Ancient Tech

I’ve been in Florida for a week and went swimming for the first time today. It was lovely; I came home and promptly passed out. I was woken by the harsh ringing of Charles’ evil telephone—it’s an old-fashioned instrument, the color of dried blood, with a crocodile pattern, only used by telemarketers. This is because since 2007 he’s been checking his messages at most twice a year in order to subtly persuade people to call on his beloved iphone or go away. Some can’t be persuaded.

He came in the bedroom and took it off the hook to stop the ringing, but off course I soon had to get up to deal with the busy-signal yammering, and the sight of the receiver dangling from its curly cord brought back so many memories of hope, agony and loathing. Do kids today ever feel this amorous dread? They must want someone to call and someone else not to, fear calls they have to make, and so on. But the phone itself doesn’t seem to become the personification of what they feel; rather it’s a part of them, like their own ears (which makes it so upsetting when teachers confiscate them). If a woman were to rip her ears off for bringing her news that broke her heart, or mildly annoyed her, we wouldn’t all sigh with recognition, or complain, “What a cliché. Can’t these screenwriters ever think of something original?”

Which reminds me of Jeff Bezos laughing like a hyena on Jon Stewart the other night, discussing the Kindle. Stewart talked about the feel of a real, paper-and-glue book, its low-tech homey comfort. Others have rhapsodized about this. I could too—though I’d also like a Kindle. What we’re afraid of is losing everything we’ve projected onto books: their understanding, their silent dignity, their assurance of immortality (for some). Their independent life.

Once, I was idling in a bookshop, as I did so often in my youth, and saw a book on a low shelf, no dust jacket, with the title, Phone Calls from the Dead. I glanced at it several times, checking that it was really there and that was the actual title, but I didn’t pick it up. It stirred too many emotions, and not because I believed any of the departed had my number. But someone had written a book about it, the book had been published, and the shop had ordered it. The idea was made flesh. It was like seeing a voodoo doll that looked just like me, one pin quivering in the heart.

No way I’d get that feeling from an online list of titles available on Kindle. Anyway, I can read books on my iphone.

Now we’re going to the beach again. It’s 9:30, Saturday night, we’ve been hard at work since dinner (an early dinner that felt like lunch since I’d slept half the afternoon) and we’re taking the last of the wine to the dark gorgeous crash of the waves.

some books

Frank is a Good Dog’s Name

My mother and Frank

I saw Michelle Obama on TV complaining about the names her daughters are considering for the new First Dog, a Portuguese Water Spaniel : Frank and Moose. I’m always in favor of kids having free rein with pets’ names, unless they name it something obscene or after their grandmother.

But the thing is, Frank. My mother had a dog named Frank. Her rule of thumb, learned from her father, is that a dog’s name must be one syllable so you can call it easily. My grandfather had hunting dogs, so this rule made sense for him. If you were ever part of a big family and experienced a parent try to call a bunch of kids inside, away from the cliff, out of the water, and mangling all the syllables in a frustrated snarl, you’ll get the point.

Frank loved my mother. When he was a young adult animal, she was a single woman in her midfifties, her kids out of the house. She wanted that devoted love, and a Doberman is a nothing if not a devoted, one-point-focus kind of animal. But she also wanted to be free to travel with her boyfriends. Particularly she wanted to accompany a rather unpleasant Australian man who took her all over France and Italy: the kind of leisurely car trip we all dream of, although not with him.

While she was gone, a young man named Greg looked after her house and Frank. Greg was a gay friend of my brother’s who didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, and my mother had extra room, so he lived with her.  She always liked having a young person in the house, and was happiest when her children were of an age to provide her with needy cast-offs.

Frank missed my mother intensely. He mourned, as only a dog can, silent, stoic, not knowing if the beloved will return but holding hope alive steadfastly. I’ve always been inordinately sympathetic to the loneliness of dogs. It seemed a crime to me to inspire that degree of love and then depart with no way to explain or reassure, no possibility of postcards. On the other hand, in my mother’s place, I would have gone to Europe.

Greg told me that one night he came home from work—it was summer and still light out—and found Frank on the lawn, staring at a line-up of my mother’s shoes. My mother had 15 or 20 pairs of shoes, some quite old. Frank had taken one shoe from each pair out of her closet, down the stairs, across the hall, through the kitchen and outside. He had arranged them on the grass and then lain down in front of them, nose between his paws.

I was living in Berkeley then, reading Proust, Flaubert, Colette—all the masters of unrequited love—far too afraid of that kind of surrender, although I thought of myself as daring in matters of passion. And there was Frank, who could never take my mother to Italy, who didn’t own a car, couldn’t compete with a man who was far beneath him except for the small matter of species—Frank, who could only carry the shoes that held her scent out into the sunlight and look at them.

Maybe you don’t want this model for your daughters, Michelle. But I have to say, Frank was a good dog.

**

“The woman whose face we have before our eyes more constantly than light itself…this unique woman—we know quite well that it would have been another woman that would now be unique to us if we had been in another town than that in which we made her acquaintance, if we had explored other quarters of the town, if we had frequented the house of a different hostess. Unique, we suppose; she is innumerable. And yet she is compact, indestructible in our loving eyes, irreplaceable for a long time to come by any other.”

~Marcel Proust

Ash Wednesday: A miscellany

I realize these leopards are not white

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been
contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live?

– from Ash Wednesday, by T. S. Eliot

***

(Ash-Wednesday). Up and by water, it being a very fine morning, to White Hall, and there to speak with Sir Ph. Warwicke, but he was gone out to chappell, so I spent much of the morning walking in the Park, and going to the Queene’s chappell, where I staid and saw their masse, till a man came and bid me go out or kneel down: so I did go out. And thence to Somerset House; and there into the chappell, where Monsieur d’Espagne used to preach. But now it is made very fine, and was ten times more crouded than the Queene’s chappell at St. James’s; which I wonder at. Thence down to the garden of Somerset House, and up and down the new building, which in every respect will be mighty magnificent and costly. I staid a great while talking with a man in the garden that was sawing of a piece of marble, and did give him 6d. to drink. He told me much of the nature and labour of the worke, how he could not saw above 4 inches of the stone in a day, and of a greater not above one or two, and after it is sawed, then it is rubbed with coarse and then with finer and finer sand till they come to putty, and so polish it as smooth as glass. Their saws have no teeth, but it is the sand only which the saw rubs up and down that do the thing. Thence by water to the Coffee-house, and there sat with Alderman Barker talking of hempe and the trade, and thence to the ‘Change a little, and so home and dined with my wife, and then to the office till the evening, and then walked a while merrily with my wife in the garden, and so she gone, I to work again till late, and so home to supper and to bed.

