reasons I didn’t get to the novel today

I did start, but let myself find distractions:

* head ache
* fatigue
* waiting on clothes dryer delivery guys (who were nice on the phone but when they arrived and discovered a problem, the lead guy treated me like I was a dumbass simply because I have breasts and chose to ask questions rather than just stick my finger up my nose and say, “Oh, ok, bye now.”)
* need to call an electrician (not an emergency, but annoying and related to the above)
* waiting on a call back
* phone calls from friend who was doing me a favor
* quick visit from Girl and her dad who are on their way to the county fair where the Girl will march with the band
* soft kitty who needs petting
* urge to scrub bathroom clean

step three (insomnia)

Step three involves allowing whatever is to be.

It will be 4 a.m. here soon. I’m completely awake, not a little bit sleepy, not even kind of inclined toward dream.

I might actually have to give in and self-medicate with a Benadryl (allergies have sucked today, anyway, so I wouldn’t be completely abusing this lovely miracle OTC drug). That was my mother’s drug of choice for me when I was an insomniac high school student well before the days when you could get Benadryl over the counter. It was so convenient having a doctor daddy.

My computer makes odd, sizzling noises.

No. They aren’t sizzling sounds. Just the edge of sizzling, just creepy enough to remind me of a scene in that novel I’ve been finishing for years.

I truly haven’t had time to write, not anything real, not poem or chapter or new novel beginning. For a couple of weeks there, all these wonderful ideas jostled each other in my brain. Then I drove to Florida and got, well, tired, and the ideas just lay themselves down in a stack and went to sleep.

Today/yesterday was a day of rest and reading. I didn’t do anything at all. I didn’t pick up my house, didn’t cook, didn’t empty the dishwasher (until something woke me up at 1:40 a.m.). Didn’t write anything but blog posts, didn’t check email, barely checked for my own pulse.

One of the things that happened to me in San Francisco at Diane Frank’s amazing poetry workshop was that I felt for a long weekend that I might not be so invisible, that my colors were, maybe, brighter than I realized, that the things I make are vibrant and appealing. But the group I was with was unlike any group I’ve ever encountered. It was the combination of spirits.

Oh, God. I sound so … new age.

But how else can I put it? There was spirit and energy and practically the idea of auras.

It was magic.

I felt visible and beautiful and that I could possibly kind of sort of some day even maybe for two seconds consider that what I do, this writing shit, has value and is or could be art.

In my real reality, this time when I’m parenting a beautiful and brilliant but believe me not exactly undemanding teenage girl, when I’m aging and things begin to hurt but I’m trying not to notice, when I’m extremely aware of my mortality and the fact that I haven’t accomplished nearly as much as my brilliant siblings (who love me anyway despite the fact that I’m a monumental failure), I become invisible again.

Less significant.

My stuff doesn’t shine.

People either run into me in stores in the mall because they can’t see me or look at me weirdly because I don’t fit here.

One of the sad things about having no parents (though I should be over this since I’m 51 now; my father has been gone 10 years; my mother gone for going on 16) is that I no longer have in my life that person who could see me, could see through my shit-coated exterior to the beautiful child he/she made, know with ultimate certainty that no matter what, I was of value.

No. This isn’t coming out quite right and sounds far more pathetic than it should.

I think what might be happening is that much as I love seeing, witnessing, watching, reading, encouraging other people, I also feel an almost involuntary pull to do less witnessing, more living and grappling, more demanding.

It’s a scary thought for a wallflower, but I want to be …

gosh, this is such an alien concept to me that I can’t find the right words. I was going to say that I wanted to be the prom queen instead of the wallflower, but that doesn’t “resonate” with me because my high school had no proms, no queens. I would be stealing someone else’s metaphor.

It’s 4:07 a.m. I think I’ll do that self-medicating thing even though it’s ridiculous time for it and I won’t be able to wake up until 11 a.m. I don’t have to be anywhere until 6 p.m., don’t have a child to feed and drive around (she’s in Florida, after all), a boss to please.

I’ll finish working this out tomorrow/later today, after I get a little sleep.

By the way, I love the new book I started reading by Jincy Willet. It’s called The Writing Class, and it’s so fucking familiar to me that I find myself snickering about every other page. I was worried that I wasn’t going to like the main character, but I do. I started liking her more when I read the chapter about her blog.

