People You Know By Heart

2012-02-01T07:14:00.000-08:00

--THAT WAS THE FIRST TIME I'VE EVER SEEN YOU IN SHORTS

…I have three poems--"Imbroglio," "Combat" and "Archival" up at Right Hand Pointing today. They're also here under "Words in Print."

…Last night I went to a book signing and Q & A by Kristin Hannah.
Although her style of writing doesn't parallel mine, it was very interesting to here her thought process on the craft:
-she never names her novels because her publishers always change them anyway
-she regularly will scrap 500 pages of writing during the editing process
-it takes her 14 months per book (she's written 19, the bulk of which have been on the NY Times ----bestseller list)
-she usually just has a theme when she beings but doesn't know where the book is going or how it will end
There was a good turnout--about 120 people, seven of which were men, me included.

…I've been very staggered the last few days, doing start and stop things either with organizing, submitting to agents or writing, getting caught in the Facebook quagmire or worse: dawdling. It's as if some puppeteer is having devilish fun with me, yanking on the strings every five minutes or so. Is that you?

…Listened to Conor Oberhest this morning. Do you know him? From the band, "Bright Eyes."
By the time he was 13 he'd written 500 songs. The lyrics are clever in a Dylanesque way, although maybe more obscure.

…Rejection gets easier, but it's never fun. The other day I got three. That's a record, especially considering I haven't been sending much short stuff out.
But today I had two poems taken, so we're almost even.

…What's happened today is I've jumped back on the productive wagon. I'm cleaning up a lot of the odds and ends I have around here with regard to unpolished poems and stories. I'm buffing them up and shooting them out into the universe where they'll either be caught or disregarded.
I'm trying to gear up for novel start day which is Wednesday.

…If you're a writer, I wonder if you're like me: do you have stacks of books and folders all around your desk and sort of spilling over the sides?
I have a few hundred (really, that many) story/poem starts stuffed into manila envelopes that I think have potential even if I haven't glanced at them since first writing down the idea. So why save them right? It's hard to cast out a line or phrasing that sounds lyrical or that has moxie. Even if it goes nowhere, at least it's not completely dead.

…So this morning I entered two more contests. Cost $34 but the winner gets $250 for each entry and their face on a place next to the presidents on Mount Rushmore. Something like that.
Contests are labor intensive, not to mention costly financially and time-wise. Why do it?
Why not?

…In the bathtub yesterday I read the inaugural issue of "Mad Rush." There were some great pieces in the anthology. A few inspired me so I wrote a story about a young girl who exacts revenge on her cruel father. It was short and bloody but had punch. I sent it to Dogzplot for a special they're doing called, "Vagina Saint."
I know--creepy name/title/idea.
My piece is called, "Homework."

…Speaking of work, I'd better get to it. Have a great Wednesday and thanks so much for being here.

2012-01-30T06:19:00.001-08:00

--I'VE BEEN HOLDING ON SO TIGHT

…I've got a couple more little micros --"Hirsute," "Window," and "Mad up at Eunoia Review and also here under "Words in Print."

…I passed my 600th acceptance the other day. That's since I started submitting work in May of '09. If you read this blog, thanks for being there with me. Really. Writing is such a lonely gig. Even virtual support is meaningful.
So what does 600 mean? I don't know. I'm not sure. Certainly there's a small dose of validation in getting to that number. But numbers aren't everything. Roxane Gay recently reminded me that quality is paramount and more important than quantity. She named a few great books, classics, by different authors, thus making the point that some writers produce a great amount of work but no one recalls any of it, while the perfect book that resonates with the reader is remember for all time.
I get that. I do.
Not every one of my 600 pieces was remarkable, but most were pretty good. I think so anyway.
In any event, on Wednesday I go back to the novel I am halfway through. It'll be good to re-visit those characters. I've been missing them.

…I like these things to start the week off:

"I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still
I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do." Helen Keller

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious." Oscar Wilde

"The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal." Walter Benjamin

"There is always something within poetry that desires the invisible." Barbara Guest

"It was just that sometimes reality, the same little reality that served to anchor reality, seemed to fade around the edges, as if the passage of time had a porous effect on things, and blurred and made more insubstantial what was itself already, by its very nature, insubstantial and satisfactory and real." Roberto Bolaño

"They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the slush of dishonor. They crawled into tunnels and walked point, and advanced under fire. They were frightened to be cowards." Tim O'Brien, "The Things They Carried"

2012-01-29T09:10:00.000-08:00

--I'VE SEEN YOU BLEED, HAVE I SEEN YOU LOVE?

...I have some new micros up at Eunoia Review and here under "Words in Print."
They are:
Anniversary
Futurama
Newborn
Glitter
The Drummers

...Here are some things you might find interesting:

19,757 -- Number of IED (Improvised Explosive Devices) attacks in Afghanistan in 2010
20, 483 -- Number in 2011

31.9% -- Number of college students in 2005 reporting they spend 6 hours or more a week on homework
39.5% -- Number reporting the same in 2011

Birth rates per 1,000 teenagers ages 15-19 years old:
1990 -- 60
2000 -- 48
2010 -- 34

Number of miles driven in the US:
2000 -- 2,700 Billion
2008 -- 3,200 Billion
2010 -- 2,970 Billion

--According to New York's Downtown Alliance, lower Manhattan now has more than twice the number of residents, three times the number of hotels and 130 more businesses than it had on September 11, 2001

--At least 22 states reported budget surpluses in 2011

--Violent crime is at its lowest level in over 40 years

--Rates of teens giving birth have fallen to their lowest level in 70 years

--Drunk driving has fallen to its lowest level in 17 years

--State workers in Indiana were given bonus checks worth $1,000 because of the state's surplus of funds

--Men are four times more likely to commit suicide than women

--On average, Americans are 20 pounds heavier than they were in 1990

Elephant Facts:
--Elephants eat more than 450 pounds of food EACH day
--They're gregarious and need to be around other elephants
--Most are divas, demanding and pushy
--African and Asian elephants don't mix
--Only female elephants live in groups and ther's always a queen bee who's not a fan of the new elephant

2012-01-27T08:11:00.001-08:00

--WHY IS THAT SO IMPORTANT TO YOU?

…Last night I went to "Cheap Wine and Poetry" at the Hugo House in Seattle.
The wine was mediocre but just $1.00 a glass.
The poetry was exceptional, as were the performances. I say performances, because there really is an art to reading one's work in a way that both captivates and engages the audience. I'm still learning about this.
Greg Bem, one of the featured poets, walked to the podium after his introduction, said only, "I have fifteen minutes," set his phone alarm, grabbed a candle and swept through the room the entire time, reading and sometimes shouting out some really fabulous beats.
Next up was Peter Pereia, Greg's opposite in content and outlandishness. He was soft spoken. His poems were stories. They were sweet and lovely. He was brilliant.
And then there was Amber Flame (real name?). She is a playwright, has won poetry slam contests, teaches drama to preschoolers, and sure knows how to own a room. She was swearing and gesturing, cracking jokes and many times reciting her poems from memory, emphatically, poignantly, venemously. She was outstanding.
So three different presentation styles, three completely different writing styles. It's a good reminder that one should just be oneself. No need for copy cats. Just do your thing--whatever it is--and do it to your very best.

…AWP sold out in record time. 9,300 people are attending. It seems a bitter irony that there are more writers than ever when readership is at an all time low.

…I spent two days writing a story. I never do that--put so much time into a single piece.
But this one was longer (appx. 3,000 words) and I plan on entering it in the Pacific Northwest Writer's Association contest. They get hundreds and hundreds of stories. They pick a winner and runner-up and name those at the conference here in Seattle this July.
You never know. Somebody has to win.
I like the story. I wish I could say I love it. On a scale of 1-10 I'd give it an 8.5.

…I like these things today:

"He is the longed-for, and the one who long; he is
the arsonist--and he is the scorched." Ovid

"In the middle of the journey of our lives,
I found myself upon a dark path."
Dante

"...the hill has not yet lifted its face to heaven that perseverance
will not gain the summit of at last." Charles Dickens

"The real measure of your wealth is how much you'd be worth if you
lost all your money." Bernard Meltzer

2012-01-25T10:29:00.001-08:00

--HERE, LET ME SHOW YOU SOMETHING

…I have a new poem, “A Recent Split” up at Orion Headless and here under words in print.

Also, yesterday I received the inaugural issue of Mad Rush with one of my poems in it:

The Fashion Model

You are no longer so beautiful.
A leper now,
Flakes fall from your lips when you speak or sip
Or try to skim a kiss.
Your skin is ruddy dandruff dust.
Your hair is wicked white nests.
Just this instant your bones are molding,
Your organs molting.
The smell is rancid yet familiar,
As unforgiving as damnation
And so I think I’ll stay here
Watching you smolder
Every patch of plastic melting
For all to see.

2012-01-23T14:32:00.000-08:00

--LOVE IS HERE, LOVE IS NOW

...I have a new poem, "Archival" up at cur.ren.cy and also here under "Words in Print."

...Today, right at this very moment, the sun is shining. She looks pretty and proud, not at all lonesome up there in the sky all by herself.
The dirty dregs of snow are sliding off the road banks or pooling in the street like grainy oil. The town and land is no longer perfect and beautiful. Rather, now the purity has been stripped away, like a woman without makeup, like a man telling you his secrets and sins.
Both images are real, both are true, but we lean toward one and away from the other.
Maybe that's why the world adjusts itself at night.

...This is another piece that was published in an anthology edited by Lydia Davis at 6S. Each story has to be six sentences or less...

Moving Day

The box smells musty but after I shift some contents, it doesn’t. Maybe twenty-five years have passed since I’ve seen this; brittle now but still bearing the faintest sweet scent, still blushing berry hues in the bed of its pedals.
I carry it down the steps like a trophy, a gift, a caught butterfly, and I imagine time as things were when you held one side of your gowned chest to me, so clear-skinned and optimistic you were then, me pimpled and nervous that I’d stab you with the corsage pin.
I reenact it all, right down to the part where I hear your insistent voice say, “If we don’t get going pretty soon, we’ll never make it.”

2012-01-22T10:28:00.000-08:00

--THANKS

...I'm at Starbucks this morning. Still having some residual issues with no TV or internet service following the storm.
There's the cutest little girl looking at me right now. She has a stuffed moose under her arm, lipstick pink shoes and sparkly, hoody sweatshirt.
I love kids and wish I would have had more than the two I did.
If you're thinking about having kids, I think 5 is a good number. At leat five.
I was feeling a little grumpy this morning until that little girl waved, smiled and said, "Hi." Now I'm feeling sort of happy.
And this morning I heard an accoustic version of the song, "Rainbow Connection." It's cute as a peach, that song. I'd only heard it before sung by Kermit the frog. Some british band sang this morning's version.

...I'm reading "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." A little late, I know. After seeing the movie, I have immense appreciation for the screenwriter of that film. The book is very bloated. I'm actually surprised it was so popular. All of the names and excessive details are boggling.

...I hope you're having a super Sunday.
Here are some things I like today:

"If you are patient in one moment of anger you will save a thousand
days of sorrow." Chinese Proverb

"Every writer should have a favorite bartender." Robert Hershon

"Don't get yourself trapped into thinking you have to publish. The only thing that is necessary is your nest poem. Your next story. You next song. Your next expression, whatever for it happens to take, of treading through the unusual, incalcuaable sad-splendor of life." Lucas Farrell

"The face you look out of
is never the face
your lover looks into." Peycho Kanev

"The role of the writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say." Anais Nin

"It's natural enough to have thoe moments of, 'Maybe it's just not meant to be.' The important thing is, What do you do after you have that thought." Brett Foster

"A friend is one before whom I may think aloud." Emerson

"All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence." Martin Luther King Jr.

"Americans are still stupid people, by and large: they believe anything you tell them."
"The bigger the lie, the more they believe."
"You can go a long way killing black people in this country."

2012-01-21T09:43:00.000-08:00

--IF I TOLD YOU, YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE ME

...I have a few recent things:
-"The Day the Universe Learned to Lean" at Matter Press
-"The Hater's Club" at Close to the Knuckle
-an interview at Crack the Spine
All are also here under "Words in Print"

...The power is back on at my house. I am not at my house.
I spent the night in Seattle with my son and three of his friends. I turned up the heat so high it was like sleeping in a blow torch, but after all those days of freezing, it felt delicious.
I laid on the bed and typed up some of the stories I wrote longhand to see if they'd hold up and they did.
Today we are supposed to have 70 MPH winds, so who knows what's going to happen to all those tree branches.

...I am standing up writing this. I'm in the lobby of the hotel. Actually this is an Inn. I'm not sure what makes a place an Inn as opposed to a hotel. Maybe you know.
I'm listening to the workers talk. There are four or five of them, all in crisp green shirts, most of them with really nice smiles. Everyone is speaking in Spanish.
Spanish is a good second language to know. For a while when we had a Hispanic nanny, I was very close to becoming fluent. Then I stopped practicing and out the door went my Spanish.

...There are many other things I want to say to you, share with you, but I have to skeddadle.
More to come.

2012-01-19T12:56:00.001-08:00

--I THINK THIS IS THE END OF IT

…The power went out.
It came on for ten minutes, then it went out again. Then again. And once more.
It’s been out for five days, which is the reason for my lapse in blogging.
I’m trying to be a good sport. There are worse things, right? Homeless people. Kids starving in Africa.
I’m at a local Starbucks. On the way, I passed down power lines lying across the middle of the roads, cars in ditches, trees downed over roadways, broken branches hanging on telephone wires.
It’s a bit like winter Armageddon.
Please keep your fingers crossed for me.

…So the last four nights I’ve read by lamp or candlelight—still Kim Chinquee (“Pretty” this time. I’m convinced she is one of our generation’s greatest and most unique voice; a kind a Carver for our times).
I also got “Stripped” in the mail, Nicole Monahgan’s assemblage of some forty flash writers (me included). No story is given an author byline (not for a year anyway) so that not only is author gender stripped away, but identity as well, of course.
There is some really good work in “Stripped.” You should check it out.

…When I wasn’t reading by lamplight, I was writing longhand on a real paper tablet.
There’s something about filling up the pages, seeing actual ink and you own preposterous penmanship with its scrunched letters looking like drowned spiders.
I wrote a lot—maybe 30 pieces, all very short.
Here’s one:

Outage

The outage is going on day three when she decides.
Both of them are bundled in sweats under heaps of covers and her grandmother’s quilt. Both of them have started to reek, his skin exhaling garlic and cilantro.
He keeps pulling her close, saying, “Body heat, Baby.” Baby is new. Baby is not a moniker she’d ever have expected him to use. Baby is something they’d once planned to have.
Now they’ve got this house in the hills. Heavy, heavy snow has crushed so many things: her blueberries; old trees; Bo’s abandoned doghouse; them.
Last night, searching with a flashlight for a fresh pair of pants, she found his jeans instead, and the note. Her name is Holly. Young. Or else she’s just girlish, the way Holly wrapped the tail end of the y with a heart.
Her mother had warned her that to save a marriage meant being a whore in the bedroom. Whore. The word on her mother’s lips sounded salacious like Satan was saying.
While he snores, she takes inventory—they did it in a cluster of trees, in a U-Pick strawberry field, on an airplane, a church parking lot, and once on the top bunk while her niece slept below. They had been quiet that time. It was like playing with plush, Play dough, holding their tongues, sucking back gasps, moving underwater almost.
What was enough? What was plenty?
Thaw should come soon, and with it, possible flooding. Around spring time things will adjust, renew and blossom. Some will be better and some will have disappeared forever.

2012-01-15T19:21:00.000-08:00

--WHY DON'T WE JUST SAY WHAT WE MEAN

...It snowed.
It snowed a lot.
Big flakes the size of bread slices.
I enjoy a really good snowfall. For 20 some years I used to hate when it snowed because I was in retail and snow means death for retail because every stays home and no one shops.
In the same perverse way I used to get depressed when it was sunny on the weekends because that meant people would play outdoors rather than go to the mall.
But not I am making up for all that.
I stood by the big picture window and looked up into the sky. It was filled with shredded coconut. Very cool. I loved it.
Unfortunately, since I live in the boondocks and we still have telephone poles, the power went out for a long stretch.
But it's back. It's back and there's still seven inches of white outside.

...Today I got a batch of the new Durable Goods.
This story, partially about my parents, was in it:

Union 76

It starts with gasoline.
My father an attendant, back when they had them in those days. Mother showing up on empty.
From there, they had two botched abortions, then me, a trailer home smelling of barley and brine, a place ravaged but replaced with shattered things.
It ends with gasoline, my father soaked in it one night after passing out on the couch. Mother putting the can down, flicking a lighter, saying, “Enough is enough.”

2012-01-13T10:05:00.001-08:00

--MY HANDS ARE HOLDING YOU

…I was good at math up until the third grade. In fact, I was so good at it that me and another girl and I got separated from the rest of the class. We had our own book and no teacher. We were told we didn't need one, that we could learn the material on our own.
That didn't work out so well. Not for me anyway.
I fell behind.
Then I was moved back in with the rest of the class but fell behind there too and never did catch up.
Since then I've convinced myself I'm not good at math and, guess what? Myself is correct; I'm not good at math.

But I do love statistics and facts, lists. I like little nuggets which have a superficial truth with a deeper truth beneath it.

Here would be some (very random but interesting, I hope) examples:

In a surprise (to me anyway), album sales actually rose in 2011.
77,000 albums were released.
90% of the sales came from the top-selling 1500
Adele sold 6.75 million albums
Justin Beiber was second with 3.39

20 years ago the average fashion model weighed 8% less than the average woman
Today the average fashion model weighs 23% less than the average woman

Top five most stolen vehicles:
1. Honda Accord
2. Honda Civic
3. Toyota Camry
4. Acura Integra
5. Cadillac Escalade

Will next year be financially better for you:
(Percentage who said Yes)
2007 -- 42%
2011 -- 30%

Number of firearms discovered at TSA airport checks:
2005 -- 851
2011 -- 1,238, or 4 per day

Percentage of married adults in the US:
1960: 72%
1980: 62%
2010: 51%

Despite high gas prices, SUV's/trucks/vans combined for 55% of all vehicle sales

Registered organ donors in the US:
1990: 2,123
2000: 5,945
2010: 6563
2011: 4,487

46% -- Percentage who say they never wonder whether they will go to heaven
44% -- Percentage who don't spend time seeking "eternal wisdom"
18% -- Percentage who don't think God has a purpose or plan for everyone
"We might as well be cars. That makes more sense to me than believing in what you can't see." --Ben Helton

Sex:
31% -- percentage of Swedish women say they are attracted to both genders
20.4 -- number of lifetime partners for New Zealand women, highest in the world
10 -- number of minutes that sex lasts for Thai women, the shortest time in the world
41% -- average of French women who have participated in orgies
10% -- average number of Greek people who say they have sex 5 times a week, the world's highest
German women rate their male lovers the worst in the world

There are more than 15 million Americans presently on food stamps

Scariest jobs:
24% -- Bomb-squad technician
15% -- High-rise window washer
14% -- Armed forces
8% -- Miner
7% -- Police Officer

Cosmetic Procedures in 2010 by age group:
13-19: 219,000
20-29: 750,000
30-39: 2.4 million
40-54: 6 million
55 and older: 3.3 million

Women who color their hair color it:
55% -- Brown
23% -- Blonde
12% -- Red
10% -- Black

2012-01-11T08:01:00.001-08:00

--LOOK AT THESE KNUCKLES, THEY'VE GONE WHITE

…On the radio yesterday, the disc jokey said he didn't think newspapers would be around ten years from now. While I think he may be correct, hearing someone say that out loud kind of threw me, made me pause for a moment, stirred something inside of me.
It wasn't a friendly feeling.
I tried to remind myself that change is not often welcome, and that technology--for the most part--improves things.
I started thinking about magazines and books and how they will likely disappear as well.
That sort of made me sad.
I don't think people will stop reading, but I do think they'll read less.

…Yesterday, as well, I got a new Esquire magazine. It's my favorite, and I get a lot of magazines.
I love the "What I've Learned Column." There always seems to be something to glean from it.
Here were my favorite bits:

--Gangs are formed by kids who want love.
--My mother saw me in a gang jacket and said; "You're out of the gang or you're out of this house. You decide." For the next few years I had to run every day. They were waiting for me after school. I climbed out the back window. They beat up all my friends, stabbed two of them. But they never got me. I could have won the Olympics with the way I was hurdling. --Charlie Murphy

--Critics can say horrible things. It only hurts when I agree with them.
--Every time one person gets a piece of information, the likelihood of that information being exposed grows exponentially. It's no longer two people who said something. It's two people squared. --John Cryer

--Aspire to hard work, talent and passion. Fame is not something to aspire to.
--Moving to New York is like taking the lid off the can. --John Oats

--Chekhov has this wonderful line in "the Harmfulness of Tobacco. He says, "There's no one I can open my heart to." Ultimately, love is about opening your heart and being received for who you are. First you have to love here before you can go there. So that's the work. --Jeffrey Tambor

--Respect is what you get when you take the ball away from somebody.
--Being the youngest of twelve kids and having your underwear handed down teaches you how to share.
--What I've learned from being successful is to be thankful. --Scottie Pippen

2012-01-09T07:54:00.001-08:00

--YOU HAVE TO ADMIT THAT IT ALL MADE SENSE AT THE TIME

…Yesterday I got a check in the mail for $60. It was for a story I wrote called, "Sphinx." I wasn't expecting to get paid.
There's something validating when you receive a stipend for your writing, even if it's a nominal amount of money.
The first payment I ever received for writing was $40 two decades ago for a story called "White Pianos." I took second place in a contest Byline Magazine had.
The second check came two and half years ago and was for $10. I have that check and the $40 check framed.
In all, I've made less than $500 for my trade.
I've likely spent more than that on paper and printer ink.
Last night I was at a dinner party. When people find out you're a writer they get very animated and curious. They ask the obvious questions. Some wince when they find out you don't have a novel on the shelves in Barnes and Noble. Others prod you to self-publish.
A few look at you with narrowed eyes when you describe your writing as "dark."
I used to not be able to attach the W word to my name. It's gotten better, yet it still feels funny to call myself a writer, even though that's the thing I spend more time doing than any other activity.

Sphinx

She said she’d be there for me. She said forever. Then she amended the declaration; “I’ll be around until the first of us dies, or at least until one of us flunks out of high school.” She suspected I’d be fleeing the scene before her, mainly because I’d become careless and had stopped showing up for most of my classes.
I could hardly be blamed. I was beside myself, smitten with love for Dawnielle. My life—the bland summation of fifteen whole years—now belonged to the trout fishing ballerina with bowl cut hair and stone cutter’s eyes.
I said, “Name something impossible and I’ll do it for you.”
“Buy me the moon.”
“Ah, that’s too easy,” I said.
The next morning I watched Dawnielle leave her house for the bus. She stopped immediately, struck by a series of chalk moons I’d painted in succession across the sidewalk. From a hiding spot, I watched Dawnielle break open a grin, and it felt as if I was the books she hugged against her chest, the light glittering in her eyes.
Another time I said, “If you knew how much I loved you, you might be frightened.”
“I don’t scare easily.”
“I love you so much that sometimes it’s hard to breathe when you’re not around.”
“Just practice holding your breath. It’ll come in handy for swim meets.”
“I love you more than my parents.”
“I would hope so, your parents suck!”
“I love you more than God.”
“Now we’re talking.”
I was afraid to kiss her. I did not want to soil or stain or defile her in anyway. To me, Dawnielle was the perfect creation; the sphinx before Napoleon’s cannon blast, before erosion and sun damage. I could never stop gazing at her. She said, “Most boys go blind doing that other thing.” And here she made an up-and-down motion with her hand. “But you’ll be the first to go blind from staring at me.”
“Do you think you’ll ever fall in love with me?” I asked.
“I’m working on it.”
We traded dirty jokes our brothers had told us. I bought her perfume that smelled like pomegranate because it was her favorite fruit. I wrote her poetry that made her laugh and cry. She said, “You’re a really good person.”
When she went missing, I thought she was pulling a prank. Dawnielle liked surprises and sneaking up on me, shouting “Boo!” so I’d jump and start to get angry. “Go ahead,” she’d say, egging me on, “Yell at me. Get really pissed.” But I couldn’t ever get mad at her, just as I still can’t get her out of my head to this day.
She never ages. She’ll always be fifteen, perfect and pure, a little aloof and unattainable.
I picture her in slow motion, skipping or twirling inside a shower of leaves. I imagine her leaning in for our first kiss. I recall the scent of her breath.
My wife says I drift a lot. “Everyone daydreams occasionally,” she says, “but you, you get lost in other galaxies.”
And she’s right, of course. We’ve been married thirty years and, like any wife, she knows me better than almost anyone.

2012-01-07T12:28:00.001-08:00

--EVERYONE'S WAITING FOR YOU TO BE FAMOUS, SO HURRY UP ALREADY

…Yesterday I wrote seven poems and two stories. I think they were good, but you never know.

…The story I wrote last week about the overweight bus driver named Tiny got accepted by NAP and will be in their May issue. Jesse Bradley even called me on the phone to let me know. That's pretty unusual, but a very nice touch.

…I tried watching Portlandia. I wanted to like it. I did not like it. It features several of my favorite actors, but the show tries too hard. It's like the weirdest Saturday Night Live sketch, but to the 10th power in oddity.

…Whitney Cummings is a very funny person. Her show, "Whitney" is not very funny, but her standup is hilarious. She's one tough lady and you'd have to have thick skin to be her boyfriend, but boy would you laugh a lot. She's also pretty coarse-- "Why do all testicles look like they're 150 years old? And now you guys are shaving them. Are you kidding me? The last thing they need is more exposure."

…I also watched Zack Galifinakis do standup for a special DVD he did. It was disappointing. I'm pretty sure he was bombed out of his mind. He knew his performance sucked, too, because he kept losing his train of thought and would interject, "Man, I suck!" But the audience would laugh anyway. Maybe the whole place was plastered.

…Lastly I saw Russell Brand's standup schtick. Russell is so damn hairy, like an Australian Jesus, and he has a very thick accent, but once you get used to him, he's endearing and charming and it's easy to see why he gets a lot of chicks.
Here's a sample: "Sympathy, when used correctly, can easily be turned into fellatio."

…I like these for the weekend:

"What a dangerous profession, to be dying for attention." Alana Noel Voth

"Never trust a naked bus driver." Woody Allen

"I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh
try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere
behind the morning." J.B. Priestlet

2012-01-05T07:24:00.001-08:00

--WELL, NOW, AREN'T YOU THE ARTICULATE ONE?

…I’ve got my mojo back.
Yesterday I wrote four stories in a burst of two hours. The last one needs some tinkering, but I really liked the other three, plus one got accepted that afternoon.

…I started reading “Oh Baby” by Kim Chinquee again. She’s astonishing. Each piece is so perfectly and beautifully truncated. The stories might only be a paragraph long and yet they never leave the reader wanting more. There’s a certain melancholy honesty in her writing. I’m a huge fan and have been. She was one of my first inspirations for writing flash.
Kim also has another collection called, "Pretty."

…I wrapped up season 5 of “Dexter.” Do you watch it?
The supporting story lines are a lot more intriguing than the main one. They may have jumped the shark with the Doomsday Killer.

…I wish more people would go see “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” It’s so well done. I’ll be very sad if they don’t make the other two films.

…This morning I ran to Temper Trap. It’s quite good. You should give them a listen.

…I saw this and liked it:
“You will always having to be getting up from your chairs.
To move on to other heartbreaks, be caught in other snares.” John Ashbery, “Some Words”

2012-01-03T09:41:00.001-08:00

--REALLY?

…I have a new story, “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” up at Pure Slush.
Also, a 25 word piece, “Lady Like” was named Best Of 2011 at Nail Polish Stories. It’s here with a collection of 25 word stories under the heading “Limo Scene” under Words In Print.

…I saw this post today from Charles Wendig on “30 Things Writers Should Stop Doing.” Some points were redundant but others hit a chord. Whether you’re a writer or not, I think there might be something here for you…

I culled down my favorite points to these:

Fuck dreaming. Start doing. Dreams are great — uh, for children. Dreams are intangible and uncertain looks into the future. Dreams are fanciful flights of improbability — Pegasus wishes and the hopes of lonely robots. You’re an adult, now. It’s time to shit or get off the pot. It’s time to wake up or stay dreaming. Let me say it again because I am nothing if not a fan of repetition: Fuck dreaming. Start doing.
Right here is your story. Your manuscript. Your career. So why the fuck are you running in the other direction? Your writing will never chase you — you need to chase your writing. If it’s what you want, then pursue it. This isn’t just true of your overall writing career, either. It’s true of individual components. You want one thing but then constantly work to achieve its opposite. You say you want to write a novel but then go and write a bunch of short stories. You say you’re going to write This script but then try to write That script instead. Pick a thing and work toward that thing.
Worry is some useless shit. It does nothing. It has no basis in reality. It’s a vestigial emotion, useless as — as my father was wont to say — “tits on a boar hog.” We worry about things that are well beyond our control. We worry about publishing trends or future advances or whether or not Barnes & Noble is going to shove a hand grenade up its own ass and go kablooey. That’s not to say you can’t identify future trouble spots and try to work around them — but that’s not worrying. You recognize a roadblock and arrange a path around it — you don’t chew your fingernails bloody worrying about it. Shut up. Calm down. Worry, begone.
It’s not going to get any easier, and why should it? Anything truly worth doing requires hella hard work. If climbing to the top of Kilimanjaro meant packing a light lunch and hopping in a climate-controlled elevator, it wouldn’t really be that big a fucking deal, would it? You want to do This Writing Thing, then don’t just expect hard work — be happy that it’s a hard row to hoe and that you’re just the, er, hoer to hoe it? I dunno. Don’t look at me like that. AVERT YOUR GAZE, SCRUTINIZER. And get back to work.
You know you’re a writer because it’s not just what you do, but rather, it’s who you are. So why deprioritize that thing which forms part of your very identity?

