Left the San Francisco Writers Grotto

I'm not sure what to write here. I feel like I just wanted to say that I did. I was seriously considering it in the summer, but chose to stay. I wish I hadn't. 

Posted to FB in 2017

This morning consisted of hours of screaming. Then I drove Baz around a while and thought all was well. When we went to his play group, all he did was whine and cling to me.

"Me?" I asked when it was time for my check-in. "I'm curious about the toddler disease."

"What's that one?" one of the Mommies (TM) asked.

"A joke," I said, in a voice that could rival antifreeze.

Then the group's facilitator started asking me questions. Well, he's in day care now, right? You were GONE, weren't you? He's a little off kilter, isn't he?

My anger built and coalesced. Two years of the Mommy Squad telling me not only how to think and feel, but predicting how I was GOING to react to everything ahead of me.

"That's lame," I said.

"What's lame?"

"That supposedly I can't do things for myself, take time for myself. Baz can deal."

"Nothing is fair," she said, and smiled.

Six years ago

I took a pregnancy test. It was positive. There lay one of those lines you cross and can never cross back.

Thankful

Health scare resolved. COVID test negative. Thank goodness this week is ending on a good note. 

Baz to me

"I have to help people, Mommy!"

Today's writing

Outside lurks the enemy, too microscopic for most to target. Ten months since we last sat in a café, a restaurant. Nearly a year since we reliably sent our kid to school. Everywhere you look: death and neurosis. Don’t stand so close to me, will you? All of a sudden we are all Sting.

 

The spiral happened quickly. We were hearing about some crazy Chinese shit and then all of a sudden the governor was like, no big gatherings. Then no medium-sized gatherings. Then finally it was stay home, stay safe, stay solo. We laughed nervously and updated our Facebook statuses. We bemoaned the fact that our children were going to be home from school for a projected three weeks. The only way I figured I could handle that was because Danny was working from home. But I would handle it. It would pass.

 

Sure it would. Absolutely.

 

Life now: a series of emptyings and fillings, of planning dinner at breakfast, then, fatigued by doing so little and yet so much, contemplating take-out by the time the sun sets. Target and Trader Joe’s our escapes when we can no longer pretend to appreciate nature during our walks. Sex a refuge when we’re not so blasted from a full day of being a family unit, the togetherness a viper around all our necks.

 

Tell me this a year ago and watch me laugh. Derision, cynicism, ignorance. Not like the bottom wasn’t falling out – politically, professionally, personally. Not like we went from riding in the glass-bottomed boat to being trapped under it in one motion, the triumphant swish of that tail when predator devours prey.

Nadia Bolz-Weber on meditation

Meditation’s magic is in the returning. Not in the never having left.

Quotes that saved my sanity today

The crayon is the tool of children and idiots. - Fran Leibowitz

I thank you for dogs and Wellbutrin which in combination manage to keep me from cratering. - Nadia Bolz-Weber

Just written

You’d think instinct would have me grab for Baz, for my son, who I’m supposed to love more than anybody or anything. Instead, I wanted to run my ass out the door, to the car, and take myself to a place where she could never find me, where she wouldn’t even think to look. Sausalito, maybe, where I’d taken him at three weeks old. He barely woke up to see the view, the multiple ice-cream shops plying their sugary wares to tourists. No apple cakes here. Fuck that. Sausalito, where I’d read my work to a Marin audience who sighed in all the appropriate places. Where I’d gotten stoned with Scott long before my uterus went into action, singing Willie Nelson songs, banging at the half-open sunroof of his Solara.

One of the better Bernie memes

 

Bay Area Arts Worker Relief Fund Grant

I am so grateful to receive a Bay Area Arts Worker Relief Fund Grant from Independent Arts and Media! Super thankful to those who support the arts and artists. 

The fucker has left the White House

Let change begin.

End of my damn rope

I used to write in fancy cafes, get poke for lunch, do the occasional hot tub as a treat. I thought two weeks with my kid while he was out of school was torture. Holy shit. I knew nothing. Nothing.

Jesus fucking Christ

This virtual school thing is going to kill me. I just walked around the house screaming "Fuck!", kicking walls, hitting them. I can't do this any more. 

Editor in the room

They say kick the editor out of the room. I tell my students that they can make friends with that editor, beckon it to sit down, offer it a cup of tea. As I write in the middle of the night, I have to remember that for myself. 

Recent writing

Rene is late. Rene is always late. Hustling down Ashby Avenue in search of a parking spot, he almost hits a woman and her little dog. They were walking against traffic, outside of the crosswalk. That’s his rationale as she screams at him, flips him the bird. Even the dog seems to take a vindictive shit once it hits the sidewalk. He turns onto College, can’t find anything until he’s almost at Alcatraz, meaning he’s a sweaty bastard by the time he walks into the café. This place is too much for him. Hippies, but what does he expect? Old hippies to boot, but what else do you find in this town? He feels his cell phone tingle. It’s his father. Pops is 85 and doesn’t feel a day over 100. The man makes bitching an art form. In other words, he should let it go to voicemail. Instead he picks up and talks too loudly in line. Old man’s talking about something he can’t even understand. State Farm something or other. Rene doesn’t give a crap. The guy used to bite his ass when he was a little kid. Seriously, bite the shit out of his bum. Rene never figured out why. Got to go, Dad. Got to go.

