Just In Case

My wife reminded me this morning about Our Last Shopping Trip.  You know, before she popped out Twins A & B.  She had read in numerous (really, there were numerous) pregnancy books that, prior to opening up the bomb bay doors, please, Hal, one should go on a shit-crazy shopping spree, purchasing seven dozen rolls of toilet paper and sixteen tubes of Mango/Orange Tom's of Maine Mint is the Antichrist toothpaste, just in case the creation of twins results in a chaotic situation that does not enable one or one's psychotic spouse to ever go to the supermarket ever again.

So, we did that.

And it's a good thing, too, because, while we were eventually with it enough to venture out of doors (it took us approximately two months or so) on an errand or two, you don't want to be brushing your teeth with a twig covered with old shoe polish or wiping your ass with the Anthropologie skirt you got your wife for her 24th birthday.

As hurricane or tropical storm or nor'easter or federal pound-me-in-the-ass storm Sandy approaches my 'hood, which is thoroughly unaccustomed to bracing for meteorological events any more fierce than a couple days of swamp-ass inducing humidity, I felt the need to write.  Just in case the power goes out for a week.  Just in case a tree limb falls on my head as I go out to check the storm drains and I incur a traumatic brain injury that turns whatever remains of my writing prowess into apple sauce.

Just in case.

Facebook wants me to confirm my phone number.

The computer wants me to restart so the latest version of Norton can self-install.

Richie Havens wants me to come downstairs and listen to him sing to the babies on my wife's iPad.

"Don't mind me, 'cuz I ain't nothin' but a dream."

Everybody wants something, don't they?  Narcissists must have it real easy-- the only thing they're concerned with is what they want.

(I'm jealous.)

I want my family and I to make it through this storm okay.  I want my supervisor at the hospital to text me and say, "Don't be crazy-- don't come in tomorrow", but she's not going to.  She said, "If you can make it in, great, but if not, I'll be here, so no worries."  But that's not explicit enough.  She's basically saying, get here, but, if you can't, don't sit at home fretting and worrying and brooding.

Which is, you know, what I do besides eat, digest, breath, and excrete.

On Saturday, we went to Longwood Gardens to celebrate six years of marriage together.  The babies stayed with my father, but we weren't completely untethered-- my wife had to pump in the Longwood parking lot, and then driving home on Route 1, which must have been quite a sight for anyone pulled up in the lane next to us.  Autumn puts on one hell of a show, as does my wife at a red light, and being out in the crisp air surrounded by amber and gold was just right.

Just like our wedding-- just right.

Today, we shut ourselves in with the babies.  During still moments of naps, I watched some old interviews on YouTube, because I'm weird.  I enjoyed William F. Buckley telling Noam Chomsky he was going to "sock you in your goddamned mouth".  I wish he'd done it.  I guess people talk a lot more shit than they actually sling-- especially people in neckties.

I've been looking for jobs, for around half-a-year, and I spent some time doing that last night.  This non-profit and that non-profit.  Time to be a desk-jockey again.  I'm done getting assaulted and slammed up against walls and fighting for my life for no reason, and a pittance of pay.  I wish someone would pay me to write-- I think that's really what it all boils down to, in the end.  Every wish takes a route, however circuitous, back to that.  Back to where I feel most at home.  Behind a monitor, hitting keys, making them dance for me.

Dance, you qwerty motherfuckers.  Dance.

Either it'll happen or it won't, and I expect I'll be alright either way, really.  The winds are kicking up out there and the rain is coming down.  A storm comes and then it goes.  People try to outwit each other on Facebook-- where everyone is Oscar Wilde-- and my trashcans are tucked away inside the garage.  I'm rambling, of course, but you knew that.

Don't mind me.    

Getting On With It

I was talking to my therapist last week about acting, which I sort of do, and he and I were exploring the possibility of it one day (far, far away) becoming more than just an amateur, "sometimes" pursuit, and making it a professional, bread-and-butter pursuit, since it's really the only thing I'm reasonably sure I do well, and it's definitely the only thing for which I'm qualified.

"How do you reconcile, though, what I think is your core belief about acting," he asked me, astutely crossing his legs and cocking his head slightly in the manner of an inquisitive Border Collie, "that it's vainglorious and indulgent?"

