Category: life

Carpe diem

Here is a beautiful and loving tribute to Heath Ledger.

It makes me ashamed of all the time I’ve ever wasted. I don’t mean time spent staring at the ocean, or reading Travis McGee when I ought to be washing dishes, or lying on the grass watching clouds go by — that’s all time well spent, in my opinion. But all the time I’ve wasted on bullshit, pettiness, avoiding work, letting fear win, or feeling sorry for myself for more than 15 seconds. Any time spent diminishing myself.

Seize the fucking day, people. Kiss it hard and use it for something good, because one day will be the last day. And we can never be ready. The best we can be is full of days well spent.

More Trav

But I could not get into it. I am apart. Always I have seen around me all the games and parades of life and have always envied the players and the marchers. I watch the cards they play and feel in my belly the hollowness as the big drums go by, and I smile and shrug and say, Who needs games? Who wants parades? The world seems to be masses of smiling people who hug each other and sway back and forth in front of a fire and sing old songs and laugh into each other’s faces, all truth and trust. And I kneel at the edge of the woods, too far to feel the heat of the fire. Everything seems to come to me in some kind of secondhand way which I cannot describe. Am I not meat and tears, bone and fears, just as they? Yet when the most deeply touched, I seem, too often, to respond with smirk or sneer, another page in my immense catalog of remorses. I seem forever on the edge of expressing the inexpressible, touching what has never been touched, but I cannot reach through the veil of apartness. I am living without being truly alive. I can love without loving. When I am in the midst of friends, when there is laughter, closeness, empathy, warmth, sometimes I can look at myself from a little way off and think that they do not really know who is with them there, what strangeness is there beside them, trying to be something else.
 
Once, just deep enough into the cup to be articulate about subjective things, I tried to tell Meyer all this. I shall never forget the strange expression on his face. “But we are all like that!” he said. “That’s the way it is. For everyone in the world. Didn’t you know?”
 
from The Scarlet Ruse by John D. MacDonald, 1973

An earlier post on Travis McGee here.
 

Travis McGee and me

I’m currently re-reading some of my favorite books — the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald.

Here’s a writer I wish I’d had a chance to know. Not “meet.” Meeting isn’t good enough. I’m greedy, I look for connection and relationship with artists whose work I admire, which is why I’ll wait in line for 12 hours to be in the front row of a U2 show, but I won’t hang out for 20 minutes at the stage door hoping that Bono will autograph the back of my hand so that I can squeak Ooh, I’ll never wash it again! (and please, girls, ick, the last tour was over 2 years ago…go wash those hands!). That’s not the kind of relationship I want, the fan yearning for connection and the artist wondering if there’s any roast beef left in the green room.

I love the artists that I love — writers, musicians, actors. They take me places no one else does, sometimes places I’ve longed to go but couldn’t find by myself. They have changed me, shaken me up, rocked my world, made me think, made me cry, made me dance, given me moments of the most piercing joy — but I don’t think they are better people than I am, and I don’t worship.

But I do like to talk (grin), and that’s the relationship I would love to have with my favorite artists — the long evening of food and drink and conversation, the time to roam around inside each other’s heads. To share stories. To connect over how amazing it is to be alive in a culture that has time for art, that makes a space for it.

I think I would have liked MacDonald. He writes smart and funny and deep. He makes small moments big. He tells a great story, And he likes to riff in his writing the way I do, to just go off…

I went out into the bright beautiful October day and walked slowly and thoughtfully back toward midtown. It was just past noon and the offices were beginning to flood the streets with a warm hurrying flow of girls. A burly man, in more of a hurry than I was, bumped into me and thrust me into a tall girl. They both whirled and snarled at me.
 
New York is where it is going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust population reaches a certain density, they all act like any grasshoppers. When the critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm, and try to eat the world. We’re nearing a critical point. One day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. But this time they won’t snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each other’s throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread outward from that point. Old ladies will crack skulls with their deadly handbags. Cars will plunge down the crowded sidewalks. Drivers will be torn out of their cars and stomped. It will spread to all the huge cities of the world, and by dawn of the next day there will be a horrid silence of sprawled bodies and tumbled vehicles, gutted buildings and a few wisps of smoke. And through that silence will prowl a few, a very few of the most powerful ones, ragged and bloody, slowly tracking each other down.
 
from Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald, 1964

MacDonald does that kind of thing all the time — Travis takes a moment to ruminate on some aspect of life, the universe and everything, and then just goes on about his day. He’s a smart, complex man engaged with his world and yet very separate from it. A thoughtful man, a man of sex and violence, a man who sits still for sunsets and notices the small beauties of the world. A man who wanders through his own interior swamps and doesn’t always like what he finds, but owns it anyway.

The series was written from the early 60’s to the early 80’s, and the early books have the occasional dash of a particular, casual racism, sexism and homophobia that were characteristic of that time in this country. (The racism, sexism and homophobia now are different, it seems to me, in terms of expression at least). I don’t like it, but it doesn’t spoil the books for me. I no longer need purity in my favorite books; I’m not pure either, you know? These days I need emotional truth and growth and the feeling of recognition in both the joys and sorrows.

I wish I had a Travis in my real life. (Although I think it’s arguable that my imaginative life, the life inside my body and mind and heart that only I know, is just as real to me as the outside stuff…) But I wish there was a Travis in both, the way I wish for an Aud and a Crichton and a Morgon.

And there’s all those real live people whose work I so enjoy, that moves me so. People to know someday. I have hope.

Who do you wish for?

Addio 2007

2007 started hard, in sadness and worry, and in some ways it stayed hard. Some disappointments, some hopes dead and others deferred. But those aren’t the biggest kind of hard: I didn’t lose my home, my partner, my mind or my life. So perhaps it’s better to think of it as a learning year. (Oh goody, another learning experience. As a wise lad named Calvin once said, I feel smarter already.)

Well… I’m not sure I’m smarter, but a little wiser about some things. Maybe a little more of a grownup.

A lot of 2007 has been trudge-trudge-trudge a little further down the road of adulthood — Lookee here, missus! Responsibility! Fewer easy answers! Sucking it up! Come get some of this wacky adult fun before we run out…. But in spite of that, okay, fine, maybe because of it, I feel better, more clear, younger than I used to. I’m a little less likely to just take people’s bullshit, and I’m also a little more likely to let the small stuff slide, which can turn into a pretty interesting moment of choice when someone’s bullshit is about the small stuff.

I feel a little more free.

And so that makes this hard year a good year.

Every New Year’s Eve, Nicola and I buy the best bottle of champagne we can afford (which varies pretty spectacularly sometimes, but this year is lovely — Alfred Gratien Mill&#233sime 1997). We prepare a meal (prepare is a relative term that includes everything from cooking five courses to running out for Indian takeaway, and by the way Indian food is great with champagne). We eat and drink and talk about the year that’s ending and the year ahead. We don’t make resolutions, we make dreams and visions and goals.

One of mine, this time last year, was to feel more like a writer. Not just to have written, but to be more rigorous and more honest. To dig deeper, be more brave. To work harder. And to write things even if I know I can’t, even if I know I’m not good enough or honest enough or brave enough. To suck it up and do it again.

And so I did. In 2007 I wrote a screenplay and a novella that make me fizz — both of them more quickly, more rigorously, than I have written in ages, in spite of the sadness and worry and various fucking grownup responsibilities. It’s the year I started a (second, original) screenplay with an opening scene that makes me wiggle, it’s so cool. The year I came up with a master plan for conquering Hollywood. The year a real live editor asked me to write a young adult novel, and I began to find young people in my head with some things to do and say, some big feelings to feel, some life to live. It’s the year I taught Clarion West and was privileged to work with an amazing group of writers: I think I helped a few of them, and I know they helped me. 2007 is the year I gave myself back to writing, and now I feel like a writer again. Who knew it could be so easy (huge laughter here….).

This year I started going dancing again. I reconnected with old friends. Nicola published her amazing memoir and began writing an even more amazing novel (more about it on her myspace blog). And she began some other stuff that I feel unexpectedly deeply hopeful about, but it’s her stuff so that’s all I’m saying about it, except that it’s both hard and good to feel hope.

This hard year has been a good year. I’m grateful to it, and I’m glad to see it go. Addio, 2007. In 2008, I look forward to hopes realized, dreams lived, hard work, good times, and doing more than I think I can. Bring it on.

My very best to you for whatever you want from the new year. May it come to you in joy.

Plus ca change…

There’s an interesting conversation going on at Nicola’s blog about the concept of being a digital native vs. a digital immigrant — in other words, division along (and distance across) generational lines by whether or not one is “born to” a particular level of technology. Nicola cites an article that does a good job of dismantling that idea, or at least showing all the ways in which it’s reductive. And she posits in turn that this division isn’t about age, it’s about temperament. It’s about how each of us responds to change.

I think so too. There are so many ways that humans deal with change. We run away from it. Or we use it to run away — the abrupt and radical changes that take us away from problems, from fears, from love, from commitment, from the cages we’ve made out of our lives. Or maybe we “don’t believe” in change (news flash: it sure believes in us). Or we throw ourselves like lovers at the new thing because it’s part of our identity to be the person whose edge is always leading… We tackle it with plans and checklists, we wake up scared in the middle of the night, we celebrate it, we yearn for it.

And then we have to learn the new software at work, or we’re expected to navigate the hospital by following the colored lines on the floor, or the Syrian restaurant we really liked is just gone one day, and I stop and think You know, when I said all those brave words about change, this is not what I was talking about.

I think most of us are actually pretty good at stepping up to the seismic shifts in our world — we may not be graceful or happy about it, but on some level humans are built for it. I think it’s the thousand small daily changes that wear us down and do us in. And I’m coming to the reluctant conclusion that it happens to us all. I don’t want to stop learning, you know? Even if it means having to change in all the daily ways. When I stop being willing to do that, I don’t know if I’ll still be myself… I want to be one of those 90-year-old women with long gray hair and a fierce face who still updates her own website, even if by then we’re all managing content with our eyebrows or whatever…

I guess we’ll see.

(To find Nicola’s post about this, visit her blog and look for the entry “digital immigrant/digital native”. Would someone please tell MySpace to get with the permalinks?)

Giving thanks

I am thankful. I have a good life. I love Nicola and she loves me. I love my handsome old cat who sleeps at my hip and harasses me for drinks of warm water from the bathtub. I love the work that colors and shapes my life, that takes me to places in myself that I can’t go any other way. I get to live other lives when I write, and that makes me live my own life more deeply all the time. I get to do it anytime I want, in a house that feels like a haven to me, with someone who understands my work and helps me do it better, and doesn’t get offended when I leave the dinner table to go make a note about something. I am so grateful for these things.

I am thankful. At a point in life when many people are set on an unswerving course, I find myself suddenly in new territory — learning to write screenplays and discovering that I absolutely love it, and that there’s a real chance I might be very good at it one of these days. I’ve spent a year exhausting myself in the race to stay on the leading edge of the learning curve, getting up at 4 AM because the only way to learn fast is to do twice as much work as an experienced screenwriter would do in the same number of days. I have learned a lot about discipline and focus and sucking it up and going back and making it better. I am so tired and I have had so much fun. I’m grateful for it.

I am thankful. I started to believe a few years ago that I wasn’t really meant to be a writer after all. Being able to write isn’t the same thing as being a writer. I wrote tens of thousands of words in the years after Solitaire, beautiful words that told stories that didn’t ring true, that didn’t take my characters or me anywhere meaningful. Stories that didn’t matter to me. Stories that I thought would be good for my career (I know, blech, I know, but that’s what it was). And then along came the screenplay and it mattered so much and suddenly I found myself full of story, flooding with story, and I sat down and in six weeks wrote the 25,000 words of “Dangerous Space,” and it took me places that left me gasping. And now I am a writer again, with a passion for my work and a confidence in my ability that I have never had before. I am so grateful for that it makes me weep.

I am thankful. I have wonderful friends, intelligent, passionate, funny, caring people who love experience and conversation and connecting. I have four parents who love me and are proud of who I am and what I do. I have a family of in-laws who love me and are glad I am with their daughter, their sister, their aunt. I have good neighbors, and we help each other. I’m grateful for all these people and for the community they give me, that I never expected to have.

I am thankful. The hard things in my life are not hard beyond bearing. Nicola’s multiple sclerosis that kicks her in the teeth sometimes, the way it changes our lives and steals our hope in little bites, and my terror that someday she won’t be able to fight back. The worries about money and career and whether anyone will even give a shit about books in ten years, the dread in my heart over the inevitable death of the cat who has been our companion for 16 years, the fact that I’m the only child of aging parents. The sick feeling that no one will ever publish another of my books. The sadness I feel sometimes because my life is sometimes smaller than I wish, because I am sometimes smaller than I wish. The choices I regret making and the things I’ll never do that I regret even more. And more stuff, boring boring, blah blah blah. These are things that are hard for me, but they don’t kill me and they only shut me down temporarily. I am grateful that I’m becoming enough of a grownup to handle them.

And I’m thankful for everyone who has taken the time to read my work and find something in it to touch you, to make you feel or think, to make you yearn , to help you hope. I’m grateful to you.

Happy Thanksgiving to us all.