[photo via Gothamist]

1.

On the train down to New York Thursday, in the seats across from me, a 26-year-old American soccer player who works on an organic farm and a 30-something Turkish artist talk to each other for most of the trip. The soccer player tells his age when he says he feels old. The artist laughs at him.

The soccer player then confides that his girlfriend is the daughter of his boss. Also, she reminds him of her father, who he met first, and who set them up and wanted them to be together.

I try not to stare. “I see him so clearly in her,” he says. “It’s almost eerie.”

No, I think. It actually is eerie.

Watching them talk of it, it looks like courtship. They are shy and flirtatious with each other, each mentioning their girlfriends but soon they are beside each other playing a game on the computer of the artist. Their heads leaning in.

I want to stand up and say Go ahead.

2.

With no internet connection and a broken phone, I work on the train uninterrupted for 6 hours on editing the manuscript of my second novel, which, when I review it, looks nearly complete.

Otherwise, the broken phone is a blight on my whole trip to New York.

The train arrives in Penn Station, and as I exit and walk to the subway, I feel a little like Amherst is the outermost borough of New York.

I take the train to Chelsea for a party for John Freeman of Granta, celebrating his new book, The Tyranny of Email. The irony of being at this party after spending the train ride down in a media fast isn’t lost on me. I leave after eating some truly incredible chocolates that Nicole Aragi made and passed around, with Maud Newton, the person who first told me about Freedom, the program that turns your computer off for 8 hours so it can’t go online, also in attendance. We get a little dinner, and then I see her to a cab afterward and  go to meet up with Marie Mutsuki Mockett, who has been at Der Rosenkavalier.

As I walk into Lincoln Center’s plaza, the renovated fountain shoots up in a curtain of glowing water that feels like a welcome just for me. I ask the guard if it’s okay for me to sit there. He reassures me it is. I ask if the fountain is smaller (it looks smaller to me) and he insists it isn’t, but then points out where some of the jets are tipped over. “Boy, are they pissed about that,” he said. We watch it quietly for a few moments.

You can only see it from certain angles.

I begin to read John’s book by the light of the fountain while I wait for Marie. He speaks of how email has become a to-do list that you don’t set for your own day. The truth of this horrifies me. Marie emerges from the theater and we go to Jackson Heights, where I’m staying with her.

3.

The next morning I check my email. Almost 200 messages, just as John Freeman mentions in his book as the average.

Checking in with my students posts on the class blog, I must keep correcting them on their use of the qualifying phrase “it seems almost as if.”

This is the language of a political smear, I tell them. It has no place in literary analysis. It is a way of saying something without saying it. It’s innuendo.

4.

In my email, a friend writes with a question about Twitter.

what is the deal with the thanking of the retweets? I have noticed you and many others doing a big thanks for retweets. Is this something that is just “done”? Do you think it important for me to do with ______ and _________?seems like an ego thing to me, but I am the newbie and want to respect the culture. thanks in advance.

Many do, some don’t…

As a rule, I think your social media use is most successful personally and professionally when you feel like it doesn’t compromise your personality. If you feel like a creep thanking people, then don’t thank them. Does that make sense? My friend M___ never does #FF recs because it creeps her out, for example. My approach comes from how in my life, I basically feel that not thanking someone is rude. I do it because I’ve never been given to think it was anyone’s responsibility to help me…. so when they share my links or work on Twitter and FB, I always thank them. I’ve tried not thanking them and I feel like a dick, so I went back to thanking people. And maybe I’m too conscientious of it or whatever, but for now I at least get to feel like myself all the time.

He likes this, writes back, says, Put it on your blog for people like me.

5.

On the way back, the train to New Haven is bursting as it leaves Grand Central. A young man who looks to be a painting MFA student at Yale sits down next to me.  It turns out this is the day everyone wanted to go to Connecticut. There are no empty seats.

From New Haven, the bus I take is full of rows of girls drowsily checking cameraphones full of pics of themselves drunk from presumably the night before, and they alternate smiling or frowning, saving or deleting. The boys apparently on the earlier or later bus.

1.

Saturday, I drive to Vermont with my friend Tayari, to Bread Loaf. The mosquitoes are terrifying. At a cocktail reception, as we take turns outside spraying ourselves, Sigrid Nunez advances a theory that this is because the bats are dying and are not eating the mosquitoes anymore. All up and down the Eastern seaboard, the rise in temperatures has promoted a fungus that is killing the bats. Leaving their noses white.

I think of the stories of bald eagles driven to eat the young blue herons, because there are fewer fish, but say nothing.

2.

Sunday, Charles Baxter delivers a brilliant lecture to the crowd on lush styles, entitled “Lush Life”, and inspired partly by his hearing the Sarah Vaughn version he heard, while waiting in an airport lounge. He was taken by the lyrics, and points out the song was written when Strayhorn was 17. His thesis is that we have taken to a default ironic and stripped down mode as a way to survive the lies fed to us by advertising, the media, our government.

Later this will explain to me why Twitter exists.

Also, novels, stories, essays, in that light, seem suddenly like acts of resistance.

He describes a lush style as being born often when the writer tries to combine the past and the present, to mix times. I see it briefly as a slowly sifting Black and Tan. I have two realizations. The first is that this is what has been so hard with the second novel, the reader’s relationship to time. The second is that the first novel solved for this by using the present tense to describe events in the past, and openly so. And that this may be why I like it.

In the afternoon, he returns with Thomas Mallon and their editor, Dan Frank. There he says something about how with long fiction, so often the problem comes over time that for mulling it so much, you can’t recall what is on the page and what is not.

This is something I’ve also noticed but have not articulated. I want to hug him for reminding me this is true. Because we love writers for when they can stand in the face of a thought and not reject it, pulling it out of the fire.

3.

By the time Luis Urrea and Randall Kenan read, I feel as if I have been gone for several days, but it is just a day. But my mind keeps being blown, and that becomes some other way of keeping time, a sort of personal calendar of realizations with days that last for just an hour or 45 minutes.

Luis Urrea’s reading is like a lesson in how it matters to really love your audience. Not just for paying attention to you, but to love them because you just love them, out of your helpless and enormous heart.

4.

I convince Sigrid Nunez to enter the barn dance. This moment counts as a day lasting approximately 40 minutes.

5.

I keep thinking about the bats and the eagles. Another theory is put forward, that it is just a wet summer. This is quickly adopted. But is not any less upsetting, because the wet comes from the melted North Pole, as we are a closed system, and by ‘we’ I mean, ‘we on planet Earth’. The water had to go somewhere. All of this rain, this is the North Pole on the move, coming to us daily in storms.

6.

The Rob Cohen and Natasha Trethewey reading is like several of those days of short duration because of the mind blowing apart. And then the waiter reading afterwards is electrifying. I discover two favorite new writers, Reese Kwon and Vanessa Hua, and fall in love with Jennine Capó Crucet. By now we are in what you’d call Monday, approaching evening and the bonfire party in the woods as if on a train that will take us there.

It occurs to me that it is not just the mind blowing apart and settling back down, like leaves kicked in the yard. It is also that each of these readings is an experience of a writer playing with time, of insisting on the manipulation of it to describe the world. And so yes, I’m just walking across the campus, going to readings and having a beer or a coffee, but also an interdimensional traveler, with worlds invented and then disappearing around me.

7.

I check the news periodically. It is disappointing. In the rest of the world, 12 men with guns at a town hall for the president. How long do you think they would have been able to stand there during the Bush administration? That these men are not in Guantanamo already feels like an improvement they are immune to feeling.

