I know I shouldn’t dwell on it, and yet I will!

Today is the anniversary of the death of my very best friend in the world. He has been gone now for 19 years, and in most ways, it feels like he died  only yesterday.  (He designed sets for the theater, opera, TV commercials, and Hollywood movies. We met in high school – back when being gay, bisexual, or queer in any way was totally NOT cool.)

Yes, I lost my father, and my best friend, and one of my dearest mentors (Bob Cato – a Senior VP at Columbia Records when I knew him), all in the same year.

Men have always been the hugest part of my life, so 1999 was sort of a killer year. (I use killer in its worst possible sense.)

But time barrels along faster & faster as the years go on, and it just gets so much more difficult to process any of it.  The tears, of course, are all gone. You can’t keep crying over stuff, right?   And also, to say that I believe in life after death is the most enormous understatement – almost everyone I know who has died still interacts with me constantly. So where is that line between here & not here?

It fades, I’ll tell you that. The hardest part is not being able to touch the person, see them in a 3-dimensional way, or even smell them. The senses we use to process “being here” in the physical are useless when people cross over and become Energy, right? So I do interact with the people I love who have died. And yet I still grieve. Selfishly wanting to touch them again. To see them.

All righty.

I’m packed for NYC. I’ll be leaving Crazyland at something like 4:45 A.M. in order to try and stick to something related to this ridiculously crammed schedule I created for myself. But rather than focus on the insane schedule, I’ve decided to focus on simply being excited, happy, hopeful — and all the theater things that I truly love about New York and my life. Plus, knowing me, I will probably go about 90 MPH most of the way.

I will mostly be traveling on the truly lovely I-80. It has the best scenery throughout Pennsylvania.

So, in honor of myself, I leave you with this little ditty. (BTW, Tom Petty’s birthday was Saturday, wherein the town of Gainesville ,FL, dedicated a public park in his honor. So cool. Maybe I’ll go see it some day.) Have a terrific Monday, gang, even if it kills you. Thanks for visiting. See ya.

Revisions on Act 2 of the CLEVELAND TV pilot are complete! Yay.

That means only 2 more Acts and a total of only 24 more pages to revise!! Plenty of time to get notes from one producer in LA. and then send it off to the other producer before I go to L.A. the first week of December

I don’t imagine I will work on it again until I come back from New York City, later next week. I need to be in theater mode for now.

I’m really happy with this new direction the pilot is going in, although, in key ways, it is so different from my initial vision for it – different from the reasons I wanted to write it in the first place, but that’s okay. It has evolved and I’m happy.

Okay. I think I’ll play records, stare up at the ceiling for awhile. Tomorrow, I have to clean house! Diane is staying here when I go away – to look after my cats.

Here are 2 of them right now. Yes, they are still feral, all these years later. Yes, they will likely disappear the entire time that Diane is here. But I’ve decided I’m still gonna have her feed them…

Okay. Happy Saturday, wherever you are!! Thanks for visiting! See ya.

To say it’s been an intense day is to merely underscore that it’s been an intense week.

However, today, I finally got through a scene in Act 2 of the pilot that had me stymied. So that feels good. 3 good pages, and now on we go.

I’m looking forward to the play tonight  (The Full Monty). I need a break from my own reality for awhile. (And it will only be us women as the guy from work changed his mind, which, to me, makes sense. His wanting to go was what didn’t make sense to me.)

Anyway. For some reason, which I don’t even clearly remember, one day last week, I needed to see when a particular event had happened – a long time ago. And so I was checking some old journals of mine and once I found what I was looking for (in October of 1984), I got swept up in reading old journals. Not the best idea.

3 things immediately presented themselves: I’m an entertaining journal writer, but I have clearly also suffered from suicidal depression for my entire life. And my adoptive parents were just unbelievably mean – eternally. So unloving. Christ.

That, in itself was suicidally depressing – you know, seeing the  living proof of all that in ink on paper; year after year. The constant emotional struggle. The inner turmoil. All of these intense things going on in my life at all times – in terms of my writing, both songwriting and fiction writing. I knew some incredible people, some of whom were famous.  Some of whom were infamous (went to prison). A whole lot of whom have died already. Yikes. That’s scary. And through it all, the undercurrent of me trying not to kill myself. It was just so sad.

