What can we possibly say when the one we most wish was listening to us has turned away?
The only channel left is this simple, lonely blog, where I place foolish words in random order that roughly mimics the Blues beating through a giant hole in my heart.
Here's what I actually wish -- that I could dance with you tonight. In my fantasy, you would shake your head in that crazy way, and be barefoot.
But here is also what I must accept -- that you have left me, rejected me, and now must be free to dance with others. In other words, what you want is for me to move on, and ease any burden you still feel by my love for you.
So, dance away from me. Life is short, listen to what the music tells you.
The common tune that touches all of us is the rhythm of love. On this night, my hands are those only of a conductor, not a player. The strokes of my fingers cut through the open air, chasing a lost beat endlessly, only offering pleasures like the breeze that suddenly cools your cheeks, or the soft rain that kisses your lips...
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Our transparent lives
First off, to set the record straight, my philosophy is that every parent is a single parent in our society; most of us just don't realize it. The myth of the nuclear family remains so entrenched that two adults who try to fuse their parenting methods into one consistent set of rules and activities may think they have outwitted the fates, but I doubt it.
Children have an eerie arsenal of highly developed extra senses to employ against their parents. Most adults lose these skills; they atrophy as we become independent and no longer need to fantasize what those who hold power over us are thinking or feeling (except in abusive relationships or in dictatorships.)
Among their unique talents, children push and probe, pitting one parent against the other repeatedly, and use their photographic emotional memory to ascertain the places where gradations of nuance, no matter how minor, exist between their parents that might be exploited to their advantage.
In this way, the gain access to resources that otherwise would elude them. To our children, we parents are transparent. They see us in every circumstance, including the stressful times when we forget who is watching. They never stop watching us, until they have learned what they need to know, then they become teenagers and use all of that accumulated wisdom to manipulate us into helping them do what they want most to do -- follow their hormones.
I remember thinking my Dad was the most powerful man in the world. But then I observed a strange gesture he made, rubbing his chest nervously, when talking to the head nurse at the facility where they held my grandmother.
I should explain. My grandmother was feisty, and into her 90s, and we'd been told she was "causing trouble." From what I could gather, she'd acquired a boyfriend in the nursing home, and when they wouldn't let her visit him one night, she tried to kick a nurse, and fell out of bed in the process.
Who knows if I have this exactly right; it’s a good story, and this is the way I remember it. We were there to visit her and had driven quite a distance from our town to do so, but the head nurse was punishing Grandma by prohibiting any visits that Sunday afternoon.
Dad was trying to challenge her, but he was rubbing his chest in that way that I just somehow knew meant he felt nervous, outgunned, intimidated by her authority. He wasn't going to win this confrontation, and his children were there witnessing his humiliation.
My sisters probably have a different memory, no doubt more compassionate. It's not that I loved my father less for turning out to not be the most powerful man in the world, it's that I noted this weakness of his for future use.
My own first two children were girls. When my first son was born, I'd been a parent for five years, but suddenly I felt something new -- "My God, what if Peter grows up to see through me, that I am hardly the powerful man my girls see me as?"
A new kind of witness had shown up in my world, and that made me uncomfortable.
Women possess many advantages over men, emotionally. We're all used to the social narrative of women's oppression these past 40 years, and many inequalities remain. Pay disparities, who gets top jobs, sexual abuse, and many other legacy systems remain in place.
But men have vulnerabilities that would kill women; in fact, that is precisely why we die at younger ages than they do. After a breakup, a man has lost his confidant and best friend, more times than not. He's lost that one person whom he felt he could count on to take care of him. He's lost the mirror he relied on to make him feel like he matters in this world.
I'm not suggesting women don't lose important things when they lose their men, but my experience and my observation is that they almost always come out stronger, better able to cope, and less prone to self-destruction than we do, particularly in middle age, which is when breakups begin to really take their toll.
My children, all six, see through me in ways that I hate to consider. It's not that I have a certain image I'd hope they could hew to; far from it, my one true hope would be they would integrate my experience into their own in ways that help them avoid some of my worst mistakes and pain. So, I want them to truly know me.
Maybe that is an element in what is going on here, for me. I'm conscious that time is accelerating, and I may not be able to get everything out about how I feel in the world in the right ways, so they have something later to review and match up with their own observations and insights.
Since when I'm in love with somebody I tell her all the rest of my story, the parts we don't necessarily tell our kids, being in an intimate relationship is like appointing our partner as the custodian of our life story.
Think about it: there are so many secrets we tell our lovers, things we would never share with other friends, co-workers, neighbors, parents, siblings, or our kids. Things like our sexual fantasies or what we really think of the pomposity of others around us, as well as our dreams for wealth, a perfect house, travel, and artistic hopes.
As we lurch fitfully through our lives, absorbing so many wrenching changes and unwanted transitions, it can feel as if our stories have all been reduced by post-modern discontinuities to a series of random and barely related chapters. Maybe that's why memoirs have supplanted autobiographies?
No one's life could ever have enough coherence to be a book anymore.
Children have an eerie arsenal of highly developed extra senses to employ against their parents. Most adults lose these skills; they atrophy as we become independent and no longer need to fantasize what those who hold power over us are thinking or feeling (except in abusive relationships or in dictatorships.)
Among their unique talents, children push and probe, pitting one parent against the other repeatedly, and use their photographic emotional memory to ascertain the places where gradations of nuance, no matter how minor, exist between their parents that might be exploited to their advantage.
In this way, the gain access to resources that otherwise would elude them. To our children, we parents are transparent. They see us in every circumstance, including the stressful times when we forget who is watching. They never stop watching us, until they have learned what they need to know, then they become teenagers and use all of that accumulated wisdom to manipulate us into helping them do what they want most to do -- follow their hormones.
