novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- owner surrender 1. windows ajar padding down the hallway i missed my friend 2. today at petsmart steve and i were looking at the cats up for adoption and i found one that looked exactly like my cat, only she was a girl with brown eyes, not a boy with green like davey. her face was a little sharper but she had the same exact markings. same gray nose. she was curled up in the farthest part of the cage, white-tipped paws peeking out of her gray fluff. eyeing me sleepily, much less skittish than my boy. we read her paperwork; surrendered by owner. i almost started crying and then i wanted to save her so badly. steve said i could have matching cats. my little gray bookends. i'd rename her. oh but that is not realistic. oh but i can't afford another cat. is this a no-kill program? are cats put down if they're not adopted? no. she is the same exact age as davey. down to the month. 3. last night sweet tooth and i threaded through groups of rogue sailors in peacoats with upturned collars and spoke with grizzled sixty-year old bikers in black leather chaps and nodded at the tall ancient bartender in the beat up fedora and sat upstairs by the pool table against the wall watching girls imbibe and then slide onto boys' laps, threading their arms around their necks. afterwards we went to the indian rock and we told the universe exactly what we wanted. the indian rock is actually a very large rock formation that popped up out of the mountain before california was reached by settlers. decades ago someone carved a staircase into the largest, tallest rock, and if you hold your weight on your toes and take this staircase to the top you can sit and from your little nook in the berkeley hills you can see the entire west bay area; you are level with hundred year old pine trees and million dollar houses with very large, un-shuttered windows. i pointed out the mansion down and to the left of us, and told sweet tooth how the man who used to live there would always watch porn on his big screen tv. we watched the city wink and pointed out our favorite constellations. i showed sweet tooth the cities i've worked in, and when i ended up pointing at downtown oakland my eyes turned right and landed on the cranes. those cranes that had what, a foot of clearance as they sailed under the bay bridge to get to the port of oakland? the bicyclist would know. this made me think of the bicyclist and how he knew the names of different birds we passed but was still surprised to find a crane operating at nine o'clock at night. silently skidding along its machinery. you know, that crane looked almost ominous. especially because you couldn't hear it coming. i should have known. 4. thursday after workshop the entire class went to a bar with our teacher. we bought each other shots and discussed authenticity, how almost all fiction is thinly-veiled nonfiction and how do you really know how to write something unless you've lived it? otherwise it would fall flat. how do you inflate pure fiction? so the writing process is like the game operation. you are thumbing through your catalogue of quirks tics one night stands beautiful children and chivalrous moments tattoos and blood and bile and an accountant for a baseball team and the time your father traded a car for a trampoline the size of the kitchen he enlisted the local high school football team to deliver it to our backyard that was what twenty years ago you take all this well parts from each of these and you make a pile of everything that you think you want to use. and then you use it. in unbelievable ways. i took a quiet survey and everyone in the class submitted at least one piece that they'd admit to happening not-quite-but-almost verbatim. as we know more we can blur more. where is that distinction, how do you tell your life so it seems more storylike, so it has a discernable plot? this is the story of my life. i have no plot. i have a series of scenes. even the teacher. even the bouncer who used to be a cop. i learned that you can get a break in your taxes if you prove you are an independent contracter; if you prove you write. you can write off books, dvds, cds, road trips as research. and if you work from home you can deduct a portion of your rent. it's not much, i mean as a writer you won't ever get much, but hey, it's something, he said, leaning forward and placing his forearms against his knees. i saw his glasses shining through the dark light and was thankful he was so kind. i had been questioning grad school in general and if anything now i know that i can teach at private institutions with an mfa degree and that i can save a little on taxes. i remember coming to the living room window and seeing boys with unusually large shoulders and very small hips shunted to the side so that they could hoist the trampoline's great big iron frame around the back of the house, and that is when i learned about shoulderpadding, about the impact that football players endure. and i wondered why anybody would want to play a sport that could be reduced to rams clashing heads. i was barefoot that day, it was in the middle of a short-lived heat storm and spiders would crawl down from their corners at night, i'd find them when i woke up sleeping next to light switches oh our old square house. 5. things do not happen to you to teach you a lesson. god is not trying to teach you a lesson by giving your mother cancer or drowning your hamster or breaking your heart or not giving you a teaching assistantship. if you're lucky, you'll learn a lesson, but your hamster your mother your lover were not put on this earth just so that you could learn a valuable lesson. do not be that self-centered. things happen because things happen and this is how we are weathered. "I know you had your heart set on it but sometimes, for reasons that we do not understand, the heavens have a different rotation. I am a firm believer that things happen for a reason. I usually do not understand the rationale but there seems to be a purpose. I have always been amazed by being open to what happens (given a certain level of effort) and by being open to the lesson. As I've aged, I see that life has less has to do with me, my wants, my desires...and has more to do with a harmony, a rhythm, a balance that is not mine to understand." and we want to be weathered. we want to earn the right to be older. 2:27 am - 04.17.05 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||