Bring it, 2020

Show me what you got.

Lighting

Phone, the other night

I wonder, when you talk about me to your friends, how much emphasis you put on the positive versus the negative. How much you own up to being a full partner in crime. 

Must be the money

I got hooked on this song when we were living in Missouri, appropriate enough given that Nelly is "from the Lou, and I'm proud." Enjoy.

From "The Vanishing", a personal essay

I met Carl while working at Inman News Features. He liked to curse at his computer on deadline. Every morning we walked to Semifreddi’s for coffee and a seeded sourdough baguette. He made me laugh then as he did now. I needed that. I was nervous. I was never good with discussing my sexuality, never comfortable at the prospect of revealing my body. It took me weeks – months, if I think about it – to feel comfortable naked around my boyfriend. It was because I was me and there really was no way around that. You could only go through.

Back to that burrito. Chicken, as I recall. I’d asked them to leave off the salsa. I was toying with a tortilla chip when my mind went into a skid. It wasn’t because my period was late. It wasn’t because I felt physically different. I just felt less alone.

I took my lunch to go, walked home, called Carl.

Can’t be. I can testify. I watched you walk out with that goodie bag of pills and condoms and lube and whatever else they stuffed in that paper bag.

It wasn’t foolproof.

Maybe you screwed up on the birth control.

I was starting to get pissed. Carl, amateur contrarian itching to turn pro.

Look, Landa. I’m giving you options. That’s all.

Tori Amos, "1000 Oceans"

These tears I've cried.
I've cried a thousand oceans.
And if it seems I'm floating
In the darkness...
I can't believe that I would keep,
Keep you from flying;
And I would cry a thousand more
If that's what it takes to sail you home,
Sail you home.

I'm aware what the rules are.
But you know that I will run.
You know that I will follow you
Over Silbury Hill,
Through the solar field.
You know that I will follow you.

And if I find that you
Still remember
Playing at trains,
Or does this little blue ball
Just fade away?
Over Silbury Hill,
Through the solar field,
You know that I will follow you.
I'm aware what the rules are,
But you know that I will run.
You know that I will follow you.

These tears I've cried.
I've cried a thousand oceans.
And if it seems I'm floating
In the darkness...
Well, I can't believe that I would keep,
Keep you from flying.
So I will cry a thousand more
If that's what it takes to
Sail you home,
Sail you home,
Sail you home.

Birth playlist

Adam and I made a Spotify playlist for Baz's arrival. It kicked off with (of course) "Push It" by Salt-n-Pepa. Others included The Beatles, Tom Petty, The Doors (I think) and Afroman. I remember it well, especially on this cold morning with no sleep under my belt.

On lying

I've done plenty of it in my life, but it's stupid. Don't do it. Especially to me. I know a lie when I smell one.

Wesley, God damn it, why did you have to die?

That's what people are coming to you for. They're coming to you for a kind of honesty and authenticity.

So cute

Sarah and Jered had a Hanukkah party yesterday. When we walked in, all the kids were running around the studio playing Tag. Baz had no idea what was going on, but joined in eagerly. God damn I love my little boy, running around with clay dust on his butt.

Four years ago

With Uncle Jon. If only he and I could have a stable relationship, that would be just awesome.

Nine years ago

Observation

Decency is a really hot quality in a guy.

Fuck Christmas

Fuck the hype, the pretense, and the commercialism. Fuck the stupid shit I see coming down my news feed on Facebook. Fuck the overdone dinners and fears of dumb family drama. Fuck you, goyim. Where's our day?

Recognition

Michael and I were in the Philosophers' Lounge at The Pub on Wednesday when a woman came in from outside. "Didn't you do a storytelling event last week?" she asked.

Why yes, I did. And I love acknowledgment.

Bazzy and Daddy

Today's writing

Russ. What would he have to say about her behavior of late? He always thought she was such an innocent and she supposed that during the time they shared she was. When did her innocence creep off? Was it some sort of middle-of-the-night hijack, an unwanted escape? Or did it crawl away in bits and parts?

Lennon, she said, it’s time.

