Melody Hill

AS I TYPE THIS I feel like my skin might melt off my rotting bones at any moment, and that's because I picked this time (now) to try to quit eating sugar. Seeing how writing that sentence, alone, was like climbing over a stone wall with glass shards on top, maybe this isn't the best time to try to write a “memo.” Or maybe it's a GOOD time to. Maybe I'll be concise. That's one of my latest goals or resolutions, or what have you—besides not eating sugar—is to be more concise—kind of going against my natural inclination to go on and on and on. Seeing how writing that, above, took me the entire evening, and now it's the next morning, makes me want to get this over quick. I feel a little better, except for that I hurt all over, but in no place in particular. Anyway, I may have had no (zero) readers of the “Memoir” section of this website, and I kind of let it die off like a New Year's Resolution “to be good”—and I realize I could just say goodbye. But while I still have a few labored breaths yet to breathe, I'm going to continue it, if not for that one reader who might be out there (even if that's a future or imaginary reader), then for me.

In fact, I'm adding to it, a new memoir page. So, first of all, if this isn't obvious, none of this is actually memoir, as in its strictest definition. Maybe I will actually do that kind of thing, some day, but probably not. First, there's The Golden Pineapple, which is not a memoir, but “a novel by R. Speen”—which is to say, it's either a novel in memoir style, or a memoir in novel style—and R. Speen may be me—and it may or may not be worth reading (I haven't, in awhile), and I may or may not continue it at some point, but don't hold your breath. Next, there is the “Memoir” page, which is where I'm typing up my old journal entries from notebooks (starting in 1972) in roughly chronological order. Currently, I'm up to 1981, during a period where I didn't seem to write in (or save) any notebooks, but rather type on a communal typewriter in the Garbage Inc. record store. I'm re-typing some of those entries (not all), including some by other people, including Keith Busch, who was a big influence on me. I'll get back to the actual notebooks come 1982, no doubt, as I spent a lot of introspection time that year freaking the fuck out. It should be fun to read, especially if you want to laugh at a 22-year-old with no clue—just an ink pen and the luck to survive.

The next destination of note is “Notebook Journals” which is actually just a page to link to a separate website, one of my old, long-running “blogs,” where I first started to re-type old notebook pages written in around 1996, onward. There, I'm currently up to 1998, when I lived in Portland, Oregon and things, journal-wise, really started to heat up—maybe a little too much. The next page, then, is called “No Memory” and was meant to be my current notebook entries—well, starting in 2016, anyway, which is no longer current (or too current, depending on how you look at it). Anyway, this will be the chronological journal from 2016 to the beginning of 2020, which I'll attempt to slog through, with some difficulty, because my handwriting got worse, the words got wordier, and the midlife reached crisis level. It sounds grim, but who knows, it might be funny. If I can laugh at myself, perhaps a hapless reader could, as well—though you might just want to tell me to shut up and die.

And if that's not enough—if you haven't yet, imaginary reader of one, please check out the new Taco page, where I'm trying to write something about every place selling remotely Mexican food in the greater Milwaukee area, one week at a time, in a not very comprehensive but hopefully entertaining paragraph and listing. Trying to make my “Taco Tuesday” more than a dumb hashtag. Also—seeing how February is almost upon us, I like to celebrate that snowy month as “Farraginous February”—writing on another external site, DJ Farraginous, where I'm attempting to write short bits, or at length (sometimes), about all the vinyl records I own—which is a motley bunch, believe me, that keeps growing. This year I'm going to either listen to and start writing about, and/or post an entry on each day of this short yet long month—though we'll see how this sugar withdrawal thing plays out...

And though that's more than enough, this is where I'm either announcing an exciting new project, or finally confessing to a kind of pathetic, boring insanity (take your pick, but please, don't tell me—let me at least try to keep afloat on my own weird idea of fun). Yes, a new page, a new memoir, which will be starting with the alarmingly contemporary date of my birthday, January 19, in the year we are now struggling to grasp the significance of, 2020. (And seeing how my first notebook entry, on that date, went about nine pages, “concise” might just be a pipe-dream.) At any rate, if you check back here in the coming months, or weeks, you will see it magically appear—titled “Sexagenarian Diary”—a title that may be at once provocative and very unprovocative. Maybe I'll even present the clickable page heading as “Sex Diary”—both as a kind of joke, and because, I've heard, “sex sells.” Though I don't have anything to sell, at least not until I finish my novel, The Doughnuts, which I'm still working on—but let me tell you, with age, a full-time job that is NOT going great, and a fairly long manuscript to be revised, it's not easy. Nothing is easy for me, but then nothing is easy for most people, maybe all people, and probably most things are a lot easier for me than for most people, and to be anything but thankful for my life would be just pretty offense. Most of the time, like when I'm not in the throes of this dumb sugar withdrawal, I feel really, honestly, pretty fortunate. So it's about time for a spellcheck, then overdo the italics, and then it's showtime, folks!

Randy Russell, 30 January 2020