The Hive
The official blog of science fiction / horror author Terence West.
William Gibson Blog
Famed author of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.
The Word Foundry
Joe Clifford Faust's "blog of a working writer: tracking writing projects, musings on the
creative process, occasional side trips into music, media, politics, religion, etc."
A Writer's Diary
By Cynthia Harrison, who has the good sense to quote Virginia Woolf: "The truth is that writing
is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial."
The American Sentimentalist
"Never has any people endured its own tragedy with so little sense of the tragic." Essays by Mark W. Anderson.
Screenwriting By Blog
David C. Daniel writes a screenplay online. "I've decided to publish the process as a way to push myself through it.
From concept to completion, it'll be here."
SeanAlonzo.com
Official site of occult fiction author Sean-Alonzo, exploring symbolism, alternative
history, philosophy, secret
societies and other areas of the esoteric tradition.
Crafty Screenwriting
Maunderings of Alex Epstein, tv scribe, about life, politics, and the tv show I'm co-creating.
Saturday, June 28, 2003 Happy birthday, Luigi Pirandello! Winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature, best known for his play Six Characters in Search of an Author.
Erratic blog Publishing this blog is still an erratic affair. Sometimes the editor works fine, sometimes not. For example, the memoir excerpt today published fine but the next two posts did not. When the editor doesn't work, however, I've found another way to publish -- so maybe I'd better leave well enough alone. I used this "backup" method to publish these last two posts and bring the blog up to date.
7:40 AM
Tired of telemarketers? Here is a do-not-call registry for various states. Access now. I've been on the Oregon list since it began -- and it works.
7:02 AM
Dick's death [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03] Each of my parents died instantly. There may be no better way to go.
Dick Crooks died within weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. Shortly before the diagnosis, he’d visited us in Portland, and he was in worse shape psychologically than I’d seen him before. Sobriety did not seem to be agreeing with him.
On the drive home to Idaho, one of his legs swelled. A doctor in Lewiston didn’t know what to make of it, so Dick went to the V.A. Hospital in Spokane. This is where he was diagnosed with cancer, which was in his pancreas and already was terminal. There was little to do but make him as comfortable as possible for the end.
I was very close to Dick’s mother, Esther. She was a short woman, under five feet, with red hair that turned silver as she aged. Feisty and funny, she’d grown up in logging camps and bars and took no shit from anyone. She was very active in Democratic politics in Clearwater County and for a time served as Orofino’s mayor.
The first time I met Esther, during a trip when Dee and I drove up to visit Dick in Moscow, where he was attending the University of Idaho after getting out of the Army, we’d gone to Esther’s house in Orofino for dinner. I found the address and knocked on the door. When it opened, I looked down to find this short woman grinning up at me. “So you’re fucking Deemer,” she said. This was Esther.
Esther took Dick’s death harder than anyone. She had been only a teenager when she’d had him. Dick was her only child. She talked about how it wasn’t right for a parent to outlive her children.
Dick was moved from the hospital to a hospice in Moscow. I visited him with his two sons, Brad and Kass, and it was clear he didn’t have long to live. He was rapidly losing coherence but while he was still able to communicate I told him I loved him and then kissed him on the cheek. Dick smiled and said, “Lovely.” This was the last thing he said to me.
I returned home and a few weeks later he died. I went back to spread his ashes with Esther, his two sons, and a cousin of Dick’s who was especially close to the family. We spread them at the top of the steep grade descending to White Bird, Idaho, above the Salmon River, where the Crooks family roots were.
Because Dick was a veteran, Esther had a simple memorial plaque made, which we set in cement in the White Bird cemetery just out of town. I like being able to visit it, not only to stop at the top of White Bird grade where we scattered the ashes in the summit wind that never seems to stop, but to drive down to the small town graveyard and stand at his plaque, reading his name, engaging his memory. Like most institutions that exist in this life, we have cemeteries because we need them.
Dick’s spirit lives on in his sons and in me. Brad has continued the mortgage business that his father started. Kass wrestles with the same demons that haunted Dick. I would not be who I am had Dick and I not become soul brothers. Each of us carries a little bit of Dick Crooks around with us every day.
Sometimes I wonder if my spirit will live on in anyone after I’m gone, but I can’t think of anyone so I think of something more pleasant.
6:56 AM
Friday, June 27, 2003 Islam Under Siege Ahmad Faruqui reviews a new book by Akbar S Ahmed.
"The world's 1.3 billion Muslims are being squeezed between two equally strong forces. On the one hand are the forces of the West that want to modernize them, if need be through regime change. On the other hand are the forces of Osama bin Laden who want to de-Westernize them, if need be by wrapping their women in dark flowing robes. The pain is being shared equally by the two-thirds of the Muslim population that lives in Muslim countries, and who are often governed by tyrants that suppress all independent scholarship and dissent and the one-third that lives in non-Muslim countries, where even some of the longest standing democracies are rapidly regressing toward tyrannical control over their Muslim minorities." Access now.