Her words spurred a shit-fit the likes of which she had never seen from him. He didn’t just fling himself to the floor; he made the way down a production. First he kicked his little legs until his butt slid off the couch, then he struggled both up and down, unsure whether he wanted couch or floor. The effort vexed him and he screamed even more, banging his head on the couch’s soft cushions, then on its wooden legs, then finally on the floor, where the echo against his cranium was too much for her to take. She picked him up and he bit her shoulder, hard.

That’s when she almost flung him as far across the room as possible. It would be the most violence she had ever done against him. There were the small transgressions over the years: the pinching of the soft arm, the too-tight squeeze of the shoulders, the hasty and aggressive putting-on-of the shoes when they were already late for school. There are so many minute ways to hurt these small people. You don’t want to engage in any of them, but the reality is that we almost all do.

Therapy

We've been in couples therapy for a few weeks. Today we talked about my coming home super late the other night. I was able to get a better perspective on the whole matter, which is awesome. I really appreciated that. I want to say more, but I think some things are confidential.

Petty rant

I don't understand people who ask you to watch their shit in cafes. I mean, it's not like I have anything better to do than protect your MacBook Air, douchebag. If you're going to the bathroom, take your crap with you. It's really that simple.

Rant over.

Mommy, she's the best pet

Today's writing

The evening dragged on. Lennon was fussy and didn’t want to go to bed. He didn’t want to sleep in his room. He so rarely slept there that it didn’t feel like home to him. He wanted to sleep on the couch, where he would be closer to Mommy and to Daddy. She felt her frustration rise, then tried to put herself in his place. He was just a little boy, a little guy who needed his parents. He wouldn’t always need them the way he needed them now. Blessing and travesty, that.

She wanted to be the one to put him to bed. There were times she worried that Gary was too involved and she not enough, and she didn’t want that to come back on her later. Her – her – it was always about her. What about how it would affect her child? There were times Ruth recognized the depth of her selfishness, the seeming nonexistence of a floor or ceiling, and it was like an electric prod to the stomach. Was everyone like this? No one would be able to tell you. We never see ourselves the way others see us, the way the world envisions our existence. It’s that conundrum with the voice, the way it jounces along the ear canal, the way it arrives at our hearing like a passenger shaken from a turbulent flight, off-kilter and staggering.

Overheard

"She thinks I'm bi just because she's my daughter and SHE's bi. What she forgets is that I met her father at a gay bar while I was prowling for women."

When you know

Some mornings you realize you're stronger than you were the previous day. This is one of those mornings.

Stay with me

Adam loves this song. That says so much about who he is, if you really know him. And few people do. He's such a kind and decent person, and those are not just words. I will always, always love him.

Prague, in another life

Three years ago

At least I can write with insomnia

She swallowed hard, spikes studding her throat. There are moments you can so clearly choose your direction. She’d done it when Lennon was born, the second day of his life, when they took him away from her in preparation to be circumcised. She was following the nurse who was wheeling him toward the elevator when she heard the door click closed and realized that for the first time, she was separated from her son. She turned to the security guard and pumped her fist. Dude, she said, I haven’t been alone for nine months!

This moment was everything and nothing like that one. There was no joy here at the Berkeley Bowl Café, no opportunity for silly humor to take the edge off something that could be so damn serious. Just the exposed bone and marrow of a secret finally revealed.

Kristen and Sean's party, January 2015

I was pregnant at the time, but didn't know it. That's why I got high as a kite in Sean's man-cave and laughed my ass off until the wee hours.

Seven years ago

Two words: Sandy Hook. As I write this, I watch my own son sleeping on the couch as he typically does, though he has his own bedroom, because he wants to be closer to his father and to me. As I write this, I grapple with the unspeakable in the dark of night, and, failing words, I trip away.

Sonoma, today

Today's writing

Of course humans also came as matched sets. Wasn’t that the whole Noah’s Ark concept? They survived the flood by marching two by two aboard the life raft. When she and Gary married, she committed to becoming one of those sets. It wasn’t anything she had ever predicted. If you’d asked her, she would have assumed she’d be single most of her life, if not throughout its entirety. She’d never been much for dating. It just felt like too much damn work, presenting yourself as best you could in hopes that others would – what? Consume you? If she’d wanted to be eaten, she would slather herself in mustard and head over to the savannah.