–from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1663

***

I was driving a 69 Chevy Nova 370 four-barrel with mag wheels and a dual exhaust. It’s a kick-ass car. I took the muffler out so it sounds like a Harley. People love it. I was staring at myself through the window into the driver’s side window; I do that all the time. I’ll stare into anything that reflects. That’s not a flattering quality, and I wish I didn’t do it, but I do. I’m vain as all hell. It’s revolting. Most of the time when I’m looking in the mirror, I’m checking to see if I’m still here or else I’m wishing I was somebody else, a Mexican bandito or somebody like that. I have a mustache. Most guys with mustaches look like fags, but I don’t. I touch mine too much, though. I touch it all the time. I don’t even know why I’m telling you about it now. I just stare at myself constantly and I wish I didn’t. It brings me absolutely no pleasure at all.

–from Ash Wednesday, by Ethan Hawke

**

As for me, I went to the beach and it was sunny and breezy, the waves breaking with fine force, sweeping over the sand, lacy foam sparkling, white and blue and deeper blue, and my thoughts were chasing each other, dates, places, deadlines, choices, and I’d jerk my gaze back to the waltz of blues and think you’re an idiot not to be captivated by this and then the wheel of thoughts creaked around again; I had that stony feeling I get after hauling myself up from mucky hateful despair, just barely not resenting the existence of beauty.

I’m in the dim house now repenting my lack of joyousness.

Nor was the ocean quite this dramatic

“…And all wonder and a wild desire.”

Venus and Cupid, Lorenzo Lotto

I’d like to meet the man who invented sex and see what he’s working on now.
~ Author Unknown

My sex life has waned along with the economy. The correlation is obvious. Of all the turn-ons I’ve ever heard of, financial anxiety isn’t one of them. Escaping from anxiety is, of course, a classic motive for mindless fucking, but my lover and I seem to have worn out the escapist thing for the time being. “It is what it is,” he keeps saying. What he means is, “I’m finally ready to face what it is, even though the ‘is’ is a lot worse than a few years ago when I couldn’t.”

It’s okay to take a break. We have stuff to do. But just because my sex life is on pause, sex doesn’t go away; others are doing it; I have to stop and think why I’m not, and what’s left to want. I need to write about it to remind myself not to worry. Too much of my worrying happens when I’m not looking.

It’s a truism that people use sex to get lots of different needs met, and my greatest need when I was young was to know. Specifically, the longing to know about men was intense and overpowering. My father died when I was 10, a suicide who was scarcely more available when he was living. I wanted to experience the full range of men, to gather and categorize their glamour, and also, eventually, to dispel the excess. As the shrinks say, I needed to learn to self-regulate.

The laconic boys of my teenage years were such utter mysteries that every morsel of knowledge gained was a treasure. I regarded them with awe. Even the ones I deemed unattractive were more attractive than I wanted to admit. Many other girls had it easier—knew more boys, chatted and joked with more confidence because they didn’t see the opposite sex as beings of light and terror—but I also thought they didn’t know anything.

My first lesson was that sex (on the first, not-necessarily-date) zooms you past male defenses. It did so especially then, in the 1970’s. It surprised boys into intimacy in a way that being a ‘girlfriend’ wouldn’t have. For whatever reason, my willingness didn’t slot me into the category of slut, or not most of the time. Sex was my gift—offered freely, for my own pleasure and to see what would happen—and gifts evoke a whole different response than structured exchange.

In my 20’s, I had to deal with all the usual things sexual wanderlust brings—shame; the need to create a philosophical rationale for my behavior; and jealousy, mine and others’. It was exhilarating and then it was boring. I can understand how for some, tilting against or fitting oneself into social norms can be a source of lifetime intellectual fascination. But I was interested in special cases: as in, everybody is one.

I wanted to know secrets. Among women, that’s not usually too hard: sit patiently, ask questions, offer cake, withhold judgment and most will tell you the good stuff. Men are more of a problem. Often, they don’t know what the good stuff is and/or think it’s dangerous, so you have to fuck them silly.

But whatever you learn, there’s so much more beneath. And if you learn that, there’s twice as much.  I suspected this about people in general from a young age but preferred not to dwell on it except when I was writing fiction, when it was a technical problem.  But in matters of love, it’s the thing that pulls you under.

We want love to be difficult. There’s no possibility of romance if every door swings open. What do you do when it’s too difficult; how do you decide if you’ve reached that point? What scares me about myself is that though I’m a woman with many interests and identities—writer, friend, daughter, sister, stepmother, aunt—sexual or ‘partner’ love is my ground, my true north, the heat I would seek if I were a heat-seeking missile. And the men I love are not easy. Being in a many-partnered situation (adultery, polyamory, whatever—I hate all the words) insures that new levels of weirdness will appear. You wake up in the morning and there are seven extra floors in your brain, inhabited by invisible women and argument; and you have to take it in stride, make the coffee, get your work done. To do otherwise would be saying, all those passionate promises were nothing but sexual hysteria. Actually I can’t handle anything. Take your reality and shove it.

Life is hard now. There are uncertainties I can’t write about here, except to say they involve others’ pain and desperation, and cause me a different kind of desperation, and then there’s my financial loss, which, although I’ve been writing about it for months, I have yet to fully absorb. But I still value desire, still imagine it as the secret path away from the horrible and towards the true, as if the true were never horrible. The truth often is horrible, but desire is like water. When it evaporates, the seemingly vanished is in every breath you take. When it freezes, watch your step. And when spring comes, there no escaping it.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.
~Henry David Thoreau

O lyric Love, half angel and half bird, And all a wonder and a wild desire.

~Robert Browning

Wordcamp, Miami

Me, tree

Yesterday I went to Wordcamp in Miami, a WordPress conference at the Mayfair Hotel in Coconut Grove and listened to a presentation by Jim Turner about how to make a living blogging, and another by David Bisset about the new WordPress brainchild BuddyPress (buddypress.org) which is a platform for building your own social networking site from a WordPress multiple user blog. The latter sounded fun and gave me visions of starting the next Facebook and owning reams of personal information that would allow me to rule the world, but unfortunately I can’t even start an MU site, since very few of my friends will start or stick with a blog. And even if they did, I’m not sure they’d want to be associated with this one.

