Full House

I did some cleaning today. Just vacuuming in the living room and some stuff in the bathroom. I don’t need new speakers, but I do need my computer to be able to control the ones in the living room as well as the kitchen. If I can get a full-house sound, I might clean the full house. If not…you’re in big trouble, mister.

The Moms has been hassling me about not blogging. My response, apparently, is to create a paragraph-long post featuring a joke from a sitcom she never watched. And still no grandchildren. I am a terrible kid.

full_house.jpg

These are not my kids.

Categories: General | 1 Comment

Bob

We have a thirsty ghost and his name is Bob.

I knew Bob in life. He lived on the top floor of our building. He had a hard time getting up the stairs and used to rest in the lobby before making the climb; sometimes I’d be passing through and I’d carry his laundry up to his door or just sit and chat with him. I quite liked him.

Shortly before he died, Bob asked us to switch apartments with him. He wasn’t going to be able to manage the stairs any more. We said no for a variety of selfish reasons, but it turned out not to matter as he died in the care facility where he was staying at the time.

Since he died, Bob’s been keeping me company. And the poor guy wants a drink. Every so often, he pushes something off a shelf where it is firmly lodged; the first time it was a beer bottle, today it was a water glass. I am always in another room when this happens. It’s a lot of shards to sweep up, but I don’t mind. I’d leave a beer for him on the counter (in a plastic cup), except I think Gene might object to sharing his hard-bought beer with my invisible friend. Bob’s also been screwing around with our refrigerator, I believe, covering the things inside with a thin layer of frost but still not really chilling things. Maybe he lives in there. I might, if I were a ghost who missed food.

Of course, it’s possible that working alone all day I’ve simply invented a friend, because I am a sad, pathetic person. But self-interest compels me to believe I am not sad and pathetic. I’m just hanging out with Bob.

bob.jpg

This one’s for you, friend.

Categories: General | Leave a comment

The Wart

My jaw joint (located just in front of the ear) is inflamed. You can’t tell from looking at it but I sure can feel it. Apparently, I’ve been grinding my teeth in my sleep. The inflamed joint was diagnosed a week ago, and since then it’s spread to the other side of my face and part of my throat. So, I don’t know. I might just collapse into a heap of pieces. My days are clearly numbered.

It’s funny that I am a tooth-grinder. I’m also a shoulder-tenser, a nail-biter, a back-huncher and a brow-furrower. Where is all this tension coming from, though? Used to be, I could blame it on school or work. Now I’ve stripped all sources of stress away from my life and I am left with the simple truth: I am a very worried person.

I worry about global warming. I worry that Gene might never want to have kids and I might someday want to. I worry that a guy might whistle at me on the street, that all my books might burn down in an apartment fire, that a friend will tell me what she REALLY thinks of me. Should I be cleaning the house more, writing more fiction, wearing a more attractive shade of nail polish? Should I be more outgoing? I worry that a doorway might open into another world and I won’t have any money when I get there and will starve before I have any magical adventures. (I used to keep a small cloth pouch of loose change in my bedroom for just this emergency.) I worry that the flight attendant on the plane might ask me a question I wasn’t expecting. I worry that someone I love will die, as a judgment on me because I didn’t spend enough time worrying about it and trying to picture it.

I think I worry to stave off trouble. I live in a beautiful apartment, in the city I love best in the world, with the person I most want to live with, doing a job I love, and looking the way I want to look. I have never done anything to deserve this and I worry that I am at the beginning of my particular bildungsroman, not the end, and there are trials by fire ahead of me. I worry so that the gods and cosmic narrators will know that I am not really enjoying myself. Even though I’m eating this banana in the store, I fully intend to pay for it. I will pay for it. Look, I’m paying for it now.

And so I pay a little every day, and waste half the pleasure of having the banana in the first place.

wart.jpg

Categories: General | Leave a comment

Help!

Now that I’m trying to write short stories, I think I need to read more of them as well. I’ve read Nabokov, Wodehouse, McKillip, Thurber, Gaiman, Saki and Salinger: who else should I read? Your help will be highly prized.

Categories: General | Tags: | 5 Comments

Custer’d

A few days ago, Gene and I were floating the idea of buying a place, like a paper boat in a bathtub. We take the boat out and play with it from time to time, but just for fun, and it always ends with an agreement that in order to buy a place as nice as where we live now, we’d have to leave this neighborhood we love living in.

This time, though, I started to think about the Mission. The recent glut of gay marriage street parties and Pride celebrations has made me realize how little there is for us in this community. I don’t have any desire (or ability) to force myself inside — I like that it exists as it is. But wouldn’t it be great to be in a neighborhood where I was a member of the bubble? To constantly be running into people I knew, to have a neighborhood bar of my own?

Then again, is de-Mexican-ing the Mission any better than de-gaying the Castro?

I was reading an article talking about how the LGBT folks came into Eureka Valley and did it up proper, and how sad it is that their work is being taken away from them now that so many are being priced out of the neighborhood. The article didn’t mention the thriving Italian community that was here before them. I suppose in twenty years there will be articles about how sad it is that the hipsters are being priced out of town, after we put all that effort into “cleaning up” the Mission.

