Suspension of belief is gonna have to wait, while I go living in the past.

Once upon a time, I changed lifestyles and home addresses with the alacrity of an escape artist. I'm gonna hit the trail again soon, and pay a call on that person I used to be.

Well, really, I'm gonna fill up the car and pack some bags and hit the interstate in a couple of days, The Blondster in tow (well, really, in the passenger seat) and it's gonna be an interesting ride, heading west to a place that isn't really West; since we live on the East Coast, but still, it's a ten hour drive to the 'left' on the map, so there you go.

We're driving to Kentucky for an extra-long holiday weekend and we haven't been there in a while. Wouldn't have a reason to go back at all, except my cousin/close friend and her husband and daughters (who are roughly the same ages as Robin Jr and The Blondster) live there, and it will be wonderful to see them.

One morning while we're there and JB is off golfing, I'm driving up to the city I'm from and taking myself on a tour of places that figure, fictionally speaking, in my novels, and taking pictures. I have a list, so I won't forget where I'm going and why, because I don't know when I'll be back there again. I'll be visiting places in the old parts of town, and looking at houses I haven't seen in so long, it seems to me they can't be altogether real, because memories play tricks, and because I'm not the same person who visited them or lived in them or mourned for the person who lives in them no longer. There are a few places I won't be able to find again; I'm pretty sure about that - places out in the county that I barely knew how to find when I drove to them the first time, because they were off my radar, and really, stayed that way, even when I checked out of other things I was doing and stayed here and there a while.

I expect to come away somewhat surprised, and a little sad, not that the days when I was there (or in the various 'theres', really) are over, but that the days when my life seemed like it would spin on and on world without end, and any given day I'd have another lifetime to switch up and simply go on, are over. Personal infinity is no longer a pretext for my actions; and the way I choose to see this development, it frees me up to stop wasting time and make damn sure I do what I need to do.

Have you all done this? Visited past 'scenes of the crime'?

So in answer to that Troll guy...

...no, the beginning of the post before this one (the one I have yet to finish), doesn't have one small thing to do with Michael Jackson. (Or potentally large thing, cupped in hand.) Nor does it have one small thing to do with the (very recently) late Farrah Fawcett. Does anybody besides me feel sorry for her bad luck, dying the same day Michael Joe Jackson died - thereby firmly placing Farrah, she of the iconic 1970's poster, way over somewhere on a far side stage?

I'm not a fan type of person. Fan as in fanatic. Fan as in living breathing shitting crying and dying over someone else's breath or their body of 'work'.

Picture it:

BLINK.

It's 1980. And there I was, strolling along and doing whatever the hell it was I did in 1980. I can't remember what it was, although me being me, and in my twenties at the time, I was doing something(s), even if they've been clouded over, my powers of selective retention being as strong as they certainly damn well are.

And in to this pleasant picture walks the jangle of a phone, you know, the ones that actually had a ring tone before you had to select 'old timey ring tone' from the ring tone list. Ring ring ring, it rang. And I answered it.

"OH MY GOD OH MY GOD ROBIN ROBIN DID YOU SEE THE NEWS DID YOU SEE THE GODDAMNED NEWS THEY'VE KILLED HIM ROBIN THEY'VE KILLED JOHN! ROBIN ROBIN ROBIN DID YOU HEAR ME THEY'VE KILLED JOHN ROBIN!!!"

It was this big chick I knew, back in the day. Stood a foot taller than I stood, with a big personality to match. Biggest follower of other human beings I've ever met. If there was an award for 'biggest adorer of anyone other than herself", this chick would've won it, hands down, at least five years in a row.

So when she stopped screaming in my ear and took a well-earned fucking breath, just about gasping from the trauma of all her hard work, I stepped in with a word.

"Yeah. I heard on the radio some nut fuck shot John Lennon in Manhattan, and he's dead."

"ROBIN ROBIN THIS IS HUGE THIS IS HORRIBLE DAMMIT ROBIN (I checked out about here, but the screaming went on for a while, about BLAH BLAH BLAH and how could I be so callous and John was a genius and John how could anyone ever replace John...BLAH BLAH FUCKING BLAH.....and I checked out some more).