The advice on making money was about attaching oneself to a corporate PR department, pitching your ability to reach the online universe. (For a fulltime position, expect a salary range of 30k-100k). Most of the attendees were techie experts of one kind or another, or considered themselves such. Turner was asked whether Fortune 500 companies would hire a blogger for this kind of work and he advised to steer clear of the big guys, because in that kind of company, “you submit a post to one editor, who shows it to someone else, who runs it by a third, who sends it to legal, then back down the chain and by the time you see it again, it’s unrecognizable.”* I’ve had freelance jobs where the same thing happened and I was working for a solo professional. Turner was also asked how to have your blog show up on Google and suggested writing good content. I like a man who sticks to the basics.

* this is not a word-for-word quote, but as I remember it.

The focus was on success yet I felt far less fear of the future than I do in New York. The Great Depression of the 21st Century, the Clusterf*ck To The Poorhouse as Jon Stewart so memorably calls it, seemed to exist elsewhere, though I have no doubt everyone present was figuring it into his plans. Certainly driving around Miami and later through Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale, we saw lots of empty storefronts, the kind where the sign is still up, and the plate glass window and dusty floors have a distinctly confused look, as if the whole business including proprietor collapsed into a black hole one afternoon without warning.

My husband says that kind of gathering—Wordcamp, not the empty storefronts—makes him feel like he’s allowed to be young, not finished yet, to be the explorer and not the authority. I’ve been feeling that way for some time. My heart’s Mickey Rourke and my body’s a collection of symptoms waiting for the inspiration of disease, but my imagination has been weirdly rejuvenated, even cosmically charged, and I would like to formally thank all the gods and powers I devoted myself to in my adolescence. Since then, I’ve fallen into rationality, but maybe I’m getting my reward for that long ago surrender.

After the conference we went to Fairchild Garden and got intimate with the Ficus Banyan trees*, which are no longer allowed to be planted in Miami-Dade county because they destroy indigenous species. You can tell that just by looking at them—how they spread out, branches growing aerial roots down to earth, adding trunk segments like extra rooms, porches, illegal apartments. Left alone, they can cover several acres. In the city, they’re notorious for breaking pavement and sidewalks, sewer systems; one woman had a tree emerge from her toilet, like the tackiest of horror movies. I don’t know the details on that story but I like to think she was away from home for a few months and returned to find the tree fully dominant, admiring itself in the mirror over the sink while tender roots cascaded into the bath.

*Ficus benghalensis, family Moraceae.
ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from Portuguese, from Gujarati vāṇiyo ‘man of the trading caste,’ from Sanskrit. Originally denoting a Hindu trader or merchant, the term was applied by Europeans in the mid 17th cent. to a particular tree under which such traders had built a pagoda. (From my Spotlight Dictionary.)

The Apparition of those Faces in the Crowd

It appears that Facebook has let go its claim to own my stuff forever, even if I quit, but as I understand it, the corporation still owns it now. And, as has been pointed out, even if they ‘erase’ the file when I exit (Can I bear to? How much in life must I renounce? ), there will always be copies. A few months ago, I was irritated that none of my friends were posting status updates that were the slightest bit interesting—nor were they responding to mine—so I said, “Margaret is trying to figure out how to dispose of the body of the man she just killed.” I expected comment. Questions. Advice. Maybe even concern that it was my own body my ghost was tasked with cleaning up before it could join the party in Hell with all the cool suicided poets and how does a ghost do that? I haven’t the faintest idea. If I were in that situation of course I would ask my friends on Facebook. Nobody said a word. They weren’t amused; they had compelling real lives; whatever. I added more friends. In actuality, there was no body (my apartment is very small, and I’m completely sure of that) so it’s unlikely I’ll be framed for murder. But what if I’m nominated to a Cabinet post someday? Wouldn’t the murky circumstances around the ‘confession’ torpedo me instantly? But wait. I don’t want a Cabinet post. I’d be the first to swear that I am utterly unqualified, unless Obama decides we need a Secretary of Imaginary  Friends—in which case my murder rep would still be iffy, but I could probably explain it to House Republicans, who are well versed in creative lying, and who understand the need to do anything to get attention. They’d also be pleased that I’d require such a small budget. A token salary—100 k would do fine—and I’d create a portfolio of imaginary friends for any citizen who asked. The actual chat would be outsourced to Africa where for pennies an hour farmers, truckdrivers, unhappy wives and lonely young men would study the specs and write charming, nonsensical, and smart-assed notes on their complimentary cellphones; English speakers would be paid a bit better to translate. Update The Wall Street Journal reports some Christian parents are considering giving up Facebook for Lent! How can they do that?  These are people who used to think it was silly kid stuff but now check in 20 times a day. They’ll be so lonely.  The article says of one penitent, “She’s also joined an online quitting-Facebook-for-Lent support group. (Since the group is hosted on Facebook, none of the members — in theory, at least — will be logging on to comfort one another during their days of trial.)” Prayer won’t help these people. Not this year. Jesus, my angel sources tell me, was summoned by Obama for advice on the economic meltdown but Tim Geithner rejected his idea to raze the banks and re-institute barter. I think the discord upset the Stock Market, but it’s hard to tell what ails that delicate beast. It blowth where it listeth. These days our Savior is occupying himself being the ‘mutual friend’ linking Malia, Stevie Wonder, the goddess Athena (now reincarnated as a 13 year old Pakistani boy) and me. I have to say, the Son of God has access to some awesome video.

Petals on a Wet, Black Bough

—Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”

Chickenhearted Kings of Stupidity

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
—Chesterton

This came to mind when I was thinking about the chimpanzee, Travis, who ripped a woman’s face off. In particular I was thinking how unpredictable in their violence and general behavior chimps can be, because they are like us, and how it is that people forget this when they fall in love with chimps because they are like us.

There are many conjectures on the Web as to why Travis behaved as he did. He’s getting a lot more sympathy than the victim. Because he wasn’t human, he’s forgiven as a psychopath never would be; we assume the mauling was an instinctive response to the promptings of fear, hormones or illness-derived brain dysfunction. Maybe; probably; I don’t know. I’m of the opinion that intelligent animals have some degree of free will. My mother’s poodle certainly does.

Of course, for apes as for men, there are patterns and reasons for violence, needs and impulses that can be understood—but what does it mean to say a man can understand a chimpanzee? a) It’s presumptuous, and b) it’s like saying one criminal understands another.

