WFH Window

The day is impossibly beautiful and breezy. Dazzling.

Nekkid baby has returned to my strip of the sidewalk, on a tiny bicycle. Riding it like a scooter. One foot on a pedal, one accelerating heedlessly.

An hour ago, with his mommy, he had walked by wearing nothing but a pull-up diaper, holding a sippy cup, absorbed utterly by anything under his nekkid little feet. Leading with his lil' boy belly. Dappled in sunshine.

But now, on his bike, daddy along for the ride literally, he is dressed and helmeted and speeding. I hear no wailing; he must be good at not falling.

He fades down the road.

The passel o' boys across the street from me are outside playing some game, squealing with joy between yelling like angry badgers, all modulated by occasional, calm dad-voice.

It. Is. OSUM.

Oh man - another bloodcurdling scream! Kids at play so often sound so terrifying!!! It sounds exactly like my own neighborhood, circa 1978.

Between this, tweeting birds, and inviting breezes, I am hard put to finish part 2 of the month's reporting. Gah.

There is this very specific inflection to kids playing - an elastic up-and-down wave, nothing like so tidy as a sine - in which the sound of injustice resonates with purity. BUT WHYYYYY ... can't I go over here ... does he get to run to the next base ... am I not wiii-ii-iiiiiii-in-in-innniiiinnng?

The breeze in the maple outside the window, playing with the grass, scintillating in the treetops across the way. The beagle a couple houses away, Expressing Opinions.

It is ... beautiful.


***


Just a few miles away, filthy Confederate monuments I want to see for myself, updated for our age by people angry, and sad, and bereft for the several-millionth time in 400 years. The police chief here has been on the side of citizens. Just south of us, another chief stood with his people. It is not loaves and fishes The Beatitudes, and it IS optics and choices and amplification calculated - but it is good to see choices for those these polices forces are here to protect and serve.

One of my dearest friends, my best neighbor at work, a woman I love so much - I have heard the sirens, but she heard those and the sound of "no justice/no peace" and "I can't breathe" all this weekend. She is a living blessing.

The Daughters of the Confederacy could have done as others have - served history instead of themselves, as an institution. Why anyone would care to be institutionalized with a group of worshippers of the Lost Cause - people lionizing rebels, who broke away from and tried to destroy the United States - is beyond comprehension. Their existence is shameful, and their mission indefensible. They should relinquish their revolting relics to actual historians, donate their facilities, repent and make reparations. They are shameful. They burned - for a little while - this weekend. This is not looting, it is reprimand, and long past due.

Lee's tired horse, on an exalted platform of ridiculous loftiness - tail down and tired, while the old General still rides, ramrod straight and UNASHAMED, bronze and burnished, but shat on daily by local pigeons with more rectitude - is bedaubed with graffiti. Stuart's plinth, a little shorter, surrounded by a wrought iron bridge it could *not* have been easy to bring down - but brought down it has been, by living bodies who matter more than these rebels do.

Leave them desecrated, the echo of the desecration these insurgents brought to the United States, in dividing them. Remember them for the failures they were. Let the bronze and granite decay, the rot take them over. Leave them to rot, or take them away altogether.

Leave Kehinde Wiley's living horseman in their place - no traitor, but an AMERICAN man - pristine and strong and proud and standing for something. Let him tower over the others as they fall down.


***


It would take only minutes to see what has been done, and what has been undone, in my city. I will probably drive out - before the newly enacted curfew - to see what I need to know. To be a part of it.

To see the dazzling sun, perhaps, set ... on these newly-faced (hardly DEfaced - how do you "ruin" idolatrous monuments to traitors?) images.

To breathe the good air, and commit to using my privilege ... so that little nekkid kiddo can stay untouched a while longer.

A story

"My dad used to take us camping," she said to the curious group at the booth in the bar. We began to quiet down to listen to her. "We would hike up this mountain all morning in summer. It took hours, and we would be so hot, and so tired and hungry by the time we got where he was taking us. You had to go up rocks, and through these trees. But then, breaking out into the sun ... there was this lake. Perfectly clear. The most amazing blue. It was beautiful..."

The story, as my friend K once told it, was actually several minutes long.

It's the closing line I can never forget.

"And that ... is the color of Diane's ex-husband's eyes."

All I ever managed, in praise of his startling, Nordic baby-blues was to say they were "like Windex." Even that I stole off of Carla Tortelli.

My mom once amusedly scoffed that he must wear contacts. I countered with Paul Newman. Even just a few years ago, I showed a somewhat recent pic of him to my Aunt, and the exclamation she made indicating how good he looked was a familiar, memory-claiming, "Those eyes!"

Beloved Ex's eyes are still that shade of extremely bright, clear blue. But it got weird, too. Not so long after that pic I showed my aunt, he was in an accident and injured, and suffered what he and I generally just refer to as Bowie eye. No eerie, glamorous alien rock god, BEx *has* been a hellacious front man in his day; even just last year, seeing him perform for (my) first time in 24 years was a revelation. He's a great performer.

Last year was also the first time I ever saw him with the eye dealio. Dear as our friendship is, neither he nor I ever pretends we're not exes, so we talk and email and text, but we haven't visited in many moons. He wanted to come for dad's memorial, and had car trouble, and so the last time we were in the same room before last year had been in 2002. (He did get to see dad before he died; maybe that is right, and better.)

The Bowie eye thing is cool, of course - but BEx isn't much of that opinion. What many of us might feel as a distraction to people we meet, he feels as an embarrassment - and, too, he certainly has to squint more than he used to. The shades stayed on a lot. And, not actually doing the rockstar thing after all, one does understand how he doesn't embrace the visual oddity. Like most things people dislike in themselves, or worry about anyway, this isn't as exceptional to see as it is to own.

Lately, I keep running by movies we saw together, when I flip channels. They take me back, not so much to Ohio, or even particularly the late 80s/early 90s, but just to him.

If it seems hard to understand why someone I like so much, and love so much, is in any case still an "ex", rest assured it's been brought up to me before. Given how he talks about those people in his life who haven't met me apparently respond to him talking about *his* ex, I assume that I am not alone. And, as old age with nobody but a cat and a dog in my life looms, the fact is I query myself whether I could live in Ohio again after retirement. Once mom goes (assuming I actually outlive her; it's just possible), I will be essentially alone in the world wherever I am. Of course, I don't expect to be able to retire before age 78.

At the end of the day, though - and as much as seeing him last year was GREAT - it also reminded me of a fundamental way we are incompatible.

BEx was not raised in a house of yes. Even going back to college at what he feared was the "old age" of like 28 came in part under the influence of my dad - not his. His default expectation is of frustration and failure.

During the year or so of our functionally being married, we ran up against ... me. I was restless. I wanted to see some "other side" to Ohio - to get out - to not be so poor we had to discuss, "Hey, can we afford toilet paper?"

I also saw myself turning into a pretty awful person. This probably owes to sabotaging us: I wanted out so badly I flailed. When a cherry business offer came from his then-employers - "Buy our music store, we'll make you a deal" (they were lovely people and really cared for him) - I saw two things. One, that I didn't want to stand in the way of that. And two, that it meant a pretty deep root in Ohio.

Restlessness turned to nagging and discontent and nastiness. I went home, got work, we stayed married and hoping, but I also succumbed to that most impossible of urges - I wanted "to grow."

That was 25 years ago, and I am still at it of course, but what revealed itself relatively early is the major problem between me and him. He is wary and wise, facing life with bets hedged and expectations low. This is completely right and fair.

