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?