I remember thinking my Dad was the most powerful man in the world. But then I observed a strange gesture he made, rubbing his chest nervously, when talking to the head nurse at the facility where they held my grandmother.
I should explain. My grandmother was feisty, and into her 90s, and we'd been told she was "causing trouble." From what I could gather, she'd acquired a boyfriend in the nursing home, and when they wouldn't let her visit him one night, she tried to kick a nurse, and fell out of bed in the process.
Who knows if I have this exactly right; it’s a good story, and this is the way I remember it. We were there to visit her and had driven quite a distance from our town to do so, but the head nurse was punishing Grandma by prohibiting any visits that Sunday afternoon.
Dad was trying to challenge her, but he was rubbing his chest in that way that I just somehow knew meant he felt nervous, outgunned, intimidated by her authority. He wasn't going to win this confrontation, and his children were there witnessing his humiliation.
My sisters probably have a different memory, no doubt more compassionate. It's not that I loved my father less for turning out to not be the most powerful man in the world, it's that I noted this weakness of his for future use.
My own first two children were girls. When my first son was born, I'd been a parent for five years, but suddenly I felt something new -- "My God, what if Peter grows up to see through me, that I am hardly the powerful man my girls see me as?"
A new kind of witness had shown up in my world, and that made me uncomfortable.
Women possess many advantages over men, emotionally. We're all used to the social narrative of women's oppression these past 40 years, and many inequalities remain. Pay disparities, who gets top jobs, sexual abuse, and many other legacy systems remain in place.
But men have vulnerabilities that would kill women; in fact, that is precisely why we die at younger ages than they do. After a breakup, a man has lost his confidant and best friend, more times than not. He's lost that one person whom he felt he could count on to take care of him. He's lost the mirror he relied on to make him feel like he matters in this world.
I'm not suggesting women don't lose important things when they lose their men, but my experience and my observation is that they almost always come out stronger, better able to cope, and less prone to self-destruction than we do, particularly in middle age, which is when breakups begin to really take their toll.
My children, all six, see through me in ways that I hate to consider. It's not that I have a certain image I'd hope they could hew to; far from it, my one true hope would be they would integrate my experience into their own in ways that help them avoid some of my worst mistakes and pain. So, I want them to truly know me.
Maybe that is an element in what is going on here, for me. I'm conscious that time is accelerating, and I may not be able to get everything out about how I feel in the world in the right ways, so they have something later to review and match up with their own observations and insights.
Since when I'm in love with somebody I tell her all the rest of my story, the parts we don't necessarily tell our kids, being in an intimate relationship is like appointing our partner as the custodian of our life story.
Think about it: there are so many secrets we tell our lovers, things we would never share with other friends, co-workers, neighbors, parents, siblings, or our kids. Things like our sexual fantasies or what we really think of the pomposity of others around us, as well as our dreams for wealth, a perfect house, travel, and artistic hopes.
As we lurch fitfully through our lives, absorbing so many wrenching changes and unwanted transitions, it can feel as if our stories have all been reduced by post-modern discontinuities to a series of random and barely related chapters. Maybe that's why memoirs have supplanted autobiographies?
No one's life could ever have enough coherence to be a book anymore.
Friday, June 23, 2006
Single Parenting-2
My seven-year-old daughter and I have a few projects we've recently developed. One is planting some flower and pumpkin seeds, hoping to beautify our front "yard" and grow a few pumpkins for next Halloween. Another is we cook a few meals together. Tonight, we watered our plants and cooked spaghetti and meatballs, one of our specialties.
Everyone except Julia in our household is a male, and since I have three sons, and their friends often drop by, Julia usually feels badly outnumbered here. She and I have developed our routines partly as a way for her to feel happier here. In her Mom's house, by contrast, she always has at least one other female, and often others, as her mother's friends drop by.
When we are working side by side, as we did tonight, her on a chair and me with my feet on the floor, she often tells me her secrets. A while back, it was her sadness at being excluded in a friendship triangle by two of her closest friends. Tonight, it was something else altogether.
I had asked her what her favorite memories in this household were, and she responded with a list of times involving my former girlfriend:
*"When we had the party for J when she came home from Mississippi the first time, with candied apples, cakes, and my sign on the front door."
*"When J made the mosaic box with me."
*"When J took me to get my nails done."
*"When J showed me the catalogue and we bought my bed."
She also told me she feels our house is much sadder since J left.
She told a friend she wanted to write J a letter and tell her how she feels. But I reminded her that she had already sent her an email last month, with no response. "I'm sure she has just been too busy helping people to write back," Julia told me.
Everyone except Julia in our household is a male, and since I have three sons, and their friends often drop by, Julia usually feels badly outnumbered here. She and I have developed our routines partly as a way for her to feel happier here. In her Mom's house, by contrast, she always has at least one other female, and often others, as her mother's friends drop by.
When we are working side by side, as we did tonight, her on a chair and me with my feet on the floor, she often tells me her secrets. A while back, it was her sadness at being excluded in a friendship triangle by two of her closest friends. Tonight, it was something else altogether.
I had asked her what her favorite memories in this household were, and she responded with a list of times involving my former girlfriend:
*"When we had the party for J when she came home from Mississippi the first time, with candied apples, cakes, and my sign on the front door."
*"When J made the mosaic box with me."
*"When J took me to get my nails done."
*"When J showed me the catalogue and we bought my bed."
She also told me she feels our house is much sadder since J left.
