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The Blair Caldera guy sent a panicky email this morning: he'd changed his mind! (Beware the hot sauce purchase made in high cups.) So now we are many zeroes minus again though plus the hefty transactional fee I will be charging him and plus the proceeds of a boffo weekend, so I suppose it's all good, although I still desperately need a vacation.
Spent all yesterday dicking around with the Venezuela story. Most unsatisfactory, an exercise in strangling darlings. My usual writing voice is comic and mildly ironic but this plot is yr basic sci fi Conradian exercise in horror-r-r-r where you really have no time to take your readers on amusing detours so I ended up scrapping everything I wrote in an intense fit of intense self-loathing. Why was I pretending to be a writer when there was circus publicity to be done, endless mounds of store bills to be sorted, bills to be paid, websites to be updated and even a 12 year old to pay attention to?
In the evening Eleanor called. I was down at the Little Store, quite lovely now on these fogless evenings with the apple green from the setting sun reflected in the bay and the bright reds and yellows and greens from the millions of chili lights I use to decorate twinkling into the night.
I do phone with Lucius and Abe because otherwise I would never communicate with them at all; I do phone with Annie because it's too crazy-making to be in the same room with her. In general, though, I don't do phone. I am not a phone person. I would much rather write letters, monologues being so much more fulfilling than duets with the Invisible Man on the other side of the cell tower.
Eleanor knows this about me. So I knew something had to be going on to make her call.
We this-ed and that-ed for an hour. Her parents – as dysfunctional a couple as ever lived but deeply, inextricably connected – both developed Alzheimer's at exactly the same moment 15 years ago, and much of Eleanor's ensuing time has been spent caring for them, protecting them against her other three siblings, all deadbeats in one way or another, all anxious for the old farts to die off before their maintenance and upkeep can exhaust the million dollar estate. And, too, she's a middle school teacher in an East Bay school district with all the stress that entails. Plus she's living with a man who's nice enough but doesn't really get her, something I saw from the get go but held my tongue about after I saw she was really, really determined to go after the relationship. After Mark, I suppose, she saw Bill as an avenue to sanity.
Then it came out. Deep breath. "Patrizia, I want to ask you for advice about something…"
"My life's a mess, darling. You of all people should know that. I'm not sure any advice I have to give would be worth getting. But ask away!"
"How do you get find meaning in your life? I feel like I'm on a conveyor belt, and on the other side I die. I mean, I'm doing a billion things and none of it connects me. I don't see the point in being alive, and it's not about depression –"
"No," I said. "It's the classic existential crisis. Ever wonder what kind of novels Camus might have written if Prozac had been around in the 1930's? My dear, you are working so hard, and what you're doing is so admirable, so amazing. But it's all invisible. No one really sees it but you. You feel invisible."
"That's it," she whispered.
"Well, if it's any consolation, you're not invisible to me. I've been studying you closely for forty years now, I have a PhD in Eleanor-ology and I want to do post-graduate work! But we're really not in the day-by-day of each others' lives anymore. You need to be visible to the people around you."
"Are you?" she asked.
"To some extent," I said. "The Little Store may be a marginal business but it's a great place to try out my stand-up comic routines on a captive audience. Plus, you know, there's Robin in whose eyes I am the great Kali with powers to destroy and repackage the burgeoning child ego. But, you know, the only place where I really feel visible is in my writing. And the only thing I have time to write right now is my journal. So I keep it online. Really, I don't know how Emily Dickinson managed to pull it off all those years. A writer writes so that somebody else will know they're there. All that garbage about writing for yourself is just bullshit."
Spent all yesterday dicking around with the Venezuela story. Most unsatisfactory, an exercise in strangling darlings. My usual writing voice is comic and mildly ironic but this plot is yr basic sci fi Conradian exercise in horror-r-r-r where you really have no time to take your readers on amusing detours so I ended up scrapping everything I wrote in an intense fit of intense self-loathing. Why was I pretending to be a writer when there was circus publicity to be done, endless mounds of store bills to be sorted, bills to be paid, websites to be updated and even a 12 year old to pay attention to?
In the evening Eleanor called. I was down at the Little Store, quite lovely now on these fogless evenings with the apple green from the setting sun reflected in the bay and the bright reds and yellows and greens from the millions of chili lights I use to decorate twinkling into the night.
I do phone with Lucius and Abe because otherwise I would never communicate with them at all; I do phone with Annie because it's too crazy-making to be in the same room with her. In general, though, I don't do phone. I am not a phone person. I would much rather write letters, monologues being so much more fulfilling than duets with the Invisible Man on the other side of the cell tower.
Eleanor knows this about me. So I knew something had to be going on to make her call.
We this-ed and that-ed for an hour. Her parents – as dysfunctional a couple as ever lived but deeply, inextricably connected – both developed Alzheimer's at exactly the same moment 15 years ago, and much of Eleanor's ensuing time has been spent caring for them, protecting them against her other three siblings, all deadbeats in one way or another, all anxious for the old farts to die off before their maintenance and upkeep can exhaust the million dollar estate. And, too, she's a middle school teacher in an East Bay school district with all the stress that entails. Plus she's living with a man who's nice enough but doesn't really get her, something I saw from the get go but held my tongue about after I saw she was really, really determined to go after the relationship. After Mark, I suppose, she saw Bill as an avenue to sanity.
Then it came out. Deep breath. "Patrizia, I want to ask you for advice about something…"
"My life's a mess, darling. You of all people should know that. I'm not sure any advice I have to give would be worth getting. But ask away!"
"How do you get find meaning in your life? I feel like I'm on a conveyor belt, and on the other side I die. I mean, I'm doing a billion things and none of it connects me. I don't see the point in being alive, and it's not about depression –"
"No," I said. "It's the classic existential crisis. Ever wonder what kind of novels Camus might have written if Prozac had been around in the 1930's? My dear, you are working so hard, and what you're doing is so admirable, so amazing. But it's all invisible. No one really sees it but you. You feel invisible."
"That's it," she whispered.
"Well, if it's any consolation, you're not invisible to me. I've been studying you closely for forty years now, I have a PhD in Eleanor-ology and I want to do post-graduate work! But we're really not in the day-by-day of each others' lives anymore. You need to be visible to the people around you."
"Are you?" she asked.
"To some extent," I said. "The Little Store may be a marginal business but it's a great place to try out my stand-up comic routines on a captive audience. Plus, you know, there's Robin in whose eyes I am the great Kali with powers to destroy and repackage the burgeoning child ego. But, you know, the only place where I really feel visible is in my writing. And the only thing I have time to write right now is my journal. So I keep it online. Really, I don't know how Emily Dickinson managed to pull it off all those years. A writer writes so that somebody else will know they're there. All that garbage about writing for yourself is just bullshit."