Yesterday

Morning wit

ME: Jack's sniffing for anything he can get his mouth around.

ADAM: Like you?

Marriage Story

I totally see why Marcus told me to watch it. Totally.

From Facebook memories

Berkeley, CA, 2014. Photo by Maya Blum Photography.



New Mexico, 2011.

Is it abuse?

When someone gropes you in a "friendly" way at a bar in Innsbruck, Austria?

When you wake up to someone having sex with you?

When you don't remember what happened the night before, but you know it wasn't good?

Not written by me

She understood. She got “it.” Some core principle had been transmuted. Some inner love, discovered. Some truth, uncovered, revealed.

We were locked in. Click.  

Touching

Marcus recommended we watch Marriage Story. I'm sitting here watching it on Netflix and there is this one moment when they transfer their son from her arms to his. The way that kid has his head on their collective shoulder. Damn. Just these little things get me every single time.

Today

I did no writing. We ran around like idiots. I'm so glad not every day is as ridiculously overscheduled as this one. I mean, people live like this. They pride themselves on being busy. Me, I enjoy sitting on my ass.

More

Jack wanted to touch her hand again. She could tell. Instead he placed both hands, palms down, on the table, leaned forward. He took his lower lip between his teeth, tugged. The gesture made her horny as hell, but she tried not to let on. Instead she just sat and waited for judgment to fall like some sort of modern-day guillotine.

I’m trying to figure out how to put this in a way that you’re going to hear it, a way that’s going to be constructive rather than just piss you off. That’s one thing about you, Ruth: you have a temper. It’s hot, don’t get me wrong. It makes me feel into you, but it also gets me feeling put on the spot, so maybe that’s my issue. So much of this is my issue, so you’ve got to take it with a grain of salt.

Her cheeks were already flaming, her ears full-blown infernos. She never could take criticism. She knew this. Didn’t want to admit it, but knew it was true.

It seems like I can’t do anything without pissing you off. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s probably true of Gary and even Lennon too, I’m not sure.

Her family’s names in his mouth just didn’t seem right. She wanted to slap them out, watch them shatter on the concrete of the ground. Don’t talk about them she thought. You know nothing about them. Nothing.

Today's writing

I don’t cut people down. Weak, Ruth. That sounded so terribly weak, especially to her own ears.

You’re kidding me, right? That’s your game. It’s what you do. Part of the reason I’m into you is because you do it well, and usually it’s amusing, but damn it, Ruth, there are times it stings like hell. Do you even know how much you can hurt someone? Do you?

That’s the thing: we can’t see the world from anything but the inside out. We have a necessarily flawed look at ourselves, a skewed take on who and what we are. It’s like listening to one’s voice on a recording. That’s what I sound like? Really? Something about how the sound bounces along the jawbone to the ear, it changes things. Ruth wasn’t sure what. She just knew there was a metaphor in the mix. She wanted to explain this to Jack, but he didn’t appear to be up for a meditation on metaphor.

I don’t, she finally choked out. I don’t know how much I hurt people. Tell me. I’m listening.

His fingers skidded lightly over the surface of her hand, landing briefly at the wrist before pulling back. How much detail do you want? How much time do you have? A joke, but was it really? Time was never on their side. It was very infrequently their friend. Today was no exception.

Time, for lovers of the secret stripe, is a controversial subject. Always there is a clock and always there is a deadline or a schedule or somewhere one of the other must be, and excuses must be made, noted, filed away so that there won’t be any confusion among the piles of lies later on. There are always piles of lies.

Four years ago

Blarney Stone, SF. I miss that coat.

Today's writing

When she was 26, she considered suicide. It was only when she found herself comparison-shopping for aspirin that she realized she still had the will to live. Now, nearly 20 years later, she wasn’t at that cliff, but she recalled some of the feelings. There was desperation, sad and stupid, a drive to make things better but without the will to find a way and make it stick. There was a stupor, as if life laid a massive couchlock down and wouldn’t let you go. Finally, there was the sense of an ending, a closed door, an impassable path, all those ways of saying that there was no way to get There from Here.

