Making Space, Part 2

So, here's the new chair, set nicely in its new home.

It was a bit of an odyssey, buying that chair. We had to drive out to Highway 1 to one of the many furniture stores there, which I had trolled previously in search of a bed (not for me). My companion started out by sitting in the enormous leather beast chairs, which I would have been fine with, had the chair the remotest possibility of fitting into the chair nook in my office. He asked what style chair I wanted, as it was my office. My answer: any chair that fits, and also cradles you so comfortably you will be peaceful there. Perhaps a chair with a built-in cone of silence. Just kidding about that last thing - sort of. The reason for the comment isn't because I don't like hearing him talk, it's that I enjoy hearing him talk much more than I enjoy biting my fingernails and trying to write something. The odds are already stacked up against me. The last thing I need is an attractive, charming person in a chair nearby, just dying to tell me something interesting. It's sort of like going on a diet while living with a very talented pasty chef who specializes in croissants. Talking to you, my dear, is like eating a croissant. So, please shut up when you're sitting in the chair.

It's a somewhat attractive chair, in that standard attractive but spill proof fabric kind of way. I'd briefly flirted with upholstering it in an English garden print to coordinate with the rest of my English Garden style apartment. The only thing not at all English Garden style is the gallery, which is full of unsettling photographs, one of which was of a door in an insane asylum somewhere, taken by Ayngel Kaye (I hope I've spelled that correctly). I've had that photo since the SF WorldCon was in Boston, and it's a treasure. I have other photos in the gallery that do not say, "English Garden," but the space is coming together as uniquely mine. I have the teapot set that is supposed to look like a charming set of frogs, but really looks like elder denizens of Innsmouth, ready to suck your soul out of your eyeballs. I don't know; maybe I'm exaggerating. You tell me.



The living space continues to be cold, but so long as I have the boiler steaming and the valve open, my office is as snug as one could wish. I kind of wish I had bought some of those note cards that I disparaged in the Art as Commodity post to put up on the mostly empty bulletin boards, but I'm reminding myself that I'm leaving them purposely blank so I can employ the Tim Powers method of story building. It involves index cards, the arranging and rearranging of index cards to create the story's architecture. He told an amusing story about the cat walking through and rearranging the note cards, and creating an improvement in the flow of story, so I'm a little anxious that pinning up the index cards might remove this fortuitous type of thing. But the cat was caught, on the first day, sharpening her claws on the excruciatingly expensive new chair and so has been banished from the kingdom of the third floor until she can get her act together, which may end up being never.

The chair is my hope, in a way. It says that my companion thinks it's worth that ungodly sum to have a comfy place to amuse himself while I write. As you can see, it's not a leather monstrosity; it's a combination chair. Enough of a wing chair to satisfy my aesthetic taste, and enough of a squashy, rocker-recliner to satisfy his comfort needs, or anyone's comfort needs, who chooses to sit there, including other companions, or the dog. The dog who promptly puked on the chair on the first day, but he did not get exiled, as we had purchased the stain-protection plan. If only there were a cat-claw protection plan.

Art as Commodity

Still behind and playing catch up; the good news is that I'm feeling a little better now that I'm home. The vacation in California was excellent, and has given me much to write about, but travel, as much as I love it, is exhausting. I think is has something to do with my introversion, and a lot to do with my hypervigilence. I notice things. I pretty much notice everything, with few exceptions. My brain doesn't seem to filter out things many folks consider beneath their notice and provide me with a comfortably limited tunnel through which to walk through life. For example, one of my companions doesn't really notice green growing things so much. If he sees a tree, it gets whited out in favor of other things. For me, it's not like, "Tree. Better go around." It's, "Oh, California golden oak. What terrifically twisted branches. Tim Burton would love this tree. I wish I could stop the car and take a picture of that tree. I wonder if I can; no I shouldn't; I'll get beaned by that Chevy Tahoe bearing down on me at seventy miles per hour from the left. These trees are breaking my heart, the colors, shapes, and shadows! I'm just glad I got all of those photos of the cypress trees in Carmel and Monterey. I'll be thinking about these trees later. Maybe I can do another trip to California and bring my tripod, and spend the very early morning waiting for the perfect light for these gnarled, twisted oak trees." Blah, blah, blah. I can shut up this constant babble, but it takes pharmaceuticals and sometimes a bottle of wine.

Taking the vigilence into an art museum is a rewarding, stimulating, and ultimately exhausting experience. There are few people who have the patience to "do the museum thing" with me, because I take a long time to let my brain ping around at a thousand miles an hour. Once, I had someone who told me I had an hour and a half to visit the entire Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and I almost just sat in the courtyard. Luckily for me, I did decide to go in, and spend the hour and half with the impressionists. Roughly half the time was spent with Van Gogh's Irises. Fortunately, my daughter was with me when visiting the Guggenheim in Manhattan. It's a small museum, but the art is always surprising. When I went, the central exhibit was of six compact cars in various attitudes, some suspended from the ceiling, and the effect was of a single car flying off the balcony and flipping through the air to land in the atrium in an explosion of LEDs that looked like fireworks. I had patient company at the Isabella Stuart Gardener Museum, but nothing is marked there except the paintings that were stolen, and I don't enjoy the mystery of standing before a piece of art and having no idea of its provenance. I've had many more museum experiences, but there's one thing about museums that creates a different experience than going to art galleries: you pay your fee, and then the guardians open the gates and let you look as much as you want. When they stand around watching you, it's with a different kind of mission than a gallery attendant. It's: don't touch, but look all you want. Some attendants are clearly proud of their museums, and even take pleasure in watching people taking pleasure of the art. Going to galleries is different.

In Steve Martin's novel, An Object of Beauty, he satirizes the art industry, revealing the strangely imaginary foundation on which it's built. It was wonderful to read this book, because in part, it explained something about galleries that I had understood instinctively, but not consciously. I've been visiting galleries since I was a teenager, and back then, it felt almost as if I were casing the joint rather than looking at the art. The agent sometimes sat at a very simple desk up front that you had to get past in order to see anything. Though now I realize these people, though always well dressed, were mostly very young, and probably very poor recent graduates from art school, it was intimidating just to get within a few feet of their sparse cherry desks. Many a gallery attendant scared me away from even going inside, so for a while, all I did was window shop. It was a little easier to visit galleries if the attendant was seated at the back of the gallery, but even then, it was like approaching some magnificent potentate behind a grand, elevated desk containing only a MacBook, a pad of paper, a pen, and a credit card machine. When I finally ventured inside, I avoided the back, and enjoyed the art in the front of the gallery, beating a hasty retreat if I accidentally made eye contact with the potentate, or god forbid, she stood up as if to approach me. I was poor. Poorly dressed. Usually in a parka and worn sneakers. I did not carry a Coach handbag. I was not wearing jewelry for the most part. There was nothing to identify me as anything other than "poor person, who cannot afford to buy the smallest piece of art from this gallery." Once, when I went into the Photography West studio in Carmel, years ago, I consoled myself with a purchase of several note cards featuring the lovely photographs on display. That's all you can have, when you're poor, is a handful of note cards of original art that costs more than your car.

Maybe the increase in my income has helped my self esteem, or maybe I'm just older than most of the attendants now, but they no longer have the power to intimidate me. When I went to Carmel this last trip, I went into any gallery I wanted to, no matter where the desk was, even knowing I still didn't make enough to actually buy any of the art on display. I wasn't dressed any differently. I wear a few rings, one from Tiffany, but you couldn't tell by looking at it. My boots were scuffed from the New England winter, and I was wearing a wool wrap over the whole thing that made me look somewhat shapeless. At the first gallery, I was asked if I was looking for something for a particular wall, the attendant rather ... attentive. I said we were just there to look. Then she asked if I was an artist, and without stopping to think, I said no, I was a writer. Without hesitation, she said, well writers are artists too, and she wished me well "doing the gallery thing" with my daughter. She neither wrote me off as a "no sale," nor followed me around just in case she could convince me to put a mortgage on my house for one of the house-sized oil paintings in the gallery. She was simply a lovely, respectful person, and I had the best gallery trip I'd ever had in my life.

I bought two posters at the Photography West gallery. One was "Holland Canal" by Brett Westonand the other was "In the Box (horizontal)" by Ruth Bernhard.. Upgrade from notecards ($3/per) to posters ($45/per, average) and not quite at framed print level ($4500 for the Ruth Bernhard, which is the one I love the most). The original photograph of "In the Box" is currently on the market for $25,000, which is a bit beyond my means. Surprisingly, I also made a purchase of a small painting at The Titus Contemporary Gallery, the third painting in my collection (I have a tiny "gallery" at home). (The other two paintings are by Dona Nova. Though I didn't spend a terrible amount, I felt rich when I left, with the posters to be shipped home, and the painting wrapped tenderly and cushioned between sweaters in my flight case.

