nine is my lucky number

I have 94 days left.

I’ve used up six.

I’m writing a book.

Day One was deciding to write it. Completed by lunch.

Day Two was carving out specific times to write. I made a schedule.

On Day Three I was supposed to decide what to write about. And I did.

Day Four was more of the same which was good because I actually hadn’t really decided on Day Three.

Day Five was advice. “Do not bore the reader.”

Today is Day Six. Dissect a book you love. See what makes it tick. I picked The Catcher in the Rye and have fallen in love with Holden Caulfield for the twenty-third time. “I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I was wondering if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.”

I’m going to tell you something.

I’m a little scared. I don’t need a pep talk or a pat on the back. But holy fucking shit, when writing matters, it’s terrifying.

I bet you knew that already though.

Letters are my currency. It’s comfortable to live inside them. To let them drip from my fingertips. I’ve been doing this since I could. Writing on wide ruled paper with a pencil as round as a popsicle. Telling myself stories so I could fall asleep at night. But.

Dang.

This idea. This story. It’s personal. It’s humbling. My antagonist is my real life dark cloud. To give that face and voice and body. To say hello? To invite it in?

I don’t know.

Tomorrow is Day Seven. “If you create a story that has real meaning to you, chances are it will have real meaning for the rest of us.”

pinball

T::h::e F::o::r::e::v::e::r S::u::r::v::e::y requires a jingle. And I have a guitar. It will be something simple. A couple of chordless strums and me singing over the top of them. Something about how they should

take it
take it
take the survey

just take it
take it
take the survey

I can’t play guitar and I can’t really sing. But I’ve never let details like that bog me down. After all, the survey requires a jingle and I have a guitar. I was going to record it two weekends ago with GarageBand and my bathroom’s acoustics. I figured: how hard can it be?

It can be so hard.

Many things have gone wrong.

Number one: I’ve dated a disproportionate number of boys who do, in fact, know how to play guitar. One could argue that this is the number one problem in many areas of my life but for my purposes today, I’ll confine its impact to how it thwarted my attempts at a jingle. It thwarted my attempts at a jingle because Bob left the pick stuck in the strings. I didn’t realize it, accidentally untuned it, realized it, tried to tune it but instead untuned it more and then gave up. I don’t usually give up, but I know when I’m beat. And in this instance, out of tune won.

Not wanting to have an out of tune jingle, I Goggled guitar teachers in Queen Anne. I found this ad:

TRADE: Guitar lessons for Philosophy tutoring.
posted 07/27/2007
I want to trade Guitar Lessons (for you or your kid(s))for Philosophy tutoring. I'm the guitarist you're the philosopher.
Steve@...

No shit.

Did I mention that I was a philosophy major in college? I was a philosophy major in college. It took me no time at all to pen a response and by Wednesday we had a tutoring coffee date set up and I had 60 pages of Kant’s moral theory to read. Oh, that. Right there. The 60 pages of moral theory. That’s Number Two.

Flash forward! It’s Saturday. I’m going to meet Steve to go over the 30 pages of moral theory that I read and have a latte and a muffin.

Meow.

So, I’m walking to the coffee shop.

Meow.

And I get followed by a cat.

No shit.

Number Three: Getting followed by a cat.

Simba. Orange. Friendly. On my heels. I check the collar. Call the number. Leave a message.

“Oh, um, hi. I have your cat. Well I don’t actually have your cat, but it’s following me. It’s been about 4 blocks now and I don’t know if she’s lost but if she is, we’re on 1st and Roy and, well, here’s my cell number so you can call me if she’s lost and I’ll try to find her again... ah... hmm... I’m not sure what to do.”

Meow.

I keep walking. I have 30 pages to read in 15 minutes (Exactly like college! EXACTLY LIKE COLLEGE!) and as we cross the street Simba trots in front of me and into the arms of a dum-dum sucking hipster. “I got your cat!” he says.

“She’s not my cat. She’s following me.” He looks at her collar. I say "I’ve already left a message." I start to over explain about why I can’t take her home. See. I have a cat. And. Um. I have 30 pages of moral theory to read. And my guitar is out of tune. Did I mentioned I called the number on her collar already? Number Four: I think at this point, I start sweating. “I can take her for a while.” he interrupts.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I don’t have a cat.”

