clickety-clack

Print is dead. Nobody reads books anymore. Letters are dead. Nobody writes letters. Ray Bradbury just died. He wrote about people burning books and being addicted to giant screens projecting 24-hour soap operas. That day has come, he knew it would come, and now it has and he has died. Before he died, he finally gave into pressure from his publishers to release Fahrenheit 451 for Kindle. Kindle is not the same as 24-hour soap operas on giant screens to which people have become addicted, I understand, but I still find this ironic. Paper is made from trees. Best we use less paper. The trees are dwindling; it's all dwindling. Kindle is not in itself an evil, but I remember reading an Asimov story as a child in which all the kids had to read their books on computer screens. I said to my dad, "this is awful, I would hate to live in that world," and my dad said, "you will live in that world one day. sorry."

Before Maurice Sendak died he said he hated e-books. He said something to the effect of "if that's the future of books, whatever, I'll be dead." I would never have seen him say that if I didn't watch the Colbert Report on my computer in the mornings. I don't have giant TV screens and I'm not addicted to a 24-hour soap opera, I don't think. But I have a Facebook account. So, perhaps I am.

I'm writing a series of books for Kindle. These books will not have my name on them; it will be someone else's. If they were going to have my name on them, I would not be doing it. If I were not doing it, I would not be able to pay the rent. I do not feel sorry for myself; I feel grateful to have some means of paying the rent. Many people do not.

Often I become stuck, partly because the subject matter of these books is not that interesting to me, and partly because I have always become stuck when writing. No matter how interesting the subject matter, no matter how personal or necessary. To write is to be stuck.

Of course I wish I had the freedom to lounge around all day thinking of the stories I'd like to write and then writing them. Slowly, carefully, being stuck for hours at a time but free from fear. Of course I wish that.

Today a friend posted on the 24-hour soap opera site a link that made me cry. Partly because it's easy to make me cry and partly because the link was about children writing to authors who had helped them. Who had given them something beautiful, something that made their lives better. I was such a child. I never mailed any of my letters off, but I wrote them or daydreamed them and most of all, I knew that there were some writers in the world I would never meet who had, literally, saved my life. C.S. Lewis, Madeline L'Engle, Tolkien, many others. They told me stories and comforted me and promised me that adulthood would be better. They gave me somewhere safe to go in the meantime.

That is why I started writing, too. To give myself somewhere safe to go. On days like this I wonder if my series of Kindle books appearing under someone else's name will do this for anyone. And if not, it makes me feel sad and useless. Because that's the only point of writing at all, isn't it? To help someone, to ease their pain a little.

So all I ask for today is to find a way to help someone, somewhere, through the medium available in this world I have lived to see. This clickety-clackety, shiny-screen world that doesn't feel like paper and doesn't smell like ink. Even here, I'd like to feel useful.

late is the hour

Once, it seemed, I could say "swing" and it would mean "father."
At one time, sometime in my past, metaphor was the only language.
And a grand, sloppy language it was--sweeping over whole years
of my life. Drenching all memories in meaning.

To be sane, I have attempted to see meaning in less.
I mean, in fewer things.
Reserving meaning for the big moments--
the ones shaped as keys.

It is a more even way to proceed.
And I have come to dislike the tumblings,
the upheavals. At least, that mood takes
me less often.

But I still love, deeply love, always will love
the mind's ability to wander. Vastly,
and without apparent motivation, over the
topography of what is perceived. The
dramatic, meaning-making urge of human
thought, encapsulated in language, so
frail and imperfect.

The moments of the mind at its most distinctly human:
when contemplation of the word "fragile," for example,
becomes both sound and story.

I do not know if it is any more remarkable than
whatever way it is a horse thinks. Or a dog. Or a bird.

It only is, and it is the type of mind that I came into.
That I inhabit. And I do love those most fragile
and pointless turnings of consciousness.
They brought poetry into being and it is only
through them poetry can exist.

A very species-specific endeavor, poetry.
To me, this fact gives it no more weight
than the dog thinking "supper time,"
or "I'd like to go for a walk." All things are.
Yet I need the abstract, the unnecessary. An inherent
contradiction that is nonetheless true.