This reminds me of another favorite quote of mine, from Chekhov, “The stupider the peasant, the better his horse understands him.” Maybe if we continue on as we have been, the chimps will eventually understand us. Take the money and stay put: that’s something a chimp would do.

And, yes, I too am more inclined to forgive a chimp than a human (assuming the human has done something more destructive than get out of her car). But if animals R us, don’t look for saints or cuddle toys. And on the subject of stupidity—which the Chesterton quote alludes to, unless it’s alluding to madness, and unless there’s a significant difference—

Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you’ll know. It’s the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world.
—Werner Herzog

I got sidetracked talking about violence and chimpanzees. That interests me but what weighs on me is that the world is leaking stupid and I’m picking it up on my shoes. I live in Manhattan, currently full of the cannibalistic, nightmarish and chickenhearted kings of stupidity.

I feel stupid too. If only I had a horse.

Chimp Attack

My, what big teeth you have

I just saw the story about the attack on the woman in Connecticut by a supposedly tame chimp named Travis, who’d been raised with humans and used in advertising. I was surprised at the naivete of the owner, considering how much is known about adult chimpanzee behavior. Last year I read a number of books about chimps raised with people, mostly by primatologists living in Africa. It inspired me to start a novel, set in the ‘70’s, about such a scientist who brings a baby chimp home to his family in Connecticut. (I’ve never lived in Connecticut. It just seemed like the right place for the story.)

I set the book in the ‘70’s because in those days the study of chimps, especially chimps raised with people, was still young. I could imagine a cocky, impulsive manwanting to prove himself in the new field of ape language studies, and thinking nothing would happen that he couldn’t handle. His chimp would learn to speak, learn the social graces, be the missing link personified. I intended the chimp in my book—an unusually sweet and gentle creature whom my husband is in love with after having read 75 pages—to be involved in a violent incident because what I learned from everything I read was that is what happens, if you let a chimp roam free long enough. While they are children (chimps stay children for 7 or 8 years) they are generally controllable, but as adolescents and adults the males especially are very strong and often violent. They don’t always intend to hurt, but many times they do. How much harm they think they’re inflicting is impossible to know.

It’s difficult for even professionally observant ‘parents’ to understand what sets off an incident. A chimp can be charming, loving, clownish, testing limits but generally behaved for years, and then all of a sudden become the ‘beast’ it in fact is. In the wild, chimps are routinely violent towards each other, mostly rivals but also sexual partners and offspring. They’re not like dogs, animals that co-evolved with humans over millennia, becoming tamer and tamer until eventually we trusted them to be our closest companions. Your dog isn’t safe around the kids because you love him and were kind to him as a pup, though that certainly helps, but because he was bred to be.  A pet is not any animal you choose to take home, but one that has adapted over generations to be able (for the most part) to share our homes. What chimps share is roughly 98 % of our genes.*

Imagine a teenage boy raised by an alien species, close enough to ours that he sort of feels like one of them but not quite, can’t understand the language or the meaning of social norms, and hasn’t learned from early childhood—from both witnessing and participating—what fighting is and what its consequences can be. Imagine further that this boy-turned-youth, with all his hormones firing and causing the usual emotional confusion and  aggressiveness, has grown four or five times as strong as the alien adults.

What you end up with is not a “tragedy” but a predictable and avoidable disaster. I’m not one to call for a lawyer quickly, but if I were the daughter of the savaged woman, I’d be sorely tempted to sue that owner for sheer stupidity. Why didn’t she take the trouble to learn what happens as chimps mature? (I would ask the same question about the town authorities, who were all familiar with the animal.) Why didn’t she have a backup plan if the chimp got out of control? It especially bothers me that, knowing she needed help, she chose to call a female friend who was apparently unarmed and untrained. If a professional with a tranq gun wasn’t handy, a beefy neighbor with a baseball bat would have been a better choice.

*The precise number is still a matter of debate, as is what it means. How the genes are regulated matters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/nyregion/17chimp.html?scp=1&sq=chimpanzee&st=cse

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frans-de-waal/another-chimp-bites-the-d_b_167768.html

Times to Readers: Give Up

Titanic

Book news of the day: Alfred Knopf is dead at 90; noted writer stabbed in Bejiing; fatwa on Rushdie turns 20.

The stabbed writer was only wounded and Rushdie is alive and thriving. As for Alfred Knopf, making it to 90 isn’t so bad.

Still, it made me feel kind of hopeless, along with all the financial articles in the paper today. The Times is clearly preparing for deep shit, reeling in more experts, finding new angles, shaping their ignorance (which we all share) with writerly elegance.

The subtext of the day’s stories: telling this is our job. We’re lucky to have one. So listen up. Yes, the news is bad. In fact, it’s worse. Sorry, but you have to pay attention. We’re going to tell you how bad it could get, from five different experts, and how bad it looks to two noted forecasters of the crisis. Isn’t that cool? It’s hard on us, you know, because reporting depends on change, and this shit ain’t going anywhere. I mean, yeah, they’ll be more of it, but that’s kind of the same, isn’t it?

So pay attention. It’s not our fault we have to tell you over and over. You listened to Bernie Madoff and his ilk for ten years, and it was all the same shit every day, up, up, up, no change; you just thought it was change. Now it’s the same too, just worse. We’re Times reporters; we can take it. But you have to listen. Keep buying the paper. C’mon. This is our job.

Just as an intellectual exercise it’s interesting, isn’t it? You liked Titanic. I mean, the story was obvious: ship hits iceberg, begins to sink, continues to sink, is sunk. Where’s the suspense? But you liked it. You weren’t sure who was going to die and who’d make it  out. We promise, some will make it out of this. Maybe us. Maybe you. And if you don’t, we’ll print your obit, if your survivors submit your stats with the requisite fee.

Posting Valentines

“— Sweet fiction, in which bravado and despair beckon from a cold panache in which the protected essential self suffers flashes of its existence to be immortalized by a writing self that is incapable of performing its actions without mixing our essence with what is false.”

This is Frank Bidart, from “Borges and I,” a poem in his book Desire.

What Bidart refers to in these particular lines* as falsity was to me the beauty, the world. To capture it and mix it with myself gave me shivers of power. I remember my first real novel, which was the first one published, the minor characters who had none of what I thought of as ‘myself’ in them were by far the most thrilling to me, though I knew they were not written with any great brilliance or insight. They were barely the real thing, but they were it; they existed and were not ‘me’; that was the power, with which nothing compares.

