Subterranean Protozoa, Reincarnation & Hope

Ever since landing a repeat role as the drummer in our subdivision's Madonna cover band the summer after fourth grade, I've had a hangup around the idea of being famous. Because life is meaningless if your face isn't plastered in gloss on someone else's bedroom wall. Right?

As a more mature adult, it's been my belief in reincarnation that's helped me reconcile the fact that my name is conspicuously absent from Oprah's bestseller list. I have multiple lifetimes to achieve greatness! My soul has been pretty busy building pyramids, schlepping water in pails out of rivers and rubbing elbows with the Queen. Maybe more than that- I'm not sure- the latest Facebook quiz assures me I'm 88% gay, not big news to my husband THIS lifetime. So after receiving several lovely rejection letters from my first-ever national magazines queries (my fave came from Men's Vogue, which I didn't know existed 10 minutes before I sent them a typed up shard of my latest adventure query-style. Turns out they don't. "Sounds like a good idea, but Men's Vogue is no longer," wrote the editor), I've decided THAT article is just another chapter for the memoir. Which thus far exists 50% as a huge unwieldy mess on my hard drive, 10% in the journal that VANISHED from the face of the earth last month, 7% in my witty, comprehensive, beautifully crafted status updates that disappear into the ether of nowhere land and 33% in my repressed subconscious.

Regardless, I seek out my place on the food chain of literary fame and find myself subterranean protozoa, again and again. And then there's always this perspective offered by my good friend and the oft-published author, Eliezer Sobel last November at the Jewish Book Fair. "How's your book coming?" he asked.

"Miserably," I said. "I'll never get published."

"Well, hurry up and get published so you can be miserable AND published like the rest of us," he said.

So last week, plodding through the unsung joys of domestication peppered with a few rare and erotic moments of inspiration, I organized a panel for a local nonprofit on playwriting and screenwriting. You might say I joined the nonprofit so I could borrow someone else's budget to organize such panels, carting in my handful of wildly successful friends from around the country to the capitol of the South just so I can hear them talk.

Of course prior to the panel, I was most concerned with what to wear. After amassing a pile of unsightlys on the sagging mattress, I headed to the local Exxon to vacuum out the inch of dirt, twigs and volcanic sediment encrusting the bottom of my car before driving to the airport to pick up my good friend Bryan, creator of The Philocetes Project. Handing me change for a dollar, the curly-haired Hispanic woman behind the counter said, "Hey, I see you the last Thursday of every month!" I quickly scanned my memory for all of the various cults I attend regularly but came up blank. "You know, The Writing Show!" she said, introducing herself by way of her name plate, "HOPE." "I started going last October."

"No kidding!" I said. "I hope you can come tonight- it's gonna be a good one."

"I'll try," she said. "But it's the end of the month and there are a lot of inspections to get through."

Right then and there I felt more famous than God. Someone recognized me at the GAS STATION!! My whole attitude and outlook on life changed. When I saw Hope later that night in the front row of the audience splendid in a lavender v-neck, I gave her a huge hug and introduced her to the panel.

So for today, fame may not be what I'm after, after all. As I write this, I'm reminded that for a while there in '98, aspects of my life on the farm in Arkansas paralleled Monica Lewinski's and I never envied her press package one bit.

When I had my identity crisis back in January, I quit my job as Book Editor over at our local rag, and tried half-heartedly to find a full time job. Thank God I didn't. Even the part time job I had was so painful that on the 5th day I called my editor from the bathroom and begged him to let me write something. Just, you know, ANYTHING that didn't require wearing an apron and punching a time clock. Luckily he had a fun little press release about the author of "I Was A Teenage Dominatrix" sitting on his desk. I was in.

[Editorial aside: Ladies, if you have even the remotest desire for ex-boyfriends or other unruly specimens to ring you up I suggest you write an article about a dominatrix too. What are you waiting for? Get on it!]

After that, I essentially continued interviewing authors and writing about books. People kept sending them to me! Events kept happening! I couldn't say no. I didn't want to say no. And knowing the intense amount of sorting, labeling, reading and hysterical laughter required to run the Fiction Contest, I offered to help with that too. In the end, I ran it. For the 5th consecutive year. And I loved it just as much as I ever had. Around a smoky bar after the winners had been awarded, read and gone home I had a heart to heart with my editor, who is very inconsiderately moving to California in July.

I want you to have something regular here, he said, so it won't confuse my successor.
OK, I said. I'll be the book editor again.
Good, he said.
You never gave it away, I said.
I knew you'd be back, he said. A good editor knows you better than you know yourself.

And maybe he never met my grandmother and doesn't have a clue what kind of granola I eat with lowfat vanilla yogurt, but dammit if he hasn't had a thread connected to the big picture all along. Five years ago we met at a crowded intersection. He was whistling and smiling and I didn't know what to do with my hands. Why aren't you crossing the street? he asked. I'm afraid of getting hit by cars, I said, a bird might shit on my head and what if I don't recognize the grass or the sounds or the glints of light on the other side.

C'mon, it's easy, he said and crossed with a confident gait, a wink, a snap bouncing off the end of his long fingers. I waited another second before following, everything new and breathless and possible waiting for me on the other side.

Now, I'm at another intersection, but this time it's a cliff atop a deep sea filled with jagged rocks and circling sharks. For months I have been pacing the precipice, hearing the sirens call. I don't want to drown, I'm scared of getting my dress wet, of being eaten alive, of falling for some horrid merman and never regaining my rightful place on solid ground. As I try to think of what will happen if I lose my balance, or jump or if I am pushed, I realize that I may not know how to fly, but I already know how to swim.

Bad Valley Takes the Night Bus.

She’s got generic cigarettes, a Zippo, gummy bears and an illegible map streaked with blood and beer stuffed in the side of her bra. She has taken other forms of public transportation including hitchhiking and moustache rides, but now she’s on the night bus without a clue as to where it- or she- is going. She finds the middle of the night the best time to listen to institutional escapees talk about their lives and the ghosts only they can see flying past the tinted windows. Bad Valley listens as the lady with the wig takes out her teeth and tries to offer her $100. Bad Valley doesn’t take it, but she lets the woman give it away to the man in the back, huffing down a beer underneath the brim of his baseball cap.

Bad Valley pretends to listen while she daydreams. It is Bad Valley’s Jesus Year and she is full of sin. She is full of hellfire and damnation and those little guys in Purgatory that wait around with hooks and crooks to drag good people down. Bad Valley rides the tilt-a-whirl backwards. She knows where and why and how the grass is greener and yet still she steadfastly refuses to plant or tend to anything.

She closes her eyes, nodding occasionally and lets the wig lady buy her a cheeseburger and a coke. And a coffee. And a beer. Bad Valley is always drinking something and usually way too much of it. She is ready to sleep on someone else’s floor. She is ready to abandon someone else’s dishes and someone else’s laundry on someone else’s dime. She wants to listen to scratchy records and smoke unfiltered cigarettes indoors all day, without a clue as to whether or not the sun is out. Bad Valley doesn’t want to call home or check in. Bad Valley doesn’t carry the proper documents for travel. She shreds her parking tickets, her state taxes and any evidence of having being insured, past, present and future. Her license and her visa are expired. She only keeps them around for their pictures, which are pretty and dark and difficult to discern.

When it stops, Bad Valley has no desire to get off the bus and doesn’t have enough money for another ticket so she cries until the driver takes pity on her and takes her where she thinks she wants to go. Bad Valley arrives unannounced, unaccounted for and unexpected. Even so, Bad Valley is welcome where she is found.

Bad Valley doesn’t care what Good Valley thinks. Bad Valley doesn’t have a bedtime, watches the sun rise, makes the sunset hazier with smoke from her swishers sweet cigar. Bad Valley doesn’t teach, she takes. She doesn’t’ listen, she tells. She doesn’t wake them up when she gets to where she is going. She crawls into their bed, puts her arms around their waist and whispers to them until she is the most important thing they have ever dared to dream.

Some Jobs Are Like Bad Boyfriends

Some jobs are like bad boyfriends: they never truly go away. Or they go away at the wrong time and then pounce when you're weak. Having been almost entirely dumped by my job last September and then attempting to cut the remaining strings in January, somehow I managed to find myself in the office working for the better part of the day. And loving it. Missing it. Remembering only the good times. The complimentary cupcakes. The witty office banter. The escape from the feverish den of my home currently housing a sick child, a semi-employed man that loves to talk about wire and H-cats (am I making that up? I'm sure I am) in a space roughly equivalent to a rich man's closet. I love my house, don't get me wrong, especially on the days I think we're gonna lose it. But today, it was nice to be gone.

Packing up my massive stack of papers from the ice-hockey table (I don't exactly have a desk anymore) I felt the satisfaction of accomplishment. A job well done- or at least done. I didn't wonder if I should continue to revise (OK, I did) or if I should start a whole new draft or chuck the whole damn thing in the already overflowing recycle bin. There was a start line and a finish line and I made it from one to the other, from A to B-- zip zip zap. Not so easily done in "real life" anymore.

A decade ago, in my first months home off of the boat in Alaska I felt utterly lost, directionless and adrift. I felt that I had to have a job to stand and be counted but during that time I wasn't exactly employable. My mother, the artist, pointed to the cat lounging luxuriously on the bed by my side. "Does Felicia have a job?" she asked. "No," I said. "And she's perfect just the way she is," said my mother.

