Nothing Was Wasted

Blossoms at Greenwood cemetery in Brooklyn, while in search of the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat's elusive grave.

I began writing in a diary when I was 11 because I wanted to be like S.E. Hinton, and write stories with boys like Ponyboy. I wanted to both marry Ponyboy and be him. I also wanted to make sense of a home life that could be violent and scary. I also wanted to write about the boy I had a crush on, and the members of Duran Duran.

I stopped writing in a journal when I went to high school. After reading Be True to Your School by Bob Green, a couple of friends of mine and I were inspired to start journaling our junior year. I still have this red spiral bound notebook and once, years ago, looked through it, and was so appalled by my sexism, angry insecurity, and pettiness I have been too spooked to look at it again.

After that, I kept a heavily illustrated, but sporadic journal of sorts. Then, when I was 21, my grandmother died. It was my first loss and a big one. She was the matriarch to a complicated and large family. She was also one of the few people who's eyes lit up when I entered a room. Once, when I decided to stack all my journals chronologically, I saw the pattern of my journals--the random notebooks and hardbound sketchbooks of various sizes. Then the moment my grandmother died, they come right after another and have ever since every 4-8 weeks.

I began my 80th journal today.

Today I am thinking about all the plane rides and train rides, and cafes and libraries, and bedrooms all over America that I sat writing and drawing and cutting and pasting in. I am thinking about the heartbreak and the leaps forward and falling back and the discovery and the dreams. I am thinking about all the pens, the ones that leaked on my fingers and in my bags, and who wrote every word and drew every face.

I dismiss so much of my own efforts, and seek out the elusive sense of accomplishment in my work and life, and then I turn to something that has been a source of constant companionship for years, and it suddenly ALL ADDS UP. Even if its just for today, in this moment, I can see that nothing was wasted. I have lived.

Bird Song & Traffic

Oh my goodness is it beautiful out. I mean, SO BEAUTIFUL. You almost can't take it. This weekend I felt like I was running around like a chicken with her head cut off, because it was warm and beautiful, but there was still a part of me used to the crummy and cramped weather. It was like spending the last few months starving to death and then suddenly being faced with a banquet of food. I FORGOT how to eat. It was wonderful, but confusing.

Luckily, by the time yesterday rolled around, I was READY to really soak up the spring that had arrived. I did something I had dreamed about when I was working full time and prone to such PANGS of yearning. I got up early on a WEEKDAY, packed a bag and went to Central Park to lay on a blanket and read and write. As it turned out, I spent most of yesterday on a green slope of grass, surrounded by sunbathers, birds, cherry blossoms, and American Elms. It was SPECTACULAR. Central Park may be one of my favorite places in the world. In a city that is both exciting and relentless, it feels like a necessary oasis that brings the feeling of relief and humanity when you enter its green gates. I remember taking my dad there when he was visiting in October and he breathed a sigh of relief and said, "Oh, THIS is how people live here." It's both beautiful and magical.

At 10:15 in the morning I arrived on the Upper West side, with the sun rising above the buildings. I love being out in the mornings, because everything feels so sweet and fresh. There weren't a ton of people out because it was just after rush hour. I entered the park, passing the tourists at Strawberry Fields, snapping pictures of the IMAGINE circle. By 10:30, I was laying on a blanket, listening to bird song and traffic, with my shoes off. I had fruit and water with me, two books, my journal and some pens. It was HEAVEN.

At lunchtime I took a break and met my friend Michael, who took me to an old Italian deli for lunch. On the way we saw Alan Alda and his wife strolling the warm streets. After a courtyard lunch of a sandwich and an iced cappuccino with chocolate ice, we went back to the park and lay on the blanket, talking about writing and books and relationships.

When I came back home, I wasn't ready to be inside. So Graham and I went out to dinner and sat in another courtyard and I drank an ice cold pomegranate martini which was sour and delicious. I felt like it was one of those perfect days, and I wanted to savor everything. And you know for once, I wanted to savor something, and I did.

Happy spring everybody.

Things to Do at Work Other Than Work: Take Pictures of Your Co-Workers Leaping By Your Desk

A Room of Ones Own

I finished the set up for my studio last night and I feel like its Christams! I couldn't WAIT to wake up this morning and drink my coffee and write. I love how cozy and colorful it all is.

