Impatience

If ever there were an emotion ready tailored for you, its shoulders allowed for, its waist pinched in, it's right-off-the-rack fit assured, that emotion is impatience.  It is a certainty for you that things do not come soon enough, don't last long enough.  Even though it has been a good five years since you were summoned for jury duty, that call has come too soon and you can't wait to have it behind you.

Have you covered the entire spectrum, hinted at the impatience to get through with all unpleasant things, the absolute lack of respect for the way the universe is playing out its drama?  Not to your direction, it isn't, thus you do the next best thing to overrule your impatience, you write, you make things up or,if you are of a mind, down.

What after all is story but a bundle of events concocted to show a disparate group of individuals, most of whom you invented on the spot, having cast them before you got to learn their quirkiness, their own insistence on behavior even more quirky and notional than individuals you know in reality.  You borrow here and there from persons you know in reality, but these individuals you create are not content.  As Pinocchio wished to become a real boy, your characters wish to become real persons which means you either have to put up with them or send them packing.

The same obtains with your stories, wanting to--needing to seem real in order to give you the energy to continue your task of rearranging what you consider to be the dramatic furniture to be more to your liking.  The source of the energy, in fact the cause of the energy is impatience.

Well and good that you believe you are optimistic, that you talk yourself out of black moods and funks, often by reminding yourself that it was you who got yourself into these black moods and funks in the first place.  Thus you are impatient with yourself, first for the invention of the scenarios of gloom and disaster, then the counterweight of the need to invent happier turns of event, plans that will send you forth as you were sent forth to school as a younger person, secure in the knowledge that there was at least one substantial sandwich in your lunch bag and one more idiosyncratic sandwich such as peanut butter and jam or smoked salmon, or one of your more favored yet,slabs of cold meatloaf.  Even such lunch bags could not get you through the horrors of junior high school with complete insouciance.  Realities of the sort that is junior high school must sometimes be endured until they are over, increasing your inner roil of impatience.

It pleases you to be so focused on a new project that you are impatient to get to it, each day in its presence much reminding you of the early stages of romance in the works, the times where you are finding out things about the project and it is finding out things about you, which comes down to the calculus of how much of you are you going to put into it this time, how much are you going to share, and how vulnerable will this make you.

One thing you have learned that is worth keeping:  Do not take up with a project for the sake of something to do, nor however impatient you might be while waiting for the project to come along, take one from a sense of desperation.  You will know her when you you find her beginning to return your steady eye contact.  She will have the power to break your heart.  And you will be impatient to know her better, trying with all your skills to resist showing off for her.

Trying.

Things

 Small booklets, pamphlets, so-called 'zines, and similar ventures of the smallish book have always fascinated you.  Even now, within reach on your desk are three such items, one a small, two-and-a-quarter-inch by four inch note pad containing sixty-four pages on which to write things, another being two-and-a-half by three inches, a short tale by Beatrix Potter called The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit,and the most recent addition to your collection, an English publication three-and-an-eight inches by four and three-quarters inches, quite thick with over 240 pages.  This last one is called Understanding Dreams.  You found it in the trash bin at the post office, pounced upon it by no means because you were eager to discover what your dreams mean.  You already have a pretty good idea what they mean; you were aware of having lost your considerable collection of small publications--but not your collection of Haledman-Julius Little Blue Books--during the misadventure of your move from Hot Springs Road to your current home.  You wished to rebuild, driven by some quixotic dream of publishing small pocket- and purse-sized booklets, venturing so far as to have lists of titles and topics you'd publish.  Never mind how you'd market them or even let the world know they were available; that would come later.

Part of your fondness for the more conventional size of books as well as these miniatures is your romantic notion that readers want to have things explained to them; people want to know what things mean, even such abstract things as love, faith, hope, happiness, beauty.  In some ways, the format for the dream book is similar to the non-fiction project you have placed with a publisher and are awaiting.  People want to know what everything means.  They would also like some assurances that their interpretations of what things mean is not radical in departure from what other individuals think the same things mean.

