Tenderness trips me up. Lately, an unexpected emotion has washed across my eyes and hands and heart as I work. I've gotten through almost thirteen years of doing massage by keeping a thin, hard layer across all my exposed surfaces, all my tricky synapses. For the last few weeks, however, I've fallen into an unexpected kindness. A tremor of empathy runs through me for the exhausted, aching people who lie naked on my table beneath a thin sheet and soft blanket.

I've never been a cookie cutter therapist, but I've always let my hands be my dominant guide, working on an instinct that seemed to largely circumvent both highly technical routines and overly emotional responses. That same instinct remains intact, but now something else has seeped into my sessions.

My cynical mind remains cynical. The collapse of the Great American Dream continues full force. The destruction of the planet grows loud and real. Religion blinds us, money corrupts us, etc., etc., etc. Nothing new there. But as I sit at the head of the table with a person's head in my cupped hands, my fingers pressed along the edges of their vertebrae and my palms wrapping their tired shoulders little wishes for them run through me. Wishes for kindness and joy, wonder and health.

As one of my favorite William Meredith poems says: "But whether from brute need/ Or divine energy / At last mind eye and ear/ And the great sloth heart will move."

Go figure...

I stacked my youth into a pale blue bin: letters from a boy in upstate New York once scoured for hidden signals, journals smeared with the misery of being seventeen, and eighteen and nineteen, good photos of people whose names I forget and bad photos of people I still love.

I read a couple letters and smiled. I showed some of the photos to some of my friends. I read some of my words, decades old and showed them to no one. And then I went to sleep.

There I met my high school boyfriend. We were both soft and lined and smartly dressed and despite our long absence from each other, still together and still the same. He sang obscure songs at me and wouldn't tell me what they were. I moped at his side and answered every question with "I don't know." We stared at each other and I confused pangs of anxiety with pangs of love. I woke up annoyed, as if our dream selves should have learned more in all these years. Am I doomed to repeat history, even in my sleep?

The blue plastic bin is heavy. I will need Sean to help me lug it to the basement. In another twenty years I will pick at the detritus there and let it trickle through the sluggish coils of my brain. And when my dream self again meets an old beaux or enemy, a lost friend or lost chance, maybe she'll take the opportunity that dreams offer and try it a different way.

Euphorbia. Euphoria.

The sun comes softened by a breeze but still makes its mark on the new leaves, the sloth-rich soil, my frightened winter skin. Now, with a fresh blush burned into sternum, nose and arms, I am Italian again. I am the tomato-grower. The protector of young basil. Despite the dip of light, evening will not start for hours. We are busy playing music and writing poems. We are sun drunk and in love with our drinking buddies.

On the radio this morning, I heard a worldwide call-in talk show focused on the topic of slowing down. More than half the people were happy with the quick pace of their lives and thought that to slow down would mean failure. A few people advocated for reading poetry in the sun or taking the time to cook a really good, really healthy meal, but most of them liked their quick paced lives, their busy schedules. For them, staying busy was equal to staying both happy and productive.

In my head, I argued that being productive doesn't have to be the key to happiness. And productive in what capacity? If I take the time to read a book, am I not being productive, albeit on a cerebral level? Isn't taking a walk and admiring the spring flowers productive for your health and well-being? I think so.

But here's the catch... I've been in such a funk lately because I haven't produced nearly enough writing. Despite what I said in my last post, I've been struggling to get the words down, though I've been trying. At every step I meet a hurdle if I'm lucky, an electric barbed wire fence if I'm not. This sticky, gummed-up story is driving me mad.

So maybe those people were right. I may not need to produce reports, resolutions or widgets but I need to produce something to feel my best, to feel like I'm something other than a receptacle for youtube videos and Netflix DVDs. My only solution is to ratchet down the expectations to an even slower pace and try to learn how to savor the drip...drip...drip onto the page.

I've written it in pen, right there on the calendar, not only for Wed. 8th but on all the days of the following week. I've swallowed too many misspent hours and feel a bit nauseous, a bit deceitful. My life feels funny without a solid writing project in front of me. The new project is unformed, unweildy, un-everything. It has things to teach that I'm reluctant to learn. For one, have some goddamn fun. Furthermore, make millions of mistakes.