And that is just one way to be. Others are
like me, others are different. What I really need most
is the mystery, the contradictions. They please
the brain. They entertain and renew. Without them,
there is only stagnation. The mind grows self-satisfied,
weak. Moves in lazy loops.

May nothing ever
answer all the questions.

tracking the mind

Day four in a row working at home alone. The days can tend to run together. Morning finds me waking up as usual at exactly 8:03. J has been up for an hour. We have coffee together and I get chatty. We feed the dog, the cat. Then there's a little breakfast and watching last night's Colbert Report on the computer while J gets ready for work. My getting ready for work consists of putting a sweatshirt on over my pajamas and checking my email. I also make the bed. I can't write in a house with an unmade bed. As we say our goodbyes, I mention something about cabin fever, but I'm not sure that's exactly what I have.

I have always enjoyed long stretches of hours alone. It's necessary for a writer and natural to me anyway. Sometimes I can't believe that I actually have this life. It feels like a daydream I had when I was twelve. I sit on the porch in the cool morning light and watch the progress of my mind. I sure can sit and stare. The creative, the mundane, the revelatory, the anxious, the worried, the doubtful, the meditative, the curious and sleepy progress of a mind with time and space to wander.

This morning it goes like this:
Do I have cabin fever? No, that implies a desperate feeling. I am not desperate, only slightly worried. There was an email yesterday from the landlady. She wants to sell this house in the spring, much sooner than we expected. Could we buy it? I'm used to thinking there's no way, but maybe there is. I guess we can try. And if it doesn't work out, we'll move again. What a nightmare. When will we get to feel settled?

Alan Alda was on the Colbert Report. He has always reminded me of my mother. Not just because she loved Hawkeye from MASH when I was growing up. He actually reminds me of her, personally. In Jungian psychology, we all have a contra-sexual figure who makes up a significant part of our psyche. The anima for men, animus for women. Mine takes the form of Bruce Springsteen sometimes, sometimes Sherlock Holmes. My mother's animus must be like Alan Alda. This thought is comforting. On television he played a doctor. My mother is a healer, untrained but in possession of natural healing gifts. Also, she is funny.

Are we really going to have to think about moving in ten months? Why have I never established good credit? When will I start acting like an adult? Why did I take out so many student loans? Did I have a choice? What is choice, really? Isn't every decision just a combination of necessity and self- or societally-imposed limitations on the possible?

How do things work? I mean, like real estate things and mortgages and filing taxes as an independent contractor? These are all things I have to find some way of understanding soon, this year. But just looking at the words overwhelms me with a yawn. A deep internal sleepiness. Is this normal? When threatened by a predator with spoilage of home and safety, does a nesting cardinal simply yawn, overcome with boredom? Wait, I know the answer to this. I've seen it! She doesn't yawn, she chirps loudly and puffs up to make herself look bigger. What is the metaphorical equivalent of that for me?

Does my brain function properly? Why do so many things make me feel sleepy? Is it because I'm biologically intended to spend a greater portion of my time lounging, like a chimpanzee? What kind of evolutionary madness is responsible for real estate and mortgages and student loans and taxes?

They can make holograms now, just like on Start Trek. I saw the Tupac hologram  on YouTube. A dead man made of light performing on stage with a living man, looking almost equally substantial. The line between the real and the simulated blurs and blurs and blurs, but still the simulated gives itself away  in unnatural flickers. My business is metaphor but all I really want to do is dig in the dirt with bare hands.

ghosting

My dad was a writer too, a journalist. He told me recently that the reason he was a sports-writer for so many years was that being a real reporter in a small town ensures that you have no friends. Eventually, he said, nobody likes you. Sports are neutral, in their way. It's just a matter of what did or didn't happen at the basketball game and nobody to blame for it.

I always thought it was odd that my dad wrote sports, considering how little interest he had in them. He didn't really care to watch the football game on Sunday afternoon, nor did he relate to the kind of guy who did. He'd rather watch an episode of Star Trek or the Twilight Zone--by far. And then meditate out loud for an hour or so to his small children about what the meaning of it had been.

