the graceful plumber

Following Monica's advice, I've crafted up a couple of chapbooks. Two-and-a-half hours at Kinko's trying to format my Microsoft Office Publisher document in such a way as to be able to mass-produce it in booklet form, front-and-back.

Sort of a fun, self-promotional adventure, but for the fact that my 8-yr old was in tow and flinging himself on the ground every five minutes in a cry of abject boredom. It got really fun when he got somewhat tangled in the myriad hose-sized cords webbing printers to power junctions.

Carson has better fine motor skills than his mother, so when it came time to glue the back of page 7 to page 8, I handed him the stick.

Road trip to Sisters tomorrow!

reading in sisters

My friend Monica Drake has invited me to “open” for her when she reads next Friday at Paulina Springs Books in Sisters, Oregon. At Monica’s suggestion, I’m going to put together a little chapbook for distribution at the bookstore. What the hell, right? Shameless self-promotion?

The perfect little arts n crafts project for the last week of summer!

voice

I’m working up a voice for my Watch Hill narrator. Sort of disaffected Fran Lebowitzish with Edie Sedgwick undertones… But with a heart. I hope.

The conceit is that the mansion must be sold. Time ticks by before the chopping block hour, and the narrator, Frances, along with Cousin Caroline, are charged with collecting, distributing and/or throwing out all the contents of the house before it is sold for “pennies on the dollar.”

So the overlay story has a bunch of squabbling, relationships going awry, and secrets revealed, while the backstory describes the sordid lives of the previous generations who inhabited the house. There’s a murder-suicide, myriad affairs, groundbreaking science and lots of booze. O, to live in New England with the filthy rich back in the era!

Off to the Wallowas for a few days, and plan to bring my notebooks!

torch

I’m tired and satisfied after a week of literary interlude. I’ve been seeking out writers lately. I miss the ol’ shop talk. You know, the pros and cons of first/third POV; alignment with memory in of itself vs the thing remembered. A robust tug-of-war focused on sentimentality in literary fiction (and you thought that was an oxymoron).

Cheryl Strayed came over tonight. She was our “visiting author” at bookgroup. She had all the gals in the palm of her hand just by being genuine, unapologetic and smart in discussing the background and circumstances of her book,Torch .

The book deals with the hardest of subjects, death and grief, and was fueled by Cheryl’s real life sudden loss of her mother at a crucial time in her life.

Torch, despite the somewhat schmaltzy chicklit book cover, is unflinching and sometimes painful to read. The myriad forms grief takes—the way sadness, rage, numbness and dissociative strategies can blossom into implosion—finds purchase as Strayed rolls along the year following her protagonist’s death from cancer.

The heart of the book is that it’s so personal. So particular. There is not one cliché, not one grab-and-go metaphor—but the universal broken heart threads throughout the story. You must read it.

what if...

My latest project is taking shape around a pit of truth. The flesh around it isn't true though. I'm wholesale inventing two characters (at the very least) upon whom plot and arc will hang, so it kinda feels like I'm putting some sort of fertilizer in the mix here. The vivid neon of Miracle Grow in an otherwise organic scaffolding.

Occasionally a situation will occur to me and I'll want to build character to accommodate the scene playing in my head. For instance, last night my 8-yr old (who I hadn't seen in over a week) wanted to play "spa" with me. He got out lotion and a comb and hair spray and wanted to "fix me up." It was one of those situations where you wonder if this will be replayed on a therapist's couch down the road.

After a few minutes of him trying to yank a comb through my rat's nest hair, I suggested he put the beauty products away and go to bed. "But I want to sleep here, with you!" he said.

"Nope."

Soon as he was in bed I thought about how this scene could play out with the not-yet-fleshed-out characters in my work. Suppose the mom really got into her little boy playing with her hair and giving her a facial, etc...? Then let's say the little boy grows up to commit infractions of a boundary-issue nature?

It's back to that old process question one hears from time to time. The difference between fiction and non-fiction? Non-fiction seeks to explore the question: "What about..." whereas fiction meanders into the territory, "What if..."

show me the invoice

The days of August. They are the dog days, are they not? Feet up naps and circuitous strolls through shady parks. Bike rides are a good idea in August. So are matinees and mimosas and myriad delay tactics at work.