At first I wanted to think and dawdle and dwell on the shape and character of this new book and I've done a bunch of that. But now it wants me to write it out fast. It wants to be long and shitty. It wants to make so many wrong turns I get lost somewhere kind of cool.

If only I had a montage. Enter the button-down recluse whose worn down all the erasers in the house. Exit the footloose free spirit who tosses off pages without a second glance. All set to some jangly folk-pop song by Feist. A magical transformation.

We, as a city, exhaled fully these last few days, dropping our cramped shoulders down from our ears. The sun came and cured us of most of our bad moods, our tedious confinement and our frighteningly luminous flesh. Someone told me there were 25 days of rain in Portland this March. It felt like it. But now, I'm sitting in a tank top and shorts writing this beneath a picture of this year's first flowers, carried home in my bike basket. If it didn't interfere with my cargo capacity I would carry potted flowers around on my bike all the time. You should know this about me...for a misanthropic hermit, I am inordinately delighted and soothed by the presence of brightly colored petals. I am also notoriously bad with plants. More on this conundrum to come...

Almost all of my friends live a decent but nonetheless check-to-check existence and always have. This craptastic economy has tightened our well-cinched belts, but ultimately hasn't changed much in our daily lives. Except for this: We used to joke when we talked about a grand European vacation or saw a perfect piece of perfectly spendy art or walked by a gorgeous 5 bedroom house that we would go ahead and buy it. "I've got $5 bucks in my pocket. That should be enough right?"

Well, now it is. In Detroit, at least. I know, it's Detroit but still...When I heard about the crazy market there I googled Detroit Real Estate, entered a value between $100 and $1000 and came up with 156 results. The above 6 bedroom multi-unit building is going for $600.

I'm not sure why, but I'm totally fascinated by this phenomenon. Maybe it's just the strangeness of watching a city decay, first in increments and then in leaps and bounds. Maybe it's the dash of entrepreneurial spirit inherited from my father that makes me think somebody should be taking advantage of this, not in a greedy, lecherous way but in a way that does something daring and grand for these neighborhoods.

I'll go crazy and throw in $20. Who else wants in on the American dream of home ownership?

Somehow, I've ended up with a number of jewelry designer friends. Some are of the fine metalsmith artisan variety. Some are of the cute, affordable and fun variety. Cute, affordable and fun sounds pretty good right around now... This piece is made by Sisteria Designs. They use reclaimed game tiles and fine Japanese papers and make these pretty pendants. They just got their online store up and running so now you can order them directly. http://sisteriadesigns.com/index.html
Definitely a cool gift and if you and your friends collect enough of them, you can turn them over and play dominoes with them too.
This purty birdy is from Twicksie Jewels. I got it at Christmas, then immediately lost it as is my way. To my delight, I discovered it a few weeks ago when I pulled out my luggage again and found it in a forgotten pocket. Twicksie's lovely baubles are for sale here: http://twicksie.com/

I walked a maze of pink and white trees in search of the faint scent of spring, but even this fresh blush has failed to alleviate the cool gray gloom. Almost everyone I come across is weighed down by it. No surprise, I guess.

What I am surprised by is how thoroughly I've abandoned my own writing over the last few weeks. I'm reading a lot. I'm thinking about my stories a lot. I'm thinking about story, in general, a lot. But all I have to offer is this paltry handful of words. The good thing about this is that it feels calm here. There's no worry that the words won't come back. I'm in a lull and think lull is a lovely word.

My brief time with my family in California left me with a few thoughts:

Nothing has broken my heart more quickly than the sight of my grandmother sobbing. I've never even seen the woman shed a tear, so to witness her red-faced and weeping, caught in a steady loop of lament and despair was overwhelming. I wanted to believe that a certain hardness or world-weary resignation developed with age, but grief is such a powerful thing that years alone are not enough to stop it.

