More Faulkner, my time at the USPS, and a birthday.

Still reading the Faulkner bio---it is WILLIAM FAULKNER, THE MAN AND THE ARTIST by Stephen B. Oates. Terrific biography, I'm breezing through it and have already put THE SOUND AND THE FURY on hold at the library.

One of the more interesting things is that Faulkner was quite the layabout in his youth, causing quite the stir in his Mississippi hometown. At one point, he had a position as postmaster of the Ole Miss post office, but "read and wrote poetry on the job, sold stamps and sorted mail only when he felt like it. . . and generally went about with a cheerful disregard for his duties and his customers." Sounds like the typical postal worker to me, I guess Faulkner was sort of a pioneer.

I worked for the Quasi-Governmental Corporation with a Reputation for Workplace Violence for nearly seven years, and sadly it is still the place where I had the most career success. At one point I put in for a supervisor training program, but did not get it due to lack of experience as well as difficulty with the government format of writing for job applications. Glad I didn't do it at this point, I don't think I would have done well, and I would not want to be like all the other poor supervisors I had while I was there.

There were some real characters there, and every so often I attempt to write something or other about the place, but I have never been able to stick with it for long. But each time I feel like it gets a little more workable, and I'm hoping eventually I may pull it off. I think sometimes the problem is that the reality seems too unbelievable, which is a common problem when you're writing about true events.

Happy 38th birthday today [March 29] to my cousin, a Major in the Air Force. We were pretty close as kids, more like brothers, really. I had not seen him for some time but we got together again last year [for a sad occasion, unfortunately, a death in the family] and talked for a long bit. One of the things he said seemed to me like a perfect line to use in either a poem or story, but I am perplexed about how to use it. I continue to work on it...and of course I won't say what it is until I do figure it out!