Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: A Book Review

I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel last week and it was a reading experience that will stay with me for some time. When it was published a year ago, it was one of the first novels to take as its theme the events of 9/11. The story is told in a somewhat surreal manner reminiscent of the genre known as magical realism. The protagonist and narrator is Oskar Schell a precocious boy who lost his father when the towers fell that day. From the first chapter as Oskar rides in a limousine to the graveyard where they bury his father’s empty coffin to the last chapter when he returns in that same limousine on a dark night to dig up his father’s coffin, Oskar is on an odyssey of encounters that test and shape him and ultimately show him how to be in this suddenly terrifying world, how to embrace life and love in spite of overwhelming fear and grief.

Early in the story Oskar sets himself the task of finding the lock to which a key he found in his father’s closet belongs. The only clue is the name ‘Black’ in red ink on the tiny envelope the key was in so he embarks on a quest to visit each Black in the New York phone directory in alphabetical order. There are over 200 of them and he estimates it will take over a year to visit each one. Each Black that he encounters is uniquely drawn, many of them quite eccentric and every one living their own story of love and loss and learning to adapt after their world seems to have lost its meaning.

Interspersed throughout are epistolary chapters in which his father’s parents tell their own stories of having lived through and survived the firebombing of Dresden as teens towards the end of WWII. His grandmother writes her letters to him. His grandfather writes his letter’s to his own son to explain why he has abandoned him before he is born. Thomas Schell Sr. responded to the trauma of the Dresden firebombing by attempting to hold himself aloof from ever loving or needing anyone or anything again. Not even his own voice. He went mute and communicates by writing on whatever surface is available and with the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’ tattooed on his palms.

Oskar keeps a scrapbook called Things That Have Happened to Me of pictures he takes with his grandfather’s camera or clips from magazines or prints off the Internet. These pictures are scattered throughout the novel. Included among them are pages taken from a scratch pad at an art supply store on which people have doodled in different colored ink their own names and the names of colors. These and other textual oddities have received mixed reviews. I do not agree with those who were made uncomfortable by them. I did not find them distractions or ‘too precious’ or ‘gimmicky’. I found them not only to deepen the experience of seeing the world through Oskar’s eyes but also to hold clues that unlocked elements of the theme and the meanings we are to take away from the story, things that Oskar’s limited perspective could only hint at.

Oskar’s perspective was limited in several ways. First of all by his youth. Most of all by his grief and fear from which he retreats into the comforts of his imagination and memory for trivia by taking off on flights of fancy or reciting a litany of facts and statistics in attempts to put distance between his chaotic feelings and the events he is experiencing. Oskar is an example of the unreliable narrator. It is not that he is a liar, just not fully aware when he is acting on mistaken assumptions. Several of the reviewers of this novel admitted having difficulty in suspending their disbelief precisely because they find it hard to believe that a nine year old can be so precocious as to wander the five boroughs of New York alone let alone have the kind and quantity of insight and knowledge that Oskar displays.

I did not have this problem. For one thing, I have never found precocious children unbelievable as I have encountered too many of them in my life to think that they are so rare that one must always assume that every nine-year-old one encounters is a self-absorbed air-head with no thoughts beyond the next sweet-treat, little memory of yesterday and no concern for tomorrow and no ability to apply insights gleaned from experience--even vicarious experience. But mostly I had no problem getting past having to believe Oskar was only nine because I never really believed that he was.

It was his very name that indicated to me that his age might be other than what he claimed. Why was an American boy given a name with a German spelling? If either his father or grandfather had had the same name it would have been unremarkable but both of them had the name Thomas. Whether Foer gave him the name to plant a clue for the reader or Oskar himself took it in his attempt to overlay a new persona that might be better able to cope with the new realities of life after 9/11 cannot be gleaned from the text itself. But I understood from the moment early in the first chapter when Oskar expresses his passion for percussion instruments and talks about carrying a tambourine about with him that he was a literary reference to the precocious Oskar Matzerath of Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum who, born during the height of WWII in Danzig becomes so disgusted with the obscenity that is the Third Reich and the acquiescence and complicity of the adults of his community to the atrocities and absurdities of Hitler’s regime, he chooses to stop growing at the moment he reaches three feet tall. He also carried a tin drum everywhere and made a terrible nuisance of himself with it. My suspicion was confirmed when Oskar requests cups coffee while declaring that it stunts your growth. The clincher that also indicates his true age is the time his psychiatrist asks him clinical questions designed to discover whether Oskar is experiencing symptoms of puberty. Why would such questions be put by a doctor to a child several years too young to have developed them?

I went looking for reviews of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close specifically to see if this relationship between the two Oskars had been commented on by anyone else. I found no reference to it. But there were several references to other literary allusions to fictional places, people and plots buried in this novel. Almost all of these to writers known for work that borders on the fantastical, absurd or surreal as is Gunter Grass. Many of those I missed because I had never encountered the novels in question. And again, some of the reviewers who recognized these references were irritated by them, even going so far as to accuse Foer of ‘cribbing’ from another novel. I find that irritation to be symptomatic of a lack in the reviewer and not in the novel. A lack of what I am not sure. But I was seriously irritated by their irritation. If I was a name-caller I would call them fuddy-duddies.

Meanwhile, I believe Foer, by referencing these other stories, is not only honoring their creators but attempting to give his readers a key to unlock the multitudinous meanings of 9/11. He is hinting that there are as many meanings as there are hearts in the world but that the wisdom we need to embrace life and not despair in the face of absurdity is never any further away than your own heart opened to the possibilities of love in defiance of fear and loss.

Here are some links to reviews and resources I encountered in my search:

Read what is on the book cover flaps.
Read an excerpt. I didn’t check it word for word but I think this is the entire first chapter.
Read a review by a fuddy-duddy.
Read a review by Mark Flanagan
Read reviews by Meghan O’Rourke and Ruth Franklin
Read this exposition of the novel in Wikipedia. Spoilers.
Read this interview with Jonathan Safran Foer
Visit Jonathan Safran Foer’s own web site. Warning: this site uses flash technology and may load slow on dial-up.
Read a commentary on Gunter Grass and the Tin Drum.

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Why do I always do this?

The post I set out to write in the wee hours of Saturday morning got shanghaied by my meandering mind and digressed so far I couldn’t bring it back to the intended point without deleting all but the first paragraph and setting off anew with my toes pointed at the target. But that would have meant not posting at all that morning as I had run out of time. As it was--and a close look at the timestamp of the previous post will show this--I was breaking my new schedule’s rule to not return to the Internet again after 6AM because every minute I stay awake past six-thirty is like pulling a brick out of the wall of my carefully structured blocks of time built to support the ladder that reaches for my goals.

This is more true of Saturday morning than of some others because it isn’t just my schedule and my goals that are impacted by my arriving at Grandma’s on Saturday afternoon sleep deprived. So when I came out of the trance of writing to notice that it was fifteen to seven, I hastily tacked on that last sentence--which also became the new title--and hastened out to the living room with my laptop on battery power to save time and ensure that I would not be tempted to linger. I was back in bed in less than half an hour.

But I digress yet again. That opening paragraph about going to the library was supposed to help me segue into a discussion about books and movies and another major insight regarding my new schedule, blogging and writing in general that the day’s events had given me. This awkward substitute for the pretty essay I had pictured as I wrote that first paragraph yesterday morning is distressing me more and more with every keystroke. I’ve more than half a mind to trash it and move on. But that is the perfectionist in me that constantly tries to convince me that it is better to do nothing at all than to be caught making a mistake or making a mess.

I am writing this post while closed up in the bedroom at Grandma’s without Internet access. My intent was to get a jump on Sunday night’s session since I may be so sleep deprived and otherwise distracted by the weekend’s events that it will be difficult to get something ready to post before I have to get off line Monday morning. And thus another brick will falls out of the wall. So I am not going to tank this either. As awkward and ugly as it is, it serves the purpose of setting the context for what I want to say.

I’ve lost track of how many light bulb moments the past two month’s reassessing of my goals and revamping of my schedule have generated but there have been many and though some have been as significant as the one I had Friday this one has to be in the top five percent--right up there next to the realization that I could not sustain flipping back and forth between graveyard and day shift every weekend. In my failed attempt to get a post written and ready to go before I went online Friday night, I recognized a pattern of behavior that I saw as a failure of will and further proof that I didn’t deserve to reach my goals since I was nothing but a dilettante of a writer with one hand full of wishes and the other full of spit. Why, I asked myself, do you always do this? Why can’t you stick to the plan? Why can’t you just…..

And I broke off, suddenly cognizant of the tone of harangue typical of my harassing harpies. Why, I shot back in a professorial tone, can you not ask that question as though you truly desire an answer you don’t already think you have and not as though you are shoving your answer down my throat? The better to gag you with, my dear, she sneered. Ah. And about that time my laptop got cranky again and insisted on a nap (restart) to install updates and clean the cobwebs out of its RAM. So I had about fifteen minutes to sit and contemplate the question. Why? Why do I always do this?

