Busy is Busy is Busy

It’s hard to sum up what has been done.  Life is busy.  For everyone.  Life gets filled up.  The quality of what fills it is debatable but I would never argue against anyone being ‘busy’.

So yes, we’ve been busy.  Valerie and I moved.  Into one apartment temporarily and then finally into our new home in Winchester, MA.  I have a new job during the day.  Valerie has a baby and a thesis to write during the day.  Edie has been learning how to say ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ and how to hi-five.  She also hoots like an owl now when she likes something.

Flux is hard.  It upsets routines.  It makes you gain or lose weight.  The former for me.  I’ve been writing a lot but the writing hasn’t been appearing here.  I need to stop making posting on my blog such an event.  Stop making it a place where I have to fashion something new .  Just make it a place where I can put up some pictures.  Say, “Hey, dudes.  This is what has been going on.  I know the rest of you use your blogs for that. Why can’t I?”

I’m always making blog resolutions.  Blogolutions.  Resoblogtions.  Here’s a new one.  I’m going to use my blog as a better journal.  Since I have no real journal.  I just have notebooks full of writing and notes.  If you pieced together my life through the dozens of notebooks and journals I’ve kept you’d find very little true information.  Or maybe it’s all true.  Maybe you’d get a map of my head instead of my life.

So I need to tell you about our new adventure. I’m sure you’ll get more Edie and Pop textings and more of my Romance Novel and whatever else hits my whim bone.  But I want to be better about some recording of life stuff. I’ll be here more regularly.  Stop by.  

Edie and Pop Ep. 10 - B is for Boston and Baby Saddles

When Edie was only six weeks old, she learned how to text. This is the continuing saga of our communication.

EDIE:  Pop, there's weird brown things around our apartment.  And they aren't mushrooms this time.

POP:  Those are called boxes.  We put stuff we like in them so sweaty ex-Russians can put them in a truck for us and break the things we like.

EDIE:  Ok. I will register this taste as 'box'.  I'm off to lick the mushrooms again. What are the boxes for?

POP:  We're moving.

EDIE:  Cool. Where? To the park?  Because I vote for the park.

POP:  We're moving to Boston.  It's farther than the park.

EDIE: So it's by the library?  That's great.  I love that place.  The librarians are all nice and smell like gouda. And you know how I love gouda.

POP:  Do you remember when we took those plane rides to California and Michigan?

EDIE: What? We're going on a plane?  I hate those.

POP:  I know.  You adequately demonstrate that every time we fly.  Well, Boston is much farther away than the park or library.

EDIE:  You're taking me away from the PARK?!  You monsters!  I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.

POP:  Are you throwing an actual temper tantrum or just a text one?

EDIE:  I couldn't decide.  Also, I'm stuck between two of those box things.  I'm going to lick a hole in this one and sabotage the whole move.

POP:  We can just get a new one.  This is happening.  Wrap your little head around it.

EDIE:  Fine! New plan!  I'm going to hide until you have to stay.

POP:  You get hungry like every two hours.

EDIE:  Rats! Alright.  Leave a bunch of cheese and squeezy fruit packages on the ground and then leave and then I'll hide.

POP:  Hey, I don't want to leave New York either.  Me and your Mom love it here.

EDIE:  What's a New York?

POP:  It's the city we live in. Actually, we live in Brooklyn which is a part of New York which is a city in the state of New York.  Boston is in Massachusetts.

EDIE:  I don't even know what you just wrote there.  How about you just not ruin my life and move us to the park?  I want to live near the Dog Pond.  Dogs are hilarious.

POP:  There will be a new park.  A new library.  A whole new world to lick.

EDIE:  Don't pigeonhole me, Pop!  Licking isn't my only 'thing'.  I'm complicated.  I'm a mystery wrapped in a cuddly blanket.  Which is 50 percent mystery and 50 percent rayon.

POP:  What are you licking right now?

EDIE:  The bed spread.  It tastes like soap and high thread count.

POP:  We might live near Harvard.  You could Good Will Hunting yourself into the school.

EDIE:  Do you ever get tired of saying pop culture crap to me I just don't get?

POP:  Not really.  Do you ever get tired of making me tired?

EDIE:  I do not.  Is there a dog pond in Boston?

POP:  We should just get our own dog.  Then you and me could just make our own dog pond. And by that I mean the bathtub.

EDIE:  I don't think Mom wants a dog.  Which is too bad because I just ordered a little baby saddle.

POP:  Oh my gosh.  The thought of you riding a dog makes me not even mad at you for using my credit card.  And being on the internet.

EDIE:  I want to be a baby jouster.  Boston has that kind of crap, right?

POP:  I'm sure. Boston is mega weird.  Your Mom's getting out of the shower.  Let's both look wistful while we stare at pictures of dogs.

EDIE:  I'll get some tears going. She's a sucker for my weepy peepers.

Editing Your Life

I was at a poetry/Russian translation reading last night. I asked friends who had published books to give me some advice on what to do here at the final touches of my manuscript. A friend of mine asked me to explain what my book is about. Not for him. But for myself. That I should be able to articulate what some of my reasons for writing it is.

So here it is:

There is a certain power in writing through your own life. It means you get say-so on history. I've never believed in non-fiction so I have no moral problem with pushing or pulling things to my liking. We do it anyway. A story is one way to one set of eyeballs. Memory is faulty. I have no allegiance to the past or anyone else's version of it.

So I keep rewriting and reinventing my life. A little here or there. Until it becomes less my story and a parallel universe cruising next to me. A looking glass of altered reality, better or worse with my telling. The Allen and Craig and Candace of my poems are not my siblings. But have echoes in them. The Mom is not my Mom. But is James's mom, the James of this place I create. He is angry at points when I'm not angry. He will not forgive where I have let go. The James in my created world is a man/boy looking for the sky to fall down on him. Is sure that doom is around the corner from him and he's right. I have doom coming for him.

The best thing about Parallel James is he gets insight where I did not. He synthesizes his life immediately within 20 to 40 lines (my average poem length). He is master of the past and present all at once. He is the recipient of all my hindsight and sometimes teaches me. Sometimes I try out an idea on James, see how it works. He is a camera I look through. I use him to focus on one moment of life at a time. Instead of living it again, I dissect it. Examine it like a god.

Here's another edited poem from this morning:

File This Under: Things You Should Have Seen Coming

What we left when we moved:
a button, the wheel and hose and nozzle,
the dirt in our treads, a wild side garden,
the holes of the nails, a watch battery, a lie,
stove and pipes and cabinetry,
the dust of our skin, and the sounds of us,
shoe scuffs and creaks we caused,
ideas of permanency, the anxious dream quit,
the skeletons of poisoned mice catacombed in walls,
the tire swing about to give, the tree we gentled into the earth,
friends, an address, a phone number, him—

We left a giant letter A painted on the garage,
not by us but a family previous,
for which we harbored a kids hope
it meant something nefarious like Assassins or A-Bomb,
but assumed it stood for Anderson or Adams
We know now. It meant what it always meant.
We learned the word foreshadowing long after we left.