Can You Move the Vortex? on The Nervous Breakdown

I have a new short essay up over at The Nervous Breakdown, which is, as they say, "An online literary publication type deal."

It's basically about this:

"...My entire 20s were spent living in a neighborhood which, either by default or by careful consideration, made me the writer that I am today, and I was afraid that if I moved away from it, I wouldn’t be able to write as well, as much, or at all."

and this

"If my identity was a product of the neighborhood, and my novel was a product of my identity, was it wrong to presume that the novel—extrapolated to my ability to write anything at all, forever and ever again—was contingent upon my living at the corner of 34th Street and 34th Avenue?"

Please click on over, share it, "like" it, etc.

Things I am Thinking About This Week

-Sorry it's been so long. Sometimes the world makes too difficult for me to compose my thoughts. Between gay bashings, gay torturings, Obama's idiocy regarding DOMA and DADT, Carl Paladino's iciocy, a brief bout with a seasonal cold, and what might be a touch of early seasonal-affective disorder or plain old creative comedown, I have felt too spread out to make any real sense.

-We saw La Bête on Broadway, which starred a very underused David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley, being steamrolled over by the very good, but very exhausting and not particularly specifically-memorable, Mark Rylance. All the performances are quite lovely, but they are, sadly, weighted down by this play that, well, I just didn't want any part of after fifteen minutes. In writing circles, we might say "I am not the audience for this work."

-Delores Van Cartier, which is the name of the lounge-singer in disguise played by Whoopi Goldberg in "Sister Act," is the best name I've heard in a while.

-Is Sister Act ever really coming to Broadway?

-I found it fascinating that there was press regarding the fact that Jonathan Franzen's fantastic novel "Freedom" was not nominated for the National Book Award. (I found the book to be wholly-engrossing, purely pleasurable, and carefully, wisely written. Pretty fucking fantastic.) It was as if people couldn't stop talking about how they are ready to stop talking about it.

-Does anybody still order transcripts from television talk shows?

-Kip is sitting next to me on the couch, making us a White Tree of Gondor from aluminum armature and sculpey. I am the luckiest guy in the universe.

A Moment of Stuckness

For dinner tonight I made pesto from Greenmarket basil, as well as some basil that I picked from our container garden on the back porch. I kept dumping things into the food processor that I was trying to get rid of. First, it was a quarter cup of cashews, to go with the normal basil, lemon juice, and walnuts since I didn't have pine nuts. Then it was a cup or so of steamed broccoli, which was leftover from last night's dinner, then it was some frozen peas that I felt like needed to go somewhere (read: my belly.) It was a diehard Italian's nightmare, certainly.

Now Kip is upstairs watching The Golden Girls on WE, and I'm downstairs typing this and spending time with The Bean, who, as you might have previously read, isn't ready to join the other two cats in co-habitation just yet. She seems perfectly happy down here, though she does sound what we call the "Love Alarm," which is a kind of happy-sounding, somewhat-impatient sounding series of chirps and meows, which we can hear all the way through the apartment. The other day, we decided to let the three of them re-meet each other, and expecting the worst, were surprised when she hissed dramatically, and the boys were scared shitless and went running back upstairs to their part of the apartment. You just never know.

The days and nights seem slower since we moved in together, somehow. This is a good thing, not a complaint. I just want to get back into the motion of writing, which has eluded me for the last several months. First I was packing and sorting and throwing away, then I was unpacking and re-sorting and still throwing away, and now I am basically settled, but can't seem to find the steam again. The new novel is in that early stage of becoming material, but still too early to be anything substantial. In other words, I can see all the flaws, but can't do anything about them yet because I'm still working through it. Rather, the book it still deciding what it is. This is kind of a nightmare place for me to be. I feel both trapped by it, and far away from it. I try to start new sections, pick up at a new place each time, but that has just left me feeling even more fractured and unhappy with it. This is always the case at some point. Just because it's a familiar feeling doesn't mean it's not unpleasant. Ugh.

Brooklyn !!

Kip's cats were inseparable, like a single animal with one set of thoughts--twin boys, mostly Russian Blue, skittish but loving and lively. They slept together, ate together, smothered us with their furry nuzzles in the bed together. Then we woke up one morning two months ago to find Joel walking funny. Actually, the way he was limping his hind leg made me feel as if something was seriously wrong--my instinct said this can not wait until later, he needs to go to the doctor right now. I wondered if he'd broken his foot in the night, or caught a toe somewhere and had to pull himself free. The vet said that it was bone cancer, and his legs were eaten up with it. We aren't the kind of people to let things drag on and on, and so Joel never came home. Since then, Zane has been a new, refreshed kind of cat--demanding more and more attention in the cutest, most delicious of ways, and wanting nothing more than to be by our sides at every moment. Yesterday, when I moved my two cats from Astoria to our new apartment in Ditmas Park, I wondered how the meeting would go.

When Zane saw Bad Thing (yes, that's his name) for the first time, electricity fired through the air and Zane made the most incredible, completely recognizable--which is to say, human--movements. It was so clear. He thought it was Joel, then upon realizing that it wasn't, he blinked, set down his head, and let out a sad, guttural wail. I'll never forget it. This first, tiny interaction was enough to send me into a spiral of sadness and longing, which I'm sure was nothing like the confused tunnel of memories that Zane was going through. We recognize that cats are "like" us a little bit, but we too often see ourselves as different creatures. What a beautiful, extraordinary, unexpectedly emotional moment.

