Friendships
Mar. 6th, 2011 02:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraSixty degrees out yesterday. A dull, soft rain melted much of the snow. The shrinking drifts with their blackened crusts of ice looked like the flanks of dead leviathans; I pried a huge chunk of dirty ice out of my rear wheel well that looked exactly like a giant cervical vertebra. A herd of deer grazed in the pasture at the back of the little cement bungalow for the first time since fall.
It wasn’t spring though.
I’m watching the rain turn into sleet. Winter storm watch in effect: The temperatures are plummeting, and tonight’s storm action is supposed to deposit a full foot and a half of snow. So odd to live in a place where the weather is such a huge factor in daily life, like traveling backwards in time somehow.
###
Lao Tzu's three Great Treasures: Compassion, Modesty and Frugality. Discuss and Apply.
###
Ran into Carl Frederick, a most delightful man – childlike without being childish. Faithful readers may remember him as the science fiction writer who led the workshop I took last fall. We chatted animatedly for well over an hour, one of those conversations that seem to take place outside of time, as though you’re sitting at a table together at the Café Bardo discussing a particularly engaging movie you both happened to catch onboard a plane to some place else, a movie entitled The World We Live In. Such conversations are my meat and sustenance, one of my absolute favorite things in the world. We parted with plans to meet up again and my heart was crazy heady – oh, my gosh! what if I’ve found a friend?
Then toddled off to Wayne Fest 2011 at the Charter House. Very odd to see my coworkers at Dull, Unremunerative, But Hey! It Is a Paycheck Central out and about in the real world, making selections off the extensive 150 Beers On Tap menu. Wayne is going off to become a real grownup. I will miss him – he was the first new person I met in Ithaca whom I actually liked.
Found out that Paul Smith used to be a television producer. Not surprised – Paul Smith is crazy brilliant and totally eccentric, one of those people who if I only had a video camera I would absolutely follow around for a week just so I could turn him into a character in a novel. In fact, quite a few people at DUBHIIPC are interesting away from the cube farm.
So all in all, a fun weekend. RTT boycotting his father’s after last week’s unpleasantness, a gesture of support I appreciate very much.
###
Still have to figure out what to do about the novel B and I have been collaborating on.
Decision would be easier if I could figure out if the novel’s any good.
Honestly? I don’t know. I have this thing where I think everything I write is a piece of shit until I put it in a drawer. Then when I take it out three weeks later, magically it’s been transformed into a thing of great subtlety and artifice.
Ben is a good writer, in some ways better than I am: I don’t want to be in the position of cutting off my nose to spite my face if the thing has commercial possibilities. But it’s supposed to be a mystery novel, and neither of us has any experience writing a mystery novel. Underlying plot Ben came up with is pretty good in a Nicolas Cage National Treasure kind of way, but like Raymond Chandler says in mystery novel, you’ve got to have corpses and you’ve got to have torture scenes. So far we’ve got neither, and looking over the plot outline I don’t see any place to write them in.
That’s a quibble.
The bigger issue, of course, is the meta-issue: it’s not in my best interests to have anything to do with Ben except collect child support and guilt trip him into doing occasional maintenance on the cement bungalow. I don’t need him to write. He needs me to write. Of course, writing is no longer essential to him, just another ambition for him to jettison as the memory of escape velocity fades and the gravity of the place he was born engulfs him. But for now it still means something – he’s way more into this collaboration, for example, than I am.
Writing is such a solitary activity though, and right now I should be hanging out with other people. Much of that solitude is unavoidable: the majority of my income is obtained through scut writing right now and then there are my own stories and projects. On top of that I’m supposed to add writing with him? What’s the payoff?
“Did you tell Jayne LeGro you’re working on a novel with me?” I asked him Friday.
“You told me not to!”
“No, I told you that if you told her you were, she’d make you stop. Would you stop? Or would you just lie to her and go on working on it behind her back?”
“I’d lie and go on working on it,” he muttered.
I snorted. “Why should I invest any of my energy in a collaborative project you have so little commitment to?”
“What do you mean I have so little commitment to? I just told you I’d lie for it, didn’t I?”
I shook my head in disbelief. “You really don’t get it, do you? Boy, you’re pussy whipped.”
“I suppose,” he said nastily. “But then I was pussy whipped when I lived with you too, wasn’t I?”
That really pissed me off. I never bossed him around when we were living together. He made himself subservient to me, I didn’t ask him too. That’s on him.
How ugly he looked with that sullen sneer on his face, a bad cartoon version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. This doesn’t get sorted out in this lifetime, I’m afraid. The friendship, such as it was, will not survive the GF letter. Point and game to Jayne LeGro.
