Things That Made Me Smile Today

My back yard smelled like Santa Fe this morning, thanks to pine smoke from the chimney and the fresh coffee in my cup. It took me on a cold, bright vacation to the fall of what seems like a hundred years ago. The smells whisper to me of promise, of joy in the midst of uncertainty. Of presence in the midst of hoping. Of a story I will some day tell. I wanted to sop it up like honey with a bit of warm tortilla, crunchy with cinnamon and sugar and yielding soft in its interior.

My true love sent me notes today. Sent me such silliness in the midst of business, strictly business. He popped up there on my screen and said hello, I love you in a thousand different ways that made me laugh. He reminded me what's good, what's right, what's true. He told me things that only I would understand. He was a tangible presence there, like a hug from far away. He made me wonder why I thought anyone else ever mattered.

My muse visited me today. In spite of his being a wee bit battered of late, he came to say hello. Yes, my muse is male. No he isn't real. He's just visits me from time to time and brings me treats of words. Phrases and ideas that tumble around and fall out through a pen that moves so smoothly, uninterrupted. I thanked him for his time and explained I'd love to stay and chat forever, but there was this laundry to be done, food to be made, people to tend. He said it was all right, he'd just hang out in the back of my mind a while. He kept me company while I worked.

These little people in my life with their speeches and their declarations, their moods and their mischief. I looked at them through new eyes today. The eyes that say that's good, that's right, that's how it should be. They whirled themselves green on the playground; fell tumbling, laughing to a heap of suddenly longer, leaner arms and legs. Arm in arm they skipped away to find the next adventure. They have their secret language, the language of being born of the same womb in different times. The language of eyes that match each other's and barely distinguishable laughs. Their world is two halves of a whole, a yin and a yang and a hop, skip, pounce, giggle. My eyes said that's good, that's right, that's how it should be.

Photo courtesy of morguefile.com

There are things you'll never know. The things that make me cry. The things that light up the inside of my head like too many fluorescent bulbs and make me cringe and cower. The things that hurt and annoy and break. The things that seek to destroy. The things that bring me to my knees. There are things you'll never know because they aren't worth knowing.

These things that make me smile, though; I collect them like stones and carry them in my pockets. Their weight is ballast. Their clam insistence holds me to center when balance is precarious. These stones shelter me when the outside is scratching to get in - whining, niggling, insisting upon itself. These warm stones that fill up the pockets of my thoughts: the scents, the sun, the soul mate, the source, the smallness of hands and feet with great big souls. These are the things that made me smile today.

Dear Uncle Stevie: An Epistolary, Intensely Personal Book Review

Dear Uncle Stevie,

I just finished reading your book, On Writing, and I feel like I owe you an apology. I'll get to that.

First of all I want to tell you thank you. Just thank you. There are a number of reasons that I have put off reading this particular book, not the least of which is that a lot of other books and essays that I have read by prolific authors have taken the sort of tone that says: "Of course, I can tell you how I did this, but you never will because you are not a famous author like I am." That might be my imagination projecting my insecurities on the authors, but I don't think so. Your book, in its openness and concision and wit was more like talking to a friend. (Please know that I am fully cognizant of the fact that you are not my friend, nor will you probably ever be. I'm not creepy, I'm just using that image to describe the tone.)

I appreciated the nuts and bolts kind of information that you shared about the process of sitting down to write and of getting published. I think sometimes we non-famous writer folk tend to think of the publication process as what you are doing now with the big publishing house contracts with movie options and instant best-sellers and stuff. Then we look at what we're doing and think "I'll never get there." To see that you got there by starting here - writing because you couldn't help but write and sending it to whomever would take it - is encouraging, to say the least. I appreciate your transparency in that. I actually cried during the section where you tell about getting the phone call about the Carrie paperback option. I was so happy for you, and I was so happy for the possibility of it all.

Your section on editing was completely priceless to me. I have a hard time editing. I have a tendency to self-edit as I go along and I think that hinders me to a certain extent. I write best when I'm in the flow of it, when I'm barely thinking - almost in a trance-like state - and I had often wondered if this was just the stuff of coffee house poets and nut jobs. Perhaps it is, but it works for me, and I was pleased to have some external validation for this. I almost danced when I read that for you ideas seemed to leap out of nowhere and that you would sit to write them and discover them as you wrote. This struck a very deep and resonant chord with me. I had been taught at some point that sort of thing was lazy writing - that I needed the plot wheel and the character notes and the outlines and that to do otherwise was just amateurish. Of course, I found all of those tools suffocating. I much prefer your tools: vocabulary, good grammar, active voice, easy on the adverbs, etc.

Most meaningful of all, to me, was the concept of "writing the first draft with the door closed". Sometimes I bungle myself up with being conscious of an audience and then it all comes out stilted and awkward. Kind of like this letter. Because I imagine you reading it and picking out all of the passive verbs and adverbs and rolling your eyes. But that's why that concept was so meaningful to me. I can just tell you to go take a hike because you are not my Ideal Reader, and then I can look at it all later when I've forgotten about it and get rid of my own adverbs. This is a freedom that I think will serve me nicely. (See what I did there?) I am going to write out "I am convinced fear is the root of most bad writing" and put it someplace prominent in my writing space. Of all the sentences in the book, that was one of the most resonant. So, thank you.

Now about these apologies. I read your 'Salem's Lot when I was about 12 or 13 because my friends said there were dirty parts in it. I wasn't that thrilled with it. I'm sorry. My tastes at that age tended toward Agatha Christie and Douglas Adams and I just couldn't get into the grittiness of it. My friends went on to read Pet Sematary and Carrie and the like and I tried to watch the movie version of Carrie at a sleepover, but it was just too gross. I did read The Running Man, though. It was gross, but it had good dirty parts and I was captivated by how gross it was. What can I say? It was the mid-80s, I was young and I listened to my mother who said your books were "just trash." It's a review I'm sure you've heard before.

For years I have associated your books with gross movies, with the New York Times Bestseller List, and with massive amounts of bizarre verbal abuse from bookstore customers who were desperate for your first Dark Tower to drop. I am definitely not your Ideal Reader. I just don't like the suspense/horror genre. It's nothing personal and obviously millions of readers worldwide don't share my opinion.

Something has changed for me in the last several years, though. My husband, who is also an avid reader and has pretty good taste in books (well, except for those "man-mances" - you know, the pulpy sci-fi stuff) has sworn by a few of your books. It and The Stand, especially. He tells me: "Think what you will about the genre, the guy can write."  I started reading your column in Entertainment Weekly and I fell in love. Not with you personally, that would be creepy; with the voice of your non-fiction, with your take on pop culture and especially with your taste in books. I read Mischa Berlinski's Fieldwork on your recommendation and it was one of my favorite books that year. I judged you by your stories and dismissed you and your work out of snobbery and I'm sorry. I know it hasn't hurt your sales or anything, but it's just an uncool thing to do to another writer, or even just another human.