Problem is, September is an expensive month. What with back-to-school, soccer equipment and fall maintenance checklists… The disconnect between billable hours and bank deposits is sobering. So, alas, here I am in my faux Aeron chair in between conference calls and data entry, thinking that it sure would be nice to get paid (well) for the sort of writing I most like to do.
Yesterday I read a piece by Steve Almond in the July/August Poets & Writers. (I’m a little behind—you should SEE the towering stack of NewYorkers by my bed). The article (which he probably got $300 or so to write...) is called “Will Write for Free.” Almond laments the lack of pay for creative work, time spent promoting creative work, and the attitude of small press publishers and anthology editors when a writer deigns to broach the subject of fee-for-service.
Almond left journalism to become an “artiste” and pledged to turn his back “on the commercial world.” After writing, publishing and hawking several critically-acclaimed books, the guy is living hand-to-mouth and now has a wife and kid to support.

He wraps the piece by relating some tough-speak he had to employ to get a kill fee from a food glossy when they tanked an article. Evoking the litigious possibilities when you get stiffed, he claims, is sometimes a necessary evil when you’re trying to make your nut with words.

When I finished my MFA program I was all set to do the adjunct crawl. Write, teach, and patch together a literary life. Only problem was, even to get an interview at a community college for a part time slot I needed two years teaching experience, a published book and connections I really didn’t have in place. I began the process of prerequing myself for the crumbs of academe when an opportunity to write for a marketing company bubbled out of the ground.

Through this opportunity, I wrote copy for various financial services companies (think Wall Street…think Hedge Funds…think Bullshit) and made some pretty hefty bank. Talk about selling out. I think it was over the Thanksgiving holiday a few years back when the principal of a Hedge Fund IT company called with a request that I immediately fix a minute glitch on a banner ad for a disaster recovery product that caused me my existential crisis. Not only was I abstracting myself from my family during THE secular fest of the year, I was sweating over the font size of a phrase I’d invented likening a life preserver to ensuring the uninterrupted flow of more money than could choke a major metropolitan sewage system.

Oy fucking vey.

So I declined continued work from said company and similar verticals, and cozied up instead to food companies, yoga studios and other lifestyle businesses that sold actual services and products. My particular pact with Satan was mitigated by contingencies that reduced my culpability as a marketing slut. For instance, I won’t write copy for big, scary corporate banks. Or private financial services smoke-and-mirror organizations . Or individuals who want their web sites to have lots of red and “but wait, there’s more” messaging. But I do have to continue to write marketing copy for a living, and I am putting the kybosh on little journal pieces that pay less than seventy-five cents a word. Time may not be money, but it is time, and I have a Happy Hour to get to…it’s August!

mt st helens

If summer is the canvas upon which subverted paradigms are splashed, then a trek above the timberline is exactly the medium to do the splashing.

Kirk and I (along with Kirk's fleet-footed son, Brendan) climbed up to the summit of Mt. Saint Helens on Sunday, to see what we could see. The air is pretty damn fresh up there at 8,365 feet, and so is the perspective. So with cleaned out lungs, a cleared up head, and slightly sore calf and quads, I feel ready to tackle the next big thing. (Or continue with the big thing I've already begun...)

covering the past

For the past few months I’ve been increasingly aware of the ipod in my brain. At any given time an obscure song from the past whispers, clangs or rocks the sidewalls of my skull. For years, whenever I was anxious I found myself humming Christmas tunes. A sort of audio version of grinding my teeth. Instead of being self-soothing, the audible “Silent Night” or “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” was prelude to catapulting into a state of ill temper.

Not so when my playlist includes some obscure ballad from days of yore, such as “Billy, Don’t be a Hero,” or “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down.” I find myself eager to whistle along or worse, belt out the occasional refrain with abandon. Maybe it’s the secularity of the tunes that eases me into this fuzzy state of goofiness. Maybe it’s a sort of memory lane wonderland divorced from the actual hell I must have been experiencing (given that the target date of most of these bubble-ups is smack in the middle of adolescence) at the time.

