School's Out for Summer. School's out for EVA!

Today is my last day at Saint Ann's where i have spent the last year as a 7th and 8th grade middle school teacher. It has been, in a word, heaven. Talking with brilliant kids about well written books all day is heartwarming, mind-expanding, and totally decadent. I want to write lots about my experience with them, and I will. But I have other news.

I have sold my novel (again, but this time to the right place) to Little A and they will be publishing it June 2016! This summer I will be bent over the computer spinning straw into gold, or at least looking like a disgruntled gnome. I have decided to share this strange process with all of you (meaning my mother, hi Mom!). So this is just a brief post to say, please stay tuned. I will talk all about my miraculous editor who has undone the tangle of a novel and given me a thread to lead me out of the maze. I will talk about what it is like to dismantle and reassemble something I have been working on for eight years. I will talk about how I want to ignore everything in my life in order to do it. I will talk about how I am devastated to be leaving Saint Ann's and also feel like it is a gift. TIME! There is nothing harder to find.

The Great Miralax Debate

Having a kid with a GI tract that closely resembles the BQE on a summer Friday is stressful. Feeling conflicted about the treatment of that traffic jam is even worse. One oft-prescribed solution is Miralax. In the last decade doctors have taken to recommending Miralax to kids for quick relief, and to that end, it works like a charm. You and your sad, stopped-up counterpart, need quick relief, otherwise a cycle of holding poop and painful poop can compound the problem (or compact it, ick). The criticism of Miralax is this, there have been no conclusive studies of its longterm effects on children, and, more importantly, it doesn’t deal with the underlying cause. Like basically every parenting challenge, the key here is a shift in lifestyle, a permanent change to Sorrento’s or Nile’s diet. I say permanent because often, if the doctor suggests temporary changes, we lazy types, who are used to immediate gratification, try something for two weeks and then decide, humpf! It doesn’t work. But what if you are a good doobie, you go balls to the wall on this diet thing and nothing happens? You cut out anything starchy including apples, bananas, rice, bread, pasta, potatoes of all varieties. You eliminate excess milk, add fiber, up the water intake, incorporate “P” fruits into ever meal, push citrus like you are a Florida lobbyist, add flaxseed oil to pear sauce, and still there are tears when a deposit needs to be made. This is what happened to me, from the day the kid started solid food until age three. The doctors, who I love and trust, kept going back to the diet, not fully convinced I was doing everything I could. Cut out dried fruit since it pulls too much moisture from the system. Cut out yogurt (she always refused yogurt anyway). Put her on a probiotic. The kid went Paleo before anyone. Eventually the doctors decided Miralax was the way to go, but insisted I keep the duration of treatment short and include a slow weaning process. Every time I tried to cut down, no matter how slowly, things went bad. Hemorrhoids-bad. Anal-fissures bad (for her sake we will pretend we never had this conversation). We, her parents and doctors, had to accept that she just needed to be on Miralax (and mineral oil) in an ongoing fashion. The weaning process started at two and a half and took at year. Yes, you need to go that slow. And now, my girl is Miralax-free, and eats healthier than I do. In our organic, let-your-body-be-your-guide era, I felt incredible guilt and frustration that I couldn’t find a more “natural” way to help my girl. But her body needed Miralax. Sometimes, the sh*t-kicking chemicals are what we need. Thanks science! (Though I’m still pretty sure raw honey is a magical healing potion).

[this post first appeared on A Child Grows in Brooklyn]

old man moriarty gots something to say *blows nose and stuffs hanky back in her cardigan sleeve*

The call of the cranky old man (or woman) is "things used to be different." It is that refrain running through my head that let's me know I've arrived at middle age (that, and my fortieth birthday looming on the horizon, just 16 months away).

A contributor to the blog I edit recently wrote something about pizza (because we're parents and this is what we have to talk about). And he said something that resonated with me. "Pizza used to be special." While he went on to talk about some amazing pizza joint in Fort Greene, I stayed with this idea. What happened to us that things like pizza are no longer special? Is it am emblem of the demise of home cooking and the family dinner? Is it a new interpretation of both?

Growing up with a mother who was once a farm girl, I was raised on some serious home cooking. Homemade bread, whole smoked chicken that she briefly considered selling at the local gourmet food shop, popcorn that was not made in the microwave or one of those awesome corn popping machines (which I desperately wanted). Lagsanga with béchamel. Steak with hollandaise. Butterflied lamb. These were the dishes served on holidays and at family dinner parties. But for birthdays we would get pizza, or at least on my sister's birthday we would. That was always her requested (I preferred the lagsana, because even gravel would go down smooth with a little béchamel). But pizza didn't come from Spucky's, our local pizza place where we occasionally order steak bombs. No, our mother made the dough, the sauce and dealt with chopping and grating all the various toppings herself. 

I watched her many times stretch the dough to fit a large baking sheet, pressing it into the corners. I watched her cover it with sauce and cheese and then together we'd add toppings. It was delicious, of course. But for many years I thought pizza was just OK. I didn't really understand other people's facisination with it, since I had never had the grease-soaked marvel that is a real slice. 

