In case of ALCHEMY

At six, my body is a furnace.

I stoke it out of bed and coax up a flame in my eyes.

I send myself faithfully out.

I am the quiet priest of a quiet religion,

Cloaked in flannel and milk white fog.

At seven, I turn the key in the lock, brass to brass.

I fling wide the door,

Opening, open,

Before a morning has been sung hello,

Before a plank has been lifted or a nail driven,

Before a pen has touched a page.

My body is a furnace,

Opening, open.

By eight, I’ve already served bread to the jangling gypsy band,

Tea to the king’s mysterious wife,

Dark cups of blood to the usual ghosts.

I send myself faithfully out.

At noon, the sun is roaring with his golden mouth,

Opening, open.

I am tumbling in a sphere of metal and glass.

I measure ice and potion,

Weigh metallic heaps of dust,

Pour and chop and carry.

I coax up a flame in my eyes.

At three, I am a cog in the clock of time.

I’m pulling coffee from its dark bean fists,

Separating water from earth,

Sorting moons from stars.

More visitors cluster around to watch me work,

To trade their coins for cups.

I am the quiet priest of a quiet religion.

At six, the sailors come whistling in, homebound.

Beggar children stretch out their hands for hunks of cheese.

The king stops by to ask after his wife.

I kiss them all,

And turn them back to the door.

I am tumbling in a sphere of metal and glass.

By nine, I distill the day into night.

I float through the shop like a white moth in a cave.

The lamplighter comes by, singing,

Offering me his arm.

I turn the key in the lock, brass to brass.

I am a cog in the clock of time,

Opening, open.

In case of BOB DYLAN

Well. I’m back. And even I can’t believe all that’s happened in the last couple months. I’m reeling in the shock of it, the joy of it, and the mystery of it all. My life is radically different…and amazing.

Here’s an enumerated list.

1. Screenplay. I finished my screenplay, the screenplay that kept me away from this blog, on June 22, and I sent it off to Forceful that night. (Still waiting to hear from him, so don’t get excited.) Looking back on that process, though, gives me great pride. I worked my butt off. I wrote daily. I wrote pages and pages and scenes and scenes that wound up in the trash.Sometimes, I would sit and stare at my computer for hours without writing a word. At other times, I would write ten pages in two hours.
   
   To borrow an idea from Madeline L’Engle, I feel more NAMED. I feel like a radio, picking up waves, playing the song of the universe. I feel like I know what I’m supposed to be and do. I feel strong, important, alive. Pages and pages of more thoughts on this later, inevitably.

2. Good food. Shortly after I quit writing on this blog, I came down with some kind of strange internal disease. After some debate, days of pain, and a trip to a doctor, I decided it was linked to my gallbladder and/or pancreas. Obedient to research on the matter, and at the suggestion of the aforementioned doctor, I cracked down on my diet. No more two cups of coffee a day. No more fattening foods, including chocolate and all forms of refined sugars. No more beef or fowl, and no dairy or eggs, even. Nothing processed. And I became a vegetarian – well, more like a vegan – for two weeks. Not a single slip. The pain wasn’t worth it.
   
   After that, I started working little things back into my diet. Cheese came back. Fowl, so as to get my protein. And by the time my sister’s wedding rolled around, I was doing well enough to eat cake at the reception. The gall bladder/pancreas thing? Pretty much gone now. However, what I found out through the whole thing was that GOOD FOOD MATTERS. Giving up eating shit was like…well, torture, at first. But after a while, I felt so good that I stopped craving the bad stuff. I feel lighter, better, healthier. Plus, cooking is AWESOME. So much fun. And I love knowing what’s in the food I’m eating, you know? Let’s hope this lifestyle change is here to stay.

3. Michael. Michael came to California on June 23, and then we both went to Ohio on June 25. Getting to see him, here, in my world? Indescribable. So good. SOOOO different than I thought it would be. (In this case, the “good” and the “different” are unrelated, “different” being fundamentally neither positive nor negative.) I just can’t get over it. I’m dating him, and we’re happy, but we can be such strangers to each other at times. It’s been eight months now – going on nine – and how can I learn so much that’s new, really new to me? And the new things are delightful, wonderful, but NEW?!? How can that be?
   
   As Michael say, “It’s like knowing half a person. The half I know, I know very well. But the other half has been so hidden until now.”
   
   In any case, we are learning. And we’re excited to be learning. Onward and upward!

4. Lisa and Lin’s Wedding. What can I say? It was beautiful. It was incredible. It was just about perfect.
   
   It was also 100% STRAIGHT CRAZY. The days leading up to the wedding were some of the most stressful, busy, manic days of my life. The sheer number of crafts and projects! I can’t even describe it. But was it worth every minute?
   
   Yes. Yes and yes. A thousand times over.

