California 2013: Sense and Sensibility

Alaska is known for its beautiful and rugged landscape, a fierce (and sometimes violent) history of gold and lumber-pillaging and is still the choice setting for much fishing, hunting, and the famous Iditarod. It also boasts a compelling wildness tipping point that is more fluid than most other places in the United States: bears that wander through grocery parking lots and moose whose hulking bodies mist morning backyards. 

The natural environment offers challenges in weather, accessibility, fierce beauty and formidability. It might be one of the reasons why the people that I’ve met who have lived there are some of the most interesting individuals I have ever run into. I’ve met them on dance floors and midnight at a hotel hot tub, at motorcycle bars and video arcades. They are vibrant, friendly, and in the chorus of the universe their voices are probably the most bold (and possibly slightly off-key).  Perhaps this is why I would like to go to Alaska someday: to be away from the things of man, to be close to people who affably clash with expectation, and to encounter a place that is still a little wild. I’m jealous of my friends’ summer sojourn there.

But right now I live in California, which is perhaps at the opposite end of the spectrum. It is the land of Neptune High School, celebrity politicians, and people who have never even heard of salt damage to their cars. Flowers bloom year round here: Godetias, miniature hollyhocks, baby blue eyes. The bodies here are well-yoga'd, creative, vegan restaurants abound, and a motorcycle can be a practical commuter vehicle.  I admit that I read my friend’s warnings on Facebook about possible pipe freezes this winter with a certain degree of smugness, as though I, personally, had discovered this coastal paradise, like my arrival here was a badge of some sort of achievement that I had earned by clocking time over the past three decades in soggy or more gloomy climes.

But life has a way of straightening you out, reminding you that no matter how extravagant the sunset or how well-lit the highways are by banks of rippling, golden mustard flowers, that you are just as foolish as you have ever been. I will admit: this has been an unwieldy year for me so far.

I purchased a motorcycle: a red 2006 Kawasaki Vulcan, a great starter bike. It is like falling in love, it is like the first few months of college, I am having an undeniable romance with motorcycles: reading poems and books about them, listening to stories from older, more weathered motorcyclists at my coffeeshop as though they are handing down legend, smiling at the cheeky motorcycle quotes that I find:

“Four wheels move the body.  Two wheels move the soul.”

“The perfect man?  A poet on a motorcycle.”

Lucinda Williams

“Life may begin at 30, but it doesn't get interesting until about 150.”

note: I don’t think I’ve gone over 40 yet on my motorcycle yet. I haven’t even taken it on the freeway

A few weeks ago, I went on a short weekend motorcycle road trip with my boyfriend and another couple (not on my bike). It was so hot that my female counterpart wore a bright pink tank top while she was on the bike for that entire first day – no jacket required (note: Phil Collins reference intentional and would also like to acknowledge for my parents that this is not the safest choice – I won’t do that, Mom). We drove North through Anderson Valley, a less populated and less commercial wine country where the tastings are free and there are no corkage fees, we stayed overnight in Boonville (a remarkably small town, but with enough personality to merit its own language). Over the course of about 36 hours together we tasted more than five bottles of wine and ended the day in a garden drinking down cold hard cider from a nearby farm. We tramped through high-grassed meadows in our motorcycle gear only to strip down to our bikini bodies by the river. We traveled back

to the Bay area down the coast in the booming sunlight: the beaches of the Mendocino coast are an odd mix of West Coast and East coast: slightly gray and weathered, foggy bogs creating dunes of cherry brush and large rock outcroppings that offer dramatic coastal viewpoints. We parted ways after we broke up a chocolate chip cookie that we ate at the delta of the Russian River while an outdoor jazz band played covers of “We’ve Got the Funk.” It was a weekend full of stampeding herds of pleasures.

And yet, I had spent the better part of the Spring in distress, feeling stunted in many of my pursuits, incredibly cut-off (even left behind) from some of my best friends and most of my recent history, and a whole host of other unhelpful reflections.

No one tells you what a hard thing surviving your own mediocrity can be.

This was me in the Run For Your Lives
Zombie 5K Obstacle Course (but is
also a pretty good approximation
of my springtime
emotional state, too).

I asked my friends to forgive me: “forgive me if I am too glum, too concentrated on our inevitable self-destruction as a species, on talking about how we’re trampling the planet, or talking about my own failings and sadness.”

Suffice to say that I spent a few months under water, trying to convince the people close to me that “yeah, I was bummed, but things were manageable, that I was fine.” This, in some part, was a lie. For the most part, I’d be more comfortable being naked in public than I would be letting you see just how much I resemble a sobby, red-eyed, greasy sloth on a bad day. But stay with me here for a moment and you’ll see why I'm going to bother to mention it this time around.

