I’ve been writing since I was in single digits. It started with diaries; hardback books with butterflies or flowers on the cover and a lock that came with a tiny little key providing the illusion of security, the kind of book any intellectually precocious little girl with a mother who valued smarts might have. I still have those diaries, big loopy handwriting (always in blue if you please) replete with bad spelling and half-formed thoughts.

Prose, mostly, came later. Typed away on my second computer (it was an 8088) in a program that was meant for business and not the home user and that ran off two 5 1/4 inch floppy disks, most of my stories from that era were little things to entertain myself or to express longings it wasn’t then possible for me to let out in the world. Many of them, I freely admit, are quite dirty.

In college I continued to scribble away taking the only creative writing class my undergraduate institution offered in the time I was there from a graduate teaching assistant who really wanted to be at Bennington with Brett Easton Ellis but had missed her chance. It was a fertile time for me though, and the writing from then is sprinkled with vivid imagery and sensuality. Speed writing exercises on fruit and snack foods that were really metaphors for desire; short stories full of awkward pauses where not much happened but the characters yearned, and yearned hard, straining against their own frailties and general humanity to try to be more. The spiral bound notebooks sit silently on my shelf, each one bearing scuff marks and bruises from being hauled around with math books and philosophy texts, each one covered at some point with a blur of ink from being well used on an outdoor subway platform during a rainstorm.

It wasn’t until graduate school that I got the most pivotal piece of advice I’ve ever had from a writing teacher. Creative writing seminars can be one of two things: intensely rewarding and productive or an absolute snake pit of loathing, jealousy, and betrayal. Which the seminar is depends as much on the professor as it does on the students in the seminar, and the professor I had for mine managed to take what would have been a marginal group and make it useful.

He got around the big ego on the Stanford grad former Army officer who decided mid-stream that a Master’s in Film wasn’t good enough and he was going to get the MFA in Creative Writing instead. He pulled vivid, interesting stories out of the alumna who was using her benefit to take an evening course for just $50. And he managed to make me realize that despite all of the folding, spindling, and mutilating my screenwriting instructors had done over the previous three semesters to get me to conform to the Hollywood model (9 plot points occurring at specific places in the script serving specific character and plot related purposes), it was really character that drives any narrative.

It is the conflict that comes from thwarted desire, from longing and yearning, from the trying to be more, better, different that makes a story interesting. How he got me to realize this was by making me read. He made me read Raymond Carver who wrote in a minimalist style that Hemingway would have envied.

This professor gave me a book of short stories, and in these stories pretty much nothing happened. I still have it, somewhere, but the only one I remember was about a woman waiting for her child to come home from school on a fall day, sky slate gray and it won’t quite rain; just cold enough that the wind gets down the collar of your coat. All she wants is for the man she’s talking with as she sits at her kitchen table to be out of the house before the kid gets home. Everything else was details: the way the cigarette butts filled up the ashtray; the ring his coffee mug left on the Formica table top; the rushing of the clouds across the sky out the kitchen window hung with curtains that seemed to the woman to be way too colorful for the view they framed.

On asking him why Carver my professor said he wanted to shock me, to make me think about how characters create story and that what I should do is read, widely and anything, anything at all, but to pay attention to how the characters grew and changed and drove the story. And this brings me to the point of this entry: I have not been reading enough this year and I’ve realized, finally, that it’s one of the causes of my general discomfort. For if I am not reading, I can not write; more accurately, I can not listen to the world and can only listen to what is going on in my head, and my head has not been a pleasant place of late.

Over the past couple of months I’ve read Christopher Moore whose work very nearly got me in trouble during Federal jury service and who is recommended for his intimate grasp of exactly how surface public transit in San Francisco functions.