Letting the caller ID find the pens and paper for us, we trade cell phone numbers by dialing each other's.

“What’s your name?”

“Heather. What’s yours?”

“Hunter.”

We both laugh. I briefly picture us on TLC's A Baby Story talking about how we met. “And then she said her name was Heather, and mine is Hunter and I just knew. I just knew.”

I watch him for a second with Simba draped over his left shoulder walking up the hill.

30 pages to read. Now 5 minutes to do it. I call Simba’s house and leave another well worded message. Hunter. Cat. Call. Me.

I get there. It’s hot. Number Five: still sweating. I get an iced coffee and a blueberry muffin and find a seat in the back for what will turn into an hour of moral theory (I wing it) topped off with an hour of Russell's problem of proper names and descriptions (I wing that, too.)

“What do you want out of this?” I say at the end. Trying to be a good tutor. Vowing to do the reading.

“I want to believe in an afterlife.”

“With or without god?”

“Without.” he says.

“I think I can help you do that.”

“I owe you a guitar lesson.”

“I actually just need it tuned.”

We part. Shake hands. Lots of head nods. I call Hunter. He still has the cat. He left a message for the owners. They now have two messages from me and one from him.

I run errands. See friends.

“I’m having this weird day.” I tell everyone.

“Getting followed by a cat makes everything seem weird.” Everyone says back.

4pm. Coming back from Target. I bought a mop. It was awesome. Phone rings. It’s Hunter. He’s going out and wants to know if I can take the cat.

Number Six: I can’t take the cat.

“I don’t know if I can take the cat. I have a cat already and she’s kinda mean and weird. Hmm. Ah. Well! How about this. Do you have fifteen minutes? Can I come get you? We can drive up to Simba’s house and walk around to the back - if there is a cat door, we’re off the hook and we can just leave her in the yard. If not, I’ll figure something out.”

“OK.”

“Where do you live?”

“330 5th Avenue.”

‘Oh! Weird. I live at 316.”

No shit.

I get there and Hunter comes down the steps, Simba is draped over his right shoulder now. He gets in and I laugh. I blurt out how weird of a day this is.

Meow.

Number Seven: I talk when I’m nervous.

We drive up the hill to the address on Simba’s tag. A man is watering the front lawn. Hunter worried aloud that Simba’s owners might have moved and I chime in that it would be crazy if they had moved to South Dakota or something and Simba walked all the way back here.

“Is this your cat?” he calls out.

“Simba!” the man with the hose answers back. “You two are the third couple to bring her back this week!”

We stare blankly at each other.

“Just set her down wherever.”

Hunter plops her down on the sidewalk. Completely anti-climatic. I hadn’t realized I was hoping for a relieved puffy eyed 5 year old to grab Simba gleefully from our arms. But. I was.

We say our good byes to Simba. She follows us back to the car.

Meow.

We drive back down the hill. Lots of small talk. He works at Boeing. An engineer. “I sell ads.” that’s what I say when I don’t want to talk about it. I say I work at a newspaper when I do.

We say good bye, exchange "Weird days!" and he starts to get out of the car.

“Hey, do you play guitar by chance?”

Number Seven. “Nope.”

“Well, see ya around.”

“Yeah, see ya.”

A week goes by. A few e-mails from Steve. A few dozen from Matt, a couple phone calls, too. I thought I was going to marry Matt. Back when I was trying to read 30 pages of moral theory in 15 minutes for the first time. Now he’s a philosophy professor in California and I sent him an e-mail proclaiming that my getting a “job” as a tutor is one of the lesser known signs of the apocalypse. “It’s right after rivers running with blood and right before the locusts.”

“I still don’t recall it being mentioned. Do they refer to you by name?”

He graciously offers to run through Russell's problem with direct names and proper descriptions which isn’t so much a problem as it is a series of statements. “I don’t really buy it.” Number Eight: That sentence has been responsible for countless philosophical arguments between us, most of which I lose.

“You don’t buy the theory of universal grammar?”

“That’s right.”

“Don’t say that too loud or you’ll have MIT field linguists parachuting in around your house. It’s like threatening to kill the president.”

Steve and I are supposed to meet on Friday. He e-mails and cancels. Some attorney meeting. Maybe a birthday party. My Saturday is full. He works on Sunday. Number Nine: “Next weekend?” “Next weekend.”

