82

Today is the 82nd month that my lovely wife and I have been married, and since Blogger is finally acting properly, I can now step up and let my wonderful, kind, sexy, smart, and infinitely patient wife that I'm lucky to have found her. I know this might come out wrong, but with all the work we have done behind-the-scenes in regard to our wills and life insurance, I got a little more mature and childish at the same time with both roads leading to a newfound love for my one and only. When you write a will and set up a life insurance policy, it's a step where you say, "That's it. I'm ready to die. My spouse will be taken care of. That's all that matters." After my wife did her will, I dropped into a fear state, imagining her gone and me puttering around in my house living half of a life. After my funk, I went through a small renaissance, understanding how much I love her, how much she changed my life. It's strange that with six billion people roaming around how just one can affect you so deeply.

We are both in our early 30s, and barring something catastrophic, we'll be alive for a long time. We won't need to worry about who has to bury whom, and what to do with all the belongings that no longer have an owner. We can go about our modern lives, being who we are and enjoying ourselves, eventually retreating back along that dissonant line of thinking we will be around forever and all major worries are in some gray distant horizon. For me, there came a definite liberation when I signed my will. I don't need to worry. Everything will be taken care of. I kept it modest; I don't think I could legally get Radiohead to play at my memorial service if I just wrote it in the document. But the cats will have owners if we both die. My wife's jewelry will find a home. A couple of charities will be getting post-mortem donations. Writing a will gives you a feeling that you can still be a force for good, even if you aren't around. I reckon I'm rationalizing, but it makes death seem not that bad.

A bit of trivia: Microsoft Word for Mac has a Will template.

So, today my wife and I will have our little monthly celebration, rest assured that we're a little older and far too responsible, but we are still, always, immutably, in love.

I love you. Happy 82 months.

Two Women

Today is my grandmother's birthday. 89. All things considered, she's doing well. Yes, her eyesight is approaching nil, and she battled back after a near-fatal heart attack last July, but she's a tough specimen, defiant to the last in that modest, quiet way that has seen her through the death of her husband more than 40 years hence, the loss of a son in childbirth, the raising of another son and a daughter, being a working mom before such critters were acknowledged as a voting bloc by campaign consultants, a landlady, and a faithful Catholic of the old-school Chicago "I don't care if it's snowing, I'm walking to Church" stripe. She says on the phone this morning that she misses me as I wish her a happy birthday. She is living with my mom and step-dad in Chicago, and being in Seattle I miss her. I know I'll see her in October, when my wife and I attend my mom's 60th. And should my grandmother keep her spirits and health up for another year, I know I will be there as she laughs at a 90th birthday cake coming her way.

I know she doesn't get into the whole Internet thing, or can even read this, but I love you Grandma. Happy birthday, and may you know how much you are loved and thanked for all your help, kindness, and support you gave me when I was young.

Seeing your family extend into, and likely beyond, the octogenarian range, you can't help think about where you are going to end up on that invisible timeline that stretches out before you to some undisclosed horizon. As the man says, no one gets out of life alive. Add to that tiramisu a layer of newfound maturity when you hit your mid-30s, and you find yourself writing another rough draft as you write your novels. This time, it's a will.

My wife drafted up hers yesterday, and I have to admit I wasn't prepared for seeing my wife's post-mortem wishes in black and white, nestled in the sterile landscape of a Microsoft Word document. Even though I felt her next to me, even though I could smell her perfume and hear her voice, I suddenly felt as if she was gone, taken by some unseen force. And there was me, in the kitchen and alone, holding her wishes in my hands, just trying to find the courage to hand away her belongings to friends and relatives. A preview of grief as I projected myself to a future point on that timeline where I remain and she has gone ahead. Days and nights alone, and the house is deathly quiet, her life gone and mine reduced to a half-portion.

I held her later that night on the couch, asking her for something not rational, something primal and reassuring. I didn't want her to go. I don't want her to be absent, and I'm terrified that if she goes and I survive the shock, will I start to forget her in time. Will pieces of her vanish from me as I give her jewelry to friends and family, as I donate her clothes to charity? In Kevin Brockmeier's new novel "The Brief History of the Dead," the newly deceased, who occupy a sort of urban limbo, come to understand that they continue on in their spectral state because someone in the living world remembers them, and as a plague reduces the population in the living world, the strands get severed and the memories of the specters cannot be sustained. And it makes me wonder, in a depressive pallor, if the same can be said for her possessions. Once gone, will a complete picture of my wife remain? Will little bits of her exist in the necklace, in the shoes, in the perfume she collects? How long will her scent last on the bedding? What remains and for how long?