I’ve spent a lot of time diagnosing that feeling when it’s cropped up throughout my life: the wrong blend of chemicals in my body, childhood experiences, new birth control, a need more exercise, less sugar, terrible jobs (past tense), terrible relationships (also past tense), maybe I needed to create a list of daily affirmations and say them to myself in the mirror, maybe I needed to get out and make some new friends, maybe I needed to get back in touch with old friends, too much TV, not enough TV. The list of things that you are doing wrong or could be doing better for your own good is seemingly endless, but there is one thing that has unswervingly paralleled with a better mood.

Writing.

Tree tunnel near Point Reyes, CA

When I am writing. Even if it’s just in my journal or on this blog or a few lines of poetry, I realize that I am healthier when I am organizing my thoughts line by line progressively down a page. In the months in which my journal is full and my blog is updated and I’ve spent some time researching and typing, I spend less time at the bottom of my own well. It had not been happening enough.

Which is why I rebooted an old pledge that a friend and I had made to each other: one poem a week. Each week, I send a poem to a friend of mine and she sends one to me and (if nothing else). In this way, I’ve made some room for creative productivity in the middle of the rest of the business in my life. And the difference has been remarkable.

I also started doing yoga four time a week, drastically improved my diet, and bought a motorcycle and the change has been remarkable. 

That is the dramatic montage version of making all these choices: it does not show my grumpiness over giving up my morning coffee or the withering looks I’ve come to give scales, but I am happy to report that all of these things have set me up for a very promising summer where I am looking forward to motorcycle adventures, road trips and reunions with some of my favorite people back East.

On the eve of my birthday I took a ride through the rolling headlands that boulder right into the Pacific ocean. It is glorious to be at the edge of America with the surf that comes in threatening undertow to humans and their dogs alike: a bit tumultuous. It is also wondrous to be in the month of April and lie on a black sand beach in the 80 degree heat. Generally I associate my birthday with damp, cold mornings and sunshine threatening to break through the clouds, but not beaches and motorcycle rides. It’s a feeling that I could get used to.

They say that smell is one of the most powerful generators of memory and not just sense memory, but emotional memory. In April, I woke up on a Monday morning and rode through the streets of waking Oakland (men in blue overalls constructing yet another watchtower-like hospital building, an officer uncommonly casual and reading the paper in his car) and was overwhelmed by how much the heat of the streets and the coming day smelled like Rome in the throws of summer. Whatever pall had been on me slipped off just a little as my sense memory catapulted into hot weather and the perspective offered by history. 

It was the same thing hiking down the hill to the beach the day before my birthday, invited by Jason* whose talent are many. But surprise, recreational botany is such an underrated and unexpected talent that it takes a special prize in my heart. Down we go on perilously, ready-to-tip log steps laid into the cliffside and with each step, he reaches his hand back behind him, handing me small crumbles of leaves and ferns that he’s crushed between his thumb and forefinger and telling me to smell, illustrating the landscape not just with information, but with perfume:

“California sage,” he announces as my lungs bellow with a white, lemony fragrance, “it’s not a true sage, but it’s one of the natives that you find along the coast.” Another few steps, “Yarrow. Now that’s a magical plant,” the smell is rotund and almost floral, “it’s good for wounds and was once used to treat soldiers in battle.”

He invites me to reach out and touch a bud of orange bouncing in the hillside breeze and I pull back my hands to find them strangely tacky. He smiles and says “sticky monkey flower.”

I don’t identify much with my astrological sign, but one quality of Taurus that has always seemed embarrassingly accurate is their sensuality, an almost feline love of tactile pleasure. In this way, a ride down to the ocean is a riot of delight. It is ocean spray, citrusy perfume, the crash of waves, some hazy horn sound like a dial tone on the water in the distance, the hot sand in comedic avalanches under my bare feet – an unstoppable collision of sense after sense.

It is almost healing and I am convinced that this is part of what appeals to we Taureans – it makes the flinty, sparking neuroses of intellect go quiet for awhile. Of course, no great insight or philosophy is achieved in this time, but it is a welcome pause from a lifetime rooted in self (even selfishness). One is more a part of the slippery cave water coming down the bluffs, the roar of wind along the highway, or the rush of clean, sugared smell of opening fresia blossoms. Sometimes it is better this way.

###

*"Wait! What? Who's this Jason person?" you ask.

"Oh yeah," I reply, "I'm dating a man named Jason."

Cities Like Me

Who says that you have to choose
between a night out and writing?