I like the notion that this braintrust exists, whatever the source. It gives me hope that somewhere in the archives I can pull up the German I knew fluently at age five, or maybe I can retrain myself to skateboard with proficiency once again. Right now? My storage system is serenading me with “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

zeitgeist

Still in NY, just back from East 64th, where Kirk, Maggie, Carson and I did a short and dirty 20 hours in Gotham.

I brought along the beginning of my friend Tom Spanbauer’s latest work-in-progress, which is a craft book on Dangerous Writing. I’ve had the pages in my e-mail file for over two weeks. I had been saving the read for my NYC dip on purpose. To know why, you’d have to know Tom, and my history with Tom.

Like many of his students, I became utterly smitten with Tom within minutes of meeting him. His heart is that enormous. He wasn’t my first, nor my last writing mentor, but the profundity of his effect lingers like a scent from childhood: Ditto ink, say, or a beloved relative's kitchen. Tom’s epiphany about writing came to him while he lived in NY in the 80’s, and I knew that’s where he’d be going in his intro, so I waited until I was on sacred ground before losing myself in his philosophical scaffolding on what it is to write dangerously.

A few months ago I was invited to opine on a movie being made by Portland filmmaker Neal Corl. The movie is called Dangerous Writing. My initial thought was: Fuck, I have to stay away from this. Far, far away. I fancied myself some sort of Mata Hari, envisioned Tom getting wind of this, thinking that I might be appropriating his gig for some sort of narcissistic gain. Neal reassured me that the screenplay he’d written and the movie he was about to film were more about exploring his own teacher shadow-figure than deconstructing a popular writing teacher’s methods. What he wanted from me was reality check. A bit of advice from someone who’d studied minimalism and other writing workshop paradigms.

With quite a bit of trepidation I agreed to attend the initial on-set meeting. Amid the group of actors and crew he’d assembled on the set, Neal offered his interpretation of what it is to write dangerously. And he got it completely. The story he coughed up as example courted shame, remorse, sexuality and bad behavior. It did not apologize, was not sentimental and had that quality of spotlighting the place where you’d rather be anywhere else. I thought, Well, okay.

The spirit, the energy and intent of Neal’s approach was honest, and aligned with my experience of why artists , real artists, are compelled to look at the underbelly of humanity, starting with their own failures. The storyline of Neal Corl’s Dangerous Writing had nothing to do with Tom Spanbauer’s story. In fact, the main character, Ezra Rosen, is profoundly different in personality from Tom. But the intersection of humanity is glaring. The broken heart. The wounded grace.

What I came to during my limited involvement in Neal’s movie (I was on set twice, and offered only what I could rightfully claim as my own writing philosophies, leaving any of Tom’s lexicon out of the mix) was similar to the hit I just got reading Tom’s writing book draft, and that is this: storytellers are heroic. It is only through recognizing the heroism in telling an honest, dangerous and self-reflective story that we can assemble the context for purpose.

Go forth fellow storytellers, whatever your medium. We’re waiting.

watch hill

Just returned from the most vigorously inspiring journey! My friend Rachel is part owner of a mansion on the coast of RI. Kirk, Carson, Maggie and I were invited to partake in a Gatsby-esque summer home experience complete with salt sea air, the essence of unmitigated wealth and the company of charming heirs. Verklempt doesn't even touch it.

My new project is a fictionalized account of the family who has owned this place for more than half its life. Here's a tiny snippet:

Mr. and Mrs. Dick are dead. Your old-fashioned murder-suicide: bullet to the brain, bullet to the chest. The children were about, but the carnage was timed, as is often the case with well-thought-out homicides, to coincide with the imminent arrival of the housekeeper. The police followed shortly thereafter, having been tipped off by Mr. Sheldon Dick himself, who’d placed the call, speaking in the present tense of an act that had yet to occur.

I'm bombing along with a zeal I haven't had in months. I'm going to write this novel. It's too good, this backstory, to pass up!

time management woes

One of the biggest hurdles for me is where to draw the line on unpaid efforts. I’m a pleaser, and as such, my tendency is to fulfill. That’s how I’m wired. The challenge comes in when I have to prioritize fulfillment, especially now, when most of my opportunities are writing/editing related.
My boyfriend Kirk suggested that I look at what I’m giving away. How do I value that, if I were to apply something as gauche as money to it? What’s my intellectual property worth, in other words? Kirk says, “Well, if you were punching a time clock, you wouldn’t be able to do what you do.”