I read just recently a not very well written first novel that is an excellent study of just how character can be misused making what could have been the compelling theme of love and the ways in which we allow ourselves to be deceived by our desire for it seem pedestrian and even boring. Despite being not all that it could, this piece of fiction did contain a little truth in the author writing “For while almost by definition every true lover feels that his or her love is extraordinary, only a very small handful of lucky ones can actually prevail over the extraordinary to achieve a garden-variety domestic happiness.” That little bit of truth, along with some others, made it worth the time.

I am currently learning to love the insanity of Jasper Fforde (well, how else would you describe a man who could conceive of a world in which Richard III is performed once per week with actors chosen from the audience and in the manner in which Americans of a certain age approach a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show?) and I will probably return once more next year to Kelley Eskridge’s Solitaire, the beautiful story of Jackal’s change from privileged golden child to full-fledged adult woman.

My great-grandmother often said that libraries will get you through times with no money better than money will get you through times with no libraries. It had a certain wisdom when there wasn’t a superstore on every corner, and it still carries some weight in that the collecting of books in one place under an orderly system produces by alchemy a certain type of magic that can be found no where else.

So, go read something besides me already, even if it’s only a piece of candy romance novel. As for me, I plan on spending some quality time today on the subway, over lunch, and pretty much any other time I can justify it getting to know new friends in print.

My grandfather, a man whom I never got the pleasure of meeting, a man who has been viewed through 46 years of myth and who, even after a year of demythologizing my uncle after his death, I still suspect I would have enjoyed knowing, lived his life by a few basic rules that, pretty much, hold true not matter what.

One of those had to do with respect: always call a man “Sir” until you have a reason to call him a son of a bitch to his face. Keeping this in mind keeps you from taking others for granted.

His rule that if you sit down at a card game for money with strangers and you can’t spot the mark you should get up because it’s you holds true particluarly in the day and age of competative poker. This allows you to remember that not every stranger has kindness in his heart, and that people will do the most vile things for money.

Truth can be found in the most surprising places. I’ve often thought that small but important truths hide themselves in fiction simply so that we have the pleasure of absorbing them in a dramatic rather than rhetorical context. Take this little gem from one of the best things on television today: “It is naive to believe that the horrible things that happen to us have simple explanations. To think that they have simple explanations allows us to believe we have control when we don’t.”¹ It is the nature of truth, though, that has interested me most of late.

We are taught to believe, at least at base, that expressions, whether they be promises, exhortations, or simply life, have but two modes: true or false. It doesn’t take much of a brain to scrape away that top layer and realize that some things are only true under certain situations: I am pulled immediately back to first period junior year chemistry lab in high school; my partner and I failed all of our experiments but still made good grades simply because we tried. It was marvelous. It was so unlike life.

So how, then, does the idea that something can be true when uttered but not true if conditions change apply to human relationships?

Is the strength of the promise made, and then broken, determined by its feasibility? Promise me the moon and I’ll give you the stars doesn’t seem all that achievable, yet, uttered in the right tone under the right circumstances, almost any promise no matter how unrealistic can be made to seem real, desirable, and worthy of trusting.

Or is the absoluteness of the truth, and the strength of any promise, really simply an illusion governed by whim, shifting circumstances, and the will of the individuals involved? Are desire, will, and outside forces the base, agent, and reagent of human interaction?

More to the point, is it possible for something to be true one day and then equally false after circumstances change, like those chemistry experiments Cathy and I did so badly at?

Given recent rather pointed and still painful experience, I’m going to have to go with this: there are no absolute truths when it comes to relationships. What may be true today may not be true tomorrow and the only thing we can do is be careful and honest, and make sure that we are unafraid to say we don’t know when we don’t know.

Oh, yes, and my grandfather’s third rule applies: it is always better to say “I’ll do my best” than it is to make a promise you aren’t 100% positive you can keep.

