Echoes in a Hollow Space

I wasn't sure I was going to talk about this here, but it felt like I was giving Blue short shrift by not talking about him. He was a sweet, loving old cat, everybody's friend, and we're going to miss him.

I didn't talk about Blue here much because he was already living with the roommate when I moved in back in '05 and he was kind of her cat. But Blue wasn't exclusive in his affection. If he had a shot at a lap, he took it. He was always in the yard as the official greeter whenever anyone came to visit, and he loved looking in on the neighbors. In fact, he had several of them conned into believing he was homeless, caging meals from many households. One lady was so worried about him she put out flyers asking if anyone was missing a cat. Someone finally recognized him and told her where he lived.

Blue gave a lot of comic relief like that. Everybody had a favorite Blue story, and loved to share a laugh over his latest escapade. He also would politely knock on the iron door when he wanted to be fed—sometimes as often as six times a day—or otherwise wanted attention. If hitting the door with his paw didn't make sufficient noise to rouse us, he'd put his shoulder into it, giving it a good body slam. That usually got us moving. Then he'd look up at you with that "What took you so long?" expression.

He didn't like to be confined, didn't like to stay inside much, and would tear his way out if you did try to lock him in. He was a free spirit, so we made him warm places in the garage where he could sleep if he didn't want to come inside, and a cat door in the garage door so he could go in and out. He remained pretty much true to himself until the last week, then took a sudden bad turn. We took him to the vet, but the x-rays were very, very clear: he was full of cancer. It was still very, very hard to make the decision, and I still feel guilty, but the vet said even with extreme measures, chemo treatments, et al., the prognosis was very bleak. He was nearly fifteen. It would have been very, very hard. We couldn't see putting him through that. In the last days before we took him to the vet, he'd already started to lose some of his dignity. And Blue was a very dignified gentleman. He would have had to have been confined, which he would have hated. So. The vet gave us a room and we spent a lot of time with him, giving him love and scritches. He purred for us right up until the end.

The whole neighborhood is sad. That's a pretty good legacy for an old guy to leave.

Last night I drove east on Washington Boulevard near the Culver City-L.A. border and passed a mini-mall on the corner of Washington and Rosabell. Normally, the marquee outside this mini-mall holds a white plastic neon-lit rectangle prominently featuring the name of a cut-rate dental office. Last night, the front and back panels of this rectangle had been removed, leaving only a framework with vertical bars of neon lights spaced like the bars in a cell door. They were lit, pumping out bright white light, a neon prison. Perfectly framed behind this prison of light was the full moon. She looked a sad, weary sister behind that artificial brightness. Once she'd been the brightest light in the night sky, now she'd been overwhelmed by the human need for attention-getting.

I found myself thinking how much I related to that forlorn moon.

I must explain that I was extremely sleep-deprived yesterday. Boyfriend of Ms. 207 upstairs was on an real rip-snortin' tear Thursday night-early Friday morning. The two of them, but mostly him, woke me up every half hour between 11 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. I have to get up at 6 for work, so you can imagine I was a wee bit tired. It was one of those situations where just as I drifted back to sleep, another noise eruption broke out and I'd be awake again. It culminated with them having loud, raucous, bed-thumping, screaming vocalization sex at 1:30. Before that, just before one, Boyfriend had cranked up the stereo and was singing at the top of his lungs (off-key). I guess he was anticipating the loud, raucous sex to come. But one good thing about that loud, raucous sex (from my POV, anyway) is that once it occurred I knew I'd probably get some sleep because, well, the darling young things would most likely be going to sleep themselves soon after. Indeed, that's what happened.

