bottle in the sea

in the small hours this morning i woke from this dream.

i was involved in a several-car pileup on the highway. kara and i and john landfair were in our car (a car kara had bought earlier in the dream - long story). john landfair is a guy i went to high school with. one of the other cars in the pileup pulled away from the wreckage, wheeled around to face the pack. i could see that the driver of that car was a woman, banged up, and she was pouring gasoline on herself. (i didn't recognize her.) she shouted (not in so many words) that her intention was to ram the mass of mangled cars and create an inferno, killing us all. i got out of our new car and called to kara and john, who also got out. john was a tranvestite. (i have no idea if he is a transvestite in real life. i have not spoken to john since before graduation almost 18 years ago.) we three ran from the pileup and toward the edge of a cliff as the suicidal/homicidal woman gunned her engine. we leapt and clung to the cliff face. i expected a fireball or a speeding vehicle to follow us over the edge, as in the movies. but what i saw, to my surprise, was max, draped over a pole of some sort jutting from the rock wall of the cliff. he was in need, and we had to find a way to help him.

thus i woke to the sound of max moaning on the floor in the living room. several times during the night last night i had to get up and help the old man to his feet. i don't know if he's incapable of getting up when he's moaning like that or if he is just tired or in pain or what. anyway. i helped him up.

and now i'm thinking of those people in high school i knew. wootton high school, rockville, maryland, 1989. wherever is john landfair now? and where are david weinraub and becky rak? where's hannah quigley? john and henry heuscher? n'gai pindell? archana and swati gupta? tom bodie? my prom date, michelle provenzano? how have they fared? what are their lives like?

i have been in touch with exactly none of them since graduation. no one from high school at all. they're all gone. when i left high school, i left. i wouldn't call those my glory days.

though this is roughly what i looked like in high school, i think, if you can believe that. i'm actually not sure i can.

i'm going back to maryland a week from today, for my mom's birthday. i haven't been back east since 2002. it's not the same house we lived in when i was in high school, but still. maybe that's why long lost mr landfair appeared in my dream?

four things

thing 1: my annual review is coming up in the next few weeks. usually these don't faze me so much; i'm decent at my job and i tend to not get into trouble. the complication is, because i work at home nowadays, my supervisor might well want to perform the review on these here premises. of this i am fearful. we're not used to visitors and there is (i'm sure, though i'm used to it) a lingering nasty dog/cat smell, especially given max's tendency toward incontinence of bowel and bladder. plus of course there are partially full (and partially empty) boxes upstairs, remaining from when we moved into this house a year and a half ago. there are fully empty boxes as well, waiting long months for there to be room in our recycling bin for disposal. items of variable value (boxes, documents, trash, pens, clothing) are deposited on our dining table and remain there for months on end. needless to say there is work to be done.

i can understand the need for my supervisor to check out my work area and make sure i'm complying with all the legal issues surrounding health information. but i've been working from home since august and no one's bothered to visit thus far.

thing 1.5: the other day i had a surprise visitor and had little choice but to grant him entry. there's a little something in the medical transcription universe called speech recognition. i won't delve into the details of that but say only that the speech recognition software had not been working on my particular computer for the last six or seven months. the telephone rang early monday afternoon but it is my practice not to answer the phone during work hours (or other hours). and our doorbell is only occasionally functional. i was alerted to this visitor's presence by the barking of our dogs. i ventured downstairs and there was a man at my door, telling me he was from the speech recognition company (to make a long story short) and he was here to tinker with my machine.

fortunately i'd swept the bunny-sized dust bunnies from most corners of the house over the weekend. as i say, we're not much in the way of housekeepers but sometimes enough is enough. last weekend was enough and i'm glad of that, because having swept somewhat lessened the humiliation of having someone see how we really live. he was quite pleasant (his name is steve) and said nothing untoward. he worked on my computer for a short while, and the next day my speech recognition was working!

all the same, i'm going to try to have the review take place in the office rather than here. we'll see.

thing 2: i'm not such an avid frequenter of youtube but sometimes i tune in to this los angeles woman's video blog. here's her latest missive; check it out. i like it quite a bit, though i can't get behind the canceled-television-show post title (though, sure, i like claire danes as much as the next fellow). lucy is beautiful and she looks so sad here.

thing 3: kara and i have been granted admission to the star island all star 2 conference the week of july 7th to 14th. normally i would be overjoyed at the news but we have the max situation. he is rickety at best, but holding on. if he is alive we are not going on vacation and we are not going to kill him in order to go on vacation. if we tell the good people at star island by the end of may that we're not coming then we get some of our money back. i think the deadline is may 26, a month from tomorrow. if we tell them before the deadline that we won't be coming, max will die on or about the 27th of may. isn't that the way it goes? i'm not sure what we're going to do.

thing 4: tonight is the third meeting of the drawing class i'm taking at the community college. i am at this point disenchanted. i'm no good at shading as of yet and i had trouble bringing myself to practice this past week. the class is fine but perhaps not quite as fun as i was hoping. but i'm not giving up; i'm going tonight. i'm trying to maintain an open mind.

