Bird by bird ...

This is another picture of best friend B and me in Paris in January  of 2011. I post it because a) I like it, b) Brian and I are both writers and can spend hours lamenting our habits of procrastination, and c) I couldn't find the picture of birds that was meant to accompany the title of this post. I have an old computer and a new computer and something about a firewire and Bob's your uncle and I don't have all my bird photos. 

I'm supposed to write. I like writing - and even more, I like having written - and I get good feedback on my words. I have three projects in the works right now and have spent part of today working on one, which I conceived of in 2006. This year I will finish a draft. It is so damn hard for me to do this - the ease of distraction notwithstanding, due to my editing background I am constantly rewriting as I go, which is exactly what I should not be doing. I should get it all down and then polish. Not supposed to say should but tired enough that I'll let it slide this time. This comes easily to me, jotting down these thoughts about nothing and everything and whatever my brain tells my fingers to type, and if I could I would post and move on, maybe reread in a day or two, because the fact of the matter is that few people read this and the ones who do who know me will forgive me the trespasses of an absentee comma or misplaced, dangling whatever. 

Hi Cousin.

I am in the country right now, with my mum and our dogs. It's been a quiet, bonding weekend during which I accomplished bits and pieces of what I'd hoped to. I've started an editing project, gotten further in a (way too long) screenplay I'm reading for a coworker, worked a bit on project the first, read a page or two of my friend's book, exercised, and so on and so forth.

Need to keep writing keep writing don't stop don't worry if it's good or if it's going to be part of the final project or is just the stuff I'm purging to get to the final project. So much easier said, that. Oh! I also read a spec script that I wanted to read and am going to work on on behalf of two of my darling writing clients. Whenever I tell people what I "do" (don't ask me why that's in quotation marks; it just is) they inevitably follow it up by asking what it is that I write and edit - one might think that I'd have my stock answer but I don't, and so I fumble and half-explain and leave things out and mumble and downplay and all that good stuff. What I do for a living: I read and write. That's what. 

Bird by bird, I will move forward and write my way through these projects 'cause without a first draft there can be no second. I will not get this done in one shot; it will take many and might very well wind up a pile of pages that allow me to move on to the next. Maybe not. But I have to start with one bird to get to the entire flock. Or murder, if it's crows we're talking about. Nevermore. I've been meaning to memorize Annabel Lee and thus far have but the first and second verses (stanzas?) memorized. Mesmerized. 

Okay. This was something. I've now written in my blahhhhhhhhhhggggggggg. Knoblauch. 

I might be back later tonight. And I very well might not. 

I am a writer, damn it. I really am.

(right?)

Sleep no more...

...or so it seems sometimes.

Random thoughts:

I wish I could get my blahhhhhhg to look like it used to; in experimenting with the settings I lost my old ones.

I'm somewhere between a luddite and a proficient technology user.

I have a love/cringe relationship with social media. My 20th college reunion is this spring, and while it will be really interesting to see everyone in person, what with The Facebook and all, what will we catch up on? "So, how was that new restaurant you went to two weeks ago?" "Wow -- you are quite the Ron Paul supporter!" "Your turn in Scrabble - I played "nexus" last week."

Many years ago I had an interesting one-night with a fella I almost up and drove across the country with the next morning. We maintained a long distance email romance back in the days of dial-up and chat rooms and he wrote me what remains one of the most romantic things ever written to me: "I just want to take your hand and walk you around the world."With all due respect to the brilliant men who've written me romantic verse, this one strikes a particular chord.

This has been a flucked up week but what's done is done. The present is what we have. I have a very difficult time staying in it - the clutter of my mind takes over and doesn't let me.

There are things I wish I could write and publish (the old-fashioned way) but I'm in touch with too many people to be as open as I want to be.

I recognize that this is a shoddy excuse for procrastinating.

I am a far better writer than I am a story teller.

I am a big believer in apologies and a bigger one in forgiveness.

I forgot what I was going to say.

Whoosh...

I have something racy that I could post, but perhaps now is not the time.

From a good piece in the Times about Homeland ...

So let a thousand conversations bloom. Secrets held up to light and air lose their power in the public square. Spies know it as keepers, and writers know it as tellers. 

This is the context.

Driving on Nine...

Now what? I've started writing here again and so I will attempt to keep it up. God willing, the interesting times are not all behind me. But in writing the title to this piece I think of Cousin, who may or may not read this. I wish I may I wish I might. I think of 1994ish, when I brought the guy from Baltimore to Mars Bar, and attempts were made with ecstasy that that night didn't live up to its name. Mars Bar - you were in my dream the other night. I wish I wish I wish I could spend ten minutes in some of my memories.

Grow old along with me ...

In Paris with my dear friend B, 01/02/12

After a long and winding delay, I have reemerged from the ether. My 2011 was defined by medical issues, the likes of which I hadn't yet experienced. Surgeries, ERs and grafts, oh my. Stitches, iv's, and so, so much Percocet. Apple juice and graham crackers upon coming out of anesthesia. Lost days, weeks, most of a season.