That said, it was heartening to note just how well my grandmother raised her family. At a memorial full of hundreds of relatives and my aunt's friends and coworkers, I suddenly realized how few divorces there were among us. My grandmother was married for at least forty years before her husband died and each of her three daughters followed in her footsteps. Distant cousins I hadn't seen in years appeared with their spouses and grown children and more recently married relatives showed no signs of trouble. In a time when one parent households and multiple marriages are so common, I feel blessed to be a part of this clan that has learned how to hold on through the rough spots and find a solid source of love.

In that same room of hundreds, I became keenly aware of my sister, father and I as the tall, geeky ones being antisocial in the corner, the ones who left California and settled in New England. On top of that, I had to field an exhausting number of questions about being a writer. Being able to announce the title and publisher of my book among such a crowd is probably the number two reason I want to be published. Then there would be no reason for people to tell me about their neighbor's mother-in-law who works in publishing (though they do mostly science textbooks) or their friend who has a son in Hollywood who could turn my novel into a movie or how they don't really read anything but mysteries but they're sure my story is great. I don't want to deny my identity as a writer, but there are certainly benefits to leaving that portion out.

Of course, I will probably never see most of these people again. That was the final revelation of my visit. As the immediate family sat in my aunt's house in the hills of El Cerrito I realized how unlikely it is that I will ever be in that house again, or even in California again. Regular holiday visits there have been a part of my life from the time I was a baby. Now, with my grandmother moved out and my aunt gone, there is little reason to be there. Though my love for my uncle and cousins remains true, we have never had a connection independent of my aunt. While I used to be certain that I would live in California as an adult, I now leave it behind. An unexpected and entirely reluctant goodbye.

Less than a year ago, my Aunt Maureen was diagnosed with cancer. Last Saturday she finally succumbed. Now I fear that a few others will follow, her gregarious spirit unwilling to go out alone. Maybe her mother, my grandmother, will loosen the last few knots holding her here. Maybe her husband, whose heart was already tied together and tricked into working again, will find himself undone. He will have to find a way to sleep without her kicking feet, her slightly sour breath, her faint heat pulsing toward him.

Off I go to Oakland to be with the rest of Maureen's family and her wide blanket of friends to stumble through what we can. To say we will miss her is not enough.

Back from the woods and the tiny town of Shelton, WA. Elspeth Pope and the Hypatia-in-the-Woods organization gave me my week in the beautiful house Elspeth's late husband Jim built. The house is not just surrounded by trees, but seems to have grown right out of them. They were my constant companions. The top photo is the view out the bedroom window. Every morning I got up and felt like I was in a Grimm's Fairy Tale. Every day I sat looking out the dining room window at the trees in the bottom picture, a chaos of greenery. At night, I listened to the owls moan and sobbed over any small thing offered up in the movies I watched on my computer.

I thought long thoughts. I wrote words and barely erased anything at all. I bathed in silence. And by the end of the week my longing for home grew piercing. This is my way, my stubbornly middle path. I like the idea of falling full force into a piece of fiction, into language itself, but I can't obsess that way. It's rare that I pick up a book and can't put it down, no matter how much I love it. And when given all the time and space needed to dig deep into my own imaginary worlds, I only have so much breath. Good things happen down there below the surface, but I need to come up for air. I need to talk to my family and friends and walk down a busy street. I need to watch The Simpsons and rant about some bullshit on the news.

I'm thankful for my week away and equally thankful to be home.

Okay...I couldn't resist. No, that's not true. I could easily have resisted. However, I chose not to. I drove into thriving downtown Shelton, WA. Sat myself down at the libaray computer and pulled up my blog. And as I sit here I realize how little I miss it. After a walk, I will return to my little house in the woods. I will watch the cedar branches lay very still on top of other cedar branches. I will listen to the water drain from the dirt. I will follow my thoughts from ocean to desert. I will luxuriate in the solitude. The tiny ache. The wide, slow sweep.

Not banished, but hiding.

Last year at this time the first pink trees were fully blushed. This year we struggle towards the season, taking gusts of cold wind with our sunshine and frost in our morning hours. The forecast has my week away at my writing retreat full of cartoon clouds and cartoon rain and chill all around...Well good.

I will hole up as best I can. I will try to subdue the rainy day child in me that finds satisfaction in nothing, each option dismissed with a cranky whine. Who will hear me even if I do? Might as well cozy up to the stove with a nice pen and a smooth white sheet of paper. Or find stories in the good green damp.