One exceedingly interesting thing I discovered involves that one short story I wrote back in 1989 that got me that problem with the FBI about 10 years later.  I had pages and pages in my journal, documenting all the fan mail I was receiving on that one story – some hate mail, but mostly letters from men all over the country who really loved that story and why – deeply personal explanations about why the story meant so much to them. An occasional gay woman would like it, but mostly straight men. And then…a letter from a pedophile in prison.  A big fan.

And a little bell went ting-a-ling.

Thanks, dude, I thought to myself. (Although I know he wasn’t the only one. It was a nationwide ring of pedophiles that led the FBI to my door.)

In my journals, I documented how much I sometimes struggled with my replies to readers. I always sent hand-written replies to readers who took the time to write to me. And because of the things I wrote about, and the way readers responded – in such personal ways – it wasn’t always easy to know how best to reply. But I always did.

It was illuminating and strange to read over all this stuff in journals that are 29, 30 years old. And since the Internet came about, I never get handwritten mail from readers anymore. When I first started getting published, the world was full of magazines and literary quarterlies – these were the kinds of publications I got published in before I started to get book deals.

The world of underground literary quarterlies was just so cool and is now SO gone. Nothing on the Internet compares with what that world was like. Even while I got published in those kinds of zines, I was also a big fan of reading them, so I felt I really understood my readers, even if some of them were in very dark (sexual) places.

Nowadays, I have no clue who my readers are, or how they might respond to their own worlds. It’s sort of just like sending my work out into outer space, really. Not a good or bad thing; just an observation. It’s a lot less personal.

All righty, well, I gotta scoot! Enjoy your wonderful evening, whoever you are and wherever you are. Thanks for visiting! See ya.

What a week! And it’s only Wednesday…

I completely LOST things like the Columbus Day holiday (#Let’sMakeAmericaSpanishAgain!).

(Last week, when the guys were here collecting the wood from my now-no-longer-there-fence, one of the guy’s wives was here, sitting in their truck, and she said to me that she’d taken a long weekend because of the holiday. And I said, “What holiday was that?” Thinking it was still late July. And she looked at me disdainfully and said, “Columbus Day.” And I was stunned back to the reality of this being October already and no longer July, and also really embarrassed that I suddenly had a living witness to my Muse-induced insanity around here. )

(See tons of posts below re: the powerful new  Muse in my life and how I can’t keep track of anything anymore because all I do is write in this sort of Muse-induced frenzy.)

(And I’ve now lost 20 pounds since the Muse arrived, 3 months ago – I no longer eat and I hardly sleep. A girl at my PT job said the other evening, “God I wish I had your willpower!” You don’t need will- power to drop 20 pounds in 3 months. You just need to be crazy.)

Anyway.  I also lost complete track of Monday, October 15th, which was my big day to pay the water bill on time without getting a $10 late fee tacked onto it.  I’d made out the check on Saturday but decided not to drop it in the weekend mail-slot because I wanted to ask the lady at City Hall which night they do Trick-or-Treat around here and at what time, because I didn’t want to be caught candy-less by all the young trick-or-treaters here in Crazyland.

And because of that good intention, the perfectly on-time check sat on my kitchen table, and then I proceeded to think that October 14th went on for about 48 hours, and when I awoke on Tuesday, the 16th, I realized I’d lost an entire fucking DAY, and now my water bill was late and I owed them an additional $10 for absolutely nothing.

(And loyal readers of this lofty blog will no doubt recall that this past month, I had that weird episode with my garden hose spigot that refused to turn off, and so a ton of water was just coming out of it for hours without my being able to turn it off… So I’d already garnered myself a huge water bill for absolutely nothing, and now it was $10 more.)

(And in the middle of me telling all my water-bill woes to the lady at City Hall, who comes wandering out from his office to look at the strange creature telling this weird story but the Mayor of Crazyland himself!) (That was weird.) (BTW, he, the Mayor, was recently arrested for pulling a gun on one of his employees. Literally arrested. But he got off with a fine. I just love living here in Crazyland!!)

(And also BTW, our City Hall is in a storefront and is about as big as my kitchen.)

I’m not sure why I’m in this sort of overtly-parenthetical mood today.

The good news is that I’m still really happy. And the revisions of the TV pilot are still going well, though going slowly. And next week I’ll be in NYC for a few days to work with Sandra on the musical, and to see American Son on Broadway.