Complaining — like worry, like regret, like that little knob on the toaster that tells you it’ll make the toast darker — does nothing. (Doubly useless: complaining about complaining, which is what I’m doing here.) Blah blah blah, publishing, blah blah blah, Amazon, blah blah blah Hollywood. Stop boo-hooing. Don’t like something? Fix it or forgive it. And move on to the next thing.
You hear a lot of blame going around — something-something gatekeepers, something-something too many self-published authors, something-something agency model. You’re going to own your successes, and that means you’re also going to need to own your errors. This career is yours. Yes, sometimes external factors will step in your way, but it’s up to you how to react. Fuck blame. Roll around in responsibility like a dog rolling around in an elk miscarriage. Which, for the record, is something I’ve had a dog do, sooooo. Yeah. It was, uhhh, pretty nasty. Also: “Elk Miscarriage” is the name of my indie band.
Writers are often ashamed at who they are and what they do. Other people are out there fighting wars and fixing cars and destroying our country with poisonous loans — and here we are, sitting around in our footy-pajamas, writing about vampires and unicorns, about broken hearts and shattered jaws. A lot of the time we won’t get much respect, but you know what? Fuck that. Take the respect. Writers and storytellers help make this world go around. We’re just as much a part of the societal ecosystem as anybody else. Craft counts. Art matters. Stories are important. Freeze-frame high-five. Now have a beer and a shot of whisky and shove all your shame in a bag and burn it.
I said “stop hurrying,” not “stand still and fall asleep.” Life rewards action, not inertia. What the fuck are you waiting for? To reap the rewards of the future, you must take action in the present. Do so now.

2012-01-02T08:00:00.001-08:00

--HEY REMEMBER THAT TIME WHEN MY FAVORITE COLORS WERE PINK AND GREEN?
--HEY, REMEMBER THAT TIME WHEN I ONLY ATE BOXES OF TANGERINES?
--HEY, REMEMBER THAT OTHER TIME WHEN I WOULD ONLY READ THE BACK OF CEREAL BOXES?
--HEY, REMEMBER THAT TIME WHEN I WOULD ONLY SMOKE PARLIMENTS?

…"And now we welcome the New Year, full of things that have never been" Rainer Maria Rilke

….What is your New Year's Resolution?

41% -- Lose weight
32% -- I don't make them
11% -- Get a job
8% -- Make a major purchase
8% -- Fall in love

…7 million smartphones and tablets were activated on Christmas Day

…Yesterday I had this piece published at Ascent Aspirations:

Where I Am
I am not as ferocious
or unknowable as you might think.
Look at me.
No, I mean look at me.
See me.
Take my face in your hands and hold it there.
Search for the center of me,
that soft landing
pillowed place
hollowed-out space
which is neither a mustang or
a viper
but rather a little girl’s room
painted pink and soft yellow
like kind sunshine.
You are having difficulties,
I can tell.
You men make it so complicated.
I am a princess.
I am your best friend
Lover
Secret keeper
Soft shoulder
And open eyes.

Okay, then,
now take my hand
here, open it,
see the fingers uncurl
like petals.
Find the creases in the bend of my palm.
Find my life line and see if you’re not there.
You are.
You have always been there
even if you never knew it.
You’re not a fool.
Neither of us is.
And that’s why,
right now,
you need to slip your hand inside my shirt.
Go ahead,
it’s okay, I want you to.
Yes, I’m sure.
Start at the hem, go under and up
over my belly.
Glide.
I want to feel skin against skin there
where it’s warm and soft
and receptive and sacred.
Reach up under my shirt and don’t stop
until you’ve reached my breast,
the left one,
but go past,
not skimming or stopping.
This has nothing to do with my bosom,
it never has.
Okay, now press your palm there.
Yes, right on that exact spot.
Do you feel it?
That’s me.
That’s where I am.
Beating.
Alive.
Blood pouring from a spigot,
needing a receptacle.
still, alive, yes.
waiting for love,
endlessly waiting for you.

2011-12-31T00:15:00.001-08:00

--WE'RE WELL ON OUR WAY

...Hey, I really hope you have a magical New Year's Eve and a fantastic new year in 2012.

…Before I forget, I had a couple of things published recently:
“Just Do What I Do” at Pipe Dream
“Together” at Rusty Truck
Both are here under “Words In Print.”

…They’re all important, of course, but a year like 2011 felt especially important in the scheme of things, in the scheme of learning and growing and fucking up.

As usual, I pushed myself to be productive, but what was even more important was meeting people, doing things and going places that took me well out of my comfort zone.
(Being uncomfortable is often a really good idea if you find yourself in a rut.)
(Being uncomfortable is important provided there’s a potential happy ending in the outcome.)

At AWP, I was completely overwhelmed.
I felt like a little kid peeking through a cracked door, listening to adults discuss classical music or quantum physics.
Even with snow storms that disallowed many from attending, there were still 9,000 writers there.
I felt very small and insignificant. For a good part of the time I felt lonely.
However, I did meet some of my favorite internet writers/people, thereby making them real--Roxane Gay, xTx, Aubrey Hirsch, Heather Fowler, Nicole Monaghan, Matt Bell, Rae Bryant, Randall Brown, Steve Himmer, Mel Bosworth, Tim Jones-Yelvington and many others….

…I saw Junot Diaz, listened to Mary Gaitskill read.
I stood in line for coffee behind a frail, bug-eyed Joyce Carol Oates.

…I did my first readings ever—at The Cell Theater in New York City, for Housefire in Portland, OR, and twice at Iowa City, Iowa.

I read for two audio podcasts/radio shows.

I did ten or so interviews…

The Summer Writers Workshop was a thrill.
Being in Iowa is the opposite of being in New York, yet for a writer, Iowa City is hallowed ground.
You’re walking where Carver walked. Where Robert Frost and John Berryman walked.

I had stories accepted. I had stories rejected. I ended the year with just under 600 acceptances in the last two and a half years. Once I hit 500, something odd happened. I felt deflated and uninspired. I slowed way down. I got introspective. Roxane G. helped set me straight about quantity versus quality.

I did not get an agent for my novel this year, nor did I get a publisher for my story collection(s). So those goals will swing into the New Year.

My mother died this year. She’d been in ill health for quite some time and her death was not sudden nor a surprise.
Still, I didn’t expect it to affect me the way it did. She was a complex woman, a pivotal figure who shows up in the majority of my writing and who perhaps is the main reason why so much of my writing is dark.
My father asked me to write her eulogy, which was extremely difficult for several reasons, chief being the challenge of portraying her honestly without denigrating her.
But I did, I wrote it and read it.
A writer friend posted the eulogy on her wall (which was perfectly fine by me) and a huge number of people commented. Most of them misread what I wrote, thinking I'd made her superhuman when what I was really trying to do was make her "humane." That difference of perception really caught me off guard. It made me wonder how much of my writing is misinterpreted. It made me question my ability to make a poignant point that is clear enough to be understood.

I've got my New Year's Resolutions done for 2012. If you want, I can share them with you.
As I've said, there are some carry-over goals from 2011.
A lot of them are statistical.
Taken as a whole, it sort of makes me look like a "human doer" again, as opposed to a human being.
But I need that--landmarks in the sand. Lots of stakes in the ground. I can't wait for a muse to show up. Otherwise I get lazy. Life really is short. I'm more than half way through mine. I wanted to be a writer at age nine and waited almost forty years to finally do so.
I've got a lot of catching up to do.

2011-12-30T09:00:00.001-08:00

--I'M A RAGDOLL BOY

…As we approach the new year, here are some things I recently happened upon that have meaning for me:

"There's a line in Don McLean's 'American Pie' that goes, 'Do you believe in rock 'n' roll?/Can music save your mortal soul?' and I say, no. I don't believe in rock 'n' roll. There's always a great side to it, and there's also a phony, bullshit side, which is a lot of guys selling sex, and this sort of all-American confidence, and selfishness and getting wasted, and all that is a way of life that transcends all others, and I don't believe in that. But can music save my mortal soul? yes. I write when I'm falling apart. For some reaon that's when the songs come. I never sit down to write a song. It happens on its own. And I allow it to. Then why do I feel the need to record and be in a band and all that? I don't know. There's an element of this that I don't want to figure out."
--Christopher Owens, of the band "Girls"

"Peace and love is all good, but it's nothing without forgiveness."
--Bob Dylan

"Negative self-talk is toxic to a person's self-esteem, sense of efficacy and, ultimately, their self-confidence. We start to buy into our own negative press and begin to believe that just because we think and feel something negative, that that must be the truth of the situation. All of this poison feeds a generalized sense of helplessness, which saps our motivation and energy to be proactive and try new things, and undermines our ability to be creative.
The good news is we can break the cycle at any point…We have the choice to believe in the good or the bad about ourselves. It's never too late to change the direction of your thinking and start the journey to a more optimistic, happier and healthier version of you."
--Arlene Cook, clinical psychologist

"The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies."
--Ann Patchett

2011-12-27T19:58:00.000-08:00

--I THINK THEY CAN GIVE YOU SOMETHING FOR THAT

…I never read "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" or the other two in the series, but I did see the film yesterday.
Then I saw it again today.
Saw it twice in two days. I've never done that.
The film sizzles. Holy Hell, does it ever.
Rooney Mara is mesmerizing. She needn't even speak to convey her strength and fear, her complexity and vulnerability. There's never been a character on screen like the one Ms. Mara plays. Someone please throw an Oscar nod her way.
The score, written by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, is superb. It takes the heartbeat out of your chest and stuffs it inside your eardrums, ratcheting up the tension (of which there is mounds and mounds) through the entire film. At 2 hours 40 minutes, the movies ends in a blink.
There is a fair amount of candid sex.
There are several brutal scenes, including two gruesome rapes.
Many people die, or are shown to have died.
But this is as fine a film as I've seen in a while. It's got it all--tension, spot on acting and casting, wonderful cinematography, action, drama and it never talks down to the audience.
It's a must-see movie.

…There's a new site called Wish Tank @ deathwishing.com where you can post what you would want to have happen on your death bed. It's kind of a cool idea.

…I got side-tracked trying to write a love poem for a site today doing a themed issue. Usually pieces just jump out of me, but this one, like the last couple of stories, has been a bit constipated.

…There might not be a more romantic song than "18th Floor Balcony" by Blue October. Please see for yourself.

…Something that makes me very happy is hearing children laugh or giggle. That's the sad thing about getting older--you spend less time around kids.

…Studies show the most common birthdate is September 16th, exactly nine months from now. It has to do with a combination of the rainy season colliding with the holidays.
Get some rest tonight.

…I like these a lot:

“The first product of self-knowledge is humility.” Flannery O’Connor

“She sat and thought of only one thing, of her mother holding and holding onto their hands.” Eudora Welty

"Fifteen years old is the middle of my life, regardless of when I die." Edouard Levé

"Your Jesus is my mother is someone else’s turtle." Sugar

2011-12-26T06:25:00.001-08:00

--YOU ARE MY SWEETEST DOWNFALL

…Yesterday I woke before anyone.
The house was quiet although you could hear the wind pressing in against the windows, sort of eavesdropping. I read some. I turned on the fire. It was nice and peaceful.
…After present opening, I colored with my two kids. That was peaceful, too. It takes a lot of patience to color.
…I got a lot of music in the mail from Amazon: The Civil Wars, Fences, Mayer Hawthorne, City in Colour, new Cold Play. It’s all good.
Oh, and Christina Perri. I’m not a big tattoo fan, but she’s kind of hot with hers. And “Jar of Hearts” may be the greatest female FU song since Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.“
Sample: “Who do you think you are? You’re gonna catch a cold from the ice inside your soul. So don’t come back for me.”

…There’s a lot of writing online. Massive amounts. Quite a bit of it is mediocre. A fair amount is just plain bad. It makes me wonder if mine is any good. Perhaps I just think it is.

…I love pens. I have a bad habit of filching the ones I like when I’m at a restaurant or doctor’s office. I prefer the fine point kind that make your penmanship middle school sharp.

…The day before yesterday I wrote a story called “Hominy” about a poor kid raised by a cruel German grandmother.
Yesterday I wrote a story called “Tiny” about a bus driver named Tiny who is actually 400 pounds. I kind of fell in love with the guy.

…The other day I made a list of my new year’s resolutions and after I was finished something weird happened so that when I clicked on the document the words crumped into the black messy cluster, the way a spider folds in on itself it if gets too wet.
So I’ll have to make a new list.
People have accused me of being too goal-oriented, too fixated on numbers.
One person said I should try being a “human being” instead of “human doing.” That particular person wasn’t being cruel when they said that particular thing about me.
I’ve tried that person’s advice. I tried it most of the last half of 2011. It made me feel lazy. I was lazy. I got very little done. I wasted a lot of life.
So in 2012 I’m going to be a “human doing.” I’m going to get shit-tons done.
Just watch me.

…”My favorite sexual position is long division.” Madison Langston

2011-12-24T09:11:00.000-08:00

--IT HELPS IF YOU LEAN INTO THE FALL

…I’m back after five days down south in Mexico.
For whatever reason, while I was gone I got quite a few responses from queries:
--one rejection on a story collection I’d sent a publisher
--two rejections on my novel from agents, both form letters
--and, one request for material (the first 50 pages) of the novel.
I’ll count that last one as a win. Just getting over the query hump is a feat in and of itself.
A body’s got to start somewhere, right?

…I didn’t read as much on vacation as is my habit. In the past I’d plough through a dozen or more books.
This time it was just two…

…One was about finding God in unexpected places.
In the book, I learned lots of random yet fascinating things.
--In it, I learned that half the world’s citizens still get by on less than two dollars a day.
--In it, I was reminded that there are more stars than grains of sand on earth i.e., there are over 100 billion galaxies, each containing in excess of 400 million stars.
--Polar bears aren’t really white, but there hairs are actually transparent, acting like fiber-optic tubes that trap in heat, making them seem white.
--On their trips south, some geese maintain a speed of 50 miles per hour and fly 1,000 miles before making their first stop for rest.
--In the book, I learned that 2 weeks after 9/11 only five percent of the missing bodies had been found. Rescue dogs got so discouraged that their handlers had to play games with them to keep their interest up. The dogs searched all day and found maybe a piece of clothing or an elbow or scrap of skin. They cut their paws on the sharp edges of steel and whine in frustration because, like the human rescuers, they had so little to show for their efforts…
--In the book was a wonderful excerpt from Phillip Roth’s, “The Ghost Writer”:
“I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence, then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.”

…The other book I read a fantastic collection of non-fiction feature pieces written by two time Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Weingarten.
The book is called “The Fiddler in the Subway” and it has some terrific true life stories, many of which seem to entwine the impossible with reality.
The title story is about an experiment The Washington Post undertook by having Joshua Bell—who received The Avery Prize, recognizing him as the finest classical musician in the world—play violin at a busy bus station in affluent, erudite Washington D.C.
…Here are some excerpts:
--“The idea was to discover if in a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?”
…It was January 12th, in the middle of rush hour. In the next forty-three minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Only three stopped to listen, while 27 gave money for a total of $32 and change.
Bell, a child prodigy, had the night before filled Boston’s stately Symphony Hall. His talent commands $1,000 an hour.
Bell, whom Interview magazine once said of his playing ‘does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live…’
So some of the obvious retorts are:
-- What was he doing in a busy bus station? People probably grouped him with other street musicians.
-- It was rush hour. People were on their way to work. Who has time to stop and listen?
…But some people did stop and listen, if only for a few minutes. They caught the magic. Art transcended the banal.

…What I wish for you this Christmas and Holiday Season is a childlike sense of wonder. I hope you can be entirely present in the moment.
…Merry Christmas!

…”What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.” W.H. Davies

2011-12-21T08:05:00.000-08:00

--I AM A LOT LIKE YOU

...Iḿ in Mexico typing on the hotel keyboard staring at a gigantic flat screen TV where everything is connected--phone, computer, cable television, you name it.
This hotel is the fanciest place I have ever stayed in.

They have many pools here. Some of the rooms open up to pools so you can open up your patio door and dive in straight from there.
Not many people are reading books.
There are a lot of very bad tattoos. I mean, really bad. I have (Iḿ not using many contractions because this keyboard is giving them the Hispanic umlott you see in the word Iḿ) become a fan of tattoos, but these here are really awfully. It is as if every person here had one or more appendages dipped into a vat of ink and then it sort of whorled around on their skin.

I ran five miles this morning. At one juncture, I came to this cove with a sandbar surrounded on both sides by water, shallow water, and Iḿ pretty sure I saws an alligator lurking topside of the water surface, just waiting to have me for breakfast, so I turned around and sprinted the other direction.

The last few months of this year have been lazy ones for me. Relatively speaking, they have.
I have been taking it easy, not writing or reading much.
I have been doing a lot of thinking, though, contemplating why I write, what I want to achieve and why I want to achieve those things. Iḿ almost to the point where I have answers for myself, conclusions to the questions Iḿ asking.
When Iḿ all the way there, I will share them with you.
My goal is 1-1-12.

...I hope youŕe having a good week. It is strange to be in another country this time of year, to be hanging out in shorts and a t shirt while back home it is parka weather.
People are fond of saying how small the world is, especially now with technology being what it is, but really, the world is quite large.
I hope you are having a splendid week wherever you are in the world and I will write more Saturday.

2011-12-19T06:49:00.000-08:00

--NOBODY KNOWS IT, BUT YOU'VE GOT A SECRET SMILE AND YOU USE IT ONLY FOR ME

--By year, average number of Christmas gifts people said they would buy:
2007 -- 23
2009 -- 18
2011 -- 15

--On Average, how many holiday cards do you usually receive?
0 to 10 -- 33%
11 to 25 -- 35%
26 to 50 -- 23 %
51 to 75 -- 6%
75+ -- 4%

--Have you ever re-gifted an item?
46% -- never
29% -- a few times
18% -- once
7% -- many times

…This was kind of interesting and surprising:

Psychologists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon say that their study demonstrates that anti-atheist prejudice stems from moral distrust, not dislike, of nonbelievers.
"It's pretty remarkable," said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study, which appears in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The study, conducted among 350 Americans adults and 420 Canadian college students, asked participants to decide if a fictional driver damaged a parked car and left the scene, then found a wallet and took the money, was the driver more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher?
The participants, who were from religious and nonreligious backgrounds, most often chose the atheist teacher.

--Here are some disturbing findings:
The military divorce rate is at its highest level.
In 1999 30,000 military marriages ended

--Nearly 1 in 5 women report being raped in their lifetime.
30% report being first raped when they were between 11 and 17 years old
12% were 10 or younger
Nearly 1 in 2 women and 1 in 5 men experienced sexual violence other than rape at some point in their lives

…This is good to know:
The act of smiling alone makes you happier. The muscles in your mouth send a signal to your brain to produce a drug that makes you happier and helps you live longer.

…I like these to start a new week:

"If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than
because he was he, and I was I." Michel de Montaigne

"The idea is to write it so that people hear it & it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.” Maya Angelou

"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn
how to do it." Pablo Picasso

2011-12-18T09:23:00.000-08:00

--YOU ARE THE BRIGHTEST STAR OUT THERE

...I have a new poem, "Lipstick" up at Word Riot and also here under "Words in Print."

...Last night I was at a party and I drank a lot and ate a lot (for me) and laughed quite a bit, too. It was fun. My time was spent 80/20. Eighty percent of the time I was with women, twenty percent of the time with men.
I got into political discussions but was mostly able to hold my tongue.
We talked about abortion.
I admit, at one point, I tuned out because I thought the other person was more or less inane.
I need to be less opinionated or not cling so tightly to those opinions I have.

...I am going to Mexico tomorrow. It will be interesting to look the sun in the eye, to say, "Where the hell have you been hiding yourself?"

...I wish I was the kind of person who didn't need to be liked. I wish I was stronger.

...There was a stretch of time this year where I wrote a massive amount of poetry. I am just realizing now that a lot of it was bad.
Much of it was nonsensical gibberish.
One of the worst feelings is reading an old piece of writing and not liking it.
One of the best feelings in the world is reading an old piece of writing and thinking, "This is not so bad."

...Here is something I wrote that was published in a print journal. My son said the first line when we were watching a movie. I wrote it down and then later on that night wrote the piece:

This One

You can learn a lot about a person from where they sit on the bus.
He always takes the same seat, middle row window and keeps his face flush to the glass the entire ride. When there isn’t too much sun I can find his reflection in the pane, his regretful eyes, sullen and swollen and so pulpy I want to suck them dry.
What makes it worse is his brooding cheekbones and rooster tail James Dean hair, so much like my ex it is heart-stopping.
Give me air, give me space. I need a man who knows better.
This one could be it. I’m not fishing, but sometimes fate finds you askance.
I saw him help a grandma with her shopping bag. Once he accepted a slice of gum from a cute blonde girl even though I could tell his breath was just fine. And then there’s the stance he takes as he stands, a familiar body yawn stretch, subtle enough to go unnoticed if you don’t look for it.
This one is beauty.
After he steps off I change positions. He has left the faux-leather warm for me. I squeeze my thighs and stare out the window and wave, watch him walk off, a queer, confounded twist on his face.
In a world of perpetual pity parties, a boy like that needs not a thing.
Tomorrow I will get off at his stop. The next day I will follow close behind. Another day and I will make a move. If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s easily fooled.

2011-12-17T12:29:00.000-08:00

--YOU SAID YOU’D BREAK FOR ME

…I have a new poem, “Lipstick” up at Word Riot and here under “Words in Print.”

…This morning while running I listened to “Better Than This,” John Mellencamp’s latest album.
I like John a lot.
I used want to start smoking so I could have his gravelly voice.
I thought that would make me sound tough because I certainly don’t look very tough. If anything, I look the opposite.
I listened to John and ran hard until I was quite sweaty. I stopped a couple times to replay a certain song that is quite catchy.
Now my butt is sore from using too much incline on the treadmill. I suppose that’s a good thing--having a tender rear end because of exercise as opposed to something else.

…It’s almost Christmas. How are you doing? Are you ready? I am.

..Here’s my favorite ditty off the new album.

“It’s not my nature to be nostalgic at all.
I sat by the phone last night waiting for you to call.
It’s been decades since I spoke to you.
I just wanted to say I’ve been thinking about you.

Did you get my message I left the other afternoon?
Your young girl’s voice said, I’ll call you back real soon.
I bet that your daughter sounds exactly like you used to.
I just wanted to say I’ve been thinking about you.

So long ago, those summer afternoons.
I bet they tore that playground down where I first met you.

Don’t mean no trouble, don’t want to cause alarm.
Ain’t looking for nothing, just wondering about your song.
If you ain’t got time to return this call
I’ll understand that you’re busy and all.
Thanks for the memories when the world didn’t seem so small.
I just wanted to say I’ve been thinking about you.
About you.
About you.”

--John Mellencamp, “Thinking About You”

2011-12-15T22:48:00.001-08:00

--EVERY NEW BEGINNING COMES FROM SOME OTHER BEGINNING'S END

…Last year I had three pieces published in a print anthology from 6S edited by the legendary Lydia Davis.
6S is short for Six Sentences, which means each story--in order to be considered for publication--can be no longer than six sentences.
Writing in a truncated format like that is a challenge I like. I've done 20 word stories, 12 word stories, pieces that were so-called "Twitter" fiction with no more than 124 characters…
Anyway, this one is about 9/11.
I think about 9/11 a lot. Sometimes it hits me at the oddest moments. "Timing" is about that…

Timing

Sometimes it happens this way, with him driving 1-90 to work, seeing a plane floating low over Union Bay, toggling between buildings and it’ll catch him unaware and he’ll remember stopping at Starbucks that September morning, the newscaster’s baritone tremulous and uncertain, him and everyone thinking hoax, thinking Orson Wells, and then later that night, thinking Armageddon and Satan.
Many days afterward there was a Robert Deniro documentary and he thought this could be a teaching moment for Hailey, his young daughter, with whom he had custody on weekends.
He made cocoa with mini marshmallows and once they became soupy Lilly pads Hailey plucked their white guts with her little girl fingers and drew letters across his cheeks.
On the television the buildings simmered and smoldered, sirens shrieked, people leapt and bodies thumped. They’d left none of the horror or death out, and while he knew he should have switched the channel, he couldn’t, riveted as he was.
When the program finished, his daughter turned to him with a yawn and asked if he could read her a story.

2011-12-14T08:35:00.001-08:00

--I DON'T KNOW WHICH ROAD TO TAKE, HOLDING ON FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE

…Yesterday I wrote a story while taking a bath.
It's a freaky piece called, "Pets."
The first line is, "Seated next to him, the girl keeps herself busy drawing pictures of dismembered pets--dogs, cats, rodents with collars."
I actually really like it.
What's even stranger is I wrote this in the tub longhand, dried off, typed it up, read it out loud, made some edits, submitted it to a site and got it accepted all in a three hour span.
Now that's freaky.
The story is at Airplane Reads and also here under "Words in Print."

…Also about yesterday--"Slut" came in the mail.

It's an anthology produced by Matt Potter of Pure Slush. I have a piece a piece in it called "Sex in the Time of Now" which is actually a parody of America's obsession with sex.
I would share the story here, but it's probably too long for a blog.
Here's the line Matt quoted: "He could no longer tell the difference between lust and love, sex or sweetness."

…It's nice to have words in print, on paper, in books, anthologies. But you have to wonder how many people ever see these small literary journals.
You have to wonder.

…I did an interview for Crack the Spine. They're going to be publishing a poem and a story. I tried to answer the questions different from all the other interviews. I tried to be honest.
One question was, "Why do you write?"
I hate that question.
And, No, I didn't reply, "Because I have to."

…Do you think I'll ever get a fucking agent? Do you think I'll ever get a story collection in print?
(Sorry-- I just had to get that out. Don't worry, I'm still fighting the good fight, going through the paces one must go through.)

…I've been obsessed with this Linkin Park song called, "Waiting for the End."
This morning, however, I listened to The Airborne Toxic Event's new album.
There's a song on it about Iraq with the lyric, "The kids are lined up on the wall and they're ready to die."
It's just a damn good album all around.

…Here are a couple things I like on Wednesdays:

“Laughter is the language of the soul.” Pablo Neruda

"You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be." – Chucky P.

"People say friends don't destroy one another, but what do they know about friends?" The Mountain Goats

"Come - I'll trace you one final autumn,
and you can trace your last homecoming
into the snow or the sun."
~ Annie Finch

2011-12-12T12:10:00.001-08:00

--I COULD LIE OF COURSE, BUT WHAT GOOD WOULD THAT DO?

…On the treadmill this morning I listened to “Live Through This,” by Hole.
You either hate Courtney Love or you love Ms. Love. I’m sort of on the “love” side.
I like that particular album anyway.
It has some great lyrics: “I am doll eyes
Doll mouth, doll legs.
I am doll arms, big veins, dog bait.
I want to be the girl with the most cake.
I love him so much it just turns to hate…”

…I went to a wine tasting last night with two other couples, so six of us, right? I spent the majority of the night huddled with the three wives (one being mine.) Why is it I always feel most comfortable talking to women? Why is it I feel out of place, as if I’m acting when I’m with men I don’t know very well?
Is it because I’m not mechanical? Because I don’t know anything about cars? Because I can’t fix anything? Because I have approximately 30 tools, six of which are screw drivers and five of which are hammers?

..I was thinking about how hard it is to be a great listener, about the amount concentration it takes to stay completely focused. It’s actually pretty hard to do for any extended period.
Try it.
Next time you’re with someone, shut up and let them speak and try not to let your mind wander, focus on what they’re saying and keep doing it and see how long you can last before you’ve unconsciously broken away into your own thought pattern.
“Listening is an Act of Love.” Dave Isay
Love, I think, is about being voraciously present.

2011-12-10T07:43:00.000-08:00

--YOU HAVE ONE HELL OF A TEMPER

Be Well

I am running to you
in the rain
a deluge of blue frozen stain,
a scratched-off signature or promissory note of the pain
I have caused you,
irrevocable, yes,
no different than trampled on trust,
a violation of every promise I ever made.

Overnight now,
I feel like a villain
because the truth is
I am.

But you,
you should lift your head high
toward the sun.
It loves you so much.
It has its arms encircling your waist,
its fingers in your hair.
It is breathing bright light
across your cheeks at this very moment.

Be well, my loveliest.

2011-12-08T09:03:00.001-08:00

--YOU CAN'T TELL ME YOU'VE NEVER FELT THIS WAY

…Is there a better song than Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah”? No, there really isn’t.

