I've been humbled a lot in an essential way since I last wrote you in October. I crashed the car I asked you to bury me in, slept in a Lincoln Continental Mk. IV's rear seat for a few cold weeks, and generally fucked up my Oregon immigration enough to warrant coming back to Missouri for a bit to regather myself, but I'll be returning as soon as I can (as soon as my tax return comes, anyway.) Perhaps it was all inevitable, for better or worse, but things have changed, without a doubt.
Last night, I went briefly to see a Denver rock band at a Columbia punk venue called Gay House, which I watched first sprout in the middle of a village of fraternities in the year after high school (that is, five years ago.) I say "punk" - it was, then, but the kids were this time indie enough that they'd have felt real fear seeing the bands that were showing in my era. A single of the original occupants remains and there were three others there from those days whom I've drifted apart from, but the way to it on foot is filled with bright, trendy new businesses where fenced-off alleys used to be, and the big, tall parking garage is center-field in one's vision, now, as they stand where I used to pee. I've mentioned how I've felt time, enormous, since my Big Crucible in early 2015, and how I expected to say goodbye to this place when I moved, but coming back after just a few months has made it clear that Columbia has said goodbye to me.
Coincidentally, Drycast episode 10 was recorded three years ago, today, amidst my peak (I’ve continued occasionally listening back, trying to figure out what I’ve since lost.) Alex Jones is the fastest man on the planet. I ended up showing Honk in its entirety to my friend for the first time, after the show, and I realized how pitiful it is to continue looking back this way. I’m not going to get back whatever it was that made me so sharply, originally (I thought) entertaining, but I’ve gained spades in literacy and depth. In reading David Foster Wallace’s first book, The Broom of the System (which he published at my age,) I recognize a heightened, much smarter form of my own potential wit, and an edgy absurdity not unlike that of the sort I am closer-than-not to losing - the sort that led to a conceptualized novel around this time two years ago which I have decided to commit to pursuing (at a variable pace, mind you) when I have the time.
Barney Blimp's new boss is absurdist billionaire, Theodore Pith, who's ironic buy of his employer (MapQuest) personifies the reality of his mistakes and cements in his psychology the consequences of the listless lifestyle he's led after his mother's death. In the process of his internal reckoning, he loses his sanity to sleep deprivation and mounts a chaotic quest to steal Pith's new pet project - the recently-unearthed, painstakingly-restored Hindenburg II airship from its berth in Hong Kong, where it's awaiting transport to his compound in the Ukraine. Against all probability, Blimp succeeds, and begins a week-long voyage across the Atlantic. Unsurprisingly, Pith is delighted by the commotion, so he seeks out communication with Barney to amuse himself. However, in the hours they spend conversing throughout the long haul, both minds return to reality for the first time in a long while, and find unexpected friendship. By the time the airship actually reaches the United States, the two are co-conspirators, and they mastermind the least sensical attack in New York City's history.
There’s no way I would be able to come up with such a wacky abstract these days, and there’s no way I would’ve committed to the sort of effort long fiction requires in 2015. It’s suddenly occurred to me that I am on the further end of a crucial transition; that all of the unfinished projects with little snippets of genius are about to expire from my vocabulary altogether. My goal for Blimp’s Burden is to rescue (loot) as many of the best ideas from Children of the Corn 30, Fleet and the Furious: Drakesville Drift, Eugenics (the album,) and whatever else I find and utilize them and the skills I’ve acquired since to refine the most original work I can. My hope is that I can use it to finally say goodbye to it all and… truly… move on. I’m nearly 10,000 words in and let me tell ya… Novels are hard, but I guess we’ll see. I'll keep ya posted.
Thanks,
David