Guinness Book of Records Steve Einhorn and his wife, Kate, folksingers and owners of the local Artichoke Music, hope to set a record this Sunday by assembling two or three thousand guitar players at downtown Pioneer Square to sing "This Land Is Your Land." This is a benefit for Sisters of the Road Cafe. Einhorn, who saw my Woody Guthrie show some twenty years ago, has invited me to open the affair my reciting these lines of Guthrie:
"I hate a song that makes you think that you're not any good. I hate a song that makes you think you're just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody, no good for nothing. Because you're too old or too young, or too fat or too thin, or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or your hard travelin'.
"I'm out to fight these kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I'm out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world, and if it's hit your pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter how hard it's run you down and rolled over you, no matter what color you are, what size, how you are built; I'm out to sing the songs that will make you take pride in yourself. And take pride in your work."
Memoirs I'm about a week away from completing my daily serialization of my memoirs. One way or another -- either commercially or less commercially as a print-on-demand paperback -- It's All Material: The Education of a Marginal Writer will get published.
If you are interested in being kept up-to-date about its publication, drop me an email with MEMOIR INFO in the subject line.
3:52 PM
Done deal Managed to wrap up two projects today: got the review written and off to the magazine; and I finished Ger's manuscript, uploading the print-ready file to the publisher. Good to get those two off the back. Onward.
3:37 PM
Projects Here's what I'm working on:
Today I hope to finish a review of 3 books on screenwriting craft for Creative Screenwriting magazine.
Am back to work on my novel, Love in the Ruins, and hope to finish a draft (from the screenplay) by the end of July.
Back at work on my libretto to Dark Mission and also hope to finish it by the end of July.
Should have Ger's book I am editing off to the publisher this afternoon. Am including some sheet music and waiting for composer's notes, due at noon today.
Still waiting to hear about Emmett's Gift, 4 months now at its last-chance publisher.
3 agents have the memoirs; don't expect to hear anything until later in the summer.
Dorothy Parker About ready to begin rehearsal of a tribute to Dorothy Parker I am directing, called You Might As Well Live (access script). This is the best cast I've ever assembled for one of my annual dramatic presentations at the Unitarian Church, and I'm excited about this show. Onward.
6:46 AM
Update Woke up this morning -- and the blog is working perfectly again! All morning so far. Knock on my wooden head.
6:26 AM
James Agee Profile by Georgia Steinhardt. Access now.
Return of the Weepie "Sixteen years ago, though, and squarely within what most would have reckoned as the Age of Irony, Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast took on the apparently narrow and outdated worldview of the weepie and provided an exhilarating sense of what it could teach us. A decade and a half before movies such as Far From Heaven seemed to offer their take-it-or-leave-it option-either solemnly accept these conflicts on their own terms, or patronize the entire project-Babette's Feast opened up a more generous possibility." Article by Jim Shepard. Access now.
6:11 AM
Dad's death [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03] Dad’s death – like my UFO sighting while observing sunspots as a teenager and like sitting next to Robert Kennedy’s future assassin when learning of President Kennedy’s assassination – was filled with a sense of the mystical. I tell the full story in my essay “The Weight of My Father’s Soul,” which appeared in Oregon Magazine.
After mother’s death, Dad was beside himself. He moved back to New Jersey to be near his relatives. He never got interested in another woman.
Somewhat selfishly, Bill and I convinced him to move back west in order to be closer to his two sons. We found him a nice room in an assisted living building near Eugene, which also was near Bill, whose life was far more stable than mine. I flew to New Jersey to help Dad settle his affairs and to accompany him west.
I’m convinced that Dad decided to die on the east coast. Here is how I pick up the story in my essay:
What I remember most about that trip are the final minutes of my father's life. We were invited to Gubby's for a farewell dinner, and the drive to his country home was spectacular along country roads lined with the bright oranges and reds of a New Jersey fall. I pulled into the parking area near the secluded house and turned off the engine. Reaching for the door, I felt Dad's hand on my knee.
"I'm sure glad I got to see the leaves change before I go," he said.
This remark haunted me for years. At the time, of course, it made perfect sense in its literal meaning: he was happy to see one final New Jersey fall before moving to Oregon. In retrospect, however, I wondered if he were referring to a different kind of "going," if he were speaking of his own death. After all, in only several minutes after the remark, he would be gone from this world.
Gubby and especially his wife Betty were loving caregivers to my father. They phoned him daily and saw him as often as possible. They'd been concerned, I'd learned, because Chick had been losing a little weight lately, and when we walked up to the house, the first thing Gubby said was, "Chick, I think you've gained back some of that weight."
