Avoiding The Crowd by Wading In The Basement while Shouting & Murmuring to myself

This morning I signed up for an Open Salon account, spent about five minutes noodling around their website, then signed out and came back here. I know it sounds snobbish (as snobby as I can be considering I’m probably the only person actually reading this thing I had mostly abandoned) but it just felt crowded and desperate. This little place is a blank sheet of paper to me, a way to get my juices flowing if you will, and I do my best writing not crammed and slammed amongst others.

I don’t think I could handle living in a crowded city like New York or Los Angeles. My brain seems to require large tracts of land.

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Regarding my own tract of land, our basement is like many in New England today: waterlogged. To recycle a joke I wrote in a letter to my brother Bob and his wife Michele, I’ve always enjoyed fishing, and now I don’t even need to leave the house to do it. Hopefully the Weather Channel is correct and we’re in for eight days of no rain, so I can patch the holes and cracks in the floor and get someone who knows how to waterseal a basement and make it actually stay dry.

Side note: a 2.5 Gallon wet vacuum only actually takes in about a gallon of water before it starts puffing water out its side blowhole. Wish I had gotten the 16 Gallon…

My wife is worried about the water and all the other problems we’re having with the house, but I’ve seen worse, and really, what’s the worst that could happen?

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Yesterday I finished writing a submission to Shouts & Murmurs, the humor section of The New Yorker.

I expect to be rejected.

I’ve found that if I have a positive attitude going into a submission, it hurts to get rejected, whereas if I send it off, swear it off, and get on to the next thing that will be rejected, it dulls the pain. It’s like getting your finger caught in a door versus your dick slammed in a drawer. If/when it gets rejected, I’ll post the piece up here. I think it’s funny, which is half the battle. You’re supposed to be your first and harshest editor, and I’ve taken that to heart. I’ve shredded, deleted, burned, recycled much of my writing because it didn’t work for me. Do I regret it? Nah.

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Nah?

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Incidentally, if my piece is accepted by The New Yorker, I plan on running around the front lawn in my underwear, dousing myself with champagne. So New Yorker editors, if you catch drift of this, there could be a fun web weirdo video cross-promo in it for you…