Wendy Wimmer Dot Com

I am currently in the throws of writer’s block.

Which is ironic, because prior to this diary, I hadn’t written anything especially weighty in, oh, three or four years.

Sometimes I think I should be working in a delicious 300-year-old English cottage somewhere, with lichens growing on the slate roof. Even though most English cottages have those thatch roofs, though I’m certain that they would tend to get musty or possibly moldy and that makes my throat itchy. I yearn to be a independently wealthy writer, capable of taking weeks off as the muse dictates. I think it would have been easier if I had been a writer in, for instance, Jane Austen’s time’. Or maybe Mary Shelley. They had things like absinthe and opium and they were LEGAL. I think. Maybe not. But then I think about niceties like penicillin and my asthma inhaler and the little cake of chemicals that I drop into the toilet tank so that I don’t have to scrub out the tank. So maybe I’ll just live in the now and wear a lot of empire waist dresses.

This writer’s block is not so much block as angst, even though I detest that term. Everyone is so angsty, there should be a store at the mall devoted to it, like the Gap, filled with many drab outfits and smelling of eucalyptus. Douglas Coupland has decided that he regrets ever coining the phrase ‘Generation X’. One of the little 19-year-olds that I trained actually told me that they were ‘Generation X’. I am 30 years old and I barely old enough to qualify for that generation. Stop calling it Generation X and start calling them the Depressed, because that’s really what they are.

So since I’m feeling all ‘writerly’ today, I thought I’d share my favorite poem of all time.

It’s about poop.

This should surprise NO ONE!!!!

However, I went looking for the book that had ‘Poop’ in it (The Maverick Poets I believe it’s called… it had a black cover) and now I can’t find it. I believe it to be in Computer Room #1 which is where all my stuff has been…well, stuffed, but I had no luck finding it.

I did however, just purchase an entire book of Gerald Locklin’s poems. It doesn’t have ‘Poop’ in it, though. But here’s a different poem that I like also. Not as much as ‘Poop’, because it doesn’t have any reference to poop. But it’s pretty good.

a tyrant for our times

it’s in his novel ham on rye now

but I remember bukowski telling

a long time ago

how his father used to beat him.

and when he’d turn to his mother for help.

she would intone, ‘the father is always right.’

I liked the way it sounded

And so, even though I don’t beat my kids

I do like to tell them

‘the father is always right.’

They tell me to get fucked.

By Gerald Locklin from the firebird poems

It’s no ‘Poop’ but I like it.