Waterfall at the Foot of the Mountain

It isn't that I haven't been writing. I have. I've started a story with the tentative title "The Waterfall at the Foot of the Mountain". It's so sad, but I really like the story idea.I'm not going to say much now, but I'll share once I have the first part written.

Little Alex Wins a Washing Machine

I did a new oral history interview today with Alex Arroyos. He had great stories to share, and he really has done some amazing things for his community starting in high school. One of the funniest stories was about when he was something like eight years old and living in Edna, Texas. They were having a raffle for an electric washing machine. This is like in the 1940s. He saved up soda bottle caps and turned them in for tickets. On the night they announced the winning ticket, he looked in his notebook to see if one of his tickets was the winner and it was. He raced home and woke up his mother and said, "un mexicano gano!" He then started describing himself. When his mother realized that he had won, she was so excited she started crying. Only later did he realize that they couldn't use the washing machine since they didn't have electricity.

Dinner with Billy

I really want to keep up this posting every day thing, but some days are harder than others. At least it's not because I have nothing to write about. No, today was incredibly busy. To be brief, I had dinner with Billy tonight. I love Billy. Billy and I have really great ideas and it gets me really excited hopeful for the new projects we dreamed up and I get that manic energy that is not too manic and just productive enough to keep me going for a few weeks or months. Coincidentally, the walk back to the parking lot with Laney was great, too. She mentioned a run that's local and raises money to plant trees in Memorial Park and in the swag you get a tree too. How cool is that! It's called 4 the Park and it's in April. Now I have a cool goal "race". Totally encouraging for me right now. And another co-worker and I had a great idea of having a vegetarian/vegan potluck and recipe share. Yea! SO excited for all these projects. Now, just to reign in the excitement and get all this stuff organized. Am I just busy enough? Yes, I think so.

New Orleans Setting

Did another ten minute exercise today. Listened the "Madness" by Muse and the story turned out to be an assassin, I suppose. Lesbian, definitely just waking up from a fun night and reliving it in the shower. Interesting.

Today at lunch I remembered how much I love mishearing other people's conversations. I wrote them down. The best line was "God is playing a rookie quarterback this season." So many different ways I could take that. Is God the rookie? Is God the coach? Wouldn't that be interesting? For at least three minutes, I would say.

Keep Calm, Carry on, and Use the Oxford Comma.

"You will not fuck with the way we practice the English language in my household!" --said by a parent arguing about the points I took off her son's paper for not using the Oxford comma. Not really. But how awesome an argument would that have been.

Just a Regular Sunday of Dressing Wounds and Watching Sherlock

We decided a Mexican brunch needed to be eaten, so we invited the Pumpkin over. She asked Joy to redress her wound from surgery. It's always nice when it's your best friend who saves your life. This according to the doctor. Now Pumpkin owes Joy the last bite of cheeseburger...whatever that means; though, knowing Joy, it's probably quite literal. She does enjoy a good cheeseburger.

Meredith, ever so persistent, gratefully persistent, asked me to go walking with her and Nico and to bring Gaby along, of course. So I went. I had to. It's been months since I've done any exercising outside of Christmas shopping. It was nice. I bought some Pumas that were on sale for $10 on amazon and they fit wonderfully. We went to the dog park first. Gaby chased a small pug mix back and forth. It was funny. She's in a pen full of dogs to play with, but she always just wants to run with the smaller dogs in the next pen. After that we went walking around the park, and I noticed that there was a spot on Gaby's side that wasn't laying quite right but I thought it was just fluffed up from playing with the dogs. When we got back to the car, I took a closer look and saw she had this 1" wound on her side. Meredith and I surmised that she must have caught her fur on the fence and ripped off her skin.

Joy went to get some first aid supplies and we dressed her wound. Gaby is truly an awesome dog. She let us do all the dressing without complaining, and now she's walking around with bandages all the way around her middle and not messing with it at all. Very impressive. And, no, there are no pictures. I mean, do you really want to see a gaping wound? Ew.

