Progress Report

30,000 words y'all.

I am deep into writing this thing, wanting to stop whatever else I'm doing and plug in a placeholder for yet another chapter, or drop 1,000 words about Richard Buckner or Thomas Dolby or the little wheels inside cassette tapes or my friend that set out across the country with the inside of his truck packed so tight that he couldn't get to his tape deck, which was loaded with a Conversational Spanish course. He couldn't hear the right speaker where the Spanish part was, so he just heard a stern voice saying

Where is the bathroom?

(pause)

I'm allergic to fish.

(pause)

This fork is dirty.

(pause)

coming out of his left speaker, over and over, across America. I am planning to finish first draft of it by the end of April and then spend the next two months editing and tweaking and trashing and redoing whole slabs of it. The publisher likes what he's seen so far, and we are looking at it hitting the hands of eager readers toward the end of the year.

Sure, it is will be another log on the fire of premature memoirs that keeps many a picky reader warm at night but its not really a memoir as much as its a way of looking at life through the music you listen to, finding what is there in that gap between art and life that Rauschenberg mined. It will be like Killing Yourself to Live with less dating and better music. It will be titled Needle on the Record, until I come up with something better, but enough of what it will be. What it is - 30,000 words.