Twitter me a Tweet, Boz

Dr Samuel Johnson and James Boswell walking up the High Street, Edinburgh, from a print by Thomas Rowlandson, 1786. "Mr Johnson and I walked Arm in Arm up the High Street to my House in James Court; it was a dusky night; I could not prevent his being assailed by the Evening effluvia of Edinburgh." As we marched along he grumbled in my ear "I smell you in the dark."

I read that celebrities are now hiring people to ghostwrite their twitter entries. I don’t mean ‘now hiring’ as in send in your resume. I’m sure they have the requisite flunkies on hand, or if they didn’t before the Times piece, they do now. Young assistant or actual freelance writer composes, publicist OKs, star is informed of what he/she said if it has any likelihood of ever being quoted, and all the little people realize that access to the real private lives of the famous is not in fact available at the click of a mouse. You still have to put the hours in. Stalking is not a lazy man’s art.

Social networks are for our own grubby networking (and fun, yes, that too) and I’m not expecting to network with movie stars or Barack Obama. I know I’m the perfect person to help him with the new book; he may be a fantastic writer but he’s kind of busy these days. I could bring that rare “I’m not a speechwriter” quality to the manuscript, but I doubt Twitter will land me an interview. Maybe if I saved one of his kids from drowning? Oh yeah, they already have people for that. And it’s too late to become a dog psychic. That’s the sort of business you have to start when people are itching to get rid of their cash and the dog won’t eat it.

The Times quoted 50 Cent’s twitter (something he actually said in an interview; his assistant plucked it for a tweet): “My ambition leads me through a tunnel that never ends.”

We could all use that sentiment, and that sentence, with a little tweaking.

“My sex addiction leads me through strange vaginas that never end.”

“My nostalgia leads me through a fictitious youth that never returns.”

“My mother-in-law leads me through a wilderness of stories that never discover their point though they do grow fainter when I leave the room.”

“My blogging leads me into digressions where I have to confess a lot more than I might otherwise in order to make the entry flow, so if I mention you and you don’t like it, send me a rewrite and I’ll consider it.”*

• This is not a paid position.

I find I journalize too tediously. Let me try to abbreviate.

~James Boswell

And Paint My Breasts Blue

I’m not going to Florida after all. Not now, anyway. Charles isn’t certain how long his job will last. I’m both relieved and disappointed. I like feeling that I still have my city, even if I don’t know how to afford it, but I miss the idea of escape, of being in another quieter place for a long time. I miss the prospect of living with my dear, delightful husband again. I’m very tired of loneliness and simply seeing more people more often doesn’t cut it. Social life is work. I like domestic codependence with a man, which I was having on weekends this winter with Philip. That’s not all good nor is it easy but it comes to me naturally, just like some people are talented at jiving strangers out of fortunes.

I can’t go into the reasons why Philip will be relatively inaccessible for the foreseeable future, except to say that it’s not under his control, and if I don’t like the extent to which he’s responded to the situation, I have to admit it’s entirely in character and most people would say good character.

My view is more nuanced, which is a nuanced way of saying selfish. Let’s face it: I respect his choice,  and my rage is like a wall of fire. Except that I’m not charred and dead, and the furniture looks untouched, so I guess it isn’t really. That was the image that came to mind though, yellow flame 20 feet high, no wider than a bedsheet, what any demon worth her salt could throw out with a flick of a taloned hand if she were pissed. And then shrug if the humans got upset, saying, “What do you expect? I’m a demon.”

I can tell you one thing: writing supernatural fiction isn’t nearly as cathartic as reading it. Too much lowly human labor, too much, “You have to write even if you don’t feel like it, bitch,” (said to self), and most of all the curse of all writers of a certain age: the awareness that no matter how well crafted a story may be, what illusions it can create in the target brains, words are still lifeless.

We know it; you don’t.

Humans have a hard time believing anything is lifeless. I read a story in New Scientist about money’s wily power. People who have had  their hands burned in boiling water report their pain lessened if they’re handed a few bills. The lonely feel less so. Those asked to make sentences out of ‘money’ words (‘salary’, ‘pay’, etc), rather than out of neutral words, reveal in a follow up, difficult puzzle-game more reluctance to ask for help, even though they’re allowed to, and more reluctance to offer it to others when asked.

Not that this should surprise anyone. We all understand the movie images of criminals rolling in their leaf-pile of cash, laughing or kissing in wild good humor as the green notes flutter, and the subsequent scenes where they get suspicious and proceed to kill each other. The classic end for such a story is all the people dead, knives sprouting from chests, brains splattered against the wall—and on the bed, the pile of money untouched by blood, waiting in deceptive stillness for its next victims.

It’s hard not to be interested in what stories are going to come from this economic swoon. Crimes, heroism, religious conversions, and everyone’s favorite: the next great invention, produced by those creative geniuses previously shacked to remunerative work. But my natural curiosity has been quelled somewhat by what I’ve been reading lately about threats entirely likely and infinitely more dire than the last 6 months (not climate change or suitcase nukes). I won’t inflict them on you, at least not until tomorrow or next week.

I’m taking comfort from the idea that if Charles’s company goes under, he’ll visit me a lot more often. I can visit him too—in the nudist colony where he’ll share a doublewide with his brother. He says the middle-aged and old ladies shave their crotches there, just like young women do nowadays. I’ll feel like a savage. Maybe I can figure out how to grow it to my knees. And paint my breasts blue.

****

I have never walked down Fifth Avenue alone without thinking of money.

~Anthony Trollope

 

 

OVERHEARD IN NEW YORK

 

Hobo: Any change? Anything you got to give?

Suit: I wish I had something to give, but pretty soon, I’m going to be like you.

Hobo: My man, you cannot be this awesome.

–Bleecker & Lafayette

 

 

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

~Murray Kempton 

 

No one as yet had approached the management of New York in a proper spirit; that is to say, regarding it as the shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance. No one is likely to do so, because reflections on the long narrow pig-trough are construed as malevolent attacks against the spirit and majesty of the American people, and lead to angry comparisons.

~Rudyard Kipling 

 

In New York it’s not whether you win or lose–it’s how you lay the blame.

~Fran Lebowitz

Teeth

Sabertooth skull

Yesterday, I was just getting a start on sorting my clothes (Florida, Philip’s apartment, storage, Housing Works), and thinking the dizzy wanting-to-lie-down feeling was emotional, until the toothache that’s been bothering me mostly at night—taking hideous, pus-and-beetle shapes in my dreams—hit me with a full body infection.