My time clock is virtual. And therein lies the rub.

I was born to be a support girl. A Gal Friday who shows up with half-combed hair and a soft pencil. Preparation has never been a strong suit. For me, the excitement is in the unexpected, so my preparation is more about deciding which of my senses I’m going to foreground for maximum capture. My strategy is that I have no strategy. Ergo, I go into overdraft every damn month.

I have the feeling that if I really convinced myself that making money was important, I’d have more. Only problem is, money only figures in when I’m completely out. How passive is that?

I’ve decided to stop writing community news. To stop doing any journalism that doesn’t translate to $25 or more an hour. Better to spend that time on business development for BridgePointNW (which, if you’ve linked on, you realize is the web equivalent of the shoemaker’s child ). So, those 20 or so hours a month I was basically giving away for the byline are going to be rerouted to show-me-the-$ land.

For now, I feel I need to continue to say yes to requests for brain-storming and helping various friends with writing/editing needs. These tend to pay off quite well, in the long run, as everyone I’m helping is part of a network of writers who now and again throw bones my way, and as an Independent Contractor, nearly all of my income-producing opportunities have been word-of-mouth type serendipities.

Okay, so when do I work on my creative stuff? Where’s that 20 hours a week going to come from? Stay tuned for phase two of my Time Management journey…

husbands: a correlative

I just read my friend, David Millstone's blog entry where he aligned his allegiance to two personally significant mediums of expression (writing and acting) with his two marriages. Because David was my first writing mentor, I’ll always side with his metaphoric first wife (though I never met his real first wife).

David will always be a writer in my mind. This designation bears out in that in his blog entry he started with his second love and wife, as opposed to his first. Emotional chronology does not necessarily correspond to its temporal equivalent—and because David has an ear for emotional composition that I find mind-blowing.

Funnily enough, David’s current acting role is that of a writer/writing teacher. His two loves fused into what must be, for him, the sort of challenge that leaves you edge-walking a precipice filled with glorious doom. God, I envy that!

Not to be outdone by my mentor and friend, I’m going to slap up a short marital correlative of my own.

My first husband was barely a grown up when we met, but at the time, my sense of who we were together was a couple who’d been married for 25 years. The portent with which I entered that union, the big Catholic bolus of righteousness, was similar to my first swipes at fiction. Too many words, fueled by concept and wholesale epiphany. Something I picked off of a nose-high shelf, wrapped in shiny paper and called my own. Oh, to feel normal, for once. My stories were chock full of sophomoric, ironic jabs. My marriage had jerky transitions I tried to sand over with compulsive attention to minutiae. I pursued a false God who lingered in the obvious details. Fear. Fear. Control. Fear. That husband died, all of the sudden. My early stories are yellowed dot-matrix testament to that unripeness.

Enter husband two: a volatile boy-child who I followed down a dark gravel rut.

Fourteen years of stream of consciousness vomit punctuated here and there with clarity. The muse of instability yanking me around: happy hour followed by hangover followed by hell. I loved this second husband who gave me an electron microscope with which to examine the cells of my navel. I courted intimacy in my writing, though avoided it in my marriage to this stunted man. The dark side can keep you from that just as effectively as the myth of wedded bliss. A little danger. Less control. My writing matured, deepened. Still, I couldn’t quite commit. Didn’t commit. To either the marriage or the writing projects—which lie in various hard drives and between the plastic covers of chunky binders. I emerged from that work-in-progress battered and jaded, ripe with failure of spirit, and tentative about whatever comes next.

And what of that, the next big thing? I feel the need for interface. A sage-sticking, perhaps? My current love has suggested a fire. Burn the evidence. Concretize the psychic space for tabula rasa. My intuition tells me that he’s correct. I need some sort of bold leap. Enjambment to the unexpectedly next right thing.

it's been too long since...