The house has no internet connection. No TV. No phone. This is not a punishment but a prize. I head out (and head in) to meet my imagination. I'll see you on the other side.

I never understood the full extent of my pet peeve against holiday and other seasonal flags until I saw this one. This is the flag that proves how silly all the other ones are. It was hard to get a good photo of it unfurled, but this is a homemade flag saluting mac and cheese. "Since 1990." It's brilliant and ridiculous and I love it.

If I were more crafty, I would make my own flag. Maybe an I heart Snooze flag. Or maybe a Celebrate Near Miss Day (March 23rd...the day in 1989 when the earth came within 500,000 of a mountain sized asteroid). The possibilities are endless...

In my grandmother's square of concrete and begonias we made pools out of buckets and restaurants out of old iron patio furniture. Surrounded by stucco walls and overhanging oaks we made ourselves into rich artists and elegant athletes. We stepped into the only patch of sun my grandmother's house offered and found a bubble of privacy and fantasy interrupted only by the demands of my mother – What are you doing out there?

We were playing. We were at Grammy's house celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving and birthdays and anniversaries. We were celebrating our own young selves.

In her 95th year my grandmother has finally moved from that square of concrete patio, the circle of pale blue furniture, the dim lace-lined bedrooms of the only home I ever knew her in. She has left the eucalyptus scented streets of her retirement community in Walnut Creek. She has left the circle of East Bay cities and towns that held her for her entire life. And now she's on her way to Columbus, Ohio to start new in an assisted living apartment near to where my aunt lives. I can only imagine being forced out of my home by my own clumsy feet and my own weary mind. I can only imagine leaving behind a daughter, terminally ill with cancer, because I fall and forget and grow exhausted with loneliness.

My grandmother cried for days and I may too.

Valentine's Day is stupid but Love isn't

I'm guessing most of the people reading this will have already signed the petition at The Courage Campaign but if you haven't, watch this video and sign on. It made me cry even though I couldn't care less about the institute of marriage for myself. It makes me insanely mad that people are so scared, misinformed, hateful...whatever.

I will now spend the afternoon in a swirl of creative revenge fantasies against Ken Starr.


"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

Shirley Hazzard is my hero

Though it feels like I've been wild about her for years, I haven't raved about Shirley Hazzard enough, not here at least. Back in grad school, I resisted her despite a trusted source insisting she was worth the struggle. But the struggle presented by Transit of Venus was too much. I put it down after a handful of pages.

Years later, after easing my way in to Hazzard's world via her early novel Bay of Noon then falling in love with her most recent, The Great Fire, I returned to the difficult middle and found reward. She is not an easy read. Her sentences are dense, her structure complex and the characters are hers to control not ours to relate to. But I have never been so in awe of a book, sentence by sentence, for the precision of its observations. There isn't a single lazy word here.

So read it slowly. Read it twice. She is truly a master.

Here is a description, early in the book, of Ted Tice who has just arrived as a guest in this home and is awaiting the host:

In the fireplace, below the vacant grate, there was a row of aligned fragments, five or six of them, of toasted bread smeared with a dark paste and dusted with ashes.

He was used to the cold and sat as much at his ease as if the room had been warm. He could not physically show such unconcern in the presence of others because the full-grown version of his body was not quite familiar to him; but was easy in his mind, swift and unhurried. From all indications, his body had expected some other inhabitant. He supposed the two would be reconciled in time–as he would know, in time, that the smeared toast was there to poison mice and that Tom was the cat.

February used to be the most dreaded of months. Back in New England it usually meant that the snow was either continuing its seemingly endless descent or it was lingering along the sides of the roads getting black, crunchy and utterly detestable. You were sick to the core of all the winter bullshit. If you had to wear that stupid red sweater one more time you were going to cry. If you had to lunge over yet another puddle of slush you might lock yourself inside for the rest of the season. Glasses still fogged any time you walked in from the cold. Elevators, mass transit and small crowded shops all smelled of wet wool and trapped sweat.