I dragged my feet about reading On Writing, but pulled the trigger this past week because I've had enough. Enough of the fear, enough of the wondering if I can make it, enough of feeling the need to justify writing. Also because it was recommended to me by two writers I like. (M-Half and Masked Mom. Do you know them? If not, you will.) So it is with gratitude and with honest-to-goodness tears that I write and say thank you. Thank you for pushing through the pain of your accident and the discomfort of non-fiction writing for you and publishing that book, so that I and countless other writers out there could, if nothing else, read this last few sentences: "The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up."

Thank you for understanding that, for whatever reason, some of us need that permission slip.

Wishing you all the best (and honestly, I probably still won't read your other books but you probably won't read mine either, given your distaste for the personal essay),

Tangled Up In Lou


Note: I grew weary of all of the links to the specifically referenced Stephen King books and movies, so let it suffice to click here. It's his official website where you can find all of that information and more and possibly purchase a hat.

Buffy and Piaget

My favorite season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is season six. It is the deepest and the darkest and although it is a silly, fantasy TV show, it explores some very real themes about finding one's way in the world and dealing with loss. There is one glitch in the season, though. Buffy, through a confluence of supernatural events in the previous season has inherited a little sister, Dawn. In season six, Buffy is faced with the challenge of parenting a teen-aged sister and trying to fight demons of both the supernatural and the internal sort while being just barely an adult, herself. It makes for some good drama and lots of leather pants. Anyone familiar with the show knows that each season revolves around some sort of impending apocalypse from which Buffy must save the world. It is in the midst of this impending apocalypse that Dawn continues to whine and flounce around the show, complaining that she's overlooked, that her sister is mean, that she can't do anything she wants to, nobody likes her and oh, boo-hoo. The Chief Lou and I love to hate her. We sit on our couch with our chips and queso and yell (sotto voce, of course, so as not to wake the monkeys) at the screen: "It's all about you, Dawn!"

In Piaget's stages of cognitive development, the Preoperational Stage is marked by egocentrism. It is a time of life when children are learning that their actions can have an effect on objects. They are learning motor skills and practicing them regularly with varying degrees of success. They are generally pre-literate, so they think in images rather than words. Any parent of children ages 2 to about 7 can vouch for this. Their small perspective, just discovered, is king. The way they see things is the way things are. They are the center of their own little magical universes and anything that happens around them is happening to them and probably on purpose. Anyone who has tried to convince a small child with logic or reason that there may be another way of looking at things has come to realize that most times, words have little or no effect. I had a discussion about pigeons with my Hooligan awhile back wherein he was explaining to me that pigeons are mammals. No amount of explaining that mammals have hair, not feathers, that they give birth to live young, not eggs, and that generally they don't fly would convince him otherwise. "I know all that, Mom. Pigeons do have live babies, not dead ones and they feed them milk from the nipples in their throats." You cannot argue with the logic of a four-year-old.

When children are small, this is endearing in a way. I really believe this egocentrism protects them from seeing the scarier world at large in a lot of ways. If they live in a happy, peaceful environment, then the world is a happy and peaceful place. If the people in their lives are generally nice and loving, then they carry that expectation with them of everyone they meet. In a healthy childhood, this auto-protection mode helps them incrementally deal with the darker things in life as they are exposed to them. This is as it should be, in my opinion. Of course, this egocentrism is also one of the most frustrating things about parenting at this age. It is when the "But it's not faaaaaiiiiiirrrr" thing crops up. (Side note: my monkeys are not allowed to say this because it is a cliche that forces me to respond with another cliche: "Life's not fair." They may express this sentiment to me, but they have to find other words to do it.) But all of this frustration is an opportunity for learning. It is generally accepted that children will behave this way because their perspective is, as yet, not fully formed. It is by butting heads with the real world and things being imminently "unfair" that they start to realize that they are not, in fact, the center of the universe.

This trait is not at all endearing in adults. Not even a little bit. By the time you are grown, you should have moved well past the Preoperational Stage into, and through two other stages (with a brief revisiting of egocentrism in adolescence, but for a different purpose) into the Formal Operational Stage that allows for both abstract and logical thinking. By the time you are an adult, you should be able to realize that all of the people in line in front of you at the post office when you're in a hurry were not put there solely to inconvenience you. By the time you are an adult, you should be able to differentiate between people talking around you and people talking to you or about you. By the time you are an adult, you should be able to understand and respond to logical arguments. And certainly, by the time you're an adult you should be able to recognize that the humans with whom you interact are not constructs of your imagination, put there for your entertainment or your personal persecution (depending on your particular bent). There should be that magical moment at some point when you realize that other people have bad days and good days, just like you do; that no, if there is no reason for a stranger to give you a dirty look, then probably they aren't - probably they have indigestion or are thinking of something unpleasant or their dog just died or they smelled something foul or their face really did "stick that way" as their mother warned them it would or any of other infinite possibilities that - gasp! - have nothing, whatsoever to do with you.

One of the criticisms of Piaget's theory, though, is that sometimes there are gaps or lapses in these stages and sometimes people don't complete a stage and get stuck there or just have bits of it stuck to them as they proceed on to other things. So you could have an otherwise reasonable adult who insists, in spite of all evidence to the contrary that it is, in fact, all about them. We are self-centered creatures. It is, I believe, our default mode. We all live inside our own heads and it is impossible, really to get into the heads of others. I've discussed this before and I don't believe I'd want to even if it were possible. But isn't that the beauty of growing up? Isn't that the blessing of being a rational animal? That we can realize this self-centered view is not necessarily the best one to take? That we can actively think - I know this is a challenge for some - and choose how we will respond to things? That we can operate in something other than "default mode"?  Isn't it a distinct advantage that we have over two-year-olds that we don't have to just be a ball of emotional reactivity? To be able to realize that it is not just raining on me today because I wanted to go to the zoo? To be able to see clearly in the height of impending apocalypse that there are probably more important things than someone borrowed my favorite sweater without asking?

We all have these little sisters inside us that want to wail "It's not faaaaiiiiirrr!" and storm around and cause petty problems even while there are larger things at stake. Larger things that we - wait for it - that we might not even know about, that we might not understand or that - how can it be?! - have nothing to do with us. We are all the protagonists in our own novels, the stars of our own shows. But as adults, we have that distinct pleasure, and I would argue the responsibility, to sometimes be the reader - the detached observer to see the larger story unfold. Or the TV viewer to watch from the couch and shout with dripping irony through mouthfuls of Tex-mex treats: "It's all about you, Dawn!"

Making Way

A few months ago I wrote about my Tenacious Pear. This tough little pear held on through a snow storm and ice, through the worst of our strange winter. Some time in the last few weeks, it fell. I didn't notice right away because I was busy doing other things. One day I was walking in from the car, burdened down with groceries and the ephemera of daily life and I stepped on it. It gave a little bit under my weight, but not completely. It squished a little, but mostly held its tough, resilient shape. As soon as I stepped on it, I knew exactly what it was. I looked up at its bare branch and said a silent goodbye. While I do find delight and meaning in the small things of life, I'm not much one for believing in these sorts of signs.

