Farewell to a Mustang

All first cars are beautiful. It doesn't matter if you're driving Daddy's Mercedes or an AMC Gremlin you scrimped and saved to buy yourself -- the machine that gives you great freedom of movement when you are young and wild is always a cherished thing.

My first car was a 1971 Mustang. It was school bus yellow, with racing stripes down the sides. Sleek. Huge. It looked so much like the women's car in "Deathproof" that when I first saw the movie I had to call Dad and talk about the car.

The 1972 Mustang from "Deathproof." Pretty pretty car.

The hood was a mile long. And the car was all metal. Heavy. Safe. A glorious, shiny, sexy fortress on wheels. And it was mine.

But before it was mine, it was my mother's. She bought it brand new the year before I was born. I have always looked at that car as lasting proof that at some point, Mom was incredibly cool.

When Mom was in labor with me, she and Dad climbed into the Mustang and drove to the hospital. (None of us knows how on earth a woman 9 months pregnant managed to get in and out of a car that low-slung, but she did.) After I was born, all three of us piled into the Mustang and it took us home.

It wasn't just my first car -- it was my first car from birth.

I can't even begin to speak to all the memories I have of driving that car -- it's where I was sitting when I first met many of the people I'm friends with now. It drove us around on our high-school quests for cheap fun. One day we crammed 9 people into it and went to the river for lunch. One night I drag-raced the then-mayor's son and beat him. At least two people I was friends with had sex in the back seat. It has stories to tell.

That Mustang had very nearly surpassed its mechanical limits when I became its driver, and so it seemed like something was always broken on it. The guys in high school who preferred Chevrolets used to tease me with the typical Ford jokes -- "Found On Road Dead," "Fixed Or Repaired Daily" -- and I laughed good-naturedly, but even when it was living down to expectations I never stopped loving that car. And we never sold the car. Mom's initial ownership of it, Dad's love for mechanical puzzles and my passion for that car led us to hang onto it probably longer than we should. It has been sitting in my parents' driveway, immobile (Found On Road Dead one time too many), for nigh on 15 years.

My '71 Stang. Farewell, my friend. 

This evening, I went over to my parents' house to sign the Mustang's title so Dad could sell it to a young man down the street who wants to fix it up. I had to fight to keep from crying as I did it, but I knew that it was for the best. I don't have the money to get it fixed -- pretty much the only functional parts are the radio, the engine and the transmission -- and Dad doesn't have the time to do any work on it. This guy will take care of her and, hopefully, come to love her as much as I do.

It wasn't until after I got home, bawled for half an hour, went over to a friend's house to think and talk about it, and came home and bawled some more that I realized the best thing about that old Mustang: It taught me how to love something that's broken. It never mattered if the carburetor was messed up or one of the pistons stopped firing or the electrical system was acting wonky -- I never stopped loving that car. Even after it broke down the last time and Dad and I weren't sure whether or how to fix it, I still loved it. I still love it now.

And after teaching me how to love broken things, my old Mustang is teaching me how to let go.

Of Love and Loss

Tom, also known as Tommy the Cat, 
Major Tom, Thomas A Cattus and Meowsolini

I knew it had been a while since I last posted, but until a friend and reader mentioned it I didn't realize that my last post was in August. Good heavens. I know why, though. A couple of weeks after my last blog post, my dear orange tabby cat Tom died. He was the most human cat I have ever known. He had a habit of waving at me or tapping me on the shoulder. And he was a chatty cat -- he had long conversations with my housemate and me. He loved to snuggle, too, and I remember the last time I asked him if he loved me, he meowed once and put his paw on my arm. He died here at home, in my arms, and I had him cremated. In honor of his talent for waving at me, I have a golden Maneki Neko coin bank on top of his box of ashes, like a tombstone.

About a week after Tom died, one of my best friends lost her mother to cancer. That was hard for a lot of people in a lot of ways. Her mother was a talented, generous, loving, bright soul who touched a lot of lives. The memorial service for her was a fitting celebration of her life, with music and food and people sharing stories and laughing and crying together in a room filled with her creations -- blankets and moppets she'd crocheted, photos, things she'd written, and memories that her friends and loved ones shared. Memories are among the beautiful things people create for each other.

That same month, an old friend of mine died. We hadn't seen each other in at least a decade but when we were close, he was very kind and supportive when I needed someone to be kind and supportive, and I've never forgotten it. I rode to Wharton with a couple of other friends to attend the memorial service.

October is my birth month, and though I did a lot of self-pampering, I didn't feel much like celebrating. I have a pinata sitting in my front room that I had thought about filling with candy and tiny bottles of liquor and inviting people over for a party, but losing my eldest fur-baby and two dear friends knocked the wind out of my sails. Then we had what I think was our second hundred-year flood this year, damaging homes that were just beginning to come back together after the floods over Memorial Day weekend.