And I got it. It wasn’t about numbers or things but the quality of my ability to simply be. Something I’m still not good at. The minute I start to meditate I think of an email that must be sent IMMEDIATELY. If I don’t have specific plans, I’m restless, moody, pacing, trying to stalk down everything contained within the moment that I should be seizing. When I sit down to write, I wish I were writing something different. It’s why I couldn’t stand to live in New York. The constant influx of choices at every moment. Each street, each alley, each job, each bad boyfriend calling my name.

creative house cleaning

When I was growing up my mom attached a pin to her dresser mirror that said "Fuck the Real World- I'm an Artist." As the dining room table was often piled high with inedible objects, we ate dinner on a picnic blanket in the middle of the living room. On one memorable occasion, a friend and I found potatoes in the washing machine. I had no idea what an iron was. Our house was characterized by dirt, oil pastels, clutter, clay, those colorful crystals that you can use to make feaux-stained glass window hangings, tissue paper, tye dies, paint brushes, cats, cat hair and random surplus natural and manmade materials that might at some point come in handy for creating something. A lampshade collage! A little clay animal friend to hang out in a potted plant! One of our cats often slept in the dish drying rack because it was pretty much guaranteed to be dish-free. We didn't have a TV until I turned 13 (and then my mom insisted it be in my room and not in her WAY) so we made shit. And we didn't clean. At least I have no memories of cleaning. My first 3 jobs after graduating from liberal arts school were in the house keeping and food service industries. It was while scrubbing out cabins on a dude ranch in Colorado, hotel rooms in Arkansas and heads on a cruise ship in Alaska that I learned how to use a mop, a vacuum cleaner and to tell the difference between Windex and 409. This was a skill set previously unknown to me and I tried it on like an ill-fitting wig. I was fast but never good. I simply couldn't make myself care, the way that people who grew up cleaning every Saturday did.

For the last 10 years I have lived in the house that I grew up in. The feelings surrounding this are as complex as the sedimentary layers of dust and dead skin and karma that have built up like invisible earth. I light sage, I put mirrors behind the toilet and baguas in the corners but the sacred hold of the past and dead things and my childhood burns stronger. I woke up this morning with every intention of setting things straight. Putting this here and that there. Sorting, folding, sifting, washing, scrubbing, arranging. But I simply cannot muster up the right kind of energy to make it happen. Over animal crackers and steak this morning, I told my husband I was too busy anymore to attend to domestic duties and asked if we could please hire a maid.

Sure, he said. How should we pay for it? Well, you could sleep with her in exchange for laundry, I suggested. OK, he said. But in that case, I get to pick who we hire. And you're in charge of finding lawn care.

In a Continuum Class that I took a few months ago, one of the other participants- the wife of the leader in fact, said that before Continuum, she had felt like a walking head that happened to be attached to a body. She felt disconnected from her toes and her fingers and her legs and arms and the cellular makeup of her skin and blood and bones. As it so happens, I feel exactly that way myself. I put so much credence in words and thoughts and phrases and paper and computer screens and hard copies and leaflets and magazines and newspapers and blogs and facebook and deadlines and short story submissions and new releases and press releases and poetry and emails and snail mails and bills and documents and my living will and our tax return and cut-off notices and receipts and sticky notes and scratch pads and cookbooks and recipes and jokes and photographs and jpegs and calendars and planners and theatre tickets and parking tickets and the million and one works of art by my son and the million and one to-do-lists and floor plans of my husband and our combined and individual legacies of paper in paragraphs and sentences and phrases, it all gets in my head and I forget that I have anything attached to those rapidly moving fingers. Cuticles. Knuckles. Arms. Ankles. Toes. Ridges. Miles and miles of skin and organ and breathing masses of blood all contained within myself. So last night, I got in bed with my book and then I got back out and put the book down on the floor. I lit a candle and stood in the darkened room lit by a flicker. I touched my toes. I pulled my arms behind my back and over my head. I sat on the floor and arched my neck to the ceiling and saw the words that I've been eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner digested into the moving shadow of my body. Everything creaked like an unoiled machine. It's uncomfortable to remember bones but worse to forget. Everything I have ever done and known and lost is still contained within the memory of my flesh and most days it's easier to throw clothes over top of it all and bury my head in a book. But that can't work forever. Two days ago, at the edge of the river, I watched my son and his friends squish their feet and hands in the mud, smearing it up and down their legs and arms for the sheer pleasure- it seemed- of sensation and cool, wet earth- what grown ups pay hundreds of dollars for at the salon and massage parlor- something solid and mostly alive in full contact with their skin. I kept my shoes on and my pant legs rolled down, hesitant to engage in the elements below my neck. But I wondered abstractly- through talking and safety and admonishments- what I might be starving for in this anorexic relationship with the elements. Because truly, I am more ruled by the insistent coming and going of winter and summer and the terrible seduction of spring and fall than I'd ever care to admit. Even if I slam my door shut and black out my windows my natural rhythms are still magnetically yanked about by the moon. I can forget or ignore or deny or wrap my body in cloth like a mummy but it still will answer the call of its true master. And it ain't this screen.