Dear Boyer,

I can't remember if I read it or not. I sure know the name. It could be on my bookshelf, though I’ve looked a little and can’t find it. On Google I get: "A River Runs Through It is a 1992 American period drama film directed by Robert Redford, based on Norman Maclean's 1976 semi-autobiographical novella of the same name.”

I wrote Planet Busters, which is 410 pages long. It isn’t the greatest novel, but my Mom was reading it and she started laughing at one part and said at first she was ho hum but that part was good. I remember Christopher Hitchens saying he didn’t think he could write any fiction. He seemed to think that good fiction authors were born and not made.

The only fiction story I wrote that I think is good is The "Sluggards," a 5,743-word SF story. The editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, said he liked it but chose not to use it and that is about the biggest SF mag of all. Isaac Asimov was asked to write a science article for them and he said he would would do it on two conditions: 1. They didn't pay him. 2. If they'd let him write one for every issue. In one compilation of the essays, he wrote: “I don’t expect to live forever and I know that one day the last essay will have been written but except for my wife and daughter, there is nothing I will miss more in leaving this life than the chance to write these essays forever.”

He began each essay with a joke. In one such introduction, he recounts that a person asked him if he used a typewriter or a computer. Asimov says that he used both. Then the person asks if he believed that War and Peace would have come out different if Dostoyevsky had had a computer, to which Asimov replied, "I think it would have been the same since Tolstoy wrote War and Peace." Then he writes, “Now that I’ve told you about a bonehead, let’s learn a few things about bone.”

I’ve written 21 books now, three with real publishers and a Japanese edition of one. Eleven are memoirs in Spanish as I am somehow driven to write memoir and to do it in Spanish. I put the English on facing pages so a 150-page memoir is really only 75 pages. I've been writing my latest for ages and it's only 83 pages. The working title and subtitle are a little overcooked:

How the Days Grow Long
As the Years Ride away on the Wind


Speaking of fishing stories, do you know that beer “Two-hearted Ale?” There’s a trout on the label so I guess it’s a tribute to the last two chapters of Hemingway’s In Our Time: "Big Two-Hearted River" Part I and II, a trout fishing story.

Oh, I have a gig. A memorial party at Mulligan's Saloon for someone who died. I was just going to play all my guitar songs on my Radio Shack organ. The piano setting is too tinny, but the strings setting has beautiful sound. The songs are really pretty but too much of that organ imparts a rather too-dreary feeling for the occasion. Thus, I tried playing the guitar and I can actually do it. I think maybe it was the CE/CFS chronic fatigue that kept me away. I can't really lift the heavy solid-body guitar very well as both arms are gimpy, but I'll be sitting at the organ. I've got twelve days to re-learn the songs and I need them; some of the tunes are awfully complicated. I used to have to practice for two days before a gig. Now I haven't played in two years and I'm rusty. 

How about you? Are you playing the Cello anymore?

Yours truly,
Wombat

PS: If I didn't mention it, I had the lens from one of my eyes removed and replaced and I have 20/20 vision again.

[They call them firehawks          Science Times, February 5, 2018
They call them firehawks, flocks of brown falcons,
black or whistling kites that snap up rodents
flushed by the smoke and sparks of brushfires.
And when the flames sputter, they snatch
lit twigs, fly half-a-mile to start
new fires to resume the hunt.
Or so go the stories, told for years, as yet
unproven by research in the field.
That black kites snatch food from children’s hands
in schoolyards, this is known. And that
in Aboriginal lore, human knowledge of fire
dates to the Dreaming, the time before time,
when the firehawk brought embers
to people on a burning stick.
The Hunger Stone
   New York Times, August 24, 2022

The year was 1616.
If you see me, weep, said the stone
exposed in the riverbed. The Elbe
drained by drought, the crops parched,
the farmers starving.
Did they walk toward the ocean,
too exhausted to carry even
their youngest, left behind
to fend for themselves? Or did they
sit with them by the roadside,
watching a pink sky, drowsing
hungrily before the darkening horizon.
Pluck
                    Science Times, July 18, 2023
The common coot builds nests
with condoms, carnations
made of plastic, discarded rubber
wipers that once swept rain from
Subaru or Chevy windshields;
while magpies, with thin
metal rods, those spikes
on buildings and rooftops meant
to ward off feathered fauna,
erect habitats described
by one observer, in admiration,
as ‘cyberpunk porcupines.’
 
Worldwide, dozens of species
construct with plastic bags, cloth
straps, fishing line, rubber bands
and cigarette butts, whose
nicotine may help deter
parasites (or poison inhabitants).
All of which causes
furrowed brows on some
ornithologists who’d prefer
their Nature Edenic. While others
celebrate these avian collagists who
fabricate from human trash
found on city streets,
without a power drill or plan,
a hearth and home of sorts
in which to make more birds.
Song of the Cosmologist     
     (on the death of the Sun)

There will be a last sentient being,
there will be a last thought.
There will be a last wave, a last bird
taking flight. There will be a last
time to say Hello, a last Goodbye.
A last flash of light at sunset on the horizon,
a last walk down a mountain path,
a last swim in a mountain lake.
There will be a last cruel word
meant to sting. There will be a last
gun fired, a last suicide. And a last
sigh, a last song, a last breath
and heartbeat, a last chance to offer
praise before the litany of death.
 Boyer Rickel