And tomorrow, I’m going to see The Full Monty at our local professional playhouse (that link takes you to the bigger-budget UK version of the play but you’ll get the gist of the story). And I’m going with a wonderful woman I know from my job. She’s about 10 years younger than me and spends 110% of her time on her own planet.

She sends me these wonderful texts sometimes in the middle of the night – very poetic – while she smokes a cigarette and looks at the moon and thinks about her sexuality and wonders about all the spirits who have crossed over. I love getting texts like that, especially in the middle of the night,  and she’s the only one in the entire world who sends me them.

Plus, for some reason that she came up with, we’re taking that young guy with us to the play (the 23-year-old who looks like a surfer dude but who is not a surfer dude) (see a text below somewhere from late July, I think, re: me being or not being a Silver Cougar who would or would not be willing to have sex with a 23-year-old guy who looks like a surfer). [Editor’s Update: You know, I looked for that post and can’t find it anymore, but the answer was a resounding NO, I’m not a Silver Cougar and it had something to do with my overload of unwieldy sexual fetishes being too much for surfers to manage, and I had also gone on to talk about that other guy from work, and all his knives and the map for the year-long sea voyage…. All of it vanished from the ether!]

But, indeed, all three of us are going out to dinner and then to the theater to see The Full Monty, and I have no idea why he wants to do this with 2 women who are crazy and old enough to be his mom(s), and I also have no idea if he knows that there is nudity in the play – all male nudity, at that. So we will see! It should prove to be a greatly informative evening, regardless of which way it plays out.

Plus, this other woman is always really nice at work, if also crazy, whereas I am almost always a total bitch, but only because almost everybody there is almost always pissing me off. (I almost always have a sort of turbulent inner world whenever I’m at work, because I would almost always rather be at home, writing.) So, why this guy wants to be out in public with us is anyone’s guess…

Well, life does indeed go on. And the morning is already half-over so I gotta get back to the TV pilot. I hope you have a splendid Wednesday, wherever you are in the world, and wherever it winds up taking you! Thanks for visiting! See ya.

To express the joyous feeling I have in my heart, gang!!

Except perhaps words like, “Yippee-ki-yi-yay! The fence is gone!!”

On other happy news fronts:

Last night, I completed revisions on Act 1 of the TV pilot, which is the hardest section. 3 more acts to go, each successively shorter, so the actual completion of this project before I need to head to L.A. finally feels doable. What a relief.

I was gone from the house yesterday for about 14 hours. It was around 11 PM when I pulled into town, took a right on Basin Street, drove a couple blocks down to my house on the corner, pulled up along the side of my house, onto my off-street parking and discovered —

OMG! My fence was already gone!!

It was supposed to come down today, but yesterday they decided it was a 2-day job, so they started early.  Most of the fence is now gone.

What an amazing feeling it was.  It was a clear night, too. Tons of stars out, and for some reason, having that fence gone made it feel like the sky went on forever.  This was probably just how I was feeling inside my soul, because the fence was nowhere near tall enough to hide the sky.

God, it feels so incredible to have that fence gone.  It was so ugly. Plus, I am just not a fence kinda gal.  I think it’s a psychological thing, plus I don’t have a dog so I don’t need one.

Now, of course, I’m focused on all the work that needs done to the horse & buggy barn, but that will have to wait until spring. I have 2 other smaller jobs outdoors that need to be done before winter comes. But, God, it feels so good.

Re: my little barn, though (see yesterday’s post), I think it’s really amusing that my neighbors have begun parking their car there – on my property.  They have street parking in front of their house, and they also have a driveway in front. In back, they have a large garage – he’s a drummer, so their garage is now a music studio – but there’s enough space outside his garage to park his pick-up truck. And now they are also parking in my parking space in back.

They also did some roof repairs recently to the roof of their garage, and left all the junk from it in a pile in my space in back there, as well. I also have a pile of fireplace-type logs at the side of my house, in front – right up next to the fence, that I don’t want, and I’m perfectly happy to have anyone come take the wood. But I noticed that last week, they put a fire pit in their backyard and now a lot of my logs are gone.

I actually think it’s funny. Like, have you even noticed that I live here?  Of course, once the rest of the fence is gone, it might be more difficult for them to convince themselves that everything on the outside of my no-longer-there-fence belongs to them. I guess we’ll see.