Then the habit of questioning assumptions developed in the last couple months took over. First of all, what is the ‘this’ that I ‘always’ do? And is it truly always? And what do I know about myself that can explain it? The ‘this’ in this case was not being able to get something worth posting written on a timely basis. Regular, consistent creation and posting of new content for my web sites is one of the rungs on that ladder reaching for my goals. But it is one of the more important ones since it is fairly low down so if I can’t establish a solid foothold on it, I will never get very far off the ground. After all, without content there is nothing to promote and without consistency you cannot grow a devoted audience.

As to what it is that I know about myself that could explain this inability to create content on demand? Could it have anything to do with that pesky perfectionism? Well sort of. Peripherally. Because I was trying to come up with something to write about, something important or profound or unique or wise or creative or… anyway, at the very least, readable and interesting. But my mind was like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower and never landing on one long enough to compose a sentence let alone a paragraph.

Oh, but wait. There was one flower it kept hanging out on but I kept swatting it off. It kept coming back to thoughts about the library, the walk there and back, having missed having it for the past month and fears of not having it at all by this time next year mingled with hopes regarding the better facilities slated to open next summer and all stirred up with images of book covers and DVD cases, with anticipation about starting certain of the books I brought home that day and anxieties about spending time with the books that have to go back next Friday and the novel I am in the middle of that was due Friday but which the librarian was kind enough to renew through Monday so I could finish it over the weekend. All of this is what I wanted to think about but for some reason had deigned unworthy of writing about. But why is that? What could be more worthy of a post on a blog called Joystory with a subtitle that reads in part, ‘musings on reading, writing, thinking and being’, than musing about a trek to the library and the books one has encountered there and the importance of libraries in every reader‘s, writer‘s and thinker‘s life?

There is another thing I know about myself that helps explain the difficulties I’ve been having with consistent content creation and this was the big Ah ha! I do not easily switch gears. Psychology uses the term ‘slow to warm up’. It explains shyness and so much more. It is difficult for me to get started in something but once started and heavily engaged, it is just as difficult for me to quit. It is hard to wake up. It is just as hard to go to sleep. It is hard to get in the pool, or the shower but once in it is hard to get out. It is hard to engage me in conversation at first but once I am engaged it is hard to shut me up. This has been true of me since before I started school and it was the bane of all my school years, that necessity of switching subjects every sixty minutes or less and from sixth grade on switching classrooms as well. It was excruciating for me.

But the good news is that I have understood this about myself ever since I took child psychology in college twenty years ago and learned that it can be a strength and not a weakness. If you accept it as a given, as a trait that is hardwired in your brain and nervous system and thus no more changeable than the color of your eyes or your handedness, then you can adjust your expectations and create an environment that not only accommodates it but capitalizes on it. For one thing, the focus, once engaged, is incredibly tenacious. And that is a good thing for any serious writer, reader or thinker with complex and long-term projects like books, blogs or webzines to write, edit and promote.

The next obvious question then was how do I accommodate this trait and capitalize on it in regards to regular and consistent posting on Joystory? The answer is to stop trying to change the subject when I sit down to write a post. There is always something engaging my mind and since the subtitle of this blog covers all of my obsessions and passions, it is certain that whatever has engaged my mind is worthy of blogging on here. So if I am as successful at implementing the accommodation for this quirk of mine as I was at implementing the new schedule recently, you can expect more posts here and more variety. And if life throws another series of importunate events at me to test my resolve as it did last month then you can expect that I will be less reticent about blogging about them as they occur, musing on how they impact my attempt to stay focused on my goal to create an environment that nurtures my passions for reading, writing, thinking and being.

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I Can’t Imagine Life Without My Library

Today I made my first Friday library run since the library opened in its new temporary location after a three week hiatus to make the move. I can’t believe those three weeks are over already. I can’t believe I survived them. I did get to stop in briefly on Monday afternoon on the way to Grandma’s house but I couldn’t stay long to explore as my mother-in-law was waiting in the car for me. I grabbed three books and two movies for myself and five books for my husband. I like to keep my due-dates on Friday so I didn’t want to check out very many but nor could I stand to wait until Friday which would have put four full weeks between library visits. Today was my 195th visit to a Jackson County Library since we moved back here in August of 2001. I know this because I number my receipts. Today I came home with my rolling backpack stuffed to the gills with books and DVDs.

The temp building, which is one of the older buildings in this blink-your-eyes-and-miss-it town on Oregon’s Hwy 99, is about one third the floor space of the old one. The wiring is so old that they can’t use their coffee maker once the computers have been turned on in the morning. They anticipate staying there for about a year while their new building is built.

The new building will be twice as big as the old one with all kinds of new features, including study rooms for students and WIFI internet access. The funding for this new building was finalized just before the tech bubble burst. It has taken them this long to find the location for the building. Now the fear is that once it is built the funds for keeping it staffed and stocked with new books are not going to be there by the time they open their doors next year. This is because Congress is about to vote to discontinue the timber money’s that have been supporting our county library system since the seventies. I don’t understand the ins and outs of this issue. But I’m about in a panic over it.

I’ve tried to research it but so much of what is written assumes you already know what they are talking about. ‘Timber moneys’ is a short hand term for something that is more formally known as the Oregon and California Funds. And they are something that was set up to compensate northern California and most of Oregon for the loss in potential taxes when large sections of forest were designated to be conserved from development or resource extraction. Every time I try to search online for info on this, all I find is recent articles in local papers that assume their reader’s already know the full backstory. Those links that promise to answer some of my questions are always to pay-per-view archives or personal websites that do not cite primary sources adequately enough for me to feel comfortable citing them.

This is a big issue and yet nobody is talking about it other than to just casually mention that the vote to discontinue the funds is set for sometime this fall and that it is assumed to be a done deal, no point in debating. The questions I have that I can’t find answers to are:

When was the original law passed that created these funds and what was it called? What were the arguments for and against back then? How many times has it been renewed and what were the arguments at those times? At whose instigation is it being discontinued now?

This is going to affect the rural communities of Oregon and Northern California quite drastically. It isn’t only libraries that will lose funds. Among the things various communities use the funds for are: sheriff’s departments, drug rehab, and domestic violence shelters.

I can’t imagine life without my library.

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Discipline Is Love In Practice

The last couple of months have been an exercise in re-examining every 15 minute block of time of my 24/7 schedule, every assumption about what is and isn’t necessary and reassigning priorities to reflect my goals. Most of my posts in the last six weeks or so have been about this experience. I have learned--and in many cases re-learned--valuable lessons but I would not ask another busy writer to read those 10-15,000 words of meandering musing and wimpy whining. I’ve been hoping to distil it down into an essay of about one tenth the length. Meanwhile, a post over at Write Stuff on the related theme of goal-setting and discipline for writer’s, inspired me to leave a comment based on my recent experience. I spent so long composing that comment, I ran out of time to compose a separate blog post but I realized that I had managed to distill the last six weeks of angst induced insight into two succinct paragraphs that contained all of the main points of the lessons visited on me:

Let's not forget that discipline shares the same etymology as disciple. A disciple is one who follows a discipline out of love not fear. Love either for the teacher/exemplar, the ideology or the craft. If you allow discipline to be imposed from without or within by a rigid taskmaster the love is corrupted into something demonic. And even discipline requires flexibility.

Discipline can be custom designed to fit the exigencies of your unique life circumstances. A fact about myself that has remained stable for over forty years is that I cannot snap to attention upon awakening. So, like the poster I left the comment for, I always used to feel like a failure when I attempted to apply the advice of seasoned writers to make time for the writing by getting up an hour early to write before other duties intruded. Some people need more time than others between first opening their eyes and feeling like all the lights are on inside. There is no sense in calling yourself a failure because you can’t be task-oriented while your brain straddles the waking and dreaming worlds. That slow-to-simmer time could actually be a gift you don't want to kick in the mouth by accusing it of laziness. It seems, in my experience, to be a source of creative ideas and energy that can be nurtured. A schedule designed to make time for writing must take into consideration this, or any other, idiosyncrasy as well as those can’t-get-out-of duties related to work, family or community.

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A Series of Importunate Events IV

Here is the story I’ve been promising. Parts of it are rate R for riotous. You have my permission to laugh. This happened on Wednesday, the last day of May. We--my husband, his mother and myself--were having dinner at the kitchen table. I had plenty of light so that offers no excuse. The power outage affecting the kitchen light had been fixed the previous Friday. We were having hotdogs and mac and cheese. There was no room on my plate to lay a piece of bread so I lay it on the table as I needed both hands to pick up and open the ketchup bottle. This was a large plastic squeeze bottle that had once held probably about a quart of ketchup but now held only enough to fill the neck. It had been sitting upside down in the fridge door for over a week. My doing, since my mother-in-law never saves the bottles once they get that low. She just tosses them. She has mentioned to me before that leaving them in the fridge upside down leaves a sticky mess that is annoying to clean up. But that hadn’t broke me of the habit learned from my depression-baby mother. I couldn’t easily stomach the loss of those last few squirts of red goop.