Then she took another breath, sucked in some stray saliva, choked a bit, and told me she and Blah and Blah and Blewie were gonna somehow get to New York City, no matter what, because it was really important that we show our respect or pay our respects. Whatever.

I said, Have fun.

She got pissed and said something about what a callous cold idiot blah blah blah...
(I knew she'd been planning on me doing the driving.)

BLINK. It's around Christmas 1998, I think. Late 90's anyway, and I have a different life, which is a damn good thing, because if you've been a functional adult between 1980 and 1998 if you haven't changed or done much, you may as well just check out and get it over with.

Anyway, JB takes me to Paris for a long weekend, and it's a good one. I do remember fussing with some French dude in the nice hotel where we stayed and telling him that a king-sized bed was NOT simply two regular beds shoved together, but other than that, it was a wonderful trip, wandering up and down the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, and poking around in other places here and there. And in one of those poking along walks, we came upon a place right in the middle of a crowded road, with flowers left everywhere. We looked around. What the hell? We scooted across and looked around, standing, if I remember this correctly, on the median strip in the middle of a busy thoroughfare. And then, we looked down an opening and saw a road with cars driving like mad in a tunnel below. Ah. They were still laying flowers where Diana had died - or at least hit.

Really? I mean, honestly?

BLINK. 1963. I remember when Kennedy died - barely - because I had just started Catholic school, and the meanest nun there, this old striation-faced hag named Techla, croaked over the intercom and told us we could all go home and be with our parents. We all liked that going home early part, and then I walked in my front door, and saw my father and mother crying, I'm talking sobbing, holding each other on the couch. Grasping. I was devastated - my stomach dropped down to the basement and landed splat and cold on the concrete floor, because when you're little and you see your parents in panic, you know hell has just happened upon you.

This one really was hell; the world felt like it was tipping on it side and it would never right. (Innocence was lost, if it had truly ever been found.)Of course it is true that serious-consequence life-altering deaths do occur; deaths that are meaningful not just to the human being who suffered the loss of his or her life, and to the people who knew them and cared about them, who loved them or hated them, or needed them, or never wanted to see them again - but who actually KNEW them, and not just on a television screen or in Life.

But that doesn't mean that every entertainer or 'personality' that goes needs or deserves a drill-down shock-wave of trauma from society at large. If you don't believe me, ask yourself how many people actively care now - that Helen Hayes is dead. That William Holden choked to death. That Myrna Loy or Joan Crawford are no more. Even Marilyn Monroe, who died young and was pathetic, is fading out except as an icon - which is a fake thing to hold on to, kinda like a talisman you keep for yourself, to anchor your self, to think about..your self.

In short, I'm not soppy.

In long, I have something called A LIFE. I don't toss out my feelings to the four winds. I care about people worth caring about, in my world. And I define what that world is, and I make no apologies that I'm not gonna lay down the dawg because someone who sang some good songs and then came out with Thriller and oh yeah,I remember listening to Thiller that summer I stayed in Germany with my friend that worked for Amex...God that was a good time and I remember I didn't wanna ever fly home was for the past twenty years pathetic and held his own flesh and blood baby outside a window, grinning like a fool, has died.

I do feel for Farrah Fawcett, woman to woman, even though I never knew her. She had a three year battle with a cancer that was eating into her. THAT I have sympathy for; it must have been horrible....and I tried to have my hair cut like hers, back in the 1970's and oh yeah that was the year I fixed my hair that way and they hired me at the Playboy Club my hair never did look exactly like hers because afer all she had hairdressers, but it looked pretty good, annd every guy I knew had that damn poster of hers and oh I wish I was young again...

Hmmmmm. Does it sound like me feeling bad for Farrah is really..me feeling bad for me and thinking about...me?

Yeah. I'd say, honestly, that about says it all.

Suspension of belief...

...and how you deal with that suspension is a huge part of what living means if you're really gonna live, in my opinion. How you decide to work through the absolute fact that, as John Irving would say Garp said, we are all terminal cases.

