A Bud Under the Influence
Typed in, “tried to watch A Woman Under the Influence but it’s not on the one streaming service I pay for where it should be so I checked the one where I could rent it, ok not there, but the thing says the devil says I can watch it if I kill myself and go to hell” and someone wrote that it was on YouTube. So then I watched the first two hours and twelve minutes of A Woman Under the Influence on YouTube but it ended abruptly. Mid-scene. Thought, ah, these art films. Went to wikipedia and read the plot overview and learned there is another scene to the film and so I went back to YouTube and found a clip someone had posted of just the ending (in response to the first popular clip cutting off just before the ending). Fourteen additional minutes. Watched it. So now I’ve seen the whole thing. Was really good. Read that when Richard Dreyfus first watched the film, it made him puke, how harrowing it was. Went back to the original YouTube clip that was missing the ending and read the comments. First comment was: “the movie made zero sense”
It’s Sunday here. Two thirty in the afternoon. Woke up this morning and read a little bit of Brothers Karamazov and then kinda feeling numb about books right now I opened up one by Thomas Berger called The Feud and instantly remembered why I like to read so much. Was hooked from the first page. Somebody goes in a hardware store with a cigar in their mouth to buy turpentine and gets in an argument with everybody about the cigar (though it’s unlit) and then a guy in a suit says he’s a cop and a gun is pulled on the turpentine cigar man who thinks he’s getting arrested and then maybe he is, he’s handcuffed and crying and begging for mercy and then the handcuffs are taken off and he’s released and soon as the cop is out of the store it’s revealed to the cigar man that the dude was just a railroad detective who is related to the owner of the store and then the cigar man is just obsessed with revenge. Petty revenge. Revenge. Revenge. Getting his wife and kids involved. Funny book. Reminds me of Charles Portis’ writing. Anyways, I’ll come back and see you soon Dostoevsky.
Made pancakes and eggs and bacon. What do you think of that?
Then I put some weights on the both sides of the barbell and I got on the bench and I did some bench presses. Nothing crazy. Lots of my friends irl are hoping to die during a personal best bench press attempt; lots of my friends online are just chillin’ and chillaxin’ and low key party rockin’ but hoping to survive. I’m surprised. Day by day is fine but then they also expect us to suffer night by night also. One or the other. Thank you. I keep sneaking back online to see how everybody is doing and ruining my elevated heart rate. Can’t help peeking at the emergency unfolding. Did some bicep curls and then some rows. I’m trying to work up a little sweat because I have plans to sit around and do nothing for the rest of the evening. The weights all neatly fit back into the closet and the door is shut and you’d never know this room was a world class gymnasium.
Been working on some new stories. Been typing them up on the typewriter and then retyping them on the typewriter. Here and there I get a little tiny message by someone asking if I’d send them a story to read for their literary journal but I’d have to type the story into the laptop. I try to retype the story into the laptop but the laptop is dead. So I charge that. And while it’s charging I get distracted. The other day I put up a couple tweets about how I like to write my stories on a typewriter because it feels riskier, just like, I could lose them somewhere, or a fire or flood could happen. My friend Bill commented on the post that I shouldn’t do that because Hemingway had a whole novel and a bunch of stories that were lost by his wife who came to a train station during WWI with the manuscript in the suitcase and somebody stole the suitcase. I promised Bill that I would not go off and fight in WWI and have my wife come to a train station in France with my new stories and have them stolen by the Nazis or whatever. I’ve got this one story I’m working on about these three people who beat the shit out of a broken down car with baseball bats. And another story about a man who falls out of the sky with handcuffs on and survives. The other day one of my stories got published on the internet, it’s called “Rewild” and you can read it at this link if you’d like.
Oh boy.