*He speaks of it in different ways throughout the long poem, which is an argument, a conversation, a man turning something around and around in his hand. I can’t do justice to his complex perspective.

Last night, Valentine’s Night, I wrote about my happiness and peace in regard to love, which was true when I wrote it. At the same time I knew or feared it wouldn’t be true later, or rather, wouldn’t be true any longer, therefore wouldn’t be able to be written about as a present containing many possibilities. A personal blog has a briefer shelf-life than fiction.

I wanted the story as it was. It was open. Its falsity was the kind that is an invitation.

Tonight I coil myself in words. I would like to keep doing it, page after page, like an autistic savant reciting prime numbers up beyond the budget deficit trillions, but I’ve done that before, and it leaves me with a hangover.

I will leave you with Bidart again, from Desire. The poem is called “If I Could Mourn Like a Mourning Dove” and this is the first part.

“It is what recurs that we believe,
your face not at one moment looking
sideways up at me anguished, or
elate, but the old words welling up…

Valentine’s Night

It’s Valentine’s night and Philip is with Christine. I’m alone in his apartment. I was lazy all day, reading a mystery novel and eating chocolate except for the couple of hours I spent cleaning his kitchen floor and tub and under the bed, where the dust lay in greasy tangles like clumps of human hair. Of course I thought how strange this would seem to others—cleaning while he dines the wife—and will seem to him when he gets home, but it felt fine to me.

I like being alone here. I like being alone, knowing he will come back. I like cleaning the apartment. Is this my way of claiming wife status while he’s with his real wife? That’s obvious and probably true, but it’s true in a way that’s not really or not only delusion or denial. I must be turning Mormon.

Next week I’ll go visit Charles, my husband, who lives in Florida, and I’ll cook and clean for him—lots of baking and waffles—and we’ll take a road trip, see more of that peculiar state. I’ll sink into our deep marriage groove, the comfort of repetition and time. All the things we remember that nobody else knows. I wish I remembered more.

They feel almost perfectly balanced now, Philip and Charles. I’m at peace for the moment. Tomorrow will change that. The Sunday shows that Philip must watch—what’s going on now? Oh, right, world panic. That. I’m part of it: my few hundred grand went up in smoke and now I have close to nothing and no job. No buyers for the novel I spent years writing because my agent won’t even send it out in this climate.

I have a lot to do fixing my life. It was strangely comforting for awhile that so many were in the same boat and I can’t say I’d be happy if everyone was still out spending like bunnies (you know what I mean), but the world panic stuff, governments toppling, planes crashing into houses—.

I don’t think I’m experiencing 9/11 flashbacks. This is different, but I do keep thinking of fire. “We have a hole in our economy” the President says, and I see a map a cigarette chewed through: the map is the familiar USA, but the Midwest is missing; and the paper is soft, thin, flaking around the burnt edges.

And now I’m thinking of the dead: Ann Beckerman, JJ, my father, my grandmother. My grandmother wore gold and pearls, face powder and perfume; she loved parties and men. She wouldn’t understand a black president, but she’d understand me, at least a little. She died when I was 13. Too soon.

I should have called my mother today. I was afraid of her loneliness. I have to get over that. It’s just there, like the panic. You can’t hide from it.

Rogue Pogue

Ocarinas

David Pogue’s column in The New York Times yesterday was about an app that turns your iphone into an octarina.**  New apps are being invented by the truckload, but not by me because I have no aptitude. But I do have ideas. Here are a few.

An app that:

*Enables you to give yourself a sonogram with your phone. That way you could see what your fetuses or fibroids were up to whenever you want—in the middle of the night, at parties or during long flight delays.

*Turns phone into a taser. This would have to be a secret app.

*Calculates body fat ratio when you rub it over yourself or someone else.

*Analyzes the pitch and tone of voices and lets you know whenever it detects a lie.

*Refinement of previous app: Tags lies as white, fear-based, guilty or psychopathic.

*Accepts phone calls from the dead. For an extra 99 cents will advise you not to answer.

………………………………………….

** Peculiar musical instrument. When I asked him about it, my musician husband had no idea what it was.

The Spry Fossil and the Grandmotherly Vegetable

'Celle qui fut la belle heaulmière', Rodin

Today in a New York Times blog called The New Old Age, Jane Gross reviewed current guidelines for how to refer to those formerly known as elderly.

‘Old’ is bad, as are a lot of other words, such as, ‘feisty,’ ‘spry’, ‘eccentric,’ ‘grandmotherly’ ‘biddy,’ ‘codger,’ ‘coot,’ ‘crone,’ ‘fogy,’ ‘fossil,’ ‘geezer,’ ‘hag’ ‘old goat,’ ‘old fart,’ ‘senile old fool,’ ‘prune’ and ‘vegetable.’

The appropriate term is ‘older adult.’

I’ve written a little play to illustrate the perils of these recommendations. The characters are a young man who’s just started at the New York Times, and his grandmother; it takes place in the skilled nursing facility where she balefully resides. It’s an eccentrically warm February evening and the young man, feeling charitable toward the world as a result of his much-coveted position, attained even as others are losing their jobs by the millions, comes to visit.

“Grandma, we’ve received new style rules at the paper, and I want to apologize. I used to call you old. That was wrong. You’re older.”
“Of course I’m older. I haven’t seen you in a year.”
“I’ve been busy…you like it here, don’t you?”
“Too many old farts.”
“I thought women liked older men.”
“You’re so wet behind the ears, you’re still dripping.”
“I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds disgusting.”
“Come back when you know something, schoolboy.”
“That hurt my feelings. Ageism goes both ways, you know.”
“I’ll take the other way.”
“I’m 32 but Maureen Dowd says I look 12. Do you have any idea what that does to my advancement prospects?”
“Well, don’t try it with that feisty Mo Dowd, but why don’t you find a woman her age in a sensitive professional position, have sex with her a few times, then tell her you’re really 12 and you want $100,000?”
“I hate that cackle of yours.”
“Chickens cackle. Ladies titter.”
“I don’t know… ‘titter’ sounds kind of dangerous, too.’
“Your grandfather wasn’t afraid of tits, nor of anything else about a woman. There was a man for you. He used to bend me over the kitchen table every night after work.”
“I really don’t want to hear this.”
“He’d throw my panties up into the air—they sometimes landed in the mixed vegetables, not that he minded—and have at me. A right randy old goat, he was.”
“You’re not supposed to say ‘old goat.’”
“I’m sparing your sensibilities. You should hear the things he used to make me call him. I’ll whisper them if you come closer.”
“Oh, god. I knew it was a mistake to visit. Mom was right! You’re a hag!”
“That dried-up prune? Sometimes I think she just pretended to be pregnant, stuck a pillow under her shirt, and then stole you from some dumb biddy babysitting the grandkid, too busy flapping her gums to notice. In the 1970’s, you know, girls like your mother thought sex and babies were a patriarchal plot to enslave women. She used to read this book called The Three Faces of Woman: Virgin, Mother, Crone. Excuse me, what happened to The Long Honeymoon: Too Fucking Sore to Walk? That’s the book I learned from. My son’s not even 60, and he’s a senile old fool because he never gets laid.”
“I’m leaving! I’m never coming back!”
“Fine with me, Junior. But tell your friends at the New York Times that the proper term is ‘death-challenged.’ As in, we’re not yet. Get it?”

