Cover Your Mouth When You Blog

For Now

Turns out that last post, written in July '07, was aptly named; this blog has experienced an extended outage.  It's hard to know for sure if the electricity's come back or if it's just a brief spark.  It's funny the things that suddenly inspire one to write. 

I live in a condo building, which is basically a rehabbed apartment building where people own the apartments.  The neighbors to my right are a young couple with three small children and a dog.  Their condo is the same size as mine (read: small) and, when I've got visitors, or R stays over with his dog, and I start to feel cramped by the number of bodies, I marvel at the family next door's living arrangement.  "They must have real unconditional love over there," I'll say, "because I could not handle all those people packed into 800 square feet day after day."

When I talk to the mom in the hallway, she seems happy, always friendly, if a bit overwhelmed.  Sometimes she's got the two older kids (five and two) scurrying ahead of her and chattering, the baby (6 months) strapped to her front and the dog (a pitbull) on a leash - the family going out for a walk while dad's at work.  "Can I help?" I ask reflexively, never sure how, exactly, I might help.  Take a walk with them and help corral the toddlers?  Provide poop-scooping duty for the dog?  Let the family annex their home into my spare room?

"I've got it, thanks," the mom always answers. 

Understandably, things next door get a bit harried sometimes.  Last Thursday, as the mom was putting the baby down for a nap, the dog needed to go outside to do its business.  Having only two hands, the mom opened the door to the back walkway for the dog to go out and relieve itself while she tended to the baby.  She didn't know the back gate had been left open and that the man who walks his two big Huskies in the neighborhood - two dogs that her dog does not like - was across the street with his dogs.  Soon, there was shouting outside and she ran outside to retrieve her dog.  The man had pulled a knife and began shouting, "I'm going to kill that fucking dog!"  A woman and man who live across the street and had been leaving their house at the time were stopped on the sidewalk, hands in the air stick-up style, as the man waved the knife and my neighbor tugged her growling dog away from the Huskies.

"Okay, put the knife away, man," the man from across the street said, "Put it away or I'm going to call the cops."

"Fine, call the cops," the man with the knife said and began to walk briskly away with his dogs.

The police came quickly and soon three cars patrolled the neighborhood, spotlights sweeping into yards and alleys, and collected the man and his dogs and brought them back to our building to get the story straight.  The pitbull had rushed them from across the street, growling.  The man had had trouble with this dog before, "It growls at my dogs from their second floor window!", that's why he carried the knife.  "Did he threaten any people with the knife, or just the dog?" the cops asked.  "Just the dog," my neighbor and the people from across the street conceded. But he was waving the knife around, they insisted, wouldn't put it away. No charges where pressed. The man walked home, sputtering angrily under his breath about that fucking dog.

I spent the night at R's house. The next morning, still dark outside, I came home to get ready for work and found the glass on the front door of the building shattered, a gray brick lying on the tile in foyer. The cops came and, this time, filed a report.  "There was an incident here last night," I said, "with my neighbor's dog and another guy. I think this probably has something to do with that."

Then my neighbor rounded the hallway stairs to the front door with her oldest boy. Her eyes were red and puffy and small and the broken glass scattered in the foyer registered immediately across her tired face.  "Oh no," she said softly, crying already.  "What happened, Mama?" her boy asked, "Are you sad, Mama?"  My downstairs neighbor got his broom and swept up the shards.  My upstairs neighbor came down in a dress shirt with a tie slung unknotted around his neck, "I'll call the insurance company from work," he sighed.

I went to a concert that night with my sister.  When I got home around 11:30pm, the man was across the street from our building, walking his dogs in the dark.  I opened the front door quickly, the damage now covered in cardboard and packing tape.  I looked back and saw the man watching from across the street.  Thanks, asshole, I wanted to say, It's not my fucking dog. He carries a knife and throws bricks; I thought better of it.

From my kitchen window, I saw the man still across the street, looking at the building while his dogs sniffed the fire hydrant.  What's he thinking, I wondered.  Regret, embarrassment for letting his anger get the better of him? Vindication, satisfaction? Curious, the way criminals return to the scene of the crime. He eventually disappeared down the street.  The window has been replaced and has remained intact for 48 hours now.

