Life is Heaven, Too

I am misanthropic again, this time seasoned to taste with anxiety bordering on panic and depression.  LOVELY.

Yesterday, I had a needle stuck into my eye.

My eyelid; nevertheless it's still the eye.

I had a "growth" on my left eyelid, which I found on Christmas Eve while putting makeup on using my mother's magnifying make-up mirror.  I thought the bump might be an allergic reaction to the seven year old MAC eyeshadow I'd been using, and using a lot of. I now go nearly goth when going to a party. Why not? Life is hell.  Anyway the growth was removed yesterday with a pair of scissors and now I have this small red dot that David says looks like a popped pimple.  The growth is at pathology. 

I am working on my anger issues.  

Ceremony fills the void.  

Speaking of ceremony, a lot of my old colleagues will be standing on it in NYC this coming week at AWP, the Writer's Conference of America. Some of them will be reading and presenting their work.  I wish them well.  I hope they all break legs.  

Self-Promotion

What I know about lucid dreams -- they are usually pleasurable. And if they're not, then you can will them to be that way, pleasurable to some degree.

I began analyzing my dreams in my early 20s, when I was staying up very late at night and waking up very later in the day, with nothing to do except write until 1:30, when I had to get ready to drive cross town to "workshop." On Tuesdays. I had some other classes, too, Philosophy of Modern Thought type of classes, "thinking and reading" classes. As if your life depended on it more than a little bit. And maybe it did.

I had some seriously fantastic dreams back in those days, dreams where I realized I was dreaming within them and so could "control" or will the action within them to accord to my desires. Lucid dreams are powerful dreams, potentially life-changing dreams. One has to take the time to honor them, these professors, our dreams.

Tools to become a lucid dreamer:
1) A notebook, in which you can write, upon waking up, without opening your eyes.
2) Some deep-seated/seeded conflict developing in your soul.
3) A trusty pen.
4) The discipline to record your dreams no matter how tired, how hung over, how depressed you are.
5) A Dictionary of Symbols.
6) A Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion.
7) The time to make the connections between the symbols in your dreams and the archetypes you learn about while doing research on your dreams. Figuring yourself out a little more.

That'll be $500,000,000. for that lesson in lucid dreaming. Contact me for my agent information.

Ubiquitazzi

I am sitting in a cafe called Agora in Houston.  It's across the street from the new Brasil, which is a more spacious version of the old Brasil.  There are characters sitting all around me -- writers, artists, math geeks, high school flirts and scammers, architects and contractors haranguing home builders (young couple) for wanting a water tank while having cut down a tree on their lot. The contractors are Middle Eastern.  The home builders are White: Some combination of generations of Americans.  

I pull out my computer and log onto Blogger, feeling conspicuous in this cafe in the glow of my pod area, but then I realize that the couple sitting at the table behind me is logged into Blogger as well, and the music on the jukebox is Lucinda Williams, and the French bartendress is probably a blogger, too, or at least a lover of Lucinda Williams.

Grief

We all deal with it differently. My brother, one of them, has been breaking down hysterically everyday since my father died this past June (May he rest in peace). He calls me every other day to update his insomnia log.

"Are you having trouble sleeping?" he asks me.

"No," I say. I have two toddlers, a stressful job, a loving husband (thank god), household responsibilities and existential angst. I have no trouble sleeping. I do however have a problem dreaming these days. I get up too early, startled out of sleep by a toddler crying out MOMMY! from the bedroom next door.

I'm not sad; I'm angry. And anger is one of the stages of grief, maybe 2 or 3 out of 7 or 5. I don't remember, but a woman wrote about them, the stages of grief -- On Death and Dying, by Elizabeth Kuhbler-Ross. My grief looks like a lack of focus, and in that way, perhaps it's lacked focus.

"What are you thinking about?" I ask my insomniac brother, "when you can't sleep?"

"That I can't sleep."