I have an appointment with the dentist later, the ever-chirpy Tim who makes me long for the wild-eyed dentists of fiction who entertain you in their backyard, wearing white flannels and drinking gin and tonics, as they dose you liberally with laughing gas, then tie the tooth to a back bumper of a motorcycle driven by a maniacal 13 year old.

Human teeth are so pitiful. It’s no wonder the young girls and menopausal women of America are mooning over Stephanie Meyer’s and Charlaine Harris’s vampires. We’ve all known the bliss of clean white canines sinking into our adoring flesh—1/8 of an inch in, anyway, with your average non-psychotic house cat.

Cats know how pretty their teeth are and that you want to be bitten by them, if not actually hurt or eaten. They’ll let you kiss them on the lips, though they prefer not to. And surely you’ve noticed how leisurely they yawn, allowing you a good look.

To prepare for the unpleasantness of the dentist’s chair, I’ve been reading about an old favorite of mine—the sabertooth cat, aka sabertooth tiger though they’re not ‘tigers’ or even very tiger-like, so we can’t call them that anymore.

The first thing I learned is that the sabertooth is the California State Fossil. I didn’t realize states had official fossils and many do not. (Florida, for example doesn’t. One website whines that the state stone—agatized coral—is really a fossil, but there’s no need to be defensive. Florida has a very apt state mammal: the cougar.)

Sabertooths were native to North America and were especially fond of L.A. Roughly the size of an African lion, though up to 50 % heavier, the sabertooth wasn’t a running, pouncing beast but a compact, rugged predator of slow-moving meat-farms like mammoths, mastadons and ground sloths. Its lower jaw could swing to almost a right angle when opened to attack—getting the jaw out of the way of the long canines. The lower jaw was fairly puny, like a screen door.

Big cats generally kill by strangling their prey, which takes a few minutes, as anyone who’s watched PBS lion kills can attest to. Since the sabertooth’s lower jaw muscles were probably too weak to strangle, or to provide the anchoring needed to bite through bone, scientists have concluded that the cat used its considerable upper-body strength to wrestle prey to the ground, then stabbed its canines into the throat, cutting through the jugular vein and/or trachea. This quick back-alley slashing helped protect the glorious teeth, which were thicker from front to back than from side to side, like knives resting on their points, and thus vulnerable to being snapped off under pressure.

The sabretooth’s nasal openings were further back than they are in modern cats, allowing the cat to continue breathing while its head was buried inside its victim. It’s sobering to realize many sabertooths must have drowned in blood before evolution worked that out. Complex analysis having to do with plant fossils in tar pits, where many sabertooths ended up,  suggest the sabertooth had a dappled coat like a leopard. But this is pure speculation as is the claim that for fun the young cats liked to suck up blood from dying mastadons and spray it on cave walls in an activity yet to be known as art.

Kindling

Jeff Bezos at a tender age

The Times had a piece today about a medical student, Satre Stuelke, who’s been doing CT scans of ‘cultural icons’ like iphones and Barbie dolls so I clicked on the pix to see what my inner iphone looked like. I wasn’t impressed. The CT scan of my husband’s head done years ago was way more interesting, making me think that perhaps humans were not descended from apes but horses.*

They didn’t include a Kindle in the slide show but I know what I’d find if I looked inside, since it’s not thick enough for circuitry: relics from famous authors, a bone, a tuft of hair, sprinkled with fairy dust or holy water, depending on the writer, and lashed to service by the stern mumbo jumbo of somebody contemporary and prize-heavy like Ian McEwan.

The Kindle is re-igniting my buying lust. I’d gotten sick of accumulating things. Now I can surf at midnight and in an instant have one of thousands of books, at a steep discount. Last night I bought a fantasy novel for 00.00 cents. It’s a loss leader, the beginning of a series, similar to the $1.69 Face yogurt Trader Joe’s was selling until yesterday when they upped it to $4.99 and I swore never to shop there again.

Before that, I had a birthday gift certificate to use up. So I haven’t actually spent any of my own money. Of course, it’s only been a little over a week.

People like looking at my Kindle. It’s a strangely naked feeling, letting someone play with it and see the 3 or 4 books I’ve bought. I’m used to my formidable library presenting evidence of how much great literature and serious nonfiction I’ve read. While my Kindle has on it…well, never mind.

One answer for this is to jettison anything embarrassing after reading. And if you should want to re-read, being in the same low-brain-cell mood? Amazon has developed a system, intended to keep you from overloading your Kindle’s memory, that enables you to delete a book from the device while amazon keeps a record of your past purchase, and lets you download it again—only to the same Kindle, naturally—anytime you want, free. It’s your very own secret (from your friends) online library, pristine and climate controlled in Jeff Bezos’ paternal embrace.**

Some people will have privacy concerns about the non-friends with access, although purchase records are already being kept by amazon (and everyone else), so it’s a little late to worry.  But the things I read will not land me in jail or even banned from teaching in the Texas public school system. What I write is more likely to get me in trouble. I’ve been considering this—reading recent wordpresss posts about people losing jobs after twittering—and though the particular mistake highlighted (slamming a prospective employer online) is not one I’m likely to make, I can think of lots of blog scenarios causing more than personal-life ill effects.

But of course I can. I wouldn’t be a fiction writer dabbling in fantasy if I couldn’t conjure doom at will and festoon it with comic grotesquerie.

The more important lesson for me is the one I learned in group therapy: while you struggle to confess your agonizing, shameful secret, the one that will make people mock you and shun you forever, your listener is tapping her feet and mentally sticking her fingers in her ears so she won’t forget the radioactive, brontosaurus-sized secret she needs you to shut the fuck up and pay reverent attention to.

*He had blinding headaches, which they decided were migraine since they couldn’t find anything wrong. I’m still suspicious since it was right after that that he started making lots more money.

** Part of what attracted me to amazon in the late ‘90’s was the name. Then I take a look at Jeff Bezos (most recently on Jon Stewart). Smart guy, sure. Making a bundle on the Kindle. But an amazon he’s not. This is a question probably answered somewhere long ago—but was he the rare lad who ignored Batman and The Incredible Hulk, reading Wonder Woman comics at night under the covers?

Going South

On November 5, in Union Square, there were tee shirts, sweatshirts and buttons proclaiming: Change has come. Well I guess so.

I’m moving to Florida soon, unless money starts falling from the sky. It’s kind of exciting when I forget about sorting and packing and leaving New York—my city, the only city I’ll ever call home—leaving Philip and my friends. I’ve been here 25 years, but before that I moved around a lot.