the bee

yesterday after work i saw this bee on the stairs. i thought it was dead and guessed it might be cool to scan. this is how my mind works - always in search of art! i picked it up with a piece of paper and it gripped the paper. it wasn't dead! of course, thinking about it now, what could i have done for it? cpr? the defib paddles? i brought it to the scanner. it crawled around the platen while i took some images. none of the images were very good, and i left the bee alone. i went about my evening, took a shower, drew some cubes, ate taquitos and watched "drive" (tivo'd) with kara, went to sleep. this morning i saw that the bee had crawled off the scanner and onto my desk. with a piece of paper i put it back on the scanner. it's still alive! had yellow or eliot toyed with it yesterday at some point, given it grievous internal injuries? are merely its wings broken? what are my responsibilities here? perhaps merely to immortaize the insect. i don't know enough about the scanner to guess why the background is blue when the bee is on its back and gray when it is on its ventral side. the images still aren't that good. all the same, i will flip it over again now, so it can crawl away and die as it will. i'm done torturing it.

and yesterday this happened in a town where i happen to once have lived, some years ago. i would repeat what i said here, more or less.

snow says no snow

i am not often overtly political in this space but that doesn't mean i don't think about such things. i have probably emailed this cartoon to everyone who visits this space on purpose, but i'm posting it here anyway. i like it. (it came from here, surprise surprise.) i continue to be surprised that no presidental impeachment procedings have been initiated. surely there is sufficient cause. all right, he wasn't blown by anyone, but still. if getting blown is what it takes, i'm asking for volunteers. kara has already respectfully declined. there are things she simply will not do for her country! well, me too, to be sure.

anyway. i suppose that's enough about that for the time being. i've got to go draw some cubes for my drawing class now. oh, and the wamt symposium the other day was fine. the cardiothoracic surgical physician's assistant was the most entertaining, for my money. he was informative and comedic. he passed around a prosthetic mitral valve.

i was the only boy in attendance. usually i don't mind that. i don't usually like boys. i did feel a bit like the ladies were staring at me, but that might have been my imagination.

cosmology

there's a monitor attached to his chair and on the monitor are menus of words. he chooses words, constructs sentences, by twitching a muscle in his face, near his right eye. during his lectures last night, between each sentence or two, there would be a silence of 30 or 40 seconds' duration, in which he put together the next sentence or two for his voice synthesizer. these punctuations of silence were sometimes helpful, as i could use the time to attempt to glean the meaning of his abstractions. sometimes, though, i just watched him up there on the stage. there were stretches of his lectures in which i was right there with him, understanding him as he described his theories of the universes. there were larger stretches in which i was far, far behind.

on the other hand

i don't have to write at all. i don't. i don't have to put myself through this. i could live out my life as anyone else would, simply: working, sleeping, spending time with the wife, reading books, watching movies. the next 30 or 40 years could easily stretch out in this way and the world would be none the wiser. there's a sort of backward pleasure in that. an ease. i could be an ordinary person and live an ordinary life. who am i to think i could be more than that?

perhaps it's that i feel i should be doing something more with my life than i am. i'm not living up to expectations. i've settled, professionally and creatively speaking. i have it in me to be more than a medical transcriptionist.

i think again of philip roth and margaret atwood, only two examples of successful contemporary novelists with careers i admire. they have made an impact on the world. what are their lives like? did they imagine such success? i don't crave that sort of success (though i wouldn't say no), just, i guess, personal fulfillment. not so much inconsistency.

there is a fire in me. a small one, to be sure - right now it's not burning so hot or so fiercely, but the pilot light is lit. i could stoke the fire, couldn't i? as it happens, this morning i'm thinking about thinking about planning a novel. so the annoying cycle begins again. do i know enough to write a novel? is there enough in me to share in this way? why do i even think about putting myself through this?

these are questions i have, and they don't feel invalid. clearly i'm stubborn and confused. and i don't know what sort of life i want. all the same, come friday morning, i might bring a notepad to the mandolin and do some brainstorming.

on the other hand, tomorrow night we're going up to seattle to see stephen hawking, the smartest man in the universe. perhaps i'll come away from that lecture about the vastness of the cosmos feeling blissfully insignificant and drop it all again.

whining about writing

i haven't been writing much fiction lately. these last six weeks or so i've prioritized sleeping in the mornings. i'd rather get up between 6 and 6:30 than between 4:30 and 5. weird? and i'm wondering if this says something significant about my commitment to this craft. i mean, duh, it obviously does. were i dedicated to becoming an accomplished writer, i would get up earlier and stay up later and write and write and write. i might even choose to work part-time instead of full-time in order to devote more hours to fictivizing - and that idea certainly appeals, because in general i'm averse to working a job. but i don't want to relinquish my 40-hour paycheck, do i?

so what is at issue here is my level of commitment. i like writing. i like thinking of myself as a writer. only a small number of people have read my stories, but most of them have told me that i'm a good writer. sometimes i like what i write. i think i have it in me to be a good writer.

