Echoes in a Hollow Space

I was tagged by mnfaure and was so very, very tempted just to update this entry from a few years back and pretend it was new. That wouldn't be sporting, would it? But that list is much more interesting. I've been squeezing my brain to come up with some more things. I'm really quite a boring individual and if I'm ever asked to do this again, I'm definitely using a previous post.

1. Although I'm right-handed, I'm quasi-ambidextrous in that I'm always doing things left-handedly. I wear my watch like a lefty on my right wrist, for instance, and, weirdest of all, I taught myself to use the mouse upside down. It seemed natural to me to go UP when I wanted the cursor to go DOWN.

2. I am related by marriage to the Old West desperadoes, the Dalton Gang. One of the siblings of one of my ancestors married one of the Dalton boys.

3. I once asked Danny Elfman if his mother was named Rosemary. We were at Madame Wongs, he was in Oingo Boingo at the time and between shows, I was drunk, someone dared me. I've been humiliated in retrospect ever since, but at the time I knew no shame. Hussy! (Hmm. Maybe I should have posted this to postsecret instead of here.)

4. There are three degrees of separation between me and Marilyn Monroe. 1) My friend, Stephan, had a writing partner I knew as 2) Bobby Miller. I later found out his real name was Arthur Miller, Jr., and 3) Marilyn Monroe was once married to Arthur Miller, Sr., therefore Bobby's stepmother.

5. I've been to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It has an open-air ramp winding all the way around the outside, always going up (naturally). When I got to the top, an Italian film crew was filming a commercial.

6. I've had my purse snatched three times, and my old apartment which I shared with roommates, was robbed four times. I am hypervigilant and distrustful as a result.

7. I have roughly 400 books in my To Be Read pile (really, three small bookshelves), and that's not even counting most of my nonfiction and the one or two boxes still packed in the garage. Can you say "sickness"?

8. My biological father was a lot older than my mother. Added to that, I was a late in life baby for my mom. As a consequence, the timeframe on my father goes back much further than most people my age. Dad was born in the year 1900, lied about his age (by one year) in order to join the Army, and fought in World War I. This also means my half-brother (now deceased), fathered by Dad in his mid-twenties, was two years younger than my mother. It also means that all but one of my nieces and nephews are older than me.

9. On another genealogical note: two creeps from history share a common ancestor with me—the genocidal maniac and incompetent general George Armstrong Custer, and the obscure, crazy, Nazi-sympathizing poet, Ezra Pound. I sure hope it doesn't run in the family. Why couldn't it have been somebody cool???

10. The house I grew up in was in the middle of the city (Venice, part of Los Angeles), but had open fields on both sides, which was quite lovely. However, this house no longer exists. Developers bought the entire block and turned it into a public storage facility. This makes me very sad.

Random quote of the day:


"The dead are the invisible ones, but not the absent ones."

—Victor Hugo


Over the weekend I was going through a number of old files, old journal entries, rummaging around in there to see if I could get back in touch with something I've lost track of the last few years. Why do I write? Why do I want to write?

This quote reminds me of something I found from December 1996, something I started to write in the voice of a character in preparation for a story. But it turned into something else, about my friend, Stephan, who died in February of that year. So I stuck it in the private e-journal I kept at the time, and never did write that story. I have millions of little bits like this that should go into stories, but never get there. I have to get them out of myself. I'd probably implode if I didn't write them somewhere.

( Longing )

Stephan

At the end he needed so little from me.
Certainly not my tears, my sympathy.
At the end his eyes were clear and deep,
already piercing the clouds separating us
from that place beyond dreams, hopes, fears,
pitying us because we could not yet see.
Lightened of greed, and envy, and regret,
he wore our sorrows like a cloak of feathers,
his smile radiant with sadness, the exquisite
illusion of the world fading, fading--here
this moment, then gone. He needed nothing
I had to give, except love. And all he had
to give was love . . . and a beautiful pain.
Then that, too, was gone, and only love remains.


###


Dead Man’s Zen

My dead friend wrote in the margin of my book:
“Nothing’s your fault, and you are responsible
for all of it. Maturity.”

The wolf stared at me and I got scared.
I cried, thinking my time was gone,
but time still ticked in my heart.
Time was not my problem.
What to do with it was my problem;
how to use it well, how to be used by it
and not mind so much.

The wolf still stares,
hungry, unapologetic, bluntly assessing
whether my tottering legs can outrun it.

But wolves aren’t only hungry for flesh.
Often it is for honesty:
sifting, weighing, natural selection.
They want authority and submission,
a leader to follow, or a pack to follow them,
arranged alphabetically.
They do not accept excuses.
They do not put up with lies
and self-delusion.
Their gleaming eyes
know when you are a fraud,
and they seek your weakness.
They hamstring the liars,
bring them to the ground
and slowly devour pretensions.

Nothing’s your fault.
You are responsible for all of it.
Maturity.

He’s in his Heaven.
You’re down here with the wolves.
So be straight with yourself--
and get to work.