The bar's red door ain't dere no more. 

In November, the news broke that Triple Crown, our beloved watering hole and the live music capital of San Marcos, would be closing in December to relocate, though when and where the new place will open is still unknown.

Beyond being a fine music venue that offered the best quality and best variety of bands I have ever seen, Triple Crown was kind of the glue that held the community of musicians and artists and bohemians of various sorts together. If you wanted to see people you knew, that's where you went. Without that central spot, that nucleus, holding us together, most of us are now communicating with each other through Facebook, like savages, although there have been a few outings and gatherings of Triple Crown folk so we can hang out live and in person. The Lost Tribe of the Triple Crown awaits the opening of the shiny new incarnation of our home.

"You shall love your crooked neighbor
with your crooked heart." - W.H. Auden

Through all of this, the one thing that has held me up -- that has held up my friends and other members of my community -- is love. The love we have for our town, our community, each other -- the basic human decency and compassion that comes to the surface during times of loss and need. I'm immensely grateful that San Marcos is full of that kind of love. Love is what forms the bond between human and pet, and simply having an animal to love unconditionally is a wonderful gift. Love is what brought friends and family together to celebrate my friend's mother's life and all of her wonderful gifts. Love is what inspired some friends and I to pile into a car and drive all the way to Wharton to say goodbye to a good man. Love is what motivated people to help their flooded neighbors. Love is what keeps local musicians going out to the pile of bricks formerly known as the Triple Crown and playing music there to keep the bar's streak of consecutive days of live music alive. (Yes, that is actually happening.)

What I've seen and experienced in the last few months has given me the shocking idea that even in the worst of times, nobody ever has to be totally alone.

6 Valuable Online Resources For Writers

I'm a writer. If you saw this headline and thought "Ooh!" and clicked on it, you're probably a writer, too. Because time is a scarce thing for most of us, I thought I would share the handful of websites I feel give you the most mojo for your minutes if you don't want to spend a lot of time out of "the process":

These sites can help out whether you're looking for work, trying to get published, or just trying to solve a problem anywhere along the line while you're working on a project.

1. Freedom With Writing - This is an amazing resource if you're looking for work as a writer. The site offers a daily email digest of websites and publications that will pay you for your work.

2. Writer's Circle - Want to find articles on the writing industry, tips on the craft, interesting facts about famous authors? This is a great site for you, then. Writers Circle also has a fun Facebook page, which is actually how I found out about the website. The website has a list of writers' resources on everything from e-book publishing to writers' conferences to accepting feedback from readers.

3. The Write Life - This website offers industry tips for freelancers and other professional writers (or those looking to become professional), along with tips on craft.

4. Duotrope - Duotrope is an amazing tool for writers submitting work to literary journals and other magazines. First, it is a comprehensive and easily searchable database of journals and magazines that accept work and will let you know if (and at what level) a market pays. More than that, it includes a submissions tracker to help you keep up with what pieces you've sent where, whether you've received a response and whether your work was accepted. Beyond the free trial period there is a subscription cost, but if you're submitting your work professionally (or even fanatically), it's worth it.

5. Writers Digest - Another great website offering everything from creative prompts to tips on writing good cover letters and synopses when you submit your work. This is also where Robert Lee Brewer's Poetic Asides blog lives, and every April he does a Poem-A-Day Challenge with writing prompts for poets who want to write a piece a day during National Poetry Month. Although there are plenty of resources at the website, if you can subscribe to the magazine or find back issues at your local library, I recommend reading "hard copies," too.

6. Poets & Writers - There is so much to be found at the P&W website, I hardly know where to begin. There are listings of journals and magazines accepting submissions, writing contests looking for entries, databases of small presses and literary agents and MFA programs, lists of fellowships and writing conferences ... you name it. There are even writing prompts for both poetry and fiction, and a message board to "talk" with other writers. As with Writers Digest, if you can get your hands on a subscription or back issues, I highly recommend the P&W magazine, although the website is fantastic, too.

10 Great Websites for Creatives, Women, and Creative Women

I'm engaged in the ongoing struggle to keep my head from completely disappearing into the abyss of Facebook, but by now I'm so conditioned to goofing around online when there's nothing else going on that it's been difficult. But as part of my quest to get beyond the Book of Faces I have come across a handful of wonderful websites for creative types and for women (and sometimes they overlap).

1. AndreaBalt.com - A great resource for inspiration and tips on creativity and leading the Renaissance-person lifestyle. I was drawn in by her essay "5 Things Nobody Told You About Living A Creative Life."

2. Luna Luna Magazine - A potent mixture of culture, commentary, art, literature and femininity, with a taste of the supernatural. I think I've recommended Luna Luna as a literary journal before, and with good reason.