And yet, you do wish to extend and express the belief and hope that there are fantastic explanations available that many individuals have yet to discover.  You in fact see yourself as some sort of Virgil, leading tourists through not Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise so much as through yesterday, today, and tomorrow, with no thought that there is a relationship between yesterday, today, and tomorrow with Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.  You in fact do not subscribe to Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.  You know that will disappoint any number of readers who were more or less preparing themselves to spend an eternity in Paradise, but in mitigation, it could easily please individuals who'd been concerned about the possibilities of Hell.  Actually, Hell would be an eternal plane trip with nothing to read but Tom Clancy, but that is another matter.

The matter here, in as succinct terms as possible, is to celebrate the fact of things having meanings.  You do not, for instance, have much use for pencils, nor have you for some time, but one of the things you keep is a small pencil sharpener in the shape of an upright typewriter, a token gift given you thirty or more years ago on your birthday by a group of students.  When you are long gone, such a token, if found by an archaeologist, will be interpreted as a totem from the pre-computer era, its inherent sentimental value to you gone with your own departure.

You are fond of saying one robin does not make a spring; you could well have said one pencil sharpener does not make a meaning.  Instead, you say this:  We give names to things, identity, description; we impart sentiment to persons, places, and things.  Even as you write this, you are moved to the cusp of tears by an email exchange with your youngest niece in which she--remarkable person that she is--did not learn the culinary secrets from her late mother (and your late sister) of the two things your sister sent you for your birthdays that invariably brought joy to you.  Thus an entire family dynamic expressed in terms of what things meant.  Your youngest niece extended the trope further by bringing her older sister into the picture, describing how yet other things your sister made for her oldest daughter affected her being, and now, of course, it spreads to you.

This is a panegyric to collecting things, not just anything but things you care about, things of quality and meaning so that looking at them, using them, caring for them in valuable ways defines you to yourself, reminds you of the complexities of being alive and the need to identify the worlds within and without, describing as you go, leaving identification marks on your landscape, noting down incidents so they may find their ways into pamphlets, booklets, books, scrolls, and, yes, electronic reading devices, catalogued with the same kinds of affection by which they were noticed and collected in the first place.

Work

Of all the onerous work-related tasks you've been required to perform, the simple act of cleaning out some restaurant cooking vessels stands out as the worst, not only because the vessels needed to be cleaned of months old chicken remains but because those remains reeked with such intensity.

More often than not,the concept of hard work was related to and in fact informed by the slow passage of time while it was being done.  It was one thing to do lifting, straining, pushing or, on a more non-physical level tasks that seemed to require mindless attention to details such that no one would notice them.  You did not object to the physicality so much as your sense that you were entering a competition with Sisyphus.

No need,then, to fill in the details of an equation where such elements as purpose and interest trump output of effort.  No need to delve into discussions of karma yoga, works as worship, if you will, or work as an offering.  

Think instead of the most difficult work you've ever had, which is writing.  Think how, its difficulties to the side, you are pained to be away from it.  The experience with those tall stock pots called in restaurant lingo bain Marie (literally bath for Marie) altered your relationship to such chicken dishes as coq au vin, and pollo en mole, both of which you had fondness toward.  The experiences with the difficulties associated with writing may have had effect on your feelings about bad writing, particularly your own, but nevertheless present in your editorial activities.  

And yet.  Yet there is the sense of awareness that this activity is worth the effort; this activity is the one activity that might be onerous but isn't; this activity, however many difficulties reside within it, is not really work so much as it is a portal to another sense of being and awareness wherein you stand for some precious few moments a chance against the events of ongoing reality.

A chum of yours from early in your Santa Barbara tenure was William Campbell Gault (1910-1995), a prolific writer of mysteries and adventure stories for young readers.  In addition to being a client of a literary agent you knew well from your own publishing days, Gault had appeared in the pages of Black Mask, the quintessential mystery pulp.  