Octopussy

Sometimes, in regard to the two men in my life and the demands of my own career and survival, I feel like the octuplet mom, Nadya Suleman, talking about what a good mother she’ll be, ‘present’ for all her children, while everyone marvels at her fake lips and Godzilla-size delusions.

Ann Curry suggested to Nadya that she was setting up for her children the same emotional situation she claimed to have suffered in her childhood: not getting enough attention from her mother. Nadya wasn’t thrown by this; she’s studied psychology. Rather, she gave her Multiple-Birth-Barbie smile and said she would do her best, that maybe she was selfish but her children would want her to be happy.

Where does such an intense and impregnable delusional system come from? The Bush White House, anyone?  Citibank’s “Live Richly?” What does a bubble remind you of?

I have, in the last 24 months, bought more than eight pairs of shoes when one or two would have sufficed. And shoes were never my vice. I started buying shoes because flats came in fashion and I thought the style might not last. No. I don’t know why I bought them. I wear maybe three pairs regularly. The rest are neglected, unloved, resented for what they cost. Maybe I should take them to the park, nestled in a stroller. When women bend to see what I have in there, I can whisper, “8 ½. Never worn. Aren’t they darling?”

I understand the fascination and incredulity, the anxiety for the infants, but not the frothing rage at the idea of one’s “tax dollars” spent on this woman’s “litter”.* We have 350 million people in this country. Some large proportion of them pays taxes. So it would be each payer’s tax nickel, at most.

Doesn’t this remind you of those editorial writer/ bloggers explaining what a tiny fraction of our economic sinkhole Wall Street bonuses represent?

If reason were in charge, writers would be out of business.

*I don’t have children, but our cat once gave birth in my bed while I was sleeping. That was my first experience of bloody sheets and it was a good one. The next days and weeks the tottering tumble seemed both magical and just right, so the word ‘litter’ doesn’t strike me as an insult. It strikes me as envy. But those were kittens and we had a big house. The mother could switch them from closet to bed to cardboard box indefinitely.

Conclusion: I’m nothing like Nadya. I have two men, not 14, and they have choices. I’ve never bedded eight at once, or even seven. And my lips are completely normal.

I deserve a book deal.

Babes in the woods

"Pan and Psyche" Edward Burne-jones

A lousy few days. My husband and boyfriend both unhappy about their wives, emotions I contract and embellish on instantly. I haven’t been getting enough sleep, and I also have a mysterious and painful skin ailment that might be shingles, or mini shingles (don’t have the rash/blisters yet).

I googled ‘shingles’ and as well as learning crucial information, acquired a sticky image of my afflicted parts covered with roofing tar and thick, overlapping black rectangles for which I will be billed $6,000, and sent to live in a Koren cartoon.

I have a nice memory of being at my country house in the summer of 2002, chatting with the sixty-something Jamaican man who re-shingled the lower, flat part of my roof. He was wiry and muscled and full of complaint, as every human being save the odd Tibetan monk is, but honest and dignified and pleasant to be with. When the American company that charged $6000 for the top part of the roof came with their long truck and buzzing cellphones, I spent the day hiding in the bedroom.

My boyfriend makes me unhappy but I’m used to that; it’s the norm. We get reprieves now and then. When I make my husband unhappy, my emotions are much more out of control. It’s like the difference between living in Alaska—9-month winters with lots of sex, brief beautiful summers with lots of mosquitoes—and driving in heavy traffic with a tornado straight ahead.

My financial panic is not being allowed all the diva room. The love debt extracts interest too, and raises the rate capriciously.* I know that financial panic comes from the same place as love panic: I’ll be abandoned to cry on a hillside like those unwanted babies who have no clue what’s happening, what the world is, or what crying is intended to accomplish.

* Originally from the Latin capra meaning goat; more recently the French caprice which translates literally as ‘fantastic goat leap’ according to a dubious online source. I’m reminded of the fleecy thighs of the girl faun sculpted by  Renaissance master Andrea Riccio. See previous post: An Afternoon at the Frick.

Sunday night we heard a child cry in another apartment—not the cry of an abandoned baby but the sharp miserable tears of a child old enough to know it’s not getting what it wants—and I told Philip that the sound of children crying has always soothed me. It reminds me of my own childhood tears, the physical release and steadying rhythm, the warm-as-fresh-piss company of the self doubling back and saying, “I hate them and I love you. Hush. I’m here.”

Panic: what the goat-footed god does to mortals. Remedy: make a fantastic leap.

But not off a roof.

Apocalypse Not

After a morning discussion with Philip about his fears for our future—I’m running of money and the publishers aren’t publishing; everyone in his company is getting a pay cut, plus no bonuses—he left to spend the day with Christine. I told him to have a good time and he muttered because he thought I didn’t mean it. But I did. After 8 ½ years my jealousy is like an old dog that sleeps all the time unless you kick it. It got kicked a few weeks ago and it’s keeping out of the way.

I worked on my novel for a couple of hours (7 pages!) and then went online. I decided to survey the fears of others, and sampled a dozen catastrophe blogs, the ones that insist we’re facing something far worse than the Great Depression: a meltdown of the whole system, capitalism kaput, riots, starvation—everything but a devolution into tree-living apes, though I’m sure there’s somebody talking about that.

Should I be more afraid? Should I make jokes? Would my building allow me to raise chickens in my bathtub? Will they allow it in six months?

I can’t sort through the welter of information to have any idea what’s coming. I don’t have the experience or education, not to mention that the future is notoriously surprising. I’m also better off than Philip, even though he has a job, because this great loss and uncertainty has unlocked my creativity in a way nothing has since I was a child and my brother and father died. But this time I know where grief leads and I’m not following. I can write from the bright side of change.