Been teaching nine week prose writing workshops online over Zoom. Short stories, chapters of a novel, creative non-fiction. Nine students. 7:30 pm EST. Tuesday nights for one group. Thursday nights for another group of nine students. Everyone workshops three pieces. The October workshops are just about to start up and are filled. I’ll keep doing these workshops. There will be ones in December and then ones again in March and I don’t know about after that. If you would like to apply for a spot in the December workshops or for the March workshops, please email me at budsmithwrites@gmail.com … please tell me about yourself and what you’d like to work on. Thank you.
In other news, I walked an hour down the hill with Rae and we sat outside at our favorite bar in town, a place called Ed & Mary’s. I like Mary a lot, she’s good people. Very kind. Ed is great too. I mean, I don’t know either of them very well. But Ed did say something recently I thought was really cool. Rae and me were standing there at the end looking at my phone, under a tree lit with christmas lights, watching where our ride was on the map. Ed said, “Are you waiting for Godot or waiting for Uber?” So this next time we came to the bar, I went up to the little window and said though my mask to Ed in his mask, “Do you like to read a lot, ‘cause last time I was here you said something cool about Beckett.”
“What’d I say?”
“You asked ‘Are you waiting for Godot or waiting for Uber?’”
“I mean, I had to read the classics in high school.”
“I like to read sometimes,” I said, getting the impression he maybe thought I was making fun of him for having known about a book.
He passed me my beers and then said, “Oh Master and Margarita, I loved that one.”
I love that one too. Have you read that book? It’s about Satan coming to town and a talking cat and naked vampire women and state censorship and Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate.
Really, books have kind of faded from my mind lately and it’s all the fault of music. Music can happen concurrently with life but literature interrupts it. I’ve been trying to live a little more. And I can put on the stereo and laugh with Rae about whatever seems funny. We’ve got this new playlist we’ve listening to. She’s been obsessed again with The Wall by Pink Floyd but you know, you can’t just play the album and then let the algorithm figure out a radio station for you, the algorithm always fucks it up and before you know it they are playing Burt Bacharach when you want them to play Syd Barret. So over the course of the last few lunch shifts I had at the plant I was working at, I added a bunch of songs to the playlist. There’s not that many lousy songs on the playlist. Just a few. She’d asked for Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Lynyrd Skynyrd so I put some songs on that were adjacent to that. Here’s a link if you want. But I also have a giant playlist I add songs to that I’ve been working on for years and years called Good Times. That one is here. Either one of those playlists are made to play on shuffle. When I say ‘last few lunch shifts’ I mean that they had to lay off me and all the other guys I was working on the construction site with because there’s no money for the project anymore. We were putting earthquake proof supports on a giant metal golfball-looking thing. They are saying maybe in November we’ll come back and finish up making the metal golfball earthquake-proof. We shall see. In the meantime, I’ll be at my desk writing my books and my stories and sometimes I’ll walk out in the big sunlit room and sit in the blue chairs chairs next to Rae and convince her to take a break from working at her computer. She’s been working remotely this whole time.
What else? I don’t know.
I did interview my friend Ashleigh Bryant Phillips for The Believer. We talked about what it’s like being from a small town and then about what it feels like to head off into the world to try and make it as an artist. I think most people can relate to that feeling. Most everybody I know who is an artist feels like they don’t belong anywhere and that they have to leave someplace to find themselves and then later on they might feel sorry for having to have left to begin with but that’s how the world works. Anyways, you can read the interview here if you like.
I guess I’m gonna go now.
I’ve got all this free time now. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t mean to just sit here so awkwardly. It’s that time of year when the weather is getting a little cooler and I begin to fantasize about ripping the toilet and the shower out of the spare bathroom and putting in a six person hot tub with party lights and those really nice jets. I wonder what the electricity would cost me a month. I wonder what the people who run my apartment building would say. I could try and sneak in the hot tub but someone is always watching. They would hear the whir of the constant motor. Sooner or later there would be a note on my door. “It is against the rules of the building to have spa equipment in your unit.”
Okay. We’re all just looking for some freedom concerning our unit. Will we find happiness? Only time will tell.
<3
Bud