You were pleased to have been the instrument of his having connected with the late Sara Freed, editor at Walker, a publisher of a nice mystery line.  The thing about Gault you remember to this day is his emphatic statement, "I'd rather be the world's worst writer than a good anything else."  Happy man, Bill Gault.

Those sentiments of his are not far apart from the relationship you have forged with it.  In some serious ways, there is for you as a man, an analog between caring so much for writing and being attracted time and again to women who are smarter than you.  There is the surprise and adventure of something to be learned in either circumstance.   

"It," "This," and "That"

 We have at least this much in common:  We all remind someone else of someone else.

You, for your part in this vast existential drama, remind a rather pleasant lady who frequents your favored place for getting coffee of her late father.  She has brought her husband to confirm the similarity, then her daughter.

Not that long past, you reminded a customer at another coffee venue of an actor.  More recent still, you reminded a man of a former victim.  He approached you in the rest room of the restaurant he manages, informing you that he completely understood why, moments earlier, you'd politely informed him he'd not known you from "back in New York."  It is not that you do not know people from New York, rather that you do not know so many from New York that you would not recognize one here,three thousand and some miles away.  With the exception of some family, whom you'd recognize with ease, and a few casual, non-publishing-related friends, say academics, who live in or Near New York, the only others are acquaintances from your days of formal connection with publishing.  This man, a bit more than your size, had about him a more intensely guarded and watchful demeanor than you are used to among your circle of friends and acquaintances.

"I just want you to know," the man persisted, "that I completely understand why you didn't let on out there."  He cocked his head towards the public interior of the restaurant, where you were with two others.

"I didn't let on because there was nothing for me to let on.  You really do have me confused with someone else."

"It couldn'ta,"  he insisted, "been pleasant for you."

You opened your hands, as though releasing pigeons.  "It wasn't me."

"Nothing personal, understand?  I had nothing personal going there.  I hardly knew you, except you were pointed out to me.  You get me?  It was something I was paid to do.  I'd get those jobs because I was, you know, good at it.  Fast and hard."

He saw he was getting nowhere with you.  Before you danced around him to leave the room, he said, "No offense, yeah?  And I don't do that work any more, okay."

There was a bit of a problem when it came time to get the check for the meal you and your friends had moderately enjoyed.  The waiter told you your money was no good here, indicating you could leave a tip for the service, if you wished, but that was entirely up to you.

Even should you choose the life of a hermit, the "it" or "that" of interpretation for your doing so is not entirely up to you; "they" will bring into the game interpretations of their own, adding adjectives and adverbs to you and your behavior you might never have considered much less employed.

"It" is a curious game; "it" could be called memoir, in which one of "them" could recall an incident with you.  But was it really you?  It could also be called history, and all you'd have to do to see the irony in that would be to read one of the many histories of the U.S. Civil War written by a scholar from the north and another from the south to give you a relative placement of the meaning of history.  "It" could also be a novel or short story.  How would "they" respond to that, and how would "they" see you?

Nostalgia

When a booklength project is taken on for publication, you feel pleased with yourself because of the trinity of individuals happy with the project, you, of course, your literary agent, and the editor who has expressed enthusiasm for the project by offering to publish it.  You know there is more to the picture, that you are by no means finished with the project.  Forces involving taste, vision, expectation, and pure randomness also will have things to say and do where the project is related.

You felt the cosmic dice beginning to roll when the editor called to speak with you, express her enthusiasm for what you had done.  Watch out.  Indeed.  Her vision of the project--in this case a nonfiction project--was somewhat more grand than yours; she saw it as appropriate for two segments of readers, a situation one might call a crossover.  As you listened to her arguments for this conflation of reading public, you began to translate the downstream effects.  No need to worry, she'd have done that for you had you not articulated the implications.

The dice were bouncing off the green felt bumper when she told you how happy she was with the six hundred twenty page manuscript.  "Your vision calls for a greater reflection of the dual readership, which means a different focus, all within the same word length,"  you said.

"That sums it up,"  she said.