I wondered what it felt like, to be buying art when Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat were painting. I'm fairly sure I would not have purchased a Warhol, even if I could have afforded it when he first started. I find his art amusing, like the Blue Dog paintings of George Rodrigue, but it's uncomfortable art like thisthat I prefer. It's a confusing world, where a single photograph costs $25,000. I love photography, and I took about a hundred photographs of trees on my trip to Carmel. When I got home, I looked at them - primary cypresses - and I wondered. What stars need to align, what skill needs to be applied, to put a $25,000 price tag on a single photo? What is the difference between my photographs of trees, and their photographs of trees? Here are a few of my photos:

My work is not a commodity. No one has ever paid $1 for one of my photographs, much less $25,000. Then again, I've never tried to sell one. I wouldn't even know where to start. It took me a long time to figure out how to get a short story into print; I know how that feels. You print and mail manuscripts (or if you're lucky, you can e-mail them). The manuscript sits in a pile of similar manuscripts and waits to be found. If you don't know anybody, or if the editor has a blind reading policy, your manuscript stays hidden under there until she gets to it. Or maybe you went to some workshop, and your name rings a bell, and the editor opens yours sooner rather than later. In my experience, they read, they ponder, they write a rejection note, then they move on. You print another copy of the manuscript and you put that one in the mail. Hopefully, you have all of your unsold inventory out in the world somewhere, in the postal system, sitting in someone's mailbox, sitting in someone's inbox, or in the mail back to you, if you included a self-addressed stamped envelope with enough postage for the editor to send it back to you. Realistically, it's not even an editor who reads the manuscript; it's a reader, most likely an intern of some sort, who has been trained to separate the rare, rare wheat from the abundant chaff. You get a different kind of letter sometimes - one that says, yes! We liked it enough to include it in our modest publication. We'll send you a modest check, and a copy of the magazine/anthology/booklet. I can't imagine the $25,000 photograph made the round this way, sitting rolled in a tube on a rainy porch in Hoboken, before being shunted off to a post office box in San Francisco. Probably there is some sort of other magic to it. Maybe some poor photographer schlepping a portfolio around with prints inside, begging someone to please look, will you have a look at these? If you don't know anybody, maybe you get the door slammed in your face. If you do, maybe you get a cup of acid coffee while a gallery owner paws through the offerings, looking at them with an eye for commodity. Can I sell this? To whom? For how much? How "important" does this look? What kind of story can I tell to move this work?

I must admit. I don't understand why one photograph could cost so much, but I have a hunger for that Ruth Bernhard. The original photo, of the long, elegant female body lying in the horizontal box, mostly contained but for one slender, pale arm escaping. I've been looking at that particular photograph for years, but my little home gallery with its three small paintings and photographs by various and sundry artists hawking their wares at SF and fantasy writing conventions, is way too modest an environment for such an incredible treasure. Only three human beings and a dog would see it on a regular basis, and such beauty belongs in the world, in a museum, where you pay your fee and look your fill. Where the museum attendants are proud of their museum, and keep you from leaning on the displays, but smile at your infectious joy.

I can't afford to hang such art in my house, but it doesn't belong there anyway. I'll make prints of my own trees, and hang those, but go to museums and wonder at the beauty without sweating the cost of admission.

Dining in California with the Girl, Redux

Here was the breakfast we ordered while staying at the Carmel Mission Inn. Unfortunately, the fruit looked better than it was, but it looked really lovely, so I ate it anyway. I thought about the summer fruits that would start making their way across the country from California to Massachusetts starting about June, for the really good stuff (strawberries, Bing cherries, nectarines) and I ate the too tart pineapple, the too bland honeydew melon, the not sweet enough blackberries, the pretty but not very nice strawberries. My daughter had a fluffy Belgian waffle with whipped cream and more slices of strawberry, and there was not one but two orders of a very smoky bacon. At home, I only eat uncured bacon, when I eat it at all, and I've started counting calories, so it's unlikely there will be very much bacon in my future. Thank goodness I had it when I had the chance. I don't normally go on a diet, but instead follow a low carbohydrate diet (the kind with lots of fruit and vegetables, but no flour or potatoes). My doctor chided me for gaining ten pounds last year, and so I'm going to stop all the stress eating I was doing during the purchase of the house and subsequent moving/unpacking. I'm using the Android app "myfitnesspal," which makes counting calories a bit easier (although it's annoying that there's so much convenience food to wade through in its vast database - I mostly cook fresh and finding simple, fresh ingredients is a bit tough sometimes). The server at the Carmel Mission Inn restaurant was brassy, but ultimately kind, and made sure my little carafe of decaf stayed topped of for the duration of the meal.

Here is the Mexican meal we ate in Monterey, at a little hole in the wall next to a record store. I was a little concerned when we went in, because the flies outnumbered the servers two to one, and they'd just opened (we showed up at a little after 11 a.m.) and the "dining room" had yet to fill with the fragrance of chile and tomatillo. The chips and salsa were a grave disappointment, the first clearly from a bag, the second clearly from a jar, but the meals were good enough to help us feel as if we were having Mexican food in California, which of course, we were, but you know, we were searching for a certain taste, which is missing from New England Mexican food. The rice tasted of cinnamon, and refried beans were a little bland, but the tomatillo sauce on my chile verde taco was tangy and nice, and the cheese enchilada was everything I wanted it to be. My daughter demolished a pork tamale and a beef enchilada, both with red sauce. She had a sangria soda, and I had my favorite, the tamarindo. The server was a twenty-something Hispanic guy with a California accent, who was perfectly nice, though not very talkative.

Here's where the day got a little bit ridiculous. We were shopping in Carmel, and after looking at galleries, shopping for bath products to bring home as gifts, trolling the antique stores, and buying candy (Turkish delight for me, violet pastilles for her), we found a shop that sold overpriced tea paraphernalia and asked if the proprietress knew where we could find an actual tea in town. In turns out that that Cypress Inn served a "high tea," and so off we went. In the Inn's "living room," there were already six beings having tea beside the fireplace, a pair of short-legged humans, a pair of long-legged humans, and two dogs. Rather than crowd this jolly party, we sat in the lounge by a window and had our tea brought to us on trays by what seemed an entire troop of very cheerful staff. The tea was Mighty Leaf "White Orchard," which is a white tea with flavors of melon and peach, served in pretty teapots and cups (matching, unfortunately). The sandwiches were cucumber, tomato basil, and egg salad. The pastries were a chocolate dipped shortbread, a chocolate chip loaf cake, a powdered sugar almond ball cookie, and a tea scone with cream and strawberry jam. The scone was hot, lightly dusted with granulated sugar, and perfect. We ate the scone, and about half of everything else, and drank enough tea to send us floating out the door, and happy with our experience.

There was a short period of unconsciousness at the hotel room, while we waited for all of this to digest. We'd done nothing but eat the day before, snacking on the plane, eating Thai just outside the airport, then finishing the day at Fifi's Cafe (which I don't have a picture of, to my regret). We'd done nothing but eat the day of, aside from a tour of Seventeen Mile Drive in the morning and shopping in the afternoon. So, it was nothing short of ridiculous when we went out to Sushi by the Bay in Monterey to cap our evening. My daughter ordered some inoffensive things, like ebi and california roll. I, of course, had to try something new or be disappointed. I did order the usual things: maguro, a very disappointingly low quality toro, some sort of nice eel maki, etc. However, after a little bit of encouragement from the girl, I had my first try of uni, which is sea urchin roe. They take a little cake of rice, wrap it in seaweed to make a cup, then spoon in the fluffy salmon colored roe. The only time I'd ever seen anyone eat this was years and years ago in San Francisco, where a friend of mine ordered it at one of those restaurants where the sushi floats by on the little boats. His uni had a raw quail egg cracked on top, and I thought I could give the uni a go without the quail egg. The server told me it was "medium fishy," and that most people who didn't like it had trouble with the texture rather than the flavor. So, I gave it a go. And it was weird. Imagine taking a walk on a pier, where someone has just baited a hook with a sardine. Imagine walking down the pier with your mouth open, letting the briny smell of the ocean waft over your palate. Then, imagine that flavor condensed into an orangy-pink clot of whipped cream, sitting on a piece of rice wrapped in seaweed. Take a bite, then drink LOTS of green tea. Look nervously at the second piece, and eat it out of a sense of freaked out duty. I had to take most of the eel roll back to the hotel, and I ended up leaving it in the hotel refrigerator. Our host, by the way, was a young Asian guy with a California accent. As soon as he figured out we were friendly, he joked around and had a great time with us. It was a splendidly entertaining meal. Unfortunately, I did not get a photo of the sushi, as my phone battery was low on charge.

Here was our last meal in Carmel: breakfast at the Little Swiss Cafe. The reason we ended up at this cafe was because the girl said she wanted hash browns. Not country potatoes; hash browns. So I Googled on the Android and found the Little Swiss Cafe. This was neither the favored cafe for crepes, nor for eggs Benedict, but they did have fantastic hash browns, delicately crispy on the outside, tender and salty on the inside. We did order the eggs Benedict anyway, and I loved the thick lemony sauce, even though it was too strange for the girl, who had never tried the dish before. She had her eggs poached hard, and mine were regular, resulting in an explosion of rich yellow mingling with the lighter lemon yellow of the sauce. An additional adventure was in store for us when I discovered that the cafe didn't take a card, so off I went into the rain for cash, leaving the girl for collateral. When I got back, the funky arty waitress drew a picture of me standing in the rain with my umbrella on a menu and gave it to me as a farewell. I hope she gets enough tips to save up for her iPhone, because from the gist of her conversation while we breakfasted, it seems like she really wants one.