"Well," I said, "it is.  But, I suppose, if one is going to make the decision to pursue it professionally, you kind of have to just get over that and get on with it."

I feel that way about writing, too.  It can be purported to be done for the writer's own demon-wrestling purposes, but I think we all know I'm after the comments.

(Gimme.)

While the twins are napping, there are other things I could be doing.  I could be dusting the... thing in the dining room.  I could do dishes, wash bottles, clean the high chair trays, prepare lunch, organize... things.  But here I am, at the computer, writing.  Writing for the first time since we put our sad old dog to sleep.  That pain and that loss has subsided some over the weeks-- has it been months?  I don't even know.  But, after I'd dressed the babies this morning, and we were playing around with toys on the bed, as I was tickling my daughter's foot, I caught myself thinking about Finley.  My wife gets triggered when she sees a dog, who maybe looks like him, or maybe doesn't, around the neighborhood, or when she sees a "Science Diet" commercial on TV.  That stuff doesn't strike me in quite the same way.  Finley comes to me at random, quiet moments, times where his rough panting would have been the background noise, times where I wish that the babies, who are far more interactive, could have spent more time with him.

There's a lot of things I wish for, and most of those things center around time, and wishing I had more of it.  More time to spend with my wife and children.  More time away from work.  More time for writing.  I've been working every other weekend, that's Saturday and Sunday from 7am-3pm, friends, for more than two years now, and I'm so tired of having my weekend family time halved like a grapefruit.  I'm so sick of cramming things into my weekends "off" (you don't really have time "off" anymore when you have children, for those of you who don't and consequently don't know) and I'm fed up with disappointing my wife, who, good fortune be praised, actually likes it when I'm home.

That fact is part of what's stopped me, incidentally, from writing more-- either on this blog or as part of something else.  When I'm home, and the babies have gone to bed at 7:00 and I know we have to be in bed by 10ish or I'll be a drooling idiot at work the next day, and there are lunches and bottles and wash to prepare for the next day, how can I reasonably justify excusing myself from my love's presence while I shutter myself away in the office for an hour clacking away at the keyboard?  To be honest, I know that, if she really believed it was important to me, she wouldn't mind, but I can't justify it to myself.  I guess it's too vainglorious and indulgent after all.  I even feel guilty doing it while the babies are napping and there's no dog to walk anymore.  If I close my eyes for a moment, though, I can visualize all the dishes and bottles in the sink, and they're calling to me.

The babies are probably going to wake up soon.  There's so much in my head that I want to talk about-- no, write about.  I hate talking.  My voice is flat and heady and boring, and my words come out in a jumble of sleep-deprived fits and starts and half-cocked ideas and trailing off sentiments.  I want to write about politics (sort of) and George Takei Facebook bullshit and memories and dreams and my family but I don't really think I know them anymore so what would I say anyway and the mess in the basement and the crawling and the teething and the changing and the graying and the rolling and the tolling of the bells bells bells and I want to connect-- with you, I suppose-- and that's what we all want, isn't it?  Your time, your thoughts, your attention.  If you give me your attention, I will tell you what I am:

I am the very model of a modern major-general.

I am the monarch of the sea.

I have a song to sing, O!

I am a writer, I suppose.  One who writes.  I string words and thoughts and phrases and ideas together and I give you paragraphs and periods and you make of it what you will, and I like that.  I think I do.  I really think I like that.  If you give me two numbers and ask me to put them together, I will give you a fucking mess in return.  But words I can cope with.  I'll take words for eight hundred, Alex.

No, a thousand.

Give me a thousand: I have twins to feed.  

Me No Read

I'm six-and-change weeks into my FMLA "Paternity Leave". I'm going back to work in two-and-a-half weeks. Back to the psych hospital. Back to locked doors and lots of keys and leather restraints and groups of dubious moral, educational, and spiritual value. But, despite how that last sentence probably sounded, I love my job, and I'm really looking forward to going back. And not just because the twins are driving me insane, and not just because I'm irrepressibly stir-crazy, and not just because I long for adult conversation that doesn't revolve around the merits of Pampers vs Huggies (Huggies, you are shit and, well, holding in shit), but because I like to work. I like interacting with the staff and the patients. I like making money. I like being active. I like writing my reports and walking the halls and saying "Good morning" to people who are shuffling around while not wearing pants like it's just any old thing.

