Love and Taxes

My husband and I have always had a relatively pragmatic view of Valentine's Day. After twelve years together valentines are more like notes we pass to each other in the halls of an ordinary day than that one beaming roman candle that you light on a Valentine's Day early in your relationship and silently hope doesn't explode in your hands.

This year, we celebrated all things red and pink by having our taxes done. Oddly, it seemed a perfect way to honor our married 2009. No year is really over until the fat, Federal lady has sung, so we celebrated a New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day hybrid while sitting in our accountant's cubicle at H&R Block.

Fifteen minutes into itemizing it was apparent that 2009's pursuits had already begun to melt into memory. When my husband pulled out the L.A. back-up documentation folder I felt a strange, sorry sensation, as if I'd forgotten the lines of my favorite poem. There it was: the evidence of all we'd tried to do -- his rental car and hotel receipts, plane tickets, and credit card bills from the western sojourn to see what else was out there. In another folder was my own paper trail of first year tuition tax forms and textbook sales slips. Added together, could our paper pile amount to something more tangible than the year itself?

I watched our accountant tally up the deductions thinking that in its own way, each w-2, 9, form C, 1040-E and 1098 was like a kind of valentine we were sending to each other. They were more than just statements of account or interest paid, they were small proofs-of-purchase from the down payment we had made on our dreams. As each form was stapled into our 2009 tax portfolio I imagined them dusted with tiny mylar cupids and adorned with lipstick kisses. I pictured signing on the dotted lines with a neon pink pen, replacing each "i" in my name with a totem pole of bubble hearts.

I was thinking,

'Valentine in black and white.
A solid, stapled
paper replacement
for time and trial.
And yet, and yet,
it warms
when I hold it
thinking of you.'

I was dreaming of before and after, of everything we did and want to do. That's pretty good for two gray chairs in a gray room, on a gray day in February. Pretty good, pragmatic valentine.

Who's Counting? Age is Just a Number. Literally.

I had the strangest interaction with my Agephobia (yes, it's a condition) this week. Some days I forget I have it. In certain moments I feel ageless or even young, and sometimes I'm just distracted enough by shiny things like debt calculations or meetings with internet marketers at least a decade my junior that it slips my mind -- my spiny, ceaseless age-panic.

I've made no secret of the fact that I'm consumed with thoughts of time, or more accurately, with thoughts of how little I fear I have left of it. I wonder endlessly about the origin of this obsession. Could it be my harried urban lifestyle? My checkered, thrill-seeking past? Is it because our friends are having second babies? Or perhaps it's because I spend so little time doing what I want to be doing that each precious second is fried up like onion skin in hot oil and made dehydrated and lifeless. In my rear view mirror I can see a billion dead seconds I'll never have the time to rehydrate.

I wasn't thinking about all this on a recent business trip with a colleague. We were unwrapping turkey sandwiches in a Jersey train station's bar and I was thinking about whether it was inappropriate to have a Midori sour in front of her. It was one of those blessed ageless moments.

'I'm not in the office' I thought. 'I'm free.'
I could have been retired or just out of college.

I didn't order the drink but it would've helped to be lubed for the next part of the conversation. Eventually we came around to age, what we'd like to be doing after the inevitable demise of the company we work for, and what is next for both of us. She said she'd like to go back to school, work in health and help people. I encouraged her to think about it, saying hey, she's only thirty-six, it's still doable to go to class at night, now's the time. I went on to describe the immeasurable sense of empowerment I get from attending classes, how they feel like a weapon against inertia...
and, blah
blah
blah
blahhhhh....
Her eyes were on the liquor selection lining the mirrored bar. I noticed she had gone internal, wasn't making eye contact and seemed to, well, not care. It was fine, I thought, she wasn't ready to really think about next steps. We were silent for a moment.

And then she said, quietly, almost so I couldn't hear,
"I'm forty."
"What?" I asked.
"I'm forty."
"What are you talking about? You're thirty-six, we're two years apart, and we've been two years apart for the nine years I've worked for the company."
"You don't understand. I'm forty. I'm just realizing it."
"Wait, wait, wait" I said. "How can this be? How can you just be realizing you're forty?"
"Well" she said softly "I was born in 1969. I guess I stopped counting. I stopped counting at thirty-six."

I thought I detected a shiny horizon of tears forming on the edge of her lower lids. She looked shell shocked.

"You're the first person in four years to ask about my age" she said. "Do you think about your age much?"
"Every second of every moment in every hour of every day" I replied.