But I became, somewhere along the line, not only a practitioner of gratitude, but actually spiritually invested in counting my blessings.

Last year, watching his progress through an iffy day up to that Really Big Show, I was powerfully reminded: BEx can't take yes for an answer. The weather was perfect, the crowd was GREAT, the band was tight. It all was sensational - and a good time. But even afterward, his focus was on details he wasn't satisfied with. As I said at the time, "He can't take yes for an answer." Never could.

Which means that BEx, as it turns out, is a striver. Maybe "a little depressive" as he and I actually used to have a personal joke about. But very much in service of his ambitions, his needs and hopes and expectations.

I am decidedly *not* a striver.

I need to be happy with what is (and, no, the irony isn't lost on me). In nearly twenty years' homeownership, this is why the hardwoods REMAIN un-refinished. It's probably why I abide in loving Mr. X, at that - someone who ruined all the other boys for me, but who also may literally never reappear, physically, in my life. The fact that I don't quite believe that doesn't mean I don't comprehend it's possible.

Not unlike BEx, Mr. X is not easily prone to taking yes for an answer.

Me, apparently I'll take "no" till the day I die. Pollyanna, just too busy to be distracted by failure, or insistently practicing that gratitude that keeps me focused on what actually does work in my life (think what you may about romantic delusions - what actually does work in my life is remarkably extensive). All of the above.

BEx is hardly monomaniacal on the subject of what doesn't work in *his* life. It's just that my need to thank my lucky stars makes his entire perspective irksome.

I would get in the way of his pragmatism and ambition. He would get in the way of my practice of gratitude - and it is, a practice.

And so, we are exes, and friends, and I actually do still think he is the ginchiest.

As, all those years ago, my friend K also did. Eyes like deep, still mountain lakes. Or Windex.

I miss ... and therein lies everything

I miss her. She and I weren't truly close until our twenties, but we knew each other from the age of twelve. In high school, we shared that certain world of boys we liked (I have never been famed for liking the same boys as everybody else, so this actually does have specific meaning). She seemed brave to me, more daring. Once we got out of school, and were together because we wanted to be, we were daring together - more and more often, until she was my sister.

Sister.

She's in my DNA. And she is gone. And I hate that. Even practicing gratitude, even counting the blessing that she was - that she IS, dammit. Even being glad I got to love that girl, and was loved by her. Nope. It's not enough, because I was only good enough on my own schedule. I was too little, and too late, and we both did that, but the last too-late was mine.

She's left us all to deal with these scurrying circles. She, bless all of her ashen bones, is at peace, I pray.

Today, I listen to old music, and Dokken seems to be transforming to make me think of her. Alone Again and Heaven Sent, no longer cis/het/sexual love songs, but longing strains of my lost friend.

I miss her.

She was SO alive.


***


I miss him.

Even in a dream, all I have left is "that you ARE" - telling myself in a dreaming brain, that it is enough only knowing he exists, and telling myself that by way of "telling" a chimera of him: "just knowing you exist."

It *is* enough - knowing whom I have loved, knowing I was loved. But distance. Depression. Distortion. They make it hard. He's a Daemon of air and darkness, and I miss him. It's all we have, to make life bearable.

If only he could be alive as she was. I pray it for him. Never sure if it does any good.

He's in my heart and head and soul. He isn't "gone" - not dead; only curved into himself; too distant. I can't even know whether to love that or hate it. The wall I am pressed against is blank.

Scurrying circles. Small ones. Vicious.

I shift to Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here - and it is nothing like him. And its drawn-out softness, its langour and melancholy and desolate gorgeousness transform me. And I am quiet.

I miss him.


***


I miss writing.

It means so much, and it means nothing. Gets me through, and on the other side of "through" I find nowhere.

Even so.

I miss writing.

Nope, still not posting ...

... still not writing either. Sigh.

But tonight, I pulled up Over the Edge to watch, and this woke up one of the happier memory parts of my brain.

Cheap Trick is OSUM, man.



But (... for now ...) that is all.

See you some time soon though, fella babies. I can't stay shut up for but so long.

Scale

God said let there be lights in the firmament of the Heaven, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years.

My lifespan seems a small enough thing to me.

To a fruitfly, it might seem a wasteland of time, beyond bearing.

To a molecule ... to an atom, to a gluon ... all existing at such different scales: would my life seem vanishingly short, or extraordinary in its immensity?

A living cell might exist within a comprehensible "human" scale, though it comes and goes more quickly than we do.

The molecule - these can be broken so easily, or may hold tight for eons and eons. Some unstable and brief, some all but immortal from where humanity stands.

Down into the tenacious atom ... the nucleus ... these buzzing, speeding systems outstripping any velocity we can understand - are we great, slow, neverending collossi, or fleeting organisms, so ephemeral as to be irrelevant? So tempting to conceive a universe in the orbit of an atom. So human.

And, if space folds into itself, who is to say that scale does not ... that Horton was right, along with every one of us when we discover the mind within the brain we already had: that, though we know the universe is the greatness around us, we also occupy the greatness which encloses lives and systems and universes impossibly small? That there are systems within us; planes we do not understand which make us up. Not merely the individual cells coming and going, each one's life one necessary part of what we think is "our" own life - but symbiants - even the impulses and autonomic actions that preserve life, but we do not create.

We are minuscule and immense; it is all in how we look - outward, and inward.

And we owe debt both to the greatness beyond us, as well as the greatness we enclose, which contains all we think is "small" ... That we are both gargantuan and infinitessimal, and that our part is to BE part of both these scales: in the universe, which is the organism of which all our lives are the tiniest part: and as the universe, within which myriad forces exist, dependent upon us, or making up the magic and meat that *is* us.



My lifespan seems a small enough thing to me.

But if I do not honor its scale, it might as well be nothing at all.

Almost my birthday, and all I want is death

This post is a barely-edited version of an email I sent this morning. It's funny how trains of thought actually seem to create their own tracks and destinations.



Forwarded message to a best friend TEO...


"When bitching about a sweater gets REALLY dup and profiend.

Sometimes, being a writer is weird."


-----Original Message-----
Original email to Mr. X
Sent: Tue, Feb 6, 2018 8:06 am
Subject: Yep nope

The quest for the right wardrobe never seems to end. I bought a sweater maybe three months ago - it was definitely "recent" - but am deciding today, it has got to go. Which is especially irritating, as it's a GAP and I usually have good luck with GAP. (One red/black damask print v-neck has lasted me like six years now, it's woooooonnnderful.) But this simple blue rib knit: I'm not into that whole Marie Kondo thing, but this sweater is NOT GIVING ME JOY.

Which, ugh. This sweater made me use THAT phrase. This sweater sucks.

The thing is - it's really comfortable, it's the length I like, and the color is great on me. It is also pill--tastick (yes, with a K - like your name, it needs the consonantal emphasis), the "inseam" tag sticks out (and no, I don't cut out care tags because lord knows I'll louse up the laundry at some point), and the front hangs really weird at the bottom. Gah.

So, though I've worn this probably not even half a dozen times: I need to get rid of this thing.

Life is too short to wear unflattering (and prematurely RATTY) sweaters.

It's just a shame I happen to be wearing the thing NOW. On my fake-Friday, and family day. And with good jewelry, too! Blah.


Tonight is steak night at mom and Stepdad's. The filets from Christmas, which we didn't eat because everyone came down with the flu.

This'll be the way to spend some family celebration time with Step, but leave Wednesday free for me and mom. He's been in bed a couple days, and says he might not eat with us (he'll almost certainly eat with us, but how he'll be feeling today overall is up in the air). Sigh. Poor S. He just can't seem to die.