…I have a new poem, “I Can Be Your Sweat-stained Shirts” and two short pieces up at UCity Review. They're also here under “Words In Print.”

…Yesterday I actually accepted two stories for publication in Metazen. It’s been a long stretch where I’ve rejected about 30 pieces. But that’s about the average: one acceptance for every ten rejections.

…Yesterday, Dark Chaos, another online literary journal, called it quits. That usually seems to happen around this time of year. The pressure of normal life, the holidays and then editing a journal—well, I guess it all becomes a little much.

…Yesterday I stopped in the middle of things and I wrote a piece I really end up liking, written in that free form punctuation-devoid style I’ve been working with. It’s about a guy who falls in love with his wife’s sister at his wife’s sister’s wedding and then, years and years later, the man’s wife dies and the man finally has a chance to be with his dead wife’s sister and…

…Yesterday I had my 575th acceptance since May of 2009.

…Yesterday I ate too much so this morning I slept in.

…Yesterday I thought about you.

“It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.” Raymond Carver

2011-12-06T12:20:00.001-08:00

--I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW PHOTOGENIC YOU ARE

…How’s your week going?
What’s the best thing that’s happened to you so far?
If you can, you should go see “The Descendants” with George Clooney. It’s supposed to be fabulous.
Also, go see “Shame.” This film is a lot more raw, an indie film about sex addiction, but the best cinema of the year. Michael Fassbender should win an Oscar but the Academy hasn’t had any testicles since “Last Tango In Paris,” so he won’t and Adam Sandler will. Nevertheless, treat yourself to some fine acting.

…A moment ago there was a flock of fifty beautiful geese eating grass outside my window. Geese are prettiest in flight or bobbing on the surface of the lake. When they come to one’s yard, the aftermath they leave behind is not so pretty.
That’s why I had to get up and pound on the window until the scattered back into the water.

…The other day I read in the paper where a man who held a Kansas couple hostage while fleeing police is suing said couple, claiming they broke an oral contract made when he promised them money in exchange for hiding him.
"Jesse Dimmick is serving an 11-year sentence after bursting into Jared and Lindsay Rowley's Topeka home in 2009 and offering them money to help him hide from police. When he fell asleep, they stepped out and turned Dimmick in. Dimmick filed his lawsuit in response to a suit by the Rowleys seeking $75,000 for emotional distress…
Unbelievable on several fronts.

…Aside from smartphones and flat screens, one of the hottest items for 2011 on Black Friday was…
wait for it…
guns.
Yep, guns.
GUNS.
I don't know about you, but that's a little freaky to me.
There are a lot of unbalanced people out there that should not be toting a pistol in their purse or man purse.
Quite frankly, I'm not a fan of guns at all. Yeah, I know, I know--it's a Constitutional right.
But I'd like to amend that.
Maybe we could just hold the shooting range, and you check them out there for target practice, then check them back into the squinty-eyed guy when you leave.
It's a thought.

…The other day I saw the top 10 online searches for 2011. I thought there were some typical ones, but also a couple that caught me off guard like numbers 9 and 10.
Here they are:
10. Osama bin Laden
9. Japan earthquake
8. Jennifer Aniston
7. American Idol
6. Lindsay Lohan
5. Jennifer Lopez
4. Katy Perry
3. Kim Kardashian
2. Casey Anthony
1. iPhone

…Today I was on the phone with my financial advisor who shared that ten years ago there were 10 workers for every retired person.
Today it is one for one.
In 2025, in American, we will have 10 retirees for every working person.
Yikes!
So much for Social Security…

…I like this a lot:

"We’ve all seen beauty face to face, one time or other and said 'oh, my god, of course, so that’s what it’s all about, no wonder I was born and had all those secret weird feelings!'" Allen Ginsberg

2011-12-04T08:49:00.001-08:00

--IF THERE'S NOTHING MORE TO SAY, THEN WHY ARE WE STILL DOING THIS?

…It’s foggy out this morning. I can scarcely see the lake. The lake looks like a see through cloud with a bit of a belly.
I like the fog. It’s mysterious and soothing in a spooky sort of way.
It reminds me of George Washington crossing the Delaware River on Christmas Eve.
It reminds me of my favorite TV show when I was a kid, one called, “Dark Shadows” a soap opera well ahead it’s time about vampires and werewolves and witched, soon to be major motion picture starring Johnny Depp.
Fog reminds me of secrets and journeys.
I have some secrets. Don’t we all?
And in a couple of hours I will be going on a journey midway across the state. Perhaps I’ll tell you about it when I return. If not, I’ll keep it a secret.

...For now, here are some things to enjoy on a Sunday:

"In art, one idea is as good as another." Wilem de Kooning

"It makes me so sad to be happy." Spalding Gray

"A heart in love with beauty never grows old." Turkish Proverb

"To the weight of our affliction will be the weight of our reward." T.D. Jakes

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." Michael Jordan

“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you.” Frida Kahlo

"There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own
way." Christopher Darlington Morley

"The idea is to write it so that people hear it & it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.” Maya Angelou

"There is no great genius without some touch of madness" Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"It's better to be hated for what you are, than to be loved for what you're not..." Kurt Cobain

"Slowly it dawned on me that they saw what I saw and that we are all alike and that I've had some investment in being special and now I have to face the fear and realization that I am basically like all the rest; a lost confused human being." Spalding Gray

"The only thing worth writing about is the conflict in the human heart." William Faulkner

2011-12-02T10:17:00.000-08:00

--I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW PHOTOGENIC YOU ARE

…I live in the boonies.
Really, I do.
People here raise horses and goats and (for some reason) lamas. Some chuckleheads even have Confederate flags. (Seriously, they do.)
We still have telephone poles in these parts, too. Because of that, power outages are commonplace.
This morning, an hour ago, was the third outage in as many weeks. It’s funny how easily one can take things for granted. Even though the power was out and even though I knew it, I kept flicking light switches and at one point I even thought I’d make myself a cup of coffee.
It made me think that there's likely thousands of things in my life that I take for granted.
It made me feel arrogant and selfish.
Just a little bit, it did.

…On the treadmill before the blackout, I listened to Mona. They’re likeable rockers from Nashville and quite good. Check them out.

I wrote two poems and a story yesterday. The poem I liked least got accepted and the one I liked most got passed on.
When I clerked for a law firm in downtown Seattle I’d always see this homeless woman wrapped in plastic with a shopping cart. On really cold days she’d hover over the steam grate outside the old Nordstrom store. Then one day she was just gone and I never saw her again.
Whenever it gets really frigid out, as it has been of late, I think of her and all those like her who have no warm place to go.
Anyway, this is the poem that got passed over, the one she inspired:

One

The winds are laced with blades,
arctic air thick blankets,
bruised blue even at night,
but us,
well, we sit at a round table
in a warm building smelling of nutmeg lattes,
loud voices tearing dust off the rafters,
our laughter rattling newsprint
and backpacks.

Through the window outside
I catch a glimpse of a woman wearing a tattered blanket,
hunkered over the steaming heat grate,
her thighs splayed as if giving birth
sending her fetus straight to hell,
saving it from her hell.

Behind, a shopping cart holds
the woman’s house
her rooms
her ceiling
her carport
her bookshelves and bed.
Something like a lottery ticket
is taped to a cardboard sign saying
I AM The oNe
and then unreadable scribble.

As it starts to snow,
two suits and a pair of lovers pass by,
giving the woman wide berth,
winter air smoking from their nostrils
and teeth.
I watch the couple kiss.
I watch a hydraulic Santa pick up a package in the store front window.
I watch the ragged woman start to tell herself a story,
praying that she gives it a happy ending.

2011-11-30T09:25:00.000-08:00

--WHAT ARE YOU WEARING?

…Yesterday was a bit of a thrill.
My story, “Mouthwash” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. It’s my first nomination.
These days a lot of people get nominated for the Pushcart because there are so many online lit journals, but it still means a great deal to me. I even have the 2008 Pushcart Anthology on a bookshelf right behind me.

I feel as if I have always lagged behind my writer peers. Most have novels out or story collections out or maybe even several collections. I know I shouldn’t compare myself, but having grown up in a family with seven brothers, well, I’m competitive.
Competitive and insecure.
These are a couple of things I wish I could change about myself, although to a large degree, they have served me well in many ways.
They’ve driven me to be productive. I guess it’s about finding more of a balance, moderation.

Sara Lippmann, a friend of mine, wrote a column in Used Laundry about the subject of striving versus enjoying. She talked about simply doing your best work. Always doing your best work, no matter what others do or say. That’s pretty good advice.

…My office smells like Aqua Di Gio, my favorite fragrance. I save the scent strip ads in magazines and open one up every now and then. It’s a good trick.

I’m listening to Sufjan Stevens. I’m not sure why artists need to use such bizarre ambient noises in their songs. All they do is take you out of the music.

The new Drake disc got four stars in Rolling Stone magazine. The new Drake disc is like listening to the first Drake disc, but maybe on vicodin.

…Today I have to put up the Christmas tree and Christmas decorations, but I am going to write. I feel like there are a lot of creative words inside of me today.

…The other day I watched Pete the eagle swoop and dive bomb a scattered gaggle of ducklings on the lake. It was oddly terrifying. I’m a fan of Pete’s, but I was definitely rooting for the ducks in this case. The fowl kept going under and then finally they went under for a long time and never came up, or if they did, I never saw them.
Right now there are a group of ducks outside my window by the dock bobbing underwater, plucking out fish and eating them. Why do I not care so much about them gobbling fish when I feared for the ducks as Pete made his assaults?

…Here are a couple of things I like on a Wednesday:

“Sometimes," said Pooh, "the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.” A.A. Milne

"I'm losing faith in humanity one faked orgasm at a time." Summer Robinson

"What kind of beast would turn its life into words? What atonement is this all about?" Adrienne Rich

"Given the choice between grief and nothing, I choose grief." Faulkner

"There are a lot more cannibals in this country than people think." Dexter

"I need you to give my heart an erection." Parenthood

2011-11-28T10:40:00.001-08:00

--I GUESS YOU WEREN’T REALLY WHO YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE, WERE YOU?

…I have a new story, “We Only Do This On A Tuesday” up at In Between Altered States and here under “Words in Print.”

…It’s chilly on this side of the country, in this little patch of the globe. Thus, I have the small fireplace going in my office. Plus I’m listening to “The Smiths.” I’m not a huge fan of theirs, but I do like a few songs, especially, “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want.”
I have the new Drake but I am waiting until I get in my car to play it.

…This weekend was festive. I ate too much and drank too much and didn’t exercise or do anything productive, though I did laugh a lot.
I had fun.
I frolicked.

…I keep realizing that it’s pretty important to have friends, a least a few who are active in your life. Without them, things wouldn’t be as hopeful. One night we stayed up until 2:30 am. I think a lot of humorous things were shared, although I can’t for the life of me remember any of them now.
It’s good to have people you feel comfortable and unguarded with.

…Along with 67,000 other fans, my friends and I went to watch our state’s two rival college football teams clash at mammoth Century Link Stadium.
What a place—with cliffs of cement, five billion slanted seats and a hole cracked through the center seam roof so that smoky gray sky can show through, rain or shine.

After all these years, I’m still not used to crowds.
I felt small and insignificant quite a bit of the time I was there, or while walking around the nearby neighborhoods.
It’s hard not to feel inconsequential among throngs like that, gigantic buildings like that with their towering advertising and shimmering squad car bright lights.
When you’re standing in line with two hundred other people waiting to use the restroom or buy a beer, you start to feeling a bit like an animal being herded here and there, at the whims of the crowd’s discretion.
At least I did.

A person can even start to understand the mob mentality that ends up rioting.
I’m not saying I would ever riot or loot because I wouldn’t, but I can kind of see how people could very easily get wound up, how a bonfire could burn pretty tall and for quite a long time.

On Saturday, one guy was lying on the parking lot ground trying to fend off policemen.
Another guy was wobbling down the road, barely being held together with help from his friend.
Others were shouting slurs and slanders against opposing teams.
And this was all before the game started.

It wasn’t totally out of control, however. Not at all. You can’t really maneuver that many people without order.
Still, I found myself being consumed by the magnitude, the scale of everything. It was intense, daunting and exhilarating.
Actually, I felt like an eight year old.
I kept thinking: People really take their sports seriously.
I kept thinking: This is very fun, but it’s not like it means anything all that important.
And then, inside the stadium, the guy behind me started shouting at the other team’s fan and I thought, Well, for whatever reason, this is quite important to him. His allegiance and this game carries meaning for him.

…We all have our biases, our passions.
On Facebook this morning I read a post from a writer I admire (who’s also somewhat renown in the virtual world) saying something such as: “I detest football in every form and don’t want to have anything to do with it. I despised being made to feel I have to like sports simply because I am a male in America.”
I get what he’s saying. But why so vitriolic? It’s almost no different than the boisterous fan at the stadium who is spewing his views at anyone close enough to hear it.

…I guess we all wear costumes and manifest who think we are by the way we play out our lives, who we engage with, where our minds take us in times of fruition or despair.
I guess there are lots and lots and lots of us and we are very much alike while being distinct and different, too.

2011-11-25T12:27:00.001-08:00

--SOMEONE HAS TO BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE, SO IT MIGHT AS WELL BE ME

…I've got a story, "Mixed Breed" up at Troubadour 21 and another story, "The Loss of All Things Tame" up at Housefire. Both are also here under "Words in Print."
The latter story was one I was queried for and given that title. I like being queried. It's one of my favorite things. It's like being asked to dance. Like being asked to Tolo.

…A new favorite thing of mine is "Words With Friends" which is an app on your phone. It's basically Scrabble and you can play with anyone anywhere.
Yesterday I got it on with a dozen people. One was Dorianne Laux. Dorianne Laux!! She's like one of the most famous poets around. I have three of her books.
If you play "Words With Friends" shoot me an invite and we'll have it out.

..Another thing I like is laughing. I like that a lot. I laugh loud and freely. I'm not afraid to cackle in a theater. Many times I laugh at things other people don't think are funny. Most of the time I laugh a second or two before the crowd does. I don't think that makes me any smarter at all, but I think I am a little more receptive to getting the joke. I think I want it more--to be happy. Maybe it's because I am more lonely than most folks.
Shows like "Get Him To The Greek" make me laugh. So does "Arrested Development" and "Saturday Night Live" and all of the "Scary Movies," especially #3.
Kristen Wiig really makes me bust a gut.
Ellen does, too. She's very witty.
And comedy shows.
Here's are the best bits from the recent (well it was three months ago) Charlie Sheen roast.

--"Charlie is the reason a dick with cocaine on it is called a “Sheenish.”
--Mike Tyson has beaten every opponent he’s gone up against except the letter “S.” So please be patient as he sounds out his jokes.
--Mike Tyson, here’s something you’ll never hear in your life: “Nice tattoo.” I mean, come on, you’ve got a tramp stamp on your face. I don’t know whether to be appalled or just finish on it.
--Charlie Sheen, you’ve convinced more women to have abortions than the prenatal test for Downs Syndrome.
--William Shatner, look at your skin. I can’t tell whether you’ve had a face lift or a vagina rejuvenation.
--William Shatner, I've seen men more bloated that were dragged out of a river.
--(from Mike Tyson) If you don't shut up, I'm gonna bite my own ears off.
--Is that Seth McFarland or Chaz Bono with guyliner?
--Charlie’s nostrils are so snotty and filled with cocaine that he calls them the Hilton Sisters.
--Charlie, if you’re "winning," you’re obviously not at a child custody hearing.
--Charlie’s meltdown was so epic that Al Gore is doing a documentary on it.
--There’s Brooke Mueller, Charlie’s ex. Brooke’s not very bright, unless Charlie’s throwing a lamp at her."

My friends make me laugh, too.

…Today I am going to spend the afternoon and evening playing shuffleboard with my best friend who lives in Portland.
This is the kind of shuffleboard that has a salted table and you toss metal pucks down one end trying to get your pucks closest to the edge to score.
It's the kindof shuffleboard that's hard to find, that is usually only available in dive bars with bail bondsman phone numbers posted on the ratty walls in front of rank-smelling urinals.
But we both love the game.
We can play for hours.
We usually turn into kids, punching each other and swearing a lot and coming up with pithy things to say.
I'm sure we're going to laugh a lot.
Just imagine that.

2011-11-23T09:53:00.001-08:00

--YOU WOULD BE SO PROUD OF ME

…Good morning/afternoon/evening where you are.
I hope you are happy today.
I hope you are feeling inspired.
I hope you are grateful.

It's raining here. Last night/yesterday I spent ten hours in a car driving or stopped or going five miles per hour in snow with flakes the size of paper plates.
When I got home--after passing fallen trees and mounds of leaves on the street--my power was out.
There's something about an outage that forces you to be grateful. It has a way of stripping off the husk of extravagance and the unnecessary.
We played card games with a lantern.

…I went ahead and culled the best bits out of Lidia Yuknavich's memoir, "The Chronology of Water." Even if you're not a writer, even if you don't like to read, I think there will be a least a few things here that will resonate with you. If not, let me know…

"I am a woman who talks to herself and lies.

There are many ways to drown.

So here's the deal. About family, you have to make it up.

I believe in art the way other people believe in God.

In water, like books, you can leave your life.

Maybe forgiveness is just that. The ability to admit someone else's story. To give it to them. To let it be enunciated in your presence. It's your job not to flinch.

It is possible to carry life and death in the same sentence. In the same body.

When the thing you are living for dies right in front of you, why go on?

It's a sadness that enters us all, just differently I suppose.

There are so many stories to tell about what we do to our bodies.

We've always burned witches.

I think my mother was just trying to drown a sadness which wouldn't lift.

I've never met anyone who hasn't fucked up in their life a time or tow. Royally. I'm pretty sure that's what keeps us connected to one another.

The other thing I'd say is that if we didn’t' have drugs and alcohol, we wouldn't have art.

You see it is important to understand how damaged people don't know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It's a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good. The shame of feeling something good. The same of not believing we deserve to stand in the same room in the same way as all those we admire. Big red A's on our chests.

Let the top of your head lift. See? There are spaces between things. What you thought was nothingness carries the life of it.

Addicts have a problem comprehending gravitas.

The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It's what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things.

I don't need anyone to explain to me why people join gangs. We do it to replace the frame of family. We do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images. To say, I too was here.

This is something I know: damaged women? We don't think we deserve kindness. In fact, when kindness happens to us, we go a little beserk. It's threatening. Deeply. Becauseif I have to admit how profoundly I need kindness? I have to admit that I hid the me who deserves it down in a sadness well. Serioulsly. Like abandoning a child at the bottom of a well because it's better than the life she is facing. Not quite killing my little girl me, but damn close.

Rehab and relapse and remember all start with the letter R.

Sometimes I think my voice arrived on paper.

My very skin knew the tyranny of speaking.

Big enough to fit the rage of a girl.

I didn't know yet that sexuality is an entire continet. I didn't know yet how many times a person can be born.

Women live their lives secretly wanting their lives to become movies.

People are often asking me if the things in my short stories really happened to me. I always think this is the same question to ask of a life--did this really happen to me? The body doesn't lie. But when we bring language to the body, isn't it always already an act of fiction?

There are many ways to love boys and men. Or to let them love you.

Language! What a thunderous mercy, huh?"

2011-11-21T13:04:00.001-08:00

--IF YOU SWING, DON’T MISS

…I have a poem, “Alchemy” and story, “Jackknife” up at A Minor Magazine as well as a poem, “New Shoes” up at Steel Toe Review.
All are also here under “Words In Print.”

…In college some years ago, I majored in Poli Sci.
Political Science.
I also majored in English.
I knew I wanted to be a writer but thought I would be a lawyer instead because that seemed smart and practical.
Growing up, a movie that had a big impact on me was “The Paper Chase.” It was about a young buck going to Harvard Law School in the 70’s. Back then, Harvard Law School had the highest suicide rate of any school—law school, normal college, what have you—in the nation. Few people could handle the intense grind necessary for survival.
The main protagonist-“James Hart,” played by Timothy Bottoms--soon discerns that there are three types of students at Harvard:

1.) There are those that will not be able to handle the pressure and so, in a matter of six months or so, they will flunk out, drop out or commit suicide.
2.) The second group will make it, but they will graduate toward the middle or bottom of the class, having done the required work but nothing outside of requisite scope of assignments. They will become lawyers in time, but at small, nondescript firms.
3.) The third group is an elite one. These are the people who do everything required and then some, always tackling the tough projects, always volunteering, never afraid of putting themselves at risk or in jeopardy of embarrassment. This is the group that will get jobs at the top firms. These are the lawyers who will go on to become judges and super successful attorneys. They are the ones who will even end up shaping our judicial system.
I tend to think life is like that—that all people can be divided into three similar stratas.
In the film, James Hart realizes he’s been coasting mid-level and so he decides he’s going to move into the top tier. He’s very serious about making it, too, so serious in fact that he drops his smoking hot girlfriend (Lindsay Wagner! from “The Bionic Woman” fame) because sex with her is too draining. (!!)
That’s how committed he is. He does the work. He makes some blunders. He graduates top of his class. He gets back with Lindsay (of course he does) and the film ends in one of those soaring crescendos that makes the tiny hairs on your scalp prickle.

So out of college, I got a job clerking at a law firm in Seattle. I did that for a year.
What I realized was I’d romanticized the law. It was nothing like what I’d seen on TV. It was nothing like “The Paper Chase.” No one really cared about truth and justice. Their concern was only about how many hours got billed. They only cared about winning cases regardless if their client/position was the right one. And they would win those cases by hook or by crook, let me tell you.
It made me sick.
It made me sick not only for obvious moral reasons, but also because I thought I’d thrown my whole college education in the crapper…
Four years of college…
A year sewing unemployed old men and old grannies…
I thought I was doomed.
And yet, I survived.
I found a job in fashion, which is funny because I never had any money growing up to be fashionable with.
But I gave the job and the industry and the company everything I had. I pushed myself into that third group.
I sold sweaters. I sold neck ties and argyle vests. I unloaded freight and folded shirts and dusted fixtures and set up sales.
I worked hard and did okay.

Over the years, however, I continued to follow politics and government, both, international and national.
I kept myself educated and up to date on current political affairs.
To me, that’s important. And I try not to be cynical when it comes to government. Lord knows there are enough people to take on that task.
I try to think politicians can do good things, make wise decisions, serve the people, drive the nation toward sustainable prosperity…
But I will say, it’s getting harder and harder to believe in government. Every other day provides another reason to think the cynics are correct.
Today is one of those.
After three months of talks, the twelve members of the specially appointed Debt Relief Committee have concluded they can’t come to an agreement on how to ease the financial knot choking our country’s throat.
What?
Really?
There’s no solution? No compromise?
Good Lord, are we really doomed?

…Sorry. I just had to rant. I feel better now. Sorry for vomiting all over this page.
Here. Here are a few things to make up for it.

“Dear delusional,
You thought that drinking all weekend would make us go away but we're still here. Happy Monday!
Sincerely,
Your Problems”
--Amy Wood

"Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth." Virginia Woolf

"I only require three things of a man: he must be handsome, ruthless and stupid." Dorothy Parker

"Good manners and bad breath will get you nowhere." Elvis Costello

2011-11-19T07:53:00.000-08:00

--AND YOUR FRIENDS SAY, "WHAT IS IT? YOU LOOK LIKE YOU'VE SEEN A GHOST."

...I have two new poems, "Holes" and "A Fortress For Teens" up at Verse Wisconsin for their Earthworks theme. Both are also here under "Words in Print."

…It snowed yesterday. White spikes, spittle, toothpicks, confetti, sand shower, spears salting the sky. It looked pretty and then it didn’t. It reminded me how, if you are brave enough to really examine it, life can be one thing then another.
My favorite snow is big sloppy white Labrador flakes. Maybe it’s something about the way that type of snow coats and hides everything beneath it that makes me feel safe.

…Here is the conclusion of “Reasons I Should Be Dead.”
5.
The bathroom is the warmest pace the heat vent pours out air holding back holding down holding apart some of the noise it’s not my favorite room because of the smell but I go there when they start to yell this time someone kissed someone else you cheating sonofabitch you bitch you bastard and there’s hell to pay I’m a boy supposed to be a man already so I open the door in time to see his oiled obsidian hair glinting open in time to see him shoot an arrow into the closed kitchen window glass shattering breaking apart like angry glaciers and when he turns the bow to me I say to myself “be brave don’t duck don’t run don’t hide we are done here.”
6.
I was too loud in church or not paying enough attention to the pastor or my room was dirty or my thoughts were dirty or I missed “Please” or wasn’t grateful enough or just because because I say so because I’m in charge because this is my house because of some reason or other whatever reason any reason the belt swings and slashes wuuuh wuuuh wuuuh through the air leather helicopter blades that bite and sting but then it stops to be adjusted so the buckle is the end that rains metal teeth bronze nails hail hitting my head my shoulders my arms here’s my heart cut it open go ahead make a mess of things get it over with I won’t hate you if you are quick.
7.
This guy can drink drinks like a fish a whale get him the funnel holy hell man how’re you still standing he’s my hero whatever you do don’t crash on your back man sleep on your stomach remember Janice Joplin and Jimmie H if they say anything else to me it is oatmeal in my ears the stairs reach right up and slap me the halls hit me someone’s got one arm someone the other and I fall a final time until there’s light everything white but not heaven the nurse saying good morning young man I hope you know how lucky you are.
8.
Hey bogart you got a death wish or what? that wasn’t a line more like an avalanche yeah yeah I say wanting to say more but my face is numb down to the roots of my molars eyes jittery ice cubes nose runny or bleeding hair 4th of July sparklers twitching my scalp but none of that matters as much as my heart sprinting up and down the gym shoe stomps booming in my ears bouncing off one wall then the next make it stop make it stop no wait don’t make it stop that’s called dead just slow the pounding please what am I doing here anyway that guy has a thin hockey stick thingy with a boomerang end scraping green felt saying “seven seven out craps” and there are men around me my friends and strangers comic book patches 12 the hard way other numbers and squares dice die my friends my heart my friend what happens here stays here.
9.
Blood taste like licking a rock when I open my eyes I see my eyes staring back at me in the rearview how did I get here why is my car stopped stalled hit something a curb lip swollen star fruit jaw sore must have hit the steering wheel hard no airbag should be dead what time is it I keep cheating time or it keeps throwing me a life line or maybe this is how it tortures me by keeping me alive why does everyone else want it so bad life?
10.
This is not the same as the other times the other times death came for me now I am searching for it at five am in the pitch dark running miles getting in mileage before the marathon is the rationale I tell my wife here it comes sixty five going seventy speeding semi on my side of the road just a hitch a little jump is all it takes and SLAM SPLAT we’re done here finally but that driver he has a wife too or a mom maybe maybe even one that loves him got to be fair play fair don’t fuck it up for other people for other people death is what they run from not to.
11.
The box is white a cream-colored coffin some irony there who called for an open casket is this somebody’s idea of a joke we tell jokes my brothers and I in hushed tones out in the sober foyer us older almost too old to take no longer skinny barefoot boys but men with bellies bald heads grudges and our own bags of sins we shuffle inside no different than dust ourselves sit on the stone hard wooden pews settle unsettle cough spit fidget fart silently “she is with God” the man in glasses says is he a liar we sing about grace “when we’ve been here ten thousand years bright shining as the sun” and then I stand because I am called called the name I was given the one she gave me I walk down an aisle dip my head at the podium I speak do not slur do not tarry I tell the tarnished and the true I don’t use bullets or blades but something falls away something dies inside of me a molting ghost carcass floating through stained glass as I inhale my first breath in this new skin.