I've got a boatload I want to write about this, but yesterday turned out to be a long one, and right now I'm about to go driving to work, and I don't want to skip anything, so I'll be back around 6:00 to finish writing. For now all I have time to say is it has to do with people like animals and the living dead and the never alive and what happens when you watch it and you don't play pretend except on purpose.

A patchwork of thinking about what living means..(#2 & #3)...

...and what it doesn't mean. And never has.

Call this a thinking-through rant of sorts. Or a self-induced meme. Or a partridge in a pear tree with only a strange sense of celebration in sight. My thoughts are too scattered to come up with more than mini-diatribes, so here we go...

1. Internet companies google my email and everything else I do, and they let anyone else who pays them in on any of my heretofore private stuff. Look up the purchase of Doubleclick if you don't believe me. I have a cell phone that I signed up for 'do not call' and 'keep unpublished' (and, goddammit, why did I even have to do that shit when I'm paying for that number) and yet I have in the past few days gotten calls from a company that could only have gotten if they were given my number by our new cell phone carrier. And I'm supposed to take this shit? Apparently I'm supposed to just take all this shit lying down, huh? Cookies and bought lists and Facebook that pretends to be a nice helpful place to meet up and find old friends and new friends but in reality is a place to extend personal power all right - power over me by someone other than my self.

All I can say is, Orwell would shit himself in his grave if he woke up long enough to look around. 1984 has come and gone, George honey. Ain't nuthin' private no more. Welcome to the fucking zoo.

2. Coming tomorrow. OK. I'm leaving coming tomorrow on (for ril). Ah, ril, how did ya know, buddy? How did ya know?

3. In the early 1990's I lived in Kansas, about an hour out of Kansas City. Had a hairdresser who had a little shop you entered from a side door in somebody's house in a neighborhood. It looked like a reworked family room, with the fake wood-panelled walls and the orange and brown plaidy furniture still sitting in the back of the room, used as a waiting room for the two-seat beauty shop now inside.

Hey. It was a living, and it saved on rent for the shop. It was a good idea. You did what you had to do to get along out in that neck of the woods.

This lady was nice but always broke. She was nice but was always trying to sell me this kinda-fair-to-partly-cloudy homemade bead earring stuff her sister-in-law or somebody made. She was nice in that every day way that's, well, pretty nice in its place, but not so nice out in the wide open. One day we tried to talk politics, or really, she told me the story of why she would shortly vote for Billy-The-Hey-I-Did-It-Yep-Yanked-Down-My-Tighty-Whities-in-the-back-of-my-old-El-Camino-on-indoor-outdoor-carpeting-in-the-floor-of-that-puppy-hey-I'm from-Arkansas-baby-Clinton. (And being from Kentucky, I'm guessing you should be able to surmise, I've known the type who tried this crap on.)

Anyway, so the hairdresser says to me...I'm votin' for Clinton because he's the only man I ever heard that mentioned hairdressers in a speech.

Good Lord, I remember thinking...The Emperor's new clothes still fit him just fine.

There's a helluva lot more I could say here, but as you're an intelligent lot, I'll leave it alone for now.

4. More coming, tomorrow.

Happy Sunday

Yesterday matched the weather, because it was weird. You know, when some days the weather sucks but you're happy, or the weather is fine fine fine but you're feeling foul, and either way you're watching, it feels like the weather version of cognitive dissonance?

Well, yesterday did match the weather for me. Threat of thunderstorms with occasional breakthrough blue skies, as I drove my visitor back down to the city where she lives. It was a three hour drive down, and a six hour drive back, but I was alone, so mainly, I was fine with the delays and the three mile wait to get through a tunnel under a shipway near the Chesapeake, and a sudden fierce storm on Route 17 in rural Virginia. It was weird, and that fit just fine.

Thought you all might get a grin out of the pictures my visitor decided she wanted copies of (pictures she'd taken from a room she never mentioned she'd been in, looking around. These were the pictures deemed 'pretty enough' to show her friends, back when I (purportedly) looked like her. Apparently I didn't have enough pass-mark pictures to make copies of more than three, so she took copies of two of The Blondster, who apparently, even now, looks just like my 80 year old mother. (The prom picture posted on here before, and a picture of the photo shoot that I didn't put on - the Blondster, in profile.) Talk about fiction fodder, baby.