My own daughter has had many many slices of real pizza in her five years. She and her father often sneak off and have it as a snack or early dinner. Living in Brooklyn, you can't walk more than a few blocks without coming across a pizza place. But why is it that pizza has become part of the weekly menu, fish on fridays, pizza on saturdays? And we wonder why kids today are so jaded. They are consistently given more and more (as is the rest of our culture), bigger and better. And so simple pleasures are harder to appreciate because they don't come with a toy or a animatronic singing moose or a child-sized motorcycle.

See, I'm old now. This morning I was literally shocked when I saw a sign in the bodega that said cigarettes $15, and, out loud, I said, I remember when they were $5. The real problem is I'm not willing to move somewhere where life is slower and simpler. I'm not going upstate or to the Italian countryside (though if someone foot the bill I'd totally go there for awhile). So I guess I just have to accept that pizza is no longer special, and I must find something else to replace it in my daughter's childhood experience. No $5 cigarettes for her. 

Learning to Hate Bill Cosby

  

I believe each of the women who have accused Bill Cosby. I feel their rage, and their disgust and their betrayal and even their fear because that is what I feel for anyone who has been sexually assaulted. But there is disbelief, not in them, never in them. It is disbelief that the Bill Cosby in my mind is the same man that violated these women. I want them to be wrong. I want him to be who he was in my mind. My disbelief vacillates between denial and dismay. It is not logical and, mostly, it is not conscious. The evidence is overwhelming, dozens of women with the same story. And yet when I listen to his voice on NPR just before he refuses to address the allegations, or when I see his impish grin in some Cosby Show era headshot, I have a Pavlovian response. I trust Bill Cosby. In my subconscious his voice and persona is totally married to the image of an affable father figure, as it is for most of us. What shocks me is not that connection, but the fact that I seem unable to break that connection.

I was born into the Cosby generation, just old enough to watch the shows when they originally aired. I reveled in Theo’s trip to the “real world” when the family decided to turn their home into a miniature neighborhood, his bedroom an apartment, his father the slow uncooperative landlord. I was old enough to wonder about the sudden appearance of a new daughter, totally absent from the first season. I was old enough to question why Lisa Bonet was shunned from the Cosby universe due to “creative differences,” (read: her desire to do more than just play Cosby’s angelic, if kooky kid). In those eight years, I was taught, in fact we were all convinced, of Cosby’s metal. His moral fortitude. His vulnerability. He was Magnum PI without the sex appeal, he was Hawkeye Pierce without the bitterness, he was Steven Keaton with a spine. Did I know if he was representing the True Black Experience? I knew he represented at least one.

Some might say he was bigger than his blackness, some might say his approach to race was simplistic and insulting. But we are still in a sad place in our culture where every black man who “makes it” is tangible proof that maybe this country won’t be sick forever, maybe we can move past the atrocities of slavery and segregation, maybe smart funny people, no matter their race, can succeed.  So Cosby’s fall, his steep, kamikaze style decent into the fiery lake of sex offenders, is a betrayal of his fans, of black men everywhere, of anyone who wants the fearful and uneducated people of this world to wake up even if it’s just one movie star at a time.

And now this former pillar of morality is just another man who thinks women are animals, objects to be used and disposed of as he sees fit. How many people in his inner circle learned that lesson from him? How many people turned to the Oracle of Cosby and discovered, “oh chicks? You just make ‘em fuck you.” How many people (even if this number is minuscule it is horrific) felt justified in their own behavior because they heard through the grapevine that’s how Cosby does it? For someone who often spoke as a voice for an oppressed minority, to turn around and be the oppressor is tragic and disgusting.

I’m not sure how I will do it. How I can break this profound association. But I must. For each of those women, I will learn to hate Bill Cosby.

blog it

Blogging for a living makes blogging for myself less fun. But really, that shouldn't be the case. Really, it should be the reverse. I have more experience blogging (aka writing random thoughts as fast as you can and putting them into a mildly interesting and relevant context, with varying degrees of success). I am more capable of cranking things out. I'm less afraid (this could be a bad thing). It is vaguely reminiscent of how I felt about personal modesty after I had a baby. That word, modesty, lost all meaning to me. Is it bad that I equate blogging with pooping in public, which is basically what happens when you give birth? (you can read about my true loss of modesty here).

So maybe I need to recommit myself to this blog (and the gym, and most of my friends, and my new novel, man I have work to do). It began as a place for me to practice writing for an audience. Even if that audience was just my mom. Now that I write for a large audience most of the time, maybe I have to reconsider the purpose of this blog. I think that is something that I will need to do as I write, as I get back to it and discover what it is that I enjoy about it. What do I take away? What do I bring to it?

the battle between the mice and the toys

I am often cynical, snarky, judgey and opinionated. But at this time of year I embrace another part of myself, the part that believes in magic, that finds nothing more nourishing that a lit christmas tree in a dark room, the part of me that feels a kinship with all people, and experiences a strong desire to hug strangers on the street and tell ladies on the subway how pretty I think they are. I'm fairly sure the holiday spirit is palpable like low pressure or fog. Yesterday, I watched it snow on stage at Lincoln Center, I watch the snowflakes dance (actual ballerinas, snow will never do any "dancing" on this blog, i promise). And when the ballet was over we walked to the subway in the snow, and I told PBT that I wished the holiday season could be longer, that it feels so fleeting. But maybe it is in that fleeting, in the very act of it slipping by that the magic occurs. It is a strange moment when we all are young, and we know it, and we know that it goes. In Our Town Emily is warned not to go back to the world of the living, she is told if she does, to pick a normal day, but she can't help herself and she picks her 12th birthday. Christmas time is this, it is a time we all go back to that is almost too special to bear. Maybe in these brief weeks we can each have a moment to realize life as we live it.

