confessions of a book slut

Before Google became the Kleenex of research, there was the library. I logged many a happy, lost weekend at the library, over the years. Scavenger-hunting and blazing trails spiked with non-sequiturs.

The tactile practice of coveting books and periodicals chock full of ideas and passion, and then carrying those lovely tomes in a stack, under my arm or, when the bulk grew too cumbersome, cradling the books with both arms, was a type of gluttony I rarely felt guilty about.

But, alas, like so many other writers, I rarely venture into those hallowed halls these days, now that most magazines and facts are so easily accessed via Internet without leaving my easy chair.

Recently, I had a retro afternoon. A reunion with the 3rd floor (north) of the Central Library. I ventured into the stacks for books on a specific activity, and much to my pleasure, was treated to two-and-a-half shelves of material on the subject. Giddy with finder’s glee, I investigated material for another project, and found several books on the second floor, in the art stacks.

I left the library with an armload of meaty books—some of the coffee table variety, even! I took them all to bed with me, too. Such indulgence! I pored over one after the other until I dozed off, finally, after midnight.

I love waking up with a reading hangover!

out with the old...

You just have to love a Christmas tree that fits inside a yard debris bag, right? Damn, I’m so happy to have all this behind me. My oldest son (who turned 20 yesterday), just zoomed off to his University town, and that means the holidays are officially over.

Today my writing group broke with tradition, and we met in the morning. It was a lovely way to start the day—centered around story, craft. On the heels of our group, I tinkered some with Unkiss Me, which was rather unsettling, because I’m working on a chapter that focuses on unpacking a particular aspect of male anatomy. You know which aspect I’m talking about, I trust.

In revving up the sex, I’m getting pretty concrete. Read: there are no throbbing members and heaving bodices. No wink-wink innuendos. Rather, I’m exploring sexuality under a microscope, from a variety of perspectives.

I have a great resource for this, too. The Joy of Writing Sex by Elizabeth Benedict. For the remainder of my “downtime,” before regular life resumes on January 2nd, I’m going to set up my laboratory and get busy. Namaste.

the day after

Christmas was a long, slow ride through hell. Beginning, even, with the goddamn eggs Benedict (completely forgot the Canadian bacon). What is that Bukowski line? “It’s not the big things that send a man to the mad house...”

Navigating the chasm teeming with loneliness and failure was exhausting and heartbreaking. I now get why people kill themselves during the holidays.

And yet, there was no way around it. My seven-year-old was 300 miles away, out scrambling cliffs and celebrating Christmas with his father and his father’s friends. And trying to orchestrate reunion, just like those twins in Parent Trap. He called me a couple of times, finishing his conversation with: “Papa really wants to talk to you!” And meanwhile, my ex-husband had carefully removed himself for the duration of the phone call but was told: “Mama really wants to talk to you!”

And then there was: “Are you going to come out here? I miss you so, so much.” And his litany of parting shots: “Miss you, love you, miss you, love you…” OCD runs in the family, so I’m trying to figure out if my little boy is blurting this mantra with quantifying rules, worried that if he misses a ‘love you’ I will die.

That my ex-husband continues to hope that our divorce is a temporary condition was problematic as well. His sentimental, beseeching voice. The sweet talk. The memories. Fifteen years of tumultuously loving this man, and writing about that love: I didn’t just divorce a husband, I banished a muse.

My guilt and self-hatred was in full swing all day. Not only was I questioning my marital dissolution, but many of my recent coping mechanisms, also. The solace-seeking, diversional, semi self-destructive impulses I’ve employed to get me out of hell—even if just for an hour or two. But everything’s closed on Christmas.

Except the movie house.

I went to see the French thriller Bridesmaid, and I was the only person there. My usual sure-fire antidote for torturous self-slaying failed me, and I sat in the cavernous theater aware mostly of the empty seats around me. Earlier, I’d taken a walk through the park and happened by great clots of families healthily striding, their cohesive chit-chat settled on my ears like wind chimes. It was pleasant, until it started competing with the abnegating voice in my head.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t have options. I turned down offers of companionship throughout the day mainly because, even though I wanted to jump off a bridge, I sensed that getting through this Christmas alone might lead to a cure.

