What's Elusive

"The Unicorn"
Los Angeles Metro Bus

Here's the good thing. My old friend Bill Martin has this new show out -- a comedy on Thursday nights called "The Unicorn." I went to UNC with Bill, and he is still the sweet, incredibly funny man I knew more than thirty years ago. Ya'll should watch his show because it's also sweet and very, very funny and we all need funny, right?

Here's the bad thing. I need a lot of funny these days. I am not going to mince words. There's a lot of shit going down in these parts -- most of it unbloggable. I guess I am going to mince words. There's a tremendous amount of hate and rage roiling around me personally. I need all your positive juju and miracle-making, please. The other night I got into my car at 10:30 at night and drove all the way to Venice Beach in my robe and nightgown. I screamed in the car and then listened to Van Morrison sing "And It Stoned Me." I listened to Bob Marley sing "No Woman No Cry." Sophie's fine. The Brothers are good. I am not fine or good. I am digging deep to find my way back to the calm and peace that I know is somewhere within, still.

I love this poem:

Before Winter by Kwame Davis

Serial Killers and Box Lacrosse

Henry had his first box lacrosse game of the season this afternoon. That's him right there in the middle. Whew. Box lacrosse is scary to watch. I wasn't made for watching rough sports and wonder what sort of karma I'm enacting (is that what you say?) as not a single one of my children really likes to read. Honestly, I dreamed of one day being a sort of Marmie, sharing my favorite books with my brood. Instead, I find myself standing on the highest bleacher in a hockey rink, watching my boy slam himself into walls and others into the ground, all while running and waving a stick with a really hard, small ball. While the other parents yell and cheer and catcall the ref, I wince at every thud. My favorite part of the game is when it's over, and my beautiful boy lopes toward me in his nonchalant way, and I wonder whether everyone, just everyone, wonders who that boy is -- my boy.

Otherwise, I'm in a bit of a funk. I did go back to kundalini yoga this week and am determined to get back into it, get in some kind of physical shape and lose some weight. Enough is enough, right? I have an amazing new ghostwriting job that will keep me busy over the next three months, I'm on a mission to find an agent for my manuscript that I finished at Hedgebrook, and all three children will be at school next week for the first time in nearly two years! Oliver is going to high school, so we're taking a break from homeschooling. We're going to see how it goes as we've found a school that we believe fits him very well. I need to work and will be able to do so, now, every school day. I am continuing my Books & Bakes salon Fridays each month, so if you're in Los Angeles and want to come, please let me know. This month we read J. Ryan Stradal's Kitchens of the Great Midwest. It's an entertaining novel by a local writer that got some nice reviews, and it has a lot of inspiring food so I'm looking forward to preparing a great meal and facilitating excellent conversation.

Despite my aversion to violent sport, I'm actually on a serial killer bent. This is unusual for me (I did not like any of those Swedish books or the HBO series), so heads up. I just finished binge-watching an English miniseries with Gillian Anderson called The Fall. Despite it being about a serial killer with the usual gruesome attacks against females, the show has some incredible acting in it, great writing and complex characters. I also just started reading Jennifer Pashley's novel The Scamp, which is described as "an intense, riveting sage of .... a girl's determination to take control." I think there's a serial killer in it as well, and while I wouldn't ordinarily read this genre, I had the great good fortune to spend some time with Jennifer last night after she read from her book at a local independent bookstore last night. She's a good friend of a very good friend of mine, the writer Shanna Mahin (who wrote the hilarious romp of a novel  Oh! You Pretty Things earlier this year), so I took the recommendation seriously, the writing is terrific, and I literally can't put the book down.

Well, that was a rambler of a Saturday post. I hope you have a lovely long weekend. Tell me all about it.

On Your Bedside Table

I had a book buying bonanza the other day with a forgotten-about Amazon giftcard. Last night, I poured myself a cold beer in a frozen mug and lay on my bed with books and magazines all around me. I then proceeded to watch three episodes in a row of the new season of Call the Midwife. Have ya'll watched that show? It's fantastic -- and the perfect antidote to a day spent in Placentia as well as my recent binge of the last season of House of Cards which, though compelling, is repellent enough that I felt almost dirty when I finished it. After Call the Midwife, I read some more of Life After Life (which I'm still enjoying, overjoyed to learn that I can indeed get through a gigantic novel).