The sun, the beach. The quiet. Not having to live alone anymore. These are good things. I can put my mind there, but I’m not there yet. I don’t want to sort and pack, sell and give away, go to my various doctors to get the questionable bits checked, or do my taxes. I want to lie on my bed in the spring sunlight, my laptop radiating through the pillow it rests on, write and surf. I want to enjoy what I have while it’s still here—take walks in the neighborhood, go to museums, have dinners with friends.

And though I kind of want to go, I really don’t want to leave. I’m angry at the world, which could care less. I was angry at myself, but that was unproductive. To be angry at the financiers, Wall Street and the banks, Bush and Greenspan—why bother? It’s not like I’m waiting outside a cold prison in Russia to hear any scrap of news of my beloved. I’m not in an Iraqi marketplace looking at bloody body parts flung among the vegetables. It can always be worse until you’re dead and opinions differ as to whether it can get worse then.

Personally, I’d prefer no afterlife. It’s hard enough moving to another state. Dead, I wouldn’t know anybody and the jackals would sniff me out. People like to say all your loved ones—like my departed brother—come to greet you, but how likely is that? My living brother won’t even come to New York.

I’m going to Florida as everyone else flees. Land of abandoned houses (some now home to colonies of bees), hurricanes, highways, strip malls, Republicans. At least my vote will count more.

There’s no income tax in Florida. No 20° weather, no 4 a.m. drunks fighting or singing under my window. And in June, in New York, the subway fare’s going up 50 cents, with likely worse to follow.

Worse to follow in Florida too, no doubt. But if the system collapses, as so many like to predict, and the seas rise and eat the beaches just to make sure we get the message, I’ll move inland and live in a crumbling lego house with the bees.

Or not. But no afterlife. Seriously. Give mine to somebody’s cat.

***

“I am going to St, Petersburg, Florida, tomorrow. Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best they can. I’m sick of the job–it’s a thankless one and full of grief. I’ve been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor.” ~Al Capone

“I turned my home state of Florida into the Land of Xanth. “~Piers Anthony

“Xanth is a land of centaurs, dragons and basilisks, where every citizen has a special spell only he or she can cast.”~narrativeandontology.blogspot.com

Always on my Mind

Death has been on my mind. Natasha’s Richardson’s accident was heartbreaking; a close friend of mine was working with a member of her family, which is not much of a connection but it lit up my own memories of her performances. I also saw Liam Neeson on Jon Stewart a few months ago, and went through the requisite envy—Natasha Richardson has everything—that one remembers at moments like this.

The flip side of that is I’ve been feeling desperately unhappy about my own life: a stalled career, no money, a 9 year love affair that is a perpetual misery machine shot with moments of transcendent joy, hours of quiet happiness—the seductions that keep one from turning off the machine.

I have health, loving friends and family, brains and talent. Nonetheless, there’s a part of me that thinks: I know nothing of Natasha Richardson’s inner life, but if it matched what one saw from the outside, 45 years of that seems better than 145 of my own life.

This isn’t about fame or a sexy movie star husband. It’s about depression, which has systematically wrecked the many opportunities I’ve had. It’s about my father, who taught me that the way you deal with severe pain is to kill yourself. My mother taught me that you deal with it by tapping your inner strength, and that’s what I’ve been doing for 54 years. The appeal of my father’s way is you don’t have to keep doing it over and over. I remember a little wooden placard he had, the kind you buy at a tacky gift shop. Written on it was, “If at first you don’t succeed, to hell with it.”

I was struck by that not just because it appealed to a kid’s natural anti-piety, but because it seemed so in character for him, and I hadn’t consciously recognized that part of his character before. My father rarely talked to me so any tidbit I learned about him was powerful. Any connection was powerful. I didn’t believe in that slogan, and still don’t: I’m more of the school that if you don’t succeed after trying for 54 years, you should strongly consider saying to hell with it.

I’m not talking about my particular goals. I know I didn’t try hard enough in my career, didn’t do what people told me to do and what I told myself to do. I didn’t try hard enough to walk away from a hopeless romance. (No, not hopeless. I can’t even say that now. Seemingly hopeless.) But the reason I didn’t wasn’t laziness, though I have more than my share of that, but depression. I’ve never liked that word, but none of the good words—despair, anguish, terror—carry the same implication of longlastingness. I have to trust you know the ferocity and multi-dimensional nature of the beast. I’ve spent at least half my life’s energy fighting it. When I read about women juggling family and career, I relate. Tending to the demands of relentless needy creatures is wearying.

Everybody’s beast is different, though, and what I can say about mine is that it’s never been that flat, affectless grey goo that so many people describe. I’ve been in that place, now and then. It was restful. Not pleasant, but restful. But I can see why it results in suicide so often. If nothing is reliably differentiated from any other thing, even death loses its mystique and becomes as harmless-looking as a sleeping pill.

Death has never looked harmless to me. I first encountered it as a murderer taking those I loved. I’ve never gone a week without moments of joy or contentment, without appreciation of the beauty of the world that death will steal from me, sooner or later. So I have to do things my mother’s way and manage to enjoy life even though the demonspawn upstairs are going crazy and may soon erupt.

You know language is inadequate when this translates as ‘hope.’

Stimulate Me

I wasn’t going to write about the AIG mess because everybody has, and I imagine readers are sick of it. But I can’t write about my personal life because it makes me weep and want to bite chunks out of my arms and legs, and my mind’s closed like a clam to to all to wonderful curious things of the world. So, politics. I keep thinking of something Philip said: that Obama was correct in focusing on the bank bailout, that Geithner would survive, and all this hysteria was inevitable and had to be both given room and ignored. “What nobody understands about politics,” he said, “is that you have to allow the populist rage. But you don’t have to react to it.”

Obama is reacting to the rage, but as minimally as he can get away with. He’s doing his best to keep the love (Jay Leno loves him). Congress gets to play the Big Stupid, as it does so well. I can’t imagine how the 90% tax plan will survive legal challenge, but maybe nobody will challenge it. Maybe the death threats will convince enough executives to give back their bonuses. Too bad Rahm can’t deliver the threats himself.

Meanwhile, AIG is suing the IRS for taxes it paid and now says it doesn’t owe. It’s one of those fights that normally would be way under the radar, but nothing AIG and its companion losers do can be under the radar now. Maybe they don’t need million dollar executives. Maybe they need a good PR guy. I know one who’d work for 250k. Although, now that I think about it, he probably wouldn’t take a job at AIG.  It’s kind of like working for the Treasury. You have to be really smart and accomplished to be considered, but if you are those things, why walk into the shit?