Where it brought me in the short run, was to poetry. I pulled one of the poison spears from my chest and fashioned it into a bad poem. Concretizing free-floating self-loathing by thrusting it into form actually was a great exercise. And probably healthier than the two hours I spent on the phone with my ex-husband as Christmas turned into the day after Christmas.

tradition

A decade or so ago, my father was married to a crazy woman who left him for someone she met in a chat room. I think the chat room concerned lhasa apsos, but it could have been mastiffs. Anyway, she got a bunch of his dough and most of his retirement, and we lost a colorful, brilliant and somewhat diabolical relative.

As evil as she was, she was the best gift-giver ever. Her ability to crawl inside someone’s soul was part of how she undid people, but the talent, when she didn’t use it for treachery, supplied us with presents that still, ten, fifteen years later, hit the highest of marks for form and function, both.

Case in point, my Joy of Cooking, which I consult on every single holiday and dinner party I host. Tomorrow is Christmas, and that means page 55, via page 130—hollandaise sauce and eggs Benedict, respectively.

The eggs Benedict thing involves all sorts of filial connective tissue. The ritual began on the morning of August 1^st, 1987, which was the last birthday of my first husband’s short life. He was 25, and my mother came to visit and prepared the dish, along with mimosas, and we indulged in our brunch while watching our little baby, Sam, crawl around the living room.

Over the years, the dish somehow jumped tracks and aligned with Christmas morning instead of birthdays, but I never could get that hollandaise to taste right without my mother’s help—that is until my dad’s crazy wife bestowed that cooking tome upon me.

The fabric of my family is somewhat tapestry-like (as opposed to, say, a sweater of Merino wool). Our rituals are abstract and accidental (like right now, my daughter has departed for a candlelight service with a friend, and my son and I have opted for the comforts of home, high-speed Internet and the fireplace), but tomorrow morning, by God, we’ll get out the blender, the butter, the eggs. A little lemon juice, pepper sauce, and a stained and dog-eared copy of Joy of Cooking, because some things you just can’t wing.

conundrum of the day

More trees today. More trails. I worked on a paragraph. Over and over I recast it, refined it. I am editing my novel and I am editing my life and I am trying to go against my whapping-paint-against-the-wall nature and take my time.

Practice impulse control.

Untangle, rest, check it out from a different angle.

All this flies in the face of my other objective, which is to have more fun. Lighten up. How can one go deep and lighten up at the same time?

Helmut and Erna and their legacy

The thought snuck up on me today, on this, yet another “shortest day of the year,” that I am only 20 years younger than my grandfather was when he died on the table during open heart surgery. I am 20 winter solstices away from that age. Sobering, but oddly, not in a bad way.

Meanwhile his wife, my grandmother, rots slowly in a nursing home. She is 94.

I think about them more and more, those two— my Oma and Opa. I think about them especially, having recently closed the book on an 11-year marriage.

When my sister and I were children, we spent many summers with our grandparents. They were Austrian immigrants, and their house (where my sister and her family now reside) was appointed with all manner of Viennese Bourgeois mixed with Tyrolean kitsch. The cut crystal. The gleaming Steinway. Shelf upon shelf of Hummels. The kitchen smelled of sour cherry jam spread on warm toast, and that smell mingled with oil paints and turpentine from my Oma’s back porch studio adjoining the kitchen. Separating a formal dining room from that studio stood a built-in, floor-to-ceiling teacup display case. On every conceivable occasion, it was my grandfather’s habit to present to his wife a fancy teacup and saucer.

My grandfather’s office was separated from the house by a garage, and at the noon hour you could hear the series of doors opening and closing as he made his way over for lunch. My grandmother would serve him a frankfurter, some brown bread. A little cucumber salad. Opa wolfed this down before striding over to the piano in the parlor, where he spent the remainder of his break time playing mostly original music. Stuff he’d spent decades composing, erasing, composing.