So, there I was exhausted and blue Friday evening, feeling a kinship with the dimmed moon imprisoned by the human need for exhibitionism. It had been an ugly, busy week at work, too, and I'd been ill with some stomach virus early in the week. I'm in the culmination phase of my novel, writing the finale chapters, and although that's going pretty well and I see the dim light at the end of the tunnel, the latest chapter I posted on the writing workshop (27-28 out of 32+epilogue) did not do particularly well. I got only one critique in over a week. I'd been doing well on the workshop before this current posting, had good luck with my posts for the last two years, but natural attrition has caused some critters to drop away, and at a certain point nobody new is going to sign on for critiques of the advanced chapters of a novel. My friend Jon says not to take it personally, and he's absolutely right, but it's hard not to take it personally. Finally, two friends took pity on me and there were two more posted critiques waiting for me Friday morning, but I was already in a massive funk by then. Aided, I'm sure, by only 4-1/2 to 5 hours sleep. I was on the point of pulling everything off the workshop and slinking into a hole somewhere to hide.

But I've learned not to make significant decisions when I'm depressed and sleep-deprived. I'm still in a bit of a funk, but the questions I'm asking myself today are somewhat different. Like: why the hell do I even bother to write?

You know, there are head answers to that question, and there are soul answers to that question. You could probably generate some of the head answers yourself:

o I write because it's a great means of self-expression.
o I write to explore universal truths.
o I write because it's a fun exercise of my imagination.
o I write to see my dreams and fantasies come alive on the page.

Etc., etc., fill in the blanks. All of those head answers--and whatever other ones I or you could come up with—are true, as far as they go. But they are all, essentially, irrelevant—they don't, at least for me, get to the heart of things. Because there's only one true answer, the soul answer: I write because I have no choice.

I would write even if no one was reading (and most times I think no one truly is). I believe there are writers who can say, "Enough," and move on to something else, but I'm not one of them. I've tried, and was utterly miserable each time. It was like having a writhing itch I couldn't reach, and it didn't go away until I started writing again. Once I even stopped writing for four or five years: the longest, most miserable years of my life. I said "Uncle" that time and never went to that place again, because I realized there is something in this particular form of artistic expression that I must do. It's my essence, ingrained in the whorls of my soul.

Trust me, I know how melodramatic that sounds. But it's also true. There's no rule guaranteeing that the truth isn't also melodramatic. Or maybe I've just never learned to express it in better terms. At any rate, if I ask my soul why I write maybe I can try to be honest:

o I write because I want someone to pat me on the head and say, "Good girl."

That's fairly honest, but only partially true. I wrote in a vacuum for years and it still did the trick for me. It's only recently that the need for attention has become part of the equation. And I can easily foresee a time when I might go back into the vacuum because this need to be noticed may never be fulfilled. I'll write anyway. I have to.

o I write because my father was a consummate storyteller. I never pleased him otherwise, and although he's been dead for over twenty years, I'm still trying to please him.

Okay, a bit more honest. That was certainly a strong component in why I originally chose this art form. I do visual art, too, always have, but it's never filled me up like writing—and I'm sure the Freudian answer would be: Daddy. But at a certain point I realized I was no longer writing to please Daddy. I woke up one day and knew I had crossed that Rubicon; moved into a new world, a new way of doing things, left the old rules behind. I do this for me now, and that's a good evolution. I lost my dad when I was fairly young and before I'd had a chance to truly differentiate myself from my parents. I think I've achieved that now—and that's always a healthy thing.

o I write because it's the only thing that patches the holes in my soul.

Yeah, that's a true reason. I've had my dark times, my New Moon phases, I will again, but the work is always the remedy, even if the work is sometimes the cause of the darkness. I always turn back to it—for me, not for anyone else—and it always does the trick, like nothing else can.

So I guess I'm like the full moon after all. I may be trapped sometimes in a prison of artificial light, made weak by the need for attention-getting—but last night in my exhaustion and depression, I forgot the other lesson of the full moon. That once I moved further down the street, the moon was still there, no longer behind those bars. And if I travel out of the city and its wash of artificial light, away from the distractions and visual noise, the moon still shines, alone in a dark sky.