The upside-down bottle was sitting on the table near me while the one newly opened for the BBQ on Mother’s day was at the other end of the table between my husband and his mother. A not so subtle message, no? So I took the hint and reached for it. I was careful not to squeeze it as I pried the flip-top cap open. The lid was practically glued on by dried ketchup. When I felt it start to give, I glanced down at the slice of bread to make sure I still had the bottle over the top of it, so I felt it before I saw it. My right hand filled with a cold wetness that overflowed onto the slice of bread. I was so surprised by this, I could not quite comprehend what was happening. I just sat there staring at my hand and the ketchup still oozing--tho a bit slower now--out of the spout. I swear I’m not squeezing it. I said with not a little tone of panic in my voice. My mother-in-law, with not a little tone of annoyance in her voice--said, Just throw it out Joy. My husband was cracking up. The garbage can was on the other side of him and I was trying to figure out how to maneuver all the way around the table to throw out the bottle without spreading the mess everywhere when he lifted it out of my hands and stuffed in the garbage can he could reach without getting up. I continued to just sit there staring at my hand but finally glance up to scan the table for the napkins. It was then my mother-in-law said that she had already handed me napkins. She sounded irritated. But I honestly had not seen them. They lay on the right hand side of my plate and my narrow field of vision was entirely taken up by my hand and the slice of bread to the left of my plate. My husband grabbed up the napkins and stuffed them in my right hand. I squeezed them, depositing the goop into them and my husband lifted the soggy red mass away and stuffed it in the garbage.

Now it was safe to proceed to the sink to wash my hands. But when I got up from the table I stumbled and bumped my elbow smartly on the handle of the metal cabinet beside the table. I let out a high-pitched Ouch! And my mother-in-law said something like, You know that is there, Joy. Which she often says when I bump into or trip over something that has been in the same spot for weeks or months or forever--or at lest ever since we moved in here in August of 2001. She said it when I kicked the cast-iron duck doorstop last July and apparently broke one of the small bones in my foot.

As I washed my hands at the sink my husband gave me a physics lesson a bit garbled by his uncontrollable chuckles. I was not laughing. In fact, I was close to tears especially after smacking my elbow like that. But I didn’t dare risk my mother-in-law’s contempt by giving into them. I could have figured out the physics myself once I had calmed down enough to think and not be so consumed by mortifying embarrassment which was now compounded with irritation at my husband’s condescending, ‘Professor Science’ tone. Imagine Ben Stein with a giggle. Eww. No, don’t go there. The physics of cold air expanding as it heats up and thus building up pressure inside a confined space that is suddenly no longer confined and then pushing the plug of ketchup as it seeks its own way out--that is simple to understand. But not very consoling in the moment.

On my way back to my chair, the subject shifted to how lucky I was that I hadn’t gotten anything on my clothes or worse. My mother-in-law then launched into the story of someone not so lucky, the account of when my father-in-law had once given up on pounding the bottom of an upturned glass ketchup bottle and slammed it down spout up on the table where-up-on the plug of ketchup in the neck exploded out and hit the ceiling. She was still in the middle of this tale which I had heard before as it is a family legend, when my left hand brushed against something slimy on my left leg. I looked down and there was a small gob of ketchup on my leg. I push back away from the table and discovered that the front of my shirt from the level of my waist band down was one huge smear of red with another large glop on the front my white slacks below the shirt with more smear and splatter on the right pant leg. Both my husband and his mother swore they had not seen any evidence of any of that when I had gotten up from the table and headed to the sink. I once again headed to the sink and washed my hands and soaked the affected areas of my shirt and pants with the--happily--clean dish rag until the stains had faded to a pale peach I could barely see. I couldn’t do better than that until I could take them off. But I had yet to take my first bite of dinner and clean-up duties would follow dinner.

I returned to the table once again but as I approached my chair I was stopped in my tracks and rendered speechless. My husband noticed my widened eyes and clenched jaws and the fingers curled around both thumbs that bespeaks an intense frustration and simmering anger. What? He asked as he leaned over to look down at my feet to see what I was so transfixed by. It was the culprit and the explanation for the mess that hadn’t been there and then suddenly was: that slice of bread that had been under my hand, that had gotten nearly as large a dose of the ketchup as had my hand and which I had forgotten about. Apparently I had knocked it off the table when I returned to my seat the last time and it had slid off my belly, into my lap and onto the floor as I pulled my chair up to the table. And then, of course, my shirt and pants had shared their bounty with the part of the tablecloth that hung down in front of me.

The story doesn’t end there. This is so long already I am tempted to cut it off there and tell the rest latter but this story is already over ten days old and I would like to just get it behind me. I meant to tend to the stains as soon as I finished cleaning up the kitchen that night but I took a break to sit on the front porch with my husband and his mother and that break lengthened until it was too late to start a load of laundry before they headed to bed. I thought it would be safe to wait until the next morning or even afternoon. But I let it slip my mind until I was reminded after dinner the next night that the laundry facilities were slated to be out of commission starting the next morning and probably thru the weekend as the work on the bathroom and laundry room floors commenced. I hurriedly got two loads of must-have items ready. One of darks and brights the other of lights and whites. It was while preparing those loads that I remembered the stains. I treated them all with Spray-N-Wash and prayer. I started the whites load first. When I was transferring that load to the dryer about a quarter to nine I almost forgot to double check on the stains before I tossed the slacks in the dryer. When I did check I found them little changed from before the application of the spray. I went ahead and started the dryer for the rest of that load and took the slacks out to the front room to show my mother-in-law. I hated to bother her just at her bedtime but I was at a loss. Her recommendation was to run the sink about a third full and put in a third of a cup of bleach and then soak them in that for fifteen to twenty minutes. But no longer she said or the bleach will rot the cloth. And don’t rub or scrub at the stains either. Just soak them. And then rinse the bleach out thoroughly.

This I proceeded to do. When I checked for the stains after the fifteen minute soak I could not find a one of them. So I drained the sink and filled it up again. Then drained it again. Then wrung out the slacks. Still the smell of bleach was strong. Stronger than the smell of a wet swimming suit after swimming in a public pool. So once more I ran water over them until they were submerged. I swished them about before draining the water again and wringing them out again. I had to go through this twice more for a total of four times and I wanted to go for a fifth but the wringing combined with the bleach was raising a blister on the tender web inside my right thumb. So I gave up.

The repercussions of this episode did not end with that. The effort of wringing out the slacks had turned my arms and hands into floppy wet rags about as capable of sustained typing as the wet legs of those slacks. Nor did I have the energy to sit up at the computer and use the touch pad to scroll web pages. I spent the next four hours on the front porch in a chair I could lean back in, reading a book that was just over 200 pages and yet was a struggle to hold up at the necessary level. To think that not so very long ago that was the normal way of doing laundry, though without the convenience of running tap water and electric light to work after dark, just boggles my mind. Knowing that some have made their living doing laundry for others by that method boggles it further. If my life depended on it, I doubt I could manage that. If just my own wardrobe depended on it, I would own only one outfit and what I would wear while I washed it would be a mystery.

I think I learned my lesson. The thought of a small stain on a fridge shelf had not overridden my strong sense of the waste of throwing out a quarter cup or more of ketchup. But the concept of the potential loss of a nice pair of white summer slacks or, as it worked out on this occasion, the time, energy and angst spent in removing the stain and cleaning up a mess like I made that night, added to the loss of a productive work session, weighed against the loss of a few table spoons of ketchup--that tips the balance in the other direction. Buh bye ketchup, you’re outta here.

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A Series of Importunate Events III

Another importunate event in the series prevents me from following thru with the story from last week that I mentioned in the last post but I didn’t want to just not post since this is Friday night and tomorrow night I will be staying with Grandma and without Internet. I will have to try to have that story prepared for Sunday night. It is longish and convoluted but it is ROTFL--if I tell it right, and that takes time and care. It involves ketchup and white slacks. Need I say more. Maybe I don’t need to tell the long version now just picture that and ROTFL. If the incident had been captured on video I’d have a sure fire winner for AFV. So the longer version is probably worth the wait. Stay tuned.

Today I woke with a migraine about three hours after going to sleep and was repeatedly awoken throughout the afternoon by the work continuing on the laundry room and bathroom floors. The toilet was removed again today for over three hours. You never really appreciate the finer things in life until they are gone. : )

The task today was laying the linoleum in both rooms. It wasn’t as noisy--thank heavens above--as they were done with the power tools. But there was still a lot of thumping and bumping and tapping and knocking and scraping and cussing and grumbling and….. Well, that about covers it. One of the thumps followed by cussing, I learned later, was my husband’s head hitting the cabinet above the washer--which wasn’t there, which is why he was under it tucking the edge of the linoleum under the wall with a spackle spatula. When he came to the end of the wall he stood his six-foot-six-inch self up and…Ouch! But that isn’t what he said.

