the art of fibbing

I applied for three jobs yesterday, it would not be a stretch to call them freaky. Two had at least a bit of charm. The other would replicate needs and devotions and semblances of skill from like when I was in the good old days of a string of program director and similar leadership positions. I will not be surprised to hear back from none of them, which says something about the way of the world here in late 2024, and likely more regards my scrambled eggs history of banging my gong here, there, and nearly everywhere.

I did – after two formal revisions and a couple more “nearly there” prods from me to the formatter – I did receive the final formatted version of my new book and quickly uploaded it to the waiting Kindle publishing machine, where it was accepted and let me name a price – ten bucks – and now it’s a wait for publishing on Amazon. Tomorrow I will upload another paid-for-formatted file for an eBook and see how that goes. The subtitle for the new book is “Stories from the Coffee Shop. It’s mostly a memoir.

I appreciate Mary Oliver standing in yesterday – I mean, come on, Mary Oliver – and there I was the Director of Housing for the AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod, lounging in my airy second-floor office in the house on Bradford Street in P’town, this was ’07-’08, and somewhere a mile or so away lived Mary Oliver. Often in the Blog here I describe myself as “Late to the party” in this life – a good current example falling in love with the musical sounds of Sonic Youth 30 years after the fact. But in the case with me and Foley House and Mary Oliver, I didn’t even know the party was going on.

I could chat up people with tales of Mary and poet me being tight back in the day. That would be the same as me getting on a Greyhound bus in Laguna Beach, California December 31, 1982 on the way to Boston, passing through Pasadena late that afternoon, and telling people, “Sure, I’ve seen the Rose Parade.” Fortunately the new book is filled with nearly nothing but truths, proving I’m not entirely susceptible to the art of fibbing.