Now, in my beloved Portland, February means the start of spring. Today was full of brilliant sun and temps that allowed coat zippers to stray south. The daffodils are starting to come up and I saw some actual pink blossoms busting loose on a tree down the street. Many a cool gray day lies ahead of us, but it's Groundhog's Day and I say spring is here.

I dream of a white washed room where I wake up in a bundle of late morning sun that got caught in the sheets. My eyes skip across the boards above my bed over to where the door bends out of its frame and can no longer be locked. You have already escaped to cook something sweet in the kitchen. And outside is the ocean and the ocean and the ocean.

My best friend of nearly 20 years turned 40 this weekend. My friend and I surprised him at the house on the Long Beach Peninsula where his boyfriend had taken him. We congratulated ourselves on a surprise well-executed and finished off a pile of linguini and clams and a couple different cakes. To keep us from drifting off into an elderly post-meal snooze, we walked onto the dark misty beach, heavy with clouds and lit by the dim glow of the little town on the other side of the dunes. I might have walked for miles if I were by myself. Instead, we returned to the beautiful victorian house tucked into its patch of mossy evergreens, watched some movies then drifted off into our white clapboard dreams


Company keeps me sane. Friends keep me human. But more and more I long for my own path uninterrupted by others. Misanthrope? Oh, probably a little. But there's something else at play as well. I feel how the day races and how hard it is to slow any of it down when surrounded by people. Or rather, how my ability to concentrate and appreciate are so easily distracted when not soaked in the luxury of solitude.

It's been hard to find the time for this space knowing that everything I might say about the inauguration and these first few days of Obama's presidency have been said. I continue to battle my cynicism and yet can't help but feel a flutter of relief when I see the man standing at the podium and then hear the man and know that he's on excellent terms with the english language. Chalk up at least one victory for literacy and language and those badly battered words, terror and nuclear.

This picture offers no evidence of all the somber and ragged humanity I encountered yesterday on my journey out into the world, though this view did provide some balm when I got back to my neighborhood.

Working out of my house in a rainy winter town without a car makes for a sheltered existence. I seem to be particularly housebound this year. Yesterday I had to go to downtown Portland for a dentist appointment and felt snagged if not shocked by all the people moving through their lives. Not that the Street of Shattered Hopes and Thwarted Dreams (Hawthorne Ave.) doesn't have its share of raw desperation, but something about being downtown really overwhelmed. It's a good thing I don't go down there often because I ended up shelling out a bunch of money to people: a man picking half-eaten egg rolls out of the garbage, the Street Roots guy selling his paper, and a performer desperate enough to paint himself silver and stand statue still outside the mall in the middle of a Monday.

Add to that the grumps on light rail, the old Chinese man slapping his knees violently at a bus stop and the high school girl sent to crawl between the wet, prickly bushes and chain link fence to get the shot put she threw there, the boys on the other side of the bushes having a laugh at her expense.

A good rattling for the stagnant loop of my winter days.

Here's a little fun I found out about from my friend over at Noodles Rice and Pasta. It's a real clock gobbler, so watch out.

Grandma always said bored was a dirty word

I just watched this video of men base jumping and flying in "wingsuits." Amazingly, I don't find this insane. What I find crazy is the human ability to adjust, settle in and grow dull with just about everything. At one point one of these guys says that trying to clear the cliff with the greatest distance got boring so they started to play around with flying closer to the rocks at 100mph.

The fact that this sport exists is kind of thrilling. I mean, they're fucking flying, right? But what does it say about us that we have to throw ourselves off cliffs to get a fresh perspective? These people jump and plummet and swoop and after a time they think they're birds. They think flying is normal.

Okay, so these guys probably aren't big Proust fans, but it makes me wonder what hope there is for delicate poetry and complex fiction and small beautiful paintings in a landscape where people grow bored with flying. Sure, they're two different audiences, but I see this lack of awe and wonder everywhere and wish we could all give ourselves the time to be amazed by something miniscule, overlooked or silent.

I studied anatomy in massage school and grew amazed at the machine that is our bodies. We're so complex that I'm amazed we don't break down and die more easily. Our outstanding adaptability keeps us going even when something goes awry. We shift and adjust and before you know it, hey, it's no big deal. Same ol' same ol'. Kind of boring really.