Having woken up at 5 a.m. in order not to be too jet lagged upon return home, and having eaten breakfast at 9 a.m., we were at loose ends while we waited for the Titus gallery to open so I could pick up the painting I had purchased the day before. I'll tell that story in a later post, but suffice it to say that we did eventually get on the road and drove from Carmel to Tracy, in the San Joaquin Valley. We met my dad for lunch, and he took us to one of his favorite country restaurant called the Four Corners. We had a simple, home cooked meal there (my dad and his wife had salad, clam chowder, and steak, and my daughter and I shared a French dip sandwich). The highlight of the meal was the dessert that we ended up taking home. While waiting for us to pay the bill, the server sat down at the lunch counter curled around a slice of banana nut cake, which she forked in with such depth of passion and appreciation that I couldn't resist a slice myself. My daughter came away with the apple-berry pie. It was, at that point, her birthday. We didn't eat the desserts until the next day, but when we did, they were as fabulous as the moaning, sighing waitress said they would be. No one took a photograph of this meal, but it looked pretty much like any dinner you'd order from a place like Lyon's or Denny's.

Ridiculous people that we are, my daughter and I checked into our hotel room, sat around until we'd mustered enough energy to go out again, and drove to Stockton to eat dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant: The Bangkok. They were so busy, all of the empty tables were covered in dirty dishes, as were the tables where people were waiting for their bills. The owner, a great guy who had served us Thai food every week for something like three years was home sick that night, and service was suffering for it. Although we were tired, we stayed and ate an appetizer dinner: spring rolls, sticky rice, and little pork ribs fried with garlic. They accidentally brought us barbecued chicken instead of barbecued tri tip, so they knocked the eggrolls off the bill, and put the beef into a take away container, as we were too full to eat it by the time it arrived. Leaving the dregs of two Thai iced teas, we hauled ourselves back to our hotel room, where we passed out until the next day. Neither of us had the energy to take a photo of this meal.

The next morning, we had a simple breakfast at a place called Scrambl'z Kountry Kitchen. The best part of the meal was sitting and talking to my dad, who loves these somewhat greasy, country-style restaurants. Now that he's a serious cardiac patient, he can't have anything with salt, but he doesn't complain a bit about it. I'm simply amazed by this, how a man who loved to eat so much could have such grace when it became time for him to decide between salt and life. He's choosing life. My daughter and I were so tired (who wouldn't be, after all that eating?) we went back to our hotel room right after breakfast and didn't move until it was time to go to her birthday party, where my sister served one of her very typical party meals: spaghetti and meat sauce, garlic bread, a tossed salad, and a Costco sheet cake for dessert. In order to make salt-free spaghetti sauce for my father, she opened 22 cans of salt-free tomatoes, and she didn't complain either, even though she'd given away her electric can opener when two of her three sons left the nest and she no longer had to put enough dinner on the table to serve a platoon. Both of the departing sons are now firefighters, and eat the way you'd imagine firefighters eating. On this trip, I'd eaten plenty of fancy stuff, but I can't say any of those elegant meals tasted any better than spaghetti and meat sauce served by my sister, even though I had to open a salt shaker over mine. But I'd like to point out that I didn't complain, and neither did my girl. We're too glad that my Pops is alive and kicking, even if he does need to ride in a golf cart in order to take the dog for a walk.

Bon apetit.

Day of Your Birth

We lived in Alaska. Your father and I met at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey when we were in the Army. We were both so young; I was nineteen and he was twenty-four. I was twenty years old when we got married in Monterey by a justice of the peace. We stayed at the Spindrift Inn on Cannery Row, and fed seagulls from the window of our room, which opened onto the beach. The Army sent us to Alaska after we were finished with training (Russian, signal voice intercept) and I gave birth to you when I was twenty-one years old. You told me the other day that some of your friends are twenty-one, and that you can't imagine any of them carrying around a baby as I must have carried you. I have the pictures to prove it; and yes, I was so young.

It was my dream from a very young age: to marry, have children, and work as a writer. This funny adolescent dream had my family scurrying around a large house while I wrote with my door shut against the noise. They would set dinner inside the door, and tiptoe away, whispering, "She's writing a book. Be very quiet." I was an only child, so I had no idea how much of a ruckus a six-person family makes, so I think it's hilarious now, that my dream included six children. Of course they would be perfectly well mannered, quietly passionate children, too busy with their own dreams to hang about my door, complaining bitterly of neglect. The life I ended up with was not the life I dreamed about when I was young; I gave birth to you, I looked at you, and I said, "She is beautiful." It turned out one child was what I wanted, just you.

I have pictures of my gently pregnant self, and then my massively pregnant self, this slender body with a beach ball under her sweater. I'd spent three years in the Army at that point, fighting to keep my weight down, fighting to keep my fitness up, and I kind of lost my mind a little. I told myself I could eat Chinese deep fried prime rib sandwiches if I wanted to, and hey, your dad had a second job aside from being in the Army where he delivered food from local restaurants (it was called Takeout Taxi) and they delivered this deep fried Chinese prime rib sandwich with au jus that you just wouldn't believe, and I weighed 190 pounds when you arrived (145 when you were just a few cells that decided to have a party). When I got the ultrasound, they asked me if I wanted to know the sex, and I said yes, I wanted to know. Girl, they said, and I was happy (any sex was fine with me). I read What to Expect When You're Expecting and I crocheted a blanket for you from green, pink, and white yarn. I brought home a crib, a high chair, a car seat, educational toys, all of the paraphernalia. When I was six months pregnant, they sent your dad to school again in Massachusetts and I went out to visit, pregnant on the airplane. He gave me flowers and took me to a lobster restaurant (Lobsterland) and drove me through Salem and then Rockport. I'd never seen such a beautiful town as Salem. I went back home for the winter; I wore cleats on my sneakers to keep me from slipping on the ice while I did the snow shoveling like a tough Army wife needed to do to tend her unit in military housing. Your dad came back from training and was out in the field, on a training exercise, when my water broke, and they ran him to the hospital in an Army vehicle of some sort, no doubt teasing him the way soldiers do when there's a baby on the way.

When I didn't start contractions after the water broke, they stopped by labor with morphine, and induced it the next morning, where a doctor could keep a close watch on your health during the birth. I was too tense, too frightened, too much in agony from the induction drug to relax enough to give birth. An Air Force hospital staffed with a mix of military doctors, they didn't dole out drugs lightly, and it was only after fourteen hours of making so much noise I was scaring the other mothers that they finally gave me an epidural block for the pain, and my body relaxed enough to let you out. Baby girl. I have pictures, of course. Your dad cut the cord and all, but there's a picture of you lying on my belly, and I look like I've just wrestled a dragon and won. A strangely peaceful look after all that anguish, because there you were, with all your fingers and toes, a tiny six-and-a-half pound gnome crying nice and healthily, but it didn't bother me as much as I'd feared, that crying.

I'd say that was the greatest moment of my life, but it's not that easy to define your life's greatest moment; they all add up to incredible beauty. I also watched you learn to talk, and walk, and run, and swim, and play the violin, and play the clarinet, and play the marimba, and conduct an orchestra, and lead a marching band, and paint murals of birds on your bedroom walls, and laugh until you cried, and eat sushi, and drive a car, and cry until you laughed, and make friends, and choose your friends wisely, and lead a concert band at Carnegie Hall, and manage all the original Broadway props for "Crazy For You," and dance with your hands in the car on Seventeen Mile Drive in Carmel. I've seen you get a job, and choose a college, and hug your grandfather, and I've seen you shine with a glow of love you could probably see from outer space. I've seen your independence, your passion, your determination, your focus, your dedication to making the best of the life you have on this earth.

You are eighteen now, and I will always think about you, but I have no fear that you will make your way, not without occasional misstep, but the confidence of someone who knows how to recover gracefully, push on through the normal rough-and-tumble crises that are a part and parcel of the human experience.

Music with the Girl

I've been too busy traveling to write, and so will need to play catch up again.

Not thinking I would need it, I left my iPod home when I flew to California. We were flying Virgin America, and I figured if any airline would have music I liked, it would be Virgin. I wasn't wrong. They had seat-back entertainment, and aside from a little trouble with the interface, I was able to find a lot of music I liked that I could listen to while working. My daughter and I have similar taste in music, and so she was fine listening to the onboard music as well. We found not only Sigur Ros, but the lead singer's alternate group Riceboy Sleeps which was really impressive. When I ran out of onboard music, I just plugged my phones into my MacBook while I worked, and iTunes churned out tune after tune from my own library. Later, on the plane back, I was checking for my equipment before packing up and freaked out because my iPod wasn't in my backpack. But a brief text flurry later, I was reassured that my treasured device, containing upwards of 20G of music, was safe and sound on the clock-dock.