But there are many other friendships to be had.
It wasn’t spring though.
I’m watching the rain turn into sleet. Winter storm watch in effect: The temperatures are plummeting, and tonight’s storm action is supposed to deposit a full foot and a half of snow. So odd to live in a place where the weather is such a huge factor in daily life, like traveling backwards in time somehow.
Lao Tzu's three Great Treasures: Compassion, Modesty and Frugality. Discuss and Apply.
Ran into Carl Frederick, a most delightful man – childlike without being childish. Faithful readers may remember him as the science fiction writer who led the workshop I took last fall. We chatted animatedly for well over an hour, one of those conversations that seem to take place outside of time, as though you’re sitting at a table together at the Café Bardo discussing a particularly engaging movie you both happened to catch onboard a plane to some place else, a movie entitled The World We Live In. Such conversations are my meat and sustenance, one of my absolute favorite things in the world. We parted with plans to meet up again and my heart was crazy heady – oh, my gosh! what if I’ve found a friend?
Then toddled off to Wayne Fest 2011 at the Charter House. Very odd to see my coworkers at Dull, Unremunerative, But Hey! It Is a Paycheck Central out and about in the real world, making selections off the extensive 150 Beers On Tap menu. Wayne is going off to become a real grownup. I will miss him – he was the first new person I met in Ithaca whom I actually liked.
Found out that Paul Smith used to be a television producer. Not surprised – Paul Smith is crazy brilliant and totally eccentric, one of those people who if I only had a video camera I would absolutely follow around for a week just so I could turn him into a character in a novel. In fact, quite a few people at DUBHIIPC are interesting away from the cube farm.
So all in all, a fun weekend. RTT boycotting his father’s after last week’s unpleasantness, a gesture of support I appreciate very much.
Still have to figure out what to do about the novel B and I have been collaborating on.
Decision would be easier if I could figure out if the novel’s any good.
Honestly? I don’t know. I have this thing where I think everything I write is a piece of shit until I put it in a drawer. Then when I take it out three weeks later, magically it’s been transformed into a thing of great subtlety and artifice.
Ben is a good writer, in some ways better than I am: I don’t want to be in the position of cutting off my nose to spite my face if the thing has commercial possibilities. But it’s supposed to be a mystery novel, and neither of us has any experience writing a mystery novel. Underlying plot Ben came up with is pretty good in a Nicolas Cage National Treasure kind of way, but like Raymond Chandler says in mystery novel, you’ve got to have corpses and you’ve got to have torture scenes. So far we’ve got neither, and looking over the plot outline I don’t see any place to write them in.
That’s a quibble.
The bigger issue, of course, is the meta-issue: it’s not in my best interests to have anything to do with Ben except collect child support and guilt trip him into doing occasional maintenance on the cement bungalow. I don’t need him to write. He needs me to write. Of course, writing is no longer essential to him, just another ambition for him to jettison as the memory of escape velocity fades and the gravity of the place he was born engulfs him. But for now it still means something – he’s way more into this collaboration, for example, than I am.
Writing is such a solitary activity though, and right now I should be hanging out with other people. Much of that solitude is unavoidable: the majority of my income is obtained through scut writing right now and then there are my own stories and projects. On top of that I’m supposed to add writing with him? What’s the payoff?
“Did you tell Jayne LeGro you’re working on a novel with me?” I asked him Friday.
“You told me not to!”
“No, I told you that if you told her you were, she’d make you stop. Would you stop? Or would you just lie to her and go on working on it behind her back?”
“I’d lie and go on working on it,” he muttered.
I snorted. “Why should I invest any of my energy in a collaborative project you have so little commitment to?”
“What do you mean I have so little commitment to? I just told you I’d lie for it, didn’t I?”
I shook my head in disbelief. “You really don’t get it, do you? Boy, you’re pussy whipped.”
“I suppose,” he said nastily. “But then I was pussy whipped when I lived with you too, wasn’t I?”
That really pissed me off. I never bossed him around when we were living together. He made himself subservient to me, I didn’t ask him too. That’s on him.
How ugly he looked with that sullen sneer on his face, a bad cartoon version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. This doesn’t get sorted out in this lifetime, I’m afraid. The friendship, such as it was, will not survive the GF letter. Point and game to Jayne LeGro.
But there are many other friendships to be had.
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-07 04:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-07 04:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-07 01:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-07 01:37 pm (UTC)I suppose the thing to do is to continue to work on it but coordinate with him through email rather than in person.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-07 03:17 pm (UTC)I know how tough that is. I've had a toxic woman or three in my life too. Very hard to get people like that out of your blood. They're like a drug.