As I also may be, but for different reasons.

I feel the default mode of ironic skepticism surround me and then let it drop. I will do as Charles Baxter recommends. And despite the horrible things, the excellent work and the friends here make the world seem more beautiful than I knew.

8.

Sigrid, it should be said, is a sprite. Also, that Tayari Jones had magnificent hair.

9.

At the bonfire, I stand with someone who tells me about the Perseid meteor showers the week before. He watched them here.  It was the first time he’d seen them.  He is a poet and it would be stealing a little from him to say more of what he said.  So, imagine you are listening to someone describe seeing a shooting star for the first time—someone who doesn’t feel the need to make a wish. You are listening as his delight, and the world feels new again.  It’s as if the night really could erase not just the day but all of the days, all of the wrongs, all of the things we have seen that hurt us or simply won’t conform to our will.  As if this night has some power all other nights did not. The stars above us, as we look at them and he talks, they are like the newest things, but they are always there, or, for our lifetimes. It is, of course, an illusion, born of lack of sleep, of having a beer in the woods like a bandit chieftain, of being an interdimensional traveler atop one mountain in Vermont. But it is beloved, and we’re not alone.

10.

In my apartment, as I make coffee for Tayari on what we know as Tuesday, she observes how it feels as if we’ve been gone some longer time. But the flowers I bought Saturday are still good, as is the basil, waiting beside each other on my counter.

Hunh, she says. And nods her head.

I wake up in Jayne Anne Phillips’ house in Glen Ridge after the longest night of sleep I’ve had in a while—10 hours. Waking up here for me is a little like I imagine it might be for someone else to wake up in David Bowie’s house.  I walk to the bookshelves and lay down in front of them. In her blue and white guest quarters on the third floor, she has many of my favorite books and many I don’t know. I pick up a few—Under the 82nd Airborne, by Deborah Eisenberg, for example—and then pull out Fiskadoro, by Denis Johnson, to look at it.

I love Denis. I was his student at Iowa. This is a book I’ve never quite understood, and I almost resent it because of that. I think of Doris Lessing, who said something like, Each book has its time when it is open to you, when you can get it. So I open it, and right there it suddenly makes sense, and I sit and read it quietly for a half hour.

A few days ago, a student said to me, of their project, Well, it’s sort of cyberpunk, except cyberpunk is so over. And I said, Because now cyberpunk is just social realism? And he said, Yes, I guess, and we laughed. I think of that as I read this.

The night before, I gave a reading at Jayne Anne’s MFA program in Newark with the poet Tina Chang, on the Rutgers campus. I got the best introduction I have perhaps ever had from my friend Tayari Jones, and read one of the oldest sections of my new manuscript, a section I’d come to question but that I no longer question after this. The reading was one of my better ones, I think—the crowd was warm and enthusiastic, and I was moved to find two former students were there, now students in the program, and they seemed happy and at home there.

When I put down Denis’ book, I take some time to think about the manuscript for the Queen of the Night. There’s something new in it that I’m testing. And my mind goes back to it again and again, pushing on it.

In Paris, the week before this, the novel’s different pieces came together with considerable force in the middle of my week of research.  I sat down to dinner with friends, Brandon and Pascal. I’d brought my copy of the Goncourt Journals with me, and I think I read from it. They began having a disagreement over some of the facts about the conditions inside Paris during the siege. And as Pascal rose to look up the facts under dispute, I felt a small click in my mind, concerning something somewhat to the left of these facts.

Like that, I thought. Exactly like that.

Prior to now, the book’s structure felt like it lacked for something, to me, and I would periodically rebel against the lack only to find myself waiting again. I frequently tell my students that writing fiction is an intuitive process, supported by and described by intellectual processes, but not an actual intellectual process of its own. The way this novel began certainly supports that–a voice appeared in my head one morning, speaking lines to me—and the way it resolves in my mind, as it did last week, proves it to me again. I have to laugh at the idea that something as simple as this could have triggered it, but that night, at the dinner, I’m too relieved to be upset at the idea that all of these years of work and struggle could come clean like that, in a friend’s kitchen on the Rue de Richelieu. And so I laugh as they conclude their argument, and the happiness of that also carries me through the rainy parts of what I had left to do that week in Paris. After this, the rain isn’t so terrible, the bags I packed with too many books don’t bother me too much, and I even drive home after the flight, start the semester, and then leave for this reading, moving along on this happiness that is so unexpected, until I am here, reading Fiskadoro, in the house of one of my earliest literary heroes.

I am very happy for this life, and very grateful for it.

Pictures and more, soon.

On the plane to Paris, I read articles about a new show coming to HBO, called Americatown. It imagines a future when Chinatown-style American ghettoes have sprung up all over the world, as Americans leave, looking for greater opportunity elsewhere. I remember a taxi ride in Los Angeles a few years ago, when the driver told me that he was moving back to India, so his son could get a decent education. I asked him about it. He was upset, having made so many sacrifices to come to the US, to find the math and science educations so lacking.

I imagine Americans, forced to go overseas to get a decent education in math and science.

In Paris, when I walk past the restaurants offering American food, I think of this show and the taxi driver.

*                                 *                               *

On the day after the visit to Vaux-le-Vicomte, nothing seems as rich or beautiful. I have to go to visit the hunting chateau of the Emperor Louis Napoleon and his wife Eugenie, and I spend two days there, studying the layout of the gardens, of the apartments, of the Imperial theater, the way you would escape from the music room out to the garden and then through the gardens to the train. If you had to.

On the second day of being there the memory of Vaux finally fades.

In the museum at the hunting chateau, I examine drawings of the Tuileries interiors. I find a room in the museum at the chateau apparently devoted to the Emperor’s two most important mistresses, the British actress he threw over to marry Eugenie, and the Italian comtesse who made Eugenie take to bed for a month. The rooms are tricky—they are renovated according to different centuries. It’s strange to visit a place I’ve been writing about for two years per accounts I’ve read and photos. Many of the things I thought were true are true, but some are wrong, and I’m glad of the trip for that alone.

On the first night back from the palace I go with Brandon to get a fancy drink. We decided we wanted fancy drinks, something epic or just incredible. We go past the hotel bars in the Palais Royale to the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz, and I look at the epic kitsch surrounding us on the walls as we sit down. I open the menus. The cocktails are 25 and 40 Euros. Everywhere, eery smiling photos of Hemingway. I’m reminded of the statue of Brandon is quiet and I notice he appears to be keeping back his revulsion.

This is like the Hard Rock Cafe of writers, I say. It’s insane.

I didn’t understand why you came in and sat down, he says.

We leave swiftly and head to Harry’s, the Bar where Hemingway actually drank. We have two okay drinks in the historic bar and while we finish the second drink, we hear this woman from the front of the bar ask loudly, “What’s French for mojito?”

Brandon offers a swift, obscene possibility. We leave, getting Korean food and then beers at The Duplex, my new favorite bar in Paris.

*                                 *                               *

In the end, the trip feels too short. Before I know it, I’m leaving Paris and I feel, on the plane, a swift revulsion at the idea of returning as well as a homesickness for Paris, which after just a day had felt like home. I don’t know how the election is going to turn out, as I sit in the plane, and when the pilot says, “prepare for landing at Newark International Airport.” On that plane, the events of the election seem remote. There seems like a strong chance that the country will elect (I almost typed “The World”) a biracial former Constitutional law professor and writer to the most powerful office in the land, but as I walk out and stand in line for the immigration, I still don’t or can’t believe it.