Last week was that restless part of winter. The days are getting longer, but the weather isn't getting any better. Chances for snow are past, but not yet time for the burgeoning spring and all of the promise it brings. It's the part of winter that gets me every year. I feel stuck in time. Not quite ready for the buzzing activity of spring and summer, still nostalgic for the cozy hot cocoa warm of dark afternoons and a stark bite in the air, but finding myself surrounded by cold mud and a sense of waiting. I don't like to look forward. I don't like to wish for something other than is. But the time of year seems to force that impatience on me. I think my pear got restless, too. She leaped from her branch into something new. I scooted her off the walkway and into the soft mud under the raspberry canes so she could share the last of her tenacious, lingering sweetness with them. And I found an object for my pervasive sadness.

Today is sunny after days and days of the solid drizzly rain for which this area is famed. Today is a day for heightened restlessness for everyone under my roof. Today I wandered around my back yard, surveying the ravages of winter. With my little tenacious pear in mind along with a jumble of restless thoughts, I glanced at her empty space and I saw them. Today there are the tiniest little gifts of hope on those bare branches where there was nothing yesterday. Small in size, barely white against the dark gray-brown of the branches, but large in promise. Tiny beads of succulence and growth. The beginnings of buds. Buds that I know from past experience will explode into a froth of finery for my mighty pear tree. They will cover three stories with thousands of their sweet and delicate little faces in a few weeks, but today they are just the kernel of a grand idea.

I was sad about my pear last week. Today I applaud her again as she rests in her next phase of life under the raspberries. She saw what I couldn't. She felt the subtle deepening in the air, she wobbled in the breezes from a different source, she heard the whispered secrets from the crocuses under the earth, she knew the time had come. The time to make way. Her purpose as my little mottled talisman was served and she knew it before I did. She took that leap of faith because she knew. There may be some more days of the cold that seeps into everything and holds its captives diminished and shivering. There will be more days ahead of the restless doldrums of the tail end of winter. But in the coming weeks, my pear in her wisdom knew, there will be more brightness than dark, there will be more color than gray, there will be more by degrees until in the midst of an explosion of color and scent and new life we will wonder why we ever doubted its arrival. She felt the buds beneath her and knew it was time to go.

How many times have I ignored these tiny, incremental changes and stubbornly clung to my branch? How often does making way look like giving up? As surely as the Earth slowly makes its inevitable revolution around the sun, change comes. It's never all the same all the time. Will I listen to my tenacious pear? Will I remember that there is a time for remaining tough, untouchable, refusing to follow the crowd, but that just as importantly, there is a time for taking that leap of faith and making way for the blossoming?

Challenge Accepted

I have written roughly eight posts in the last two days. Writing is how I leak out nervous energy when I have to otherwise be on my best behavior. We have a house guest, so farting loudly is off limits, saying "twat" instead of "what" in a sentence and giggling is off limits, "underwear time" in the living room is off limits, apparently Bill Clinton is off limits, too. What is a girl to do? A girl hammers and pecks at her keyboard in between making polite conversation and surrendering the computer to insistent small people who want to watch the latest episode of Word Girl and missed it when it was on TV because "Grammy talked through the whole thing."

None of those posts have made it onto the blog, though. Because, well just because. So I realized today that even though my stats have stayed fairly consistent over the last two days, there has been nothing new for anyone to look at. What are they doing? I wonder. I know what I'm doing, so I guess that's all that matters.

So here are a couple little secrets about me. I am demented. Well, that's not a secret. I have a tendency to get all bogged down inside my head and sometimes get trapped there and forget what's going on elsewhere in my world. Sometimes the wild mountain hamster in my head gets trapped on an endless loop and runs its little legs off. I don't like to feel this way, so I have tricks to keeping the old brain grease moving. One of those tricks is that I make up challenges for myself to compete with myself to complete. This is totally normal.

I love, love, love the show How I Met Your Mother. I could just eat Neil Patrick Harris with a spoon. Or put him in my pocket and carry him around. My own personal Doogie Howser on a leash. His character, Barney Stinson, is one of the most brilliantly written comedic characters of our time. Perhaps I exaggerate, but I do enjoy that character in all of his little complicated, womanizing, oedipal glory. My favorite is when his friends are talking about complete nonsense and suddenly he pops up and says "Challenge accepted!" and goes off to do something ridiculous that no one actually ever challenged him to do in the first place. I have a little Barney Stinson that lives in my soul.

I have always found it challenging to write well and originally about the following topics: love, death, becoming a mother, coming of age, faith, and marriage. So, like any self-respecting layabout, I've avoided them. Then a few days ago I discovered I was increasingly distracted by the squeak-squeak of my Wild Mountain Brain Hamster, so I sicced Barney Stinson on it. "Suit up!" my wee Barney hollered, "Challenge accepted!"* And that about sums up what I've been up to.

Do you set challenges like this for yourself? Writing is not the only area of my life where I do this, it's just the only pertinent one right now. Tell me about how you challenge yourselves. I'm curious.

*I realize that not everyone will understand this reference and honestly, I don't expect them to. If you do watch the show and enjoy it, then you may find this reference an amusing mental image. I know that some of my readers find television watching to be a bit of a plebeian activity and I acknowledge that and would rather not turn the comments section into a discussion thereof. I'm really interested in hearing about what sorts of challenges people set for themselves and why.

Keeper of Corpses

I've been working on a post about reality, but it will be waiting in the wings as I deal with an actual, nefarious, and unavoidable reality.

Remember the foot smell? It was suggested that it was the pipes, or the produce, or the Hooligan. Well, drain cleaner a-go-go to no avail. Sparkling clean kitchen, refrigerator, fruit basket (I even checked all my shoes because sometimes produce ends up in there. Don't ask.) The Hooligan is an advanced little boy and he can generate some very mature smells for his stature, but alas, I have never known him to smell like a corpse. I sniffed him just in case.

Yes, foot has progressed to corpse in the continuum of bad smells. Dead, rotting, bloated, reeking corpse in an, as yet, undisclosed location. It is beyond a mild "did you catch that whiff?" kind of smell. It is evil incarnate, winding its sticky fingers around the back of your neck and breathing its hot, fetid breath right up your nose. It assaults you. It bludgeons you with slime covered billy clubs and then kicks you while you lie there in a fetal position gasping for your life.

I have long been convinced that there were hobos living in our garage, and now I think one of them has crawled under the house and expired. It may be a squirrel or a raccoon. Possibly a rat. Our neighbors keep chickens and you know what they say - where there're chickens... I don't suspect it's our resident donk-um ('possum the size of a donkey) because he died under our other neighbors' house last winter. It can't be a mouse. The stench is just far too large. So tomorrow will be spent in the crawlspace under the house, looking for remains among the mud and the shanty town that I'm positive exists down there.

I have joked about this. The Chief Lou emailed me last week about an outstanding bill (it wasn't just great, it was outstanding!) and I promptly replied: "I've taken care of it. I put a horse's head in the appropriate bed." Sometimes I tell the monkeys to "hide the bodies" when we do that last-minute blitz clean before Daddy comes home. When the fire dies too soon and it's chilly in our bedroom, I tell the Chief Lou that I will warm up by slitting him open so he can be the Tauntaun to my Han Solo. I have joked about this. This isn't funny anymore.