How boring, I think. "What a bummer," I say.

The Superior Green

We eat a lot of greens around here, specifically kale and lettuce (preferably Baby Romaine). There's a campaign on right now to regulate the pasteurization of all greens. Visit Miah and Raj's site, Green Parenting, to find out more about why it's important to take action regarding these things.

The right to eat raw food is an ironic right. Isn't it? Amazing.

Facetaker

As a result of having newly acquired a Facebook page, I feel like there are all sorts of people inside my brain now, people I do not know personally (I don't mean my friends; they're the reason I'm there at all), and I can't stand the crowd; it makes me uncomfortable. I've never been a fan of them, crowds.

However, I'm not saying it's a bad thing to have other people in my brain with me at the same time, I'm saying it conflicts me with myself.

We are always in each other's brains anyway; our brains are not our own, really, they're just splinters off of the One. Or roads. Or rivers. Depends on the metaphor one chooses to indicate the One. (For me, it's a huge net, like a spider's web. That is my projection, or understanding, of the Divine. Some people disavow any type of divinity; that is their choice, their projection. Whichever way you spin it, we choose our beliefs in order to help manage our thoughts and emotions. Atheism, Pantheism, World Wide Webism.)

The first few days I tried to log in to my brand new Facebook account, I kept typing in www.facetaker.com. Had I been even more mistaken and more correct, I would have typed in www.braintaker.org.

Apology

I feel I have been too dismissive towards Joan Didion these past few years. My disdain grew slowly, although punctuated with sadness. From my early 20s on, I read everything I could stand by her, including her novel Play It As It Lays. I gifted The White Album to several friends whom I hold truly dear. I count Slouching Toward Bethlehem a book of the Bible, my bible, the one I have created for myself. When I read After Henry, I practically had to spit the experience out of me. In this book, she accounts her loss as a writer after the death of her beloved and devoted editor Henry _________. Her loss is utterly convincing, especially when she describes her debt to him as an editor, and one can see that, in fact, he seemed to have co-written all her books. The writing Didion does in this book, without her now-dead editor, is so terrible, clunky and pitiful, I felt like, "Shit, woman. You can barely write." I felt like this because as I said, the writing style was awful; i.e. not Joan Didion in the way I had come to know her as a writer.

However, just now I read a quote by her -- she's quoted everywhere! -- where she says, "I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance." *

That's right, I think. She's absolutely right. And I feel connected to her again, deeply, like I did when I was younger. And I remember that she is human (always was), and a great one at that, one who has left a legacy of storytelling and life experience so textured and vibrant, so dark and dramatic, so mundane and pedestrian, few can come close to her brilliance. I want to apologize to the universe for having held her up to ridiculous standards. I'm sorry.

* Quoted from The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers, by Betsy Lerner.

Social Networking

The Gypsy and I go out to wherever to pay the UHAUL bill today. She has been illin since an anuerysm burst in her middle finger on her left hand. Her finger is black and blue, but not as swollen as before, when it happened. The doctor told her she was lucky that it hadn't happened in her head or heart.

"I know," I say.

"I thought about calling you, but I didn't want to bother you," she says.

"You wouldn't be bothering me," I say.

"You never answer your phone!" she says. It's true that I'm not a slave to my phone, so sometimes I don't check messages until the next day. But she doesn't even call that often; and I always call her back.

"If I couldn't get a hold of you, who could I call?" I ask. I'm trying to make sure her greatest fear doesn't happen -- she will die and no one will know. I want to know when she dies.

"There's no one," she says, and I know that's not true, even though at the moment it might feel true for her. She wants me to write her story so that she will leave her mark on the world. It's hard for her, because she wasn't educated in school. Her education happened elsewhere, and it's very powerful and interesting, and makes for a great story, but I can't even hardly get the writing I do for work done -- the grant writing that supports my family's bread and butter: spacetaker.

