Negotiations With the Guy in the Purple Dressing Gown

On my way to the Boardman Library’s Gary Shteyngart event, I tracked through a forest that was so absolutely enchanted and weird looking, I had to stop my car in the middle of the road, leap out and furiously begin taking pictures.

Look at that!

Like a Doré.

After some but much-less-than-you-might-think post-production processing.

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Shteyngart is always entertaining.

He didn’t read.

Instead, he spoke about his life in the Hudson Valley. Apparently, he spends half the year living at his dacha near Red Hook. (Although why anybody’s half year in the Hudson Valley would include February is beyond me.)

The library had a small table covered with his novels. I bought a hard copy of his latest, Our Country Friends, and stood on line for his autograph.

“Slow going until about page 100 or so,” advised the woman standing on line in back of me.

That’s what I was afraid of.

I had actively disliked the novel before this one, Lake Success.

Success has mellowed Shteyngart. Robbed him of his savage comic edge.

The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan were really weird and hilarious and original, but my particular favorite of his Shteyngart’s works is his memoir Little Failure (which I assume, like all memoirs, is mostly fiction.)

Laugh out loud funny, Little Failure.

Shteyngart’s later stuff, not so much.

Still, it’s rude to go to an author event and not buy something.

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What else?

I’ve been feeling a kind of low-grade anxiety these last few days.

You’re the biggest failure on the planet, sneers some inner voice.

Which is ridiculous!

At present, Chinese figure-skater Zhu Yi is the biggest failure on the planet, followed by Boris Johnson’s party planner and Joe Biden.

I’m fairly certain that if you were making a list of the planet’s biggest failures, I’d clock in somewhere around the two billionth. Maybe three billionth!

But brain chemistry (for which, read: feelings) is brain chemistry. You can’t really argue with it. You can only eat chocolate hazelnut truffles.

I suspect I’m picking up anxiety from RTT.

He is waiting to hear whether he will get The Job.

He really, really wants it.

He’d be really, really good at it.

But the nonprofit he interviewed with is very new, and he doesn’t really fit the position he initially interviewed for. The nonprofit is clearly excited about him, and I suspect they’re scrambling to come up with another job description and another funding source—but who knows whether they will find those things?

It bothers me that I can’t be an umbrella for the people I love. Shade them from the shit storms.

But I can’t.

And no amount of bargaining with a questionably existent, white-bearded, purple-dressing gowned God—If you have to make someone’s life miserable, make my life miserable! Make his life happy!—can change that.

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Shteyngart did say one interesting thing: It’s really impossible to write for more than three hours a day. You can edit for 12 hours straight—or even longer. But that free-flowing outpouring from the source? No. Three hours max.

If you are to believe Shteyngart, he spends the remainder of his daylight hours tromping!

(I’m not sure I believe Shteyngart.)