i.

This is not an instance of communication breakdown but an example of wounded pride. I am the type of vengeful, petty wraith who is at her most compelling when she’s scorned, a shiny new convert to the scorched earth policy. You think that the act of writing is an easy, thoughtless pastime, a hobby that does not require the fried mechanics of an exhausted, Möbius strip imagination and fraying patience. You think that the act of writing is an exercise in the ego’s masturbatory need for proof of life, the unquenchable hunger for outside validation. You think that the act of writing is a symptom of a space-bound dreamer, that the process of reading and comprehending literature in order to form a cultural dialogue is as fruitless as shouting in an empty, padded room.

You fail to realize that I am writing for my life.

It happened again.

I was moving along in my happy little life as a writer and teacher of Creative Nonfiction (CNF), keeping a healthy distance from the writers and teachers of Fiction (F), staying on my side while they stayed on theirs, when seepage occurred. A writer of CNF spilled over to the F side without telling anyone. Or was she a writer of F who infiltrated the CNF side surreptitiously? It’s so hard to tell these days. But I knew one thing for sure: the border had been breached.

So I’m at the gym and one of the TVs is tuned to Fox News, which I choose to watch because the other options are all reality TV shows about the hardships of blandly pretty rich white women, and at least the blandly pretty rich white people on Fox have the theoretical potential to talk about something important, and anyway I don’t need to justify this part of the decision. It was on. I was watching it.

I know you have one. I do. I can feel the connectivity like string theory stretched across universes. And I appreciate your efforts to further my vagina’s creative mind-body pathways and how you’ve helped usher many vaginas to the top floors of corporate America. I get it. I do. But please. Please. Stop speaking for my vagina as if your vagina and my vagina are friends. Our vaginas have not met. They do not know each other at all and it’s a little bit creepy.

You remind me of high school and the girl who ran for class president with all her ribbons and buttons and then won class president and spent the entire year lobbying for vegetarian selections in the cafeteria. Most of our class didn’t give a shit about vegetarian selections. We wanted better pizza with better pepperoni. We wanted new soccer balls. We wanted to keep our arts program that was losing state funding, but this girl just kept on yammering about vegetarian selections, when everyone knew she ate McDonald’s cheeseburgers on the weekends.

I grew up sailing on the Hudson with my father, in a fourteen-foot sloop he built himself. If you launch on the Rockland County side, just North of the Tappan Zee Bridge, there are two distinctive landmarks on the Westchester shore: Sing Sing Prison and the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant.

A month or so ago, I got a Facebook friend request from someone named Dan Zevin.  I’d never heard of him before, and we did not seem to have many friends in common.  But since I view my Facebook page as the 10-watt red lightbulb in a vast virtual De Wallen in whose dim scarlet glow I shamelessly pimp my  wares—and since Dan appeared to be a “Daddy Lit” writer and not a pedophile—I accepted his request, and promptly forgot all about him.

Some time later, this message appeared in my Facebook inbox:

BACKGROUND: 750 feet in the air, on the top floor of One Atlantic Center in Midtown Atlanta for Alston and Byrd, LLP’s hosting of the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation Winetasting and Silent Auction fundraiser. The Judge stood about five-foot-six to my six feet. His wine sloshed in its glass, his caviar-smeared cracker half-bitten. I had two martinis before any wine, and nothing to eat.

I wish the magazine Parenting would just go the full shot and rename itself Mothering; it’s never too late to be honest.

It’s a magazine by women, about women, and for women, with only a few obligatory Man Ghettos, a page or two on which fathers rear their dense and uncomprehending heads. I won’t bore you with comparative page counts or (follow the money!) an analysis of the advertising: more tampons than pickup trucks (and the latter at least can be gender neutral).

Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was a carminative, carnival-hating carnivore with a voracious appetite for plump pluralists speaking in the persnickety pluperfect; and was constantly being busted for driving drunk with an expired poetic license.

Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was a highly intoxicated, contumacious succubus; a mealy-mouthed, heavily medicated, nitrous-huffing hitman that couldn’t shoot his way out of a greasy paperbag.

Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was a snide, snafu-loving, crappy lapidary, whose drooling dreams of overly depressed dromedaries were more painful than a demonstrative dreadnought in your noggin.

Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was a double-crossing, conniption-throwing con artist that was once busted for keeping an arsenal of saccharine, Silly String, and sodium nitrate in a mountain cabin once owned by the Unabomber.

Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was a sarcastic, hotel towel-stealing, hangover artist; a hanky-panky practicing, skank-loving, loopy & loquacious Wall Street banker whose soul was an all-night crematorium for creativity & coincidences.

Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was a defrocked and dehydrated follower of zymurgy and zombie logic; a bowlegged & brainwashed, jukebox-bashing bondsman, highly skilled in the ju jitsu of junkfood.

Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was a Viagra-popping, far-from-demulcent denominator for the fraction of fractured faith healers; a hernia in the body of hope; a hemorrhoid on the ass of ardency; and a total cheater when it comes to Parcheesi.

Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was a somnambulant, shrink-wrapped & wilted vibrator for the sex life of lethargy; a tantrum-throwing, Mother Theresa-hating headbanger whose great hubris & halitosis were far more unnerving than being tailgated by a time bomb.

Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was a fainthearted & hypersensitive sesquipedalian; a distraught & divisive virologist whose life was a facsimile of a facsimile of a poorly written simile.

Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was a cholera-ridden, mosquito-bitten polysyllable basher; a party-crashing conduit for slobbering dromedaries and fractured fairy tales full of false endings and wishes that never come true.

Happy a happy holiday season anyway, y’all!

I received an interesting criticism of my book today, posted by way of a comment on my blog.

I have to say, the picture on the back of your book perfectly sums up my general opinion of you, David.

You appear to be in some kind of Halloween costume. Jack Kerouac, I presume. How clever.

First off, you are “hitchhiking” on a dirt trail. Who are you expecting to pick you up? Completed (sic) staged. Buttoned down white shirt. Bright, clean and white. Wow, you must’ve been really living “On The Road,” right? Fake. I heard all the Beats traveled with cameras, backpacks, and briefcases. Oh, and over-sized aviator sunglasses of course. Funny, appears to be a bit overcast day in your photo. Sensitive eyes?

My guess is this is a bad photo op from some vacation you took. Painfully-staged “evidence” of hitchhiking abroad, living free, being on the road… Some half-witted attempt to feel like your (sic) walking in the path of your idols. Those you try so hard to imitate.

As I said, this photo sums you up. Fake, staged, phony. You remind of me a bad cover band. Desperately imitating true artists in an attempt to bask in their second-hand glory. Regurgitating their revelations with the depth of a kiddy pool. Putting on a bad costume and shouting “Yeah, me too!”

Quit jerking off drunk to faded pictures of Hunter, Jack, and Allen. You’re only making a fool of yourself.

To the first charge – of using a photo that was clearly staged – I plead guilty, your honour, but request leniency. Name one author whose author photo was taken without his or her knowledge. Unless I trawled Facebook for some drunken KTV shot taken by a friend, in which I was prominently tagged, I’d be unlikely to find a single photo that I didn’t authorize. Additionally, by actually agreeing to have the photo placed on the cover of the book, I’d surely be an accessory after the fact.

I spent a recent Saturday in Asbury Park with my 16 year old daughter, for the middle day of All Tomorrow’s Parties “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” It was a bizarre experience in tightly controlled transgression. This doesn’t really fit neatly under the rubric of these-kids-today-their-music-is-just-noise; there were just as many graybeards on stage as well as in the audience; the contest for who wore the funniest costume was fierce and thoroughly intergenerational.

Easy to get stuck between “how did your parents let you leave the house dressed like that?” and “do your kids know you’re stealing their clothes?”

It often felt like there were just as many security people—from police in various flavors of street and combat gear to venue guardians to private operators—as there were festival goers. East Berlin didn’t have this many checkpoints—and the authorities there fretted rather less about beer.

Forgive me if I can’t find the right tag for most of the music. Fill in obligatory cliché about the rattling of internal organs here ____________. And I’ll no more than gesture in the direction of mocking dumpy or wrinkled musicians in their fifties and sixties doing a simulation of the spazzing out that made them famous on stage when Jimmy Carter was president. People in my age bracket shouldn’t throw stones; we’re too brittle ourselves.