I invited the Gypsy over for dinner on Friday night. She wants to teach me how to make Gypsy Co-zine, specifically cabbage rolls. I am thinking of inviting my new neighbor, an elderly Argentinian woman named Aida to join us. For wine, cabbage rolls and conversation.

Op-Ed

I recently met with a friend who was once a student of mine at an elite high school. This friend is writing a novel. I'm so proud of him. He's trying to balance his feeling of guilt about not wanting a J-O-B in finance with his intrinsic need to write stories. Don't get the job in finance, I say. But then, hell, what do I know? Maybe he should get the job in finance; what's to say he won't end up writing an even better novel?

Is there a cross between a memoir and a novel? I think there is. I'm thinking of Michael Ondaatje's Running with the Family or The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Neither of them is a novel-meets-memoir, per se, but they're multi-genred, both of them. Interesting...but I'm not sure how satisfying they are. I mean there is nothing like a good story, one with a beginning, middle and end; where a group of people go out into a timeframe together and cause each other to change, deeply and irrevocably. These changes are painful, but they are interesting. This, we writers call conflict.

I have seen really good multi-genre works of artful non-fiction: my old students' for sure. Some of them were gifted with understandings of juxtaposition, with turns of phrases, with "seeing" eyes. Real deals: I have taught some of these people. For some, writing out of the formal authority of genre -- that tyranny! -- liberates their ability to see. Let me be specific.

I taught this boy named Peter who was probably one of the most normal guys I ever met, but who could see into his normal world, and with one to five sentences, show the dirty, pimpled butt of that normalcy: horrifying.

I am in love with the colon tonight.

I'm am trying to decide if my story can be real and imagined. I know the resolution for my querulousness sounds obvious, and of course it is obvious: the story can be real and imagined. All stories are. But, I don't know how to say this: my story will be unlike anyone else's. I understand I'm being ridiculous. I should shut up. But I can't.

But back to the question of the multiple genres telling one story -- doesn't work so well. What's happening here is that multiple stories are getting told at once. Different effect than a novel. Not to say that there aren't novels who tell stories in the kinkiest of ways. There are, and they are novels loved by the same people who wanted Kinky Freedman for Texas Governor. "He's not Kinky, he's my governor," the bumper stickers said. Hmmmm....sounds like a bunch of sex fiends. Those are the types of people that like those experimental novels: sex fiends.

Nick Hornby, Hobby Center, Houston, October 2007

After interviewing Nick Hornby on Sunday, I have come to the following six conclusions:

1). We had good chemistry in fact and feeling. It was easy to talk to him, like falling off a bed.

2). He gave me two sets of temporary tatoos that will come out with the next issue of The Believer. "Isn't it a lovely magazine?" he asked me. He explained to the audience at the Hobby Center that the motto of The Believer is to never say anything bad about any one or any thing. Sounds like my kind of people. Is that why Dave Eggers repulses me? because he reminds me of myself? I remember in Graduate School, a fellow poetess postulated that the only reason we hate a person is because that person reminds us too much of ourselves. I must have reminded my fellow poet of the most hated parts of herself because she hated me. She is not the only one who has hated me. There are many (sadly) others. But, no worries. That is what I've learned. A good lesson, that.

3). Nick Hornby is sexier in person than in his photographs.

4). He is a "gabbler" -- his word.

5). For some reason, I was born to perform.

6). When I work with awareness, the universe opens up its arms to me and folds me in like a lover, a funny, yummy, surprising lover. Lucky life.

Save the Date

Our old neighbor, the Gypsy, has a bad heart. It's been stopping and starting with every beat. She called and told me in a message, so I called her back and we made plans to visit. I saw her Tuesday and Thursday. Tuesday was a social visit, but when I asked her to call me if she needed anything -- if there was anything I could do for her -- she said that I could come Thursday and help her find the freeway where the storage place full of her mother's things is. I arrived on Thursday, and she was sitting in the asphalt lot, in the driver's seat of her friend's car, waiting for me.