I want to end this with a link to an mp3 file. But. Number ten: I can’t. The guitar tuning slash universal-grammar-is-utter-crap-no-matter-what-MIT-says tutoring session is still days away. My guitar remains out of tune. My weekend is booked. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to squeeze in a recording session Sunday night. Sometime after America’s Funniest Home Videos but sometime before it’s too late to bust out a ridiculous jingle in my bathroom. Because T::h::e F::o::r::e::v::e::r S::u::r::v::e::y requires a jungle. And I have a guitar.

take it
take it
take the survey

just take it
take it
take the survey

babble

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t have a car. I walk to work. And home from work. To coffee and back. To the store for apples and cheese and then home from the store with apples, cheese, crackers, cookies and Cap’n Crunch. If I added up all my walking each week it adds up to about 25 miles. More on busy weeks. Like weeks where I want to wander down 5th Street because it reminds me of Chicago. Or weeks were I want to smell the market and buy a French magazine.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I spend at least 8 hours a week walking. And 99% of those 8 hours are spent alone. They are quiet. No music or iPod. Just me and which ever bag I grabbed that morning with whatever stuff happens to be in it. And my Chuck Taylors. And my sunglasses. I daydream the whole time. When I get home, there will be entire stretches of the walk that I don’t really remember. Sometimes I almost get hit by cars. And I bumped into a newspaper box once. My inner life is quite rich.

You know, what I’m trying to say is that there is some part of me that works on sorting out problems that I don’t really know much about. It’s like the flip side to my daydreaminess. It grabs my worries, puzzles, ennui and takes them out to lunch and figures out what’s really going on. It formulates and draws charts. Power Point may or may not be involved. But when it’s figured something out, when it’s gotten the a-ha, it sends it home. Sometimes fully formulated. Sometimes just a word or snapshot. Suddenly I have the key. Or suddenly I have the question.

But maybe what I’m trying to say is that this is how T::h::e F::o::r::e::v::e::r S::u::r::v::e::y happened. I was walking home. Day dreaming. Things being working out. And it popped to the surface. Whispered almost. T::h::e F::o::r::e::v::e::r S::u::r::v::e::y. “Hey, what’s that?” I said to no one. “What does it mean?” No one said back. I wondered what it was. What it could be. It took me a few days to figure it out. But I decided it’s a quest. It’s a search. An Important Task. It’s me finding the thing that motivates me the most. Love.

I know what I want to say. I want to say that this is how it all started.

alaphabet super

I got some writing advice today.

I was lamenting about how I want to write a book but can’t seem to get past the ideas. The free floating nameless characters. The makeshift plots that change and shift and only make sense to me. My total lack of respect for gra. Mmar. And sentence. Structure. I get mired down in it. Stuck. The idea of sustaining 300 pages on one idea. One story. It sticks me to my chair. My hands in my lap. Keyboard quiet.

I was wishing out loud for discipline.

And she, she being an editor who I love at a newspaper worth fighting for, she said I write like Faulkner or Joyce. That it flows. That I have a voice. I said this then and I will say this now. Those comparisons are clearly too kind. They are generous and wonderful and day making. But too too kind. After such a head pat. After such a glowing review. She said:

Beware of structure. It’s like a straight jacket that you might not be able to take off.

She’s watched it. She’s lived it. Writer after writer putting it on. Tightening the belts. Living inside an inverted triangle. Tidy. Clean. They get stuck in the proper of it all. And set aside their risk taking. Their shooting from the hip. Signing up for writing seminars 5 years later where they are encouraged to write like they use to. You know. When they didn’t know how they were supposed to. She said:

Tread lightly.

I think a lot about writing. About what I’m supposed to do with it. If there is a book inside me. Or if this blog lives by itself. When I talk about writing, I talk about how it just seems to happen. 15 minutes. No edits. Maybe spell check if I’m feeling nice. And while I don’t write every day or even every week, I pay a price. An antsyness. A slow trade of inner calm for outter busy. Until the scales are tipped too much. Until the balance is threatening. And I sit down with my iBook on my lap and.