You were in large measure on time, the final seventy pages going in yesterday, late afternoon.  Early indications beyond your own belief that you'd made the necessary changes seemed to have been positive, allowing you the sense of feeling like a thirsty plant, wanting the assurance of water, perhaps sunlight, perhaps even a bit of other nourishment.

Even when you were working on projects where you were not so close to the degree of investment you feel with this one, there were still those moments that remind you of being panhandled with some vigor for spare change, that sense of someone seeing one more thing that could be done, the dread that if could well be you who saw and needed the one last thing to be done.

Why should there be any certainty where producing written material is concerned?  Simple answer:  There shouldn't be.  More complex answer:  Why should there ever be certainty?

Parts of such ventures are games.  Where ever you look, individuals appear who enjoy games.  Some games involve balls or perhaps pucks or weights, but they are still games with rules for performance and for scoring.  They have time limits, just as life has a time limit.  They have consequences to any number of individuals who are mere observers of results and probabilities.

You did not finish the celebratory coffee you ordered earlier nor the frothy draft beer you ordered still later, nor the small, hand-crafted pizza you ordered even later.  You were in some ways going through motions, waiting for the other shoe--any other shoe--to drop.

Music, the company of friends, lazing with Sally, and reading are portions of your equivalent of watering the neglected plant.  Deep within your stash of compact disks was a remastered reedition of"Red Garland's Piano," a satisfying venture into the world of blues and pre-bebop, leading to Garland's being yanked by Miles Davis into one of the most significant groups modern jazz has known.  There is such energy in the music and its chromatic flight of inventiveness, reminding you of textures, braids of connective tissue, evidences of life all about, evoking in you the feelings of nostalgia that send shivers of enjoyment along your synapses.

You first had the CD back in the late '50s, when it was a vinyl 331/3, drawn into the sounds of the block chords, sharp ninths, somewhere between the sounds of tinkling crystal and laughter, intimate and complex in its uniqueness.  You learned of Garland and much of his repertoire from that album, listening to it over and over, thinking how splendid it would be to have your own voice so recognizable, so easy to fit in with shorter narratives as well as the longer ones.

Listening now, particularly to track number one, makes you aware how important the feelings of nostalgia are to you, and how, all this time later, you seek to impart it into your own work with that same suspenseful bass line Garland brings up through his left hand.

Nostalgia is the container that is difficult to fill; thinking back on past moments of significance, you can manage with ease to bring one more vision, one more thing to the table.

Process.2

There is always another way to describe a process.  Your own description  of things observed, their how and why,their primal twitches and reflexes, help you ease your way into the deeper history of how you came to see them in the first place.

Often you were introduced to a process as a part of what is considered basic information.  Things and persons were provided as recruits in an army might be provided a uniform.  One field jacket.  One shirt. One pair pants.  Etc.  Thus you were exposed to and allowed yourself to grow into a place of mild acceptance, but a growing irritation smoldering under the surface.  There were times when you thought it no doubt had to do with girls, as in your own hormonal nudges that caused you to look then be attracted, then act.  But even then, naive as you were, this did not seem right, nor did the added smolder of irritation as it grew into anger, until you more or less came awake to the fact that girls and hormones were one thing, your anger another; they were not to be conflated.  They did not have to be conflated; your parental role models, not always easy for you to read, were not distractions that caused you to conflate your anger with the anger you were beginning to see among others, where men believed it was anyone's fault where the anger came from in the first place, then took it out on the closest target, which often happened to be a woman.

You were through all of that pretty fast, but you were still angry at something, it mounting until it became anger at nearly everything.  Later in the game, you began to recognize you were angry at the information you were presented as absolute, indisputable fact, angrier still at yourself for having bought into it for so long.  An occasional flare-up still comes your way; you wonder, will you ever get free of it?  It is probable you won't, but as Huck said, that ain't no matter, at least not so long as you keep trying to stop taking every explanation of process as some incontrovertible gospel, without so much as a flicker of challenge from you.  Is it, you wonder, possible to work your way into being a cynic?  At least a questioner, right?