From the Pages of My Mind

Things I am thinking about lately:

Inspired by Barbara Kingsolver's example and forthcoming book, Animal, Vegetable, and Miracle, can Graham and I try shopping and cooking food cultivated entirely local? We are taking a trip to the farmer's market to find out.

I want Aline Kominsky Crumb's graphic memoir, Need More Love. It's such a feast for the eyes, and she is so inspiring! I have been really drawn to women artists who just got better as they get older. I am exhausted by my fears of getting older, and losing "relevence" (whatever that means), and trying to find women, who not only lived full lives, but were/are GORGEOUS. I think I can add Aline to Ruth Gordon, Beatrice Wood, Anjelica Houston, and Dorothea Tanning (among the ones I am looking to for inspiration).

I am redoing my studio and totally IN HEAVEN. I finally got my dream desk--a door on two filing cabinets. I also got a new shelf and feel like my working space suddenly became a REAL WORKING SPACE. Graham and I found the door at a lumber store seven blocks away from our apartment, which made me realize how little I know about my neighborhood. We carried the door the entire way to our apartment, and everybody just STARED.

I am so excited to go see The Year of Magical Thinking in May. My first Broadway show since Cats in 1988!

My friend and co-worker Jose and I greeted each other today in the mailroom, where some music was playing, by starting to spontaneously dance. It put me in such a good mood, that we made a deal that no matter where we are, we will start dancing when we see each other. I swear I will do ANYTHING to make office work a creative place!

Portrait of the Artist as a Very Young Cat

Like most cats, Kingsley has a passion for paper. You want to see his eyes go LARGE and DAZZLY? All you have to do is crumple a piece of paper and he is READY FOR ACTION. Since I also have a passion for paper, he has LOTS of material to work with. Often I will catch him batting around an odd shaped piece of paper covered in pink acrylic paint, that he's obviously found going into my studio. Later, I will find these little specimens curled and floating in the water bowl. Graham and I call these his "Art Pieces." He's quite the experimental minimalist. Sometimes, depending on the materials, the water will turn a different color with these limp objects floating in its brine.

This weekend I noticed he had created another masterpiece, and as I approached it, I asked him, "What's today's work about, Kings?" When I looked down I saw this:
I immediately recognized it as part of Keri's Artist Survival Kit. Apparently, even CATS need some help in the inspiration department. He certainly had used the RIGHT ticket, as it read STEAL. When I looked over at him later, he was playing with ANOTHER of Keri's tickets:
Do I need to tell you that the little piece of paper read USE GRID? I had no idea that Kings could be such a LITERALIST. Knowing how MYSTERIOUS and SOLITARY the creative act can be, I left him to his work. Later, I found it floating in the waterbowl too.

April-That-Feels-Like-March

From Maira Kalman's Principal's of Uncertainty

Do you ever feel that you're all alone out there in the big world? The truth is, you are ON your own, which isn't the same thing. I think I confuse these all the time. I look at others and think they have it all together, or there's just more love alotted for their piece fo pie, and maybe I am just screwed after all, but then I learn that even the "haves" feel this. The difference is that they do their work, and while I am sitting here, I can be doing my work too.

I'm having the April-feels-like-March blahs. My apartment is still wrecked from its dismantaling for our house guests, and I'm still not 100% healthy (when does an infernal cold GO AWAY already), and I am in just one of those moods where I want EVERYTHING to change. I need new shoes. I need a haircut. I need some fresh vegetables. I need a new desk. I need a ROAD TRIP.

I have been dreaming like crazy lately and all the dreams seemed to be filled with the unfinished business of my life. The relationships I'm confused about. The wedding I am planning. I wake up feeling a little uneasy. Then I raise my head and see the laundry pile that needs tending to, and the light that comes in through the window is dull and gray.

I am so NOT living the dream today.

I was talking with my mother about the wedding the other night and told her I now had a working list and she interrupted me and said, "Oh no, not one of YOUR lists. You so LOVE to make lists." I laughed, because yes, I make LISTS. I am a visual person, and lists are a way to SHOW me where I need to go.

And what would be on my list this weekend? Look for the wonder and write it down. Create something, whether it's a pie or a picture. For God' sake, BUILD something and be the springtime that hasn't come yet, and help your little garden grow.

Promise Not to Tell

Still feeling like utter crap. I am going to lay down again, but not before a toot a little horn for someone, I am immensely happy for.

I went to a funky free-for-all tiny college in Vermont. Unless you went there, you've never heard of it. Even if it sounds "vaguely familiar" I can assure you, it isn't.

