN OGRE . . . I’m leaning toward the abyss one. Again, I can’t tell you why!
Did you know I’ve written two other Gritt novellas? Here they are (and you can click / tap on them):
Once this new one is finished, I suppose I will put out an anthology. Although I already have another one in mind which involves Gritt working security at a bordello . . . But anyway: each story is a stand-alone adventure, just like a James Bond or Indiana Jones movie. It’s always “Gritt Calhoon and the . . .” which I suppose is obvious now. The newest Gritt is perhaps my most meditative one. This is an older and, in some sense, more poetic Gritt, grotesque though he may be. I have combined King Lear and the Bible and Dante’s Inferno with the tale of . . . a drug-addled veteran super soldier who stands seven feet tall and who has slept with over a thousand women and who, in times of intergalactic wars he has since denounced and become jaded with, has probably killed just as many enemy soldiers. He has a gangrenous testicle and a glass eye that keeps falling out. His best friend is his old war buddy who is named Shark Gladiator, for God’s sake. And now they’re both supplementing their paltry military pensions as space truck drivers.
I say this next part not so much as a pat on the back, but more of a self-condemnation: who else is writing stuff like this? I wonder this sincerely. When it comes to fiction, I love highbrow-lowbrow. For instance, I love A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, which I consider the defining novel of this sort of thing . . . even GRAVITY’S RAINBOW falls under it. And even in some instances MOBY-DICK, my favorite novel! No one ever tells you it’s funny as hell. It is often poetic and grandiose, but there is always this sub-layer of comedy to it.
To quote one of my favorite passages, which sums it all up to me, and by “it all” I mean Life Itself:
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.
In other words:
JUST WHEN YOU THINK THE WORLD’S A JOKE, THE JOKE’S ON YOU
It would be clear to anyone that Melville was also heavily inspired by Shakespeare and Biblical writing. It’s nakedly obvious! And he wraps all this up in a deeply interesting adventure novel, for which his previous novels had made him famous . . . and subsequently faded into obscurity as a result of MOBY-DICK being panned for its more intellectual nature. Of course, I will never hit that high water mark, to write something as good as the greatest work of imagination in the English language, and the defining American novel, but it is my intention to aim for it just the same. Why try to write something lesser??
Today I applied for a freelancer tax ID through the Finanzamt, which is the local tax office here. I already have a German social security number, but I need a separate number to operate my little freelance business in Germany. With this, I can take advantage of the tax treaty Germany has with the US . . . so I won’t have to pay taxes there anymore. I bring this up because, as I wrote at length the other day, being a freelancer writer / editor here is how I am able to work on my novel full-time. The cost of living is a third (if not a quarter) of what it was in California . . . my rent with utilities is about €700. So hey baby!! I am now, according to me, a full-time novelist who has a part-time freelancing gig on the side. That rules!!
About an hour ago I took the little white pill (and a smaller vitamin D pill) that keeps me alive. About twenty minutes later, I experienced a sort of fairytale, Rip Van Winkle-ass drowsiness that I am not accustomed to. I never get sleepy to the point of needing to go to sleep. I would never fall asleep during a movie, for instance. Rather, I decide that I need to sleep. So my suspicion is that I have accidentally taken a Trazodone, which looks identical to the other stuff I take. My psychiatrist Dr. Jones had given me about 200 of these things to help me on sleepless nights, as I am an insomniac to some degree.
On the label, it says I can take a half up to two pills depending on the severity of my sleeplessness. A single pill will send me into oblivion. And upon waking, it takes me two or three hours to shake the heavy dreaminess, which I reckon is a side effect of Trazodone . . . so I usually just take a quarter of a pill, which is potent enough, and only as the Nuclear Option. I do this probably once every three or four months when I have an early doctor’s appointment or a flight to catch or whatever. And so if I did indeed mix up these pills, I’m in big trouble. It will absolutely wipe me out. I’d be staring down the barrel of sixteen hours of sleep . . .
Well! I guess the sooner I go to sleep, the earlier I’ll wake up from the long dark dream . . .
FINALLY . . .
Right here, I’m going to poll the audience for the title of the next Gritt Calhoon novel. I’m just curious what you think is all. And anyway, I love it when you email me. So if you wanna weigh in on your favorite of the six titles with which I began this post . . .
. . . just go ahead and do it, man.
My eyelids feel like lead. I know I’m headed to that landless latitude inside my mind. I hope I am not haunted by my ghosts. Though I suppose I have no control over that sort of thing. There are friendly ghosts who visit me, ones which I miss when they were still here, so if it must be ghosts, let it be them. Did I tell you I saw a ghost just before I left the US to come back here? It’s true. I saw it for a flicker of a second while I was taking a bath at my grandmother’s house. Listen, I know I’m a card-carrying stoner, and often adrift in my own mostly harmless delusions, but I was well-rested and stone-cold sober just then. Or anyway, I saw something ghostly and ephemeral, like a sort of ecto-residue from a dimension that is laminated atop our own, which Philip K. Dick wrote about in VALIS. It was a Visitor passing through the veil. I only ever see them in dreams. I think it best they stay there. Oops!
And so saying: Good-night!! ☆彡