I’m disappointed in Geithner but I haven’t given up all hope. I still trust that Obama knows a little more than I do. In any case, you can’t expect the capitalist system to transform—which is happening—without a lot of battle and mess. The astrologers say: the last time Pluto was in the place in the sky was during the American Revolution. I don’t think we have the spine for a revolution but maybe this time we can manage change without bloodshed. (In the U.S. I mean. Other countries have it rougher.)

For the record I’m a rationalist who likes to read books about how we deceive ourselves by not understanding the mechanics of chance and coincidence, and so imagine patterns and forces when none exist, and books about the evolutionary basis of religion—at the same time, I love to read Michael Lutin. *

As Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” That works for me. He went on to say, “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.” So, not quite applicable to my point—I’ll have to find another quote to bolster my split-brain problem—but very much to the current situation.

*Vanity Fair astrologer, website wheresthemoon.com

Obama’s a Leo. Where he is this week, according to Lutin:
“In order to be the creative genius you’d like to be remembered as, you have to smash a few rules once in a while and take a few risks that could put in jeopardy everything you have been trying to build and preserve for ages. On the other hand, when you hear the drums beating and the call of the wild night birds, can you really turn up the TV and pretend you don’t have those urges and yearnings?”

I thought it was me hearing the wild night birds. I guess I was just dreaming.

Btw—all those states rejecting stimulus money: I’ll take it. I’ll spread it around. I know lots of good hardworking, people who need a jolt, a little spring of excitement as the bank account zooms.

The American Plan

W. 47th St.

I had a lovely birthday, though things took a dive after that. Philip took me to see The American Plan, by Richard Greenberg. Originally produced in 1990, it takes place in the mid 1950’s. The story is simple, even hoary—diabolically charismatic, domineering mother, who “got the last boat out of Germany”, sad, screwy daughter. (The father, who made the family rich by inventing “something in lamps” is dead.)

The women are vacationing at their summer place in the Catskills, across the lake from a hotel full of people they mingle with but consider vulgar, and who in turn refer to the mother as “the Czarina.” The third in their party is the mother’s black maid-cum-companion, Olivia, a brilliantly understated character. The daughter complains at one point, “You never tell anything about yourself. Doesn’t it get lonely having no one to talk to?” Olivia replies, “Yes, it does. But if I told you my secrets, I’d be lonely for the things I told.”

Enter a young man. Later another one, chasing the first. The daughter tries to get away from her mother and fails. In the end, nobody’s happy. As one character says, it’s not that there’s no such thing as happiness. Rather, “Happiness exists, but only for other people.”

Mercedes Ruehl as the mother, Eva, is riveting, utterly lifelike as a larger-than-life character, with the added brio that art brings such a role; you’d never want to meet this woman but watching her on stage is pure delight. The way she bunches up her lips, sighs, how she moves her body in the exquisitely self-conscious, self-possessed manner of a middle-aged force of nature—it’s all enchanting. If theater didn’t exist, Mercedes Ruehl would have to invent it.

Lily Rabe, playing Lili, can’t compete with her but she holds her ground, which for the purposes of the story is just right. She’s too old for the character which skewed things a little—I kept thinking of her as a girl kept captive into her thirties, which during most of the play is not the case. And yet I’m not sure a young actress would have done so well. Right from the start the hold the mother has over the daughter is timeless; Lili is not just a 20 year old aching to get away. “This happens every year,” she explains to her beau, and it feels like she means, “every year for the last 100.” She has a bit of Laura in The Glass Menagerie to her; but she’s not Southern gothic crazy. She’s New York Jewish, post WWII neurotic. Her mind is not so gauzy—there’s real, terrible history in the background—and she has some spine. She seems, almost, to have a chance.

The title refers to what the hotel across the lake offers its guests, and what Lili is not allowed. When she was a little girl, her mother used to sing to her, “The Nazis haven’t found us/But darling, they’re all around us.” In fact, what’s around them is a pair of feckless young men with their own not-inconsiderable pain. The male characters are smaller and less interesting, but make a good counterpoint to the drowning power of family and war.

What makes the play such a pleasure, though, is not the story—twisty and psychologically astute as it is—but the sparkle and precision of the dialogue, and the just-right pacing. Not one scene is too short or too long (kudos to the director, David Grindley). Wit livens every exchange but never at the expense of character.

Happiness, for that evening, was mine.

Happiness=Books and Cake

Kindle Cake http://www.geeksugar.com/1131756

Nine years ago, I wrote a piece for the New York Times* about electronic paper, which had not yet come on the market. I wrote as one who had been addicted to books practically since birth, and who could remember the particular feel of a paperback that has fallen in the tub and dried out: swollen, a little crunchy, needing to be read carefully. I had a fondness for books that had survived immersion similar to my appreciation for my cat when he sat still and let me bathe him. Gone with the Wind, Jane Eyre, and Marjorie Morningstar were a few of my victims.

But now I have a Kindle and I can’t take it in the bath. (This isn’t really a problem, since my bathtub is not a nice place.) I’m perfectly happy to read  in bed. Since I’ve only had the Kindle a few days, it makes me feel like I’m doing something important, as when I first learned to use a computer. Not the same, of course. The Kindle is easy. It’s also made me more vividly aware that in the next decade or two print newspapers and magazines will vanish, and books will exist in far fewer numbers. That makes me sad—I’ll never lose my emotional attachment to paper—but it’s okay. We learned to live without papyrus. Nobody practices penmanship anymore.The problem is figuring out how not to lose valuable digital records as technology leaps ahead.

Right now, there are a number of people preserving old hardware and transferring data to new systems. Libraries make and will make decisions on a continuing basis about what to keep, what to transfer. But history depends on the found object, the book or pamphlet that has sat unread in an attic or library for a 100 or 200 years and come out perfectly readable, if a little musty. My reflex answer is to keep printed copies of everything important, but that’s not going to be what happens. Instead, we’ll develop computers that can emulate the processes of old systems, and all data will have meta-information about its own compatibility requirements embedded. Then you’ll open, on your new machine, that old disk or file you found on your grandmother’s computer and be bored or amazed at the stuff she used to write; you’ll lift forgotten gems from her Kindle. That may not work forever, but it’s as far ahead as I can see.

Still, it’s a little scary that so many questions now are answered by: In the future, when we have these really awesome computers Not to mention what will result when the computers become sentient, which may or may not happen, but I think it will. Perhaps they’ll be like 19th century schoolteachers, feeding us only moral tales in an attempt to eradicate the beast in humanity. Perhaps they’ll whisper erotic stories in our ears as we sleep in order to stimulate the amusing spectacle of human desire. More likely they’ll write their own books, and novelists like me will grumble about the competition.

