cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dumb appointment with Ir@ Gl@ss Sudden shift in the Th1s Am3rican Life thing. I did a whole interview a few months ago with the producer, L1lly Sull1van, whom I had helped with research last year. Now they want to rejigger the whole thing, and have me record a completely new interview in a few days with Ir@ Glass. This is the old bl@ck widow story again. The one that I wrote the NYT article about, way back. And then got flown to Panama, of all places, to film a re-enactment of for some stupid Netflix series. Of all of things I have ever done or seen or covered, why is this the one that I'm asked to revisit again and again for huge audiences who will forget my name five minutes after they hear it? I have been briefly famous so many fucking times that I cannot even remember what the count is. This will be one more. Like every other time, it will not put a gallon of gas in my car, provide me with groceries, health care, or any measurable improvement to my material well-being. I was trying to explain my attitude towards this to Lindsay this evening. She writes, and takes endless classes on writing and joins writers groups and does all of that other bullshit that people do to spin their wheels and feel like they are working on careers as writers without actually just pitching stories and working with editors. It isn't that the moment of being on a show like Th1s Am3rican Life is a let-down. It can be a great moment in a writer's life. Aspire to it, and enjoy your moment. Try to write that thing that gets you there. I have just been here so many fucking times over the last 15 years or so without any material impact on my life that I've stopped giving a fuck. All of those millions of listeners will forget my name five minutes after hearing the story. They will never notice that this same guy told then fifty other stories that mattered to them at various moments in their lives. And I will never get even so much compensation to get an up-to-date prescription for eyeglasses, which is now about four years out of date and I can't see shit. Since the week that I bought the bookstore, I have been begging the state of V1rginia to acknowledge me as the new owner of the LLC that possesses it. And they just ignore every fucking fax (no emails accepted). I cannot pay sales tax or employee withholding until they acknowledge this. I call them, ask to give them money, and they ask me to fax them another form which they do nothing with. So I cannot pay the business taxes. I have the money in the account to do this, but they will not let me pay it. Now my employees need their tax forms and I don't know what to do. This is turning into the stuff of nightmares. People come into the bookstore nearly every day and talk about what an amazing place it has become, how much life it has now. Every week I've pulled off another major carpentry project. I bought a huge collection of close to 10,000 rare and antiquarian books for only $400, with the provisio that I have them all out of an apartment within a week. A first edition of "The S0uls of Black Folk" was among them, as were many signed first editions by T0m W0lfe. We did a free gumbo day on Sunday. I spent a lot of time making it, while suffering from food poisoning from a meal eating before starting it. I had perhaps half a cup of the stuff and have only just been ale to start eating again a few hours ago. I am terrified that all of this work is for nothing when this huge, awful thing is sitting there. I have been trying to pay my business taxes for months and these fucking assholes will not take my money because they will not process the documents that show that I own the business. I have worked every single day since mid-November, including Christmas and New Years Eve. At least 80 hours each week. I am getting burned out. My dreams are all about books. I just want to spend a week outside in the sun. A parade of people come to visit me on most days. It can be hard to get work done. Friends and acquaintances and neighboring businesses and idiots and crazy people. I just want to sleep. For a long time. Being on TAL is going to seem like a really big deal to most of these people. But it really isn't. It is one more one-way blip in which I impact the culture and it does absolutely nothing in return for me. Being a successful writer has perhaps never been so entirely unsuccessful for the writer as it is today. 3:10 a.m. - 2024-03-05 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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