On Friday night, just as the sun was going down after an abnormally bright Brussels day, I cut up a baguette in a kitchen with three other women. I had on a dress that I had purchased in a shop along the main square in Gibraltar. We were talking about cooking, kitchens, the way our mothers prepared meals. I looked over at A, who is almost always on her way to or just finishing with another smile, who at that particular moment was glowering down at the hand mixer that was refusing to work as she made homemade Mascarpone for this going away party. L deftly held a knife and taught me how to peel oranges in the Spanish fashion as we assembled a fruit salad. R was already through with the entire bunch of bananas and arranging nearly 40 Euros worth of cheese, which I couldn’t wait to consume after I had finished doing L’s hair.

No matter where you are, there is nothing like being in a kitchen with a group of laughing women in the hour before a party. Especially a farewell party where you can already feel the loneliness of living very far from people that you’ve come to love. 

Farewell Party

But that has been the feel of things since Wednesday when I finished typing the final words of this first draft of my manuscript.

It feels like the last few weeks before graduation. When everything takes on the sheen of anticipated nostalgia; the way my heels tangle with the cobblestone, the throaty, whole-mouth sound of French down the bar from me, the snap of the market tents folding up in the afternoon, the grassy dry taste of a cider served in a champagne glass. All of it now marked by the ticking clocked I’ve abandoned wearing.

View from the Party

In five months, I have visited eight countries, enough so that the TravBuddy widget tells me that I have now seen 9% of the world. I have written about 80,000 words of a strange work of fiction, more than 100,000 words of journal entries, I shudder to think how many pounds I’ve put on, so we’ll leave that number out of it for now. And then we can reflect on how inadequate those numbers are. On how there is no measure for the feel of a dress flapping in Mediterranean wind under Mediterranean sun or what the rain sounds like while writing on the top floor of a four story apartment in the south of England.

I have liked (or let’s not be coy here, I’ve loved) the cities and people that I’ve met over the course of this journey intensely, and each of them in their own fashion, caressing quirks and failings in particular – because somehow these are the things that make me love something. I’ve loved them as a tourist loves anything – with a wet, eager wonder at the newness, sometimes pleasantly daunted by the strangeness. And I’ve also loved myself a little more, maybe hated myself, too.

?

Take, for instance, the day I sat in front of the computer to work on my book and composed, instead, self-applauding emails to you all day talking about how well it was all going in order to make it true. Take the day I vomited in the middle of a French-speaking grocery store in front of some very kind and bewildered Belgians (yeah, ask me about that story sometime). Take, for example, that comatose day I stalled out on Chapter 8 while I considered the sudden death of my friend (very far away) and the range of beautiful work that he left behind because he put paint to canvas with such dedication.

Central Station Farewells

Not every day is the day you’re following your dream, sometimes you’re a graceless house guest, a washed-up tourist, or a talentless hack faking it in order to survive the afternoon. And if I wrote you an email on one of those days and told you how beautiful everything was, how good I felt, how the book was progressing, perhaps including an Oscar Wilde quote as though I were worthy of sharing an industry with him, it wasn’t exactly untrue, but it might not have been what you were picturing. I’ve fabricated a few things for you from time to time in order to to make them true for myself and in order to make it through the final pages. Which I have now.

But I swear that every day, even the days that I failed were the best days of my life because I had something to live up to even if it was just the view of the stately illuminated spire of the Grand Place here in a city that has become my home: Brussels.

Promotional Art Car Instrument... Thing

Yesterday afternoon, before putting my friend John on a train back to Paris, a group of us toured through two museums, intermittently punctuated with about five different café stops. Along the way, there were two artfully wounded cars that were smoking, painted, and dilapidated and rigged to make music when you interacted with them. There were oblique references to some parade that will take place later this week after I’m gone, but the connection that these musical wrecked cars have to it is unclear. But people, including us, were still stopping to watch and play the cars without the need for an invitation or explanation.

These are the things that make me smile as L and A set to rehearsing some sort of spontaneous and makeshift song on the car and I sigh to myself, “Ah, Belgium.”

Brussels (Belgium on the whole, really) in spite of the important role that it plays on the continent, despite its history and personality will never be a destination European city. People end up in Brussels mostly and it makes a case for itself and you either embrace it or you move on. Brussels offers itself, nothing more.

12th Century Belgian Painting
that proves Gay Pride Celebrations
have long been the norm

Think about it: Rome, London, Paris. These cities need not introduce themselves, their presence is anticipated, felt, announced on every corner, their personality is well-known from the get-go – they offer you an idea and they are delivered to you. Brussels, on the other hand is another thing entirely – as an international melting pot without an inherited definition – a young country even by American standards (whose independence was not recognized until 1839) – Belgium simply shows up and is itself, and gives you the strangest hidden corners, both new and old, at odds with itself, and very, very quirky. You don’t expect anything from Belgium, you discover it and because it didn’t arrive with a preconceived notion attached to it, your time with it can be entirely yours, something you make for yourself from a buffet of Belgian artifacts.

