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.