When my daughter and I rented our vehicle (we were supposed to get a compact car and ended up with a Jeep or nothing, so I took the Jeep), we realized we'd forgotten the AUX cable at home. I have one; she has one; neither of us packed one. So, on the way from SFO to Carmel, we stopped in Monterey at Radio Shack (which we located using my daughter's Android phone) and picked up not only the appropriate cable, but also a car charger for our mini-USB cable to keep the phone (and thus our GPS capabilities) running. While she was shopping, I posted an update on Facebook via Twitter, letting everybody know what we were up to. Like everything else on that rented Jeep, the AUX jack was crappy, and it turned out we could only get tunes out of one speaker, but it was music. Not the Jeep's fault, but we discovered that CA radio is NOT MA radio, and the most alternative music on the dial is Maroon 5. Maroon 5 is okay, but Sigur Ros it ain't. Nor is it the Decemberists, Death Cab for Cutie, The Mountain Goats, Coldplay, Matt & Kim, Of Montreal, Sufjan Stevens, or any number of artists we most enjoy listening to. It was pure self defense, that trip to the Shack. Not what I'd consider an indulgence; a necessity. Who goes on a road trip without road tunes?

With oddities from Clint Mansell's score to The Fountain to a variety of dance-mix tracks my daughter called "dub-step," we drove up the hill to the Defense Language Institute, where I tried to get us in so I could show my almost 18-year-old daughter where I had lived when I was 18. No admittance. The terrorists have messed that up for all of us civilians who can no longer take our progeny up the hill to show off where we spent 50 hours a week learning a foreign language and another 50 hours a week exercising until we puked. My math is a little off, but that's how it felt to me at the time. The guard looked really regretful when he said we couldn't go in, but I dutifully turned around, and we checked into our inn in Carmel instead. When we'd gotten our stuff settled, we got back into the Jeep and went to Pacific Grove, where I treated my daughter to a swanky dinner at Fifi's Cafe and Bistro. The last time I'd gone, Fifi's was more of a bakery that sold awesome country French cuisine. It has since transformed into a restaurant with white table cloths under the sheets of butcher paper, wine standing in bouquets of bottles everywhere. This post is about music, so I'll talk more about the food later. There was elegant classical music of some sort there, in any case.

We used our new electronic gear to listen to music whenever we were in the Jeep. We listened all the way down Seventeen Mile Drive in Carmel. We listened all the way from Carmel through the golden, oak-spotted hills, driving the longer route around Gilroy to Interstate 5. It was on this leg of the journey that my daughter introduced me to the various genres of dance (did you know that the dance genre has many subgenres?) I have some types of dance on my own iPod. Orbital is "happy hardcore," where the female voices sound like chipmunks with 160 to 180 beats per minute. The girl talked about rave and house music, and showed me several songs which she characterized as hip-hop mix, where some enterprising soul would take something melodic (like Sigur Ros) and either rap to it with original words, or take a preexisting hip-hop song and blend them together into something completely new. While she talked about this, my daughter practically buzzed with excitement. She talked about tone, bpm, pitch, all the variables that had to be just right in order to create something new and beautiful out of two completely disparate-sounding songs from different genres. When she got to dub-step, she didn't bother containing her raptures. There was a driving beat, she said, and then a drop. While she played these songs for me, she danced in the car. My reserved girl put her hands out in front of her, and danced. Then she said she couldn't wait to go to art school, where other people would listen to interesting music, watch thought-provoking films, and probably wear knit caps and stand around Alwewife station in their underpants, guided by the latest Flashmob instructions.

At her birthday party, my artistic daughter sat shyly with her cousins, and my step-brother, whom I hadn't seen since I was maybe seven years old. She talked music, more quietly than when she talks it with me, but she talked. She talked about sound. My step-brother and my daughter talked about the recent Roger Waters concerts. We saw it in Boston. He saw it in San Jose. We talked about mixing equipment, Jack White, the Edge, and Jimmy Paige (from the film It Gets Loud). Later, on the way back to the hotel after her 18th birthday party, my daughter bought her first scratch ticket. She won another ticket. The next day, she cashed it in, but the ticket gave her nothing. I bought her two more, and when she scratched them, she was in raptures that she had won twenty more dollars. That left her with a hundred dollars of birthday money, which she will be using in the summer to go to Bonnarroo in Tennessee, where she'll see Eminem, Arcade Fire, the Black Keys, Neil Young, the Decemberists, Iron & Wine, Allison Krauss and Union Station, Explosions in the Sky, and all of those artists they don't play on the radio in California. In late August, I'll take her to the Leeds Music Festival in the UK. We don't even know who's playing, but we know we want to be there, to celebrate her moving on to college.

When I was younger, I used to listen to the radio a lot. These days, new music is more likely to crop up on the internet, passed from one fan to another. These artists arrive in Boston like royalty, but they'll surprise you by playing the little places. We saw the Decemberists at the Bank of America Pavillion, playing the epic concept album The Hazards of Love, where we got seats way in the thirtieth row, then saw them again this year, playing the House of Blues, where Colin Meloy was eight feet away. The same venue where Jonsi Birgisson from Sigur Ros lit up an art installation soundscape unlike anything I've ever seen or heard (or probably ever will see or hear again). We saw John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats play the Somerville Theater with his friend John Vanderslice, grungy and charming. We saw Sting and the Royal Philharmonic play Symphonicity at the lush Comcast Center in Mansfield. We saw Cake and Sufjan Stevens play at the slimy, stinky, sticky Orpheum (not at the same time). We saw Roger Waters do the original Wall concert at the Garden, and Death Cab for Cutie play Agannis Arena at Boston University, where every boy in the audience looked like Ben Gibbard, with tender eyes and moppy hair, and plaintive expressions, begging for love with Ben's lyrics on their lips. For opening acts, we've seen Robin Black and the Intergalactic Rock Stars, Wye Oak, Death Vessel, St. Vincent, and others. I'm no doubt leaving something out, but if anything, it's love for my vibrant child and the sounds she loves so much, she'll move shyly with her hands in the air.

We both wore headphones on the flight home from California. I'm happy to say that I love it when she hooks up her iPod and puts it on shuffle. I get an education, an experience, and a bond that I hope will last a lifetime.

Breaking Bread

I try to stay away from bread. Once upon a time, when I tried vegetarianism, I came down with a mysterious illness called "interstitial cystitis," which should make at least one or two of you either moan in sympathetic pain, or giggle. Interstitial cystitis feels a lot like a UTI that can go on for months and months, as it is not an infection, and is immune to antibiotics. Aside from the pain, it's a funny idea that a sometime interstitial writer should have an interstitial illness; I laughed at this myself, when I wasn't breathing carefully through the months of chronic pain. Among other things, to make the pain go away, I needed to give up vegetarianism, give up bread, give up sugar, and other things I was eating while on the vegetarian diet and not managing to get enough protein. So, the short version: for me, having a meal is no longer "breaking bread," but I will use that phrase even so, to capture that feeling of home, and company, and love, while talking about one of the most important things my daughter and I do together while we're on vacation.

We break bread together. We eat.

Once upon a time, my daughter and I lived in California, the land of Fresh Food. When we spent time together, we had nice meals and watched the kinds of television shows that spawn cult followings (The X Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and so forth). Then, we moved to Massachusetts, where the food was different than we were used to. Most of the affordable fruits and vegetables have been on a boat or a truck for weeks before they appear shrink wrapped in the produce section of our local Market Basket. Buying at Whole Foods is better, but twice as expensive. Buying at farmer's markets is best, but now I'm paying Alaska prices for green grapes (the winter I was pregnant, I bought a pound of Thompson Seedless grapes for $7.99/lb). Thus, when we travel to just about anywhere, any time we are not at a concert, an art gallery, or something like that, we are finding things to eat that we either can't find at all in Massachusetts (good Mexican food) or can't easily find (good Chinese food). We take joy in the whole process: the search for a promising restaurant or market, the trip there spiced with anticipation, ordering, waiting, and finally photographing, tasting, gobbling, moaning about full stomachs. On one trip to Manhattan, we accidentally happened on a tea shop in the West Village called Tea and Sympathy, and had four o'clock tea. I had the cream tea, and my daughter had the sticky toffee pudding, but we ended up switching around. We also had reservations for a trendy bistro, also in the Village, but by the time we arrived, we were so stuffed with tea, it was the best we could to do order a grilled octopus salad (for me) and a plate of grilled asparagus (for her). We shared a blood orange sorbet to finish, and called it a night. The next day, we had soup dumplings in China Town.

Once upon a time, my daughter was a tiny lass who came with me to restaurants. I don't remember there ever being a fight over what was available. When she was small, she had a hard time pronouncing the "R" sound, and when we went to Asian restaurants, sometimes she would shake her head at the menu (all of four years old) and say, "I just want wice." And then she would eat her rice. At Chinese restaurants, she would sprinkle it with soy sauce and eat it with a big soup spoon. At the Thai restaurants, she would take sticky rice and squish a pawful into a dense, sticky ball, which she would impale on the end of a chopstick and eat with great relish. She has always been slim, but the doctor told me she wouldn't starve herself, and so I never forced her to eat anything. If she just wanted wice, wice she would get. Now, she eats sushi with her wice. She eats stinking cheeses and cornichon pickles. She still doesn't like tomatoes or pork chops, but it's a texture thing. Tamales, fettuccine Alfredo, pad thai, guacamole, chomp chomp chomp. The photo above was our Thai lunch in San Bruno, just outside the San Francisco airport: spring roll, sticky rice, woon sen (silver noodles in garlic broth with ground pork and napa cabbage), pad thai, chicken satay with peanut sauce, and thai iced tea. Our dinner was at Fifi's Cafe and Bistro in Pacific Grove, and we had a small Caesar salad (for her), foie gras (for me), the steak frites (shared), and a brandied fig panna cotta (also shared). She was thrilled that it was my first visit in about ten years. She wanted to know what the restaurant had been like ten years ago, and then however many years before that, when I was eighteen years old and sitting in that little building for the first time.