In the meantime, anything I write is going to be printed on acid-free paper, bound and stored in a cool dark place. When I get around to it, that is. And since it’s my birthday today, will somebody bake me a cake like the one in the photograph?

*www.nytimes.com/books/99/12/12/bookend/bookend.html

My Pleasure Principles

Ingres, Odalisque

I expect that by now many of you have read the New York Times article, “The Pleasure Principle,” about a center in San Francisco called One Taste Urban Retreat Center*, which is dedicated to the art and practice of female orgasm. Men and women live together at the center, learning yoga and mindfulness, but the main event happens at 7 a.m. each day, when “about a dozen women, naked from the waist down, lie with eyes closed in a velvet-curtained room, while clothed men huddle over them, stroking them in a ritual known as orgasmic meditation…”

7 a.m.? Don’t they know that female desire peaks in the mid-afternoon? Men are the ones who wake up with hard-ons, and women have to bat them away in order to get coffee. If I had an orgasm in the morning, why would I bother writing?

At the One Taste Center, the men and women avoid eye contact during the orgasm-meditation. It’s not about romance, or interpersonal communication. The men don’t get to climax. Part of me thinks this would be a good place for women who’ ve never had orgasms, even while masturbating, or who’ ve never masturbated, or who can’t have orgasms during sex because of shame about their body. The female body is beautiful and holy and deserves to be serviced in hushed and velvety circumstances. I  can go for that (right now would be nice). But another part of me thinks—what is this preparing you for? Sex with eunuchs?

Women need to know how to achieve orgasm and how to ask for the right stimulation, and men need to learn the techniques and be willing to employ them. Plenty of women also have things to learn about male sexuality, which is a curious and fascinating field of study. I think sex workshops are a great resource for all genders. There ought to be more of them. Maybe in high school, right after the workshop in financial management. But a live-in retreat and a focus on orgasm as ‘meditation’ takes you away from ordinary life, which is, face it, where the best sex is to be found.

I would be happy if men all responded to the clitoris the way I respond to the penis of the man I love and desire: something that turns me on to look at, touch, lick, etc. I can write glorious emails about its beauty. (I’ve tried poems but that just gets embarrassing.) If men worshipped the clitoris the way they worship breasts, all would be well. But they don’t, and I doubt we can change that without intensive genetic manipulation, which is a task best left to future generations.

Even so, I’ve had plenty of nights of sex without orgasm that I wouldn’t want to have missed. The crazy heat, the tease, the turn-on of precipitous action is quite lovely. Having one’s breasts worshipped isn’t bad either. And in general I’ll take a man I love, a man I think is sexy, a man whose cock I worship (except when he’s being, excuse me, a prick) over an Olympic gold-medal cunnilinguist any day.

In my experience the best way to motivate a man to make love better is to a) arouse him, b) make sure he cares about you, or at least wants you to stick around, and c) appeal to his competitive instincts. If you let him know your last boyfriend was a virtuoso with his tongue and hands, he’ll apply himself with vigor. If you sigh and moan when he gets it right, he’ll keep it up.

Men are funny that way. Sort of like women, except with women you have to be more indirect.

On else, you could offer this incentive (from the Times article): “a baby-faced 50-year-old Silicon Valley engineer…said that the practice of manually fixing his attention on a tiny spot of a woman’s body improves his concentration at work.”

You see? I’d prefer a man who joined the Center because he wanted access to all those naked lower bodies and then went mad with desire and had to be restrained by brawny bouncers, chained in the cellar until the wild lust had worn itself out…

I guess I’m not the meditative type.

* I’m not going to make any jokes about the name of the One Taste Urban Retreat Center. That’s what comments are for.

If Madoff is the Devil, Who’s Cheney?

Cheney’s still distressed that Scooter Libby wasn’t pardoned. He has none of that paternal pride you’d expect—finally the little boy he made president grew a tiny ball. A useless one perhaps, but still. It’s remarkable in a man of W’s age.

I’m sure the Obama administration would be happy to work out a deal. Cheney testifies about his encyclopedia of crimes, enters a guilty plea to, well, lots of things but treason would be sufficient, and Libby gets pardoned.

I’m not suggesting we sent Cheney to Guantanomo, or an unnamed country, perhaps Poland, to be subjected to ‘alternative procedures.’ He can go to a country club prison for all I care, as long as he’s sentenced to 150 years.

Think of it: everyone from the media to the guy next to you at work is calling Bernie Madoff the devil. Stealing people’s life savings—including Elie Wiesel for God’s sake-—is abominable behavior. But I doubt any of Madoff’s victim’s would prefer this, “I remained naked for the next two weeks…. I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell. The cell was dark with no light, artificial or natural.” *

You may think the prisoner quoted above deserves what he got. I’m vengeful enough that torture for mass murderers and terrorists doesn’t upset me as much as looking at pictures of people starving. But I do think we ought to vote on this sort of thing. Maybe it’s time to re-ratify the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I know, scary. Do you trust your fellow Americans? Still…

If Cheney belongs in prison, so does Bush. He may have the Who Me? child thing down pat, but that’s no excuse when we send actual children to jail routinely. I’ve argued against prosecuting the Bushies because it would divide the country and I thought the Obama Administration needed to focus on the future. I’m still concerned about that, especially since the Republicans are doing such a good job of trashing their image. Ridicule is a powerful weapon. But I’m coming around.

Bush may be smarter than Cheney, after all. He has the sense to keep his mouth shut.

* The New York Times, Sunday, March 15

Russian torture Chair

Dick Cheney

Readers and Writers

Edvard Munch, Girl Kindling Stove

My sister bought me a Kindle for my birthday! I had just decided to stop buying books—as well as chocolate, fruit other than apples and bananas, and Perrier. I was going to do what my brother suggested and live on spaghetti and spam. Start watching more TV.

But she bought me a Kindle so I’ll have to download a few books, right? The Kindle will be perfect for all those airplane trips I can’t afford to take anymore. I have a few books on my iphone, mostly Dickens, but I hardly ever read my phone. I use it to take pictures. Which reminds me—another iphone app I’ve thought of: you rub the screen a few times and then aim it at your pile of gathered kindling and it starts a fire. It will come in handy when we’re all living in the National Parks, hiding from the reckless hordes of starving immigrants besieging our shores. Yeah, I know we’ve probably got ten years before the world’s coastal cities disappear and things get ugly. Still, it’s good to be ready.

**

A writer friend of mine who fought in Vietnam recently wrote a novel about that war and sent it to his agent. His agent asked him to set it in Iraq. I guess the idea is if your book is on Iraq you can go on Jon Stewart and Charlie Rose, and what could be finer than that (unless you’re Jim Cramer)?