Bro and I were talking about him this weekend. He said it was something of a shame we came to love him after he lost his mind - I think there's a feeling akin to guilt, for Bro - but I feel like it's a blessing. We LOVE him. Neither of us felt like that was a possibility twelve years ago, and okay, it took dementia to loosen S up and give him this sense of humor we treasure. But he's loosened up. He is funny. We love him. That is enough of a blessing, and dementia is enough a part of life, I feel like it's worth just being grateful for the love and the blessing.

This is the power of a sense of humor, really. Laughter is so elementally *human*, I think, that the bonds it creates can't be trivialized. I mean: look at the way I talk about your face, broken up with laughter. It's in no way a small thing, the way that is beautiful to me.

It's in no way a small gift: S's immense grace in his sense of humor.

They always say there's no comedy without pain. I'd have to agree; that's fair. S's wit has come at such a price. Life itself, arguably. But his funny-ness has made all our lives just that much more wonderful. And just saying that squeezes my heart, and all but breaks it.

And as much as I am grateful for the incandescence of S's impishness and his smile, G-d I wish it could be taken from us all. I wish he could die. Because as long as we have his brilliance with us, HE has to endure such hideous, unbreakable pain. It is so unjust - and I know life is not fair. But nobody should ever suffer this. I would not even wish this on a Trump.

And even with all that, to feel *guilty* about loving his humor would be to waste it, and to negate the blessing it is. I just have to pray it is some amount of blessing for S. It looks like it is. It looks like, even if only a moment at a time, it takes him out of the pain. Even as selfish as it is: he takes *us* out of it. He invites us out of the reality he can't escape himself.

I've never seen grace quite like that. S is something so special.

Specificity, Magic, and Getting Lost in Cover Art

Talking with Colin Smith recently at his blog got me thinking about the subjective effects of good illustration. We were discussing those pieces of art inside a number of books, but I'm struck time and again by the impact a photo cover has on me versus good old fashioned paintings and drawings. Even a photo of a sculpture is not the same.

When I was a kid, you still saw matte painting in movies and television. Science texts sometimes employed artists for renderings of various objects of study - space, in particular, was fertile ground (so to speak ...) for magnificent paintings of detailed scenes, worlds away from our own, exciting phenomena rendered in bold colors and evoking intensity, heat, movement - danger! - beauty ...

For over a century and a half, there has been a lament that photography destroys art, that it is soulless, that it is unworthy of contemplation. Of course, this is untrue.

And yet, there is something about a photograph - not least the limited and terrifyingly recycled library of stock images used these days in book cover design - that lacks, in comparison with the inspiration of a drawn or painted image.

For one, there is the specificity. As a reader, I dislike being instructed by a book's cover with quite the concreteness a photo provides.

Colin and I talked of the ability to get lost in a simple oil pastel drawing or watercolor, and I remembered the million worlds of Richard Scarry as absorbing adventures that could hold me for hours.

There is also the charm of style. There are covers of books I read growing up I still remember. In histfic, ersatz portraits that took real-life inspiration and transformed old paintings into compositions and costumes that ended up more 60s or 70s in their vibe. Historical figures' new pictures paying homage to known portraiture, but presenting attitudes perhaps less formalized than such images. (Seriously, click on the link, Robert Dudley is kind of perfectly conceived - and not even headless!)

Then there are the comparative studies - the 80s cover whose male model I crushed on, versus the 60s extravaganza of Historical Epicness. Even the 80s one isn't just a straight photograph; its sky is a painted vista, its background a world like so many of those matte paintings I knew from Star Trek as a wee little nard.

Even the most specific, detailed painting or drawing is still in some way subjective, and therefore invites inspiration over being a dictation.

Photo book covers, for me, have all the appeal of an over-sentimental film score. Bad scores are didactic - telling me how I must feel, taking away from me the opportunity to come to an emotion on my own with a character or characters.

I believe in the transportive beauty of photography, but I literally cannot THINK of a photographic book cover that has ever taken me to a new world the way other graphic forms can.

And, again, there is the issue of the strangely limited stock of images publishers seem to use. There are websites and fora all over Teh Intarwebs sharing "oh look, this pic again" images of cover after cover after cover - following the extremes of recycling costumes or particular photo shoots, or even single images, again and again and again and again. Some of the costumes used forty years ago in Elizabeth R have had almost embarrassingly over-recycled afterlife in modeling sessions for cover photos for historicals.

Even if you don't know the provenance, where an image has been used but differently cropped or tinted a hundred times before, a photo (so often of the old headless-woman) has only so much power to invite exploration. It feels like photo design covers are by far more prone to anachronism and even inappropriateness. Amongst all those discussions of "this one again" covers online, there are many conversations about how inauthentic design choices are.

A particular floppy red velvet ruff bearing no resemblance to any actual piece of clothing from any period of history ever is notorious, having graced every kind of novel from the Plantagenet to Victorian and back again. Novels taking place in one century sport covers evoking another, or one culture in the world is plundered just to decorate another. Female models wearing makeup abound; everyone must be pretty, after all.

And, not that the covers I've linked are not cosmetically enhanced in their own ways, but at least the living and breathing reality of a girl tottering about in a bad costume and pouting her strong lipstick isn't slamming me out of a story with all the power of ... well, that book I've been reading in which yards and yards of lace have appeared in a time three hundred years before its existence ...

This may be the power of the subjective graphic forms. They don't look entirely "real" to begin with, so their deviations from authenticity are less concrete, less jarring than a photograph's quantified, concrete, recorded verity. There is something banal in the carelessness of recorded anachronism or inappropriateness.

And I know I've couched a lot of my blather in historical fiction, but it is, honestly, in historicals that photography grates *me at least* the most. Because the medium is modern, it feels wrong right at the start, and because so many of the photographs chosen currently seem to have little depth (never mind being threadbare from frequent use), there is no allure.

Like any human attraction, specificity can both amplify and kill it. Specificity - that adorable mole just in front of a lover's ear, or the way they breathe when they first see your face - is magic. But it is also murder - the zipper you can see on the Elizabethan gown, or the Elizabethan gown fitting poorly on the headless model for a Regency romp ...

Glottal Start

A curious consequence of some recent binge watching - starting with BSG, and just finishing up Netflix's offering of Agents of Shield - has been noticing a single peculiarity of bad acting. It probably has a name in linguistics, but I am calling it a glotttal start.

If you've ever known a Manhattanite, you know one iconic American example of the glottal *stop*: when the name of the island is pronounced, the two Ts are a stop. "Manha'en."

The glottal is when the throat closes, and when this occurs at the opening of a word beginning with a vowel, it emphasizes the sound. Instead of riding a speaker's breath, it is pushed out. A harder sound.

For *every* (notice the emphasis here - you can read it as a glottal start) vowel-opening word to be *emphasized* *is* *unnatural* sounding. And, of course, now I'm hearing it everywhere. Indeed, an actor allowing a vowel opening to be - well, *open* - is almost exceptional.

Yet, even in fairly dramatic moments in reality, we don't use the glottal start that comprehensively. And so, in performance, a soft reading can be stronger than physical emphasis.

I'm beginning to class the glottal start with the inexperienced actor's bend-at-the-waist/wring-the-hands school of conveying drama.

I Am Not Hilary Mantel

I have dreams of midlist glory!

--Me, as recently as six or so years ago 

People say all the time, "I'm no J. K. Rowling" - but the disclaimer has almost no meaning, really. Even in a climate where you *have* to sell, and sell well - in a climate where authors *probably* can't hope for second chances - where providing a moneymaking brand and the product to keep it going is the only hope for an author to gain "publishing success".