She told a friend she wanted to write J a letter and tell her how she feels. But I reminded her that she had already sent her an email last month, with no response. "I'm sure she has just been too busy helping people to write back," Julia told me.
How do we become better writers?
It's been just over a year since I taught my last course on reporting and writing at Stanford, and I miss teaching. Throughout the 20 or so years I taught journalism at U-C, Berkeley, SFSU, down on The Farm, by far the most FAQ by students was the one posted in the title field above.
Over the coming weeks, I'll post a series of suggestions. Tonight, as a followup to yesterday's piece about technology's effect on writing, and other work, I have one simple piece of advice that can be used by anyone.
Email.
An email exchange with the right recipient is perfect for improving your writing voice. The reasons lie at the intersection between the nature of email experience and the nature of the writing process.
When I first got into email, I called it "talk-writing" or "write-talking." It was a new communication form, combining elements of the arts of conversation and letter-writing. Living somewhere around the midpoint of an imaginary spectrum connecting those two ancient forms, email opened up an ancient struggle for hegemony.
Since Gutenberg, the printed word has held the balance of power over the more ancient form of oral tradition.
Suddenly, email rerighted the balance. It's less formal, more spontaneous, and much more interactive than publishing or letter writing. It's less intimate than conversation face to face.
(IM and chat represent email on steroids. I'll get to them another time.)
Last week, J used this method to produce the first draft of a piece we are coauthoring about the ongoing FEMA scandals in post-Katrina Mississippi. Here is how she described our process:
"So... I'll try to write what I think, then if you want you can edit it etc. I'm going to just write it like an email to you. This is complete stream of consciousness, so have fun with it..."
Most people feel more comfortable just letting it go in email, whereas they might freeze up when they try to write in a more formal way. For me, as an editor, it is easier to pull writing out of a person via email than to deal with an awkwardly structured draft.
My goal is to help the writer develop some narrative form of story telling, probably based on visual cues and other descriptive triggers. By using email, she is more relaxed, and sends me information in a form that includes explaining to me what she thinks it means. She's not worrying about an audience larger than one. So she lets it fly.
That what writers learn to do -- how to become less inhibited with language and let it fly.
This is only an initial attempt to answer the question in my title. I promise to add more soon.
Over the coming weeks, I'll post a series of suggestions. Tonight, as a followup to yesterday's piece about technology's effect on writing, and other work, I have one simple piece of advice that can be used by anyone.
Email.
An email exchange with the right recipient is perfect for improving your writing voice. The reasons lie at the intersection between the nature of email experience and the nature of the writing process.
When I first got into email, I called it "talk-writing" or "write-talking." It was a new communication form, combining elements of the arts of conversation and letter-writing. Living somewhere around the midpoint of an imaginary spectrum connecting those two ancient forms, email opened up an ancient struggle for hegemony.
Since Gutenberg, the printed word has held the balance of power over the more ancient form of oral tradition.
Suddenly, email rerighted the balance. It's less formal, more spontaneous, and much more interactive than publishing or letter writing. It's less intimate than conversation face to face.
(IM and chat represent email on steroids. I'll get to them another time.)
Last week, J used this method to produce the first draft of a piece we are coauthoring about the ongoing FEMA scandals in post-Katrina Mississippi. Here is how she described our process:
"So... I'll try to write what I think, then if you want you can edit it etc. I'm going to just write it like an email to you. This is complete stream of consciousness, so have fun with it..."
Most people feel more comfortable just letting it go in email, whereas they might freeze up when they try to write in a more formal way. For me, as an editor, it is easier to pull writing out of a person via email than to deal with an awkwardly structured draft.
My goal is to help the writer develop some narrative form of story telling, probably based on visual cues and other descriptive triggers. By using email, she is more relaxed, and sends me information in a form that includes explaining to me what she thinks it means. She's not worrying about an audience larger than one. So she lets it fly.
That what writers learn to do -- how to become less inhibited with language and let it fly.
This is only an initial attempt to answer the question in my title. I promise to add more soon.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Love & Work in a Peripatetic Era
About a decade before the Web exploded, I started noticing how various technologies were speeding up the pace of my work. One example was the fax machine, which though it had been invented even before the telephone, back in 1842, did not come into common use in smaller companies until the 1980s, if memory serves. Editors at magazines with multiple offices were accustomed to delays of at least one day, while they shipped versions of stories back and forth; sometimes we would expect a week to pass before a colleague on the East Coast, say, could react to something we'd sent from the West Coast.
By the late '80s, working in the San Francisco bureau of California magazine, I routinely started sending and receiving marked-up manuscripts via fax to our Los Angeles headquarters minutes after the work had been done. The old waiting period was evaporating before my eyes.
At the time I considered it a speed-up, i.e., a work issue. But it didn't bother me, because I've always liked to work relatively fast as an editor.
An even more revolutionary change was the earlier arrival of word processing technology that suddenly turned every writer into his own editor. The act of writing itself underwent an instant transformation. I'd written long manuscripts for years on typewriters, then laboriously retyped them into "final" versions.
Now it was possible to start over and over and over again until I got my lede just right, then proceed through the piece. I've never been the type to work on one section one day and another the next, anyway. I always start over from the top and write down to whatever ending place I can reach in one sitting.
So, the iterative process of writing was accelerating, in line with the dictates of the software development cycle. Nowadays, some versions of word programs are too smart for their own good, or at least my own good, as they misinterpret my intentions and pre-populate fields with bullets or indents that I do not desire at all.
Word processing has thus altered the creative process profoundly.
These are simply two early technological examples. I won't even get started on email, IM, text messaging, video blogs, or multiple other avenues by which our world continues its speedup.
