Sold a “Cheesesteak.”
The buyer wore a dark baseball cap, bill to the front. His couple days black-grey stubble made him eligible for slotting anywhere on the café’s socio-economic spectrum. He asked about each of my books and remarked on my jacket quotes from Crumb and Ram Dass, which narrowed nothing.
Turned out he had been born in Alameda, attended UC, lives in Berkeley, and has two kids at Berkeley High. Said he worked in “software,” “website design,” “product management.”
Successfully, was my impression.
He said he had been coming to the café for 30 years, but I had never seen him before. Leonard who comes nearly every day said he had never seen him either.
FBI? CIA? Operative for a state too deep below the surface to be known?
A sale is a sale.
In other news…
1.) Neither of my pieces that were about to come out have come out and the one that has come out is in a volume that has not yet reached me, though presumably it was mailed a month ago. (Meanwhile I am putting final tweaks on two more pieces – one a “poem” – and accepted a request from a collector/connoisseur of weird cartoonists to look at/review a graphic novel by someone he knows – and I don’t.
2.) As for our anthology, we have (1) figured out how to number its pages, which means (2) we can finalize our Table of Contents; but (3) our first attempt (a) omitted one piece entirely and (b) transitioned an “Alan” into an “Ann.” We still don’t know how to format; our printer is up in the air; and we are (good-spiritedly) squabbling about back cover content, the masthead, attrributions of the previously published, word limits on contributors’ notes, and distribution through Amazon.
It occasionally causes lost sleep.
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.