Since then, they have growled, hissed and postured, in every room of the new house, trying to figure out who belongs where--maybe not understanding that as of yesterday they both belong everywhere. The most coveted area is, of course, the bed, where both of the humans are laying flat for long periods of time, and are most likely to hug and squeeze and love them. We'll see how that works out.

The move has been a lovely one, despite the days of stress and anxiety and uncertainty, and I am sure that when the boxes are all unpacked and the house starts to look like somewhere people could actually live, we'll settle in nicely. People keep asking if the move "went well." It did, despite my movers showing up 2 hours late. Although the hardest part is the part we're doing now--the deciding not only where to put everything, but more importantly, how you want to move through your space. How do you want to sit in your new office? Where should each "category" of kitchen item live? What art do you want to look at when you sit in this chair, or that chair? How do you work the dishwasher, and the new-fangled stove that preheats to 400 degrees in 6 minutes, no really.

Bean, my more adorable and more, um, Rubenesque cat, has spent the last 48 hours under the guest bedroom in the basement. She has come out once to pee--that I know of, and a few times I can coax her out for a few minutes of loving and a little sip of water. The last time I moved--9 years ago, when she was 4 years old--she stayed wrapped up inside an overcoat on a chair for three days. I want my happy little girl back.

I'm thrilled, don't get me wrong. The house is so beautiful, and so full of promise and opportunity, not to mention the most luxurious washer/dryer and central air that a person could desire. Oh yeah, and we have a backyard--it's a wreck right now, but soon (soonish?) we'll have a deck and some plants and a little garden party.

But...promise me that we made the right choice. Promise me that the bumps in the road ahead will be remembered as tiny victories over the things we used to think were problems, but really weren't. Promise me that soon we'll all end up, the five of us, napping and talking and loving in the bed with no growling or hissing (or snoring from the boyfriend). Promise me that everything will be alright.

What I Am Thinking About This Week

Today, as I begin changing everything I can think of from my old address to my new address, I am thinking of every place my information resides--banks, insurance, magazines and post office, credit cards, AAA, more and more, and more that I surely have forgotten. I'm also thinking about all this Facebook privacy stuff, how everyone is going crazy reacting to the idea that maybe your "information" has been compromised, and what is going to happen when your "information" is leaked to "outside sources." And, on top of that, I'm thinking of the census takers who I see walking around neighborhoods, with their clipboards and their open, hopeful faces. And also their begging and knocking on doors and talking to people who are too confused, or jaded, or suspicious to answer the questions. In short: I am thinking about all the ways in which we want and don't want to be known.

I am curious about the shock and surprise people are having, or are at least expressing, when they find out that Facebook, a free service, has shared their "information" with third party websites in order to, well, sell you things. I only ask: What did you expect from a website that asked you to enter all your "information" and then tracked every click of here and there? Also, What information are you trying to protect? Also, it only knows what you tell it.

I am thinking about one of my favorite things in New York, which is the moment when you put something on the curb that you don't need any more and then you go to get a Vietnamese ravioli, and when you come back, it's gone. I am thinking about how I love, love, love the efficiency of this. And I am even imagining what the object must feel when it is given a new home, and suddenly made useful once again. This makes me think of Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "Famous" where she says "I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous/or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular/but because it never forgot what it could do."

Right this moment, I am thinking: I should not have eaten the entire of bag of potato chips.

"Now you have to start letting it go," said Peter, my editor, after I turned in the final draft of my novel. I thought I had been doing that since 2005, which was when I originally finished it. (I say that--originally--because not only did Peter ask me to write a new scene or two, and to adjust a thing or two, I think I probably could have tinkered with it for another five years. It's true when they say you never finish a novel, you just stop.) But I hadn't really let it go. Do you ever? I tell you this about Peter firstly because he was right (as per usual) and also because I notice myself wondering how I am reflected in the work, and wondering how to let go of that. Just tonight, I handed a galley to a friend of a friend and thought "Oh, there I go, into his hand, into his head, and digested." (Of course, this is not really how we read books, and I know that, so I am aware that it's me and not the real thing that's happening.) What's interesting, and hard to deal with, apparently, is how I want to be known for the book, but also distance myself from the book. Oh, art, you are so complicated and wonderful and I love you!

Apartment Hunting

For the past six Sundays--my only day off from three "day jobs"--Kip and I have run ourselves all over parts of Brooklyn looking at apartment after apartment, in many different neighborhoods, at many different levels of nice and nicer (some were decidedly not nice) until, this week, we decided to move ahead with a beautiful space on East 7th Street in Kensington. Barring any unforeseen strangeness on the part of the owner, or, say, plumes of volcanic ash, we should find ourselves unpacking boxes and arguing about paint chips on June 1.

So, today, I got to spend the time doing what I like to do best: eat, sleep and watch TV. Kip can sleep through anything, and does, so I usually wake up before him, sit around surfing the Internet and chatting with other early risers, and then after and hour or so, I crawl back into bed and see if I can get a few more minutes rest. Then we lay there petting the cats and talking about what we plant to do with the rest of the day.

We decided that since we didn't have to schedule or re-schedule apartment seeing, wrestle with agents who show up or don't, whose listings are either genuine or not, and whose interest level is probably in direct proportion to the amount of distrustful, shocked looks we tried to hide while they showed us something that had been on the market for many, many months. Not to readers: You don't want to live in an apartment with floor drains in the middle of every space they are calling a bedroom.