When the election comes two and a half weeks later, Brandon tells me, The cafes in your neighborhood were open all night with people celebrating.

By this he means, Les Halles. When he says it, I experience the homesickness for Paris. But by the time I leave for Portland, OR, on Thursday, to take four of my students to Wordstock, I feel like I’ve moved to a new country.

Perhaps, because I have just been thinking about turning my savings into jewelry I can wear, this happens.

At the Southeast corner of the Louvre, on the Rue de Rivoli, a woman bends over near me as I cross the street and pulls a gold ring out of the blond dirt. She says, Mister, Mister, Mister, and holds up the gold ring. Is this yours?

She is a short, dark-haired and stocky older woman, and her hair is long and bound loosely at the middle of her back. She seems kind as she holds the ring out to me.

It’s a strange kind of men’s ring. It bulges thickly so that if it were on your hand, it would keep the fingers to either side apart. It says 18k on the inside, and it looks gold.

No, I say, and pass it back to her, though I knew instantly it wasn’t mine. 

No, she says, and hands it back to me. You should keep it, for good luck.

Okay, I say. Thanks.

Can you give me something for it, she says. I raise my left eyebrow, because, well, I did try to give it to her and she gave it back. I hand it back towards her.

Something for a sandwich, she asks me, not looking at the ring. I did find it, she adds, as if I’d forgot.

I hand her 3 Euros. And a soda, she asks. I give her 3 more. Thank you, she says. And she leaves.

I hold the ring up. It looks oddly like the ring from the Lord of the Rings films. A plain gold band. I try to put it on my hand. It doesn’t fit. I wonder if there are pawnshops in Paris. If that’s why she didn’t want to take the ring. But underlying it is the sense that this is a scam, like the guy on the streets of the East Village who would tell you he needed 20 dollars to get a cab uptown to his production studio where there were keys for him to get his props from out of this West Village apartment foyer, he just needed the 20 bucks, did you have it? He’d meet you there with the money. In my first days in New York, I gave it to him and said, Good luck. The second time he met up with me, with the same story, I let him tell it, and then I said, I’ve been through this with you before, and he recoiled and swore at me. I eventually learned he was one of the Village’s most notorious homeless heroine addicts.

I pocket the ring, and hope it isn’t famous, even though I’m pretty sure it is. I’m pretty used to being mistaken for a French speaker, for example, and she didn’t hesitate to address me in English. Which means she read me as American, and chose me for that.

My luck changes for the worse. I arrive too late for a show at the decorative arts. I turn my ankle, strain my wrist, and blisters cover my heels.

That evening, when I tell two friends who live here in Paris about the story, one says, Oh. That’s the…well, I don’t want to say Gypsy, but, basically, the Gypsy ring swindle. Did she find it right near your feet?

And then she gave it to you, for good luck?

And then she asked for something for having done this?

I gave her 6 Euros, I tell her. Deciding that the whole story is worth 6 Euros. I feel sad at the idea that this is something someone does all day, every day.

I turn it in my hand. It looks like the ring from the Lord of the Rings, I say. It doesn’t fit on my hands. I imagine taking it home, having it appraised. Maybe it is full of lead. Maybe it is real gold. The woman I spoke to didn’t look to me like a Gypsy. I somehow end with the feeling that the ring doesn’t belong to me, after all of that. I still don’t want it, even if I could melt it down and make a coin.

When I leave Paris, I lean out the window of the apartment I’ve rented in the 1st, and leave it on the far right spike that keeps the pigeons from landing there. Where no one can have it.

I go to Paris.

The day I leave, I go to the bank to make sure I can take out the money for the rent due on the apartment where I’ll stay, in the 1st. The woman teller is wild-eyed when she looks up. Before she says anything, I know she’s incapable of helping me. I consider the etiquette of asking for someone else.

I have asked if there is a withdrawal limit and if so what is it. She squints at the screen. Well…

She looks over at the next teller and asks her to come over, as I knew she would. What is that, she asks?

You take money out on that card? She looks at me as if I am a child.

Yes, I say. I think of all the money I have taken out, a river of cash in my mind.

Hunh. She squints at the screen. I’ve had people in with that who couldn’t take out money.

Don’t change anything, I say, with an abrupt suddenness that surprises me.

What’s my daily limit, I ask again. This all seems like something any of them should just know.

1000, she says, and then if the machine is offline, 1500.

This makes no sense to me at all, and in fact seems indicative of everything wrong with my country’s financial problems. I still have to go to get a crown put in, teach about Persepolis and Helen of Troy, and then drive to Newark airport, so I don’t ask about offline. Instead I have a brief fantasy of taking out all of my money, right there, and buying gems. I imagine myself going through passport control, my hands covered in cocktail rings.

Thanks, I say.

Have a nice trip, she says, still squinting at her screen.

_______________________________________________

It takes 5 hours to get to Newark. On my Air India flight, a beautiful male steward gives me 4 bottles of Gordon’s gin when I ask for a gin and tonic, along with 2 glasses full of ice and two cans of tonic. I wonder briefly if he’s joining me and decide I must look like a man who needs a bit of restocking.

Air India is a revelation. I don’t pay for the cocktails or movies, though my headphones in my seat pocket don’t fit the socket. I say nothing, not wanting the steward to feel badly, instead watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers twirl silently. My seatmates are American. one is a young struggling writer. Her boyfriend is impressed that I am published. He asks me about it, what it must be like.

It’s…a bit weird, I say.

He wrinkles his brow.

This thing you’ve had in your head for years is suddenly on a shelf, where any stanger can go look at it. It takes some getting used to, I say.

They nod. They see all my gin bottles and order gin also. You don’t even drink gin, the writer says to her boyfriend, laughing.

We toast the flight and the airline, our excellent inflight Indian food.

________________________________________________

I am in Paris for the next thing in my head. The city is full of handsome men with shaved heads. I am here without my computer. In my bag I have clothes for 5 days, 2 notebooks, pens, a sketchbook and a camera. I am writing from the Rue de Rivoli, where a cute waiter is making tight turns around the tables and flirting with the men behind me, who are very taken with him. All of the chairs are facing the street and no one pretends they are not there to watch everyone pass by.

This weekend I go to see castles. More soon.

I sit at the gate in Athens airport, Gate A5, waiting for my flight to London, and make the drawing above.

The plane is delayed, and it occurs to me that as soon as I left Sifnos, everything that has started to go wrong started to go wrong.

I shouldn’t have left, I tell myself.

Right before leaving, I get a smile and a nod from the most handsome waiter on the island, Nicky Fortis, who says, Hi Alex.

Hi Nicky, I say.

I don’t know how to tell Nicky I’m leaving. If I tell him, then I really am leaving. So I act as if I’m not leaving. As if the boat will just not come. I can’t leave, now that he knows my name—this is the thing I won’t say to myself.

The only ticket I could get for my departure time is one in “exclusive” class, almost twice as expensive as my ticket out, and I have to sit with boring people. Once I’m on the ferry, the surf is rough and people run to the bathroom to throw up. I am somehow literally unmoved. I eventually go and sit on the deck and make a drawing of a father and son at the rail as Athens comes into view. I take the subway to the Athens airport from Piraeus, and there find a meal of chicken and peas that only manages to remind me I’m leaving Sifnos.