The good news is that that project is all but finished. Just some touch up to do with the molding. All the appliances are back in place and operational. Which means that next week I’ve got some catching up to do with my laundry. The bad news is--well it isn’t really bad it is just hard to contemplate right now while the recent events are so fresh--they are going to be doing a similar project in the kitchen next month. They will be repairing the leak in the roof and around one window and then replacing the floorboards damaged by years of winter rain and summer thunderstorms. And then of course new linoleum. And around the same time, new carpet for the living room and hallway. The day before the carpet layers are to arrive my husband and his brother are going to move all the living room furniture into the kitchen and pull up the old carpet. I don’t know what that is going to mean for my Internet session that night. I’m chiding myself for fretting about it now. Don’t even know yet which week let alone which day of the week so can’t even begin to predict what projects of mine might be impacted a month from now. At least I have the laptop so will have all my files with me in the bedroom that night--and plenty of books and DVDs. So I will cope of course.

I also learned tonight that there is an extra day of racing next Monday night and they would like me to spend that night with Grandma too. My husband has to work so he doesn’t get to go but his folks want to go. Monday is the day the Phoenix library is supposed to be opening in its new temporary digs after its three week hiatus. I can’t believe that is nearly over already. If I get to go on Monday tho it would probably be only a quick duck in and out to pick up the items waiting for me on the way over to Grandma’s. There won’t be time to browse or visit. That bums me a bit. But then, on days when I’ve had one of these headaches I tend to bum way too easy. My writing exercise when I finally deigned to sit up and open my laptop, was nothing but a list of words that rhymed with ‘pain’.

This was the forth or fifth day I woke up with a headache this week but this was the worst of them. I suspect it has something to do with the construction. On some days it was more like a sinus headache. On some days I felt like I was coming down with a cold with burning eyes and sore throat and sniffles. I blame the dust and probable mold spores kicked up by the work along with the chemical fumes--the combination of which set off the smoke alarm several time so no telling what it was doing to my respiratory system and brain. I actually felt like I could be like ‘under the influence’ several times. You know, kinda spacey with blurred vision and difficulty using language and balance issues.

Well, if I don’t get this posted soon, I’m not going to get to chase down my fav blogs to store them up for reading over the weekend at Grandma’s. Though I suppose that wouldn’t be a tragedy. I have plenty else to be doing. Including about ten hours of DVDs that were due today--Friday--and which I am hanging onto over the weekend. No fine if they are in the drop box before the library opens on Monday. I intend to drop everything off on the way home from Grandma’s like I did last Sunday. Last Saturday night I watched nine hours worth in less than seven hours by using the time-stretch option and speeding them up. I was so engrossed in movies last Saturday night I forgot to watch the time and before I knew it the sun was coming up and I didn’t dare lay down for a nap for fear of not hearing Grandma get up. So I stayed up anticipating the ability to get home and lay down by ten or so. But my father-in-law wanted to hang out at home to do yard work and watch the construction project so they didn’t pick me up until after three. I came home and crashed. Told my husband I did not want to be called for dinner, that my work session that night trumped the duty to come to the table. Besides with all the chaos at the house those three days, I’m sure his Mom did not need to have to prepare a meal for us too. My husband took the cue from me and removed his name from the pot when he passed the word to his Mom that I was down for the count.

And here I thought I wasn’t up to writing a long post tonight.

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A Series of Importunate Events II

The series of mini stay-at-home-adventures continues tonight as the work proceeds on the laundry room floor. It is already after nine and the guys--my husband, his brother, and our nephew--have been hard at it since about seven-thirty and they just called a restroom alert: if you need it, speak up or hold your peace (or do they mean ’piece’ or ’pees’) for at least another hour. So it will be past ten-thirty before I get access to the front room and the Internet tonight again. I guess I better get started on this. Wasn’t much in the mood to try to think, let alone compose readable prose, with all that racket. Those power screwdrivers sound like dentists drills on steroids attached to jackhammers! I don’t think earplugs would help much. They would just silence the sounds that give context to the high decibel sounds and the jarring thumps and that would subject me to a series of heart thumping startle reactions.

There is no happy choice here for someone with Panic/Anxiety Disorder. I’m not handling it as well tonight as I was the last couple nights and not nearly as well as last Friday afternoon when I slept through most of it, waking to take note of a noise but dozing back off with little trouble. For the first time since the week of my Dad’s funeral last October, I’m tempted to take a chip off one of the Zoloft tablets left from the last time I had the prescription filled in 2001. But I’m not sure I remember where I put them after I got back from Longview. Besides there are less than a dozen approximately 25mg chips left from when I split the remaining fifteen or so 100mg tabs the week I realized that a refill anytime soon would be a miracle and if I didn’t start a controlled withdrawal immediately I would be faced with a cold-turkey withdrawal in fifteen days anyway. That was the second week of September 2001! I should save the few I have left now for times when I am required to be in a high-stress situation that includes social interaction and/or walking the public streets unescorted. Those occasions when others are depending on me to perform adequately or my life depends on me performing more than adequately.

It just occurred to me that it is a pretty good sign that I haven’t even had to think about looking for those chips since I got back to Phoenix just before Thanksgiving. That is not a lightweight realization. Go read my December archives if you need clarification of why. Especially this one. And consider that the typical holiday stresses and social expectations followed close on that. Hmmm. I need to contemplate on the variables involved. That can’t have just happened. Something that I have been doing differently on a fairly consistent basis for the last seven months that I had not been doing for much of the previous twenty-plus years? The only thing that pops out in my mind is the two big bottles of B vitamins--a B complex and a B6--that were my Dad’s that my Mom encouraged me to start taking for my high BP the week after he died and then sent home with me. I need to get online and Google Vitamin B and anxiety.

I could have been online several hours ago now. Shortly after I wrote the first paragraph of this, my screen froze while I was switching back and forth between two word processor windows one of them this post and the other a copy of an email I wrote my mother last week that related some of the events I am trying to retell here. I needed to refresh my memory on the fine detail. But the slow window turnover that started plaguing me a couple days ago and which I know is a signal that it’s past time to restart finally caught up with me and forced a control-alt-delete restart. I knew that was coming and intended to restart before tonight’s session but hoped to get the post written first. I made myself return to it after I completed the reboot and then got moved out to the living room. I’m thinking of making it another rule to have something ready to post before I allow myself to sign online each night. I don’t write as well on the fly unless something I just read has stimulated me to rant. And even then the fear of being knocked off line by bossy ole AOL whenever I spend more than five or so minutes without clicking on a link keeps me too distracted to write. Yeah, they give me a warning but I have to uncover the AOL window to get to the ’yes-I-want-to-stay-online’ button and it sometimes takes so long to appear that they preempt my choice.

This post did not go where I set out to take it. I had intended to relate one of the series of importunate events from last week. Well two actually but one followed on the other and was a direct effect of the first so I was planning to combine them into one story. So I guess there will be yet another post in this series. Well at least I won’t have to dither around about what to write about.

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A Series of Importunate Events

The last several weeks have consisted of one mild adventure after another seemingly sent to test my resolve to maintain the new schedule I designed to support my writing and all of the things that support it from reading and research to web site management. Or maybe the test was of my ability to be flexible while maintaining the resolve to honor the work by balancing the slew of major and minor priorities, giving each the appropriate weight. Success has been mixed at best. One unqualified success though has been the holding to a single shift schedule throughout the week. Not only has that meant keeping to the graveyard shift for the Saturday night that I stay with Grandma, it means resisting the temptation to return to the Internet after my mother-in-law leaves for work at six. And not just on Saturdays. Because I have been faithful to this principle, I have been better rested and more productive--in ways that have yet to be reflected here but I hope soon will be. I have been writing more and more creatively--just not material ready for an audience and in some cases, like writing exercises and journaling, not intended for an audience.

The series of events I have somewhat snidely referred to as ‘adventures’ began with a five day heat wave which began on Mother’s Day during which I felt as though I’d lost ten percent of my IQ. Until I rediscovered, as I must each year, that an increase in fluid intake must accompany the increase in temperature. On the last day of the hot weather a circuit breaker kicked off and refused to stay reset. This happened on a Friday and it was the following Friday before an electrician could come scope out the problem. Meanwhile we lived with only half of the electrical outlets and switches in the trailer house working. I mistakenly thought that the washer and dryer were among the appliances on that circuit. So I got behind in my laundry but worse than that did not get the habit of doing laundry in the evening established.

Then last weekend my husband’s brother began a major project here for his mother that is still ongoing and has on several occasions--as tonight-- kept the household up past ten and thus encroached on my work session--at least the Internet part. Tonight I am using the time I wait to begin writing something with the intent to post it later. But I’m not being very dedicated to the proposition as I’ve been surfing really stupid stuff on the TV which is splitting my attention but on the other hand maybe it is also helping me block out the racket of saws, hammers, drills, power screw-drivers and voices on the other side of the thin wall along with the occasional severe thumps that shake the bed I am sitting on. And there just went the smoke alarm again! The thing is so sensitive, the sawdust kicked out by the power drill sets it off. As does the heating up of the linoleum glue with a propane torch. On the other other hand, I suppose I could have put in earplugs. I can’t believe that I slept through this same chaos and noise the day he did the bathroom floor.

Tonight my husband is helping his brother and nephew replace the floor in the laundry room. And I do mean the actual floor boards and not just the floor covering. Last night they moved the washer and dryer out in the back yard and pulled out the carpet and scraped off the linoleum tiles under that in preparation for tonight. Last weekend they removed the linoleum and the toilet in the bathroom and cut out a section of water-damaged floorboards and replaced them and put in a new toilet. A leak from the toilet, another from the washer and a poor seal to the backdoor allowing rain to soak the threshold carpet is not what pressboard was designed for. One look at that naked pressboard leaves me amazed the appliances, including the toilet, did not need step ladders to get down to them.