There were, however, some incredibly beautiful spaces, and for not that much money. We looked at a place in Crown Heights that retained all the original woodwork from the 1910s, and, oh yeah, had three fireplaces. But, ultimately, the layout was a bit strange and we couldn't figure out how to use the space with the way we wanted. We also looked at a full three-floor house in Lefferts Gardens that was, quite simply, not to be believed. Front porch, backyard, two-car garage, three bedrooms upstairs, three bathrooms, washer and dryer, dishwasher, antique stove, and more and more and more. We decided that we couldn't afford it. Or that we could afford it, but then we'd find ourselves house poor. (Additionally, I didn't want to pay the outrageously high broker's fee to a broker who showed up 15 minutes late in his white Corvette and departed quickly to make it to his martial arts class.)

I'm nervous about the changes ahead. But also looking forward to them. Here's hoping that the cats make friends, that the presence of the dishwasher means that Kip actually does the dishes that I dirty when I cook, that the central air lulls us to sleep every hot summer night, and that the small square of dirt in the back bursts forth with whatever we plant there. Movin' on up, indeed.

Editor's Note

Back in December of 2008, I wrote this post, a kind of reflection on the year that had been--turning 30, for example. (It has turned out to be superb, not the hellish shift that some people swore it would be.) The post was also about how I felt about writing, about publishing, about work in general. I've been thinking a lot about that post, and whether it makes any sense to amend it, or maybe clarify it. I realize now that it was really about how I felt about what I thought publishing was. Everything I said back then was true. Or it was true then when I wrote it. And, for the most part, it still is true. But I think I've realized a few more things about myself, and about what it means to create things.

I wrote that "my interest in the 'book' world has waned." What I meant, I know now, was that my interest in who got what kind of advance, who the hot new writer was, who was being talked up in magazines--all that had waned. This, I know now, is not the "book world," but the "media world." I'm not sure what took me so long to understand the difference. I wrote that "the enchantment of publishing has worn off for me." What I didn't realize at the time was that actually publishing, actually being published, feels so completely different than what I thought it would feel like. (And the book isn't even in the universe yet...so I'm curious and scared and excited and worried about what happens then.) It is, at the most basic level, a feeling of being understood.

Oprah told a story once, on the DVDs of her show that you can get from Netflix, about how she got the role in The Color Purple. She had never wanted anything so badly. She was convinced that she was going to get the role, she was convinced that she wasn't. She found herself, finally, at a fat farm, trying to lose all the weight that she has struggled with for so long, and she's walking laps around the track, and feeling so overwhelmed by everything, that she bursts into tears. She realizes that she has allowed the want of this thing to control every aspect of her life. And in that moment, she says to herself, okay, I give it up to god. And then, and only then, does someone come out of the house and say "Ms. Winfrey, Stephen Spielberg is on the phone for you." He says to her, "Get off that track right now, because if you lose one pound you can't have this role." Sometimes I love Oprah's stories. It's as simple, and as complicated, as that.

I think at the end of 2008, I came to my own Color Purple moment--I had given it all up to the Goddesses of the Universe and, in turn, they gave me what I wanted. Or needed. "Be careful what you say that you 'need' around here," my brother said when I was in Orlando visiting my nephews, meaning toys and things. I understood what he was trying to say, but sometimes those things are the same. Sometimes what you want is what you need, and when you get it you feel elated and understood and grateful.

Two Things

1.
I'm not really a skier. Too much equipment, too much boots and poles and gloves. Too many layers. I like all the things that surround skiing. The whooshing sounds the other skiers make in the powder. The slow, swaying ascent to the top of the lifts. The warm fires in the lodge--though I've really only been skiing in places where the lodge looks like a cafeteria. I like the way your body feels spent and accomplished at the end of the day, and the hot shower that accompanies the exhaustion when you arrive back home. The Frito-Chili Pie that you eat to replenish the energy that you spent, the wine you drink and the champagne bottle you put out on the porch to chill and forget to open.

But the skiing itself--ostensibly the point--is another story. I'm scared of it. I'm afraid that if I start down the hill then I'll never stop. I'm afraid of the uncertain motions that the earth feels like its making underneath you. I don't like that the green circle trails at one mountain have no resemblance to the green circle trails on other mountains, and that you don't get to see the elevation changes in the trails when you study the map they give you. I don't like that your friends tell you that you can "do it," and you believe them, and then you nearly expire of frigid disbelief in what your body can accomplish on its own.

I think to really enjoy skiing, you have to be a little bit outside of your body, or, rather, you get the most benefit, the most pleasure from the skiing experience when you are willing to let go enough that you feel like you're flying. You want it to feel effortless. And so, paradoxically, in order to feel those real moments of effortlessness, you have to really be grounded in your body--you have to let your body make thousands of tiny movements and adjustments as fast as your body can make them. The movements have to be totally instinctual, unconscious.

Earlier this week, while I was at the top of the second section of a blue square trail--Fox Tail at Mountain Creek, in Vernon, New Jersey--I started thinking that maybe the only way to be outside of your body, is to really become it.


2.
The B61 bus is now the B62. Well, actually, they have split the line into two lines--the B61 now runs from Red Hook to Downtown Brooklyn, and the B62 runs from Downtown Brooklyn to Long Island City. Apparently, the Red Hook section of the line kept making the buses late, and then they would all stack up and make for a line of five or six buses all hitting a single stop at once. Or, they would all sit around at stops waiting to get back on schedule--and this makes the riders late.