New Years Eve I rose in the early, unhurried dark and made my way back west. I hit many of the major forms of transportation–car, foot, plane, people mover, light rail, bus–and arrived back in Portland twelve hours after waking. I didn't even make it to midnight on east coast time, exhausted with the effort of crossing a country.

I've now slept, finished off the last of the sweets (for a while), exercised off half a sliver of the massive amounts of chocolate and cheese that I've eaten over the last week and gotten back to work. I sifted my way through the pile of mail, sneering at a pat rejection letter that took a year and a half to get here then moved on to better news. I've been awarded a week long stay at Hypatia-in-the-Woods, a retreat center for women artists in Shelton, WA.

Come March, I will be tucked away in this little secluded house with nothing to do but write. How wonderful. My thought is to try and write something new while I'm there. I want to dig in to the solitude, send the nagging critic off into the woods with some bread crumbs and see what happens.

Pause

Andover is folding itself into a late afternoon fog and we, in this particular holiday household are on pause. The 6-yr old nephew and his mother, my sister, are out at a movie. My parents are at work. My brother in law is working in his bedroom. My old friends are off in other towns. The dog is asleep. In this pause I breathe more fully and relish the quiet.

In another hour the household will rev up again for the evening. The TV will blare, drinks will be poured, both gentle and biting arguments will begin. In this house,traffic jabs and shifts around oversized furniture in miniature rooms. There is no flow. In this house, without a single curtain, drape or blind to its name, all our noise and jagged movements are advertised to the neighborhood.

I love this family but I'm ready to go home to a cover of rain, velvet curtains and the familiar sweeping silences of my Portland life.

Oh shortest short day ... Good riddance. Let the light creep back. Let the rain come down. Melt, melt, melt.

Right now, I'd like to persuade some scientists to work on getting the earth's axis straightened out. What, you say you like variety? You like the seasons? Oh, okay. Keep the tilt and bring me better boots and a few more bottles of wine.

On the first day it snowed, we opened the door and tried to see if the cat's instinct to go outside at any and all moments extended to an outside sugary white and blustery cold. No. She, like us, ran back in and spent the day under blankets.
On the next couple of blustery cold and painfully bright days we woke to ice art that had grown on the INSIDE of all of our old, thin windows. We worked when we had to but we returned when we could to our blanketed warmth, our huddled protest of a winter we both thought we'd left behind in New England.

It continues today and tomorrow and into next week. Damn stuff. Maybe, when I fly to Boston for X-mas I will find a mild, soft drizzle, a perfect Portland holiday.

Another draft done to throw on the pile. If, in the long run, this book goes no further than the folder on my desk, at least I built a mighty stack of words with all my efforts. I still have to go through this and fill in a few details (How many legs does a crayfish have? What are the names of the different positions on a roller derby team?). I still have to address a few issues I've already noted. But lets call the damn thing done. Done for now. Done for this round. Then I'll let it sit while I find the right readers. It will sit and the cream will separate from the crap. Hopefully, it's a richer mixture than the last batch.

In the spirit of playfulness, I decided to share my Christmas present to myself with the cat. I couldn't resist the cool new pod/rattles that Carol Lebreton made this year. Shake it and it sounds like sleigh bells. Sitting on my desk it looks a seed from a Dr. Seuss tree. On the floor with the cat, it looks like a mild amusement to be ignored at the first sign of a stray rubber band.


Today didn't feel much like play, but it was productive nonetheless. If my vision is correct, I have only one scene left to write before this draft is done. The last bitter bite to gnaw through. If I was writing this by hand from a tropical hammock, I would push on through to the end. As it is, I'm cold, it's dark and my eyes are about to burst from staring at the screen all day. Ah, the rewards of a successful day of writing.

Creativity and Play

I am nearing the end of another draft of my novel. Only a couple more chapters to go. As I push forward, grinding through sentence by sentence, I found this TED video a good reminder about how being playful encourages creativity. It's so easy to get stifled by an idea if that idea is held too closely, too seriously. Preciousness can be a disastrous thing in a creative project. Self-censorship can kill it off before it even begins. So here's to more brainstorming, more mistakes, more play.

