A girl called McButtocks, Richard Brautigan's suicide, the cleaning lady's cross-dressing husband...

More random excerpts from a writer's intimate diary

Latest publicity photo. I really, really think the glasses are me.

I lapsed into retrospection over the weekend in order to avoid doing anything productive. The subtitle above explains everything — once again I am shamelessly exposing the seedy underside of existence. To avoid the reader jumping to alarming conclusions, it might help to know that Nellie and Romeo are dogs, not people. I have deleted all the dates. The events float, as they do in memory, without sequence or causal connection.

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I suppose all these things will make you stronger — adversity makes you stronger until, one day, you die. This paradox, the idea that you always get stronger until adversity finally kills you, has always puzzled me; maybe it doesn't make you stronger, maybe it just softens you up for the final blow.

Shelly from Colorado gave her graduate lecture this afternoon, said lecture climaxed with a long section on my story "Woman Gored by Bison Lives" and a tearful homage to me as her advisor. At the end she played a tape of Oh Canada and gave me a wall plaque she had made that reads DOUGLAS GLOVER THE MASTER. It had two dozen Canadian beer caps embedded in the background around the words. Perhaps this was over the top. I don't know.

I got to the end of the day today and was racing down the road with Jonah to coach his soccer game and realized that I had forgotten to shave for three days and that I was wearing the jeans that the parrot in the pet store spit parrot food onto the day before (this is another long story — I WAS talking to this parrot while I was in the store buying vita-snacks for the boys' pet rats, Rex and Streak, but I digress). I guess I didn't look SO bad at the soccer game because one of my team parents accused me of flirting with the coach on the other team. So then Jacob was sitting on my bed killing himself laughing when I came in to read to them tonight and he was reading the thing I was writing and he'd just gotten to the part where the 13-yr-old heroine goes up to the tennis player and says, May I play with your balls. So then I read him the part where she throws the tennis ball off the boat and the dog jumps in after it, and he had this appalled look on his face and said, No, no, Dad, you can't do that! And then began inventing all sorts of scenarios by which the dog lives. All this was right after I had to explain what a prostate is (and then explain again to Jonah who got prostate and prostitute mixed up). Let me see: and last night around 11:30 p.m. my ex stopped by with some school stuff Jacob had left at her house and told me how her cleaning lady's husband has told her he wants a sex change operation which is new, though EVERYONE knew he was a cross-dresser for years (I didn't know; I am the eternal innocent!), and that he'd gone on the internet and met another man who wanted a sex change operation and he had invited him and his wife to come and spend the weekend so they could all get together and talk about it.

I just got home from the hospital. Jake helped me get changed into something clean and threw all my hospital clothes in the wash and has gone off to the drugstore for pain killers. I sank into my own bed wrung out and exhausted. But on the whole the operation went well. I was not the guy in the room across the hall screaming every time they moved his leg. My surgeon was pleased with himself. He said I was in the top ten disastrous knees he had ever operated on. I was the first surgery Monday morning and woke up around 10 and dozed till 11 and then they put me in a room. On Morphine, Oxycontin, Oxycodone and Valium and an injection in my stomach called Lovenox. I tried to sit up to eat lunch and nearly fainted, decided to stay down for a while. But I was up and walking Tuesday morning and climbed a flight of stairs Tuesday afternoon. The guy in the next bed was shitting blood in agony and had been in 7 foster homes before he was 16, beaten and molested, and is still illiterate. Last night my surgeon ordered wine with my dinner. They moved me into a room with a 78-year-old guy who listened to music and watched tv simultaneously, coughed endlessly and disappeared this morning for dialysis. His name was Harold. Now I am in bed and thinking of trying to nap, but my leg hurts from packing and being in the car. I need some drugs.

I have some Scotch and vodka which I am sure go well with Oxycontin.

Ramona Dearing used to call me the Old Bull Moose; now it's seems especially a propos. I trip over my broken antlers every day. The belly hangs low, legs are crooked, eyes dewy and dim, erections scanty and fleeting, people grow silent when I pass because I remind them of their own last end. The only person older than me is my mother. She and I were talking about the ugliness of decrepitude just yesterday. She had much of her stomach removed for cancer in April but is still on the farm by herself (I am visiting right now) with her chickens, fighting it out to the end.

Am feeling pressed to the wall. I walk across campus and a student comes at me, grabbing at my shirtsleeves, asking whether I think she should work with mentor X or mentor Y or neither and who else would I recommend given that she couldn’t possibly work with me because I am scary. I walked into the computer center and a man I didn't know came up and asked me for a quick list of six or seven contemporary satirical novels-of-manners for his bibliography. Like I have that list taped on the front of my brain.