I'm not sure where a person finds out about this before it happens. I found out when I was standing on Bedford and South 4th Street and the B62 arrived, which was a bus I'd never heard of. And I take buses a lot. There was a sign inside the bus that explained their thinking. I'm on board with this--ON BOARD, get it!--but I'm curious to see if it actually changes anything about how long it takes to get from one end of town to another, or if it actually makes the buses less late. What they should really do is stop that dumb curb installation at the intersection of Classon and Flushing Avenue--THAT'S why the bus uptown from there is always so dang late, because to squeeze all those lanes of traffic into the one within a single block is absurd. But I know why they do what they do. They do studies, right?

All this is to say: changes are happening.

Weekend Update

It took me about an hour and a half to drive home from the Greenmarket on Saturday night. We ended up getting about 9 inches of snow, with parts of Brooklyn getting as much as 14. After closing up the syrup stand, we went to have dinner at The Spain Restaurant, which is one of my favorites. When people ask me what it's like, I say, "It's 100 year old drunk waiters in polyester bolero jackets." It's also the place, when asked if they could bring something for the vegetarians, said: "I'll bring some potatoes." So, after dinner, we made it back to our parked trucks and slogged ourselves through the oncoming blizzard. Taxis were sliding all over Third Avenue. On the Queensboro Bridge, the visibility was so bad that you couldn't see any light from the city, from Queens, from the cars in front of you. I'm glad I made it home without incident. I was glad that I had a large heavy vehicle, and not some tiny plastic car. Perhaps the most New York-ish of images, was, of course, some delivery guy on a bike, at 10pm in a blizzard. How we do love our delivery.

I'm writing a set of discussion questions for Yield, which will be in stores in Sept 2010. I'm not sure what do to about this. What do people want to talk about, or think about, after they have read my novel? In some ways, I think that the author is the worst person to write these questions. Perhaps I am the best person to answer the questions once they have been written? Or, maybe the readers are the best people to answer these questions? I'm not sure what to think about this.

Kip and I are headed to South Carolina and Tennessee for a few days after Christmas. We hope to see Laura and Amy while we are all in the same place--perhaps convening at a Waffle House, which Amy has learned to love.

I'm taking a short break from the blog--and will see you in the beginning of the new year.

Love to everyone.

Important Ages

1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21, 25, 29, 30, 31, 37, 40, 48, 49, 50, 55, 59, 60, 62, 65, 70, 75, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100.

This Week

Part One:
One of the (many) benefits of living in the great City of New York is that cultural events happen here on a very large scale. The downside of this is that everyone wants to attend these events, and when something comes around like Lady Gaga at Radio City Music Hall for two nights only, way more than 12,000 people clamor for tickets at 10:00am on that fateful Friday only to discover that, surprise, you are too, too late. Even the presale tickets were gone at 12:00 noon the day before. But somehow, StubHub was selling tickets throughout each section, orchestra and all three mezzanines, days and days before even the date of sale was announced. People on Craig's List were selling Orchestra pit tickets weeks ago. This speaks volumes about the terrible truth of how the music industry and its cronies and friends-of ruin the music business for fans. But then, after it became clear to me that I was not getting tickets, and no one I knew was able to get tickets, I realized that maybe this wasn't such a big deal after all. Everything Lady Gaga does is about visibility, about being seen. So, I figure, whatever she does those two nights, I'll see it. It will be on YouTube, or all over the blogs, she'll Twitter her thanks to all her fantastic gay fans, and perhaps this monopolizing of the imagery and webwaves, maybe this is what Gaga is all about.

Part Two:
Tonight's dinner turned out terribly. Does rice expire? Even when you have it in the fridge? I guess it does--it sort of fell apart, like puffed rice does in leftover cereal milk. I was trying to re-create this leek and white truffle risotto that I made a few weeks ago when some friends were over to watch the Emmys. That night is was spectacular. I was actually surprised it came out so beautifully. But, like other things, and like a lot of people, I need a little reason to shine. So, when it came time to make this big pot of dinner this evening, I felt half-assed about it, and the results are hideous. If I weren't alone, I'd throw it out.

Part Three:
The new Margaret Atwood novel is intriguing, as one might expect. I'm having a weird reaction to it--I'm loving the writing, the specific sentences. But the overall narrative isn't that compelling to me. And this is odd, considering that this one, The Year of the Flood, is kind of a continuation of a thought, a sort-of sequel to one of her books that I loved, Oryx and Crake. I sit on the B61 and read and read, and I keep wondering when the story is going to start. In fact, today I skipped ahead and read the first two pages of a later part of the book to see if there was something maybe I wanted to get to. The good news is: There was. So, I continue on.

Part Four:
I just finished the new Dan Chaon novel, Await Your Reply. This was a totally different experience. The story itself is so exciting, so twisty and slow-to-reveal itself, that I couldn't wait to get to the end. I felt really torn about it. The writing is so beautiful, and so concentrated and thoughtful, that I wanted to take my time. But the what-is-going-to-happen was pressing on me so much that I wanted to stay up all night and read and read and read.

Part Five:
The madness of the holidaze has begun. What to do for a holiday card this year? When to schedule the tree-trimming party, in which people don't actually tree-trim but admire the tree-trimming that you have done earlier in the day? What to buy people? Whether to buy for people? How long do marshmallows keep if you ship them?

Part Six:
Can we see Levi Johnston naked already?