We entered the kitchen, and Gubby immediately came in behind us with a portable scale.
"Step on this," he said, setting the scale on the floor.
I didn't see what the weight read but Gubby said, "Look, you've gained three pounds!"
They had a weight chart for Dad on the wall, and Betty wrote down the new figure.
Then the scale went to zero. Then my Dad stepped off the scale and without a word headed for the bathroom. Then he fell dead
Apparently the battery on the scale had gone dead just before my father died. But the story doesn’t stop here.
It was late when I returned to Gubby's. I'd been invited to spend the night and accepted, rather than returning alone to my father's apartment several hamlets away.
I was sitting in the kitchen, drinking a beer, when I noticed the scale on the floor. I got up and slowly walked to it. Then I stepped up onto it.
The scale registered my weight.
I stepped down and up again. My weight appeared again.
"The battery isn't dead," I said.
Gubby and Betty came forward, and each stepped on the scale. It was working perfectly.
"Why did it register zero?" I wondered aloud.
Somewhere I'd read that, according to some ancient superstition or wisdom, the soul left the body at the moment of death. Had the scale registered the departure of my Dad's soul from his body, only moments before he came crashing down onto the bathroom floor?
It's a ridiculous possibility, of course, and one that still haunts me.
One thing Dad did after Mom’s death is often tell me he loved me. I told him I loved him, too. Don’t wait, he said, because one day it might be too late. Apparently he hadn’t told this to Mom as often as he felt he should. Indeed, from my perspective, their marriage was not a particularly happy one after he became a civilian but particularly after his stroke when, according to mother, he became less social and less active. She once told me that Dad was “a great date and a lousy husband.” Still, she stayed with him long after her two sons had left the house, long after she’d completed her obligations as a mother.
I remember them happy in Pasadena. They went out a lot, and they had a lot of friends. Friends often filled the house for canasta parties. In Medford I only knew them on visits and increasingly (especially after Dad’s stroke in the early 1970s) they bickered or, more commonly, stopped listening to one another. Sometimes visiting them would be almost surrealistic, as each would converse with you without paying any attention to the thread of the other conversation.
Yet Dad had a hard time living without her. After she was gone, perhaps he realized how much he loved her. Dad and I did not talk as intimately as mother and I did, but once he told me that he had never been in love with another woman or ever cheated on Mom. I suspect he must have had sex with prostitutes or someone else during shore leaves in the Navy. I suspect he must have known about oral sex to ask mother to perform it. But in his mind this was not cheating, and he loved her more than he was able to tell her while she was alive.
I like to remember my parents as they appear in the home movies, laughing together during a block party in Dallas, or embraced in front of a Christmas tree in Pasadena. They were married when it was fashionable to endure marital problems for the sake of the children, and I have no doubts that my childhood was happier than it would have been in our modern age when parents think of themselves first and their children second. There is something to be said for parental sacrifice. Of course, this is not a theory I practiced. Far from it. But I admire and thank my parents for providing a stable home full of family activities and joy.
Dad, like Mom, was cremated. I put a part of his ashes in the creek in the park in Milford. Part I gave to Bill, who scattered them in the Willamette River near Eugene, and I scattered the rest in the Shakespeare Garden in Washington Park, which overlooks the Portland skyline. I wanted to scatter part with Mom’s ashes but by this time her fishing hole was nowhere to be found.
I miss not having a parental gravesite to visit. Even visiting the Shakespeare Garden is not quite the same thing as standing at a gravestone and reading a name carved in stone. Cemeteries exist for the survivors.
Dick’s mother knew this. When she learned that Dick wanted to be cremated, she made sure he got the best of both worlds.
6:05 AM
Thursday, June 26, 2003 Aren't we clever? I think I discovered a very, very convoluted way to publish my blog -- too much work but it will do until the "company" gets its act together. We'll see. Onward.
10:38 PM
The nightmare continues Well, 2 folks who tried to help me so far haven't been able to. Is the 3rd time the charm?
7:00 PM
Happy birthday, Charles Messier! Anybody know who Charles Messier is? He catalogued star clusters, nebulae, and other objects in space, and amateur astronomers learn to identify these objects by their "M" or Messier numbers.
7:59 AM
Automatic Bad Movie Trailer Generator This looks like a real hoot! Access now.
6:27 AM
Toward a personal philosophy [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03] Sobriety has brought me many gifts but perhaps the greatest has been a reintroduction to myself, to the self that got sidetracked in the Army when I learned that I had an abnormal capacity for alcohol and used this to pursue the social life I thought I’d been missing. Sober, I’ve learned that I’m reclusive by nature and that there is nothing wrong with this.
