MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA-

I stopped into Los Angeles recently; I wanted to get a new guitar strap and there was also this minor literary thing that I figured I could go to while I was there. It was a good trip, and one that I will cheerfully blog about at some length. There are some stories that must be told, and moments that I fear will haunt me forever unless I sobbingly confess them to the internet at large. Like the point over dinner when I suddenly realised that the twinkle in Brad Listi’s eye wasn’t pleasantly welcoming bonhomie at all, but rather a deep and unforgiving madness (the two look remarkably similar).  Or the time I first heard Greg Olear’s voice, and I knew in my bones that terror had a new favourite uncle. Even now, I can’t close my eyes without seeing Rachel Pollon laugh and laugh and tie Ben Loory to a railroad track (the story of how he survived is one of incredible heroism, skull-shattering evil, and one man’s surprisingly aerodynamic straw hat).

But these are things that will have to wait until my next post, as I have other things to say first. (more…)

LOS ANGELES, CA-

Part I: Always Use Your Napkin

I didn’t mean for it to end up this way. I really didn’t want to be standing at a rather nice wedding reception, glass of semi-expensive white wine in one hand, and napkin full of half-chewed, hastily spit out stuffed mushroom in the other. Sure, I knew my friends, the now-hitched earthy couple, erred on the side of unconventional and wanted their wedding to reflect that as well. It was taking place in what used to be the old Ojai Jail, a cluster of tiny, ramshackle cabins in the mountains above Santa Barbara. And yet, in the middle of this somewhat rugged mountain setting, my friends had imported stunning orchid arrangements, enough wine to baptize the whole city of Santa Barbara, and (my personal favorite) a wicked cheese platter.

There were even waiters gliding around, passing out tiny, delicious treatsies on trays. And after hurriedly hauling myself to Santa Barbara, surviving the van ride up the mountain with a driver who may have very well had one eye closed, and quickly pounding two (okay, three) glasses of the aforementioned very nice wine, I was starving. Add to the mix that fact that my ex-boyfriend and his new ladyfriend were not only in attendance but also in very close physical proximity, and you could maybe see how the wine would be priority Number One, followed by food.

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COLDEN, NY-

The summer after my father lost his business in the great tsunami of 1960 we were cash-poor. I was just 17 and managed to get a job with the Hawai’i State Department of Fish & Game, which oversaw much of Mauna Kea, a large mountain with a lot of wildlife on it, out of a ramshackle camp at Pohakuloa.
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JERSEY CITY, NJ-

My final night in Manhattan, October 2001. Autumn in New York, which should have been wonderful as fall usually is, perhaps without the beauty of quick-changing leaves but with all the excitement of holidays to come. Usually there’s a somewhat breathless anticipation to the City at that time, but I didn’t feel it that year.

I was feeling a lot of things then, but breathless anticipation wasn’t one of them. The World Trade Center had fallen six weeks before, and the City had suddenly begun to feel bigger and scarier and more intimidating than I had realized, so I planned to leave for my parents’ house in South Jersey. I had planned to take a few weeks to gather my thoughts, to reflect, and then to begin again, to find work personal training or substitute teaching (or both).

Did Lennon say life is what happens when you’re making other plans, or that plans are the surest way to make God laugh at you? I feel like he said one of the two, and I think he should have if he didn’t. Both seem like very John Lennon sort of things to say.

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SAN FRANCISCO-

I sent one of my stories to a so-called literary magazine and got back the strangest rejection letter I’ve ever received — and I’ve been doing this for over thirty years. I’d never heard of The @$$!@# Reader until the night I picked up (but didn’t buy) a copy at my local Borders where I go with my daughter, D, every Wednesday afternoon. (more…)

COLS, OH-

At 11:30 each morning, John the stroke victim delivers the mail to our office. I hear him before he appears, hobbling down the hall like a peg-legged pirate, tilting, rhythmic, yet inching forward, accumulting feet and yards until at last he is in our office doorway.

