We're So Close to Hating Everyone.

Probably about five years ago, while we were driving somewhere-or-other, I was going on and on about how much I disagreed with someone-or-other, and Jeff chimed in as well with his reasons for disagreeing with this person as well, and it escalated into this: "What the hell? Why is this person like this anyway? How on earth could he (or she) think this?" kind of thing. And then it went further: "How could this person believe in any of the things he (or she) believes in? And other people think this way, too?! Like, what the? What's wrong with people, anyway?"

And it's not like this was the first time we had conversations like this. They were (and probably still are) a recurring thing that come up here and there, probably more often than they should. Basically, a nice, long, bitchy diatribe about how we're right and everyone else is wrong.

Which led me to the great title of the book we're going to have to write, because it is so bitchy, unreasonable, and haughty, and we've had these conversations enough, they may as well be collected: We're So Close to Hating Everyone. And it has to be co-written because I'm So Close to Hating Everyone just sounds way too whiney. And the "so close" comes in because, when it comes down to it, I don't think it's very nice to really hate anyone. It is bad for other people, and it is really bad for me, anyway. So I have to at least make a half-hearted effort to not condone outright hate.

If I actually did write a book like that, though, I wonder what it would look like. Maybe a little bit like something Glen Beck would write. Or maybe it would be a little bit more like an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

At least it would be honest.

Because the trouble is, I think there are already books out there like that, disguised as something else. And there are already television shows, movies, entire universities, musical acts, etc., that also espouse this kind of attitude, but it's not quite so in your face as my title. And it's kind of toxic, actually (I know, it's hard to read between the lines and everything): Even though we live in an age where we are supposed to be open-minded and postmodern and stuff, I think most people still adhere to their own personal set of ideas as far as what life's supposed to be like, say "to hell with those guys,"(or much worse), but are unwilling to acknowledge this unreasonable quality contained within themselves. And it's not such a good thing (to quote-mutilate from Martha Stewart).

So, in an attempt to lend some kind of structure to this blog, I want to devote some of it to this "book" of mine, mainly as a tongue-in-cheek way of deconstructing my own unreasonableness, and understanding where it comes from, and why it happens. I think this counts as a blog post for today, so I won't begin it right now, but let's just say that from here on out, the week will begin with "We're So Close to Hating Everyone Mondays" (even though Jeff won't be writing it... like I said, "we're" has a much better ring to it).

A Strange Overlap: Music and Words.

Sometimes I find myself listening to music and typing a story or some thoughts or whatever, and I start to get this weird desire to write something that might somehow match the music I'm listening to in order to connect the two mediums and make my experience complete.

I've never been able to fully separate music from words. One feeds into the other.

When I was younger, maybe in second or third grade or so and couldn't really write all that much, I would draw pictures of stories and listen to music on tape cassette to accompany it. I can write without listening to music, and I can definitely listen to music without writing, but when I'm really on a roll, and in the zone, the two are synched up, and I find one song on a loop as I type page upon page upon page. 

I listen to music while I'm reading too, and then whatever it is I was listening to while I was reading that book becomes forever associated with it. When I was a junior in high school, we read In Cold Blood, and I was listening to Soul Junk's 1956 at the time, and now I will forever connect the two. Same thing more recently:  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and All Delighted People. In both of these examples, the music does not really reflect the tone or subject matter of either novel. At all.

But, then again, I associate all music I listen to with certain periods in my life. And it isn't some vague, nostalgic feeling. It is a distinct, specific event or time. My husband thinks this might be one of my special little eccentricities. Virtually every single album I listen to has a connection to something else.  It doesn't just exist on its own, as its own separate entity. Like most things in life, it gets all tangled up with something else.

I'm fortunate to live in a day and age where music is so readily available, because otherwise I don't know what I would do with myself. I'd probably have to seriously take up an instrument. But it seems kind of difficult to play a sonata on the piano and write a novel simultaneously.

(On a side note: this may not be so difficult if it was playing a sonata and a video game simultaneously).

Sometimes the two activities manage to flow together well. But right before I began writing this post, I felt that horrible disjunction between the two. And I'm starting to think that this disjunction indicates something a bit more important: Whatever it was I was writing was getting BORING. So music has also become a bit of a litmus test. If the music I'm listening to can't get the job going, then I'm screwed, right?