Meanwhile, I have been considering the dilemma of people with extraordinary ability to focus not on multiple tasks but on one significant task only. It is endlessly frustrating for these special beings to constantly be interrupted and diverted from the task at hand. They can become disoriented and depressed. They often don't feel valued by our current, hepped-up economy. They start to question their nature.
Artists, scientists, investigative reporters -- almost anybody who tries to do special and unusual in-depth work have certainly benefited from new technologies, but not necessarily from the work culture that is emerging as a result. How can you concentrate on any one thing when the flood of incoming lights and pings drowns out the virtual island you need to carefully construct for yourself? Or when others expect immediate attention from you when what you need is the space to be able to think?
To be clear here, I personally am among the worst of all multi-taskers. It's not unusual for me to balance seven or eight discrete work tasks simultaneously, plus an equal number of personal matters. So this era is really a dream come true for the likes of me.
But this entry is not about me; it is about my polar opposite. It was provoked by one brief conversation this afternoon with my sweetie in Biloxi. She most definitely is not a multi-tasker. She doesn't excel at juggling multiple projects, nor does she need or want to indulge in instant communications most of the time. Her forte is her ability to focus and concentrate. The people she's helped post-Katrina would be the first to testify that her dogged persistence in staying on their cases no matter how many barriers were placed in her way is the singular quality that got them out of leaky tents last winter and into FEMA trailers.
And her clients have benefited enormously in her role as a graphic designer over the years due to these same qualities of hers.
On the personal side, having her concentrate just on me, whenever she was able to do that, was like receiving an emotional laser beam straight into my heart; it made me warm all over. No one else has been able to lock onto my eyes and pour her soul into mine, extracting mine in the process. This is her power over me, and what I miss so much.
For our world to regain its proper balance, all of us probably need to take a breath and step away from the pace of change now and then. Take a vacation from email, and so forth. And consider how much poorer our experience of life will be if we continue to race through our lives, never stopping to even consider why we feel the need to move on so quickly in the first place.
The alternative is to reach the point where we may be continuously running only in circles, like my dear departed hamster, Spark, did every night until the one before he died. Nor will we ever figure out what it is we might be running away from.
That challenge, however, is precisely where my polar opposite and I meet again, either racing toward or running from, and neither of us can truly say which applies to whom.
By the late '80s, working in the San Francisco bureau of California magazine, I routinely started sending and receiving marked-up manuscripts via fax to our Los Angeles headquarters minutes after the work had been done. The old waiting period was evaporating before my eyes.
At the time I considered it a speed-up, i.e., a work issue. But it didn't bother me, because I've always liked to work relatively fast as an editor.
An even more revolutionary change was the earlier arrival of word processing technology that suddenly turned every writer into his own editor. The act of writing itself underwent an instant transformation. I'd written long manuscripts for years on typewriters, then laboriously retyped them into "final" versions.
Now it was possible to start over and over and over again until I got my lede just right, then proceed through the piece. I've never been the type to work on one section one day and another the next, anyway. I always start over from the top and write down to whatever ending place I can reach in one sitting.
So, the iterative process of writing was accelerating, in line with the dictates of the software development cycle. Nowadays, some versions of word programs are too smart for their own good, or at least my own good, as they misinterpret my intentions and pre-populate fields with bullets or indents that I do not desire at all.
Word processing has thus altered the creative process profoundly.
These are simply two early technological examples. I won't even get started on email, IM, text messaging, video blogs, or multiple other avenues by which our world continues its speedup.
Meanwhile, I have been considering the dilemma of people with extraordinary ability to focus not on multiple tasks but on one significant task only. It is endlessly frustrating for these special beings to constantly be interrupted and diverted from the task at hand. They can become disoriented and depressed. They often don't feel valued by our current, hepped-up economy. They start to question their nature.
Artists, scientists, investigative reporters -- almost anybody who tries to do special and unusual in-depth work have certainly benefited from new technologies, but not necessarily from the work culture that is emerging as a result. How can you concentrate on any one thing when the flood of incoming lights and pings drowns out the virtual island you need to carefully construct for yourself? Or when others expect immediate attention from you when what you need is the space to be able to think?
To be clear here, I personally am among the worst of all multi-taskers. It's not unusual for me to balance seven or eight discrete work tasks simultaneously, plus an equal number of personal matters. So this era is really a dream come true for the likes of me.
But this entry is not about me; it is about my polar opposite. It was provoked by one brief conversation this afternoon with my sweetie in Biloxi. She most definitely is not a multi-tasker. She doesn't excel at juggling multiple projects, nor does she need or want to indulge in instant communications most of the time. Her forte is her ability to focus and concentrate. The people she's helped post-Katrina would be the first to testify that her dogged persistence in staying on their cases no matter how many barriers were placed in her way is the singular quality that got them out of leaky tents last winter and into FEMA trailers.
And her clients have benefited enormously in her role as a graphic designer over the years due to these same qualities of hers.
On the personal side, having her concentrate just on me, whenever she was able to do that, was like receiving an emotional laser beam straight into my heart; it made me warm all over. No one else has been able to lock onto my eyes and pour her soul into mine, extracting mine in the process. This is her power over me, and what I miss so much.
For our world to regain its proper balance, all of us probably need to take a breath and step away from the pace of change now and then. Take a vacation from email, and so forth. And consider how much poorer our experience of life will be if we continue to race through our lives, never stopping to even consider why we feel the need to move on so quickly in the first place.
The alternative is to reach the point where we may be continuously running only in circles, like my dear departed hamster, Spark, did every night until the one before he died. Nor will we ever figure out what it is we might be running away from.