So there.

back to trying to sleep.

(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)

step two (lists)

The second step, or 19th step or 45th step, forward, of course, not backward (yesterday I went forward and then backward then forward again), is to rest, then settle, then sort, select, dig hands and head and heart into writing, revising, editing.

Small things that brought me joy yesterday:

* That bald biker I saw on the freeway on his red motorcycle with those toy bald eagles. His destination was my town, and I kind of want to try to find him to give him a cookie.

* The reflection in my rearview mirror of my teenaged daughter dozing in the back seat of my car when I drove her and her daddy to Columbus yesterday. Good God, she’s so beautiful.

* Wheat Thins and slices of mozarella cheese.

* The realization after reaching page 55 that the memoir I’m reading isn’t annoying; it’s delightful.

* That the server who fucked up my dinner order yesterday evening made a joke when he brought my dessert and then thanked me profusely for having a sense of humor after I burst out laughing (“Here’s your eggplant pomodoro,” he said as he placed the tiny cup of tiramisu in front of me.).

* Barnes and Noble and the gift of a book I’ve never heard of by an author I haven’t yet read.

* My soft, soft cat.

The phone call from my sister just before my fiasco of a dinner, the later phone call (I was in bed, but, shh, don’t tell him) from my younger brother, the two texts from my older brother.

* The understanding that when I am tired, I absolutely cannot see myself through my family’s eyes and tend to believe they think that I’m a worthless twat, but that’s the fatigue talking, not my siblings. The understanding that they simply don’t understand me, but that they love me, anyway, and know I’m … some kind of wonderful but don’t know exactly what kind of wonderful I am.

* My quiet house

I was going to make a second list of things that made me cranky yesterday, but I’m actually forgetting what those things were, and that kind of list will only get in the way of the settling down and diving into creative work.

If I can finish the memoir I’m reading before 7 p.m. (doubtful. I have about 160 pages to go, and I have some writing I need/want to do today), I’ll take myself to see Julie and Julia, which was supposed to be a kind of a birthday treat with a friend, but she went to the midnight showing Thursday with freer friends who aren’t parenting teens or have partners in parenting. That she went without me is a gift, too, because I love to go to movies by myself far more than I like to attend movies with anyone but my daughter.

(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)

step one

It could as easily be step 17 1/2 as step one. Step into now. Step backward. Step over the dog shit in the yard (we have no dog, haven’t had a dog since our schnauzer died in 2004).

Step, set, test, stress.

No, no stress here, not today.

Today, I am 51. I’ve been dreading today for months and months, that step over the line from 50 to being in my 50s. Last year on my birthday, I took myself away on a lovely vacation with my wonderful daughter to visit one of my favorite people in one of my favorite cities. It was 08/08/08. Very cool.

Today, the numbers are all tilted and odd, except for those eights. I love the eights, round and balanced. I like being an August “baby.” I like that we were always on vacation on my birthday when I was a kid. I like that I started school young and then got younger because I skipped a grade (sometimes, I was two years younger than my classmates).

I am not like a Leo. I am quiet and pretend that I don’t like to be the center of attention.

On my birthday, about my birthday, I’m passive-aggressive. I don’t want to make a fuss, but when no one remembers (because I hide the date), I find that I want someone to make a small fuss.

Today, I’m driving my daughter and her dad to their hotel in Columbus where they’ll stay overnight. Tomorrow, they leave early for Florida, their annual vacation. I don’t mind “losing” my kid on my birthday. They’ll take me to dinner, maybe to a bookstore where I’ll make them buy me some novels I don’t need.

Or maybe not.

I’ll drive home, feed my cat, crawl into bed with a book, sleep tomorrow until I wake up.

While they’re gone, I’m going to write. I’m going to transcribe my notes from the San Francisco poetry workshop that feels so far away and unreal now (I’ve completely lost the magic). I’ll send the second half of my novel to the friends who are interested in reading it. I’ll let myself drift to a new project, maybe write some poems.

All this in a week? Well, maybe not, but I can start, take a step, maybe three, maybe 17.

I don’t really mind being in my 50s. We’re beautiful, us matronly sorts. We’re funny and real and warm and extremely kind. So we’re a gift.

*

(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)

processing in public without editing

If I don’t write about the weekend workshop every second I find using every medium possible, I’m afraid I’ll lose it. I took copious notes, though, not just on everything everyone said during the workshop sessions, but on my own responses to everything, everything.

I make a dreadful noise here, no explanation of what I’m going on about. Worse, I end a sentence with a preposition.

Here’s what this is about: I had the chance to attend a very intimate workshop with the lovely dancer/poet Diane Frank this past weekend in San Francisco. (author of such books as Entering the Word Temple and the the Pulitzer finalist novel Blackberries in the Dream House)

There. That should be enough to make this a little more connected to … what? Reality?

this is probably just part one of 70 million parts.

a few things I loved:

* I loved every single poet in the room at every moment they were in the room (and beyond) plus the Diane’s cellist partner Erik (who graciously allowed 11 strange women and one man (a friend of his/theirs and a harpist) to invade his house and drink his tea).

* my friend/poet/traveling companion who doesn’t hate me even after I snapped at her yesterday early morning a couple of times on our way back home.

* the goosebumps that rose on my arm when I heard exquisite “drafts” of the poets’ poems.

* the goosebumps that rose on my arms when another poet read my own poem back to me and I heard something … well. I heard another woman inside the poem who was familiar to me, but unfamiliar, and the goosebumps rose because I realized who I was hearing, and I … well, I guess I can’t quite articulate that part yet (maybe I need even more than 12 hours of sleep). and the goosebumps also rose because they fucking liked the poem, and I had had no clue that it was any good at all.

(pardon my cussing. that’s part of who I continue to be and I choose not to stop right now because I just don’t wanna. pfft!)

* I loved the fact that our hotel sucked so much but was, at least, clean and safe.

* Muir Woods.

* walking.

* walking.

* the beach

* the glimpses of the ocean that I got between fits of fog.

* the fog (I was the only person who loved the fog)

* the chill air.

* the heat during the San Francisco Symphony’s free performance.

* the San Francisco Symphony.

* the crazy little man who did an impromptu “performance” just before the real performance (he really was mentally off, but darling)

* the fact that I didn’t get heat stroke.

* my body.

* the different voices I heard all weekend from the other poets to the bass violin (dude! you with the white hair, ponytail and sunglasses. If you’re not already taken, I want to marry you even though I claim I’m never doing that again) to the trolley cars’ wheels on tracks to the shuttle drivers’ accents to the shriek of the espresso machine in the coffee shop next door to our ratty hotel…… (oh. here is a poem possibility, huh?).

* Diane’s car.

I’ll stop for now. I need to drink more coffee, get dressed (yes, I am still in my pajamas, the clean pair I had saved for last night), shift clothes from washer to dryer, etc., etc., life things, etc.

My Girl comes back to me today! (oh, breath!)

Golly. What a fucking amazing time I had!

(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)

lists. wait. there are no lists. there is just “do.”

Daughter is now at her dad’s until next Tuesday, July 21, when I return from the poetry workshop I’m attending this weekend.

The profound, impossible silence (except for a neighbor’s lawn mower) worries me. Can I focus around that silence?

I have had what I can only think of as a “gentle epiphany” this past week. This “epiphany” has changed my attitude toward myself, my work, my relationships, my role in my small world. But I am the same person with the same bad habits and the same way of rolling out of bed too late in the morning after sleeping badly at night, the same bad habit of starting my morning in the afternoon when my girl is gone, of feeling sorry for myself because I have to let her go to her father’s.

I have to get over myself.

I have a shitload of things to do between now and Friday morning when I drive my friend and myself to the airport for our flight to San Francisco.

God. I can’t wait.

But I’m also excited about the work I’ll do this week on my novel and on poems I will bring to share (eep! I hate workshopping my poems. Dear God, please help me to be brave and open, brave and open, brave and open.), work to do on my dreadfully messy house, maybe even on my yard.

My Girl’s dad has volunteered to attend tomorrow night’s band boosters meeting at the high school, and I will let him happily since I am so, so busy.

I just wish my busy led to some kind of income.

It’s funny how just typing through my loneliness when my Girl is newly gone helps alleviate that loneliness.

All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close up.

(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)

“They say that teenagers scare the living sh** out of me…”

I love my daughter. I love teenagers. One of my gifts is the ability (and willingness) to see the person inside the age or despite the age or through, around, because of the age. Girls are easier for me because I have a daughter. The boys are a little skittish around me until they figure out that, really, I have no ulterior motive when I choose to talk to them. I’m simply interested in them the way I’m interested in people in general (unless I’m feeling ugly and reclusive or shy and reclusive or pissy and reclusive).

That said, they are driving me mad, mad, I say.

I’d say I can’t wait for Aug. 24 when school starts again, but they all begin high school in the fall, and that’s scarier than allowing gaggles of teenagers to hang out in my house together.

list?

- Novel stuff was going well until my daughter shook herself out of her artistic haze and started plotting social events again

- I am feeling an irrational conflict between wanting to be so reclusive I never talk to a soul again and wanting to shout, loudly in my most obnoxious voice, HEY! YOU! OVER HERE! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! YOU OWE ME BECAUSE I’VE BEEN LOOKING AT YOU!”

- It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, and, yes, we were planning to join the city’s Fourth of July festivities down at the river park.

- I confess that I’m one of those weird people who sets aside my loathing of crowds and knowledge of how terrible fireworks are for the environment to ooh and ahh when they burst into color after I’ve been wandering, hot, through the masses.

- It might be cool enough tomorrow for me to get away with wearing jeans instead of dashing out today to buy a new pair shorts (my ass spreads relentlessly as I approach 51).

- I think we’re going to have an overnight guest tomorrow. As long as the girls let me sleep at least five hours, I suppose I’m OK with that.

- Do you ever feel that you might have done something to annoy someone or piss off someone to the point where they just don’t want to talk to you any more, but you’ve been so reclusive you can’t even think what that might possibly have been and then you realize that maybe it’s the “being reclusive” business that pisses people off, but you can’t imagine that they would really even care all that much when you disappear, but, really, you want them to care because you care when they disappear, and you realize that thinking this way is a massive waste of energy and you think you’re hungry for some grapes, so you decide that you’ve spent enough time on this list and just….

…quit?

(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)

if…

If I don’t ignore you while I write this,
I will never get it written.

You are what matters
ultimately
but not right now.

I can only give you what you want
if I finish
and I can’t finish
if I imagine
that you are reading over my shoulder
rolling your eyes
at my sentence fragments
redundancies
awkward clannish symptoms….

what?

my daughter still sleeps
I think
she stayed up until at least 2 or 3
drawing
I think

I have been working
at trying not to imagine you
reading over my shoulder.

Ah. She’s up,
telling me that her friend’s boyfriend drama
is driving her crazy.

She did draw until 3:40 a.m.
silly kid
while trying to help her obsessed friend
get over her suspicions
that her boyfriend
loves another girl
(He is 14. Of course he loves another girl!
He loves all girls).

(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal.)

mix

My girl’s father had his surgery. It was the “belly” surgery to remove the cancer there, not the spot on his cheek. It turns out the doctor got all of the cancer on his cheek when she did the biopsy, so he doesn’t need to have the second surgery next week.

I think it’s all right if I let myself cry a little with relief. Yes, we are permanently separated, my husband and I. I cannot be with him because I can’t be what he needs. He can’t stop needing what he needs. Even though he doesn’t understand it because he knows I’m splendid, he’s just not that into me.

But he’s my good, dear forever friend, and I’m so glad things will be OK despite the inch and a half scar on his belly, despite the certainty that more little skin cancers will crop up in his future (it’s a family thing. In my family, we suspect we will die somewhat young because our parents each died at 68 – well, younger brother and I at least since we have both sets of bad genes and I have just gone off on an incoherent tangent born of relief born of fear born of love and regret and … and not regret….).

My poetry teacher sent an email telling those of us in her July 17 workshop in San Francisco that she is going forward with the weekend, that even though she has been quiet since her father’s memorial (he died June 18), she’s been writing a lot and has some excellent ideas about what she will do with us when we get there.

This decision of hers to go ahead with the retreat despite her grief is also cause for (selfish) relief.

I need this poetry retreat. If she had canceled, I would have been going on a vacation, but one without my daughter. And right now, that’s no vacation at all. This “working retreat” is perfect.

The third relief is that my daughter’s little insane gathering didn’t happen after all. She never reached Mustache Guy. Of course the plotting and planning will begin again for Sunday.

I may just have to run away from home.

But in a good way.

(reminder: this is not a blog; it’s a journal)