That night I remembered an interview I'd read with Andre Dubus III, the author of The House of Sand and Fog about what inspired the book. He said, "It began with a newspaper article of a woman who was evicted from her house for failure to pay back taxes she said she didn't owe. The house was repossessed. They evicted her, sold it off and then discovered they had the wrong house. This happens a lot. It was a computer snafu. Yet, the man who bought it in a fair and square legal auction was under no legal pressure to buy it back, or to sell it back, and he wasn't sure he wanted to in this real article. And I saw that the man's name was Arabic and it wasn't Persian, but earlier in my life I'd known a Persian man who was a colonel in the Shah's air force who found himself in the United States working 16 hour days in menial jobs. He was working at a gas station for the first eight hours and then in a shoe factory. And he said to me once, you know, that he used to work with kings and queens and presidents and vice-presidents of entire countries by himself and now he serves candy and cigarettes to kids who "don't even know who I am," he said. And I never forgot it. And so when I saw that Middle Eastern name in that newspaper article about that woman's house, I began to wonder well, what if my colonel bought that house and that began the book. You see, I mean, the whole fuel for writing fiction is curiosity. It's not what I know, but what I don't know. And that's what actually drives-- it doesn't drive me-- it actually pulls me into story writing."

Tiny decisions and coincidences - to let the dog out the backdoor by itself, to walk your Huskies at a certain time of day - spark events in life.  Curiousity about those decisions and coincidences and the events that follow spark story writing. I'm starting to feel the sparks again, the curiosity.

Extended Outage

The electricity went out last night at Ryan's house. We were sitting on the couch, my legs propped over his lap, and I told him I was emotional, scared, because my best friend from college had a baby on Saturday and described the labor and birth - she pushed for an hour and had to have a C-section - as the worst pain of her life. They pressed on her uterus three times during the C-section to free the baby and she felt it, intense pain. I wanted to cry on the phone at work as she talked. I felt faint. I can't handle stories of childbirth. I don't know if I can handle childbirth. So I told him I was scared of having children. And he joked, "well, making them is the fun part." And then I cocked my head to the side and narrowed my eyes in his direction and he said, "look, it'll hurt, but if it's something you want to do, it'll be worth it. Is it something you want to do?" For me the conversation was hypothetical - hypothetical children with a hypothetical man - and I worried that for him it wasn't. He's been saying, "Care about you," at the end of phone conversations with the same intonation usually reserved for "love you" and sometimes I'm afraid he'll say it.

"I think I want to," I said pulling my legs in toward my body and then the TV blipped out and the whirring of the ceiling fan hummed lower, the sounds of his apartment slowed and stopped. "Is it a breaker?" I asked.

"No, the whole place is out," he answered, clicking light switches in the bathroom, then farther back in the kitchen. He went out the back door to see if the neighbor's lights were out, too.

I stretched out on the couch and thought of Costa Rica. The electricity went out one night as Angie, Andrea and I ate ceviche at a beachfront cafe. "It's out in the whole country," the bartender told us, "happens way too often." He would continue serving drinks, he assured. After another round of mojitos, we took a cab to the hotel lobby, borrowed a votive to make our way down the gravel path to our villa and lit three more candles that sat on the kitchen table. We pulled the beer we'd bought that afternoon from the refridgerator, the outsides of the bottles moist with perspiration. Andrea remembered that her iPod speakers ran on batteries and we carried the candles, the beer and the speakers to the pool outside our backdoor, shed our clothes in the dark and waded into the water.

"It's really the only thing to do," I said, "it's too hot to just sit inside."

"And this beer'll go bad," Angie said, cracking the top off a bottle.

After an hour or so, Andrea got tired and went inside. Angie and I bobbed in the pool, keeping our beers above water and she said, "so this new guy, you like him?"

"I guess," I said, "I mean, yeah. I'm spending lots of time with him."

"You see a future with him?" she asked.

"Not really."

"I guess I just feel like what's the point then?"

"The point is I'm biding my time. Like I know eventually I have to deal with the fact that J and I are probably over forever. And that if I want to have a husband and a family that I'll have to eventually start looking for a new relationship, but right now I just don't want to. But I don't want to be alone either. It sounds sort of pathetic, I know. I guess it's all I feel like I can do right now."

"I get it. I just feel like I don't have that kind of time anymore," she said and the lights on the back porch blinked on and things started moving again and I instantly longed for the darkness, the stillness, the feeling that the only thing to be done was to float in the pool and drink a beer and sing along to that Kanye West song that I hate to love. But it was late and the air conditioner was working again and so we went inside.

