June 2009 Issue

The window behind my writing table looks out on a vast field stretching to the horizon, containing only corn, coyotes, and the occasional wandering meth-head in search of anhydrous ammonia.  Sometimes I see things on fire from my window, mostly houses because incinerating one’s own home is a popular pastime around here. The precursor to the house with the red roof about a mile away over there, for instance, burned down last year due to an overloaded insurance policy. Unfortunately, the owner had stored so much ammunition in the closets that the Fire Department had to wait a ways down the road for an hour while the rounds “cooked off.”  Fortunately, it was all fairly small-caliber stuff and we were well out of range.

In the corner of my office is a schoolteacher’s desk from the 1920s which I bought in 1969 for five bucks at a thrift store in Chillicothe and have been dragging around the world for 40 years.  The tooth marks on the front edge there are a souvenir of Trevor, a foul-tempered Shetland pony I bought from some gypsies and kept in my rooms at Oxford.  Eventually the college administrators noticed that neither Trevor nor I were actually enrolled, whereupon Trevor, Oxford and I parted ways.  I haven’t been able to get the drawer on that desk open since 1976, and I fear that whatever’s in there is now even more illegal than it was back then.  But I can’t actually sit at the desk anyway because I put a kitty-litter pan in the kneehole in a futile attempt to teach the cats proper office decorum.

The bookcases over to the left there are actually perfectly plumb — it’s the floor that tilts.  Yes, it’s very disturbing, as if the whole house were sinking, which it is, but I try to avoid thinking about it.  Atop the bookcase you’ll notice my collection of plastic lobsters, the legacy of an ill-advised vacation many years ago in Maine.  Apparently the primitive tribes there worship the damn things, but you couldn’t pay me to eat one.  The gargoyles were acquired during my Dark Period in the early 1990s, when I listened to nothing but requiems and lay prostrate on the settee all day, weeping bitterly.

On the shelves are books that people send me, mostly the folks at Oxford University Press, who got confused a few years ago and input my name into their database three or four times, so now I get multiple copies of every flipping book they publish. Lately someone over there has apparently sold my name(s) to Random House, because I received three copies of P. O’C.’s latest book last month and there are probably more in the mail as we speak.  No, I haven’t read it, but I enjoyed the cover(s). Over there on the lower shelves are stacks of my own books (the barn being full), which I buy because it makes my agent happy.  But lately I’ve been thinking my money would be better spent on ammunition.

Of course it’s true. Most of it, anyway.

And now, on with the show….

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