It's been three & a half years since my last post.  I'm still writing, but struggling, too.  I have several manuscripts essentially completed, but needing editing and revision.  For some reason I am afraid to contact agents about these works, perhaps fearing that they are not good enough.  Also, I retired from teaching, retired in many ways being a term similar to "waiting for death," like being in airport waiting for a flight you hope will be endlessly delayed or even cancelled.

So, why do I write?

Because I am a profoundly lonely person who lives a life of quiet desperation.  I have almost no real friends, people who are glad to see me, people who call me up to go get coffee or a beer. That’s been the case most of my life.I’ve been lonely most fo my life and I’m also terrible at making friends—I’m extremely clumsy socially and often humiliate myself spectacularly.

I can say I’ve been isolated literally and emotionally most off my life.   I really can’t say why, other than those folks who told me I’m intimidating or thought I was aloof. 

Friends call you out of the blue just hear your voice. Friends care that you seem lost and directionless.

My high school friend Jan Nice once told me that I intimidate people.  I’ve since had someone else say the same thing.  I have trouble believing that. I honestly do not know how I do that. I feel, instead, rejected or abandoned. Another acquaintance from high has since told me she (and undoubtedly others) thought I was aloof and uninterested in social tings.  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

I’ve never been aloof in my mind, but I can say I’m basically lacking in self-esteem, I’m painfully shy in small situations, and I worry how people will respond to me, even fearing rejection.

In my writing, I can have the competent person I long to be doing things.

People can point that I should proud of my accomplishments, my books, my professorship, my musical skills.  Maybe.  But it does little to wipe away the sense of being invisible.

Since I’ve retired, no one in my  former department has bothered to contact me, to check on me or invite me to any departmental events. It’s as if I’ve ceased to exist.

I’ve also lost my passion.  I love history and doing historical research, but now I find my field is under assault by ignorant assholes who don’t want to hear bad thins abut their country or their “race.”  This unfortunately is a world-wide phenomenon and it’s made me feel that there is no hope for the future, that imbeciles will try to run things and drive us to collapse.  Makes feel like it’s almost pointless to deal with truthful history because too many people are too stupid to accept reality.  

Basically, however, I really don’t know how to make friends. I don’t know how to compliment people without sounding like I have ulterior motives—which I don’t but can’t explain what I really mean.  That’s part of a self-destructive streak that has sabotaged me than I care to to recall.  It’s cost me a couple of jobs and probably has cost me potential friends.

My only real friend (other than my late first wife, Vicki Brown and my wife Nancy), I suppose, was Vicki Redick.  We’d always talk on the phone and had lots of shared memories.  We dated a while but circumstances always got in the way.  I genuinely grieved after she died. 

Her death still bothers me. I knew we had a mutual attraction, but I nearly lost it emotionally when I learned after her death that she had told a friend in Nashville that I was the love of her life.  It was shattering to learn that.  She was someone I could  talk with, feel comfortable with, enjoy watching movies with and she was a fabulous kisser. Neither of us had the guts to tell the other what our true feelings were.

Vicki R., as I’ve written elsewhere, also suffered a bilateral stroke a few years before her death and wasn’t found for about ten or eleven days until the postman  through her front window spotted her crawling around her living room.  She had been able to feed her dogs, but not control her own bowels, something I knew likely embarrassed her profoundly.  I left her with a right hand permanently curled in a ‘hook.’ Oddly, that forced her to use her left hand and may have helped her recover as she later told me she’d was a natural left-hander who’d been forced to learn to use her right hand, a barbaric practice I hoped had long disappeared. BTW, I’m left handed, too.  I learned Vicki’s stroke while I was in a bad depression myself, and this only made things worse.

With Vicki R., we shared enough with each other that I learned her version of me quite well. I explain my version of her in a number of stories I’ve written in which she is a major character, if not the protagonist.  The novel I’ve just completed the first draft o, has a lot of my feelings toward her in it. I guess I wanted to make her immortal—something I know will never happen for me.

Surprisingly, many of my real friends have been women, most of who approached me.  My first real friend was Karen Trollope, who lived down the street from me in Isle Perrot, Quebec. Her folks were from South Africa, if I recall correctly.  Sh introduced me to the Hardy Boys mysteries and we do make believe as th characters.  She also was a writer, and could write good stories even in third grade. I think she inspired me to write s well.  I do not not what ever happened to her, but I’d love to think she became a successful writer.  Our relationship ended when my family packed up and moved to Oklahoma. I guess I still wonder what might have been, but Karen certainly made me love strong, intelligent women.