Then we can all return to our snark and our judgements, thank god.

the new you

Parenting, the source of love, a hot spring that burns you, that comes up between fissures in your soul and scalds you. It is miracoulous becuase you keep living, because you love it, because while you feel like this you are also doing mundane things like brushing hair and washing hands and saying "you can't wear them in bed, you've just worn them outside." And you hold and kiss and wipe and scold and laugh and warn and generally maintain safety protocals. You are the voice on the trian and they are aliens who've never ridden the subway, "Mind the gap!" "Don't hold the doors" "Don't train surf unless you want to die" "Don't laugh, dieing is not a joke." This is your life. But then in the middle of the night when you put blankets on a lump in a twin bed the lump says to the darkness. I love you mommy. And you think we are not on a train we are in heaven. We are in the sun and all you know is pure light. And the lump says "don't go. Peter Pan is on the cieling and he's locked in a cage." and you say, "we'll talk all about it tomorrow."

my alien

thumbs and other addictions

I recently wrote a blog post for my regular gig about thumb sucking and I started thinking about my own oral history, as it were.

I sucked my thumb until I was nine. I still remember how good it tasted, how rubbing my nose with a hang nail while thumb sucking was basically the greatest thing ever. I would occasionally do it at school, cupping my hands over my mouth and nose as if that somehow hid my actions. I was never made fun of, I must have stopped doing it at school before people really noticed. But then again, I went to a fairly vanilla school where there was no bullying and the biggest problem there was cliques. Yes, cliques, that I will go into another time.

So thumbs. For a kid who was facing her parents divorce, the thumb was a crucial form of comfort and sameness. And I was addicted. My parents and siblings were always trying to convince me to stop, making bets with me. My father and I had a running bet, if he quit smoking I would quit sucking my thumb or vice versa. They stopped short of dipping my thumb in vinegar, since they are good people. I couldn't tear myself away from this delicious habit. Looking back it was just like my experience as a smoker. I would resolve to stop the following day and I'd wake up, having forgotten my vow, smoke, have a Homer Simpson moment and then decide screw it, the day's shot anyway. Maybe my thumb sucking primed me to fall in love with cigarettes. Cigarettes: thumb sucking for grown ups.

I quit sucking much the way I quit smoking. I was forced to. Not by anyone, but by my body. As a smoker I developed asthma, had an attack and that was the last time I ever smoked. As a thumb sucker it was a little more gruesome. No, I didn't lose my thumb (though that was probably the only other thing that would've worked). I had a horrible bike accident the summer after I turned nine, the first summer my parents were separated. My Huffy off-roader (fine print, do not at any point ride this bike off-road. My brother missed these instructions and used to make jumps out of planks and firewood. Ah the 80's) had been handed down from my brother to my sister and then to me. Apparently seven years of hard riding is more than the limit for that model. As I flew down the hill anxious to show my dad just how fast I could go, no shoes, no helmet, I saw the front wheel wobble, a bolt having come loose, and then blackness. I woke up in the back of my dad's car, my brother holding me saying, don't go to sleep, don't go to sleep. I had knocked out three teeth, had a cut that ran from my upper lip to my hair line. Both knees were shredded, and I had cuts on most of my toes. My sister stayed behind while we went to the hospital to search for my teeth. She told me she followed the blood splatters, but it took three days to find them in the brush by the side of the road (she's the best). Magically, I didn't break anything. But, with no front teeth and a puffed up lip, sucking my thumb was out. I struggled to sleep for the first week, in part because I was cold and couldn't have a blanket over most of me since it hurt. But now I realize, it was also because it was the first time in my life I had to fall asleep without sucking my thumb. But don't feel bad for me, eight years later I found cigarettes.

Something that felt too raw to post at the time, now, almost a year later I can

Recently I lost someone. I should say a man I didn't know, or just knew of, a friend of the family, was lost. His family lost him, his friends lost him. He was lost at sea. A man I knew, or knew of, was swept from his boat, from the deck my brother and father had stood on just weeks before, hauling lines and facing winds. There was no difference between when this man was on his boat and when my brother and father were on the boat, there was no great disadvantage to his location, no lack of knowledge (of the sea or the boat or the wind), there was no lack of crew, no lack of expertise aboard. There were storms, and wind and nights, and shifts in watch and all had gone smoothly as it had for them for seven previous summers. But this day, this change in watch, there was a rouge wave, two in fact. And two men were washed out of the boat and only one man was washed back in. Strong winds and a broken rudder meant procedures could not be obeyed, meant that thrown lines dragged through water, through hands. The boat could not stop or turn. One man, trying to save two. One man, left in the water, stayed in the water. While my father slept in his bed, while my brother brushed his youngest son's teeth, they on dry land. They safe from waves. It could have been them. Strange that in our streaming, gleaming modern age, full of gps's and sonar and satalite everything, the sea still trumps all. Sailors can die today the way they have for a thousand years, and we mourn them. We see only black sails.

