Had a head full of words and delayed setting them down just long enough to lose the thread. ... Well.

***

Eventful week, from my perspective, given that I usually stay shut up in Sylvia most of the day and night and shut up in the house the rest of the time. It rained and rained, which is unusual for these parts and most pleasant to experience from Sylvia's innards. Wonderful sound on the trailer roof, and with the barn heater going and the curtains open wide, catGreta to my right and dogApple at my foot, I was snug and happy indeed. Read copious amounts, taking notes from a heap of books-in-progress. Did almost no writing.

On Monday I drove the old Cougar down the mountain, a rapid turnaround trip for a cheapie ultrasound from a clinic there that serves uninsured people. I suffered not one whit from the journey, so my heart must be beating again behind these thyroid pills. The result of the imaging was - gall stones in plenty, due to my sluggish no-thyroid decades. Doc says let's remove your gall bladder forthwith; I say not so fast.

And fast I did, on Granny Smith apples and spring water, for three days (ugh). Then Friday night I flushed my system with olive oil and lemon juice and spent much of yesterday passing softened (from the malic acid in the apples) stones in great quantity, from sand and gravel to end-of-my-thumb size. Impressive. Felt much relieved, most pain and discomfort of past several years was gone, and I was down another two pounds.

So, yay.

I'll do this every month for another 2-3 months, though, and incorporate lots of raw apples into my menus - at least one Granny Smith every day.

I think all may be resolved.

***

I've been reading John Clellon Holmes's essays in his 1967 volume Nothing More to Declare. If, like Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac is considered anomalous and undeserving of critical respect and more closely looked at in biographical terms, then John Clellon Holmes was Kerouac's Ted Hughes.

In a way.

Having read Kerouac's notebooks, journals, and working drafts during a time in the late '40s when his friendship with Jack was particularly close, Holmes, perhaps not believing Kerouac would ever publish, and lacking themes of his own, wrote and published the novels Go and The Horn and, particularly, the essay "This Is the Beat Generation," using ideas and materials sseemingly culled directly from Kerouac's papers. When Holmes was the first to be published and celebrated it was a slap in the face to the trusting Kerouac, who fumed for a year or two before finally forgiving him.

But I find, at least in this autobiographical collection, which does not seem self-serving but rather generous and affectionate, that the great betrayer has been misunderstood. Here, he is Kerouac's interpreter, apologist, promoter. I find no trace of guilt, but neither do I see any defensiveness. Humility in plenty.

If anything, I think his preemptive work probably broke the ice, provoked the curiosity that got Kerouac read later on - perhaps even got him published in the first place. Holmes could no more parrot Kerouac than fly, given his constricted verbal imagination. Clearly he envies Kerouac's casual access to otherconsciousness, the ease with language his own coifed and tailored approach could never incorporate.

He was not Kerouac's Ted Hughes, in the end, but his John the Baptist. And who remembers him now? This volume of autobiographical essays has been out of print for decades, and the few available used are cheaply acquired.

I think he was an OK guy, in the end.