My grandfather was a physician by trade, but his artistic nature burst cholerically from every cell. He sketched, he wrote poetry. He built my sister and me a lavish, multi-story dollhouse with every miniature refinement found in their own home: little Victorian chairs, cabinets festooned with bric-a-brac. When my father, their only child, was a boy, the result of Opa’s obsessive handiwork was a railroad masterpiece spanning half the cellar. Not wanting to leave anything out, Opa fashioned forests and mountains. A village bisected by a paper mache creek. The railroad sat in grave disrepair during my childhood, finally becoming permanently disassembled by my sister and her husband just last year.

My grandmother was a temperamental hausfrau, ruled and defined by the degree to which she felt uncherished. Her sole creative outlet, painting pictures that became more and more abstract as she aged, was not embarked upon until she reached 50. Compelled by duty to engross herself in quotidian tasks she abhorred, she became as brittle as her teacup collection, over the years. And yet. And yet. At 94, she somehow continues to supply the necessary trickle of blood to her wounded heart.

That my grandparents had a horrible marriage intrudes vaguely on my recollections of them. (Much like the ever-present tinge of turpentine still permeates their house.) The sharp bickering between them, cast in German aspersions, is far less defining to me than their strong personalities. My grandfather clearly could not bear to spend time in the same room with his difficult wife—a woman who has outlived him by over 30 years, keeping the same middle-aged likeness of him in a gilt-frame within arm’s reach of her bedside. But still, I continue to think of them as a pair of bookends—Oma riding shotgun and Opa trying to escape.

So here, on yet another winter solstice day, I have more humanness than I can easily contain. I am feeling deeply part of a tribe, and less alone, actually, than usual. I feel weirdly connected to my dead grandfather, a man whose heart gave out from over-use. I feel, in turn, playful, adventurous, contemplative and, well, I’m just going to say it—sexy. It’s part unfettered liberation (hard won and playing, always, with guilt), and part flagrant gratitude. In short, I guess I just I’m just having a good day—even us dark, over-thinkers can have those now and again.

Addendum: On a solstice walk through Forest Park this afternoon, my grandfather's presence loomed even closer. That he would have loved the park, that he died decades before I moved to Portland, and that my grandmother, upon hearing that I'd moved to Oregon muttered only, "But Washington is so much more beautiful!" all seemed a harmonious and fitting alignment to my solo trudge. Oddly, a freshly fallen monolithic fir (the last storm sent this puppy crashing down over the path, to rest atop a tree that had fallen in a storm a couple of years ago) gave me pause. As did a brand new bench, memorializing someone young. The epitaph from RW Emerson read: "The measure of a life is not in its length, but in its depth."

the mighty winds

A storm blew through Portland the other day. Eighty-mile-an-hour gusts uprooted trees and splintered massive branches. Thousands of families lost power for days—hundreds in my neighborhood alone. For 24 hours, the Willamette Valley was cut off from points east and west by hurricane and then blizzard conditions in the Cascades and Coast Range.

Typically, winter in the Pacific Northwest is a long, slow, damp affair. One gray, soppy day after another, with the occasional sanguine burst of sun. Much the same as our population, come to think of it. We mellow, flannel-clad fern-dwellers, we like our microbrews and our bitter, dark coffee and our moss-flecked roofs. But every once in a while, we crack open and wreak havoc with the status quo. Unfortunately, much of our press has to do with scandal and misfortune—Tonya Harding, Bob Packwood, Neil Goldschmidt, hypothermic hikers. (My father loves to forward me e-mails linking to yet another Oregonian in disgrace, letting me know, I guess, that he’s keeping an eye out for me—or on me, perhaps?)

As a culture, we’re pretty young out here in the upper left. I’d like to think we’re still mulching our art. Building up compost to sustain generations of artistic fertility. We’re not as angst-ridden or intellectually nimble as our eastern counterparts; instead, we’re rather cautious and particular. Kinder, perhaps? Less convinced of our momentary authority?