A lot of people at this funky college wrote. I was among them, but in truth, I was clueless. Like so many others on that campus, I was flailing around on paper a lot of the time. I'd write things like "I am the diamond, who smears like milk." (Actually, that's too good.) I was reading a lot of Sylvia Plath poetry, but not really GETTING the poetry. It was, of course, not a bad way to go for someone in college finding herself, but sometimes I wish I could write apology letters to my English teachers. Then again, my fellow classmates weren't much different. I can't tell you the amount of poems I heard with words like "Big Wheels" and "Masturbation", not to mention "My name is Womyn or Wimmin or Wombmn".

And then there was a student named Jennifer McMahon. The first time I heard her read, something in me GOT IT. It was like I had a blank box that finally got checked off. I not only knew that she could write, but I LIKED her writing, the way you like writing you find in a "published" book. Right away I knew she had something. There are phrases in her poems from back then that I STILL can remember. She was my first writing IDOL, and although it might embarrass her to know this, she was my first real writing teacher by example.

I got to know Jennifer better a couple of years later, when we formed a writing group with another friend, Seth Knapp (come back to the five and dime, Seth Knapp, Seth Knapp!). I still adored her work, and found a lot of inspiration from her, but it was a different dynamic. For one, I was writing better, and with Seth we formed a supportive group of equals.

Through the years, the three of us lost touch, but I always thought of those two, and in particular, Jennifer, because her writing and her example meant so much to me. So you can imagine my delight when she found me through that weird labyrinth of nudie girls and networking, called myspace. I was SO HAPPY to hear from her and when I found out that she had a debut novel coming out, I was BESIDE myself.

I cannot tell you the amount of talented people I have met through the years, who eventually just gave up or didn't have time, or forgot that some art form meant something to them. To know that through the years, Jennifer not only kept writing, but that some of that writing was MAKING IT out into the world, felt like JUSTICE. It felt like a big old stamp of HOPE that said YES WORLD.

On Tuesday, her debut novel, Promise Not to Tell hit the bookstores. I am SO HAPPY for her. When I went to go pick it up, I was going to take a picture of it on the table of "New Fiction," but it was right next to a book titled Is The Bitch Dead Or What?, and I couldn't stop LAUGHING to save my life. Oh, the GLORY of being a published author!

Please buy this book. She deserves it and so do you--it's good. Also, all the old manuscripts I own of hers will become VALUABLE. Hey, a girl's got to eat.

In the Wilderness of New York

Hi folks. So sorry to be so long out of commission. Our house guests left, but not before I came down with a CRAPPY and LONG WINDED cold/flu. Today is my first day up and back on the saddle. I don't mind telling you that I am GLAD to be OUT OF BED. I am good invalid for about a day and then I get CAGEY and IMPATIENT.

While I was on the steep decline of getting sick, we went with Coreen and Lauren to do a bunch of VISITING NEW YORK activities like going on a carriage ride through Central Park and going to the Natural History Museum. I have such mixed feelings about the Natural History Museum. On the one hand it is one of my favorite places to go on the city--the dioramas are spectacular, and it's old and beautiful and CHEAP. You can wander the halls and follow the trail that JD Salinger described in the Catcher in the Rye. You can draw antelope or photograph them. You can touch the inside of a GIANT CLAM shell, and don't even get me started on the breathtaking dinosaur skeletons.

On the other side, it's just a big TOMB. All those amazing dioramas are filled with animals that were minding their own business one day, only to be shot by Teddy Roosevelt and his gang, so that they could be displayed in a painted case. They called it "collecting", but let's be honest--they were HUNTING. The baby gorilla all the parents point out to their own babies, and who everyone says, "Oh, look, how CUTE!" was KILLED to be here. The point was MAYBE that they could save other animals from human intrusion by presenting these animals as easily visited examples, but knowing what I know about Teddy Roosevelt, that crazy, toothy president, it was also for sport.

Here is something I didn't know before attending Disneyland in March and the Natural History Museum in April: Springbreak is as bad as Christmas for travel and event planning. I thought lunchtime in Midtown New York was bad, but it's GOT NOTHING on the Natural History Museum during springbreak. There have only been a few times I have felt AFRAID when I saw such crowds. It was NUTS. It was the one time I was glad that Lauren had the attention span of a hampster. It meant we go in, we saw a few things, and then we were OUT OF THERE.