I wrote a story.
I read a novel.
I spent uninterrupted time suspending disbelief.
I wandered alone in the woods in a daydream.
I sat in a room filled with writers.
a sentence I heard gave me a chill.
characters from my pages have invaded my dreams.
I drove around with a notebook beside me, writing ideas down and missing my exit.
my rhythms of speech affected those of made up people.
I last languished in an entire day of reading, writing and pondering.

girls weekend

I’m at the coast this weekend with a gaggle of chicks I don’t know real well and one gal who’s a best friend type of gal, and it’s her 40th birthday we’re celebrating. We’re drinking a lot. We’re dancing and saying things like: “My husband wouldn’t mind it if I fucked Beck.”

Okay, I’m not saying that. One, because I don’t have a husband, and Two, because I’ve gotten over my star-fucking era. Really, I have.

So, as usual, I’m holed up in the space under the staircase working and reading, and only occasionally partaking in the rollicking discussions of our periods and what crap we use to keep pubic hair from spreading out of control.

Okay, it’s not that bad. But it almost is.

No, really, repeat after me: I can be normal. I can be normal.

I can dance to Beck and Madonna and whoever else is spilling out the ipod. But, man, I hate champagne. I’m not much of a crab dip girl, either. But I love this friend of mine who is about to join me in this exciting and rewarding decade. She’s one of those gals who reinvents her enthusiasm daily. She doesn’t spend five minutes enduring crap or people or situations she abhors. I cut the cord of her youngest child. We’re tight. But we’re different.

I’ve had plenty of friends who live in the land of normal. They seize pop culture and absorb it and swerve it with their own brand of my-husband-wouldn’t-mind-if-I-fucked-Beck. I never quite know how to be around it all. One gal talked about a spray-tanning place where a person sprays the tan on you as opposed to a machine spaying a tan on you. It’s sad to be so out of touch. There are places that spray tans on you?

I need to finish my pr piece on creative use of crunchy toppings. I’m developing a must-have pantry list. I wrote the word “craisins” in my list. I’m dragging myself into the 21st century. Reluctantly.

on self love

I remember the day my parent’s marriage finally broke up. I was twenty, and a junior at Syracuse University. I had dinner guests over at the off-campus house I shared with three women. Putting on a dinner in those days was a huge deal, and there we were, about to sit down amid the plates of doctored Top Ramen and bottles of Gennie Cream Ale.

The phone rang. It was my mother announcing memo style that she’d just left my father. I don’t think there was an invitation to Q and A. I placed the phone back on its cradle. I said, to the little group of college kids assembled around the plywood table, “My parents just split up. Let’s have some noodles.”

Calm, calm, calm as could be. But the following year was one of the more tumultuous in my memory. Here is a partial list

1. Worked in a hospital over the summer and decided to forget my dreams of becoming a writer-slash-anthropologist and learned instead how to counsel heart patients on eating less eggs and bacon
2. Took up with a coke addict
3. Got diagnosed with a mitral valve prolapse and went on beta blockers
4. Learned the coke addict (who was 28) was married. Didn’t care.
5. Went off beta blockers and began smoking a lot of weed
6. Broke up with the coke addict, went back to school, and worked full time at a bar
7. Began dating the bouncer (secretly) who was a black ex-con
8. Took acid and flipped out
9. Got really good grades in food science
10. Got really bad grades in sewing (I had to take a whole slew of home economics classes for some strange reason)
11. Began dating (not secretly) a graduate student who had lots of rattlesnakes in glass cages a few feet from his bed
12. Stopped doing drugs altogether, stopped dating questionable men, and began dating the Italian Catholic boy who’d been pursuing me for several months

I graduated college with a degree in Dietetics Management and moved to Phoenix, Arizona because it was the opposite of Syracuse, New York and because I’d read an article about it in Cosmo during a blizzard. I dragged the Italian Catholic boy with me, much to the dismay of his Buffalo, New York Italian Catholic clan family, and set out to live a conventional, church-going life.

I began to pop out the babies as prescribed, and we moved back to New York State. Four days before my second child’s birth, the Italian Catholic boy’s head was crushed in a fatal car accident.