5. Job. Well, it happened. Oggy let me go.
   
   It was kind of mutual, if you want the truth. He and I discovered months ago that I was wrong for the job. When he hired me back in January, he thought the studio needed someone administrative, managerial. But as it turns out, the studio needs someone sales and business. I’m not that person. I’ve never been that person. And I’ve never claimed to be. So it was only a matter of time before Oggy’s need to pay his bills won out over his love for me. This happened on Tuesday, July 7. Less than a week ago. Incredibly, though, I already have a new job. It’s nothing fancy; it’s at a cool little coffee shop here in Monrovia. It’s part-time. It’s minimum wage. And it won’t fix all my problems. But I’m so happy. In all honesty, Oggy did me a favor.
   
   Plus, now I may even be able to go back to teaching my kids. Can you imagine? Serve coffee to hip locals? Teach my beautiful, inquisitive Asian children? Do you have any idea how fulfilling that would be?!? I should have quit at the studio long ago.

Which brings us up to where I am now. What do you guys think?

That’s right…

The times they are a-changin’!

In case of DESPERATION

Every November, Jans writes a novel. 

She makes me jealous.  She inspires me.  She shames me.  It’s an incredible feat, and one that she has somehow pulled off for the past three or four years or something.  10,000 words in a month.  Amazing.

Now, I’ve never read any of these novels.  Jans, to the best of my understanding, keeps them under lock and key.  So I don’t know much about their quality, except that I’m sure the writing is superb, even if the story lags a bit in places.  The writing is the point, anyway.  She writes for the sake of writing.  Because it is in her.  Every November, Jans writes a novel with desperation, as though her life depends on it.

I’m only now beginning to realize that it does.

A few weeks ago, three and a half now, I befriended a man who writes for a living.  We’ll call him Forceful.  And what Forceful has been teaching me is that a writer who doesn’t write every day, who doesn’t write like her life depends on it, is a sham.  A writer who writes casually, as though she has all the time in the world?  That, my friends, is not a writer.

So for the past three and a half weeks, I’ve been working on a screenplay.  I came up with the idea, developed it, and dove into writing it within a handful of days.  It consumes me.  The screenplay is all there is.  And, in case I ever for a second forget that, there’s Forceful to kick me in the ass and make me go again.

So that’s where I’ve been.  I get up, shower, breakfast, work, home, dinner, and WRITE WRITE WRITE, then Michael, then bed.  In fact, it seems the only time I have to breathe is lunch.

So I’m sorry that it’s been almost a month since my last blog.  I’m sorry for all of you, because I’m being a bad friend.  But I need to do this.  I need to quit whining and be a writer.  I need to write.  Forcefully.

I'll be back when it's done.

In case of THE INVISIBLE MAN

I see things.

And in case you’re about to be all comforting and reassure me that, it’s okay, everyone sees things, let me say right here exactly what I mean. I see things that aren’t there.

This is, I think, what it must mean to be a writer. We’re the kids that played pretend games all the way through elementary school, all the way through fifth or sixth grade, all the way until some Backstreet-Boy-Wanna-Be decided to start pushing us around. And even that wouldn’t have gotten us to stop if it hadn’t awaked our survival instincts. I mean, really. I blame Darwin. Survival was the reason we stopped.

We stopped and we traded our pretend games for, well, secret pretend games.

It sounds funny, but I’m not kidding. It wasn’t that I ever stopped SEEING The Big Dragon. I just stopped POINTING at The Big Dragon.

Thanks a lot, Chuck.

But now I’m starting to wonder if it really is all in my head.

Like, I look around. And there’s all this drama and meaning. There’s all this story everywhere. I can point to anybody and be like “you did this because of that time in your childhood when you ran through the lawn sprinkler. And, what’s more, you’re bound to run through the lawn sprinkler again!” Or whatever. And I can write it that way and it will make perfect sense.

But some days I wonder if I’m just grasping at the air. I wonder if The Big Dragon really exists at all. Or if he ever existed. I used to see him and I ran. But to everybody else…I was just running. I wanted to believe that my running meant something. But maybe it didn’t. Maybe it really didn’t.

And sometimes, when people hurt us, we feel like there’s a reason. Because in our minds, there was a relationship there. There was a promise there. There was trust and love there.

Trust. Love. Intangible things. But they’re the realest things we know.

So when we hurt, we want to believe that it means something!

But maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it really doesn’t.

I’ve spent my life throwing words at this, throwing flour at the Invisible Man. I feel like if I can just powder him from head to foot, give shape and space to him, then I can prove that he is there!

But sometimes the flour just floats, gently, in a horrible yawning silence, to the floor. There’s nothing for it to cling to.

And sometimes there’s no reason to run, anymore.

In case of SUDDEN, UNEDITED POETRY

I listen to us as a song

Discovered in my youth and caught, bright

Between the panes of memory.

We’re still here

And there

In symphonic phrases

Hymnal lines tripping to their ends

Lyrics insisting FM radio

And in the smoke of our melody

bluer than blue.

I play our love deliberately.

Watch.

I listen to us as a song

A gentle vinyl spin

Scratched by the sharpest of needles

Around and around

Beginning to end

And then –

Silence.