My sense of foreboding continues, and sure enough, once I board the plane, the airconditioning on the plane isn’t working while the engines are off, and then once the engines come on and we’re finally cool and waiting to take off, a woman in the back decides she can’t fly, and we do have to let her off. As we power the engines down and she walks to the front, she tells the captain she’s changing her mind, and he kicks her off. I don’t believe you, he says. We’re now almost 3 hours late. We have to unload the plane of passengers and our carryons and get on a bus while the plane is searched in case she left something on it, and then we get back on, and as we taxi down again, some Greek man in the back begins to demand the pilot take off immediately, like it’s a car he can just drive off, or he wants to get off also, and I feel a rage that makes me both weak and incredibly strong.

I talk to the woman next to me instead. She’s older, in her 50s, tanned and very kind, a handsome silver-haired woman on vacation with her handsome silver-haired husband, who also looks tanned and kind. They’ve been going around Greece swimming, and they have fit bodies and the relaxed air of swimmers. It makes me understand that I need to keep swimming, talking to her.

We’re trying to get me to my hotel, Hotel 55, in North Ealing. By the time we land the Tube is closed. Which is to say, it’s 1:30AM. I was due in at 10:30PM. After a taxi and a bus, I get to my hotel at 4AM.

The rest is a long road, that begins with the Hotel 55 in the dark and me calling inside for the night doorman to come and open it up and check me in, the room a good bargain at 80 pounds, me placated by degrees. By the quiet dark air-conditioned lobby, the room, beautiful and simple, contemporary design, the shower, clean and with powerful water pressure. I sleep deeply, for six hours, have breakfast in their beautiful contemporary garden with my friend David, and then we go around London for a little sightseeing. I get on the plane back, and once back, decide to drive home to Amherst, instead of staying over at my friend Jorge’s place in Queens, in order to begin moving the next morning. I get back, finally, at 2AM and am up the next morning at 8AM, when it is plain to me I should have stayed over in Queens.

I move for five days in the heat and rain, swimming every day in the afternoon, because it’s the only way to feel connected, somehow, to me. With my ears stopped up by water, I can only hear me. And as the happy couple showed me, in the plain way they were together, and happy, and relaxed somehow while the flight was delayed in the heat and anger, swimming makes everything okay.

The new apartment is beautiful and empty. After the first two days I don’t want to bring anything else into the apartment but there’s still more stuff to come. I hire a boy who actually knows how to drive a fixed gear bike and a circus performer girl who is basically there because she’s lusting after the boy. The three of us make for a sort of moving circus, or a circus of moving, and I imagine her making flips as she carries my boxes. I pay them and also give them food I never used but that is still good, rice vermicelli I will never make, beans I can’t care about. My old apartment, as I empty it, seems, on the third and fourth days, like a museum of my ambivalence, and I call it that, and on the fifth day, the day the housing office tells me I must have it empty, I push hard, and manage, eventually, to get it empty.

I vow to never move this way again, ever.

Which is to say, this is the end of that particular road.

————————-

After two weeks of, as my friend Meredith puts it, touching everything I own, it’s time for me to leave again. I drive to Maine to take care of my mom, who’s having a knee replacement, in a car still littered with things from the move I don’t have the heart to bring inside. Two Le Creuset pans, for example, scorched and in need of resurfacing, rattle in the backseat. They seem too valuable to throw away and yet I don’t know how to fix them. Perhaps, if I’m attacked, I can pull them from under the seat and deflect a bullet, or stun an assailant.

Are you excited, I ask her on the phone.

What? No, she says. As if this is the worst question.

I think you should be excited, I say. And she laughs, which is good. For how she’s my mother, she both understands me best and doesn’t understand me at all. And I think the same is also true.

I have been watching Grey’s Anatomy episodes in what will eventually be my formal dining room, but for now is a provisional bedroom, where I set up my bed with the help of the fixed gear cyclist and the circus performer, and left it. On that night, I briefly imagined living there as I did in a New York apartment, but the empty rooms of the house call me into them, and we have conversations that end with me deciding my bedroom is upstairs. But also, and not deliberately, Grey’s has me thinking of my mother’s surgery. Every mom on the show is my mom, every problem my mom’s problem. This isn’t, of course, going to help her in the slightest. One show features a patient who doesn’t believe in God, or medicine, and his doctor insists he has to want his new heart or it will be rejected. I of course am trying to get my mom to want her new knee. And when I tell my therapist about this, he approves.

In the hospital, the helping of her is multifarious. I imagine helping her everywhere. Once I bring her home, the reality is, she’s doing quite well. She is released early, which is good, because, as if all of the people in the hospital have been watching Grey’s also, they are all back from vacation and spending too much time talking to each other. At one point, I summon something that I think of as the “I’m kind of bald, I have big muscular arms and am not at all happy right now” face, and go to the nurse’s station to find out where her pain meds and bed pan are, and when they ask me, defensively, if she’s rung for them, I hold up two fingers and walk away, saying, Please bring them right now.

They rush to get the items to her.

My mother is impatient with me a little, and I tell her she’s ornery, even though I’m secretly glad. She hasn’t been ornery like this in a long time. My belief is that the knee will restore her to herself in a way she doesn’t expect, and because I want this to happen, and because she’s negatively suggestible, like me, I don’t tell her. I stop trying to get her excited about her knee, because it will mess up her getting excited about her knee. Yes, I say, instead. I’ll go to the drug store right now. I say, I need to get some pens, to make more drawings. Or I say, I’m heading out now, to go swimming.

The night before I made this drawing, I went with my friends for cocktails at the home of the former ambassador to Greece and his wife, who have a beautiful house there on the edge of Kastro, overlooking the ocean. I went outside to their patio, to take in the view of the water. This is something that sounds terrible to me, all of a sudden–”take in a view” is an awful way to describe what I felt.

I felt like I should be able to see mermaids, and when Gabe, my friend Sabina’s son, joined me outside, I said as much to him. He agreed. Yeah, he said. Mermen too.

Gabe is a big believer in gender parity, at age 6, which is part of what’s so great about him.

When I was told this was called the Mermaid’s Chapel soon after that, I experienced something like a confirmation of my sense of there being mermaids there. I never found out why this was called the Mermaid’s Chapel. And I may even have it wrong. The legend I was told about this chapel was that there were two lovers who were being chased by pirates, and they prayed for help from God. The rock split, protecting them, and making this spit of rock the chapel stands on.

In this drawing, I can see how I’m trying to figure out how to draw the rocks, which are incredible there. I experimented with different kinds of lines. There were kestrels, also, making these incredible dives on the wind, and so I drew them in as well.

Kastro was a Venetian settlement on Sifnos, and of the towns, has a kind of Greek architecture that’s unique, that winds into and around itself in a way that is very confusing–it’s easy to end up in someone’s courtyard or suddenly down along the cliff, far away from where you wanted to be. It lends itself to taking chances. Nick, Gabe’s older brother, told me this style was meant to confuse pirates. On the days I spent walking around Kastro after he said that, I kept imagining of lost pirates, paused in the alleys, trying to decide where to go.

I spend 36 hours getting to Athens, and that isn’t my final destination.