As I type, the Chief Lou and the monkeys are en route to the airport to pick up my mother-in-law, who will be spending a few days with us. I have an amiable relationship with her because her only son has been happy with me for nearly 15 years and I raise and feed two of her grandchildren, but she has always thought I was a little bit odd. I have lit heavily scented candles in every room of the house. I have burned incense. I have scrubbed all that can be scrubbed, including myself (just in case.) I have done everything short of calling in a priest for an exorcism, and yet it lingers. In a very few minutes I will have to welcome my mother-in-law into a house that smells like the lowest circle of hell (with heavily scented candles) and concede that I am, in fact, odd. Yes, that's me, your strange daughter-in-law: sewer of clothes, lover of underdogs, breast feeder of babies, protector of trees, eschew-er of make-up and bras, keeper of corpses.

Toxic Waste

photo courtesy of www.morguefile.com

I live in a house with two small children and neither of them whine as much as some of the adults in my life.
This landfill does not accept toxic emotional waste. We spend a great deal of time worrying about our carbon footprint, our environmental impact. We would never even consider just dropping our trash on the ground, much less flinging it at someone else. Is it possible that we could pay even half as much attention to the toxic emotional waste we hurl about? That stuff has a serious environmental impact, too.

Brushes With Fame

On some level, we're all obsessed. It's OK, you can admit it. I can admit it.

I saw Denis Leary walking out of a Burger King near my house.
I saw Imelda Marcos on the Great Wall of China.
I saw Dudley Moore leaving a tube station in London.
I stood in front of the most glorious lamb chop sideburns in all the land at an Avett Brothers show.
My kids' dentist is a roadie for the Avett Brothers.
I see Christopher Walken everywhere. Or maybe it's just my reflection.
I asked the Governor Richard Snelling of Vermont for his autograph at a Black Watch performance when I was 8.
Ditto the Commander of the Black Watch.
I saw Justin Townes Earle walking down the street in front of Pike Place Market, drinking a cup of coffee.
I see Gary Busey everywhere. Or maybe it's just a homeless man.
My dad sat next to Cokie Roberts on a plane and told her all of his thoughts on international politics.
Kylie Minogue tried to "bum a fag" from me at a club in Hong Kong.
A girl at my school who was a year ahead of me dated the drummer from INXS and she dumped him.
I am pretty sure I saw Jim Broadbent getting off the bus the other day.

Did you hear Whitney Houston died?

I went out to lunch with the Chief Lou the other day and there was a giant TV in the middle of the restaurant tuned to CNN. I have never had cable, so correct me if I'm wrong, but that stands for "Cable News Network", no? For some reason, I thought that meant they showed news. While we were waiting for our food, we listened to the coverage of Ms. Houston's death that played on a continuous loop the whole time we were there. It was three days after her death and they had no new information to broadcast, so instead, they interviewed (I am so not making this up) the guy who worked in the gift shop of the hotel where she was staying when she died.

When I go, I want to go out in a blaze of glory. That's what I always tell the Chief Lou. I want a big New Orleans style funeral with parades and dancing and zydeco. What I don't want, however, is some pimpled kid milking his Warholian 15 minutes and saying things like: "Oh, she was so nice and she smiled a lot, but she seemed kind of out of it. You know? Just out of it. I don't have any specific examples, really, it was just a vibe. She may have been a little twitchy and she scratched her nose. You know, out of it."

I don't want the contents of my stomach at my time of death to be of public record. (I can tell you now it will  contain at least one, and probably all, of the following things: refried beans, sushi, hummus, chips and queso, and lots of coffee.) I don't want people to whom I haven't spoken for years to show up and give tearful interviews about "everything she's been through". I don't want theatrically sympathetic people to analyze every bad choice I ever made in my life and  to speculate about whether I was still haunted by something I did in 1986 or not.

I get it. She was a celebrity, so she was "ours". We have this seemingly contradictory passion for celebrities: the tongue-tied idol worship combined with wanting to think of them as one of us. We have access to so much information about personal lives and intrusive photos and gossipy speculation that it seems sometimes we forget that these aren't actually people we know. But these people we worship, they have people in their lives who actually knew them. Who will go through the very real and heartbreaking stages of grief and the adjustment to life on this planet without their loved one. I cannot imagine how that is compounded by Gift Shop Boy and CNN and their hours of idle speculation, multiplied by the tens of thousands of media outlets doing the same thing.

When I go, I want the sales of my collected works to skyrocket. I would love for people to turn up out of nowhere and publicly claim what an impact I had on them in formative years. I want there to be readings in cafes across the land as weepy hipsters mourn my passing. I want fans, and I want them to miss my work when I'm gone. I don't want any of them to act like they knew me. Those are creepy fans.

I would, however, tolerate a sea of flowers and notes and photographs and stuffed animals on the street outside where I lived. 

Submission

That's a dirty word in American society, isn't it? I am independent. I am not submissive. I know my own mind and no one can tell me what to do. Right? Except for when we're not independent. Except for when we do what we're told. Except for when we frequently submit our wills to any number of things and people around us. It's how we stay on the road when we're driving, it's how we keep our jobs, it's how we stay in relationships, it's how we live.

If we didn't submit to the utilities services and pay our bills when they demand that we do, we would be without electricity or water or garbage removal (with the possible exception of Mark on his mountain.) If we didn't submit to our bosses and show up every day or when we're scheduled and do the job that is required of us, we would quickly be without a job. If we didn't occasionally submit to our loved ones, we would become bores and chores and probably find ourselves without said loved ones eventually.

I spent this afternoon watching eleven preschoolers, tired and cranky from a busy day at school and all hopped up on sugar, whine and grab and run and ignore their parents. There are any number of torturous hells I would have preferred to endure. There are any number of really fun things I could have been doing. I could have been taking a nap. But, I submitted. Because a little boy with brown eyes painstakingly made thirteen rocket ships out of Lifesavers and Hershey kisses and paper to give to these little miscreants and his teachers. Because my needs are important, but sometimes it is necessary to set them aside to watch little grubby hands carefully deliver love notes into decorated paper bags. So I find the joy in watching him navigate the bedlam that is a preschool party. I swallow the urge to tell someone else's kid to blow their nose. I, once again, sit on my hands so they do not reach out and pet a mom's fur coat. I smile and make appalling small talk and wipe the frosting out of my hair. I submit to this out of love, out of necessity, and in the service of something greater than my own comfort.

We all submit in one way or another. It is another kind of submission that occupies my thoughts tonight, though. It's the same word for a different kind of act, but it carries some of the same ideas. I have a submission. The big envelope with the scary words: "Attn: Editor" in the address. I have dutifully counted my words, checked, double checked, quintuple checked all of the necessary information I must include. I have edited and cut and pasted and read, re-read, re-re-read and edited again. There are any number of ways to torture myself. There are any number of really fun things I could be doing. I could certainly be taking a nap. But now I submit. Because the time for doing other things has passed. Because I have run out of excuses. There are any number of things I could be doing. But instead, I submit. And in this, like in all the other ways I submit in my life, I submit this out of love, out of necessity and in the service of something greater than my own comfort.