I’ll just say that a lot of the music was meant to be played on bad sound systems in abandoned warehouses, in which you could dance for six or eight hours at a time to the rhythm of your recreational substance of choice, until the sounds of helicopters (either in the sky above or in your head) became too loud and you had to run for it.

It’s not the perfect fit for an auditorium in which pimply twenty-somethings wearing yellow security t-shirts jostle through the crowd to yell politely in your ear, “Sir! I’m afraid I have to ask you to step back from the stage!”

The crowds were obedient to the point of standing up and attempting energetic movement when instructed to do so by the musicians: rebellion on command! But you could as easily dance in a two-seat commuter plane. So people pogoed, twitched, and head banged, periodically puttin’ their hands in the air! in a way that had to make anyone who has seen video of Nazi rallies just a little queasy.

There was a bonfire on the beach that night—speaking of rallies—but it was tended by professionals, surrounded by a fifteen foot buffer zone, and encircled by benches, chaise lounges, and tiki torches. No alcohol permitted on the beach, of course. Burn baby. . . oh never mind.

Things started on time and ended on time and people paid strict attention to rule #3 in the festival program: Please refrain from being an asshole.

Well, as long as they asked nicely. . .

Chaos is over-rated, violence flat out sucks, you get nostalgic about mayhem chiefly when it’s pretty far back in your rearview mirror—and the surgeons have confirmed that the loss of vision in your right eye will be fairly minimal.

But it’s an odd sight to see a middle aged man rage on stage, violently knocking the mike stand over, only to have it returned to place a minute later by a stagehand. After the third time, it’s kind of like watching some weird inversion in which the baby keeps giving Grampa back his rattle just to see it thrown to the ground yet again. You feel for the kid, but a job’s a job; you’re really embarrassed for Grampa.

A lot of this music has gone from Raging Against the Machine to Oiling and Tending the Machine so we can use it again next year. Some of this is commerce, some of it is who we seem to be post-9/11.

Welcome to Kettle America. Please refrain from being an asshole.

Dear Friends and Readers:

As some of you know, I’ve published three novels in the last ten years and while every story has attacked disparate and challenging subject matter, and each book was written in a dramatically different style from the last, I have struggled with a common and recurring problem that I am now going to attempt to neutralize, nullify, expunge, annihilate and liquidate once and for all.

My neighbor loves his chain saw. Every day during the summer and fall months at precisely 1:40, he fires it up and goes to town on his acre lot filled with trees. It’s like the rising and setting of the sun – you can set your watch to it. For the next couple of hours, he works his forest with short, sporadic, Turrets-like bursts.

Damn you, tree.

Damn you to hell, branch.

Eat shit and die, oh siskin of the lofty pine.

The fact that there are any trees left at all on his lot is a miracle in and of itself. I don’t know if it speaks more to the persistence of the forest or a sacrifice of function over form, but he has a ways to go. I have seen him at work, though, smoothly following through with his undercuts and back cuts. His technique is impressive. The remaining forest will not last long.

If the zombie apocalypse comes, he will be well equipped to deal with the impending doom. Zombies move slowly so he can afford to take his time with the short, sporadic burst method he has perfected so well. Also, if he slips up with his timing and accidentally gets bitten or infected by one and becomes a zombie himself, he has a chainsaw. With his well-honed plunge cut skills, he could quickly advance in the zombie ranks. He could be a zombie king.

But I’ll have trees.

When I began telling people that I was pregnant, people said ominous things like, “Your life will never be the same again,” and “This will change you forever.”  Others (generally parents themselves) took to more back-handedly complimentary, self-satisfied sentiments like “This will make you a better person!”  Or “You’ll find that pregnancy and parenthood are humbling experiences.”

(Wait.  Did you just call yourself a good, humble person for having had kids? I think you did. No. Really. I’m pretty sure you did.)

I think the ominous sentiments are probably inescapably, terrifyingly true. I think the smug sentiments are probably just there to warn me that some of my friends and acquaintances are smug.