The first flight goes relatively well. I exit at London Gatwick at 6:25 AM, having had little sleep due to two chatty Aussie women behind me, young lovers who spent the whole night drinking vodka cocktails and talking and laughing, as if we wouldn’t arrive as we do, in the early morning. Even the earplugs don’t block them out. Dazed by lack of sleep, I struggle to get my bearings in Gatwick, to get online, to get phone service, to attend to some basic details. My flight to Athens isn’t going to arrive in time for the ferry to Sifnos. Frustrated, I arrange to spend the night at the Hotel Cecil, a beautiful small hotel on Athinas, in the Monastriki neighborhood. Then I settle in and have a breakfast, and wait to check in for my flight.

I notice the vending machines full of novels and think of how at the Wesleyan conference, someone suggested the novel might be dead, again.

The Novel and God are always being declared dead. But they don’t seem to care. Also, vending machines for novels is kind of brilliant.

The flight to Athens, because boarding is delayed, seems to take a week. I find myself seated in front of a man who I keep thinking I know, and then realize we may be myspace friends. I’m too embarrassed to ask, though he looks at me also, as if he suspects the same thing. If he is, I tell myself, I’ll just write to him later and if he’s not it doesn’t matter. We land, I deboard, and head to the luggage claim, where I find what appears to be a regiment of Greek soldiers or more, all very young, shockingly handsome and shouting their conversations at each other, like some kind of happy argument. They emit a kind of radiant masculine force. They all look like what you think heroes look like and my group of passengers walks by shyly, a little in awe.

On the metro, everyone seems to have a message t-shirt. Some message t-shirts I see as I arrive in Athens on the subway from the airport:

• I Fuck On The First Date
• Got Milk
• Will Work For Beer
• Watch This Space

These are all worn by Greeks. By the time I get to Piraeus, where I’m to get on a ferry for Sifnos, I decide to try and find obscene Greek message tees.

I never do.

I’m not good at taking vacations, but I’m trying to get better at it. Partly it’s because as a writer the part of time when you don’t work is never very clear. I get ideas at 11PM as much as I do at 11AM, and if you ignore those ideas, they don’t come back. So you learn eventually to just go and write, even if it isn’t your “writing time”. It’s a little like being a doctor on call, but all the time. Add to that the teaching of writing, and it’s easy to just live in a blur of constant tasks. But I’m burned out, and I know it. I need to switch off.

In Piraeus, at the gate for my boat, a man walks by, his hands full of sunglasses. Are you selling those, I ask, as if he might just be walking by with thirty pairs of glasses. Yeah, he says, and fans them out at me. He has cheap Rayban knockoff black aviators, with insistent fake logos in all the wrong places. They make me think of something I heard recently about liars, about how one way to tell a lie is in the extensive detail. I buy the lying glasses and head off to get a good hat, which I find across the street. After, at the cash machine, an old woman stands ahead of me, seeming to struggle mightily with the machine. I set my bags down, as I wait, and as I do, see that she’s holding about ten cards, all clearly stolen, and her problem is that she’s trying to get in by guessing their pin numbers. She’s having no luck. I wonder if there was one time it ever worked, and if this is why she’s doing it this way, which seems like a kind of modern Greek Sisyphean task. She notices me noticing her, and runs off.

I need to email my friends, to tell them I’m coming, as I’m late by one day due to plane delays, and spend a half hour getting directions to an internet cafe from strangers that turn out to be not quite right. I get the email sent, and then run for the ferry. I install myself on the deck near the bar and decide it is time to just begin the vacation, een though I’m not there yet. So I buy beers in twos, so I don’t have to keep getting up, the first one cold and the second one, less so, with this method, but it works okay. I finish reading Brideshead Revisited, which becomes, at the end, one of my favorite novels, and then read the second volume of the graphic novel Ordinary Victories, just out in translation. All around me, tourists nap on deck, sun themselves, eat ham and cheese sandwiches and smoke copiously. Greeks smoke more than Koreans, it seems to me. I meet a friendly Greek couple near me and we begin talking. They ask me where I’m from, and I tell them, and they laugh.

We thought you were Belgian, the young man says.

Why, I say.

Because you were quiet, drank beer and read comics the whole way.

This cheers me up incredibly.

He is a gardener, though it seems he can’t quite explain what he does–something to do with medicinal plants. She is a social worker, working with refugees seeking asylum in Greece. The sky gets dark, and we begin buying rounds of beers, and as we pass islands, they tell me about them, talking about them a little like the myths were real. That’s the island where the giants mined iron, they say. It looks big enough, I say. They are headed to the island Apollo made for Jason and the Argonauts to rest out a storm, after capturing the Golden Fleece. By the time I get to Sifnos, the sky is almost black, the water and sky indistinguishable. As the boat approaches the harbor of Kamares, the lights of the disco flash, like the burning mouth of the cliff, and I get off the boat, saying goodbye to my new friends. The friends waiting for me hug me, as I run off the boat, all of us shouting each other’s names.

I’m standing in my mother’s guest room, having just arrived for Memorial Day, when she says, Norman found these and they’re yours.

Norman is my mother’s second husband, a man with an enormous capacity for helping. He’s often doing things I never thought of asking anyone to do, ever. When he suggests that I could clean out my car, for example, he runs to the door of the garage for a garbage bag.

My mom holds out a black messenger bag that looks like mine, the one I brought, that is on the floor of the guest room. It looks a little like something I would own but I don’t remember it right away, and so it makes me suspicious, as if they’ve made a mistake. This bag she holds towards me looks sort of funny and sad, and not quite right, like it wants to be the bag I have now, the bag I packed to come here, so I could visit my father’s grave with her. Inside are copies of The New Yorker and Outside, from April and June of 2005, respectively, and a hardcover of Alice Munro’s Runaways, with what looks like a small bloodstain on it. There are boarding passes for air travel to Atlanta, from Boston, and printed emails, two for reservations and then two from a boyfriend. Emails of love. I turn these so I can’t read them, and do it quickly. There’s also a drawing of a feng shui map for an apartment I wanted up here, near my mom, in Maine, when for a brief period I was intent on moving back up here, and under that is an application for an apartment in Rochester, NY, where I ended up instead, for a year, with the person the emails came from.

Also, there is a picture from a magazine, of Freddie Ljungberg in his underwear.

Oh, thanks, I say. My mother has already moved on and is doing something else. In the guest bathroom, I throw away the emails and the boarding pass stubs, the hand-drawn map to the apartment I never took and the application to the apartment I did take.

The blood on the book, the size of a penny, almost looks like part of the design of the cover, and is from a nosebleed I had, in a hotel. I never noticed the stain until now, but I also don’t remember reading the book. A boarding pass is tucked inside it. The bag, over the next few days, like much of it’s contents, represents a life that wasn’t ever really going to be mine. On the cover of this issue of Outside reads the subhead, Where To Go, What To Do, & How To Have Your Best Summer Ever. I didn’t do any of those things. And the summer was terrible.

——————

The one thing I did do from the list, when I sit down and check it later, a glass of Crown Royal in my hand, was to go to the Lobster Shack, on the Outside Hot 50 places that summer, a place I grew up with, in Cape Elizabeth, ME. I took the boyfriend there, I recall. And on Monday, I go again with my mother. Her car’s back seat is full of flowers we chose to put at my dad’s grave. We stand in long wind-whipped lines for the meal of a crab roll (her) and a lobster (me). We arrive at 2 and the line is out the door still for lunch.

My summer was better described in the issue of the New Yorker, inside the bag, which contains reminiscences of Paris that Saul Bellow gave to Phillip Roth. Bellow had gone to Paris with several hundred pages of a novel that was not Augie March, his wife and a Guggenheim, and the interview, I remember, as I read it, felt lucky, because I had already decided to go to Paris with the boyfriend. I wished for it to be like a premonition. He talked about how Augie March had leaped on him there, how it came in a torrent, and I thought of the months preceding the planning of the trip, in Los Angeles and then Maine, during which I’d finally hit the center of my new novel.