I like that.

That said, of course, I also like being home.

A lot.

And because of that, I have very much enjoyed this time with my wife, my buddy, my best friend, my partner, and my two new, small, nice-smelling (most of the time) buddies.

I have to say, though, that when I look back on the nine weeks I'll have spent at home, I think I'll be most disappointed by one immutable fact: I haven't read.

Anything.

No books. I've barely skimmed a "Car & Driver", and I did so listlessly and in such a disconnected fashion I couldn't tell you if I read about the new Passat or about the new Porsche Cayman.

Forget about books-- I'm not sure I even know what a book looks like. I ordered "The Art of Gilbert & Sullivan" by Gayden (suppressed snicker) Wren to get Free Super Saver Shipping on something else and I fanned through it, instantly turned off by how Wren was overtly judging and critiquing Gilbert's product quality in the later operettas like "Utopia, Ltd" and "The Grand Duke", when Gayden Wren himself is responsible for one of the most regrettable stage productions ever, "A Gilbert & Sullivan Christmas Carol". Don't even get me started.

I couldn't read more than fifteen pages. It's on the shelf with the two-dozen other G&S related books and libretti and scores. Moo.

I don't read blogs anymore so, if you write a blog that I used to read, forgive me. I still love you, but I just... I don't know. I don't read anymore. You're probably doing something really awesomeballs that I don't know about because I don't read your blog anymore, but it's not that I'm too cool for school, it's that, I don't know. Maybe it's the sleep deprivation. I am writing portions of this blog with my eyes closed-- and I can do that thanks to my 6th grade typing teacher, Mrs. "F. J. Space" Dougherty who, in addition to being strict as a nun, was a world-renowned emetophobe. All you had to do to be excused from her typing class was say you felt sick to your stomach. You wouldn't be welcomed back for two weeks.

My sister-in-law told me, just after we'd had our children, that new parents' I.Q.s diminish by twenty points.

"So I suppose that means that parents of twins lose forty points," I said, surprising everyone in the recovery room that I could muster up that math after such a traumatic, intelligence quotient-lowering event.

"Probably," she surmised. "It's only temporary, though," she said, attempting reassurance.

But, how temporary? Like, when does it come back? And, does it come back gradually, like at a ratio of a point a year or something like that? I've never had an I.Q. test. I think, to get into the Challenge program in middle school you were required to take an I.Q. test, but my parents told me that was ridiculous and that they wouldn't sign the form, so I never got into the Challenge program and I never got an I.Q. test. Frankly, I'd be scared to take one. I know it doesn't hurt, but I don't like engaging in tests that reveal something about me. This is why I've never taken a "Cosmo Quiz". If I have puffy areolae or way too much in my purse, I'll let you know, damnit. The only exception the self-revelatory test aversion is the occupational aptitude test I took in high school-- I enjoyed that. Though I'm very sorry I never got to become a forest ranger.

I suppose I could read about forest rangers, though. You know, if I ever read again.

Inspiration: It's as Easy as Breathing

I haven't written a decent, solid, cogent piece of fiction in years. Apparently, I haven't been inspired. Or so it would seem.

Inspiration's rather a funny thing. Lots of writers sit about, or stand around, sort of waiting to be inspired. Sure, they might make notations or outlines or sketches of things they've been sort of turning about in their heads, but this is all just to escape pure idleness, I expect. These are but inconsequential doodles meant to pass the time in a writerly sort of way until inspiration hits.

I guess there are certain other writers who go out in search of inspiration. Some of them seek out waterfalls, or encounters with babies or old people or wrinkly dogs, some of them travel to countries whose names begin with the letter "I" and have sex with locals, some cook a lot. The methods and modes and means may differ, sure, but the ends are very much the same: do thing x in the hope that it will inspire writing y that will lead to royalties z.

It's a logical proposition, but then, the world isn't always very logical. Just ask the woman who tried to tell me once that there was a bomb inside her head.

