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"You have to have a tranquil home life if you want to be a writer," Abe told me once; and this is one of those quotes that has resonated in my mind for years along with Marybeth's question: "People's lives are supposed to get simpler as they get older, but yours gets more and more complicated. Why do you suppose that is?"
The only thing I really want to do, the only thing I've ever wanted to do, is write.
And I did write professionally for a while. Was middlingly successful at it too. But I felt very odd about the whole networking thing. It's strange that I can schmooze people very successfully within the context of the shop – my little universe – but was incapable of schmoozing editors within the context of the great magazine publishing universe. I was given a lot of lucky breaks but could not work them.
Novels are always brewing in the back of my brain. But I've also had this idea for a memoir about the store, kind of a combination of True Tales of Hot Sauce and an examination of the creation myth of my particular Boomer cohort that you can always reinvent yourself.
I dreamed of starting the memoir while Robin was gone and I had the psychic space to sink into myself.
But my life is too fucking chaotic and the house is a hideous mess, not a tranquil space for generative processes.
Latest Chaos scat: true to Michael the buff @ Your Service Guy's prediction, the store computer crashed and burned Monday.
And while I've generally been conscientious about back-up, I must confess that since Ben left, I'd done no backup at all; thus dealing with the situation became considerably more complicated than getting another computer and installing software and backup disks since I need those three months worth of financial data. More complicated and more expensive, not to mention the disturbing psychic residue that's left when situational fuck-up's become a perfect metaphor for your life at large: no back-up…
(Not quite as bad as it could have been since the local computer repair shop was able to dredge up the files from the dead hard drive. They suffer from "logical corruption," whatever the fuck that is. But they're there, they're accessible without having to fork over $2500 to DiskSavers in Novato.)
Needless to say, the coulda-woulda-shoulda's tortured me for a couple of days. If I hadn't paid that upstart kid to upgrade the memory… If I hadn't defragged the hard drive…
"The mother board failed," the white-bearded fellow at the computer repair shop told me.
"So-o, it didn't have anything to do with the memory upgrade?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Coincidence."
"Really, you know, you should have grief counselors on stand-by to help your customers deal with this," I said.
But he didn't have a sense of humor. "Next time maybe you'll be better at backing up your data."
And of course he was right but this wasn't what I needed to hear at this particular juncture. I wanted to scream at him: you try working eighty hours a week at two jobs plus having to take the dogs to the beach twice a day and being on the receiving end of hateful messages from your eleven year old whose grandmother unaccountably told him I thought he might have ADD even though I specifically told her I wasn't going to tell him anything unless the psych evaluation proved diagnostic.
I didn't scream at him though. Instead with a big flourish I presented him with a bottle of Ring of Fire Serrano Chile Sauce and left another for the tech who was laboring over my dead machine, figuring – rightly as it turns out – that this would shave two hours off the labor costs on my bill.
Then I went home to sob uncontrollably.
I'm tired of this. So tired of this.
Called Abe. "Can you give me a pep talk? I'm thinking very seriously of letting Ben come back because I just don't think I can do this anymore."
"Poor bunny," said Abe. "You're working very hard, aren't you? And you know you get an enormous amount of credit in my book for keeping it all together. I think you're way too hard on yourself."
I took a deep breath. "I'm doing too much, Abe. And when you're doing this much, there's no way you can be doing any of it well. That's why I'm hard on myself."
"Circus Boy built the computer, didn't he?" Abe asked. "So isn't this another example of the little Circus Boy time bombs -- like the van -- that you just know are going to detonate throughout the next year?"
Circus Boy did indeed build the computer. Circus Boy was also pointedly Not Answering the Phone when I called him repeatedly five weeks ago to ask whether the store computer would tolerate the upgrade. Circus Boy and I are talking now though and in numerous phone calls throughout the day, Circus Boy vented his spleen against the kid who did the memory upgrade – "He must have left some wire unplugged –"
"Stop," I said. "It doesn't really matter why it happened, I mean it doesn't help the resolution of the problem. It happened, I'm trying to deal with it."
"I could catch a bus on Sunday and be there in 10 days," he pointed out.