Of course it helps that I’ve lost money, not beloved people.

Philip was disparaging Facebook last night and I said that all this networking, connecting to friends and relatives who’d otherwise be far off the map, might be a great boon if we have a real Depression. More solidarity, more links to obtain help, barter, trade information and cheer. “It brings people together,” I said.

“So does war and plague.”

“I’m putting that in the blog.”

“It’s a good line, isn’t it?”

“Actually plague doesn’t bring people together. More the opposite.”

“It joins everyone in death.” He was scrolling through his blackberry to see if there were any responses to the memo he had to write at the last minute.

We were waiting for our chocolate soufflé in a French restaurant: his idea, his credit card. I had called him earlier to say—maybe we shouldn’t go out to eat, honey, I can cook—but couldn’t reach him because he was working so hard, now that his assistant has been laid off.

For the most part, it was a lovely evening. We talked politics and I reveled in his smarts—he has a kind of real-world intelligence I don’t, and most of my friends don’t. And when he jokes about death, it’s so unexpected (death’s my province, he loathes the place) that it lifts my spirits.

“What a pair we make,” he didn’t say, but he’s said it often before.

About the apocalypse blogs: this country suffers from a surfeit of imagination. Too many movies about a future dystopian America (road rage with zombies) too much excitement in the media about all things violent and strange. Too many guns and people who want to use them. Granted, we also have the experience of Katrina, and the stories of other countries’ collapses. Argentina on the one hand; Rwanda on the other.

In the current New Yorker, John Updike is quoted talking about the Great Depression. Where he grew up, in a small town in Pennsylvania, when hoboes came to the back door the custom was to give them a dollar. A dollar was a lot of money in the 1930’s. Are we so much worse now?

She Wolf

http://stores.ebay.com/MKDiehl-Jewelry-Designs_

While following the stimulus-plan drama on TV, I’ve been making Valentine’s Day jewelry—not specifically for V day, just necklaces featuring that bright pink we all associate with heart-shaped chocolate boxes, roses, and female baboons in heat.

Many men, for reasons I fail to understand, have an aversion to Valentine’s Day. Flowers, chocolates, sex—what’s so difficult? No guesswork is involved.  My husband kept forgetting that I really liked expensive chocolate. For 25 years. But he made me some spectacular cards.

That was Charles, forgetful and poor. Philip actually hates the day itself, even though he listens to Sinatra on Jonathan Schwartz every weekend, and often cries. He’s as soft inside as a Hershey bar left on the dashboard in high summer. But maybe that’s the trouble. Why have a day for romance when all of life is supposed to be romantic, from boyish heroics to glamorous women, ‘50’s jazz bars, torch songs, idealistic Presidents…oh, wait, we have that last one. Maybe he’ll feel better this year.

I’m thinking we should skip the 14th and move right on to February 15th—the Roman festival of Lupercalia. On that date, in Classical times, Roman priests would go to the cave where the mythic she-wolf once suckled the twins Romulus and Remus, sacrifice a goat and a dog, smear the foreheads of two highborn young men with blood and wipe it off with wool soaked in milk, at which point the men were required to laugh—are you with me so far, guys? Then the hide of the goat was cut into strips and soaked in blood. The young men ran naked through the streets—except for a bit of goat hide fastened around their waists (I don’t know what happened to the dog, possibly eaten by the priests)—brandishing their bloody whips and lashing everyone in sight, but especially women who would line up for the favor, as this ritual was thought to bring fertility and ease in childbirth.

Now that Robert Bly’s Iron John has been unhip long enough to be hip again, maybe we should encourage our partners to strip down and flail about with animal hide, while we wait “like children at school present[ing] their hands to be struck”* and keep our mouths shut about how often we’ve entertained the fantasy of pulling out a bloody tampon and smacking them in the face with it.

Ok, maybe that’s just me.

Yes, I have my period today, for the 475th time. Imagine if I’d made embryos out of all those eggs, rounded up a herd of wolves to bear and suckle them…I could replace the entire House of Representatives and all Republican senators with my offspring.

* Plutarch, The Life of Caesar

Shovel Ready

I’m getting seriously tired of these Republicans. From that wimp Gingrey who apologized on the air to Rush Limbaugh because, for one moment, he acted like he was actually in Washington to do his job, to McCain thinking he didn’t lose yet—I want to say one thing: America, love it or leave it! You can be in Iceland in six hours!

What does Obama have up his sleeve?  Is he letting the Repubs dig their own grave? (Now there’s a shovel-ready project if there ever was one.) By being so nice…a little stern with the Wall street guys but giving the Senators cookies…letting them think they can work him over, let them bring on their bully boys, their would-be Cheneys…then watch as the I’m-mad-as-hell-and-I-just-can’t-take-it-anymore citizens run amok and dispatch the lot of them with everything we’ve learned from watching MSNBC’s Lockdown?

Actually, I don’t watch Lockdown, but I have caught a glimpse or two. Anyway, I’ll leave it to others to do the rough stuff. I just want to help create the reality shows where we chain Limbaugh and Madoff wrist to wrist and stick them into a hot jungle together; put Cheney to work changing the octuplets diapers 24/7; and, why not, let Palin shoot John Thain and friends from a helicopter….

Well, that was fun. Back to my own reality show. Not much happening here. Lovely lunch with my friend Maddy, and before that a brisk walk in the pretty cold sparkly winter day, a stop at the French bakery (where I bought cake because it was Maddy’s birthday) and the conversation went like this:

Me –I don’t know what I want yet.

Baker  –That’s okay, it’s good to just get out of the cold.

Me    –It’s not that bad out now. It’s sunny.

Baker  –It’s dark when I get to work; it’s dark when I go home.

Me    –Well, at least it smells good in here.

Baker –I can’t smell anything anymore unless it’s nasty or it’s women’s perfume.

Me –Um, which of these two [cakes] is better?

Baker – I don’t know; I don’t like chocolate…

For those of you who get hot thinking of resurrecting extinct animals, here’s one for you. George Mitchell could take it with him as a negotiating aid. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/04/titanoboa-cerrejonensis-2_n_163943.html

Warm Mushrooms

Charles and me, wedding day

I went to thenation.com to read about the banking rescue/ /givaway/gamble, got distracted by a poem by Tomaz Salamun, and wanted to paste it here but it’s subscription only so I don’t think I should. But here’s a little—

women want to be more than metaphor.
With their moist, round, soft skin, with their
drunken scent of warm mushrooms they drive me insane.