Becoming the kind of writer of your upward spiral of dreams presents to you, you recognize there is a kind of monasticism about it that has nothing to do with hormones or girls or close relationships so much as it does being with yourself on a long project and running through the gamut of intimacy with it while attempting to maintain a relationship of intimacy with yourself.

Because you live in a city that by relative size is small, you see in your daily rounds individuals who have become familiar to you and you to them.  I know who you are, a complete stranger tells you at about noon today, as you sit in one of your favored coffee locales, sipping latte while trying to work out a pesky paragraph relative to your revision project.  You are tempted to tell this individual that you congratulate him for knowing you because you do not always know who you are.  But at the last minute, you forebear, thinking your response, intended as an irony, may slip over the boundary from irony into that suspect country called sarcasm.  Then what?  You'd have bewildered someone who was trying to be nice, show appreciation, that's what.

It helps that you know where a major source of your angry sentiments had their origins, not by any means from your family of origin but rather your education of origin and your responses to it, and how it distracted and diverted you.  What you have now is scarcely of the intensity of your previous anger, more an impatience with the relatively large amounts of things to be learned and the smaller amounts of time in which to learn them.

At least you will not have the institutional targets at which to direct your impatience and cynical eye; you will have your lurching, grasping self.

Table d'ho ho ho

Quite without intention, a thirty-inch by forty-four-inch table has become a revelation both of serendipity and need for you.  To begin, it did not start out in life as a table.  You have no idea what it was intended for and now, there is no way for you to find out.  For some years before you moved from Danielson Road to Hot Springs Road, it began achieving its identity by serving as a coffee table adjacent a long-gone sofa.  Before that, before it came into the more active centers of your memory, it was merely "around," which is to say not in immediate use, a thick slab of redwood you connect with having had origins further up the coast at BigSur.  Somehow, a set of legs, about one foot high, came into your possession, probably from the so-called King's chair your father rescued from the time of his auctioning off the assets of the famed Pasadena Playhouse.  Imagine yourself sitting in this chair, he chided, being any Shakespearean king you chose.

As it so happens, the redwood slab fit well on the legs, its first step toward tablehood.  Somehow, it acquired a thorough coating of black wax shoe polish, imparting a grainy gravitas, to which even more wax was applied, giving it now a dignity.  It has survived the move from Hot Springs to here, residing against what is more or less the west wall, under three windows facing out on a garden.  On this table are arranged in some semblance of neatness a combination tape deck, CD player, FM radio, two speakers, a pre-Columbian terra cotta doll, a stack of books ranging from late Victorian fiction to contemporary, a Hopi kachina doll with an arm needing repair, a Miwok basket filled with potsherds from the Second Hopi Mesa, a stack of things published in my undergraduate days, wanting placement in the nearby bookshelf, a stack of literary journals, another pile of books, and a small bag of dog snacks for Sally.

If this arrangement does not speak to the concept of the polymath, little else does.  Thanks to the weekly ministrations of Lupe, the maid, this table, which for all its disarray, does not appear cluttered, is the most chaotic aspect of the apartment; it is also a monument to polymathism which, you maintain, is the entry ticket a person needs for admission into the tent of the writer.  You acquired the pre-Columbian doll because you thought it beautiful.  Could you write about it?  No. but you'd know a number of sources to consult so that you could write about it.  Don't get you started about Hopi kachinas because you not only did publish about them, some unscrupulous sort out there on the internet has pulled a number of the pieces from a magazine and is offering them for sale for something like twenty-five dollars.  Do you stand to make anything from the transaction?  No; it is the only publication of yours you know of that you hope does not sell.  But that is another matter.

The matter at hand, thanks to the table that did not start out to be a table is that the writer who did not start out to be a polymath needs to become one; you need to pursue your way toward becoming one, every writer needs to open up to the lure of the curiosity of every and all things.

This goes well beyond the mis en scene of a clutter-free desk; this goes to the forgotten element in the writer's tool kit, every bit as vital as enthusiasm.  Curiosity.  Get there.  Once you think you know, you're screwed.