2011-11-17T07:04:00.001-08:00

--PEOPLE SHOULD SMILE MORE

…It’s funny how the mind works. Or how mine does, I should say.
Mine jumps around a lot. It goes weird places. It ends up at odd junctures. It talks me out of things and into tight tunnels.
Sometimes it says, “You should really think about getting better at ______.”
Every once in a while it will say, “Remember that time when you could have done ______, but you did _______ instead? Me, too,” it will say. My mind will go on to postulate, “Life would be different if you’d done ______. I’m not sure if it’d be better, but it’d sure as hell be a lot different.”
On the treadmill this morning, I listened to Newton Faulkner (if you’ve never heard Newton, please do yourself a favor and find “Dream Catch Me” on YouTube. you won’t be sorry. cross my heart.)
While I was running and panting and sweating and singing along (“There’s a place I go when I’m alone. Be anyone I wanna be…”) my mind started to play a film reel of my past, not a life-flashing-in-front-of-my-eyes type thing, but more of a selective-moments-of-my-life-flashing-in-front-of-my-eyes situation.
For some reason, I don’t know why, my mind was trying to use my past misdeeds as a way of getting me to grasp a certain concept, one that is spelled:
G-R-A-T-I-T-U-D-E.
And it didn't mean that I should be grateful for material things or friends or any of that.
No.
My mind said, “Hey, I was just thinking.”
So I said, “Oh oh.”
To wit, my mind replied, “Yeah, man, I was thinking that you’re one luckiest dudes I know.”
And I replied with, “Is that right?”
“Mos def,” my mind said. “Let me show you what I mean.”
And then we did this kind of Ebenezer stroll through my life, highlighting a number of times where, quite honestly, I should have been killed.
Car accidents.
Domestic disputes.
A rafting trip gone awry.
Stupid adolescent experimentation.
Stupid adult experimentation…
In all, I came up with 11 (yikes!) different times that I should have died, been killed, terminated, done in.
Funny thing is I wasn’t even trying very hard and I came up with 11 Johnny on the spot.
But I did get off the treadmill, shower, and sit down and write an experimental version of those eleven called, “Reasons I Should Be Dead”
Here are the first four parts of what I wrote, before I get to adulthood…

Reasons I Should Be Dead

1.
Before I was or am death comes for me rambunctious sloppy drunk death knocking over a headboard a mirror breaking a lamp or plate black blast to the ribs to her back belly uppercut that shakes the planet the lake the ocean the soup that I swim and float in becoming a typhoon while I bob like an upended boat but do not drown.
2.
Before I am fully me death returns again sneaky bastard while I’m sleeping slumbering dreaming not snoring death and death’s hand stabbing a thin metal rod into the milky cloud where I am hiding hibernating death poking and jabbing at the juice and fleshy walls tearing red gashes into this embryonic tent angling aiming for me a slippery fish who will not be so easily aborted.
3.
After I am born the woman driving the car takes long pulls on her cigarette as if she’s french kissing a snake made of smoke touching a finger to the edge of her white cat-eyed glasses “have I seen you before?” I say only saliva slips out over my lips like goo she is sad is annoyed she sneers down at me on the seat and says “what?” I recognize the voice I want to say “it’s you isn’t it? you’re my mother?” but my words my thoughts are gurgles Gerber baby food the thunderbird trundles over some tracks then shuts off even though Charlie Pride goes on singing does my ring hurt your finger when you go out at night I want to ask “why are we stopping?” but bubbles—two or three floaters—slide out of my mouth instead this is where grandmother died not necessarily here but on a set of railroad tracks somewhere in the middle of the night no one knowing if it was an accident or on purpose I heard them talking—the one time they were civil instead of two angry attack dogs—making funeral arrangements maybe we will go like gran “mom we’d better move a train might come” those are the words in my constipated head that become nothing but soapsuds and blue breath on the way out of my mouth “I can tell I can just tell” mother says “you’re going to be like all the rest a useless piece of shit.”
4.
I am in another car and the man who is my new dad who is not my real dad my blood dad he has the convertible caddie going very fast the car black as evening long like a parade float but sleek I wish the wind weren’t so rough I wish I wasn’t freezing I wish my brothers would stop saying “faster! faster!” I wish my mom would stop holding onto her head scarf and use it for a parachute a homemade airlift cape that could get us out of here but instead we go over a hill leaping the crest like a slow motion trout and I think this is where death will get me right here all of us together a bunch of broken bones bloody bits or a burnt out car nothing to do but scream and pray my soul escapes somehow.

2011-11-15T06:03:00.001-08:00

--TELL ME ANYTHING YOU WANT, ANY OLD LIE WILL DO

…I have a new story, “The Drunk” up at Troubadour 21 and here under “Words in Print.”
This was one of the twenty or so "label" pieces ("Daughter," "Brother," "Son," "The Fan," "The Prosecutor") that I wrote for a chapbook (which never came out) called, "People You Know By Heart."

…Yesterday I sent some stories out to people who had queried me and I got the fastest acceptance of my life. I sent the piece out at 11:01 am and got a reply accepting it for publication at 11:09.
Now that's greased lightning.

…I thought this news was encouraging, or somewhat anyway:
When asked by CBS News, “Have you read a book in the last month?” these were the answers:
Yes –68% 74% of those were women, 65% under 30 years of age)
Yes –62% Men
No —32%

…I thought this was discouraging:
73% of critics gave last week’s #1 grossing film (“Immortals”) an unfavorable rating.
3% of all critics gave Adam Sandler’s new film a favorable rating versus the 61% of audience-goers who liked it.
That seems to be a big disconnect. The message is: Dumb down you movies. Go ahead, make inane films because people will not only pay to watch them, but afterward they will say bizarre things such as, “That was a really good motion picture. I think I’ll recommend this to my friends!”
I’m not a snob berating family-friendly fare, but when theaters are saturated with week after week of horrid films it gets discouraging. Film is an art form. They are print stories brought to life.
Just makes me a little sad.

…Did you know that there are now 7 billion people on the planet?
Did you know that the world consumes 1.7 cans of Coke every day?
That’s a lot of folks.
That’s a lot of soda.

…How do you feel about airports?
I had never flow on a real airplane until I was 24. I was terrified. Not only am I afraid of heights, but I was frightened by airports, not knowing how they functioned, where to go, what to do, etc.
My very first flight on a plane was from Seattle to Hong Kong. Yikes. And then three days later Tokyo. A month later it was New York City. Within a year it was Scotland, Italy, England and NY again.
I was a clothing buyer and that’s what buyers did—they flew to places and bought merchandise from vendors so as to resell it to intrigued customers.
Since then I’ve flown scads and scads of miles. Even still, airports still make me nervous and agitated. I always feel like I’m doing it wrong, that I’m going to make a mistake and get in the B lane instead of the D lane, miss my flight, miss my connecting flight, arrive at my destination hours late, thereby screwing things up for my waiting ride.
Mostly, though, when I’m in an airport I feel very small and insignificant. I especially feel that way in any airport that is not SeaTac.
To be surrounded by thousands of people and not know a single person is, to me, very daunting. Watching all those people with their lives and cell phones and packs and bags, purses and ear buds going wherever it is they’re going—it all sort of turns me inside out.
Shit starts to get deep for me sometime.
Questions can start to fly:
“Who are all these people?”
“Where are they going?”
“Why do they all seem so busy, focused and full of direction?”
“Why am I here?”
“What the hell am I doing?”
“What’s my purpose?”
“Am I sure I’m going in the right direction?”
Inside airports, the world seems both big and compressed. Inside airports, you can hide but not really ever get lost. Everyone inside an airport is a little like a convict looking to get out, eager to get on with their lives.
I don’t know about you, but it kind of fascinates me.

…More wind today. Right now. Bold and belligerent as hell, it comes right at me, right at my windows, spitting cedar spikes, clawing at the glass like an unleashed animal, a hungry demon with razor tipped paws, a rabid Doberman that might actually crack through no different than one of the Darkseekers from I Am Legend.
Behind and beneath is the black old man water wrinkled foaming without foam ridge after ridge lapping slapping turbulent black tea green tea no duck or gull brave enough to sit there no eagle or hawk flying overhead. Even the sky looks worried, as if there’s not enough light getting through the patchy areas, as if this place on the planet has decided to play a different game, using its own rules, having turned Mother Nature against herself.
All I can do is watch and listen and write. My defense is that weak. If I’m taken captured or swallowed up into the vortex, tell them there’s nothing to worry about. Tell them I am writing a better story from all the way up there.

2011-11-13T08:35:00.001-08:00

--AND THAT WHITE DRESS YOU’RE WEARING, HAVEN'T SEEN IT FOR A WHILE

…Yesterday I had three stories accepted. The day before, I spent an hour or so submitting. It had been a while.
Getting work accepted is sort of addicting. It’s addicting if you have an addictive-type personality, which I have.
Clearly, the compulsion has to do with needing to feel valued. So I guess there are a lot of times when I feel valueless. Is that just me? Or do you ever find yourself in that place?

…On the treadmill I pulled out The Airborne Toxic Event. The first album. They’re very good. You should check them out. Make sure to get the album with “Sometime Around Midnight” on it. That song is pretty brilliant for a lot of reasons.

…I’ve started watching “The Wire.” I’m six episodes in. I’d give it a solid B. When you don’t have a unique premise like “Dexter” (vigilante serial killer kills rampant murders that the justice system can’t apprehend) or “The Sopranos” (present day New Jersey mob boss battles with duality and sees a psychiatrist), the acting and characters become even more important than the actual plot.
I’m going to give it a few more turns.

…It’s possible to be lonely in a crowded room. It’s possible to be huddled in the midst of a lot of other people, to be the center of attention in that particular huddle, to be the one speaking while everyone else is listening, somewhat rapt, and feel very alone.

…I wrote these a while ago:

Exuberant Inertia

The vapor of your ghost
hangs like gossamer.
Was there always this much space?
Were the walls once red?
How about that chair?
I remember you leaning over the bed post
dripping sweat and eating a meaty chunk
of strawberry that bled juice down your chin.
You snarled and
curled your finger,
claimed you wanted to feed me.

Now we are too old to turn back.
I have no reserves.
One thing is not like the other
and fingerprints are only useful for felonies.

So I step out onto the sun porch,
blinded by bright white glare.
Geese blare
as they stripe the lake surface with their shadows.
A fish twists in midair.
Shore-side,
two kids squeal about the icy water.
All around me life pushes on,
--not even pushing, really,
rather simply moving without effort.
Gliding by
without you anywhere in it.

This Time

I have spent the day
considering the archeology of your kiss
wondering about the line of your lipstick,
where it’s going,
if there is thirst involved,
who’s going along for the ride
this time.

My Elite

Kant and Proust push through,
shoulders high
slinging blades and barbs,
spittle.
You join in with coiffed curls
and a fingertip answer
about sexual duality
and gender inconsistencies.
Sometimes I could just puke.

2011-11-11T11:32:00.001-08:00

--I'VE BEEN YOUNG AND I'VE BEEN OLD BUT I HAVE NEVER SEEN THE RIGHTEOUS FORSAKEN

…I have two interviews up at Scribophile that had somehow slipped by me. They were posted late October. Anyway, they’re here listed as “Scribophile Interview, Part 1” and “Scribophile Interview, Part 2” under “Words in Print.”

…Today is Veteran’s Day. 11/11.
Veteran’s Day is an important occasion in my family. Four of my brothers went into the miltary. One is still serving.
Their experiences changed their lives. You can see the way it’s been worked into the fabric of who they are. Sometimes it’s very obvious—a broke down body, a flag tattoo spread across the entire expanse of a back. Other times it’s a subtle hitch of the eye when a certain word is said.
My oldest brother got sent to Vietnam when I was ten. I remember watching the news, Walter Cronkite, reporting on various battles, showing the black body sacks being lifted, airborne into helicopters. You could tell Walter didn’t approve. A small film camouflaged the fact that he was more than a little bit fed up and disgusted with the war. News people were supposed to be unbiased when reporting, but Walter was always like that gentle Grandfather who was strong yet not afraid to cry in front of you.
I wrote a paper called, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again, or Does He?” I was in 7th Grade and the teacher made a big fuss over it. At first she questioned whether I really wrote it. She told me I was saying things adults said. She asked how I could write something without having experienced it firsthand (which is what people would continue to ask me to this day.)
My brother, Charlie, served on the demilitarized zone, the line drawn between North and South Vietnam. However, it was anything but “demilitarized.”
His squad came under attack the first week they were there and a buddy of my brother’s got hit with a missile while in a trench. (CAUTION: READ THE NEXT LINE AT YOUR OWN RISK). The explosion blew my brother’s buddy’s body apart, his head flew through the air, through smoke and haze, dirt and splattered blood, before landing my brother’s lap like some horrifying fruit.
That’s one of a few stories my brother told. There were others that were worse. I know, how can there be worse? But there were.
Eventually my brother won The Bronze Star. It’s the fourth highest award a service man or woman can receive for distinguished bravery, heroism and meritorious participation. My brother carried a severely wounded solider over five miles on his back. Every day since then, he’s paid for that act physically. He walks with a cane and some mornings—all these years later--the pain is so severe that he doesn’t get out of bed.
Last week when I was home for my mother’s funeral, I asked if he’d do it over again knowing what he knows now and without hesitation, he said, “I’d do it in a second.”
I am not that brave. In fact, it’s difficult for me to comprehend that kind of daring and courage.
--When I was a boy, my parents somehow got a hold of a stash of military rations. They felt it important that we know what our brother was feasting on each day in the muggy jungles of Nam, so they pried open the tins and sliced up the coagulated globs. Everything came out of a can and was a combination of pasty and dry, like Elmer’s glue rolled in sawdust, like dog food dusted with someone’s cremated ashes.
That night I studied the only picture we had of him in Nam. In it, he’s stacking mortar shells into a massive pyramid taller than himself. Each copper-colored shell looked double the size of a king Salmon. My brother was smiling and shirtless.
It was raining that night, and after dinner I felt very strange—proud of my brother yet guilty for not being in the service myself, even if I was only 10 at the time. I remember (and this is going to sound really stupid, but it’s the truth) taking my shirt off, going into the rocky hills behind out trailer and walking bare-chested in the icy rain for several hours until I could no longer stand it. I guess I thought by doing so, I was somehow proving I could sacrifice as well as my brother, that I had gumption and moxie.
--When I lived in Virginia, my brothers all came back for a reunion. It was a touching time. At dinner I heard them tell raucous tales. They spoke a common language, employing some terms that meant nothing to me unless I asked for clarification.
I heard some heart-searing stories about the Vietnam War, ones I’d never heard before, ones I’m sure I will never hear again, stories I won’t ever forget.
The second day we went to the Mall, to the Vietnam Memorial. It’s a long black marble wall built into the ground, sort of like a retaining wall. The names of every dead service man and woman, plus those still missing, are etched into the stone. No one spoke. Not my brothers and not any of the other dozens of people. Most touched their fingers against the names carved there. Some had tracing paper and would pencil a reverse stencil and lift a name off. There was a book on a pedestal there were a person could look up someone. My oldest brother spent a lot of time flipping through the pages, his breath catching every so often. He cried but didn’t speak a word.
5,604 Americans have died fighting in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars since November 3, 2011.
58,794 Americans died fighting in Vietnam.
My third oldest brother is a Colonel. While we were in DC that time, I got to see him in full uniform. Everywhere we went that day, if a soldier was passing, they stopped at once, pivoted, clicked their heels and saluted. It was a startling thing to witness.
When I was in the corporate world, I more or less gave up my life for my job. I sacrificed time with my kids and special events. But I wasn’t literally sacrificing my life. I was just walking in the rain, without a shirt, getting very cold and frost-bitten.
…Obviously I’m a bit in awe of my brothers, just as I am any service person. I hope we do right by them. I hope we get out of the wars soon. I hope we don’t cut their benefits. I hope we help them find jobs and transition back into society. Those things seem like the bare minimum.
Here are three poems I wrote that were published last year at Rusty Truck. Each is more or less nonfiction:

The Wall
We went as brothers
from different towns to this one,
meeting at the memorial,
our pasts broken down by
slab after slab of gray granite.
People moved like solemn shapes
no one speaking.
Black rain pecked our skins
but those were tears on Charlie’s face.
There might have been a million names.
There might have been but one.
War is an unscrupulous host.
A young boy my son’s age
Dragged his fingers across rows of engraved letters
I thought my brothers might be angered by the child’s act
but instead my eldest grinned and said,
“That’s why I went.
For him.”

For Those
For those born later
they would only know it as the bad war
the mistake
the one they made so many movies about.
At the time, protesters received more attention
and history may never right that wrong
or the ignorance of a new generation
but to the men
to the women
to the souls who went there,
I bow down
and I say,
“God bless you.”

Veteran
His brother took him to a pool hall,
bought him tequila and beer chasers,
farted out loud and
commented over the texture and vibrato of each.
His brother laughed at anything—
his own jokes,
the old geezer with a chin stuck inside his mug,
the skipping juke box saying, “You give love a bad naye-naye-naye-naye.”
This place had the classic arcade games—Pac Man and Space Invaders.
Around 2:00 am,
Stucky threw them the keys and said to close up,
as if it was something he’d done a lot of times before.
He studied the homemade tattoos on his brother’s forearms.
Everything was short, choppy and to the point,
no word or ink mark wasting time on being clever:
Nam
R.I.P.
JayDed
Old Glory Hole
The little gray bug men
marched across the screen in neat rows.
His brother shot them down with his finger beating the sweaty red button.
He killed as many as he could.
He seemed happy.
_______________________

2011-11-09T09:21:00.001-08:00

--I DON’T BELIEVE THAT ANYBODY FEELS THE WAY I DO ABOUT YOU NOW

…Is there anything that makes you feel more vulnerable than sitting/laying in the dentist chair while two people poke inside your numbed mouth using needles and electric drills that screech and smoke?
Can’t be, can there?
Perhaps gynecology visits for women. That would be unnerving. Just the thought is more than a little unsettling to me.
Yesterday I was fitted for a crown. I’d much rather have been fitted for a tux or even a bra.
Thankfully my son wisely suggested that I bring an iPod to squelch the drilling cacophony. I put on Ryan Adams and kept my thumb on the volume path slide and would turn it up as loud as I could take it without making my ears bleed.
Yikes.
I went through 23 Ryan Adams songs during the time I was there.
Afterward the left side of my face was numb until the afternoon. I felt like Elephant Man.
What’s funny (is that the right word? Probably not) is I didn’t go to the dentist until I was 23 years old. Yep.
My mother didn’t believe in dentists, or so she said. Really, I think it was just that we couldn’t afford it.
On my first trip to a dentist, he told me I had no cavities and the first thing he asked me was if I grew up in North Dakota. I said, “How did you know?” He said, there’s in fluoride in the water there that shields the teeth from cavities.
So there’s at least one thing good about North Dakota.
I remember flossing once and my mother later telling my dad, “You should see it; he cleans his teeth with a string.”
Anyway, getting fitted for a crown isn’t much fun and though it wasn’t anything like childbirth, nothing even remotely close to it pain-wise, for some reason yesterday’s experience gave me a renewed appreciate for mothers.

…I'm still enamored with Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir, "The Chronology of Water."
"You see it is important to understand how damaged people don't always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It's a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good. The shame of feeling something good. The shame of not believing we deserve to stand in the same room in the same way as all those we admire. Big red A's on our chests."

…Today, in just a few minutes after I read some submissions for Metazen, I am going to work on the novel. It's been a while. This week I've written a few thousand words--six pieces in all, kind of stylistically experimental for me.
Here's what I wrote yesterday, which is more or less a true event from my childhood:

Twisters

I am six almost seven when the twister comes do you see it do you see it my brother asks it must be as far away as Dickinson or Fargo the hill we live on gives a view of the flat land and on it this afternoon with the sky gone gray as night this twister is a manic marauder a cone-shaped thing alladin’s angry genie unleashed will it take us I ask you’re such a scaredy cat my brother says but he doesn’t realize I’m not really afraid he sleeps downstairs and can’t hear their fights mom’s muffled shriek’s her squeals mirror glass shattering atop their dresser pipe or fist hitting the wall going through it on the other side of mine my little indian warrior clock with its big brown eyes coming free of its nail breaking off one pony tail when it hits the floor and bounces dead as I always knew hate you hate you I hate you she screams and so he hits her his father does hits or slaps I’m leaving you you’re a monster oh yeah I’ll show you a monster last night was the worst every evening is bad but last night the floor shook bombs exploded I expected smoke expected flames to burn their room to cinders but breakfast came and mom was at the stove frying flap jacks wearing a head scarf and jackie o sunglasses smoking silent as a hollow log saying stop your gawking and eat go on you let it get cold and I’ll whoop you sure as satan and now in the distance the cyclone is swiveling its smoke hips and I imagine it sucking up barns and buildings and houses with screaming children and astonished parents milk cows and chickens hogs farms being rolled up like rugs the moss place folger’s farm chicory square all of them slurped up that massive funnel of dirt while I wait our turn kenny says we better get downstairs come on you stupid turd I shake him off fine go ahead and die see if I care he might mean it he might know more than I think there the twister pivots like a jerky dust dancer moving through smolinski’s plot swiveling mowing pulverizing breaking things apart wherever it finds them a motorcycle comes flying this way hurled a mile through space like a chrome asteroid this is it this is it this is deliverance this is god acting saying I’ve heard your prayers this is his wrath that I’ve read about only at the bottom of bell street where the coolie sits the twister veers east without warning east east why east I’ve been waiting my whole life my short life willing eager to give it up and there you go god there you go you do not exist don’t tell me any more lies there you go no different than the gray ghost vapors my mother blows out of her nose when she smokes mom dad and me the fight between three maybe not tonight but tomorrow tomorrow the twister will reappear a different cyclone but just as savage and cruel and it might finally be the one that takes me the one that ends it all.

2011-11-07T10:27:00.000-08:00

--I THINK THE WAY YOU EAT YOUR TOAST IS ADORABLE

…I have a new story, "Maps" up at Curbside Splendor, a story, "The Hard Dance" at Awosting Alchemy and a poem, "Sunglasses," about domestic violence up at S/Word.
All of them are also here under "Words in Print."

…My hands are shaking.
I hate that.
It would be hell to have Parkinson’s. I just voted and my script was all jagged as if I was signing my name with a razor blade.
Prior to voting, I blew all the cedar shavings off the decks. It took over an hour. The vibrations from that machine get into my nervous system somehow, and I ended up being numb in one arm and have a twitchy thing going on in the other.
This typically lasts an entire day.

…Prior to all that, I ran five miles on the treadmill.
I listened to Alicia Keys.
I think she is a doll.
I think she should make dozens and dozens of albums.
I hope her marriage survives. I'm not betting on it, but I wish she would find love and that it would stick.

…I’m almost done with Lidia Yuknavitch's astonishing memoir, "The Chronology of Water." Her story, delivered, ironically, without a chronological timeline, is rendered in ruthless truth and her writing is lyrical and lovely.
Here are a few samples:

"I didn't know yet that sexuality is an entire continent. I didn't know yet how many times a person can be born."
"Women live their lives secretly wanting their lives to become movies."
"People are often asking me if the things in my short stories really happened to me. I always think this is the same question to ask of a life--did this really happen to me? The body doesn't lie. But when we bring language to the body, isn't it always already an act of fiction?"
"There are many ways to love boys and men. Or to let them love you."

Do yourself a favor and get her book.

…Last week before my mother died, before the funeral and all that, I spent a full day reading stories for Scribophile. I was guest judge for a contest they were holding, a paying contest.
Most of the stories were very bland. Quite a lot of them were about zombies or robots or other weird sci fi shit.
I found three winners pretty easily. But that's all I found. It was too easy. I wanted it to be struggle. I expected it to be very, very difficult to hone it down to three. So what does that tell me/us? there are too many writers? Everyone thinks they're a writer?
Don't get me wrong--I was happy to be judge, honored and flattered to be asked. I just wished there would have been better writing.

…One of my favorite things is laughing. Saturday Night Live can pretty much always make me laugh. It's not as sharp this year, but there are still some good gags.
Laughing reminds me that I'm alive and that life is a good thing.

…Another of my favorite things is being asked by someone to write a story. I guess it's validating--having someone like your writing enough to solicit a story or poem.

…I am sometimes on Facebook longer than I'd like. I get sidetracked on it. But there are other people, people you know, who are on there ALL THE TIME. These people also have jobs. These people also edit lit journals and have a spouse and probably take time to bathe and dine and go to the restroom.
These people are writers.
How do they do it? Where do they find the time? And why is it so important for them to share every inane detail of their life?
I honestly don't get it.

…One other thing I love is Amazon. Amazon is dangerous.
The other day I ordered the new Jack's Mannequin and Laura Marling (because Ryan Adams name-checked her), two Kathy Acker's books, Jen Knox's book, and Gene Weingarten's, "The Fiddler in the Subway" about classical violists who anonymously pose as homeless people playing in the subway stations.
I can't wait for that box to arrive.
Oh, and I ordered Drake's new disc.

…Here are four things to ponder on a Monday:

"The innocent and beautiful have no enemy except time." Yeats

"Nobody has ever measured,
not even poets,
how much the heart can hold."
~ Zelda Fitzgerald

"When I sing, I feel like when you're first in love. It's more than sex. It's that point two people get to they call love, when you really touch someone for the first time, but it's gigantic, multiplied by the whole audience. I feel chills." Janis Joplin

"There is a smile of love,
And there is a smile of deceit,
And there is a smile of smiles
In which these two smiles meet."
~ William Blake

2011-11-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

--ONE DAY WE'RE GOING TO LIVE IN PARIS. I PROMISE.

…I was really excited to have a story, "My Mother, Marilyn Monroe" named Best of the Web by Sundress Press and Dorothee Lang.

The story is about the mom character in my novel "House of Rats" who dresses up in costumes. Her daughter thinks the mother is going nuts. Her son, the narrator, thinks the opposite, that--following her husband's suicide--she is finally starting to live.

And then some stuff happens.

…Death has a way of allowing us to live better…

…So, I'm home now.
Got here last night.
Thank you for all who were so kind about my own mother's passing.
The world seems small in a good way. A lot my best friends now are people I've never even met, not physically anyway.
You find out how much people care about you when you get knocked down and dinged up.
And it’s not that they buy you a drink or send you flowers. They’re just there.
“There” can be anywhere.
Nicolette Wong, a talented writer from Hong Kong, is someone I "talk" to frequently via this blog or Facebook or email. Same with Maree in New Zealand and others in Germany, Scotland, etc.
But having cyber friends can be tricky. It often takes a lot of reading between the lines. It takes having to bend sentences so that the words form facial expressions. You have to throw your darts accurately, and you have to use the right ones or what you mean to say can end up meaning the opposite.
I'm not a huge fan of the exclamation mark, but every once in a while a well placed ! adds a little something, like Cayenne pepper in a meatloaf.
Someone once posted, "It's the internet. It's not real."
But it is real.
It has certainly felt that way these last few days. You can tell when someone is being genuine and authentic, even if they're half a globe away, even if they are someone you've never met.

…In college I took a lot of writing classes. My major was Poli Sci and I was going to be a lawyer because that seemed like a good choice, fiscally. But in my heart I wanted to be a writer and ended up double majoring, adding English to the mix.
I took scads of writing classes. In one, I wrote a story about a dysfunctional group of brothers who gather together for their mother's funeral, and afterward, after the wake, they sit down to play a game of Parcheesi, something they did quite often as young boys. During the game playing, secrets spill out, grudges get matched and vented. There's a lot of anguish and tension. Wounds are laid bare in order to be cleansed and then sutured. I think it was one of the better pieces I'd written up until then. I was 19. My professor gave me A for "The Parcheesi Game."
It was strange how similar yesterday was to that story.
--Following the service and burial we all met in the trailer where I grew up. It was very crowded to say the least. The food was not what my mother would have cooked. Most of the crowd kept taking smoke breaks. A few drank canned beer. Initially it was awkward and tense. Men are not very skilled social beings. Throw in blood line and a tarnished history and, well, it be very uncomfortable.
But eventually it was okay.
It was fine to be a little bit vulnerable. To not feel threatened. To saunter up to a brother you hadn't seen in 30 years and say, "So tell me what your life is like now."
It was all right to play Parcheesi again.
Death has a way of allowing us to live better.

…At the funeral one brother leaned over to another brother and, speaking of Mom, said, "God better like to eat."
Then he added, "And he better not have a problem following orders."
A little bit of levity that was quite accurate.

…I feel good. I feel fine. The lake is very still outside my window--a sheet of wax paper. A few geese keep flying across at tree height and on the south end steam or fog has bearded up the boat launch.
It's all quite beautiful.