I guess I learned logic from him, and a love of story, and a curiosity about culture and various ways of life. I never picked up his Spock-like ability to deliver complicated sentences perfectly articulated, with no hesitations, in an emotionally neutral tone of voice. Or his steel-trap memory, a vast catalogue of names, dates, numbers, faces and facts on topics as wide-ranging as Chuck Berry's discography to Napoleon's defeat in Russia, arranged with encyclopedic sobriety and available to him at will. The only thing he can't seem to remember are the names of the people his children are dating, generally, and I suspect that's a matter of choice.

Putting your name on something you have written is hard. My dad and I agree on that. Neither of us cares much about praise, and we're too tender for blame. I used to act on stage, and thought I loved getting attention. I don't like attention anymore, positive or negative. I just like to get a job done and relax at the end of the day.

So I write out the ideas other people have in their heads, and I try to get it right. I pretend to be them, like I used to pretend to be other people on stage. I'm having a hard time today, because the book I'm supposed to be working on doesn't interest me that much.

I suppose my dad felt that way once or twice.

country moments

1. Carnage.
A few nights ago, kicking back by a blazing fire with a couple of cold ones, J and I heard what he now refers to as "the massacre." A deep, sinister, rumbling snarl followed by the agonized screeching of some helpless prey.

At first, I thought it was my cat and a chipmunk. Then I realized that the predator's growl bespoke a much larger animal than my fifteen pound tomcat. Upon which realization I suddenly feared that my tomcat was in fact the squeaking victim. I ran inside to look for our pets, finding both of them on high alert near the front door. Clearly, they heard it too, but--clever with self-preservation--made no attempt to go outside. They both knew that whatever this thing was, it was bigger than them. And it must have been much more vicious, because normally our sixty-pound dog doesn't hesitate to tear out after any moving thing, including deer, SUVs and tractor-trailers. Size normally doesn't figure into his calculations.

Without a flashlight handy, we didn't see much. So we went back to our fire and conversation. Twenty minutes later, we heard it again. Closer, this time, just around the corner of the house. Something big, snarling and tearing at something crying, high-pitched and desperate. I thought of werewolves. The crying stopped, followed by a dragging, scuttling. Sickening.

We never actually saw anything. Too dark, too lazy to fetch a light, too fearful of what we might see, in truth. For days now, death has felt a little closer. Not in a threatening way. Just in a way that is. That is, that death is happening. Not just death, but carnage. Hunter destroying prey. A violent, a tragic, a necessary thing. Around us, in the yard. In the woods. Next to the lilies on the western side of the house.

Incidentally, the Roman Polanski film, "Carnage," was a great rainy Sunday afternoon experience a couple of weeks back. Watching it, we were reminded of a more metaphorical kind of massacre--that of the human need for companionship in a society which has managed to "civilize" itself away from any hope of closeness.

I'll take this country carnage over that any day.

2. Cradled.
J has two hammocks strung up in the woods now. He cleared out a gorgeous swatch from the tangled mass of thorny vines, poison sumac and dead tree limbs in the acreage behind the house. Three tall, slender trees in a triangle begged for a pair of twin hammocks. The sun filters down through the leaf canopy during the day and the stars arch brightly overhead at night. We spent as many hours as we could this weekend, cradled there.

Outside the front window of my writing room, a cardinal mother-to-be has set up a cozy little nest in the bush. She's cradling a number of eggs, and our eyes meet if I lay on the sofa and glance over. I wonder how much of her nest is made up of our dog's fur, which lies in tufts all over the yard, and is often seen hanging from the birds' beaks. A good incubating insulation, I am sure.

3. Country.
Went to the flea market this weekend and came across a treasure trove of old records. Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Patsy Cline. Finally, some music to fit the mood I've been in.

4. Cookout.
Last night we had my sister and my brother over for a midwest-meets-southern-style feast. Midwest for sure was the barbecued chicken, but southern the collards with bacon, the vinegary slaw and the skillet cornbread.

My brother seemed calm here, more attuned to those around him than usual. He found his way up to the hammocks on his own and relaxed awhile. This place is good for people.