I'm not even Hilary Mantel.


Bestsellers, I rarely read. Some of the greatest authors I've ever found were ones who WOULD not emerge, or survive, today - at least in American publishing - at least not the way they did when they came up the Traditional path. Donald Harington. America's Chaucer, I've seen him called. Parke Godwin, who wrote perhaps the best work in my own genre, to whose standard I will always aspire - and who also was able to get away with comedic sci-fi/fantasy farce too. Not happening, that genre-jumping, not such a long jump.

There is no place anymore for the adequate author, for great writing but un-thrilling sales, for second novels from workhorse producers, for first novels from the rarefied genius.

... or is there ... ?

I don't know.

Among the great factors on my mind, as I have begun to contemplate becoming a self-pub/indie author has been the desolation of the middle class, in traditional publishing.


The situation looks, on the one hand, very much like a symptom of an industry upper-class avariciously destroying a wide, bread-and-butter segment of its own livelihood. I don't pretend to know that's the case. Whether it's the corporate imperative of growth above all, infecting a business ... which never has been entirely comprised of uber-moral artistes in any case ... or the creaking imminence of the death of an outdated system: my education is not wide enough to judge.

Even if I knew enough to judge, probably best to make few pronouncements, in this life.


I tend to be skeptical of harbingers of death. In my less than half a century on this planet, so many concepts have died, I no longer take stock. Rock and roll has died - multiple times, I believe - yet seems curiously animate to those of us in ignorance. Disco has died too - or was murdered, indeed by friends of mine - but retains some vitality, no matter how often we tell it it's over. Civility is a perennial hospice patient; it's been dying for centuries now, off and on.

And so I wonder whether the extraordinary shrinkage of the middle-class in publishing ... and I watch the increasing cross-pollination of self-pub and trad-pub - authors increasingly working both ways, at multiple levels of success and experience - and I am forced to wonder:

Are the evil gatekeepers in the traditional infrastructure the virus - or  another patient?

Or are they - is the industry - are we all - metamorphosing?


Transformation is painful, pretty much every time. We've watched for years as newspapers have died (another one for the list), going digital and either suffocating for life's breath without subscription money, or becoming less available ("you have read your limit of free articles this month PLEASE SUBSCRIBE" and you're splatted on a paywall), or even losing relevance just because the vastness of availability means ABC/NBC/CBS aren't the masters of the media universe.

Nobody cried for typewriters.

We kept them on at most companies, without pay, as long as carbon paper took to eke its way out of existence. Sometimes, we used them to cobble together documents already barfed out of a printer but in need of corrections or additions. We used pens, too.

We began to think typewriters were cute.

We forgot they existed.

We began harvesting the truly quaint ones for keys to turn into DIY jewelry.

The typewriter lives on, but primarily in steampunk design now. Rarely used for writing anymore. Even spiral notebooks find more use there. Though those dwindle too, and we recycle more.

And so ...

I both reserve my weeds where death is heralded, and I believe in it at the same time.

And I grew up in Beautiful Downtown White Flight.

I know, sometimes, things just: move.

And again my education is poor.

Did the middle class move to self-pub when it got squeezed out of the ever-decreasing real estate available for non-bestsellers in traditional? Or give up and just ... keep the day jobs, losing the dreams.

The sheer volume of dreams clearly available seems in this world to me to discount the latter, to an appreciable degree.

Have dreams changed?

I wonder about that too. Because, before I ever even began my education as an *author* as opposed to a writer - my education, with the real and quantifiable goal of becoming published ...

I dreamed of not having to deal with those "gatekeepers."

And, no matter how many of you love Janet, and know you're going to do it, and *have* done it, don't you tell me for a second you never thought about that. "I'll just copy the thing and sell it myself." Even before the days when self-pub had gained the traction it has, the legitimacy it has. Even before people DID that, and it was a real Thing.

Before even I dreamed of midlist glory, before I ever encountered James River Writers, when I was a mere stripling of thirty, or in my twenties, or unable to concentrate but somehow aware I was a not-bad-stringer-of-word-thingies ... in fear and before the blank wall of "how the hell do people become authors anyway" and never knew I would, or could - I thought, "why not copy my writing and sell it myself?"

Easier than learning.

("Oh. Wait ...")

And, yeah. It turns out - something to learn, all itself.

I come from the generation that brought the 'zine to its apex. I come from a wordy dang family. I come from all the fear every Woodland Creature (reg US Pat Off, Janet Reid's Phrase and Wordventions Incorporated) ever experienced, not to say wallowed in. I come from curiosity and confidence and ...

Confluence.

I live, in myself, in that moment where the inchoate dreams of a non-author who was nonetheless still a writer has come face to face with the first dream I ever had, and found that a "real" author can do it too. It's not just the throwaway resort of a 'nartist.

It would be sad if it's the *only* way for a non-bestseller to be published, but ... again, I'm decreasingly of the opinion anymore that self-pub/trad-pub is an either/or proposition.

And I have a resolution in my mind, to always learn, to commit to the preservation of my wee and paltry brain by feeding it with knowledge, and challenges.

And ... self-pub was, in its way, the first dream I had, as a writer. Granted, out of fear. But the way I saw it was an instrument of control. The way I saw it was as an escape from rejection, yeah. The way I saw it came from a time before it ever really existed.

And now it does. Because my dream is widespread.

<Image I'm not stealing, but you should click to see>

Programming note for those who've been kind enough to inquire after me lately - the illness I've had is called labyrinthitis, it's something I've dealt with periodically since I was twenty. It STINKS but is nothing dangerous, and I've been so grateful for everyone's well wishes. It's still not quite cleared off, but I am safe to drive and very happy back at the office, and Penny will be especially pleased when I'm sure enough on my feet for her to get her regular walkies once again. (She's a tugger; you have to be *really* sure on your feet to walk her!)

Sunset and Shadow

Yesterday, I left work at that point in a February afternoon when the sun has just begun to go down, and the horizontal shadow creeping upward toward dusk was still below the tops of the trees. One long, golden line of late light, bright and rich and warm.

My commute takes me eastward, away from the sun itself, but hurtling toward its last light, and takes me across the highest hill in the region. Climbing that ascent, I came into the light still un-shadowed. There is a traffic signal at the top of this hill, and as we sat while it was red, the sun sunk enough that that line of shadow had risen up almost to the top of the trees atop this long, high hill. It grew indistinct and diffuse, ruddy and so soft the shadow of the earth was no longer clear.

And yet, plunging down the hill was not the descent into evening. Not quite yet.

The sky holds on to the sun's light even after its rays are no longer directly available. Humidity, pollution, the magic of physics. The lee of the hill was not the dark side of the day.

But ten minutes later, on the last straight line of asphalt, the final approach to my house, the light had been switched off the Earth, the homes, the trees. Only the lingering glow - and trees now all but emitting darkness, bringing night to a sky still in denial.

The moon appeared as if from nowhere.


Home, and parked, my yard is a place unmolested by the traffic going on behind me.

In the kitchen window, Gossamer peeps out, because he knows when I get home. And, at the back door, he snoots at me from the counter and Penelope greets me as well.

And I am home ...

... and it is dusk.

Thoughts From a Week

Note to self: listening to Melissa Ethridge (and, lawd help us, singing) in the throes of PMS results in Noticeable Kitten Distress. Also: Gossamer the Editor Cat is closed to queries for works concerning women who do things like the way I do. Seeking Celine Dion, James Taylor, and Gregorian Chants at this time.

