third and first

i'm thinking about first and third person a lot. the word "organic" is a word that is coming up often when i think about first person. i think i like stuff that is written in first person that feels very "everyday" and the story sort of arises from the voice. for some reason i don't like overly language driven stuff in first person. for some reason that feels more at home to me in third person. this may be because if i read a really language driven piece in first person then i have to imagine this person, who is doing these things, who is doing some talking in the story through dialogue but somehow the talking in dialogue is nothing at all like the language that the narrator is using to tell the story. it bothers me. sometimes, while i really love a lot of lish's and say gary lutz's writing, i have this first person issue. i do not have this same feeling for someone like christine schutt, but that may be because many of the stories in a day, a night, another day, summer are in third person.

i got a fortune cookie this past spring, maybe late winter, that read: you will take a chance in the future and win. i put a lot into my fortune cookies. i have more faith in a fortune cookie than other people, probably. i thought at the time this had to do with publishing or maybe with a job. it turns, i believe now, it was a job and stuff. i quit my post-doc at etsu to move to sc. i didn't have a job until two weeks ago, but i'm making as much as i did at etsu and only have one prep. also, i'm living with emily the fiance and pat the texan.

i'm running six miles easily. i might do a 5k soon and actually try to run well. maybe shoot for 18. my sister asked me if i'd ever do a marathon. i'm not a distance runner, i'm a mid-distance runner. i will never run a marathon, i don't care too. i would like to be able to get up to an easy nine miles and run a good 5k. i don't know.

playing tennis every other day about. some full matches (best of 3 sets) i remember:

6-1, 6-4 (W) very early in the summer, we struggled to play a full match after this because it was above 90 every day and we kept going out at 1 and quitting, tied after two sets. then i couldn't play for a week or so because of calf problem.

7-5, 4-6, 6-3 (W) this one was fun, in the last week or so, with my new babolat. i do remember thinking my opponent was tired in the third and so i got a little lucky there. i hit some big forehands here that i was pleased with. trying to put more on the serve.

7-6, 6-7, 3-6 (L) one of my favorite matches even though i lost just because of the mental effort involved. i thought i could close it out in the second set but ended up losing the tie break. sort of was defeated after that and couldn't get anything going in the third. pat's serve also defeated me, kicking out wide to my backhand on the ad-court.

6-2, 1-6, 6-3 (W) i don't know what happened in this match. i think what happened was pat got pissed off he lost the first set, so he played out of his mind in the second and killed me (serve and volley), and then i got pissed off i lost the second set so badly so i turned it up in the third, really ran around backhands and tried to be aggressive. it was interesting and fun to play.

3-6, 4-6 (L) got my ass killed in this one.

north carolina dmv humid august tennis falling attic staircase stitches

north carolina dmv has taken 400 of my dollars. i made a mean post about their evilness and deleted it. i felt as though i was in a kafka novel, unable to satisfy the north carolina dmv, unable to determine what exactly had happened for them to make me pay so much money on so many separate occasions, for only one traffic violation, speeding 12 miles over the limit. played a two hour tennis match in 95 degree heat, the courts shadowless, empty of any others, and cicada-droned. pat and i tied one set apiece. we could not play the third set. pull-down attic stairs got stuck, emily tried to unstick them atop a chair, the stairs crashed into the bridge of her nose, between her eyes. never seen so much blood. it spurted. she was knocked from the chair, a gaping hole in her nose. i grabbed a towel and a bag of ice, then quickly put the ice back. then really looked at the cut/hole on the bridge of her nose and declared we must go to the er. i declared many things. you need stiches. holy shit, you're bleeding. we need to go to the er. then we went to the er and the doctor let me see the bone in emily's nose before he stitched her up. amazingly, the hole was stitched up nicely, should only be a small scar. after the er, we ate wendy's frosties and fries at 2 am. she had a headache, a bad one she said. i said this was reasonable.

i recently finished two new stories: "Three Days A Red Wolf" and "Droughtville"; i don't know about the second title. have a third story stuck in my head.

august again

finally in, in the new house. homing it up some. i don't think we'd been home for more than a week all summer, or it felt that way. went to iowa, where the land is flat and corn-ruined and where it felt like fall. i read a book by robert haas while i was there. i don't read poetry, i don't know why, but a friend recommended it pretty hard and i like "eastern" things and i like haas's version of basho, issa, and buson. so i read Praise and loved it. it fit so so so much a summer into me besides the one i was living. here's an excerpt from a poem called "Songs to Survive the Summer":

...I thought of Wallace Stevens

walking equably to work
and of a morning two Julys ago
on Chestnut Ridge, wandering

down the hill when one
rusty elm leaf, earth-
skin peeling, wafted

by me on the wind.
My body groaned toward fall
and preternaturally

a heron lifted from the pond.
I even thought I heard
the ruffle of wings

three hundred yards below me
rising from the reeds.
Death is the mother of beauty

and that clean-shaven man
smelling of lotion,
lint-free, walking

toward his work, a
pure exclusive music
in his mind.

and this from "The Beginning of September":

In the summer
peaches the color of sunrise

In the fall
plums the color of dusk

there's no way of saying what these poems felt to me reading them in a foreign bedroom in the summer, without airconditioning, curtains blowing, moving from bedroom to a tent the next night, where the wind swept so hard through an oak tree outside that i dreamt of ocean waves all night. i want summer hotter and heavier and like some thirst, to stay just unquenched, because it's always the longing, i think, that's better.