My brother-in-law originally thought this would be a two day job. One day to prepare the bathroom floor and one to prepare the laundry room floor and to lay the linoleum and reinstall the appliances. But unexpected things happened. Isn’t that always the case? Lessons in flexibility and adapting to reality while staying true to the values that under gird the floor of my life seems to be the theme of this little adventure.

The sight of soggy floor boards and bare floor joists has also stimulated the return of the dreams that plagued me in the mid to late nineties at the time I made the final break with the fundamentalist doctrines that I thought had been supporting my value system and my fundamental sense of self for over thirty years. Those dreams of walking across carpets that sank under my feet, of stepping on floors that tilted and buckled under me, of houses that collapsed into piles of pick-up-sticks around me, of roofs that blew off and water that rose up about my knees and fire that roared about my ears, seemed at first to confirm my sense that the foundations of my life and self could not hold without those doctrines. But in the end, after hundreds of repetitions and dozens of variations on the theme of de-construction, I learned that doctrines are among the man-made stuff used to build a sense of security, pin things in place and decorate our lives. They are ultimately as replaceable as soggy pressboard, as interchangeable as floor coverings, for they are but feeble attempts to point to that Ineffable Something that grounds our being but they are not the thing Itself.

I could go on for another thousand words and still not tell the whole story of the past several week’s series of importunate events and how they impacted me but I think I will break off here for now so I can get this posted and still have a couple hours to surf.

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The Hours

Over this past weekend, I read the Michael Cunningham novel, The Hours. This was an exquisite story, a many faceted jewel that still glows in my mind 24 hours after I turned the last page. Cunningham weaves a cunning tapestry with the threads of three separate days as lived by three individual women separated by decades but not by spirit. Three separate stories interwoven chapter by alternating chapter, centered and strengthened and given their meaning by a fourth thread--that of the novel, Mrs. Dalloway. There is the day in the early twenties on which Virginia Woolf began writing Mrs. Dalloway, and the day in 1949 when a suburban housewife and mother began reading Mrs. Dalloway, and a day near the end of the millennium when a woman named Clarissa plans a party for a beloved friend who many years before had bestowed on her the nickname, Mrs. Dalloway because she had the same first name as the character and, he claimed, the same qualities of mind and spirit. Each woman lives the hours of her day in contemplation of the character of Mrs. Dalloway and of the world which she inhabits and each woman’s day is enlarged, impacted and particularized by this contemplation. It seems at times that the very spirits of the four women are in communion across the decades and across the divide between ‘real’ and fiction. I have encountered few stories that go so directly to the heart of story itself; exemplifying the truth that story is the very heart of life; that story is the very way of life; that the stories we tell to ourselves and those we tell one another co-create the stories we live within the hours of our lives. This novel was well deserving of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize.

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Just a Reminder to Remember

Memorial Day is not about gas-guzzling vacations, blow-out sales, or block-buster summer movie releases. Memorial Day was meant to be time set aside to honor the lives, service and sacrifice of the men and women in the armed services, of our loved ones gone on before us, of every one who came before and wove their thread into the tapestry of life, culture, and community that supports, nurtures and sustains each of us today. The same tapestry into which we are, moment by moment, weaving our own threads, co-creating with past and present threads the tapestry that will be ours and our children’s future. Memorial Day is a day for remembering that every thread, no matter its length, strength, color or place is essential to the whole.

Today I remember and honor my father, Richard Wayne Coon, whose life was the embodiment of love, generosity and service for his family, community, country and God. His thread began in 1931 and ended in 2005. It mattered to many.

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We Return to Previously Scheduled Programming In Progress

The musing, analyzing and reappraisal of priorities has been ongoing form the moment I began writing the previous post nearly two weeks ago. But I’ve done more than think and stew. I have targeted several issues as high priority and devised possible solutions and implemented them. They are still in the experimental stage but have generated good results already. The highest priority was sleep as only chaos and confusion is generated by a sleep-deprived mind. Giving in to the greed for sleep the latter part of last week meant the loss of most of my late-night work sessions. But the payoff came when I arrived at Grandma’s last Saturday afternoon feeling rested after sleeping for most of eight hours. Something clicked as I compared the way I was feeling that afternoon to the previous weekends. I realized that attempting to flip my hours back and forth was not working and no amount of will power or self-chiding was going to make it work. I needed to choose one schedule that would work for both the weekend and the rest of the week. I grabbed a piece of scratch paper and, using my coffee mug, drew two fat circles on it. I turned these into AM and PM clocks. I started by shading off the non-negotiable hours--the 6PM to 7PM dinner and dishes hour. Then over the next several hours I experimented with various mutations of 24/7 day schedules and 24/7 night schedules. I eventually settled on the graveyard shift as fulfilling more of the non-negotiable criteria while continuing to give me the largest blocks of time for uninterrupted thinking and writing, the most access to the internet and the best fit for my natural night-owl bent.

This meant that I had to stay on the graveyard shift Saturday night while staying with Grandma. Having the laptop meant that I had access to all that I needed to have a productive work session. All I lacked was access to the internet but that could actually be a blessing as I don’t get much actual writing done while online. I am too busy chasing down web pages. There were several additional adjustments to make but they were easy to figure out once I had settled on a foundation. In order to work the graveyard shift Saturday night, all I was giving up was a few hours of crappy, anxiety ridden sleep anyway. But in order to make it work I had to come prepared by a solid seven hour sleep that ended no earlier than noon. This meant that I had to give up Saturday morning as laundry day. It also meant that I had to lay down no later than six. No more retreating to the bedroom when my mother-in-law got up at five to bide my time with reading or writing until she left at six and then zipping back out to the living room to get back online--sometimes to stay there until just before her expected return at noon.

Continuing to work backward thru the days to find the sticking points, I realized that the same held true for Friday mornings in which I had long had the habit of going without sleep in order to get a couple more hours of time online and then begin the involved process of preparing myself and the books for the weekly trek to the library--this was described in excruciating detail in the previous post. This had usually meant that I lost much if not all of Friday night’s work session and those rare times I had a full session work was compromised by sleep deprivation. So I spent a great deal of time contemplating the elements of library day, looking for ways to carve up the time that gave priority to the sleep that was necessary as a foundation for quality work. I knew that I needed to have the same standard for Friday morning that I had just set for Saturday morning or it would be difficult to maintain it for Saturday morning. It was like a falling dominos game. The practice of going sleepless on Friday morning had been workable before racing season’s Saturday’s with Grandma had been added to the picture because I had the freedom to make up that sleep Saturday afternoon. Then it seemed to be OK because it helped me flip my hours from graveyard to days for the weekend. And this gave me Saturday mornings for laundry, hanging with my husband and packing for the overnight stay. Giving that time back to sleep meant shifting or losing those tasks or benefits.

The same went for Friday mornings. Staying awake had seemed the best option because I do not return to the waking world easily and I needed to be alert for the walk. That was a matter of life and death for me. I must keep my mind on every step I take while walking among moving vehicles and other pedestrians. Most of the tasks associated with library day required an alert and focused mind. Just about the only one that didn’t was the shower and shampoo. And even that took much less time if I wasn’t groggy.

So, I began to look for tasks from Friday and Saturday mornings that could be shifted elsewhere. It occurred to me that I could shift showers to the previous evenings in order to free up a good chunk of time--nearly an hour. Establishing an evening shower made sense in other ways. It could be a symbolic gesture of respect toward my graveyard work session--getting ready for work like someone with a traditional ‘job’ could set a tone of respect for it. I shaded off the 7PM to 8PM hour for this. That was a little more time than I actually needed so it occurred to me that I could combine laundry into that hour and possibly into the post dinner hour--start a load before I start the dishes after dinner. I couldn’t do a weeks worth of laundry in a single day with this time slot but I could spread out the loads among two or three or more days. It was at this point that the chaos began to shape itself into an order that I began to feel good about. The concept of shifting the tasks backward applied elsewhere. Like preparing the returning books. Most of them could be prepared on Thursday evening while I waited for access to the living room. Those books that I knew had used up their two renewals and those I knew had a queue of requests behind me could be stripped of their bookmarks and packed. The movies and books that I or my husband finished with during the week could be packed instead of stacked.

One of the major priorities I had set out to work into this new schedule was the reinstitution of a fifteen to fifty minute free-write time immediately upon waking each day. This habit, recommended by a number of writers, had paid handsome premiums in the past and I wanted to bring it back. It was the habit of returning to the internet after six each morning that made waking up in time for this problematic. This exercise serves to prime the pump so that words and ideas and original thought flow freely throughout the day. But it only works if it is the very first thing you do upon waking--before engagement with words from any other source I.e. TV, conversation, reading, even the analytical thought involved in planning your day or accomplishing involved tasks like preparing a meal getting dressed. I hope to go into more detail about this another time. For now, suffice it to say that of all the elements of the new schedule I developed last Saturday, this is the one I have remained most faithful to.