I think he should write a novel about a squadron of young recruits being sent to Iraq, entering a time warp after the plane collides with some very old geese, and ending up in Vietnam, circa 1966.
“Man, this is some weird desert.”
“Desert’s supposed to be sand, right?”
“Probably the whole country isn’t desert. You know, like Arizona isn’t the whole U.S. This is just like Lousiana.”
“I been to Louisiana. This ain’t Louisiana.”
“How come our guys all have their guns pointed at us?”
“They sure look funny.”
“They’ve all got fucking antique guns, that’s why.”
“Fucking Bush.”

Okay, now you see it has to be a TV show. Hogan’s Heroes meets Gilligan’s Island. The present-day guys finally figure out what’s going on and try to explain that the war is over, that we lost, that there was no point to the whole mess anyway and the best idea would be to sneak over to Iraq and kill Saddam while he’s still a young thug (though others have different ideas on who should be killed).

The Vietnam-era soldiers, annoyed by being asked whether they’ve killed any babies yet and where their ear collection is, spike the newbies’ drinks with hallucinogens and send them out to find what the old soldiers keep referring to as ‘IUDs’, except for stuttering Jeremy from Fresno who has an eidetic memory for Internet porn, and is kept in camp to spend his evenings describing every video he’s ever seen in minute detail. Viewers love the way his stuttering disappears when the sex gets hot, and the way the Vietnam-era guys smack him every time he says, “iphone.”

The Gelded Age

George Grosz

Europeans are considering castrating sex offenders, while we can’t even manage to get the drop on the Wall Street economy-assassins.

Bernie Madoff in jail will make a lot of people feel better. But that was an easy case. He broke laws flagrantly, admitted guilt, and his victims are specific and powerful. What about the rest of them, the ones who may or may not have broken laws but nonetheless have impoverished millions of people?

Jim Cramer’s excuse on Jon Stewart last night was the CEOs he trusted, “guys I went to school with, friends,” lied to him. Stewart was scornful of this; journalists should expect to be lied to. Cramer isn’t the real villain here, though he’s a jackass. The powers-that-be at CNBC decide when and how to deploy their real financial journalists.

But what now? Americans want bonuses returned, regulation put in place, credit restored. They also want those who lied criminally to be punished, and for the rest to admit it was greed and stupidity as far above and beyond the greed and stupidity of the average person as those bonuses were above the windfall of 50 grand of new equity in your house that maybe you spent unwisely.

I understand that it all made sense if you were part of the club where everyone else was insane too. Really, I do get that, having hung out with alcoholics. But once the game is over, you’ve dried out and seen the damage, once the whole world is listening in on those private drunken conversations about your mutual brilliance…to not see what went wrong takes enormous mental effort, the kind that deforms and constricts all cognitive functioning.

Are they laughing up their sleeves? The ones who got out in time are. Many of the rest are painfully riding it out, hating their attackers. And some have brains are dribbling out their ears from the continual strain of lying to themselves. Those are the ones we need sobered out of the complex intoxication of wealth, status and risk and put to work in our universities and MBA programs, explaining to the young how it happened, what the dangers, temptations and ignored warning signs were. Nobody understands it better. Like ex gang members, they have street cred.

We don’t need their experience to run our banks. What part of it was valuable they trashed themselves. We need to tap into the fascination people feel for those who fall far, especially into the willful stupidity that intelligent kids find so hard to fathom—childhood and adolescence being places where you need your wits about you.

As for those caught in criminal lies…while they’re awaiting trial, lock them in cells with continuous video of those European doctors gelding sex offenders.

Dead Is The New Black

John Berryman, poet, who jumped from a bridge in 1972, waving goodbye

A guy from Philip’s company jumped out the office window yesterday. Philip didn’t quite know how to talk about it. He’d never met the man. He seemed to both of us more of a casualty of war than an individual meeting his private fate, though the two can’t be separated.

I thought perhaps he was shorting financial stocks on the day of the big rally. It’s just as likely something in his personal life deteriorated over the weekend. But there are so many suicides lately. You can’t help thinking of the people who jumped from the twin towers. Maybe one of them woke up that beautiful Tuesday planning a dive, but you kind of doubt it.

The last person I knew who killed himself that way did have bad things happening in his personal life but was also a high-functioning paranoid schizophrenic (he worked for The New York Times). My mother is certain he thought hostile forces were coming for him and he was trying to escape. Of course all suicides think hostile forces are coming for them. The only difference is that some of us realize the forces are in our minds.

No, I’m not a suicide. I’m writing this, aren’t I? The dead don’t write. At least, they don’t write to me. I’ve never even come close except for the night of my first date with my husband—I was suicidal before he asked me out, not after—but I have suicidal ideation, as the shrinks call it.

“I’m going to jump out the window!” I said to my doctor several years ago.

“Go ahead,” he replied. “We’re on the first floor.” Smug little bastard…I forgot we were in the new office…

I like that phrase, though, suicidal ideation. It rolls off the tongue. You could use it to name a child. Suicidal Ideation Jones. Or Suicidal Ideation Napalm, if you want the correct initials.

My father used the car-in-the-closed-garage method, classic for the time and place (mid-60’s suburbia) and his character type (pain-avoidant, fastidious about his person). Two  teenage brothers I knew from Texas shot themselves while on LSD, my friend Susan’s father hung himself, and the others used pills.

You know all those life insurance policies that disallow benefits in the event of suicide within three years? I bet the ones past the three-year mark are all being yanked. Check the fine print. And keep in mind that your kids would probably prefer it if you pulled them out of their too-expensive schools and organized a family bank heist gang, or drove to Cleveland and squatted in an empty house.

Suicidal ideation isn’t meant to lead out the window. It’s like those sexual fantasies you have about…you know the ones I mean…you’d never really do that. In your mind, you’re allowed the most extravagant depravity. Keep it there.

John Berryman

Dream Song 127

Again, his friend’s death made the man sit still
and freeze inside—his daughter won first price—
his wife scowled over at him—
It seemed to be Hallowe’en.
His friend’s death had been adjudged suicide,
which dangles a trail

longer than Henry’s chill, longer than his loss
and longer than the letter that he wrote
that day to the widow
to find out what the hell had happened thus.
All souls converge upon a hopeless mote
tonight, as though

the throngs of souls in hopeless pain rise up
to say they cannot care, to say they abide
whatever is to come.
My air is flung with souls which will not stop
and among them hangs a soul that has not died
and refuses to come home.