Unlike Bellow, I was going to Paris for just a few weeks of research— for the novel. I’d rented an apartment there from a scholar who was headed to South America to visit family. I remember avoiding his Portuguese concierge, a woman who disliked me intensely for being a subletter, and watching the zinc rooftops outside in the 19th lighten in the mornings as I cooked in his small kitchen. But my magical moments, just for me, were few; the boyfriend was anxious, and was completing his doctoral thesis, due to arrive after me. I bought wallets of phone cards and spent too much time in the coffin-like, airless glass phone booths of Paris, talking him through his anxiety. By the time he arrived, I was exhausted and our reunion was anti-climactic. We never quite got our footing back but we stayed together for a little over a year. I got what I needed for my book, for sure, in ways I didn’t expect. But by then, this odd little bag that just returned to me was forgotten, in my mother’s basement. Waiting to be a metaphor.

I think we get in trouble when we choose our premonitions. Much as Bellow had described, I had felt annealed inside the French language around me, which I spoke crudely, but this, I eventually understood, the situation of my character–I hadn’t expected that, somehow. I walked the neighborhoods she would have, looking for signs of the Paris that was there when she was there. And trying to find the details, constantly. I felt it was important to go into the buildings and sit there and listen, even if they were now museums.

A few days after arriving, I spoke to my then-2-year-old nephew, Benjamin, my sister’s first son, on the phone. He was with my mother in Maine and a little lonely, as our large family had gathered there and then dispersed, except for him and mom and Norman. He was to be with them for a week, while my sister went on a retreat for work.

Say hi to your uncle, my mother said, and handed him the phone.

Uncle? he asked. I laughed and said hello, and told him I loved him. Come home, he said, sounding both a little angry and sad. And I felt a sharp pang, at how I’d thought I wasn’t so important to him as that–how could I have been so stupid?–and also, amazed at being loved.

——————

They had to put down Pepper, says my mother, of my aunt’s cat. We’re walking on the beach near her house, bent against a fierce wind. It’s Tuesday. There’s white-caps on the water and Norman is back at the house, reading. It’s almost evening and my mother took me up on my offer to take a walk. I think about how I like this part of Maine, the hard weather and cold.

That’s terrible, I say. Pepper was a mix of Maine Coon cat and money cat, a small, funny cat, one of three Coon cats my aunt had, and best friends with my aunt’s now-deceased dog, Roma. Pepper as a kitten had the habit of attaching herself to the pants of customers, who didn’t notice her hanging on them, and as they got near the door to my aunt’s road-side flower shop, Roma would pluck her off their leg with her mouth, by the scruff. The person would laugh in surprise that the cat was there, and then that the cat looked both content and chastened, as it hung in the mouth of the giant golden retriever.

Roma was killed a few years back, hit by a careless driver in what we think of as a preventable accident. We think of her as killed, not dead. Her life taken, not ended. We bear a grudge, as a family, against the driver.

What happened, I ask. Prepared to be angry at someone else.

Pets are getting diseases humans get, my mother says, from living indoors so much. Who knows? We walk, head down, into the fierce wind, the sand biting. Pepper lived much of her life outdoors on the 40-some acres around my aunt’s house in Rangeley, so I know it’s not that. The Coon cats were barely tame, skinny from running the woods for game. One of them, Marco, famously choked up a whole bird on the kitchen floor as they ate dinner. It had not even bothered to take the head off. But sometimes my mother just wants to say something to me and the connection is indirect, and I don’t notice the lack of connection until the next day, when I’ve spent part of it doing things outside that I would otherwise do indoors. I read a book outdoors, I run windsprints at the beach along top of the sea-wall. I talk to my sister on the phone.

I want to have a family, I say to her. As I think about the next five years of my life. In the background, I can hear her daughter Lucia doing her sort of sing-shout-yell voice practice. She’s 6 months old and has begun learning to use her voice at the top of her lungs. I listen carefully, because I want to remember it. I think the sound of it is amazing. It’s free of grammar and yet it’s structured by what she hears, her beginning to imitate the sounds around her. It’s like a 6-month old version of the problem Bellow describes in that interview, when he talks about wanting a whole new language back before he wrote Augie March.

Well, sure, my sister says.

When I was an MFA student, Stephen Beachy’s beautiful debut novel, The Whistling Song, was one of my talismanic objects of worship kept close to my bedtable (Anna Karenina is there right now). Stephen is one of my heroes, and he surprised me by showing up at my reading here in San Francisco last night and telling me he teaches my novel, which was an honor. If you don’t know his work, one way you may know him is that Stephen was more or less the guy who unmasked JT Leroy in New York Magazine. Stephen’s shopping a book of essays around and if you’re an editor reading this you should track him down and buy this book.

I’m thinking of this because I’m a little high on Bluebottle coffee, French press, and whole grain hot cereal from Boulettes down at the Ferry building, and a live sighting of Laura Albert, the woman who is/was JT Leroy, who was at the next table. She was in my line of sight, and we gave each other a look of, “don’t I know you?” and then I remembered who she was, and then also remembered how a former agent of mine once told me JT Leroy was reading my book as a possible film project (this was 5 years ago) for Gus Van Sant. We never heard anything because that’s how film stuff is and also, when my agent told me that, I had a sinking feeling, because I didn’t think Leroy would like the novel for a film as everything Leroy seemed to do involved helping Leroy and not other writers in getting to Gus Van Sant. Also, I think it would be better as a 4-part TV series for Showtime. But in the meantime, Gus, if you’re self-googling, I would love it. Just in case she never passed it along.

That was also, it should be said, the second time I got close to Mr. Van Sant in that way. In an age almost past remembering, when I was in this documentary, the film-maker, Marc Huestis, told me he’d passed my reel along to Gus or that he wanted to–I don’t remember. It may be he and I aren’t meant to work together or perhaps that we just have to meet right.

In any case, it was strange to be here less than 24 hours and feel like I was in a movie about my life complete with themes and mildly uncanny coincidences.

I’m writing this from within the Loyola Villages apartment the USF people have put us up in for the Emerging Writers Festival, where I’m rooming with Sarah Gambito and Maggie Zurawski, with Alex Lemon around the corner. The reading went well. Sarah Gambito read first, and was amazing. She read new poems. I then read from St. Spencer of the Lost, which seems to me increasingly to be my homage to Escape To Witch Mountain, the mu dang of Korea, video games and the idea of Joan of Arc. In 20 minutes, we appear on a panel on how to turn yourself into writers, and then tonight, Maggie, Alex and Katherine Noel read. And then we’re turned loose in the Castro to drink and feast. Tomorrow I go to bounce my niece Lucy on my knee out in San Mateo and listen to her experiment with Stmaking the sounds that become language, and I will make howling vowel sounds to help her shape them. And read Anna Karenina at the beach.

It’s snowing outside and I have to leave the warm office bedroom I’ve created for myself in this cavernous, drafty apartment, to get coffee and eggs, somehow. Thick piles of fluffy snow line the streets, which appear to be clearing, though the snow still falls. I spoke to my Aunt Priscilla, up in Rangeley, ME, and she asked, “You know my rose trellis gate to my vegetable garden?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“I can’t see it.”