Other aspects have been harder to adjust to or needed refinements. And in the case of the library trek, yesterday was the first of three Friday’s the Phoenix branch is on hiatus and by having the returning items packed before I lay down Friday morning, my husband was able to return them on the way to work so I didn’t have to make the trek at all. That allowed me to get a solid sleep Friday which in turn allowed me to have a full Friday night work session. Which has set me up to carry the same schedule thru the weekend. If I don’t blow it now. I am breaking one of the cardinal rules of the new schedule to get this posted--returning to the internet after six. But I have a bit of leeway this weekend as the races were canceled due to weather. I am still going to be spending the night with Grandma tonight so my father-in-law can have a break, but I won’t be leaving as early.

Last Saturday night after Grandma went to bed and I was holed up in the other bedroom, I watched two DVDs: Under the Tuscan Sun and Being There. They took priority over reading or writing as they had been due on Friday and had to be in the drop box by Monday morning and Sunday afternoon was already assigned to watching Dreamkeeper, a three hour movie also due Friday, with my husband. And Sunday night was the season finale of Desperate Housewives. I am in the same boat this weekend with two movies due Friday and held over the weekend. This time it is Blackboard Jungle and A Lesson Before Dying. Speaking of season finales--Lost was the last of my prime-time stories to have its season finale this past week. This is going to free up a lot of time and make transitioning into my work session much easier. Sometimes I really miss having a working VCR to record shows that infringe on the sacred hours after 9PM when the living room and thus the internet become available. Before the VCR in our room decided to stop spitting out the tapes, I never let a TV show commandeer one hour of that precious night-shift.

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Dreaming Awake

(The following was written over a week ago with intentions to post but when I began to prepare it for posting and discovered it was over 3000 words, I postponed in order to edit it down. Then when I began to edit I started having second thoughts about having revealed more than I should. This caused me to choke up with self-censoring induced writer‘s block.

I am tired of feeling gagged by all this second guessing of my words based on attempts at guessing what someone else might think or prefer. This is my blog and its very title implies that it is my story. I have the right to tell it my way and sometimes I tell long stories. The impetus of this story was musings about why my writing and web work was stalling. It was an attempt to get onto the screen in a format that could be referred back to all of the ramblings of my mind as I attempt to reassess my priorities and identify the clutter both literal and metaphorical that is preventing me from doing that which I say is my passion: writing.

Since I wrote this, I have begun to implement potential solutions to some of the problems identified and I want to write about those but they would be out of context without much of the material in this rambling backstory. So, for what it’s worth…)

What happened to my famous intractable insomnia? Where is it when I need it? I’ve been having a incredibly hard time adjusting to the new realities of my weekly schedule which commenced in early April. The first weekend of April I spent five days sitting with my husband’s Grandmother while his parents went on vacation. It took me nearly the full of the following week to recover my equilibrium and get back on a graveyard schedule for my online sessions. That following weekend was supposed to be the beginning of dirt track racing and thus I expected to be sitting with grandma again that Saturday so I adjusted my schedule back to days in the twenty-four hours preceding. But the races were rained out. The same thing happened the weekend after that. But every weekend since I’ve been spending Saturday afternoon thru Sunday afternoon at Grandma’s. And there have been other days when I sat with her for an hour or two or several--usually on a Friday and or Monday--while my in-laws shop and run errands for the two households. I used to be able to flip my hours around without unbearable repercussions. Not anymore, apparently. Every time I open my eyes I am so disoriented that I’m not sure who I am let alone where I am or even when I am. I seem to have lost my ability to tell by the ambient light in the room what time of day it is. When the light is dim is it dawn or dusk or just cloudy?

Friday afternoons are also my weekly walk to the library which is a major investment in time and energy. I calculated that it takes upwards of five hours beginning with the hour plus I spend on the library catalog online in the wee hours tending to renewing and requesting books and searching the catalog. Followed by an hour plus preparing books and movies going back by removing bookmarks and notes, noting down page numbers on each book’s bibliography slip and packing them. Followed by an hour to prepare myself to go out in public. Followed by an hour plus to make the walk each way and tend to business at the library--I rarely do this in under ninety minutes but when I leave the house too late and absolutely have to get back by three for Dr. Phil, I can push myself to get there and back in under an hour--just. This isn’t wise in warmer weather tho and that is now upon us.

Besides, that parameter is going to change after this coming weekend as the library is moving shop a block away into temporary quarters while they construct a new building about four blocks further than that. The new building is slated to open in a year and if we are still living here at that time, I will have to allow for two hours just for the walk to and from sandwiching the visit itself. But on the other hand, when that time comes I may choose to make that walk every weekday to hang out at the new facilities which will have air-conditioning and WIFI!!! I could say goodbye to the graveyard shift altogether.

Anyway, the fifth hour plus spent on the Friday library run is spent on putting bookmarks in all the non-fiction books, referring to the bib slip of the repeaters for the page number where I left off, making new bib slips for first timers, making room for the books on the makeshift shelves--mostly cardboard boxes of various sizes from shoe boxes on up to large produce boxes--and finally taking stock of which books and movies are coming due the following Friday whether they have used up their two renewals or are high demand and unlikely to renew. Some of this latter I do while renewing online and while pulling items from the shelves for return.

After all of that, I get to read very little if at all before Monday! This is very frustrating. Often I have not slept Friday morning and thus am unlikely to have a Friday night session online. Which means I lose three nights in a row as my attempts at napping Sunday afternoon, after returning from Grandma’s, to prepare for a late night work session have not worked out. Either I am too wound up, have too much caffeine in my system or the nap does nothing but make me crave more sleep.

So it is Monday night before I get swung back around. And then what do I do? I spend most of the next four nights, chasing down my favorite blogs and websites to catch up on them! And there are so many of them that I don’t have time to actually read them while online, I use the magic of synchronizing and saving to disk for some but mostly just rush from one to another opening them as fast as I can using three different browsers with multiple tabs and windows. Some will only remain available while offline if the window it is in remains open to it. Others will open again to the last refresh when I am ‘working offline’. The major downside to this practice is that any time I spend reading stuff saved on my laptop is time I don’t have for reading library books or watching DVDs. So more and more books and movies are going back untouched. I get further and further behind on current events. Worst of all from a writer’s perspective, I am squeezing out the time available for my own original writing. This has got to change!

So I am setting myself the task of adjusting my priorities over the next three or four weeks. After this Friday (May 19), the Phoenix branch of the library is on a three week hiatus so I won’t be making the library run, books and movies will be going back as they come due but none will be coming home. I will have to spend the time on the online catalog to manage the renewals and requests but the other four hours plus will be available for other tasks. I intend to make one of those tasks Writing! And not just on Friday.

My fingers are fairly itching for the keyboard every minute I am awake. I am writing in my head constantly. I don’t know why it is that it is at those times when circumstances curtail the availability of writing time that I get the most interesting ideas. Whether I am washing dishes, at a family gathering, attempting to sleep, waking from a dream, doing laundry, in the shower, riding in a car, reading a book, watching a TV show or movie, watching pages download, the ideas and the words are flowing through my mind but I keep on putting them on hold. Whatever I am doing always seems more pressing. Often it is. As when I am woken from that dream by the sound of Grandma’s labored breathing over the baby monitor, or I am at the dinner table or performing a task others are depending on me to complete, or I’m washing my hair.

When I was dreaming of having my own laptop last spring and summer, I dreamed of being able to take it outside with me to write from a lawn chair next to the rose bushes with my cats on their leashes just far enough away they can’t quite reach me. But to my dismay, when I tried this the first time the weather permitted, I discovered that I can’t read my screen outside in daylight. It is also difficult when there is too much daylight in a room. This completely bamboozled me. I have seen laptops featured in photos, commercials and in TV shows being used in daylight outside and beside windows indoors. I don’t know whether it is something to do with a setting on my computer or just one more thing I can thank my RP for.

Another, related frustration, is that when I am working in the dark which is when the screen is easiest to read, I can’t read my keyboard. I had anticipated this when shopping for my laptop and had hoped to get a light colored case but when the time came it would have added several hundred dollars to the price tag to insist on a white or gray case. Just today I spent over an hour going thru my fun sticker collection looking for cute stickers in light reflective colors and small enough to stick to some of the more crucial keys in an attempt to solve this time wasting frustration. Now I have a tiny furry white cloud on the delete key, a left-leaping neon blue dolphin on the backspace key, a right-swimming dolphin on the tab key, a multicolored heart on the left control key, a rainbow arising out of clouds on the space bar, metallic-red ladybug between the right control key and the up arrow and a metallic aqua and silver Tao on the return key. After I got them all stuck on, I put a jacket over my head and screen to make it dark enough to test it and it seems to work to make those key visible by the light of the screen even when it isn’t mostly white. A secondary benefit had shown itself as I type this. It is helping me find those keys and more by touch without looking down at the keyboard. The one I’m finding most helpful is the fuzzy cloud on the delete key as I have never before been able to use it without looking and when the light is dim or non-existent I have to get about two inches from the keyboard to read the less familiar keys. Of course I’ve been typing since I was ten or eleven so I have no trouble with the alphabet and number keys once I have my fingers positioned on the F and J. But nearly every other key on this keyboard is in a different location from the last three keyboards I have used. I hope this is going to save me a lot of time and frustration. I had the idea for it several months ago but I never took the time to do it. Now I wish I had. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve lost a thought because I was looking for a key in the dark. I had been using my little book light to light up my keyboard but its batteries are dying.