I know I buy things secondhand and therefore can’t expect the perfect, plastic, out-of-the-box Latest Thing – but … this CD player doesn’t have a volume knob? I missed MP3s, the 21st century, and One Direction, but … there’s some new way to turn up music now? We DON’T turn up the volume now? What’d I miss?

Robert Verdi at six o’clock in the morning. That is a whole lot of look to manage at that hour, y’all.

Pulling clothes off the clotheslines in my basement, watching the pet hair fly up off every item in the lurid light of a naked bulb: “Yep. Allergy season is here.” *Wiggles nose* *A lot*

Penelope is learning to show me her ham bone and her rope toy as distinct items. So far, the Kong remains unnamed. *Cue Zeppelin*

I grew up Southern Baptist and went Episcopalian. I’ve never given anything up for Lent in my life (I always forget it’s even a thing until too late, get distracted by shiny work and life and pets and homeownership), and since my beloved priest left my church, I’ve been only a few times. But Episcopalians are not the world’s most slavedriving dogmatics. Am I lapsed?

(Yeah, pretty much I am. I know.)

Inaugurated the new/old stereo for upstairs with “Yellow Submarine”, the CD my dad bought me when I first got a CD stereo (yeah, all of 17 years ago, that). I always forget what a LONG and what a great album that is.

Note to self: it is perhaps weird to bop to Nowhere Man.

Note to self: bopping to anything at all results in Noticeable Kitten Hilarity. I swear, he’d “Bless your heart” me if he could talk.

“Aw, so pretty” is the new “Bless your heart.” Write it down. Use it often.

"Life. Don't Talk to Me About Life."

I love Scientific American.

Life is a concept that we invented.

… an immense spectrum of complexity, from a single hydrogen atom to something as intricate as a brain. In trying to define life, we have drawn a line at an arbitrary level of complexity and declared that everything above that border is alive and everything below it is not.

(T)his division does not exist outside the mind.

There is no threshold at which a collection of atoms suddenly becomes alive, no categorical distinction between the living and inanimate, no Frankensteinian spark.

We have failed to define life because there was never anything to define in the first place.

The Eighties. My Forties.

Lately, the more pungent memories of the 1980s have been percolating around my brain.  I grew up in the fairly quiet swamps of the midatlantic South in the 1970s, and can still remember how bracing and almost frightening the 80s looked to the denizens of my world back then.  It might be expressed in a bit of silliness about “boom boxes” or the slight, benign, almost comical horror with which the less-young faced New Wave (though, to be fair, my completely wonderful grandma did sort of know who “Cindy Looper” was, which I still adore).  It might be the advent of Reagan and preppiness and the bewildering-even-then-to-my-eleven-year-old-self rather shocking backlash against a president once accepted warmly enough as a Christian and a Southern farm boy.  I remember “Thanks, Ron” and “morning in America” and a sense, at his first election, that the eighties were about to begin.

It’s hard to remember the rest of the eighties, around Reagan and Greed is Good and preppies and yuppies, but there WAS so much more to this period when I departed childhood (in some ways, all too abruptly) and began to learn to think, as my mom and dad taught me to, both critically and as an adult.

I remember the sound of the masses across the world, chanting SO-LI-DAR-NOSC, and I remember when Walesa’s name had an N in it in most American broadcasts.


I remember just how real the threat of nuclear war seemed - and how, in the most repulsive fashion, they made a movie about it which, actually, made itself something of a cultural phenomenon at the time.

I remember the music – not just the classic rock which never (even now) seems to have left my life, but the NEW things – New *Wave* not being the least of it – my brother’s albums, Nina Hagen and Oingo Boingo and Devo and even The Romantics.  I remember the very first single I ever bought, “Barracuda” – which makes me proud, that I didn’t buy something cheesy and awful I’d be embarrassed to admit a generation later.  It was the one record I could identify and afford, and I paid forty-five cents.  I could not tell you the B-side, and probably have not owned this artifact for twenty years now, but I know the first music I ever bought, and I know it was a pretty bitchin’ tune.

But even by the time I bought it, music was changing, and we got all Adam Ant-y and Duran Duran-y and Prince-ificated very quickly.  My freshman year in high school saw also the serious encroachment of cable TV into my community, and with it MTV – which, for you young-uns, actually was a REALLY big deal.

Imagine a world so small you’d remember “Video Killed the Radio Star” and that MTV was on channel 33 locally, for the rest of your life.




I expect it’s all but impossible to even quite believe in a world as small as where I grew up (a time when this blog post would have been beyond my wildest dreams - or my Prius), but it was in the eighties that world became so much bigger.  My family traveled internationally in 1982 – to Israel, and to Greece.  Just days after we visited it (as close as we were allowed), there was a shooting at the Dome of the Rock.  I was all of fourteen and still in my first-Christianity (the one inherited from my parents, not the one I came back to embrace so many years later), and I felt a kinship with Israel for a long, long time after we went.  Even now, realizing I don’t feel that sense of “ownership” we forge with places we’ve been is something of a surprise to me, as I think of it.  But my time there was spent in a place that both no longer exists, and is eternal in a way far beyond my paltry grasp.  I presume no claim, and find not only my remoteness, but its living presence now, to be utterly heartbreaking.

Imagine a world so small that you can touch memories of The Clash, Minor Threat, White Cross … and (shamefacedly, she admits) even Shawn Cassidy with the same naïve hand.  I always like to say my first concert was The Clash – but, before the seventies quite died, there was a teenybopper show at the Colisseum in town, and I drove my parents MAD over it, and my dad took me … and I was so actually-SCARED of the loud opening band I made him take me out of the venue before Cassidy ever took the stage.  I repented, of course, bitterly, as Da Doo Ron Ron or something piped its way above our heads, walking away – but dad was, quite rightly, having NONE of my begging him to drag me back inside.  So, in a way, I’m not quite lying …

But it’s symptomatic of the way of the world, of pop-culture, before it really took over and corporatized our whole life’s experience, that a kid obsessed with that particular teen idol would so quickly become a kid hanging out with the little, pale punks, being ooh-ed over by girls who wanted to know “how I got my skin so WHITE” and taking for granted my brother ending up on a classic album cover or Aweem-Awepping before Minor Threat (it was MT, wasn’t it, dear brother?) tore into their standard 30-second thrash songs.

It’s symptomatic of exactly the whiteness and quietness and swampiness and conservativeness of our world that he took to angry music, and that I was allowed to follow him.  Looking back, it seems almost odd my parents let me go with him – and that HE did – but we had expectations of safety, somehow.  The privilege of our quiet, white world, perhaps.  And – indeed – those earliest subcultural kids I hung out with, most of them having almost nothing compared to what I did, were a pocket of protection.  If you were inside that strange bubble, they were NOT letting anyone get at you, and I (and all the other girls) *were* safe amongst the torn tights and plain jeans and black hair and spray dye.  I was always safe with my brother – almost unbeknownst to me, and I suspect even unbeknownst to him, one of the most terrifying boys amongst a lot of kids calling themselves “punk” precisely to put people off.

Some of those kids liked Prince, though.  I know one in particular who got to be a bit of a Dead head, and ended up pretty mellow indeed.

We took what we could get.  There was no homogeneity in practice, not in a world like that.  If something promised to be cool, you crossed your personal genre boundaries, most of the time it didn’t matter much.  I certainly was no punk, but I was entirely part of my brother’s pack of friends – considered them mine – think they returned the favor.  I still hang out with subcultural types, particularly when Mr. X and I were socializing together, and never ever presume to own any given label, but find myself welcomed by all.