Physically, I have escaped relatively unscathed.  No serious complications and so far free and clear of the more common, inconvenient, and uncomfortable but generally harmless physical complaints as well.  No nausea, no frequent headaches, no stretch marks, and no sign of the dreaded FATs, thank you very much.  Fiber, fiber, fiber.

Pregnancy is a fuckin’ breeze.

Or not exactly.  Not the part where I go considerably more insane and become an entirely different person, both in fact and in the perceptions of others.

I’ve quit enjoying music.  And the internet, for some reason.

The only straight man in my office has started treating me differently, cloyingly; he is less trustful of my opinions, less heedful of my warnings and advice.  He pushes back at me where I’m pretty sure, prior to my pregnancy, he found me intimidating and accepted that I was the expert on matters related to my job.

He is seemingly confused about whether the baby is in my uterus or in my brain.  About whether I am  expecting a child or I am the child.

It doesn’t help  that, as Tawni Freeland observed elsewhere, most maternity clothes look like oversized baby clothes themselves.  Lots of ruffles and lace and empire waists and baby-doll lines and floral patterns.  An overwhelming cutesy-feminine-preciousness that is simply not befitting of the fearsome creature I can be.

I’m the she-goat.  I AM YANG.

I AM SETH I AM KALI I AM CHAOS I AM THE COLD AND THE DARKNESS AND I AM HAVING TROUBLE REACHING MY TOES COULD YOU TIE MY SHOES FOR ME PLEASE WHENEVER I BEND OVER I FART AND ALMOST PASS OUT.

You can totally run, and you can probably totally hide, too, since I barely even fit in a restaurant booth these days. Pretty much anywhere you go, if it’s at a pace faster than “shuffle,” I won’t catch you.

I do my best not to wear shirts actually made for pregnant people unless I am entering a situation in which I think it is somehow to my advantage to be perceived, potentially exclusively, as the cute and helpless pregnant girl.  That or a disabled person.  This is not to say there is never such a situation.  But it needs to be strategic decision, not one made for me by the dearth of sane fashion options in maternity sections of the Twin Cities metropolitan area.

A friend of mine related to me that her husband had enjoyed her being pregnant because it seemed to “even out” her temperament.

In my case, my own father said to me today:  “You were mercurial, at best, to begin with; throw this in the mix and…well…It’s okay.  It will be okay.  It will be over soon.”

Thanks, Dad.

But he’s right.  My stubbornness has become inflexibility, my stoicism, iciness.  My frankness has become tactlessness, my willfulness has become belligerence, and my driving, for some reason, has gotten really, really aggressive.

I am largely free of misgivings.  About anything. My will is a juggernaut.  My resolve a bunker.  When I say “I don’t give a shit,” I am startled to realize how sincerely I mean it.  My single-mindedness is staggering, and the power and control people are granting me now fill me with a terrible, addictive euphoria I can’t quite describe.

Makes me feel, maybe, just a little, like a god.

It’s probably not good for people to just do what I say like that.  But if they don’t, I lose my shit.

Standing there in my preppy, pretty khakis and ruffled seersucker blouse, skin glowing, smelling of rose lotion and clean laundry, belly swollen with the miracle of new life, fists coming down hard on top of the washing machine, my makeshift pulpit, my eyes wide enough to look like the balls may just explode from their sockets:

“THIS ISN’T ABOUT YOU OR HOW YOU FEEL OR ME BEING OUT TO GET YOU OR WHATEVER THE HELL YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!  I JUST WANT IT DONE!  DO YOU GET IT?  DONE!!!  THIS ISN’T PERSONAL AND I DON’T GIVE A SHIT HOW! MAKE IT BE DONE!!!!”

A bunker in an lacy empire waist.  A missile silo with pink siding, a window box, and a picket fence.  Venus flytrap.

Sorry baby, but your soft blond mama is a loaded gun.

It’s all so incongruous.  Me.  Pregnancy.  Me. Femininty.  Me.  Nurturing vessel.

I struggle to salvage my Self.

I knew this would happen.