5. Crawling.
J went into the kitchen for his stash of candy after dinner last night, and there were a thousand tiny ants swarming the Brach's bag. We spent an hour armed with diatomacious earth and cleaning spray trying to put a stop to their mindless stampede. Perhaps mindless is not the word. Single-minded is better, I think. Don't they all just have one giant brain basically? It's something different from telepathy, even more profound. I don't like it. It seems robotic and unnatural to me. Individualism is embedded in my DNA, I suppose. I know I shouldn't judge them, and maybe it's time to drag out the Thoreau and revisit his observations of red ants...

But, really, they somehow got inside an unopened, perfectly sealed bag of marshmallows. That's just gross.

6. Contrary.
Today I'm supposed to be ghostwriting. Something got into me this morning, and I decided to do my own writing instead. A strain of contrariness, of resentment.

But the bills must be paid, so I'd better get back to it. Most contrary of all--I have to now imagine myself as a twenty-something person working in the corporate world, looking for the next rung on the ladder. For this ghostwriting job.

Nothing could feel further from the truth.

stand-off

It seemed like the only possible way I could find happiness today would be by giving the dog a bath.

He is coming from the opposite perspective, apparently.

I was over-confident, I think, because I succeeded in giving the cat a bath a couple of days ago. Which tends to be even less likely. And not only that, but it was at 10 pm after 13 hours of moving. And the cat was covered in what I can only describe as "fear fecal" from being transported to the new house in his despised carrier and trapped in a car for half an hour. And, again, not only that, but the cat carrier had also been dropped, so the cat was good and doused, as well as angry.

Yet I managed to give him a bath. And this mild-mannered dog of ours is winning the stand-off by a huge margin today. I'm sitting on the floor in the hallway where I lured him, just feet away from the fully prepped bathtub. And he's just about ten pounds too heavy for me to lift. I had some crazy idea that he would just hop into the tub the way he hops up into our bed when invited. Surely he would, because he's chewing on his paw even now, trying to get those elusive fleas. Which I could wash right off of him if only he would let me.

But, like so many of us, he doesn't know what's good for him. Or, more accurately, he has decided that what's good for him is not as much fun as being just a little bit miserable.

So, I guess we'll hang out crouched on the floor in the hallway. Just gazing at each other over our paws. That's fine. I literally have all day.

trying

I was up until two in the morning, staring and worrying on the couch with the cat curled right up against me. His steady, even purring was the only thing that kept me from pacing, from breaking things.

I got word last night that my brother yells, at himself, alone in his apartment, at all hours. In a sense, this is not strange. After ten years on the street and a lifetime of struggling with schizoid personality disorder, one might yell. At oneself, or at another person one feels is present. Or perhaps even at god. Why not? Why not yell at god? I am often tempted to.

And so he yells, and it sounds scary. And it happens in the middle of the night or early in the morning. And the people in his building don't know what to do. And you know what? I don't know what to do either.

I lost my brother for a long time. He was my childhood friend; he was, in many ways, my childhood. And he absorbed, let's say, a special amount of the darkness of a wounded family system. And this propensity of his--to absorb damage and grief--led him, as it has so many millions of human souls in this broken country, to a life on the streets, in and out of dysfunctional institutional settings, to nearly die I have no idea how many times.

And then after 10 years we spoke again. And he told me parts of his story; the rest I could imagine. My brothers and sisters and I--still struggling in our own ways to pay the bills, to keep it together--wanted to help him. We felt that this was what a family was for. And we had love, as well, in our family, underneath everything. Love, but no money.

So for the last two years we've been trying. Trying to find my brother the things he needs, trying to keep him fed and housed and warm and safe. We've been trying imperfectly, and with an edge of desperation, too. Because, strangely, the system that nearly killed him still has so little to offer in the way of help.  You would almost think they were trying to kill him on purpose.

And they say he's paranoid.

The streets my brother slept on all those years are the streets of the city where Kurt Vonnegut was born and grew up. Vonnegut loved to quote his son Mark, who documented his own personal experience with a schizoid break in the book "Eden Express," and the quote of his son's that Vonnegut returns to is this: "We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

So, we're trying. Be patient.