Anyway, Happy Father's Day to the fathers, Happy Sunday to the others of us. And now, back to editing for me...

This one's a hoot. I was nineteen or twenty - and dating the nice guy standing there next to me (not just when he was standing next to me. I dated him other times as well.) My visitor took this one with her because I reminded her she'd made this white dress, so she wanted people to see how well she sewed. JB was thrilled she chose this photo rather than our wedding photo. Oh yeah.



And this one's a hoot, because we skipped me from age twenty to age forty-one or so. She took this one because she remembers the sun room in the house I owned at the time, and she liked that room, and my hair looked nice back then.



And this one's a hoot, because she chose it because she liked my hair short in this one. Age: mid-forties.



Hey, it could have been even weirder. She actually wanted a picture of me in my wedding dress from my marriage to the girl's biological father instead of this last one. I told her no.

Tough Week

There's a reason there's a literary genre of Southern Gothic, ya know...

I'm sorry I haven't been around much, visiting you guys. I'm also missing out on a good reading I need to be doing, that I can't do, and that's because from the time I arrive home, and I do mean, pull up in my driveway, I have a visitor waiting for me, looking out the window to see when I arrive, talking incessantly, humming to herself, incessantly, when she's not talking, showing me clothes, taking pictures off my shelves if she decides she wants them and putting them in her suitcase and, when I call her on it because I see it's missing, she gets mad; hoarding food in the back of the refrigerator if she found something I bought for her, that she doesn't want to share, showing me more clothes, telling me how she cleaned my microwave out for me (because I am not ever clean enough, apparently - she says this as well, by saving the paper towels she used to clean and saying things like just look at this, Robin) telling me she wants me to make copies of pictures of me that she found when she went through drawers without permission, because she wants to show people back where she lives, when she goes home, that I was pretty when I was young, that I looked like her when I was young...and then she says...I wish you were still pretty, Robin, like you used to be, back when you look liked me. Well, fuck me.

I'm living in a fast-forward version of the way I grew up, guys, and it's pretty hard. This isn't what it sounds like, not exactly. This isn't a relative faultering with age - well, it is, but it isn't. Because what she is, is exactly what she was like when she was younger, but I have to grit my teeth and be kind, because we all get old, and how could I live with myself if I wasn't charitable enough to put up with crap from an old lady every once in a while. Any old lady, but especially this old lady.

I'm tempted to say something dramatic like...if you don't hear from me, you'll know it's because I blew my brains out, but it won't happen.

Oh, good Christ, there she goes again...hmmmmmmm hmmmmmmm hmmmmmmm...fast, staccato-like, in the same way she used to mumble to herself out in the kitchen when I was a kid, carrying on a running conversation with her favorite person...

The real me will be back sometime Saturday afternoon. Meanwhile, I've checked the fuck OUT.

Hope your week is better than this.

A surprise of a novel idea walked into my head...

...a couple of days ago. It happened while I was driving, just passing the place you can see in the picture below, which makes sense, because I love to drive, even when I'm driving in to work, and because I have my music going, and no one talking; just me with me.

At stoplights, I jotted down phrases and drew lines to connect them so they made sense later. A couple of things I'd been juggling around for a while came crashing together, and I saw a way to do something with them.

(I swear I need a new laptop with a battery that lasts a while - if I drove up and down the miles along the parkland road that runs along the Potomac near our house, I think I could write this novel in pullover places, and imbue it with immediacy. Or I think I could, anyway.)



Trouble is - I have no idea how it ends - I see the scenes, can just about taste them and smell them, they seem that real. The first sentence of the novel came to me this morning, while I was driving alone again. This is how I wrote the best parts of my first novel. Sentences, sometimes several, walked across my thoughts and I'd write them down, catch hold of them before they left me. But I don't know what's gonna end up happening.

Another trouble is - I already had quite a bit of the opening chapter to what I thought was my next novel written. But this one is stomping on me. And I'm gonna write it in fast-forward over the summer. And it's gonna be a short one.