This weekend, I make my will. I'm not looking forward to it.

thirty-four

Just a short note. Today's my birthday, and I don't know exactly what to feel. When I was younger, I thought a birthday was akin to New Year's Day, where everything starts over again with you, a year older and this magical new coat of paint you get applied every 365 days. I desperately wanted to feel that sense of rejuvenation, that sense of everything is new once more. I suppose if I believed it enough I'd feel it.

However, I know (in that creeping adult sense of rationality) that it's just another day. I'm staying home from work, taking it easy. My lovely wife is making a cake. Going to get a haircut at long last. And, as usual, write another thousand words. To me, it's just like any other day, but with cake.

There is nothing special I want to do today, and I don't know if that's good or bad. I'm lucky enough to be not enough of a materialist to think I need gifts or a lot of attention on this one. My surprise party for my 30th, bookended with having my 31st in Paris, was probably as good as it's going to get, and I'm in the mood where I need to be thankful more often. I'm lucky. I have everything I really need in this life. I have a great wife, a nice cozy home, good friends (a couple of whom made a donation in my name to the ACLU), time to write, Massive Attack tickets, and a pair of cats who (as of this writing) haven't pooed in any of my shoes. I'm a king among men. And I'm getting cake.

Finally, a thank you for everyone who drops by to this little blog. I'm grateful you take a little time out of your day to read me.

Happy Potter and the Order of OfficeMax

From the AP wire

J.K. Rowling, well into her seventh and final "Harry Potter" book, says the writing is going fine despite one annoying obstacle: the lack of paper.

"Why is it so difficult to buy paper in the middle of town?" the author, a resident of Edinburgh, Scotland, lamented in a diary entry posted Wednesday on her Web site, www.jkrowling.com.

"What is a writer who likes to write longhand supposed to do when she hits her stride and then realizes, to her horror, that she has covered every bit of blank paper in her bag? Forty-five minutes it took me, this morning, to find somewhere that would sell me some normal, lined paper. And there’s a university here! What do the students use? Don’t tell me laptops, it makes me feel like something out of the eighteenth century."

Three things immediately leap out to me

1) Just how damn big will this last Harry Potter book be if she's consuming college-lined pulp like an addict.*

2) You are J.K. Rowling, whose books have defoliated whole forests. There's something darkly humorous about a woman who has so many books in print can't find paper to jot a day's work on. Maybe use the rejection slips given to the tens of thousands of other authors.

3) Again, you are J.K. Rowling. Flash your Almighty J.K. Rowling Badge of Power +5, and tell some office supply store you are commandeering their stash for the greater economic good of publishing and children's fantasy. Failing that, I'm sure you could hold the publishing world hostage by saying, out loud in a public venue, that you can't write another word of the most anticipated novel in the history of the world until someone gets you a pad of paper, a few pens, maybe a cup of chai tea, and a comfy pillow. I'm sure you could eventually work up to getting your own airplane or small island if you held out long enough.

I hear that's how Dorothy Parker did it, until she went too far, climbed the Empire State Building, and got shot down by marauding biplanes. Sad, really. All for the want of a pack of cigarettes and the head of Ernest Hemingway.

I'm not sure about the biplanes, so don't quote me.

*I should talk. I have a virtual sea of notes, from legal pads to post-its, in and around my office. But I can quit any time. Honest!

And my life is just an image of a rollercoaster anyway

Hello again. It's been nearly two weeks since last post, and at first I didn't think i'd post until my life got interesting. I had nothing of interest happen. Last weekend, ordered Massive Attack tickets and my lovely wife and I will be standing on the main floor, gazing up to stage. I have no idea what to expect, but the new single ("Live With Me") is worth your hard-earned 99 centsUSD at ye ol' Apple Music Store. It's a bluesy lament, caked in an imaginary cityscape where the streets are layered in a fresh coat of rain and the sun is coming up over the skyline, black outlines of telephone wires and buildings hiding their souls as they are backlit from a rising sun that can't burn off one man's sorrow.