Letter from Greece, Part 6 of 10

Day Four: Santorini

The “ferry” is actually a huge cruise-ship style boat, carrying about 1,800 people from Athens to Santorini, making interim stops at Paros, Naxos and Ios. Imagine that you’re in a small airport, and every flight has been cancelled due to weather. Everyone spreads out, taking up every corner, every aisle and walkway. They have planned to be immobile for the eight-hour trip, and so every table on every deck is full—card players, smokers, drinkers, elaborate board games and stacks of worn paperbacks. A few laptops drink from the scarce electrical outlets. Some passengers wander up and down the boat, holding their cords and plugs out in front of them, forlorn and wishful, like beggars.

But we have sprung for a first-class cabin—it is perhaps the best money I have ever spent. About an hour after we board—after coffee in the lounge, and the waiter’s light scoffing at me drinking Coca-Cola at 7am—we figure out how to get into room 702, which has two tiny beds, along with its own shower and toilet.

We lay down and I fall, miraculously, asleep.

Periodically, the ship’s crew makes strange, squawky announcements, which emerge from a tiny speaker on the nightstand. Out the window is ocean as far as you can see, then a dark line, then sky.

We arrive at Santorini’s new port, maybe two hundred of us, everyone looking for a taxi, a rental car, a scooter, some even hire donkeys. After a bit of confusion about which car we should get into, we end up squished against some gay guys from…Germany? The Netherlands?…who I decide must be deaf and on their first date—they are full of hand gestures and awkward pauses. Thankfully, we arrive at our hotel first, the El Greco. They put us in room 314, which looks out over the pool on one side, and over the caldera on the other. We open the windows and the breeze blows through the room. It’s so remarkable, and simple, that I use my little camera to take a movie of the billowing curtain—which I later post on Facebook, to the “like” of nine friends. (Logging in from Greece changes my preferred language to Greek, and I start getting emails that say things like: Stephanie Hughes σχολίασε την κατάσταση σας.) We lie on the bed and talk about food, about whether we should venture to the beach today or tomorrow, whether we should get in the pool before or after we walk into town, whether we should order in. We discuss options like we’ve won the lottery.

Santorini, aside from the views, is famous for a dish called Domatokeftethes, which is a tomato fritter seasoned with mint, and for the local fava beans. What makes the fava beans taste so great is the dry, volcanic soil, which—apparently—concentrates the flavor. The restaurant we choose for dinner doesn’t have the fava on the menu, and the tomato fritters arrive soggy and rather tasteless. The trouble with eating in tourist towns, of course, is that you have no idea whether any particular restaurant has any particular reputation. However, the rest of the meal is lovely, and, as it turns out, the soil makes for deliciously complicated white wine—bright, sunny and dry. The artichoke stew is homey and filling, but the grilled pita brushed with olive oil and dill, on that breezy evening on the rooftop restaurant, looking out over the caldera to the West, is the best thing we put in our mouths.

We eat dessert in bed, watching “Greece’s Got Talent,” which is a clone of the American show of similar name. For the most part, at least according to the contestants on this particular episode, the Greeks do not have talent. The act that gets the most applause is an old man who manages to stand on his head on top of a rickety chair. Then, an older gay man, like pudgy Paul Lynde, sings a traditional Greek song. The judges are a goateed man with no discernable sense of humor, a model/actress/princess (?) who changes outfits during every commercial break, and whose hair is an elaborate spray of stiff, shiny black, and the last, another singer/entertainer type, dressed in a light suit with a huge turquoise pocket square, who looks like a less-butch Elizabeth Ashley.

The first night in Santorini, I spend three hours awake, level 3 out of 10—not sleeping, but without anxiety. For a while, I watch the tiny green blinking light on the fixture in the ceiling. Insomniacs, like me, who just lay there—instead of getting up to do something, thus compounding layers of worry on top of a kind of eerie displacement of time—have the opportunity to be conscious with their unconscious bedmates for long periods, listening to their breathing, their murmurings and ramblings.

Jason was a serious sleeper, shutting the world out entirely, motionless, his body becoming heavy and immovable in the night—quite the opposite of his bright, energetic waking self. We slept in the loft bed of his 29th Street apartment, with books stuffed in between the mattress and the bed frame, as if one needed fifty choices at arms length.

Andrea was a sleep talker. She washed her hands at night, holding them above her in the air, rubbing her elbows, and waving conjured cobwebs away from her shoulders. “Did you find the bodies?” she once asked, to no one in particular. “Thank you, Mr. Peterson,” she said, “Add them to the list.”

Mario slept quietly, soundly. He had trouble getting out of bed in the morning. His alarm clock was the CD player, and every morning, for months, out of the speakers came first the Jill Scott record, then the Dixie Chicks record. I listened to those songs over and over, holding his hand in mine under the pillow, wondering if he had any plans to get up.

Meg never used a pillow, and took up little space in the bed. Not only was she a small person, but her movements were always was focused, contained, and she slept the same way. Resting her hands behind her head, or along her sides, always on her back. Even in sleep she was conserving energy.

Kip twitches. He snores. He has nightmares that he either rarely remembers, or rarely shares with me. His body is always relaxing one more muscle at a time, sinking into sleep. Sometimes I lay there imagining elaborate devices to hold open the throat, thinking that if I just had a curved piece of plastic or something, if only I had a tube of some kind, a way to sleep hanging face down, somehow—your mind does strange things in the small hours. He snores into the pillow corner, into the cats’ faces, into my ear as he holds me.

In the morning, I look up the side effects of insomnia: drowsiness, increase in stress or anxiety, headaches, problems with digestion, physical impairment, mental impairment, heart disease, memory loss, weight gain, depression, reduced self-esteem, premature death.

What Happened on Friday

It took me 19 minutes to get from Union Square to Astoria last Friday night. That's a world record, surely. The avenues were empty, and the bridge was so clear and gorgeous--which is often is, but I noted it, just the same. When I arrived home, in my mailbox was the first check from my literary agent, for my novel, Yield, which is coming out next fall. This was turning out to be the best day of my life. Except that, at sometime between noon and 6:45pm, a burglar had broken through my back bedroom window, swiped my laptop and my jar of change, and then bolted away. When I saw the window the first thing I thought was -- why is my window open? And why is the computer missing? Then it all sort of assembled together in my brain, and I felt numb.

Bean was still cowering in the closet, making the small, scared noises that she does when someone she doesn't know is in the apartment. (This said to me that the person could have been in the apartment even five or ten minutes before I got home, but she is also the kind of cat who would stay hidden in the dark for five hours.)

The cops came. We filled out the paperwork. They were very nice. One bitched about their superiors who, he said, were "fifteen years younger than us." "And man," the other one added, "they really bust our balls." I felt bad for them; in that moment they seemed pitiful. One of them was huge, and he looked too big for my little chair and desk. They told me they'd wait outside for the sergeant to arrive, and they probably wouldn't be calling me again. I didn't expect that they would.

When people are burgled, they talk about feeling invaded, violated--as if something from outside of them has moved into their being. But I feel the opposite -- as if a part of me has been taken out of my body and is now wandering the world. Pictures of me, essays I've been working on for months or years, my manuscripts, thousands of emails that I have saved for their important information, or for their sentimental value. The lesson here is, of course, protect and backup. Thankfully, Apple's Time Machine feature saved everything I had except for about two pages of new fiction -- and the second draft is always better.

I spent the entire day on Saturday trying to counteract the negative energy of the theft--somehow feeling the burglar's desperation, that desire, that sad karmic choice--as if it had come from within me, how strange is that? I bought some arty junk from one of the artists on the south end of Union Square. I was ridiculously helpful at the syrup stand--even to the customers that I want to stab in the eye. There was a guy playing electric guitar under the subway at Broadway in Astoria, and I put ten bucks in his hat. I needed to make choices, and I wanted to choose generosity. Do you understand how this kind of giving was about steeling myself against the alternative?

What Do You Want from Air Travel, or Miracles Do Happen

"It's raining, can you believe it?" my mother asked at about 5:45am this morning, when I had staggered out of my bedroom. Everything was still dark and quiet. The weather meant that my plane was about an hour late getting out of Chattanooga--the worst kind of late, the kind where you're all sitting on the plane, buckled and stowed, and yet the weather has you grounded--so no getting up, no moving around, no getting off and rethinking the whole idea. "Maybe we could just drive there," says the guy in the other row--ha ha, never heard that one before!!! Eventually, they re-routed us over Nashville (who would have known?) and we made it to Memphis, where I had missed my connecting flight to LaGuardia. (None of this part of the story is that interesting or original. I know.) However, there was a flight to JFK that was to depart about 25 minutes after I found myself at gate B1, and the nicest of the nice, "Ms. Anna B.," as her name tag said, was kind enough to put me on it. Hence, I'm on en-route as I write this long rambling post. A miracle!

The woman sitting in the seat next to me on the ground in Chattanooga was quite impatient, making huffing noises and glaring at the flight attendant, as if she had something to do with the rain, or something to do with NOT making it go away. I'm always amazed at these people. Because the pilot--whom you just have to trust, like surgeons or cab drivers or, you know, literary agents--is trying to make the best decisions possible. Because the alternative is, you know, death.

The 4th of July holiday has "become my Christmas," my mother also said. These days, it's the only time our whole family gathers together. With my brother and his family in Orlando, making their own Christmas traditions and rituals, and me having 11 years of being stranded in Birmingham, Cincinnati, Charlotte, Atlanta, Memphis, and even Philadelphia, I try to avoid flying in the snowy months as much as possible. But I like to come down and see everyone, eat bad food that gives everybody strange bowel movements, and watch my dad run in fear from a canon.

The older you get, the stranger your family becomes. Rather, the more you get to know them, and hence, their eccentricities float--dramatically, quietly, hilariously--to the surface. They were weird to being with, most likely. I began thinking a lot about this over the weekend in Tennessee, where the whole American suburbia thing started to make more sense to me--actually, not "make sense" as much as "reveal.". When I say "the whole American suburbia thing" I mean whatever Sam Mendes is always trying to work out in his movies. (See American Beauty or Revolutionary Road, or even, god help you, Away from You, or was it Away We Go, or something.)

Your neighbors grow up and become frail old people. They introduce themselves to you, forgetting that you are the tiny child that they once invited to eat popcorn and watch a movie. They forget that you are the tiny child that was disappointed to find out that the movie was "Around the World in 80 Days," and not something that had been released in the last two weeks--like maybe about Ninja Turtles--let alone his lifetime. It was not as fun as he had hoped, and perhaps as you had hoped, but he remembers it fondly--and I suppose that's the most important thing.

Also, things that happened to you when you were smaller, and that you will never ever forget even if you live to be 200 years old--like the handle bar of your brother's bike jamming up into the side of his mouth and taking off a layer of his gum, followed by your mother rushing out of the house with a bottle of cold water and making him drink and spit, drink and spit, the water rushing red out of his mouth, then pink, then red again and again, screaming--you may learn that your mother, for example, doesn't even remember it happening. "There were so many," she said, meaning injuries, meaning tiny, urgent emergencies.

My nephews are glorious little specimens of humanity. It's good that I do not have children. Children to me are simultaneously the most fascinating subject one could turn his attention to, and the most boring, repetitive robotic weirdos you could meet. Why do they do what they do? I guess, why do any of us? They are lovable little terrors and joyful little bunches of personality.

Miracles do happen! In the Memphis airport, and in your very own family. Okay, miracle may be the wrong word to use--particularly when all "Ms. Anna B" did was her job. But this plane is being battered around quite a bit by the wind outside it--and if you are reading this, then it means that I survived, and made it to my boyfriend's house in Brooklyn, which is pretty miraculous. The nephews, too, are pretty miraculous. If you want proof, here it is:

Letter from Greece, Part 2 of 10

Day One: Departure, New York City

The outbound flight is overnight, just over eight hours—we will arrive at about nine o’clock in the morning. I take one Ambien before the dinner service. I’ve loaded my iPod with Woody Allen movies, and I stuff Vestal McIntyre’s new novel down into the seat pocket in front of me, plus three New Yorkers that I’ve let pile up. Kip gathers the small pillows and the blue and yellow blanket sealed in a plastic bag, and fixes himself against the window, soon asleep. The in-flight television has nine channels, each with a series of Greek television shows, or cheap copies of popular game shows, all of them seem to feature graying male singers, in tuxedos with slick-looking hair—Frank Sinatra meets Zorba the Greek crossed with Barry Manilow. The women in the TV audience are going wild. I can’t tell if the performances are from this year, or from thirty years ago. Old guys like this could never be pop stars in America.

Sleep never comes.

But I’m used to that.

I read, I watch the movies on the iPod, I stare into the blank screen. Hours pass. I drink a tiny, airplane food-sized bottle of red wine, remarkably good—I consider waking Kip so he can taste it. The man sitting in front of me has bad circulation, or restless leg syndrome, or unassailable boredom, and he takes to standing in the aisle for long periods of time, checking his pockets obsessively. For something he brought? For something he forgot? On the screen at the front of the cabin there’s a map of the world, shifting from far away to closer distances, following our tiny tin tube as it crosses the Atlantic, over the northern border of Spain, over the heel of Italy, and eventually to Athens.

Some Angst

New York has been lovely of late. I've been doing a lot of nothing since we got back from Greece, taking my time before delving back into the novel for a few weeks (months? days? overnights?) of work to make it ready for publication. And, after that, of course, comes the waiting for it to appear on shelves. (Or, in remaindered boxes at the back of the store, which I have considered.)

I am both excited and anxious about re-entering it. Can I access that emotional place, that language, the energy that made the book what it is? This is the difference between inspiration and work, I keep thinking. Writing is so mysterious that I think we are often fearful that the magic won't take. It takes so much out of you, that it becomes to sacred. Of course, the big secret is that there is no magic, and nothing is sacred. And yet...

This business of art-making still eludes me. I realize more and more as I get older, that I am purely an instinctual writer. (Are there other kinds? Puzzle-y kinds? Character-y kinds?) I don't start with plots, or characters, or even "ideas." What always emerges first, are voices, and even more enigmatic forces, which I can only describe as "The Feelies." It's kind of like this: Say you are on a front porch somewhere, and miles away, the wind starts blowing, but you can feel it, even though it's not on you. You just know it. You just have to trust yourself more than you trust anything else. The wind will eventually reach you. Or something like that.

I can't put a finger on that distant knowledge-thing that creativity feels like. And, I guess the most ridiculous part is that I feel simultaneously compelled to understand it, (and to write about it in unclear metaphors about wind and porches) and also so completely indifferent to it.

Jean Gray, where are you to explain all this?

Greece!

--Currently engaging myself in the anxiety of feeling unprepared for my vacation to Greece. We leave tomorrow. I found myself, perhaps foolishly, reading a little here and there on various travel sites about what to do and see, and, not surprisingly, became overwhelmed. Luckily, I am not one of those people who needs to do and see everything to feel satisfied. Whatever we do, fine, hooray, it's not work and it's not my regular life! Success!!

--I have been so out of it, so tired with show and syrup and work and such that I managed to get on the train tonight, headed to see my friend Jamie in her dance performance and whoops, I went to the wrong venue and thus missed it. Oh well. Sorry, Jamie.

--On my walk through the East Village, (on my way to the wrong venue) there were two places, two separate street corners, where huge dumpsters had been set out to accommodate all the NYU kids moving out of the dorms. Parents with cars were tossing stuff into them at one end, and people were fishing through them at the other. "Look, Brian," said one young woman, holding up a tacky fake chandelier, broken and dirty, "I totally won this in the lottery that is right now!"

--I haven't seen the new Star Trek movie yet. I am contemplating going to tonight's 11pm show. Okay, I've talked myself into it.

See you when I get back from Greece!!!!!

Hump Day Update

--Vermont was lovely, if brief. I guess I was there for about 18 hours, total. Still, I was able to spend some time walking through the woods, and feeling like myself. At some point while I was walking up through the part of the farm that they call "The Marriage Area," I picked up a huge branch that had fallen. It was not heavy, just large and twisted. I propped it on my shoulder and kept walking, a kind of Tom Bombadill moment. As I came to the higher part, I turned around and looked out over the hill and the snow and the land all around me. I felt such a huge swell of gratitude toward the trees. I wondered, for a moment, if I should say it out loud to them, or would they know it already? Would they care?