They’re cute, you know. So young. A husband & wife with 2 very young blonde girls, and then other musicians and their wives hang around, also.  They play this Death-Metal type music, not my thing at all, but I love the fact that they are musicians. They smoke a lot, out on their side porch, and they also smoke pot on Friday & Saturday nights – which I also think is cute. And all of this stuff just wafts up in through my open windows, day and night. Including their conversations, their laughter; the little girls crying occasionally, or getting exuberant.

I’m guessing that they have no clue that they are absolutely, utterly sharing my world.

You know, I’m the kind of person who really wants you to have my stuff if it’s going to make your life better somehow. I have had to let go of so much in my life that I know for sure, everything I have is just stuff.  I have only a couple things, of sentimental value, that I would really not want to part with if I don’t absolutely have to, so, you know, take my logs, take my parking spot, put your leftovers into my space, fill my open windows with your lives. None of it really matters in the long-run.  I like watching you be alive – for me, it’s a joyful thing. And I’m always saying little prayers for them that their lives end up being really, really nice. It’s so hard to be a musician, and be married and try to raise a family, own a home.

They’re really blessed that they can manage it. Probably 30 years from now, they’ll look back and say, “Wow, how did we do that?”

Meanwhile, I’m trying to just streamline. For me, it’s all about the writing and finally being free. My life has just been so stupidly hard.

Yes, tomorrow the rotten fence is coming down and being hauled away!

I thought I would share with you the lovely view from my backdoor as the fence stands now. And if you notice the small slab of concrete way in the foreground of the photos – this covers up the original well from when the house was first built in 1901. You can easily pick up the cement slab and see the old well.

I am really excited about this, gang. I’m glad the fence doesn’t have to go through yet another winter. Really, all you have to do is touch this thing and sections of it fall over. And when the winter winds blow, forget about it…

My mother is probably coming the first week of November, so this means the fence will be long gone. Yay.

Okay. Thanks for stopping by. Have a terrific Monday, wherever you are in the world! See ya.

My reply to the Muse was, “Surely, I only want what You want.”

Which sometimes is not true. Sometimes, it seems I only want what I can’t possibly have at that moment.

This goes back to the day after my most recent post, wherein I had such a difficult time with Chapter 12/b. of Blessed By Light. And was perturbed by the disappearance of 17 hours from my getting-shorter-by-the-minute life, when I felt I should have been working on the revisions of the TV pilot instead. (I guess I’m going to turn my creativity into a moral issue now. Sounds healthy.)

The following morning, out of bed I leapt, knowing that the remainder of Chapter 12/b. was awaiting me!

Well, 2 pages came out immediately but then – nothing. Suddenly, out came revisions for the TV pilot.

I’m not knocking it, because they’re good revisions. They had way more depth than I was expecting. But still. I was, like, “But Chapter 12/b. is still just hanging there…”

The Muse: “But yesterday you carried on like a big baby, wanting the TV pilot, blocking me at every turn while I tried to give you really good pages on the new novel.  So, today I’m giving you the pages of the TV pilot – pages you cried and carried on about for 17 hours yesterday – and now you’re getting all pissy because you want the rest of the novel. Why don’t you just tell me what the heck you want? Hm? How ’bout it? Tell me: what the heck do you want? Why don’t you just give it some thought – you know, get some of that clarity you’re so famous for – and then get back to me once you figure out what the heck it is you want.” (Contrary to the title of this post, my Muse does not actually use the “F” word – I’m the only one in the room who uses the “F”-word – and, at that, quite constantly.)

Then he went on a little holiday for a couple of days, wherein, I sat in the room alone and fumed and became complacent and worried and did some other stuff.

Well, today we’re working again on the TV pilot, because the Muse and I had a little chat last night while I was driving home late in the car; wherein, I said, very compliantly, “You just choose what we’re working on tomorrow, and when I wake up in the morning, I will know what you’ve decided we’re working on and whatever you decide, I know I am going to be really, really happy about. How does that sound?”

I’m actually not really kidding.  This Muse I’ve got now is full of vitality, and personality, and emotions. I can actually tune into him when he’s around. It’s remarkable and it’s amazing and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

(Yes, in case you’re curious, I do sometimes wonder if I’m completely fucking nuts. However, I figure that if I’m getting good work done, and I’m still able to function as if I at least look completely normal – i.e., pay bills, do chores, show up for work – then it doesn’t actually matter anymore if I am nuts. It’s all about the writing now.  I’m not a spring chicken anymore. I’m a very late-fall chicken, heading into early winter. All I really care about anymore is to get my work done.) (Okay, well, that and sex.)