Wait, did you hear that? It almost sounded like…Spanish? Nah, I dunno what I’m thinking. Lead on, Custer.

custer.jpg

Categories: General | Tags: , | 1 Comment

About writing

Samuel R. Delaney, in his book About Writing, says “Writers are people who write.”* My heart sinks immediately whenever I read that old truism, thinking of the short story that’s been stalled in my fiction folder for three weeks now, thinking how little fiction I’ve written at all.

I forget that I write every day, stupid. (Stupid is me.) I write articles for magazines and newspapers, I write blog posts, I write in my journal for myself. For some reason, if it’s not a made-up story about dragons, I seem to discount it. Why is that?

*I found this on today’s post from Neil Gaiman.

dopey_dragon.jpg

This is not my dopey dragon.

Categories: General | Tags: | Leave a comment

Clean living

Sometimes I rather plaintively ask Gene why we can’t have a house cleaner come in a couple of times a month, and then he says “Would a house cleaner cost me as much as you do?” and we both laugh and it’s all very cute*.

But anyway, a few weeks ago I finally hit saturation point and was curious as to what color the tiles on the bathroom floor were originally, so I got down and did some serious dirt removal about the love pad. The result was delightful: shining and dustless and really very pleasant to hang around in.

What was Gene’s reaction, you ask? Well, as soon as he got home from work, he looked around, smiled, and proceeded to buy a whole new sound system from a guy on craigslist. So now my computer, once soundless, emits sound on kickass speakers and is attached to other speakers in the kitchen, so I can download the whole soundtrack to, for example, Footloose, and listen to it while I make toast.

I don’t know what lesson you’re taking from this, but it seems clear to me that cleaning once annually yields exciting results. I think I’ve found a timeline I can live with.

*or adjective of your choice.

housewife_happy.jpg

This is not my housewife. But seriously, how awesome would I look in this dress?

Categories: General | Tags: | Leave a comment

Pleasant

I’m dog-sitting in Pleasant Hill for a couple of weeks. When idly checking for something to do out here, I was surprised to find a motherlode of options. It’s like there’s this whole, awesome Stars Hollow town under the featureless suburb I remember from my younger years.

For example, on Saturday, I will be attending a library book sale at a Mayberry-esque spot known to locals as “the schoolhouse.” The night before that, I can check out Garage Bands at the Lake, which is local acts performing at the man-made puddle outside City Hall. Also at City Hall is a regular Teen Moonlight Movie, where kids can come sit on the lawn and see blockbuster movies outdoors for free. Or the whole family could attend the Dive In Movie Night at the rec center pool, where you can swim while you watch Pirates of the Caribbean. On the Fourth of July, you can plan your whole day around town-sponsored activities, including a cooling-off visit to something called the “sprayground.”

Why so cool, P Hill? When I was growing up, the only sprayground we had was Michele’s garage. (Because of the cats, get it?) There was no Brazilian takeout place, no beaver controversy, no Derby Day competitions. Things have changed.

I still don’t want to live here, but it really is a nice place to visit.

phill.jpg

This is not my town.

Categories: General | Tags: | 1 Comment

You are spearing that tomato and I don’t want to hear another word about it

I hate authors who do that dippy routine about how “the characters tell me where they want to go and I just follow,” invariably followed by a specific example of that time when the author wanted to do one thing and the characters wanted to do something else and they had a long argument and the characters won. I hate it because it makes all authors sound like swoony psychopaths who have to have long discussions with their forks before they use them, when actually the most successful authors tend to have a strong work ethic and take no nonsense from their imaginary friends.

Ok, but I’ve been writing more and more fiction lately and I have to say, it is pretty exciting to sit down with no idea where the story is headed and then watch as it actually heads somewhere. And while I am not talking to my fork just yet, it really does feel like it comes from somewhere else, like it’s something I’m reading in someone else’s book as I write it.

There is always the possibility that I am actually cribbing from other stuff I’ve read and I’m just not remembering, of course. I understand this is a common danger for neophytes. But either way, I’m pretty delighted these days.

robot_writer.jpg

This is not my robot writer.

Categories: General | Tags: | 2 Comments

Smell

A few weeks ago, our top-floor neighbor’s sink overflowed and all the apartments below him, including ours, had water damage. Ours was pretty minimal, though the port-a-potty smell of wet drywall did linger for several days.

Today I began smelling the faintest whiff of port-a-potty again and notified both the upstairs neighbor (who is also the building manager) and the company that runs the building. This was the first they’d heard of the leak, which means I may have just gotten my very nice building manager into hot water. Hot leaky water. If he gets in trouble and blames me, we may have to move. But probably he won’t, as the lady at the management office didn’t seem too concerned. Then again, why would she be? After all, she’s not the one whose home office smells like toilet.

smell.jpg

Toilet.

Categories: General | 1 Comment