A Hundred Thousand Worlds, by Bob Proehl

As I may have mentioned before, I have a great friend who slips me advance copies of mostly mid-list literary novels (which might still hit it big!)  Absolutely loved Proehl's first novel -- there were so many times I had to stop and mark the page, so let me get out of the way and show you:

'The universe is like a garden full of forking paths.  Every time you or I or any of us make a decision the path splits again.  When you decided to come to class today instead of staying in bed with your boyfriend, you created two possible timelines.  One in which you came to class, the timeline we're in, and one in which you didn't.  These splits happen a billion trillion times a day; each split creates a different timeline, a different universe.  If you look backwards, you'll see one path behind you.  The path you've been walking the whole time.  Your universe.  But if you could hover up above the garden, you'd see billions and billions of paths running parallel to one another.  The question is, what keeps them parallel to one another, what keeps them from intersecting?'

I'm pretty sure they do intersect -- mostly in your dream/life.  A couple of weeks ago I dreamt I was with someone I loved, adored -- his face was completely specific and we were SO HAPPY to see each other (and it is no one I know in life, nor any composite) and I felt myself being pulled away and woke up crying.  Not something that happens to me very often, at all.

I also sometimes feel shadow lives, who I might be if I'd gone that way instead of this...think we'd have to tesseract to the 5th, or maybe 6th dimension to get a glimpse of the multi-verse!

Regarding one of the few women at a comic convention who writes for a particular book, she muses on how sexed out all the women in comix are -- at the beginning she tried to match the look (failed), and 'Now she sports the same worn jeans and hoodie she wears while writing.  Her outfit tomorrow is a variation on the same.  The winning move is not to play.'

Definitely one strategy...

Re having to share custody, Valerie thinks:  'Maybe if he were an ugly child, she wouldn't be in danger of losing him.  It's not a charitable thought, but charity is for people with things to give away.'

What Alex, her precocious 9-yr-old thinks when they're halfway across the country: 'He can feel, through his forehead, through her shoulder, that she's in California already, that maybe she's been in California since before they left New York.  She's in a place they're not together anymore.  He doesn't know how to bring her back here...all he can do is ask her to meet him somewhere else.  "Tell me a story?" he asks quietly.'

Break my heart!

'Val can remember when her life was like this, the few years in LA when she floated in a moneyless world.  All cash transactions were handled elsewhere; cars and drinks and food appeared and were consumed and everyone was properly compensated as if by magic.  It always struck her as funny how having money made money obsolete.'

I remember those days...

Love his dialogue, too -- here are people playing characters from Angels in America (though the name of the play doesn't come up, which is cool, too):
'You have to come to the club with me,' Louis is saying to the Angel.  'Like that.  I don't know why I haven't thought of it before.  People will lose their shit.'
'I'm afraid "people,"' says the Angel, 'will have to hold on to their shit for one more night.'

Everybody is well drawn, deeply drawn, every character has her/his own voice, the dialogue is natural and often funny, the women as clear as the men -- a rarity, esp all of it together.

Alex, working on his own story:
'"You're a writer?" he asks.  She nods like she's been caught doing something she shouldn't have.  "Me, too," he says.
"It's no way to make a living," Gail says, which is something his mom says about acting sometimes.  He wonders if that's something you say about things that are important to you.  His fingers tap his own notebook as he decides where to start today.  He didn't realize this about telling a story, that you needed to figure out where to start again and again and again.'

God, don't I know it.  But it's gotta be the difference between writing formula, and writing fresh.  It's more -- how do say in California?  -- organic.  And still, I bet writing formula is just (or kind of) as hard as writing anything.  Writing is hard!  (wah wah wah)
But hey!  At least it doesn't pay!
(Certainly not when you're working-in-progress...the days of the advance are long gone).

'"Everything changes, all the time [says Brett, who draws pix for kid's book, briefly].  Even if you tried not to change, things would change around you till you'd have to.  It's like you're a story, not a picture."'

C'est si vrai!  It's also how living in New York made me feel...

'Alex is so tired.  So tired he could stay awake all night.  So tired he should never, ever go to bed again.  He knows this place.  It is where being sleepy and being wakeful, as in literally full of awake, blur into each other, his body's and his brain's signals getting so crossed that they're entangled and inseparable.'
The not-enough napagens problem.  I LIVE in that place (until I got the meds -- took 3 of them -- to pull me down under).

'She's sweating like Nixon.'
I am stealing that, and if you notice, g'head & call me out -- fair enough!

Saying no to her ex, 'she can feel some power move from him into her, a strength created by negation, the energy released when an idea, unwanted, dies.'

Okay so that's almost the end of the book.
Imagine everything I left out -- or better yet, don't.  Just read it.

RE:  Christodoro, by Tim Murphy

Jared, re breakup: ' he's drinking every night w his buddies,.  Bombed, he would wordlessly approach them and give them long, rocking hugs   How ya doin, they'd ask, and he'd shrug slowly, searching for words:

'I'd say I just went from the period of unbearable, scalding misery to the period of abiding but somehow just barely tolerable misery, he'd finally say.  Like, from waking up in the morning and thinking, first thing, I'm alone, I wanna die, to thinking, I'm alone, I wanna die, yeah, so fucking get some coffee and the paper and get on with your day and deal with it.'
AUGH!

'Like all New Yorkers who move to LA, even those like her who'd lived in New York but briefly, she clung to her New York identity…'

'…she held on to that New York period of her life, when she was a messy, lost party girl booty-grinding to Mary J. Blige on a coffee table at somebody's after-hours party.'
(that was Part II, the late 90s NYC, post-deevorce pour moi; (a little bit, as Carmen would say.  I love you so much, honey.  I just love you a little bit, okay?)

[ASIDE: Notes for book:
You'll See What I See
Take a Look at My Life; other lyrics, songs from that album.}

Back to el libro!:

'Protease, fucking protease.  I fucking hate that word.'
(God!  It never occurred to me!  What a weird big-pharm mindfuck!)

'And then, oh God, Carrie!  He'd sought her out…lured her…he was so hungry to use…'put your self-hatred about Carrie on the shelf,' his sponsor says. … That's about the only thought that keeps Mateo from blowing his brains out over the thought of Carrie, because basically he feels like he killed her.'

I can imagine that so well.
[ELEPHANT ENTERS ROOM.  HEAD.  HEART.]
It's a heart-stopping, mind-killing STOMP.

A guy at an AA mtg, 'Welcome to my world, little man.  The Try-Not-To-Hate-Yourself-Too-Much-Today Club!  We're all VIP members here!'
(Now that's the line that would lure me in…)

'There will never be a drug that hits him as hard and as fast as New York City, the first sight of which, swallowed whole from above, seizes him with dizzying waves of exhilaration, nostalgia … And unlike a drug, it's real, it's all real.  Everything that happened down there is real, real, real.'

'The cab went straight through the East Village tonight.  I got a hot flash when we  crossed Ninth street.'
Me, too, M-Dreem – especially when I checked out the list of tenants on 317 East 9th, and there was my name, on #7  (you can see Veselka's from there, gone from humble 24-hour café, to posh diner that serves $18 bowls of borscht!)

Damn!  I hoped I'd still been living there, and there I was!

March 12, 2016