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. :)