The Travels Continue: Physically and Between the Ears
The writing desk of E. Vernon F. Glenn
It’s Bastille Day! Go drink some good champagne and think warmly of the French who on this day in 1789, tore up the debtor’s prison and continued the foment of the French Revolution. The tumbrils did roll and the guillotine did slice! Oh Happy Days!!
I find that I’m not very good at indolence. I feel I need to keep moving, keep doing something. Now, I’m not bad at grabbing a quick cat nap here and there and every now and then, will vaguely watch television, drifting along not really seeing what I’m looking at but basically, I need a little action. It’s my raison d’etre.
So as is par for the course this summer, I traveled some more. This time I flew into San Francisco last week (SF seems to get nastier by the minute. The powers that be clearly have taken a powder when it comes to some semblance of order. Homeless hovels on medians and took a cab over the Bay Bridge to Berkeley to check out my youngest, the fascinating Rory and his partner Ryan. They’ve bought a little Southern California bungalow and are fixing it up.
It sits right on the Oakland/Berkeley line and is in a very nifty neighborhood. Homeless hovels are on every median, trash and filth everywhere, junkies shoot up in public, panhandlers and grifters loll about in stinking clots, crime , especially shoplifting and ‘minor’ theft on the hot rise…other than that, it’s the paradise it always used to be…
Anyway, my kids have bought an Oh So perfect, little-looks like a doll house - 100 year old California bungalow which sits right on the Berkeley/Oakland line in a nice neighborhood, right down the hill from the beautiful, iconic Claremont Hotel where I now hang my hat when I’m out that way.
It’s sort of like I make sure that I regularly make my rounds, checking on everyone. They’re fixing up their house and of course, the architect and contractor argue all the time and it’s all months behind schedule so what’s new? The young ones are seriously vegan and took me to two of their favorite spots and the food was delicious. I wish we had more of that here in Charleston. Done right, it’s excellent stuff!
In the middle of my three days, I had drinks and dinner and long, long catch up with an old friend from North Carolina who I went out with forty-five !! years ago. She took me to a superb Italian called Corso, right across from Chez Panisse, on Shattuck in the middle of ‘Gourmet Gulch’ and we chewed and choked well and talked the bark off the tree. All three meals were outside in glorious sunshine and cool weather. It was an excellent travel. I took a 7 a.m. out back to Charleston through Charlotte and, knock on wood, all of my travels this summer have been smooth and efficient and on time with none of the chaos that regularly shows up on the evening news. Sometimes I’d rather be lucky rather than be good.
How about that zany Murdaugh fellow. Of course, that’s tongue in cheek. It’s the biggest Club FUBAR deal I can ever have imagined. The biggest crime story to ever come out of South Carolina. Jesus! And they say there’s lots more to come. Since the son was killed by shotgun blasts and the wife was killed with an automatic rifle, makes me wonder-did he have accomplice(s)? Or did he just have two different weapons with him. Have those weapons ever been recovered? It is said that there was blood and flesh splatter on his clothes. From which (or both) decedents? So many questions. So much to think about. Someone said it was going to be a hell of a movie. I rejoined, “…and a really long one too!” As I type today, I expect the Grand Jury is wrapping up its work and its considerations of that which is being presented to it and indictments are taxiing for takeoff. Remember, a good prosecutor can get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich but I think this is going down a whole lot harder than that. And, WHY did he or someone kill both the wife and the son? I have theories. Wife was getting ready to leave him, causing huge financial disruption to him. And he feared son would roll over on him for subornation of perjury in the boating crash/death case. It all and more was more than enough to unhinge him and make him crazy. In the end, I find him to be a narcissist, an amoral pathological liar.
By the way, this excuse that they keep trotting out about him being a hardcore opioid addict I find to be bogus. Legitimate opioid addicts cannot even balance a checkbook and this guy had twenty-plus bank accounts all over the place that he kept and kept close track of.
So as I often say, let’s watch this space for further developments…
A few book recommendations:
An oldie but goodie-BITTER BLOOD by Jerry Blesoe. Multiple Murders and Madness. One of the victims was the sister of the Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, Susie Sharp. She was the first female State Supreme Court in these United States. A good friend of mine now owns the beautiful Georgian brick house where the initial gush of murders happened. It’s just on the outskirts of my hometown of Winston-Salem. As you can well imagine, he got a quite ‘deal’ when he bought it. I’ve been a guest there many times. It’s a gorgeous home, set in a bucolic grove of tall maples and oaks. To know what happened there and juxtapose with the beauty of the place is jarring.
Here’s some fantastic military history. As well-written and gripping as anything I have ever enjoyed. I’m on my second reading of it all now and still love it! Rick Atkinson’s trilogy of the United States Army in World War II, from North Africa, across to Sicily and then Italy, culminating with Operation Overlord, the Normandy Invasion and the drive across Europe to the liberation of Germany. The three volumes are 1)AN ARMY AT DAWN, 2)THE DAY OF BATTLE and 3)THE GUNS AT LAST LIGHT. This is Great Stuff!
And just for fun, I’m a third of the way through Leo Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE. It’s only 1,150 pages. I have never read it so I grabbed a copy as I headed off to California. It’s deep and thick and pretty good too. Not sure I’ll note it as one of my all-time favorites but I am enjoying it. It surely is a challenge but I’m staying with it. Allegedly the most famous and perhaps greatest novel of all time, many say. So, why not? Give it a try.
Now, I have finally gotten a steady start on my next book, ‘OK, I’VE HEARD ENOUGH’. There was a lot of shuffling and slogging and wandering for a good while after I sent ‘SLIM AND NONE’ to the editors on February 8th. I was ‘writing worn out’ and couldn’t get my engine re-started. (By the way, SLIM AND NONE is a big book, a big manuscript and is still with editor. We (that being my wonderful publicist Hannah and me) have decided that we are now shooting for a Spring, 2023 release date. And as a sidebar, the date February 8th is now very, very special to me but it’s a secret and I can’t tell you about that. Sorry!)
Anyway, I am the walking poster child for ADHD which has helped make my life so much fun and interesting-I harnessed it early and can multi-task and work with multiple strings and strands of thought like the guy spinning ten plates on sticks all at the same time.
One of the hallmarks of ADHD is often that old, irritating ‘bugbear’ PROCRASTINATION. And in terms of getting started on ‘OK, I’VE HEARD ENOUGH’, old man procrastination really got hold of me. But after five months of dithering, I have finally gotten down to brass tacks
I recently recalled something has really resonated with me. Before Covid, I attended a bunch of presentations at the Charleston Literary Festival.
Among the speakers was the marvelous and prolific Joyce Carol Oates. She told us many fascinating things (one is that this tiny little lady who looks like the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s twin sister loves Boxing!) and she talked about her writing technique.
She spend 70% of her time thinking about what she’s going to write and 30% putting it to paper. And importantly to me, she said she has to know her beginning and her ending and then she writes them together. Presto! Changeo! That what got me off my duff and now I’m rolling.
I have spent the last two days, fully laying out my characters, my protagonists and antagonists and supplementals and also doing a substantive summary of the plot and its narrative. I have written the beginning and ending together. This book is going in a different direction than the Eddie Terrell Trilogy. I hope I’m getting ready to give you a good story.
So that wraps it up for me today. Stay safe, keep reading and writing and have some fun along the way!
I send you all my very best,
Vernon