Lonesome

Be good and you will be lonesome
Be lonesome and you will be free
Live a lie and you will live to regret it
That's what living is to me
-Jimmy Buffett

The Little One

She has lost something. What? She doesn’t know. She tries not to examine things too closely. She used to examine, but now she can’t, or she won’t—she says it doesn’t matter. She is a writer. She is independent. She lives alone in a new building. She takes classes and joins groups. She is very involved. But then, what she writes are things she doesn’t find interesting or worthwhile, her groups and classes are no fun and are filled with women who she thinks are petty and stupid, and she has not turned out to be as attractive as she thought she would be, and this particularly surprises her as she had always thought she would be the kind of woman who grows into her own, like men do. Her apartment is small and not very well made. Men who come over tap on the walls and check the cabinets and say that it’s a shame how shitty everything is now. They tell her it’s not like it used to be. There is this and other things that she hates about men, and so not very many of them make it into her life. She does have a boyfriend now, though, and he stays with her some nights, when she has the time. She likes him, but she also likes her mornings alone. In the morning is when she does nothing, and also on Saturdays. She isn’t sure how she got so busy. He is over now, in bed with her. With reluctance, she considers him. Would he like something to eat? Would he like coffee? What is he going to do today? She never used to be considerate like this before, but now she feels compelled. Why? She doesn’t know. He tells her he has no plans. He would happily spend the day with her, she knows, but she will not make this an option for him. Today she will spend walking through Uptown. She knows she will be disappointed with what is there. She is always disappointed with what is in Uptown and so she normally doesn’t bother, but it’s warm and early spring and she should go outside. She's been driving through Uptown all winter, and she keeps thinking there must be something there. Have they added something? She didn't know. Today she will know there is still nothing there. She will go and she will think, I should be able to find something here, but there is nothing here. What she will find is a book she has been wanting to read and a pair of shoes she isn’t sure if she can wear. This will be her afternoon, but what she tells him when he asks is that her day is busy and her evening is full. As she says this, she is fairly certain she will get lonely at some point and will want to see him. She tells him maybe tomorrow will work. But it will not have to wait for tomorrow. What will happen is she will buy her book and her pair of shoes and then she will cook dinner and this will make her sad and she will look around her empty apartment and she will call him and tell him to come over. He will be out with his friends, but he will say that he’ll try. She will hang up and be annoyed with herself for not having planned this out better. Why doesn’t she listen to herself? She doesn’t know. She will drink wine and watch TV until she cannot stand it, and then she will go to bed alone. She will look up in bed and think, I have lost something, haven’t I? He will call then and tell her he’s in a cab and on his way. She will say fine, though she’ll be certain he’s drunk and not up for sex or for company in any way. And he won’t be, and she won’t care. He will get in bed with her and they will fall asleep. In the morning, she will ask how his day was and he will say that it was fine. He will ask how her day was and she, too, will say it was fine. It was fine, she will say again. It was fine.

About Me...