Notes:

1. “Hero”, Battlestar Galactica, original air date November 17, 2006

I don’t sleep well, haven’t for a decade or more (probably a side effect of graduate school when it was easier to get a film editing table at night than at any other time) so it’s not unusual for me to awaken three, four, five times a night. The past few nights, though, I’ve been drugged out of my head on antihistamines and decongestants and sleeping the way I slept as a teenager (out like a light for 14 hours or more). That is until the screeching of tires and brakes pulled me out of a rather mottled dream that had more to do with social anxiety than I care to think about (something about not being young enough or feminine enough to measure up) in the bright sunlight of a late-November day.

See, my house is on a dead-end street, “No Outlet” posted in big letters on the corner of our nearest cross street. My block is bisected by an alley which has been used by way more traffic than it should since the NIMBYs up the block had the terminal two blocks of our cross street changed to one-way northbound in anticipation of a day-care center that never materialized. Instead, the transportation vans from the hospital up the street, in addition to all the hospital personnel (at regular shifts of 2pm, 7pm, 11pm, 3am, and 5am), all use the alley to get to the major cross-town artery that is a block south of us. The city says there is no additional traffic through the alleys as a result of this change; my dining room, living room, and guest bedroom walls say otherwise in the cracks they’ve acquired in the plaster from all the additional traffic over the past five years.

But since people don’t really pay attention to traffic signs when they drive – as is evidenced by the removal of said signs in several European cities – we get a lot of people speeding up the block thinking they can cut across town. I’m not quite sure how they miss the big building at the end of the block, but my neighbors and I never fail to give them a big thumbs up when they’re dumb enough to do it in broad daylight with an audience and are forced to back down the street to get where ever they wanted to go in the first place (usually they choose down the alley…what a shock). Last night’s imbecile, probably drunk to boot, decided the backing down wasn’t enough.

Whomever he was, he was a helluva driver. He managed to make a U-turn, drive over my lawn, right through my flower bed, down the sidewalk, and back out into the street without hitting any of the cars or taking out the light post that stands between me and my neighbor. I’m guessing ATV or some other bullshit form of personal recreation vehicle…or really tiny sports car (a mini, perhaps?) given the wheel base and the width of the tire tracks in the street (yes, I played CSI out in the street with my Stanley 50 footer).

Suffice it to say, the next time I hear screeching tires that loud, I might just get out of bed to have a look.

Throughout human history naming has been one of the most basic powers a human being could seize. We see it in religious literature where we are told “So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.”¹ We see it as we watch children learn about the world around them as they grasp intuitively that in order to have their desires fulfilled they will need to name the objects they want.

Politics shows us very clearly that being able to name gives one control over the debate. After all, how many people who classify themselves as “pro-life” also support the death penalty and, by definition, negate their stance as being “pro-life?” BushCo. is famous for appearing to change tactics while only changing language (Did Rumsfeld really try to change it from the “war on terrorism” to the “struggle against violent extremism” or did we just imagine that?)².

Economists Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner maintain that names migrate through society based on socio-economic status³ and that a child’s name can affect his or her success in later in life. Not, they say, based on the name itself but more because parents in socio-economic circumstances that provide fewer opportunities to their children are more likely to choose certain names than parents in circumstances with more opportunities for education.³ To put it more bluntly: poor parents choose names that sound poor while rich parents choose names that society regards as unusual but upscale until they filter down through the rest of the socio-economic scale and fall out of favor.

Having gone to high school in an environment where there were at least three guys named Michael (always called Mike) in each of my six daily classes, not to mention the minimum two Katherines (Kate, Kat, or Katie), and being graced with a given name that does not lend itself to nicknaming I’ve always wondered how powerful it must make someone feel to be able to choose her name.

Online identities, like the one under which I write this blog, offer people the opportunity to create an identity for themselves that matches their self perceptions. Of course, unlike offline nicknames, online identities also offer people the chance to hide and create a smoke screen, to pretend to be something they really aren’t.

Which leads me to the question, why is it that some people attract nicknames and others don’t? Is it a function of the people with whom someone socializes? Is it a function of personality? Or is it just luck that some people end up with the opportunity to choose their own names?

