Finally, My Vision Will Be Realized!

All I have to do is get my hands on one of these invisibility cloaks. Now I will be able to fight with true heroic effectiveness, speed and aplomb, the dastardly forces that threaten all humanity!

Invisibility cloak. Sweet.

Stuck? Scared? Stuck, therefore Scared? Scared, therefore Stuck? Crap.

I'm stuck. Or maybe I'm scared (maybe you got this from the title). At any rate, I'm definitely intimidated. I'm writing a new story, well, actually I've got about three on the stove right now. And they're all stuck in the same spot. Arg. So frustrating. All three of them are just out of my reach, like when you're going after that bowl that you don't use often but is gorgeous and sits atop your kitchen cabinets, and your fingertips keep brushing the rim, but you can't quite grab it. Of course, maybe someone else would do the sensible thing, get a stepladder and calmly retrieve the bowl. But not me. That would make sense, indicate logic and proactive problem-solving. What I usually do is keep jumping, keep brushing it with my fingertips until it wobbles and falls, and then hope that I can catch it before it shatters and/or kills me. Right now, I feel like any one of these stories could tumble, shatter and/or kill me in the process.

The problem is, I have to make decisions. Usually when I am writing and it is decision time, if I don't know what to do I take a deep breath (wait a few days, a few weeks, whine about it to friends like jessie and amber), then jump in like it's a pool that I know is really friggin' cold, come up gasping, and start doggy-paddling. That has been a pretty good system. But this time, not to belabor the pool metaphor, but I am in way over my head. I need to make decisions, but have no basis from which to make them. I feel like I know just enough about writing to get myself in trouble. You know how sometimes, the more you learn about something, the more difficult it gets? I try not to make writing to much of a conscious process in terms of mechanics, at least until a certain time, after which I become painfully meticulous.

But this is about changes in time and space more than anything else, and I'm not sure what to do. I know that any changes I make don't have to be permanent, I have saved a copy as an alternate version that I can mess with, and still have the previous draft to go back to if I have to trash my efforts. But I still can't do it. I can't make the changes. There's this part of me that knows that even though the changes on the paper aren't permanent, if I change the story, the change in the way I see it will be permanent. I won't be able to see it the way I saw it before. And that scares the crap out of me.

And so I blog, and I make fruit salad, and I weed my garden and check the mail, and paint furniture and make pants. But the whole time, in the back of my head, in the back of my throat, there is panic. I tiptoe around it, dance up to it to see if it is still there, and retreat quickly when I find that it is, that as soon as I approach it the feeling in my throat slides down into my chest. So I tiptoe away and force it back where it was, knowing that I should meet it head on, but lacking the strength. What a wuss.

Protector of the Pack

This is my pooch, Zoë. This is her worried look. She worries a lot, and with good reason. We rescued Zoë when she was three, and she is nine now. When we got her she was 96 pounds (70-ish now) with a huge weeping sore on her neck and rampant ear infections. Life had been rough, just one of neglect mostly, and she had been forgotten about too many times. Sometimes they would forget to feed her, then remember and feel bad and feed her too much. Sometimes she got left outside overnight, and sometimes it was storming. She’s had bladder stones, infections galore. The dog is allergic to grass, and most of the summer we have to keep her on doggie Benadryl. We call her diphenhydra-dog.
She worries for her own safety, but she especially worries for ours. When one of us is sick she sticks close by, and licks hands for comfort. When there is a thunderstorm, as there was last night, Zoë stays awake, trembling, sure that the ramparts are being stormed, concerned for the security of our little pack.
Today she is snoozing in the armchair in my office, making up for lost sleep last night. As she gets older, she sleeps more of the time, and grunts and groans like an old person when she lays down and gets up. She also sighs in disdain at many of our antics (young whippersnappers), and her eyebrows shift and twitch in disbelief at the silliness of humans.
In a way, she reminds me of Nanny, from Peter Pan (I should get her a mobcap). It’s sort of nice knowing she’s there, watching out for me, saving me from the onslaught of woodland creatures that breach the security of our yard on a regular basis, and all the other threats the outside world has to offer.

