Imaginary Friends

With no particular story banging at the doors to be let out, this seemed like a good time for a cattle call, an open audition for characters in search of a job, and possibly a combustion of ideas and concepts resulting in a story that wold whip through the landscape in the manner of the recent fires.

First to show up was my old buddy, Lew Lessing, who first appeared in my fiction back in my undergraduate days, a more-or-less alter ego who has done a number of the same things I have but who at one time in is life has done a number of things I haven't. He is often under consideration for a lead role or walk-on. Since we have much in common, my worry is that I don't push him enough to get away from and past me. He likes the work, is reliable, shows up on time, doesn't make excuses. But in this reading he was noticeably not on his marks because his reading partner, Maeve, growing progressively impatient with his timing, wondering when he was going to be through, finally announced her frustration with the accusation that she couldn't trust him. Lew, I learned subsequently, likes to be trusted. I told him I'd give him a call back but suggested during the next while that he work on why he is so keen on being trusted, and what he can bring to the next reading.

Maeve, on the other hand, is a keeper because of her insistence that men are not to be trusted for any reason sooner or later, she says, they will do something to bear this out, making the tracking of her an interesting project.

Matthew Bender also showed up. A pretty good actor, Matthew keeps suggesting a format for a group of short stories, thanks to the discovered connection between his name Bender and the fact of Odysseus of Iliad fame bearing translation as a man of many turns. We've contrived between the two of us, Bender and I, that as Odysseus returned home after the Trojan war, experiencing adventures along the way, Bender is returning to Santa Barbara after having been in a long run with Troilus and Cresida in an off-Broadway theater. Not quite a war for Bender although T & C has the Trojan War as a background element. Bender seems to attract rather than pursue younger women, somewhat of a frustration because of his interest in women in their late thirties to early forties. Naturally, Bender wonders why. I see him back home, being offered a job in which he wears a chicken suit as a part of a California ballot initiative for free range farm animals.

Cindy is a gifted actor who would rather be a fine art photographer.

Meryl is a teacher at a junior college who so far as she is aware harbors and broadcasts heterosexual instincts but who has been the object of romantic interest of a number of female psychotherapists.

Junior is an accepted member of a Cro-Magnon hunting clan only because his father, Curly, is an highly accomplished hunter. Junior wants to be a shaman, but shamans have not been invented yet. His best friend, Art, would rather paint animals on cave walls than hunt, and Rose, Art's girlfriend, wishes he'd get a better job.

It is true, I have been focused on two nonfiction book projects for some months now, but the consequences involve these guys and others like them, trying to get my attention. "What's with you and nonfiction?" Lessing will ask me from time to time, and Cindy frequently accuses me of denying my heritage, which could mean a lot of things, many of them quite true.

I'm fond of reminding friends that when I was a kid, we couldn't even afford imaginary friends, but the fact was and is that they have always been around, clamoring for attention, wanting to be listened to. Happy families may, pace Tolstoy, be all alike, but so are characters, alike in the sense that they have stories to tell and want to be heard.

Some Notes on Happy Endings

Happiness is like sleep; we expect a certain amount of each in our daily life, we become cranky, even depressed if either is withheld for too long. Being in either state contains no guarantee that the condition will endure: a dog barking, a cat jumping up on one's chest, a sudden unanticipated noise will cause a sleeping person to awaken; a refusal of any sort, a disconnected day of writing, a warning note from one's bank will cause a happy person to shift gears.

Often associated with achieving one's ambitions relating to security, romantic, and artistic adventure, happiness becomes more complex with age, often extending its protective umbrella to members of one's clan, one's friends, perhaps even one's students if students are part of the equation. Happiness ultimately becomes a potential warning for the equivalent of what has happened in recent years to New Orleans and Galveston. From so much happiness, an old, cynical warning advises, can only come tragedy. Tolstoy thought so little of happiness as a dramatic state that he lumped persons enjoying it as being all alike. You want story, he seemed to be saying, you look at the permutations within the ranks of the losers, those who were but no longer are happy. Camus, on the other hand, posited that Sisyphus, the doomed eternal rock star, was a happy man.

Happiness has many landing strips. Individuals wandering about the streets, their iPods delivering music or podcasts to their ears, seem to be on the verge of if not completely resident in a form of happiness. Runners splashing through rain-pelted streets appear happy just as bird watchers, spying an egret or heron seem happy enough. Diners in a range of restaurants often have the look of happiness through satiety of well-prepared victuals, sippers in coffee houses have the unglazed look of being at one with the universe, and Buddhist monks, caught up in prayerful chant, have the transcendent look of having moved beyond time, space, and causation. A fine artist or ceramicist has the unique pulse of happiness at the completion of a work. Before the tidal lapse into post-coital tristesse, lovers experience the pleasure of having unwrapped a glorious present. A chef, placing the garnish of parsley on a dish, has the ratification of inner warmth. Happiness arrives like an unexpected guest, with advance waves of timidity. Happiness sneaks in like a crafty burglar. Happiness comes with fanfare and hoopla. It leaves sometimes without leaving a thank-you note; it departs over the wrong tone in which one word was uttered. It nudges you in the ribs with an over-the-top reminder that you have never been this happy before nor are you likely to be again.