Write.

opening lines

The first word they read will be "Welcome." It will be black on a white background and it will be written in Helvetica. All uppercase, I think. Maybe not though. A mix of the two might be best. What comes next will be a reassuring sentence about why they have come to that web address. How it wasn’t entirely chance that their name was selected and it wasn’t entirely not chance either. I think it will say: “If you are here, you are meant to be here.” Yes. That is exactly what it will say. First it will say:

Welcome.

And then it will say:

If you are here, you are meant to be here.

I think that will keep their attention while also being two true statements. I could keep their attention with sensationalism or exaggerations but instead, I will chose to do it through sweeping but truthful statements. I will chose to do it through telling them things they secretly long to hear and by asking them questions they secretly long to answer. They might so secretly long for these things that they don’t even know they long for them. Those are the people that might get choked up. The people who when they read:

Welcome.

and

If you are here, you are meant to be here.

Feel the pluck of their heart strings and an increased dampness in their eyes. For them, maybe this will be like getting the answer they’ve searched for. For me, it will be an IP address. An IP address is a unique address given to your computer so it can communicate with other computers. And that’s how I’ll know them all first.

67.128.90.32

Them being the men who get the postcard. The men who demographically fit a profile. The ones who have filled out a warranty card or subscribed to a magazine. The ones in a database available for sale for just $25. Them. I’ll know them as an IP address and they will know me as a mysterious post card.

T::h::e F::o::r::e::v::e::r S::u::r::v::e::y

Welcome.

If you are here, you are meant to be here.

left and leaving

It’s kinda weird, this moving on thing. This letting go. It seems to happen in pieces. Or percents of me. My opinion on it differs from one second to the next. I’ve learned to keep quiet. Realizing that I usually feel differently before I even finish the thought. Sometimes I picture it like lightening bugs in a mason jar. Appearing and reappearing at uneven intervals. Blinking like broken Christmas lights.

Many days have gone by without thinking of him. Busy with a thousand other things, my life rings my door bell more than I deserve. For someone happy to spend a weekend alone or even a whole month the ding dong of consulting jobs and art projects and writing opportunities is steady. I find myself wondering on walks home what would happen if I actually tried. Maybe the whole world would burst open and I could pick and chose. Chose and pick. Like being the first kid to find the Halloween candy. It’s all Snickers and Kisses. The Smarties and DumDums are for the second wave.

But I stay busy. Even on days I would rather not.

Those days. Those are the days he crosses my mind a thousand times if he crosses it once. Imaginary conversations that have grown up from Grade A romantic comedy happy endings to me walking away and saying how I can’t do this anymore while wishing him well over my shoulder. It’s how I heal, these elaborate day dreams where I know the color of shoes I’m wearing and if my petal pink nail polish is chipping off or perfect in it’s plasticy shine. All my broken hearts have followed this well worn path. This trail from wanting to not. From better off with to better off without. It’s a journey I watch happen as much as I make happen. Waiting for the magic day where I say no thanks. I can’t predict it’s arrival but I’m never surprised when it comes. It signals the beginning of the end.

The end being when I don’t have imaginary conversation with him anymore. Where I don’t think of him at all and if I do, it passes through without much notice. Eluding the emotional radar, slipping out the back. Unlike the day I say no as opposed to all the other days where I said yes. This changing of the guard day, this haven’t thought about him in a while day, it goes largely uncelebrated but I think that may be the point. It’s the day he doesn’t matter in the same way. Where he takes root firmly in the past and I’m face forward, eyes open. By definition it can’t be celebrated because leaving him behind isn’t important anymore. It requires no ceremony. No words. It just is.

I’m not there yet. As this post attests. Right now, I’m saying no and thinking of something he could say that would make me say yes. I circle around and around but keep coming up empty. Wrestling with the uncomfortable that comes with realizing I don’t think he can be different. And knowing I can’t be happy like we were. We break up a hundred times. I walk up the concrete steps to the plaza while he stands at the bottom. By the porcelain statues of the little girls that are ten feet tall. With their polka dot dresses and rosy glazed cheeks. I don’t look back but I’m sure he walks away. Down the diagonal street to his brown building that peeks between the skyscrapers. Where they make tin cans connected by string.

learning to love you more

Assignment 52

Except I can't decide who to call.

How To Use Up All Nine Lives In 15 Minutes or My First Bicycle Commute To Work

I just needed to get that off my chest. I'm going to go rock myself in a corner now while muttering "cars, cars, cars go fast."