I tried to imagine waking up halfway through forty. Maybe it'd be better to have it land on your head like an anvil and stun you into accepting it. Maybe it was better to realize it at a Jersey train station bar, over a cello-wrapped turkey sandwich, with someone you only know professionally. She seemed as shocked that I spent all my time thinking about aging as I was that she never did. And suddenly I felt self-consciously young and foolish; idiotically worried about things I have plenty of time to sort out. What if I had somehow stopped counting and one day woke up years older, wondering how on earth I'd forgotten to mark four years of my life?

"Huh", she chuckled. "My husband's gonna love this. Guess it makes him forty four."
"What now?" I asked.
"Well, I'm wondering if I should have a birthday."

Just for that night I didn't pull at the pair of vertical ski-shaped wrinkles cutting their way into the space between my eyebrows.

I Hold These Truths to be (Pretty) Self-Evident

Salt Creek, Death Valley, California
December, 2009
Photo: Cox

'Fa-la-la-la-la, another end-of-year wrap-up.'

I'm not going to hide it. I've been avoiding this post. We're two, me and this bedeviled blog, and the occasion seems to merit a generic birthday candle photo, top-ten list or resolution of epic proportions ("Fifty Pounds in Fifty Days!"). At the very least I should post a group of folkloric-themed lessons born of the year's experiences. Yes, I've been anticipating this moment for weeks: the convergence of MCY's second anniversary with our decade's close and the end of my monumentally shadowy year.

I had hoped to rustle up some mustard seeds to bury alongside 2009, but the truth is that I dug really deep this year, all the way down to what I thought was the bottom of the well, and well, I found no truth. In fact, I found no bottom. So, in 2010 I'm going to have to keep mining.

It's three days past this blog's birthday, a day into the New Year, and I'm halfway through a Wendy's Chicken Club and a champagne flute full of Sauvignon Blanc. I'm writing by the light of my weeping, dehydrated Christmas tree's tiny colored bulbs. Everything new could be old again. I could be Alice and the Rabbit having tea with yesterday's OneKate. The point is, time is irrelevant. The New Year is whenever I say it is. I've heaved this beloved blog over the 2009 finish line so that it can land smack dab in 2010, diapered and dapper as a fledgling bunch of font instead of the haggard old man it would have been if I'd left it lingering in last year's time zone. Today is going to be its birthday.

I walked along the trail pictured above in Death Valley three weeks ago. It's the trail one finds at the end of the trail near the park's only body of water, a thin stream called Salt Creek. The trail has no end. I followed it until I became too conscious of being alone and when I stopped I christened it "My Road". If only I could have known this path existed in all the years I wanted to walk one just like it. I found it on a naked, solitary desert salt flat. At least now I can conjure a line when I need one. After I got back to camp, I wrote the thoughts below. I think I came closer to finding a grain of truth in that chilly evening's musings than I was able to touch in my whole, heavy year of reaching for one. Now, onward.

12/I Don't Know/09
Death Valley
Furnace Creek Campground, Site 83

I don't like to find things from home tucked into this notebook -- horoscopes, letterhead with my notes on it: "to do", "to get", and the like. I'm tucking them into a back page somewhere to be discovered later. I'm writing by headlamp (pause). Excuse me, I had to tend the fire. I'm the fire-keeper here. I'm by myself. There's no one else to tend the fire. I'm horrible at it, actually. Earlier I burned my finger, thinking (well, not thinking) that a stone wouldn't be hot. I moved it to accommodate a log. Still, my fire's been burning for a least an hour and I consider that progress.

What did I see today? Did I think? Yes, I thought about what I saw. I thought about thinking. I thought about the long shadows on the cool dunes. I thought about my husband. I had periods of intensely missing him. Then I felt empty. Not in the way I always do at home--empty of direction in a panic-stricken way. I felt empty of care. Empty of judgment and opinion. Empty of need to decide. Anything. Pleased to be. Pleased to watch bodies tiny as pinpricks climb smooth, sculpted dunes while I did whiskey shooters in the sun. Pleased to drive long, empty stretches of road that looked as good in my rearview as they did out my windshield, thinking of nothing but how strange it is that salt flats look wet in the low sun. Pleased at how easy it was to let go.

