It’s been a long time. I always stop writing when big life changes happen, and such has been the case with: moving into a new home over the summer, adjusting to living with someone new, dealing with dying pets, being very broke and demoralized about work for many, many months, and then deciding to go back to school and several work opportunities pop up simultaneously and suddenly I have work, a vision, a plan, and the balls are rolling and I’m running on top of them. And it feels pretty good.
For a few months I was a weekly karaoke host at a neighborhood bar. I met some great strangers, learned a great deal, and it was fun. I’ll miss it, but I’m also planning to do it again, so I don’t feel too sad about it either. I’m working 4 other part-time jobs, and the unifying factor in them all is that I’m working for small businesses/entrepreneurs, and I think this is something I really like about it, I’m learning so much behind-the-scenes in that capacity, which is good since at some point in the near future after moving to Asheville (oh yeah, I’m moving to North Carolina at the end of 2012) I will mostly likely be opening my own shop, as a shiatsuist. Oh yeah, I’m in shiatsu school now.
So what about writing? I write every day, mostly e-mail correspondence between business parties and marketing copy, but I dig it, because of who I’m working for. Despite having a lot of time when underemployed, I was too stressed and depressed to make much good use of it. I am prone to inertia in both forms – once in motion, I like remaining in that state, so I tend to like alternating busy-busy times with resting times. As for my personal writing, I hope to find my way back to it soon, now that I’m working again. There is a novel I’m ready to revisit, a poem I’ve had in my head for weeks, and a book proposal to draft. But I must say, I don’t especially miss pop culture blogging. It is so luxurious to watch TV and movies solely for my pleasure. But for the record, over the summer I fell in love with Suits, I’m a little obsessed with American Horror Story (I’ll never quit you, Connie Britton), and after getting taken in by Mentalist reruns, I’ve started watching that show from the beginning. And of course, my long time friend, Dancing With the Stars, which is starting shortly, as a matter of fact.
I get this song stuck in my head a LOT. Today was so bad, I decided to actually look it up on youtube. I haven’t heard this song in over 15, nearly 20 years, and turns out the imprint burned in brain was pretty right on, note for note. I wish I still owned the record, I’d play it when I DJ with FLOF next week for our Michael McDonald tribute night.
Summer has finally arrived here in Chicago, and it’s that time of the month:
I’m in dress/tech rehearsals for a play that opens next week, I’m DJing on Sunday and performing in a cabaret on Monday, and sometime in the next few weeks I’m moving into a new apartment – but I still want to write more this month. Continue Reading…
Chaz Bono is making waves in my social media feeds, and I can’t look directly at it. First off, I stopped reading New York Times articles on trans people 5 years ago once I realized they were always being published in the “Style” section. Second, enough of what Bono is saying has trickled out to know it would give me a headache from all the eye-rolling. I’m having a busy week with stressful deadlines, I don’t need to get involved with correcting someone else’s ignorance right this minute, especially when most of what’s been said is boring and oft-repeated. Despite the temptation to jump into the fray and correct the annoying bits, it would mostly just be me yelling at my friends and family. (Incidentally, if you are one of my friends and family and you have been paying attention and you find yourself wondering what to think of Chaz Bono’s declarations about what trans people are or what they do, I will assure you that all the things he’s saying are true for him, but I wouldn’t extend any of his ‘insights’ to anyone else without asking first.) Continue Reading…
Ever since watching this mini-TED Talk awhile back, I’ve been very aware of the phenomenon of choosing to tell or not tell people my ideas, plans, and goals. But it can be hard when I’m excited about new projects! Since I’m not wanting to dissipate the energy or motivation, instead I’ll watch the video again.