Today

The oak trees are blooming now, blooming golden, as if already aged, looking wise next to the pert lime green of the new birch leaves. It is blue skies today, and in Minnesota, that alone is a reason to call it a fine day. The wind is brisk and strong, coming straight off the lake and up our yard. The clouds stream overhead as if on an interstate, and me, a hitchhiker hopeful by the side of the road. The group of bass trees on the edge of the yard are fairly young. They stretch over the lawn and almost touch the older, dying basswood in the center of the yard, a span of inches between tip of branch to tip of outermost branch. It’s almost like they’re reaching for each other. And the yellow finches flit across the space between the branches, streaming between them as if there is an invisible connection, delicate as cobweb, like a bridge so fine that from a distance it seems to disappear in the center. I, planted on the ground, am not privy to those features and landmarks that are so obvious to the birds from their aerial view. I look up through the trees to the sky as if I’m looking up from underwater. To them, the whole world is topography that they dip into and swoop through. I'm too far down in it.

Treasures from the Basement

Oooh. I’m so excited. Jason dragged me down into the basement tonight (I hate the basement and avoid it when at all possible -there’s some serious bad mojo down there) to look in my many Tupperware tubs (4 of fabric, 4 of yarn, 3 of soapmaking supplies) for some fabric to make him boxers. And to find his soldering iron so that he could put his electric razor back together (don’t ask - things get dull out here).

But when I got down there, I unearthed a huge stash of summer clothes in need of minor modifications. I had set them aside last summer and never gotten around to fixing them up (you know how it goes). I was also looking for material to make some cool summer pants, but what I found (and had forgotten about) was this: some time ago, some friends and I happened upon the leavings of a huge rummage sale that some of the older ladies in Detroit Lakes had put on for some charity or another. One of my friends, who helped put the sale together, brought everything that didn’t sell to the theater one night, and we just dumped out garbage bags full of vintage sixties and seventies gear. Polyester lives! And while I was completely enamored of all of it, everyone else wasn’t quite in the same frame of mind. Therefore, I got pretty much everything I wanted. We’re talking those high necked long sleeved floor length seventies dresses in crazy florals, yards of fabric. Now it’s all piled in the middle of my office, smelling a tad like cool musty basement, and waiting for me. And I am scheming, my scissors are gleaming, and finally I have a table to put my sewing machine on.

A whole summer of groovy pants awaits.

A New Favorite

Don't you love it when you find a new favorite?

I just recently did: Me and You and Everyone We Know. It's just poignant and funny and touching and sad and happy and ridiculous and all the things that I love about a movie.

The first time I saw this movie, I suspected it could be in the favorites category. I've sort of been auditioning it for the role since then. This is how I do it: every couple of months I rent it. Three times. If after I've seen it three times, it still holds something for me, it goes into the category of movies I want to own. Sometimes, like this time, the movie slips right into the favorites category. It is rare, but it makes me so happy to find out that people are still making movies that I love.

Five Things

In my fridge

Fruit salad
Big Tex pink grapefruit juice (the kind in the can)
Peanut butter cookie dough (chilling before I put it in the oven tonight – yum!)
Corn tortillas (bought in those big bags of fifty or so - a staple at our house)
Guiness

In my closet

Guitar
Bathrobe
My favorite belt with the big flowered buckle
Sleeping bag
Box of hats, knitted by me, that I don’t know what to do with

In my purse

Homemade lip balm
My “random thoughts” notebook
Approximately $14 in small change (or so it feels)
Excedrin Migraine
My prize collection of ancient ATM receipts

In my car

WD-40
My favorite big red sunglasses
Minnesota DeLorme topo map
A roll of toilet paper (you just never know)
The Grapes of Wrath