Beer, chocolate, fries, mussels, lace and comic books. These are the traditional Belgian associations. Godiva chocolate, the Smurfs, even some of our finest diamonds - these high and low delights emerged from gray, complicated cities.

Brussels Basilica of the Sacred Heart

Which is something that I love about it: its delight and its sincerity, its lack of perceived notions, association, or affectation. You have to want what Brussels has to offer to love it, which is a strange assortment of personal collisions: the butcher that chased my friend down the street when he forgot his wallet, the Belgian punks spilling beer on themselves, threatening to piss on the Metro and then holding the door open for an old woman, an impassioned defense from any citizen on the ninth art: comic books (reminding you of the indignation of incredibly gifted and fit girls who would knock you out were you to suggest that cheerleading isn’t a sport – of course it is). But it’s also the strange Atomium on the skyline (built for the World’s Fair in 1958), the smoking car band promotions on the street, the green art deco Basilica (which my friend L remarked was such a strange, sci-fi stylized church, it looked as though Star Wars fans or Rocky Horror Picture enthusiasts might be more comfortable holding conventions there than the world’s Catholic faithful who might come here to marvel at one of the ten largest Catholic edifices in the world), it’s the sun-glassed young Green who’s shouting poetry in French and Dutch during Brussels' Gay Pride celebration, it’s the old couple at the local market that stops to listen to the live brass band interpretation of David Bowie’s “Heroes.” It doesn’t make sense, and it isn’t always sophisticated – but it might just offer you more than you expected. It is allowed to be unusual, to contradict and redefine itself. Which is its problem. And its grace. And sort of the challenge for everyone I know.

Or maybe I’m just coming to the end of things. Maybe I’m just observant in that acute way that you’re only capable of when you’re in grief or joy.

Random Statue on the Way to the Basilica

I like Brussels, because it reminds me of me: unassuming, awkward, a little weird, a fusion of all of the best of the people that it has met, sometimes gloomy, but overall on the verge of laughter at all times.  You have to get to know it to like it and it offers you what you weren’t looking for instead of what you expected to find.

Which is a trend that I think will continue in the coming months.

And, if social media is the new platform for life updates and if blogs are the accepted channel for personal press releases, I should say now that when I return to the states that I am not staying in Seattle. I’ve been offered a position in San Francisco, which I am taking and I will be moving there in mid-July. 

I’m thirty, I wrote a strange book, I have a suitcase full of chocolate and shoes and beyond that, nothing is really certain.

Which means that things remain to be discovered and the boundaries of self-discovery are really only restricted to the borders of your heart, which, if you want it to, takes in quite a lot of territory.

The farewell party thrown by my friends on Friday night was a small affair by some standards, but it had all of the earmarks of a good time – an overflowing food table, dancing, an array of Belgian beers, and a great view.  And so maybe the moment you leave home for another city is a bigger departure than you had anticipated and maybe all love and all travel are just a series of cycling greetings and farewells, but it’s worth the hardships if it means you end up raising a glass with your favorite French family or dancing to Adele at three in the morning while overlooking the city skyline with your friends.

And so this is what it feels like to finish a book and come home.

Social Graces with Dalloway, Vincent, and Others

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

Certainly one of the most confident opening lines in literature and, after all these years, it is still one of my favorite initiations into a character and a plot. It’s a line that introduces the woman and her circumstances so effortlessly and, in a way, is the whole of the thematic character of the book in one line: Mrs. Dalloway in preparation for a party she will give – moving towards community, but also alone and intensely strained.

I have a tendency to “Mrs. Dalloway” my social scenarios. Strange - since I think of myself as someone who loves to meet new people and build small circles of friends who hug too much. I am, sad to say, a little socially handicapped. I spend vast amounts of time at parties near the cheese dip, stuffing my face and dusting broken tortilla crumbs off of my scarf, so that I don’t have to make too much conversation and thereby say one more off-color thing that proves me to be the socially inept hunchback that I am, leaving people to wonder who let me in.

Museum Night Fever

Here is this small insight into me. Perhaps I am talking to you at some well-lit party – a gallery opening in Seattle, say. There are girls wafting through the room, making it look easy to walk in heels, a band I haven’t heard of is whine-harmonizing in the background, and I am holding a glass of white wine more as a prop than to actually drink it. If I am stumbling through a story, laughing at awkward intervals and veering off the course of the conversation, or wandering dangerously close to unnecessary, blush-inducing innuendo and then spilling wine down my front, it is probably because I like you and I think you’re cool and I’m not necessarily up to the challenge of conversing with you as an equal. You’re probably either very funny or very intelligent (or worse, both). You wear a hat without looking like a poser. You’ve read more important books than I have, are disastrously well-informed about politics or the current financial crisis and I am terribly afraid that I’m about to be discovered at any moment.