Damon Brown forwarded me a story from the LA Times about one of the sampling mysteries in hip-hop finally getting solved: the bass line of Mobb Deep’s Shook Ones, Pt. II. While listening to the original Herbie Hancock song Jessica, I got chills when I heard . I love these moments. I dabbled for a second in producing my own music, but decided to stay on the side of being a nerd about it. Here are a few of DJ BoyWonder’s favorite sampled songs, with the song that used them (and sometimes a story of how I found them). Continue Reading…
I have not written a fan letter in a very long time, which I just realized this is what I am writing, a fan letter. I just put down your book This Is How and it recharged my heart in the way novels should, the way writing should, I think of what Frank O’Hara said, the ecstasy of always bursting forth. I stumbled upon your book mostly from luck (wandering the aisles of the library haphazardly looking for something new to catch my eye) with a bit of help from it also being a well-designed book (the cover, the font, the heft, the type). I read the book in two big bursts this week, and I find myself wishing instead of writing to you, I could write to Patrick in prison, which you hopefully will take to be the larger compliment, as that how it is intended. Continue Reading…
While I don’t mind people calling me “Ray” informally, I always introduce myself and write out my full name as Raymond, a habit I wonder if is in part because most of the Rays I’ve seen on television, movies, and books were, to be honest, low life jerks. Frequently they are the drunk ex who shows up in a dingy a-frame t-shirt that some colloquially refer to as a “wifebeater” – a term I don’t use, though in the case of a Ray, chances are, they do indeed beat up on their wife or girlfriend or kids.
The month of September was spent at the Millay Colony, doing a writing residence. For those who aren’t familiar with “writing camp”, there are residencies all over the place where you submit an application — generally a writing sample and a one-page proposal for what you want to work on — and then if the committee happens to like your stuff, you are picked to come to live and work, usually for free (though some cost a modest amount and a few others give small stipends). All I had to pay for was a plane ticket, then I got to spend a month up on a small mountain, living and eating for free while I wrote everyday. You don’t have to attend any lectures, there are no presentations or readings, it’s just time and space to do your thing. It is, in a word, a privilege. One that I soaked up and enjoyed every second of, even as it wore me the hell out at other times.
At the Colony, I had a bedroom and a studio. The tradition is that artists and writers who’ve stayed and worked there carve their name and date into the doorframe, and one of the first names I noticed on my studio door was a friend from a residency stay at Ragdale last year (hi Nora!). I started to make my way around the etchings, looking for other familiar names and contemplating where I would leave my own mark, when I noticed off to the side, by the hinge, was another name I knew: Peter Hedges. In 1991, I checked out What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? from the library because of a profile on Hedges I read in Sassy magazine. I loved it and checked it out from the library two or three more times throughout high school to re-read (it was the only way I knew to get it, the book was absent from the shelves of Waldenbooks and B. Dalton in the mall, my only other source of reading material). One of the greatest gifts I received during a courtship several years ago was a hardcover copy with the same familiar cover I knew and loved, tracked down on ebay for me.
The date on his name is 1992, so I imagine him working on his second novel, An Ocean in Iowa, which I also enjoyed. He quit novels for a while to go have a wildly successful screenwriting career in Hollywood, but turns out he just released a new novel this year, which I’m now really looking forward to picking up. Most of the measures of success in writing have to do with publication, but last month, I got to enjoy a small marker of progress: writing my name in the doorframe next to an author I adore.
Today, the first day of autumn, was a hot one. At noon, the hilltop was steamy, gnats out in full force as we squinted into the camera for the colony group photo. Too hot for me, I retreated to my studio after lunch, and by the mid afternoon, the mugginess had gone grey with cloud cover and threats of rain that never materialized. I napped too long and missed dinner, walked up to the mainhouse and unwrapped the saran wrap off the plate thoughtfully left behind for me. After I was done eating and internetting, it was fully night, the temperature eased down and the thicker clouds erased – the harvest moon was fully bright and visible. I went in and convinced the painter and the playwright to come stand outside and see it with me, and the former pointed out Jupiter, the untwinkling dot, shining a few inches below the moon and said tonight was the closest the planet has come to us in fifty years. I tried to feel as Jupiter as I could. A dark cloud threatened to steal all the light, so I didn’t linger long at the top of the hill, I retreated to the barnhouse while there was still bright streams casting long shadows. Once I got back to the studio, I immediately wanted to be outside again and the sky seemed to be clearing up, despite that one patch that tricked me.
I dropped off my laptop, grabbed a hoodie and my cell phone, then marched across the dirt road and up into the meadow on the opposite hilltop, the old grass tennis court of Edna St. Vincent Millay, where you have an amazing view of the entire valley – including the cell tower in the distance, which means I actually have service. (There’s nothing like having to walk outside 500 yards away from your home just to send a text to curb you of that habit.) On the way up the path, I saw a tiny glint in the grass, a glow. A tiny firefly? I got closer, no that wasn’t it. It dimmed a little as I leaned in, I didn’t have a flashlight on me to look closer, but it reminded me of spider hunting – looking in the woods at night with a flashlight held up to your temple, right next to your eyes. As you look around slowly, patiently, within a minute or two, you should spot a reflecting glow on a leaf or a branch. If you freeze your vision on that speck and follow the light to the object, two tiny specks you realize, you will find a spider – their eyes cause the reflecting twinkle. I thought about this while squinting into the grass, but I wasn’t using a flashlight, so I couldn’t imagine that was the answer. I kept walking.