Afterwards we went and got a carriage ride, which was fun and exciting, and also pushed my conflicted buttons of animal sympathies.

After a final meal at a greasy New York diner, my body now full ACHING with fever, New York gave our guests one last THRILL, by presenting the actor Danny Glover in our trail. We couldn't have missed him even if we wanted to. He's at least 6' 4", and he was standing on the sidewalk WAVING and occasionally YELLING. He was wearing one of those headset cellphones and apparently trying to locate someone. "I think I see you." He was saying, and then he'd wave and yell " JOSE!" andthen say, "Do you see me?" And I thought, Who DOESN'T see you? It was the perfect ending, and then I went home and collapsed.

A Message

Tender

Here is something I've realized: when I don't get enough sleep, it's like I'm drunk. I am terribly MOVED by everything. I once sat at a work lunch after about four hours of sleep, and sat listening to two co-workers talking about BLUE JEANS. I looked at them, with what I imagined was the look of a droopy-eyed Saint Bernard, and said, "I am so tired that I love EVERYBODY." They laughed, thank God!

This morning I came into work feeling like if anybody so much as looked at me the wrong way, I might break like a big sand castle left out in the sun to dry. I kept asking myself, what's wrong with you? Why is the world so TENDER? Then, I remembered I didn't get very much sleep last night. That would explain the tunnel vision and the sudden DEEP AFFECTION for the soft spring air that confronted me as I ascended from the subway. Oh, dearie me, my eyes welled, I do SO LOVE the Empire State Building guilded with the morning light!

I feel like a sailor on shore leave, his arm around his buddies, singing "My Funny Valentine" and thinking it is the most tragic of all songs and that life is so beautiful that it is hard to take.

Some people do fine without sleep. Apparently, I do not. I am not a pretty drunk, people. I am a TRAIN WRECK.

The Guests are Coming

Tonight, through the foggy sky, Graham's sister, Coreen, and her two year old daughter are coming to stay for five days. This means we are shacking up in our tiny apartment, rearranging furniture so that the four of us can sleep properly (which means sleeping at all), and trying to send telepathic messages to the cats to let them know: YOUR WORLD IS ABOUT TO BE ROCKED.

Coreen and Lauren came last year, about this time. Sleater-Kitty had been living with us for about six weeks, and we already knew that she had EMOTIONAL PROBLEMS, and was very, ahem, SENSITIVE from whatever traumatic history she had. Not like I can EMPATHISE or anything. Nothing prepared us however for the STRONG REACTION she would have to the invasion of another small being, the one year old Lauren. Lauren immediately loved Sleater-Kitty with an unbridled passion, that filled her entire body. When she went to show her love, Sleater batted at her and fled. Lauren then would see her, and stand rigidly about three feet away from her, and literally SHAKE with her love that had to remain a LONG DISTANCE love. Sleater showed her feelings in a slightly different way.

Graham and I decided to try and sleep out in the living room. Not only did she pace all night, around and on top of us, but then came a particular WITCHING HOUR, when we would hear her digging around in her litter box, only to stick her little white butt OUTSIDE the door of her box PROJECTILE POO. Then, she would WALK THROUGH IT. This didn't happen just one night, this happened EVERY SINGLE NIGHT that Coreen and Lauren were staying with us. Graham and I couldn't sleep a wink for FEAR of the DREADED scratch in the litter box sound, which then followed with us blocking her inside the bathroom, cleaning up the poo and her. MIRACULOUSLY the projectile poo STOPPED the day they were gone.

Coincidence? I think not.

We are trying things a bit differently this year. Sleater-Kitty has grown up quite a bit. She's had babies, she now lives with another cat, and there have been other house guests. She is also less of a spaz now in the POO and ATTACK areas. She actually LIKES being held now, which is a totally new development. Also, we have replaced the lid covered litter box with a larger tray model--to give her AMPLE aiming room. Best of all, this time she won't have us sleeping in the living room. Graham and I are sleeping in my studio, with the DOOR SHUT, thank you very much.

We spent all day yesterday cleaning up, rearranging, and getting ready. I finished the above painting made out of my old beloved satin pajamas that had turned to rags, and acrylic paint. Just a last minute bit of art making, before the desk gets moved and the bed gets placed. My cats aren't the only ones who have rituals that make them feel safe. Difference is, I can HOLD IT for a few days.