No answers, just questions to ponder as life changes and the world reforms yet again.

Notes:

1. Book of Genesis [Revised Standard Version], Chapter 2, Verse 19, Internet Ancient History Sourcebook, Fordham University
2. New name for ‘war on terror’, Matthew Davis, July 27, 2005, BBC News
3. “Trading Up: Where do baby names come from?“, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, April 12, 2005, Slate.com
4. “A Roshanda by Any Other Name: How do babies with super-black names fare?“, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, April 11, 2005, Slate.com

If my personal pattern from the last couple of years had held, I’d have about 46,000 words of a novel today. As it is I’ve got a raging sinus infection and no ideas for commentary on the beginning of the gluttony Christmas season. So, I bring you a mash up of questions and thoughts that just haven’t evolved into things meriting a full blog entry.

When will Thanksgiving become politically incorrect?

With obesity being described as a “global epidemic” how long do you really think it will be before Thanksgiving becomes an unacceptable holiday in American culture? It is, after all, an entire holiday dedicated to overeating despite all the publicity about giving thanks for the people in our lives, for their health and good fortune.

Why is it that the big guys are all so damn pokey?

My friends Steve and Jim are 6’4″ and 6’5″, respectively, and I love going out in public with them. At 5’9″ with a healthy build standing around with them is the only time I ever feel even vaguely petite or feminine. They are, however, two of the pokiest walkers I’ve ever met, just lollygagging along to a point where even I feel hobbled. I asked Jim about this once and his reply was that he’d gotten used to slowing down for those of us with less vertical lift.

Is it just me or is the umbrella the most useless thing ever invented?

Seriously, they only work if it rains straight down and there’s no wind, which it never, ever does and there always is. And even in the event of a weather singularity where it does just rain straight down the umbrella does nothing for blowback from your shoes as you walk so you still end up wet from about mid-calf down. So…umbrellas: good for when it’s raining straight down, there’s no wind and you’re standing absolutely still.

They’ll tell you that we only have the five senses (sight, taste, smell, hearing, and touch). Culturally the “sixth sense” is often used to represent perception of things that we can not grasp with the standard five, things like precognition or the ability to communicate with spirits of the dead. I think we do have a sixth sense but that everyone is wrong about what it is.

The sixth sense is memory.

I smelled my ex-girlfriend on the street the other day. It wasn’t really her; in fact, the woman who smelled like her looked nothing like Aimee. Yet, one whiff of Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door perfume and all the memories, both good and bad, came rushing back.

There was the time at the Copa in New York (yes, that Copa) during the 25th anniversary of Stonewall celebrations when the crowd parted and there she was, standing at the top of the stairs leading to the dance floor scanning the room for me her face lighting up in a huge smile when she finally saw me.

There was the time we decided to stay in, order pizza and watch a movie. She fell asleep with me spooned against her back, my arm around her waist, and she wouldn’t let go of my hand. The movie was Orlando and for reasons I still don’t fully understand I don’t think there was a time during our relationship when I loved her more than right at that moment.

Then there was the time I got called by the ex’s name in a particularly awkward situation. Yeah, that left a mark and I’ll definitely never forget the way the linens smelled, suffused with the scent she’d dab behind her ears and on her wrists.

Memory is an amalgam, like love, made up of both perception from the senses and interpretation based on previous experience, knowledge, wish fulfillment, desire, and self-delusion (OK, maybe only love includes that last one; a much longer debate I think). Sound, music in particular, has the ability to take you right back to a specific scenario complete with feelings and physical reactions.

The song that was on during an especially memorable romantic encounter or the one that was on the radio on the way home from the funeral of someone you loved deeply can bring back feelings that you thought you’d processed, forgotten, left behind, and bring them back with the same force they had when you first experienced them.

Yet, the song itself, the actual recording, has not changed. More interestingly, that same song can mean something completely different to the person sitting right next to you.