All of this barely scratches the surface of those things competing for my time and attention. One of the most egregious, making all of the above simple irritants in comparison, are a culmination of events in my personal life that I don’t feel free to share in public because of those elements of the story that intersect with other’s stories. I don’t mind confessing to my own mistakes, errors in judgment or any other thing tending to embarrass or shame me but I don’t think I have the right to include those aspects of my story that might tend to embarrass or shame someone else. The story of the last thirty years of my life has all the material for a compelling roman a clef--a novelization of real life events with thinly disguised characters and true and fictional events and characters stirred together. Those of you who have been reading regularly since the debut of Joystory will have encountered a number of those elements of great stories, any one of which would make for a great story on their own--but imagine them all combined into one story! And then imagine that is barely scratching the surface of my life: coming out of fundamentalism and learning to think for myself; living with severe visual impairment; living with Panic/Anxiety Disorder; surviving several episodes of severe depression; living with infertility; living for years in extreme poverty and then finding ourselves on the edge of becoming another high-tech millionaire family after my husband got hired onto a pre IPO in the Silicon Valley only to find ourselves homeless on the streets of Santa Clara County, California after the tech bubble burst and subsequently losing all the belongings we left in storage when we left the state on a bus--among them twenty years worth of my manuscripts and notes and what remained of my personal library after selling several hundred books in an attempt to hang onto the roof over our head; taking in a special needs nephew for three years and three years after seeing him out on his own sitting vigil beside his hospital bed after his surgery for colon cancer, then two years later two rooms down, sitting beside my Dad’s hospital bed following his surgery for the same thing and sixteen months after that sitting beside my father’s bed in my parent’s bedroom moments after he stopped breathing and two months after attending his funeral, attending my Mom’s twin sister’s funeral and that same weekend learning that the building in which I attended church and Sunday school and eventually was married in had been donated to the fire department for practice and had been burned to the ground while my Mom and sister were out of town for the funeral. I swear, life itself has a sense of story at least as good as the best storyteller ever known. Or is that just the experienced storyteller in me framing the episodes of my life as story?

Most all of those things I listed have been covered to some extent here in Joystory. There are many other things I haven’t brought up. Among them my struggle with weight since it seems so cliché, other health issues because they are just a jumble of symptoms without attached diagnosis and it makes me sound like a whiner to inject them in every time they crop up. Some I have touched on occasionally: joint pain, dangerously high blood pressure, allergies to just about everything under the sun and sometimes it seems the sun itself for every exposure to the sun beyond twenty minutes is invariably followed by a fever later that day, evidence of OCD and ADD, a mouthful of bad teeth, migraine headaches….. Like I said, whining! I need one of those photos of a wailing baby to insert here.

You know what? I am going to drop a hint about the situation obsessing me lately since it is as much my story as anyone else’s and I am sick and tired of tip-toeing around all of the peripheral issues: I believe my husband and I are candidates for Dr. Phil’s Mooch Squad as I no longer believe, and haven’t for at least three years, that our continuing imposition on my husband’s family is justified by lack of sufficient income. Mismanagement of that income is the decisive factor now and it fills me with shame and a sense of helplessness. I want to be clear that I do not absolve myself of blame but I have control over only my own behaviors and am struggling to figure out what my response to certain events should be and how to coordinate all of my personal difficulties so as to figure out how to become part of the solution instead of part of the problem. With that caveat I must confess that every time I watch my husband light up a cigarette I feel my whole being fuming along with the tobacco. A cartoon image reflecting my mood at that moment would show a grim-lipped, clench-jawed face with smoke flowing out the nose and ears. As the cigarette burns down I see the dollar bills I had saved toward my business plan that had to be redirected, the pages of the books I had to sell, my lost manuscripts, family photos lost in two different forced moves, the bus ticket back to Longview to attend at least the free walk around Lake Sacagawea that is part of our thirtieth high-school reunion this July, and hope itself. I fear I am succumbing to the sin of bitterness.

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Sunsetting Democracy

Following is a collection of articles that I’ve come across in the last month which were disturbing individually but taken collectively tempt me to despair for American democracy especially considering the undermining of the vote in the last three elections. Often as I read, my mind juxtaposes the oddest things from previous reading, television and movie viewing and personal experience across the spectrum from novels to news and I’m never sure whether I’m having a profound insight or need to be committed to a psyche ward and hooked up to a Thorazine drip.

Un-elected Panel Could Guide Federal Budget Ax--Congress could be voting on the creation of a panel whose members are appointed by the president who are charged with analyzing the effectiveness of federal agencies and programs and recommending whether they should continue to exist or continue to be funded. Such recommendations would then be submitted to the legislators in a single package for an up or down vote without debate. Thus dozens of agencies and programs created by Congress--in many cases after years of public pressure--could be de-funded, truncated, or sunsetted without any opportunity for debate among legislators or those they represent. How would this not be the very sunsetting of representative government? By voting for such a panel Congress would be voting for their own irrelevance.

How Bush Sidesteps Intent of Congress--with presidential signing statements submitted at the time of signing bills into law, the president presents his interpretation of the law he is signing, including in many cases his contention that he as executive is bound by the law only to the extent that it does not infringe on his constitutional prerogatives as executive and commander-in-chief according to his interpretation of said prerogatives. So…according to this theory the Executive is rewriting the laws and interpreting them as well as executing them. Add to this the untold number of executive orders. Many of them classified! How is this not the subsuming of all three branches under the executive branch and thus the demise of our three branch system of government and our constitution? If the Judiciary and Legislative branches continue to sit still for this they might as well submit to wearing ceremonial dog collars.

Homeland Security contracts for vast new detention camps--This is especially chilling in light of the reports that Federal aid for Louisiana following Katrina was being withheld because Governor Blanco would not declare martial law and hand the state National Guard command over to the President. But this article pulls together several more obscure actions at the executive level going back to the seventies, tracking the steady accretion of power into the executive and their hankering after martial law and the suspension of the Constitution. Many of those advocating over the last thirty years for such a response to every disruption of order from civil unrest to natural disasters work in some capacity for this administration. One of their contentions is that 9/11 has made America itself--from sea to shining sea--a war zone and thus we should implement the same command structure here as any other theater of war.

Is it time to hold a coast to coast candlelight vigil in memorial of democracy?

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Washing Those Harpies Right Out of My Hair

(This was my guest post at Write Stuff last Saturday)

My personal nemesis is perfectionism. My Moby Dick if you will--tho it is more like a swarm of harpies than a great white whale and they didn’t abscond with any of my limbs nor wreak any other havoc upon my physical being, nor do they hide themselves in the deep abyss of either ocean or sky, playing a diabolical hide-and-seek game. I wish! If they would but remove themselves to the underbelly of the clouds, I could possibly let the grating of their incessant berating be subsumed by the susurrus of wind and rain or the white noise of an off-air TV station. But no! They must hover and fly about my face so that I feel their hot, foul breath on my eyelids as their screeches fill the interstices of my eardrums with scorn-fed laughter and they fill all the bandwidth of my brain with invective.

I’ve been plagued by these hell-spawned haranguers since as far back as my memories go, since well before kindergarten, well before I could either read or write. They disrupt many areas of my life but none so much as writing. My Mom tells the story of my earliest adventures with crayon and paper around a year old. She says that I was the only baby or toddler she ever witnessed who never scribbled. I drew little circles about the size of dimes. They weren’t perfect circles--some weren’t closed and those that were often sported a tail or two where the line met itself, like small stemmed fruit, but they resembled grapes more than they did cherries. I’ve seen these early efforts--and effort is the precise word for them as they exude a miasma of intensity and focus and unmet expectations. Mom remembers how I would point at these marks one by one uttering a syllable or two of baby-babble. So resembling the way she read to me by pointing at the words in my storybooks as she spoke them, she is sure I was trying to tell a story. If that is true, then I’ve been a storyteller since before I could walk, let alone talk. But I suspect that I was scolding the fruits of my labor, giving voice to the harpies already nesting in my curls and shaking their sharp-nailed fingers at my nose.

My memories of the physical task of writing begin at around age three. I was still drawing those circles but I was also carefully copying alphabet letters and even short words off of whatever nearby source presented itself. But this was still more like drawing than writing. I was about four when I started writing letters to my grandparents by copying the words my mother had carefully written down as I composed the sentences aloud. It would take me a few minutes to compose those several sentences, my mother a few minutes longer to produce a clean copy, correctly formatted and punctuated but it would take me hours to produce the finished letter. I still remember those efforts--the painstaking drawing of each letter, the oh-so-disobedient pencil, the erasures that left smears, the starting over, and over and over. My first memory of writer’s cramp is from this time. My first conscious memory of having stories to tell comes from about this same time too. But I could never seem to coordinate the act of imagining the story with the mechanics of making marks on the paper. By the time I got a handful of words on the page, the fragile images and sound-track of the story would have been shredded by the dread harpies claws and gnashing teeth.