Or another possibility: if I seem at all cogent or clever – if I manage not to mispronounce “endive” and don’t run roughshod with the volume of my voice, then I probably really like you and behind the steady and coyly, vague brown eyes, I am running a marathon in my head; Google-indexing everything I’ve ever learned, replaying past conversational faux pas at an alarming volume in hopes of side-stepping them this time around and wondering if you're preoccupied with the gap in my teeth.

Add the challenge of speaking in French to the mix and I’m absolutely blithering.

I’m socially useless and I know it, which means that I run at every communal occasion as though it were an episode of Survivor, wondering which round I’ll be eliminated in.

So, I am rather tense on the eave of a party – a dinner party for my small network of friends here in Brussels. I tried to buy the flowers myself, but they were too expensive. But, in spite of the nerves, in spite of the pressures I feel as a hostess for carrying off even a small party, I turned on the music, changed outfits three times and waited by the door while everyone arrived about a half hour late. Right on time for a slightly late European dinner.

Sunflowers by Van Gogh

I’ve been thinking about artists and their relationships. Probably my whole life, but certainly on this trip. Anne Lamott writes of her father who was an author, “I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.” A sentiment I agree with. Artists seem to come naturally to their own loneliness, but not necessarily comfortably. And the trend seems to be that artists are these funky creatures who are both in reverence for people and humanity on the whole and astoundingly lonely at the exact same time. Or maybe I just want to imagine better, awkward company near me at the cheese dip.

In Amsterdam, Kevin and I visited two museums. One was the Van Gogh museum, which thoroughly secured Van Gogh’s place in my heart. The whole experience is set up chronologically – shepherding tourists through his burgeoning impulses to become an artist into the full-fledged effort that he throws himself into in his early years, encouraged largely by his brother Theo, then on to his tours through France, Belgium, and Holland sampling different countrysides, colors, and landscapes along the way.

The museum, in this way, is also somehow a story of not only Van Gogh, but his brother who loved him so dearly – to their deaths, so close in proximity to one another. It turns out that much of Van Gogh’s acclaim is owed to Theo’s widow who felt honor-bound to earn Van Gogh his acclaim after both of the brothers had died, since their wish for his success was a shared passion.  It becomes clear as you walk through the work that much of it wouldn’t have happened without Theo encouraging him, without Theo to write to as Van Gogh tried to explain and hone what he was working on, without Theo to berate for not better advocating his work, without Theo to hearten him and tell him that he truly believed in the work he was doing.

Wheatfield with Crows by Van Gogh

I saw some of Van Gogh’s sunflowers which echoed my experience of seeing them in the National Gallery in London a month ago, bringing some amount of unity to the widely-flung net of my travel. I walked along his wheat fields, forests, still lifes of fruit, and looked at the grimly set faces of the Potato Eaters, admired blossoming trees, strolled along his garden paths and watched the world turn to whorls of water under Van Gogh’s paint brush. My favorite painting ended up being “Wheatfield with Crows,” which is supposedly his last piece. I didn’t read more about him until later that evening when I again had internet access (thanks, Wikipedia).

Self Portrait by Van Gogh

Never married. There were several women that he confessed his love to that refused him, a prostitute that he lived with for several years along with her two children. He had a professional fixation on Gaugin and was obsessed with the hope that Gaugin would someday view him as his equal (which never really happened). And then, as his mania reached a fever pitch, he went to confront Gaugin with a razor, thought better of it and went to the arms of a prostitute at a local brothel named Rachel where he cut off the lower part of his lobe, gave it to the prostitute and told her to bare the package carefully. Then hospitalization, cloistered experiences that still yielded paintings, and then, at the age of 37, he ostensibly shot himself and died two days later with Theo at his side. Another theory goes that two boys in a field shot Van Gogh who they knew to have a gun, though this theory seems to not be recognized by the Van Gogh museum. In any case, the gun was never found and Van Gogh’s last words were “the sadness will last forever.”

I’ve since been reminded by a friend of a book called Dear Theo, which is a collection of the correspondence between the brothers. I plan on reading it myself, but what seems most clear from my friend’s description of it is that Van Gogh wasn’t a raving, talented lunatic. His letters instead reveal that he is a complex, feeling, intelligent, troubled, and oftentimes lonely person. And, according to the museum and those letters, in spite of that loneliness and feeling of inferiority, so often what he wishes to express in his art is connection, reassurance, and hope. I think this desire comes to artists because they feel some gap between themselves and the rest of the world and are simply trying to build a bridge over it. Maybe everyone feels this way. I don’t know.

