And I Think It's Gonna Be a Long Long Time Till Touch Down Brings Me Round Again

Jump: Parkers Prairie, MN → Wadena, MN – Wadena County Fairgrounds: 30 miles
RIGHT out of the lot… arrows through town to HWY 29 NORTH
HWY 29 NORTH to Wadena… in town, LEFT onto HWY 10 WEST/ASH AVENUE
Arrows to the lot on RIGHT… fairgrounds will charge anyone plugging into city power today
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm

The astronaut Karen Nyberg was born in Parkers Prairie. I guess she figured outer space would be less remote…

Underage Girlfriends & Things That Sound Like Trains

Jump: Wadena, MN → Park Rapids MN – Fairgrounds: 50 miles
LEFT out of the lot back to Wadena…
LEFT onto HWY 71 NORTH and follow detour close to town in Park Rapids
LEFT in Park Rapids onto HWY 34 WEST and follow arrows to lot ahead on LEFT
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm

When you’re seventeen and gorgeous and you’ve just started doing your father’s forty-five year old boss, the one thing you really want is a trailer bigger than your parents’.

Thus it was just as soon as Chance and Chantal became an official item, she prevailed upon him to ditch the small but perfectly serviceable Ford motor home that had played home to Chance, seven cats and George the Dog for the past twelve years. The new Denali had a flatscreen HD TV so Chantal could watch reruns to America’s Next Top Model, a kitchen with solid wood cabinet doors & drawers and a countertop extension where Chantal could cook – (desserts were her specialty), a comfort plus queen size innerspring bed and pleated night shades just in case any of the Mexicans got funny ideas about peeping inside.

Once he came down with a dystrophic wasting disease, George the Dog mostly lived outside. But the seven cats were messy and Chance found it difficult to surrender the habits of bachelorhood. Previous girlfriends – closer to his own age – had been too smart to live with him. Chantal spent at least 5 hours a day cleaning.

It rained hard in Wadena yesterday. Chance cancelled the first show. Nobody in the history of the circus has ever canceled a show unless air raid sirens were involved so this decision caused a lot of grumbling. For some reason this made Chance nostalgic for the old RV:

“So I remember one night about five years ago in Kansas it was raining really, really hard, I’d finally fallen asleep. Then all of a sudden I woke up with a start – I heard a sound like a train approaching. And I’d always read that that’s what tornadoes sound like, you know, like trains coming down a track straight at you. And I thought, Damn – I should get out of the RV, throw myself on the ground and pray I make it. Only for some reason I just couldn’t move. I lay there half paralyzed.

“And the train sound kept getting louder and louder.

“Finally I managed to stagger out of bed, throw myself out the door. Landed face down in a puddle.

“Then I heard something start to squeak. And I thought, What the hell – tornadoes don’t squeak. And I looked over – and the lot was ten feet away from a train track. For some reason I hadn’t noticed. The sound was a train. And on the one hand I was terribly relieved to be alive and on the other hand I felt like the dumbest fuck in the world –“

Oh, you are, Chance – you are.

But not just because of that.

The Ghost of The Little Store Past

Now that I have almost limitless time to write, it’s become extraordinarily hard to write. Not surprisingly – I’ve always written best, most effortlessly, when I’m stealing time from other things, as though the creative part of my brain only functions as an odd kind of parallel circuit to the responsible workaholic’s.

I’m not very responsible these days.

Really the only thing I have to do right now is my 2008 federal taxes. I was so suicidally depressed last winter while the Little Store was tanking that I stopped doing all necessary bookkeeping. Thus there’s an enormous amount that has to be done before I can even think about taxes. Cash register entries have to be ported from point of sales system to Quickbooks. Vendor invoices have to be entered; accounts payable have to be parsed and sorted. I actually lugged the old store computer 4000 miles in the back of the car with the thought that one of these days (not today though) I’d finally get around to it.

In Pennsylvania I didn’t think I could put it off any longer.

Process is depressing as shit…

Receipt # 32433: 749: Dios De Muertos $8.50 Visa / 1016 Ring of Fire Habanero, $10.50…

Receipt # 32434: 1354 PETA POTATO teeshirt XL $20.38 Total: $30.88 Cash…

It’s exactly as though I am back behind the cash register of the Little Store. The sun shines, the otters scamper in the kelp beds, it’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon and this guy standing here in front of me – the only prospective customer in several hours – wants to tell me all about the time he first tried Dave’s Insanity Sauce back in 1998. The oddest thing has happened to me – I’ve turned into Scarlett O’Hara. A smile is frozen on my lips, my eyelashes are fluttering. Oh, aren’t you just the funniest, most daring and adventuresome food lover I’ve ever run across. You deserve your own show on the Food Network – I’m sure Anthony Bourdain’s penis is a lot smaller than yours. Buy something. Please.

And he does.

But do I feel triumph?

No, I do not. Because while I can coax people who wander into the store to buy stuff, they have to be in Monterey to wander into the store, and nobody – fucking nobody – is coming to Monterey, a fact which my landlords, the Cannery Row Company – to whom I owe commercial rent in the amount of $3200 a month – seem unable or unwilling to understand. So I’m like a kazoo player on the deck of the Titanic. First I’m gonna freeze, then I’m gonna drown… But damn! I play on…

Not a happy-making memory this.

No, I’m much, much happier in the featureless present tense. And believe me this present tense is featureless. Yesterday’s Town. Today’s Town. Tomorrow’s Town. Never any towns named Memory. Nobody I have to say two words to except for Ben and he ain’t talking much. New books to read every day, culled from Today’s Town’s library discard shelves. Last week I finished Pete Dexter’s Deadwood (brilliant), something with Rainbow in the title by Fannie Flagg (dreadful), a book about girl gangs in San Antonio (interesting), Seven Hundred Forty Park Avenue by Michael Gross (ver-r-r-ry entertaining social history of New York City) and Michael Korda’s Charmed Lives. I have a crush on Michael Korda.

I can see how this may sound dreadful, but in fact it is very restful.

Advice I used to give myself when I was writing the novel: it doesn’t matter that it’s good, it only matters that it is. You can always make it good in the second draft. But you can’t do a second draft unless you do a first.

And now back to the memoir…