That challenge, however, is precisely where my polar opposite and I meet again, either racing toward or running from, and neither of us can truly say which applies to whom.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Out of Control
When my lover and I first revealed that we had become romantic partners to a group of mutual friends, she felt so shy about it that she pulled her big, pink, fake-fur coat over her head and blushed furiously.
That was almost two years ago. Recently, I asked whether she has told her friends down there that we had broken up. She said yes. Apparently there was nothing at all embarassing about that.
I remember a long time ago when it was more embarassing to break up than stay together. Especially, of course, for married people. Many tried to keep their troubles secret.
Now, the social pressures have shifted. It is easier to talk about breaking up, and all the reasons why, than how meaningful you find your most intimate connections. Maybe this is logical. When I look around me, it seems almost everyone is breaking up, or having trouble in her relationship.
But a few of my friends really value their partnerships. Maybe they are the ones who appreciate how hard it is to find true love, so they don't throw it away quite so casually. Listening yesterday to the founder of Found magazine talk to Michael Krasny on KQED, I was struck by the sensitivity of his appreciation for the rarity of love.
When you focus on keeping yourself moving in this world, and you want to be able to travel lightly, it is far less burdensome to be alone than part of a couple. Then, freedom truly is just another way of saying you have nothing left to lose. But, when it is the feeling of loss itself that you are afraid to confront, self-protection dictates you turn away from any strong feelings of attachment. You'll run away from love.
Not that being alone doesn't have its advantages. Here, in the land of rugged individualism, we are almost all part-cowboy, determined to ride into the sunset alone.
Most of us will succeed. As I've noted, recent census figures indicate that more adults in America are single than married; and that most of us will spend more of our adult years unmarried than married. The trend is stronger the younger you are.
The marriage part of this is not my issue. It's the love part. All I can do, as a lone voice in the wilderness, is draw my own line in the sand: I believe in love, romantic love, and attachment. I think 1 + 1 adds up to a lot more than 2. It's geometry, not arithmetic.
If emotional honesty is ever to be at the core of some phrase I utter, it is this: Listen to what your heart tells you before you listen to your brain. This is my formula for how to get into a lot of trouble in this world.
Like falling in love.
That was almost two years ago. Recently, I asked whether she has told her friends down there that we had broken up. She said yes. Apparently there was nothing at all embarassing about that.
I remember a long time ago when it was more embarassing to break up than stay together. Especially, of course, for married people. Many tried to keep their troubles secret.
Now, the social pressures have shifted. It is easier to talk about breaking up, and all the reasons why, than how meaningful you find your most intimate connections. Maybe this is logical. When I look around me, it seems almost everyone is breaking up, or having trouble in her relationship.
But a few of my friends really value their partnerships. Maybe they are the ones who appreciate how hard it is to find true love, so they don't throw it away quite so casually. Listening yesterday to the founder of Found magazine talk to Michael Krasny on KQED, I was struck by the sensitivity of his appreciation for the rarity of love.
When you focus on keeping yourself moving in this world, and you want to be able to travel lightly, it is far less burdensome to be alone than part of a couple. Then, freedom truly is just another way of saying you have nothing left to lose. But, when it is the feeling of loss itself that you are afraid to confront, self-protection dictates you turn away from any strong feelings of attachment. You'll run away from love.
Not that being alone doesn't have its advantages. Here, in the land of rugged individualism, we are almost all part-cowboy, determined to ride into the sunset alone.
Most of us will succeed. As I've noted, recent census figures indicate that more adults in America are single than married; and that most of us will spend more of our adult years unmarried than married. The trend is stronger the younger you are.
The marriage part of this is not my issue. It's the love part. All I can do, as a lone voice in the wilderness, is draw my own line in the sand: I believe in love, romantic love, and attachment. I think 1 + 1 adds up to a lot more than 2. It's geometry, not arithmetic.
If emotional honesty is ever to be at the core of some phrase I utter, it is this: Listen to what your heart tells you before you listen to your brain. This is my formula for how to get into a lot of trouble in this world.
Like falling in love.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Voices
What is going on here, on one level, is simple -- I'm trying to rediscover myself as writer, after many years ignoring that part of myself in order to work with others, either as an editor, or a teacher, or a friend -- and sometimes as all three. In the distant past, I published three books, and I currently owe a publisher a fourth (a biography of Jann Wenner); and have partially written but not sold a fifth (about my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Afghanistan); and here am probably developing a sixth, perhaps a novel about love and love lost. But there is a seventh that needs to be written, as well, about the murder of a dear friend's mother, which we may soon explore here in this space. I have other ideas, as well.
In other words, a whole lot is being compressed into this simple little blogspace. I am starting from the place of my still-broken heart, and my enormous sense of loss of a relationship that felt perfect to me on so many levels. I hope to broaden out soon from my own pain to connect with others about their own personal senses of loss, but also about how they rediscovered joy in life. Because, let's face it. Our time here is short. We all need to be able to capture the beauty and the humor of our lives in this time and place. And, then, of course, to let it go, as we must each learn to do. Whatever is happening to all of us, it is funny, at least from where I sit, as well as very, very sad. There are two types of tears.
Like all of you, I know both all too well...
In other words, a whole lot is being compressed into this simple little blogspace. I am starting from the place of my still-broken heart, and my enormous sense of loss of a relationship that felt perfect to me on so many levels. I hope to broaden out soon from my own pain to connect with others about their own personal senses of loss, but also about how they rediscovered joy in life. Because, let's face it. Our time here is short. We all need to be able to capture the beauty and the humor of our lives in this time and place. And, then, of course, to let it go, as we must each learn to do. Whatever is happening to all of us, it is funny, at least from where I sit, as well as very, very sad. There are two types of tears.