3. JuliaCameronLive.com - The website of Julia Cameron, author of "The Artist's Way." Some people can't stand "The Artist's Way" -- my housemate thinks it's some sort of authoritarian system of churning out art -- but it has done me a lot of good in the past. I went to a workshop based on "The Artist's Way" last fall and recently visited the website to kind of refresh myself. Cameron's blog offers encouragement and insights, such as this post about inspiration.

4. CreativeSomething - A great website full of ideas, inspiration and talk about the creative process. There's also a podcast and a "library" -- a list of recommended books about creativity.

5. Brain Pickings - This website offers all kinds of intellectually stimulating content -- and that in itself can spark some creative inspiration -- but it includes some wonderful posts specifically about art and creativity, such as this article containing advice on creativity from Neil Gaiman.

6. Vagina: The Zine - This is a gutsy and interesting journal featuring creative work, opinions and advice articles. Not only is it full of engaging material, but anyone who self-identifies as a woman can contribute work.

7. Entheos - This site might be a little New Age-y woo-woo for some tastes, but it has a lot to offer. There are lots of things for sale, but access to some lectures can be as low as $10/month, and Entheos occasionally offers fantastic and free conferences or symposiums. Check out their page of conferences dealing specifically with creativity for ideas of what you can find there.

8. Being Boss - This is an awesome site for those looking to become creative entrepreneurs (not necessarily entrepreneurs in the creative "industry" but running whatever business venture you've got in a creative and successful fashion).

10. Amy Poehler's Smart Girls - Okay, I'm wayyyy over 30 and I love this website and wish it had been around several decades ago. It might not have a lot to do with the creative process, but it is inspiring to see what girls and young women are capable of when it comes to making changes in the world. Plus there are downloadable coloring pages and Galentine's Day cards, among other things 12-year-old me would have loved (and adult me still does, because why not?).

On the quest to die laughing

This was what I posted on Facebook a year ago today, the day after Robin Williams' suicide. I make no secret of the fact that I've struggled with major depression and panic disorder off & on throughout my life, and it was kind of mind-boggling to see so many people saying, "But he was so funny! How could he be so sad?" Well ... you kind of have to be funny or else you're miserable.

Sometimes I think a certain degree of depression can be a gift -- it's the "strangeness in the proportion" that gives a person a different take on the world, that helps a person understand that this world is indeed temporary and that every one of is is going to die someday, though most people don't like to think about it and think you're weird if you do. That sense of urgency, and that sense of sorrow, can be fuel for a powerful fire. You look for the sweetness in life. You appreciate how rare and wonderful the beautiful and funny moments are. You run like hell from the darkness that's chasing you, toward humor and beauty and light. I think that's why it turns out that so many funny people are depressed -- we're not joking, we're fighting for our lives. And if you're lucky, really lucky, you can find a balance between the darkness and the light. You can stand on the edge, keep that fire burning, without getting sucked into the blackness. But sometimes you lose that balance. Sometimes you get too tired to keep running. And if you don't ask for help, if you don't find help, that's the end of you. But there is help, folks. There are friends. There are professionals. There are meds if you want/need to go that route. Every day that I wake up and find one thing that touches my heart or makes me laugh is a "fuck you" to the disease that could have taken me but didn't. Today I'm grateful that I found help -- the best group of friends a person could hope for, wonderful therapists, meds when my heart was too heavy for even these kind people to lift, and lifestyle changes that have made the struggle more manageable. When I find myself balancing on the edge, I don't stand there -- I dance.

Writing about writing for non-writers

During this whole process of making major revisions to my novella, I've been posting progress updates on Facebook. Possibly too many, and almost certainly more than were of interest to my Facebook friends. But there is a method to my madness.

Writing is a weird vocation. It's not like most of the other arts that I'm surrounded by. If you play music or sing or dance or do spoken word stuff, there's a stage and an audience and an immediate exchange of energy and appreciation (hopefully) between you and the audience when they see the result of your offstage efforts. If you paint or sculpt, there's a finished product that people can look at and instantly be wowed by. Sometimes people will even watch you paint or sculpt, like the live painters I've seen at some art shows (and some music shows), and when you're done they can look at the fruits of your labor and decide whether they think it's awesome or awful.

Writing isn't like that. Nobody watches you do it for fun. You usually do it alone or maybe in small groups. You may do some readings from your book, but unless you read the entire thing to an audience, it only gives them a small taste of the whole thing. There's no immediate gratification, no instant "wow" when someone looks at your book (unless it has a great cover and/or great title). Appreciation of writing takes a lot of effort on the part of your potential audience and patrons. They have to sit and read it. Part of the challenge is writing something that's interesting and engaging enough to convince people to give that much of their time.