I was calm, calm, calm as could be. I gave birth. I moved back out West. The cycle began anew, and I repeated all the former mistakes and followed them up with band aids back to sanity.

Skip ahead, several lifetimes from my parent’s divorce and the ensuing pachinko, and I think I’ve figured out a thing or two.

Here’s the residue:

1. Life doesn’t play by the rules
2. Don’t trust anything that suggests there is order in the Universe
3. Love fully
4. If you don’t acknowledge the dark side, it’s gonna find you and it won’t be pretty
5. To be human is to make mistakes. Make them, say you’re sorry, and do better the next time… It’s the only way to find any grace
6. Keep fighting for who you are

anatomy of a train wreck

Along with the mania of spring, the other shoe must fall. Things hum along at breakneck; until they don’t. Aside from duct tape and cases of bottled water, how do you prepare for disaster? I’m talking about all the types of disasters: physical, financial, heartbreak…

The sudden failures-of-spirit, disappointments and fallout from living a passionate, whole-hearted and not particularly safe life. A reckless life? Sometimes I want to say to myself: repeat after me, Suzy: I don’t believe in faeries, I don’t, I don’t! Imagination is a powerful drug—way more potent than hash, weed, opium, any of it. The muse giveth, and the muse taketh away.

It’s April, the earth has tipped just so, and all around me entropy reigns. Which has always been beneficial to me on the page, but a disaster in my personal life. I’m worried that this sweet little house of cards I’ve constructed so carefully and lovingly might just cave in. It’s awful to feel that way, simply awful.

aloysius

I’ve decided to err on the side of precocity in developing my little boy character. This is new and fun, this nod to suspension of disbelief. I’m characterizing him as a sad genius—one of my favorite types of kids, and one often exploited both for comedy relief and pathos.

The other thing this buys me is poignant and complex interaction with the adult characters, both in developing tension between the child and various adults, and the child and the larger story.

This kid, who I’ve named Aloysius, is eight-years-old, and his parents have recently divorced (sound familiar?). But unlike my own precocious 8-yr-old (for whom I’ll be attending an IEP mtg this afternoon in order to ferret out his reluctance to read), Al is plagued with additional anxieties and compensatory strategies.

I am eager to follow this rabbit down the hole to see where it leads!

the arsenal

There are three boys playing vigorously in the next room. It’s nearly noon on a Sunday, and I’m still in my jammies. I’m working. Been writing all morning—a new project for which I feel the old mojo. Feels so. Damn. Good.

The theme of this new project includes aspects of the questions I’ve been chewing on for years, namely, how close to edge is too close? Especially when you’ve got kids you’re raising by yourself, and a livelihood dependent upon balance and sanity.

In a life-meets-art moment this morning a neighbor mom came shuffling through my mudroom door just as I was writing dialogue from a kid confronting his mom about her inappropriate choices. So here I am in the Sunday morning writing chaos, unkempt hair, pjs, dirty breakfast dishes and couch cushions in “fort” piles all about. The mudroom mom was hand-wringing and nervous. Seems she’d been meaning to ask me about something for months. Last time her son (a wan vegetarian boy she’s raising on her own) came over, he saw a gun. A real gun. He reported this real gun to his mom, and his mom was caught in that weird social anxiety place where you wrestle with confronting another mom with something that may or may not be true.

Well, it’s mostly true. Carson does have a gun. A blue rifle bb gun. But he doesn’t have bb’s for it. Here in town, anyways. I had to try and explain my (our) somewhat un-pc philosophy on guns. (I didn’t begin thus: Well, when your son’s father is a redneck… so, two points for me!) Carson has, indeed, discharged an actual firearm out at the hotsprings. But today, here in town, I offered mitigated consolation to the mudroom mom. “There are no working weapons on the premises.”

Except, of course, for Carson’s collection of knives.