My idea of "arriving" is having a front porch and time to sit on it | I once thought I had a good grasp of things | Trees and waves are not that different to me | A perfect evening for me is: a stiff drink, a stack of records and the company of a good friend; or an outdoor baseball game on a perfect spring night; or being with Jamie | I once worried that if I didn't plan the perfect honeymoon, my newfound wife would leave me. I was 8; my tentative plan was a safari - I even drew pictures of us riding on elephants. As it would happen, Jamie and I never really had a honeymoon, and surprisingly, she hasn't left me over it | I find writing stories to be a lot like drawing a picture; the page never turns out quite as well as you imagined it would | I have never smoked pot | I seldom read genre books and usually regret when I do | I like cold air against my skin | I grew up listening to vinyl, wishing my dad would replace our collection with CDs. Now I'm forgoing CDs for vinyl. Some things change; some things wait for us to change | My mother used to make me watch every State of the Union and Inauguration | I'm learning to withhold, though I'd rather be sharing | During a block party when I was young, my mom asked if I'd join her for the line dance. I said no. She offered me a dollar. I still said no. I've never turned down a dance since | I should've been a rock star. Books will never compete | There is little as wonderful as clean sheets after a hot bath | I always take my coffee and whiskey neat | I’ve seen Clapton play “Cocaine” | It’s important to me that my wife and I have a “connecting” conversation everyday | I was able to sit in on the U.S. Supreme Court on the first day that Chief Justice Roberts delivered a decision; it was also on one of the final days that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor delivered one of her final decisions | I never feel close to God than when I’m lost in nature | Until I went to high school, I started every day with my mother reading to me and my siblings | I don’t need to mean everything to you, but I do need to know that I mean a lot to you | I sometimes dream about being an outlaw, owning only my bike and what my bike can carry | I have almost a religious love for record stores, bookstores and great bars | In most regards, I try, but not as hard as I could | I have a profound love for adventures, both big and small | I don’t discriminate when it comes to beer | My father once said to me, “The first time I told my father I loved him was to his grave, and I never heard him tell me that he loved me.” He looked at me then and said, “I love you, I do. And I want to hear you say that you love me too” | I don’t remember meeting my wife; we were young and probably at family camp | I’ve seen Neil Young play “Rockin’ in the Free World” | I’m of the opinion that we need to give ourselves permission to try things and to be willing to look stupid in the process, though I sometimes struggle with both. Convictions, as it turns out, are not the half of it | I think there is nothing more attractive in a person than reverence | It’s hard for me to accept that I will never be everything to everyone close to me, and even harder to accept that they don’t want me to be | I don’t understand poetry | I proposed to my wife by bringing her to our bridge and having, at the stroke of midnight, a canoe filled with white roses, candles and a wedding ring come floating out from under us | I will never nurture, mentor, befriend or love as many people who have nurtured, mentored, befriended or loved me. But I will try | I’ve seen John Prine and Emmylou Harris play “Angel from Montgomery” | Most of what’s making this list is what’s on my mind at this particular junction in my life | I drive really well, probably better than you | I am trying to understand how fiction works | I’d almost always rather be bicycling about | Most things are more fun with the company of my wife; but not anything to do with baseball | My father once took out the garbage only to realize when November arrived that he had thrown away all of our hats, scarves and gloves | I batted .490 my senior year | Line by line, I am figuring out how fiction works | I have never wanted to live anywhere other than Minnesota since the day Paul Wellstone died | I have the unfounded worry that the Coliseum will fall down before I get to see it | I have two mottos: 1) Michael's is my Home Depot, and 2) Just because I don't like construction doesn't mean I don't like construction paper | I once forgot to run on a suicide squeeze | My wife once turned me and said, “Do you think people think I’m kidding when I tell them I want to be Spider Man?” | I have an amazing capacity to eat | I realized that books had been written while trying to count every book in my parents’ house | I will never get used to rejection | I have picked up hitchhikers, but never hitchhiked myself | I have a fear of being abandoned and in no large sense have I ever been abandoned | My family used to walk on Christmas Day evening