Once I taught myself to type at age eleven, I was able to hold those howling harridans at bay long enough to get whole paragraphs on the page and I would build my stories or essays one sentence or paragraph at a time like laying bricks. But it was impossible to proceed to the next sentence or paragraph or page as long as I perceived any imperfections. If I needed to insert words or phrases or make corrections, I would have to start the page over even knowing that the threads of the story might vanish by the time I got back to where I left off. This made it so tempting to just sit and stare at the pristine white page in the typewriter’s carriage, letting the story play out on it like a movie screen. This is what ‘writer’s block’ was for me. It was never about having nothing to say, no story to tell or no ideas. No, those hovered about my head like flocks of butterflies. But their delicate wings could not survive in the searing gusts generated by those leather-winged fiends.

It was about the time that I was introduced to word-processors that I came to understand that there were two distinct tasks involved that I had been conflating: creation and communication. Creation is chaos unfolding into complex beauty and it is messy. Communication must adhere to rules of order agreed upon by a community so that individual minds can be understood by one another. Carelessness and flouting of the rules increases the chance of misunderstanding. There may have been a story behind my carefully inscribed circles, but if so, I was the only one who knew the language, the grammar, the punctuation and that knowledge probably did not survive my next nap. So there was no communication, no sharing, no meeting of the minds and hearts that the best stories can conduce.

This was meant as a preamble for sharing the methods I learned over the last twenty years to tame those harassing harpies, to wash them right out of my hair and transmogrify them into feather-winged angels playing harps and wearing circlets of butterflies in their hair. But I’ve run out of space and time so I am going to leave you with the little poem I wrote in the late eighties--about the time that I made the breakthrough described above:

Crucify the Critic

To write and not worry if all is spelled right,

To write and not think of the good and the bad of it,
To write and not judge, neither budge
A finger to backspace or erase,
Thinking only of white space,
Fingers flying like birds, to fill it with words-
With thoughts sublime or absurd,
With plots simple or complex,
With dreams shallow or deep,
With observations, inspirations, aspirations,
To make someone-if only me-laugh or weep,
To make their brows perplex,
To slake their verbal thirst
For soothing nouns and zesty verbs.
Wandering solitary in thicketed woods,
Wooing amid airy leaf-lace that enchanting face,
That muse, unnamed, neglected, un-embraced, until
That harassing harpy who begrudges-even sabotages-
The art of it, is banished from the heart of it.
So crucify the critic writer, and write!

(c) 1988 by Joy Renee

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Write Stuff

I guest-blogged at Write Stuff today--Saturday. It is another riff about those harrassing harpies of perfectionism but its a little more put together than the average one I spill out here. I will probably cross-post it here later--in a day or two--but I want to encourage you to go check out Karen's new community blog for writers. It features some good writing, helpful tips for writers and inspring insight about the writng process.

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Free Press on Chopping Block?

Kevin Drum sees an ominous import to the governments espionage charges against the two AIPAC lobbyists accused of receiving classified information from Pentagon analyst, Lawrence Franklin, and then passing that info on “to persons not entitled to receive it.” It is the broadness of the charge that concerns Drum and should concern any journalist and any champion of transparency in government. For a common sense definition of espionage amounts to passing information with potential to harm the U.S. interests to a foreign entity, as the defendants did when the shared ‘scuttlebutt’ with their clients at the Israeli embassy. But by using the generic phrase, ‘persons not entitled’ this administration seems to be attempting to set a president that can be applied more broadly. Think Sy Hersh. Think Daniel Ellsberg. Think bloggers!

Well, we seem to have one thing going for us. The judge hearing the case, conservative, Reagan era T. S. Ellis III, has expressed deep discomfort with the governments premise here and says that he regards the 1st amendment issue as “central to this case and important.”

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Elder Caregivers Deserve More Respect

After most of four days and all of three nights on high alert even while sleeping, I was too weary to see straight after returning home Tuesday afternoon from sitting with my husband’s grandmother over the weekend. My sleep was accompanied by the static and hum from a baby monitor that erupted several times per night with the sounds of wheezing and coughing as Grandma struggled for breath. But other than the fact that it deprived me of the rest I needed to be prepared for the next day, the nights were easy. Because at least I knew where she was and was fairly sure she was going to stay there until at least dawn.

I could even stay fairly relaxed until after Grandma had her coffee in the morning. But for the rest of the day, I had to stay very alert to her every move as she was impulsive and sneaky and careless. Just like a toddler. But toddlers have yet to be autonomous adults. Grandma may no longer have the wherewithal to be autonomous but she has the experience of having been and she continues to act as if…

And I haven’t the heart to abuse her sense of dignity any more than absolutely necessary to preserve her health and life. So I had to be sneaky and alert and proactive. I had to watch her from around corners. I had to couch my offers of help as questions that appeared to give her options she didn’t really have. I had to try to anticipate her needs so she wouldn’t try to do for herself things that endangered her.

But there were some things I could not pre-empt. Grandma has one over-riding obsession and that is her dog Spot. She wants to know where Spot is every minute. She is constantly calling to her and if she doesn’t get a quick enough response will go looking for her. Even to the point of going outside! She got all the way outside once while I was sitting just three feet from the door she exited.

I thought she was just going to call to Spot again as she had ten minutes earlier when she found Spot on the front porch and coaxed her inside. But Spot had made a circuit around the room as Grandma made her way back to her chair and then as soon as Grandma had sat back down that dog headed straight for her doggie door on the back porch. Grandma had called and called until her asthma had kicked up and she’d had to stop to use her breathing machine. As soon as her breathing was under control she headed straight for that front door again. I heard that door open but I assumed it was just a repeat of before. But when I heard silence instead of the calling of Spot’s name, I turned to look and there was Grandma’s walker standing alone in front of the closed door.

She also obsesses about Spot having food in her bowl. No matter how many times I assure her there is, she keeps going to look and if the amount doesn’t suit her she adds another full scoop--a day’s serving. She did that three times that I witnessed on a single day. This is one of the tasks that is dangerous for her as bending down to the floor risks a fall or wrenching her back again.

The thing I dreaded most happened on the first night as we were heading for bed. Grandma fell. But it was slow motion and amounted to an abrupt sitting down onto the floor and not a tumble. She was attempting to stand up from her recliner while pulling her walker towards her all the while giving me instructions about shutting down the living room for the night--be sure the lights are all out, and the TV is off, and turn down the heater and lock the doors. And she seemed to want me to start doing these things immediately. I used poor judgment on my part in eagerly complying. Especially in turning off the lights. I am nearly helpless myself without lights!

I was across the room when I saw her shadow swaying. Spot and the walker were between me and her so there was no way to get to her in time. By the time I did reach her she was already scrambling over onto her knees and pulling herself up by the seat of the rocking recliner. She ignored my pleas to stay put until we were sure she was OK. I’m alright. I’m alright. She kept repeating until she had kicked her asthma into high gear again. It was another forty-five minutes before she was settled in bed and breathing comfortably. It took me another two hours after that before I was calm enough to doze off. Then, not an hour after the last time I saw the time on the clock, I was awakened by the sounds of another asthma spell coming over the baby monitor. And that was just the first night.

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May be away for a few days

Was trying to get a substantial essay ready to post this morning but I’m not going to make it. And now I am probably not going to be able to post again until next Tuesday night. I am committed to spending the next several days sitting with my husbands frail, 91 year old grandma while my in-laws take their annual trek to the coast. I don’t know what, if any, opportunity to get online I will have. I hope to use some of the time there to write and continue with the major revamp of my sidebar so that I will have plenty to post here in the days after I get back.. But my attention has to be primarily on Grandma as she is impulsive and forgets there are things she can’t do unaided anymore. I have to keep a close eye on her and try to anticipate what she needs so she doesn’t try to do it herself if it endangers her. She has had several bad falls in the past six months and I dread her having one on my watch.

I’ve also had to switch my hours back to days for this so it should be interesting switching back again Tuesday night. Grandma is an early riser and early to bed and I have to shut myself in the other bedroom after she goes to bed or else her dog, Spot, will stay with me and Grandma will keep getting out of bed to come wheedle Spot to come back with her. I am taking my laptop with me which gives me plenty to do in both work and entertainment once I am shut up in the bedroom. Last spring and summer when I spent every Saturday with her so the family could go to the races all I had was books and sewing. Which was plenty but I ached for the keyboard because the previous racing season I got to be on the family PC from 3pm on Saturday until people started getting up Sunday morning about seven or eight--if I could last that marathon which I often did. Got a lot done that year. This weekend I’m taking DVDs with me to play on the laptop. And books of course. And my sewing because Grandma is always interested in what I am working on and asks about it even when I don’t bring it with me. But I will have to be strict with myself about the temptation to stay up all night because I have to be awake with the sun to get Grandma’s breakfast and coffee or else she will try to do it herself.

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