Some people have coffee or smoke breaks, I have John. He is a mile post in my day. I know he will spend the next half hour struggling to tell me what he did yesterday or what he will do today. He lives in a realm of scaled down choices - lunch, movies or libraries. Everyday I tell him I might just leave and join him and everyday he shakes his head and grunts in acceptance, “come!” (more…)

NEWPORT COAST, CA -

I have participated in a number of political demonstrations, but few as memorable as the March for Women’s Lives in 2004.  More than 1.15 million people converged on the mall for the largest march on Washington in U.S. history.  Organizers jammed more than 100 speakers into the program; exemplary speeches demanding access to contraception, sex education, global family planning, and choice.

 But what I am starting here—it is not the memory of a massive protest, or a recollection of the Bush Administration’s use of women’s rights as a political bargaining tool.  Writers do this. We begin with something approachable, something we trust we might get onto the page or screen correctly.  We try for a moment to hold the story in our heads, even as we know we have to let it go. 

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LAWRENCE, KS-

It was after you slurred those filthy songs with a sweet voice, eyes rolling up to the colored gels covering the lights, thinking, “FUCK! They can make me beautiful,” that I decided I couldn’t look at you anymore,

The first time I met Tricky, she told me to pour her a double, baby, and so I did. On a good day she drank Stoli and soda, heavy on the Stoli, light on the soda, in a glass. On a not so good day she did away with the glass and drank straight out of the bottle. I had never seen thirst like hers. (more…)

CHICAGO, IL-

Home was Los Angeles. And my life there was one of aimless, tipsy grieving. My father had died six months before this story begins and ever since I’d been casting about listlessly. One of my best friends, Lucy, lived down the street and we spent many a day together, drinking cocktails before 5pm and pondering the meaning of our mid-twenties. One such afternoon we decided that the best possible solution to our problems would be to go into business together importing t-shirts from Thailand. This may have just been an excuse to conduct “business meetings” over Bloody Marys at a restaurant in Culver City called Dear John’s, but whatever the case, we forged ahead with the plan.

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COLDEN, NY-

In the white shimmering overexposed one he’s looking through his chrome camera at Niagara Falls in late December. This was before black cameras were the common things they are now, so the only black in the print is Makis’ face, though little of it shows above the fur collar and below the knit hat. It’s 1978.
 
In another he’s holding what we christened the world’s largest chicken, a stupendous fowl as big as a small turkey. He cradles it in the crook of his arm as if it were a baby. We couldn’t decide whether to boil it village fashion or to roast it whiteman style. In the end we roasted it because we had neither bush spinach nor coconut milk, and anyway, what’s the point of bogus village cooking?
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NEW YORK CITY-

compulsion
n.
1c./1d. An irresistible impulse to act, regardless of the rationality of the motivation. / An act or acts performed in response to such an impulse.

–

I, a full-tilt Virgo, have been inclined since the tender age of five, back when my chore of choice was folding laundry, keen (hell-bent?) on matching corner to corner, edge to edge, of The Wonderfully Right-Angled Bath Towel, to observe an indulgent amount of order in the course of a day. I’ve never really seen this as an impediment, however, considering the routine straightening of pictures, aligning of chairs, and, yes, still the fastidious towel folding, have never, like, axed friendships or lost me jobs or sent lovers fleeing in abject horror. At most/worst, these and other related behaviors have brought about the conspicuous rearranging of my office desk fixtures at the hand(s) of knowing coworkers. And that’s just kinda funny, you know? (Not that said fixtures aren’t promptly and vigorously returned to their rightful homes. Heh.)

Anyway, yeah: I’m scrupulously neat and I’m okay with it. It evens me out. (more…)

LOS ANGELES, CA-

I had a friend in grade school named Krista.  I didn’t like when she came over to play with me because when she was around I had to eat dry cat food.

It was my own fault.  I told her I ate dry cat food, that I enjoyed it.  It wasn’t true.  I don’t know why I said it.  She didn’t believe me, so I had to prove it to her by, indeed, eating dry cat food in front of her.