"Get in," she says. "We'll take the baby and go in my car, because I don't want you to have to pay for the gas."

"We can't," I say. "Diego needs the car seat in my car."

"Okay, we'll go in your car." She got out of the Accord and got into my Chevy. Her keys clanged against the floorboard where she threw them.

"Where are we going?" I asked her.

"I don't know. I'm not sure how to get there."

"Get where?"I asked. "The Storage Unit?"

"Yeah. U Haul," she said. Her phone rang. "Go to 59," she said. She answered her phone.

"North or South?" I asked.

"I'll tell you when we get there." I headed South, because that was the general direction she pointed in. She blabbered some language into the phone: Gypsy, she later told me. She was talking to her adopted daughter, making plans to visit her in New York, where she lives. I approached the entrance to 59 South, and the Gypsy started crossing herself, making the sign of the cross, very quickly and semi-consciously, at least twenty times. "Yeah, get on here," she says, immediately resuming her unintelligible conversation over the phone. We merged onto the freeway, and within moments, the Gypsy yells, "Oh no! We're going the wrong way."

"We need to go South?" I say, merging back into the far right lane so that I can exit on Sheperd and turn around.

"No, I think it's another freeway," she says, "Mama, I'll have to call you back," she says into the phone then hangs up.

"It's another freeway?" I need a little clarification.

"I think it's --." She's confused, too.

"Is it 45?" I say.

"Yes. No. I think it's the 10 freeway, sort of."

Sort of? What could that mean? "Is it 290?"

"No. I don't know. You know, I've got the paper at my house. If I can find it, we can look for the address."

I imagine she means newspaper. I'm starting to think we're not going to make it to the storage unit, the one that she doesn't know where it is. "You have the paper at home?" I say, trying to lead her to some sort of detail.

"Yes. I have a receipt from them. I can find it for you and you can find the address on it." The Gypsy doesn't read, can't read. I remember seeing her once at the Kroger, handing her bills to the bag person in the checkout line to read for her.

We pull back into her driveway. She gets out and I tell her I'm going to get gas and that I'll be back. "Okay," she says. She looks back at Diego and squeals, "Oooooooo you're so cute, yrsocuteyrsocuteyrsocute."

When I pull back into her driveway after getting gas, she's sitting on her neighbor's stoop with a long cardboard box. She gets into the car with the box, opens it up and shoves it in between us. The box is full of envelopes of receipts and bills and correspondences. She digs through, every few moments pulling something out and holding it up for me to read. "What's this?" she asks.

"The car registration," I say.

"What's this?" she says.

"A traffic ticket receipt," I say.

"Oh yeah, I paid that," she says.

"What's this?" she says.

"Uhaul!" I say. I dial the number at the top of the page to get directions. The person who answers gives me directions, 34th street between 290 and Magnum.

"Let me talk to him," the Gypsy says. "I want to ask them if I can come Monday to pay the bill."

"We can go out there, now, and pay it," I say. "Unless you don't have the money right now."

"I don't have the money," she says. Which shocks me a little because she was just saying to her daughter that she was going to call the airlines and make a reservation for New York for next weekend. That ticket's gonna cost at least $500. Maybe that's why she doesn't have the money right now. Probably.

It turns out that the Gypsy can pay the bill up until November 20 without incurring any late charges or property loss. She's elated. "We don't have to go now. But thank you so much for helping me."

I tell her she's welcome. I tell her that we have a new car payment due on that day, so I will help her remember the date.