As I approach retirement, I find myself spending more and more time reflecting on my life and on the meaning of life in general. This memoir is a product of some of this energy. Today I’m able to articulate my belief system with greater clarity than ever before, even though I considered myself something of a barstool philosopher when I was drinking. But in those days, I was pontificating. Now my beliefs inform my actions, not my tongue.
Every experience I’ve related in these pages has influenced my philosophy of life. But I’ve purposely delayed sharing several important influences until now. Among these are the deaths of four people I loved.
Most people who knew my parents believed that my mother would outlive my father. Dad, after all, had had a stroke in his early sixties. Women, in general, outlived men. There was no reason to believe that Mom would die first.
There certainly was no reason to believe her days were numbered when she was scheduled for a routine rectal operation. I talked to her on the phone from Maryland the day before she checked into the hospital and teased her about her condition. I knew she would consider this particular kind of operation very “unladylike.”
We were always teasing Mom. She was the perfect person on whom to play a practical joke because she was so gullible. Dad set up the most involved traps for her, and his greatest practical joke of all was the night of the Willapoo.
Carol and I were visiting them in Medford. One hot summer night we were sitting around the kitchen table playing pinochle. Carol and I, of course, also were drinking cold beer. There was a large round thermometer on the patio, visible through the window, and the temperature was still in the 90s after nine at night. Mom, who hated heat, couldn’t stop complaining about the weather.
During a break, Dad took me aside and told me to keep Mom occupied when she came out of the bathroom until he gave me a signal to return to the kitchen table. I knew something was up and agreed.
We were back to playing cards when Dad suddenly shouted, out, “Oh my God, Flo, look! It’s a Willapoo!”
He was pointing at the thermometer outside – which now was registering only 60-odd degrees! Mom rushed outside, and we all followed her. Immediately her face lit up, and she started dancing across the patio, saying, “Feel how cool it is! This is so nice!”
Carol almost fell into the trap as well, mentioning that it did feel cooler. Dad explained that a Willapoo was a rare atmospheric event that happened only once every 250 years when the such-and-such and the so-and-so collided to cause a low pressure trough that pulled cold arctic air into southern Oregon.
Finally we went back to playing cards. Mom was no longer miserable from the heat. At the next break, I took Dad aside and asked him what was up. While I was keeping mother occupied during the previous break, and while Carol was in the bathroom, he had taken out some ice and held it on the thermometer until the temperature dropped. He had caused a Willapoo.
The temperature finally climbed to the high 70s again, and before the night was over Dad gave in and told Mom the truth, as he always did. She said, “Oh, Chick,” as she always did, and the matter was forgotten until the next time Dad had an audience to whom to tell the story.
I was very close to my mother. She told me things she told few other people. Once she told me how shocked she was that Dad had asked her to perform fellatio. “What kind of a woman does he think I am?” she wondered aloud. This speaks not only to the prejudices of her generation but to the intimacy of our relationship. I never missed sending her flowers on Mother’s Day or her birthday – except on one occasion, which she never forgot. I was raised by her, of course, while father was at sea, and for six years there were just the two of us. This formed a special bond that lasted all our lives.
In my office at home is a photograph of us, taken when I was about three, and both of us have bright eyes and broad smiles, mother with dark hair, pretty, myself silvery blond, cute, the pair of us looking like the two happiest people in the world, the bond of mother and son. When she was gone, I missed her terribly.
Mom dropped dead in the hospital lobby as she and Dad were checking out the day after her operation. The operation had gone well. Then my mother’s heart short-circuited, and she died instantly before she was able to walk out the hospital door.
I was stunned when I heard the news. I flew from Maryland to Oregon immediately. I drank through most of the long flight, thanks to an understanding stewardess who sympathized with me and let me buy more than my limit of liquor. I was pretty drunk by the time I stepped off the airplane. Mom was cremated and her ashes spread in the Applegate River at her favorite fishing hole. A few years later a dam project flooded the area, and the fishing hole disappeared.
5:56 AM
Day 3 Still no visible progress in getting my blog fixed. The only way I can update it is to ftp to blogspot.com, open the source for the index.html file, change the file, save it, and ftp it back to replace the original one -- in this way, I do manage to continue the serializing of my memoir. But what a drag. Meanwhile, the Pro publishing tool appears to work fine on my end, all my normal posts appear to be saved, but nothing is getting published. 36 hours without any word from "blogger control," which is the help institution here. Patience, patience! Wish they had a goddamn phone number for assistance.
5:52 AM
Wednesday, June 25, 2003 Frustration! End of day 2 of my blog publishing problem. Very frustrating -- mostly since I haven't heard from anyone for over a day, when a fellow wasn't able to help me. Customer service here isn't at the speed of light. Patience! I tell myself. Not always easy. This is a great site when everything is working but when it isn't, well, a good deal of patience is required.