Pleased to be west. Pleased to see red walls and washes, cairns and drainage. Pleased to move. To be cold in a tent at 3:00 a.m. To be alone and not feel scared. To be alone, feel scared and get past it. To run along a trail for fear of rattlesnakes. To realize the sound that I fear is rattlesnakes is really my Prana Yoga pants rubbing between my thighs. To hear the small voices of everyone I know come poking through and to ignore them. To truly understand that silence is a sound. To believe for a moment that rocks make noise.

To understand that I've learned a lot and to be okay not saying what any of it is. To feel centered, apart, calm, at peace, apathetic, relaxed, awestruck, alone, indignant, joyous, bemused, and grateful to the benevolent provider...and to not even care that I just wrote that sentence or what it means.

PROCESSing

This time tomorrow I'll be in the desert.

Crazy part is, it'll actually be a real desert. It'll be the kind with dunes and dust and rolling shadows that trick your eyes. It won't be the desert of the soul, the parched graveyard of the mind, or the dark night of the spirit. Nah, it won't be any more of that existential shit. It'll be the kind of dry I can hold in my hands. If I can stumble through one more urban day, one more day skating on this glass and iron grid, I'll get on a plane and wake up in Vegas. And then I'm going to drive.


The idea is to pitch my tent in Death Valley, pour a bourbon, make a fire and think about this:

PRODUCT VERSUS PROCESS
or....

prOcess versus PRoducT
or...

OCESSP sveRUS prOCTDu

I finish my semester this evening. I want some kind of internal brass bell to ring. A button. A gong. I want Anthony Michael Hall to punch me in the shoulder. But what I've got instead is, well, creative process, which looks a lot more like a bunch of work halfway through its life cycle, some inspired, some shit and all of it only breathing if I fill it full of my helium. Somehow this feels anticlimactic.

Last semester, after reading the equivalent of the Library of Congress' bibliography section on international politics and the Middle East and acing a final and three major papers, my husband and I went out and drank a paycheck's worth of wine. The first toast was along the lines of, "here's to doing something tangible and easy to toast to!" This semester's toast will be something like, "here's to coming up with some solid concepts and then getting a little off track after workshopping them, but finally accepting that taking a bit of breathing space will inevitably restore buoyancy to your craft!" Salut!

This was a process semester. Scratch that, a process year. I'm seeing this whole school-slow-as-molasses thing as an exercise in forced process. It's like that scene from A Clockwork Orange where the guy's eyelids are forced open with those little metal prods so that he can bear witness to the atrocities of the world before him. I will be forced to surrender my need for a moment of conclusion. My consciousness will be scrubbed of words and phrases containing the likes of "content", "pages", "bang it out" and "nail it".

I will get comfortable with the following idea:

I AM NEVER FINISHED.

And if I can't get comfortable with it yet, I'll just get drunk and go hiking.

Happy Hollowdays

Oh, Gawd, it's good to be back here, layin' down font in my tiny piece of e-real estate. It's like diving into a warm, electric swimming pool. This blog, my unrestricted voice, home of shit poetry and endless depressive job-hating, blonde strand-coveting exploits. It doesn't have to have a market or a point, page views or analytics. It doesn't have to be search engine-friendly. It can just be a little square of space and I can just show up, walk around, post, scream, yell, cry, pontificate, paint, shatter into a million pieces and glue myself back together sideways. And I don't have to care if it makes me any money or determines my future or gets me out of my job or gets me in any doors or buys me freedom or gets me sponsored or opens my days or makes me in any way better or more accomplished or successful...or stops...the...gerbil wheel...even.for.a.second.

November went down like a shot of vodka. I hardly remember it. It says here I last visited the ranch on October 23rd. Well, shit. Since then I've gone another year grayer (but you'll never see it), spent Thanksgiving in jammies drinking Moet, bought a near-eight foot tall Christmas tree and filled it full of sparkly things and am now staring down the final two weeks of my semester. I've written fiction, for God's sake. Real fiction. Well, fake stories about real people that I've imagined. I can't believe it. I'm halfway through the required manuscript, which is due in a week. I'm still not sure where it's going, but if that isn't this year's fuckin' t-shirt slogan, I sure can't think of a better one.