I like singing these lyrics to Adam

Do I stress you out?
My sweater's on backwards and inside out
And you say how-ow-ow appropriate

Apparently I'm a downer ...

I showed Adam the paragraph below and he said: "At least give lip service to the good things in life!" So there you have it. I'm officially a big old downer.

Today's writing

There was a time. Of course there was a time. For every couple, there was a time and then there is the now. Usually one looks back from the vantage point of the now, back into the mist of what was, and it feels nostalgic as hell. This morning Ruth wanted to claw her way back through the fog into that past, the find her way back home to the familiar, where it was her and Gary and no one else, where her head on his shoulder was the only home she needed or wanted.

Naptime

Freakout

How do you parent and NOT freak out about the idea that you may be doing it wrong? Like, right now Baz is watching a show on Netflix and I'm sitting here going screen time, shouldn't he be painting a watercolor or saving the world? He's four, for Chrisssakes. Put him to productive work. Instead he's watching Green Eggs and Ham and loving it. Maybe I need to take a breath.

About Last Night Storytelling

This Friday I'm throwing off my mom-mantle and telling a dirty story at About Last Night Storytelling. I love these people, love this show. Join me, will you?

WRITING FROM THE EDGE goes to Costa Rica!

Happy Thanksgiving

Today's writing

That night she lay beside Gary, eyes open long after they should have been closed. She knew she wasn’t the ideal wife, nor was she the perfect mother. There had been times she’d wondered if they wouldn’t be better off without her, if she shouldn’t just disappear into the great dust bowl that was the outside world. Such defeatist thinking. She knew that too.

Would they be better off as friends? Then again, could they ever be just friends again? Was there ever any going back?

Come study with me in Costa Rica!

Major price reduction! Check it out here!

Sacramento and Davis

2011, redux

 This was taken at my mom's house, where we stopped for Thanksgiving en route to Columbia, Missouri, where we lived for four months. Lately I've really been missing family.

Upcoming workshops

I'm teaching half-day workshops at The Writing Salon and The Grotto. Please check them out!

My life as seen by another

She told me repeatedly how much she loved Baz, how much she relied on Adam. How they were such a fun, good, solid couple, how they leaned on one another, how everyone they knew saw them as the “ideal” couple, how they’d once traveled everywhere and now didn’t, and how that weighed heavily on her heart, because, also like me, she loved to travel, had a fresh hunger for it that was both reasonable and detrimental. We both wanted everything at once. We wanted to have our cake and eat it too. We wanted to travel the world, write the Great American Novel, and have a solid relationship and perhaps raise a family, all at the same time. What was wrong with that?

Engagement

Under St. Mark's in the East Village. 2007. I had just finished my solo show as part of the FRIGID Fest and was exhorting my small audience to see other performances.

Then Adam was down on one knee in front of me, opening a box. It winked at me.

"Is it real?" 

"What do you think?"

"Where'd you get it?"

"Where do you think?"

"Costco."

"Yes. Now say yes so I can get up."

We all know the answer to that one. 

2011

Alice's Restaurant, November 2015

Back in the day

This video came up on my Facebook memories and I can't stop watching it. My little two-month-old sweetheart.

Thanksgiving traditions

Somehow I wound up in the Chron. 

My baby shines

I clean up okay

I do like this paragraph

For a minute everything felt as though it was simmering in chaos, bathed in the white light of sound, baked in the hot breath of fear. She had reached a point beyond return; she could never even consider going back to what once was, what she once was. She looked at all the points of entry and exit: the doors, the windows, the single skylight in the living room. That was part of what sold them on this place, the light, that natural inhalation and exhalation.

What has happened to me?

I'm sitting in this cafe grinning at a baby who couldn't be more than a few months old. This kid is adorable and reminds me so much of Baz at his age: calm, engaged, social. So smiley. I have to stop staring or else I'm going to be mistaken for a creeper.

Trying to write

From yesterday:

She was tired. Jesus God she was tired. It was that kind of tired that numbs the brain and cossets the heart. You could also call it being drained, though Ruth never used that expression because it reminded her of her mother, who always talked about how drained she was, no matter what she had just spent time doing. She remembered being on the beach in Hawaii, a rare family vacation, and her mother crying because she was drained.