Yesterday was my first day out of a cast since April, when I discovered that, six weeks or so earlier, I had fractured my scaphoid. This is also when I discovered that I had a scaphoid, and I have since said this word enough to compensate for two decades of negligence. I have had three surgeries on this tiny bone, a bone so vexing to the medical community that it has its own book. Surgery one involved putting a screw in to hold it together. Surgery two, three months later, was a bone graft from my radial. As icky as that was, it absolutely pales in comparison to surgery three, a bone graft from my hip in October. Should anyone offer to remove your iliac crest and graft it onto your scaphoid, politely decline. It's not as much fun as it sounds.

In the middle of it all, on June 7, 2011, I took the first (and last) of a six-week class, Intro to Personal Finance, as prescribed by my father for reasons too obvious to fight. It was an unseasonably hot and humid day, and after lunch in the park (Bryant), I decided to walk to my appointment with the wrist surgeon on 88th Street. I was not really supposed to exercise during this stretch, but a 45 block walk seemed reasonable. At the corner of 52nd and 5th, I started to feel lightheaded and nauseated, which is a relatively normal state for me. The subway was across the street, and I decided to abandon my walk. Thank God I never got there. I started seeing dizzying splotches of bright sunlight, the same patterns repeating everywhere I turned. Behind me was a Juicy Couture - yep - and the last thing I remember is deciding to go and sit down in the air conditioning. Some four (according to the witnesses) minutes later I came to surrounded by Juicy employees. Someone handed me a cup of water and someone else told me that I'd fainted and it was very hot out and that they'd called the paramedics. I told them I had to go to my appointment and had to get up, but they kept me there. I remember looking to my right where my bag and papers were and seeing a big pool of Hawaiian Punch. I asked what it was and the fellow behind me, holding a compress to my head, who would turn out to be the one with the CPR and First Aid training, said, "We spilled something there. Don't worry about it."

It took the paramedics about 15 minutes to arrive, and on the way to the hospital I asked repeatedly if I was going to die. I fear things like this happening to people I love on a regular basis, and the results are usually far-reaching in my malevolent fantasies. I think they said no, as I imagine they always do. The female paramedic asked my name address date of birth, which she read on the driver's license she'd extracted from my splattered purse. I was semi-triaged at Bellevue ER and spent a lot of time on a gurney in the hallway being hip checked by passers by. The man having tests in the room I was parked near died an exciting death, fifteen doctors and nurses responding to shouts of "Code Blue!", frantic instructions to repeat whatever was being done, and, finally, the flat line. The denouement. When I finally got to a room, seven staples and many conversations with a cocky resident who so wanted me to have a drug problem he practically begged later, one of my roommates was a Mr. Singh, who shouted insults at the nurse in Hindi (they found a translator) throughout the night. They turned my valium drip up as high as they could so that I could sleep.

Turns out I had a concussion, and a not super-minor one. Short term memory loss and something resembling aphasia took away most of the summer, with that first bone graft thrown in for reinforcement. People came to visit me throughout and I forgot who, and when. My memories came from photos and conversations I found myself in. None of this is good for the mood, which is further squandered by lack of mental and physical exercise. In two weeks I go to an appointment suggested by my neurologist, four hours of neuro-psychological testing, to ensure that I've no longterm damages from the event.

I've since learned what happened between my deciding to enter the store and my coming to. I was leaning in the doorway of what turned out to be the employees' office when a few of them came back from lunch. I grabbed someone's arm and told him that I didn't feel well. He told me to come into the air-conditioning, turned his key in the lock, and I fell straight back and landed on the floor. They got their manager and the guy, Chris, who knows first aid and CPR which we should all know, and at first I was just passed out. Then blood, with the decency to resemble Hawaiian Punch, started to pool around my head. Apparently this made them uncomfortable. I was out for four minutes, and waited another eleven for the ambulance.

I have been profoundly lucky in the health department until now, and these harrowing experiences mark the end of taking it all for granted and the beginning of trying -failing- and trying again to do things well and to stay as from from danger as I can comfortably manage.

And how was your summer?

Something I wrote ...

...just now without an edit - started out as something else but turned into this -- concussion only partially to blame; I've a wandering mind. Among other things.

It is not quick, or effortless, to come to great wisdom. Knowledge is not wisdom – knowledge is a toolbox with too many drawers and little bits and dusty parts easy to over look. Knowledge lives in the brain and the muscles; wisdom lives in the soul. In the mind, in the self, in whatever those who write books choose to call it – all wisdom is fundamentally the same. Belief is not wisdom. War is not wisdom. Hate is nothing at all – it’s other things shifting focus because they’re too embarrassing to own; anger the same. Fear and grief and love and loss and gratitude are real. Tears are real, those not conjured for cameras through masquerade eyes. Loneliness is fear. With wisdom comes a slow-building cure for all that ails us.With wisdom comes gratitude, trust, acceptance, love; there is no room for guilt and regret.

One I just found from Dorothy Parker:

A Very Short Song

Once, when I was young and true,
Someone left me sad-
Broke my brittle heart in two;
And that is very bad.

Love is for unlucky folk,
Love is but a curse.
Once there was a heart I broke;
And that, I think, is worse.