6:29 PM
Keeping the faith My editing tool here at Blogger (Blogger Pro) is working fine, and from my end everything appears to be getting published. In the split screen environment, the bottom record of the blog looks perfect. Only nothing is getting published at the website. So I'll continue here in the editor as if nothing is wrong, keeping the faith that once the bug is fixed, everything will go online and we'll be back to normal. We'll see!
Meanwhile, I am using ftp to add new installments of my memoir as a temporary fix for my readers until this situation is fixed.
8:23 AM
Mom, apple pie and ... Potato salad! Especially for the 4th of July and other summer picnics. I belong to the traditional, keep out the fancy stuff, school of potato salad. Here is an all-American recipe I approve of. All-American Potato Salad.
8:19 AM
Sobriety [from a memoir in progress, which started on 4/13/03] I loved sobriety. I loved waking up without a hangover. I loved how much better I felt physically and mentally. For a long time, I still missed a few things about drinking, especially its ability to distract myself from immediate stress, but one thing I didn’t miss was hanging out with my drinking buddies. Even what I missed about drinking was its private moments, not its social ones.
Dick Crooks’ adventure in sobriety was very different from mine. Dick behaved as if he hated sobriety. He said he loved it – but he was always grouchy and on edge about something. Drinking, he could be positive to a fault, but sober he became someone who would find something wrong with everything. He had loved jazz and blues all his life but went as cold turkey on music as he did on booze. He couldn’t listen to Billie Holiday or anyone else without it bringing along memories of drinking, and so he stopped listening to the music he loved.
Typical of this change was something he said during our last visit before he was diagnosed with cancer, passing away very quickly after that. We were driving somewhere or another and were stopped at a traffic light. A middle-aged man was crossing the street. There was nothing particularly noticeable about him that I could see. But Dick suddenly observed, “Look at that asshole. Who the fuck does he think he is? Jesus Christ. This fucking world, man.”
When I asked him what he meant, he either didn’t hear me or chose not to expound on the subject. I let it rest. But this was typical of his change in attitude, from a man who frequently laughed, who could crack a joke under the most stressful circumstances, to someone who verbally attacked strangers passing in front of his car.
Since Dick lived such a short time sober, I’ve often wondered if sobriety was even a gift to him at all. Then I remember what he told me about his last days of drinking, alone in his apartment, buying cheap wine because it’s all he could afford – this wasn’t much of a life either. I just wish he could have experienced more of the joy of sobriety.
As I write this, I am one month and two days away from ten years of sobriety. I don’t make a big deal of milestones like this because I know how fragile sobriety is. I hope I never forget. In treatment, I met a woman who had relapsed after almost eleven years of sobriety. She had remarried and built a new life. No one knew about her life as a drunk, except from her stories. They had never witnessed it.
One night, to celebrate something special, she had a single glass of wine with her husband at dinner. She turned down a second glass and didn’t miss it. This worked so well that she began to have a glass of wine with dinner more often. After a week without problems, she allowed herself to have a second glass of wine with dinner. This was all it took. Within a month, she was drinking a fifth of vodka a day again.
I hope I never forget the conversations I had with this woman. I hope I never forget the awe in her voice as she told her story, as if she had become possessed by some demon greater than herself. This is the sense in which the alcoholic becomes powerless over alcohol.
At the same time, I must go back to what I learned from my reading in the medical library. There are abusers of alcohol who have learned to drink responsibly. There is always the danger, therefore, of anyone aware of these studies deciding that s/he, too, is the exception.
Since I was a binge drinker, since I most enjoyed drinking when I was drinking to excess, I do not believe that I am one of those people who will ever enjoy a glass of wine with dinner. I assume alcohol is out of my life forever, and I remind myself of this as often as necessary.
6:48 AM
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 What a mess Blogger moved to a new server, I guess -- and it's a NIGHTMARE!!
11:15 AM
The Pledge Rewatched this 2001 movie last night, based on a novel by Durrenmatt, directed by Sean Penn, with Jack Nicholson in one of his fine performances. Like it as much as the first time, a lot, maybe more. A taut psychological drama wrapped in a crime story. "Within this peculiar hybrid of European existentialism (Fredrich Durrenmatt) and American Gothic, Sean Penn has produced something that looks like a masterpiece," writes Lawrence Russell in his review (access full review). I would agree.
Doomsday? "Citing the hazard of genetically engineered viruses, eminent astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has said, 'I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years.' Martin Rees, the knighted British astronomer, agrees; he gives us a 50-50 chance. Serious thinkers such as Pulitzer Prize winner Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, and Bill Joy, who wrote Wired's own 2000 article 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,' warn of techno-calamity. Stephen Petranek, editor in chief of the science monthly Discover, crisscrosses the world lecturing on '15 Major Risks to the World and Life as We Know It.'" Greg Easterbrook is more optimistic. Access article now.