--My brain has been pleasantly distracted by the goings-on lately, and I feel simultaneously exhausted and charged, like I'm on speed, but drunk. As soon as things pan out and situate in some kind of finality, I'll be able to relax more. I think. I hope.

--After all the fuss, I joined Facebook. (And I have since updated my previous post on this blog about not joining it, so there.) People have been going on an on about it to be, as if it were the savior of mankind. It is not that. It is no more or less interesting and annoying than any of the previous social-networking websites, although this one has a certain reach, and therefore people who, I would gander to presume, were not a part of Friendster, for example, have signed up and send inane messages to my boyfriend about assinine right-wing causes. Hello? The interesting part to me--so far--at least, is how people talk about connecting on Facebook, but there really isn't any connecting going on that I can see. There's just confirmation and information. "Hi, it's been 15 years since I saw you!" the notes say. I am glad for them, but we are not really sharing anything other than some kind of intangible proof that we still exist. "Here I am," the thing says to the universe, and here is my data. It also makes me realize that I have no photos of myself. I stopped taking pictures with my own camera a while back, and so now my digital self lives inside other people's computers--the modern era is so fractured.

--I think the boyfriend and I are going to Prague sometime in May-ish.

Open Letters, Vol. 8

Dear Modernity,

Oh, Modernity, you bitter mistress, you taught me so much over the weekend.

Actually, you didn't teach me anything concrete, nothing I could say for sure--which, in itself is its own kind of modernity--you just brought up a whole new set of questions. Socrates would say that is teaching, but you know, whatevs.

First, on my Twitter feed, I watched as Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore began complaining about their neighbors. Then I watched as very slowly, the story got picked up by various "news" outlets and broadcast all abouts the interweb. It was the first time I was able to see one of those celebrity stories from beginning to end. What started as something rather vacant and light suddenly became a news story, and people were quoting the Tweets and talking about how Ash and Demi were feeling. Who really knows how they were feeling? The machine took something and chewed it into bits.

And second, me and some other gay boys (plus a real live lady) sat around on Saturday night drinking beer and watching dumb videos on YouTube. We watched the one where the guy pukes on the morning news show, the one where the Swedish lady pukes on that morning show, the one where the lady falls and really hurts herself while trying to stomp grapes, the one where the lady falls on the Segway, the farting aerobics instructor, the farting newscaster, Sue Simmons and her important question, the gay/blind hiker, the weather man with diarrhea, and many, many others. How did we miss this typo?

Kip suggested that this was the current version of sitting around the campfire telling stories. It was pretty remarkable, in a way, all of us sitting in a circle, passing around the laptop, calling up one crazy narrative from YouTube, and turning the computer around so everyone could watch together. It didn't feel vacant, which you might presume.

I'm not the kind of person who bemoans how technology and modernity are keeping us apart from one another, but I'm not foolish enough to believe that things like YouTube and social networking websites are actually bringing people closer together--perhaps in an organizing sense, in a mobilizing sense, but never making quality interaction among people, surely. Right? Maybe? Instead, I think it's some unknown mixture of the two. Our language is becoming these videos, truncated for cultural ease--like that joke about the prisoners telling jokes in prison*. Our consciousness is becoming the translation of Twitter feeds.

Help us, I want to scream. But, to whom? And from what?

Sincerely,
Lee

*Let me know if you want to hear that joke.

Still Alive

Still Alive, Part 1:

Skiing in Maine was fabulous. I did not die. Skiing is somewhat horrible in that for the first few hours that you are on the skis and in the snow, your body is refusing everything. You are convinced that you are going to begin falling down the mountain at uncontrollable speeds until you end up in a pile of broken bones and bloody ice hanging from your nostrils. Plus, you have all these clothes on that are puffy and weird and are too big for you. Or maybe all of this is just the amateur's response to skiing for the first time in about fifteen years.

We had a lovely house filled with lovely company, and I was so glad to have been asked. Cory even made Frito Pie.


Still Alive, Part 2:

My mother called today to see if I was still living. Over the weekend, due to who knows what, I came down with some kind of stomach virus, which sent me to the bathroom for about 36 hours in various states of "hmmm," "rush," and "emergency." I want to blog about the gory details, but something tells me that we all know them deep down somewhere already. I'm not sure I really have anything particularly revelatory or original about shitting your brains out and puking out of your nose. There, I said it.

Okay, fine, JUST THIS: after you have puked, and you blow your nose and everything, and you think you are ready to go back to bed, do one extra thing. Throw your head way back and snort around a bit. There is some kind of place back there, some kind of pocket, where the puke waits. And just when you get horizontal, it comes sloshing back into your throat, and you have to get up, spew it out, and try again. I'm just trying to save you a step.


Still Alive, Part 3:

My friend Marc, who lives in Paris, sent me a New Year's postcard with a gouache of a man who has hung himself from the top of the Christmas tree, which is bent over sideways. Underneath him is the fallen chair he has kicked over. Sort of morbid, but I thought it was hilarious. I laughed right there at the mailbox. I survived the holidaze, despite how much distaste I have for the season. The older I get, the more I'm able to just let it be what it is. I think I'm starting to realize that Christmas comes around every year, just like New Year's, and birthdays and Thanksgivings and so on. So if the fondue turns out not as thick as you wanted, eh, who cares? There's always next year. I think I'm finally starting to loosen up.