The Brennan Files

Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 09:52:17 -0400
From: chickq@aol.com
Subject: Re: FRIDAY

Dear E., it is 6:30 a.m., the house is quiet, but for the lapping of the water in the canal outside the windows of my friend’s home here, just south of San Fran., so for the first time in quite a while I have the luxury of being able to read your words, and respond – although there is the remaining issue that I am still adjusting to the keyboard of his computer, forcing me to write more slowly, and spend more time correcting typos, and such.

Yes, I recognize that something would need to be very extreme and unusual, to strike you as such. So here is your answer, and , while it is still a bit extreme, it’s not that unusual anymore. It’s running marathons. I didn’t start running until I was 40,and did so primarily to try to keep from being/getting (too) pudgy. I’ve run 13 of them in the past 8 years, from London to Maui, and will be running my 14th and maybe last, this fall, either in Burlington, Vt., or Cape Cod. So, there it is. (As for sky-diving, or anything remotely close to that, I don’t like even thinking about those types of activities, much less do them. I don’t get it. I’d box, before jump out of a plane).

Here’s a question for you. What do you expect your role/posture will be this year as the anti-Columbus Day parade business starts heating up? I expect I’m going to be the newspaper’s main writer on that, this time around, and as mentioned in a previous correspondence, I expect that this year it’s going to get very crazy and strange. Do you expect to be in the middle of it, somehow? And if so, in what capacity. Your answer on this one is important, to me.

Our vacation was wonderful in every way – one of the key things, for both of us, each of us being cool weather fans, was avoiding heat. And for 11 consecutive days, we saw literaly not one cloud -and yet, because we were right along the coast each of those days, in northern Cali. and Oregon, we never were exposed to a temperature of more than 75 degrees – and often, noticably cooler than that (that streak ended on Tuesday, when we swung inland into Ore., and zoomed back down into Cali. by route 5). This, at a time that I understand temperatures were a bit higher, in the Denver area. My wife and I both consider anything more than 75 to be hot – the kind of hot that we’d rather not have to be around for. We never got to Eugene, although that had originally been on the itinerary. We did make it to Ashland, the first time, for me. Really, really liked it.

Dan Glick, by the way, is “available” (more or less). I thought “Powder Burn” was pretty good. Not great. Have you read his second book, “Monkey Dancing”? That book, I was less impressed with, although the idea behind it had tremendous potential. It also had a working title which, because it worked on three different levels, would have been far better: “Before It’s Gone.” I was very disappointed when he changed the title – particularly to what he changed it to.

Being a huge movie fan, one of the few drawbacks to our trip was that we saw not one movie. I’m looking forward to catching up – want to see “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (if I have the title right), “Heights,” “My Summer of Love,” and a number of others. Did you see “Mysterious Skin” which was in Denver recently? Outstanding. Haunting .

One more highlight from vacation is that I have two new songs well on the way to completion. One, titled “Book of Days,” has the refrain: “Each of us born naked/we clothe ourselves in memory.”

That’s what I know, Charles