But, of course, everything else does.

I’m one of those old-fashioned coffee drinkers and I steadfastly refuse to allow this to change.  Meaning, I drink an old-fashioned style of coffee: percolated Chock Full o’ Nuts. And that’s how I start every single morning, and have for literally decades.

And thank God for that. Because, at least, you know, there is something I truly love that I can just always reach for. Nothing else really remains, does it?

Wow, yesterday was difficult.

I awoke at 4 A.M. with Chapter 12/b.  of the new novel, Blessed By Light, waiting there in my brain. I could tell I had sort of “downloaded” it during the night. And I was really excited. I could sense what it was going to be about, I knew it was in there. I got out of bed, made coffee, fed cats, etc., sat down at the laptop and —

17 (!!) freaking hours later, I had managed to get 3 and 1/2 pages out. You know, what is that?? I like the pages I finally ended up with, but the 17 hours part is the part that confounds me.

I had expected it to be a relatively simple thing, and then I would switch to working on the revisions for the TV pilot, which are truly pressing and really, really difficult for me. But an entire day was spent writing 3 and 1/2 pages.

I was just so frustrated with myself.

Twice I even took these really strange naps. Meaning, I would suddenly feel like I had to collapse. I’d go over to the bed, lie down, and be out like a light for maybe 10 minutes. Just a really deep sleep. Then I’d pop awake and realize that I needed to add a sentence about the view from the balcony in Paris at night.  You know – you can’t just stand there on the balcony and smoke without saying something about the view because it’s Paris, right?  Seemingly important stuff like that, but it didn’t really get me much farther.

I was getting sort of depressed. Plus, I’ve also made this pact with myself that I am never allowed to have suicidal thoughts again. I need to just stop it, forever. And that’s really difficult, too, because now where is the closest exit? Nowhere. That’s where. You have to just sit and get the writing done. As Sartre warned us: No exit, baby.

Around 6 PM, I took a break and walked to the cemetery. This is the resting place for most of my characters in the other new novel I’m writing,  The Hurley Falls Mysteries: Down to the Meadows of Sleep, and I thought it would help to be out among friends.

It did kind of help, frankly, but more than that, it was just sobering.  I mean, there were all the men, the founders of the town I live in, along side their wives. Most of them dead for well over 200 years now.  And yesterday, I noticed that most of them died either right around the age I’m at now, or even younger than me.

Okay, well, thanks for that head’s up. I have so much writing I still want to get done, you know?  Projects sitting here waiting for my complete and undivided attention. I don’t mind dying, but I do mind not getting any more of my work done.

And then, of course, my eye falls on the occasional tombstone of a baby who lived about 2 weeks, or maybe even a day.  And this, about 200 years ago, as well.  I mean, it’s so heartbreaking, but it’s also, like, well okay, why am I here? (I mean that existentially; not why am I in the graveyard.)

I stood there on that hillside, looking out at the valley below me – all the cornfields that have been harvested and are now ready for winter to come (even though I can’t remember when summer ended and it became fall); the foothills all around for as far as I can see are gorgeous. An old church. A few old houses. Trees galore. Just beautiful country. Just lovely. So contented and peaceful-looking – so unlike moi.

And I thought to myself, you are not really going to just stand here in this old graveyard on this hillside and cry are you? That will not solve anything at all. Go back to the laptop, sit down in front of it and get those words to come out. Just do it.

So I walked back home, made myself eat something (about 4 tortilla chips and maybe a tablespoon on guacamole – I have lost almost 20 pounds since the Muse arrived during the summer and I kinda stopped eating), I got the coffee set up for the morning, closed down the house for the night and went back upstairs for the duration.

You know, I sat there for a few more hours, polished what I had already gotten down on the pages, but the rest of it – words that I could tell were still in there – refused to come out.  So I just went to bed.

This morning, you know – a second chance to maybe get it right this time. And thank God, the coffee was there. An anchor to all my Great Expectations.  So we’ll see, gang. We’ll see.  (And my mother will be coming soon. I seriously need to clean this house.)