RIP, little Corolla. 1997-2012.

Written to my husband, May 1, 2006:

You and I are driving home, reminiscing about those days when we first flirted together.

I remember the first time I looked at you with desire was in the Fall of 1998. You were driving me somewhere then too, and you said something funny. I laughed. Not to be courteous: what you’d said was truly funny, and it was a real laugh, a laugh with surprise in it. In mid-laugh I felt a pang of sadness because I was going overseas and I thought that this was your last year of graduate study, so that when I came back to Stanford, you would be gone. I thought that I would never see you again. I was mistaken.

“Do you remember?” I say. “We were in the same car we’re in now, in the same seats. The car was new then.”

Do you remember? I was leaning against the hood of this car when you first kissed me, on the evening of July 8th 1999, just a couple of weeks after I got home from Europe. It was at Ocean Beach and it was so cold and windy. We had just walked together by the water and you’d held my hand. I’d showed you the scar on my knee from the surgery on my broken leg, and you’d laid your palm on the place where my tibia is still bumpy–where it mended into an unwell shape. You were so close and I was waiting for you to kiss me. There was a bus idling at its terminus near us in the parking lot–it waited with the lights on and the doors open for its turn-around time. You were waiting for the bus to leave because you didn’t want the driver to see us. Perhaps, the driver was waiting for us too.

The three of us there, late on a thursday night.

You body touched mine and we were tired of waiting then. It was then that you put your arms around me and gave me the first kiss of many–leaning right against this car–with the bus driver watching.

In this car, you drove me to the emergency room so many times that they cannot be possibly be counted–you so quiet and worried, me curled up in the passenger seat in blinding pain as always. Some nights, not in this car. Some nights, in an ambulance.

In this car, you drove me to the hospital to get cut open.
In this car, you drove alone to San Francisco to marry me on the morning of June 6th, 2004.
In this car, you drove us home the next day from the honeymoon suite of The Seal Rock Inn–the first place we’d made love all legal-like.

This car is old now. The latch on the glove compartment just had to be replaced–its random small parts are starting to fail. One day we will have to get a new car, maybe drive some kids around.

This car: a 1998 Toyota Corolla, white.
In this car, I first looked at you with desire.
In this car eight years later, you drive me home.

We bought a new car today, a Prius in a lovely ocean color. “Sea glass pearl,” the manufacturer calls this color. In some lights it looks blue, in some lights green, in some lights gray. The ride is smooth and very, very quiet. Accelerating in this car makes a whispering wind-up sound reminiscent of stately space vessels in cheesy sci fi movies. It sounds like the future.

That furrow is a permanent resident on my face now, and will do nothing but deepen.  I named that furrow George W. Bush.  I have not yet decided which of my body’s signs of aging I will call Dick Cheney.  I may be saving that one for something chronic, painful, and insidious, like an ulcer.

But, let’s talk about something brighter than my inexorable decay.  Guess what?  13 rue Thérèse was nominated for an award!  The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, to be exact.  Pretty sweet, no?  It’s always lovely to be surprised by a bit recognition from the outside world as I toil in my writerly cave.  It gets pretty hermity in here.  (I just looked up the correct adjectival form of “hermit” and it’s “heremitic,” but I much prefer “hermity.”)

Speaking of the writerly cave, I did a revision of In the Red over the past couple of months.  I am going to give it another once-over, then send it along to my agent.  It’s always weird to have another human being read something that’s been simmering sealed away in my head for years.  It’s a real passage, and it always comes with a big dose of trepidation.  I was once asked by an interviewer about what my greatest fear is when I turn in a manuscript.  I said that turning in a manuscript is like trying to tell someone about an intense dream you had: it may just turn out to be incoherent hash and leave you looking like an idiot.  Scary, no, when you spend a couple of years and 80000 words telling the dream?

So, we fight for a while, Japanese-animé style, hurling balls of lightning at each other and leveling cities and such.  Bad Angel is clearly kicking my ass.  I am lying there in a pool of my own blood trying to gather the last shreds of my energy for a desperate suicidal onslaught when Bad Angel pities me and says, “Don’t bother, it’s useless.  You think that even if somehow you win, human beings will stop hating and killing each other just because they have a Good Angel to watch over them?  Just give up.  They’re all mine.  The world was made for me.”