5:35 AM
Harriet [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03] I’d met Harriet less than two weeks before I entered treatment. Some months before, when I was trying to get sober on my own, I’d replied to several personal ads in a moment of intoxicated loneliness. I’d forgotten all about them by the time I got a response from Harriet, who had written one of the ads. She already had dated several men who had responded to her and apparently was working her way down the list after they hadn’t panned out.
No bells rang when we met for coffee on the day before her birthday. She headed back east to visit her sister, and I entered treatment. To my surprise, she visited me at CARS once we were allowed to have weekend visits.
We began seeing one another as friends. I was thankful to have someone in my life who wasn’t a barfly, as virtually all my friends were at this stage of my life. Harriet introduced me to some of her friends, and I began to get a sense of a social life away from the bar scene, which also was a new experience for me. Harriet, although Jewish, was shopping around for a church to get interested in, and I sometimes accompanied her, which was a very new experience for me. The last time I’d been inside a church other than for a wedding was when I’d pulled chapel duty in the Army.
Then, one night when she invited me over for dinner, the first spark of romance flashed, and our relationship took a new direction. By the time I was ready to graduate from the Dom, we’d decided to live together, and I moved in with her. Four years later we got married.
Harriet provided a solid foundation for my early years of sobriety. She made the transition far easier than it would have been otherwise by giving me a new social world to discover, a companion into activities that I’d ignored for many years or done only within the context of drinking. Without her circle of friends, and her social base, I’m sure I would have ventured back into the only social world I knew, the bar scene, especially at Seafood’s and Nobby’s. If today I can comfortably go to Nobby’s for breakfast and visit with Greg, Millie and others from the “good old, bad old days,” it’s because I’m secure in my sobriety – and Harriet played an important role in helping me attain this security. I’m not sure I could have done it without her.
In the beginning of sobriety, everything was new to me. I, sober, was new to me. I rediscovered the teenage recluse I once was and realized that when not drinking, I was not a very social person at all. I enjoyed my solitude more than I enjoyed company. As I had written in a sonnet, the inside of my head is my country. Sober, I discovered that I liked myself a lot.
As I was discovering this, I also faced a very different challenge. With Harriet, I began something very new to me – a sober relationship.
5:28 AM
Monday, June 23, 2003 Cyborger "The Cyborger will tell you what your name would mean if you happened to be a shallow imitation of humanity with a dark purpose." Try it out. When I did: C.H.A.R.L.E.S.: Cybernetic Hydraulic Android Responsible for Logical Exploration and Sabotage.
4:30 PM
Whiteness studies "Advocates of whiteness studies -- most of whom are white liberals who hope to dismantle notions of race -- believe that white Americans are so accustomed to being part of a privileged majority they do not see themselves as part of a race." Article by Darryl Fears. Access now.
Harry Potter and the Meaning of Life "Since it began, Potter-mania has represented a cultural infantilism, that only grows as the years go by. It is about what we expect from our kids, our books, our value system and ourselves. Whatever happens in The Order of the Phoenix, the story of our obsession with Harry Potter is unlikely to have a happy ending." Article by Jennie Bristow. Access now.
The Dom [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03] Mel was right. I never would have stayed sober going directly from CARS to my apartment. I almost didn’t make it through the three weeks I had to wait before checking into the Dom.
One afternoon, in fact, I bought a six-pack of beer and took it home. I kept staring at it. I took out one can and set it on the table. I kept staring at it. I still had over a week to wait before checking into the Dom. While I was still thinking about whether or not to open the beer, a sober friend knocked on my door to see if I wanted to go for a walk. When I got back, I took the beer, put it back in its sack and carried it outside. I left it in a doorway, a gift to a passing drunk who needed it more than I did.
Life in the Dom was good. I retained my job in the medical library, continuing to educate myself about alcoholism. There were only a few classes during the day, giving me a lot of time to write. I started working on the screenplay that became Recovery. I also made some new friends and shot a lot of baskets on the Dom’s outdoor court. We got passes to go downtown, and I took a lot of walks.
While I was in the Dom, Dick Crooks entered CARS. I couldn’t believe my eyes the day I saw him in the mess hall. I thought he was there to visit me but he was a new patient. I’d written him from CARS, letting him know I was getting sober, and he had written me, telling me he’d decided to get sober, and our letters had crossed in the mail. However, his letter to me had been mailed to my apartment, and I didn’t receive it until some time later.
It was great to have Crooks around. I didn’t get to spend much time with him except at the mess hall until after he graduated from CARS. He decided to remain in the area for out-patient treatment, renting an apartment near the V.A. facility, but in a few months financial needs sent him home to Idaho, where he eventually started a mortgage business in Lewiston, near his home town.
In the meantime, I found someone else to spend time with. I started dating Harriet, who was the head of the Women’s Studies program at Clark College, which was located right across the street from the V.A. facility.