And now I will take a nap.

Cupid's Misfires

I got two bouquets of flowers for Boss's Day this year, I also get them sometimes because it's a Tuesday or because I'm really tired, or because he felt like it. I buy chocolate whenever it's on sale. The Chief Lou and I have "Date Night" every night after the monkeys go to sleep - where usually we eat the sale chocolate and watch DVDs or read together or something incredibly romantic like that. Valentine's Day in our house is centered mostly on the manufacture of tiny handmade cards for classmates and surprising the monkeys with balloons and treats on the morning of February 14th.

I have a rather dim view of holidays intent on promoting the sale of greeting cards and demoting anyone who doesn't have anyone to give them said greeting cards. Love, like everything else, should be celebrated daily in myriad ways that do not involve mass consumption of disposable goods. Although mass consumption of chocolate is a good idea almost any time. Except right before dinner. Unless you know dinner might be especially nasty.

I'm not ungrateful, Cupid has been good to me. We've reached an understanding. Or rather, I have. It took a good many misfires for me to realize what was up. I had a whole post written on this topic, but it was long-winded and sounded self-pitying (which I'm not. Well, I'm long-winded occasionally, but not self-pitying. Especially not in regards to silly holidays.) I read somewhere that aspiring writers can make some freelance money in the greeting card industry, so instead, I decided to try my hand at that. Here are some Valentine's cards I could have written over the years. Perhaps I can send them off to Hallmark and make a few bucks.

I am so glad you asked her to the Valentine's dance instead of me...

Your hands were clammy and you always smelled vaguely of fish. 

***

After all these years, I saw your profile on Facebook and I just wanted to say...

Who's ugly now, Mullet Man?!

Happy Valentine's Day!

***

Valentine's Day always reminds me of you...

I'm sorry I left like that without a word. 

I was young and scared and weak and I didn't know what else to do.

***

Oh, Valentine! You know me so well...

I always wanted to find you passed out and covered in whipped cream in my bed.

The teddy bear was especially thoughtful, too.

***

On this Valentine's Day, all I ask of you...

Is that you not speak. 

I am only dating you for your motorcycle.

***

Nothing is more romantic, my Valentine...

Than a "fancy" dinner at the Olive Garden where you flirt with the server and leave a lousy tip.

***

When I said I loved you...

I was really drunk and thinking of someone else.

Happy Valentine's Day.

***

When we first met...

I wish you had told me that 

you were really into dudes.

Happy Valentine's Day.

***

Happy Valentine's Day, my true love...

like the coffee grinder I gave you on our first Valentine's Day together,

we are still going strong after a lot of 

years of hard work.

***

Perhaps I should stick to my day job. 

Hand Over Your Keys

Various experts in such things will tell you that there are Keys To A Happy Marriage. Like it's something you drive.

Two of these Keys are:
 1. You and your spouse should share common interests.
 2. Your relationship should be occasionally fresh and exciting.

***Oddly, none of these expert "keys" include lengthy discussions about who did what with the keys the last time they drove the car and who was late to something because after an exhaustive search for the keys, found them in the refrigerator. But I digress.*** 


So it is only fitting that we should have been in the car this evening when we expertly exhibited these two particularly profound Keys To A Happy Marriage. Just keeping the love alive out here on the Periphery.

Tangled Lou: [General nattering about newly discovered knowledge of the possible existence of wild mountain hamsters]
Chief Lou: [Turning up the radio] Shh for a second.
TL: Did you just...? Oh, you did not just shush me so you could turn up Phil Collins.
Phil Collins: [Singing.] Su-su-ssssudio. I just sail away. Ohhhhhhh! Su-su-su-sudio. (Or some such nasal-ing about.)
CL: Oh wait! Is this Phil Collins?
TL: Uh, yeah.
CL & TL: [Insert brief discussion of the lameness of Phil Collins even though TL used to actually own No Jacket Required and thought it was rock music, but that can hardly be held against her because she was very young and grew up in rural Vermont and China for crying out loud and what was the deal with Genesis? And a very little more about wild mountain hamsters.]
TL: [Triumphantly.] Whatever. You're the one who turned up Phil Collins.
PC: [Still singing. Too loudly, still through his nose.]
CL: [Spluttering a bit.] But... I... I didn't....
TL: No. Did you, or did you not, just shush me and then turn up Phil Collins?
CL: Yes, I did but...
TL: Tut tut tut tut. I rest my case.
CL: No. I did but, I thought it was Gloria Estefan.
TL: !!!!!!!
PC: [No longer singing. Probably because he's hurt and confused.]

So, come on. Shake your body, baby. Can you do that conga? I know you can't control yourself any longer.

Blowing Bubbles: An Intensely Personal Review

An intensely personal review of the article The Great American Bubble Machine by Matt Taibbi. It is not recommended bedtime reading.


He handed me the article at bedtime. "You should read this," he said. When he recommends things, I usually listen. He has impeccable taste in reading. The title sounds like fun, but I know it's not. Not fun at all. I read the first few paragraphs and have to stop. "I can't read this before bed," I tell him. "It will make me dream of horrid things." I don't like to go to bed angry.

We live in our own bubble. From the inside, we see the world through irridescent soap shine - scrubbed and pretty, all glossy-bright and warped by our happy walls. Inside we float, bouncing off each other, protected. There are other bubbles that people speak of, but they are not our own. Or so I like to imagine. He helps me maintain our bubble, keep it from glancing off blades of grass or clapping toddler hands. He knows how important it is to me. He knows it's for our monkeys who are too young to think of things like Wall Street or the housing market. Money, to them, is two dollars and fifty cents a week. Fifty cents to charity, two dollars of financial freedom to save or spend. This is all they know. This is what they should know. They should not know of other money just yet. The money that equals power, corruption, usury, division and inequity.

"He's the new Hunter Thompson," he tells me of the author. Big words coming from the man who spent our one and only trip to Las Vegas, tripping in the steps of Fear and Loathing. (Not literally tripping, like the late Mr. Thompson, just visiting.) Nerdy vacation habits aside, this man I love is educated in political science, history, the law. He's also educated in a different way - in the ways of small people with large hearts, the ways of a soul mate with odd notions, the ways of being Daddy and Husband and keeping the wolves at bay. He's the pragmatist to my idealist. He tells me things will be OK when I lather on about the State of Things. He tells me that These Things come and go. I trust him because my mind is full of other things than history. He tells me, "You should read this," and I do.

I do not like what I read. I do not want to finish. It's too much to think about, too much to contradict. It makes me think of things like Goldman Sachs. Last week I didn't think of such things. I laugh and say it's a good thing we have no assets and then I worry about my mom, her entire retirement tied up in investments she doesn't fully understand. I don't understand how the large, imaginary money works. Technically, I do. I'm pretty smart that way. But in the center of me, I don't understand. I don't understand how there are people who not only cannot say "I have enough. I am content." but also seem content to take from those who have very little to begin with. I do not understand this and it makes me want to hug my kids, to hope their world continues to be two dollars and fifty cents every Sunday or some variation thereof.