Like all of you, I know both all too well...
Want to know more?
In some ways, this blog has been hiding its light under the bush for too long. I need to explain the political and emotional drivers of my connection to the Gulf Coast, and why I won't stop writing about it any time soon.
The most powerful relationships in my life have been characterized by this type of convergence. My first great love and I covered the violence in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968, for our college newspaper. Little did we know that we would be witnessing (and participating in) the last march Martin Luther King, Jr., would lead before his assassination. After his death, we coauthored an op-ed called "The Violent Death of Non-Violence," still one of my favorites among the many hundreds of piecesd I have written alone or with others throughout my career.
My second great love and I were writing partners on some investigative environmental stories, particularly the tragedy of Los Afectados, thousands of Central American banana workers rendered sterile by exposure to a pesticide supplied by U.S. companies after it had been banned in the U.S. for causing manufacturing workers here to become sterile.
Most of my work has involved the attempt to balance accurate, professional journalistic standards with my own social conscience. It has also often been one way I have grown more connected with my partners. When my girlfriend returned from her first, short stint in Mississippi last October, I was deeply affected by the stories she told me of the suffering she'd witnessed there.
After she returned to the south a month later, I visited to see for myself. The very first afternoon she drove me through East Biloxi, I was stunned; I've not been able to get the images out of my mind ever since. It is difficult to adequately describe a devastation so extensive that experts say it will require twelve long years of hard effort to rebuild that community.
Her passion for the area and the plight of Katrina's victims has rekindled my own. We share a deep anger at the injustices of race and class so visibly on display since the hurricane ripped the facade of classlessness in America to shreds. Today -- as we were fond of saying in the '60s, "You're either part of the problem, or you're part of the solution."
If there is any solution to be found for such large issues, it is educating ourselves and our fellow citizens about our fundamental responsibility to collectively restructure the way our society creates and sustains poverty amidst the greatest concentration of wealth known to history.
She and I have drafted our first article together about this subject, to be published by a national outlet in the upcoming weeks. When it does, of course, I'll link to the site. For me, naturally, there are personal aspects of this new partnering that are bittersweet. Though we are no longer able to be together, we are just now finding our mutual voice, much as I have done with the other great loves in my life.
It takes two. Thank you, Freebird.
The most powerful relationships in my life have been characterized by this type of convergence. My first great love and I covered the violence in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968, for our college newspaper. Little did we know that we would be witnessing (and participating in) the last march Martin Luther King, Jr., would lead before his assassination. After his death, we coauthored an op-ed called "The Violent Death of Non-Violence," still one of my favorites among the many hundreds of piecesd I have written alone or with others throughout my career.
My second great love and I were writing partners on some investigative environmental stories, particularly the tragedy of Los Afectados, thousands of Central American banana workers rendered sterile by exposure to a pesticide supplied by U.S. companies after it had been banned in the U.S. for causing manufacturing workers here to become sterile.
Most of my work has involved the attempt to balance accurate, professional journalistic standards with my own social conscience. It has also often been one way I have grown more connected with my partners. When my girlfriend returned from her first, short stint in Mississippi last October, I was deeply affected by the stories she told me of the suffering she'd witnessed there.
After she returned to the south a month later, I visited to see for myself. The very first afternoon she drove me through East Biloxi, I was stunned; I've not been able to get the images out of my mind ever since. It is difficult to adequately describe a devastation so extensive that experts say it will require twelve long years of hard effort to rebuild that community.
Her passion for the area and the plight of Katrina's victims has rekindled my own. We share a deep anger at the injustices of race and class so visibly on display since the hurricane ripped the facade of classlessness in America to shreds. Today -- as we were fond of saying in the '60s, "You're either part of the problem, or you're part of the solution."
If there is any solution to be found for such large issues, it is educating ourselves and our fellow citizens about our fundamental responsibility to collectively restructure the way our society creates and sustains poverty amidst the greatest concentration of wealth known to history.
She and I have drafted our first article together about this subject, to be published by a national outlet in the upcoming weeks. When it does, of course, I'll link to the site. For me, naturally, there are personal aspects of this new partnering that are bittersweet. Though we are no longer able to be together, we are just now finding our mutual voice, much as I have done with the other great loves in my life.
It takes two. Thank you, Freebird.
Monday, June 19, 2006
Warm San Francisco Nights
It's a safe guess that most of us who've migrated here since the the Gold Rush arrived seeking one or more of the main elements of this City's mystique, which usually have included tolerance, freedom, love, diversity, radicalism, and an entrepreneurial spirit that sometimes can generate tremendous wealth. But, ever since the 1850's, many more people have failed than succeeded in this last area, which is only to state the obvious -- that few will ever become rich here, or anywhere else, for that matter.
Like other edges of the country (the Florida Keys, New Orleans, Anchorage, Honolulu), San Francisco attracts artists, outlaws, writers, itinerant musicians, comedians, misfits, and people who would never even try to articulate why they showed up, because words can't provide a suitable label.
But we all recognize each other once we arrive, as the kindred souls we are.
Even if most of us do not realize wealth here, we do have a pretty good chance of experiencing some of those other aspects of the City's offerings. Tonight, I'm thinking about love. This City has been good to lots of people, including me, seeking love.
But love, like wealth, is easily lost. So, another trait of San Francisco's is it has more bars per capita than most major cities; and my guess is that many residents have tried to drink away the loss of their dreams (wealth or love) here than other places, too. Crying in their beer, so to speak.