I watch people a lot. Lately, I’ve been spying on families. Couples and their body language. Their roles as they march through town. Here’s what I’m noticing; the women are getting more frantic, and the men are becoming phlegmatic. Okay, okay, maybe I’m projecting. I’ll allow that that may be the case. But. Time after time, day after day, I see a little family embarking on, say, a bakery. The dad is carrying one of the children in his arms, while the mom is multi-tasking to beat the band. She orders, then explains to the whining kids why she ordered as she did. She procures the cutlery, the napkins. She hunts and gathers extra chairs from nearby tables. She flies around the room, leaping up from the table for cups of water or bar towels to mop up spills. Meanwhile, dad is trying to extract the kid from a front pack, or take off its parka, or keep the kid from tearing open yet another creamer. Dad looks war-weary. Exhausted. Okay, I’ll say it—downright catatonic.

Here’s a couple I witnessed on an elevator yesterday. It was one of those security elevators, where you have to insert your room card into a slot before the elevator will move. The woman was explaining all this to her clueless partner. He asked her if she had the room card. He’d forgotten his. He asked her if she remembered their room number, he did not. He asked her if she’d made reservations for dinner, and when. She attended each query with clear, measured answers, as though guiding a feeble-minded octogenarian.

My own son, on vacation from college, fell asleep with an empty saucepan of macaroni-and-cheese by his bed the other night. When he awoke, at noon, I offered a moderate amount of opprobrium, and asked him what his girlfriend thinks of his slacker behavior. I asked him what was up with these over-achieving women and their lackadaisical sweethearts. (His gf, by the way, is an 'A’ student, pre-med, speaks three languages fluently, and busies herself with all manner of domestic tasks—like cooking my son dinner and baking him pies—betwixt bouts of studying.)

“What’s the attraction?” I asked my son, with no rhetorical intent.

“I guess it helps them feel better about themselves,” my son mused, in all seriousness. He cited several examples—his Halo-playing poker pals seem to have found themselves in similarly fortunate circumstances.

But then again, I know my boy has come through in certain ways for his young woman. He is gentle, sweet and caring. Those dimples in his cheeks, that inability to be anything other than what he is. His overwhelming comfort with himself. All that calm-in-the-storm that exudes from his conservative push toward grace.

So therein lies my attraction to Portland, maybe? You can’t help but find balance here. The city is awash with mitigation. That, and tree debris.

eavesdrop of the day

Young woman talking to young man while waiting for an elevator:

Woman: I don't really get that expression 'bite me.'
Man: You don't?
Woman: Yeah, like when I'm really pissed off at someone, I'd like to bite them...not have them bite me.

it's coming on christmas

…they’re cuttin’ down trees.

In creating traditions which might, at some point, become my children’s oral history, I’m feeling my way, Braille-like, around the edges of common culture. Being agnostic, I have the pleasure of embracing it all, or none of it. Different years I’ve dipped into our Catholic heritage for music, incense and nativity. Sometimes the holiday finds us at the local progressive and predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Church (one year one of my kids had a role in a Christmas play there). We go to Chanukah parties. We attend holiday theatre. Occasionally we careen around all of it and opt for Christmas Day blockbusters, like Titanic.

This year, I’m all for minimalism. The excesses of the season just feel plain wrong to me. The other day my friend David invited me to a preview of a local Christmas production, Mars on Life: Susannah Mars. At intermission we sort of shrugged our collective shoulders eyeing each other for context. The show was okay, but somehow fell flat at inspiring any sort of emotion or resonance for either of us. David asked if I’d noticed a dearth of Christmas spirit about. Until that moment, I hadn’t thought of it that way. The usual lights were lit along the West Hills. The infamous martini glass, strands of colored baubles, lots of bare branches festooned in white twinkle.

But it was David’s feeling that there might be ennui, a down-spirit this year, and that this feeling might be tied to the protracted war and the global mess we can no longer be blind to.

Gulp.