In some sects of Buddhism, it is seen with as much suspicion as the concept of God. Sometimes you are so happy as to realize the disparity between this moment and the entirety of your life to date. Happiness in some of its avatars is like the realization that your mate of choice is bi-polar or bi-sexual or both. You write to experience and define happiness, during the course of which you may or may not point to the happy ending as your pole star. Happiness informs what you read, whom you read, and when. If you believe you have experienced much happiness in your life to date, you may not have a sense of humor, confusing your cheerful nature with your optimism, which can and does produce laughter.

Like happiness, sleep is not always easily come by. You may ingest substances to lure it forth, may indulge yoga breathing, replay happy moments the way you reread favored poems or stories. Like happiness, sleep may come when you least expect it or do not wish it. Like happiness, sleep is an healthy alternative to boredom; each replenishes you, expands you. Coming forth from sessions of either is a steroidal entry into the day of choices, decisions, actions, behavior toward others. Telling someone you love, Sweet dreams, is urging them to experience happiness and sleep at the same time, a splendid twofer. Telling someone with whom you have issues, Sweet dreams, is attaching the rapier thrust of irony, sarcasm; the same words with one of the more malevolent intents in the tool kit.

One of the joys of sleep is the opportunity to send responsibility on a vacation. Things visualized in sleep that you allow yourself to remember become wish lists of intent. These intentions may be sought after without modification or they may serve as an index of behavior to be governed by your awareness of convention. Another joy of sleep is to use it as a vehicle to pursue stories, scenarios of your creation, journeys to be taken without the frustrating delays at airports, where baggage and happiness are rifled, often misdirected.

Like sleep, happiness has some kind of ending. Happiness with other humans and with animals has endings. Sleep allows us the opportunity to revisit some of our endings, to recall the nuances of those endings, to prise out of those nuances an index of how, at this remove, we still care.

As writers, we take a daily vote on how happy our endings will be and what efforts will be necessary to make them plausible.

The Francisco Connection

My earlier post about animal friends, past and present, had greater consequences than I anticipated.

Sure, I had the time to think in order and detail about the warmth and comfort and sense of connectedness one experiences when riffling through the deck of friends. It also enhanced the muscle memory that goes with being a friend to those animals and humans whose life touches my own. Not to forget the sense of late summer holiday, the pre-Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas celebration that comes from the cyber recollections of others about their splendid friendships. Liz reminds me of her Jack and the connection she has forged with my Sally (whom I', sure considers herself to have initiated the connection with Liz). John Eaton offers up some pals in ways that make me wish I could have known them. Nor do I forget the lovely portrait Pod posted of his antipodean pal, Portia. It is nice to be connected by the tissue of pleasure at friends having good, close friends.

To use the legal parlance seen in some writs and decisions, Comes before us now one Francisco, who wonders if Sam, the splendid short-hair who came to visit me when I lived in the Hollywood Hills, probably in walking distance from where fictional LAPD detective Harry Bosh lives. Francisco straightforwardly asks if Sam=Hipshot?

It took a few moments for the penny to drop (an expression that surely betrays my age): Sam was Sam, I said almost impatiently. Hipshot, ah, Hipshot was a character in a comic strip, Rick O'Shay, set in the indeterminate old West. Tall, tow-headed Rick was the sheriff, Hipshot was a gun fighter, a pretty cool character who had his own, individualized code.

One day, there appeared in my apartment a smallish, gray long-hair, an agreeable, fluffy ball of mischief who enjoyed playing more than eating and whom Sam seemed content to admit. Somehow this young visitor became called Hipshot. At first it was thought that Hipshot was a boy, and as I recall the sequence of events, this assumption held for quite some time before Hipshot grew visibly rounder, disappeared for a time, then appeared one day with a tiny kitten in her mouth, which she deposited on the carpet, disappeared for a time, returned with another wriggly kit, and disappeared again. Before she returned, there was an insistent ringing of the buzzer on my front door, heralding the arrival of a harried-looking woman neighbor, who described a cat who she called Nasturtium, a cat who in all probability was Hipshot.

With the news that Hipshot was Nasturtium and a mother, that splendid acquaintance was gone from my sight line, apparently fated to undergo some surgery that would put an end to her maternal instincts.

I am talking about some serious years having past since the advent and departure of Hipshot, including a move from the Hollywood Hills to the city of my birth, Santa Monica, a momentous shift in career from working with Arnold H. Kegel, M.D., whose last name informed a series of exercises, to running a California-based publisher to running an LA office for a NY-based publisher, and then a migration to Santa Barbara, where the editorial toe was thrust into the waters of academic and scholarly publishing, only to be tempted by another New York venture.

From the mists of those years and my developing connection with The University, an institution even funnier than Book Publishing, emerges Francisco to ask if Sam were Hipshot.

No. As I said earlier, Sam was Sam, and an effectively brilliant Sam at that. And Hipshot was Hipshot until he became Nasturtium.

Perhaps we will see how the Francisco connection plays out. On the other hand, Tolstoy deliberately introduced fascinating characters and events into his novels, notably War and Peace, only to completely abandon further mention of them because, as he put it, "Life is like that."