7:45 AM
Sunday, June 22, 2003 Health [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03] We were walking along, enjoying the day, when I suddenly felt dizzy. I had to sit down to clear my head. Zeena, who worked in a hospital, suspected something or other (a potassium deficiency comes to mind) but made me swear to see a doctor as soon as we got back.
I went to doctors only when I was in pain or worried about something – and suddenly I was worried. Back in Portland, I went to the V.A. for a checkup and learned, to the horror of the doctor, that my blood pressure was something like 240/170. I was put on blood pressure medication immediately.
My doctor gave me a stern lecture about the relationship between my drinking and my blood pressure and my survival – and since I’d admitted to only a fraction of my daily alcohol consumption, she scared me to death. If I was being this reckless with my life based on the lie, imagine how much more I was flirting with death based on the truth. What I was doing was drinking myself to death. This obvious fact was a revelation to me.
I didn’t want to die. My best writing was still ahead of me. I decided to do something about it. I decided to quit drinking.
I decided to quit drinking on my own. Most drunks make this decision first. It took only a few months for me to realize this wasn’t going to work at all. I needed help.
The Veterans Administration (V.A.) had a program that, if I were accepted into it, wouldn’t cost me a cent. It was an intense 28-day in-patient treatment program, followed by months of out-patient care. The program was called CARS, which stood for Chemical Addiction Rehabilitation Services.
Even though the program wouldn’t cost me a cent, I was living so close to the edge financially that I didn’t feel I could take a month off from my freelance writing income. How would I pay my rent if I took a month off? The gods heard the question. Quite unexpectedly, Chateau de Mort got scheduled for a revival in the Pittock Mansion in the summer of 1993. My contract provided decent royalties for each season they performed the play. Now I could admit myself into CARS and come out with a fat check waiting for me. I bit the bullet and applied.
I entered CARS on June 14, 1993, a Monday. The previous Saturday night I went out and got plastered, having one each of every favorite drink I could think of. I wrote about this experience in my essay “Liquor and Lit: A Portrait of the Writer as a Drunk,” which was published in Oregon Magazine:
For a nightcap, I ordered a special drink for old times, a farewell toast to a way of life, a moment I expected to remember forever – and have. I ordered a B-52. Its layers reminded me of the different periods of my life – the high school science nerd, the confused mathematician, the Berkeley street person, the linguist-spy-mascot, the ambitious grad student, the less ambitious playwright – each period clearly set apart from the others. When I raised the small, narrow glass and tipped it, the fragile spectrum dissolved as each color ran into its neighbor to become a drab concoction of spirits, suddenly dark and dreary, just as the periods of my life finally had succumbed to one all-encompassing description, which had become more meaningful than any colorful distinctions between them: I was living the life of a drunk. I belted down the B-52, paid my considerable tab, and left.
One B-52 pilot on one final mission. Over and out. (But somehow I lived to tell the tale.)
Upon admittance at CARS, I was assigned a room and a roommate, a counselor, and a part-time job. My counselor was Mel, a no-nonsense former addict with a reputation for taking on the tough cases. To my surprise, I was considered a tough case because I was “a college boy.” Mel told me that the failure rate among those with college degrees was higher than in any other demographic. We thought we knew too much, we’d second-guess everything we were told, we had perfected rationalization to an art form, we were arrogant – all of which would make sobriety difficult for us. I was determined to prove him wrong.
Mel’s no-nonsense approach became the model for the character of the counselor in my screenplay, Recovery, a thriller about an abused woman who tries to hide in a treatment center. Here he is addressing a group who have just entered treatment:
How many here want a drink right now? Or a fix? Drag a weed, snort a coke, shot a Wild Turkey? (No one responds.) You lying sacks a shit. You scumbag assholes. You'd kill your mother for a drink. You'd sell your little sister to a known carrier of AIDS to buy some crack, you'd take money off your grandma's night stand to buy your weed.
The style at CARS was in-your-face and confrontational. Though I rebelled against it just like everyone else, in the end it was just what I needed.
Each morning, we read a proclamation that summarized the CARS philosophy: “Our concept of a meaningful life is not merely to stop drinking or using drugs. It is to replace that part of yourself that caused self-destructive behavior in the first place. … If you're not ready to examine yourself with ruthless self-scrutiny, then you may want to reconsider your reasons for entering this treatment program. You may want to leave before we kick you out.”
My part-time job was in the medical library. As a result, I read everything about alcoholism that I could get my hands on. What I learned didn’t always jive with what I was being told in treatment. For example, in Europe, according to medical journals, a large number of studies had shown that the success rate for getting sober in treatment was no better than for getting sober on your own.