I think my Korean herbalist may have reset my internal hard drive. Since Halloween I've been drinking a vicious brew I named "the hell broth", a mahogany-colored liquid packed in cellophane bags printed with stags that I've been downing twice a day before meals. It's meant to strengthen my liver, which in Chinese medicine is responsible for a whole lotta goin's on, including anger, mood, headaches, muscle pain and imbalance. The instructions were strict: no alcohol, pork, fried foods, fats, sugar or raw vegetables while on the regimen. I did pretty well for most of the course of treatment, except for the Moet, which in my mind isn't really alcohol but is more of a tonic. I've noticed over the month an odd sort of sedation. In someone like me that's beyond obvious and more than welcome. It's hard to explain to people that you're taking something you don't understand the contents or the effects of. I guess it's also hard admitting that I don't understand the power of my mind over the health of my body.

This is always a dreaded time of year for me. The minute "Santa Baby" starts playing in Food World at the start of October, I'm pretty much ready to smash a pecan pie into the face of cheer. I used to find it sad that some people wanted to spend Christmas at the bottom of an Old Fashioned, thinking that being jaded during the holidays was a cliche. Well, it is. But so are fireplaces and holiday home makeover shows. What can I do? This season is an emotional minefield. I've come to accept that it's better if I have an escape plan. This year it's the desert. I can do trees and carols and family and the whole biz if I can just go see some southwestern sky and breathe some red dust. I believe in the cleansing powers of the desert. Get me to a place where I won't hear "White Christmas" for at least two days, and I'm good to go.

Death Valley, here I come.
Should be all clear out there.

I Will Not Think

I've been told that if my pulse does not improve I'll be put on herbs. This is Chinese medicine for "get your shit together."

I've been meditating with a back full of quills on the long bed in the small sleeping closet at the acupuncture office for several weeks now. I'm trying to figure out a way to process my emotions so they don't make me sick. To learn, as I've been instructed, to imagine that emotions are like a picture frame and mentally drape a sheet over them when I don't want to feel them. To see emotions like food. To take them in, digest them and then pass them--never storing them as pain. There are apparently all these ways to picture emotions and do something about them. I've been picturing ways to picture picturing them. Or something like that.

As my doctor turned out the lights and left the room last night he asked, "Do you have any questions?"
"Yes," I replied, pleadingly. "What can I do? Can I cut anything else out, stop eating eggplant, use more fresh ginger in my diet, perhaps add a little light jiu-jitsu or something?"
"There's nothing else you can do. Except...worry less. Ponder less."

Now, to be fair, he said this with a small hint of the desired irony that one with a back full of hot needles would demand in a moment like that. And then he left me in the dark. And I thought. I thought about thinking less. I thought about pondering less. I thought about worrying less. I worried about worrying less. And then I made a small vow. For one week (let's not kid ourselves here), I'm going to imagine a sheet. And when the grinding machine begins to chink, chink, chink away, churning itself into nothingness, I'm going to put up that sheet and let those thoughts hit it.

I'm not going to worry.
I'm not going to worry.
I'm not going to worry.

Okay, let's revise.

I'm going to worry...less.
I'm going to worry...less.
I'm going to worry...less.

And after this one week, I'm going to see what worrying less has done.
Because hey, I sure know what worrying does.
(Insert blank space here).

Ill Wind

Well, it's official. I won't be representing my country in the Ironman triathlon in June. For that matter, nor will I be able to continue my work as a fit model, UN Goodwill Ambassador and Dan Brown's ghostwriter. It's all become too much. I'm overextended, outwitted, undernourished and ornery as hell.

I've developed these cravings, see, for pickled foods. I'm waking up nights wanting gourmet doughnuts and grilled cheese. None of the usual fare satisfies. Don't want beer. Can't be bothered with caiphrinhas. Don't wanna feel altered. Just wanna feel hidden.

It all started when I heard about Muir drinkin' that pine needle tea to get more "sequoiacal". Purple juice, restoring color. I thought, 'I'm only drinkin' this here Kool-Aid. Somethin's wrong.'

I don't see sky. My roof is these fluorescent bars. I've gotta see something mightier than silver, more ancient than chrome.

I miss mountains.

The electric city is electrocuting me. Blue wire, red wire, motherboard. I'm plugged in at the fingernail. Muir said "overcivilized". That's too kind. Overdone, overzealous, overboard, overwhelmed. Over it.

I went to see my acupuncturist last week. I sensed the wind element, the presence of which had sent me to bed for days with migraines and a piercing pain that crawled along my spine like a spider wearing stilettos. He said my lungs were exhausted. In traditional Chinese medicine they govern growth and maturity. In his strangely stoic and well, "sequoiacal" style, he explained its root cause as "too much sitting on one problem for too long."

Did I say I miss mountains?