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The Stupid 365 Project, Day 3: El Sombrero October 3rd, 2010 
Boy. Yesterday was only two days in, and people were already carping. “Use the 300 words a day to write the new Poke,” says Gary. Laren’s on me about using two subjects in a single blog, which suggests that he shares my skepticism about whether I’ll be able to sustain this mindless marathon. Pat says, “I’d rather you wrote 300 words a day on a new Simeon Grist novel . . .” She also says, ” . . .everybody and his dog is writing about writing. Maybe you could just tell us about your life.” Breathe deeply, Tim. They mean well. Gary, Poke is taking a break right now. He and the family continue to marinate in Bangkok, and I make notes on them from time to time. I know what the next two books are, and they’ve even got tentative titles: The Fear Merchant and The Growing-Younger Man. But it’ll be a bit before I begin to write them, because (are you there, Pat?) I’m writing a new Simeon, Pulped, which is unlike anything I’ve ever written. It’s going to be published as an e-book because the first three Simeons are doing so well on Amazon and there’s obviously a readership, hard as that is for me to believe. Okay, Pat, you want my life? I’ll give you my life, a childhood incident that scarred me for years. It even has a title: El Sombrero When I was in elementary school, there were no intercultural sensitivity issues because there were no other cultures to inter with. Where I lived, we were all white except for the relatively small number of us who were black, and we all spoke English, with varying degrees of proficiency and verve. What I learned about Mexico can be summed up in a single sentence, paraphrased from one of my second-grade textbooks. Mexicans used something called a tortilla instead of a spoon. There was no picture, which would have helped. There may have been Mexican restaurants where we lived back East, but my parents, who were whiter than Moby Dick, wouldn’t have frequented them. I conjured up probably hundreds of mental images of what a tortilla was and how it replaced a spoon. (Remember, I was in second grade and my experience of the world was somewhat limited.) And then I learned one more thing about Mexico: It had a dance that was really easy to do and it was danced to a catchy tune called “La Cucaracha.” My teacher either didn’t know or didn’t think it was necessary for us to know what a cucaracha was. So, in the darkness fate moved its heavy hand and the Mexican Hat Dance was selected as the second grade’s contribution to the annual School Show, which — now that I think about it — must have seemed decades long to the parents who suffered through it. The choice of the dance meant I needed a sombrero (I’ll dispense with the italics), and that, in turn, gave my mother a jolt of inspiration. My mother dabbled in oils. She painted either the sea at night under a full moon or vaguely Hawaiian mountains, all steep green slopes and pillows of fog under a sky the piercing blue-green of a Korean pottery glaze. And, once in a while, she did a still life because fruit and vegetables don’t move around much. So, in an imaginative breakthrough, my mother decided to paint a still-life on the front of my sombrero. She decided to do this on the night before the show, and oil paints take a while to dry. When I got on the bus the next day, wearing my gaily decorated sombrero, I was in the center of a pungent sphere of linseed-oil fumes that cleared the seats on either side of me, in front, and behind. That was the first indication that the day was going subtly wrong. And then came the performance. All the boys were wearing sombreros, although none was as distinctive or as aromatic as mine, and all the girls’ mothers had gotten them white peasant blouses from somewhere, perhaps a failing little boutique called La Peasante or something, because I never saw another peasant blouse again as long as I lived there. We second-graders gathered backstage in our orderly little lines, the music started — da dump, da dump, da dadadada da dump — and we trotted into the light for our moment of glory. It was immediately obvious that we should have rehearsed the dance with our sombreros on. The hats made the boys a good four inches taller, and when boys and girls faced each other so the girl could curtsy and the boy could bow, there was a lot of whoops, and a couple of hats hit the stage, knocked off when they brushed against the front of some little girl. My sombrero was fastened beneath my chin, and I suppose I was congratulating myself on not losing my hat as I moved down the line to the next little girl, and the girl to whom I’d just bowed began to cry. I bowed to Girl Number Two and looked over my shoulder at Girl Number One as Girl Number Two also started to cry. They both had vivid streaks of oil paint in the most primary of colors down the front of their white peasant blouses. From then on, things got blurry. I remember girls scurrying backwards to get away from me as it was my turn to bow to them and seeing them bump into the kids behind them, and one or two kids doing impromptu sits on the stage, and then someone in the audience (me, if I’d been old enough and fortunate enough to have been sitting there watching instead of up there dancing) began to laugh. Laughter is, of course, contagious. Even the boys onstage were laughing. The girls were not. I was not. Kids teased me about that damn hat until fourth grade, when something much worse happened — but if you think I’m wasting that now, you’re nuts. 362 days to go. You want life? I’ll give you life. Life at its rawest.
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But you might find of interest this article about Barnes & Noble setting up their program for authors to “self-publish” in e-book form: