fall risk

My friend Lisa just posted a link to an essay she wrote back in March of 2012 about whether great (or even good) art (writing) somewhat necessarily comes from pain. She had (recently, I presume, because who could do it while actually having) had a migraine. My first thought was, since I didn’t leave a comment and don’t remember reading it:  Where was I in March of 2012? Curious enough to check, I looked back at my digital calendar. Ah. In the last weeks of Craig’s dying. Which explains so much.

And begs another question: what kind of pain? Here I’ll digress to gratuitiously tell you that my right thigh and hip joint hurt right this second as I type, not viciously but enough that I can’t forget that they do. It has only been a week since Dr. Handsome Witha Saw replaced my corrupt and grizzled right hip joint with a lovely mechanized version in titanium and pearlescent violet ceramic, and, although it could be so so so much worse (as it was with Hip #1 last year), I ache.

Say that word and really draw out the “a” – I aaaache. This dull, deep, barely-rolling-tires-on-a-gravel-road bass line to everything else is my ache. My leg aches, more when it’s still than when it’s moving, which tricks you into moving it more which increases the next being-still ache. It’s not that bad, I tell myself and you, which makes me wonder why I find it necessary to qualify. Because self-reliant, tough chicas can handle pain, ride right over it without griping? Probably. That’s a persona I’ve projected all my life. I’m bitching now because this time I’m saying it’s allowed and no one is editing this piece, probably not even me. Just write the words and don’t reread it if you want honesty and not badge-shining, so that’s what you’re getting this time.

In March of 2012 I was aching on two sturdy legs and writing some of the best stuff I had ever put out. The same is true of my essays from the End of Marge era and from Saying Goodbye to Dad. I sense a theme here. I wonder:  Maybe it isn’t that I write better when I’m emotionally cratering but when I write about death. Ah, but I can write the crap out of a piece about being in love, especially when my heart is exposed, reckless, pining, defenseless. I’ve written many about Mack and how it used to be when I would fling myself in front of the steel-studded tires of his indifference. I used to relish a challenge. Now I wonder how someone can fake it this long – or how foolish it is to not see unkindness for exactly what it is: not caring, an empty well, a missing chromosome, and that it isn’t the reason that matters, only the fact.

A singer-songwriter said once that she was, for the first time in a long while, happily in love but that the songs she was trying to write were awful compared to the ones written when she had been lonely and treated badly by some rat-bastard. Antje Duvekot, I think it was, and that’s my description, not hers, but you get the drift. Angst, it’s more than the salt in your soup; it’s the 24% Dutch-process cocoa powder in your flourless chocolate cake, the difference between meh and magical. And if you don’t think so, make two cakes, one with the 24% and one with Hershey's, taste them and get back to me. It’s the difference between a tentative, questing, hungry, warm-lipped kiss and one so perfunctory you can taste the resignation behind it.

I came home from the hospital with wristbands intact, three of them this time. I wonder if modern medicine has need for more info than can be crammed into one bar code, or if they just add them one by one as you get older. Two have been scissored off, one remains because I rather like its message.

Wandering off the path a bit, I found these paragraphs in an unfinished piece from a couple years ago:

A friend the other night described how he used to swim because it was great exercise but found it "just so fucking boring," said the only way he could keep going was to daydream about sex; he would weave these elaborate fantasies that carried him along, buoyed and distracted. I said, "Swimming laps is so awfully slow, though. How long could you keep the movie going?" He laughed. "A long time, a lot longer than in real life." I like an honest man.

We're all getting older, and we're married and too content to be tempted by cheating. Well, except the idea of it; that lingers, sizzling like bacon on a griddle, background noise in the busy diner of our lives. They say men fantasize about women other than their wives or current amours; I didn't ask Brian who he imagined fucking for ten laps, and Mack would never have even answered the baseline question about imaginary sex; Catholic school has sealed his sinful lips. I smile. He knows he would like Brian to ask me if and about whom I daydream, but also is more sure, even than I, that he wouldn't like my answers. We maintain the pretense that we are always monogamous, in thought as well as deed.


The anesthesiologist last week gave me an amnesiac before the next drugs made me unconscious, something I find especially wonderful. It isn’t given because you might be writhing in agony on the operating table when the scalpel opens your skin and fat layer like a ripe peach and it would be better if, indeed, you didn’t remember that (a scenario that horrifies my friend Ellie and, she swears, is the reason she can’t commit to any cosmetic procedure that requires a general); I think it’s a bit of insurance for those times that the anesthetic effect might be lightening, intentionally or otherwise. I had a total hysterectomy back in the late nineteen eighties, and my smart-aleck friend and OB/GYN told me I talked all the way through it but refused to tell me what I had said. He hinted, though, with a raised eyebrow. He had sure heard enough during my regular office visits in stirrups back in those days to know there was the potential for some embarrassing stories. I wonder if, during these hip procedures, I babbled anything incriminating. Better not to know.

Let’s get back to pain. On one hand, low-grade, nagging, constant, ranging from an annoyance to beginning-to-gnaw-on-one’s-last-nerve and, on the other, intense, sharp, breathtaking, blood-pressure-raising, consuming. My hip ache – or my heartache – compared to a blinding migraine or a throbbing, flayed wound, well, we all know which we would choose if choice were possible. The hard pain – 8 , 9 or 10 out of 10 – doesn’t enable or produce art or anything good, only agony and a plea for release, please please. The former, for some of us, is necessary for words to flow or notes to string or hearts to open, to bleed bright red, to feel instead of describe, to swim in a vast warm sea instead of a chlorine pool, to imagine the taste of lips yours will never touch, words that will never be whispered into your willing ear, a thudding heart against yours that belongs to someone for whom you are as essential as breath because, apparently, some people won’t stop until they find that, won’t settle for almost-there or sometimes-there or pretense, won’t give up because it’s too much work or it leaves one vulnerable-to-death. And it doesn’t matter one tiny bit whether all this happens in the real world in your real life with skin-and-bones people or just in the endless reaches of your shockingly fertile imagination. I don't even know if perhaps this reality was once mine and Mack's and has been flattened by decades of grinding life or if it was only ever mine, woven into whole cloth from threads of hopefulness and need. But I guess at this point it doesn't really matter:  pain is pain, love is love, the only and insignificant difference is how you get there.

I guess I have always been – and remain – at great risk for falling.

the season of expecting bad news

We are coming up on Highest Fire Threat time, mid- to late October. Since I wrote the piece below we have lived through almost five late summers, thick with heat, and one terrible wind-driven blaze that charred the canyon black just across the street from our driveway, the one I described so cheerily back in 2011. My brother, whose story crept into this narrative, died, as most of you know, the following spring. The oppressive weather of September and October used to make me bitchy and angry. Now this semi-season grows a tumor of dread in my belly; fear rolls off me like sweat; I start at sudden sounds. Sometimes I read this piece to remember how it began, when I realized I could control only the small, unimportant things.


Thursday, 9.8.11

            Some guy at the power substation in Yuma, AZ flipped the wrong switch and most of the lower third of the Great State of California and four million people of its people are powerless. Maybe he should have been thinking about the grid instead of that woman in HR with the nice ass. And why did he have to do it today when I am itching to write in a way I have been longing to itch for weeks, this afternoon when I am riding full tilt in the Word Funnel, phrases and ideas swirling in my head, waiting to blow out the little end onto a virtual page, lines and squiggles in Book Antigua?

            No matter, said Ms. Efficient, gathering hurricanes and candles, log lighter, matches and many, many flashlights, congratulating herself for grilling an extra-large steak last night (just in case Yuma Guy was thinking with his penis today? did she know?) and not being out of romaine, as usual. Dinner, handled. Last half-gallon of milk in the freezer ice bin for morning coffee and don’t open the door ‘til then. It is a freaking sauna in this house – open the windows here and down the hall to try to achieve the miracle that is cross-ventilation.

            When Tom pulls up the drive, I’m out there in the Mini with the engine running and two chargers plugged in, juicing my cell and iPad, singing to The Wreckers with the air-conditioner cranked and a full tank of gas. He frowns, puzzled, at my cheery wave. Making the best of things, I say, all charged up.

            Once in his home team uniform of shorts and ratty tee, he hands me his soggy suit coat and slacks. What did you do, I ask, swim home? No, he explains, but he was in the lobby of the office building when the power went out, so he walked up 20 flights to where his clients were waiting for him, then back down 20 when the guard said the emergency lights in the stairwell were shutting off in half an hour. He’s a wet, tired, 80-year-old Energizer bunny who deserves a big glass of wine.

            We eat outside in the gathering gloom (as the Moody Blues sang), whispering about how far sound travels in this spooky quiet. A neighbor across the canyon out back, a quarter mile away, talking. Coyotes far down the canyon, yipping and laughing. The faintest hum – can you hear that? – that we finally agree is the sound of cars on the interstate six miles west. The air is thick and hot. Night has fallen hard to the dark ground. The tea lights are guttering. A mosquito bites and Tom’s palm slaps skin. Inside.

            He tucks into the guest room because I want to write. Besides, he thinks he hears more coyotes over there, though I know better. He’s asleep in seconds, his breathing a bellows that sucks air out of the hall. I blow out the candles like a birthday girl and follow the last one, held in my hand like Tinkerbelle in a jar, down another leg of the hacienda to our bedroom.

            I build a light fort with flashlights balanced on furniture and sit in my underwear where the beams intersect on the bed, legs flat out and a fat feather pillow scrunched between my thighs, in the vee, iPad on top. My fastest-typist-in-the-class fingers are flying on its pretend keyboard, not tapping because the only sound is a minute skin-glass thud, maybe a thid, a thip, a tip – tip tip tip tip, they run together, it’s so fast, words are shooting out my fingerprints, nanopauses here, there. I hear a coyote just outside, a bark, another, and I look up.

            Where the light beams cross on the bed is a campfire. The black-ink corners of the room are the night, and the walls have fallen away, leaving me under a sky of glitter and silence and a three-quarter moon that begs for an ululating howl. The coyote obliges, and then her friend nearby, calling, calling. So I answer, straightened back, chin up, whispering aaaah-rooooo, the same note, held, the lyric to a coyote tune.

            A Paul Simon song from yesterday bounces into my head, and I remember the words: 

            “A pilgrim on a pilgrimage
           Walked across the Brooklyn Bridge
           His sneakers torn
           In the hour when the homeless move their cardboard blankets
           And the new day is born.”

            Writing songs would be so hard, the music part especially might as well just be impossible and then fitting words to its melody, and then rhyming, for Pete’s sake, and not just moon and June but verses that are so good you can’t forget them, not ever, like:

            “Folded in his backpack pocket
            The questions that he copied from his heart
            Who am I in this lonely world?
            And where will I make my bed tonight?
            When twilight turns to dark.” 

            “Questions for the angels
            Who believes in angels?
            Fools do
            Fools and pilgrims all over the world.”

            My brother had cancer, you know, and now he has more cancer. I wasn’t writing about that, not on the night the lights went out and not today before this, but now I guess I am. The surgeons cut it out, a lot of it, all of it (we thought), chunks of his neck and arm, big meaty pieces that left one hand quivering and his voice as scratchy as an old 45, twisting scars like long gristle rivers that cross craters covered with skin. Tiny dots on a PET scan, some new things or maybe some old things a knife or the poison missed, who knows, no one, no one does, but there they are. More cutting soon, maybe with lasers this time. He’ll be fine. He will. He says and I believe. I don’t believe in angels, fool and even pilgrim that I am, but I believe him. Maybe. Maybe he’s an angel.

            But that night I was just thinking that if I wrote more and more, tip tip tipped more words, thousands of words onto the lighted page, that every once in a while some phrase would stick, like “questions that he copied from his heart” does, would strike the inside of a tiny brass owl and make an almost imperceptible sound and be remembered by someone for a little while even without an accompanying string of notes.

            That night I was sitting at my campfire in the arms of the intense silence of a powerless night, in a darkness that came from the bottom of the lightless ocean and colored everything invisible for hundreds of miles, blotted it out, wondering how Simon had thought of rhyming “disappear” and “zebra tear,” listening to Tom breathe and the coyotes cough. Until I yawned one last time and clicked off the flashlights, pulled a sheet over my hot legs and lay my sweaty head down to sleep.

            By morning power had been restored and everything was just as it had been before. 

            “If every human on the planet and all the buildings on it
            Should disappear
            Would a zebra grazing in the African Savannah
            Care enough to shed one zebra tear? 

            “Questions for the angels
            Who believes in angels?”

Eyeliner

Last night I was opening saved blog posts from the writing/mag site where I started posting back in 2009 because the site is closing for good and a bunch of us who had belonged there were waxing (or waning) nostalgic. I found the piece that follows, though it was never published and was written years after I had left that site; it's just been sitting in a folder on my Mac. Though I barely remember writing it, I do remember the time, years ago now, and feeling like a balloon held by someone who didn't have a firm grip on the string. Reading it made me laugh and shake my head a little. I didn't edit it, am just serving it up as the messy omelet it is.


           I write better with eyeliner on.

            Last week was spent splashing around with Simone, first in the fountain here at Casa de Swell, then the beach, and finally in the big blue pool at Spirit Hill Farm. I wore baggy capris and lots of sunscreen but no makeup for a who-cares-bare-your-face summery seven days, but now I’m back and trying to get real. Like a brother-in-law told me:  It’s nice to vacation at the shore, but part of me misses my wingtips. The gimlet-eyed sliver of me that watches blood dripping from my fingers onto the keyboard and issues a score for authenticity sees those pajama bottoms and dirty hair.

            How can I be this old and still unsure of so much? I swing from one end of an arc, down and up to the weightless other (imagine The Pit and the Pendulum), then down and back, over and over. I want success and praise and fame and money, I’m jealous of others who get those things, I tell myself I could do/have them except for -- insert list of Things Beyond My Control and list of Things Which Require Too Much Effort – but then I’m all … meh. Seriously, imagining one could be The Next Blogging Rock Star is like thinking I should cash in our IRAs and go to Vegas. And I hate Vegas. I don’t even buy lottery tickets, though I totally would if that national one that’s illegal in California wasn’t illegal in California. Who doesn’t want a few Mega Millions?

            Then I happen upon some statistic (after getting sucked into logging in at Twitter – an utterly mysterious universe – by the baited hook of an email that says someone wants to follow me  - pant!pant!) - that the Twitter Snarks push in front of my confused, insecure, uneyelinered eyes that crows: So_and_So has 4,836 followers. And I happen to know that So_and_So is an annoying, self-righteous, adjective over-user that my invisible friends and I have made fun of for years. And I think: 4,836? Really? and try to work out how So_and_So got like serious dirt to use as Follow Me ransom on nearly five goddamn thousand people. Which leads me to be totally positive that I would have to be just like So_and_So in order to be popular on Twitter, so fuck that, I will eschew Twitter, possibly forever. I write down “eschew” so I can remember to use it again soon. Or not.

            Time for a break from “work,” so I read the latest from The Bloggess, who is one of my online heroines. Should I just try to be wackier? Adobe Soup would certainly be funnier if I used all the loony unspoken flotsam that sloshes around in my brain, X-rated topics allowed, full confession time, with a straight man like Bloggess’s Victor as a foil. I’ve done some Wry Dialogue With Mr. Forte pieces, but he’s the bumbling comedian and I always get to play the smarty-pants with the raised eyebrow and the right answer. Should we reverse roles? Not in real life, just in the stories. Wait. Stories? Could it be that Jenny’s blog is stories, not real life? Or maybe rewritten real life or exaggerated real life? Does that require a disclaimer, like “This is not exactly nonfiction” like that guy James whatshisname who got busted for exaggerating the grisly details of his drug addiction and rehab? If I cartoon up Life With Mot to get strangers to laugh/follow/become huge fans, what about all the people who actually know us and read Adobe Soup who will then think Mr. Respectable is married to a potty-mouth lunatic? I should never have sent those email blasts to friends/family trolling for readers. Maybe I should change my name.

            Okay. James whatshisname’s drug addiction leads me to consider writing a memoir, which is really nothing more than many emotive, embarrassing-past-disclosing blog pieces published under one title. Like that woman in the New York Times Magazine piece, Jeanette Walls, who wrote “The Glass House” about her horrific childhood and god-awful mother (who still hoards, lets cats pee all over her house, refuses to bathe and, therefore, stinks and who hid – and ate – a Hershey bar when her kids had no food).  I have to admit that when Ms. Walls (“whippet thin,” according to the reporter) said she sometimes doesn’t eat for a day or two, I really hated her even if it happens because she spent her childhood being hungry all the time. That memoir was a monster bestseller. Or Mary Karr, who wrote “The Liar’s Club,” another secret-spiller and money-maker. In a contest for crappiest mother, mine could hold her own against those two, I think. Still, a book is even more of a crapshoot than a blog. All those months of work, clinking through the Carmeda memories like so many empty booze bottles, agonizing over the cover art (because I so would) and font style, only to wind up with a bunch of unsold Kindle editions … do “unsold Kindle editions” actually exist? … I’d be better off writing a cookbook.

