A Grand Canyon update…

Note to Vicky: We should head out to the Grand Canyon before it gets too hot. I think it'd be cool to revisit… or should I say "visit for the first time"…

Before I give you the update, there may be some of you who don't quite catch the irony of me writing a Grand Canyon book. Here it is. I hallucinated the Grand Canyon twice before I drove out there to kill myself. When I did, I didn't enter the park or see the Grand Canyon. Now, I'm writing a book called A Grand Canyon, which is an allegory for the disconnect I felt with, well, my life, basically. So, after those four events, it would be nice to, you know, actually see the place!

I finished Chapter Two: Ken and Rosa's Place today. It told about our lives from apartment to apartment to home, with our wedding in there and our first separation, along with tales of meningitis, shattered arms, and lots and lots of fighting.

Not that it was without humor, such as:

We saw the second counselor years later. (We may have already been in the house.) Here was his take: "The problem, Ken, is that you expect Rosa to contribute. You expect her to help out. You expect her to be supportive. Now, what right do you have to put all of these expectations on her?" I was out of there before our hour was up.

The next chapter will be called "The End of Ken & Rosa". This will start at the abortion, cover our tenth-year anniversary, tell about how we nearly split up and how we did split up. It'll cover about three years.

Vicky wasn't too clear on what I was doing or how I was doing it and I realized I hadn't explained things too well. After all, I have over 325,000 words right now and I say I've only started, and yet I'm at 1995. I've covered 30 years. Only started?

So, here's the deal. Only about 12,000 of those 325,000+ words are the actual book. The rest of the words are from letters, emails, and blog entries that I'm using as research and reference for the book. After all, having documented the past five years so thoroughly, I'm in a unique position to tell this story in very clear detail as it happened, sometimes using words I wrote at the time. Those 325,000+ words will mostly get eaten up as I progress through the years. The first couple of chapters covered a lot of material because it's meant as an overview, the "set up" if you will. (That is, if you consider the rest the "punch line".) It wouldn't make sense to start the book with "I lost my wife" without telling you how much Rosa meant to me at the time, would it? So, I cover 30 years in the first two chapters, three in the next, and just a few months in each chapter thereafter, with the final chapters spanning mere weeks. Heck, the chapter about the Grand Canyon will cover only one day!

So, now I begin the descent and tell about the end of my marriage - a story many of you know. Wish me luck...