Part of this is hormones, I suppose.  But part of it is an adverse or compensatory reaction to being treated–suddenly–differently.  A reaction to people, even my own father, reaching out to touch my stomach without asking.  People seem to think there is no longer any reason to be afraid.  As a result, something in me is compelled to take up wanton displays of my capacity for sheer, unapologetic force.  To show that I can marshal the peculiar attributes of this “mellowing” condition to make myself even more awesome and terrible.

To show them that “for the better” is relative.  Better at what?  Throwing the viciously crazy quotient of any given situation totally off the charts?

Pregzilla.

Everyone be cool, this is a pregnancy.

Any of you pricks move and I’ll execute every motherfucking last one of you.

My dad spoke to me in baby-talk not long ago.  He said “My wittle girl is having a wittle girl!”  Mere weeks later, having forgotten he said it to me, he tried to tell me my mother said it to him about me.  Maybe she did.  Maybe people go around calling me a “wittle girl” to each other now.  Maybe he just wanted an excuse to say it again.

No one in their right mind would speak to unpregnant Me in baby talk. They would have to have a death wish.  No one should ever speak to any woman in baby talk unless she is actually a baby.

Later he said, “How’s it goin’, Mommy?”

That one I couldn’t let go.

“NO! GodDAMNIT! You don’t do that! Grown men don’t get to call me Mommy!”

This startled him.  My dear old dad is as sweet and lovable and generous and kind and well-intentioned as they come.  But I have grown up a tomboy, his only son, and I was not about to let him infantilize and hyper-feminize me.

My mother frowned at this.  He is approaching 70.  I am his daughter.  I have a daughterly obligation to allow him, in his dotage, to reduce me to an infant.  I am obligated to humor a cooing, high-pitched sentimentality that casts me as the lynch pin of a million-times recycled and fairly sexist Hallmark moment.

Well fuck that.

Mom can frown all she wants.

She knows better.  I’m her daughter.

An unexpected boon to my new-found dispassionate and largely unbending relationship style:  Like a lot of humans, the dog has become incredibly obedient.

Some archetypal energies, I’m tempted to believe, are universal.  Even across species.

I wonder if the birth of my child will cause setbacks in her training.  That is, I mean, if my temperament ever evens out.  If I am ever sane-ish again, I wonder if she will stop respecting me.

I think about her constantly.  Worry about whether or not she’s feeling fulfilled in her essential doggy-ness.  I bawl inconsolably at ASPCA commercials.  The little puppies with crusty eyes and no one who cares enough to wipe the boogers away.

You could show me a thousand videos of human children with distended bellies covered in flies, and I would not react with such abject sorrow and soul-clutching existential despair as I do to one 3-second shot of a dog with matted fur shaking in fear.

My fixation on dogs has been clear and curious.  It is basically harmless, so I’ve felt no need to stifle it.

It’s not unusual, I guess, for pregnant women to develop these kinds of fixations.  I was prone to fixation anyway, so it only stands to reason that this tendency, too, would be amplified.

It’s just that now my fixations are even less interesting to other people than the ones I used to get.

My husband appears slightly concerned that I love the dog more than I love him lately, and I very well might.

I suspect it is some primordial urge driving me towards the most vulnerable, needy thing in my home, commanding me to provide for it, instruct it, protect it, stroke its head, value it above all else.

At all costs, if need be.

Do not fuck with my dog.  Do not say mean things about my dog.  Praise my dog and her incredible good looks constantly.  As far as I’m concerned, compared to my dog, your dog and everyone you know sucks, including all your children, Mozart, and baby Jesus.  So just watch it.

It will be interesting to see what happens when my attention and concern are forcibly split between an infant human and my irrationally beloved Sydney dog.

I expect to feel a great deal of guilt and anxiety, no matter what.

The only other question that remains is whether I should continue trying to fight it or stop kidding myself and just let go.  Just go Full Lunatic right from the outset.  Revel in it.  Roll around in it.  Maybe if I let go, stopped fighting, I would become less, not more, crazy.

But, probably, I would just be different crazy.  Crazy like all those other parents I know, running around bragging about the humbling power of parenthood without even the slightest sense of irony.

I already have plans for a Christmas card that involve, potentially, putting clothing on my dog.