The snow banks in her yard are over 10 feet high. “Driving around here feels like you’re driving in tunnels,” she said.

Instantly, I thought of the ski area near her, Saddleback Mountain in Maine. I’ve skied there over the last 32 years with my family. There are trails there that haven’t had enough snow to be open in over 20 years. Located in the Western corner of the state, near the borders of Canada, Vermont and New Hampshire, there are days when you can see into all three.

I spoke to my sister on the phone, as she, as she put it, “staged for Hawaii”. She’s joining my brother’s family there next week for a vacation. I told her what was happening. “You have to go,” she said. “Oh my God, I’m so jealous.”

“I have to go,” I said.

“You have to go. It’s like your responsibility to our family or something.”

“I’ll take pictures.”

“I’m so jealous.”

For now I’m here, reflecting on how I feel like my whole life I’ve just been watching the US turn into a sort of deepening enormous mine for the very rich, with democratic ideals subverted in the name of triumphalist capitalism at every turn, and good people undone repeatedly because they believed liars. At some point I’ll get my boots on and trudge into town for eggs and coffee, and then work on this novel, and check in with my friend Meredith about whether we’ll brave the snow for the Yankee Rowing club meeting, where we’ll watch rowing videos. But in my heart, of course, I’ll be on the top of Saddleback the whole time.

I get there on St. Patrick’s Day. I’ll wear a shamrock on my ski helmet (I’m Irish, too).

This was a pre-Christmas post that I discovered in my drafts section and forgot to post, because I spent way, way too much time at the San Mateo Starbucks and started to forget who I was, and why. I thought I’d put it up…

I walk around shopping in San Francisco, looking for presents for my family. Things keep coming into my head, as I do this. Like, Wow, Potrero Hill is really beautiful, and, Why does it feel like capitalism hurts my feelings?… This as I rounded the corner of 18th and Castro. It gets darker and colder and soon I can tell I am going into stores for no good reason, except to get warm. I forgot how to be here, to bring extra clothes. I stop and get a Manhattan at a bar called The Men’s Room, where there are a few regulars getting drinks and laughing loudly at things only they understand.

I started at 10:30 with my mother and sister in a mall in San Mateo, and then went alone to the city by 2PM.

Capitalism is like the friend that only takes, I decide. It wants you to think you get things in return and then later you notice your life is missing important sections, as if after a blackout drunk. But it’s just you, ‘working for money’. And if I die, Capitalism wants me to know, it can replace me, just like that.

I finish my drink.

On the street, it’s warmer from the bourbon. I walk downtown, and take a train to the Lululemon store on Grant Street, something unthinkable to the person I was when I lived here previously.

Yoga clothes are popular presents for everyone in my family.

In my head I go over the details of a conversation from a few days previous, with my friend Fiona in New York. We did yoga teacher training together in 2000, and I remember she and my friend Laura and I all talked a lot about our patterns at that time, something that happens because in doing so much yoga, they become apparent. During that time I used to say, If I have one more realization I’m going to freak out! And yet people in my life feel I was nicer back then.

Fiona and I talk most of that Thursday about trying not to just be the last thing people thought we were. Specifically our family. I’m not going home for Christmas this year, she says that afternoon. I go every year, and it’s never good enough. She tells me her family says things to her like, You don’t know what you’re talking about, to shut her down when she wants to discuss politics. I think of how everyone in my family is afraid of ever saying that to me, ever. Even if I were insane and wanted to set the house on fire for Christmas, they would still hesitate to suggest I didn’t know what was going on. I do not mention this to her.
What’s your family like, she asks. Do you discuss things?

We’re all…kind of the same, I say. We all basically have the same taste and politics. My mom likes to watch the news and get angry and shout at the screen. We all do yoga, even the small children. Some of us are vegetarian and some are not but we still eat together.
Do you talk about politics, she asks.

We sort of do, I say.

I don’t know how to describe my family, though my sister, brother and I once decided we were basically all the same people, at different stages. We were all almost marine biologists. We have anxious relationships to color and prefer to wear black, white and khaki, most of the time. My brother and I have the same phone voice when we answer.

What Fiona and I were talking about that day was how there’s a way your family functions, and the people in it come to depend on your behavior, good or bad, and so you supply it, even though it often leaves you feeling as if you’re a robot. A friend told me about how his girlfriend, who’d said to him, I’ll never break up with you over money, then did break up with him, saying, I just didn’t imagine that I would get serious about someone who couldn’t support me.

So you’re breaking up with me over money, he said.

And then she cried, and he wanted to comfort her, but also, not to comfort her.

She’s in her pattern, I said to him. You pointed out she’d turned into a robot and she didn’t know how to stop it.

I think of all of this as I get into a taxi, so I can make the train home.

Yeah, we don’t do gifts anymore, the taxi driver says. We all just decided it was really for the kids. I wish desperately to be in his family, for just a second.

My family relies on me to be someone who is never shut down, even when he wants to be, it occurs to me. I don’t know if this is true but I fear it is.

By 8, I’m on a Caltrain headed back to San Mateo, tired but successful. I check to make sure I am still myself, and satisfied, I go back to my sister’s house.

My friend Noah sent me these of him and his friends. I was supposed to be in Trinidad, CA, this week with him, checking out the beaches of Humbold County.

So, I am not, for example, surfing with my friend Noah and his friends, down in Laguna Beach.

My friend Mary Lum sent this to me today, from Paris, where she’s exhibiting new work. Two men walking down a Paris street. This is me wishing I was there.

I went to Maine this weekend to visit my mother up in Biddeford, a small town along the coast. I’m going to spend over a week with family at Thanksgiving but she still wanted me to come up and have a bit of whiskey in the kitchen with her like we do sometimes and just talk. The enormous storm came up Saturday, and we sat it out, watching some television. She has satellite, and as I clicked through the channels I thought of how my friend Anston said last weekend, at the bar where we went with some dancers who were visiting Northampton, All of the men were talking about sports and all of the women were talking about weddings.

You could see it in the alternating television shows. Shows about sports, shows about weddings.

The only other thing was shows about the supernatural. Which it seemed to me covered sports and weddings.

Sometimes when I think about being a writer in these times it just feels like I’m taking these things that I spend so much time on and dropping them over the wall at a zoo that happens to be on fire. I imagine myself as some sort of anonymous functionary in a city like DC in this particular mental image, like the factory novelists in North Korea who write novels for the workers, with the wall being something like the one around the emu cage there, and I watch as the books are trampled by stampeding and frightened animals and people.

That’s sort of what it looks like when I watch the news, or read it, or listen to it in the car like I did on the way up to Maine–a radio show with media talking heads talking about media talking heads and their influence on the election, and if it was a good or bad thing. There was a lot of disingenuous breast-beating and hair-tearing, we’re so bad, thank you for listening, more later. Each time I leave the little valley in Massachusetts where I live, there’s some world out there that’s by degrees more dangerous and angrier and less understanding than it was three minutes ago because of something I can’t see happening. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll walk outside and find the whole thing burning, like the scene from Heroes, where the guy who can fly is captured by a telepath who can make his nightmares seem real. He walks through a door and finds himself on the roof of a building in a burning city, and turns a body over, and it’s himself, his face burned. I feel like my world is in the hands of a telepath who doesn’t like me or people like me. And that there are choices ahead, choices I don’t really want to make or know about, and I might not even get to make them.

I don’t even really like Heroes. I think it’s kind of like some terrible cross of Escape To Witch Mountain and Mean Girls.