…Here are a few fun things for a Seattle Saturday:

"A story has no reason whatsoever to exist unless it's about trouble." Les Edgerton

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.” Oscar Wilde

"When we sit or when we run in place with images and sounds rather than flee farther into our rational minds, the imagination quietly reawakens to the possibilities of wonder and awe." Charlotte Beck

"The influence of each human being on others in this life is a kind of immortality." John Quincy Adams

"Let everyone sweep in front of his own door and the whole world will be clean." Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days." Sylvia Plath

2011-11-02T07:08:00.000-07:00

This is a eulogy for my mother and a small tribute to the family she left behind…

Like my brothers who are here today, I grew up on the north side of poor and didn’t realize it until there was nothing to be done but work hard, listen well, mind yourself, respect others and—if you were able--share.
Sharing is a kind of bravery when you don’t have much. It’s Biblical in the purest sense.
My dad is, and always was, a genius with his hands, a mechanical artiste hardly matched by anyone in the entire state. Time and time again he tried to share his knowledge of mechanics with me, but I preferred poetry to Peterbuilts, books instead of bolts. Lovingly, he called me “Sally” and “Flower Child” because I had long hair and wore puka shells like David Cassidy, my idol, from “The Partridge Family.” So, whether or not he meant to, my dad taught me that it was okay to be different, to be a nonconformist, so long as you were true to yourself.
From my brothers I didn’t get a lot of advice, but I did get mounds and mounds of Hand Me Downs. I’d get ornate western shirts with pearl snap buttons, yoke-stitched shoulder seams, and silver-tipped collars. They were fine shirts, something a countrified Elvis might wear—but they were usually four sizes too big for me and typically most had an unbleachable rust-stained patch of Ring Around Collar.
I also got their coats and gloves and hats and ratty old sweaters that resembled boneless cats. It was always an honest thrill to receive a new article of clothing because I figured if the item had once been good enough for them, it was doubly adequate for me—as if by sweating on the garments, my brother’s had somehow doused and blessed them with Holy water..
For many years, I owned exactly one pair of jeans. Once, during baseball practice, a fellow player slid in high and cleated me in the knee so rough and hard and deep that it splayed my tendons open like lasagna, and you could even see bone. When I got back from being stitched up, Mom washed those jeans and sewed the flap and I continued to wear those pants until I outgrew them (Ironically, the pattern formed a huge L, as if I was wealthy and had started monogramming all my clothes, even work-play apparel.
Because I was shy and essentially friendless, I spent a lot of time in our kitchen. I would read at the table or practice my penmanship by copying the first fifty pages of the dictionary. Every day Mom was there cooking. She used oversized kettles and pans, gigantic, steroid-infused cutlery, hardcore cookware you’d expect to see in the military.
There were a lot of us kids, many hungry boys with insatiable appetites, and she meant to take care of us.
So she’d toil for hours on end, Mother would, dropping bags of potatoes into a cloud of steam, using a rolling pin to flatten a blanket of bread dough, slathering glaze over a tin of caramel rolls.
It was all very workman-like yet fascinating. Watching her cook, or bake, was akin to witnessing Michelangelo paint, Rodin sculpt or Lawrence Welk smarmily conducting his Champagne Orchestra.
Mother made homemade donuts and bread and cream puffs and Aunt Anne’s cake and Glorified Rice and dumplings, German dishes with strange names like Fleisch Keeklah that really amounted to nothing more thanfried dough and hamburger. I thought she must be a chemist, a magician, or at the very least, the best cook on the planet.
When I’d run out of things to tell her, I’d make them up. I don’t know if she knew I was lying or if she was even that interested in my outlandish stories, but Mom let me ramble on and on. I was really just trying to impress her. Back then, a huge goal of mine had been to make my Mother love me without condition.
One Spring when I got really bored and complained about having nothing to do, Mother handed me a plate of rolls and said, “Here, take this to the Lemelys. They live a mile and half over that hill. Tell them I said you needed to be put to work.”
I had no idea who the Lemelys were or if there was even a house a mile and half over the craggy landscape that was our back yard, but Mom’s instructions were always meant to be carried out, and to veer from them was a very unwise decision—like cheating on your taxes or spouse, like relying on the rhythm method for your birth control.
And so I did. I grabbed the rolls and ran. And just as she’d predicted, there was a house and a kind old man named Homer Lemely who took the caramel rolls with a big grin, handed me a rake, and after watching me work like a fiend for two hours, hired me on the spot.
Work was an important element of our lives—in the lives of being a Kuntz, a Volk, or a Hauff. When you don’t have much, what you do have are two clear-cut choices: to whine about not having anything, or to get busy.
In our family, we were always some sort of busy.
But being busy—for us anyway--often meant getting over yourself, steeping yourself in survival, ignoring embarrassment that others might equate with shame.
We raised milk cows—Kathy and Irene, Go Go and Thunder--that we milked each morning before school. We had chickens that Mom butchered. We had a makeshift garden and after harvesting, Mom would drive me down to Two Schwabbies. Working out a deal with the store manager, I’d be allowed to sell vegetables in front of the store. “Cucumbers, cucumbers, ten cents each!” I’d shout. Invariably I’d see a schoolmate who would gawk then stiffen like an erection, as if I were some diseased horror. Or often times there’d be some lady who would see me, stop and ask, “My God, aren’t you Joe and Alice’s son?” in a horrified voice that might as well have asked, “Aren’t you Michelle and Barrack Obama’s son?” On a good day, I might make four or five bucks, which Mom would collect, note on a ledger, and save for me inside a stained envelope labeled with my name.
During summers, Mom took us to the fruit fields where we picked strawberries, pie cherries, raspberries, and sometimes corn. We were the only white family among groups of Hispanic migrant workers. Mother was a Checker. Her job was to make sure no one loaded the bottom lug or flat with rocks and leaves instead of fruit. Her task was to sign off on each carton, tell workers where to pick, and generally, just run the show. It was a man’s job, but my mother could be as tough and mean as any male when she wanted to, and I think she was--by all accounts--a pretty damn good Checker.
Before The World’s Fair in 1974, Mom would drive a school bus down to the river, to a very sketchy area known as “Skid Row.” Always we arrived before dusk, usually at 4 am. When she’d honk the horn, the bums and winos would saunter out of the foggy dark like constipated zombies. They’d trundle up on the bus, and then mom would drive them to the cherry orchards where they’d pick fruit, get cash money on the spot, sing old Buck Owens songs with their bottles dangling from branches, drunk as one-legged dogs, burping and farting in key. I was 12 and 13 at the time, but I still recall the friendly, rank stench of those bus rides to and from the fields—it was a kind of cat pee-meets-lighter fluid-meets-embalming fluid odor, and to get through the journeys, I plugged my nose and breathed through my mouth. I remember Mom driving, smoking, wearing cat-eye glasses, tapping her fingernail on the steering wheel, looking tough as steel. I think the men on board both feared and respected her. They certainly didn’t give her any guff.
There are a lot of quirky but true stories, similar to those, that I could tell, but time is short and no one likes a story that never ends.
So, lastly, I just like to say that whether she knew it or not, Mom shared a way of living with me, with us.
She taught us how to love and she taught us how not to love.
She was hardly perfect. None of us are. The examples she set were sometimes unorthodox, often far from textbook, never Dr. Spock-approved, but if you looked and listened you could gain a sense of how to survive, even if history was a disloyal friend, even if the brightest odds looked bleak.
Mom taught the value of dollar, the importance of hard work, the value of service to one’s country, exemplified through the examples of my brothers here today.
She taught me that life can in fact be both simple and full at the same time.
She taught me that it’s better to be surrounded by a gaggle of noisy kids than to be sequestered alone in an empty room.
She showed me the importance of family and the necessity of a loyal, loving spouse, and how in the end those things are what’s true, how they become a kind of living legacy.
We don’t pick our parents—none of us do—but we do get to pick what we remember of our parents, or at least how to use what our parents taught us to better inform and shape our life.
My mother, my brothers’ mother, my father’s spouse—she was a complicated and paradoxical woman.
She was many things.
She was a young girl, someone’s daughter, a farmer’s daughter, a farmer, cook, chef, model, lover, spouse, bible salesman, truck driver, field hand, foreman and Mariner’s fan.
She was a tiny stick of dynamite that could take out an entire building or someone’s self-esteem.
She was a lot of things, but in the end, she was my mother. She me—gave us, her children—life.
So it seems only fitting that at a moment like this, on a day like today, that we fill our hearts with kind remembrance, that we give our mother a full measure of gratitude, that we wish her all of the grace and God’s love we would humbly wish for ourselves.
Thank you, and thank you for being here.

2011-11-01T09:43:00.000-07:00

(...from last night when i was without a connection...)

--I WANNA BE SEDATED

…I have ten new micro fictions (each one is 25 words exactly and the titles are all nail polish color names) up at Nicole Scarpato Monaghan’s fun new site, Nailpolish Stories.
They’re also up here at “Words in Print.”

…Today was a productive day on some fronts.
I ran. I read. I took a bath. I submitted some poems to two different sites.

But most of the day I worked on my mother’s eulogy.

Last night late, my Dad called and asked me to give one.

I sort of new he would. I was actually expecting it.

He said, “Heck, you knew her as well as anyone.”

I thought that was an interesting thing to say.

Did I know her as well as anyone? I doubt it. I really do.

The eulogy is four pages long. It was tricky to write. To capture the essence of someone, to celebrate their life truthfully without denigrating it.

I think it turned out all right. I may put it up here before I leave on Wednesday. We’ll see.

I am reading “The Chronology of Water” by Lidia Y. (I can’t remember how to spell her Czech last name and the book is downstairs. It is phenomenal, this memoir. She’s so, so brave. Many of the chapters read like eulogies. That helped me with mine.

Plus Mona Simpson’s eulogy of her brother, Steve Jobs, is running around all over the internet. Her take on her life and their relationship also helped me create a flavor for being honest in a respectful way.
This week I will see brothers and sisters I have not seen since I was 14 years old. I will see others who do like one another. I will see some who vowed never to speak to my mother, and hadn’t for well over a decade.

I once saw an interview with Winona Judd where she said, “Our family put the ‘fun” in dysfunctional.”

My family puts the “dys” in dysfunctional.

But it’ll be okay. I think it will.

…It is Halloween.

Where I am on the planet it is pitch black out. The lake is a sheet of tar, ending only shore-side where some house lights glow.

We will not get a solitary Trick or Treator. We haven’t in the last four years. It’s not an efficient undertaking as it requires too much work to cover this road and make the long trek down our road.

When I was a kid, Halloween was my favorite holiday. Free candy! As much as you want! We used to take pillow cases with us and run door to door as fast as we could. We’d work well into the evening. Halloween is a poor kid’s lottery winning ticket.

I hope you have a great holiday wherever you are.

I hope you are chewing on something sugary and maybe getting a little bit chubby.

…Here are some things I like on Halloween:

New York City – stingiest city for giving out Halloween candy
Washington, DC – third stingiest
Los Angeles – fifth stingiest
"There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self." Aldous Huxley

"We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard." Voltaire

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting." e.e.cummings

"Nothing makes you a hypocrite quite like parenthood." Amy Wood

‎"I've always had this sense that the unexamined fact is like a rattlesnake. It's going to come after you. And you can keep it at bay by always keeping it in your eye line." Joan Didion

"Art is a lie that speaks the truth." Picasso

"What ought one to say then as each hardship comes? I was practicing
for this, I was training for this." Epictetus

"I saw myself when I shut my eyes: space, space, where I am and am not." Octavio Paz

"Don't bother about genius. Don't worry about being clever. Trust to hard work, perseverance and determination." Sir Frederick Treves

"The one thing an aspiring writer must understand is it's hard. If you think it's not, you're not doing it right." Gene Weingarten

2011-10-30T09:48:00.001-07:00

--SO, FOLLOW YOUR HEART AND NOT YOUR HEAD

…I have a new story, “Black Heart” up at Pure Slush and here under “Words in Print.”

It’s a counterpoint piece to Andrew Stancek’s fine, fine story, “Belly Laugh.” The idea is Andrew would write a story and then I would take one, or two of the characters from his piece, and re-design it from a fresh/different perspective and point of view.

It was a lot of fun to write and I really enjoyed working with Andrew, who is an imaginative author and great support to me.

********

…I suppose I should tell you what happened, that my mother died.

This is true, not fiction.

She died yesterday. In the early morning.

I wasn’t there. My father was.

She had been sick a while. A long time, really, but technically, officially sick, since her stroke a few months back, and then early onset dementia.

I wasn’t going to write about this or her, her dying. It seems both outrageously personal and impersonal to write about one’s mother dying, to do so in a blog, to let strangers read your thoughts and garner your emotions, even guess at what you’re thinking or the ways in which you’re reacting.

I’m not sure how to feel about things. I’m doing something very odd here, just thinking out loud with a key board, not even pausing to edit. I am writing this right now not knowing if I will really post it, not knowing if I will finish it or what I’m even intending to say. I’m writing because that is the thing which more often than not helps me cope and sort, escape and survive, understand.

If you know me even a little bit, you know that much of my writing is “dark.” That stems from having a less than bright childhood. There are typically wounded, broken characters in my writing. Many times these are children. Often there is a mother figure present. Are the stories autobiographical? Well, some are. Some are nearly 100% true, yet I’ve just taken to calling them fiction, either to save myself from embarrassment or shame, or for some other reason I can’t readily identify.

Most of the time I’ve taken the germ of an event and contorted it, because without that real kernel there’d be no story. Without that dark truth, I’d not have had the foresight to be able to bend it into an acceptable lie.

Yes, I believe it when people say, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” A lot of mine has been that way.

As far as I know, my mother never read a single story of mine. She knew I was writing full-time these last few years, but it must not have interested her that much. My mother was very much a creature of habit. Adding new things to her plate—even lightweight stuff—would set her off course, put her of kilter so that the natural order of not only her universe was jolted, but so, too were the galaxies of anyone around her.

She was a complicated person, my mother. I know that word—“complicated”—can be a cop out, but it’s fitting in this case. Not only was my mother complicated but she was paradoxical across the board.

She was tiny but could be loud.

She was kind to strangers yet could be cruel to family.

She gave birth to a large group of children but didn’t seem to care that much afterward.

From time to time, she’d say she loved me, but rarely, if ever, did she show it.

And, for such a petite woman, she could sure create a lot of destruction.

Money (being poor) and sickness (she was a hypochondriac) were major preoccupations of hers. A ritual was sitting in the trailer saddled up to the kitchen counter, smoking Tareytons incessantly, drinking black coffee, and bemoaning gas prices or the hike in what coffee cost, how her gall bladder or goiter were going bad. This was her entertainment. It was the sad, cloistered world she’d shaped for herself, and rarely did she venture outside of it.

When I was a teenager, I toggled between knowing my family wasn’t normal and sort of daydreaming that we were. I knew TV was make-believe, too good to be true. There was always too much love on display, too many happy endings. So, I thought, perhaps we weren’t all that screwed up.

But we were, of course.

For years, I worked fiendishly at becoming everything my family wasn’t—I became book smart and went to college. I never got sick, even if I was. I worked until I could accumulate the types of things we never had (sugar cereals, clothes, a big house.) I grew my hair long and wore jewelry. I read poetry and wrote it. Eventually I became an attentive and loving parent. I told my children I loved them and meant it.

So, I'm rambling a bit, and you can see rather plainly, I would suspect that I’m still working through stuff. On Wednesday, I’ve got a solo, five hour drive to Eastern Washington ahead of me to do some ruminating. I’ve got that and the rest of my life.

In some ways, my mother did the best she could. In other respects, she might have tried a lot harder, or in the very least, there might have been different tactics utilized in raising her brood.

But if I’m complaining, I don’t mean to be. Growing up with little in the way of a material or emotional bank, having to make my own way in the world—well, those things have really helped me as an adult. Surely I’d be a different man without them.

Surely I’d be a different son without her.

2011-10-28T11:21:00.001-07:00

--YOU ARE ALWAYS RIGHT

…I have three new stories, “Hiccups,” “The Sin Jar,” and “The Veracity of Certain Demons” up at Petrichor Review and also here under “Words in Print.”

…Coincidentally, I have had the hiccups for two days now, off and on. It’s a little bit annoying.

…On my face, where they cut out the cancer, is a big red-black mark of blood and stitches. It looks like a crimson horse fly is stuck to the side of my nose. It’s not pretty. I am not pretty or handsome. I’m sorry, but that is the truth.

…The truth is that, today I feel a little bit lonely.
I do.
The sky is rippled with grey-sheeted clouds and the lake looks lacquered black. There are no birds. There’s very little light. My blinds are not drawn. I am here.

…There is something I have been trying to say to you all morning, but I took my last Vicodin and the pill has clogged my throat, sort of like the way a log catches sidelong at the narrow juncture of a river, creating a dam.
What I wanted to say was important. It was meaningful and all about you. If I knew Morse Code or could fan smoke signals I would share my message. Or if I knew sign language I could tell you what I wanted to tell you with my fingers and thumbs moving rapidly. Whenever I see couples speaking in sign language I sort of think it’s adorable. Don’t you? They are so completely wrapped up in their own universe. They are the definition of great listeners, and yes I know how ironic that sounds.
Sounds.
Have you ever wanted to be somebody else?
Have you ever wondered what your purpose was/is?
How many times in your life have you said, “I really like my life. I really like who I am.”
Last night I spoke to my dad and then I spoke to a brother and things did not go so well. Or maybe they did. Maybe that’s just how it goes.
But back to you and the things I wanted to say, the things about you and what you’re like and how special you are…
At some point today you should look into a mirror. Study your face. Find something new in it. It can be a blemish or new crease, a random whisker or too-long eye lash. Just discover something new.
Then, later on, you should sit down in a quiet space and do nothing for several minutes. Let’s say ten minutes. While you’re there, think about all the things you’re grateful for. Consider all the people you care about and who care about you. Maybe even say a prayer. Who cares if you don’t believe in God. Say a prayer anyway.
In the silence, in the spaces in between while you’re not praying or thinking, while you’re sort of dozing daydreaming, I’ll whisper in your ear. I’ll say the sweetest things you’ve ever heard and they will make you smile.
I promise.

2011-10-26T10:09:00.001-07:00

--I WOULDN'T BE HERE IF IT WASN'T FOR YOU

…I've got a new interview with Michelle Reale (who is a fantastic writer) and story, "Monster" up at Flash Fiction Chronicles. They're both here under "Monster" in "Words in Print."

…I have cancer. Skin cancer. It's the benign kind. It didn't seem like a very big deal to me until I went to the doctor's office yesterday, and while waiting to be operated on, they make you watch this video.
Holy Hell.
All of these people go on and on about having CANCER. They say it like that--in a large and scary kind of way. I arrived calm as a cucumber, but got very nervous very fast.
The only thing that happened, however, was they hacked up my face. First they shot up my cheek with needles until the liquid spewed out of my nostrils. (I know--"Gross!" but I'm all about full disclosure on this blog.)
Afterward my face was swollen on one side and I sort of looked like an old football you find in your garage that is partially deflated. I definitely am rocking a Phantom of the Opera look with this huge white bandage on the left side of my face.
Today I have a skin graft. This procedure is supposed to be worse that yesterday's Disney adventure. Yikes!
Then Thursday I get a crown for my back molar.
It's a loverly week. (Yes, that "r" was on purpose.) But, hey, don't cry for me, Argentina.

…I am listening to Radiohead, “Pablo Honey,” a really great album. I don’t get their newer stuff, but this album is The Shit.

…I just read today that 11 million Americans owe more than their property is worth. Isn’t that awful?

…Holy Hell it’s windy today. Cedar shaving keep getting slapped against my widows, the lake looks like a black, whipped cream cake and there’s not a bird in the sky. I think I just saw Dorothy and Toto fly by. Yikes.

…Did you see the Charlie Sheen Roast? It's likely you didn't. The thing aired the same night, same hour, on a different channel as the "Two and a Half Men" premier.
I don't know your feelings on Charlie. Most people detest him. Me, I'm a fan. I know he's a screw up, but he was really funny on that show and, well, Ashton is not as funny. Ashton really is just playing a version of the role he played on "That Seventies Show."
In any event, the roast was quite funny. I finally watched it on DVR the other day.
Here are the best bits:

--Charlie is the reason a dick with cocaine on it is called a “Sheenish.”
--Mike Tyson has beaten every opponent he’s gone up against except the letter “S.” So please be patient as he sounds out his jokes.
--Mike Tyson, here’s something you’ll never hear in your life: “Nice tattoo.” I mean, come on, you’ve got a tramp stamp on your face. I don’t know whether to be appalled or just finish on it.
--Charlie Sheen, you’ve convinced more women to have abortions than the prenatal test for Downs Syndrome.
--William Shatner, look at your skin. I can’t tell whether you’ve had a face lift or a vagina rejuvenation.
--William Shatner, I've seen men more bloated that were dragged out of a river.
--(from Mike Tyson) If you don't shut up, I'm gonna bite my own ears off.
--Is that Seth McFarland or Chaz Bono with guyliner?
--Charlie’s nostrils are so snotty and filled with cocaine that he calls them the Hilton Sisters.
--Charlie, if you’re "winning," you’re obviously not at a child custody hearing.
--Charlie’s meltdown was so epic that Al Gore is doing a documentary on it.
--There’s Brooke Mueller, Charlie’s ex. Brooke’s not very bright, unless Charlie’s throwing a lamp at her.

2011-10-24T16:05:00.000-07:00

--DON'T WORRY; I WON'T TELL ANYONE

…I have a new micro, "The Trader" up at Troubadour 21 and also here under "Words In Print."
The piece is very small. In a three day span I wrote twenty different micros--"Brother," "Daughter", "Thief," "The Drunk," The Trader"--about labels we attach to people in order to compartmentalize them. I wanted to just scratch below the surface of the label and hit at a nerve, at the thing that makes them real.
I wrote these over two years ago and packaged them as a chapbook, "People You Know By Heart" but never did anything with it.
That's where the title of this blog came from.
The notion is: we think we know these people--even those closest to us--but do we really? How many people on this planet are you completely, utterly honest with?

…Today I didn't plan this, but I wrote 10 tiny pieces for Nailpolish Stories and did an extensive interview, replete with a flash story, for Michelle Reale and Flash Fiction Chronicles.
I still have to write two stories for Jennifer Tomaloff, which I am excited about.

…I saw "Moneyball" with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. Phillip Seymour Hoffman even makes an appearance as a bad baseball manager with a bathtub gut. It was a different role for him, but not much of a stretch for his fine acting chops.
Brad was good, as was Jonah. Being a true story made it that much more powerful. I'd give it a solid "B".

…The Ryan Adams concert on Friday night was sensational.
It was just him on stage. He had two guitars he switched off playing and a piano.
He was funny, witty, quick on the draw and engaging with a crowd that was boisterous yet referential.
He also revealed himself to be quite the nerd.
But talented, that guy is. He played for over two and a half hours.

…On Saturday it was a double bill: The Head and The Heart opening for Death Cab For Cutie.
Head and Heart were so much fun! I'd seen them a year ago at a smaller venue, their first Seattle appearance. Here they were playing in front of 35,000 people, prancing on stage like a bunch of giddy pirates.
It was just a treat. I knew almost all the lyrics.
Death Cab had so much energy. Their recordings don't do them justice. Ben Gibbard was a fiend on stage, flying around, whipping his hair (Willow Smith would have been impressed) and chatting up the audience.
Fun times at Ridgemont.

…Here are some things I like at the start of the week:

"This is perhaps the supreme offering of the short story, the reader’s feeling that some proof has been submitted that life, long or short, funny or tragic, is simple. The short story is the loaves and fishes run in reverse: many things have gone into it and mysteriously become few." Valerie Trueblood

“When you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link that is stronger than steel. Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free.” Catherine Ponder

"Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity." Gustav Flaubert

"Whatever else can be said about sex, it cannot be called a dignified performance." Helen Lawrenson

"The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident." Charles Lamb

"Which yellow bird fills its nest with lemons?
Why don't they train helicopters to suck honey from the sunlight?
Tell me, is the rose naked or is that her only dress?
Is there anything in the world sadder than a train standing in the rain?
Why do clouds cry so much, growing hapier and happier?
Why do leaves commit suicide when they feel yellow?
Why doesn't Thursday talk itself into becoming Friday?
Who shouted with glee when the color blue was born?
Is it true that sadness is thick and melancholy thin?
Why do the waves ask me the same question I ask them?
And why do they strike the rock with so much wasted passion?
Don't they get tired of repeating their declaration to the sand?
If all rivers are sweet where does the sea get its salt?
How do the seasons know they must change their shirt?
"Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who's never waited for anyone?" --all from Pablo Neruda, "The Book of Questions."

"The life that conquers is the life that moves with a steady resolution and persistence toward a predetermined goal. Those who succeed are those who have thoroughly learned the immense importance of plan in life, and the tragic brevity of time." W.J. Davison

"What you don't know is you're going to be 18 for the rest of your life." --"Six Feet Under"

"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing." Sylvia Plath

2011-10-21T11:21:00.000-07:00

--GO AHEAD AND TAKE THAT TONE, I CAN HANDLE IT

…I am not that strong.
I’ve been struggling. Struggling again.
How often does this happen to you, if ever?
I’ve been spending a lot of time alone in this office.
Years ago, I used to pray for alone time because, back then, I was always surrounded by people, having to engage with them, stay on point, carry the conversation, have answers or ask questions if the conversation ever dipped, which it would, which it did if someone wasn’t steering. The only time I was ever beside myself was in a hotel room and I used to relish those moments. They felt almost sacred.
Now I have lots of time by myself.
Yes, the old adage is true: Be careful what you wish for.
Sure, a writer has to have alone time in order to compose, but sometimes the sheer emptiness of a day can weigh on your psyche in unexpected ways. It can weaken one’s will.
For instance, I talk myself out of things and into other things.
For instance, I’ve sort of flat-lined with my novel. Right there, smack dap in the middle of it, I’ve stopped writing and I’ve reverted to short form writing.
Why is that?
I think I tend to talk myself out of the story, out of thinking it’s readable enough or important enough or even interesting enough. I know I should be writing for myself—not for an agent or editor or audience—but still doubts set in.
Does that ever happen to you with your work? I mean, even if you’re not a writer, do you ever struggle in this way?
For me, I guess it’s about fear, dumb as that sounds. Maybe I’m afraid I’ll finish another novel and then have to try to get it published, living with the pressure of that wearing on my shoulders. Maybe it’s that or maybe it’s something else.
What do you think?
It’s 11 am and I’ve already written 1,200 words, but that was for two short stories, one of which was planned, one of which just came out of sitting here reading Brandi Wells’ collection, “Please Don’t Be Upset.”
One story is about a barren, overweight wife who, in taking her life back by finding a sperm donor and assassin to kill her husband, is suddenly hit with a stroke.
The other is about a man who comes home and can’t find his wife anywhere. Eventually, he does locate her, though, inside their washing machine, alive, having put herself there in order to cleanse her past sins. It’s called, “The Spin Cycle.”
So, are these stories interesting or important or readable enough? Are they more so than the novel? No, I don’t think so. I think they’re quirky but intriguing and easy—for the author and reader alike—to bite off and chew without investing a whole lot. One can get in and out easily.
So, yeah, I guess I’m just mind-fucking myself.
Do you ever do that? Please don’t tell me I’m the only one, but please don’t lie just to make me feel better.
Okay, here I go now, back to the novel. Yep, here I go…

2011-10-19T10:37:00.000-07:00

Gordon

Itchy, itchy spiders scrawl messages on the undersides of her eyes when she is not with him. Sometimes she’ll scratch her corneas bloody or pour oil on them to assuage the anguish.
There’s no one she can tell. They would think her unhealthy, obsessed, crazy. She’s tried before which is why she has no friends now, just a cat that ignores her.
If she could be near him every second, if that were possible, she would do it, but life interferes. There are tasks to be done, money to be made so that she can afford an existence. It’s a sad truth.
Her yearning borders on torture. It is a physical assault, a slow, demented violence, like having her skin peeled off with a paring knife.
She finally figures out ways to take parts of him with her to work or when she has to visit her mother in the hospital.
Connie, the only coworker bold enough to approach her, does so one day, leaning over her cube so that Connie’s cleavage splays apart, two pale globes. “When do get to meet this Gordon you’re so nuts about?”
She feels violated, threatened. Her breathing hitches. She measures the space inside her cubicle, wishing there were better air circulation. Connie’s nose twitches. “Sure smells minty.” Connie has an accusing glare in her eyes.
Leave, she tells Connie telepathically. Gordon is mine. Mine. I don’t like to share.
Connie is far to patient and brazen, but even she gives up after a full two minutes of silence. “You really are a whack job.”
She opens the drawer and paws the plastic container she’s put Gordon in. She’d suck him right now, but she’s afraid Connie is going to return, and so she wills herself to wait.
At the hospital that night, she sits by her comatose mother. She’s brought Gordon with her in his original form, even though he takes up so much space in her handbag. She drinks directly from the bottle, her lips on his, swallowing him, gulping while her mother lays like a piece of white-haired driftwood. Gordon’s never tasted so good. She licks him off her lower lip, then puts him in her mouth again, swallowing hard.
Her father got her started, showed her the gateway to her current fixation. He was in love with Jack. “Here, have a sip. See what you think.” It was like drinking fire, like injecting magic into her veins. “That’ll get your blood rolling, huh?”
He’d been with Jack all day before getting into the car. Her mother knew, of course she did. Maybe she was just waiting for the accident to happen, the thing itself a kind of divorce, certainly permanent now that one is dead and other nearly so.
She takes another long drink, caressing the label “Gordon’s London Dry Gin.” White thunder scalds her insides, liquid electricity. She can almost hear it hiss.
The sheet behind her is pulled back so sharp and suddenly that it startles her and the jug slips, cracks like a glass bomb.
“See! I told you. She come in here and drinks herself stupid every night!” It’s the old bag on the mattress next door speaking to the lab-coated female doctor.
“Miss, you really can’t be—“
But she’s up and standing, swaying a bit, but moving, stepping on the wet pieces of Gordon, him a diamond puzzle.
“I hope you’re not driving!” the doctor calls.
Down the elevator. Out into the parking lot. Her key won’t fit the lock. Wrong car. Where is hers? Someone stole it. She misses Gordon. No one understand her but him. They were meant to be together, same as her Dad and Jack. Gordon is life.
She crosses through the lot and down a block and into the street and then she’s on the overpass. Twin, white-lighted eyes screaming at her, beneath her feet, the beams incriminating and unflinching.
“Gordon,” she says aloud. “I love you.”
Her jump is timed for the streaking semi. She doesn’t feel the air or the impact of the shrieking vehicle. Instead she draws up her knees into the warm bed that is her circulatory system. She tells Gordon, “It’s okay. I’ll wait for you. But hurry up, I’m cold,” and imagines a blanket being drawn over her body, then being tucked in for the night.