No Sleep til Brooklyn (parentheticals are the best!)

On my 36th birthday, now a few months ago, I was lucky enough to see Sleep No More. In case you don't read New York Magazine (my one true love, the charticle) or watch Gossip Girl (Nelly Yuki is back!) or have yourself been asleep for the last two years (Rip, you devil!), Sleep No More is billed as a piece of theater. Certainly there are theatrics and performance, but I would not call this a play. It is an interactive art installation, the focal point of which is the performance by a dozen dancers in a wordless adaptation of MacBeth, with some slight references to Hitchcock's Rebecca (based on the book of the same name by Daphne Du Maurier, which is even more beautiful and scary than the movie, and I'm a little sad the musical based on it turned out to be a giant scam), found mostly in the names of things and the general asethetic. Rebecca is one of my favorite movies and one of my favorite books. I, growing up among strange creepy death filled artwork (thanks mom), have an affinity for creepy. Not at all that I like to be scared, but that I can see things as beautiful even if they aren't necessarily pretty or alive or positive. And Sleep No More is this wonderfully decaying world of death, betrayal, sex, jealousy. The performance is in a warehouse that has been completely reimagined, five floors create a world in miniture-a hotel, a town, a house, a forest (two actually), a castel, a hospital, a churchyard. You are desposited into this world with little explanation, instructed to wear a mask and to explore, "take risks and you will be rewarded." The entire audience is masked, while the players are not. You can follow the players as they go from room to room, floor to floor, no space is off limits to you (yes, it sounds like directions for a board game, because that is basically what it is, interactive Clue, only you go in knowing who did it). Or you can stay in one place and watch the action unfold, wander through the world and stumble across people, things, secret passages, hidden moments, hidden room, orgies, murders. It is voyeristic, it is a haunted house, it is a living movie, a waking dream, it is angels in america and you are the angels, it is obviously inspired by Rupert Goold's MacBeth (with Patrick Stewart) but the actors hold your hand, guide you to a seat, sing to you, cry in your arms, whisper to you, give you clothes and you dress their naked bodies, you soothe them and they come together and pull apart, three shows a night. In short, if you miss this you miss an once in a lifetime, mind altering experience that is worth every penny ($100+). Do it. Do it now. (or maybe wait until they have power and running water.)

Vacation Land (a farewell to summer)

The following is a visual taste of the place that inspired my novel, The Rusticators (one day you will all get to read it, but for now it is making an Odysseian journey of agent inboxes). This is maybe the most magical place there is. If magic were made out of rope and seaweed and lobster shells and lichen and cocktails and ping pong and, of course, porches.

dancing in the streets of hyannis (isn't this where we all started, psychically speaking)

 Now, I know that all of you are familiar with the origin song, a song a band pens that chronicles their rise to fame, a biographical ballad, a musical memoir, a rock recitation (this one is a stretch, but you get the point). While those geniuses of the rap/hip hop world have basically taken ownership of this mini genre, the form is actually far older. Mama Cass called their version "An epic tone poem of historical nature."

So you may ask, To What End? Well, there is the obvious, this is the band's most current and profound life experience from which they draw inspiration and material. Sure. It is also a way for these highly successful bands to stay connected both creatively and psychologically to their roots, I believe the musical parlance for this would be "keeping it real." When faced with the money, success and fandom (read: p***y) these bands must find a way to appear, or to actually be, grounded in their former everyman reality. Doing so also helps them keep their audience, who, after the band's financial and creative success, may claim that the band has sold out, caved in to The Man, given up on some unknowable dream of creative success that is achieved without widespread noteriety or monetary compensation. This type of audience is basically a bunch of reactionaries that assume popularity=crap, this is why some people alway prefer earlier albums despite the fact that they may not be said band's best work. It took me years to get over Nirvana's popularity and embrace them for their pure awesomeness, but I digress. (What would a Nirvana origin song be like . . .....)

Anyway, self referencial songs, like the origin song, give the listener the sense that they have a unique perspective into the personal story of the band, as if 1. the band is secretly confiding in them or 2. that the listener, having already known this story, is among the special annointed few, a true fan or 3. for the new fan, that the band can publicly claim street cred that they may have lost in their meteoric rise to fame or 4. In the case of Boyz 2 Men they are referencing their far more famous mentors to build on the mentors' already established audience or 5. It's just an awesome story and they're are artists, so I can just shut up and enjoy the music. The bottom line here is I love me an origin song.

mean cat nice cat

Today my cat died. We decided to put her down, a tumor crowding her lungs. She had lived for months longer than expected, she had been fine. We had almost forgotten about it, thinking the exploratory surgery had some how fixed things, instead of just confirming the inevitable. We wanted to believe that a cat so mean, so tough, couldn't possibly do something as passive as die. Dolores was a powerful feline. She felt her power, her wildness and she exerted it often. She would tear through the house, pupils dilated, on the hunt, on the heels of her kill. Didn't matter that there was nothing there. She had the ability to scare everyone (except us), even pet-savvy people with mean cats of their own. When sitting at the dinner table she made guests afraid to stretch their legs under the table, eating their meals scrunched high on their chairs. A friend took care of her one weekend while we were away. On our friend's first visit Deedee (as we called her) chased her down the hallway. On her next visit she simply opened the apartment door, slid in an open bag of cat food, tipped it on one side and closed the door.

