Let me dump a few little things here today:

• “…the drum can…be a tool for personal transformation and healing.” Well, then! Putting bongo learning and practice into my daily regimen is even more powerfully beneficial than I thought. My instincts must have known and steered me in the right direction while my rational mind was happy enough to have something to bang on and release pent-up and bad energies. Arthur Hull wrote that in his book Drum Circle Spirit: Facilitating Human Potential Through Rhythm. Yech! Hippy crap. I’m embarrassed to say I got something out of it, but that was the only line I read in it, honest! It’s a pull quote that I happened to notice when I was putting the accompanying CD back in the sleeve glued to the inside cover so that I could take it back to the library. I only got it to have something to play my bongos along to. I did a couple time. It sucked for the most part. But that quote sure fits my circumstances in an eerilly providential way. Speaking of library books I just want to say that I finished Christine Schutt’s A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer. That has nothing whatsoever to do with my “circumstances” except for the fact that ‘read’ is an item on my daily must-do list. The stories have a voice in harmony with mine in my story-to-novel chrysalis, which is also on my list. So that could tangentially relate in a positive way. But basically I just wanted a public record of my reading the book. Because it’s a cool book. And I first published one of the stories in there. So there. I did it.
• Speaking of quotes, and the novel… In an interview published in the January 30th edition of Time magazine this year, Larry McMurtry said, “If you let yourself go on a good day and write 25 pages, the well is sucked dry, and it’s harder to go on. The thing about a long narrative is momentum. A little bit every day is better than a lot one day and nothing the next.” He limits himself to five pages a day, which he usually gets done by 8:30 in the morning, and then passes off to his writing “partner” who keys it into a word processor, subtracting things, adding things, moving things around and restructuring. I could use a partner like that. Not going to get one in the near future, so I’ll focus on building some momentum by writing a little bit every day.
• In the mail that came this week from my box in New York was a nice letter from Newby, Sartip, Masel, & Casper, LLC. They’re attorneys at law, they say. For a second, the pitch of my heartbeat went high, but it was old; I’ve transferred my Carolina Radiology debt to the more patient folks at American Express.