I have to admit to a sense of things coming unraveled. Not just for me personally (though, that’s certainly been true of this past year), but for humanity, generally. Greed, fear, hate. It all abounds. Like three-year-old children, many of us begin to cling to the familiar, and embrace destructive patterns that keep the raw chaos of it all at bay. Perhaps we go on buying sprees, taking pleasure in holding a new jewel or piece of cashmere for just that period of time before new fades into repertoire.

But others search for meaning within their passions. This is potentially a great time for art. Art that is difficult to embrace, in particular, because it drives us to look at what we should be looking at, with a part of our humanity that feels somewhat dangerous. Now is the time, more than ever, to open our eyes, our hearts, our spirits. Eschew the predictable and well-trod for the unblazed.

My friend Rachel and I took our two little boys into the woods Friday, in search of Christmas trees. We trekked about the forest, climbed some hills, found a bit of snow to sled down and eventually sawed through a couple of spindly trunks. Mine, fittingly a hemlock, is now supported with chopsticks so it stands straight in its Rubbermaid bin in a corner of my living room. Two strands of light, a clip-on bird and a few glass balls is all the decorating I’m doing this year. My kids are appalled, even the one who helped fell the tree. But they’ve chalked it up to an acceptable eccentricity, and are willing to embrace my need to follow spirit instead of conjure it. We’ll see how they feel about a Christmas Eve dinner of sushi and miso soup.

chuck lit to die for

This past weekend, I had the great privilege of looking over a typeset copy of Rant, Chuck Palahniuk’s forthcoming book. I was perusing said book for typos and such—a proofreading job. But. I have to say, I think this book is among his finest. Even as compared with Fight Club.

For one thing, the book is unapologetically complex. There is wrinkled chronology that actually works, there are metaphoric parallels to renowned social and political “race and resettlement” horrors. Then there’s the whole liminality motif. The guy’s a genius, and that’s enough said about that!

If you don’t want to wait until the release of Rant (sometime in 2007), for new stuff from Palahniuk, grab a copy of Monica Drake’s Clown Girl, out in January by Hawthorne Books. Palahniuk wrote the intro. That, and Monica’s book is terrific. You can read more about it here.

eavesdrop of the day

In a women's clothing store--one perplexed woman to the salesperson:

"I know that cows stand in the rain, I just don't buy the concept of washable suede."

sweat in the city

After a couple of years doing the marionette thing, happily bending words behind the curtain, I’ve again been seduced by the allure of the byline. Along with Community News features, beginning in January, I’ll be writing a column for the regional magazine, The Northwest Women’s Journal.

The premise for the column concerns my quest for balance. Mitigating the hours and hours I spend kneading language into conceit. So, in desperation and because a business opportunity presented itself, I began Pilates classes, hating every minute for a solid month. Who knew I was that crooked, that weak, that flabby?

Because I have to grope every experience I have into philosophical bullet points, I naturally began to write about my frustration at being so completely out of touch with my body. A month into the classes, though, something shifted. A body memory thing that had nothing to do with my noggin. I have begun to understand that illusive aphorism about “listening to your body.” Even though I’ve been writing a yoga studio’s newsletter for a year, that crap always sounded like New Age gobbledy-gook. I never absorbed it, scoffing instead: Bodies don’t talk! That’s a fallacy!

Surprise! Yes, Virginia, your body does talk! It’s just that my brain has been bossing my body around so long, I was unable to hear it. So now I listen, and I hear these lovely quotidian whispers which translate into tiny actions: Instinctively sitting up straighter when my shoulders start to burn from too much writing. Being aware of slouching, standing crooked and leaning on my hip to indulge my slight scoliosis.

So I’m going to be writing a column, and the column will most likely be called Sweat in the City. It’ll have that Keep Portland Weird regional flavor, of course. Each month I’ll investigate movement opportunities, Pacific Northwest versions of exercise—stuff we all have in access to in this fecund, young, and somewhat outré metropolitan region.

Look for the column starting in January. Better yet, pick up a copy when the December issue of The Northwest Women's Journal hits the stands. It’s available free at most public libraries and various outlets around town.

money money money money

There is the faintest dusting of snow this morning. A skin of white on the roof of my garage. Branches are bare. Gray is the pervading color all around. The smarter of the squirrels have foraged and now sit fatly wherever it is squirrels hole up in these parts. The dumber of the squirrels check their bank accounts hourly online, hoping that their supply of acorns will last through the week.