Deedee had a growl that connected her to her tiger brethren (rwowowowow) and was her chief mode of communication. If you did not heed the growl or if you didn't get clear fast enough, then a flurry of swats would follow, but the kind of panicked rapid fire of someone actually afraid of fighting. She would smack wildly with her head turned and her little green eyes closed, then she'd run away. Really, she was the queen of the tough face, of the stare, of the terrifying pop that only really mean cats make. But she wasn't actually mean. She loved to sniff the tops of our heads and would bury her little nose in our parts. She would sit on our laps and purr, though if we actively pet her she would then give a warning growl, a "this is a one way street sister" sort of growl. She liked to sleep next to us, she liked to sit on the balcony and sniff the wind, she liked to eat dirt out of the house plants. She liked peanut butter and tortilla chips. She never once scratched or bit our daughter (that can't be said for one of our other cats). She began her life the runt of a litter born under the stairs of some dilapidated collegiate housing. PBT went to pick up a kitten he had selected from the litter days before, but that kitten was gone and the only one left was Deedee. He took her home. She was crawling with fleas, too little for most of medicines he had to bathe her and massage flea repelling foam into her gray fur. He brought her home to boston, she scratched his father, his grandfather. He brought her to New York and when I moved in with them I brought my two brutes, tom cats used to running the show. And she held her own, never giving them an inch, never letting them be the alphas they wanted to be. They found an uneasy peace (punctuated with fights where the fur actually flew). So she began with PBT. And she wasn't sure about me. But I saw her. I saw that she wanted to sit in my lap. She wanted me to scratch the top of her head. She still woke and waited at the door when she heard PBT open the building door downstairs. And she would know when it was him, and when it wasn't. She didn't get up for a delivery man or a neighbor. So she was his. But for the last seven years she was mine too.

on the occasion of becoming a true new yorker. Ten Years.

Some people want to journey to the edge of things, to find themselves at the foot of mountains or fringes of forests. To find a patch of land to raise horses, chickens, see the sun moving across the entire sky. Then there are people like me, who just want to be in the middle of things, to go deeper into the compact spaces between things, who like hallways and elevators and alleys and streetlights. I want to be in the middle of everything, but most particularly of New York. I feel sure that Central Park is actually Eden, and yes that makes the rest of the city the barren dust parched land of toil. But wouldn’t you want to live close to Eden, to walk through it on your way to dinner or after a dentist appointment?

I want to be in the middle of things, I don’t want to cast out into the wider world, I want to burrow deeper in to here. I want tiny subway cars to run through my viens. 

Time

When I started this blog I told myself it was a place to be brave, a place to write without any expectations or judgements. Why do this in a public format, you might ask? Because I, like many people, am far too ruled by my fear of what others think. So this a a way to force myself to do the hard thing, to put my ideas out into the world regardless of how imperfect they may be. Not exactly the best way to generate a readership I know, but that's not really the point. So I've been feeling swamp lately, over committed, over tried, overwhelmed. I've been letting my fear and laziness get the better of me, half drafting posts only to let them languish. I was reading my favorite blog and wondered where the fifteen year old author found the time to write a blog, start a website for teenage girls, watch the entire Twin Peaks series, contact spirits on her Ouigi board, do her homework, eat, and of course try on outfit after outfit to create fashion collages that express her current aesthtic obsession. You could say, she doesn't have a job, or a spouse or a kid, but whatever, we are all busy and this girl is more productive then most adults I know, certainly more than me. So I started thinking about time, what the frog am I doing with my time, reruns of Friday Night Lights and BBC's North and South, yep. Living up to my creative potential, not so much. So I'm trying to use my time more wisely, to squeeze creativity into the crannies of my life (not sure why that sounds so dirty, oh well). During my daughter's naps, instead of looking at real estate listings that I can't afford and folding laundry, I'm going to write. The house will be messier, there will be one less looky-loo at the local open houses. But maybe I can get back on the old blog horse, maybe I can finishing a few frogging short stories, maybe I can prep for my classes.

shut up and make stuff, part II

Everyone needs to immediately run out and find this essay, graphic essay, whatever you want to call it by Lynda Barry. Why? Because she captures here in the most essential straightforward way the ridiculous cycle of fear and judgement most artists find themselves in, or maybe I'm projecting. One particular part of this work resinates for me, when a little figment of her imagination is leaning over her shoulder watching her draw and it says, "oooh that's good ... uh, you wrecked it." That is my biggest fear, I make something that is almost good, almost done, almost an expression of my true potential but I stop short, terrified that in adding to it I will wreck it. And so I have spent many years being "promising" but not achieving. So what do you do? How does Ms. Barry suggest I, all of us, escape this horrible trap? Shut up and make stuff. Enjoy the god damn process, stop thinking about it needing to become anything.  Stop thinking about results and instead think about experience. Ram Dass isn't dicking around when he says BE HERE NOW. 