She was telling me the other day about going to a bar one night — she left her husband a couple of years ago — and dancing with a much younger man and feeling quite good about herself till he asked her, "How does it feel to be with someone so much younger than you?"

Brilliant day! I wrote, then raced out at 4:30 to pick up Jonah, Nick, Owen and Sam. I couldn't find Nick. Sam's mother had her bunion operation yesterday and can't get enough painkillers. Apparently, her husband doesn't do carpooling. Owen's mother lives in town, not in the neighborhood, but she called me to pick him up anyway — her husband is also too important to do carpooling. So I dropped Owen off, bought groceries, came home — caller ID says Bobby's father called. I call him. A guy Jacob got into something with last fall got an obscene phone call (actually his wife got the call) from Bobby last night while the boys were at the wrestling meet. The first thing you realize here is how bone stupid Bobby is. Poor guy. The next thing you realize is that Jake and his friend Darren must have put Bobby up to this. I talk to the guy twice. Then I get Jake and Darren and Darren's mother in here and try to figure out what happened. At some point Jacob alleged that somehow the whole wrestling team got this guy’s phone number and was calling him! It's too dumb to commit to words on the page. Do you realize how systemically brain dead teenagers are? Actually, as the dust settles I begin to discern who is probably the tacit leader in all this — Jake just goes along and Bobby is dumb as a post, but Darren is a bit of a creep. AND he was the one sitting next to Bobby last night when he made the call.

I did write some nice words today. It makes me self-righteous. I myself have never done anything stupid in my life. Never. No lie. Not even close. I have lived a life of measure and good judgement, prudence and caution, wisdom and — something else…

Jonah, 12, was on the phone late last night and then he came in to talk to me and it turns out several of his female friends are cutting themselves. He's mentioned this before. He was interested in one girl for a while and then stopped because she was cutting herself. But now he says it's spreading amongst his friends and one girl possibly damaged her wrist — mostly they cut on fleshy part of the lower arm, I think, but this girl was cutting her wrist. This weekend, he says, a couple of girls are going to have a cutting war. So he and another friend have decided to go and try to alert the school guidance office and get some sort of intervention. I wanted to go in with him to support him, but he wanted to do this alone with his friend.

I've always been a strong believer in buttocks and any female who would like to be called McButtocks is okay by me.

I got here in 6 1/2 hours last night, had dinner with my mother and then had to wash shit off her old dog’s butt. Was awakened at 6 a.m. by Romeo throwing up in the hood of my sweatshirt. I drank coffee on the porch looking over the green field and red trees all misty and covered in frost in the sunlight. Then we went to see my dying aunt who looked at me and said, I don't like him. After a while, she said, He's a funny one. And then later she got enthusiastic and said, I like him. A one-eyed cat came to visit her and took a liking to me, too. Aunt Margaret is strangely calm with inquiring eyes. She recognized photos of her mother and father, traced her mother's face with her fingers. She held my hand and I kissed her goodbye. When we left, walking down the hall, Alzheimer's patients in wheelchairs kept saying, Hi. Hi.

Back from seeing Aunt Margaret. Chilly and rainy. In the games room they had a widescreen tv playing an endless tape of some guy on the electric organ — Loch Lomond and Beautiful Dreamer. The corridor smelled like shit. I talked to one of the supervisors, a woman who grew up in St Williams across the street from the woman who had my great-grandfather's suicide letter. She told me secrets — the town once had a brothel. Then they took my aunt to have a bath and my mother and I took off and found coffee. Then we came back and Margaret was dressed and sitting in a wheelchair and we took her back to her room and she hugged and kissed my mother and was very sweet. She liked me right away this time and held my hand and kissed it. Very strange sweet old thing. Amazing expressions playing across her face. She held my hand for ages, rubbing it, rubbing my sweater. She wanted me to take one of her stuffed dogs, but then after a while decided she'd better keep it and take care of it. When I said goodbye she took both my hands and then placed one of them firmly on her thigh and indicated she wanted me to leave it there. I asked her if her leg was hurting (her legs are a purple scabby mess) and if that helped. But it also seemed strangely flirtatious. It's been a month since she stopped eating. She hardly drinks anything. But while she was holding my hand with her right hand, she put on lipstick by herself with her left hand. Something of her old self still there.

Richard Brautigan shot himself with a pistol he borrowed from the owner of a restaurant he frequented in San Francisco. Later, an acquaintance said, Someone who drinks that much should never keep a gun around the house. No one noticed Brautigan had disappeared. But later on his agent in New York got an offer for a two-book contract and sent out a private detective to find him. The detective found the body. This story has no bearing on my life except that I don't have a two-book contract either.

Very quiet tonight, just the hum of my computer fan. Nellie's asleep on my pillow. The boys are asleep in their bunks. The floor is strewn with camping equipment. Romeo just peeked in at my study door.