So here's what's on my bedside table, along with the beer:

Begley's new biography of John Updike, Updike (I'm not a big biography reader -- I think the last one I read was probably about the poet Anne Sexton --  but am looking forward to this one)

Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell (an uncharacteristic YA purchase -- I generally can't abide YA -- that I made on the recommendation of one of my favorite bloggers, The Diamond in the Window)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez' short stories Strange Pilgrims (that I bought on the recommendation of another amazing blogger who is also a butcher.   Stay tuned, because I have An Idea that has to do with a salon and food and cake and books and me as a moderator who makes a bit of money).

Chinesy: The New Way to Read Chinese by Shaolan (Have I ever told you that I studied Chinese for two years in college? At the time, I had the insane idea that I would learn the language and read the poetry of Tu Fu and Li Po. HA! HA! HA! I learned about four hundred characters and have since  forgotten them. In fact, the only thing I remember is the expression Ni hao ma? I don't think I've ever told you, either, that I got myself a job teaching English in Taiwan for the year after I graduated but was convinced by The Boy I Loved to blow that off and stay in Chapel Hill while he finished his master's degree. HA! HA! HA! Some of you know how that all turned out!).

Yes, we all have pasts, don't we?

Anywho.

Reader, what is on your bedside table, including drinking beverages?

I'm off to Seattle this afternoon, where I'll be meeting some new people and attending the Caregifted benefit on Friday night. Word is that Molly Ringwald will be singing jazz and the great poet Robert Pinsky attending. Heather McHugh, the Master of Ceremonies, Saint of Caregiver Recognition and Poet is responsible for this beautiful event, and I'm very excited to be a part of it! If you haven't already, please visit the Caregifted website and look around. There's a wonderful video, photos, testimonials and even a place to donate, if you're so inclined. I look back on my week in Victoria, a grant from Caregifted, and realize, yet again, that what I received was literally life-changing.

On another note, are ya'll watching the second season of House of Cards? No sooner had Downton Abbey finished then I opened up my Netflix and watched the first episode. I won't type any spoilers here, but what happened churned my stomach. I was into the first season, and have just now finished the second and third episodes, but I'm wondering why exactly I'm watching such vile people. I've never been a big fan of Kevin Spacey, although I concede he's an incredible actor, and the relationship between him and his scary ice-queen wife, played by Robin Wright, is something to behold. But, it's just gross -- the whole thing -- and at the same time sort of boring, the way perversity is sometimes boring.

Stupid Meditation on Peace

BY ROBERT PINSKY

        “He does not come to coo.”
                    —Gerard Manley Hopkins

Insomniac monkey-mind ponders the Dove,

Symbol not only of Peace but sexual

Love, the couple nestled and brooding.

After coupling, the human animal needs

The woman safe for nine months and more.

But the man after his turbulent minute or two

Is expendable. Usefully rash, reckless

For defense, in his void of redundancy

Willing to death and destruction.

Monkey-mind envies the male Dove

Who equally with the female secretes

Pigeon milk for the young from his throat.

For peace, send all human males between

Fourteen and twenty-five to school

On the Moon, or better yet Mars.

But women too are capable of Unpeace,

Yes, and we older men too, venom-throats.

Here’s a great comic who says on our journey

We choose one of two tributaries: the River

Of Peace, or the River of Productivity.

The current of Art he says runs not between

Banks with birdsong in the fragrant shadows—

No, an artist must follow the stinks and rapids

Of the branch that drives the millstones and dynamos.

Is peace merely a vacuum, the negative

Of creation, or the absence of war?

The teaching says Peace is a positive energy.

Still something in me resists that sweet milk,

My mind resembles my restless, inferior cousin

Who fires his shit in handfuls from his cage.

(lifted from the Poetry Foundation page)

The Mind of Summer

Chinatown, Victoria, British Columbia

Maybe it's the week of rest and relaxation, now a sort of distant thing but for the quiet within. Maybe it's the plunging back in, the laundry, the late mornings, sleeping in, the shouts of summer, the brooding, the heavy blanket of relationship. Or maybe it's the five thousand, six hundred and eighty-six episodes of Brothers and Sisters that I've watched on my Kindle Fire.  I'm reading The Middle Passage, a slim book written by a Swiss Jungian analyst. Maybe it's the subtitle of the book, From Misery to Meaning in Midlife. In any case, I'm hard put to write anything at all.

Requiem for a Television

Pop Pop surprised us with the purchase of this flat-screen television:

Rest in peace, 1996 behemoth television that lived with us in New York City, traveled across the country and sat in our living room for so many years. You served us well.

We're just spoiled rotten.