There are so many things I read, I know. There are so many things I wish I didn't. I cannot fix those things. I cannot even begin to see clearly to the end of the problems. It cannot be solved with a swift kick in the shins, which is what I want to do. I laugh when I think of getting my common mud from my worn out boots on the perfect crease of a $2000 suit. But I cannot kick their shins, for my monkeys' sake. I can only keep my own bubble and make it work the best I can. I like to feel invisible, like no one can touch us. I like to feel aloft, afloat, swaying in the breezes that change.

Defeated at dinner last night, like I have not seen him about Such Things before, he tells me he's used up all his outrage for the day on the latest corporate bail-out. "A 'settlement' not a bailout! They're saying this!" He rages, "It is criminal, but it's not. It should be." The Hooligan expounds on broccoli and the jBird mimics her hero's fuming without knowing what it is she speaks of but maybe she does know: "Why can't people just share?" We do not usually talk like this in front of the kids. The fumes take up too much space inside our bubble. I raise my eyebrows at him and tell my jBird not to worry. He sighs, "I think it's come to the point where they're just looting the carcass."  These words from him chill and make my dinner suddenly unpalatable. This defeat, this portent of a world left picked clean by pillagers, leaving what? behind for the future that picks at its broccoli at my table.

These are the things I think about today, but they are out of my control. So we blow our bubble a little bigger: I bake bread with my son, I bring a surprise lunch to my daughter at school, I pound out these words, I play kickball, I go to the zoo, I blow those darker bubbles away from me - my quiet acts of peaceful rebellion. Today I cannot care about housing markets or tech stocks or golden parachutes. I am too busy investing in futures.

Tangled Small Talk: Twitter-style

Twitter makes me uncomfortable, but I'm told it's a good way to "build my brand" (which makes me think of a towering monolith with ill-fitting jeans and mismatched socks and I shudder.) I also get a teeny bit defensive that there are things out there that I don't really "get", but teenagers adopt them with ease. So I must conquer them. It was that or Justin Bieber, and Twitter seemed the lesser of the two evils.

Twitter combines two of my nemeses: small talk and algebraic looking symbols. But I'm getting the hang of it, sort of. I waded into the stream of chitchat today and saw this Tweet from Kristen* at Four Hens and a Rooster, who has awesome hair and is very patient with my socially backward nonsense:

We're awesome! RT @BlogHerBlogging: Bloggers Launch a JCPenney Shop-In To Support Ellen DeGeneres, Tolerancehttp://ow.ly/1hiehe

I have heard rumblings about this whole JCPenney debacle, but honestly haven't paid much attention. Apparently JCP took on Ellen as a spokesperson and a whole bunch of people protested and wanted to boycott the store. I'm all for being awesome and tolerance and Ellen and boycotting, but wait! Boycotting? This jangles some sort of socially conscious umbrage from a few months ago, so I Tweet:

@4Hensandrooster Weren't we supposed to be boycotting JCP over the whole Tshirt thing in the fall? I'm confused.abcnews.go.com/blogs/headline…

This is the jBird's last experience with JCPenney:
jBird - age 4 and lovin' it. Hooligan - 18 mos. and not
with the Texas cousins who obviously know how
to get their portraits taken at the mall.

We have discussed the T-shirt Thing at home. "What T-shirt?" the jBird wants to know. After hemming and hawing around I tell her outright "It says 'I'm too pretty to do homework, so I let my brother do it for me'." I am uncomfortable to even say the words out loud, even more uncomfortable than I am with Twitter. "Well, that's dumb," she says. "What does being pretty have to do with homework? And besides, that's unfair to your brother. What if he has his own homework to do? And anyway, my brother is in preschool. He would completely mess up my homework." These are all valid arguments. "Who thinks that's funny?" she wants to know. "Um, I don't know, really," I am relieved that she's indignant. "But a lot of people felt the same way you did and decided not to shop at JCPenney because they sold it. So many people that the store finally pulled the shirts." She thinks about this. "Well good. I don't like that store anyway." The conversation then devolves into how I'm such an activist and they totally noticed I was boycotting because I went from never shopping there to decidedly not shopping there. Except now, I'm supposed to shop there because:

@tangledlou that's old news..;) Yay to JCP for telling one million moms to suck it re: Ellen spokesperson protest

I appreciate their right to protest and I will defend it, but I really think some people need to find better things to do with their time.

@4Hensandrooster I can't possibly keep up with such things. I'm all for telling 1m moms to suck it, though. Sadly, I only shop local & small

This makes me sound awesome to some people, but really it's another example of being an activist by accident. My neighborhood is populated with small, local businesses to which I can walk. I loathe the mall and I loathe the driving in traffic and hunting for parking spots. I am essentially lazy in this regard. But my laziness works for me in this case. Except for tomorrow, when I'm supposed to show my tolerance by buying things I don't need from a large, national chain store that I hate.

Because this is small talk and I think because Kristen realized that she doesn't actually know me, she followed up with this:

@tangledlou unless you're pro OMM, then yes... Boycott away...

I'm down with OPP, but I have no idea what OMM is. Fortunately, this whole thing is taking place on Twitter, where my ignorance cannot be witnessed as a blank-blink-blink stare. I quickly Google OMM so as not to appear the sheltered idiot I am.

Osteopathic manipulative medicine? I've got no objections to this.

Orangetown Mighty Midgets? I'm pro-that, whatever that is, because it's fabulous.

Old Man Murray? Oh my, yes. I am utterly and completely pro-Old Man Murray.**

Somehow, I don't think any of these are what she means. I spend the next few hours trying to untangle this mess into which I've stepped. I like to be a responsible citizen. I like to take a stand for my beliefs. I like to denounce things like intolerance. I really do. But I'm confused about this whole thing. 


Was the hiring of Ellen Degeneres as a spokesperson a calculated measure by the giant store to draw former boycotters of bad taste back into the spending fold? Does the hiring of Ellen cancel out blatant sexism aimed at children? Does JCPenney really care? Either way, they're getting a ton of free advertising (like from me, right now.) How can it be the 21st century and this is what we're discussing? How can you not love Ellen? She's funny and she dances and wears suits with sneakers and shows pictures of cats on her show. What's wrong with that? Oh wait. Is it because she's gay? Are people afraid they might catch gay if they buy their commercially emblazoned children's wear there? They might catch bad taste. And as far as that goes, I wonder how many gay people work for the store (or any store), nationwide? Yet there was no need to boycott (or overshop) before. Why now? What could OMM possibly stand for? Offended Mad Moms? Openly Melodramatic Moms? Obviously Mental Moms? One Million Mothballs? 
I have no idea. I do have an idea about something else, though. 