I've seen plenty of separation tactics from her in the last year. She's away more often than she's home. She has a driver's license now, and no longer needs cab rides to her many activities. She spends time with friends. She has a job. She no longer asks if she can go places; she now informs me, telling me the least amount of information possible and steadfastly refuses to go the extra mile and put her schedule on Google calendar. And yet, she's also drawing closer, as the date of her departure to college approaches. She spends whatever time we're together remarking on the Venn diagram of our likes and dislikes. She's more comfortable now with how alike we are, now that she's so close to leaving home. She's more comfortable with how much we look alike, how similar our tastes are in art, music, theater, film, television, and so forth. She's yearning for the food of her childhood, and can be drawn into communal meals with the promise of an old favorite: chicken Alfredo, stir fried tofu with black bean sauce, fried chicken wings, Philippine adobo. Tonight, she asked, "If I run out of money, and I'm hungry, will you feed me if I come home?"

I said, "Just give me a little warning, and I'll make sure to cook something." I don't cook every night any more, not the way I did when she was little. I used to put a meal on the table every single night of the week that we weren't going out on adventures, filling the house with the familiar cooking smells of soy, ginger, cream, black bean, parmesan. When we first moved into the new house, she said, "I can't wait until our living space smells like us."

I'm so glad there's an us. Tomorrow will be the last day she is seventeen, and next fall she will be driving her car and a little U-Haul trailer to some Boston-area college, but she is telling me, loud and clear, that there is still an us. That we have traditions. That we have food. That our house has cooking smells that are uniquely home. That she will take a little bit of home with her when she goes: a rice cooker, a tea kettle. And when she gets hungry, she'll come home and ask for her favorites.

Maybe, if I'm lucky, she will show me some new music that she's excited about. Maybe if I'm really lucky, she'll want to watch an episode of Buffy, or Lost, and laugh that full-body laugh, and tell me stories that keep me firmly in her life.

Yes, my daughter, I will feed you when you come home. For as long as we both shall live, amen.

Making Space

There's more to making space in your life for writing than to assemble a room like this one, but here is the room I have made for that purpose, a funny little room that technically makes my living space "two-bedroom," which the previous occupant used as a walk-in closet. This photo was shot using my phone, not one of the excellent digital cameras I have in my office (cables, fussing, etc.) So this shot is a little hazy, but romantically hazy, I think. It was shot from the doorway of my bathroom, because that's the best angle for capturing the feel of the office without catching the glare from the little window above my printer. That dark blotch under my desk is my dog sleeping in his squishy bed. In addition to being at my feet when I write, he is also close to the radiator, which is just to my left, about six inches from my elbow. He could be curled up warm in the bedroom, but usually chooses to hang out with me, because he's truly a devoted pack animal, and wants to be close to me, even if it's not as warm there as it is elsewhere. The radiator isn't always on, because it costs too much to keep the boiler going all day, so I turn it off once it's got the room to a tolerable level of warmth. We'll see if I end up needing gallons of lotion for my skin, if I sit here and dry up from the heat. There isn't enough steam coming out of the valve to keep the room comfortably humid, so I anticipate needing to bring in the humidifier once in a while to keep from turning into lizard jerky.

Here is the view from my office chair through the adjoining doors to the bath and kitchen. I spent several hours the other day putting up pictures and bulletin boards, primarily in the office, though I did hang some in the kitchen as well. I'm nesting, I guess you would say. This is an old old house, and the windows are drafty, so I will measure them today and go to Home Depot, and order thermal blinds. Hopefully, there will be thermal and anti-UV blinds that will still allow some light into my house, as I suffer from seasonal depression, and appreciate a house that is full of light.

Here is the space next to my desk. I spent three hours yesterday shopping for the right rocker recliner to park here, and found one that should work well. This chair is not for me, though perhaps I will sometimes sit there and read now and then. This is for my companion to sit and read or work/play on a laptop while I'm writing. This is another way in which I'm doing my best to make space for my work, and others are trying to help. You need a lot of space for writing. Although not everyone is lucky enough to have a private physical space, you need at least three square feet to park yourself while typing or writing by hand. My physical space used to be a rescued desk parked in my old kitchen in an older, less splendid house. It was not a computer desk, and so I ended up with repetitive stress injuries in my shoulder, my elbows and wrists. I've written sitting at a kitchen table, tucked in bed, sitting on the floor, in cafes and hotel rooms. Wherever there was space. Now and then, I have been lucky enough to have an actual room of my own, and I have one now.

In additional to the physical space, you need thinking space. You need some way to shut off the voice that says you have laundry to do, family members to attend, a yard to weed, an old, old house to care for and button up for the winter, so you're not heating the entire neighborhood trying to keep its insides warm. (The first floor has an uninsulated pantry that you can use as an icehouse in the winter. Who needs a subzero freezer in the winter when you have a room like this in a New England home? We'll make beef jerky in there in the summer.)

Above all, I think, you need at least an approximate sense of self worth, and emotional space. You need some way to tell yourself that although there are things other people value about you, that you are not defined by that, altogether. That if you stop providing some of those things, you will not lose value to the ones you love. That if they love you at least partly for who you are, instead of what you do for them, they will value you even more when they see you being your best self. Here is what I have considered my best self for the last several years: I have a lucrative job as a managing editor at a biotechnology company that is working on a cure for hepatitis C, and bring home quite a bit of the organic, uncured bacon. If a house has a manager, and I think every well run one does, I am that manager for my house. I put things on the to-do list that keeps things running efficiently, keeps the unwelcome creatures at bay (bugs, mice), keeps things in proper working order, asks for clutter pick-up to prevent breakage and injury (and to preserve my own OCD peace of mind). I wipe tears and give Talks: "Relationships are built on trust, and here are the kinds of things that build it, and the kinds of things that destroy it." I am the slow, methodical thinker, where others are more comfortable figuring out or implementing solutions. I'm most comfortable if I can spend time looking at the problem from every angle before doing anything about it. Parenting, housework, partnership. Examine, analyze, THEN brainstorm and implement the very best solution. I've given everything, over the past several years, to building this family (three adults, three children), using every ounce of my intellect to construct a framework that can withstand the test of time, depression, lay offs, relocations, relationship reconfigurations, family storms, etc. In my community, a family like mine goes through three stages "forming," "storming," and "norming," where "norming" usually happens, if at all, in Year 3. We're at Year 2.5, where the seismic activity of Year 2 is calming to occasional aftershocks.

I am not at the point where I can evaluate my work against the rest of my life, and say that the work is more important than the tone of my own demise. I will write, but it will not be hungry and alone in a garret over the Seine. It will be next to someone in a rocking chair, who has graciously welcomed my art into our home, though it reduces the amount of time and attention I can pay to domestic things. I will switch my travel to writing conventions, but I will continue to travel, and sleep in a bed, not in my car. I will parent my children attentively, and make sure I have helped teach them what they need to know to stay out of prison, remain employed, one day have families of their own of whatever kind suits them. I will not hand them the game controller, and let Nintendo raise them so I can have more writing time. Perhaps I am not an artist after all, merely a dilettante, and I will never write anything great. Perhaps I will never write anything as good again as what I wrote when I was doing so full time, getting repetitive stress injury in that little kitchen all those years ago.

But as someone has recently told me: forever is a long time.

I support you, those of my acquaintance who make different choices in your writing life than I do. I applaud your focus, your diligence, the sacrifices you have made and continue to make in order to make space for your work. No doubt many of you have agonized in this same way, and chosen not have children, not to work 50 hours a week at an intellectually demanding job, not to have a partner at all, much less an intentional co-op of six people. Perhaps you have found a partner who can provide the financial stability and the health insurance needed for domestic stability, and things have clicked for you in a beautiful way (I have done such a thing, and it was lovely). Perhaps you have given up five prime writing years or more to situate yourself in some profession that will feed your writing life, suffering the multitude of privations, large and small, of following your dream. Perhaps one day I will choose differently than I do now. One day, perhaps, I will roar back in, where now I am returning on tip-toe. Perhaps one day the variables will be different, and I can have stability and "enough time" for art, those luxurious sixteen hour days in which I wrote my best work.

Perhaps one day, my values will shift.

Forever is, indeed, a long time.

Eighteen Years

Soon, I will have been a mother for eighteen years. My beautiful daughter's birthday is this Friday, and this is one reason we're flying to California today. My father suffered complications of congestive heart failure over Christmas and New Year's Eve, and when I got the news, I booked two tickets. The last time we saw him was in Oregon at a gathering of the Confederated Tribes of Grande Ronde, where he and I marched side by side in a parade of military veterans. Also marching with the hundred or so veterans was an uncle and a cousin, the four of us participating in the stately progress around a tented pavilion with the rest of the family watching from the bleachers, eating moose burgers and taking pictures. I still have the gift of tobacco the tribes gave me, tied in a tiny red pouch. I keep it in my wallet for luck.