So world of the interwebs, and my mom, I have officially finished my novel. I have managed to finish something I have been terrified to finish, because I haven't wanted to frog it up. But it is done and my mantra through out was "no judgment, not expectation." Did I live up to that? Hardly, but I had moments that were clear-eyed and true, moments that were just me and my characters in a room staring at each other saying, so enjoying the weather? And now I have the terrifying, exciting task of 1. selling the thing (not so process oriented) and 2. making something new. And here is where I get to embrace the moment. Not think of my next book, or my first one, but just write, just make work, generate pages and see what comes out. The joy of starting fresh is there are no limits to where I can take a story, no problems that need to be solved, no characters that need another level, it's just whatever it is. FUN! So I assume in the next week or two the writer's block will descend. Or I'll have to do more revising of the frogging book. Is anything every really finished? (another post all together)

night out

It wasn’t so much that I was old or that I was no longer willing to stay up past midnight. I stopped going out, specifically going dancing, because I was no longer a slave to my addiction. While I was a drinker, from the drinkenest town, I was what you would describe as a problem drinker. Some of my problems involved fidelity, unopened mail, honesty, the City of Boston Impound, and keeping food down. But my addiction was something else. When I escaped Boston and all the freshly tapped kegs of Pabst therein, I stopped. I stopped drinking the way you stop at a busy intersection. I no longer wanted to cross the street against the light. I wanted friends and a life and a job. I gave up my addiction to Nights Out. Liquor I could turn off, like it was a bad song on the radio, but the Night Out was harder. So full of potential, the Night Out held all the promise of every John Hughes movie that had made my twelve year old heart sing. The Night Out was not just dancing, though that was usually the most promising, it could be the local dive bar, or the house party of a friend of a friend. I had to know some people, but never everyone, there had to be an element of surprise, of, most crucially, possibility. This was my true addiction. Like a coke head searches for the cleanest high, I searched for the ultimate good time. The ultimate good time was a cliché, the party where I was the sparkling, brilliant, mysterious girl flowing through hallways and up stairwells, leaning in close to hear breathless confessions and sticky sweet gossip, on a mad search for cigarettes with a girl I’d never meet, listening to a boy cry about his lost love and mixing him the most outrageous drink I could create from pinapple juice, marachino cherries and stout, all to end or, actually, to never end with some blue-eyed mop-top in jeans that would be too small for me. Not casual, but destined, not fumbling but frenetic. And driving fast down roads where familiarity sufficed for sobriety, winding up on a roof top in the winter looking over the river, in a park on a bench snow coming down on a the half gone whisky bottle, in a loft above the paint store smoking a joint, a new party a new group, a new boy. But usually it was four beers, furious dancing or furious talking with the eternal wing girl, and then a swerving drive back, asleep by three up by noon. This addiction plagued me. Sent me to a local bar thinking that drinking would somehow bring about the perfect Night Out. But those nights never existed. A few came close, but ended in parking tickets or my car keys thrown on a roof, perilously close to being swept into the gutter with the leaves. The perfect high was far beyond the simplicity of white powder and green cocktails. It was a ghost that told me I was beautiful and unique and out there was a man that would read my mind and play my pussy like a flute and bring down the sky and heaven with the sweetness of his words and I would be fulfilled in everyway. I would be cool. I would be unafraid. I would be understood. The reality was a man that stalked me until I discovered I was too lonely to get a restraining order and too far away from my perfect Night Out to be alone with the tv and the bong.

            My Perfect Night Out now is very different, because it isn’t perfect or out or even at night most of the time. Usually it is afternoon in the park, watching the dogs swim at their muddy little beach. Or it is morning in bed in the sun with a man that gave me nothing but space until I couldn’t take it anymore. Or it is on a train heading home to my new city, the one that never sleeps, where ironically, I go to bed early.

you can do it (or shut up and make stuff)

Deborah Ellis, her work feels like home

Here is the question of the day, or at least a question that has been coming up a lot with various friends: are you an artist if you aren't actively making work? This then opens up the larger question of how do we define the term artist? (when I use the word I mean anyone who has a creative pursuit, musician, writer, visual artist, director, actor, dancer etc.) To the first question my immediate response is: Of Course You Are. To the second question my response is: The homeless guy camped in the tunnel between the 42nd street F and 7 stops, who sells drawings of alien invasions done in marker on cardboard. That is frogging commitment, plus he is GOOD.

I've been lucky enough to know a few artists in my life. My maternal grandmother painted portraits, my mother was a sculptor for decades before switching to writing, a cousin of sorts is a particularly accomplished painter (see above),  a close friend is the most productive committed artist I've ever known, when choosing between food and paint he always chose paint, well paint and cigarettes. I grew up watching my mother patina steel and bronze sculptures on our back porch. I consistently had slivers of paper glued to my socks because of her constant collage work and use of spray glue. We had a thirty pound block of clay, a kiln and oxy-gas torch tanks in our basement. My sister and I made clay sculptures (a guinea pig, a buddha, a mermaid, a spinx) and painted pictures. My sister posed for a portrait, slept under a quilt she sewed, stirred the fire with a poker she smithed. I learned how to use our guillotine of a paper cutter, painted watercolors, made a paper mache penguin. My mother matted and frame her collages, drilled holes in granite boulders to mount sculptures. I worked the guest book at her art openings. I began writing at age nine, including but not limited to, a serial I wrote in the second grade about a team of astronaut dogs (which may have been heavily "inspired" by Pigs in Space). I wrote a murder mystery at age twelve, my older sister read the first three pages and knew who dunnit. Creating was just a part of my life. Though that never made it easy. I wanted my drawings to be photorealistic and, in elementary school, felt completely defeated that I couldn't make it happen.  I wanted my writing to be original and complex, my predictable murder mystery was the first of many perceived failures. I grew up on art the way most kids grew up on video games and sports scores. But that doesn't mean that it has been easy for me to say, out loud, I am a writer.