A few thanks

I'm thankful for the local beauty...
And the beauty strange.
I'm thankful for my family blood...

and my family built.

Thankful, always thankful, for my good little life where I wander through hundreds of secular miracles every day.

I haven't been posting much in part because of the weird time warp that I've slipped into. It always seems as though I've just posted, a day or two ago, wasn't it? But no, a week has passed. A day is devoured and another and another and yet the week never feels full. It's Sunday again while I'm still on Wednesday.

Everyone has this problem, I know. While I just pulled up my tomato plants, or rather, I pulled them up some time last week, it will be time to plant again in a flash. While I gather chapters for my book, piling up the words on a daily basis, the hours are too slippery and I can never pin down enough of them. A whole hour disappears getting a character from kitchen to bedroom. It can take a week for some of them to complete one true thought.

I look forward to spending some time with my 6 year old nephew this Christmas so I can remember what it's like for a day to feel impossibly long. Banished to my room for a few hours was sufficient punishment when I was that age. I only wish my hours now went by so slowly.

This time of year, I can go days without opening the door except to grab the mail. But tonight I finished working and went out into the dry twilight fall and was reminded of why I love Portland. This is a city of real neighborhoods; Here we sleep and eat and work and meet, all within a few friendly blocks. I recognize a certain portion of the people on every walk I take. It isn't until I go to some less pedestrian friendly city or suburb and see how lucky I am to be able to thrive here without a car for 15 years.

I slip on my ipod and listen to the shuffle of old R.E.M, Nick Drake, The Cult and Violent Femmes. I watch the calm blue sky. I watch the cats waking up for their evening shift and the people turning on their lights for a night in. I listen to the crunch of leaves under my feet and admire the dahlias still proudly yellow and orange and pink. I feel the quiet like a bass note beneath the music.

So here we are, in our first week of hope. As Homer Simpson says after his chiropractic appointment, "Hey, it feels a little better."

In the spirit of hope, I am charging toward finishing another draft of my book. Today I was searching in the nightmarish maze that is my writing folder on my computer for a scene I once wrote long ago. The fact that I couldn't find it and can only vaguely recall its components simply confirms that it is the keystone to this novel. Ah well...

During the search, I came across a file titled "Poker Face-novel." It was like discovering a container of old spaghetti sauce in the back of my fridge. I had no idea it was back there. When I opened it up, it looked awful and smelled worse. Still, all this time I've been thinking of the book I'm working on as my first novel. In fact, this other thing is, at least the 150 pages of it that got written. That was my practice novel. This new one is the one that I'd like to get right. I hope, I hope, I hope.

This was downtown Portland last night. My neighborhood, normally rowdy with drunks from the local bars celebrating their drunkeness, was rowdy with drunks from the local bars celebrating Obama's smackdown. For once, I was thrilled at the noise.

I tried to imagine the same kind of energy and excitement being generated by some other democratic candidate and find it hard to imagine. Would we have pulled out the drums and the flags and danced in the street if Kerry had won? Would the world be celebrating in the streets with us? Of course, I'm sorry we had to slog through eight disastrous years to get to this point, but here we are. Relieved, ready and actually excited to move forward.

I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead perseverance, application, industry, assiduity, will, will, will, desire, desire, desire.
-Gordon Lish

This month, while others attempt to write a whole novel, I will attempt to revise the rest of mine. Much of this will involve writing whole new scenes and chapters and here, on day one, it already hurts. I don't understand how people write quickly. I plod. I feel as if each sentence my characters speak is a bit of hard-earned labor as if they thought in Swedish but had to speak in English. I feel as if each move my characters make is done by me lifting them and posing them like giant mannequins, but they're not mannequins, their real people. Oh wait...

It's true that sometimes this is the result of my critical mind, but just as often it is my creative mind seeking the right thing. Not even the perfect thing. That comes later if I'm lucky. All I'm looking for is what is plausible and, for me, that is rarely overwhelming and obvious. I'm not sure why.