Cool Brains, Inaugural Reading

I'm interviewing Nick Hornby this Sunday, October 28 at the Hobby Center at 2 p.m. He will be reading for 20 minutes from his new novel SLAM, written for a Young Adult audience. Probably because of my background in teaching high school, Inprint, Inc. asked me to have a conversation with him -- on stage -- after his reading. They think we'll have good chemistry; that's what they said. We're both writers, and we're both have the music. That's what they said, "you both have the music." I'm assuming they meant like the music interests: I was in a band; he's obsessed wth bands. Actually, he's obsessed with songs, not bands. He's written a book called SONGBOOK where he writes around 17 essays or so about favorite songs. "Thunder Road" by Bruce Springsteen is his favorite of all time. If he's heard that one 23,000 times over the past 30 years, he's heard all the other songs 500 times max. Something like that. In any case, I don't think Inprint meant that he and I have the music in the same way Leonard Cohen sings in "Chelsea Hotel" that he and Janis Joplin are "ugly but [they] have the music."

I'm sure Inprint isn't implying we're ugly, Nick and I. Although, I don't mind the comparison; it's the kind of unbeknownst-to-them compliment I cherish.

I've had to do a lot of reading to catch up with Hornby. Besides SLAM and HIGH FIDELITY, he's written a bunch of other books, and he keeps a column as well in the monthly literary magazine, The Believer: "Books I've Bought. Books I've Read."

In terms of music, I don't think Nick and I share the same passions. I prefer the poetry of Dylan and Cohen to the prose of Springsteen, but I think he's a good storyteller, and I'm looking forward to talking to him.

If you're in town, come hear us.

Great piece by Gregory Rodriguez in today's LA Times.

Here's What I Think I Know

The beginning and the ending.
The three disasters.
The three women at the center of the story (I threw in another one, in honor of my father).
The time period.
The setting.

The reason my throat has been closing for years.
The reason that it has to open back up.
The reason I fly out of my skin at the first chance I can find.
The reason I know how to fly.

I'm Good

http://www.christaforster.com/2007/08/torch-song.html

Thanks for asking, AnaVerse.

I started working with a novel writing group again, and I have been thinking all day about the three disasters. What are they? I ask myself while I drive cross town to the mechanic's to pick up the Malibu. I ask myself while I sweep the food Diego has thrown all over the floor, and I ask myself as I pass the behavioral chart we've once again created for my daughter -- a reward system that merits her privilege, access to things she wants: cookies, to play, to sit next to us. It's horrible, the chart, but it's what helps us all get along. Imagine if I didn't reward her for the way I want her to be: then she would be left to her own divisives while being forced -- by one's job, say, or one's "community" -- to make decisions about how best not to harm one another. We call this enforcement of behavior Morality.

"You're such a good mommy," she says everday, stroking my face, looking me straight in the eyes. Is it real? I ask myself. Is this dream I'm living Reality. Then I remember that I don't have to ask that anymore. I know that it is -- this life -- my reality, real. And my life matters. To me, at least.

In the novel writing group, we're a small cadre of local writers, veterans of the Creative Writing Program, for one reason or another. Not heroes, no. The heroes are being vetted by the powers that be. I will not mention them here because they do not so much interest me. In short, they never have interested me enough.

My comrades in writing now met last night for the first time. We related our histories, blurbed them really, some of us more, some of us less. We gave each other our time to listen to the idea of the story each one of us desires to tell. Steve talked about Macbeth. I lit up. "A tragedy can be hopeful," he said.

"Macbeth saved my life! I love Macbeth." I didn't go into my rhapsody just then, but later we got to go to the bar and talk about it some more. Gemini had to go home because her five year old was waiting for her. But she was a light for sure, a beacon out over the dark waves: of sorrow, of new beginnings, of existential confusion, or even dismay. Though never really dismay. Let nothing you dismay.

Miah typed up the notes: five paragraph structure. "How many of us teach or taught writing?" We all had.

What are the three disasters?

Tonight I begin to think of the book as seasons, and as such I begin to imagine the sections of the book divided into four colors: red (the passion), orange (the past, the memory), blue. Green. The three disasters correspond to a color. They are tonal, as in colors in music. They are specific, adroit and horrible. They are monstrous. But what are they? What are these crimes of passion? What are ...