After sufficiently mooning over the moon, sending a few texts and a quick phone call, I turned to head back and glints of light caught my periphery vision. I looked and saw more glowing in the grass, not just one, but dozens, hundreds, of them twinkling. I walked slowly, tilting my head to see how my movement made them blink back and forth. My hand instinctively reached down and touched the grass: dew. The hot humid day had dropped twenty degrees in a couple hours, and there was late night dew on the grass. The harvest moon was so full and so bright, the drops sparkled as I walked, a phenomenon I see every fresh snowstorm in Chicago, but never on worn grassy paths at nighttime. Walking back to my room, I ignored the moon itself and focused on the indirect magic it created, a glittery path to home.
The barnhouse I call home, for the month of September, as seen from the top of the hill main building that contains the main kitchen and wireless routers. I hike up that 50 yard hill at least three times a day, so if I don’t finish this novel rewrite, at least I’ll have stronger quads and glutes.
I’m pretty good at games like password, taboo, pyramid; once during a game of 20 questions, I correctly guessed “David Leisure” after 6 inquiries and another time I correctly guessed “Bob Hope” after four, but both of those instances were on long road trips with people I was dating, so the combination of long hours of playing with day-to-day intimacy makes sense when those giant leaps happen.
The weekend before last I was vacationing at the cabin of a friend of a friend’s family, with a small group of strangers and acquaintances. On the second day, my friend Nicole suggested a round of two-person catchphrase, and I accepted. Nicole and I have started hanging out more in the past year and I certainly adore her, but I’m still filling in the gaps of getting to know who she is and the trip was the first time we’d even spent significant time together beyond a few meals or house parties. So, we were 15 minutes into our game of Catchphrase, using the timed beeper version. If you don’t know the game, it throws up words or phrases from a category and you are trying to get the person(s) to guess without saying the words — basically Taboo with no restrictions, so it’s about getting as many as possible before time is up. I was pleasantly shocked when this happened during a turn in the entertainment category.
Nicole: “Oh. Um, I don’t actually know why this person is famous…..”
Me: ”Carmen Electra.”
And that was correct! Catchphrase soul twins.
Seriously, you always want me on your team when playing charades.
It’s nearly 9 pm on a Friday night and I’m sitting on the edge of my bed, in a bedroom that is not mine for much longer, that has been mine for many, many years — a large portion of that shared, but the third of it alone is the more recent recollection — and I am looking out the window at the church across the street, with its flashing neon OPEN sign that is illuminated only on Friday nights, for weekly community social nights, and I’m looking at the last few boys of the night, still playing basketball in the parking lot, against the hoop mounted on the wall, and the sun is long gone, twilight is long gone, but they still want to play, so they find an adult — a man most likely, a man who understands the need, but not exclusively men either, I have seen mom, sister do this on other weeks — with a car and he pulls it up and turns on the headlights, and these two beams shine up into my vision and cast shadows on the wall of my bedroom, and I look out at their source and see silhouettes of lanky and chunky teenage boys both, going for the ball, making shots, mostly missing, but going for it, going for it, going for it, they don’t want to stop, no matter that it is dark, no matter that bedtime is approaching, or maybe because of it.
The weekend before last I was vacationing at the cabin of a friend of a friend’s family, with a small group of strangers and acquaintances. On the second day, my friend Nicole suggested a round of two-person catchphrase, and I accepted. Nicole and I have started hanging out more in the past year and I certainly adore her, but I’m still filling in the gaps of getting to know who she is and the trip was the first time we’d even spent significant time together beyond a few meals or house parties. So, we were 15 minutes into our game of Catchphrase, using the timed beeper version. If you don’t know the game, it throws up words or phrases from a category and you are trying to get the person(s) to guess without saying the words — basically Taboo with no restrictions, so it’s about getting as many as possible before time is up. I was pleasantly shocked when this happened during a turn in the entertainment category.