Dream Song 29

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of.  Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late.  This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing

I read the news today, oh boy…

Warthog. n.(wôrthôg, -hg) 1. A wild African hog with two protruding tusks and warty excrescences on its face. 2. A person who always eats the best bits. 3. Inspiration for name of school in famous children's story 4. (slang) Banker

From The New York Times, March 10, 2009, explaining the huge jump in the stock market this morning, “That hint of hope came in the form of a memorandum from the chief executive of Citigroup, Vikram S. Pandit, saying that the bank had turned a profit in the first two months of the year, and that its quarterly performance to date, before taxes and special items, was the best since the third quarter of 2007.

Mr. Pandit gave no indication of how much special items, like write-downs or credit losses, would be…”

Does anyone else feel the slightest twinge of mistrust? This nugget of questionable news made bank stocks rise in the double digits. A sweet profit for somebody. Think of the possibilities for a person with advance notice of this memo. Think of the temptation to write it.

Think of all the money people will lose when the market changes its mind tomorrow or Friday.

***

In its weekly grammar column, The Times castigates itself for its cornucopia of errors, having apparently decided this approach is cheaper than hiring more copyeditors. Today’s column concerned metaphor abuse, citing a sentence that contained this specimen “…a stew of programs, some with warts and all.”

I find that strangely evocative. Is it really an error? I’m sure I’ve had warts in my stew. Middle School cafeteria, maybe? Not that I’m complaining. Pretty soon we’ll look back on these days nostalgically. The few ancients will tell stories: “Once upon a time, children, you could still get warts. Real warts, served up hot in a stew. You can’t imagine how tasty they were: chewy, protein-rich, and no two exactly alike…

“But never mind; dirt’s good enough for us. We can live on dirt thanks to our genetic modifications derived from stem-cell research. Of all nations, America produced the most aborted fetuses in the early part of this century, giving us an unbeatable technological edge, and ending the old argument about whether sex is good for anything. It’s a shame we had to let it go.

“Now, children, what your older siblings told you that made you cry and have nightmares is in fact true—if a 2009-era person saw you, he’d crush you underfoot or spray you with nasty chemicals. But they were primitives, greedy, stupid and mindlessly destructive. They didn’t understand the elegant efficiency of the human-insect hybrid with built-in wifi capability, access to communal memory farms and daily upgrades. They didn’t even appreciate wart stew, for god’s sake; I used to have to tell my husband it was chipped beef. Beef? T bones on the grill, filet mignon with béarnaise? Forget about it. Eat your dirt.”

The Empty House Cupcake Dream

I was reading in the New York Times Magazine about abandoned houses in Cleveland. Not a place I’ve ever wanted to live, even in a mansion, but the article was long and I kept seeing the empty houses—single family, unpretentious, a few bedrooms—seeing them in the hundreds and thousands and thinking: They’re empty. Why can’t people live in them before the pipes are ripped from the walls and the boiler stolen? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

I don’t know where I’m going to live six months from now. Here in New York or in Florida or both, going back and forth like the child of a particularly odd divorce. I’ve talked about this with both husband and boyfriend; we all have decisions to make, not knowing what the future holds; jealousy and possessiveness are still in play but security looms larger.

Philip has often said plaintively, “Why can’t we all just live together?”

“Because Christine hates me,” I would reply. “And Charles hates you.”

Now Charles has his own girlfriend, whom I will call Cynthia, and he won’t be able to afford me if he loses his job. Yesterday, he said, “I’m starting to agree with Philip. Maybe we should live together.” Meanwhile Philip dreamed that William Shatner was running for Governor, and he wanted to be his campaign manager. I want to be getting a snack in my mother’s beachfront kitchen in New Hampshire in 1974 while she and my teenage brother watch Star Trek reruns on TV.

The Times article mentioned houses being sold on ebay and craigslist for prices like $2,000. Now if it turns out that the house you bought for $2,000 has been stripped of its innards, condemned by the city and comes with a large back-tax bill, your deal is slightly less awesome than what you can find on my ebay site (beautiful jewelry, guaranteed-your-money-back free of mold, mice, vandalism and zombie banks).

But my interest was piqued and I went on line, looking at houses in South Florida. Houses that cost $8,500, or $24,000, or $55,000. Tiny houses and very small houses and smallish houses that resemble road dividers. The tiny and very small ones are often cute, painted fuschia or tangerine, with front porches, bushes, and white trim. Dollhouses. Surely I can buy several, string them together like Christmas lights?

Ten minutes later I was reading an article on Huffingtonpost.com about the amazing deals that can be had now on designer clothes, electronics and so forth. They might as well have been talking about discount plastic dog vomit. I couldn’t imagine buying anything more indulgent than dessert.

Houses like cupcakes, and the rose-tinted old days. That’s what I dream about.

Michelle, ma belle

I have no doubt many have said this before me, but I love Michelle Obama’s arms. My own arms tend more toward the languid and I’m fine with that, but when I was 13, my cousin Faxy could beat all the boys in the class arm-wrestling and I liked nothing better than watching her do it. Winning bets. Big guys. I don’t think we bet money; this was in the 60’s. It was just cool. Her mother was a radical lesbian novelist who wouldn’t let anyone of the male persuasion set foot on her territory (11 year old son excepted, I think) and that was kind of cool, but I liked men so I was conflicted. I had no conflicts at all about Fax muscling up and showing what a girl could do.

The First Lady’s fashion choices may be of minimal importance to our collapsing society. So is my recipe for banana bread and what my husband has decided to name his stray cat. They add texture though, don’t they? If you had the recipe and the name I mean, which you don’t, but it’s okay, you have Michelle. The children. The dog. We’re primates and grooming matters. Anyway, there’s no shortage of reporters giving us the grim, grimmer and grimmest news. After dutifully acquainting myself with our (by which I mean the world’s)  increasingly bizarre circumstances, remembering that someday this will be ‘history’ and I’m living it so I should take notes when I’m not having panic attacks, all I really want to do is watch Jon Stewart and look at pictures of Michelle and her daughters.

If only Maureen Dowd and David Brooks had broken the story that Michelle is really Supergirl. That would be worthy of a column.* If only Maureen and David were in a sci-fi story where the taxi left-turned into another reality where there was nothing but Nothing outside the car, no space, no time, and they were condemned to forever ride in other’s company, gossiping until their tongues became as thin as paper, thinner, and they forgot who it was they spoke of and what laughter was, until—

OK, they could come back after a few months. They’re frequently amusing. But to say Michelle has made her point? Her point is this is who she is and what she looks like and fuck you if you don’t like it. Michelle is what little girls want to grow up to be, unless they’re like me and want to grow up with a Michelle as their best friend and cousin (secretly Supergirl). I may be turning her into an empowerment object, but too bad: I love looking at her arms. My mother said recently that when the President smiles, she wants to jump into his arms. I guess it runs in the family, the arm thing.