Take it to the streets, people. Howl long and loud about what it is you believe. This First Amendment of ours is important. Use it or lose it. One woman's insane is another one's cause. Shop there, don't shop there, do what you feel is best. But please, oh please, pretty please with cherries and sprinkles, don't ask me to go to the mall on a Saturday! I'm pro-tolerance and I find it a lot easier to be tolerant of people if I'm not surrounded by them. I'm boycotting crowds. For Ellen, of course.


* I would like to note that I have nothing but the utmost respect for Kristen. She writes a magnificent blog, runs an online community for parents, plans galas for very good causes, encourages and promotes other bloggers, and still finds the time to be eternally patient with me via various social networking sites with which I am completely inept. And I love her hair.


** These are actually 3 of the top 5 things that came up when I Googled "OMM".

A Thousand Things

A thousand things I wanted to write today. A thousand things got pushed aside. A bossy idea is ruling my head today. It won't let the others have their say. Oh well, Bossy. Have it your way, but I'm not going to talk about you yet.

The gray and rain is back. I read things about things, you know. I read about the rain inside some people's heads. I read about how it sometimes falls down their cheeks. I read and listen to the tiny rain fingers drum on my greenhouse window. I read things that others write. They pour out their hearts and exercise their rights, they show themselves in tiny ways. I stopped reading when I got to "irregardless" and then I felt bad. But not bad enough to push past that word and soldier on. My eyes have other things to see to.

A thousand things I wanted to write today. A thousand things got kidnapped and stowed away in dank corners and forgotten folds in my brain. Their ransom notes come to me as half-finished posts and sentences that do not satisfy. I'm not sure I want to pay to get them back.

The quiet is back. It seeps around me and fills me up. So much I can't hear the dying stories strangling in my head. So much. I looked around, a halfhearted attempt at collecting the bits and pieces a monkey hurricane has left in its wake. Collecting my thoughts, collecting the socks, the blocks, the little bits of paper, collecting the nerve to do something. The large and quiet of something big, something looming just outside my vision. The quiet of my own space and everything and nothing to do.

A thousand things I wanted to write today. A thousand things skittered and hid. They clambered over the practical things of life and hid behind them, cowering. They sit and they snivel and play with misdirection, shouting a list of things I need to do. "Do not waste your ink on us," they say. "There are forms to fill out. There are checks to write. There are grownup things waiting." I called them cowards, but listened to them anyway.

In spite of it all, the fire is back. It has been smoldering, almost snuffed for years. But for some kindling here, a sudden flare there, it would have been gone. It's back, it's there, it's building and it will not be ignored. In spite of rain and hurricanes, disconnection and deafening quiet, it's there.

A thousand things I will write some day. I wrote one today and that is all I ask. I'll write another tomorrow and a thousand tomorrows after that if they're given to me. I wrote one today. One. Slowly, clumsily, in this stiff-legged baby-walk way, gripping the edges of things for support, I'm walking forward into what I want. One little malformed, flawed, defected offering far surpasses a thousand intentions unfulfilled.

On Lingering Man-Hugs

Being a relatively quiet and nosy person, I tend to notice things. Things I'm not really supposed to notice, I don't think.

The other day I noticed an acquaintance of mine give his 17-year-old son a Lingering Man-Hug. He stroked his son's back, whispered something in his hear, and then drew back and kissed him on the forehead. As with most things that make me uncomfortable, I stared and watched the whole thing. Yes, it made me uncomfortable and that raised some Very Serious Questions.

Why did it make me uncomfortable?
Was it just because I was an accidental witness to what was obviously a private moment, somehow rendered more intimate by the public setting? Was it just because I was intruding? (Like when you watch a stranger eat. Such a personal, private thing to be gawped at.)

Was it because I am uncomfortable with seeing two men hug each other? I've seen my husband hug countless men, never lingering, but including a man at a parade with a "Free Hugs" sign. That doesn't make me uncomfortable. I've seen my neighbors, partners for nearly 20 years, hug each other and I just think it's sweet if I think about it at all.

Was it because they were father and son? Perhaps. It wasn't that many generations ago that for a father to show physical affection to his son was considered "unmanly". Do I have remnants of this notion that cling to me like a vestigial tail? I once received some lovely advice that I shouldn't be too affectionate with my (then 2-year-old) son because he might grow up "funny". I was appalled by this, and rightly so, I believe.

But is there a cut-off point in this physical affection? Does it at some point become uncomfortable? I think it's the cutest thing in the world when my 5-year-old son hugs his Daddy and kisses him on the mouth. Will I still think that when he's 17? Is it one of those cases where I'm judging something now and later I'll look back and realize what an idiot I am?

Or was it just the fact that it was a lingering man-hug? One that went on just a little too long for a situation outside, say, a funeral?

Or must I admit that I don't particularly like this acquaintance of mine? That I find him a bit phony and creepy even when he's just standing there, neither lingering nor hugging?

These are all questions I ask myself, not just to kill time or write a particularly ridiculous blog post, but to examine my immediate reactions to things I observe. Our guts tell us all sorts of things and sometimes all they're saying is "Lay off the refried beans right before bed." I believe in intuition; I believe that we perceive things that we can't really name and they lead us to conclusions we can't really explain. But when one is faced with a Lingering Man-Hug, one must question these conclusions. These snap, emotional judgments we make are fodder for all sorts of misconceptions, misunderstandings, prejudice and future embarrassment. They are also the sort of judgments that keep us out of danger - both emotional and physical - in certain situations. But still, I examine.

I believe it was one of the original Lingering Man-Huggers, Socrates, who said: "The unexamined life is not worth living." Do you suspect he was talking about this?

I Fell In Love Today

I tripped out of flannel sheets into the chilly morning and I fell in love. A pile of blankets on the living room floor, two small heads poking out, little eyes focused, little lips moving silently, hair and breath that spoke of early rising - quietly cuddled with each a book, patiently awaiting the day.

I fell in love today with the street. Unseasonably clear and wide open skies - the kind I forget exist when the clouds always crowd the edges - a yawn of trees, sparkling sentinels in the uncharacteristic morning sun. They waved their arms in alarm at me and pointed to the west. And there she was: stony, stark, crested with white just the palest shade lighter than the icy sky - the mountain. An opulent dowager presiding over the city.

I fell in love today with a pile of wood. Maple, cherry, alder. Just a few sticks of cedar for kindling. I fell in love with my arms and legs and back again as I hauled and stacked and hauled some more. These bundles of potential energy in my arms, promising their hard and seasoned warmth in this, the most uncertain of our seasons.


I fell in love today with a little boy. His dimpled chin and crooked grin. He winks and does the pointed finger thumbs up at me. "Is there room to stand up there?" he asks of the mountains and barely waits to hear before he's off - climbing mountains in his mind. There is, doubtless, heavy machinery and technical jargon involved. He catches me watching him think. He winks at me and I melt. In everything he's casual. "I feel kind of chokey and I have a headache today," he says calmly while he plays with my hair, "Do you think it would be all right if I didn't go to school today? I think I need to rest." So rest we did. I lost myself in those dark, dark eyes and cocky grin and forgot the question.