Otto Frank at the Anne Frank Museum

Kevin and I also visited the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, which effected me more than I thought it would. I hadn’t realized that it would be so hard on me (after not having read the book for such a long time), to visualize Anne Frank growing up here in this cage and then enter that final room knowing that she died of Typhus just a month before liberation and just a few days after her sister without any of her family left to mourn her (except her father, years later).

The museum takes you through the two stories of the secret annex and is completely unfurnished. It is an interesting choice meant to honor the wishes of Otto Frank who said that he wanted the museum to stay exactly as it was after the raid that exposed the family. Purely on a practical level, I don’t know how people would get through the place if they moved any of the furniture back in – there would be no room for maneuvering and the flow of traffic would be like the 520 highway between Bellevue and Seattle at rush hour. But, on another level, the empty rooms that were once her entire world communicate another sort of sadness, that isolation from the rest of the world that Anne describes in the book – something that I’m sure Otto Frank hoped would be implied. Even as you squeeze between the shoulders of other backpacked tourists, trailing curly-headed kids behind them, there is something inherently lonely about those rooms.

Whoever betrayed the Frank family was never discovered – the anonymous tipper remains anonymous to this day, in spite of extensive investigation. Which left this hollow ringing in my stomach as I thought of her while we exited the museum into the unreasonably pleasant sunshine outside. As someone who so desperately wanted to be a part of the rest of the world, I wonder what would have become of her book if she survived, what sort of writer she would have grown to be.

Amsterdam's Homomonument

So even though the sun was beaming as Kevin and I stopped by the nearby Homomonument (a large pink stone triangle in the center of a square, placed in honor of all those persecuted for their sexuality), I didn’t feel light and giddy in the spirit of Amsterdam, as I should have. I felt weighted, tired, and more reflective than social.

Kitties will Save You From Despair

We stopped at a café called Walem and ordered a soup for me and a sandwich for Kevin, while we discussed plans for tonight, the order of operations for stopping into different night clubs, what we should wear, etc.  But the conversation was slow and half-hearted in a way that isn’t the norm between Kevin and I. As we ate lunch, a gray cat wandered through the cocktail tables and scratched on the wide-windowed back door of the restaurant that looked out over a terrace. The tall, balding, and well-assed waiter opened the door and went about clearing more dishes from the lunch rush. By the time I was at the bottom of my Diet Coke, I still had that lonely, hopeless despair rock in the center of my stomach thinking about the distance between Anne Frank and the rest of the world and was just about to ask for the check when the restaurant’s gray cat wandered back to the high bench I was sitting on, leapt up in one coiled move and settled onto my lap. And even though nothing had changed, even though I could still hear Anne’s father’s voice from the video at the museum’s finale telling me that he was not sure that any parent could really ever know their child, as I stroked the soft gray furry back while marshmallow paws gently kneaded my stomach, whatever sadness I was suffering as I pondered the human condition gradually melted away. I ordered a coffee and Kevin and I sat there gazing at each other over the lunch debris, smiling.

Along the Rue des Bouchers with Kevin

It is a good thing to have another writer alongside you as your companion. What is so often a solitary activity, suddenly takes on a new form as you and your friend settle in front of your respective machines and begin to clack-clack your way through an hour.

When we are out together in one another’s company, Kevin and I, we are often mistaken for a couple. We walk joyfully arm in arm and the two of us take turns sometimes resting our head on the other’s shoulder. On our first night in Amsterdam, in one of the city’s oldest coffeeshops, Bulldog, Kevin and I met two very nice older gentlemen on a one-day layover in Amsterdam. One was a ship’s captain, the other – a chief engineer. Kevin clarified “so you’re Jean-Luc Picard and you’re Geordi La Forge?” The two guys loved it and roared with laughter. “You’re right,” they said, slapping Kevin’s shoulder, “that’s exactly right.”

They bought us drinks and talked to us while we settled into the feeling of the city. They were both interested in us being writers and were glad to talk to us about it: why we liked it, what books we liked, what we were working on. When I left the table for a moment, the chief engineer turned to Kevin and asked “is it hard to date someone that you have so much in common with?”

Then the explanation that has followed a few times on this trip: no, we’re not together, we’re just good friends, he’s gay and we’re both single. We’re just here on an adventure together.

At SOHO in Amsterdam

And somehow giving the explanation is both an invitation to remember how single we both are, but also oddly comforting. Kevin looks at me and I look at him and as the chief engineer asks “well, then, do you have a boyfriend?” Kevin replies with the most subtle of sighs, “I just think it takes a long time to find the right person.”