It’s not that the taste is so horrible.  It’s really a texture thing.  It crumbles dryly in your mouth, and because the flavor isn’t fantastic, your mouth doesn’t respond with much saliva.  The result is a mouthful of paste that tastes very little like the “Chicken Dinner” it claims to be. (more…)

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA-

Not the dumbest thing I have ever thought, mind you. That honour goes to a moment when I was walking down Castro Street in San Francisco, glanced across the street, and saw a burger joint called Sliders. And into my head came the thought Huh. I wonder if that’s a whole place themed after that Jerry O’Connell show from the mid-90s?

This was followed, instantly, by There it is, Simon. Right there. That’s the single stupidest thing you will ever think in your entire life.

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CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA -

2:45 AM — In my mind, it’s hard to write about heartbreak at age 26.  It’s one of those intricacies about the writing profession - a musician writing a song about heartbreak at age 26 is rarely questioned, yet a writer writing a piece about heartbreak at 26 is deemed, at least by me, to have not experienced enough.  How can you write about heartbreak at 26?  You’re still a kid.  A 26-year old can’t possibly have enough worldliness to know how truly bad it can get, how painful it really is.  That’s the view I tend to take - writers, unlike mathematicians, improve with age, and the more you live through the more you are capable of writing about.  I suppose it’s a hang-up from being constantly told to “write what you know.”  As a fairly normal suburban white kid, that didn’t make for very interesting writing, but nobody ever told me anything else. (more…)

LOS ANGELES, CA-

It was the night of my dear friend Clara’s birthday party. I can’t quite remember if it was a momentous year - a round number, the beginning of a new decade - but I do recall having party nerves and that I’d be going solo. I wasn’t seeing anyone at the time or, if I was, it wasn’t serious. Or maybe I was seeing Mark but he was out of town. None of these details matter, really. This essay is about me and how good I looked at Clara’s party.

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CHICAGO, IL-

One day in spring, accompanied by a 50-something-year-old inorgasmic couples counselor* snapping photos for her out-of-state-lover on her cell phone, I went to a sex store that I always call Great Sexpectations, though it is actually called something else.

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TULSA, OK-

In fiction, one common and generic way to refer to well-drawn, realistic characters is to call them “round.” As in:

“…characters as described by the course of their development in a work of literature. Flat characters are two-dimensional in that they are relatively uncomplicated and do not change throughout the course of a work. By contrast, round characters are complex and undergo development, sometimes sufficiently to surprise the reader.”

–2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. (more…)

BOULDER, CO-

School is starting Thursday and for the first time in my life I’m watching from the other side of the proverbial school bus window. Yes, it’s true. I am about to be the mother of a school kid.

Over the next thirteen years I will watch as my child returns to me each day a little older and wiser. She will learn to skip rope, make fake lava, exhale the multiplication tables, spit out the capital of the 50 states on demand, discuss Hamlet in detail, and learn to calculate pi.

She will also learn to dress funny, hide gum in her mouth, text message her best friend without being detected by teachers, cuss, and spell the word “obfuscate” with first-hand knowledge of what it means.

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COLDEN, NY -

Prologue: I’m getting worried about the Simon Smithson Effect (SSE). This afternoon I was fiddling with this piece, which is a companion to the earlier “I Don’t Brake for Mongoose,” both belonging to a larger work called “The Dump,” when in comes an email from the guy in Hilo who’s been using my trailer, telling me that this morning at sparrowfart, when he was least expecting it, he was stopped by a cop and told to register the trailer or face a $100 fine. SSE? WTF? LOL! Read on.
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JERSEY CITY, NJ-

I can’t decide how it feels to type those few words. Just a location. Geo-spatial coordinates related to a space I’m occupying. Heck, my phone has some radio or other Google Maps can apparently pinpoint to within 50 or so meters (not sure how I feel about that one yet, either), so it’s not as though location is a difficult thing to measure.

So. This is my first post here at TNB. Happy to be here. I actually meant to begin posting sooner, but then I read that every post on this site begins with a location . . . suddenly, I felt cogs slowing to halts. Grinding down. Or maybe spinning harder, faster, nearly out of control.

I guess that’s just one more thing I can’t be certain of yet.

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