Later Joy and I sat and watched Sherlock. It was an episode we had seen before but liked very much so we watched it again. It was the one about The Woman. In the episode Sherlock tells his brother that she can be followed on Twitter and gives her handle, and it turns out she really does have a Twitter profile. How fun.

I really do need to sit and read Sherlock. Heck, maybe I'll get it on audiobook and listen to it in the car or while working out since my commute isn't that bad.

Tonight we had a visit from Sandra who said her family is really going to buy the land. The house should be built by next year, so it looks like we will be losing Sandra to Mexico in 2015. Sad face.

It's Too Late and I Am Too Drunk or Clockwork Birds and Things Are Big in Texas

God, I hope things are spelled correctly in this post. Yep. Drunk like that. Not quite at the point that I need that app that makes you do math before you can use your cell phone so you don't drunk dial someone you shouldn't, but drunk enough that I gave Joy my keys saying "Don'crashmah car, kay?" the whole way home.

Oh, and def drunk enough for y'all to not get a story tonight about these clockwork birds I saw in the window tonight at the shop next to Brasserie 19 where we went to dinner tonight last minute. Fuck that savings plan! I'm eatin' out in style tonight. On a whim. 'Cause I can. Yeah. It was very good, too.













Giant drinks and tiny tabasco sauce bottle 'cause things are big in Texas. Hardy har har.

Ha! Even that second one looks oddly sized due to the perspective of the shot. Well, the last one is dessert of poached pears in red wine sauce and some other fancy shit and a glass of port. I have to thank Carl and Gary for introducing me to dessert wines  and ports and pairing them with desserts. Amazing dinner tonight.

Frank's Muse Loves Karma

Frank's muse loves Karma, and I don't mean like the whole idea of people getting justly served their rewards and punishments in this lifetime, but like Karma. Capital K there as in proper name. And Karma loves Frank's muse. Usually. You know how difficult goddesses can be. Sometimes Karma isn't quite so happy with Frank's muse, Karma makes all sorts of people's punishments happen near or to Frank. Poor Frank. Frank's muse usually supplies Frank with all sorts of great stories about unreasonable partners foolishly being unreasonable until the tension wears off or something nostalgic reminds them of how much they love each other. Then Frank becomes a best selling romance author. He publishes that under a pseudonym, of course. Sometimes they play pranks on Frank. Frank's muse inspires him to write a story vaguely reminiscent of someone from his past, and Karma puts rewards and punishments into play that lead that person to Frank or Frank to that person. Sometimes it's a good thing. Sometimes is uncomfortable. Sometimes Karma lets the person who bought the lottery ticket right before Frank win a huge prize. Right in front of him, too, because sometimes Karma's a bitch.

Busy Day Imagining the Future

No stories today except what I did. I attended an all day meeting where I was told to imagine the future. What would my library look like in the year 2025. It was interesting. We were also asked to look at other companies as metaphors to figure out how my library meets those same sorts of services, etc. or how it would look if we could. They wanted me to imagine, so you can understand if I'm a little worn out to tell you a story. I did write today, though. I'm just not sharing it as it was a very messy Ten Minute exercise about a woman who sets out to settle a feud by calling up the Seven Devils of her childhood stories and using her own heart as the sacrifice whether the feud is settled successfully or not.

Back to the future library, though. MOOCs are in the news about what a cool idea they are but what really is going to happen to them, with them and so on. I had this idea that in the future, people could earn certificated for attending these free virtual classes and completing all the assignments and that my library was one of the certificate granting institutions and that it offered MOOCs in Groups where people could work together through a class so it wouldn't be such an isolated task and that way people would have something of a support system to help them get through the class beyond somebody answering email. These certificates would help people gain more skills they could put on their resumes that they make at classes we offer in partnership with some sort of staffing agency that also offers, with my library, a cloud based staffing service. We would fund all this through a grant, of course. And then with the other classes we offer in other skills and small business, etc, and through the skills learned in maker spaces, we would help people be able to start their own small businesses at home or part time or whatever. But what does that have to do with books? Libraries are more than books.

