Ten Little Things

Recommendations and Thoughts

1. Had a dream last night that I had to fight Rambo but he was the size of a mouse and no threat to me but he was basically unkillable, unstoppable. I covered him with a plate and stacked a bunch of stuff on the plate and dreaded how we’d have to fight the whole rest of my life because he’d find a way out from under the plate.

2. I’m on the gold couch now and can see through the door as Rae takes a bath. She’s got a broken foot and needs my help getting in and out of the tub. She’s been using a pink plastic cup to dump water over her long dark hair and everything else. She’d been washing with a bar of Dial soap the same color as the bathroom walls. She’s been singing and humming along to pieces of songs playing on her phone that is resting on the top of the toilet tank just out of my view. Songs I can’t figure out.

3. I’ve been writing little stories in a little green notebook, the size of a cellphone, I keep in the top pocket of my work uniform. For years, and years, and years, people have given me little notebooks for Christmas and my birthday and I’ve never used the notebooks for anything. But now I write little stories in the small pocket-size ones like what’s linked above. I flip the notebook vertical, as if two index cards. The pages are dotted rather than lined. The skeleton of graph paper. It’s nice. I sit in the work truck and make makebelieve and feel even better than when I write on my phone because I don’t have to look at my phone. I use those blue Bic pens, the cheap ones and I use correction tape to keep the pages clean of my errors/fix stuff as I go (just like I do when I work at my typewriter.) Three pages of the pocket size notebook equal one page re-typed on my typewriter. Which is equal to about one page in a paperback book, but all that doesn’t really matter. What matters is making makebelieve on my lunch break.

4. A moment ago I heard the water draining and so I looked up and saw she had taken the blue towel in her hands and sitting there she’d begun to dry off and was smiling at me.

5. There’s a lot to do today, there’s garbage to be taken out and cardboard boxes to be broken down and taken out too. There’s laundry to do. There’s edits I’m supposed to do to the final short story in a collection I’ve been working on. I’ve been editing the collection with the same editor who worked on Teenager. It’ll be my best book. I’m not sure when it’s coming out. I’ve got to finish everything and there’s the dishes. There’s the vitamins. There’s folding and putting the cups away when the dishwasher dings.

6. “Okay,” she says, “I’m going to try and get out.”

7. I get off the gold couch and go into the bathroom and now I can hear the song, it’s “Maneater” by Hall and Oates. I help her out of the tub.

8. We’ve been sleeping on our couch, a gray sectional. The other day I talked a little bit about my couch for the Los Angeles Review of Books. There was an interview that had some to do with how I write stories and some do with my wife’s broken foot and some to do with my sectional couch that we are sleeping on. I also talked with Mike Jeffrey about the life of a person swept up in professional paintball tournaments.

9. It’s a rainy day today and now Rae is getting dressed and trying out different outfits and combinations of footwear. The right foot has the walking boot and left foot can either have a variety of different sneakers, or can have a big honking black combat boot. She settles on big honking black combat boot so she is evened out, hips feeling right, bones of her feet not screaming. We’re killing a few hours until we go and pick up Kate in the car and take her to Michael’s movie premiere. He wrote a movie called Dogleg with his friend Alex and now they are showing it at the Roxy. I think I’ve seen it now three times. It changed each time. We’d watch it and then we’d talk about it in his apartment and drink gin and laugh about it and drink more gin. The final product is genius. You should go to the Roxy tonight and see Dogleg or you should keep your eyes open for the movie when it lands in other places. I mean, the movie is so good we are going out in the rain tonight to see it and Rae has a broken foot and everything.

10. I been putting MCT oil in my coffee. A tablespoon. It’s insanely feel-good brain-good. But I also have been doing these sixteen, eighteen, twenty hour fasts to try and control my allergies. The fasting has worked for that. My allergies are so shitty I went back to the allergist for the third time in the last year and just surrendered and let them make this serum that they will now inject into my body twice a week for three months. Supposedly after the three months I’ll start to have some kind of relief and my sinuses won’t be constantly swollen and my immune system no longer on overdrive, making me exhausted all the time. But after that I’ll have to get the shots for a long time. I don’t care. I’ll bring a book to read for the rest of my life. What am I suggesting? Well, try that MCT oil in your coffee. And hey if you feel like shit, go to the doctor, do something about it.
    
    Thanks for reading … I have made a decision to post new short stories here on this substack, so if you would like to read them/have them sent to your email please sign up below. I hope your life is good today <3 Bud Smith