I had a hippie phase once identity was all up to me, once out of the house and discovering those early internet geeks on my campus, who combined nerd elitism and computers and a little quasi-mysticism with one or two charismatic and attractive upperclassmen to create an aura of clandestine and exclusive appeal.  I got as far as being a Twaddler, with that, but never made ‘Zard, which may have been as well, given my poor predilection for join-ery.  But:  fun.

Freshman year gone, right out of the gate in year two, I met Beloved Ex, and became not only the girlfriend of a townie, but began a years-long career as a bit of a hair-metal groupie.

Through all of this:  Reagan.  Bush.  Mandela.  The sound of Mutabaruka barely-singing, in horror, “WHAA?  Dem invade Angola again?” and the inevitable horrors of watching those less privileged than I – before college, and beyond, in those friends so much less privileged, less safe – less CONFIDENT – than I.  The little girl punk I will never forget, whose very (supposed) NAME meant “sweet”, and the girls passing out in bathrooms in college.

Always, a girl, worse for wear, reminding me my luck was not my own, and that not everyone had it.  Poor G, that exquisite and vanishingly tiny girl, taken advantage of and ending on the filthy tile in the dorm.  Or L, whom I loved so much, but whose life gave me vertigo and made me worry, even years after I lost her, years after she looked at me and said she knew she’d never see campus again.

Years and years later, the girls in bathrooms – so like the little punk girls (indeed, believing they are such), asking me how I get my skin so white.  Being tiny, tiny, and (when they find out my geriatric age), enjoining me, “Oh, please stay this cool!”

I look at the girls now, the tiny skinny ones, still so young, wearing “The Exploited” t-shirts someone actually made money off of, and all I can hear is the sound of SO-LI-DARI-NOSC and the echoing void where I know the face I am seeing is deaf to the reverberations.

I look at the world I share with them now – born in the nineties, perhaps – and see unions demonized.  That force which once ALL knew to be righteous – reduced to the impingement upon corporate margins.  The music around me – there is much raw reality to be had, but to mine for it has gone beyond my parameters.  I still take what comes, you see.  And what comes is so much less rough-edged, so much more processed.  Extruded.

Solidarity logo ... Image:  Wikipedia

 

I look at my own experience – a public servant who got scared, and ran away before I could be run off without my volition.  I look at those who have not run, and the deterioration of what it is to serve our nation, even without ever carrying a gun, without ever being seen doing it.  It breaks my heart.

I came of age in a recession – made $10,000 a year, my first job.  By the time BEx and I married, I was the breadwinner and scarcely more than that – and temping, no less.  The year we had to ask, “Can we afford toilet paper?” when there was nary a square to spare, and more mac and cheese generic box meals (even without milk) than you could shake a stick at.

I left my marriage and the Midwest, and came home to my quiet, easy swamps, and tripled my income in five years.  From 10k to 30 by the time I was thirty.  And counted that a triumph.

But then, 2001.

And back again.  At the highest administrative echelon, in Risk Management, working with and for and around people I respected and even loved, for one of the largest securities firms in the country.  Back, and proud.

But then, 2008.

I’ve taken 4-digit pay cuts more than once in my life, I’ve learned … when to run.

It’s a paltry takeaway, in some ways.  Along with the fact that I’m corporatized enough, myself, now, to use words like “takeaway” …



I want to shut down the laptop, listen to the quiet neighborhood around my house, this city I’ve known all my life, its interstate humming, its quietness looming, reassuring … and turn on something my ex husband used to sing, to hear someone who once wrote music I actually inspired.

I want to be alone, with Gossamer, and Pen.

And I want so badly – not to be alone, anymore.  The eighties are twenty-five years gone.  The nineties, when I was still young too.  The aughts, or whatever you like to call ‘em.

I’ve got too much to do.  And I am afraid.  And proud.  And wide-eyed.  Peering through fog, at the indistinct and unknown world ahead.  Not knowing it brighter, not knowing it darker.  But here.  Still here.

Stealing from INXS?

I just had a little fun using the phrase "elegantly sated" in the latest polish, getting a bit of food on the tables, so to speak.  As much as this might sound like a certain INXS song, the fact is, this particular phrase is actually a tribute to someone - well, who once was - in my family.




We still quote him.  "It is an elegant sufficiency.  Anything more would be a superfluity."

I can admit, Michael Hutchence's superfluity (though he actually was a tiny little thing; saw him live once, basically doing one long Armani-down-to-bike-shorts-and-combat-boots strip tease) did work for me, just fine.  Fortunately, my physics-major boyfriend at the time seemed not to mind

The vid still looks slick, modern, and even current to me.  Then again, I am old and wildly out of touch.  *Grin*

Wetlands

I grew up on the swamps between the Tidewater and the Piedmont, and the office complex where I work is a stone’s throw from the home of my childhood.  The land here is where my brother used to go exploring, coming home with odd treasures, from Civil War bullets to contemporary plastic casings, to that one partially skinned deer hide that one time.  People have tried to prettify the term swamp by calling these wetlands, and as much as possible, man has chosen to landscape over the marshy ground and put it to “good use” as we like that term.

Fortunately, there are still a few members of mankind who protect what is necessary to us, and these swamps have not been overdeveloped in the past thirty years.  There’s more than there was out here – and traffic is like nothing I imagined when I was a kid – but the swamps themselves continue, in places, unmolested.

To me, this is absolutely beautiful.

At my last job, which was near here but in a more landscaped/manmade part of the office park, we used to run to the windows like little kids – to watch the weather, to watch eagles fly, to catch a glimpse of deer or the fin of a carp, or the sight which still captivates me, the White Egret.  It was a wonderful moment, here and there, getting to remember what it was like watching Wild Kingdom as little kids – but in our own backyard.

A bit down the road and off the landscaped path, my current building lies on a very low bluff over the swamp proper.  No grass gets mowed outside our windows, the land just drops off after a couple of yards or so out from the building, and it’s bare trees and patches water and dead leaves and squirrels’ nests.

Again – to me, absolute loveliness.  Even now, in winter, the colors muted and the sky drear with leftover snow and rain, the untouched sight (or, at least, if we must be honest and not call this “natural” – at least it is less-touched than almost anything else I can expect to see day-to-day) can be full of peace.  And marvels, too.

This morning, we had snow, and it was a frost-swept wonderland out there.  When I got out of my car, in a corporate parking lot, the air was still and sound muffled, just like it always was when it snowed when I was growing up.  Impossible not to think of that time my dad and I walked to my grandmother’s apartment in the snow, and shared fresh-baked cinnamon rolls with her, just the three of us.  And walking home, dad telling me how snow used to be so cold in his smalltown home in the Midwest, that it crunched, dry, beneath your feet.  Impossible not to remember the time I found a bright feather on the packed snow of our street, on my birthday – a feather, I have to believe, I still have pressed somewhere in an old diary, journal, or book.

Yesterday, the evocative veils and whorls of thick fog.  Not an all-encompassing sky full of mist, but clearly delineated piles of it, walls of it beside the roadways, clinging in the trees, rolling down the gulleys behind the building.  Wondrously pretty.

The swamps make me pause, make me slow down even when I am busy commuting, and take in the odd dead trunk or bed of cattails, the breadth of space not overtaken by *buildings*, the way the light plays in spaces I’ve known all my life – the way, sometimes, it doesn’t, and how that is lovely too.  These quiet spaces lurk, peace between a drugstore and that service station dad used to walk home from after dropping off the car; places where kids explore and find treasures, where birds eat and ignore us and go on about the business of life, which is older – and will outlast (that blessing, that marvelousness) every strip mall and drive-through we erect to sustain our silliness.  There is peace between those townhouses, built in the 1950s or 60s, and the slender grey stalks of trees, of those grown and died since I grew up here myself, of those still coming up, of those dead now and quietly standing, still.

