all is destroyed

It was after a conversation with my visiting in-laws last month in which I realized I am completely undisciplined about my writing practice.  I have been trying to change this. Some days, three days so far, I have sat down, set a timer for two hours, and spent that time focusing on projects.  If I can get myself to sit down and commit to the time, once I get into it I stay engrossed.  However, before I sit down there is that cat hair-strewn floor to sweep, my desk to clean, dishes, laundry, wouldn’t I rather gchat and oh wait what about exercise you need to exercise and then my wife comes home and I want to hang on her every word.  I stare at her like a puppy and she says, “what?”

We spent Memorial Day weekend in the Mohave Desert, driving from Barstow to Joshua Tree, passing through Calico and Kelso Junction.  It was clear, bright and dry, the sun beating forth new rhythms on my face that I later moisturized again and again.  The twining branches of the Joshua Trees at dusk: enough has been said on this subject, I cannot add anything more.

The trees, they reach

Calico is a commercial ghost town with a slight theme park bent, we rode a train through mining country, bought state plates, drank in a saloon.  I wanted to fill myself up with sights, sounds, things, so when I came back and stared into the computer there would be something to say.  Living as I do with an excess of time, and little money or responsibility, there is a certain blankness that comes from being so inwardly focused.  In the end I’m in my apartment with the curtains drawn and the a/c on staring at the internet waiting for it to tell me I’m okay, and that’s no way to live.  For writing material I draw on my past life, which was a lot more hazardous and exciting, or I make things up and Frankenstein them together, or sometimes use present circumstances.  The latter does not work well, the book I was working on lesbian married life has stalled due to the fact that my current lesbian married life is so placid and comfortable that it makes excruciatingly dull and self-satisfied text.  I read it and I want to hit myself.

So, finding the discipline, finding the content, those things are crucial in one’s writing practice.  Finding the fire when tall cool glasses beckon from the porch.  These are some of the things I’m struggling with.

Creatively, I am stretched between projects.  I am waiting with much anticipation for a publisher to return feedback and a verdict regarding Scaffolding, the nineties punk novella.

My attempts at editing Unpredictable Boots at NaNoEdMo were an abject failure.  Edits have continued since, but I have come to the conclusion that, while the first seven chapters are acceptable, the next seven are trite, embarrassing trash and must be completely rewritten.  It also needs a new title, the one it has is way too chic lit cutesy.

Because I am an adrenalin junkie and also a bit of a sucker, I have signed up to do Camp NaNoWriMo in June to produce another half-baked novel fragment which may become a novel with time and massages.  This one is about identity theft grifters in San Francisco and I’m anticipating will be quite a bit of fun.

I’m reading in the Sumarr reading series, curated by Diana Arterian, on August 26, 2012.

And summer rolls onward.

It’s a rocky start for me too.  Regrettably I only completed 50 minutes yesterday, out of the requisite 1 hour 37 min.  More than that I am frustrated by large chunks of my novel that read like plodding, stagnant diary entries.  This editing may be more of a slash and burn.  It is likely that I need to rewrite large sections around the middle.  Clearly, more work, a lot more work is needed.

Just as my novel needs midsection whittling, as do I.  (Segue!  Segue!) I’m jumping back into strength training on a mat on the living room floor, doing squats and leg lifts by the bunny cage, using armchairs as benches for bench dips.  Living room as gym as I’m unable to get a gym membership and my iphone app seems good enough.

It feels good, it feels productive, and in both these pursuits I feel like I’m working towards something larger that hopefully will pay off.  Yet in both I’ve fallen behind and must strive to catch up. Tightening things up.  This will take much longer than a month.

And in that the optimism of both NaNoWriMo and NaNoEdMo I take issue with.  I understand a month is about as long as most people can devote the intensity each program demands for the project. I get that they’re trying to break what seems like a gargantuan task into manageable bites, I appreciate that.  It is effective. But I hope that somewhere in the literature they are letting people know that writing a novel, editing a novel, takes much, much longer than a month.

Bacon + Beer + Tiara = Babe

Making stuffed mushrooms in 2009

Part of me (the part that subscribes to Real Simple) enjoys playing the perfect housewife, vintage apron wrapped around my waist, braised tangerine chicken in a platter carried to the table where my butch waits. Our food blog, Lez Cuisine, attests to this. I relish the fact that I can indulge this housewife fantasy without feeling as if I had sold out feminism.  I’m a woman cooking and cleaning for another woman.  We are making it work the best way that we can.  There is only so much time, and I admittedly take a certain pleasure in camping up the housewife trope.

