It’s a rare occasion when I take the risk of buying a pear. You have to make an appointment to eat one. They are too hard when you pick them —it—and if you wait too long they’ve (it has) gone too soft. Tonight was the night. So I poured a small glass of red wine and cut some Brie cheese to go with, and it’s my dessert and nightcap. Maybe I’ll be smart and go to bed when I’ve finished. I don’t trust me any more. I try not to think of anything, but i never know. I’ll think of a phrase or a line of poetry, and I have to look up the poem to re-read it and then I get caught up wth the poet’s biography, learning all the time, and there goes s decent bed-time. You win some, you lose some.

Some times I come across myself. I know a lovely phrase which I felt described the risks I take, and I looked it up—

“tools too keen for timid safety”

—and I found that I’d been there before, and written about it and that I was being quoted about it in Wikipedia!. That was some time ago. More recently than that but not that recent, when I was still hot about pataphysics, I looked up Wikipedia to see if they knew more than I did, and I found a reference to me because I had written about it in Dropped Threads, the first one, an anthology by and about women and their writing that no one would buy—their writing not the book. The first Dropped Threads was a best seller for weeks and weeks , dropping to second place for a week when a new book by Mordecai Richler pushed it down a notch.

When I was invited to join the group I knew just what I wanted to do.

Not so the other women. They wrote of unrequited love and abortions and abuse and stuff like that, no longer forbidden now, but it gave them a release at the time. I wrote about pataphysics because no one seemed to understand it and rejected it. My editors couldn’t reject me because they had asked for it, but they cut a lot of it. Too much editing, because they didn’t understand it or the humour of it. Well, so. Neither did the reviewer who came across my essay in the Threads book and wrote a review, sort of, in a category in Wikipedia devoted to pataphysics.

Weird.

I actually wanted to write a book about pataphysics but I kept getting rejected. Too bad.

Now I’ve finished my pear and cheese and wine and I’m way past my bedtime.

Good night.