My second birthday gift is coming in the mail, with the good folks at ThinkGeek and UPS letting me know visage del Miyamoto will be at my door by Monday. All is well.

Or was well. The writing had stalled out, and I was trapped with piles of pages and nothing unified or interesting. Imagine creating a skeleton and surrounding tissue, but unable to design and texture the skin to hold it all together, to give it a smooth, silky appearance to hide the guts and the alien bones underneath. For days I'd be trapped, unable to make any serious headway. I'd sit, and nothing strong would come. There's a saying that sometimes the definition of bravery is to say "I'll try again tomorrow," but really, we all know that's slipping into Lame Excuse Village. Stalling in the artistic void, and eventually the thermals would give out, leading to a catastrophic plummet.

And then everything just accelerated, moving laterally and in swerves. The aircraft morphs into an out-of-control sled that screams down a dark, wintry hill, and everything appears this ghostly blue-black, including the tree racing at you.

In brief.

1) My job might be evaporated sometime in 2007. The newspaper I work at is entering into arbitration with our cross-town rival. Years ago, the two entered into a joint-operating agreement with a clause that if one side could show that they were taking three consecutive years of losses, they could break from the JOA and go their own way. The bad news is, the newspaper I work at can't survive that divorce. We share the printing press as well as the sales/circulation staff. Imagine losing your mouth, legs and veins. It's that bad.

Well, our cross-town rival had dragged us to court a few years back saying that, yep, they lost three-years worth of money and now they want out. Our strategy? Stall and bleed them dry, because one of the JOA rules states that if they put their paper up for sale, we get the first shot. Plus, some of their accounting for three years of red ink looked questionable, so the thought was lose their complaint in the courts until they gave up, they went under, or until our future robot masters took over the world.

A couple days ago, the word came down: our rival and our lawyers were moving into arbitration. The good news: everything would be decided by or before May 2007. It would be over, and our rivals (if ruled against) would go back to their cave and lick some wounds and we could go on with thinking about kicking their asses on a daily basis in print and online. The bad news: Nearly everything else.

If the judge rules for them, then we're over with. If the judge comes back in, let's say, December, and says, "The other guys win," then the judge has to set a date for our dissolution that will be anywhere from six-12 months from the ruling date. No appeal. If that happens, then we are all crossing out fingers that our corporate overlords offer us the same severance package our sister paper in San Francisco got when their had their doors closed not too long ago. By my math, it would be six-months pay, a comfy cushion to soften the blow as I try to find gig that doesn't involve a paper hat.

2) Before the news came down, I came across a job listing on Seattle's Craigslist I couldn't pass up. It's a writer/editor job at a local gaming company, with requirements that sing to me with golden notes, practically crafted for yours truly. I submitted my resume and a trio of small writing samples two Tuesdays ago, but I haven't heard back yet. I try to tell myself that they are probably getting bombed with hundreds - if not thousands - of resumes from everyone who games and thinks he can complete a sentence, and that my Zen Jedi perfection is just trapped under a Word document avalanche.

Of course, I'm also reading it in the insecure junior high mindset of "Well, if they really liked me and thought I was pretty, they'd invite me to the big dance on Friday by now." And this was back when I didn't know my job might be lined up in some Death Star target station for demolition. I'm weighing the pros and cons of writing a follow-up note, considering nouns and verbs that don't reek of desperation. Ideally, I'd love to get the job after getting an offer of a severance package from here, but then again my wife wants a pony and we all can't get what we want.

3) I am writing again, but it's on a new project that I think my brain came up with in order to rescue me from the morass I'm in with the current novel. I'd love to spill all the beans on it, but I can't. I'll just reveal this: It's a superhero-ish story about an urban (likely Seattle) woman who inherits a timeless ability as well as set of siblings. It's in the vein of Piers Anthony and Neil Gaiman, a sort of magical realism and mythology of how the metaphysical world works. I'm taking lots of notes at this point, writing a couple fragments as I go in a running brainstorm. I'm not abandoning Rayelle or Divine, but I find myself enjoying this batch of fresh air. Lots of fun to be had here and the critic is almost silent as the glowing amber idea generator in me flares as bright as a supernova.

4) Oh, finally saw "Brokeback Mountain." Sucked, and not in the homoerotic way. As my wife put it, "How can a movie about two hot guys humping each other be so boring." I mean, I understand the movie intellectually, but emotionally it was a dead zone.