* re: Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times, March 7

Saturday, Named after The God who ate his Children

The Swan Nebula, taken by the Hubble Telescope

They turned up the gravity in my body. There’s a switch for it.

I’m too depressed to work on my novel, or go out on this beautiful Saturday, or call anyone.  I’ve already tried vodka, chocolate and trash fiction. I’m typing this sentence because I hope it will lead somewhere better and already I feel that little excitement in the words, like a dog when you take its leash off the hook. When I was a very young writer and the only things I knew for sure were the things I didn’t want to admit to anyone, I thought I could just play with words and phrases like paints, that the beauty of the sounds and associations were enough. If I’d been a musician—but I was much too lazy to be a musician—

There are reasons to be depressed and just as many not to be. My husband, after many years of marriage, suggested to me once that maybe the reasons came after the fact. I remember feeling defensive and embarrassed; mostly afraid I was nothing but a walking storm of unhappiness. And I didn’t even know what a terrible thing that is to be, that the weight of the world’s unhappiness has always been outrageous.

People have believed in astrology for thousands of years because it’s just common sense to think the planets are yanking us, swatting us into orbit, or collapsing on top of us. Nothing else is big enough to create such effects.

I would like someone to knock on my door and ask for help,  preferably something physical. What’s the difference between that and calling my friends to see who would like help with something? Simply that I feel that to be asked would snap me out of this, while to offer would be an admission of need, and my need is too great and diffuse and primitive…it could only lead to me jumping on someone’s back and dragging them under with me.

Note to self: they can fight back.
Re: note to self: that’s what I’m afraid of.

It has calmed me to write this. A blog is an amazing thing. It’s not a letter requiring response. No one pays for it; no one is owed. Yet it’s a step outside the monotonous washing machine of diary writing. When you clip the leash on the dog’s collar what does it expect? Around the block, same old story. Better than nothing.

Home Sweet Home

As I walked in the door at about 2:00 pm today, I planned to look at my apartment as potential renters would, as well as assess it a task to be accomplished. I expected to see clutter and dinginess, evidence of my psychic disarray, and was instead astonished at how charming and homey it was, the rugs, the books, the art, and the cabinets of beads. In the bedroom more books, photographs, my writing desk, and the full-length mirror on a stand I bought a few months before I stopped buying anything. Yes, I have too much stuff for the space and there are places I’d rather you didn’t investigate too closely, but really I wasn’t thinking about you, about anyone but me; my place, mine; I thought could spent the rest of my life in these two rooms, reading, writing, watching TV from bed, making jewelry at midnight and cookies in the afternoon, and never be unhappy for a moment.

Then I ate an apple and fell asleep. I woke at four, ground coffee in my closet kitchen that has a floor half cheap linoleum and half crumbling plaster and dirt covered with $3.99 rugs—that part mostly hidden beneath the butcher block cart that serves as my only counter space—and thought of the rust under the sink and the oven that follows no instructions other than on and off, things I put up with (though I’m perfectly capable of cajoling the super) because a part of me loves neglect, feels safest when my environment is both lovely and imperfect.

I was like this as a child, in my mother’s big, beautiful house, which was always clean. Told to vacuum, I would vacuum 95% of the room and when my mother said, “Really, isn’t it just as easy to finish the job?” I didn’t know how to say, “Yes, but I like it better this way,” in words she would understand. It confused me that it wasn’t obvious, the beauty and rightness of some dust remaining, a few little patches of dust sparkling in the sun. How they set off the clean part, added nuance. And when we drove through the town, I was interested in the other big houses in our neighborhood but I was enchanted by the little houses, the smaller the better, houses where I imagined families packed like chocolates in a box.

I’m aware that, as an adult, my attachment to pockets of squalor is more complex. I’m reacting to what others think—those girlfriends who come in and say, “I could do so much with this place!” or my boyfriend who scolds me for my living conditions as if I had rats running over piles of rotting garbage and the occasional severed hand. No, actually he doesn’t scold me like that. I have just felt it sometimes, in the interstices of his words, which, as he would say, is my problem.

But leaving aside the dicey parts, I have spent a bit of time and money in the past two years touching up the place—buying a runner rug from overstock.com that I put on the far side of the bed where it’s sometimes chilly, where my boyfriend and husband have to step when they get up in the middle of the night; a painted, supposedly antique Chinese cabinet (in the Tibetan style) on ebay, which I keep the TV on; and the aforementioned mirror; and the kitchen cart…

The New York lottery prize, I heard on the way in from the airport, is up to $212,000,000. If I took it in cash, it would be a little under a 100 mil, subtract 45% for taxes—plenty for me, my mother, Charles, Philip, Lisa, Gina, Andree, Berta, my two nieces, my two siblings, my four stepchildren and their offspring, a half dozen other friends I’d like to free from the shackles of their jobs…and my husband’s brother and his daughters…and Faxy and Kate if they need it…

I wouldn’t have enough left to move. And that would be fine.

“To feel at home, stay at home.” ~Clifton Fadiman

Nothing but Blue Skies (Not)

It’s almost time to leave Florida, and as always I’m torn between my two lives. Charles and I have knit together invisibly, through dinners and walks and days and nights. I don’t want to leave and it’s harder now than usual, because what’s waiting in New York is so scary.

I may be leaving New York this summer for a couple of years, and having to go back and face that and all the effort that has to be expended to make it happen—all the while thinking that I should be trying harder to make it NOT happen, looking for work, though there is no work, and what little I might find would not be enough

—and the feelings from losing my house in the country rise up

—the debacle of renting it after endless months of fixing it up to rent, scrubbing the oven until my arms were bloody, the wasp nest I had to kiss a man to get rid of, the cleaning woman who had an anxiety attack and quit, Jennifer who broke her tooth falling forward against the roof while getting rid of the borer bees which is why I resorted to kissing the plumber to handle the wasp nest, the water with antifreeze in it, and the spiders and the snakes although the snakes were fine with me it was my tenant who had a problem

—and then emptying the house to sell, until only my study had anything in it (a pile of blankets and a laptop to play music, a bottle of scotch and the sound of the wind)

—and I feel sorry for myself because the bad dreams only stopped coming in the last six months

—and none of this is very much compared to what others are going through

—ok, but it’s the not knowing

—but everybody feels that

I’m just sad.