Music makes everything better: chores, long commutes, movies, sex, food, books... life. Probably death too. 

I've heard some people argue about how this overload of music and ipods and things are actually bad for us. It's cluttering up our life, etc., and we should be engaging in Socratic dialogues somewhere instead, and so on. As a college instructor, there may be some truth to this, since it seems many people are becoming crippled by their inability to connect with others, and ipods can certainly make it easy to shut the outside world out.

But I think really great music makes for better connection.

I mean, the reason why concerts are such wonderful experiences is due to that sense of communal enjoyment. And this often happens among complete strangers. One can just bask in the sounds and the feeling of the music.

Although it's not an airtight argument, I think music proves God's existence. And it makes my writing work better. It feeds it and helps it grow. It's a little strange, and it maybe marks me as a Gen-Xer, but it's like the music goes from the machine, up the wire, into the headphones, into my ears, down my neck, shoulders, through my arms, and back into my fingertips, and so, onto the page (typing or writing, whatever). It's a cyclical pattern that obeys natural law: nothing is lost. It's all self-contained.

Now, if only I could figure out how music can help me write something I'm not all that inspired to write...

Writing Obscenity, and Listening to Jonsi. (Neither of which are actually related to each other...)

Before we begin: 

I've been a bit lax in my blog posting. I'm a little worried about what theme I should pick for it, since it appears most blogs have some sort of subject. I don't really want to pick a specific thing to focus on, though. Maybe that's a bit lazy of me to do, but it's been that kind of a year. Or two. I've been lazy, or at least, I've been rethinking ambitions and what place they should have in my life, which makes one seem  lazy. And this whole blog-business was supposed to be about discipline, and making sure I wrote something at least five days a week or so. So here is this random post about a couple things I've been thinking about. 

Thing #1: Vulgarity and Obscenity in my own Writing. 

I've been feeling more and more paranoid about this. I don't think of myself as all that vulgar or obscene, but it would seem that I maybe give off that impression, somehow. A friend recently observed: "You're like the Skinny Bitch writer, because you swear all the time!" True? Not sure. I don't mince words, anyway, and I don't really avoid talking about topics that might be considered "inappropriate." Plus, I think adolescent-boy humor is amazing. 

So, when I am writing, I do use somewhat colorful language at times, usually in character dialogue. It has to make sense, and it shouldn't detract from my writing, but it often feels necessary. Although a lot of the stuff I write is not "realistic" or realism, I think in order for a reader to suspend belief, they have to really believe in all the surrounding elements of the story. If everything is complete nonsense, then the book becomes nonsense. 

For example: In a film or a television show about gladiators, we can expect a certain amount of blood, dismemberment, foul language, lewd everything, sex, and other stuff. But in the show Spartacus, the level to which all of these things are taken is so extreme it becomes a joke. The writers probably had conversations like this: 

"Hm. We have not seen a single bare breast in this scene in over five minutes." 

"But this scene takes place at a Chuck-E-Cheese..."

"Yeah... but there has to be some way we can make this sexy and/or violent." 

"I know! We'll have a woman with gigantic implants start stripping and gyrating against the play-place before she openly breast feeds her eighteen year old son!"

"Yes!"

"Brilliant."

"And then, Chuck-E comes in with a sword through his stomach, spurting blood everywhere!"

"Yeah! Great!"

 (All right. Slight exaggeration. We all know there aren't any play-places at Chuck-E-Cheese.)

I do understand that this over-the-top extremism is a fantasy. People don't watch Spatacus to get a history lesson. It's a guilty-pleasure kind of show. I've never been into guilty pleasures. It's probably the wet-blanket New Englander in me. 

But it is equally nonsensical, (to draw an example from my own writing), to have a working-class, abrasive, alcoholic talk like Pollyanna. 

The trouble is: some people do not like this. My older sister is my first go-to editor/critic. I take her advice and suggestions about my writing very seriously. But she just cannot take "the f-bombs" as she puts it. She thinks it is ridiculous. But she mainly thinks it is ridiculous because she would never, ever drop an f-bomb. In fact, I'm pretty sure she has never uttered the word in her entire life. (Although she did try to use a much worse expletive in a particularly desperate move in Bananagrams). And I am about to join another writer's group made up of Christian writers, and I am a little worried. One is a friend of mine, and I don't think the others are judgmental or legalistic types, but still: there's no way my book (if it were to ever get published...) would ever be put in the Christian/Inspirational section at Barnes and Noble... 