My extended family would tell you that my devotion to family does not extend past the border of Massachusetts. I keep up with them via Facebook and e-mail, but in a haphazard fashion, with nothing approximating the amount of attention I give to those I live with. I'm well-meaning, but I admit that I do not prioritize frequent contact across country or overseas. Buying plane tickets, hotel reservations, rental car reservations, and getting myself to the airport is an excruciating ordeal that I do not at all enjoy; the fact that fewer people die in airplane crashes per year than in auto crashes per month is cold comfort. Getting on an airplane requires medicinal assistance, and I leave fingernail marks in the armrests on take off and landing. But visiting family is important, and so I get out the crowbar and use it to lever myself out of my house onto a plane every few years. This year, my beloved daughter will be celebrating her birthday with my side of the family, and she's excited. They will throw her a birthday party so big it'll have to take place in the recreation hall at my dad's little lakeside community.

My daughter was named after a girl in a Marillion song, not the spunky spaceship mechanic on Joss Whedon's short-lived show, Firefly. The TV show wasn't out yet, and the way her father and I shopped for a name was not by paging through a baby name book. Instead we rifled through his CD collection (now, I suppose all of that music is called "classic rock"). Lola. Layla. Lita. Roxanne. I suppose all of these rock-n-roll names were possible candidates, because they were there on the shelf, but we settled on the name with the most complicated spelling, because we thought it was a pretty name and a cool song, and we weren't worried she wouldn't eventually figure out how to spell it. If you want to figure out what her name is, go do a little research by listening to Marillion and/or watching Firefly; for now, I'll keep her name off the internet. After this Friday, she can go get her own website. She has a job. A low-paying retail job, where the predominant skill is looking pretty and skinny, but it's a job, and I've heard she folds shirts with astonishing military precision, which warms the cockles of my heart.

I was twenty-one when my daughter was born, and it wasn't until this year that she understood what people meant when they kept saying, "Your mom is so young." She has friends who are twenty-one now, and she's freaked out by the idea that I could be like them, so young, and carrying a baby around. Not that she hasn't seen girls even younger carrying babies around; there are several high school girls of her acquaintance whose parents chose to teach the "making threats" method of birth control (don't do it, or else!) and are now grandparents much sooner than they'd hoped. For a while, girls like these worried her so much, she swore she'd never have children of her own. She said the idea of "pushing one out" was too scary, and adopting seemed a much saner and healthier choice. Weren't there thousands of perfectly good already existing kids out there who wanted a nice home? In the car the other day, however, she admitted that she might want to have her own child someday in the distant distant future, and we got into a discussion about the difference between "having a child" and "being a parent." I asked her to please know the difference between these motives before "pushing one out," for her own sake, and for the sake of the little push-ee.

Being a parent has not been about creating a little version of myself who would love me unconditionally. I did end up with a little version of myself, sort of. I'm so much younger than the parents of her peers, and she is so mature in her demeanor, that we're often mistaken for sisters (she's the skinny one). We like the same movies. She grew to love my music, and when she got older, I grew to love her music, and we go to concerts together often. Neither of us is a particularly flashy dresser on the day-to-day, and her hair is long and straight, as is mine, though lighter in color, as her father is blond. We even have the same taste in eyeglass frames, which adds another layer of freaky twin-ness. When asked about my relationship with her, I say we're the Gilmore girls, Lorelei and Rory. But, I have to admit, we're not always best friends. Although I do love her unconditionally, and I do believe she loves me, when necessary, I turn into Meanest Mom in the World, Who Does Not Care, and Never Gives Girl What Girl Wants. Who Always Criticizes Girl, and Wants to Deprive Girl of Dearest Dreams.

And then in the car the other day, while we were discussing the change from maybe someday adopting a kid to someday in the distant future "pushing out one of her own," I was lucky enough to hear the thing maybe every parent wants to hear. "Thank you for raising me the way you did. I think I'm going to be okay in college." Then, we talked about the differences between "having a child" and "being a parent," how being a parent means you're not always that kid's best friend. Sometimes, you're the evil nosy person who wants to talk about birth control, who actually forces you to practice with the kind that requires practice. You're the stern presence over the top of the report card, saying, "I'm not telling you these should be higher. I'm asking you if you're satisfied with these. I'm asking if you know where you want to go to college, and what that college will be looking for in terms of GPA. I'm telling you I'm here to help you achieve that, or to help you figure out what you'd prefer, if college does not seem the best choice for you." You're the voice on the end of the line who says, "You can go where you want to, but I want to know where you're going, who you're with, who's driving, how long they've had their license, and when I can expect you home." You're the voice of reason cutting through the chemicals, the one who reveals the consequences, holds the trembling hand while waiting for the news (whatever that news might be) and wipes away the tears.

She acknowledged the difference between having a child and being a parent. She would not expect to be her best friend all the time. She would expected to be screamed at, peed on, disrespected, and maligned. She would not expect the kid to even like her very much. Regardless, she would buy the baby Bjorn and take junior all over the place, to show her things, and teach her how to live in the world. She would upgrade to the baby carriage, deal with car seats, and booster seats, deal with crying and fatigue, and inconvenience in order to raise a curious, active, self-propelled human being with passions and interests outside of television and video games. Someone who can order Chinese food via phone (or these days, internet). Someone who can find the turmeric at the grocery store. Someone who can tie her shoes, brush her teeth, meet and keep friends, say no and take no for an answer. Someone who can name more than three states in the US, who uses social media to keep track of what's going on in the world as well as exchanging pictures of people standing in their underpants at the Alewife train station.

She is not perfect, my child. She's tall, beautiful, confident, intelligent, self-respecting and absolutely driven to create her own opportunities. She's also a bit neurotic when over-scheduled (which is often), leaves bowls of macaroni and cheese fermenting around the house, and has aggressively (and somewhat scornfully) high standards for companions of the opposite sex that will leave many a fellow broken and weeping in her wake (which I suppose is neither good nor bad, really). She's unfashionably passionate about her interests (art and music) and is not afraid to speak her mind, loudly, in company. In early summer, she's headed to Tennessee for a music festival. In late summer, I'll be taking her to Leeds for yet another. Camping, for both. She's prepared to be broke, broke, broke, broke in order to find a technical job in the industry - music, theater, something. Some job where she can be in charge of the big mixing board, making someone sound amazing and worth the price of a ticket. Maybe she'll change her major nine times before graduation, but she's standing at the wheel; I don't have to worry about that. She has her eyes on the prize, and the prize is life.

She is a prize. One of the greatest prizes of my life.

Reading and Writing About Writing Instead of Writing

Still trying to climb out of the rabbit hole and catch up. This post was started on 22 February, finished 23 February while flying to California, and back-dated 20 February in hopes of posting every day, and something getting lubricated in my fingers or in my heart.

This is how I usually do a thing. I stumble across the thing I'd like to do (tile a floor, have a relationship, become a Buddhist, write a book) and then I read at least a dozen books on the subject (fewer, if there's clearly a best way to do something, like tile a floor) before doing anything about it. I need to analyze the problem, before diving in. This is why I stink at undergraduate term papers. A perfectly acceptable undergraduate term paper shows that the writer knows how to write a term paper. I don't want to learn how to write a good term paper; I want to write something interesting that means something to me. So, it takes me weeks and weeks and weeks to write something that pleases me, rather than the syllabus. It's not enough to get by. It's not enough to get a story published and a check in my hand. The story needs to be architecturally pleasing. It has to feed the dark beast, or it's not worth the time I put into writing it, much less the cost of ink, paper, electricity, or whatever resources it took to produce it. Even if it's not a particularly good story, it has to live.

Before I write anything, I need to read a lot about something, and build a head of steam. And before I start to read on a topic I'd like to write about, I need to do some reading and writing about writing. It's kind of like what I do at my day job. I'm a managing editor, and the first thing I do on arrival is look at the procedures. The first template I write is a template for templates. The first procedure I write is a procedure on how to write procedures. I start at the beginning and work my way stepwise, methodically, through the process of creating a process. In terms of writing, this means I read about how and why other people write. Autobiographies are among my favorite things to read when dipping my toe back into the pool. I will read A Moveable Feast. I will read the diaries of Anais Nin, again. I will read Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends. I will read Stephen King's On Writing.

My wife made a crucial difference during those two years I spent teaching at Hampden (and washing sheets at New Franklin Landry during the summer vacation). If she had suggested that the time I spent writing stories on the front porch of our rented house on Pond Street or in the laundry room of our rented trailer on Klatt Road in Hermon was wasted time, I think a lot of the heart would have gone out of me.