I fell in love with a tall tale today. My proud little girl declares "Mine was the tallest!" Indeed it was. Well over six feet tall, this tale was. A tale spun by a precious Bird of a hero, Violet. She uses her new-found super power to save her village, but she undertakes the task of the saving before she even knows her ability. This tale that says so much about its author. I swoon over her dialogue, expression, her metaphors. I swoon over her own super-power, that great big heart that bulges through everything she does. She shows more gums than teeth when she gives me her proudest grin. Hers is the tallest tale.

I fell in love with myself today. I walked into the kitchen to get my vitamins, I ate some jelly beans and forgot. I told the firewood guy I was waiting for him to leave so I could roll naked in the beautiful wood. I spoke with nerves and without filter as I often do when confronted with talk that is small. He laughed and said "Look out for splinters!" and drove his truck away quickly. I spent an hour doing something that should take a minute. I wandered the paths in my head and found myself standing in strange places wondering why I had opened the fridge. I giggled with monkeys and exasperated them and then scolded them and told them to clean up the mess. I contradicted, I forgot, I drank too much coffee and spent too much time staring into space, imagining what I will wear when I'm famous. My pants fall down, my socks don't match, I am a grouch. I love it all.

I fell in love with a man today. He works alongside me every day. His work is away from here, mine is always here, but he's there. He phones to tell me ridiculous things. He comes straight home from work and stacks wood with me, shooing me away to take a break. He reads my words and glows. He knows me, with my pants and my socks and my wandering open fridge and he laughs. He hugs me. He hugs them. He knows withheld affection personally and will never withhold. He bathes and he tucks and he reads and he prays and he kisses good night. And then we speak of things that grownups do when children have gone to bed: the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the merits of maple wood, sauerkraut and Ricky Gervais. He sets my hair on fire. He calls me by my true name that no one else knows.

I fell in love today. I fell in love with the horizon, the mess on my living room floor, the dirty socks beside my bed, the chaos of a smile, the silence of a telephone call, the projects left unfinished by my chair, the books I have yet to read, the words I have yet to write. I fell in love with possibility, with endurance, with compassion, with awkwardness and grief. I fell in love today. I fell in love with today.

Relatively Silly

In a mad fit of clearing out and organizing, I came across a journal that I thought was lost. It was an interesting read. More on that later. But for tonight, since there seems to be some sort of televised gladiatorial contest today, a gem of sorts that I unearthed. I wrote it while staring out the window and trying to stay awake at the most boring job in the world - answering phones at a bank. Enjoy.

October 27, 1995: Big Brown Camaro

Oh big brown Camaro! How you've seen your better days. Your hood is wearing thin - spots of spray paint to stop the baldness - like Rogaine for cars. Your fish-like body slides through the street with your taillights grinning in their big-lipped delight. Delight at being a has-been, a used-to-be-somebody. Once a sporty young buck, shiny and new. The girls wanted you, the guys respected you. In your glory days. Days - I may interject - which also glorified the likes of Olivia Newton John, The BeeGees, and acid washed jeans. But now you haven't aged very well, dear Camaro. You're a rusty old man with a beat-up body from your muscle days. Your big, toothy, backward grin and your poisonous, growling cough from too many years of smoking those tailpipes. Yet you seem to notice no age, no trends. You continue in your preening strut, though now more a growling schlep. You imagine that women still want you and men still respect you, but how often sings the refrain when you drive by: "Oh big brown Camaro, how you have seen your better days!"

Relatively Confessional

Gather 'round, cowpokes. It's Saturday night and it's time for cleaning out some stalls around the ol' Confession Ranch. You know what they're full of, so grab a shovel. It's knee-deep around here.

Stall #1: I was an Amway distributor for about a year in the early 90s. Oh yeah. I went to the rallies, attended the meetings, listened to the tapes, read the self-help books, I even tried to recruit a couple of people. In my defense, I was bored and aimless and I had a massive crush on my sponsor. Isn't that the way it always goes? I discovered a few things about myself in the process and I ate a lot of vitamins and power bars along the way, so it wasn't a complete wash. I discovered I am neither a capitalist nor an entrepreneur. I also discovered that my dream was not the so-called American dream. I discovered that I am not what you would call a networker, but I did learn how to "Win Friends and Influence People" - but not really because I always felt disingenuous putting ol' Dale Carnegie's tips to use. These were all important discoveries even though I didn't realize it at the time and spent a lot of time wondering what was wrong with me. My sponsor asked me what I would do with an extra $5000 a month and I said I would help pay off my parents' debts and then give some to charity. I think I was supposed to buy a fur coat or something. Regardless, I watched people from all walks put themselves out there, risk their credibility and their dignity for something they believed in. This is admirable. A lesson could be learned.

Stall #2: I would rather be the Chief of Staff than the President. I would rather be the guy who works hard to make things work. I would rather be the one behind the scenes than the one in public view. I would rather retire quietly to the sidelines and cheer on a more charismatic person. This drove my mother crazy while I was in high school. One of my best friends was extremely popular and had a great way with people. I would help him execute his wild schemes and he would get the credit. This didn't bother me. Especially when the recognition for the wild schemes came in the form of detention. Now I have extremely charismatic kids. I don't know why, people just like them. So once again, I get to be in my comfort zone - in the background - while they get the attention and make the friends. For some reason this doesn't bother my mother, even though it's basically the same thing.

Stall #3: I have harbored a dream since I was quite young of being an author. Of books. Of actual, tangible books. For a long time I kind of thought that if I just kept writing enough, someone would come along and notice my Norma Jeans and turn them into Marilyns. Now I've known for some time that's not really how things work and I've finally gotten over the strange Puritanical hurdle that writing is a frivolous pastime, but I wonder if I've got the gumption. I have this fear cloaked as laziness (or laziness cloaked as fear, who can tell these things?) that holds me back from really sitting down and working something out. (See Stalls #1 & #2 for lack of entrepreneurial spirit, ability or desire to self-promote, etc.)

**If this is getting boring, you should Google "pannus" (be sure to have it set on Images) and then you'll want to read anything.**

Stall #4: I was a theater major for a few years in college. I loved acting, loved the stage, the lights at my feet, a room stuffed with people I couldn't see, sitting in orderly rows, waiting for me to speak. I appeared in two public access cable shows: The Hot Plate, and University Boulevard. I am terrified that they will turn up on YouTube somewhere (don't go looking for them.) I did not enjoy the competition and self-promotion. The theater parties were always fun because they involved costumes. They were also a tedious bore because have you ever been in a room full of drunken thespians trying to out-Shakespeare each other? So I dropped out of school for a while and ended up getting my degree in psychology which is almost the same as theater.

Stall #5: My youngest child is going to school full time in the fall and it's put me in a bit of a state. I am ready for him to go, I will not cry when I drop him off. He is ready to go and I would not deprive him of the absolute joy and excitement of that first day by getting all mired in my own angst. But it has put to the forefront of my mind lately that the career I left to stay home with the kids is no longer really waiting for me. Nor am I anxious to pursue it again. I am floating above this whole thing just observing for now. I am somewhat appalled that I'm 37 years old and I still have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. Except an old man, but that's still a few years down the road.

I'm just stalling.