No, Ruth did not want to be like that. She also didn’t want to think of herself as a container that was either full or empty, replenished or drained. She didn’t want to see the world in that binary way, where you were at either one extreme or another. Lucky for her, though, due to heredity that was exactly the way she saw it sometimes. Life at the opposite ends, no middle ground to be had. Polarity.

Texts

More from his side of things

I weaved past others standing in line. I heard the guy who’d been behind me walk up to the resister and say, “Can I get two macchiatos and an espresso with half vanilla and half milk.” I spotted Allison, seated facing the glass doors, facing an empty seat and I had this feeling like I was about to plant myself in The Hot Seat. When I sat down, I would be crossing a line, a boundary; some fixed point in space would be altered forever. An existential choice was being made.

            I sat facing her.

            “So you’re a writer,” she said.

            And we were off.

            “Yes,” I said, sipping tea.

            “What do you write?”

            I shrugged. This common question, one you hear endlessly from non-writers, from other writers, at conferences, in writing classes, etc. What can you do but answer it. I always wanted to say, “I write what’s in my heart.”

            “Novels. Short stories. Nonfiction. Started out writing poetry but have since moved away from that,” I said.

            She grinned. Sipped her coffee, which had cooled. “I hate poetry. No: correction. I loathe poetry. Snobbery. Pretentious buffoonery.”

            I laughed out loud, a fast crack of thunderous, deep-seated humor; my neck ripped back. “Me, too. Poetry sucks. Too insular. Too self-aggrandizing. Self important. Sad bastards.”

            We somehow knew and both lifted our mugs, clinking them together simultaneously. “To the death of poetry,” she chimed. I nodded. We were in agreement on that.

Man

I am so not jazzed at the portrayal of Adam in this whole thing. This has to be a topic of conversation. He is my husband and it is my responsibility to stand up for him. Anyone can write anything they want, but my green-lighting it is an entirely different story.

Email to Adam just now

If I don't kill myself, I'm going to get a manicure after you get home from work because I have a Groupon that's expiring.

Fucked-up philosophy

The path toward success has many forks, and I've fallen from them all.

My heart

At Sarah's launch two weeks ago.

What a bunch of bullshit ... courtesy of my mother

Check out this passive-aggressive shit she posted on Facebook. Give me a goddamned break. You want to talk about treating someone any old way and heart hurting? Oh, and the person who loves you the most? I don't usually talk about this stuff here, but give me a fucking break, will you please?

Tale of two books

When we first got back into communication, it didn't take long to realize we'd both written about the experience. They are, of course, quite different. His was originally 94,000 words and, from what I can tell, very intensely focused on me and the relationship between us.

Mine casts a much wider net. Of course he is in there, but so are meditations about motherhood and marriage. When we spoke on the phone the other day, we both agreed that there can be some sticking points. There already have been. Factual errors are fine, but when I feel like a goddamned caricature, I stand up and say something. I'm glad I did.

From mine:

He put the truck in gear but didn’t move. Instead we sat still on my street, looking at the sage and jasmine, the jacaranda trees and the wayward rosemary that grew wild out here just as it did in my own backyard. Grant Street had changed so much from when we first moved here. Back in 2006 it was still recovering from slight stigma, from being a tattier stretch. Now in 2017 it was dotted with homes that would sell for a million or more. We’re not talking mansions. We’re just talking places to live.

“Your street is cute,” he said without looking at me.

“Why wouldn’t you come into my house?”

“I told you.”

“And you were full of shit. Why couldn’t you give me and my husband the courtesy of spending five minutes in our house?”

“Did you really want that? I mean, really?”

Well, there was a question. Part of me hadn’t wanted him in my house, if I was to be honest. My place was too heartfelt, too vulnerable. There was a picture of me at six, holding my childhood dog; a shot of the three of us, Adam and Baz and me, in the hospital immediately after birth, together as a family for the first time.

What would it mean to share these moments with Jack? Would he understand their significance or just shit all over them?