i tend to feel better about myself when i'm actively working on a writing project. i love holding in my hands the pages of something i've written. i love the physicality of the product, the feel of the paper, the shadows and shapes of the paragraphs on the page.

i don't know if i'll ever have much of an audience. will i ever be published? well, not at the rate i'm going - i haven't even submitted anything for publication in years. nothing ever feels quite finished, or good enough. though i don't think i'm a good judge of my own writing. the people who have read my stuff are family and friends, so can their praise be taken objectively?

and how much does being published matter? is being published the point? it's a mark of success, of course, and the idea of making money from writing is incredible. but that's not the reason i write. so then - why do i write? why do i care? do i feel i have something to say?

i guess the answer to that is: well, not really, i'm afraid. not so much. at least i don't think about it in those terms. it's not as if i have an agenda or a soapbox, or a desire to educate. all i can say is, i see characters in my head, i don't know why, and i want to describe them. there are ideas i want to explore for myself. do i believe truths dwelling in my subconscious will rise and emerge and teach me things?

sometimes i think my nature is too flighty. i don't think i'm ready to write a novel, though i love the idea of immersing myself in such a momentous project. mostly these days i'm thinking about short stories. there's nothing wrong with that. but then from time to time i feel i'd rather be a poet again, though the last time i wrote a poem i felt halfway good about, it was 1992.

a poem appeals because i could get a draft out in an afternoon. there's also a sense of freedom with poetry. the boundaries are hazier, if they exist at all. also, as i have said, novels appeal because of the sense of losing myself in something huge. these are opposite pulls. are short stories the happy medium? well - i don't really find them satisfying. (so maybe there is something wrong.) i'd rather be at one of the poles, but i don't know which one. i fluctuate, and that makes it hard to be productive. so that's another issue.

what i am learning from the writing of these paragraphs here is that i'd rather be writing. i need to tighten up. kara spends some time in the evenings with her books, so perhaps i could be an evening writer rather than (or as well as) a morning writer, if mornings are more for sleep. or i should just kick myself in the ass, set an alarm, get up before dawn, and write.

right now i have an idea for a story turning around in my head, and if i don't tend to it, it will die. i have a character, a young man, and a situation, a murder, and i don't know what will happen. i want to find out.

not a work-related injury

if it's not one thing, it's another. am i wrong? something's getting torn up all the time around here. if it's not the go away mat then it's i. an hour and a half or so ago i was cutting a bagel. it's not that i wasn't paying attention; i actually watched the knife's serrations bite into my index finger. i was powerless to stop it. i swore (inwardly). i'm not keen on blood, so i wrapped a bandage around the wound without inspecting it. the thought of pinching the wound open to check for depth entered my mind, but i did act on it. i confess i got a little woozy, but that passed. blood pooled about the edges of the bandage and dotted the keyboard as i continued to work. so after a few minutes i removed the bandage and applied a bit of this product to the laceration. it's a product i employ from time to time. it doesn't smell great initially and (due to my questionable borderline ocd) i tend to peel it off prematurely; those are the downsides. but now i can type fine. there is little pain. and i guess that's all i have to say about that.

welcome

this is what happens when you're mowing your lawn and aren't paying attention. at least this is what happens to me. it was the first mow of the season yesterday and everything else about it went quite well. the grass is now prettily cropped. i like it like that, i admit. the gas-powered mower, which had been abandoned in the garage by the previous owners of the house we owned before this one, started up immediately, even after having been thoughtlessly left out in the weather all winter long. nice little mower. poor little go away doormat. another lesson learned.

again with the monday

it seems it's monday again. so much for my three-day weekend. i never get quite as much done as i'd like, but that's mostly because i gravitate toward laziness. alas. well, it's okay. i feel fine.

i suppose a low point of the weekend came when i had just finished mopping the living room floor, because it was nasty - and when i returned from putting the mop away max had made a huge puddle on the same patch of floor. in his senility he sometimes forgets to tell us he wants out. kara was kind enough to step in and clean up that spill. both of us did a lot of picking up of max when he fell down. his back legs just go out from under him sometimes. often.

anyways. i slept pretty well last night, and have done so for the last week or two. i pay for this three-dayer with a one-day weekend next weekend, and we'll see how i handle that. i expect that on saturday the 7th i'll do as little as possible.

it is indeed april already. that's crazy talk, i know. time goes by faster and faster because each successive year represents a smaller fraction of our lives. for what it's worth, i've got picasso's running women on my calendar this month. readingwise, having finished the mailman, i'm onto a drury. i like his style a lot - i think of nicholas mosley and don delillo. something about the sense of disconnect seems to grab me.

we finished season five of "24" yesterday. in the final moments, jack was (literally) shanghaied - grabbed up and put on a ship bound for shanghai. i reckon season six will be available on dvd around christmastime, so we have a while to wait before we find out what happens there. (of course, as indicated above, the months will surely race by.) very exciting, though.

our lives are less thrilling, but still rather good. i do like things quiet, as it happens. and as a bit of an irrelevant aside, this graph here represents my popularity. it seems a fair amount of people happen by this space, but not so many come back. alas again. i suppose i'm not for everybody. but we knew that, didn't we?