I don't think this is something that can be neatly tied up and set aside. Everyone has his or her idea on how much or how little one should censor oneself. I guess it's just something that every writer has to decide to deal with in some sense. When it comes down to it, I think one should just do whatever it takes to tell the story in the best way possible. If this can't be done without a decapitation or characters making whoopie, whatever. You've got to do what you've got to do. I guess it comes down to a personal judgment call. Safe stories aren't always good stories, are they? And shocking, crazy-brutal stories don't guarantee quality either... 

Thing #2: Jonsi. 

I don't have that much to say about him. I just love him, and find his music wonderful. 

A World Away: Inspiration and Perspective.

So right now I am far away from Massachusetts: one state up, to be precise. Because we are broke, and because we do not want to add to our credit card debt, Jeff and I haven't gone on a vacation together in over five years. But, we have taken a few 2-day escapes. Right now, we're in Portsmouth, NH, which is only about two and a half hours from home. This week's get away was very much needed.

And it has cleared my head a little bit.

I don't know why I don't break from routine more than I do. I think when you become an adult, and get a job, and settle into a certain kind of life, it's easy to get boring and dull. But this is not so good, especially when you like to write, because you start to think life is kind of sad and every-day. And great writing is not sad and every-day, even if it is about sad and every-day kinds of things, because art is all about perspective.

So it is not so much that one must get (far) away in order to create. One must gain new perspective to create.

I wonder if I could gain perspective simply by doing the "writerly" thing and going out to get coffee for a couple hours every day, rather than stay home, just to surround myself with people who I don't know. It's pretty easy for me to isolate myself from others. Some people find this surprising because I like people. I am very talkative. I like people/animals, etc., around me at home. I am loud.

But at the same time, I like solitude, and won't hesitate to yell "No!" in the face of one of my cats for trying his hardest to sneak his entire 17 pound body under my typing hands while I am on the computer. (In my defense, I am usually very patient and only gently nudge him aside the first six times or so). I also will put on headphones, which is apparently one of the most isolating things you can do. I don't like to call people on the phone, even though I do like to talk to them.

When I am at home, I am at home, and I don't venture out. It's been especially bad lately: there isn't a dog that needs to go out anymore, and I find that not even getting that couple minutes of fresh air a few times a day affects me. (And, also strange, those few minutes of being outdoors with an appreciative dog who loved to be outdoors had a nice effect on me; Bella sniffed almost any item she came across with wagging tail and gusto. Animals truly live in the moment).

I can't help but think this hermit-like existence is a killer of creativity, and perhaps also of happiness. When I get all wrapped up in my own problems and unhappiness and thoughts, I tend not to be able to get anything accomplished, let alone writing (hence, my lack of blog posts the last few days).

(But then again, there is Emily Dickinson...)

At any rate, while this trip was planned way in advance of what has happened this week, it's almost providential in timeliness. Jeff and I walked along the ocean for a few minutes. It was snowing these tiny little snowflakes that stuck in small white dots on my collar and shoulders, and it was beautiful. The air was crisp, and the sky was gray. It was getting dark outside, and there weren't a lot of people out and about. We stood on the end of a dock and looked out across the shipyard and watched seagulls and boats and buoys. And perhaps for the first time this week, I could appreciate the moment for what it was and just enjoy living in the present: standing on a dock near the ocean in New England with my favorite person. Not doing anything, really. Not thinking about anything. Just walking and being and looking and talking.

I am thankful for that.

Distractions.

Ever since Monday, I've been trying (and other people have been trying) to distract me. Because that is what you should do when you are so unhappy and grieving like I am. And, at times, it works. I still don't want to eat, and I cry when I think about my poor girl, but I manage to find things to take my mind off of what happened. I visited my sister in Gloucester, I watched television, I checked email, I listened to NPR, I wasted time online...

Because you aren't really supposed to just sit around and dwell on your loss.

Even though this loss is a large loss for me and my little family, I get this feeling that I am supposed to distract myself, if only to give my eyes and mind a rest for a few hours.