Perenially Geeky

I love perennials. I’m a novice gardener, and don’t have much money for it. As a result I am a scavenger, taking clippings from other people’s gardens (with their permission, mostly), digging wildflowers out of the edges of our yard and moving them into my garden, an elliptical slice of dirt along the side of our house. For the past couple of years it hasn’t looked like much. Things just didn’t seem to be taking that well, and I got discouraged. Then, last weekend, I pulled on my gloves and pulled all the dead leaves and grass, all the weeds, out of the garden plot. And to my wonder and delight, it actually looks like a garden! There are clumps of healthy green plants spaced evenly (well, at least in the part the dog didn't dig up last year). I’ve got dwarf daisies, bee balm, columbine, yarrow (which grows uncontrollably all over our property), lily of the valley, one lovely little blue-green hosta plant, one behemoth hosta plant, a wild rose bush that I can’t control, yellow irises, and last but not least, my mint plant that I thought I had lost because it didn’t come back last year, but is the best mint tea I have ever had. When I was pulling out the comfrey (the planting of which had been a huge mistake), I kept smelling mint, even though last year it hadn't come back (or at least, I couldn't find it). I located a tiny little patch under a bunch of grass and leaves, and have been nurturing it since.

Fascinating, I'm sure. Okay, now I feel like a geek.

Art Is Hard

Poor Jessie. That is a sad and lonely feeling. I think one of the hardest things about any art is that it is usually entirely self-motivated. No one else really gives a shit if you press on through or decide to give it all up. It only really matters to you, and that has to be enough.

But sometimes it is not. It is so important to feel that we are being appreciated, validated. Not necessarily the art itself, but a recognition of the difficulty of what we are attempting, the effort involved, and the fear and vulnerability that go hand in hand with the creation of something entirely new and completely personal.

And it stinks. To feel like, after two years of hard effort and a high level of personal and emotional involvement, you really are just another student to them. To you, it has been life-changing. It has been a deep and meaningful journey of self-discovery and awareness. To them, you are another paper to be gotten through. (Although, I must admit, one would necessarily expect a higher level of involvement and respect, for chrissakes, for a thesis proposal). That's a little slap in the face, especially when you have really put yourself into your work, instead of taking the easy way out (which you could have done).

So, girl, here’s what I say: Screw the bastards. If they’re so caught up in the intricacies of administration and bureaucracy that they start treating students like numbers and forgetting that the most important thing a teacher can do for a student is be involved in the relationship, they don’t deserve your best effort. Reserve that for yourself alone. You deserve your best effort, your writing does, and your art does. It is the fact that you are so involved in your work that makes it great, and will make you a great teacher as well. Maybe you’re in love with your work (which is only right, for an artist and teacher). And we all know, love hurts.

Rejection Makes Me Happy

I got my first rejection slip yesterday - from the Alaska Quarterly Review. It came so speedily, a mere couple of weeks after I sent it, that it startled me, sitting there in the mailbox. Now I kinda feel like a real writer.

Ah, grasshopper, in rejection, at last we find acceptance.

One Small Step for Toad...

We begin our broadcast day!

Big Toad Lake has moved into the twenty-first century (or thereabouts). After six long years, we finally caved in and got internet. It’s a slow and primitive connection, but it is there, and we are in touch with the rest of the world. Or should I say the invasion has begun? The relative isolation of our home (no internet, television, radio or newspaper) has been breached. The internet, possibly the most insidious of all these (well, television is probably the worst, but anyway), has found its way in. And it’s all my fault. Or rather, my blog’s fault. It’s true. One reason I finally broke down was that, after eight days around the homestead, I began to miss my blog. And other people’s blogs too. And now, from the convenience and privacy of my little home, I can blog away. Bloggity blog blog. See?

Go Ahead - Judge a Book by Its Cover

I got two books this weekend from a friend – both slim little paperbacks printed in the early seventies – both 1971, I think. Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, and Richard Brautigan’s The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966. There’s something nice about reading a book that is of the original vintage, so to speak. These books were conceived in the 70’s and printed in the 70’s, and so the sensibility of the book: the cover, the font, etc., is such a part of the time. The Brautigan book has this great photograph on the front.

The point is, I don’t care what they say. I do judge a book by its cover, all the time. The pleasure of the reading is all wrapped up in the physicality of a book, isn’t it? Reading ugly books is difficult, or books of an awkward size, or icky paper. I don’t like books that are shiny in that sticky plasticky way. My favorite books tend to have that smooth satiny matte finish. I also like the pocket sized old school pulp paperback. These two fall in that category, most definitely. Anyway, very exciting happenings at Toad Lake over the weekend. New books are always exciting – especially cool vintage free books. Or is it just me?