I’ve had a couple of male friends I guess were close friends. One was a friend from school and the Boy Scouts (something, which like many things in my life, I eventually bailed on and quit). Another two were fellow drama students with whom I’ve kept in touch, but rarely see. One is a successful film actor and the other became a college prof, just like me. One of the women in the group still contacts me, but I know she’s busy with the bar she runs and the other have her own life, too. [Both of them took me for car rides in high school, but I was too naive and stupid to realize they were trying to seduce me.  I love them both and did eventually sleep with one of them and I included both of them in my newest novel..

My college friends are almost all too far away to talk to, although they are always welcome to call me. Just hearing a friend’s voice would be welcome.  My friend Lisa Alkana has her own issues. She suffers from MS, as cruel a disease as ever I’ve known, but she’s one of my favorite people in the entire world and, like Vicki Redick, I think events got in the way of things between us.  I love Lisa’s love for and knowledge of old movies.  And she’s the basis for a character in the novel I wrote about my old but now mentally disturbed friend Bill Mansker. He always loved Robert Ehinlein’s work, so I wrote what I hope is a Heinleinesque novel for him, which I need to edit & revise.

[Sidenote: I have somehow known several people who have MS, probably more than most people ever know in lifetime.  One was my shrink back in Norman, and the others were friends or classmates of the spouses of professors. All had a connection to Norman, which may or may not be significant in someway. I don’t know.]

  

Vicki Redick, though, is the first one I’ve really made a character in my fiction.  The love I’ve just finished, tentatively titled “Nebraska Gothic” has her as the female protagonist and  love interest .  She’s also one tough kick-ass lady, who drinks, smokes, and can handle firearms and is a crack shot and loves sex. Which Vicki, in reality, in many ways was. (I love tough, strong women—I suppose that means I’m a bit of a submissive.)

I could talk to her about anything, especially our shared experiences and acquaintances (esp. Bill)  and our frustrations with our parents, esp. our mothers. She could me her troubles, I’d listen.  In fact, in the years before her death, I think I did most of the listening. We both had issues with Bill and his wife—which I’ve written of elsewhere—and I think we were each others emotional support.  I regret not being able to be with her when she was dying.  I could’ve done more, but I confess I don’t know what that would be.

* * *

Now all I have to do is finish what I’ve started.  I confess, though, that deep done I might have an irrational fear that if I do finish something, that would be the finish of me, too.  I hope the universe is not done with me. I know I’m not done with me yet.

So, there you have it.  I write, therefore, to create a world where I am in control, where my characters do the things  I wish I could do, where I have friends whom I cannot alienate, whom I cannot offend, who will always be there. I tell stories to make sense of the world.  I have been honored for my writing.  I really don’t know of any other reason, emotionally, why I write, except maybe to be loved and respected and generate some empathy for a solitary, lonely being.

Addendum:

Lately, I’ve lost some people I’ve called friends, although maybe they’re only just close acquaintances.

I recently lost three female acquaintances who meant a lot to me. Mary Kay Jackson was funny, smart, cuddly, lovable, hilarious and just plan fun. Her death back in October shocked me.  It was unexpected, as was that Ann (A. E.) Silas.  She  died in November, although I didn’t learn of it until a couple of days ago. was a classmate and another writer who impressed the hell out of me. (I briefly dated her sister, a wonderful lady herself.) Yet somewhere along the line Ann, like my friend Cathy Ball, stopped producing, I don’t know why. It could’ve been writer’s block or perhaps an inability to finish (a trait I share) or simply she was too perfectionist—another trait I can identify with.

Barbie Beck’s death was a real shock.  She was the younger sister of my friend Cathy Ball, who died from cancer a few years ago, and I didn’t know Cathy was ill until someone told me she was in hospice.  Cathy’s husband Jim Brassel had died of cancer just a few months earlier, and she’d been nursing him up until his death, neglecting her own health at the time until it was too late.

Barbie was about ten years younger than Cathy and was always friendly and nice to me. She died of a massive stroke and she was only 58.  I would never have guessed she’d suffer a stroke, but I suppose you never know.  Stephanie Baker, another friend from Norman and part of the fandom group there, died in her mid-40s after a series of strokes.

Barbie was a writer, like her sister, and had published a couple of novels under her own “Brass Crab” imprint— Brass from Brassell and Crab from Cathy’s initials.  Barbie had planned, I knew, to publish some of Cathy’s short stories under the Brass Crab imprint, but I don’t think she ever got that far.

What upsets me are though is that all these women—and other now dead friends—are part of my own life narrative and had perspectives and observations about me that are now no longer available to anyone, not even me.  What ever impressions I made on them, good or bad, are now lost to eternity.  So part of the portrait of me is now forever unavailable, even to me.  All I can is use them as the basis of characters in stories and hope that I will have done them justice.