Other times, however, the pleasures of the EZ-bake oven (or the 4-burner gas Edgewood) pale with the fact that in this cluttered apartment with a cat, a rabbit, and no dishwasher, I can spend all of my time running from one task to another, doing load after load of dishes, laundry that never seems finished, tidying up after the pets that leave shedding nests in every corner.  The work is never done, and subsequently my real work is never done.  My work as a writer is easily shunted to the side for the more tactile and visually demanding work of pushing back the monsters of filth.

So it goes.  And every day I make choices to procrastinate on one to the benefit of another.  As I sit here typing this there is a load of dishes at the sink, the kitchen floor is filthy, the living room which we cleaned yesterday is again larded with crumbs from a gathering last night.

I could bitch about it.  But then I look around and realize that for so long I wanted a place that was mine, that was not a roommate situation or a dorm or my parent’s house or some godawful crackden.  Watching the sun set over downtown, lacings of branches segmenting the pink and orange, I am content that this is a home I share with my partner, as an adult, and that that alone has been a long time coming.

Outside the kitchen window, all is calm

The empty stage before the bar opened

Reading from Jet Set Desolate

The knife fight breakup scene!

Photos by Claudia Casey

Many thanks to Liz Garo for organizing the event.

Valentines day ended with all of us in Two Boots, where I gorged myself on pizza to sop up the free beer.  I awoke the next morning feeling like I needed to start strength training again.  I’ve been neglecting my exercise routine for the last two weeks, and my body feels it.  The base of my spine, a pain, whether from five inch heels the night before tramping up and down to the Echoplex and back looking for the stage door, or from my body falling out of tune.

Angel on the wall at Two Boots

Dark clouds and an early morning, and sitting with Stephen and Alex having a work party.  Essentially we sit in a circle with laptops so as to make the work less lonely. My work right now is this and that, the other, quite a bit piling up.

Via the Homo-Centric blog I found Glitter Tongue,  this amazing Valentine’s Day collection of queer love poems. Diving through them this morning my heart brightened, inspired.  I wanted to write poetry again.  Writing for me comes in waves of compulsive excess and then withdrawal into administration/promotion/performance. There are the things that go into being a writer that do not involve writing.  I can spend too much time on them.  I want to swim again with lyric prose.

I recently finished Camille Roy’s Sherwood Forest , after her powerful performance at Featherless #13.  On the subject of queer love poems, poems of desire, poems of piercing clarity and ferocity.

They make me feel alive.

Two episodes, with Untucked, back to back.  One would think I was starved.

Back to back the readings come, then.  The Rhapsodomancy event went well.  Here are some pictures:

Instagram of Podium at Good Luck Bar

Reading from Jet Set Desolate

Photo by Omar Routher

The red chinoiserie of the Good Luck Bar felt glamorous.  It was like reading poems in a James Bond movie.  Now onward to The Echo’s Valentine’s Day Sad Hour today:

Tonight! Free!!

I slept at Stephens last night so that he would not be alone.  Sleeping on the couch, the Christmas lights shimmering soft, I left them on and tied a padded sleep mask around my eyes.  Since his rotating potluck/shiva, when the house filled up with food, there was a roach sighting.  One or two.  Here or there.

I was reminded of my old apartment in North Hollywood with the very real roach problem where I slept with the lights on every night with hopes the pale glow would keep the insects back.  I had a sleep mask and held onto the lease with both hands.

Now, in Echo Park, we have gnats, moths, and daddy longlegs on a rotating seasonal schedule, but I have not in two years seen a roach. I sleep here safely in the dark.

When I am ready for the dark, and when it is ready for me.  I keep going into the bedroom, curling up beside my wife, the warmth of blankets and soft sheets. I lay there and suddenly it’s as if the night spits me back out again, I go stumbling out of bed towards the living room, towards stimuli, the lonely glow of facebook, the empty ask of email, the rabbit-hole of tumblr or twitter.  The internet gets boring after 2 am, it ceases to vomit forth content with such rapidity.  I also am finding certain platforms less charming (tumblr) than the endless vortexes of amazement that they once seemed to be.

With overuse, all things fade.  Especially sparkly kitty gifs.  OMG Cats in Space,  however, still does it for me.

disarray

There is a coziness here, but a feeling of calm before chaos, respite from the emotional turmoil of the last few days.