And the biggest trouble is -I haven't really wrapped up the first novel yet - don't know what's happening with it, should be editing it down right now, but I feel a very strong pull to the new, with sentences walking into my brain fully formed and pissed off if I don't write them down. I think it has to be done while it's forceful and immediate.

So...please tell me - has this ever happened to you?

Photos of The Blondster in a fashion shoot today made me think about...

...when my world was small and I didn't know how to make it bigger for a lot longer than made sense if you happened to be a person on the outside, watching - because it isn't only money that opens worlds, is it? It's what you're taught and what you're told about where your boundary lines are drawn – and if they exist to hold you in – or to keep you safe until they let you go.

If you have what it takes to reach or exceed them; it’s not all about the Horatio Alger crap – smart striving getting you that brass ring you’d been dreaming all about – as far as I can tell, it’s hardly ever about that at all. I’m not saying it never works. I’m saying it works only rarely.

It's all a tangle, wrapped up as it is in what you believe you can do – because you’ve been allowed to believe it. Even when you don’t remember about those boundaries, they’re still out there, existing.

I truly believe this, and I’ve felt them, and they aren’t nice to feel, because they last a lifetime, long after you’ve found out about them, and you know about what they do.Most of the time I was writing my novel, I had to fight a voice I recognized from a long time ago, telling me in a hush whisper sound on repeat… You can’t do this. Who do you think you are, you can’t do this, who do you think you are…And I still feel that way, even though I'm a capable faker.

Freedom of choice, free will; that old playground is a bit of an illusion, when the choices you make are so much determined by your circumstances of birth, and I don’t mean exactly money – I mean, in how you are loved. And I mean by that – in what way you are loved; or not. If you’ve been held close to the vest to fulfill the needs of a parent, of what they want for you so they can have it themselves, in an enclosed environment - or if you’ve been held close and loved but allowed to envision open travel and an open vision of what you can do in the world. You have to be very much cognizant of who you are, and how you ended up that way, to stand on your own when you've been taught not to.

I want my girls to have open choices – to work for what they want, of course, to try and succeed on their own, but to have choices, and not feel that they have to be attached to me to be well, to be all right.

I’ve been thinking about this all day, ever since I received pictures of a photo shoot The Blondster was in today, in England. JB flew over with her a few days ago – they spent time with our wonderful family in Somerset (those of you who’ve met Jan, you know what I mean), and today Ms. Blondster modeled dresses designed in silk and woven precious metals that look so soft, it’s hard to believe the metals aren’t exquisite spun yarns – the gorgeous silks designed by Jan and the woven metals by her daughter, my niece, Rachel.

So, we’ve been working to give the girls this open feeling to where they can go with themselves, and it sure as hell isn’t easy, but Sky Miles sure help, and having a step-dad who's willing to go the extra mile with those puppies, to help Ms. Blondster reach out and grab for some good and different stuff, and to have a family waiting there with open arms and a happy request for help showcasing the gorgeous clothing and jewelry that caught the attention of one of the best fashion photographers in England, who came into Jan and Rachel’s shop one day some weeks ago, saw one of the dresses on a mannequin and said I have to photograph this.

So she did.

Here: http://charltonhouse.com

Here’s a snap Jan took of the shoot-in-progress at one stage:



Damn. I wish I’d been there. But more than that, I’m so, so very happy The Blondster was.

Here's mine. And when your voice posts are ready...

please put a note on here, so we know to come and have a listen.

UPDATE TO UPDATE: (2 more voices up)

Aerin and
Writtenwyrd have added theirs, and the links are in the comments - toward the end of the comment trail. I'll beback to listen when home later - I think this is a first for WW! AND, Aerin has something a bit different going on, so...have at it with these two listens.

FH has hers up, and it's a good one! The link is on the right.
And these are up as well, if you're checking to make sure you've seen them all:

EE (the link is in the comments trail)

And the rest - just go to the links on the right, by name:

freddie
McK
Paca
Pete
Whirl

So that's now ten of us altogether so far for voice posts, and Kiersten has a song up, with a link in the comments trail that leads right to it.