Every day of my job, I come home in a unique way – some days, I feel it powerfully.  Summer, the windows open, a song on the radio which might have played when I was a teenager, the quality of light JUST as it simply *is* in this town, in this place, in this world, which can’t change the way it plays.  I drive home eastward, past places I have known in one hundred different ways, and I’m grateful I get to live in this place that *feels* like home.  In this place that doesn’t reject me, nor change against me, nor spit out its own past like so much disposable trash.

There’s some past around here we must regret, but to do that we must remember it too.


When I was very small indeed, there was this one long road nearby – which went, one way, out to the country where we drove to see my family – and, the other way, into the city where we drove when shopping or some sort of event demanded it.  I conceived an idea that this road, this long, straight byway into the country, into the city, rising and falling over hills but rarely bending, was the route to the past, or to the future.  In the West was the past.  Go far enough beyond the country I knew, past the farms where the red clay lived, where the old grey wood house was, in which my mother was born – far enough, so far as to be inconceivable, where the big red sun set – that was where Jesus lived, where olden times were, where the Revolutionary people and Civil War people were.  Go east – the direction we rarely took to speak of, at least beyond a particular hill – that was the future.

I can still remember when I found out that road – that road that never ended, that went so far it encompassed time itself, had an endpoint in the east.

Where it terminates in the west … I still have never traveled there.

And, to this day, when I drive out of my mid-century, Norman Rockwell neighborhood, coming west on that road, I come every day to my own past, and don’t proceed beyond the land I knew, the land I crawled on, growing up.

And, every night … I drive home.  Eastward.  Toward the future.  Leaving the swamps behind … but only for a little while.  They’ll be there.  They’ll be there tomorrow.  And I’ll be back again.  I’ll never forget.  And I’ll never stop loving the patches, the creeks, the dead trees and cattails.  And the miracle of the birds I still get so excited to watch and wonder at.

Music or Noise

Clattering a cup full of ice this morning, as the drink machine began its cruel, whining refill, I was thinking what a loud place the world has become.

There’s been a brick-repointing project of some sort going on (interminably) at the office.  For over a week now, not only the beeping of the crane, but the grinding of drills stripping out the old concrete to make way for the new between our bricks.  Yesterday, the work made its creeping way toward our area, and today the roar and groan and beep and grind has taken an increase in pitch, and become a far more screeching affair.  Hideous.

Our wildlife, unsurprisingly, has taken a powder – and, even if it were here, taking a moment or two by the windows to look out on the blue heron or to spy an eagle or deer wouldn’t be worth it, when right next to the window there is a crane basket occupied by guys who just want to do their job and not get stared at.  It’s a small thing, not having that minute in the day to just step away from the desk, but all this time into this extended project, it’s telling at least on my nerves, and I no nobody else in the building is any more enamored of the process than I.

One small side effect of this issue is the resultant en masse response of resorting to ear buds.  Even I own some now – luddite that I am – but I’ve never been a fan of wearing my music on (or in) my head.  Back in the days of earphones, the headbands gave me headaches, and the earphones themselves generally pressed on the whorls of cartilage in my ears, and that hurt.  Now that it’s buds, they irritate me too, and as amazing as the sound quality can be, having foreign objects in my ears seems to be something I’m far from habituating myself to.

Foo Fighters, though, and Judas Priest are *almost* well suited enough to manage the awful noise, though.  And so, in order to overcome noise I can’t tolerate I jam noise I’ve chosen right into my cranium, and try to tolerate the delivery system instead.

So far, I don’t think I’ve managed to wear the buds longer than an hour, and at this point it’s a question of which NSAIDs will stay ahead of which particular noise and vibration headache I will allow.

Let it be said that, for my money, Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” may not be everybody’s cuppa, but I still like it better than power tools.  Even if some wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference.

Highly effective:  “Hell Bent for Leather”.  Ice Cube’s “We Be Clubbin’”.  Run DMC’s “My Adidas”.  New Order’s “Shellshock” (you know, it never IS enough until your heart stops beating).  Fatboy Slim (and not even THAT mix, y’all!).




Less so:  Tiësto.  Shakira.  Anything by Lacuna Coil, The Gathering, Amy Winehouse.


This wildly useful expertise is yours to use, all for free.  Implement such knowledge with care, fella babies.

The Day in Twenties

It takes until twenty after six to get out - but then, it took until eight a.m. to get up, and I was two hours late getting in today.  Without a single break all day - for lunch, even for a "short break" (easily accomplished when you're not drinking enough water - and miss breakfast) - it ends up coming out in the wash, actually.  I might have been able to leave sooner.  But mom's training and my own desire to accomplish certain things keep me there, and the worst is beaten down.

The past two weeks have been ten and a half hour days in a long row.  I'd had hopes today would let up, at least normalize, if not be less busy.  No such luck.  The highest of the high opens my day, word from the extremities of my employment, the stratospheric heights have chosen Transaction X for an audit, and I have to provide electronic copies of the documentation.  Not a tricky task, but between the digging, the picky equipment, and the interruptions, it's twenty minutes gone when every minute counts.

The whole day goes like this - including a nasty knock when the calendar I haven't looked at carefully enough comes up with a call for me, with my top boss.  I'm unprepared, but he appears unfazed.  We get through.  I keep pushing.

(And now, as I write, I realize one thing not done was the penning of a note, the sending to the team - an open invitation to do something nice for a couple of our folks.  Sigh.)

Notes to people I need to meet on an upcoming visit.

Orders set, and room notes taken down.

Several consultations with my chief partners in crime.

But I push off a friend for lunch - and do all I can for our attendance confirmations.  An astoundingly time-consuming task, reaching out to dozens of people for personal yea-or-nay when the electronic ones either haven't come, or don't tell the whole story, and neither has word of mouth.  This seems like the bulk of the day.  But there are also updates of to-do's, updates of general calendars, meeting inquiries sent,  all the sleeve-tugging of the day to day.

Travel for my management.  Two trips held; one slightly changed, then finalized.

Series of management trips, set out through November.

A dozen things I can't even remember now.  It's not my worst day, not by a long shot.  Not the hardest, not the most discouraging.  But not easy.  A day where the paycheck is earned.

It takes until twenty to six to get out.  The building is as empty as it needs to be; I can't see the guards, I don't see housekeeping, I am gone.  It's green through the window, and as I step out the grey sky asserts itself, the wind, the first drops of rain falling at the horizontal - not hard, but blown.

My skirt billows wildly, a bohemian confection of georgette and lace, asymmetrical, long.  Beiges around my body, a long soft sweater not quite warm enough for the mid-sixties with rain and wind in the grey.  The parking lot definitely empty.

I've never told anyone, but I can't bear to drive the old way home anymore.  Always take the "long" way now, unable to face stop and go, unable to face intersections, changes in speed limits, too many variables.  I've become afraid, this past year, to drive by anything but what seems somehow easier.  So it goes.

In the car, I want something not liable to make me bounce, to evoke dancing, noise, and dark rooms.  I shift, among the CDs available, over to Whitesnake.  It's cheesy, but the 80s evokes something for me.  Something I like.  It's not too downbeat, but it suits well enough.  By "Cryin' In the Rain" it's on the nose, perhaps, but I can take it.  The rain isn't too bad, I take it slow relative to the other traffic, and whistle my way home.  Whistling is the way I keep my face exercised.  You'd be surprised how well 80s hair bands work for this maintenance.