This is the kind of thing I'm looking for when reading books about writing; reality so thick you can practically smell it. Sure, I have a bunch of books on technique, editing, grammar and syntax, the nuts and bolts of writing. Those are helpful too. But the books I need at this stage are less about how the words go on the page, but how people live their lives while doing so. It's a search for value and determination and purpose, and perhaps inspiration to be braver in my choices. My story, unlike that of the Kings, does not feature maggoty table cloths or pink polyester Dunkin Donuts uniforms, or living in a trailer barely able to buy antiobiotics for a child's ear infection. My story is about a person who lives a very comfortable life, who has gotten used to being able to pay cash for the antiobiotics if I need to, staying warm in the winter, getting enough to eat, who isn't sure how to scale back from cushy affluence to affordable and comfortable simplicity, when the comfort has such high value to her family. I read about Hemingway living and working in Paris to get a feel for what those choices might feel like, and it's often frightening to see romantic deprivation; I'm not a romantic person by nature. Passionate, yes. Romantic, no. Romance has been a wrecking ball in my life, and I prefer stable, steady, mutually growthful love over wild romance as a lifestyle these days. My stories tend to reflect this conflict between intense need for safety and intense desire for freedom. So, I read and read about writers, and I study the choices they've made and the reasons for the choices, and I understand that my analytical mind will not solve this conflict, but I need to let the beast chew on it for a while before I can blast through the fear and make the sacrifices.

I'm an hour into my cross-country flight, and I only brought the Project Gutenberg books I have on my Sony Reader, so I can't pull any more quotes from books on writing just now, but I can list the books that provide me with the kick-to-the-gut I need to get going, in addition to those I've already mentioned above (Chabon, Hemingway, King). I'm less enthralled by writers who seem to spend more time writing about writing than writing fiction or poetry, or whatever is their main artistic output, so my favorites are Erica Jong (Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life), Twyla Tharp (The Creative Habit). I do also read Annie Dillard, Julie Cameron, Anne Lamott, and Natalie Goldberg, but I much prefer to read writers whose other work I love, so these have fallen further down the reading list. Also inspirational, and nutritious to the beast (who loves human tragedy), I've read and loved biographies and autobiographies of artists and musicians, one notable piece of horror called Long Hard Road Out of Hell by Marilyn Manson. The last thing I want to do is to live these frightening lives I read about, but even the most sensational expose, if written well, and I think the last one is written well, has enough truth in it to feed the analysis engine, even if the result is, "No way, I'd never go that far." That's at least a point of data in the "safety" column. No heroin. No river stones in my pockets. No shotguns. Thanks, Papa Hemingway. Thanks, Kurt. Thanks for the object lesson.

I didn't bring any books on writing on my vacation to California. I brought some hefty Russian novels. I brought my paper journal, in case I want to write something that's too private to blog about (I only let the beast blog about remotely interesting things; and much of my angst is profoundly repetitive and uninteresting). But I did pay the $12.95 to use unlimited wireless on my Virgin America flight, and so will be blogging from the air, writing about writing.

When I get home, I'll make a library run for books on Joseph Cornell, and I will write about preparing to write.

I'll stop writing about writing, and starting writing-writing when I'm ready.

Thoughts on the Rabbit Hole

I am writing this post on 22 February, back-dated to 19 February.

From 19 to 21 February, I fell down the rabbit hole and didn't post, so I hope to catch up by double posting for a few days. I'm not sure what this will look like when cross-posted, so if it looks crazy, I apologize. No, I won't apologize. Maybe that's part of the point. No, it most certainly is the point, so never mind.

A few thoughts on the courage it takes to write, and the rabbit hole, starting with a few words from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

It's possible that if I weren't mad, I would not be here, writing about writing. Maybe I would be golfing (not presupposing that mad people don't go golfing, but that perhaps I'd be a completely different person if I weren't - let's say, maybe someone who enjoyed big people's golf). I've been trying, over the last week or so, to describe why exactly it takes so much courage for me to belly up to the page. I have several official maladies of the mind: generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (without the compulsive, extra helping of obsessive), and some peripheral sorts of things that are hard to categorize but result in things like hyper-vigilance and occasional bouts of panic, for which I take medication. In addition, to further complicated things, I have several unofficial artistic maladies, including an interest in the darker side of human experience, and a tendency to turn things that have happened in my life into unsettling stories of fabulous tone. Not everything I've written about comes from personal experience (for example, I've never been addicted to an illegal substance, killed anyone, or attempted to resurrect a loved one), but there is still something intensely revealing about putting one's imagination on display. Even if you haven't done the thing you are writing about, you can still imagine doing that thing, and if it's sufficiently disturbing, people will look at you as if you are at least capable of doing that thing, if you're capable of describing it with verisimilitude.

All right, I said this was about madness, but also about courage. So, what takes so much courage, then, about moving one's fingers across a keyboard? I think the fear is different for each writer, so I can only speak to my own: I believe that even the most introverted among us, unless deeply sociopathic, has a yearning for social acceptance and community. No matter that we might wish to think otherwise (especially if you think of yourself as perfectly accepting and loving to others), people will look at you differently, treat you differently, hug you differently, and speak to you differently, if some part of your being is alien to their experience. And if you are hypervigilant and a little paranoid, like I am, you will see it in a thousand details. According to the sources I could dig up through Google, there are 52 muscles in the human face. These muscles do different things, depending on how a person feels, no matter how they wish to appear to you. They want to smile warmly, but there's something around the eyes that speaks of horror, confusion, distaste, distrust, or some other kind of negative judgment. I think hyper-vigilance is caused by a lot of things, but perhaps the simplest way to explain it is with the obvious and most overt. What kind of defenses do you think you would develop if you were used to the human hand approaching you at velocity? Most likely, you would learn how to read a person's body the way a boxer does, out of self-interest, always looking for the signs of a punch communicating through the body, so you would know when to duck to get out of the way. For me, to write is to have the courage to stand and not duck. It's to put the workings of my mind out there, despite years of experience letting that boxer's blow land. Yes, I can write about despicable things. Also, I live a non-traditional life that many don't understand. And sometimes, I let the fear win, and I do duck. I've been known to duck for years. And why not? It's kind of crazy not to duck. Crazy and self-destructive. It's basic self-preservation to wear your armor in public. Grandma does not need to know about your underwear drawer; it would make her uncomfortable, and her discomfort would make you uncomfortable. Better to duck and be safe, right?

But here's the thing. I wrote a story I haven't sold yet, about a frightened man and another man he loves. In the story, they're fleeing across country from California to Massachusetts. As they run, the man's lover is decomposing. When the man, a photographer, stops running and takes a photo of his lover, there is a miraculous, temporary healing, but of course, there's a price. A crash happens soon afterward that ends other lives, every time the man restores his loved one. No matter how fast they drive, they can't outrun death; it comes after them in a tornado of screaming tires and broken glass. The metaphor: I can run away from my writing as fast as I can, and it will catch up with me. I can duck, and I can duck, and one way or another, it will race through my life and smash something to smithereens. I can duck, but I can't escape the madness. It will come out in the writing, or it will suck me down the rabbit hole, where I will pickle in the crazy. That's where I've been for a while now, pickling in the crazy, walking like a ghost through my beautiful new/old house, touching things and trying to anchor myself in the now.

I've been trying to make a trade. Madness, dear madness, if you let me walk around, earn a living, take care of my family, I will not reveal you to the world. I will keep your secret. I will feed you with expensive meals, romantic trips to seaside towns, films, art shows, and other entertainments. The thing is, the beast inside doesn't want to be bought off and kept a secret. It doesn't want to hide its grotesqueries and gnashing teeth; quite the contrary. It wants to cavort down Main Street in its yummy sushi pajamas. It's an exhibitionist. It can't take the trade; the best it can do is to make a counter-trade. If you make enough room for me, it says, I will let you live. How about that? If you let me out into the world to dance my revealing dance, I wil let you get out of bed in the morning. I will let you eat, and I will let you sleep. Writing stuff down in a journal is okay when you need all of your artfulness to keep you alive, but as soon as survival is no longer a problem, I will hop out of you, and dance around town with my butt hanging out the fanny flap of the yummy sushi pajamas. You can create all kinds of emergencies, and try to distract me for a while, even a few years, but I will, in the end, win out. I am as inevitable as death.

When I keep this creature bound and gagged, I can pretend I'm okay. If I keep the madness on the inside, it helps me look okay on the outside, at least for a while. I can put on the suburban professional face that I wear at work. I can socialize, pretend I'm not the kind of person who enjoys investigating the darkness of the human spirit. I go to school plays, company parties, church socials, the grocery store. Then I find myself down the rabbit hole, in bed and unable to climb out. Maybe everybody has this creature inside, and for one person it's writing, and for another person it's golf. Maybe there are people out there in the world who would climb into bed and not come out, if not for the promise of one more round of golf, one more animal rescued, or an hour spent fishing, or an extra hour researching Roman sewers, or an extra evening a week trying to cure cancer or knit shawls for the dying, or watching television. Are there really people whose madness would overwhelm them if not for a curative daily hour of television? Sadly, I think so, and I'm glad that my exhibitionistic madness has, at least, some sort of product to mark its steps, however much that product may make people draw back for a roundhouse punch.

I think we're all mad, here.

I'm mad. You're mad.

Otherwise, we wouldn't have come here.

eXistenz

In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice. (Richard Bach)

It depends. Whose boredom are we talking about here? I find it easy to give up my own boredom, but harder to disappoint someone by asking them to give up theirs for my sake.

What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage. (Bruce Barton)

I think it's called lack of self worth, but I could be mistaken. Sometimes, I can be really dumb about these things (searching pockets for own self worth).

Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. (James M. Barrie)

Wait a minute; everything? I just got done saying I had a hard time giving up someone ELSE's comfortable boredom to follow my dreams. *suspicious* Just what are you trying to say, here?