I look up at the Bad Angel, absorb what she said, realize that she is right, and pass out.

When I wake up, I am covered in brambles and crap.  It’s fifty years later and the whole planet is a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  Nobody remembers the battle I lost; nobody even remembers there was ever a Good Angel.  I am weak and miserable and I don’t know why I bother being alive, alive forever to wander the Earth and watch the human race degrade itself while the Bad Angel laughs, laughs, laughs.

Other suggestions welcome for the lead actress…  Who else does badass pathos?

 Is that cover sexy, or what?  I think I like the purple even better than the red they had on the spec cover.  I have yet to see it in person, and I am totally dying to do so.  Hurry up and send me my copies, Michel Lafon!

In other news, I am officially a crazy orchid lady.  What can I say?  They are awesome, for a whole list of reasons:

(1) They are cheaper than a bouquet of cut flowers, plus I don’t have to kill anything to brighten my home.

(2) They are pretty and colorful and, let’s face it, pretty lewd-looking–especially when the bud is first splitting open.  Any flower that freaked out Victorians is a friend of mine.

(3) They are low-maintenance lifeforms that somehow manage not to succumb to my black thumb.

(4) The cats thankfully do not seem to be interested in eating them, probably because the orchid is one of the few houseplants that will not poison them!  (Huh.  I wonder how much of an overlap there is between crazy cat ladies and crazy orchid ladies…)

Here is a little gallery of the new friends I have acquired since I last posted on this blog:

It’s sitting on my desk all printed out.  It’s quite a manly pile of paper.  See?

The last thing that’s typed on my computer screen in this photo is, “It’s sitting on my desk all printed out.  It’s quite a manly pile of paper.  See?”  Do you feel like you’re with me in the moment, or what?  The photo is all moody and dark because it is currently midnight.  The shadowy pot on the left side of the photo contains my desk orchid.  Unfortunately, the African violet that was once there is no more.  It turns out even elderly cats have a taste for certain types of plant flesh.

A moment of silence for our departed friend, Saintpaulia ionantha.

Since my furry little murderers haven’t touched the living room orchids, I decided to play it safe and get another orchid for my desk.  Wanna see?

Pretty sexy, no?  It’s a yellowed parchment color with closely packed, bright red dots all over it.  It was looming over me as I finished the book.  It will surely continue to loom over me as I finish the book again and again, until one day it is printed and I can stop finishing it.

Now, who wants to see some pretty flowers?

I was at Costco the other day and they had a great big display of orchids.  I thought it would be nice to get one or two for the living room now that the cats are old enough to not automatically murder every plant that comes within chewing radius.  I looked through them but they were all broken or half-dead in some way, as if they had been brought to the store in some ghastly orchid slave ship.  Then I remembered where I had seen some super gorgeous orchids for sale.  Guess.

They were at the local branch of Fry’s.  Yep.  I went to an electronics store to buy flowers.  And it turns out that Fry’s is really good at flowers!  Check it out:

Given that I did not have little dishes to put the plants in, I repurposed a couple of old Frisbees as flower pot plates.  I had three old Frisbees, and two plants.  You know what that means.  It pretty much guaranteed the purchase of a third plant.  For the sake of completeness, you see.  Meet my new little writing desk friend, an African violet from Orchard Supply:

It looks exactly like an African violet that was butchered by a kitten that shall remain nameless in 2003.  Said kitten is older and more sedate now, so hopefully this plant will not meet the unfortunate fate of its former brethren.  Wish it good luck and godspeed.

Meanwhile, some neato news while I hermit:

• 13 rue Thérèse is finally coming out in France in August, from Michel Lafon.  Here is the link to pre-order from Fnac, which is like the French Barnes & Noble.  Squee!  Just thinking of a French edition of my book being in their big-ass store in the Forum des Halles right near where I grew up makes me all tingly!  Here is the cover, all tiny because I suck at technology:

I am wee.

• Also, whilst googling myself to see whether anyone on the internet has posted that I like to bathe in the blood of Christian babies, I found this lovely review of my story “Commuting” in Zyzzyva, on Ruelle Electrique, an online literary salon.  It’s their “unabashed favorite from the issue!”  “A rich story” teeming with “grit and beauty!”  How does randomly finding something like this make a writer feel?  Why, it fills said writer with hearts and butterflies!

is all I’m sayin’

• Canadian serial killer rapes and butchers prostitutes on his pig farm in Canada for YEARS while Vancouver police kind of suck at policing.