Maybe I’ll get one of those strollers for twins.  Buy matching bonnets, cut ear holes in one of them.

Change?  Yes.

Amelioration?

Let’s just say some small shred enough of Me remains to  have some very, very serious doubts.

I am sick of the fucking internet. I’m not supposed to say this because I am a child of technology. When I was 12, my big brother got us on AOL. He was in a chat room for fans of the Allman Brothers Band and introduced me to all these people. As they all said hi to me, I felt shivers running up and down my spine. I was so excited I couldn’t stop moving.

Chat rooms felt like a dark closet full of strangers, outrageously intimate. I liked to engage in religious debates the most. I also wanted a boyfriend but found teen chat rooms annoying. I would stay home when the neighborhood kids went out to play because I didn’t like them and preferred to talk to strangers on the internet. I mailed my cheer-leading pictures to a boy in New Orleans who may or may not have been a real person.

I hang out with real geeks because I wish I was one of them. I am uncool in the non-hipster way of being uncool. As in, I’m too awkward to get along with normal people but I don’t know any programming languages. I taught myself HTML once upon a time and thought I was pretty badass, but I couldn’t stay afloat once CSS came on the scene. I know how to crimp a Cat 5 cable, and I can put together a PC. I married my husband because I thought it was hot when he wrote code.

Every now and then I get this need to be well informed about the world, and I go on a news binge. Last week, it was a combination of Norway, Lulzsec, the debt ceiling and Google News Badges. Those badges don’t update properly. The thing says I read 5 articles about Norway, so I started reading a lot of articles on different topics. Then I read like 20 on Anonymous, but it wouldn’t update. I have a bronze Norway badge. I am disappoint.

Although it damn near made me kill myself over the weekend (only a slight exaggeration), I go back to Google News on Monday like an addict looking for inspiration. There are people out there breaking the law and pissing people off and making a difference in a way I can never do. It’s totally possible that the things they’re doing all completely wrong. I’m not convinced anyone is doing anything that’s not completely wrong.

I am a project manager. I am a rule follower. I respect authority.

Every few months, I decide I’m not really a writer. I am angry that I went to college and even more so that I went to grad school. I wish someone had told me how worthless it was. I’m not saying it wasn’t fun or that I didn’t meet lovely people and learn some stuff, but look, I discovered yoga at age 16, and I knew I wanted to teach yoga at age 17, yet I dropped that idea and went to college because that seemed like the appropriate thing to do. I am so tired of the appropriate thing.

If I had followed my instinct, I would have a career by now.

I try to tell myself this is my dharma, that karma put me here. I tell myself I’m here to learn something, and I’m working extra hard to learn it as fast as possible so I can get the fuck out of this cubicle and start doing what I wanted to do all along. Did I really need all those student loans to have this realization, karma? I am $32k in the hole for a degree I will never use.

I don’t mean to be such a downer about it. I mean, I can use a semicolon like nobody’s business, but I rarely do because most of the time it’s pretentious. I fucking love run-on sentences.

I’m tired of buying things. I hate things. I hate stuff. I hate clutter. It’s not just the laptops littering the living room but also the server racks down the hall from my bedroom, and also the ones in the basement, and the miscellaneous cables scattered around the technological wasteland that is my house. It’s also the unwashed underwear, the piles of recycling, the perpetually half done renovation projects, the stacks of unread books and magazines on the floor and dust bunnies, my god the dust bunnies. And furthermore, it’s Twitter and Facebook and Google + and Google Reader and Google News and my two blogs, one of them disused. It’s also IRC and GChat and once upon a time AIM and ICQ. It’s also Skype and Ventrillo and Stickam and Daily Booth and Youtube.

There is a BMW being born on my behalf and a loan check to prove it. I feel like a teen mom except I’m not a teenager, not a mom, and not a reality TV star, but my life does have that familiar ring of this is not really- this- this- this is not really happening…

You bet your life it is.

I am often afraid that if I said what I really thought about the world, I would be burned at the stake. Maybe I should just make peace with that. After all, this flame proof suit will not last forever. Maybe sometimes it’s better to douse yourself in gasoline and go for the fucking glory.

Maybe I should be a little less dramatic.