around Lake Calhoun, stop at Café Wyrd for coffee or hot chocolate, then continue on to Cheapo for records | I love having a tattoo and think I’ll probably get more | I love swimming and climbing trees and sea-worthy sailboats | Canoeing away from our wedding on a still night was when I realized I loved being married | It meant a lot to hear my dad say: "John relies on me for everything. He will never feed himself, change himself, put himself to bed or do any of the things we do for ourselves. It has been one of the greatest pleasures of my life to do these things for him” | I waited to have sex until my wedding night; my wife waited too | I love being a student, both formally and informally | I firmly believe good music is good music, and I am trying to abide by that | I was there when Johan faced Schilling and went five shut-out innings, struck out a baker’s dozen and, alas, the game was won via a walk-off slam by Jason Kubel in the bottom of the twelfth when the Twins were down by one | I was meant to be in love | I’ve seen B.B. King play “The Thrill is Gone” | I feel insecure that I will never be able to give birth | I spend more time listening to music than just about anything else | I don’t like gambling | I am not sure how to feel about my growing sense of skepticism when it comes to the church | I would like to know how David James Duncan felt when he finished “Brothers K,” if he knew what he had just done | I sometimes read a book in a day, but then go a month without reading a book at all | I have only occasionally seen my father confront anything, which is probably why I confront everything | I believe lists are both useful and not me | Once, while taking one of my “walking away” pictures, I was able to capture a lightning strike | I believe someday there will be a book with my name on it | I am comfortable with ambiguity and skeptical of absolutes | I once spent a year reflecting on the word “worship,” then the next year on the word “reverence.” This year, I’m reflecting on “lonesome” | I used to think grammar was spelled with an E | My first girlfriend and I had the same birthday; I was a year older | Every place I visit, I take a picture of me walking away | I was born on my parents’ living room floor during the Carter Administration | I don’t like having a job and can’t wait for the day I can bid them adieu | After telling Sam, the boy I have taken care of four almost five years, that I was going to be on vacation for two weeks, he teared up and said, “Who’s going to take care of me?” | I write better when I’m drinking, and this remains true even when I wake up the next morning and look at what I’ve done | I was once alone in a room with President Clinton | I need encouragement and to be told that I am loved and appreciated | A day without a nap is an incomplete day | I would happily give up writing for one Major League at bat | I once went to Scrabble club and met the midwife from my birth. As it would happen, she remembered me; could even remember my birthday | I love peanut butter and eat it almost everyday | There are times, usually when we’re standing face-to-face, when I feel like I’m seeing my wife for the first time. When this happens, I am amazed and cannot look away | I felt a greater loss when “Boston Legal” ended than when “West Wing” ended, and I have never gotten over the fact that “Arrested Development” ended | I believe I'm very close to where I should be | I so admire Virginia Woolf | I used to go with the women to the antique stores while the men stayed home and watched football | I’ve seen Dylan play “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” | I find a profound sense of freedom in Vonnegut’s “So it goes.” | My dad once offered to hold my slingshot while I used the outhouse. When he used the outhouse, the slingshot fell in. He fished it out with a stick, but it was never the same | I have two thousand books and as many problems, but at least I've got two thousand books | I think often about what it would be like to be able to play an instrument or dance well or have a motorcycle | I love teaching, but not being a teacher | I remember when MacDonald’s put their sandwiches in Styrofoam containers, and I remember how my mother would plead to have our sandwiches delivered on napkins | After getting married, my wife and I loaded our ’87 Corolla and moved to New York City. We had very little money and no jobs, and, as it turned out, an apartment with a broken sink, a toilet that didn’t flush and barely enough room to stretch out | I go to a lot of shows, but not nearly as many as I’d like | Finding something to connect over never gets old | I find it hard to give people a complete picture of me | I’ve seen Springsteen play “Thunder Road” | I love spontaneous gifts and handmade cards | I sometimes imagine what it would be like if it weren't 90 feet to first | I am seldom as moved as when I am witnessing a man cry | If it’s not late into the evening already, I’m wishing it were | I am all too aware of the distance between you and I

