Hello Again

Hello Beauties,
Well, it's been two days since Xmas, a day I look forward to all year (this is a sort of hard to explain quirk of mine, since I hate Christianity and sort of all religion so much, but I seriously LOVE December) and nothing much has changed but the wonderful red Minnetonka moccasins and Gryffindor sweater I'm wearing to work today.  I do feel bummed that I don't keep up  with my blog, and also that I don't really write anymore these days.  Also, I've been very lonely.  I have a wonderful son and a great husband and they are my best friends, but seriously, I'm so goddamn lonely anyway.  Maybe I will feel less lonely if I get busy on my blog again.  I don't have many new ideas or fictions to share right now though so I'm going to serialize my novella Yesteryou, to get me back in the swing of things, and maybe to get discovered (chuckle times infinity).  I started to serialize it a couple years ago and in fact the below chapter first appeared on this blog in November 2009 (with a little introduction about the man I wrote it for, my wonderful dead friend Bill Tunilla) but after that, I only serialized chapter 2 before getting discouraged by not getting more than 1 comment.  But I want to give it another shot, not as a way to elicit comments this time, but just as something for me to do to keep a hand in.  So without further adieu, here is the first chapter of Yesteryou. 

1.

Imagine the sun beating down on you, on a day in the year in which you feel the most youthful you will ever feel. There is a breeze. You extend your bent arms out a little further along the arms of the porch rocking chair so you can feel the jewels of sweat that have been forming slow as a drugged breath along the curves of the caves of your armpits, every inch of you radiating unshakable confidence, for once. It is 1956, George. Shhh. You are not dead yet, you are still alive and I am still just the ephemeral glow surrounding fireflies or the particles of dust that drift visible across shafts of sunlight through the curtains on a Sunday afternoon, I am not yet born. This is one of your birthdays. This is the day on which you feel your absolute youngest. Does it feel good? Yes, of course, but not too much better than later birthdays on which you will feel old. No better, really, than being 45, when it is painful to walk but you are gifted with love.

George was born in 1943. He was 25 when "Yesteryou," a song sung by Stevie Wonder, was out and being played on radios. This was his all-time favorite song -- for the most part he didn't notice music, though he was often mistaken for a music-lover. But he loved the way this song captured the melancholic, sunsetty feeling of nostalgia. There's a part where the lyrics ask: "Where did it go, that yester glow? When we could feel the wheel of life turn our way?" When someone asks a question like that, it sounds like they are scared, of the way time moves and the way it feels to get older, and this was the anxious way George felt about the passing of time as well, the pure inevitability of time. But he also appreciated the song for itself, for the way it sounded. Like I say, there's something of the sun in that song. The beauty of it agitated him, even, made him ache for an omnipotent knowledge of how other people felt about the passing of days.

When he was a child, he and his family moved from a mostly black suburb of Connecticut to a mostly black suburb of Los Angeles, called Inglewood. He would remain in Inglewood several years into his adult life, before settling in a different sort of Los Angeles suburb, a place called Pasadena, where he would eventually open a used bookstore that would be like heaven to spend his afternoons in, friends and customers drifting in and out all day long, and only one robbery in all the years the store was there.

On this one birthday of his childhood, the day he feels the youngest he will ever feel, he has a broad, bespectacled, homely face, and he always will.

Beth, on the other hand, was born sleek and slender and night-visioned and falsely inviolable-seeming as a young tomcat. That might have been the most power Beth ever had, sadly -- when she was a beautiful baby girl.

loneliness

Easter Memories

I lived with my dad and stepmom, and stayed with my mom at her apartment on the weekends.  She is a Lutheran now but when I was growing up she was an ex-catholic, and I’d been an atheist since sixth grade, when I signed off forever with one final, angry goodbye prayer; nonetheless, we always made a big deal of Easter.  I think that a lot of non-Christians, including myself, celebrate Christmas despite the fact that it’s a Christian holiday, and who can blame us? - in December, the city looks the way I'd have it year-round if I were God, with little lights like glowing, stationary fairies outlining rooflines and tangled in branches.  But Easter's theme of martyrdom is palpable and a drag, and the decorations are all in muted pastel.

 

By the time I was eleven or so, Easter and the Fourth of July were two of my least favorite days, because I’d been on a kids-free vacation from school by the time each of those holidays rolled around, and therefore was incredibly lonely by then, and it seemed sad to enjoy all the bells and whistles of either of those days with just me and my drunk mom and nobody else around us.  

For Easter she put on solitary easter egg hunts for me in the front yard and for the Fourth of July we walked down to the freeway overpass where we could see the fireworks show coming from the Rose Bowl.  Our Easter celebration feels particularly bizarre because we did it until I was at least fifteen, and I think I may have actually been eighteen and about to leave for college in a few months on our last Easter Egg Hunt.  It seems so weird to me that we still went through it all when I was a sullen teenager, still dyed Easter eggs and then mom still hid them, along with a lot of candy and little toys, while I waited inside, and then she sat on the front porch and took pictures of me looking for the eggs.  It seems like a huge example of neither of us knowing what normal behavior is.  This morning I was just remembering a particularly depressing Easter.  Her apartment was down the street from a really cool record store, the record store where I bought most of the Riot Grrrl and Sonic Youth records I listened to so much in High School, when I wasn’t acting out the rituals of an over-sized only child on holidays.  One Easter when I was in my late teens and still doing the Easter Egg Hunt, these two indie teenagers were walking past the front yard on the way to the record store and one of them asked me, “Aren’t you a little old for that?”   That's one of those things you'd expect to see on a sitcom, like something you'd watch just once because it was only sort of funny and there was something depressing about the premise, only slightly but enough to make you wish you'd changed the channel.