Why are you watching this, my mother asked me. She peered at the screen with the burning city.

I’m trying to understand why people like it, I told her.

It seems like it goes on forever, she said.

It’s because they’re running the episodes back to back, I said. But you’re right.

WE COME TO CONQUER, read the t-shirt in front of me Tuesday as I stood in line to board my morning Jetblue flight to San Francisco. I was tired, though, and had a moment of what I call Freudian reading, and read it as, WELCOME TO CONQUER, and thought, Oh, funny shirt, and then watched as the words reformed in front of my eyes.

The night previous I’d had almost no sleep, after first a beautiful meal at Mary’s Fish Camp in the West Village (heirloom tomato salad, grilled 1 and a half pound lobster, glass of white bordeaux. It was a small perfect moment that I’d been after for a while, and I sat, ate and balanced my legal pad on my knees as I wrote out a rough draft for a chapter idea that had come to me as I was packing to leave. Afterward, I met my old friend Joe out for a drink at the garishly redone Paris Commune restaurant, surrounded by hideous drawings of Moulin Rouge dancers that looked like those old Sears pattern catalogue drawings. 

At 1AM, I drove out to Jamaica, to the Days Inn JFK, slept a bleary five hours in a sort of clean room off the hotel lobby, and left on a morning flight.

Now I’m in a suite at the top of the W Hotel in San Francisco, a guest of an old friend from college. In the mirror behind me I can see the cloud-lined mountains. Ghosts of how the neighborhood used to be when I lived here in 1990 are almost mute, except for a moment ago, when I walked up to shop the strings of new stores on Kearny and Post, and heard drums. I thought it was the Radical Faeries, and remembered protesting the first Gulf War down near here in the 80’s. But it was a high school drum corps, and I don’t know what they were doing or why.

In general on this trip so far, I feel a little of a disconnect as things that were once familiar enter new combinations: being in San Mateo with my sister and her family on Wednesday, for example, at their new house, all their furniture in new surroundings made everything look new, even though I’d seen all of it for years. And my old college friends, in this suite, also. Last night I sat with a hundred polaroids of parties from 20 years ago, and watched my old look go by.

I’d forgotten how much I’d committed to looking like James Dean.

Last night here at MacDowell, we sat around making Simpson’s avatars of ourselves. While talking about incredibly deep things, of course. Here’s mine:MacDowell word count to date: 9,862

I’m writing this alone in the MacDowell Colony Hall, in the early afternoon, after enjoying a peanutbutter and honey sandwich. There’s a beautiful light wind steady outside, making the branches move and keeping the day cool. I admit to being worried a little about the lack of air conditioning, but I forgot about how the forest would keep us cool, despite the 90 degree temperatures. I drove here Friday with my hands hurting from Anna Karenina the whole way, and have been working on the second novel and reading Chekhov’s short novels and of course, more Anna Karenina. There’s a lovely Russian composer here, named Yevgeny Charlat, who explained to me why Chopin’s mazurkas are not like any other mazurkas, and Nami Mun, my favorite new writer, who blew me away with her work when I met her the year before last at the University of Michigan, on a job search visit. She was a student there and now she’s graduated and is finishing her story collection, here and then at Norton’s Island and then at Yaddo over this summer. I don’t ask how it’s going when I see her, but it’s exciting, because when she’s done I’ll get to read the other stories.

Which, is part of the fun here. Also the live readings after dinner from the day’s Mary Worth comic strip in the paper. I’ve been told I might be asked to be Bruce when the current Bruce leaves.

I’ve stopped answering the ‘what is it about’ question with the book as I meet the other colonists, and people take it pretty well. I do really think answering that question obscures your ability to perceive the answer, which, really, is the book itself–whatever answer you come up with feels like a weird lie afterward, no matter how close to the truth you got, and with that lie, you lose your ability to trust your relationship to the book, gradually. And then you have to get it back. Writers are often accused of being superstitious for not answering the question by people who are a little wrong to be indignant at a refusal.

I spent a lot of time this last year undoing that and the excitement for me is back as I drive down the long narrow dirt road to my cabin here.

I’m up in the north of the property, in the cabin I had before, in November 2005. The last residency I had here was good, but I made the mistake of letting my partner of the time keep me on the phone too much, and it left me drained and feeling half here and half there. Be away, my friend Nathan said to me, when I complained about it, and I didn’t follow his advice but it runs through my head now at odd times while here. I have to call him and let him say I told you so.

The difference is pretty great. I happily spend hours reading in Colony Hall at night on the big sofas, or in my room. My next love is going to have to be pretty self-sufficient, because I won’t go back to how it was.

A new friend here, Tayari Jones, has her colony word count going on her blog, and here’s where I try it out.

Colony word count to date: 2842

Reading Anna Karenina at the beach will hurt your hands, if you are on your back, holding it over your face for hours.

It’s good to be back in Maine. I’m a little sandy as I write this, in the Biddeford-Saco Public Library, near the house where I’m staying with my family up in Maine.

The format on this post may look funny for a day or so as I left my computer’s power cords (the regular and the spare) at home and the HTML codes I use to edit this site are on my stickies, inside my temporarily dead MacBook Pro. I discovered there’s no Apple Store in Maine, which proves what I always say about how being from this state is like growing up in the US 35 years behind everyone else. I think it’s good, though, because it was a better country then, in 1972, despite what was happening.

The house is a rental, with two upstairs porches, a short walk from the market and the store, and I’m here with my brother and sister and their families. It’s a busy time here because Putin is visiting the President at his house nearby and the towns around it, including this one, are full of people anyway, but also protesters and reporters. We did see the president staging a photo op while fishing a few days ago, his boat up close to the shore. My sister asked if my 4-year-old nephew, her son, wanted to get closer to see him, and my nephew said, No, he’s not a very good president, so no. Last night we sat and watched a little television as the sun went down and it was odd, to have a screen next to a picture window of a stunning view of the marsh and the sunset. It made television look just about as crappy as it really is. We were watching Monsters, Inc. on the Disney Channel and this strange skinny teenager came on and sang in a way that was supposed to be like Kelly Clarkson, but she was dressed like Britney Spears from the very old days. It was a sort of info-mercial music video for their teen fare, and a little frightening. It made me uneasy for her. I wished I could wash the make-up off her face and have her there in Maine with us, give her a lobster roll and let her eat a little.

Anyway, enjoy your holiday however you do. I’ll be in the house with my nephew, who, like myself, doesn’t like the fireworks.

It’s a rainy afternoon in Washington, DC. I’m in the downstairs cafe of Politics & Prose, conveniently near my sister’s house in Chevy Chase, where I’m helping her move. I’ve been watching as people come in, order, turn around and then in amazement see that the entire cafe is full. At which point, instead of saying, Oh God, I’m so dumb, they become vaguely angry, as if we all snuck in here while their backs were turned and sat down in all of the chairs.

I’ve always said that the small things are indicative of the big things, and so far, the pattern here in DC is people so focused on what they are sure is true (that there is room for them) that they don’t check to see whether it is true, or, in this case, not.

They do seem to take it personally.

The majority of people in the chairs are on Apple computers and there is vicious positioning for outlets. The people who are coming in and ordering without looking are not with computers. They appear to be just ordinary if amazingly helpless cafe-goers. I’m just hoping they keep going upstairs, reading and buying books, and perhaps soon they too will be able to walk into a room and figure out if there’s any place to sit, instead of just assuming the place is there.