You’re familiar with the idea, I’m sure, that you can’t really love anyone until you love yourself. God as my witness, I am married eighteen years today and I am extremely capable of loving others while still hating myself. I had a lot of time to think today, five hours to be exact, while retrieving the car from New Jersey. I mostly thought about my idea for a screenplay, never getting past the first eight scenes. I also thought about how much I hate certain people. I wasn’t actually thinking about how much I hate them, but rather replayed scenes and conversations when I felt wronged or betrayed.
Then Freebird came on the radio, and it seemed brilliant as the sun broke through a pyramid of clouds over Bridgeport. Am I really eighteen years married? During a period of severe depression, my mother told my husband that I was a lot of work, but that I was worth it. Am I a lot of work? I’ve always hated the idea that marriage or any relationship is work. Work is trying to understand a royalty statement, or pitching a book for the 29th time, or reading the 6th draft of a book, or renegotiating the Pitney Bowes lease. Am I wrong? Suddenly, I’m starving. Though I know you don’t read my blog, happy anniversary my love.
What does any of this have to do with writing?
Filed under: Uncategorized | 28 Comments »
Dearest Readers of This Blog:
On February 1, 2010, I posted what I believe is the first ever 
When I was in high school, I met a woman in my poetry class. We were from opposite ends of the earth, meaning she was an athlete and I was a deadhead. We discovered our shared love of poetry and entered into a clandestine friendship, exchanging our diaries and poems for each other to read. After graduate school, I would meet a prose writer with whom I formed an instant bond. We could say anything about each other’s work. Gloves off. Bring it on. Twenty-five years later, she is still the little bird on my shoulder, still my first reader. I remember reading in Joan Didion’s memoir, 
Am working on the copy edit of the revision to Forest for the Trees. I thought I was making it better, but today it seems worse. You know how that is. In fact, I can’t believe I ever got it written in the first place. I seriously don’t know where I got the balls. The cojones. The brass ones. The nuts, nads, teabags. The taint, the testes, the kajmaster. The ballpark.
A revelation to me is a series of books that all have my favorite word in the title: dead.
Dear Readers: I apologize in advance. And if you can’t take it, then skip today’s post. But here’s one where I can’t find anything negative to say. I just can’t. Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida is mecca to book lovers. And following that line of thought, its proprietor, Mitch Kaplan, is a god. Do not go to south Florida and fail to stop in (and spend serious time) at this store. Your aching body will straighten itself, your exhausted brain will oxygenate, your bunions will dissolve. Why? Because this is one of the country’s great independent bookstores and from the moment you set foot inside, you become part of a working intelligence that cares about everything you care about.
