The other day I bought a lunar calendar and hung it on the blue wall my desk faces. The calendar has the phases of the moon running down vertically on a twenty inch black and white print, beginning with the first day of the month and ending with the last day of the month. There are twelve columns and each column is a month of the year but none of the vertical columns are labeled. The first vertical column is of course, January, and the moon in the topmost left hand corner of the print is the first day of January. It looks like this:
What I thought I’d do, and what I’ve been doing, is coloring in each phase of the moon when I work on my project (revisions on my next book) for an hour a day or more. I don’t need accountability but I had seen this advertisement on my Instagram for an LED accountability tracker device that was THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY FIVE DOLLARS (hahaha) and I thought, damn, look at that shit, look at the stupid shit people spend lots of money on, all they did was take a lunar calendar thing and make it so you could touch the moon, how ridiculous. That thing looks like this:
The lunar calendar paper print I got was $19.99 from some random website. I didn’t really like the way it looked, thought it could be improved through simplification. But the good news is I already own scissors and glue. Back in kindergarten they taught me how to modify stuff, so ever since kindergarten, I’ve been modifying stuff. A snip there, and a glob of adhesive there and I was off to the races.
I should spend a moment here and talk about the motorcycle momma I have hung below my lunar calendar.
I used to go to the Englishtown Flea Market once or twice a month and I’d hit up the Columbus flea market too. I didn’t have a reliable job back then and used to just walk around and find junk that looked cool and buy it cheap (if I could) and then figure out a way to resell it to somebody for more $ later. I know—brilliant. I was onto something. This was before eBay ruined flea markets and junk shops of all orders. At one of the stands there was a man with a bunch of nudie magazines but he had one of the pictures framed and I said, “How much for the lovely lady?” and he said, “Oh, she’s not for sale!” But he was just messing around and I purchased the framed photograph from him, except when it was time for him to hand the frame over, he tightened his grip and made a play like he would never release. I didn’t rip the frame out of his hands, partially because I didn’t want to destroy the frame but also because, you shouldn’t rip anything out of anybody’s hands. But finally he let go and he looked extremely sad and he said, “Now you please take care of her, mister.” And ever since then she has been hanging in my office. Maybe someone out there in internet-land knows exactly who she is irl, and if they do, I should probably interview her for Fleamarket Quarterly or something.
That same day I found a used copy of Where the Wild Things Are
I paid $3 for the book. I remember I paid three dollars because Rae was standing right next to me (as she had been when I bought the picture of the woman on the motorcycle) and this guy had a never ending table full of rusted junk and rags and broken ash trays but he also had (I noticed as I opened the cover) a SIGNED first edition copy of this classic Maurice Sendak children’s book. I waved the man over, and he was talking to himself and didn’t seem like he was in his right mind at all and I asked him how much and he said, “$3” and I thought, ‘holy shit’ and I dug out the three bucks and gave it to him and he said to me (honest to god), “That's a first edition, and it’s signed.”
Well anyway. I got the fuck out of there. With the book.
I tried to figure out how much the book was worth. Some places on the internet had it listed (a signed first edition) for $10,000! This was ten years ago, or more. This might have been fifteen years ago now. Jesus, how time flies.
I took the book to The Strand, upstairs, to the rare book department and showed it to the person up there and they said the book was a first LIBRARY edition and it wasn’t worth thousands of dollars, it was worth in the low hundreds of dollars and they offered to buy it right there from me for $400 but I said no. This was back when Maurice Sendak was still alive and now that he is dead, who knows what the book is valued at but I’ve got bigger fish to fry in my life and I’m not interested in finding out.
I’ve been very busy ejecting all the coats out of the coat closet in my wee widdle apartment:
I’ve been picking up tool chests and shelving and slowly turning that coat closet into a workshop. NO more FUCKING around. If something needs to get done, if some serious business needs to be dealt with, I am no longer going to let the limitations of a coat closet slow me down. Soon the coat closet will have a vice and not too long after that I’ll probably put in an anvil. And then who knows, but one thing is for sure, if I run out of money to fund my needs, I have a rare book to sell.
It’s no secret that I am getting older and I am dying. Because of that I have been sure to get enough sun and to drink enough fresh water and to laugh and cry and read good books and to immediately stop reading a shitty book when I decide it is shitty and then I take it to the workshop that is now in my coat closet and I cut it apart with my chainsaw.
I mean, dying in the way that everybody is dying. But also, living in the way that everybody is living. But hopefully, like you, alive in a way that few actually are.
I’ve been welding together things at work and sneaking them through the turnstiles when the guards aren’t looking. The guards don’t really care. And it’s just garbage I find out of the scrap dumpster that I’m using to make things out of. I’ve built two carts for the weight plates I now keep in my blue office. Behind the desk where I write, I’ve put in a whole power rack where I can do bench press, and deadlifts, and overhead press, and squats, and pull-ups, and dips, and you name it, if it’s an exercise, I can do it in this room now. The weights have rubber on the outside of them so they bounce when I accidentally drop them onto the hardwood floor:
There’s one of the carts there. And here is the other:
I enjoy that they look like Lifesavers.
I like to say, “All right, time to go play with my toys” as I head down the hallway to my office, where I’m working on my novel (my favorite toy) and coloring in my daily pink moon.
“All right time to play with my toys,” as I load the Lifesavers onto the bar.
Well I better get going now. The evening is rolling on and I’m supposed to go and drink cold glasses of alcohol in front of the stereo and laugh and sing along and all that other stuff. But before I bounce I wanted to show you the two books I am reading right now. The first one is an excellent (life changing) manual full of weightlifting routines, which I have been studying and following since October. It’s a bunch of sound ideas written in as confusing a way as possible, and reminds me in a way of the manuals I read when I first got my synths and sequencers and tried to make sense of what all the wires and knobs did on that old analog electric equipment which had modular equipment chirping together in a synced language called MIDI. Only this weightlifting stuff and its obscure and convoluted linguistics and acronyms have nothing to do with filters and oscillators and so on, in fact, it just has to do with your heart and lungs and the bones and ligaments and all that blood sloshing around inside you.
I recommend reading the manual if you want to get into some kind of strength training. Of course, the training also means you’ll be doing some running and jumping and stretching and even some tumbling. You know, just like in kindergarten.
And speaking of that. I don’t have a dog, but I’m reading this book now too. I can’t say if I can recommend it to you yet. But you should probably be getting your book recommendations from The New York Review of Books, not this jackass’s substack.
Bye for now — Thanks for reading and living along with me.
Much Respect,
Bud Smith