1998
Gal,
I'm going to eat my corn and tomatoes and send you this scroll, the largest letter I've ever been responsible for, and when I get it done, I'll send you my first 5 chapters of the book Nick wants me to write. He called today and raved over the 5 chapters he's seen. He told me to read Hotel New Hampshire and Garp by John Irving, for pure tale-telling, and I tell you to get and read A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley, but beware - it's a very sad book. Get the Peoples Almanac out of the college library. It's a gold mine. It'll seize you for a week, full time. Please try not to feel low, Glenda, you are not losing or anything of the kind. You're just doing things in your own time, and your own way. Struggle to get your plane pointed toward the sky, which is what some of our lives are all about, mine included, and it can be done, or I couldn't do it, and I have. I love you, love child, and we'll be coming back home before long if the money doesn't start coming in out here. Probably live someplace beautiful, and I'm finally a writer. You look upon the people you work around as "contacts" and keep in touch with some of them. Maybe get a few letters of recommendation wherever you can. They mount up. I'll write you one if you suggest me a name to sign. Please translate for me this line into German:
The jackrabbit, thinking about something else, runs
But he never sees the other side of the highway . . .
Or
By the time you see
The body on the beach,
It's too late to be
Afraid.
Write back ASAP, Captain, report to your colleague at the far end of the line. I love you, aufwiedersehn for now.
Black Mike
Black Mike the Scrivener
Post script: someone chucked a spear through the window. I'd better go outside and straighten up a little.
Mike -
Haven't heard from you in awhile. Sorry I never got those chapters you were working on. During the inauguration festivities, it was too unbearable to just face you were not here for this in any way, shape or form. You just missed it. And if you were here, you would be a fount of almost impossible to find information about Obama and his background and personal life and public and private affiliations. Then that night, you showed up in my dreams. You were wearing a black and white shirt like cow-patterned. We wandered outside through a raw and grey day around the green and parking lot of a limited-income apartment complex, mostly, like we were kids again with limited options and time on our hands. And just like that movie AI, I was afraid when you lay down to sleep the effect would be undone. I was asking you to explain to me before you went to bed exactly how you were jump-starting yourself, so just in case you couldn't wake up again I could replicate the process. You seemed to suggest some idea that you were too heavy for me to lift alone, so I would not be able to do it without help. You said you had a friend who could help me.
Then I woke up and realized you were wearing a "Gateway" shirt. I hope it meant you got to see the inauguration.
Poking around in your geophysical anomalies book, I have taken a liking to a passage you highlighted about Sweden Valley Ice Mine in Potter County, Pennsylvania. It features an excerpt from a report made in 1913, and seems to be referencing a situation that had already been ongoing for an indefinite interval, so hard to tell exactly when the mine was discovered. It says a couple of prospectors - presumably in the 1800s - found a sheet of ice below four or five inches of moss. Burrowing down to clear a shaft, they passed petrified wood, some odd stone, fern fossils, bones thought by them to be human. The following summer, one of them revisited the shaft and found the sides of the shaft to be coated with ice. Cold air wafted up from the shaft. The ice thickened into the summer, before beginning to melt away, disappearing by winter. The phenomenon had, as of the 1913 account, continued in that rhythm without deviation.
Do you remember that short piece in Vanity Fair in the late nineties about the murder of that young Yale grad student? Residents of a hoity toity residential district heard a scream one evening, fairly late, like eleven p.m. Shortly, the still warm body of a young woman in her early twenties was found, lying on a grassy median between opposing sides of the street. Her name was Suzanne Jovin, and she was a political science major hoping to go into diplomacy or something. Suzanne was born in West Germany, and both her parents were German born scientists working in other countries. Many suspected her graduate advisor of doing it for some sexual/ego based reason. For some reason that case was on my mind a couple of weeks ago, so I looked it up to try to figure out why. Turns out the senior essay she turned in hours before she was found dead was on Osama Bin Laden.
1998.
But you would know all about that, even if you were still alive.