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being. (Carl Jung)

Okay, correct if I'm wrong, but this sounds stupid. Why do something if it doesn't make you happy? An artist has to sacrifice everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary guy? EVERYTHING? What it this art crap, anyway? Tell me you have to give up food and sex, and I'll be really confused (Henry Miller spent some time eating and having sex; I have it from Anais Nin's journal. But admittedly, I don't think he did anything else. Have sex. Eat. Write. Maybe use the toilet. Repeat.)

The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. (George Bernard Shaw)

*sweating* This is clearly going too far, isn't it? That's a bad, bad person, there. Writers must be selfish, heartless, terrible people; why would anyone want to have a partner like that? Only really strange, possibly masochistic people. I'm starting to really hate writers. Oh. Wait.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

WAIT. Now I have to DIE for my art? I quit. Why can't I just write, say, for one hour every other Wednesday, and change absolutely nothing else about my life? I mean, it's just wriggling my paws across a keyboard. My cat can do that. How hard could it be? Why all of this sturm and drang and sacrificing everything? It can't possibly be that hard (whimper, whimper, magical thinking...)

The important thing is this: to be able, at any moment, to sacrifice what we are for what we could become. (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi)

So, you're saying I don't have to give up my family, sell my dog, kill and eat the cat, give away all of my personal electronics, and live in a cardboard box in order to do this thing? *suspicious* You're not like all the other guys. Pull my other leg, Maharishi. Tell it to Boo Boo Bear.

Writers in existential crisis should not Google.

The Defenses

To what lengths will you go to avoid the blank page?

When I was writing full time, avoidance took the form of surfing the internet. Or doing perfectly legitimate things, like running errands, scrubbing the toilet, making dinner, folding laundry, going to the library for "research" materials, making plans to attend writing conventions, walking the dog, exercising, clipping my fingernails, watching a movie with my daughter, hanging out in front of a Red Sox game with my husband (ex, now). If it would keep me away from the computer, I would spray furniture polish on everything and rub gently with a lint-less cloth. I would talk to other writers about writing. I would post on forums, write scores of e-mails, doodle in my reading journal, listen to music, watch the special features on my collection of David Lynch DVDs. I would fill up my Netflix queue, and write lists. Lists of books I wanted to read, films, I wanted to watch, wines I wanted to try. Research. How am I supposed to write about a Campari soda if I've never had one (damn you, Mary Stewart and your gothic novels - Campari sodas are bitter as divorce).

Despite all of these methods, I managed to write quite a few "successful" stories. By successful, I mean someone paid me to print them. Presumably, people bought and read these books, and at least accidentally read a few pages of mine before skipping to the next story in the anthology that was not as neurotic, and didn't leave them with the urge to clean their toilet with a toothbrush.

At that point, many of my peers began shopping their novels, and I think I got really scared. When I got my first typewriter at age 10, I thought that a novel was the apex of achievement. Too ignorant to be intimidated, I wrote one immediately. I think it was about teenagers who ride their horses into the deep end of a swimming pool and end up in a secret country. Maybe I was reading a lot of DeLint. Throughout grade school and high school, I wrote more "novels," which were long, schizophrenic stories usually done in a spiral notebook with several different colors of pen, and random handwriting shifts. They made no sense, had no beginning, middle, or end. To be fair, they usually had a beginning. That was marked "page 1" in the upper right hand corner, as shown in my Writer's Market example manuscript. Other than that, they went here, and there, and over there, and few ever had endings. They had battalions of characters who became embroiled in nonsensical conflict that I didn't know how to get them out of, so I'd abandon them there, and put the pages in a binder, where they wouldn't hurt anybody. I have a box full of that stuff here in my bedroom, kept like a reliquary in case burning and huffing the contents will break the spell I am currently under.

As soon as I started publishing stories, I suppose, all of a sudden I had something to lose, where that ten-year-old girl had nothing. I had at least four people, including myself and my love interest, who thought certain stories were worth killing trees to print and sell. Let's presume that the slush reader, who passed the story up, and the delusional, underfed editor, in a folie a deux, decided to buy my story. Plus me, and my love interest; that makes four. So, as soon as all four of those people stared looking at me expectantly (all right, it's just me and my love interest - after publication, the editor and slush reader have moved one), the absolute terror set in, and I began to look for ways to avoid the whole pour your soul out, have a hundred people tell you your story's only worth its weight as bird cage lining, and maybe ten out of every 100 hours of story writing, resulted in a story seeing the light of publication. Oh, yes. The validation of publication.

After those initial stories were published, you see, my stories started getting longer and longer and longer. I tried to forcibly have ideas that could fit neatly into 3500, 5000, and 7500-word packages, but they started putting on weight. Only not enough weight not to fall apart under their own ponderousness. I had a lot of words and not enough story to hold up all the words. I was a short-story writer, or worse, a poet, with diarrhea of the keyboard. I pumped out bloated suburban satires no one wanted to buy. Bloated post-apocalyptic novelettes that never found homes. I started thinking the novel was next; it had to be next, and toyed with index cards in the Tim Powers method until I could build little cities. All I ended up with was a scene in one of my short stories where someone builds a little city out of stacks of index cards. Everything was getting waaay too roman a clef, where I was writing about my haphazard life haphazardly, and none of it hung together. Nothing made any sense. I couldn't push through that totally normal lack of sense to finish anything.

So, in order to protect myself from the fear of failure in writing, I embarked on the most complicated set of domestic arrangements I could possibly find. In the past, I'd had a fairly routine approach to relationships. I launched in with a passion, seduced the poor individual silly, and then convinced them to settle down with me and create a lovely little domestic cocoon that would eventually bore me so much, I'd write out of sheer self preservation. What's the best way to make sure you'll never need to write again? Pick a relationship that's so complicated and has so many moving parts, the domestic cocoon will never, ever, in a million years happen. Then, get a really great job as a manager at a biotech company, and use 154% of your processing power per day trying to figure out how not only to fool them into giving you a paycheck every month, but to look stylish and calm as a Buddha while doing it. Make sure your relationship package comes with small children with no boundaries, by the way. This is practically a guarantee that there will be no resources left by the time Writing Time starts. Buy a huge old house in a huge old neighborhood. Get depressed and anxious. Spend all of your time worrying about what people are thinking and feeling, and what you might lose if you let go your death grip on the steering wheel. The more people in your house, the more laundry and dishes there are, too. Make sure no one else can do the chores as well you can, and that no one can raise the kids as well as you can, that no one can have a thought that hasn't been run through your ninety-five million relationship books, because there's a time killer; emotional processing of each and every feeling anyone ever has. Put it on Google calendar, and schedule your weeks in five-minute increments. Buy a car. Start collecting parking tickets, because you can't remember how to be organized any more. Stop taking care of your body, so that it breaks down in spectacular fashion. Drop and shatter your old phone and pay over $500 for a new phone that's really an iPad, only smaller. Get a traffic ticket, your first. Forget to pay your bills a couple of times. Forget to visit your therapist and pay the no-show fee. Let organized religion invade and take over your life with its five bazillion committees, all which fall in the first week of every month. Find out that you have a woman's infection nobody likes to talk about at work, and fixing that gives you an even grosser infection, and then a sinus cold, and the stomach flu on top of that (simultaneously), and obtain a quote for a thousand dollars to fix your water heater to try and mitigate some of that $700 gas bill for that last five weeks of December and January. As an extra bonus, find out how easily and cheap it will not be to retrofit your 1950's kitchens with dishwashers, so you don't have to hand wash that flotilla of dirty dishes that pass in a continuous loops through the sink.

Go ahead. Try it. I guarantee you, you'll never have the energy to tap another word into your MacBook Pro. You'll be too worried about abnormal cells, and the fact that your dog CANNOT stop peeing on the floor, and the snow needs to be shoveled again, and we're out of fake orange cheese and Cheerios, and need more immediately.

I take a temperature reading on my courage to write, and then I whack my life, much like a really stupid person whacking a hornet's nest with a stick. Stuff comes out in a stream of stinging badness, and I have really good reason to run like hell. Which, of course, was the point all along.

Partially, to convinced myself that I'm not a quitter. That it's not my fault I don't have time to write. Not my fault at all. It's these other people's fault. It's my dog's bladder. If not for all the forces arrayed against me, I'd have a novel written by now, yesiwouldindeed. My hardcover novel would be sitting next to those of my friends, and THEN WHAT WOULD HAPPEN? I'd have to write another one, and THEN where would I be? Certainly not cradled comfortably around my laptop burning my brain to cinders with something on Netflix streaming. Leave me alone; that's where I want to stay. Under the covers, where it's warm, and nobody's asking me to strip under fluorescent lights, so they can gleefully say, "What's the bloody point to this story, anyway? Please, tell me you didn't quit your day job."

Oh, the gremlins. The gremlins. They run around in my head with barbed wire clubs, and they whisper to me evil, evil things. It's no one's fault but mine, my inability to adequately multi-task. I SHOULD be able to tightrope walk AND juggle, shouldn't I? Is that really too much to ask? Okay, maybe.

I want to find the resources to write, without jeopardizing the domestic peace. But wouldn't it be more comfortable just to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, sip a glass of cheap pinot grigio, and wait for tomorrow?