And so it goes.

I’m a dumb squirrel this winter. Juggling various accounts, hoping to avoid major credit card debt. My income comes from a pastiche of sources. The only dependable part just barely covers my myriad mortgages. Everything else trickles in here and there like faucets turned to drip during a cold snap. An editing job here, a writing job there. Occasional project management. The journalism I do pays roughly seven cents a word. Translated to an hourly wage parking meters make more money than I do.

Strangely though, (and I’ve heard this from many starving yet tenacious artist types) just when I’m down to husks, a check or an opportunity arrives. A fat editing job or a grant. Hardly a windfall, but miraculous, none-the-less.

And at 3 a.m. money woes seem to loop ever more prominently. You wake up for no apparent reason, and before you can sink back into your dreams, the black tape of hell binds you, jerking you into cul de sacs of doom: the what-if machine with lead boots and empty pockets. You slip down the hierarchy into Maslow’s inferno. No longer reaching for that crag wherein lies self-actualization, no, it’s down to the basics. Food, shelter and so on.

Luckily the doom loop sleeps during daylight hours. (Like a vampire.) Financial strategies present themselves. Belt-tightening that looked tortuous in the middle of the night morph into obvious solutions.

As a writer, I’ll never be wealthy. And as a dumb squirrel, I’ll tend toward modest piles of acorns. But most important is the gift to see money for what it really is: abstraction once removed from a thing in and of itself. I know how to find it if I have to. I know how to work. I like the view from the high branch though. Especially now that the flurries have picked up.

thanksgiving in whoville

One of my favorite holiday programs is the Grinch. I know I’m not alone in this. Seuss’s redemption of that miserly, lonely, avarice-ridden hill-dweller is everything you need from a parable. Holidays offer a glimpse at the measure of a heart. They can act as electron microscopes and cosmic telescopes, both.

As in musical composition, capacity for crescendo is informed by emotional and artistic preparation. And by artistic preparation, I guess I’m edging into the territory of one’s particular talent for reality.

The better one’s talent for reality, the better able one is to mitigate the mundane with nuance, joie de vivre, what-have-you. And the more able one is to put oneself into the provincial task of daily living, the less likely that person will be to dive off the board during a party, or leave one feeling bereft.

I’m not a naturally social person. I have more than one quality in common with the mean old Grinch on the mountain. It’s not that I begrudge, it’s more like I expect disaster. I anticipate failure. This often leads me to a brand of inertia that looks like misanthropy. I have often worried that I might pass this tentativeness onto my children.

That’s why I invited a bunch of people over for Thanksgiving dinner. With Sam and Maggie now living elsewhere, the stakes are higher. I can either claim them during these sorts of occasions, or risk losing them to households with better socially functioning people.

Now past the initial post-divorced months, I’ve been experiencing a heightened sense of reality. I am finding myself, as they say. Rediscovering a capacity for fun, for imperfection, for texture.

I’m a sap, by the way. I save weird stuff: pregnancy sticks that culminated in the birth of my kids, reconnaissance maps from childhood spy games, my college ID. I have my two degree-announcing graduation tassels obscuring a small snapshot of my first wedding—a Catholic affair complete with a crucified Christ as backdrop—sitting just above my line of vision as I type this. My environment is replete with stock. That I love, have loved, will continue to love is three-dimensionally manifest.

So, the sentimental mommy puts it all out there for a big, old-fashioned secular bash, jams the house full of people. Beloved people. And the energy is rich, textural, human. My children are engaged, all three of them, in being with people, eating hearty fair, being grateful, in their way.

What I’m getting at is this. I now have overwhelming evidence to suggest that my children are healthy, reasonably happy, and not given to addiction born of deprivation. They are comfortable in their skins. Thanksgiving helped me see this, and for that, I am deeply grateful.