The martini, for example, was invented here (actually nearby, in Martinez) in the bitter aftermath of the Gold Rush, which was a long, painful bust that drove many ex-miners to drink. Maybe it is the failure to find wealth or maybe it is the loss of love, or maybe both, but the Barbary Coast tradition lives on in San Francisco, and all you have to do on a warm night like tonight is walk around the City to witness it.
Isolation is the saddest outcome of all, and that is how too many end up on the edges of our society. Your dreams did not come true, so you fall over the edge. And, in San Francisco, that means onto the streets, where we have so many homeless people, some of them perhaps just one lucky break away from achieving some version of their original dream.
My sweet friend claims that you are never alone if someone else has you in her mind. That is a comforting thought. But what happens if the person you most want to keep you in her mind decides to put you out of her mind -- if she chooses to deny that your feelings for her continue to exist? (She claims she is good at doing that, too.)
It's a warm night here in San Francisco. A good night for finding a new love? A bad night for missing someone. Summer is a romantic time, and always has been for me, a child of the frozen north. For me, the most relevant question about romance now is knowing who is keeping me in her mind, and who isn't.
That question hangs softly in the warm air over the Bay tonight; the answer in the heavy air over Biloxi...
Like other edges of the country (the Florida Keys, New Orleans, Anchorage, Honolulu), San Francisco attracts artists, outlaws, writers, itinerant musicians, comedians, misfits, and people who would never even try to articulate why they showed up, because words can't provide a suitable label.
But we all recognize each other once we arrive, as the kindred souls we are.
Even if most of us do not realize wealth here, we do have a pretty good chance of experiencing some of those other aspects of the City's offerings. Tonight, I'm thinking about love. This City has been good to lots of people, including me, seeking love.
But love, like wealth, is easily lost. So, another trait of San Francisco's is it has more bars per capita than most major cities; and my guess is that many residents have tried to drink away the loss of their dreams (wealth or love) here than other places, too. Crying in their beer, so to speak.
The martini, for example, was invented here (actually nearby, in Martinez) in the bitter aftermath of the Gold Rush, which was a long, painful bust that drove many ex-miners to drink. Maybe it is the failure to find wealth or maybe it is the loss of love, or maybe both, but the Barbary Coast tradition lives on in San Francisco, and all you have to do on a warm night like tonight is walk around the City to witness it.
Isolation is the saddest outcome of all, and that is how too many end up on the edges of our society. Your dreams did not come true, so you fall over the edge. And, in San Francisco, that means onto the streets, where we have so many homeless people, some of them perhaps just one lucky break away from achieving some version of their original dream.
My sweet friend claims that you are never alone if someone else has you in her mind. That is a comforting thought. But what happens if the person you most want to keep you in her mind decides to put you out of her mind -- if she chooses to deny that your feelings for her continue to exist? (She claims she is good at doing that, too.)
It's a warm night here in San Francisco. A good night for finding a new love? A bad night for missing someone. Summer is a romantic time, and always has been for me, a child of the frozen north. For me, the most relevant question about romance now is knowing who is keeping me in her mind, and who isn't.
That question hangs softly in the warm air over the Bay tonight; the answer in the heavy air over Biloxi...
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Single Parenting-1
When I was very young, my grandfather took me with him to work on the house he was helping finish for my uncle. I remember we were working on flooring. Apparently, I wasn't much help, however, because he ushered me back home a few hours later, with an admonition in his heavily accented English that I would have to try a lot harder if I was ever going to learn to do anything useful in this world.
By "anything," he meant practical things, like carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, mechanical skills. He'd come to this country as a tool-and-die worker, and most of our extended family had solid working class skills. Most of them, like him, ended up working in the auto industry in and around Detroit.
My father was much more patient with me when we worked on projects together. But, over the years, I proved to be a slow learner in this regard. I also realized that if I hesitated when I was unsure what to do, my extremely kind father would step in and do the work himself, all the while instructing me over and over, perhaps never seeing that I had already hit my ceiling in pragmatism.
We worked on our own cars in Michigan; everyone did. I watched as Dad took apart a carburetor and then put it back together and reinstall it in our car. When he was done, he had a few random parts left over, but he said, "If it works, we won't worry about it."
It worked.
***
Years later, here in San Francisco, I tried to work on the first of several 1966 Volvo-S cars I owned. They were reputably the easiest cars to work on ever, and came with helpful owner's manuals. Ours needed a water pump. I took everything apart, just like I remembered Dad doing; then I installed the new water pump, put everything else back in place; and, not surprisingly, a couple parts were left over, with no obvious place to put them.
"If it works," I assured my wife, "we won't worry about it."
Confidently, I fired up the engine and drove forward a few meters, but -- kaboom! -- the fan tore into the radiator and water starting spewing everywhere. The car coughed to a stop.
My first wife proved to be immensely skilled in practical matters, out of desperate necessity. I consoled myself that at least I could write, more or less, and earn money, most of the time. But it was better for everyone if I didn't try to assemble the things we bought, or fix the things that broke, or attempt to build something from scratch.
***
Yesterday, I bought my younger three kids a stand-alone basketball hoop & backboard unit at a local store. "Is it hard to assemble?" I asked the salesman. "Not if you're handy," he replied. "You look like you are handy."
Appearances truly must be misleading.
We spent almost all of the rest of this weekend putting this confounded thing together, my three little assistants and I. They acquired an entire new repertoire of blue language, as I made mistake after mistake; had to take things apart and put them together again, sometimes over and over.
By the end, just when we thought we had it nailed, my 11-year-old son pointed out that I had installed the hoop backwards. All three burst into hysterical giggles, which upset me more than I can explain, though I kept these feelings private. In any event, this outcome necessitated another long ordeal, with all three of them helping now, concerned looks on their faces, whenever they weren't suppressing their giggles.