Home and in.  It might be a fair guess that the house of a single woman, unoccupied but by a cat and a puppy, would be a quiet space - but the radio is on for them, they themselves are life and activity.  Just putting down my bags isn't the silence of peaceful relenting.  The day isn't anything like over.

Pup out of the cage, I put my hands on her back and she's wiggling - grabbing one toy, getting away, exciteable with freedom - with the alpha coming home.  Radio off.  Dinner served.  A short trip to the yard, and I hoist my bags upstairs.

The bedroom is fragrant, still, darkening.  Soft pants, sneakers, cozy sweater dug out of the guest room - it's all spring clothes in my room now.  The weather report, on quietly enough, tells me this is foolish.

Penelope back inside again.  Computer - Windows crash.  I am not up for dealing with this.

Almost too late for the news.  I sit, eschewing windows, on the bare-bones, the quick-launch power side of my laptop.  Can't think about the problems awaiting on the full system.  This will do.  I connect to wireless.  Need to charge the tablet, too.

No ... interesting ... email.

It's already almost eight.  How did that happen?  Time soon enough for bed.  I've learned my lesson, of course - tomorrow I'm up at six no matter how miserable I feel.  Still may be there till after six, but every twenty minutes counts.  Open up Blogger.  It's been 100 minutes since I left work ...

The Essential

Giving full faith and credit to the artist, Donnie Green, I feel a certain right to post this image - as I happen to own the original painting myself.

Donnie's reason for calling this The Essential was that it included all the elements which, at the time of its creation (2000) he needed in his art.  The boy whose face peers out from the sun, not precisely sunny, but certainly a representation of innocence (oft-repeated by a man and a muse with little innocence intact).  The small, elongated rabbits - an early-ish appearance, which in later paintings reached almost Harvey-like (Donnie Darko-like?) proportions.  The bats, the foetuses ... and centrally, enduringly ... The Creepy Old Lady.

COL came to a new level of refinement at the time of this painting; I had seen her before in Donnie's astonishing output, but she had always been nothing but a head, always been a putty grey-green, incomplete and disembodied.  Here she steps forth fully formed (but for that heart-shaped - mangled? or unfinished? - cranium and the minimal number of digits), dressed in a print which always reminds me of the guy in the Bugs Bunny cartoon who walks up a set of stairs and the pattern of his loud check jacket scrolls by, unmoving, as the man moves up the stairs.  Her Chuckie Taylors are astonishingly rendered, as is the mouse.  The cats' nose piercings are gleaming and actually creepier by far than the bats and the foetuses.

The Essential is basically a koan, a blacklight poster, the sort of thing you can stare at and either lose yourself in it, or lose it in yourself.  Its meticulously colored and twisted knotwork owes as much to Persia as the Celts, Donnie studying these designs assiduously and incorporating them in his - essential - playing-card inspired proportions and compositions.  Nothing about it seems strange nor even creepy to me, much as I refer to it as I do (the epithet COL above), and from the first time I saw it I wanted it.  It took me years to pay Donnie for it, even at the wildly generous discount he gave me on its price, and I will never forget the gallery showing where I gave him the last money, and took it away with me.  When she became mine.


I actually posed for Donnie two times, and he painted me thrice.  I have all three - he used me for practice in capturing realistic skin tones at that time he was shifting from painting strictly unrealistic monsters to portraiture and more intimate, but still strange, works.  If I could take a good photo of two of these portraits, I may post them some time; one is in black-and-white, and maintains some of the extreme austerity of his pieces before focusing on people and their faces.  The second he painted from a polaroid, and though some aspect of the nose and perhaps a somewhat rosebud-ish mouth remind me of "Kelly from (the original) 90210", there's also ... something.  Something he definitely captured, of me - at least, at that time (1997 or so I think).  The second is my favorite, and is in color, and is the real experimentation with skin tone - and was painted at lightning speed, with no model but one of the photos he'd taken of me when I was actually there.  One day he painted the black and white - the next day I came back and he'd painted the color portrait, without my even posing nor being available.

The third portrait, the second I actually sat for, wasn't a sitting but a standing, if I am honest.  It is the weakest, and was the one he did "for me" - the one which was a realization of my ideas, not Donnie's own.  Its face looks like an ex girlfriend of his, not like me, and its theme is so pompously embarrassing to me now I dare not even repeat it, though I had him spell it out pointblank on the canvas.  Poor guy - but he was generous to offer to paint for me to order.

I've had these four works of his for so many years, and three of them may never ever be displayed.  For me to hang them would be vain even by my standards, and it is beyond comprehension anyone else on the planet would ever want to.  I can't even imagine any time in all the years of our long separation(s) Mr. X. even would want to have them around.  And so this artist's work, even if it is "only" practice work, lies hidden in my guest room, not even seen nor remembered for I can't even say how many years.

I used to look at those portraits sometimes, wonder what their fate could be - how they could be seen.  And yet, then, what they had to show was only what I was, every day.  Dorian Grey's contrarian cousin am I - now that they might show a face nobody can hope to see anymore ... the youth and beauty lie hidden, and the middle-aged broad with decayed vanity issues goes out into the world.

Felt Like Freedom

Mojourner, speaking as someone who *was* a punk - and on the subject of dancing like you don't give a hang who's watching.  Because that is what dancing is for.  I'm struck (not for the first time in his remarkable explorations of the punk scene he let me spectate from time to time) at how clearly, how freshly, I remember some of these faces.  The spiky mullet in front.  The fro to one side.

What he describes comes back, too.  The chicken fights, the on-the-spot made-up dances, the getting on stage.  He hasn't mentioned the time he was one of the "aweem-awep" dudes for a spontaneous rendition of "The Lion Sleeps" - and, in fact, how frequently spontaneous classics like that came up.  Sometimes sped up to 78 (as Mo said recently, an hour or so could hold thirty-eight thousand punk songs - or something far funnier, frankly, but to that effect ...).  Sometimes screamed, sure.  But sometimes, and not infrequently, pretty much in their original arrangement.  The guys on those stages were musicians, after all, as much as rebels.  Sometimes, rebellion could be performed with respect for music unlike their own.  Punk had a lot more taste than exclusively for irony, and it's easy to forget, in the post-'net world which has come to so intensely depend on snark - not everything even the strident anarchist had to say back then was said with a sneer.

Anyway, amazing photos once again, and remarkable memories I am enjoying very much.

(Also of note:  "history, brought to you by women."  In and of itself, a fascinating phenomenon of the dynamics of - at least "our" little corner of - punk.)

Summer's End

The day ran long today, and I realized as I stepped into the revolving door to walk outside, I had no idea whether to expect it to feel cool outside, or warm.

It being September here in the land between tidewater and piedmont, it was neither - and both, of course.

The humidity was enough to give a certain sensation of warmth - but also enough to keep heat from feeling penetrating.  It was dank and muggy at once, and the overcast sky did nothing to make the day feel steamy, but its stillness did nothing to chill the damp.

It won't be long before the needle falls to "cool" and heat will be the function of sunshine, of an odd afternoon, and evenings will be consistently crisp.  If we're more fortunate than last year, we will get cold - not just a little, but actual winter.  That would be immensely reassuring - and I know that is only asking for a haywire climate to go wild with sleet, and blizzards, and ugliness.  But 80-degree winters and 105-degree summers aren't natural around here.  Even a mass of snow would seem almost normal, after last year's tropical un-winter.