 

It’s not like he read most of the book. His attention span isn’t all that. But he needs people in this thirsty, consuming way. It takes up his airspace and his heart. Rene is 27 years old and lonely doesn’t begin to cut it. He’s lived in the same studio down on Deakin for as long as he can remember, or at least since he graduated from Cal State East Bay and moved up here for kicks. And a job. Both evaporated. He’s been looking around ever since like a dog abandoned on the side of the road, waiting.

 

Sylvie’s reaction to him is something out of a hybrid between a horror flick and a romance. In other words, she needs to pee now. The bathroom sucks, but she’s got no choice and it’s not like she’s so particular anyway. Hell, she can just squat over the bowl, doesn’t have to touch it. Travel in Asia for a while and you’ll figure that out. Tonight it’s not horrible though. The worst part is the walls, red like plasma. That’s what happens when red blood cells have burst, decomposed. The random knowledge you get from a Cal degree. She takes longer than she might, touches up the little makeup she wears. It’s an affect, really. Sylvie – whether or not she realizes it – doesn’t need the artificial sheen.

 

There are others too. They can remain nameless. They affect this story – the woman with a hopeful frown, the man who couldn’t quite contain his nervous belches, though he does try – but in the sense that the winter winds pattering against the windows influence what goes on inside one’s home. They are background, not the front story. They provide context, but don’t allow us to really get down to what matters.

 

Sylvie is still in pain. Pretty bad flareup. It had to happen now. She hasn’t left the house in two days. That’s a long time for her. Sylvie loves the outside world, needs it, craves it, even though sometimes she simply can’t handle what it has to offer. She needs that wind against windows, the background of the unknown and never-to-be-known, the unfamiliar, the normalcy of strangers. She can’t take the solitude of the everyday, the way the world wrings you out when it is only you who populates it.

 

What would Bethany do? She would speak to God, or to Buddha, or to the spirit of that dry and crumbly cookie, asking for the wherewithal to continue sitting here. She would reach out and pull from within, hands all over this astral plane. She wouldn’t take this earthbound bullshit. She would demand more and get it. 

 

Morning

 

The way things are going they're gonna crucify me

For some weird reason this song makes me think of the importance, the goddamned vitality, of art. I will never stop writing.

Saving up your money for a rainy day
Giving all your clothes to charity
Last night the wife said
Oh boy when you're dead
You won't take nothing with you but your soul --
Think!

Another lifetime

Twenty years ago today I flew home from a month in Europe. What a wild fucking ride that was. I traveled from Venice to Madrid, sleeping in 17 different cities along the way. I dragged my huge green backpack down train aisle after train aisle and across more cobblestones than I'll ever be able to count. I learned things. We learn what we want to learn and what we should learn. The latter was more important.

2017

 

Song from a European hotel room

 

From a letter of intent

Mornings are hardest. From bed to lion’s den – in this case, preparing my 5-year-old son for school. He wakes slowly, angrily – and in his tosses and complaints I see my own resentments. It is the time of COVID, and my husband and I shoulder unprecedented responsibility for his education.

Transitional kindergarten was never so surreal. Life was never so surreal.

Parenting, never simple, is at a new level of strain. Children are home all the time. School, once a time of relative respite, now takes place in our living rooms.

 

Sometimes

You feel raped by other peoples' confessions, bruised by the spikes of their ego, their self-involvement. You want to tell them you don't give a fuck, but you turn to Facebook to numb yourself instead. 

THREE WOMEN

Richard didn't want to ruin what they had. Sloane didn't want to either. But a switch had been flipped and she couldn't flip it back. It was like the lighthouses she could see through her window -- they were never turned off. She felt uneasy. she felt it in her gut. For a long time she lived in a sort of stabilized fear of finding out that Jenny didn't know. that Jenny was at home, baking cookies with the children, weeding her garden, worrying about money, and not knowing the things her partner did some evenings, some afternoons. Sloane lived in fear of being found out, of being called a terrible person. And eventually she was. 

You're not whiling away the years doing the same shit ...

Are you?

You're not shuffling through regrets like your own personal deck of would-be aces?

Nah.

New York

The Big Apple was always my North Star.

When I was 22, I wanted to move there, live in a tiny garret, write poetry. I wanted to dwell in cafes. I wanted to eventually get into an MFA program there. Instead I moved first to Nebraska to work as a wire editor, then to the San Francisco Bay Area where I pounded away at my work and made something of it.

I just cried so hard. I found a MetroCard and sobbed. 

Tonight's writing

It starts at Bocanova. That’s what Rene will tell you.

 

Before that he steers the Mini Cooper into the most reasonably priced parking lot at Jack London. Clash on the stereo, sunroof open to the starless sky. Hand over hand, the way he’s taught at fifteen, that kooky driving instructor. Dude used to bring a garter snake to lessons. Had it in a box everywhere, including the freeway. He thinks about telling this story to Sylvie until he realizes he already has.

 

That’s what happens in relationships. You learn everything twelve times over. Not just the stories either. Not just the details. The inflections, man. The way they tell the tale, the dramatic sighs, the strategic pauses. You hear them spinning it across the room at parties and you strike out for the bathroom, the backyard, the basement just to get the hell away. It’s hard to tilt your head and smile when the spoilers have spoiled, the drank drunk. Hard to feign anything when they know you well enough to know your personal brand of bullshit. 

Name-checked

Art name-checked me here. Thanks, dude!

When you want to email old friends

And you wish that for God's sake they would do the heavy lifting so that you wouldn't look like an asshole. Maybe for once they could be the asshole? 

Song for a new year

Six years ago, Santa Barbara

Baz, as Adam put it, was an unknown guest at this dinner at The Palace. For the record, I looked boss in that shirt.