But more to the point, I am comfortably moving into my life as a single woman, a mother, a writer, a hostess—whatever. So, bring on the holidays. Get me some mistletoe.

eavesdrop of the day

Overheard at Pioneer Square. Dreadlocked young man with several buddies:
“I have a policy not to date anyone with the same name as my sister.”

Laughter from compatriots

“And it sucks, because, like, I have a lot of sisters.”

epistemological roulette

Seems that everything I’m reading these days, and all the films I’m viewing, have chaos as their subtext. Of course, if you’ve been following the posts on this blog, you’ll note that chaos has been a recurring theme for yours truly as well.

On Friday I eagerly ventured downtown for the first showing of “Little Children,” the Todd Fields movie based on the novel of the same title by Tom Perrotta. Much of what resonated for me in this film had to do with the notion of desire and boundaries. Not just sexually, either.

When I think about moving forward, whether in romantic conquests or professional ones, there is always this foggy middle ground where projection, myth, presumption and fear reside. So many of our obstacles are visible only to us. We tell ourselves stories to keep from falling off the ledge.

Last weekend I found myself at an impromptu party: small space, lots of warm bodies, free-flowing wine. Set up for moral depravity, if ever there was one. The collective of folks in attendance were all, seemingly, at huge crossroads, considering personal epistemologies. Out of nowhere a snippet of George Eliot found its way into my hands. A Xeroxed copy of a passage from The Mill on the Floss. Something about “the great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty.” Going after what you want, versus remaining duty-bound to that which you have pledged.

At the party, truth looked like, “Who I am is someone who lives life on her own terms, in defiance of maxims and in defiance of the common script.” But by Sunday (always the Sabbath we review and regret) small tendrils formed and reinstalled the framework. The cast of characters returned: projection courting fear building to resignation. Life on one’s own terms is fine, long as the kids have their cereal, and the leaves are raked into piles, and all the recycling is out at the curb by garbage day.

when worlds collide

Here’s a stunning example of genre-bending, and the surrounding conversation. This Portland writer I know, Yuvi Zalkow, submitted a first-person prose piece to an online journal with an other-than fiction focus. The reason he did so was that the piece read like nonfiction, in that it was filled with declarations and facts that touched on the subject at hand. That, and he's an admitted submission slut! Seriously, though, he thought the journal's audience would give him a good read. His gamble paid off.

The comments on his piece touched off a spirited discussion of craft vs information. Most commenters made reference to the trial of the protagonist (who was female) and critiqued the form in which Yuvi (who is male) chose to present the story. If you have a few minutes, read the piece and meander through these postings. One caveat, the subject matter is, er, sensitive.

the numbers

Number of cities I’ve lived in 10
Number of dwellings I’ve lived in 24
Jobs I’ve had where I’ve received a regular payroll check 9
Pounds of manuscripts in my basement right now 28
Novels I’ve written at least two drafts of 3
Novels I’ve published 0
Short stories I’ve written 38
Short stories I’ve published 11
Degrees I have 2
Money I’ve made in my whole life from writing (in $) 91,528
Money I’ve made in my whole life from non-writing (in $) 58,263
Money I’ve spent on my education and writing-related endeavors (in $) 101,600

the d word and the e word

To continue in the solipsistic vein I seem to have established, I need to visit a quality that’s always eluded me. Ever since I was a pixie-haired youngster, I’ve dodged discipline in favor of the sly sprint.

With writing, I’ve often abandoned the page for weeks, only to hole up, spending a weekend in obsessive wordsmithing. Which would be fine, I think, if it weren’t accompanied by grandiose plans—calendarized promises: if I keep up this pace, I’ll have a manuscript by Christmas!

A month ago I popped one of my daughter’s abandoned Ritalins, thinking maybe the chemical imperative therein would keep me on task. The resulting effect was several hours of meth-like monkey mind, plunging with great resolve into the mundanist of chores. It was counter to creativity, but I did, finally, vacuum out the minivan!