I think the group my library assembled to take on the task of helping to imagine the future is a good one. I met many interesting people today. But we were kept so busy I barely got to really chat with any of them. I guess I'll have to wait until next time.

The most interesting person I met today, though, worked for a non-profit homeless agency, and he said they had plans to end homelessness for vets and youth by 2015. That's incredible. I hope it's true. Then, he said, they were going to tackle chronic homelessness. Amazing work people in this city are doing. I can't wait to see how they do it.

Jazz Musician Junkie

This is my dream from last night. I guess I dream in cliches a bit, huh?

A 20-something musician, mainly jazz, heroin addict was looking to clean up his life and looking for his father who left the family when the 20-something was very young, like two years old. 

Milt Jr. meets up with an old jazz musician friend of his father's who is also a junkie. More of a junkie and street performer than a jazz musician anymore. Robert tells Milt Jr. about his father, how he cleaned up his act years ago, remarried a woman who had two kids of her own. When the wife died, the step-kids were too busy with their own lives to have anything more to do with their mother's second husband. They all lived in different cities so it was easy to let the relationship fade away. He didn't even bother calling them when he was diagnosed with heart failure.

Jr. finally finds him. Tells him he had the help of his old friend Robert. Milt wants to talk to Robert to make amends. When they go back to find Robert, he's in trouble. Son offers to save him just as the police are closing in on the drug house where Robert's been staying. They go into hiding back at Milt's shitty apartment. He can't afford much since he has to pay so much for doctor's visits and trips to the emergency room. 

Robert stays on the sofa going through withdrawal. Tries to fight his way out sometimes when he has the strength. It's so tempting for Jr. to want to give into his fight and run off into the night with Robert to score. But he has his father now.

Milt calls Jr. into his room and asks him to help him get some stuff from beneath the bed. When Jr. looks underneath he doesn't see anything, but Milt explains that he sort of packaged it up underneath the slats of the bed with butcher paper and tape. Jr. pokes at it, but his father leans in and shows him to rip through the paper not worrying about the mess. Jr. feels through the paper for the objects that Milt hid there. He pulls out a few scrapbooks and a small box, like a plain jewelry box. Jr. flips through the scrapbooks and sees a few picture of him as a toddler and then a little older from when he was around ten. "Your mom tried to keep in touch with me. Maybe thought I'd come back for you."

Jr. waits for him to say more, not really sure he wants to hear more. When it's apparent there's nothing more to say Jr. continues flipping through the book. More than half of the book is blank pages. Another scrapbook has images of Milt playing saxophone and posters advertising his group. Milt looks through another scrapbook of photos Jr. doesn't recognize.

Jr. picks up the box and opens it upside down. Out falls a prescription bottle of Dilaudid and  a bundle of heroin. The words "what are you doing with this" can't even form on Jr's lips. His own driving desire to take the stash and run fights against the astonishment that his father, an ex-junkie, could sleep every night over a stash like this.

"In case I ever needed to go before my time. A more appropriate way to go, I don't know."

Jr. takes a calming breath, closes his eyes, lets himself imagine the preparation, the smell of the match catching flame, the bubbling, the swirls, the cotton, the needle soaking up that awful glory, the feel of his nail flicking the barrel, "don't waste a drop," the pinch of tying off, the firm vein under fingertips, a perfectly virgin vein that doesn't roll, the sharp pierce, the bloom of blood, a sign of a direct hit, the push on the plunger, and the release, and how everything is all right with the world.

Until it wears off and the hunger sinks in. More than hunger. Need. The shivering. The aches. The sickness. And ever the desperate need wailing and shrieking and clawing at the insides. Jr. focuses everything on that intense feeling of desperation. He's slowly able to compare it to the now. To the mediocre feeling of everything might not be okay but there's nothing that can't be handled.

"You okay there--?" Milt almost says "son". Almost. 

Jr. nods. "Can you take this? Please?" and holds out the bottle and the bundle. His hands shake.

"Guess I didn't leave soon enough." Milt takes the drugs and pockets them.

