Rothko's Rolodex

There will be a Substack. I need to cultivate it big-time, for marketing purposes. It’s a very important platform for writers. I don’t yet know what’s happening with my book, but any publishing outcome, traditional or indie, will need not just Substack but subscribers.

I want the imprimatur of an actual publishing house. Big shocker, call me a snob, I really don’t care. To sell my book to a publisher, I must sell it to an agent first. I need numbers to make that happen. This means subscribers and a proven platform of my own. I could insert a Virginia Woolf eye wink here. Consider it inserted. I’ve had a room of my own for a very long time.

I have had great success in my current room, a garage. We finished it, turned it into a real room with drywall and nice paint and a tweed epoxy floor. I call it my Magic Garage. My favorite desk is there, green-glass big slab top resting on two file cabinets. I’ve worked so well there, it’s given me pause as to moving. You see, in three months time we should be settling into our new home in Connecticut, the Hudson Valley, maybe Mahopac. We have no idea where.

Our house sale closes on June 10. We have a rent-back of 1.5 months. We’ll find something and it better be good.

Since 1992, I’ve lived in a place I never wanted to live in, never liked, and would never have stayed in, save for incredibly important reasons such as my now-adult children and my husband. My next chapter, ugh a novel pun, must be in a place I truly love.

Leaving San Diego after 34 years is a huge deal, too big to write about even casually. By casual, I mean typing with my index finger under my backyard gazebo with one eye on my dog. I should write a Modern Love-ish piece about my first bean-and-cheese burrito, eaten at Bahia, a mom-and-pop strip-mall taco shop on El Cajon Boulevard, in July of ‘92. I thought it was great. And then about my discovery of manteca, AKA lard in Spanish, tubs of which were stacked in the kitchens of Bahia and El Cuervo, my take-out spots. I had no clue that lard filled the bean part of the burritos that made this town slightly tolerable. No way in hell was I consuming the adipose of an intelligent pink pig. Pigs are smarter than dogs. And of course treyf, non kosher.

Imagine Claes Oldenburg spoofing Joseph Beuys with a 20-foot burrito sculpted from pork fat. That was my first year in San Diego. Desperately lonely, mostly underemployed, poor, hocking a likely knockoff Cartier watch for rent, phobic about driving, basically abandoned, trying to write, and thinking of things like a Joseph Beuys lard burrito made massive by Claes. Anything to make myself feel something approaching wit, or cleverness. Something trending slightly toward myself. I usually tried too hard.

The image above is Joseph Beuys’ “Fat Chair” (1964). He used fat as a medium in other works.