During this long, strange weekend, I regretted again losing my latest partner, because she is so good at stuff like this. She stepped in repeatedly these past two years to assemble things, fix things, patiently trouble-shoot problems. She has a real talent for this, although computers do frustrate her and make her a tad angry on occasion.
I don't know that I ever properly explained to her how grateful I was for her common sense and logical skill at figuring all of these things out for me. It was one of the reasons I easily concluded that we were a perfect fit, although, obviously, that was strictly from my point-of-view, not hers.
I also miss the presence of my oldest son, who from an early age, probably 8, took me under his wing to fix my VCRs, telephone answering machines, and so forth, whenever they broke, or rather whenever I made them mess up. He's on the road right now, driving his mother across the country to her new home in Washington, D.C. Maybe when he comes back, he can help me figure out what to do with all of these parts leftover in our backyard. I'm a little worried this contraption could fall down, and I sincerely doubt the company that made it included so many extra parts just out of sloppiness or kindness toward the consumer.
Do you see, kind reader, where I am going here? My three young children rely on me, defend me, and believe in me as only young children can do. They probably already realize that in many ways, I am so incompetent as to be laughable; but they are still too young and kind (or maybe scared) to speak that out loud. But teenagerhood beckons, and anyway, I always tell them how unskilled I am, usually while apologizing for calling mere inanimate objects names that would make sailors blush.
The current facts, as near as I can tell, are that this basketball unit still stands at this hour in our backyard, despite six hours of almost constant use and abuse by my small would-be Michael Jordans.
It's too soon to say, but maybe I learned something from my Dad, after all? Or, maybe, as we say in baseball, it's better to be lucky than good.
By "anything," he meant practical things, like carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, mechanical skills. He'd come to this country as a tool-and-die worker, and most of our extended family had solid working class skills. Most of them, like him, ended up working in the auto industry in and around Detroit.
My father was much more patient with me when we worked on projects together. But, over the years, I proved to be a slow learner in this regard. I also realized that if I hesitated when I was unsure what to do, my extremely kind father would step in and do the work himself, all the while instructing me over and over, perhaps never seeing that I had already hit my ceiling in pragmatism.
We worked on our own cars in Michigan; everyone did. I watched as Dad took apart a carburetor and then put it back together and reinstall it in our car. When he was done, he had a few random parts left over, but he said, "If it works, we won't worry about it."
It worked.
***
Years later, here in San Francisco, I tried to work on the first of several 1966 Volvo-S cars I owned. They were reputably the easiest cars to work on ever, and came with helpful owner's manuals. Ours needed a water pump. I took everything apart, just like I remembered Dad doing; then I installed the new water pump, put everything else back in place; and, not surprisingly, a couple parts were left over, with no obvious place to put them.
"If it works," I assured my wife, "we won't worry about it."
Confidently, I fired up the engine and drove forward a few meters, but -- kaboom! -- the fan tore into the radiator and water starting spewing everywhere. The car coughed to a stop.
My first wife proved to be immensely skilled in practical matters, out of desperate necessity. I consoled myself that at least I could write, more or less, and earn money, most of the time. But it was better for everyone if I didn't try to assemble the things we bought, or fix the things that broke, or attempt to build something from scratch.
***
Yesterday, I bought my younger three kids a stand-alone basketball hoop & backboard unit at a local store. "Is it hard to assemble?" I asked the salesman. "Not if you're handy," he replied. "You look like you are handy."
Appearances truly must be misleading.
We spent almost all of the rest of this weekend putting this confounded thing together, my three little assistants and I. They acquired an entire new repertoire of blue language, as I made mistake after mistake; had to take things apart and put them together again, sometimes over and over.
By the end, just when we thought we had it nailed, my 11-year-old son pointed out that I had installed the hoop backwards. All three burst into hysterical giggles, which upset me more than I can explain, though I kept these feelings private. In any event, this outcome necessitated another long ordeal, with all three of them helping now, concerned looks on their faces, whenever they weren't suppressing their giggles.
During this long, strange weekend, I regretted again losing my latest partner, because she is so good at stuff like this. She stepped in repeatedly these past two years to assemble things, fix things, patiently trouble-shoot problems. She has a real talent for this, although computers do frustrate her and make her a tad angry on occasion.
I don't know that I ever properly explained to her how grateful I was for her common sense and logical skill at figuring all of these things out for me. It was one of the reasons I easily concluded that we were a perfect fit, although, obviously, that was strictly from my point-of-view, not hers.
I also miss the presence of my oldest son, who from an early age, probably 8, took me under his wing to fix my VCRs, telephone answering machines, and so forth, whenever they broke, or rather whenever I made them mess up. He's on the road right now, driving his mother across the country to her new home in Washington, D.C. Maybe when he comes back, he can help me figure out what to do with all of these parts leftover in our backyard. I'm a little worried this contraption could fall down, and I sincerely doubt the company that made it included so many extra parts just out of sloppiness or kindness toward the consumer.
Do you see, kind reader, where I am going here? My three young children rely on me, defend me, and believe in me as only young children can do. They probably already realize that in many ways, I am so incompetent as to be laughable; but they are still too young and kind (or maybe scared) to speak that out loud. But teenagerhood beckons, and anyway, I always tell them how unskilled I am, usually while apologizing for calling mere inanimate objects names that would make sailors blush.
The current facts, as near as I can tell, are that this basketball unit still stands at this hour in our backyard, despite six hours of almost constant use and abuse by my small would-be Michael Jordans.
It's too soon to say, but maybe I learned something from my Dad, after all? Or, maybe, as we say in baseball, it's better to be lucky than good.
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