Weird or. . . ?

No, this post isn't about William Shatner (much), or the Loch Ness Monster or All-Bran Cereal or any of the other fine products he's pushed over nearly 80 years. I can just see him lumbering around, looking not so much like a fat octanogerianerean (or however the bleep that's spelled - 80 years old, anyway) as a fat, lumbering seventyarian. In other words, he's pretty well-preserved.

What I really want to write about are the twists and turns, the contradictions that drive writers mad. I just finished reading an article in the Huffington Post (give it a try if you haven't seen it - I'm still trying to figure out their mandate), by some writer-or-other - hell, my memory is lousy these days, but I think her name was Muffy - who in essence is saying that writers should suck it up, quit their bellyaching and get down to the nitty-gritty of sending out their manuscripts (one by one, by post, with a stamped, self-addressed envelope: "You do want your manuscript returned, don't you?" reads the withering directions on one publisher's web site), rather than bitching away on Twitter and Tweeter and Woofer and all those other sociable networks about how publishers are rotten and unfair and don't understand genius when they see it.

At the same time, feeling in much the same state myself (after sending out one too many stamped self-addressed envelopes and having them seemingly disappear), I sent a distress-call to one of my favorite writers. One of the best in the country, as far as I am concerned, with an impeccable track record of beautifully-wrought, gripping novels. I've reviewed several of them, and every time I was assigned one I thought, "ahh, I'm in for a good ride." And I was never disappointed.

This selfsame writer answered my moaning email with, in essence, this statement: I'm going through exactly the same thing. Publishers have turned me down repeatedly, and agents just aren't interested. A good, even a great track record means essentially nothing. The industry has tightened up so much, there's so much anxiety about survival that they want a "sure thing", something that will rake in as much money as possible.

I don't want to dump on publishers. They're doing business, for heaven's sake, or trying to, in a culture that is reading less and less. In no other field would there be such nasty criticism of the need to make a profit in order to survive. It's almost as bad as the head-shaking writers provoke by insisting that they want to be published. Shouldn't art be its own reward? What kind of egotist actually wants to see his work in print, or needs people to read it?

There's another factor at work here. I can only imagine how many unsolicited manuscripts every publisher (micro to macro) is constantly deluged with. Most probably aren't readable, let alone publishable. Somehow they have to pick through all this and find books, real books that might work on the shelves. Books someone might want to buy.

But at the same time, I get a feeling of a deep disconnect between the lightning communication of 2010 and the horse-and-buggy approach of the SASE and the printed-out, mailed manuscript (each setting the writer back about $12). Something ain't adding up. And success is getting more dicey with each passing year.

The whole field is. . . weird. . . or what.

I think William Shatner should investigate this, give it one of his histrionic voiceovers, one of his "hey-I'm-just-in-this-for-the-money" things. He should have some scientist slide over a giant ice field with his breath puffing out in clouds. He should show rare fossils (Shatner? - or editors who've been around too long?). Lights should flash in the sky, probably some kid with a flashlight, but never mind, that's pretty weird in itself, isn't it?

Writers have to be: tough but sensitive; not care what anyone thinks (art!!), but constantly and feverishly working to get attention; solitary (sit alone at the keykboard for hours) but sociable (get out there and mingle and work the room!). They have to be so many opposite things that it's no wonder so many of them go crazy.

Getting published is the Holy Grail, and sooooo many writers seek it, the "cuppa Christ" Indiana Jones craved. They just assume that, once they get their hands on it, everything will go smoothly from then on. (Haven't I written about all this before? Sorry. This one is really about William Shatner.) The truth is much more complicated. I don't feel so alone now, knowing that one of the foremost writers in this country is having a lot of trouble getting his books in print. But I also feel somewhat gobsmacked.

I shall have to regroup.

Like some nut, I won't quit, because this is what I do. But I have to say, this field I'm in is the strangest I've ever heard of, full of impossible twists and turns. Publishers want something original, of course. Not the usual boring stuff. At the same time, they want a sure thing, "more of the same", so that their ready-made audience will keep buying books. Harry Potter sells better than Campbell's Soup.

I don't have Twitter or Tweeter or whatever that stuff is, marking me either as a dinosaur or as someone with a whole brain who doesn't communicate in idiotic, ungrammatical fragments. (Is that why people can't get published? Do they think a novel is just a series of glued-together tweets?) So I'm hopelessly behind, and no one will ever know who I am. It took me centuries to decide to write a blog, and I don't think I have a huge fan base. I keep doing it anyway, mostly because it's pretty enjoyable and a great way to dodge my real work (which is, right now, letting publishers know that I have the best novel in 30 years tucked under my arm and will let them see it if they ask real nice.)

