LAS VEGAS, NV-
I called Brad Listi from some sleepy little suburb in Sacramento. We chatted. I think I strong-armed the poor fellow and told him that I wanted to read at TNB’s first L.A reading. He’s too kind. Dear and charming.
I got the gig.
So, L.A. I had to go. Haven’t seen my birth city in years. Memories of crowded streets and concrete buildings tumbled through my head.
I gassed up and hit I-15.
NEW PALTZ, N.Y.-
There are certain hobbies that, while possessed of an inherent appeal, I would never take up because the subculture attached to them so repels me.
Take golf. I enjoy whacking the little white ball—I’m pretty good on the driving range, truth be told—but I would never go so far as to play the game for the simple reason that I don’t want to spend a whole afternoon with golfers.
Marijuana is another example. Pleasant though the high may be, no amount of stonedness could hip me to hackeysack and Grateful Dead bootlegs.
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND -
I wear my grandmother’s wedding ring.
I wear it on my own ring finger because it’s said that’s the only finger with a direct blood vessel to the heart.
I wear it as a connection to a love story that began long before I was born.
THE DEEP SOUTH-
“Cigarette?”
“No sir, sorry,” I said. “I don’t smoke.”
It was 11pm, just outside the emergency room doors. The old man had on a blue jean jacket and a black fedora, white tufts of hair curling from the sides. He was unkempt but in a classy sort of way, like an old jazz player or a character actor on Touched By An Angel.
“I ain’t asked if you had one, I asked if you wanted one.” He scowled but the tone in his voice was playful.
“Oh - no sir, no thanks. You go ahead.”
BOULDER, CO-
I am a huge fan of fermentation. There are few things I enjoy more than a glass of red wine in the evening. Especially merlot. Yeah, that’s right I said it. Despite the best efforts of the writers of the movie Sideways, I am still in love with the “M” word. Give me a glass with a nice bowl to roll it around in and I am one happy chick. And while I am not an addict, I have come to look forward to this experience with at least some measure of regularity. For me, the hardest part of pregnancy is not the back pain, difficulty of sleep – or even the labor. No, it is the necessity to cut back from that sublime burgundy in the glass.
Unlike most of my peers within the conservative Evangelical church in which I grew up, I was not taught by my parents that the drinking of alcohol is a sin. Rather, my training was of a more subtle nature. It wasn’t that drinking alcohol itself was a sin – unless of course it crossed over to drunkenness, at which point it ranked fairly high in the seven deadliest. It was more that drinking in front of somebody else who might be inclined to have a problem with it was.
AUSTIN, TX-
With the 4th of July upon us, my neighbor screaming from a lost extremity at the hands of a Black Cat and enough potato salad in my gullet to occupy Paris, I got to thinking about America. And American institutions. Well, people, the hallowed institution of marriage is under attack in America, not just from Communists like Barney Frank and the state of Iowa, but also from other insidious forces both seen and unseen. So, in the interest of preserving the kind of marriage that God and Texas intended, here are some things to be especially mindful of:
LOS ANGELES-
My wife and I drive to a nondescript mall off Wilshire, park the car in the shade, so the dog won’t suffocate, and make our way to the Korean Dumpling restaurant. The specifications we read in the LA Magazine are all wrong and the owner laughs at us and explains that Mandu and King Dumplings are the same and that the King Dumplings can be had with beef or Kimchi and that the panfried dumplings come only with pork. (more…)
COLUMBUS, OH-
It began innocently enough, a summer day, a quiet cemetery, a three-piece box of KFC (dark meat, original recipe) and then the clothes started coming off. Suddenly, faster than a mourning dove could coo, our sweaty limbs were entangled like human pretzels atop a cool marble slab. Six feet below was James Thurber slumbering in literary eternity. The rest of the world ceased to be. (more…)
BEND, OR-
“Now the fun begins!” one of my publishers, Dan Wickett of Dzanc Books, told me on the phone this afternoon. My debut collection of short stories, Misfits and Other Heroes, is on its way to me, priority mail from Michigan to Oregon. Tonight we went out to celebrate, half high-end with a dinner of farmer’s market vegetable risotto, half low-end (My favorite half. To steal from Nabokov, “my sin, my soul.”) with a heartburn-inducing, gut-busting Shari’s Turtle Sundae.
I have to admit I am in a minor state of shock. Expecting this surreal feeling to turn to bliss, I am experiencing the sort of an…tici…pation I haven’t felt since my teens, being patted down by the burly security guard before my first Cure concert in Seattle or in my twenties on the eve of my first Dead show. There is something musical in the air around me.
LAS VEGAS, NV -
Dude, I’ve Seen Your Balls
I called an old high school buddy to give him my new phone number. It was a business call. In and out. I wasn’t in the talking mood.