• 11-year old girl strangles toddler boys to death in shitty English slums in 1968 and the authorities sit on their asses for an alarmingly long time.

• Japanese dude murders and eats pretty exchange student in Paris with no ill consequences and goes home to become a celebrity in his native land (best-selling author, porn star, lecturer, TV personality etc).

Are you advocating for the destruction of the human species yet?  What’s so fucked up is not only these freaky outliers but the responses they get from the authorities and society at large.  It looks like evil is not so much a discrete feature in the human personality as what emerges when other features are missing.  The most obvious missing feature is empathy.  But, as anyone who is acquainted with a bunch of engineers knows, being socially retarded is not an immediate gateway to murder.  A researcher named Cleckley called what I’m about to talk about “semantic aphasia.”

Once upon a time, because of the vagaries of bodily chemistry, I was crazy in love with an asshole.  Yep, it happens to many of us.  One thing he used to do that destroyed my universe of a regular basis is totally contradict himself without apparent awareness.  He’s state some philosophical belief of his, and a week later say something that was in complete opposition.  At first, I questioned him about these inconsistencies to try to figure out what was happening in his (deficient) brain, but the resulting conversations always made me want to eat a gun.  So I learned to shut up and stomach a whole bunch of bullshit.  I made constant excuses for that weird emptiness inside him.  And thus a cock-addicted co-dependent was born.

What was especially weird about his frequent lies is that it seemed, most of the time, he was not actually aware he was bullshitting.  It seriously flummoxed the shit out of me and made me want to stab myself in the soul.  This is apparently a common feature of psychopaths.  It’s called semantic aphasia and it’s how come they can say without blinking, “oh I ripped a dude’s eyeball out of his face last week and then fucked his brain through his empty eyeball hole until he died but I have never committed a violent crime.”  Psychopaths can say shit like that because they literally don’t know what words mean.  They can give you the dictionary definition of a word but they are unable to feel its emotional content.  So, if you say to a psychopath, “nazis raping baby pandas,” his brain will respond the same as if you said, “tapioca pudding.”  (Unless he thinks tapioca pudding is icky, in which case his brain will have a stronger response to the pudding, I’m guessing.)    Because of this deficiency, this means that even the smartest psychopath will be unable to catch falsehoods when they come out of his mouth.  Ain’t that some shit?  Doesn’t that shed a whole lot of light on your ex-boyfriend?

I’m not necessarily saying that your shitty ex-boyfriend it out there butchering whores, but I’m saying he suffers from the same lack as the whore butcherer, on a smaller scale.  He is, in essence, a mini-psychopath.  The world is absolutely CRAMMED with these people.  People who cannot feel meaning.  Couple that with lack of empathy and it’s Jeffrey Dahmer time.

Soapbox moment: Empathy and meaning are at the root of morality, which is why stories are good for us because they build both.  So tell your little ones a shitload of stories, and maybe in a generation or two we can dispense with Wall Street.

Okay, now I need to go find some chocolate and a purring cat.

Seriously, kitty cuddles STAT, please.

(2) Come to the Art Center in Davis (1919 F Street) this Friday, May 11 at 7 PM for a cool lit-art thingee featuring the paintings of Sondra Olson, and readings by Sue Staats (prose), Dorine Jeannette (poetry), and meeeeee.  Copies of Farallon Review, Issue 4, featuring my story, “Domestic Animals,” will be on sale.

(3) Last book event for 13 rue Thérèse in the foreseeable future!  This Saturday, May 12 at 11 AM at Corte Madera’s Book Passage.  I hope to go out in a blaze of glory!

(1) 13 rue Thérèse featured in NY Times Paperback row!

(2) Interview with me up at Litquake’s website!

(3) Speaking of Litquake, come to the Zyzzyva release party tomorrow night at Tosca in San Francisco!  I will be reading along with Peter Orner and Rob Ehle.

• Three things that we realize, post-move, we should never buy again as we have entirely too many of them:

(1) whisks

(2) umbrellas

(3) motherf*****g books

I am guessing I will be able to tamp down on my whisk and umbrella purchasing habits…  Books, however, are another story…