born lazy

whenever i've had a lot of free time on my hands, like months of unemployment or a job where there were was no work for me to do, it'd always seem ideal for me to take the opportunity to work on projects, like a short story or something, but instead the lack of human contact and the fact of being under-busy sort of puts my mind to sleep, and when i get and act on a lot of my creative impulses is when a job overworks me a little bit and i have to sneak some time during lunch break to scribble down a chapter or something.  i think it's the mental stimulation of being stressed out and challenged by the mundane shit that ends up challenging me at the clerical jobs i end up at, like reteaching myself Excel formulas in a hurry for a spreadsheet someone's waiting for, etc.  anyway, this is what i'm thinking about while i contemplate the day ahead ... sort of waiting for the darling baby to fall asleep for awhile so i can get the housework done and then what will i do with the rest of the day?

Here's a song, one of my favorite songs, that sounds like how i feel this morning.

Late Night, Maudlin Street

shout out

my favorite new blog:

http://brasstackslosangeles.blogspot.com/

Beautiful Dreamer -- amazing youtube videos

I was getting into the habit of finding really good videos on Youtube to to post on FB everyday for awhile.  These are REALLY good videos (to my taste) -- just amazing performances of my favorite songs.  but I never got anyone to really view them on FB, which is reasonable because it's more a website for checking in and spending a few minutes.  anyway I'm posting these videos on here, without further ado.  Enjoy.  love robin

Update

Just to elaborate on the photo posted during my last blog entry, I gave birth to a beautiful and mysterious baby boy on 1/3/12. I am currently a stay-at-home-mom, but only for a limited time. I have not written a piece of fiction or poem in like a year, and there was a week or so during my first week home with the baby where I was starting to write down a story idea, but that kind of petered out, so I'm still not feeling like a writer anymore, and when I started this blog it was sort of out of loneliness, but also w/ the hope that I could post my fiction on it and get discovered and published like by random house or harper collins. Recently I've realized how much editing so many of the pieces I considered complete really needs, and I've also been dealing with what a lazy slacker I really am -- thank you nineteen-nineties for that one. When I was in my Master's program I really never did any of the networking etc that would have made it easier for me to do something like become adjunct faculty at some community college, instead of going right back to the clerical job at the office I worked at before getting my Master's (only this time, under more financially unstable terms). I could have tried to connect more with the 'writer's house' there, though the few half-assed attempts I made were discouraging because the activities and journals the group put out were much more geared towards undergrads. I could have student taught somewhere though, so I would have had someone to write a letter of recommendation for me when later trying to get an adjunct faculty position. the only letters of recommendation I can imagine getting from a professional connection would be like "she has intermediate skills in the Microsoft Office Suite" etc.... I sure have half-assed it a lot, and soon I will be 33. I know that my two novels both need work and probably won't hook me a literary agent. I do think that my short stories are strong, like I know that I would enjoy reading them if I weren't me, and I really am surprised at how many rejections I constantly get from literary journals, especially when I'm pretty sure the only people reading those journals are the people whose writing appears in them, and relatives of the editors. there I go with my nineteen-nineties slacker brand of cynicism again. I would like to repackage it as an ennui that lends itself to my physical appearance somehow, or a true blue existentialism.
the baby just fell asleep, my cute little snorer. I'll end this post w/ a brief list of films and books I suggest if you are bored. None of these are my all-time favorites, just recent discoveries that I was pleasantly surprised by.

Books
*anything by EM Forster -- I can't believe it took me so long to discover him. He has an amazing respect for and understanding of women, and his stories are just beautiful.
*Colours by Rose Tremaine -- this book might seem like it's going to be boring at first, it's about a turn of the century man and wife panning for gold in a remote part of New Zealand, but the story is just amazing, I never read anything like it, plot-wise
*If you're interested in adult comix, my favorite comic book Love and Rockets has taken a disappointing turn, format-wise. Since 2008, they only put out one annual, paperback book format issue. That's a whole year of waiting, and if it's a disappointing issue, then that's like a wasted year. This comic book has been around since the early 80's though, and if you start from the beginning, it's such a powerful connection to the characters that develops and they really feel like real people, and a good issue of Love and Rockets sticks to you for days. So I was really happy that the most recent issue, #4, was so good. If you're a lukewarm reader of L&R, buy #4 at least.

Movies

these are recent Netflix-ordered faves of mine
*The Savages -- a brother and sister too smart and neurotic to ever be anything but miserable and bemused with life have to take care of their old dad, who was a dick to them growing up. the dialogue is really good and if you are someone who burdens yourself with useless knowledge acquired at an overpriced university, you will no doubt get a sick pleasure from watching the futile efforts of the protagonists. satisfying ending, though.

*Hamlet 2 -- this actually is one of my all-time favorites. It's one of the funniest comedies ever, and even though it's supposed to be funny, the part when the Gay Men's Choir sings "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" makes me cry.

*Spaced -- this is a short-lived british tv-series, not incredibly recent, from the geniuses behing Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Paul.

*Please Give -- this is another new favorite. Almost every line is perfect. It might be a chick flick though, I'm not sure. Like, a really smart chick flick. I just feel that it doesn't have much appeal to male viewers, somehow. My husband likes it, but it's a qualified liking, like he knows how much I love it, and he appreciates how good it is, but he could never identify w/ so many of the characters the way I do.

*The Accidental Tourist -- this is a melancholy romantic comedy from the 80's, based on a novel by one of my favorite writers, Anne Tyler. Geena Davis's character in it is so charming and dresses so funny and cool.

tootaloo,
Princess Robin