And I think this extends further than just mourning. I think this extends out everywhere, in our every day, happy and normal lives. Sometimes it's like distractions are what makes this world go round. We love media, music, text-messaging, social networking, internet updates, videos, everything, because these are things that we can get so lost in we forget everything else. And it can feel nice to forget everything else.

I just don't know if it's good to forget or get lost. Maybe it is. I don't know.

Is it healthier? Is it necessary? Is it just a part of living?

Our Girl.

Since I already wrote about our dog, Bella, dying, and since I already mentioned that today was a terrible day, I just wanted to post here that today Jeff and I made the hard decision to put her to sleep. Bella passed away around 5:20 earlier tonight, peacefully.

There is already a gaping hole in our home. I am completely heartbroken. Bella was such a wonderful dog. She was very sweet and gentle, and she was our girl. Right now, Jeff and I are having a hard time imagining life without her. It's hard to believe she's really gone, and she won't be sleeping in her corner when I come down the stairs tomorrow morning. It's hard to think of going for walks in the park without her. I don't think I can.

Many people have told us that Bella was lucky to have us. She was an elderly dog, and she was given up and handed over to a Greyhound rescue. Everyone thought what we did was nice, or charitable somehow. But I have a hard time thinking of our relationship with Bella that way. She added so much to our lives, I don't consider it charity that we took her into our home. She was a blessing to us. She was a member of our family.

This past summer we took her up to Sebago Lake with us. Almost every single day, she slept out on the beach, sunning herself for hours. She would sometimes wade through the water, her tail wagging. Sometimes she would run around in the shallows. She was so happy just being outside, on vacation with her people, napping in the soft, warm sand. And I'd like to think that the rest she is in now is like that nice warm beach. I hope she is at peace.

We love you so much, Bella. And I wish with all my heart we didn't have to say goodbye.

Write Through It.

Today is a terrible day. I'm starting to think this might have been a bad time to start a blog.

I am not going to go into details right now about why today is a terrible day; I'll write on it in a future post.

Instead, to avoid having too many sad posts in a row, today I will write about writing.

I'm not a particular fan of using writing as therapy, at least, not in my own life. Whenever I'd start a journal, for instance, I'd fall into this pattern of only writing whenever I was feeling unhappy. This was not good, especially when I considered the possibility of future generations finding my journal and deciding great-grandma was a super-bitchy and miserable human being.

And when I write, I usually use the activity to escape or avoid whatever might be bothering me at that moment. For instance, when I got rejected from PhD programs a few years ago, I managed to completely revamp and rewrite a novel I had been working on for almost three years. And it wasn't a short one. I think I pumped out something like two-hundred pages in a couple months. But when it came to what I should have been writing (as in, final seminar papers), I could barely eke out fifteen pages, let alone several dozen.

However, there have been a few occasions where I have "written through it," so to speak.

Most recently (and probably most pathetically), this past summer I wrote a sprawling-drunken rant in a tiny Moleskine notebook on my fears about the future. I haven't actually gone back to read it; maybe I should since it will remind me why I should never drink-and-write again. But in that instance, words just came out in ink form without any effort (or thought...) whatsoever.

Less pathetic: I also wrote a few words for my grandfather's funeral. I didn't particularly want to, mainly because I was so saddened by his death, and didn't think I could pull a coherent sentence together, but my mother suggested that I write something, so I did. I cried the entire time I was typing, and I couldn't finish reading it aloud at the funeral, but I wrote.

I've read a lot of stuff by writers who bemoan the writing process as being painful. They're usually writing about things like getting a draft finished, or coming up with ideas, or meeting deadlines or something. And they're right. That stuff is tough, for sure. But I find writing about life pretty fucking difficult. I'd rather put on the television and not do or feel anything at all.

The thing is, I don't think that being a writer is a particularly comfortable job. If you are a good writer, you can't "move on" the way other people do because you have to write about it first. You have to think about why you are thinking those thoughts, and why you are feeling those emotions. You have to consider how these things affect who you are as a person. You have to dwell on the past. You have to remember the painful memories, as well as the good memories that sometimes become painful in retrospect.

So even though today is a terrible day, I chose to write anyway. And even though tomorrow will be just as sad, I'll choose to write through it again.