Janey and BT may have posts coming soon, depending on their schedules outside-the-blogs giving them some time...



The Blondster helped me make my YouTube. It worked all right until the last few sentences, and then it stopped, as it were, midstream.

So...here are the last few sentences of what I wrote, in this scene in the middle of my novel. A few of these sentences are on the video, and then it cuts off right before the end.

So, here's the end, so you can finish it when the sound cuts off at just about the end of the first of these last two paragraphs...



...and the growing old out on the coal-filled mountain and the strip mining taking her home away, and her heart giving out with her standing up on a chair, reaching too high, rehanging clean curtains for the retarded cleaning-lady sisters that paid room and board to live upstairs in her Mammy’s house she never wanted to buy but she had to buy because she had no place else she could afford to go.

And I was so glad I’d seen her try and smile at me. Not only my grandmother Willa, but the underneath Willa coming out from her picture right then; the two of us able to say good-bye to one another, and have it touch.

I'm looking forward to hearing yours!

Over the weekend, JB and I went to see...

some of my relatives in Florida. The fun ones. I have a lot of sets, or subsets, really, of blood relatives, but only two actually fun sets. One set is in Florida, and the other is split into two - one in Pennsylvania, and one in Kentucky. OK - that's three. Whatever.

Anyway, the Florida set is three households - two on the coast, one inland. We got together with the two coasties and the inlander, and stayed at a beach condo that belongs to one of them...and we had great views.





JB says hi, by the way. That's him, in the picture:



Aside from great views, we had a good time. Wish I'd remembered to take a picture of this restaurant we liked - if you walk out the back door to the inlet it sits beside, fishing boats are docked back there, and there's a big covered area where they chop up their fresh catch. And a big sign that says "Before you dump the carcass in the ocean, poke out the eyes". (No wonder why I'm the next best thing to vegetarian. I used to have Twilight Zoney nightmares of being caught on a fishhook by some alien race dudes, and fricasseed [spelling?] into a nice, tasty, of course] appetizer.)

They poke out the eyes so the carcass will sink. Lovely.

Good thing I was drinking white wine and laughing my ass off at my cousins.

But anyway, here's the part you wanna know about - the next afternoon, we drove away from the relatives and checked into our hotel, an hour or so away. And we sat around at the pool for a couple of hours, JB and BT and me. (Okay - not grammatically correct, but it rhymes, so run with it, please. I know I am.)

Here's a pic of JB and BT that I took:



And yes, I was still drinking white wine - but they made me drink it in a plastic cup.

And yes, BT really is a sweetheart. A smartass sweetheart, the kind with a sly smile on his face and a good story behind his eyes - the best kind - and just exactly like you'd figure he'd be, which was no surprise, and that was a good, good thing. Like meeting an old friend you hadn't seen in a while, except in this instance, it had been never.

Cool, huh?

So The Blondster, While We Were Out of Town...(and 2 other things)

goes and has herself a big time. And, as you can see from the picture below, she doesn't have that big time with a guy I expected to see standing there with her - although, I have to say, it makes me smile to see them together.

JB and I were at the beach (a trip that's been planned for weeks) for a long weekend - and The Blondster didn't decide until the week before we were leaving, that she was going to the prom. So here she is, in her little black dress:



And yeah, that's right. Mama wasn't there, except in spirit, and via texting-her-ass-off.

Which has its pros and cons. As, for example, when, ten minutes before she was to be picked up, she texted me this little nugget....

" Mom. Being picked up in 10 minutes. Where's my bra?"

She meant her strapless and special bra, not one of the other nine or so numbers. But mama knows this stuff, doesn't she? Oh yeahhhhhh. Even when being texted on the beach.

The Two Other Things

1. Guess what? I met one of you all when we were out of town. It was not a surprise at all, how it worked out, which was a wonderful thing. I'll pop a picture on later this week, after I re-figure how to download pictures. And yes, I drank white wine at a bar again, but this time, I drank white wine alone. I'm sure you'll recognize the pic when you see it!

2. AND - the voice thing is this Wednesday and Thursday. YAY! I've been thinking about which piece to read, and hope you are as well.