In this new project, the centerpiece boy character is a kid like this mudroom mom’s boy: a sunken, raccoon-eyed waif to whom you just want to serve up a side of beef. He’s my foil. The element around which the plot hangs. I’ve just introduced another character to fan the flames, complicate the dynamics. I’m in the zone, baby. Watch out!

i'm too fucking busy

…and vice versa. (Thank you Dorothy Parker.) Well, today sorta sucked. One of those days where the devil to whom I’ve sold my soul looms menacingly close.
Here’s what happened: a small business owner who was seeking infomercial-like sales copy for her web site became frustrated and disappointed with my lack of capacity for slick marketing gimmickry. After analyzing this, I realize that I failed on two counts:

1. I believe (and generated a lack of engagement due to this belief) that her product is snake oil
2. Her aesthetic offends my sensibilities

I turned my nose up at the request for “…but wait! There’s more!” type spew, even though it appears that it’s the fastest way for this gal to make a buck selling her detoxification foot patches.

Coincidentally, on the eve of my disgrace, I attended Jonathan Lethem's lecture at the Schnitz, and got a nice dose of literary elitism that I drank up and savored. Here’s what Lethem has to say about the conundrum of sucking up to the normative world: Beware “insteadness" (his made-up term for the place we all go after we’ve outgrown the doobie and need a new escape hatch). Insteadness is why we’ll belly up to the Anna Nicole Smith paternity network, why we live lives seemingly absent of desperation, and why we keep stuffing our gullets full of salty, fatty, pacifying inertia-inducing mush.

And since I’ve signed up to grease the wheels of greed, I’m not allowed to side-step this. Even if it means writing shit like: change your hair—change your life. Even if it means adopting the syntactically challenged alliterative string of one word sentences that promote the gerund to imperative.

The other part of Lethem’s harangue was in support of psychological neoteny (which is the tendency to retain childlike traits into adulthood). Artists are wired for the playfulness, curiosity, humor, creativity, sensitivity and wonder associated with childhood, and it is this phenomenon—this acceptance—of neoteny that has kept us from disappearing (both figuratively—into the gaping black hole of insteadness, and literally—from extinction due to Limbaughesque black-and-white inflexibility where the button is all too accessible).

There in lies the rub for me. I embrace my own tendency toward neoteny until I get an earful from a pissed off client who wants me to craft a formula for success at the expense of my creative dignity, and then I become somber with the grief of a cynical adult. But hey, at least I’m writing.

child's play

So instead of writing workshop tonight I played Legos with my son. Remember Legos? If you were a boy, you probably designed and conjured battle scenes in which good triumphed over evil and the sound of war cries and buzzing artillery could be heard ricocheting off of the walls. If you were a girl, well, I don’t know…probably you weren’t the weirdo sort of girl I was.

My sister and I used to build mirror-image Lego families and then act out dysfunctional sagas. Legos in those days came only in red or black; I can’t recall who was who, but, as in checkers, we each had our own color. The two-button Legos were fashioned into babies, the three-pegged bricks of plastic into “kids,” and the largest Legos were the parents. We made them into bunnies. Think: Beatrix Potter meets the Sopranos.

The dad bunny Legos would have temper tantrums and slap the babies and the kids around if they didn’t behave. The mom Legos were sort of an after-thought. Often they weren’t even in the stories. My sister and I interacted the most with the kid Legos. We really had to stretch to convincingly anthropomorphize these critters—which is completely different than my son’s experience. My son, who was born seven months shy of the new millennium, where imagination takes a back seat to innovation. Today’s Legos have faces and modular plastic hair and grooved hands into which Lego spears may be clamped.

Carson’s room is littered with Lego war ships, planes and combat landing strips. Myriad shapes and menacing structures clot the floor necessitating tip-toe machinations to get to the dresser, closet or bed. Carson’s invitation to “play Legos” was really all about me watching him play with Legos while I built the structures he ordered me to build. (I’m old fashioned, I guess, I like dictator tendencies in my male offspring.) But, I found myself creating psychologically complex story lines as the evening wore on. The task-after-task-after got boring, so I fused together an evil ruler “W” and some henchmen. There was also Hippie Boy and Frudelsnapper—wrongfully imprisoned lads who were thought to be terrorists but were really slacker surfers. Not that I ventured too far into plot—heaven’s no! But maybe, in my passive-aggressive Mom for President way, I was stacking the deck in favor of circuitous drama over linear lock and load.

Anyway, I plan on attending writing workshop next week.