Now on the couch, I heard Ryan calling from the backyard. Bring his guitar. Bring some beers. Electricity's out in the whole neighborhood. So we sat on the wrought iron chairs in the backyard and he played songs he's too shy to sing the words to and I threw the tennis ball to the dog and it was the only thing to do. And it felt better, our conversation about children and fear halted in the stillness. The lights came back on a little while later and we watched Entourage and went to bed.

I had a dream that I'd removed the glass face from the big, round clock that hangs in the copy room at work and put my finger on the long, thin hand that ticks off the seconds. I woke this morning in Ryan's bed with this image still behind my eyes - my finger pressing down as the second hand pulsated against it, trying to continue it's inevitable trip around the clock.

After breakfast, I dropped him off to go golfing with friends and went home. I checked my email and had a message from J, asking me to return an old photo I'd taken from his bedroom years before. A square photo with the coloring that dates it from the seventies. He is a child, maybe a year old, in a diaper pulling himself up on a crate full of vinyl LPs. He's been surprised by the camera. I can tell because his eyes are wide, the way they become wide with surprise still. I've thought of returning the photo several times. It's the only copy. J and I talked on the phone last weekend for about two hours. I told him I'm lost, confused, in every facet of my life. I'm unfulfilled at my job and don't know what I want to do and he said, "you just have to take small steps, you just have to try different, stupid little things until something clicks and you groove on it for a while and see what happens. It's not like you just start doing something and instantly feel fulfilled." And I felt better. I told him I couldn't believe we broke up so long ago.

"It doesn't feel like it's been almost a year," I said.

And he said, "it feels like it's been twenty years."

I emailed him back this morning and said I could send him the photo, but would need his new address. He's moved apartments since we broke up. He knows I'm seeing someone new and thinks this means I've moved on, feels this means he should too. The truth is I've been lying motionless, comfortable only when everything else stops - when the lights go out and the fans stop oscillating and the clocks stop ticking. The truth is I've been holding my finger down on the second hand and wishing that everyone else - J and Ryan - could stand still with me, could understand that there's nothing more that I can do right now, could just drink a beer and wait for the electricity to come back.

I'm Out

Given that my time between posts is averaging around three weeks these days, I doubt anyone will notice my absence this week, but I thought I'd let you all know I'll be Costa Rica until next Monday. Maybe some time away from the jiggly jello of uncertainty my life seems to resemble lately will provide some clarity. Maybe seven days with two girlfriends at an all-inclusive resort in Central America is just a second helping of jiggly jello. Maybe trying to get my midwestern ass up on a surf board in the Pacific and swinging from zip-lines in the jungle treetops will inspire movement in my real life. Maybe I'm escaping. Maybe I should just fucking relax. This seems to be the place to do it.

Not Yourself

The Englishman is leaning against the bar and talking about Paris - he was there in the fall to visit a friend - and you tell him you were there once when you were 21 and saw the Eiffel Tower twice in two days and that the Tower, along with the small room in the hostel that was filled almost entirely by two single beds, is all you remember of the city. You are reading A Moveable Feast you tell him and you want to go back to Paris one day. He's reading it too, he says. The book is in his pack in the hostel. You take a drag off The Englishman's cigarette and his longish hair brushes against your ear as he moves close to tell you something and you wish that you were not already sleeping with someone because you wouldn't mind inviting him to stay at your apartment for the night to lie in bed and talk about Paris and politics and Hemingway and how the thing about travel is, it only makes you want to travel more, because the world is so vast and it seems unfair that we'll finish our lives without seeing the whole thing. You think of how Hemingway said hunger sharpens our perceptions and you want to quit your job and sell your home and cancel your car insurance and go with The Englishman to Croatia, where he said he lived for five months, poor and wild and happy. But you are already sleeping with someone and he's asked that you not sleep with anyone else and you said that you won't and neither should he.

The Englishman finishes his beer and says he has to go and gives you a sudden hug for which you haven't prepared and so your arms are shriveled together against your chest while he squeezes your torso. You take a cab from the bar to the apartment of The Man You've Been Sleeping With and on the third buzz, the hall light comes on and he comes down the stairs behind his dog that now has his paws up on the window of the front door, scratching at the glass. You kiss The Man You've Been Sleeping With and he says, "Did you have a cigarette?" and you tell him, "Just a little bit of one." He asks you later where you got it and you tell him, "From an Englishman," and you know that he means to ask who you talked to and if he bought your drinks.

