so blogger has a new look - i'm sure i'll get used to it, but as one who opposes all change, i'll grump first. what did they do, make it hard to figure out how to post? apparently so. eventually it will be just like usual. it's like an illinois license plate. the old one lasted twenty years, i forgot there was even such a thing as a new one.

i've come to hate ambient noise. i have tinnitus, and can't get rid of it, but if i can get rid of a shower fan, or some other kind of buzzing or rattling or whatever, i will. it's like the tinnitus raises the threshold. a person can only handle sixty and tinnitus gives you fifty right off the bat. so now along comes the shower fan and boom, you're over your limit. my wife puts a sound machine next to me at night so she can go to sleep. it makes noise. i do have earplugs but sometimes forget to put them in at night. so then i wake up with tinnitus and the ringing sometimss goes on all day. she's getting tired of shouting at me though. i've lost enough hearing that it's really a hassle for people who are used to using a normal tone of voice around each other. i am excluded from many conversations, which overall doesn't bother me, but it bothers me when i'm missing stuff i need to hear.

i think what i want to do is infuse my novels with things that one hears. i will write them in such a way that you hear my voice telling a story, a nice long endless one, but then, you hear other sounds, the sounds of the times the novel is set in. my present novel, which is really my third, the first two being unfinished, is set in iowa in 1975. i think that what i want to do is put as much of the music of 1975 in there as i can. things you recognize? things you don't? doesn't matter. it has to have a decent title, obviously. or i can just slip the words in there, like poetry. it will totally set the novel in 1975.

it's easy enough to set it in iowa. i know the streets, the landmarks, the places. i remember them all very clearly. my problme really is more where to draw the line between true and fiction. so much happened, and some of it is pure storyish. when you write a novel though i think you commit to having things matter. don't tell a story just to tell a story. tell a story that will go somewhere and interconnect with everything. it'll have music, yes, but it'll matter too. it'll have iowa images - corn, the grant wood painting, the hawkeye maybe - i don't know. so far the main image in my mind is the disappearing dutch elms - they used to line this street, but now they're gone. some people know what a street full of elms looks like, but the disease came and took every last one of them. now it's harder to come by that kind of shade.

it's a scary world out there, with storm troopers haunting the streets of the two cities my boys live in, chicago and portland. and, they say, they are sending storm troopers to kansas city and albuquerque. that means all my kids are covered, and my sister too. so my question is, are these storm troopers just going to make everyone disappear? haul them off and then they're gone like a covid victim? will we just forget about all these people who used to be around, and who used to complain freely about how the president was so bad...well maybe i better shut up.

my strategy so far has been to make it so you have to read a lot - in this case, all the way down to here on this blog - before you get to any blatant criticism of any living political leader. another strategy is to never name him or her by name. but if you have gotten this far, you already know who i'm talking about, these are trying times, and i'm trying...to survive them.

it's all ambient noise, and what really matters is what i write.