I love that last line, especially considering it’s a translation from Slovenian. It makes me remember evenings of drink, food, sex, the country, trees and night: youth, being driven insane. There was a time when the US was in financial crisis, the late 70’s, and I noticed and was affected, but not terribly; it was never as important as the night, wine and poetry (poetry was the closest thing to God I knew). Not as important as mushrooms wiped with a damp cloth and cooked fast in hot butter until almost black, then heaped in a bowl with a little salt and lemon, and eaten in bed after sex. Cooked after sex, I mean, naked in the kitchen together—what did we talk about, how did we touch? I don’t remember.

How much does  Charles, my dear, distant husband, remember? He’s flying this weekend to that same town in Virginia where neither of us has lived in 30 years. He’s visiting his girlfriend with whom he has wild, passionate sex. He doesn’t tell me details, but he says that much. I think I should be jealous but only feel blank. He deserves this. I’ve had my share of adulterous romance in the last several years. What we had that was precious, in bed, was so long ago; nostalgia touches it with wonder; it has nothing to do with today. At the same time, nothing can surpass those Charlottesville nights—when, mind you, I was unhappy because youth drove me insane—happiness and unhappiness threaded together so close, so glittering, sharp, blurred, gray and immense. Our rented house was in the middle of a 1,000 acre cattle farm, black angus; when we walked at night, we’d be among cows we could barely see, the dark shapes moving to let us pass, that strange almost-fear of their size jolting me now and then, as well as wonder at how docile they were, these large beasts waiting for slaughter.

Now I wait for slaughter (okay, not really. Big change.) I find poetry on the Web and it startles me. I have a few hundred books of the stuff and hardly ever open one. Youth is wise in what it refuses to know. I see my nieces holding up their shields—don’t interrupt me, I’m being young!—and applaud them. They’re hurting through this crisis, but not ready to sell a body part yet. I hope.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…

--Wordsworth

tomazsalamun.com

What do women want–part III

I’ve been reading other blogs responding the New York Times article about female desire, and found myself wanting to say more about it. First of all, I don’t think that when social scientists use the word ‘narcissistic’ they mean it as derogatory. One can argue about whether it’s an apt description, but the value of the trait, as articulated by the scientists quoted in the article, seems to me to be neutral.

I think both sexes are highly narcissistic, aroused by the desire and admiration of others. People differ in how much importance they place on being ‘quality’ examples of their gender, and how much on being unique beings. Most of us feel our sexuality is tied to the former to some degree—we want to be ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’; to be admired/desired for that as well as whatever is special about us as individuals. The point of the Times article is to survey what contemporary researchers see as being innately ‘feminine’, and I am very glad these women are doing the research, coming up with ideas, not assuming anything is settled or off limits to consider—that means more to me than whether I agree with any particular point.

My own experience of it is the confusion I felt, as a girl, about being fascinated and aroused by pictures of naked women, though my orientation was definitely hetero. Of course I thought I was the only girl that weird. Later, I experimented a bit with women sexually and found that the reality didn’t correlate with my fascination—actual women and images/thoughts of women were different things, to a degree and in a manner that wasn’t at all like my experiences with men. I think this fascination is more than learning to see through male eyes, though that’s part of it, and not quite narcissism, though there’s that too—there’s a third factor I don’t understand.

Another issue coming up in the blogs is annoyance at the representation of female desire as ‘mysterious’. Of course all sexuality is mysterious; we as a species are very far from unraveling the strands of nature/nurture, much less being relaxed about perhaps never being able to unravel them because they are in flux. Evolution isn’t over and is, generation by generation, being shaped by the choices culture leads us toward. From the right perspective, culture and biology are one, but I don’t know if a human being can ever do more than imagine that perspective.

As a rule, I think men would benefit from thinking of women as less mysterious—by going on the assumption that they can understand if they pay attention; and women would benefit from thinking of men as more mysterious.

This isn’t true for everybody, obviously. When I was young I found men so mysterious I couldn’t see what was in front of my face. That was a result of my particular background and I’ve gotten over it, as much as I want to get over it. I don’t think sex would work if one gender were inherently more complex than the other.

February 1

Jimmy at 12

It’s my brother Jimmy’s birthday today. He was born in 1951 and died in 1965, hit by a car when he was riding his bike home in the dark. Some years I don’t remember his birthday until it’s passed, although I always remember February 27, the date he was killed. That was when everything changed. The eldest of four, he was by nature more outgoing, popular and well rounded than the rest of us, and since he was the one who died, and his death preceded our father’s by months, he’ll always hold highest place for mental health. I remember him the way pundits like to talk about America before the JFK’s assassination. I’m not sure I believe countries can be innocent, but people can, children can; we were.

He died at the midpoint of the ‘60’s, after the civil rights legislation was passed, after the Vietnam war began in earnest— both issues I heard him discuss with my mother while I lingered in the hall, a nine year old girl still firmly entrenched in make-believe. He died before the Summer of Love, the ’68 Kennedy and King assassinations, Nixon’s election, The Beatles’ split. He missed sex, drugs, funerals, psychiatrists.

He missed the ‘70’s: college, falling in love, independence, career. He missed the shock of turning 30, then 40. He didn’t get to blossom or to not blossom, to know that the potential wasn’t reached, the spoils gone to fear and procrastination. I think he would have done better than I have. I know that if he hadn’t died, I would have done better. But even this life of mine, with its absurd overpayment to depression, has been packed with so much joy, learning, love, jokes, and friends, it would take me years to describe the highlights.

I want to know where his mind would have taken him. I want to see him as an adult, at work—he was always so good at things. I want to lean into the shade of Elder Brother, go to him for counsel even if I think he’ll be wrong. I want to see him age. I want to know his children.

I looked at his baby pictures over Christmas: a dozen curling black and white photos of a laughing six month old, one year old, toddler, with that soft baby flesh, those trusting eyes. I imagined more fully than ever before my mother’s overwhelming love for her firstborn, her astonishment at her brilliant creation. Not this, not words, but an entire person, fashioned as the young are among mammals, for maximum charisma.

We evolved to fall in love. With our parents, our siblings, our sexual partners, our babies. (And now, lucky us, our President.) All the accomplishments of reason are in service to that, to get and keep the best ones.

We invented God to take the love left over.

One of Jimmy's drawings