More to the point, did I even want to share them? Wasn’t part of the purpose of this relationship – such as it was – the desire to keep something separate and strictly to myself? If that was the case, then why was I looking to stuff my sweet little family life down his throat?

I laughed for no reason, no reason at all.

Little Farm

Well, that's the truth

We're like two drunk feral cats climbing through city trash cans looking for the cosmic answer to life.

Four years ago

Presented without comment.

From my book

Damn, we are so traitorous to our own selves. There is no choice in that matter. We are the only ones who can most efficiently position ourselves on the cross, the only ones who can open our palms wide enough to accommodate the nails that drive straight through them. No one else. Nobody.

I'm realizing

Having an entire book written about me is not, shall we say, comfortable, flattering, or even necessary. And as I continue to read it, I realize it's not just about me. Adam is in there too, a lot. And it's ugly.

Beginning of an essay

I got my backpack stolen at the Barcelona train station in another life. I'm playing with that here. 

-------------

I don’t talk to strangers. That’s the ironic thing. Or, if I do, it’s when I’m feeling expansive, happy, on the cusp of something fantastic. None of this was true at Barcelona’s overly well-lit main train station as I sat there in the early days of 2001.

I had a Diet Coke in one hand and a book I was handily ignoring in the other – White Teeth by Zadie Smith, which I later realized is a really good read – and sorrow that extended from my brow to the tips of my toes. Maybe he sniffed that out. Maybe he sensed the loneliness, the isolation. Could be I telegraphed some sort of desperation, a yen for companionship so strong that it overwhelmed my most basic of instincts.

In other words, I was a mark. He was almost certainly skilled at spotting them. Marks may not always be obvious patsys, but travel can bring out the worst in the best of us.

Early morning

Bazzy is passed out on the couch, where he staggered after leaving his room a few hours ago. In his sleep he looks so much like his dad.

I've watched Adam so many times in his slumber. Adam, neither my savoir nor my villain. He is simply a person, like the rest of us.

Two months old

And Jesus Christ, if he wasn't -- and isn't -- the most darling thing.

It's always something

Someone once told me that. There's always something. Damn it, why?

Memory

Napa Valley Wine Train, 10 years ago today. How I always wish to see us.

Today's writing

She and Gary locked glances, held. He was her partner in this, always would be. He was half of that little boy sitting there, half of the endeavor that it took to raise this child. No one else so clearly understood the rigors of her pregnancy, the toll it took on the mind and body. When she was five months along, she’d gone out with a friend who was maybe a month or so behind. Men don’t get it Friend said. They don’t know.

Ruth thought about the previous night, how Gary had rubbed her back when the pain grew to exist throughout her body, radiating. I’m here he said. I’m here.

Yesterday she betrayed him. A breach in their marriage, a dropped stitch in the quilt, unraveling. And he didn’t even know it.

Now she looked at them both. Her boys. To be without them in any way would be to walk on hot lava without shoes, the burn a malignant quickening beneath her soles. Good morning, baby, she said, speaking to them both.

The rest of the morning felt more low-key, running along the river of tasks at hand. While usually this annoyed her, today she was grateful for the mundanity. She made it a game, a meditative practice: packing Lennon’s lunch, the leftovers in the blue Tupperware, the one with his name on the lid. She hadn’t written it, neither had Gary; Carol Vulture labeled everything. She was lucky her kid didn’t come home with his name written on his schlong.

Indigo Girls, "Ghost"

There's a letter on the desktop
That I dug out of a drawer
The last truce we ever came to
From our adolescent war
And I start to feel the fever
From the warm air through the screen
You come regular like seasons
Shadowing my dreams

And the Mississippi's mighty
But it starts in Minnesota
At a place that you could walk across
With five steps down
And I guess that's how you started
Like a pinprick to my heart
But at this point you rush right through me
And I start to drown

And there's not enough room
In this world for my pain
Signals cross, and love gets lost
And time passed makes it plain
Of all my demon spirits I need you the most
I'm in love with your ghost
I'm in love with your ghost
Dark and dangerous like a secret (don't tell a soul)
That gets whispered in a hush
When I wake the things I dreamt about you (don't tell a soul)
Last night make me blush
Then you kissed me like a lover
Then you sting me like a viper
I go follow to the river
Play your memory like the Piper