Mel, to his credit, did not chastise me for reading medical journals at work. On the contrary, he started slipping me books that were not part of the official reading list in treatment. Three books in particular became important to me: Under the Influence, Rational Recovery, and Man’s Search for Meaning.
Under the Influence is a scientific disease-model discussion of alcoholism, which coincided with the V.A. treatment approach. Yet the V.A. didn’t approve of the book because of its criticism of Alcoholics Anonymous, which also was a cornerstone of treatment. The book did not approve of A.A.’s contention that all alcoholics have a character flaw. In the disease model, this would be like giving a diabetic a character flaw.
As a result, Under the Influence was not even in the medical library! It was as if it had been banned for its small criticism of the holy A.A. Indeed, when Mel lent me the book, he did so surreptitiously, as if he were slipping me forbidden material.
Rational Recovery challenged everything about A.A., including the contention in the first of its twelve steps that the alcoholic is powerless. R.R.’s approach was to empower people to take control over their own lives. This appealed to the existentialist in me. I decided that I did, in fact, have complete control over whether or not I started drinking. After that, after the booze kicked in, I became powerless to stop drinking – but I was in control up to this moment. I always had the free choice whether or not to begin drinking. Rational Recovery supported this contention but A.A. did not.
Man’s Search for Meaning is a philosophical look at surviving the holocaust, written by a philosopher who did. What the Nazis could never change, the philosopher learned, was an individual’s attitude – and this was the foundation for survival and finding meaning in life, even under the most depraved circumstances. This was a lesson I’d learn to put to use in less inhumane environments than the one in which it had been forged.
Because of the books Mel loaned me and my other reading in the medical library, my approach to sobriety became a program based on knowledge. Know the enemy – and conquer it. This, too, rubbed against the approach of A.A., which had an anti-intellectual streak in it, if not in theory at least in practice. “Keep in simple, stupid,” was the retort to anyone who might raise a question or challenge a presumption. I went to A.A. meetings through treatment because I was required to do so, but I became less interested in them. During my out-patient phase, I attended meetings of Rational Recovery and felt much more at home.
An important part of treatment were group therapy sessions. As a result of one such session, Mel again showed creativity in dealing with his “tough case” patient, yours truly.
During one session, in the middle of talking about my daughter, I broke down. I couldn’t stop crying. I was crying so hard that it was disrupting the session. The next day, when Mel asked me to go on about my daughter, the same thing happened. Mel didn’t want the daily group therapy session to turn into everyone watching me bawl, so he came up with a plan.
He gave me an assignment: every night, from seven to seven-thirty, I was to sit alone in my room and think about my daughter and cry. It was very important that I cry. I was to do this every evening until I had not cried for three days in a row, and then I was to report back to him.
As a result, I cried myself out about my daughter in about a week. What I was crying about, of course, was my failure to become a part of her life. I had no one to blame for this except myself. How hard would it have been to write her or call her every few weeks, to visit her once a year? I’d done none of these things. I had pretended she didn’t exist. In treatment my guilt about this erupted like a volcano.
Once I was able to talk about my daughter in group therapy without breaking down, I told the full story. I also decided to write her a letter and explore the possibility of a future relationship with her. I drafted the letter while I was in treatment, reading each draft to the group, but when it was time to mail it, the address I had was no longer current. Considerable time would pass before I tracked her down – and you know the story of what happened next.
My original plan had been to enter CARS for 28 days, then move back into my apartment with my royalties check and go on with my life. I really hadn’t given much thought to what “go on with my life” meant. Halfway through treatment, Mel forced me to put my plans in writing. When I did, he scoffed at them. Where was I going to spend my leisure time? Who were going to be my friends? I assumed that I’d go to Seafood’s or Nobby’s just as before but sit at the bar drinking coke. I really had made no plans to change my routine, other than to quit drinking. Mel tried to make me understand that my routine was part of the problem, that I needed to find new things to do with new friends, friends who weren’t themselves alcoholics.
This is when he brought up the Domiciliary, which everyone called the Dom. He wanted me to stay for six more months of in-patient treatment, moving into the Dom. Six more months! This was not part of my game plan.
Mel was clever. Seeing my resistance to the idea, he started working on me where I was vulnerable. He began talking about six-months in the Dom as a kind of writing retreat for me, where I could get free room and board while I worked on my next script. Sure, there would be classes to attend and chores to do, but so what? I’d have lots of free time, he said, and I could bring my laptop computer and write. Since when did a writer turn down six months of free room and board?
This was a ploy, of course, but Mel also was on my side. During a meeting in his office one day, he looked me squarely in the eye and shook his head, saying, “What a waste. You have so much to contribute. So much to contribute. What a goddamn waste to spend your time on a barstool.”
I told Mel that if he could get me into the Dom, I’d do it. I’d sign up for six more months of in-patient treatment.
3:08 PM
_The Writing Life