And so it goes. Keats on his death bed saying that if he could only get well again, he would go back to England and convince Fanny to marry him. Jonathan Swift’s final wish to be buried next to the woman he had loved for almost her entire life. Van Gogh struggling against his sadness until the end as his brother held his hand while he died. Me, writing in my silly journal, scribbling away at my silly book and shelving my nerves for an evening to give a small dinner party. Because in spite of my nervousness, I rather like people, so I’ve found something really wonderful in writing. There are no shitty first drafts in the improvisational art of conversational charisma. But give me a word processor, several days of editing, copious cups of coffee, a dictionary and fact-checking capabilities and I might emerge from the experience with a whole person (either myself or an imagined character) that can manage the interaction. I can speak to you this way. Or at least try to.

So there we were, finally seated around the dinner table. A – my Italian friend who studies law, who inspires me to fearlessly say “yes” over and over again. She, of all the people who were to come to the party that night had the least amount of English, yet throughout the entire evening she participated in the conversation, asked to be corrected, and laughed loudly as we covered a range of subjects from public urinals to the fashions for tying scarves. So far, she has not once said "no" to something I've invited her to. My new friend, S, who arrived with both appetizers and desserts and was there by my side in the kitchen while I cooked offering advice and telling me funny stories and who didn’t know a single other person in the room when we sat down. R - who is always fashionably dressed was there with her handsome boyfriend, eating their way through their second, long meal of the day. L – a lovely, young German woman who lobbies for the organic produce industry and is constantly apprised and letting me know about interesting things that are happening in the city (like Museum Night Fever or the concert that is happening tonight that I will be attending with her). F – neighborhood actor and English teacher who I met on the tram. And Kevin – certainly the life of the party who sits down opposite me at the head of the table, each of us taking the position of matriarch and patriarch of the feast. We laugh all night long and yes, everyone does indeed stay for coffee. 

I’ve been asked several times throughout the course of this trip (more than ever before in my life, really) why I write and I find that in spite of having a buffet of reasons to select from, I tend to trip through all of them simultaneously and somehow end up poorly quoting portions of my favorite childhood novel, Watership Down – ending by finishing lamely “well… so… rabbits… as a metaphor… powerful stuff.”

But let me try to organize myself a little better here. I write, because it is the only vehicle for connection that I have found that I can drive with some degree of skill. I write to try to communicate with you, with all of the books and authors I’ve worshipped along the way, or yes, with myself, as well.

Bike Ride to Tervuren

I think I am interested in the lives of lonely or awkward artists, because it is the aspect that I most identify with. The sense of displacement, but also a sort of reverent love for the people around me. And well, the only weapon I have to defend everything that I’ve ever loved, never had, imagined or hoped for is my keyboard so that I can tell you about all of them. I can tell you that there is a woman I know with a view across the city who loves a gardener that she has known for ten years, I can tell you about a downy-blond dog in the park the other day who waggled his tiny butt when he saw me and and then shied away back to the knees of his rosy-cheeked, spectacled master, I can tell you how good it felt to ride a bike with my friend while the bike seat somehow shifted off its axis and I laughed as I almost tumbled a dozen times into the thorns lining the road we were on. These things happened. I can tell you that they did. And if I can tell you that, maybe the distance between us isn’t such a large gap to cross after all and maybe I’m not the only one by the cheese dip. Maybe you’re here too and we can both make our way through the conversation together.
...

I went to Amsterdam, stayed out late celebrating Kevin’s birthday, met new people, stopped at a bar that looked like the library on Titanic, toured through the red light district, bought more chocolates (also watched a whole lot of Downton Abbey), gave a dinner party, wandered Vondelpark, stopped for a drink at my friends’ place overlooking Brussels, visited churches, convents, and karaoke bars. I should have written about the canals, the views, the food. Instead I wrote about artists and writing. Ah, well.

In fact, I have written about all those things – just not here. If you would like to hear more about adventures in Amsterdam  or my attempt to make friends with a  goose, please email me – I’ll send it along.

Keeping It Real

I hesitated to make this blog post. In the midst of all the vibrant delight that I'm feeling there have also been some substantial doubts and some long talks with myself and I wasn't sure that they were the correct tenor for the blog that exists as it is now. I wrote this journal entry in the first week of my time in Brussels when I was still staring down the barrel of "THE NOVEL." People keep asking "how's the writing going?" and I'm not sure if you've noticed, but there's a notable absence of a treatment on that subject. In the weeks since, I've substantially turned a corner in this regard. I've spent the past month in the equivalent of literary doodling: more than a hundred pages of short story starts, memoir-ish stabs, journaling, long letters to myself, flash fiction - just doing literary sit-ups really. And in the past week I made a command decision to start with a blank document and abandon the past three years of the novel segments that have been written at different times and in different moods and styles and just start fresh. I re-outlined, character sketched, planned and have since finished the first two chapters at an exciting sprint. So there's that, too.