So how will I get to the end of this novel in a month? I'll have to either give up my job and much of my sleep or I'll have to find a new way. I fear some kind of electro-shock get up will be required or some threat of humiliation or loss. Or maybe there's a way to re-route my panic over the elections into a sense of high stakes for my writing. If you have some better ideas, please let me know.

I waited all summer for these asters to bloom. The green of it just grew and grew, sprawling across the flowerbed, crowding out the competition, but never any buds. Finally, last week, they busted out. Now I'll have November flowers. The literal late-bloomer wins again. They glow in the dim light of this latest gloom, the dark damp that will, most probably, be with us for the next few months.

Time to get some work done. Head down against the rain. Eyes open and undazzled.

It's been a while since I've posted any cat pictures here, so indulge me, please. This is what we do, Mao and I. We find a spot of sun, grow sleepy in it, but not so sleepy that we can't keep on eye on things – A vary wary eye on the world, it's people and their inability to provide the proper amount of treats.

You'll be driving along depressed when suddenly
a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through
and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably
won't last. But for a moment the whole world
comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives—
red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermilion,
gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations
of burning. You're on fire. Your eyes are on fire.
It won't last, you don't want it to last. You
can't stand any more. But you don't want it to stop.
It's what you've come for. It's what you'll
come back for. It won't stay with you, but you'll
remember that it felt like nothing else you've felt
or something you've felt that also didn't last.

from Leaves, by Lloyd Schwartz

I haven't checked the DSM-IV, but I think someone should look into this condition I've developed. It starts with a mild curiosity about people I've lost touch with and snowballs into a pathological obsession to share my most embarrassing photos of myself. This one makes me laugh so hard I almost cry. 1985, 9th grade graduation dance. See? Why do you need to see this? Why do I need to show you?

Fall does this to me. I get nostalgic, though my youth was so angst-ridden that I can't reflect fondly on it. I have to simply reflect. That and join Facebook. Such a funny phenomenon. I got sukered into it because the photos of the people I wanted to stalk were too small to see without "becoming friends" with them. Over the last few days I've gotten in touch with people I haven't seen or spoken to in 20 years.

I'm not sure why this is satisfying since I was barely in touch with them while we were walking the same halls and sitting beside each other in English. But there you go. Saying hello, I remember you, gives a small, gentle tug of kindness. It's a nice reminder that despite the angst, we made it through. We can spy a bit on each others lives and imagine the other paths we might have taken. We can celebrate the roads were on.

Thankfully, my condition does not extend into a need to attend my 20th high school reunion happening in a month or so. If I start making plans for this and report them here, please, send a professional. I'll be needing some serious help.

Here are a few things I haven't killed. One I tortured with, apparently, insufficient amounts of water all summer. The other I'd written off as a boring old sprig of grass that neither grew nor blossomed, that is, until this week. And so ends another lesson: Be patient. Be generous. Rewards will follow.

Also, if you stare at your garden close enough and long enough the death knell of the empire dampens to a tolerable if not exactly soothing level. Try it.

It can be hard to motivate to walk along the beach when the beach is sitting in your front yard. With my long streak of outstanding Manzanita weather still intact, we gathered on the porch and watched the water from a close but comfortable distance. The radio never came on. The football game ran on mute. The sun, food and fine beverages gave us all a healthy glow.

You can feel it can't you? The need to escape. Wouldn't I love to hole up in a cabin in the woods. Or flee to a heat-soaked beach. What about that trip to Barcelona? Or the one to see my distant, but delightful Italian cousins?

Of course, I can barely manage the trip to the Oregon coast we'll be taking in a few days, but the balm I know it will provide is invaluable. There is little that a view of the ocean and a good book can't soothe.

Back in the warm July air, flames weren't really required, but who camps without making a fire? Maybe most grown adults are uninterested in glow sticks, but who wouldn't enjoy watching their friends fumble around in the dark with fairground toys tied to the ends of rope? Some of us needed a little bit of beauty and some needed to hold off the wide silence of the forest with the sound of crackling wood and laughter.

I don't have glow sticks or a fireplace these days so I'll have to find other distractions from the scary things lurking inside my silent radio and dark TV. I think it just started to rain again. I think that will do.