I'd rather talk about plot points, for that is what they're called in industry-speak. But disasters are so much more interesting.

I'll Take You There, 1980

In 1980, I was 13 years old. I wore sweaters with flowers printed around the color, pencil skirts, k-mart topsiders. When I stood in line to get my freshman ID the summer before high school, I watched the other kids talking and flirting with one another, and it was like they were speaking another language. I could not comprehend. I was truly, deeply virginal.

In high school, the worst things I did included ditching school to go joyriding on the 5 Freeway with Scott Something in his father's BMW, and hiding in my friend's closet getting drunk on cheap, pink champagne while she and another friend (who did not know I was there) waited for their dates to show up. The friend in the dark was going on her first date with my exboyfriend. I was sort of heartbroken about it at the time, but I had another boyfriend, too, at a different high school, the Catholic one up the freeway. This other boyfriend did not expect me to be his one and only, like the one at my own high school did, because of proximity I guess.

At the school dances, after I broke up with my local boyfriend, I stood on the sides and watched others dance to the music some DJ played. There was this one boy, and I only knew him as James, who always asked me to dance once during the night. He was two years older than I, and he only ever asked me to slow dance. We never spoke during school days, nor did we even really acknowledge each other if we passed one another in the hallways, but in the dark of the school dance, we held each other close and we did sway.

to the dream [s]he dreams over

1) Notes:
a.) “What the writer sees must be his own time and place, or else, as in the very best historical fiction, the past as we, with our special sensibility, (not better but new), would see it if we went back ...the noblest originality is not stylistic but visionary and intellectual; the writer’s accurate presentation of what he, himself, has seen, heard, thought and felt."

b.) "What counts in [the case of a novelist like Beckett or Nabokov] is not that we believe the private vision to be right but that we are so convinced by and interested in the person who does the seeing that we are willing to follow him around."

c.) "For another kind of novelist the accuracy required is, I think, of a higher order, infinitely more difficult to achieve. This is the novelist who moves like a daemon from one body -- one character -- to another. Rather than master the tics and oddities of his own being and learn how to present them in an appealing way -- and rather than capture other people in the manner of a cunning epigrammist or malicious gossip -- he must learn to step outside himself, see and feel things from every human -- and inhuman -- poing of view. He must be able to report, with convincing precision, how the world looks to a child, a young woman, an elderly murderer, or the governor of Utah. He must learn, by staring intently into the dream he dreams over his typewriter to distinguish the subtlest differences between the speech and feeling of his various characters, himself as impartial and detached as God, giving all human beings their due and acknowledging their frailties. In so far as he pretends not to private vision but to omniscience, he cannot as a rule, love some of his characters and despise others. [He must be as God, all loving, yet the ultimate judge.] .... The beginning novelist who has the gift for inhabiting other lives has perhaps the best chance for success. "

These spoonfuls of seriousness from John Gardner sound ponderous and ominous and they are. Make no mistake about it. To undertake a novel is an idiotic thing to do, an idiotic presumption where the idiot, the novelist, must inhabit successfully other lives in order to become sociable and socialized. Ironically, the idiot cum novelist -- or playwrite? Or poet? (I’m not sure these are the same) -- becomes socialized through solitude. How fucked up is that?

There are some writers who make it sound like utopia, or “doing it all”, is possible, writers like Michael Chabon, for one. I was seriously highly suspicious of this guy. The last time I heard the same sort of praise was when A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius came out. Yeah. I was heartbroken that I spent money on that book. I did not get past the “Copywright” section. SHUT UP! I thought within minutes of having to listen to that guy. However: haven’t you heard?! Michael Chabon is also a model citizen, officially "hot", and a father who does 50% of the child-raising. He might as well be the messiah.

Couldn't the second coming be a woman for once?