And part of me wanted this because at least there'd be someone else to walk the dogs and we could talk about current events and maybe he could figure out a way to get rid of all the broken furniture that didn't involve calling 1-800-GOT-JUNK. But most of me didn't.
The only thing I really want to do, the only thing I've ever wanted to do, is write.
And I did write professionally for a while. Was middlingly successful at it too. But I felt very odd about the whole networking thing. It's strange that I can schmooze people very successfully within the context of the shop – my little universe – but was incapable of schmoozing editors within the context of the great magazine publishing universe. I was given a lot of lucky breaks but could not work them.
Novels are always brewing in the back of my brain. But I've also had this idea for a memoir about the store, kind of a combination of True Tales of Hot Sauce and an examination of the creation myth of my particular Boomer cohort that you can always reinvent yourself.
I dreamed of starting the memoir while Robin was gone and I had the psychic space to sink into myself.
But my life is too fucking chaotic and the house is a hideous mess, not a tranquil space for generative processes.
Latest Chaos scat: true to Michael the buff @ Your Service Guy's prediction, the store computer crashed and burned Monday.
And while I've generally been conscientious about back-up, I must confess that since Ben left, I'd done no backup at all; thus dealing with the situation became considerably more complicated than getting another computer and installing software and backup disks since I need those three months worth of financial data. More complicated and more expensive, not to mention the disturbing psychic residue that's left when situational fuck-up's become a perfect metaphor for your life at large: no back-up…
(Not quite as bad as it could have been since the local computer repair shop was able to dredge up the files from the dead hard drive. They suffer from "logical corruption," whatever the fuck that is. But they're there, they're accessible without having to fork over $2500 to DiskSavers in Novato.)
Needless to say, the coulda-woulda-shoulda's tortured me for a couple of days. If I hadn't paid that upstart kid to upgrade the memory… If I hadn't defragged the hard drive…
"The mother board failed," the white-bearded fellow at the computer repair shop told me.
"So-o, it didn't have anything to do with the memory upgrade?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Coincidence."
"Really, you know, you should have grief counselors on stand-by to help your customers deal with this," I said.
But he didn't have a sense of humor. "Next time maybe you'll be better at backing up your data."
And of course he was right but this wasn't what I needed to hear at this particular juncture. I wanted to scream at him: you try working eighty hours a week at two jobs plus having to take the dogs to the beach twice a day and being on the receiving end of hateful messages from your eleven year old whose grandmother unaccountably told him I thought he might have ADD even though I specifically told her I wasn't going to tell him anything unless the psych evaluation proved diagnostic.
I didn't scream at him though. Instead with a big flourish I presented him with a bottle of Ring of Fire Serrano Chile Sauce and left another for the tech who was laboring over my dead machine, figuring – rightly as it turns out – that this would shave two hours off the labor costs on my bill.
Then I went home to sob uncontrollably.
I'm tired of this. So tired of this.
Called Abe. "Can you give me a pep talk? I'm thinking very seriously of letting Ben come back because I just don't think I can do this anymore."
"Poor bunny," said Abe. "You're working very hard, aren't you? And you know you get an enormous amount of credit in my book for keeping it all together. I think you're way too hard on yourself."
I took a deep breath. "I'm doing too much, Abe. And when you're doing this much, there's no way you can be doing any of it well. That's why I'm hard on myself."
"Circus Boy built the computer, didn't he?" Abe asked. "So isn't this another example of the little Circus Boy time bombs -- like the van -- that you just know are going to detonate throughout the next year?"
Circus Boy did indeed build the computer. Circus Boy was also pointedly Not Answering the Phone when I called him repeatedly five weeks ago to ask whether the store computer would tolerate the upgrade. Circus Boy and I are talking now though and in numerous phone calls throughout the day, Circus Boy vented his spleen against the kid who did the memory upgrade – "He must have left some wire unplugged –"
"Stop," I said. "It doesn't really matter why it happened, I mean it doesn't help the resolution of the problem. It happened, I'm trying to deal with it."
"I could catch a bus on Sunday and be there in 10 days," he pointed out.
And part of me wanted this because at least there'd be someone else to walk the dogs and we could talk about current events and maybe he could figure out a way to get rid of all the broken furniture that didn't involve calling 1-800-GOT-JUNK. But most of me didn't.