a few of my mom's pieces in my childhood home, I always thought this room was magic

I now know that I'm an artist. I had believed that quietly in my own heart for a long time, but found it very difficult to admit it to other people. It was particularly hard when I finished school. After I graduated from college I didn't write anything, some manic journalling maybe, but nothing else. I wrote nothing for two years. I spent those two years working in publishing, filling out contract templates, numbering manuscript pages, staring at an unread slush pile, explaining production schedules to some of the greatest writers I've ever read. It is a unique type of torture to be a blocked artist working with other more prolific and successful artists. Ultimately it was inspiring, or at least having a conversation between myself and an author appear in a climatic scene of their bestselling novel was motivating. The next thing I wrote was a story for my grad school applications.

To those friends of mine I say this: if you haven't made work recently you are still an artist, you just aren't growing as an artist. You are an artist if you consistently make work over a long period of time, even if that period is broken by long stretches of blocked, dead, unproductive spells (aka depression, drunken blackouts, or sobering terror). You are an artist if you are passionate about your work, whether the work is manifested or just some dark and impenetrable cloud in your head.  Call yourself an artist if you have an artistic soul. And maybe that soul is tortured by having never made art (though this would put you in a subcategory of the thwarted, unrealized, or terrified artist). Maybe by calling yourself an artist you will find the space to actually make the art. Sylvia Plath said, "the worst enemy to creativity is self doubt." So get on that toad. Paint those pictures, take those photos, film that sketch, paste that collage, pop that lock, knit those arm warmers, write those god damn poems and stories and novels and plays and jokes and songs and scripts and journals and, god help us all, blogs.

 (or just listen to this song, 'cause we can't take this toad too seriously)

a meager post after a shamefully long absence

Summer: A list

A teenage boy riding a bike with a towel over his shoulder.
Tan little girls wearing skirted bathing suits in line at the local ice cream shack, once called Dick and June's.
Sticky picnic tables at Woodmans.
Eating sandwiches at the kitchen table while wearing a wet bathing suit and a towel.
When the wind shifts and I can smell the ocean.
The drum of moths against the screen.
Time for the morning newspaper and donuts.
Riding bikes in the driveway.
Outdoor showers.
Naps (this is all year, but particularly satisfying in the summer)
Listening to my cousin play the cello, and between songs, listening to the rain.
My daughter learning the words "sand castle."
Tan lines.
Brushing sand out of my bed at night.
The quiet rumble and lull of the distant train whistle. My favorite sound in the universe.
The twenty three bug bites that prove I spent two weeks in the country.

I have been her kind

Rayanne Graff, a character on My So Called Life has been getting alot of chatter online lately. Maybe because MSCL is streaming on Netflix, maybe because of (gulp) ninties nostalgia (god I'm old), or maybe because we as a culture are more willing to look at previously marginalized characters. Whatever the reason I've also had Rayanne on the mind lately. Rayanne is both the corruptor and educator of the main character on the show, Angela Chase, who is that wonderful breed of innocent, with the lines of Eartha Kitt's "I Want to Be Evil" running through her head, "what ever I've got I'm eager to lose." Their sweet, obsessive friendship is archetypal, a phenomenon all women are familiar with (described far better than I could here by Emma Straub).

I've had many Rayannes in my life, wild girls who I worshiped, whose friendships I sought and cherished and lost. I have also been the Rayanne, I've been the slut and the betrayer, the bad influence, and the friend that brings voice to unspoken desires (or cosigns bullshit). But there was one girl, one woman, who was my true Rayanne, the first one, the one by which all others were measured. She gave me license to be someone I was petrified of being, to even consider it. She saw some force in me that I wasn't sure of myself. I was seventeen. I was afraid. But she helped me see that I was also strong and strange and full of fire. Her name was Clare Amory.

Clare, at eighteen, smoked Marlboro Reds. She read Anne Sexton and sang Roberta Flack. She was a dancer, a poet. She listened to Huggy Bear at eight in the morning at a volume that shook the clapboards of our dorm, audible from outside the building. She wanted nothing but heat, tank tops and swimming, and kept her dorm room sweltering, the radiators hissing and spitting, while she ran three seperate fans and had the window open. She made her two bunk beds into one double bed so that her room felt somehow more like a studio apartment. We would lie on that double bed leaning on elbows and discuss road trips, mix tapes, poetry, all boys, particular boys, including a boy she was stalking, physically stalking. Together we hid in bushes by the playing fields, loitered by his car in the parking lot. This was before cell phones and the internet, when someone's whereabouts were a mystery to be solved over the course of a day. We were gumshoes without the trench coats, we were partners in crime.