I don't my dearth of recent, undusty material on lack of inspiration very often, but, upon thinking about it, I should. Because I think it's a very acceptable thing for a writer to claim.

"Well, you know, just haven't been inspired much lately, really," as if to say that the fault clearly does not lie with you, but on a lack of imaginative presentation from the exterior world, which can be quite banal and lazy.

Unlike writers, of course. Certainly unlike this one.

The silly thing, though, about me claiming that a lack of inspiration is to blame for my lack of creative output is that all one would have to do would be to look at this blog and they'd be all like, "Um, what?"

Oh yeah-- I guess I've been inspired all along. Sort of.

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday about the creation of fiction. He's more plot-focused. I'm more character-driven. This distinction came about when we were talking about movies a few days earlier. I get inspired by people I meet, by the things that they say, by the unexpected looks that they give, the smiles with something behind them, the choices they make or the indecision into which they slide. I may come off as someone who can't stand people, as I eschew social gatherings numbering 2 people and above, and I have something nasty to say about pretty much everybody (blood relatives included) but, really, underneath all of that, I desperately love people. All of the best writing I've ever done has come from a passionate affection for eternally flawed people, people who love each other like mad but are incapable of expressing that love without causing pain.

I love that.

Lately, though, I haven't been inspired to create art out of people like that. Or maybe I haven't been able to inspire myself. That's probably more it. It's much easier to bang out a blog post about something silly in the New York Times or trash the pathetic cumtowels who write to Dear Abby than it is to construct portions of imaginary peoples' lives, create a conflict, and either resolve it or not.

And, really: to what end?

I long for the days when I could listent to a piece of music or watch a film and have a lyric or a line hit my ear and essentially ignite a fire in my mind that could only be contained by setting down to work. I'm not quite sure what happened there. It used to be so easy, but then, so were lots of things.

Happy Sexy Novel

I may very well be showing my age by writing what I'm about to write, but I'm sprouting gray hairs here and there, and I've been known to like me a buffet or two, so maybe I ought to let it all hang out and say: oneof the nicest things about going away on vacation is having some quality time with a good book.

There. I said it. Kiss my sweet fanny, you snotty little tyke, you.

I'm reading "A Widow for One Year" by John Irving. I like it very much. He's a pervert with aharsh and bizarre world view, and maybe that's the attraction. I'd like to say it's because I observe and am moved by some deeply lyrical literary melody in his prose, but more likely it's because I'm a horny mother and his writing is virtually showered in cum.

Honestly- his novels are like a carnival log flume ride called "The Ejaculatorium." ("Yer gonna get wet!") I recently speculted to my wife that the pages in all Irving books should be laminated.

I wouldn't call my level of reading "voracious" and it's most likely a couple shades shy of "avid" too, but I read enough to have observed certain traits when it comes to contemporary novels, and the most starkl among the commonalities is that there is always at least one vharacter having sex with another.

Not that I mind.

Nor, I suspect, do all the prudish, haughtym thin-lipped critics of sex in television and film. Because a humparama is okay as long as it's cleverly ensconsed within flowing pragraphs describing Federal-style desk chairs and the hunting prowess of Mrs. Emmilina Fitzhume's Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.

I wonder if any of the plays and manuscripts I've penned that have earned me a comfortable pillow-set of rejection letters would have been considered more marketable, or at least interesting to the reading public if there containeda pssage or two where someone was gently cupping someone else's breasts, or slowly undulating against her silken beauty beneath the damask sheets whilst Mrs. Fitzhume's Cavalier King Charles Spaniel effortlessly broke the regally-crested mallard's neck between its elegant though powerful jaws.

Maybe if I had used more of the words "quiver," "pulsate," "throb," or "heaving, rhythmic spasm."

Maybe.

Or maybe that was just the old way to get published. We're so porned out these days- unshockable. Everybody knows someone who's been asphyxiated with a feather boa or had their face used as a toilet during some off-kilter horizontal encounter.

Besides-- we shrewd, up-to-the-minute, iEverything 20somethings know how to get published; do something ridiculous for a year, blog about it, and pitch it to some gay NYC literary agent wearing edgy Danish eyeglasses and you'll be set.

See? We know how it's done. We just choose not to.