2011-10-17T09:48:00.001-07:00

Your Hair

I found your hair today and smelled it for the first time since you’ve been gone.
It smelled a little like a lemonade stand and made me picture you as a young girl, back before I even knew you were alive.
Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I sniffed and snorted. I buried my nose up to the hilt. I discovered hidden treasures: new aromas—spearmint, basil, patchouli—and almost fainted at one point.
Okay, okay, so I know this next thing was bizarre--almost pervy--but I dangled your ponytail over my skin and traipsed it across my face—brow, nose, cheek, ear--and I said aloud to your hair, to you, “Hey that tickles, but it kind of turns me on.”
As you know, I can be such a dope. In the mirror, I used your hair to make a moustache for myself. But the contrast didn’t work. In fact, I looked ridiculous, you having a butter-colored mane and me this dark thatch similar to a ball-fro.
Afterward, I took your hair to dinner (more creepy behavior, right?). But I got a booth in back and sat so I’d see the waiter coming. Also, I ordered that French thing you always liked, the one that smells like a yeast infection and stews under a silver dome. If anyone came near the table, I’d just throw a metal lid over you.
This restaurant was the site of our first date where you said, “I’d never have taken you for someone so chic,” and I said, “I don’t even know how to spell chic, is it s-h-e-i-k?” and you laughed, so I said “How about s-h-e-e-k then?” and you said, “You’re freakin’ hysterical” which is the first and last time anyone’s ever made that remark.
My weirdest ploy involving your hair might have been taking it to bed with me.
No, no, nothing kinky happened. I’m not a sicko.
But I did lay the braid on your pillow. I pretended you were asleep and I remembered that night when I stared at the back of your head for hours, wondering what you were dreaming.
Around midnight, I sang “Killing Me Softly” to your hair, switching to falsetto for “You Should Be Dancing,” capping off the evening with some Lil Wayne because I know how much you like to get krunk with Weezy.
Now it’s morning and we’ve already had breakfast, so I’m getting busy.
I’ve started a fire right here on the floor in the middle of the loft.
I’ve got your hair hanging on my shoulder like a pirate with a blonde parrot that is headless and eyeless and without talons. (Okay, so maybe the parrot analogy is a bad one, but the point is you’re right next to me, balanced on my shoulder.)
In just a moment I’m going to do what I should have done after you left—I’m going to expunge you from my life for good.
Yep.
And, hey, I don’t care if it means I have to die doing it, because the truth is, I’ve been a joke of a human being these last two years. Ask anyone.
You know how I used to talk about your hair all the time, how thick and soft it was, what luster it emitted, and then that last day you took a butcher knife to it and said, “Here, go and see if you can’t drive this batshit, too!”? Of course you remember that.
(Sheesh, it’s getting a little smoky in here. My eyes burn.)
Okay, so I’ll admit I adored your hair, but I wasn’t a freak about it, was I? My old friends, when they were still around, they just said, “No, no, it’s cool. You’re cool, Man.” and my two goldfish, Salt and Peter, all they ever did was stare at me all jowly-like, going, “Gloop! Loop! Yoop!” which I took to mean, “Girl! Loves! You!”
Boy, it’s really hazy and hot in here, and now the flames are French-kissing the drapes and the wallpaper is blistering and my shelf with your photos is on fire.
Yowza.
Here it comes, the end of us.
Don’t worry, though, because I’ve changed. I have. Instead of being all reactionary, like you always claimed I was, this time I’m going to be proactive.
Yes, you heard me correctly.
At the count of three, we’re—you and me--leaping into the fire. Sound like a plan? Hello? My eyes sting so bad I can hardly see you. Say something. Or just flop a couple of times.
Never mind then.
Ready.
Here we go.
One…Two…Thr--
Wait. Shit!Shit!Shit! My shirt’s on fire. Ah! MY HAIR’S ON FIRE! AHHHHHHHHHH!

**

When he wasn’t looking, I jumped off the Idiot’s shoulder and snaked my way to the door. It was a tight fit through the bottom slit, and smoky as all hell, but I escaped.
Of course the Idiot’s place was the only one to burn down.
The dude from 37B who found me is kind of cute. He’s not perfect, though. He’s got a fetish or two. I mean, you should see what he had me doing last night. Oh boy.
But the way I figure it, I’m the one in charge. I’m a lot more than just flaxen locks and protein. I’m a force to be reckoned with. I’ve made men leave their wives, made them go blind, set themselves on fire. So just think what I’m going to do to you.

2011-10-15T11:25:00.000-07:00

--PUT YOUR HOSTAGE IN DANGER

…I know, I know: I never talked about Vegas.
It's not because bad things happened or because what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas (In fact, there was a huge billboard that said this:
WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS DOESN'T ALWAYS STAY IN VEGAS
Free STD screening. Call today!)
And don't worry--nothing like the above inference happened.
Let's just say it was FUN. Fun is really fun. If you're on short supply of fun, as I'd been, getting your fun on is a down right blast.
Laughing until you cry is fun.
Laughing until your guts ache is fun.
Picking on a friend or being picked on by a friend is fun.
Stumbling around down the halls is even a bit of a kick, provided you have a support system.
--In Vegas we ate very good food and drank fine wine and bought greyhounds and used screwdrivers.
We sat at the pool and the sports bar.
We gambled. I won a net of $500, a first in a long time of going to Vegas.
--At LAX on the way back I saw Rick Ocazek, lead singer of The Cars. He looked the same: a black-haired, pasty-looking Praying Mantis wearing guy-liner. No one seemed to recognize him, maybe because he was with his blonde-haired son, who clearly got Paulina's genes.
--LAX is a pain is the buttocks. I hate that airport. Hate it more than Newark, which is saying a lot. I had to switch terminals there and made my connection flight by the skin of my teeth, by the skin of my foreskin. It's no fun getting on a boiling hot plane when you're already sweaty from running.
But that's the price you pay for fun.
--During my connecting and layover time I read two books:
Donald Ray Pollock's "The Devil All the Time," is a twisted, violent affair, with four sets of characters on a course for the inevitable cataclysm. It became a page-turning addiction near the end. I'd give it 3 1/2 stars.
--The other book was "Long Drive Home," by Will Allison. This novel is a romp. Definitely a page turner, written in spare English with little to no description beyond the basic. But you get hooked very quickly. Halfway through I literally could not put it down. Swallowed the thing whole. You will, too. Get it.

…Yesterday I wrote a story. I’ve been working on the novel (almost halfway now) so this is the first one I’ve written in some time.
It was a strange story about this obsessed guy who takes out his ex’s ponytail and, well, does things with it.
No, nothing kinky or sexual.
It’s magic realism and kind of fun, as well, (I think) funny. Maybe I’ll post it some time.

…Here is something I like on a very foggy day in Seattle:

"Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as: - Knowing when to come in out of the rain; - Why the early bird gets the worm; ... - Life isn't always fair; - And maybe it was my fault. Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies, don't spend more than you can earn and adults, not children, are in charge. His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition. Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children. It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion. Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims. Common Sense took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault. Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife Discretion, his daughter Responsibility, and his son, Reason. He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers; I Know My Rights, I Want It Now, Someone Else Is To Blame, and I'm A Victim. Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, do nothing." -- Coleen Hamilton

2011-10-12T11:41:00.001-07:00

--CHOOSE A PRECIOUS THING AND HOLD IT YOUR HANDS UNTIL IT GLOWS

…This is going to take a while. Bear with me.
Here, sit here. Please, will you sit here for a minute, please? (Yes, I was intentionally trying to sound like Carver there.)
Here, let me get a look at you. Hey, you look really great, fantastic even!
Don’t be shy. Come on, you don’t have to be embarrassed. Lots of people would be happy to look as good as you. They’d pay money, have surgery, do all sorts of things. But for you it comes naturally. Part of it is your genes and the other part of it is your jeans. You have style and swag, confident yet a little cautious and politely aloof.
What I want to say, why I called you here is to tell you that I did mean to hurt you.
Not permanently.
Though, at the time I did mean to do damage somehow.
Now, today, I don’t know why I did what I did, but I knew then or must have known what I was doing because I did it, right?
See? It’s confusing, isn’t it.
I never knew I could be so hurtful. You must bring it out in me. But hey, don’t think that I’m blaming you because in no way am I doing that or meaning to do anything even remotely close to that.
So this is about me saying I’m sorry. This is about me Pinkie Swearing it will never happen again
This is about me learning from my mistakes.
This is about me becoming a better man, which I have already.
I wrote you a poem a while back and several people liked it and I even ended up reading it on some radio show thing that no one listens to, but it was fun(?)—no not fun, but rather it was comforting reading it.
It felt like you and I in the lake on an August day when the water’s warm, skinny dipping again, me losing my underwear and your dad coming down to ask, “How’s the water?” while I’m treading naked.
If you’d heard me read the poem that I wrote about you it might have felt differently to you.
For instance, it might have felt like a pulsing video screen changing colors.
It might have felt like denim or leather or fine Egyptian cotton.
It might have smelled like egg yolk, buttered toast, car exhaust or cabernet.
In any event, August is over and we’re here now, a new fall, and I have just one question:
“What ever will we do?”

2011-10-10T21:09:00.000-07:00

The Black Parade

Sometimes I fall.
I am seven years old or nine, nineteen, now.
I tumble into space
a black place
without nets or any
strong arms
just an empty net
empty I think
a void saying
nothing reassuring
that's for sure
a black blanket
letting me spin and twist
in descent
I know how this sounds
I know what this must look like
and what you're thinking
about me right now
this second
part of the way through reading
and you know what
you are correct
you know the score
you have reliable answers
some with scale and some with horns or thorns
some stinger sharp
yet you do know
what's going on here
yep
and so you stand aside
watching
the black parade
and its single float
falling into an
abyss
that has no bottom
or hold
All you need do
is to make this ocassion
perfect
by giving up a little
chuckle
laugh
cackle
guffaw
Go ahead.
What could it hurt?

2011-10-06T06:17:00.000-07:00

--THERE'S SOMETHING SWIMMING IN MY DRINK AND IT LOOKS A LOT LIKE YOU

…I have an interview and reading with Anne Levine on her radio broadcast, "Anne at Night." It's also here under "Words in Print" under the "Anne at Night" heading.

…Spent nearly the entire day yesterday researching agents to query for last year's novel, "House of Rats," and publishers for my story collections. It was exhausting as well as a tad depressing, but there are a lot of worse things I could have been doing, that's for sure.
Oh, what was depressing about it was how many great agents don’t accept unsolicited work, that or not being able to find contact information for an agent who'd sold one of my favorite books.

…But that was yesterday.
Now it's today.
Today will be a good day and an even better evening.
Today, in a few hours, I fly to Palm Springs. From there, some friends and I drive to Las Vegas to meet some more friends.
It will be fun.
There will be many stories.
People will laugh a lot. Those people will mostly be us. We will laugh until our stomachs hurt and until we cry and cannot take in oxygen.

…We are all individual, unique with our own idiosyncrasies, and yet we are probably a lot more a like that we are different.
Here are many ways we are unique and different:

-- Percentage of college students who consumed these microwavable foods in the past week:
23% Soup
21% Popcorn
16% Chicken wings/fingers/nuggets
14% Burritos/tacos/enchiladas
14% Oatmeal
14% Macaroni and cheese

Top things healthy workers did after they called in sick:
53% -- Stayed home and watched TV
45% -- Stayed in bed
38% -- Took care of a sick family member
25% -- Went shopping
23% -- Met up with friends or relatives.

When asked, "Is a college education still a good financial investment?" the percentage who said yes:
2007-- 78%
2008-- 81%
2009-- 79%
2010--64%
2011-- 58%

--In an online survey of 500 Virginia Tech students, they say that because of alcohol they have:
Vomited: 64%
Blacked out: 50%
Missed class: 31:
Had an unwanted sexual experience: 23%
Had an incident involving the police: 21%
Damaged property: 15%

--8 of the top 20 bestselling books in 2011 were e-books

Population living in Battery Park City-Lower Manhattan (Ground Zero):
2000-- 20,088
2010-- 39,699

72% -- Percentage of women who trol Facebook or Twitter to investigate their dates
57% -- Percentage of men who think social networking leads to sex faster
41% -- Percentage who think it's possible to have a romantic relationship with someone exclusively online
30% -- Percentage who've had sex with someone they met via social media

Once every 30 minutes, someone is killed by an impaired driver
1 in 7 drivers on the road is impaired
1 in 4 drivers is impaired on Friday and Saturday nights.

--According to Pediatrics journal, more than 5,000 American children and teens are injured each year in falls from windows.

--In 2010, 2 million people moved out of the state of California
--1.5 million moved out of New York
--1.4 million moved into Florida
--Texas was next with 800,000 new residents

How important is your potential mate's profession to you?
--Women: 60 percent said it's very important
--Men: 5 percent said it's very important

--9 out of 10 adults surveyed said they've seen people misuse technology including:
74% using a mobile device while driving
64% talking loudly while in public
40% using a device during a performance or event
37% divulging private information in a public area
24% using a mobile device at a funeral

--I find the following figures hard to believe, however, according to StrategyOne, Features that first catch an adult’s eye are:
33% Overall attractiveness
23% Smile
20% Eyes
10% Body Shape
6% Apparel

--According to Kurgo, Things People Have Done While Driving With Their Dog:
52% Patted dog
18% Reached into the backseat to interact with dog
17% Allowed dog to sit in lap
13% Gave food or treats to dog
4% Played with dog

--According to Newsweek, the average life expectancy of a prostitute is 34 years, 50 times the next dangerous occupation (liquor store manager)

--According to Nielsen Bookscan, overall sales of print books have dropped 10.2% over the last six months. Adult fiction dropped by 25.7% over that same period. Yikes! It doesn't say if electronic book sales have made up for this plunge.

--On more delicious news, Rasmussen reports American's favorite ice cream flavors as:
Chocolate 23%
Vanilla 23%
Butter Pecan 9%
Cookies and Cream 8%
Strawberry 8%
Mint chocolate chip 6%
Coffee 4%
Other 17%

2011-10-04T09:33:00.000-07:00

--"YOU'VE GOT THAT SPECIAL KIND OF MADNESS, YOU'VE GOT THAT TRAGIC SET OF CHARMS, THAT ONLY COMES FROM TIME SPENT IN LOS ANGELES, I WANT TO WRAP YOU IN MY ARMS."

…Before I forget, I wanted to share something from a cyber friend of mine who lives in Hong Kong:
林公公
"It more or less means: 'What I truly want to say to you, from the bottom of my heart: go fuck yourself'." Nicolette Wong

…I have a few things up:
--"After My Morning Shower; The Old Man in the Mirror" at Safety Pin Review
--"Somewhere Over the Rainbow" at 52/250 A Year of Flash along with two other stories--"What Happened To All the Readers" and "Traveling Mercies" (Week 42 and week 48 respectively) names "Best Of."
Everything is here under "Words in Print."

…I finally--finally--finished Jennifer Egan's book, "A Visit From the Goon Squad." It was extremely well written, and even clever in parts, but it just did not do it for me. I had to force mself to keep reading it.
Purchase it at your own risk.

...I ran today. On the treadmill. Same as yesterday. I sweated a lot. It wasn't necessarily fun, but I always feel better about myself afterward.

…Feeling good about oneself is imporant, I realize, but it's never been something I've been good at.
I'm not good at talking about myself.
I'm not good at talking about my past.
I'm not always entirely honest. Not that I lie, but I omit things.
I see other people and I think: That person is a better person than I am. They deserve good things, I do not.
I often feel guilty for my good fortune, even if I have worked very hard. I think: Well, lots of people have worked hard, too, sacrificing like I have, but they are not in a great position, so why am I?
On the other hand, I am envious of other's success when it comes to writing. I'm happy for their success, yet if I'm being truthful (and this is an attribute I'm trying to fully inculcate inside of me) I am envious. I understand that this is a hard business to get into, a tough old nut to crack. I'd just really like to lasso an agent, get a novel published, and a story collection. I really would. In the meantime, I'll stop complaining, shut up, keep querying, and keep writing.
Thanks for listening.

…Here are some interesting things on a misty day in Seattle, Washington:

"If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness, and fears." Glenn Clark

"Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength." August Wilson

"You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you." Isadora Duncan

"Family can be just one person worry about your well being." Anonymous

"As a writer, it's important to get under the skin of things." Maurice Sendak

"Two fonts walk into a bar...the bartender says, 'We don't serve your type here!'"

"A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire." Adrienne Rich

2011-10-01T11:07:00.001-07:00

--I'M A LOT LIKE YOU

…There are just about 9,000 homeless people in Seattle. The city has just 2,500 shelter beds. That means, each night, 6,500 people sleep on the street or under bridges or anywhere they can find.
How many homeless are in your city?

…Have you ever done this: watched five hours of television straight?
My son and I did yesterday. It was actually "Dexter" we watched. The last five episodes of Season 2.
"Dexter," like "The Sopranos" doesn't feel like television. For a lot or reasons, it doesn't: there are no commercials, there's sex and vivid violence and lots of swearing.
Season 2 of "Dexter" was remarkable. I was kneading my hands and pinching myself on the stomach the whole time. It's a very, very clever show.

…I go to Palm Springs in six days. From there, I drive with a friend to Las Vegas where we will meet more friends and drink alcohol, gamble, laugh a lot, loose some money, swim, watch football, eat very tasty food, and then laugh some more. I'm quite looking forward to it.

…I've been in a big Dylan phase. Bob Dylan. "Blonde on Blonde." "Blood on the Tracks."
There are gems after gems in those albums.
"…She was working at a topless place
when I stopped in for a beer.
I just kept looking at the side of her face
in a spot light so clear.
And later as the crowd poured out
I's just about to do the same
but she was standing there
at the back of my chair
said, "Tell me don't I know your name."
I muttered something under my breath.
She studied the lines on my face.
I must admit I felt a little uneasy
when she bent down to tie the lace on my shoe.
Tangled up in blue."
The man is a genius. Truly. Those two albums, written in his early twenties, "Blood" being a thematic one about his breakup, are masterpieces. Give 'em a listen. You'll agree, I just know it.

…Day before yesterday three beavers were wrestling on the dock outside my window.
They're the size of very large cats. It's quite a sight to see them out of the water. Like a scene from "National Geographic."
Usually I see one of them swimming the length of the lake in the morning, then the other length at night.
That day I also saw the eagle swoop down and grab a fish.
Plus I saw the two ostriches a fellow down the road has.
Yeah, so it was a getting in touch with nature kind of day.

…I have blueberry bushes in my yard. They’ve been weighted down with fruit, and collectively I’ve spent over 24 hours picking berries.
Did you know that if you eat blue berries, salmon and almonds every day you’ll live to be 250 years old.

…Yesterday I went to a charity function where Richard Dreyfuss spoke. The scene in "Mr. Holland’s Opus" where Richard's character is packing up his office due to the music program being eliminated after 30 years, Richard finding a gym full of people waiting for him, claiming to be his "Opus" ("There isn't a person in here who hasn't been impacted by you.")--that's one of my favorite film scenes ever.
But other than that, I don't really like Richard as an actor. He's cloying and annoying, as if he's trying too hard as an actor.
Yesterday Richard was the key note speaker.
He talked for 50 minutes. It felt like 500 minutes.
It was a rant about the ruin of our country because "we no longer teach civics." Really, that's what he said. He said it dozens of times actually.
Looking around the ballroom at The Westin you could see everyone thinking the same thing: "Should I just kill myself already?"
Needless to say, I am even less a Richard Dreyfuss fan than ever before.

Here are few things to ruminate on:

"Patience is passion tamed." Lyman Abbott

‎''Bats have no bankers and they do not drink
and cannot be arrested and pay no tax
and, in general, bats have it made.'' John Berryman

"The body doesn't lie." Judith Guest, "Ordinary People"

"Sometimes the truth speaks from a peaceful place." "Dexter"

2011-09-29T06:26:00.001-07:00

…Yesterday I wrote and I wrote. Then I wrote some more.
I wrote a shit-ton. (Shit-ton is one of my favorite made up swear words.)
I wrote almost 5,000 words, all on the novel.
Lots of things happened. There was some kissing, breaking and entering, gun shots (though no one died) more gun shots (a car got dinged up a bit) and some white-lying.
After I was done writing, I ran outside, came home and took a bath while reading "A Visit From the Goon Squad" (It's taking me forever to read that book. Why is that?)
It's remarkable the power Jacuzzis have. Truly. They have this incredible inspirational quality.
While soaking and reading I came up with a brand new scene and it's ended up being kind of crucial.
Then I popped out, dried off, got dressed (of course) and wrote it.
Then, "Ah ha!" I came up with a twist on the twist.
Yes, I love baths and Jacuzzis.
It’s astonishing the problems you can solve in the bathtub, taking a good long soak.
I fixed all kinds of issues having to do with the novel.
Maybe they should construct an enormous pool near the White House, throw O and Congress in it, toss in some bubble bath and vino, and see if they can’t get their excrement together.

…So I felt pretty proud after my manic writing day, but then in "Poets and Writers" magazine I read about all of these prolific writers and I feel like a big slacker.
Get this:
--Iris Johansen -- 70 novels
--Bill Pronzini -- 77 novels
--Kristine Rusch -- 90 books
--Piers Anthony -- 140 novels
--Jane Yolen -- 300 books
--Robert Randisi -- 540 novels
I mean, Holy Hell, right? 70? 140? FIVE HUNDRED AND FORTY?
Maybe I shouldn't have had that run.
Or gone on Facebook.
Or surfed the web for news.
Or had breakfast.
Or made myself a bad dinner.
Or picked up my son from the skate park.
Maybe I shouldn't have taken time to go pee.
Perhaps I should have just written during those times.

…Tonight I am going to The Hugo House.
The Hugo House is named after Richard Hugo, a legendary poet and professor at U of Washington.
The House stages readings and is a place you can write while enjoying Happy Hour.
Tonight’s event is "Poetry and Wine," whatever that means.
I was at the last reading before their summer break. It was a lot of fun, even if I didn't know anyone there.
Tonight I will go to The Hugo House and I will make myself make friends. I wish you were there to go with me.

I like these things on a Thursday in The Emerald City:

"Fate is written in wood, not stone." Geraint Straker

“Never think you’ve seen the last of anything.” Eudora Welty

"The things which hurt, instruct." Benjamin Franklin

"The problem is that when people tell you your worst enemy is your imagination, they’re wrong. When people tell you that whatever you’re imagining is probably worse than the real thing, they’re wrong. " Andrea Kneeland

"Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young." A.W. Pinero

"The mind writes what is." Gertrude Stein

"It is chance, not perfectionism that rules the world." Judith Guest, "Ordinary People"

"The things which hurt, instruct." Benjamin Franklin

"There's no labor a man can do that's undignified -- if he does it right." Bill Cosby

"Let the beauty we love be what we do." Rumi

2011-09-27T11:20:00.001-07:00

--AND SO IT IS THAT WE FIND OURSELVES HERE TOGETHER AT THIS EXACT MOMENT, AT THIS EXACT PLACE

…I have some new things:
--A new poem, "Father's Day" and an interview up at Stoked Press.
--"Walking on the Sun," a mostly true story at Apollo's Lyre
--I also have a story, "Lilies From a Fallow Field" up at Pipe Dream Fiction.
All are here under "Words in Print."

…This week people are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the release of "Nevermind" by Nirvana. Originally the record label had hoped to sell 45,000 copies. The album has sold over 30,000,0000 thus far.

--I'm not digging Ashton Kutcher on "Two and a Half." Admittedly, I'm a Charlie Sheen fan (I know he's acted despicably, but his talent is undeniable.) Ashton, from the interviews I've seen him do, seems like a great guy. His character on the show is a less funny, greasy-haired, bad Jesus-looking version of his "That 70's Show." Despite the record setting season opener, I don't expect the show to make it.

…I saw "Drive" with Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan.
It's a very unusual film, and I loved it. You have to be the patient sort, however.
The pacing is very slow the first half. There's very little dialogue. Ryan Gosling says less than 200 words in the entire film, and he's the lead.
The movie takes an unexpected and very violent turn in the second half. It is reminiscent of Tarantino.
Gosling is one of greatest actors, proving his range in films from "The Notebook" to "Blue Valentine" to "Crazy Stupid Love" and now this.

…I just finished reading "Northwest Corner." It's by John Burnham Schwartz, who wrote "Revolutionary Road," which got turned into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
I had insomnia.
Woke up at 12:30.
Got out of bed at 1:30.
Finished the book by morning.
The novel is so well written, lyrically so, in present tense, which is rare, which I like, which my new novel is written in.
There are many tough and tragic moments but you will root for these characters to make into the light, and you won't be able to stop reading until they, hopefully have.

Here are some sound bites for you:

"--She would like to learn to live like that, without punctuation, hearing just the words themselves.
--The word always is fraudulent. There is only now; there is only this.
--You can do all the planning you want, or you can do none: once their bags are packed, people leave.
--A place gets defined by what's in it.
--A fist is nothing without rage.
--Because, for fuck's sake, the goal of life must not be to lose it all, to cause other people grievous harm and suffering, to wholly give up one's pride and respectability.
--Let's face it, all the good folks really want is a lacrosse stick.
--We think we are solid and durable, only to find that, placed under a cruel and unexpected light, we are the opposite: only our thin, permeable skin holds us intact. Hemophiliacs walking through a forest of thorns.
--Penny leans forward, trying to get as close to her daughter as possible. Thinking that love has a memory, too. It knows how to come home.
--Despite what the mathematicians assure us, zero is not a meaningful number in real life.
--Words leave me then. You spend them carelessly, flagrantly, and the next thing you know they're gone." all from "Northwest Corner"

--"There are heroes, and then there are the rest of us." John Schwartz, "Revolutionary Road"

2011-09-25T05:42:00.001-07:00

--CLAP YOUR HANDS, SAY, "YEAH."

…When I was in college Statistics was a required class.
I am not a math guy. I'm an English guy.
I did not do so well in Statistics. I was always lost.
For the final, which was multiple choice, I just circled random letters, then handed in the test. That summer I worked in Alaska on a processing boat (boy do I have stories!) When I got back to Washington State U. and met with my counselor before school began, he had my reportcard in his palm on the other side of the desk.
"You would've had a 4.0 if you hadn't gotten that C."
"C!"
Somehow--miracle of miracles--I aced the final. In Statics.
I hated that class and would skip it to watch "All My Children" which was on at the same time. (I had a crush on Kim Delaney, now of "Army Wives".)

Now that I'm a little older I've come to appreciate and actually enjoy statistics. I don't like the math part--like having to gather up random group sampling and whatnot, but I like the story(ies) they tell about things.

Here is some information, then, about you and I.
I hope you find it interesting. I did.

--According to The Barna Group, 95% of all Americans consistently say they believe in God or a higher power

--13% of all people pretend to talk on their cell phone in order to avoid personal interactions

--Watching up to 25 hours of television a week speeds up death by five years

--The number one single on this day in 1996 was "Macarena" by Los Del Rio. The number one selling album this week (964,000 copies) is "Tha Carter IV" by Lil Wayne

--15% of all Americans currently live in poverty, the highest rate since 1932

--As of 8/1/11, The US Congress has received it's lowest approval rating in recorded history

--In the month of July, the number of unique U.S. visitors to:
Facebook, 162 million
Myspace, 33 million
Twitter, 33 million
LinkedIn 33 million

--Sandwiches from childhood that adults miss most:
25% Grilled cheese
24% Peanut butter and Jelly
13% Bologna and cheese
7% Liverwurst

--Where we buy books:
30%, Online retailers
29%, Bookstore chains
6%, Book clubs
6%, Non-traditional bookstores
5%, Mass merchandisers
5%, Independent bookstores

--In the USA, adults who say, in a week they:
1991 2011

read the bible outside of church 45% 40%
say God is all-knowing/all powerful 74% 67%
attend worship 49% 40%
accept Jesus and expect to be saved 35% 40%
call bible "totally accurate" 46% 38%

28.7 years of age --average age for men at first marriage
26.7 years of age --average age for women at first marriage

11.6% -- Housing vacancy rate in 2006
13.1% -- Housing vacancy rate in 2010
--$100 Billion- current valuation of Facebook

--42 million-fans of Lady Gaga on Facebook

--$40-late fee charged to Reed Hastings by Blockbuster for rental of "Apollo 13." Reed then went onto found Netflix

--89% of all peole hold their computer mouse wrong
--88% of all people have poor typing technique
--84% of all people set their keyboard wrong

--29%, percentage decreas in your risk of lethal prostrate cancer if you drink 1 to 3 cups of coffee a day.

--Cities graded by education and/or intelligence of their population:
A+ Madison, WI
A- Seattle, WA
A- Fargo, ND
A- San Diego, CA
C- New York, NY
D Los Angeles, CA
F Miami, FL

--Countries with the most millionaire households:
USA - 5.2 million
Japan - 1.5 million
China -1.1 million
Britian - .6 million
Germany - .4 million

--1 in 7 drivers are not insured

--13%-Percentage by which your coronary heart-disease risk drops if you are satisfied with your sex life

--Michael Vick, pro athlete convicted of staging dog fights, earned 12 cents an hour working at a federal prison and just signed a 10-year $100 millon contract with about $40 million guaranteed.

--When asked where they'd prefer to age, accroding to Hartford/MIT lab, people said:
50% my current home
41% another home
9% not sure

2011-09-23T10:40:00.001-07:00

--I SHOULD PROBABLY TELL YOU THAT YOU ARE PRETTY SPECIAL

…I have a new story, “Lilies From a Fallow Field” up at Pipe Dream Fiction and here under “Words In Print.” The piece is really me plagiarizing from me, or from a novel I wrote three years ago called “Blue Tequila” which may or may never see the light of day.