True, certain musical cues spur certain neuro-emotional responses – minor keys indicate sadness while consistent use of low tones trigger the fight or flight reaction – and the lyrics to a song can tell a story or set a mood but if you’ve associated that song with a particular point in time or event that mood goes beyond the text itself and becomes something more through your interpretation.

Smell, obviously, can do the same thing. Associative memories of cooking can take you back to pre-conscious memory childhood. One of my mother’s earliest memories, in fact, is sitting under the kitchen table while my grandmother made spaghetti sauce and listened to Madame Butterfly on the radio. My mother guesses she was probably about 2.5 years-old at the time.

The smell of baking sugar cookies always makes me think of Christmas. I can not slice a lime without at least brushing up against the memory of stealing fresh ones off a tree planted in the courtyard of a local office complex in the neighborhood where we lived in northern California when I was 9 years-old.

The smell of fresh bread on the air makes me think not of “Mom” and “home” but of summer early mornings when the sun shines bright with the promise of heat to come and new leaves turn on the tree branches because it is in the early summer that the industrial bakery in the neighborhood where I now live switches from day baking to overnight baking.

Let’s not even think about what spending my childhood growing up in the same neighborhood as a Frito plant did for my view of snack foods (thanks, I’ll skip the Frito pie). And, of course, there is the aforementioned perfume example.

Is the same true of color or texture, things that are perceived by sight or touch? Even though I don’t have many (and more to the point, none that I care to share here) memories of that type I would venture to say yes. It only stands to reason that information, text, taken in through those senses at particular points in time could have the same affect as smell or sound.

I’ve been avoiding a lot of my CD collection lately for a variety of reasons, chief among them is that much of what is in it reminds me of a friendship that I still feel I am on the verge of losing. It’s been nearly a year since my uncle died yet I can’t bring myself to watch Casablanca which was his favorite movie and one that I enjoy both as a movie in itself and as a film geek but also because it has always reminded me of him.

The question then becomes, how to reform these memories? Is it a simple matter of associating those cues with new memories?

I don’t think so. I want to hope so, but because it involves both external and internal elements, memory is a slippery thing, uncontrollable yet malleable at the same time. Something to think about as I try to be more careful how deeply I inhale in public from now on.

Most famous for her work on death and dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross defined the seven stages of grief as

1. Shock stage: Initial paralysis at hearing the bad news.
2. Denial stage: Trying to avoid the inevitable.
3. Anger stage: Frustrated outpouring of bottled-up emotion.
4. Bargaining stage: Seeking in vain for a way out.
5. Depression stage: Final realization of the inevitable.
6. Testing stage: Seeking realistic solutions.
7. Acceptance stage: Finally finding the way forward.

As mental and other health professionals began to pay more attention to the grief process they realized that not only does the terminally ill patient go through these stages but so does the patient’s family and, indeed, anyone who is experiencing a loss that she perceives to merit grief – losing a job, moving, breaking up with someone, dissolution of a friendship – all of these situations trigger this cycle of emotions.

These stages are perceived, at least in popular culture and certainly by some mental health professionals, as discrete periods of time. Indeed, mental health professionals view cycling among the stages as a form of avoidance in coping with the reality of the new situation. My perspective is a little different.

See, just because you find a way forward, whether that way forward is finally deleting the deceased’s office phone number from your cell phone contacts list or figuring out where you’re going to have the family dinner that was traditionally hosted by the deceased, doesn’t mean that you stop feeling any of the shock that the person is gone or any of the anger over the unfairness of it or any of the sadness that goes with the lack of that person in your life. I think you still feel them, you just feel them less acutely in the same way you learn to live with the chronic, low-grade pain of a torqued out joint or a pinched nerve that’s taking way too long to heal. It hurts, just not as much all the time.

My uncle Chuck would have been 60 today. So, discrete stages be damned. Yeah, I’ve accepted that he’s gone but that doesn’t mean I’m any less pissed off about it.