And I feel it like a sickness
How this love is killing me
But I'd walk into the fingers of your fire willingly
And dance the edge of sanity
I've never been this close
In love with your ghost

Unknowing captor
You'll never know much you
Pierce my spirit
But I can't touch you
Can you hear it, a cry to be free...
Oh, I'm forever under lock and key
As you pass through me

Now I see your face before me
That would launch a thousand ships
To bring your heart back to my island
As the sand beneath me slips
As I burn up in your presence
And I know now how it feels
To be weakened like Achilles
With you always at my heels
And my bitter pill to swallow
Is the silence that I keep
It poisons me, I can't swim free
The river is too deep
Though I'm baptized by your touch
I am no worst at most
In love with your ghost

(In love) You are shadowing my dreams (with your ghost)
(In love with your ghost)
(In love with your ghost)

Damn

That feeling when someone writes about you. I mean, what the fuck. I can't put any of it here because it would be a breach of trust. But Jesus.

The friendships that can't

Some of the closest friendships I've ever had can't exist any more. The reasons vary, but the result is the same: it sucks.

Ice Cube on longevity

Life ain't a track meet
It's a marathon

Memory

December 2003. I drop him off at his place in Oakland. The damn car is making that stupid noise again. It's the rotors. You should get it looked at. A sharp swallow, holding back the tears that come unbidden. If only I had someone who would help me with that.

November 2002

Rain. So much rain. I loved a guy who was unavailable. We worked together and then he left to work at his girlfriend's company. I walked outside into a waterfall, hoping I would drown.

Today's writing

She couldn’t get away from that weirdly cold internal feeling, the so-what of the emotional world. It was as if she had turned her back on everything and everyone, said fuck you to consequences. It was as if someone had taken a rope and instead of hanging it around her neck, placed it around her heart. She’d been immersed in ice, frozen and dehydrated. Shit, she was one of those packages of dried fucking fruit you found in grocery stores: only healthy on the outside.

Sarah's launch

Compliments

You are a bitch, a whore, and a genius. And one of the best writers I know. 

Today's writing

She stood in the shower for as long as anyone should in drought-intolerant Berkeley, scrubbing, scrubbing. It was two-thirty. She really didn’t have to pick up Lennon for another hour, but lying to Jack seemed to be the least of what she’d done that afternoon.

The guilt was beginning to settle, and it was not light on her shoulders. Bricks felt better, more forgiving. The streak of not having kissed anyone else since hooking up with her husband? Gone. The fidelity she’d maintained all these years? Evaporated. The virtue of doing what one is supposed to do in wedded bliss? Shown to be a complete sham.

Happy Halloween

Baz is on the top step. He didn't want to wear his costume. It's okay. :)

Without being arrogant

I think this is some of my better writing.


She reached in the open window without asking, popped the old-school lock, got in. Then before either one of them could speak, she turned and covered his mouth with hers.

They drove to a secluded spot near the Berkeley Marina. There, with the sound of waves lapping against rocks and homeless men stirring against sleeping bags, they slid hands into clothes, fingers past lips to eager tongues, waiting. When he moved his body against hers she wanted to cry, but instead she just cried out. Fuck me she said, and he did. He did it without a condom, risky and stupid and utterly frenzied, moving in and out of her at a pace too rapid to be rhythmic. She cried out again, this time without words, and put her nails into his skin, her teeth into his shoulder.

When she came she cried for real.

She did it silently, her face turned away from him, tears sliding into her ears. The tears were not of guilt. They were born of relief, of the knowledge that something must have changed, though she had no idea or intuition as to what. He, lying on his side next to her, buried his face in the nape of her neck, unaware. He said something. It could have been I love you. She was trying not to listen.

Yes, it was relief. It had to be. She’d waited to cross that line; she’d skirted the edge so much that she’d grown tired of its rubbery taste on her tongue. She’d paced it alone, in the grocery store, walking down the path to pick up her son, alone in her brain on fallow Thursday afternoons. She’d traced it so long that she knew its every crook, every bend. She knew the parts that would hurt the worst, and to those she surrendered every element of herself.