After you've brushed your teeth and are wearing his sweatshirt and he's spooned against the back of your body and his dog is lying at the foot of the bed, he says he wants to buy some plants for his living room and could you help him pick some out? You tell him jade plants are easy and philodendrons grow anywhere and that you will go with him to the nursery sometime next week. And you want to tell him it's okay that he introduced you as his girlfriend to that guy outside the falafel place last week. And you want to move your things into his big, beautiful, empty apartment and help him finish painting the dining room and hang pictures on the walls and host a dinner party at the heavy wooden table he bought from the Amish furniture maker in Indiana. And it occurs to you that this would be so effortless; that you could simply fall into this vacant spot and set the cogs of a life into motion. And you stare into the gray light of the bedroom and feel a shot of panic that your time for hunger and adventure has passed.

A few days later at work you think of joining the Peace Corps. You've thought of this before, three years ago when you were lying in the park one afternoon and everything seemed easy and meaningless, and then you stopped thinking of it because you got a boyfriend. But now you're at work and the lawyer who's always wearing stripes with plaid is talking in a meeting about something that you know you should listen to, you know you should give a damn about, but you keep picturing yourself out in the sun somewhere with your hands in the dirt and you have the vague feeling that you'll be leaving here soon. And you go to bed that night and think, Next year at this time I might be teaching soil conservation in Suriname.

You wake the next morning with a throat full of thistles and a gong in your brain and you call your boss and tell her you're sick. You make a cup of tea and pile blankets onto the sofa and huddle in and turn on Good Morning America and wonder, What if I got the flu in Suriname?

In the early afternoon you decide to write because it helps you sort things out and you've been feeling out of sorts. Then, with your computer on your lap, you find that the narrative is coming only in the second person. Instead of "I", you type "you." And this is just how it's coming - the whole story in "you"s instead of "I"s - and you wonder if this is happening because these scenarios, these paths you've tapped out actually seem like impossibilities, nothing that you would ever do. Or if it's because they seem like options to be analyzed objectively. Or if it's just because you haven't felt like yourself lately.

It has been six months since you broke up with the man you thought you would marry and six years since you took that job just for the paycheck. It is eight months until you turn thirty. You don't know what you're doing and feel that the time for not knowing has passed. Your body is aching and you recline on the sofa and wait for something to change.

The Thing About Winter

Watching Lake Michigan's still, gray water from the passenger seat of his car, I said, “The thing about winter is it forces people inside to contend with themselves for a while.”

“And is that a good thing?” he asked.

“Depends on whether they’re up for it, I guess.”

He’s been giving me rides home from work lately. He usually comes up when he drops me off. Most nights he stays. A few nights ago, J called while he and I were lying in bed. “Who’s that?” he asked, pinching my side a little, after I glanced at the name on the chiming phone and placed it face-down on the window sill. I’d known who it was without looking.

"He calls me in the middle of the night.”

“He calls you when he’s been drinking.”

“Sometimes. Not always.”

“He says what? I miss you? I love you?”

“Not really. We just talk.”

“Does he know about me?”

“No.”

“He’d be upset?”

“I think so. I really can’t deal with that right now.”

Then I asked him about the end of his last relationship. “I just couldn’t deal,” he said, “I guess I didn’t for a long time.”

He told me about a period of deep depression and cocaine and I pressed my forehead to the space between his shoulder blades and said, “I’m sorry you went through that.” I kept my face there, eyes closed and wanted him to keep talking. “What happened? Why’d she leave? Do you still love her?” I didn’t care about the answers, not for the usual reasons anyway. I wanted to inhale his story, his pain, however raw or stale, I wanted to breathe it in quickly, straight to my brain. Soon he was on top of me and I could escape again – mind and body in heart-thumping preoccupation. Dizzying avoidance.

“I’ve got no moral judgments about what you’re doing,” my therapist said a few days later, “This distraction thing with this new guy. But it might be helpful to at least theorize about what you’re numbing yourself against.”

“I don’t really know, to tell you the truth” I said, “It's hazy. I guess that means it’s working.”

But winter in Chicago is long and he couldn’t come over tonight.