            Or just cooking. Writing a cookbook is harder than writing a memoir, and there are all those uber judgmental So You Think You Can Braise people out there. Fah. Cooking is fun and beautiful and messy and smells wonderful and satisfying in damn near every sensory way. Except for the problem that I’m oozing out of my bra and my jeans barely zip, cooking is a killer option. Some days (like all the ones between 15 pounds ago and right now) I just say, fine, if Ina Garten can wear untucked shirts and waddle around Paris in flats, not caring, so can I. (That assumes that Ina Garten doesn’t care what her ass looks like which, since we are not latte buddies, I don’t know. Maybe she cares as much as I do, which is why I’m eating tomatoes instead of a potato/cheese/cream gratin for dinner.) Size 10, here I come. Just in time to go to Paris in September for our vacation of a  lifetime and make a beeline for Poilâne where I will eat my weight in bread with perfect crust. Oh, and I’m not going to think about what the esthetician told me: “At your age (she didn’t actually say that because she’s far too nice and I would have cried if she had, but it was totally implied) if you are thin, your face looks gaunt (and wrinkled, again unsaid, like a prune) and your body looks great; if you are a little overweight, it is the opposite.” See? One or the other, never both. Except when you are young, before you are on your final swim upstream. Like a salmon. By the way, have you ever seen what happens to a Chinook’s face on that last lap? I am now very seriously considering Juvederm. And I just bought Power Swabs on Amazon Prime and am looking up neckectomies.

            So now I have spent two hours on what everybody will think is a Woe Is Me thing that I totally hate when people do. It’s not, so don’t go all “No, Candy, it’s not that bad.” I know. It’s only that bad half the time, at the bottom of the pit, and in just a minute I’ll be heading up up up to the lemon ricotta cheesecake from Della Fattoria. Or maybe beans on toast. There must be a place that grows borlotti beans that I can find around here, 500 miles from Sonoma County where they are everywhere. As if I actually need to eat beans. Or toast.

            One last thought. [Mystery Person] posted this hilarious thing on Facebook a few weeks ago that I can’t stop thinking about.

INSERT THING 

Is that not the ultimate passive-aggressive rationalization piece? I remember when my brother was trying to make a living as a musician (back in the idealistic ‘seventies) and there was a lot of bad-mouthing of bands who were “commercial” and how it was way more bitchin to write songs that were real and true to yourself instead of going over to the dark side and putting out stuff just because it was what the radio stations wanted to play and what the masses wanted to sing along with. When every single guy with a guitar and an amplifier and a hopeful voice would have thrown his best friend to a gang of starving lions for a record contract.

            Which reminds me. We watched The Hunger Games last night. I did anyway; Mr. Forte saw the first few and last few minutes, missing the bloodiest bits. He liked Stanley Tucci’s blue-haired guy. It was quite good, I thought, and I get why Jennifer Lawrence is such a hit. She’s an under-actor, a plus, and has one of those fascinating faces – not pretty (except those moments when it is and is stunning), missing the classic angles and features of magazine cover girls – that is Meryl Streep-ish. She plays strong women in Hunger and Silver Linings Playbook. She runs a lot. I think acting (back when I was young, not now) might have been a very cool thing to do if it didn’t involve running. And knowing that you always look ten pounds heavier in the film than you are, so you have to go through life eating and drinking (or exercising six hours a day) to be X minus 10. Maybe not so fun. I would totally eat the blue berries for Mr. Forte even though I’m pretty sure he would only pretend to, the heartless survivor. Story of my life, romantic gesture seeker that I am.

            A classmate in court reporting school (who routinely flunked dictation speed tests) used to say, “I just washed my hands and can’t do a thing with ‘em,” which still makes me chuckle. So I guess if I’m going to get anything down on paper that’s worth a few eyeballs, I better get cleaned up and find my Raven Glaze Lacquer pen.