His wife answered the phone. Tammy’s a good woman. Thoughtful. Funny. Pretty good pool player. I met her for the first time last year and we got ripped on margaritas. (more…)
LOS ANGELES -
1. “Supernatural Superserious” – R.E.M.
It starts like this: the immediate slash and burn of guitar. And a voice reminding us that there was once a time in our lives when we were ghosts, so supernatural/superserious in the face of this occasionally cruel world. Pasts we can hide from, pasts we can ignore, rediscover, reinvent, or simply embrace and accept as they are. As we are.
SARASOTA, FL-
In a new book reviewed by Salon here, Terry Eagleton readies the religious backlash as if the tiny minority of American atheists somehow threatens his lukewarm beliefs. His favorite tactic is to lump Christopher Hitchens together with Richard Dawkins and refer to them as “Ditchkins.” The first is a neoconservative whose book only tried to raise profits, while the second is one of the most elegant proponents of evolution who happens to feel we arrived here without the help of God just fine…though we may exit unless we rid ourselves of ill-informed beliefs. But that, according to Eagleton, is absurd, for Eagleton himself doesn’t believe in such fundamentalist hokum as creation “science.” Why, he’s not even sure God created man. With religions like that, who needs atheism? (more…)
LOS ANGELES—
In the summer of 2002, I’d just returned to L.A. from Eastern Europe — Belgrade – where I could live cheaply and so work full-time on a novel. To my frustration, the novel still required extensive surgery, and one night, in lieu of taking an axe to my computer, I drove to Ralph’s Supermarket on Glendale Boulevard. It was three in the morning, but there was a longish line at the cash register, and the customer immediately behind me was Elliott Smith. The checker wandered off, and I wondered if I should say anything to Elliott.
LOS ANGELES -
Author’s Note: I recently completed a new spoken word music video entitled, “Mistake.” To a great degree, I have the extremely talented and gracious Christopher J. Burdick to thank for this. He also directed and shot my last video, “If I Were a Bond Girl.” If you haven’t had a chance to see it, please search it out on You Tube. Lastly, a big thanks needs to be given to Erin Tylski. In both “Bond Girl” and “Mistake” she has patiently put up with so much crap, all in the name of art. Or so-called art.
With that, here are the words to “Mistake.” And right after that, the video. I hope you enjoy!
CHESTERTOWN, MD-
Not writing when you should is stupid.
Really. Really. Really.
I’ve found myself doing to writing what I normally do to my workouts.
Brain: Maybe you should write.
Me: Maybe you should shut the hell up.
Brain: Hey don’t take that tone with me mister!
Me: Here, huff this glue. A-hole.
BOULDER, CO-
When it comes to my expectations of the great beyond, I try not to get too excited. If I make it to heaven, I’ll be doing good to get a studio flat with a dumpster-side view of the golden chariot highway.
If, however, the Ever After is karma-based, death will not bring me peace, for I have work to do. No, not peace; only a new uniform in the grand roller derby we call life.
A few more turns to take in the mortal skin.
A few more rounds of puberty.
A few more high school graduations and potential conflict with my mothers.
I used to believe passionately in Hell…
SARASOTA, FL-
I’ve gone beyond anger. The land beyond anger is barren, arid. I’m in the Arizona of mental states.
Wait: We are going somewhere new. But first…
I miss George W. Bush. I miss him like oxygen because I once exhaled expletives, and now I choke on them. He was a gift box in which I wrapped my human nature. My nature, like all of nature, is violent. My anger is general. When I consider my anger specific, I lie to myself.
My anger doesn’t stop to smell the roses; it paints the town red with the petals. (more…)
SARASOTA, FL-
“Envy eats nothing but its own heart.”
~German proverb
I envy everyone.
I envy you my love with your wobbly leg and neurological condition. I wonder what it’s like to have a physical reason for suffering and I wonder why my infirmities teach me nothing yet you seem to learn with every fall.
I envy other writers. I won’t read your words too closely unless you’re dead. It goes that far. (more…)
SARASOTA,FL-
Though my confessions shall end in neither sainthood nor bestseller lists, I now come to my personal vampire. He survives the sun and crucifixes. I’m Hungarian and so is my Bela Lugosi. I call him OCD, but it’s the first initial by which I know him best. (more…)
THE DEEP SOUTH-
Holy Hannah peeled off her white patent leather pantsuit and ran naked as the day she was born through the cascade of fountains in the county square.
Her skin squeaky and pink, eyes shining like new moons on the first clear night of Summer. The words of the old pastor ringing in her ears as the water came down.
Until you have been born again, of spirit and water, you cannot enter the Kingdom.