…I wrote a story just now.
Just a few minutes ago.
I wasn’t intending to write a story, and certainly not that story.
I swear; I definitely wasn’t trying to take any political position or preach or anything like that.
It just came out.
Like a sneeze maybe. Like a twitch or blink.
Something you can’t stop.
I was reading on Facebook about a friend who liked a book by Richard Brautigan called “The Abortion.”
I don’t know what the book’s about. I think it is a story collection.
The next thing you know I’m writing and then this happened:

Mom Gets an Abortion

She sets the appointment for Tuesday at 10:00 am. The kids—the ones she’s not planning on killing (not yet, anyway)—will all be at school by then.
She’s usually not this decisive. Usually she’s a Roll-with-the-punches sort of gal, but this is a sperm-nestled-into-an-egg-taking-root-inside-her that we’re talking about. Leave the thing to roost too long and before you know it you’ve got a loaf.
At the hospital she fills out forms. There are so many that it’s a bit like buying a house. The woman behind the thick glass (is it that way because of all the gun-toting right-wingers out there wanting to grab a headline?) looks more bored than a desert, sullen, depressed and suggestively doomed. She picks her nose and eats the diggings and doesn’t seem to care if anyone notices or not.
The clinic has an electrical hum to it, like the frozen foods section at Safeway. No one seems to appreciate the vibration but me.
The woman-the patient-my mother is not particularly nervous. What she is is gassy. Too much Lo Mein with msg at The Peking Duck last night. She’s shooting silent twirlers. Other patients settle and re-settle in their stiff might-as-well-be-marble plastic seats, wrinkling their noses Samantha-from-“Bewitched”-style.
When her name is called she stands and walks toward to dumpy Asian guy wearing glasses, a septum plug, and holding a clip board.
His name is Kenny. Of course it is.
He smiles a lot, like a clever chipmunk. He weighs her and asks her questions and takes her to a white room with posters of flowering fields that might have been taken from the set of “The Wizard of Oz.”
Dr. Singh comes in. She’s a contrite woman with unreal coffee bean-colored skin.
Her voice is as soft as cocoon when she introduces herself.
After small talk and some other rigmarole, Dr. Singh quietly says, “There’s still time to change your mind if that is what you’d like to do.”
This whole time I’ve been treading water. In the car I did some butterfly strokes, then breast strokes, but now I’m lying flat on my back, floating belly up. There’s no way she’s going through with this. I’ve heard my siblings bickering, heard Allan fart and Leah squeal Justin Beiber lyrics: “Baby, baby, baby. Ohhhh.”
But before I know it there’s a tornado down south. It’s an air funnel like nothing the world has ever seen, not even on the weather channel.
I scream, “How could you! I thought you loved me!” which is sort of a ridiculous thing to be doing because a.) My mother never actually claimed to have loved me; I was just operating on assumption and b.) The vacuum suction noise overpowers my best vocal efforts.
As I shoot through the tube, my last thought centers around children—the sound of their belly busting laughter, the wide-eyed wonder hanging in their pupils, the future slippery but waiting. I see a blue-eyed blonde in the sandbox. She’s eaten a palm full of dirt and a tadpole of slime drips off her chin. She’s grinning and she’s damn cute. I wonder what her name is, if she’d have ended up a friend or maybe even the love of my life.

2011-09-21T09:39:00.000-07:00

--IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING, THIS IS AN EXORCISIM

…I did things yesterday. Things I don’t normally do. Actually, things I have never done.
I wrote a Kingish amount of words. Stevie would be proud. (That’s Stevie, as in Stephen King, who in his book, “On Writing” says that the average joker should be able to write a minimum of 2,000 words a day, but that he never leaves his desk until he hits 4,000.)
It’s also Stephen King’s birthday today, so here’s to you, Mr. King.
Anyway, I wrote 4,000. 4,000 words.
It was fun, too.
I moved the characters around.
I hurt them.
I put them into difficult situations.
I hope I also made them endearing and somewhat mysterious.

…In addition, I wrote some flash/micro fiction.
I wrote four effective pieces.
I’ve never done that before—toggled in out of the two forms so massively on the same day.
So it was a good day.
When I woke up this morning I discovered one of those micro pieces (“After My Morning Shower; The Man in the Mirror” had been accepted.) That was fast.
#536]

…Last night I went to hear Ben Loory read at Vermillion, an establishment here in Seattle on Capitol Hill.
(That’s Ben’s collection in the photo.)
The night was sponsored by Elliot Bay Books, one of the premier bookstores in the nation. The venue was fun. The people were chic and attentive, artsy types, fans of Ben with a couple of salivating stalkers in the crowd to enliven matters. I was happy to be there and it was worth the 2 hour drive round-trip.
I met Ben last year when he did a reading at John Hopkins in Washington, DC.
Ben is a great guy--humble, authentic soft-spoken and witty.
His stories are very unique. Each is a fable that feels at once real and mysterious, fantastical.
You could read these stories to your kids and they’d enjoy them.
If you read them yourself, you’ll also enjoy them immensely.
On the surface they are spare and simple, yet they have layers and layers to be peeled off, sifted through and examined.
I give the book a big thumb’s up.
I think it’s like $15 or something ridiculous like that.
Get Ben’s book and have a blast.

…Today, in an hour and a half, I have an interview for a radio show.
I did my first audio (phone) interview last month.
It was okay. It was alright.
You have to picture the other person sitting in a booth, or at least I have to.
Otherwise it’s kind of odd.
It’s kind of odd no matter what.
I was nervous about it last time. I hope I’ll not be nervous now. In an hour and a half.

…Here are some things I like on a wide open Wednesday:

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right." Henry Ford

"It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars." Garrison Keillor

"Every now and then a person should get what they want when they want it. It keeps you optimistic." -"Six Feet Under"

“The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.” Christopher Morley

"Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” Oliver Wendell Holmes

"If you laugh a lot, when you are older all your wrinkles will be in the right places." Barbara Johnson

"That's why we get involved with other people, right? Not just for their bodies, but for everything else, too--their dreams and their scars and their stories?" Tom Perrotta, "The Leftovers

2011-09-19T09:58:00.001-07:00

--EVERYBODY WANTS YOU

…I got my new issue of “Esquire” magazine. I like Esquire quite a lot.
I read the September issue last night. On page 50 they gave details of a contest. The idea is to write a short-short fiction story of 78 words, 78 because Esquire is celebrating 78 years of existence.
Naturally, being one who writes very short things, I liked this notion a lot.
I also liked the fact that there was a contest involved—a $500 stipend, trip to NYC, and a small writer’s conference.
So I came up to this keyboard I’m writing on and banged out a story.
Next, I went to Esquire.com to check out the rules/the fine print. In doing so, I saw an update for the contest saying that since announcing the contest on September 1st, they have already received 3,000 entries.
THREE THOUSAND.
Holy Hell.
Anyway, I am going to send mine in. Now they’ll have 3,001.
Here’s what I just wrote:

Union 76

It starts with gasoline.

My father was an attendant, back when they had them in those days. My mother showed up on empty.

From there, they had two botched abortions, then me, plus a trailer home smelling of brine and barley, a place ravaged but replaced with shattered things.

It ends with gasoline, my father soaked in it one night after passing out on the couch. Mother putting the can down, flicking a lighter, saying, “Enough is enough.”

2011-09-17T06:43:00.001-07:00

--YOU’RE LONELY, TOO, I CAN TELL

…I have some new things out:
-“Ceremony,” a piece I wrote at the Iowa Writers Workshop this summer. It’s up at The Boston Literary Magazine.
-“Compression” a quote for The Matter Press
-“Hiccups” at Pipe Dream Fiction
-“The Sin Jar” at The Midwest Coast Review
All are also here under “Words in Print.”

…Yesterday Abbas made an official bid for UN recognition of Palestine on the same day that convicted felon and NBA star Ron Artest legally changed his named to “We Have World Peace.”
True story. Check the news if you don’t believe me.

Yesterday I was disobedient and diligent.

Yesterday I took a bath even though the doctor who told me I have skin cancer beside my nose (it’s basil cell, so no worries) told me I shouldn’t.

Yesterday I wrote on the new novel about Caleb, Chloe and poor Claire. I liked the pacing. It sort of skipped along. I think the beginning is quite tense, or so I hope. I’ve been re-reading “Ordinary People” to help keep me in that manic state of mind, but while writing I was listening to Freddy Johnstone (“I Have A Bad Reputation”) to counteract Judith Guests’ fantastic mood-setting writing.

…I have lots and lots of books on the business and craft of writing. One is called “A Writer’s Guide to Character Traits” written by a psychiatrist. It reads more like a shrink’s thesis.
Here’s what she says about writers (yikes!):
--wounded; creates in order to heal own wounds, or old family wounds
--sensitive, imaginative, abstract and creative thinker
--driven toward achievement; fearful of mediocrity
--dismissive of ordinary problems
--not adaptable
--not aggressive
--prone to alcohol use, especially after age forty; younger writers have increased risk of depression
--prone to problems with anxiety and drug use
--unconventional, nonconformist
--isolated at times; has to tolerate periods of being alone
--required to let go of work after completion
--likely to have come from families with both mental illness and creativity
--more likely to be bisexual or homosexual
Yowzah! With the exception of that last one, Dr. Linda H. Edelstein, PH.D has me pretty much pegged to a T.
It makes me sound like a miserable human being. Who knew I was so miserable?

…I’m almost finished with Tome Perrotta’s latest number, “The Leftovers.”
I loved “Little Children” and “Joe College,” though obviously that last one is an awful title.
“The Leftovers is about a comical, quirky version of The Rapture, of “The Left Behind Books” but having nothing to do with the chosen being Christians or not. It’s a fun, page-turning read. He does a wonderful job of making you care about all of these characters. I hope to be able to do that with my new book.
…My kids and I have started to watch “Dexter.”
What a trippy show that is. After “Six Feet Under” I had to see Michael C. Hall in action and man is he good. He’s nothing like the gay funeral home operator from “Six Feet.” How he gets us to root for a serial killer is astonishing.
…I’m getting a little bit of a belly. Don’t laugh; I am. It slightly slopes over my waist band.
I’ve always been thin. My whole life I have. I sort of obsess over my weight. I could be one-quarter anorexic. And now the flab is starting to come. It sucks getting older. But what’s a boy to do?

…I like these things on a Saturday morning:

"I am convinced that the world is not a mere bog in which men and women trample themselves and die. Something magnificent is taking place here amidst the cruelties and tragedies, and the supreme challenge to intelligence is that of making the noblest and best in our curious heritage prevail." C.A. Beard

"Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups." Bumper Sticker

"I want to hear your pain. I just want to hear it in joke form." -Christopher Titus

"Dying is an art like anything else and I do it extremely well." Sylvia Plath

"I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life." —Frank O'Hara

"What those words inside me could have said, I wonder—where or what I would have gone or been today having them absorbed—somehow ending up another person—smarter, further—this, gone forever. And still, here I am. Now." — Blake Butler, "Nothing"

2011-09-15T10:35:00.001-07:00

--YOU PROBABLY THINK THIS SONG IS ABOUT YOU, DON’T YOU, DON’T YOU?

There are three of me in this picture.
No, wait. There are more.
There are four. Four or five of me in this photo.
We are all very bright, very slick, but also slight and sick. We blend into nothing but the wind.
That’s one of the problems—me not knowing me as well as I should.
Other people don’t seem to have this issue. Other people are more self-aware. They have their stuff together, their shit together. They are Get-up-and-go, Take-it-or-leave-it, Read-email-on-their-cell-phones-all-the-way-to-work types, just because they’re that fully-formed.
And isn’t it beautiful.
So what’s a boy to do?
Most boys can see a lot farther than me. They see the sail boats on Lake Washington and the lingering ash/smoke/haze from Mount St. Helens. Still, I’m the one who sees the laugh lines and the faint mole southeast of the lower lip, the lips themselves looking like pulpy fruit. I’m the one who sees beside the moon, how the clouds resemble a sheer sheath Marilyn Monroe once wore in a photo.
But what good does that do me?
Red is red and red is not blue.
We all know this is true.
Colors have boundaries just as we do, and each one designates something in particular.
A person can see red and feel blue. A person can paint either color separate or blend the two.
Last night I watched two girls (who were high on some kind of drug) sink their hands into a can of blood red paint. They talked about how silky it felt. They didn’t really need to say anything, though. It could have been a Show-Don’t-Tell moment and that would have worked perfectly.
You read this and say: “WTF? What the hell does this mean?”
And I answer: “Exactly.”

2011-09-13T07:55:00.000-07:00

--DIDN’T ANYONE EVER TELL YOU THAT YOU SHOULD NEVER LEAVE THE SCENE OF AN ACCIDENT?

…I am sitting in a coffee shop type place. Everything is humming. Really loudly, things are humming. Like zombies snoring. It’s kind of freaky, actually. I’m the only one here besides the girl who works the till, who always remembers my drink order but will never look me in the eye.
This place just opened a few minutes ago. It’s early. I’m trying to be productive. Don’t we all feel better when we get a lot of things done? Do you make To Do lists? Do you enjoy slicing a line through the various tasks you’ve listed on the list?

…Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is honesty. The idea of it, the utopian idea makes sense. But the raw reality of it is another thing altogether.
Who have you been utterly honest with? I mean, like told every solitary thing you’ve done to? Anyone? Really?
It’s hard to be honest, even with people we trust. Even to spouses and best friends.
It’s hard to be vulnerable when it comes from our own initiative.
I just read a blog where a writer panned another writer’s book. Both of them know each other. It must have taken some guts to be that honest, because there’s a profoundly (I hate adverbs in general and have never used this particular one in my life) good chance that the author will discover the reviewer’s review and not be happy.
How brave to be so honest. How delightful.
I am not so brave.
But I wish I was, and I’m working harder at it.
I really am.

…I am aging, too.
Every day I am.
I’ll be honest here and tell you that I am still not comfortable with this getting older idea.
It bugs me.
I see signs of my getting older all the time. Unless I was blind it’d be hard to escape them.
I keep thinking of all these things I want to accomplish or every once in a while I’ll realize the real meaning of a platitude or phrase or what some famous person said, and I’ll wonder how many others I never comprehended, and I’ll think, well, I still have a lot of living left.

…There are certain words I spell wrong all the time.
Words like—“occasion” and “initiative.” (I always spell “ocassion” this way.)
Do you ever do that—spell words wrong all the time, repeatedly, year after year?
There are certain words I like but can never recall how to spell.
A word like “surreptitious.” If you don’t misspell it close enough to the correct spelling the spell check device won’t even get you to the correct spelling and you’ll end up frustrated all day, or for several even, trying to figure out how to spell the damn word just as I was frustrated the other day—actually THREE days—trying to remember who sang “Sultans of Swing” (Dire Straits.)
And then there are those tricking words, syntax things, which I do not know when to use what.
“lay” or “lie,” for example. I just never know when to use which. “who” or “whom” is another example.

…Now it smells like eggs and bacon in this place. That’s a nice smell and so it’s not as freaky in here as it was, although since I’ve started this post, it’s still just me and the waitress girl.
After a stretch of near-ninety degree weather, things are gray and cloud-hooded outside.
I guess I feel a little lonely.
I wish you were here.
If you were we could chat a bit and I’d buy you coffee, and I just bet I’d make you laugh and you would do the same to me.

2011-09-11T04:48:00.001-07:00

--I REMEMBER IT VERY, VERY WELL

I was on the way to work, of course I was.
It was early, as usual, around six-thirty as I recall.
Starbucks was packed. It always was/is. (Every single Starbucks in every location is always busy.)
Things felt normal.
There was a maw of conversation mixed with some innocuous/pretentious jazz playing through overhead speakers. No one seemed manic in their discussions. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Rich people were just forking over money for stupidly-priced coffee and not minding waiting in line to do so. One lady, a neighbor, held her toy poodle at her fake breasts, while wearing a chincilla coat even though it was not chilly.
I ordered a tall-double-skinny-nonfat-no foam-latte.
I didn’t get any food.
I was in a hurry.
I was wearing a suit that morning. Gray window pane. Lavender shirt with a purple tie and natty grape pocket square. Salesman brown shoes and matching belt. (I cared about those things back then. I was a lot dumber back then.)
My car was a red Saab, 900s with a black rubber spoiler. (See?) There wasn’t a cup holder, so I had to drop my latte precisely into place, into the plastic divot molded into the stick shift. I had to do so without spilling any of the boiling brew and thus having the electrical controls lock up on me.
I’ve never been a person who listens to the radio. I absolutely love music, but I hate the radio and all those inane disc jockeys and the really awful radio advertisements that try too hard to get your attention.
But for whatever reason, on 9/11 of that year I was listening to the radio.
The announcer, the newscaster, I think it was Tom Brokaw, sounded unsure and nervous. He said something like, “It appears there’s been an accident at The Twin Towers.”
He described the smoke.
The chaos.
As he kept talking, more and more fear crept into his voice. He became a human instead of a News guy.
And this made me afraid…
By the time I parked and got to work, everyone at the office was huddled in a cubicle, wherever there was a miniature TV.
By the time I got to work, the other tower had been hit.
No one had yet mentioned Washington, DC or Philadelphia.
There was enough hysteria.
Both towers toppled. Melted.
The TV said it was unbelievable.
I thought so, too.
They showed footage of planes crashing into buildings.
They showed the scenes over and over and over and over.
My administrative assistant broke down crying.
What did I do?
I went out into the store. I saw one of my bosses. He said we weren’t closing the store early like everyone else was doing, all of our competitors. He said, this isn’t that big of a thing. Then we talked about music and hot new bands.
All the while my administrative assistant kept paging me and I kept ignoring them, because, well, I was having an intimate conversation with my boss whose name is one all of the buildings and stores in the company that I worked for.
There are things we regret. I regret that day for all sorts of reasons. I regret my lack of understanding and my inability to grasp what the fuck was happening. I regret ever opening any of our stores that day. I regret my conceit and arrogance and who I was.
9/11 is hard for me. I know it’s worse for many people, but I really do think about it often, almost too often. It amazes and confounds me. I find it hard to believe that it actually happened, not unlike the Holocaust.
I remember driving home and seeing hundreds and hundreds of miniature American flags dotting lawns or taped to trucks and cars.
I also remember the eerie feeling when a few weeks afterward, I first saw a plane in the sky, flying fairly low, across the skyline near the space needle. It was very unsettling to say the least.
A few months following 9/11, some bold people made a documentary about it, voiced over by Robert Deniro. I wanted to teach my daughter the significance of the event. She was nine. Most of the time—while people were hurling themselves off of the buildings and you could hear (honestly) the thud of their bodies, she kept remarking about how pretty the sun looked on the glass.
Here’s a story I wrote about that, which appeared in the “G6 Anthology” edited by Lydia Davis.

Timing

Sometimes it happens this way, with him driving 1-90 to work, seeing a plane floating low over Union Bay, toggling between buildings and it’ll catch him unaware and he’ll remember stopping at Starbucks that September morning, the newscaster’s baritone tremulous and uncertain, him and everyone thinking hoax, thinking Orson Wells, and then later that night, thinking Armageddon and Satan.
Many days afterward there was a Robert Deniro documentary and he thought this could be a teaching moment for Hailey, his young daughter, with whom he had custody on weekends.
He made cocoa with mini marshmallows and once they became soupy Lilly pads Hailey plucked their white guts with her little girl fingers and drew letters across his cheeks.
On the television the buildings simmered and smoldered, sirens shrieked, people leapt and bodies thumped. They’d left none of the horror or death out, and while he knew he should have switched the channel, he couldn’t, riveted as he was.
When the program finished, his daughter turned to him with a yawn and asked if he could read her a story.

2011-09-09T07:46:00.001-07:00

--THINGS WOULD BE A LOT EASIER IF YOU'D JUST PUT DOWN THAT KNIFE

…What do you do when nothing comes together? When there’s not enough sticky substance to keep the sides and center together? I haven’t figured that out. A lot of times I just drip or leak or lose parts of myself because I can’t figure out the holding-it-together jig that everyone else is so good at.

…I started the new novel. I actually started it several times. I’m not so sure which tense to use or where to launch the tension, but I suppose that doesn’t matter as much as just getting the boat in the water and sinking a couple of oars.
I mean, what do you think?

…I read a friend’s blog where they talked about going to Borders and how excited they were by the bargains.
I went to Borders and started trembling.
I wanted to puke.
It was looking inside a mausoleum, opening up smelly caskets filled with decrepit corpses that were half-wasted away.
How sad.
I was never a big Borders fan, but still, how depressing is it to see a once proud lady now emaciated and humiliated?
I wanted to weep.
Instead I left after about 50 seconds of being there.
I am not so strong.

…This morning my coffee is steaming. It burns by lips. It stings my hands when I hold the paper cup even though the container has a sleeve. It’s very hot.
Sometimes it’s good to drink boiling hot coffee and to singe your nerve endings a little so that you know you are still alive and capable of feeling things. I think that is important.

…A thing I don’t get is why people are rude.
Or why people tailgate.
I know these two thoughts are random and not inter-related, but they are subjects that befuddle me.
(Befuddle is a fun word to say. Try it.)

…Have you ever read “Ordinary People?” I saw the film many, many years ago. Robert Redford directed it. Mary Tyler Moore was in it. Timothy Hutton, too. (he was a boyish 17 years old.) I don’t recall who played the father.
The movie won “Best Picture.”
Last year I was reading a writer’s magazine and it said “Ordinary People” (the novel) was the only book that had “tension on every page.”
I tracked down an old copy and read it.
Sure enough—there was tension on every page. I mean, every freaking page. It’s brilliant and heart-racing.
I started reading it again to inspired my own novel.

…What are you doing today? Is it foggy where you are like it is where I am?
What are your plans?
What are you wearing?

2011-09-07T09:34:00.001-07:00

--WELL, WHAT'S THAT BIG, FAT GRIN ALL ABOUT?

…I have a new story, "The Sin Jar" up at The Midwest Coast Review (pg. 23) and a new story, "Strangers," at The Stone Highway Review (pg. 28).
Both are here under “Words In Print.”

…I saw "My Idiot Brother." I had high hopes for the movie. It looked quirky in sort of an Indie film way. It had Indie actors like Paul Rudd and Zooey Deschanel and that lady from Saturday Night Live.
But it was not a good film.
It was sort of a sellout.
There were no surprises. It was as predictable as tomorrow morning's sunrise.
I had an inkling it wasn't going to be any good when the previews started. You can almost bet how good a movie will be just by the previews that are shown before-hand. (Hint: one of the previews was for the new Adam Sandler movie where Mr. Sandler plays a male version of himself and a twin, female version of himself.)
So, yeah, that was a bit disappointing.

…The concert was not disappointing.
The Walkmen opened the show. They were good. They look like four college kids from Utah or Texas, the lead singer in a suit, open collar button down, affecting a young Dennis Quaid look.
But the highlight, of course, was The Fleet Foxes. Listening to them is like being inside an orchestral orgasm.
The sound was lush and soaring and quiet and adoring.
They had flutes and a cello, mandolins, violins, an old piano that looked like it was stolen from the set of "Gun Smoke."
And it was all very beautiful.
They play a second show tonight here in Seattle.
Wherever you are, go see them if you can. Or get their album, especially the first one.

…Here in Seattle, down by Pike Place Market, there's a long side street called "Post Alley" that winds a mile or so. At one point you will come to the Gum Wall.
If you know about the Gum Wall you'll be prepared and not freaked.
If you do not know about the Gum Wall you'll be taken aback and probably grossed out.
Basically the Gum Wall is several buildings in the alley where people stick their gum.
By now, many thousand people have done so. I mean, there's a LOT of gum on the walls.
They cover several buildings.
It teeters on the cusp of being disgusting, yet it also is quite colorful, inventive, collaborative, organic, and ingenious.
People/tourists were busy taking pictures when I happened upon it yesterday.
The photo above in this post is the Gum Wall.
Come check it out.

…There are things I want to say to you.
Some of these things are secrets. Some are quite obvious but need to be said anyway.
Some of the things I want to say to you are barbed and might put you on edge. I don't know. I'm not sure.
I have been thinking about saying these things ever since I was a boy, before I knew you.
I knew even then that someday, when I met you, I'd have this hankering to share my news, spill the beans.
But now that that day is here and you are here (or nearby, at least) I'm unsettled about the issue.
It has nothing to do with bravery and everything to do with dark holes. It has nothing to do with trust and honesty and everything in the world to do with the future.
You know this about me, don't you, how the future is something I keep putting off while the past is a wide sidewalk crack I hopped over long ago.
In the end, of course, it all hinges on one thing. What really matters is if you really, really want to know, to hear the things I want to say.
Well, do you?

2011-09-05T12:22:00.001-07:00

--I HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN YOU WERE THE ONE

…I have a new story, “The Sin Jar,” up at The Midwest Coast Review (page 23) and also here under “Words in Print.”

…Yesterday was Bumbershoot, the annual musical festival here in Seattle akin to Lollapalooza.
The weather, being spectacular, may had something to do with there being throngs and throngs of people.
It was quite a day.
My son and I saw four concerts in a single day:
Massy Ferguson (eh)
Sol (hot hot Seattle hip hopper who brought friends, his mom, and his aunt from Haiti on stage for the closing song)
Broken Social Scene (Canadian sound bending band. If sea glass could sing it would sound like them.)
Macklemore (huge Seattle rapper)
Additionally, these are some other things we saw:
Lots of pot. Bales of marijuana were being smoked.
Gallons of rum (why rum?) we being drank
People were popping ecstasy.
A girl in front of me fainted.
There was a female mime dusted all white and dressed up like a spastic fairy.
Mario (replete with a thick, fake mustache) and Luigi from Super Mario Brothers showed up and danced during Broken Social Scene.
There were a lot of very short skirts and some cut-offs that were essentially frames for bare buttocks.
Around 20,000 people crammed into Key Arena to see Macklemore.
I was in the mosh pit. Normally that would be a cool place to be.
I was in the mosh pit with five thousand other people.
It was hard to breathe. Moving was almost impossible.
Female breasts were squished against my arm. Slimy, sweaty guys were pushed up on my back.
The mob kept pushing this way and that. I was like a human windshield wiper blade, nearly falling backward or forward dozens and dozens of times.
It became an inferno.
After a while, after an hour and a half, I fought my way out.
Once I was on the upper floor I realized why everyone was staring—I was drenched in sweat, some my own, half belonging to strangers.
I watched the concert from up above. It was an amazing sight with 10 thousand arms bobbing up and down to the beat.
Oh, and I was the oldest person in the entire coliseum. Really, I was. I did, however, get I.D.-ed the other day at Safeway, so it’s a balancing act.

…Tomorrow I see Fleet Foxes and The Walkmen. Life is song.

…Here’s a Sylvia Plath piece like on a Monday, especially when that day is a holiday:
"Mad Girl's Love Song

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
— Sylvia Plath

2011-09-02T15:14:00.001-07:00

--LAST NIGHT WHILE I WAS SLEEPWALKING I’M PRETTY SURE I RAN INTO YOU SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE FREEZER AND THE PANTRY

…I have five stories and two poems up at Negative Suck. They’re also here under words in print and the story tabbed “History” under “Words in Print.” I was fortunate to be their featured writer for the month.
I also read some poetry and was interviewed by Annmarie Lochart for Vox Poetica. If you want a listen, it’s here tabbed as “Bridge” under “Words in Print.”

…So I saw Cheap Trick on Wednesday night.
They were Cheap Trick all right.
They sounded like they sounded all those years ago. It got a little monotonous after a while. After a while I wanted to leave.
After a while I did.

…Last night I saw One Republic. Their gig was short and sweet.
The lead singer was fun and hospitable. He’s also insanely talented. Every breath that came out of his mouth was pure pop gold.
I liked them so much I ordered their album today.

…Today I read stories for my editing gig at Metazen. I read a lot of stories and a lot of poems.
Most of them were not very good. Some that were better than others were still pretty average. A few I just did not get. Maybe I’m not smart enough. Perhaps I should resign and let a brighter reader read what might be written between the lines that I might be missing.

…Tonight I’m going to a high school football game. In a small town, games are a big deal and it’s got a nostalgic flavor. Going to them always reminds me of “Friday Night Lights” the movie, not the tv show because I’ve only seen the film. It’s quite good and I recommend it to you.

…Tomorrow a gaggle of people are coming over for a paella party. A special chef and his cooking troupe are coming over to whip up the fixings.

…Sunday is Bumbershoot, a yearly music festival in Seattle akin to Lollapalooza with literally hundreds of bands. We will be seeing McLemore and Wuz Kalifa and some rock groups.

…Tuesday is Fleet Foxes and The Walkmen.