Jr. stands. Walks over to the filmy window and looks out at the brick wall view. His hands tight in his pockets. After a moment, he answers. "No, you exited right on cue." And with that he turns and looks at his dying father sitting on the floor with his scrapbooks and a pocket full of a drugs he would have killed for a month ago. He turns to leave and doesn't look back.

2014: Fulfill Some Dreams and Spanish-English Dictionary

I have been wanting to start a creative writing group--well, reawaken HLS even though its members have been thrown to the four corners of the world. Slowly they are coming back, but until then I thought I would just start up another creative group. So I did. There are four of us and our first meeting was last Friday. It went very well. It's forcing me to remember to write and to write regularly. I gave everyone the Ten Minute exercise assignment that I did in Melanie Jordan's poetry class. Melanie, if you're reading this, it was one of my most favorite classes of all time. From those exercises we are supposed to write something and bring it to the next meeting to be critiqued at the following meeting.

Today I read this. I liked what he had to say, but I really liked his idea of how anytime we wanted to sort of rework himself, he would start a new project. He also talked about how he did a project called Today where he took a picture and wrote a story every day starting on his 30th birthday and continued for 440 days. A story a day? Maybe I could do that. Of course, I would think that, but really. Why not at least do best to attempt it. Who cares if I miss a day here or there. I'm the only one holding myself accountable because here is what I realized after reading the article. He would start a new project when he wanted to change something about himself. I would love to become a better person, to improve myself. Not better, but truer. The only constant in my life has been the desire to write, to tell stories. So if I have always wanted to be a writer, wouldn't writing everyday lead to me being truer to myself and who I am? Obvious, I know, but sometimes I need something that obvious to bang me over the head. Focus. Thus, combining all those things, I took a picture of a Spanish dictionary and wrote my Ten Minute exercise as a story about that dictionary. It's cliche, I know, but when you are rushing through something as an exercise and writing for the first time in several months, well, it's not a masterpiece at the end. I think we all realize that.

A Spanish dictionary lies on her bed near a small suitcase. The bed is unmade. Only a rumpled sheet remains, bright in the morning light filtering through the open window. The quilt fell to the floor sometime during the night and she has been too manic to stop a moment and pick it up. She flits from one task to another as her mind races from one thought to another to an excuse why she shouldn't be making this trip. Not now. Better to stay and make up with Georgianne. Georgie who didn't sleep here last night for the first time in two years because she needs some space. They really need to take a moment. Rest for a beat. How else did she put it? What does it mean that Alina cried the tears of heartbreak without the broken heart? Her heart wasn't breaking.

She picked out her best underwear from the top drawer of their dresser and stuffed it into a corner of the suitcase that had once belonged to her grandmother and somehow had come to be in Alina's possession. She'd kept it in a top corner of her closet, the space where things are put to be forgotten about. She'd kept it there until the email from Manuel showed up in her inbox three weeks ago. She'd started fantasizing about her grandmother's suitcase and jumping on a plane, taking up Manuel's offer to come visit.

Manuel and Alina had become friends during her sophomore year in college. He was in Houston studying abroad for a year. He'd told her all about his home in Barcelona, describing the art and architecture that was everywhere you looked. The sounds of the street musicians and how they had the best hot chocolate--nothing like the watered down stuff she'd had all her life. Hot chocolate and churros. She wanted to taste it. She felt she could. Imagined what it would be like to fly away with him back to his home to experience all the wonderful things he'd described all those nights they were studying together or out drinking together. But she knew she couldn't go. Not then. She had classes to take and grades to keep up and scholarships to keep so she could graduate with her useless degree.

She'd thought about it from time to time and then email Manuel. He'd write back and they'd half-heartedly plan a visit. Then life would happen and the dream would fade like the tide going out to sea until the next nostalgic email from Manuel. "Saw this and thought of you."

Then three weeks ago. Typical email exchange except the idea took hold. It didn't fade away. She even checked flights and her bank account.

And then two days ago. Georgianne said, "we need space."

5,245 miles seemed like the perfect amount of space.

She finishes packing her grandmother's suitcase. She shoves the Spanish-English dictionary into her messenger bag and leaves.