In The Toilet

Obviously, my blog project has sagged under the weight of my world these past few months. Ever since my father died. Not consciously because of his death, although I like to use that as an excuse. According to my therapist brother, we are all depressed. He called me today from the doctor's office where he went to get a prescription for sleeping pills.

If only I could afford to take sleeping pills. But somebody has to get up with the children. My therapist brother has a child, but said child has graduated to the sleeping through the night level. My youngest child has not. Diego was UP at 3:30 a.m. today. Probably because he's sick and can't breathe well enough to sleep. At 4:15, I finally got up with him, so over his bouncing up and down on my body, yacking "la da da da La dadadada, translated as "Ride a Cock Horse to Bambury Cross."

I was nauseous with fatigue for most of the morning.

I look at this blog and I get frustrated. Where am I? I cannot for the life of me get to point B from point A without having to navigate the whole alphabet in between. If this blog is B, I'm still at M. And speaking of B&M, my days are so totally solid with shit.

So that's where I am. In the shit. And I would love some shit-lifting pills.

Back, In the Night

I'm writing a novel about a family, directly based on my family, but it's not my family, of course. Because it's fiction, the story about the family is made up. I'm making it up. But there's no denying the fiction is based in reality. If it weren't for the details of the story, which are imagined, it would be the same story as the one I was told endlessly as a child, the story that was true. Or so I was told it was true by my parents.

As I got older, as I kept hearing the story, I realized that it wasn't exactly true, but that there was a spirit in the story that was true, the story's spirit was always recognizable, a solid fellow, a friend. A friend who wanted nothing more than for me to die, maybe, but a friend nonetheless.

So I'm writing this novel, I was writing it and I am still writing it now, about this family.

"Who's this story about?" my dad asks.

"It's about two women," I say.

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," he says, his spit flying onto the Sunset magazines on his coffee table, a table which sags under the weight of a year's worth of magazines. Don't touch anything! "Who the hell would want to read a story about that?!" he caws.

Is that a real question? I don't even know. Who would want to read a story about two women? Depends on what the women are doing, in most circumstances, I think. If the women are having sex, then more people than not might want to read a story about it. If the women were having sex with each other than maybe even more people would want to read a story about it. Depends on one's demographics, I suppose.

How many people want to read a story about two women struggling to survive in the world, as friends, as lovers of men and of each other, as mothers and sisters and daughters? To survive in so many ways requires magic. Might as well. How many people want to read a story about magic?

Well, maybe quite a lot. There are some folk who would argue that they don't want stories about magic, they don't want stories with symbols, they don't want ALLEGORIES (god forbid!) because, they ask, what's the use? There is no use for such things as stories with symbols in them. We're dying now. NOW. See us now? We're dying.

We're all dying. Grow up and deal with it. So much effort goes into worrying about not dying. Give up. Die already.

Then, you can come back as two women having sex with one another. Who doesn't like that? It's like puppies? Maybe not. It's like godesses? Nymphs at least. There at last to titillate us back into blooming.

Lucky Life

My friend Robin, The Other Mother, inspires me. She's a poet, a mom, an executive director, a blogger, a fellow adventurer. I have known her for 17 years! Yesterday, she asked a question on her blog: what surprises you most about your life so far?

My answer: my luck.

The poet Gerald Stern was one of Robin's teachers at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. I was lucky to get rejected by that writing program. While I don't love Stern like I love Shakespeare, or Sam Shepard, or Larry Levis, I do love a poem by him called Lucky Life. And here is the end of this poem, and then a link to the whole thing.

Dear waves, what will you do for me this year?
Will you drown out my scream?
Will you let me rise through the fog?
Will you fill me with that old salt feeling?
Will you let me take my long steps in the cold sand?
Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study
the black clouds with the blue holes in them?
Will you let me see the rusty trees and the old monoplanes one more year?
Will you still let me draw my sacred figures
and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind?

Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life.
Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life.

-- from Lucky Life