Stephen’s father died a few nights ago, and as I listen to the hissing of our heater I remember the heat in his apartment burbling like a percolator beneath the sound of muffled tears.  Both his parents were dead now. He was 27.  I sat on the couch and listened to him talk on the phone to distant half-brothers, entreating them to be his family. My heart hurt.  I wanted to bring him lasagnas or vegetable bakes, some savory comfort food as I knew he wasn’t eating, wasn’t sleeping, was stretched out on the floor between us in a sleeping bag afraid to be left alone with his thoughts.

“How will I go on with my life, what will my life be about now?  It was all about my fathers ideas before.  I’m an artist because my father wanted to be an artist.  I called him every day.  We talked every day for hours.  Who will I call no.  Who can I call that will put up with me to that level?”

dried flowers

Noone said anything.  We made comforting murmurs.

“Why didn’t I record him. Is it stupid that I didn’t record him, that I care so much about the recording?  Is it stupid that I’m obsessed with recording him and now he’s gone?”

“No, dear, no.”

“I just feel like if I had recorded him I would have him with me still.  I grew up in the computer age, I don’t trust my memory to hold everything.  It’s not enough.  The computer holds it better and but I lost my files, I lost them before and there were some really good recordings of him in my old files.  I should have made new ones, why didn’t I? Will I always be full of regret?”

“No, you may have regrets for awhile but eventually they will heal.”

The cat dashed around our feet, a flash of black and white.  The tiles shimmered, golden-beige.  Christmas lights hung around the room over clutter and an old Dutch Masters painting that looked so much like Stephen’s dad that he had hung it over the couch.  The couch, lumpy brown leather, was Wild West themed to him.

Katie, Alex and I were seated in the narrow living room with Stephen, nursing him through the night.  The call had come abruptly, Alex and I were playing the ungame, gearing up to do some voice recording, when Stephen called.  We ran out, leaving a note for Katie when she came home from work.

I am sitting here now a few nights later, having left Alex in bed with Stephen that night, leaving them in comforting slumber party mode.  The four of us were all in bed with Stephen at one point, joking that we were the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate factory.  He needed warmth, and he needed closeness.  He’s an orphan now.

Stephen refers to Katie and I as his family.  We are like his sisters, and sometimes I feel maternally towards him.   I love having him over for dinner as he acts like a son at his mother’s table eating everything in sight and talking about how delicious it is.  I know we are not his real family, but surrogate queer families can be very strong.  I feel this now.

There’s a pattern here, a pattern of restless sleep, a pattern of late rising and frenetic onset of tasks.  I sort through the fog on awakening discard some things take on others. What is it today?

Last night I had some wine and spent a little too much time discussing Tupac’s “To Live and Die in LA” on facebook chat, after Stephen posted it.  The centrality of facebook chat, gchat, to communication these days.  I used to talk to people on the phone.  A rare occurrence now.

I don’t really mind, I remember being so frustrated with the single house phone in college, I’m still mystified by my iphone and all it can do.  I wake up expecting it to have done the laundry and folded it neatly, or at least provided an app whereby I can catalog housework on a leaderboard and compete with other housewives to check in at the kitchen sink.

I am content to live and die in LA.  I was born here.  Then my parents fled the traffic and smog of the seventies for San Diego, which to them seemed like paradise, and to me seemed like childhood.  The blandness of now.  In childhood there is nothing to compare anything against, there was no frame of reference, only the constant of now. I ate Popsicles, rode my bike to the library and avoided social contact.

Now, in Echo Park, against the savaged lake and the towers of downtown, I shuffle through the days.  I am preparing for a reading, turning pages, toning inflections, resisting self-consciousness.  I am watching the cat lick herself obscenely.

When we play Apples to Apples I am told I am the literalist, and that appears to be the case here.  I am drinking coffee at the kitchen table and typing about the literal minutiae of my unexciting life.

What is outside the literal? What is exciting? What am I excited about right now?  This:

1. Austra’s Lose it, from Feel It Break
2. Gin gimlets
3. An old friend coming out of a coma
4. Upcoming Rhapsodomancy reading on February 12^th
5. My nails look like a unicorn shit on them

My scrappy manicure, post-dishwashing

It’s like this messy afterbirth of emotion.  Hopefully I can dress it up and take it out of the house sometime in the next year or two.