I am posting this, because if you are a writer and you are unsure of yourself, if you're staring at a blank screen and wondering how you do this thing that you love... well, then this might help you feel not so lonely...


When I had an internship in New York City for one summer in 2004, I made a list of all of the destinations that I wanted to make sure that I visited before my time there was through. I saw almost all of them: The Statue of Liberty, the library, the World Trade Center monument, the MOMA, Gotham Comedy Club, the Bronx zoo, etc.. Every week, I ticked off another location and added it to my collage.

I spent the majority of that summer largely alone, but it was those excursions that reminded me of where I was and all that I could experience in that city. It was dirty and hounded and torturously, yawningly vast without any break. Where did all these people come from? Where did I fit in? But there I was – breathing in books that were hundreds of years old, there I was – smelling the dim but pervasive scent of shit in the Gorillas exhibit. I made my way out into the city and (in that way) was transformed. I also got a hell of a lot of writing done that summer. The bulk of my senior thesis.

This room that I’m now lying in feels like home – downy comforter, blue robe hanging balefully on the wall looking particularly woebegone. I have the limitless reaches of the internet before me, chat conversations ticking in and out of my browser and a still amassing to do list. It feels like home. But I don’t want it to.

I want to be transformed, but transformation takes courage, something that I seem to be sorely lacking these days. It requires me to get up and leave the confines of this charming room with its picturesque framed view of the suburbs and go listen to the chatter of other people speaking in a foreign language. I am hampered by my lack of confidence and a lack of that reckless and trusting faith that the universe will take care of me. After ten years of “real life” I am afraid of the food that I eat, the fate of the planet, the viability of love, most things that I experience even on a day-to-day basis. Everything that I have learned about life has led me to this conclusion “don’t trust; you’ll just end up profoundly damaged or at the very least violently embarrassed.” It’s something that keeps me inside this snug little retreat and out of the activity that might possibly change me.

It’s also keeping me from the page. If I venture into that territory too far I run aground on fear (as usual – “Jeez, did I really just use the thesaurus for “funny?” – “Is there really a character in that buttoned-down, limited, little mind of yours that can barely manage the story of her own life, let alone someone else’s for 300 pages? What’s your problem?”). And there’s always an available alternative – Bond’s facebook always has funny links on it, I’d best pay her page a visit. Still need to figure out how much it’s going to cost to get to Paris – I’d better go see what the fares are. Oh – it’s enormously complicated to put my loans on forbearance? Better do that now.

None of these things occurred during my time in New York. I had visitors constantly – almost every weekend – but during the week I was alone and fell comfortably into a rhythm. Get up in the morning and switch on Billy Joel, shower, adorn myself, subway, work (or whatever the hell that was), dinner somewhere (preferably air conditioned), and then home to write for two hours, hummus snack and a movie to fall asleep to. Bliss. On the weekends friends and family would visit. We’d tour, experience the city, knock a few things off the list and I’d be back to my own devices by Monday. Pages (not outrageously good pages, mind you, but certainly present) stacked up at the bedside. I wrote a short story collection in a summer.

You see – I was lying when I said I hadn’t ever lived alone. Well, not really. I’d just forgotten this portion of my history. And shame on me for not remembering. I did live alone for a summer and for that entire summer I was myself. A bit reclusive maybe, but politely, pleasantly, and productively so. I must shed my apprehension and I have to trust again. I have to get out into the city and be where I am – 6,000 miles away from the “real life” that I led a prison break from. I have to sit at my computer with the internet off and just doodle and stop pestering myself about this book that I have promised I will write and just write.

I asked Heather this morning: “you will still love me if I’m not a writer, right?”

“Of course,” she replied.

And somehow after she said that I produced another page, some lines of dialogue, a little vignette about my mother's watches. A little reassurance... sometimes it goes a long way.

Maybe if I didn’t place the burden of my ego on everything that I created, maybe if I knew that I was enough whether I wrote this silly little book or not, I would actually write this silly little book.

Today there was salad with vinagrette, bread and cheese, soup, lasagna, cheesecake, and tea. There was more. There was a run first thing this morning.

I don’t think people run on the streets here. I think they run in parks along paths. I did catch a raised eyebrow or two and JP said that he thought it would be “much nicer in a park.” But as I was pounding down the trattoire at seven this morning watching the sky smear gold and then to that familiar gray as I rounded the corner toward home hundred-year old bells reminded me of where I was.