"On Not Being At Home"

sympathy for the devil (mice)

Before I Got Sick And Moved Into The Basement, I was invited to give a reading for Robert Rubsam’s Interval series. I’d never done a reading before and I wasn’t sure what to read because after all you can’t get up in front of a room of people and read a book review. (Or, well, you can, but you shouldn’t.) So I wrote a short piece that corresponded to the length of time I was supposed to talk. It got a great response in the room (people kept asking me what it was “from” which I took to be a sign that it did not seem hastily composed). I meant to go back and polish it up into a real piece (and actually sent it to an editor to see if he’d be interested in the polished version)… but I did not ever do this because [see the entire drama of my last three years as referenced repeatedly on this newsletter and elsewhere].

While there’s still something in this little piece I want to turn into a proper essay, at this point such an essay would be basically one hundred percent different—I no longer …