Unreality

Sometimes, I long for the days when my blog posts were no more serious than commenting on the latest fucked up outfit Pam Anderson was sporting. In that spirit, holy shit:

Pammy, it's Fashion Week. Not I'm-Too-Old-and-Worn/Whored-Out-To-Be-Wearing-This-Shit- Week.

Whew. I feel better. Don't you? Pammy never fails. At any rate, I'm a little stuck as of late in terms of what to write about or what exactly to say. It's a little bit about the holding pattern I wrote about a few weeks ago, trying to make peace with the now and not get too far ahead of myself in terms of the future, mainly because (as Matt puts it ever so gently), "Um, you're just sort of, well, spinning your wheels when that happens." To which I said, "You mean I freak out?" "Yeah," he said. "A little." Which is true. And by "spinning my wheels" he means that I "cry uncontrollably and worry incessantly how it is I will make money if I stop waiting tables, how I will possibly be a good wife and mother without my mother here to help me" etc. And then he is left to talk me down. Which he always does. Always.

I've tried to channel some of my angst into this forum and into some essays (my agent pitched Modern Love at the New York Times last week with one of them, so start praying please) and that has helped, but now I'm feeling a little empty in terms of material, although I know I have plenty. Sometimes, though, I long to get a little further away from the material right in front of me, so I've been trying my hand at fiction again, and have perhaps, in the tiniest of ways, even started a "novel." I put it in quotes so there is less pressure, but I tell you all about it to apply a little pressure on myself. We are a strange lot, writers, but what can you do?

I did pretty well being in the moment this past weekend, while visiting Matt, although I did dream about my mom every night, each dream some variation of anxiety about her death. The strange thing was none of it frightened me per se or gave me a hangover the next day, which I fully expected. I took this to mean that I'm learning to accept what is inevitably going to happen, but that at least for the moment, it doesn't have to rule my life. Or something. At any rate, we had a great time driving to Big Sur for the day, making a delicious skirt steak for Valentine's Day, writing and reading together - and this lucky lady even got the much coveted blue Tiffany's box handed to her - inside were the most gorgeous pair of pearl earrings I'd ever seen, picked by Matt partially because my mom, after getting a Tiffany's catalog in the mail years ago and thinking I'd sent it as a hint, bought me something from there ever year for my birthday for several years in my 20s - her only rule was that it had to be under $100. Then she ran out of those items, and the flow from Tiffany's stopped - but they are some of my favorite gifts from her - a silver bracelet I wore until it broke, a crystal candlestick, a vase painted with irises on it, a blue glass heart designed by Paloma Picasso. He also chose them because they are Cancer's birthstone, and both he and my mom are Cancers, and he wanted to give me something to commemorate her. Obviously, I was blown away by all of it, and that moment was enough to crystallize our time together forever in my mind, but there was another one we had a few days later that meant almost as much.

We went to the San Jose Museum of Art to see a Wayne Thiebaud exhibit, one of Matt's favorite artists. He's famous for doing paintings like this, and they are incredible to see up close:

















They were also showcasing art that played with "unreality" and one room housed a large set of speakers and several rows of hanging LCD displays. From a distance it all sounded ominous and strange, like aliens speaking in tongues, set to a strange rhythmic pattern. Up close, however, you could see the a computer was reading what came up on the LCD displays, words, sentence fragments, phrases, what have you - and that they were coming from some complicated algorithm that was searching for key phrases such as "I like" out on the Internet in real time and transmitting the thoughts, bits of conversation, etc., back to us. (As we walked in, a mother was pulling her kid away from it by the elbow, as he'd just read something dirty on one of the displays - maybe about man on man action? - and wouldn't stop repeating it.) It's hard to paint the full picture of what the room looked like, so when I asked Matt what his memory of it was, he wrote me this:

"In a cavernous room, housed in darkness, a giant exhibit -- a wall of columns each uniformly mounted with dozens of little LCD displays, bone rumbling speakers hidden above in dark recesses -- danced in unison to an atmospheric, somehow romantic, Radioheadesque beauty.

Over-the-top, I know, but it's worth trying to get the words around it, especially to somehow capture that closing in from afar, how the wall was patterns comprised of all these messages and posts, all such an incredible representation of humanity."

Um, waaaaaay better than what I would have come up with. At any rate, the whole thing was mesmerizing, because the phrases and words started slowly, with only a few at a time, so you tried to hear and catch all this information, to understand what people where typing. I only remember a few phrases, "I like black chicks" and "She doesn't understand what it is not to be high" and "Is he a Russian? Who is he?" We stood in front of it for at least 20 minutes, and it seemed like the rest of the room disappeared. People came and went and we didn't move, except closer to one another or to point at some strange phrase one of us had spotted. The phrases and sounds started coming faster and faster, until the words became a kind of music, so many stories flashing and changing as fast as we could read them, until they moved so fast there was just the sound of the screens clicking and rolling and flashing. Then silence. Then we waited for it to start again. It felt like we were in a movie, a little Ferris Bueller moment at the museum, the two of us together going deeper and deeper into something outside of ourselves.

I'm not sure why exactly it was so powerful, maybe because it gave a sense of the immensity and sheer volume of people out there thinking, feeling and typing, which, from a distance is overwhelming, but up close, manageable and real. I didn't think about it in terms of dealing with my mom's death, but I am now, because each moment is a shift in perspective from something huge and unknown to the manageable bit a person can take in from one day to the next.

So that's my bit of wisdom for the day. For a little more wisdom, read this stunning article on Roger Ebert, who, after battling thyroid cancer, can no longer talk or eat, yet writes to the reporter, "Don't pity me, can't you see how happy I am?"

http://www.esquire.com/print-this/roger-ebert-0310