…I have become a social animal. I have turned rabidly social. What’s wrong with me? Where’s the shy, introverted nine year old? Oh, I know where he is. He’s here:

THERE IS A PLACE
…There’s a place I go where no one can find me, not even God.
In the place, this field, forest, there are acres and acres of ancient evergreens and craggy gray boulders that resemble old people’s skin or tortillas.
Every now and then there’s a patch of yellow buttercups of wild blue bells. Sometimes they’ll have a bit of nectar in them that tastes (I’m hoping anyway) like my first kiss which I haven’t had yet.
I go to this place because I am sometimes embarrassed about my family, or just my parents, or else just myself. I’m embarrassed about myself because I am too shy to make friends and I know I should have friends, probably a dozen already, because every nine year old has too many friends, I mean come on.
I like to my secret place, to my special place, to the top of a small hill that is flat in the center with rocks coming up on all sides like shoulder pads. When I look left or right, east or west, I can’t see a single soul. If I shout, my breath flies away unsteady and balloon-slow.
When it’s windy, my favorite thing to do is to lie down on a bed of pine needles and watch the tree limbs sway above me. I guess it’s sort of like being in a crib again, watching the spinner thing hanging above with felt toys, although I’m not sure if I had one of those. I’m thinking I didn’t.
This place, my secret home-away-from-home, it feels like a fortress. My brothers have a tree fort behind out trailer that I could visit, but I don’t. No, this is my place. I feel safe here and it’s okay to be alone and quiet, to think and wonder, to be afraid or confident, anything at all really.
Sometimes I imagine I’m finding bands of savage Indians that want to claim the land as their own. I beat them back with a stick I find, or with my bare fists and shoes. In my imagination I’m like The Hulk, only white instead of green, skinny instead of muscled.
It’s really something--what a person’s imagination can come up with.
It’s something else--being nine.
Then when you factor in being nine and being me, well, you’d want to have a super-secret place to go to.
I guarantee it.

2011-08-31T16:34:00.000-07:00

--I’M NOT AS BAD AS YOU THINK I AM, AM I?

…Last night I watched, “Donnie Darko” again. It had been at least ten years since seeing it.
What a film, what a piece of work.
Holy hell.
Future film majors should be required to study it. There must have been at least 30 different cinematography shots that were ingenious. Then there’s the creepy, whacked out plot. Then there’s a kitchen soup of famous actors—Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, Seth Rogen, Drew Barrymore, Ashley Tisdale! and Katherine Ross who I once had a crush on (that’s her up there circa “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”) but who I thought while watching “D. Darko” was Meredith Baxter Birney.
In any event, if you’ve never seen Donnie Darko, please do. It’ll knock you down and laugh at you in a very spooky voice.

…Today I nailed boards to other boards. Now I have some nasty ass blisters. My hands are not used to doing anything that does not involve a keyboard.
I am not a carpenter.
I am not handy, nor am I a handyman. Just ask anyone.

…I finished Brian Oliu’s little book of quirky pieces called “So You Know It’s Me.”
This guy is a very fine writer. He strings together beautiful sentences. Sometimes you’re not sure what he means. Sometimes, I bet, he doesn’t even know what he meant. But that’s beside the point if you like lovely language. Usually people who use a lot of repetition feel fraudulent to me, but Brian does it wonderfully.

…I also finished Megan Chance’s historical romance novel, “City of Ash.” Megan, too, is an incredibly gifted writer. She’s the master at many things: building completely individualized characters, layering in sensibilities, adding historical flourishes, doing hardcore research to cement authenticity, and—something that always impresses me—adding so much conflict that the characters get shoved farther and farther into peril. The only thing I don’t understand is why Megan isn’t hugely popular. Maybe she writes too smart for most people? I don’t know, but I love her.

…Tomorrow I am being interviewed and recorded at Vox Poetica, then the link will be put up at the publication. I’ve never done anything like that before, so needless to say, I’m excited. I’m going to read three poems on the air. Yikes!

…Tonight I am going to see “Cheap Trick.” Yep. “Momma’s all right. Daddy’s all right. They just seem a little weary. Surrender. Surrender, but don’t give yourself away.” I am not a big fan but the tickets are free and company will be excellent.
Tomorrow night I’m going to see “One Republic” and meet the band afterward.
Next month it’s “Ryan Adams,” “Death Cab For Cutie” and “The Head and the Heart.” I almost had a coronary when I found out Ryan Adams was finally touring again. I would have his babies.
It probably seems to you as if I go to a lot of concerts. It seems that way to me.

…While reading Brian's book in the bath (there's some alliteration) I wrote four pieces in his style. It was fun.
Here's one.

Strangers

You never told me and I never noticed before, but I do now.
I see them, the jars inside your eyes. Mason jars. My mother used to stuff hers with peaches she picked from a puny-looking tree leaning beside the tree swing attached to two crooked trees.
But these eyes of yours, these eyes with jars inside them, they are different. They are more like glass canisters. They are a place to store precious materials, such as your memories and your laughter. I have never heard you nostalgic and come to think of it, many years have transpired since your last laugh. I am the laughingstock in this relationship, believe me.
I wonder if your eyes get dry as mine sometimes do. If they did get dry, would the jars crack from being bone-dry and sore? If you sat at a computer all day as I sometimes do, would you get so much eye strain that the glass jar canisters would crash in on themselves, shattering like a glass hit by a sonic sound wave?
Discovering these jars in your eyes has me fascinated. They are making me more and more curious. What else do I not know about you? What other discoveries have I not discovered because I have not been paying proper attention?
Oh look—there are trapdoors inside your ears. What a shock! Knock, knock, who’s there, who’s there inside your right ear and who’s inside your left ear and why are do you have doors in your ears in the first place and why are both of them locked, from the inside no less?
Now that the cat is out of the bag you snort and stick out your tongue and I see that, ah ha, it is a ticker tape tongue, a kite tail tongue with little origami strips of paper. On them messages are written in a thin scrawl, as if a carpenter ant found a fountain pen. I read every note where you’ve recorded every name ever created, even the weird, hard-to-pronounce Old Testament names like Hesekiah and Abijah, but nowhere is mine. Is it behind the trapdoors? Is it in one of the jars? Do you not remember who I am or have we really become strangers after all?

2011-08-29T07:51:00.000-07:00

--CAN I BUY A VOWEL?

…I have three new stories up:
--“Solitary” At Doorknobs and BodyPaint
--“A Colony of Termites” @ Housefire
--And “Black Notes” @ Pure Slush.
All of them are also here under “Words In Print.”
The latter story is a combination of two I keep coming back to—dementia/Alzheimer’s and lost innocence. Maybe I need to write it in novel form. We’ll see.

…In the tub the other day (what is it about the soothing feel of gurgling water?), I diagrammed the new novel, or did a rough outline of it. Since then, it’s been on my mind, which is good, because the piece needs to be flushed out quite a bit and, also, I find, when I can hold off from jumping in and just writing something, my subconscious works on my conscious, creating a new awareness, so that a lot of the things I see, read or hear become useful fodder for the writing. I watch a show with a blind person in it and think, "Maybe I'll make the sister blind." I read a story about a ghost and suddenly it makes perfect sense to add a delusional character who thinks she sees the ghost of her dead twin, and then it makes me have to come up with a subplot about why the twin died and what makes this person see her dead twin.
It's all quite fun, actually.

…My daughter and I watched two films. One was, “Flipped,” an adorable little coming of age number about falling in love in the year 1963. Evidentially it was adopted from a YA book of the same name. It falls on the cusp of cheesiness, but I bet you won’t be able to watch it and not go “Aw,” several times.
The other film, “Afterschool” was a raw, brutal look at kids in a boarding school who—materially—have it all, but who’ve become desensitized to living for the sake of living, without stimulants, both narcotic and sexual. It’s sort of a “Less Than Zero” reworking for a new generation. Beware: should you decide to watch it. There are many parts which will leave you dry-mouthed, squirming and wishing you weren’t watching it.

…It’s a gray-green morning, misty. The lake wears a wrinkled mauve face. There are no boats. The eagle is somewhere else. A lonesome dog is howling sporadically. The environmental state of things is telling me it’s to be a sad Monday, but I don’t believe that. It’s going to be fantastic.
I can just feel it.
Can’t you?

…Here are some things I like at the start of a new week:

"I will make my soul an envelope for your soul~ And my heart a residence for your beauty~ And my breast a grave for your sorrows~ I shall love you" ~Gibran

‘'Worry looks around, Sorry looks back, Faith looks up.”

"From the beginning, the soul of you and I has been one" ~Rumi

“I have so many words, but not enough beds. So they stand and fall into obedient line, chatterbox gossips with the bionic mouth and the old sleeplessness. But to your name they fold up in a cross: the arch is a bow of great pain. And so reduced, they find a place.” Emily Filocamo

"I like to think of art as living information. You simply go to it and its emotional relevance with just happen to you." Ryan Adams

--"Wisdom is benefiting from other people's pain."
--"Hard and difficult seasons are just the chapters of what you're going through at the time, they're not the story. How you get through those chapters determines the rest of the story." Jeff Knight

2011-08-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

--YOU LOOK SENSATIONAL

…I forget too much. Sometimes I can’t even remember what I’ve forgotten.
That could be scary, but I just sort of ignore the fact that I’m not logging certain events or actions down into the journal that my brain carries around.
It’s not like I have Alzheimer’s. Not yet anyway.
It would suck to have Alzheimer’s. It would suck to have dementia or any sort of disease like that.
Glen Campbell has a new album coming out.
(You think it’s really random, me mentioning Glen Campbell right now, don’t you? You might even wonder about me and dementia.)
“Why are you so happy?” a reporter asked Glen.
“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe because I’m still young.”
“Young?”
“Yeah, I’m only 75.”
I like that spirit. I like Glen.
Glen just revealed he’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He doesn’t care, though. He’s actually even going on tour for his new album. I’m not sure how that’s all going to pan out, but I admire him a great deal for doing so.
Pat Summitt, the winningest women’s college basketball coach ever, just announced that she, too, has Alzheimer’s, but that she is going to continue to coach.
I think that’s brave. You know, throwing yourself out there like that with a public admission and then allowing yourself to be vulnerable enough to erode while everyone’s watching.
I don’t know why I’m fixated on Alzheimer’s this morning.
I guess it’s because a friend was recalling memories and I thought it would really suck not to be able to remember past events—the good ones anyway.
Of course there are many things that would suck way worse.
So, let me shut up. The sun is shining. It’s Saturday in Seattle. No one’s on the lake yet, not even a duck. The beavers must still be sleeping.
Good morning to you. Have the best day ever.

Here are a few things I like today:

"If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on
walking." Buddhist Proverb

"I think laughter may be a form of courage. As humans we sometimes stand tall and look into the sun and laugh, and I think we are never more brave than when we do that." Linda Ellerbee

"Maturity is achieved when a person postpones immediate pleasures for
long-term values." Joshua L. Liebman

"I learned the sun falls a million ways on a mountain trail, so each becomes a different trail
I learned if I dressed like a folding chair I'd never be alone." Rob Cook

"A friend is one who sees through you and still enjoys the view." Wilma Askinas

"We all have stories we are trying to escape." Vanessa Hua

‎"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes." --William Gibson

"At first dreams seem impossible, then improbable, then inevitable." Christopher Reeve

"A servant wants to be rewarded for what he does~ A lover wants only to be in love's presence~ The ocean who's depth can never be known" ~Rumi

2011-08-25T13:40:00.000-07:00

--FOCUS ON YOUR BREATHING

...I've been listening to this band and this song on repeat. It's quite sweet and sad and good. You'd like it.

"When it hits me that she's gone
I think I'll run for president,
get my face put on the million dollar bill.
So when these rich men that she wants
show her ways they can take care of her
I'll have found a way to be there with her still.

When it hits me that she's gone
I think I'll be an astronaut,
make the moon my home and leave the earth behind.
So when she steps into the night
to the light that makes her prettiest
she'll be facing me every time she shines.

When it hits me that she's gone
I think I'll be a movie star,
play the finest men the world has ever seen.
So when these lovers that she's found
show her ways they learned to talk to her
behind each perfect word there'll be a little bit of me." Dawes, "Million Dollar Bill"

2011-08-23T09:12:00.000-07:00

--WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN, IT WAS A VERY GOOD YEAR

--My daughter has an obsession with Katy Perry. I’m not sure why exactly; she just does.
But it's a healthy obsession.
It’s a hobby for her, this Katy Perry fandom thing.
When I was her age I had a mild obsession with Bo Derek.
That’s her in the photo. The iconic image is taken from the film “10.”
I haven’t seen that movie in many, many years and I’m almost afraid to since I have such fond memories of it.
In the movie, Dudley Moore’s character is having some marital woes with his Julie Andrew’s wife when--while driving through Beverly Hills--Dudley is at a stop light, turns to his left, and happens upon the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen.
It’s Bo, of course, seated in the back seat of the car next to him. She glances at him as one would another passenger in the opposing lane. It’s a subtle, slow motion gaze which confirms for Dudley (as well as viewers) that Bo is indeed stunning.
When the light changes to green, Dudley fights traffic to follow the car and the woman to, of all places…
a chapel.
Bo Derek (said beautiful woman) is getting married.
That doesn’t deter Dudley.
Nor does a toxic bee sting to the nose, the loss of several teeth, an arrest, being locked out of his house, a car wreck…
Nothing dissuades Dudley because he’s just too far gone, too obsessed with his obsession.
After a series of comic pratfalls, Dudley tracks the bride all the way to…
Mexico
where she’s…
on her honeymoon.
Eventually, Dudley saves Bo’s new husband from certain death by drowning and Bo, a new age feline, ends up smoking pot and wanting to engage in sex with Dudley while Ravel’s Bolero plays on the stereo.
Ultimately, Dudley realizes that Bo is beautiful, but always somewhat vapid, scrupulous to a degree, and, well, just not the perfect “10” he’d thought her to be—at least not spiritually or mentally.
His hopes dashes, he returns to Julie Andrews, not settling, but wiser and more grounded.
The film is a great tale about the grass always being greener on the other side, the fallacy of beauty, and the truth about love.
Those are the things I think about when I remember “10.”
Really, they are.
I don’t think about Bo. It seems silly now, that I ever had a crush on her. After all she wasn’t real. I should have known better.

“Love is not a feeling. It is an action, an activity. True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.” Scott Peck

2011-08-19T09:20:00.000-07:00

--SAY IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT

…I have a new poem, "Mother's Day" up at Stoked and also here under "Words in Print." I tend to write really dark, tragic stuff, but this poem is about as tragic as they come. I even had a friend question why I would write something so horrific. I guess that's a fair question.
I don't know if I have an adequate answer.
I do know that it's nearly impossible for me to write happy pieces. It's not that I'm an unhappy guy, but rather that it feels like a cop out to take the traditional everything-works-out-wonderful-and-they-all-lived-happily-ever-after endings. It seems boring.
The dark stuff is more interesting to me, more unexpected. The truth is, the world has lots of dark places and dark moments and dark people in it.
The truth is, I'm not talented enough to write something happy without it coming across as hokey.
We all have our niches.

..I'm still working on paginating a chapbook for a poetry contest. It's a lot more work than I thought. I might be wasting my time. Even though there are three winners, contestants WORLD WIDE are encouraged to enter.
I suppose, it can't hurt.

…I got my copy of L.E.S. (Lower East Side) Review in the mail and read the whole thing through. There's lots of different stylings in it. Some of the poems were really out there and I had no idea what the author was trying to say.
I don't know why people like poetry like that.
I wonder if they can infer some meaning that is totally escaping me.
I me totally flying right over my head.

..Here are some interesting and very random facts I've collected for your enjoyment:

What's the saddest movie of all time?
-- 20% say "Schindler's List
--16% "Old Yeller"
--14% "Terms of Endearment"
--10% "Life is Beautiful" (one of my favorites films)
--10% "Brokeback Mountain"
--9% "Million Dollar Baby"
--6% "The Champ"
--3% "Love Story"
--2% "An Affair to Remember"

…There are more kangaroos in Australia than there are people

…"Mean people" earn $10,000 more than "nice people" in the work place

--91% of all adults think they are a good, very good, or excellent driver

--Has Martin Luther King's dream of racial equality been realized in the US?
Yes --54% of blacks
Yes --49% of whites

--Through yesterday, the US has tied the record (20008) for weather-related disasters that cost $1B or more

--The last seven July's have been the highest grossing movie months ever

--"The Jersey Shore goes to Italy" premier is the highest rated in MTV's history
Ambercombie and Fitch has offered to pay the cast of "Jersey Shore" not to wear the apparrel line's clothing

2011-08-16T11:01:00.001-07:00

--DON'T STOP NOW, YOU'RE JUST ABOUT TO GET TO THE GOOD PART

…I have a new story, "Chop Salad," up at ZOUCH magazine and also here under "Words in Print."
--I like the photo they used, of President Obama, Michelle and the girls. They used that pic because in the story I start off by saying I wish I was black and I wish I could meet the Prez and play with his bone-thin girls (the narrator is a chubby, reclusive girl without much self-esteem.)
I am not fat. Most people would call me thin, lean, skinny.
I am six three and 165 lbs.
Sometimes I feel fat, though. Sometimes I think I am fat. I do have a little roll around the waist. Really. It's not just me being anorexic either.
Here, have a look.
See? I told you.
Even though I am not overweight and even though I do not have a vagina, I have a lot in common with the narrator in Chop Salad.
I often feel reclusive and shy. Sometimes I feel aloof because I feel as if I don't belong to any one group. What do I mean by “group?” Heck, I don’t know.
I am good in crowds when I force myself to be, which can happen, though it takes effort.
I can be charming even if it does sometimes feel like a farce, an act.
I remember a Partridge Family episode where Danny--struggling to find out what he wanted to do with his life--had a eureka moment:
DANNY: "Mom, I know what I want to be when I grow up."
SHIRLEY: "Well, that's great, Honey. What do you want to be?"
DANNY: "A negro."
(this was in 1972, so it was still "negro" instead of "African American.")
I've wanted to be black before. I've wanted to be other people, part of another culture, especially one with strong bonds.
Is that normal? How about you? Have you ever thought of being someone else, or are you just perfectly fine with who you are?

…I have given myself the permission to take the rest of the summer off from writing unless someone solicits me.
It’s a freeing feeling but still a bit of a struggle since I often judge my success/worth by how much I produce, which as a way of valuing oneself, I realize, is far from ideal.
I did cut and paste about 80 poems together just now. I might submit them to this poetry Chapbook contest. There’s a fee for the contest, of course.
The competition will be stiff, no doubt.
But you win money and there are prized for the top three finishers and it would be nice to win a prize, especially in poetry where I am not always certain I am that skilled.
So, we’ll see. I’ll let you know how it goes.

…It smells like bacon.
It’s a good smell, strong, sort of greasy and irony.
The sun is streaming through the window of this crepe-coffee shop I’m at.
It’s so bright, in fact, that I’ve draped my laptop bag over the screen in order to thwart the glare.
I probably look suspicious to onlookers.
It makes me feel like I’m under the sheet at summer camp with a flashlight telling ghost stories.
Funny how little things like that can make a person feel nostalgic.

…I like these things on a happy Tuesday afternoon:

"The line between living and manipulating your life for the sake of your art is blurry." Art Edwards

"Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry." -- Mark Strand

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known.' Chuck Palahniuk

"Ever writer who is not a great writer is a plagiarist." Bolano

"I was making a point. It was about how small life is and how you only get to see so much but then, when you widen your lens, you miss all of the important details particular to imperfect knowledge."
--"I try to remind kids that they are not noble savages, they are human beings, and the odds are aginst them."
--"Frequently we think of ourselves as someone different from whom others think we are." --Stephen Elliot

2011-08-14T08:29:00.001-07:00

--I KEEP TRYING TO OUTRUN MY GHOSTS, BUT THEY'RE IN SO MUCH BETTER SHAPE

…I have a new story, "The Years Like Fine Dust" up at The Stone Hobo and here under "Words In Print."

..A while back I mentioned I was reading Alethea Black's story collection, "I Knew You'd Be Lovely."
I love that title.
I loved her stories even more.
The real reason I got the book was because she was featured in The Writer. Also, it's rare to get a collection published by a big house these days, so I was curious.
She doesn't fall in for a ton of detailed description, but her characters are all individualized and feel very real, most of them bothered by something, or else ridiculously peppy and bold.
Her dialogue is pretty spot on in each piece.
And every story is ripe with twists and turns and nugget after nugget of wisdom. Many a little spears chucked at your eyeballs that read like Proverbs.
Don't believe me?
Here, have some lovely writing:

--"I've never gotten over the sheer improbability that I was born."

--"The strangest thing that's ever happened to me is still happening."

--It crossed his mind that this was all chemistry ever was: two people's silent selves invisibly aligning while their noisy selves carried on, oblivious.

--It stuns me, all the things we're willing to forsake for security, which is only ever imaginary anyway.

---"Originality is just a sign of not enough information."

--Surprise is inherently hostile.

--"If you give up smoking, drinking, and love, you don't actually live longer. You just feel like you do."

--"It's a fruitless task, explaining yourself," he said. He was enjoying confessing the truth for once. "Either people get you, or they don't. In fact, even when they get you, it's always…a disappointment.

--"Nothing is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

--"There are two ways of being unhappy. Not getting what you want. And getting what you want."

--"If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"
--"If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?"

--We all desire the cut of truth.

--We say the same things over and over, she wrote.
Love never repeats, Bradley thought.

---You have cast yourself as the bearer of wisdom.

--"Wanting things too much is a form of sadness."

--"A pigeon's feathers are heavier than its bones." -- Alethea Black, "I Knew You'd Be Lovely"

2011-08-12T14:04:00.000-07:00

--YOU'RE NOT FROM AROUND HERE, ARE YOU?

…I have a new story, "Idaho" up at Right Hand Pointing and here under "Words in Print."

…My internet connection has been weak all day long. I have one red flag, not even a bar, and certainly nothing in the shade of green. I often go to the library in town for this very reason.
The library is a serious place. Everyone whispers there. No one smiles and certainly no one laughs. Everybody concentrates really hard, as if they're constipated or passing kidney stones or experience Braxton Hicks.
At the library, it's as if you're on a different planet or on a Twilight Zone episode with pod people shuffling slowly through aisles, staring at computer screens while wearing ear buds. You could probably shoot off fireworks and no one would notice.
I'm always surprised by how busy the library is. With the advent of Kindle, you'd think libraries would be barren, but it's just the opposite from some reason.
Usually people are lined up, waiting to get in, ten or fifteen minutes before the library opens up. They'll even wait in the rain.
Maybe it's about escaping, finding a quiet sanctuary where one can center their mind.
Or maybe it's about getting something for free. Maybe that's it.
You can rent really old, unpopular movies at the library for no charge.
You can get worn out copies of "Smokey and the Bandit Part 2" and "Part 3" and probably the god-awful "Godfather Part 3."
At my library, they have every copy of The Seattle Times going back to the early 1900's. They have the actual physical newsprint. It seems kind of weird (and altogether too trustworthy) for whomever runs the library to just let any Joe grab an old Seattle Times off the shelf.
There isn't any particular kind of person who visits the library. You get your old folks and youngins. You get the thin and thick, black and white and Hispanic but no Asians because, well, because, sadly, there really aren't any Asians where I live. (Instead, there are lots of rednecks and soccer moms and people who favor tattoo magazines over Vogue or GQ.)
What I don't get about the library is why they wrap books in that pasty plastic. It's like grandparents who drape their sofas or car seats in hard cellophane. I also don't understand why they have six copies of every Alice Hoffman book.
If you haven't been to the library in a while, you should make a trip, drop by. I bet you'll be surprised. You might even come away enlightened.

2011-08-09T10:20:00.001-07:00

--REJECTION IS A FRIEND OF MINE

…I am taking the summer off. Mostly I am. And I’m okay with that. I think I was getting too relentless with the writing. I’m hoping a break will bring me back refreshed, sort of like a spiritual cleanse.

…I wrote a novel a few years back called, “Clean White Pieces.” It was about this woman who physically beats her husband. I had a roommate once whose girlfriend beat him. I was always fascinated by that. Why not stop her? Why not hit her back, if you have to? But he didn’t.
In the novel, Avery doesn’t hit Ruth back either. He takes it. He’s weak and that’s one of the core themes. His only two friends are parakeets he keeps downstairs called Mac and Cheese. (Aviary is another name for a bird cage--there’s lots of symbolism in the novel.) He tells the birds all his secrets, and how much he dislikes Ruth, and the birds do a pretty good job of listening. Those are some cute scenes.
Ruth is obviously disturbed, but as the novel goes along she gets more and more crazy, sort of like Carrie White’s mom in “Carrie” only Ruth is a neat freak to the tenth power. She scrubs the tiles and counters and her skin. Everything has to be clean and white. When she finds a mole on her forehead, she cuts it off with a paring knife because she thinks it’s a sign that Satan is inside her, making her dirty.
Then we have Noah, their son, who has a girlfriend but is secretly in love with his best friend, an African American named Montreece.
Things get more and more messed up and troubling, very dark, and everything ends cataclysmically.
I’m not sure anyone would enjoy that novel, but I wrote it. I wrote it in a month and a half. It would need some polishing, but since I’m not up to that, it’ll stay sitting on the top drawer right there over my shoulder.

…How have you been? Are you having a good summer? Over here where I am there hasn’t been an awful lot of sunshine. We’ve not had the nation’s heat wave. I guess that’s a good thing.

…I’m reading five books at the same time. Well, not all at once, of course, but I’m reading one book then jumping to another and then back. They’re all very different but quite good. One is “I Knew You’d Be Lovely,” by Alethea Black. She’s a good writer. It’s a story collection, a debut, too. Sure seems like that’s a hard feat to get a big publishing house to take a first collection.

…I really want to see, “My Idiot Brother.” I really want to see, “30 Minutes or Less.”

…I’m also anxious to hear the new Kanye West/Jay Z collaboration. I ordered it. Should be here any day now.

…I know I said I’m taking the summer off from writing, and really, I pretty much am, but I wrote a few poems the other day and I’m sending them to a contest at The Sycamore Review, which is Purdue U’s lit mag. I’m probably nuts and wasting my time, not to mention $15 for the reading fee, but I saw that Louise Gluck was judging and I always thought my poetry was similar to hers in some respects. I don’t examine nature as much, but both our styles have a clear narrative arc.
We’ll see. 1st prize is $1,000.
It would be nice to win.
That would make me glad.
I’d buy you a hot fudge Sunday with some of my winnings if I won.
Keep your fingers crossed.

I like these things on an unsettled Tuesday:

"I don't believe there is any greater blessing than that of being pierced through and through by the splendor and sweetness of words…I wouldn't take the kingdom for it." Edith Wharton
moxie \MOK-see\, noun: 1.. Vigor; verve; pep.2. Courage and aggressiveness.3. Skill; know-how.
"What fascinates me about life is that now and then the past rises up and declares itself." Sue Grafton

"If you have the courage to begin, you have the courage to succeed." David Viscott

"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." Norman MacFinan

"The ability to concentrate and to use time well is everything." Lee Iococca

"I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend against its force....My love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day." Og Mandino

"Everyone who has ever taken a shower has had an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it that makes a difference." Nolan Bushnell

‎"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." ~William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
~Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

--"He'd fallen so far behind he was getting ahead just by being alive."
--"Maybe the road back to yourself begins with common courtesy."
--"You were once this girl, and all you wanted was to jump rope right in the same cold wind that's blowing now."
--"Gravity is the receiver on the hook. Mortality we smell on certain people we pass."
--"You love waitresses-they always come back."
--"Life is next door."
--"We knew there was no accounting for differences in the souls of our parents just as you didn't ask why the good witch was good and the bad bad."
--Love is wanting what you already have." -- Doug Goetsch

2011-08-06T14:30:00.000-07:00

--YOU DON'T HAVE TO EXPLAIN YOURSELF TO ME

I am making up things to tell you. That’s what fiction is. Poetry, too I guess. “Lies” is a harsh-sounding word. “Make believe” and "pretend" sounds like something a child would say.
If I made up something that ended up being true, would you tell me? Would you think I’m psychic, clairvoyant? Would you be impressed?
I bet not. You’re selective and judicious. You’re easy on the eyes but you know how to drive a hard bargain.
Here’s something that’s different: my blood has turned black.
Yep, it has.
I’m not kidding.
I cut myself by accident yesterday. It was one of those burning paper cuts. After a few seconds, ink oozed out. I thought I was passing out again or hallucinating or else turning into a black and white television set.
But it was really black. My blood was.
Another thing that’s new is I’ve been gaining weight. I’ve muscled up. If I flexed right now I’d probably rip holes in my shirt, right whe my massive biceps lurk. I am thinking of changing my name to Diesel. Len Diesel.
Oh, and I shaved my head and got my teeth whitened. Now the moon and I have contests to see which of us can glow the brightest at night. So far it’s a dead heat and we’re tied at 2 to 2.
The other evening, for something to do, because I was bored and restless and feeling naughty and reckless, I jumped off the roof of my house.
Actually, I took a running leap.
It was a thrill, let me tell you, because I’m afraid of heights. But I didn’t fall. Nope. I flew. I soared past Pete the Eagle and I even passed a Boeing 747. I went to Asia and Mauritius. I just checked out the lay of the land. Then I flew home. What a blast!
The last thing I’ll say is this: I am doing great. I’m better than okay. I am peachy keen. My complexion has color in it. I am no longer pale or dull. It doesn’t matter that the sun refuses to play, I no longer look like a cadaver. I rather resemble a field laborer with my tan dermis. It helps show off my new teeth.
So that’s all the news from this neck of the woods. If I decide to go flying again tonight, I’ll buzz by your house. I won’t wake you, but I’ll write you a note and stick it in your mailbox. It will be the envelope with the word “HELLO!” on it.