Favorite Books of 2008

For the past two years, I have tried to read a book a week. Both years, I failed. In 2007, I read 41 books. In 2008, I read 46. Better, but still not the 52 it would take to claim a book-a-week habit.

My qualification for having read a book (as I've discussed on this blog in the past) is reading every word of every page. I thumb through and read portions of a lot of books every year; probably a few hundred. Even when I've read large portions of a book, I still don't count it on my list. My list, to me, is sacred and reserved for only those books I've taken everything from.

And, alas, this list is not of my favorite books published in 2008. My Best Albums and Best Movies lists will be 2008 releases, but combing through every album and/or movie is easy; reading every book that came out this year, not so much.

So, without further ado, my list for 2008:

Woolf, Virginia - Mrs. Dalloway
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Ford, Richard - The Sportswriter / Independence Day
Waugh, Evelyn - A Handful of Dust
Kharms, Daniil - Today I Wrote Nothing
Roth, Philip - The Ghost Writer
Bolano, Roberto - Last Evenings on Earth
Dubus, Andre - Dancing After Hours
Johnson, Denis - Jesus’ Son
Saunders, George - Pastoralia


Honorable Mentions

Barthelme, Don. - 40 Stories
Calvino, Italo - If on a winter’s night a traveler
Diaz, Junot - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Ford, Richard - Rock Springs
Hempel, Amy - Reasons to Live
Jones, Edward P - Lost in the City
Koestler, Arthur - Darkness at Noon
Lawrence, D. H. - Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Lahiri, Jhumpa - Interpreter of Maladies
McCarthy, Tom - The Remainder
Morrison, Toni - The Bluest Eye
Murakami, Haruki - After the Quake
Pollan, Michael - In Defense of Food
Robbins, Tom - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Robbins, Tom - Wild Ducks Flying Backward
Woolf, Virginia - A Room of One’s Own
Woolf, Virginia - The Waves
Woolf, Virginia - A Sketch of the Past

2008 in Review

This has been, I imagine, a year I will remember sharply. There was the trip to New York to see the Twins play the Yankees in Yankee Stadium (which is sadly on its way to being a parking lot) and the Phillies play the Mets in Shea (which will also soon be a parking lot, but in this case that’s probably a good thing). I had my first (and possible last) taste of being a professor, teaching Business Communications at Globe University. How was I allowed to teach a Business Comm class? Beats me. Jamie and I have both finished the coursework for our degrees; she’s riding out the rest of her internship and I’ll be starting my thesis in February. This was an anti-climactic achievement—Jamie left school for the last time not even realizing that she wasn’t going to be coming back until she got home—but I suspect we’ll look back at this finale as a turning point in our lives. There will be the student, first years of marriage us, and then there will be the work work work, adult us. I can’t say I’m not ready, but I also can’t say that I’m not a little reluctant.

Then there was the book stuff. My book. Well, no, not my book, but a book with my work in it, anyway. This was, without a question, the best part of the year for me. I didn’t realize it when I opened the email and saw that Milkweed had accepted my story “Knowing,” but being included in Fiction on a Stick has lead to my first experience with the business of being a writer. There was the launch/book signing at Open Book, then another book signing at Barnes & Noble, and even a radio interview/reading on Write On Radio! (KFAI 90.3 FM). The radio bit was surreal. Sitting in a studio, wearing headphones, talking into a microphone, and knowing all the while that anyone, anywhere (metro-wide at least) could hear everything I was saying was both fun and unnerving.

Aspiring writers are reluctant to call themselves writers, not because they are insecure (although that is probably part of it), but because anytime you do call yourself a writer, there's the annoying and inevitable response: That's cool; what have you written? While having a story in a regional anthology isn’t the same as having a book of your own, it does go along way toward making a writer feel "official." At least it did for me.

I’m not sure whether it’s because I’m on a relative upswing right now, or if maybe I’m just getting better with each pass I take at writing a story, but this year has been a reaffirming stretch for me. Now more than ever, I enjoy writing. I’m actually beginning to see things in my writing that are surprising and exciting me. It’s like I’m beginning to see the writer in me take shape. I still don’t like most of what I put down, but I am noticing things here and there (a sentence, a paragraph) that are good and sometimes even beautiful.

As big of a year as 2008 has been, I suspect 2009 will be even bigger. Jamie will be opening her clinic (we hope) and this alone will be one of the defining moments of our lives. We’re both incredibly anxious about the details, but we are equally resolved and peaceful about this being the direction we take. My only hope is that when I sit down to review 2009, I have good news in this regard. We shall see.

Well, it’s time for me to get to my lists. Enjoy the New Year!

From a Book

From The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth:

"Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion. All one’s concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the grueling, exalted, transcendent calling. I looked around and I thought, This is how I will live."

The New Angle

Once again, I've been MIA for some time now. The reasons are fairly concrete: I write often, but seldom for this blog, and when I do, I feel like I probably shouldn't be. With what time I have, which I'll admit is not nothing, I have a responsibility to be working on my craft, which is fiction. That said, I very much like having a blog, so here's what I plan to do:

1.) I'm going to start posting photos from my everyday life. These photos will be of those things that, together, comprise my daily routine. They will not necessarily be exceptional; that is not their point. What I want is for you to have a sense of the goings-on in my life.

2.) I read a lot, and I've decided to also draw on this part of my life, posting quotes from the books I pass through.

3.) I will also, when the spirit moves me, quote from or review music I'm listening to.

What this means, more or less, is that this blog will carry less of my own writing and more of the world that inspires/surrounds me. At least I'm back, right?