As much as I dislike talking about my "process" -- and I still can't really put  my particular process into words, other than it involves music and food and keeping my calico from walking across my laptop -- I wanted to try to show some of what happens during the creation of a piece of written art, to show that writing is as much of an active process as painting or dancing or anything else. It might not involve a lot of physical movement, besides typing furiously, frowning and occasionally pounding your mattress or your keyboard or your forehead with a fist, but it's not like a writer just sits down with a computer or typewriter or paper and pencil and a novel just falls out. But since people rarely see a writer at work, it might seem like it. It's such a solitary pursuit that to non-writers, it might seem like writing takes only a little more effort than typing. Nope.

In fact, it's an arduous process -- as demanding as any other creative act. You make a plan. You abandon the plan. You try to stick to a plan but as you write the characters do something unexpected and you have to decide whether that's good or bad, and if it's good, you compensate by making sure they haven't created any plot holes. Even if you write roman a clefs or stories that take a fantastic turn but are based on real people and places, you create a whole world in your head, and then you have to make that world make sense to other people. Then comes the editing, during which you argue with yourself about a world that only exists in your head -- which under different circumstances is probably a symptom of something diagnosable.

So I was hoping to show my non-writer friends some of what's involved, to let them know that writing is very much an "alive" process. It's hard to describe exactly what goes on, but I can say that it is active, not passive. Even things that come "through" the writer rather than "from" the writer, like this book I've been refining, requires some kind of interaction with the ideas and energy in play. You have to say "yes" and offer up your skill and your time to whatever story is trying to come through you.

As a matter of fact, sometimes I'm writing in my head when I'm nowhere near pen & paper -- whether I'm thinking of things I need to fix in the manuscript or witnessing something amazing in the world and thinking, "This needs to go in a book," and hitting my on-board record button. Just because you don't see the work happening doesn't mean it's not happening or that it's not hard. It's very real.

I'm not demeaning performance art or visual art in any way -- I'm constantly amazed by both of those things, and since I also dance and play music I know how much effort goes into it. I simply mean to say that in the case of writing, the efforts of the artist aren't always as immediately obvious, and I'm trying to bring some of that effort to light.

Also, I finished this round of revisions a day ahead of schedule. I made some notes on things to doublecheck and things to fix when I make my next round of edits, but other than a few issues I'm really pleased with how it's turned out and I will be ready to share it with the world in a few months.

Comes the smiling mortician

"Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
'living it up'
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician"

-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti 

Living creatures are fragile. You'd think that living in a town that's the only place on earth where several species live, and where floods and droughts seem to occasionally accelerate the cycle of life and death, would make this more obvious, but sometimes I'm still surprised by it.

I've had a few reasons lately to think about this gossamer mortal coil that grows more delicate every day. Last week a friend's father died -- a man I was fortunate enough to know when I was a little girl. He was a college professor, a perfect profession for a wise and wonderful person whose light should be spread across the world. The biggest consolation is that his son, my friend, is a wonderful expression of that light, and so it shines on. 

The next day, I found out I have to get a colonoscopy. There's no concern about cancer, but my stomach has been so messed up for so long that dozens of diagnoses are possible -- maybe just IBS, maybe Crohn's, maybe something more, and I'd be lying if I said I weren't nervous about it. I'm trying to focus on the fact that it's not as serious as a surgery, and that I will basically get to do a colon cleanse for much less money than I'd pay for the same thing at a spa, but there's the lingering "what if" in the back of my mind that I hope will leave once the anaesthetics kick in. 

And for the past week or so, I've noticed my eldest cat, Tom, has not been eating like usual. He usually loses his appetite to some degree when the weather gets hot, but he's also been spitting up a little bit pretty frequently and I think he's lost some weight over the past month. He has an appointment with the nice ladies at the vet's office on Friday. I'm hoping maybe it's something as simple as a hairball blockage, but I'm worried they might find something seriously wrong with my old man (he's about 13, so if he were a human he'd be almost 70 years old ... which still seems too young to die). 

St. Francis, who loved animals and
just about everyone else

And yet amid all of this, the party of life goes on. Everyone wakes up every day, the sun rises, the river flows, babies are born, families have barbecues, lovers reunite, I still get up and drink tea and laugh and smile and have brunch with friends, the universe keeps churning, because all of these things that feel like the end of the world are just a part of life. We're born to break. It's what we do despite the delicate condition of mortality, what we do before we break irreparably, that makes the whole struggle worthwhile. 

I recently re-encountered one of my favorite quotes from Charles Bukowski:

"We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."

And I try to remember that -- to not get terrorized by trivialities, to not freak out about a diagnostic procedure, to not look at my elder kitty as a furry pile of symptoms instead of a living creature I love. And I try to let the fragility of life motivate me to love more, and to live more, rather than to curl up and hide away from the inevitable. Which leads me to another quote from Bukowski:

"We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."

May we all do just that -- may Death tremble to take us all.