My ex-husband (and yes, I know he’s reading this) perpetually accuses me of fickleness and erratic mood swings. Like anyone confronted with labels that tend to invite dismissiveness (e.g. since I’m erratic he’s not accountable for his behavior because no matter what he does my response will be dictated by biochemistry) I balk. True, he often got the worst of me (much like a parent gets to absorb their child’s tantrums while the teacher sees only an earnest, well-behaved kid), but I’ve come to conclude that my lack of resolve has merely become more transparent due to that good old Second Law of Thermodynamics. That’s the one about dissipated potential--you know, entropy.

Pardon my lapse into empiricism—it’s a symptom of my affliction—but entropy accurately describes the tendency of matter to achieve chaos. In other words, it gets harder and harder to pull off the successful sprint when 90% of the time I’m going with the flow in my bumbling, make-it-up-as-I-go-along way.

This morning, for instance, as I poured a packet of instant oatmeal into my son’s bowl, I wondered about all the people I know who would read the directions on the packet and employ a measuring cup for the exact amount of boiling water to add to the mix. I could only really confirm one person (the sister-in-law of my first marriage, a military wife), but it got me thinking about the fact that last month I billed 20 hours to a company who hired me to project manage the inclusion of how-to-make-instant-stuffing videos on their website.

Not only do I not measure water into oatmeal, I’ve never measured coffee, soup ingredients, laundry detergent or oil when I’ve had the occasion to dump some into my engine. Me, who holds a Bachelor’s in Food Science, prefers to wing it with muffins, pancakes, enchiladas and the Thanksgiving turkey. I suppose that’s why I’m only sometimes a good cook. Like when Mercury isn’t in retrograde or during some other metaphysically favorable condition.

So now, at age 45, I’m inviting intention into my life. No, not inviting. That would be the old Suzy Vitello. I’m painfully choosing (not always, but often) routines that fight entropy. I, the most phlegmatic chick on the planet, have engaged in twice-weekly Pilates sessions for two solid months. And they’re hard! And now, I actually look, well not forward to them, but toward them; my body has developed Pavlovian expectations that must be fulfilled. That, and I’m eating salads every day and miniscule portions of a variety of saltless foods. I’ve lost ten pounds, and that’s good; high blood pressure runs in my family (more evidence of the second Law).

And what about writing? What about writing and not answering email and not doing billable hours writing, and not allowing my mind to wander into the stinky cage of the monkey mind? I know the answer to that, and it’s even harder than Pilates.

the uncrackable code

The first thing I remember writing, ever, was a prosaic poem in the third grade. It was a sing-song one-off tribute to spring, something I popped out like an after-supper burp. Actually, I don’t remember the actual writing of it. What I do remember was the critique and the attention. The critique came from my mother, who was in the midst of acquiring a low-residency Goddard degree, and therefore attuned to the vagaries of art.

She was accurately disappointed with my poem, pointing out the dangers of cliché and received text. Only where I attempted a little onomatopoeia [tip-tap of raindrops] did my mother issue a nod. “Explore this direction a bit more,” I think is what she told me.

Conversely, my teacher Mrs. Engle (or was it Angle?) read my banal verse in front of the class, showered me with praise, and crowned me poetess of the year. Go figure.

Thus began my acknowledgement of the range of subjective consideration of the written word. And still, three decades later, I’m wrestling with notions of “good” and “popular” when it comes to production.

I hesitate to write the next thing here, which might come off sounding a tad sour-grapey. If I express it in its raw form it would come out something like: “Yeah, I can write crap people will eat up, I just choose not to.” Considering this a bit more thoroughly, I realize it’s not true. I have come to a point in my life where I simply can’t tap into the expectations of the normative world. I am at a loss to understand, for instance, the popularity of inane television shows like “Grey’s Anatomy.” The wholesale white-washing of emotional complexity, reduced to tired, predictable tropes. That’s what America craves, apparently.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve delved back into writing community news. I need to consider audience more than I have been. I must face my arrogant notions of art every time I tap my keyboard. And, acknowledge that if I was as deft at my craft as I need to be, I would have an audience, but, alas, I do not. It’s sobering. Very sobering.