We smoked cigarettes together; we walked down Lansdowne street, got turned away from clubs; we slouched through shows at the Middle East; we drank wine; we took hot baths together, our legs tangled, our hair wet; we drove the dark roads of Massachusetts around reservoirs and through office parks. At night we would park in a lot frindged by woods and dance in the headlights to an 80's compilation she bought off the tv. The music would blare from the open car doors and we were demons pounding the asphalt with our hooves, we were selkies too far from the sea, hemmed in by our skin. We were in love with each other the way girls are, when they are young, when they want desperately to be sisters, when they are both strong and lost. Or at least I loved her, worshipped her. She was larger than life. She was the Hollywood sign and I was a starving actress fresh off the plane. We had art in our blood, and farms and Maine and oceans. And dead dogs and broken fathers.

I helped her dye her hair. She showed me how to steal a bra from a department store. We bought prom dresses together. She wore a short silver slip, it was petalled, winged. She was shimmering, lanky, her blond hair down her back. She was a nymph, a sprite, an etheral insect. But with mary jane clogs she spraypainted silver to match. She danced and danced and danced.

She needed me then. She needed a home. And while, the summer after she graduated she lived in my mother's house, I was never there. Always with the boyfriend, always turning away from her. I didn't even realize it, too much the self-involved teenager. Then one day she replaced me as, I'm sure now, she needed to. Maybe with her own Rayanne, though maybe she retained that role. We did not keep in touch, but I kept tabs on her over the years. She became a dancer, a rock star. She found a man to love who loved her back. I always assumed I would see her. I wanted to see her. We knew the same people, lived in the same city. I constantly mistook people for her, someone on the street, a long haired blond in my yoga class, a tall thin woman at the rail of the North Haven ferry.  This past winter Clare passed away. Cancer. She was thirtyfive years old. It had been seventeen years since I had seen her. I cried for days. For her, for her family, for never knowing the powerful, magical person she became.

Hemingway's Province

My hands smell of lavender, 

of verbena.

Hidden beneath the tufts of silk, the fur of a mouse,

a collapsed web, 

I found a kernel bound small and tight.

In it were things that I had been thinking for months,

for years.

In it, parched and withered, undernourished

looking for courage, waiting for harvest. 

How many miles runs the road south?

An invitation burned on palm leaves.

Palms burn, an invitation. 

Take my hand and I will no longer be a fern.

Not cold and bowed in the shade, 

but crisp, singed at the edges.

la la love you

The decor is very 60's LA, to me anyway

In honor of my beloved neighbors who are about to move to Los Angeles I've decided to spend this summer changing my attitude. At least towards LA. This is going to be my California Summer, at least in terms of media consumption. I want to find a way to short circuit my knee-jerk east coast aversion to LA. I have been to the City of Angles once and had a wonderful time, but I still find it completely bizarre that people live there permanently. Even more strange, people are from there, born there. Shocking. Now I have typical objections to the place: the hideous car culture, all the evils of suburbia but with crime and heavy traffic; the image-twisting, confidence-sucking, competative to the point of mania-inducing machine that is Hollywood; flip flops; the birthplace of the plastic surgery epidemic; the obscene pressure to be thin; use of the phrases "Hella" and "it's all good"; fanatic California vegans; strip malls instead of main streets. But then I have a New Englander's objection too, the puritian values encoded in my DNA that make me think living somewhere that is continuously warm and beautiful is weak; it is not real life. Living through winter each year shows one's resiliance and resourcefulness. Like I said, this is deep instinctual stuff. Not pretty, not rational, certainly not kind. So I want to do some deprogramming. I'm ready for a mental journey west. I want to find a bi-coastal state of mind. Like Joan Dideon or the Beastie Boys. I think part of my prejudice stems from Hollywood's perpetuation of LA as the vapid and artificial Bimbo of world class cities. Of course there are far more positive images of LA in the collective consciousness. I want to figure out what they are and replace the ones that don't resonate with me with ones that do. I need to overwrite the images of stilletos on the hollywood stars, of a gloomy, disgruntled looking dude in a Barney suit, carrying his head as he walks through a CVS parking lot, or anything I've ever seen on The Hills. 

When in LA two years and 9 months ago, I ate some of the best meals of my life, saw amazing art (Martin Kippenberger is my hero!), I saw some spectacular light (at Venice Beach, on the highway coming back from Venice beach). I hung out in a beautiful garden and ate grapes, I walked a dog in the hollywood hills, I even saw someone sorta famous. And all in the company of two of my favorite people on the planet. It was a good trip. But it seemed like a lonely place. Despite that feeling, I do now hold LA dear to my heart. During that trip, in the ladies room at Zankou Chicken, I found out I was pregnant. My daughter is about to turn two and someday I very much want to take her to LA. So in the mean time, I want to find a way to fall in love with it a little. What am I missing? I'm going to hunt out that magic in the following places. Many of these I've seen or read or heard before, but I think viewing them in succession might make the difference, help me draw parallels.

500 days of summer

 The Weetzie Bat books

Dogtown and the Z-Boys

Lords of Dogtown

Rebel without a Cause

Best Coast

The Endless Summer (for surfer culture if not LA)

The Kids are Alright

A few episoides of the L word

The Big Sleep

Swingers

The Slums of Beverly Hills

The White Album (the book, not the album)

This is the LA in my head

Tony Alva

There are a few different LA's in the mind of popular culture. There is of course classic Hollywood. 1960's mod hey day. Surfer. Richies, Malibu, Hollywood sharks. South Central. When embracing the the strangeness of life on the left coast, this is what I see: