Read the Times article about the Booker Prize winner Anne Enright.

"Oddly enough, Ms. Enright said, having children — she has two, 4 and 7 — has made her work easier.

“I find that the whole sense of anxiety and largeness, the sense that you’re writing everything, the allness of it, disappears completely,” she said. “You have just three or four hours a day, and you’re going to write a book, and it just shrinks the work into its proper proportion.”

Even though I have no kids and never will, I appreciate how practical and balanced this statement is. It helps that this woman looks almost exactly like my friend if he decided to do frumpy, Irish drag.

Whadya say? I have no doubt that Kucinich's resolution to impeach Cheney will fall flat in the Judiciary Committee, but why not make a little noise about it?

Read up if you need to, click here and sign the petition to impeach the motherscratcherwarmonger.

Wahclella Falls/Latourelle Falls

It's an easy hike into Wahclella Falls and on a late fall afternoon it's easy to lose the sun behind the canyon walls and lose yourself in the perpetually wet blue-brown-green of the place. Definitely a surreal landscape, one that would have convinced me of the existence of otherworldly creatures, both benign and sinister, if I'd seen it when I was six.

Latourelle Falls is an even easier dip off the Columbia Gorge Historic Highway. In the summer, the patch of neon lichen (or is it moss or fungus or something else altogether?) is nowhere to be seen. So go in the fall and marvel at the things that nature can come up with.

Funk Shui played the big, bouncy Crystal Ballroom last night. They get in the door there by being the chosen opening band for Super Diamond, a Neil Diamond tribute band. Don't question how this happened. Nobody in their audience has.

Here's Funk Shui playing Boss Bossa at their last Crystal show where a wide stage, bright lights and a giddy audience served them far better than the microphone on the video camera.

I'm sorry I missed last night's show, too tired to push myself downtown, too fixated on getting some writing done to be a good band girlfriend. This meager blog entry is my penance.

This picturesque scene, repeated throughout New England, does nothing but fill me with a sick, creepy feeling. My early Sundays were spent inside the squat stone walls of the Episcopal Church so the slender white towers of Methodists and Lutherans have no particular connotations for me other than a general sign that I'm back in the land of dread and loathing. I keep expecting to be over it, that I'll roll into town and feel sweetly nostalgic or at the very least, neutral, but my gut refuses to let go. No matter how pleasant my stay is, the old hate lingers.

The good thing about going back east, of course, is that it never fails to refresh my love for all things HOME, where I've got a cat and a couch and a few final days of sun.

Weddings are weird. While my friend's celebration was loverly and all, it was best not to dwell too long or look too closely at anything we were doing for fear of the whole day collapsing under all the absurdity. At least, it was best if I didn't look too closely.

Do these rituals change you, regardless of how deeply you believe in them? No, I think they have to mean something to you first, otherwise my friend's sweet, heartfelt ceremony would be on par with Britney's 24hr. Vegas marriage. And if you never partake in the shared ritual at all, then what?

This Halloween I'm going as a bridesmaid and the Halloween party is my oldest friend's wedding. Instead of shouting Trick or Treat at my neighbor's doors, I will be reciting an e.e. cummings poem at a romantic Newport inn. Instead of candy corn I will be eating fancy cake. Well, let's get this party started.

Too rarely, I step out into the woods after the rains have really started. Now, I know better. These are just a few pics from the Wildwood Recreation Area, a beautiful spot along the Salmon River out towards Mt. Hood. Here are some more pics.

Fantasy as a genre has never held much interest for me. I have a hard time getting worked up about creatures who don't actually exist. Fairies, elves, trolls and the like enter my consciousness only on rare occasion. One is when a movie like Lord of the Rings becomes nearly impossible to ignore or a movie like Pan's Labyrinth delights despite (or maybe even because of)its fauns and monsters. The only other time I think of fantastic woodland creatures are when I walk around in the wood land. I poke my nose down close to the mushrooms and moss and squint my way down a path of shiny evergreens and I can't help but imagine that I'm intruding on a landscape not really meant for my eyes. Of course, the world's forests would be better off now if we'd all believed a little more deeply in the fantasy and left them alone.

Less TV. More books. More writing. More staring dreamily out the window. The choice seems obvious, doesn't it? And yet sometimes at night, the lazy in me takes over. My butt fills with lead and I'm on that couch, dammit, leave me alone. This is going to have to change. Law & Order: SVU is a really horrific show. I watch it because it's on Saturday nights and I'm awake, sleepy but still awake. It's not just a waste of time, I think it's bad for me. The fact that Ice-T is on it is no longer amusing. I'm done. And now I'm going out to stare at gold leaves and hazy skies.

The cat is back. We negotiated the return of Xiao Lao Mao (little old cat) and have her set up in the garage while she adjusts to her new surroundings and her new name. Fluffalumps? No wonder she was an unhappy animal.

Sean and I now hover on the edge of being crazy cat people. We go visit the cat, lying down on the dirty floor in order to let her climb onto our chests. We feel badly when we leave her alone for too long. We bring her fish secreted away in napkins from our own expensive restaurant meals. Okay, so maybe hover is too generous a description. We have set foot, at east one firm foot, in the land of crazy.

More beach. It's always good to have more beach.

I have great beach luck. Almost every time I go to Manzanita the weather is wonderful. We had 65 degree sunshine and very little wind. Our houseful of people coexisted beautifully with beach walks and hot tub soaks and lots of trash magazine reading (the above pic was a rare moment of book-reading). We ate well and drank even better.

As I said before, this was a trip to celebrate where we are now before things start to change (once again and always). And as it turned out, the changes are already underway. Our friend announced her pregnancy. Next fall, if we can manage another outing, there will be at least one infant in tow. On we go. . .

Off to Manzanita for a belated birthday celebration. This will be the first time I'm at my usual beach spot with a full house of friends. There was the sudden realization that things might be really different this time next year. Friends who are married might have babies. Friends who are in relationships might be married. Single friends might be in relationships. I predict that Sean and I will be in about the same place, but the world swirls around us, things change, and we're going to take a moment this weekend to hang out and enjoy where we are right now.

If only I could clear away the wires and roof tiles, the posts and gutters, all the low, ugly bits of our lives spent hunkered down next to the ground. Sure, we'd be wet and have no electricity but wouldn't the sky be delicious?

Poor ol' Willa. I called today to make a reservation at the Sylvia Beach Hotel and was told that the Willa Cather room will be a Tolkien room by the end of November. I'm not happy about that. Give Robert Louis Stevenson the boot, I say. Each of the hotel's rooms have an author associated with them. There are only four smaller, less expensive rooms, Willa's being one of them. So instead, I went with Gertrude Stein. I've got no problems with Gert and ultimately, it doesn't matter much. I plan on spending most of my time in the upstairs library tucked into a chair that faces out on the ocean. I'm bringing my novel with me, in whatever state it's in by the end of next month. I'm hoping to have another draft done by then so that I can arrive on the stormy beach with a giant stack of words, ready to be blown and twisted.

Good morning. This is a clip of the drummers that accompanied the 2007 Memory Walk for the Alzheimer's Association. They raised about $130,000 and woke up everyone within a ten block radius sleeping in at a swanky hotel, crappy dorm room or in the back pew of the Lutheran Church. My participation felt unnecessary, but it was still nice to be out in the briefest bit of good fall weather.

While the skies here are slate gray and wet now, I noticed much of the rest of the country is brutally hot. A 35 year old man from Michigan died running the Chicago Marathon today in eighty-eight degree heat. Eighty-freakin-eight degrees. What the #?!

Needless to say, it's a good reminder to be happy with what you have. Take the day and slip into it whether it be wrapped in a new wool sweater or waving a folded paper fan.

I have no proof that the inside of the woman's house looks like this, but I have suspicions. Yesterday, the owner of the sweet cat found the note Sean left her and called us. Despite the fact that the note said she was open to giving the cat up for adoption and the food cart employees were under the impression that the cat needed to be adopted, the woman just wanted her cat back. She lives in a house with no front stairs. They were reclaimed by the earth. We insisted on meeting her face to face to give the cat back and had to creep through a hugely overgrown backyard and wait for the woman to make her way to the basement door where she refused to let us in. The door to the house at the top of the stairs was shut tight.

The sweet cat immediately dug into a dish of food the woman put out for her and argued that the cat wouldn't be 16 years old if she was being abused. Good point. I told her to get a collar for her cat so people didn't think it was stray or abandoned. She was worried that we were crazy people who just went around collecting cats. I think she was projecting.

Obsessive hoarding fascinates me. Again, who knows if this woman suffers from this, I only suspect. She keeps a job, looked and seemed normal enough, but was extremely hesitant to let us anywhere near her house. What's going on in there? What will happen to the poor sweet cat, the cat that would rather sit in the rain than go inside her owner's home? We will have to be satisfied visiting the cat under the tarp, one more resident on the street of shattered hopes and broken dreams.

I came home this morning from running an errand and found Sean lying on the garage floor with this cat curled up on his chest. He is a SUCKER. A sucker for love, baby. The best kind, really. I don't know what this cat's name is yet, but Sean rescued her from down the street where she'd been hanging around in the rain under the tarp of a food cart on Hawthorne. Apparently she was being halfheartedly tended to by an elderly woman with MS in a nearby house, but both the woman and the workers at the food cart were looking for someone to adopt this sweetie. She (I'm not sure if it's a she, but there aren't any obvious signs to the contrary) is very skinny and very sweet and temporarily living in our garage. She will have to be a mostly outdoor cat in the long run, but for now she seems pretty content to curl up on a warm, dry blanket and eat some good food. Sounds about right to me too.

No picture again today. That's because Apple's got problems. My imac G5 died yesterday and there's a really good chance that it needs a new power supply. That's the same part that I had to replace a little over a year ago. It's the same part these particular computers have a known problem with. While my baby gets fixed, I'll have to get on a campaign of complaining. Does Apple not understand that I have valuable time that needs wasting?

Happy rainy bluster of a birthday to me. So, I've completed the circle. One year of writing in this little space, not every day as I promised, but often enough, I'm sure. Thirty-seven. It's neither here nor there, really. I had to steal this picture since I woke up to a dead computer. It's prettier than the gray here anyway.

It's 4:30pm. I need to turn the lights on to read. The heat has just started to rumble up from the basement. I'm opening the wine.

Fall fell. It came down on us today in dramatic fashion with cool winds and brooding clouds. Yesterday, when it was still hot and sunny, I bought two big bags of winter clothes, knowing that this was coming today. Time to stare moodily out the window at the city getting its daily bath.

My literary crush, Stuart Dybek, has won a MacArthur "Genius" Award. His book, The Coast of Chicago, is one of my favorites.

"Love, it's such a night, laced with running water, irreparable, riddled with a million leaks. A night shaped like a shadow thrown in your absence. Every crack trickles, every overhang drips. The screech of nighthawks has been replaced by the splash of rain. The rain falls from the height of streetlights. Each drop contains its own blue bulb."
from "Nighthawks"

When I saw Dybek at the only AWP conference I've been to, he read a story that contained a pirate song. Now, in general, I'm anti-pirate, but this pirate song had a purpose in the story. It had everything to do with childhood imagination and nothing to do with weird adults playing dress-up. Anyway, he sang the damn song to a packed auditorium. I have been extra-crushed ever since.

I've resorted to crawling around on my dirty office floor lining up scraps of paper. The big picture. Eventually, you have to look at it and try to take it all in. I'm finding it the hardest part of writing a novel. I wish I could hold the thing and feel its shape like a tiny, complicated statue. Maybe next week I'll have a picture of me sitting in the yard making my book out of mud.

I've been breaking my brain today, trying to plot out some of my chapters, figure out the flow, fit everything in that I feel needs to be there and rip oh so painfully the parts that are no longer useful (oh but I worked for days and weeks and months on that scene...damn).

It makes me wonder if other kinds of creative people feel this same kind of pleasant insanity. The dancers have to learn their steps and have to do them over and over and over. Is it similar to writing a scene for the umptimillionth time? How do actors doing take number twenty-five tap into the emotion they had on take one?

On another note, my last post had this comment from a spammer: "These articles are fantastic; the information you show us is interesting for everybody and is really good written." Hah!

I am the blobfish. The blobfish is me.
Too much intense massage work today.
Liam Rector's memorial service was today.
My friend's giant fluffy cat had to go to California today.
Maybe tomorrow I will feel more like the axolotyl.

Thanks to Elizabeth Kennedy for the link to these crazy creature pics)

I'm mostly lost in thoughts of the forest lately, trying to pin down the psyche of one of my characters. I emerge now and then to tend to my small bit of the world. I hosted my book club a few nights ago. Despite my unavoidable worries that people will be somehow disappointed in the way I live (Did you see that kitchen floor! What was up with all that weird art?) it went well. It's nice to be surrounded by thoroughly engaged readers. Our meetings are like the English classes I once imagined instead of the ones I actually suffered through.

I also joined a free writing group that meets in the same office complex as the clinic I used to work in. I like the idea that while I haven't left the world of massage, I have shifted positions slightly, tending to words in the same low brick building where I used to toil over muscles

I'm fairly well convinced at this point that I was a travel agent in another life. I'm still scraping off the residue in this life. Ever since I planned my first tropical vacation, I've been fixated on seeking out beach homes to visit. If the house is big and sits in the sand like this one, I spend WAY too much time trying to figure out how I can afford $300 a night to go stay there. I temper the frivolity of this by telling myself that I need to get away to write. I need to find the perfect place to hole up in so I can get at the work I'm meant to do. I haven't quite convinced the poor and puritanical parts of myself that I NEED a hot tub with an ocean view to get my writing done, but I'm hoping if I stare at this picture long enough I will someday wake up there with my feet bubbling in the jets and my notebook filled with perfect words.

This is not exciting video, just a test to see if this shit works and to prove that, yes, sometimes I leave my house, get on public transportation and go to the not so far reaches of North Portland to eat, drink and be merry.

When we got to the restaurant, I realized that between me, Sean and our friend, there was more hair at that table than a house full of fluffy cats. Mmmm, house full of fluffy cats.

I just got home from a silly experiment in public performance art. PICA's Time Based Art Festival organized hours of reading out on the streets every day this week. I volunteered to do my part. I showed up. This guy gave me a copy of Grapes of Wrath (there was also My Antonia, Catch-22, On the Road, Moby Dick and others being read in different quadrants of the Pearl District). I was sent out into the streets to read from where the last reader left off.

That there book is some hard readin' for a lady like myself. I done my best, but I don't rightly know if the general folk were much interested in what ol' Steinbeck had to say.

What I noticed most was not that people thought me crazy (though I'm sure some of them did) but that most people didn't notice me. About 75% of them were plugged into their ipods or talking on their cell phone. Listening to some weird lady read out loud from a book was not part of their plan.

Silliness. silliness. Now I will go back to reading to myself. Thank you and goodnight.

I broke my brief moratorium on book buying and came home with two paperbacks. The first epigraph is from The Inhabited World by David Long, the second from The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter. I already know I love Baxter's novel because I've read it before. Long's book comes highly recommended and I'm looking forward to digging into it. And now, with all this Beckett being tossed around I'm tempted back to the dense weirdness of the Trilogy. Of course, that's a huge mind-twisting endeavor. It's the kind of book I imagine reading while holed up in a boggy Irish cabin tipped on whiskey. Aah, the perfect winter vacation.

Twenty-four hours in the woods and the beach and I am full of rocks like skin and water like glass, trees like fur and a stars like milk. Satellites took our pictures as we smiled into a lavish sky, our queens and hunters hidden in the spill.

I'm off to the coast to camp for the night. The reserves aren't full yet. There's room for a little more sun, a little more mossy green, a view of the forest at daybreak through a thin layer of nylon.

Yeah, my ring! Rebecca Scheer did a trade with me for this. Sometimes being a massage therapist swings me the sweet deals. So, originally we joked about this being my POWER RING. You know, those right hand rings diamond companies are trying to sell to rich, single women (fools, FOOLS!). Well, the uniqueness of this piece makes it very hard to size. When I asked Rebecca what would happen if didn't fit, she said she'd probably have to just make another ring. Well, that certainly wouldn't do. The ring is a little loose on my power finger so it will now ride on my left-handed bird finger. The heft of hit feels better there anyway and I will look fabulous while I give oblivious SUV drivers the finger.

To mark the beginning of school, the clouds have been lingering in the morning but breaking up in the afternoon as if to tell the kids they aren't missing a thing. I miss being in school. Or rather, I miss learning things in a structured environment. Knowing that someone else is expecting something of me brings my attention and effort to a higher level. Who's going to be disappointed if I only finish writing one chapter this week instead of two? No one's going to gently shake their head and say, "I know you can do better." Sometimes I imagine that I have to submit what I'm writing to one of my old professor's but I can only fool myself so much. I need someone to give me the tough love and slap the lazy out of me.

Labor day and I truly did labor for many many hours. Hot damn, I got some good writing in.

What say you? You're supposed to NOT labor on labor day? Well then, I also took a girlie fashion break to buy shoes for the dress that I'll wear in my friend's wedding. I bought two different pairs, unable to decide. Whadya think S.?

Personally, this picture cracks me up. Cracks me the fuck up! I'm usually the girl in tank tops and shorts, t-shirts and jeans. But clearly, as this picture shows, I am also capable of dresses and heels on the rare celebratory occasion. I'm over 6' in these shoes. I can't seem to take my eyes of my own damn feet.

Oh and that weird object between me and my OED is Sean's mobile bass unit. A little amp hides under that blue kitty-proof cloth. He straps the thing to his back, plugs in and wanders the sidewalks spreading the funk. Me? I stay home and read the OED.

September and the silver polish is chipping.