Oops, I said this was about William Shatner. William Shatner has written novels. Well, sort of. Someone writes them for him, just as someone eats All-Bran for him. He just provides story ideas, probably retreads of the original Trek series (which I'm watching again, and enjoying hugely - it wasn't as tacky as people say it was, and broke a lot of new ground).

I kind of like the fact that this actor was working steadily in 1966 (and '67, and '77, and '87, and. . . ), and in essence has never stopped. Self-parody doesn't bother him, and somehow or other he has mastered the art of marketing the Shatner brand. And he will probably go on until he drops.

Smart. . . or what?

**************************************************
POSTSCRIPT. These things always come on a bad day, somehow. I just got a statement from my first publisher stating the amount of royalties earned and the number of copies sold in the past year. The royalties totalled almost -$100.00 (yes, MINUS a hundred), and the number of copies sold worldwide was two.

Reviewers called the novel "a contender for the Leacock medal", its style/charm/allthatstuff comparable to Ann Marie MacDonald (an Oprah pick) and Gail Anderson-Dargatz. "Fiction at its finest". Now, do I really owe them a hundred bucks???

William Shatner Loblaws commercial

I also remember an ad he did in the '70s for Shirriff Instant Pudding with Mini-Buds, in which he tasted the pudding with a histrionic "MMMMMMMMM!!". Maybe the lowest point in his career.

Burning/bright

“In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the light, lashing his tail.” Czeslaw Milosz

“Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother…the true self is aggressive, rude, dirty, disorderly, sexual; the false self which mothers and society instruct us to assume is neat, clean, tidy, polite, content to cut a chaste rosebud with a pair of silver-plated scissors.” Jeanette Winterson

“There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.” C. G. Jung

Four's company

Unless y'all've been buried under a tree lately, you'll know all about this new "reality" show on TLC called - what the hell's it called? Oh yeah, Sister Wives. Might as well call it Bob and Carol and Alice and Alice.

See, polygamy is fun now. It's cool. It's an alternative lifestyle, like composting and recycling and community gardening. Except that it's even more rewarding (or so certain people insist).

We have this guy named Kody Brown (not his real name - heh-heh) who lives in Utah, natch, and long ago married three rather large long-haired blondes (not that he has a "type"). They insist they all married this guy before any of their children were born, but then, hey presto, thirteen of them popped out (or should I say twelve and a half - one is still in the oven). This is not so much a family as a litter, a la the Duggars, the Gosselins, and that other family, the one that popped out the quints.

What's this fascination with raising such a mess of kids, anyway? Why is it being presented as such a barrel o' fun? It must be a modern-day version of the carnival side show. And what do you know - one of them really IS called Chrissie (well, Christine), though she's a little too stout to pass for that airhead on Three's Company.

We don't use the term "bigamy" any more - it's one of those words you have to blow the dust off of. Like polygamy, it's illegal as hell in Utah, as it is everywhere else. And the Mormon church is dead-set against it. Does it ever occur to this Kody guy (and who spells it with a K?) that he's not only living in sin, but living under the constant threat of arrest? Is breaking the law really the best example to his mass of kids?

But Kody has all that covered. In interviews, he literally says things like "shucks" and "dang it", insisting with sociopathic sincerity that he's merely obeying the laws of his religion. Having three kinds of nooky to choose from is faith-based, I guess, though I find that hard to comprehend.

Never mind: these wives all smile, smile, smile, and insist that their way of living is a free choice. Incredibly, they say it's up to their kids to decide what sort of life they will lead, but this flies in the face of the entrenched fundamentalism and profound, ruthless patriarchy of "plural marriage".

But there's a "surprise" here. Not content with all that vanilla, Kody wants a little chocolate in his life (or in the bedroom - though he complains of not having any "space" of his own, poor baby. I guess his only space is in these women's vaginas.) The impending addition of a fourth wife to the harem, a slim young brunette this time, seems stage-managed, almost a stunt for the cameras: or is that why the producers agreed to make this show in the first place? Is this impending shift of family dynamics going to make for good TV (bitching, hair-pulling, rrairrrrrrw!), or will it all be a whitewash of forced smiles and sweet sisterhood?

One of the worst Mormon/polygamist sayings is "Keep Sweet", and it might as well be embroidered on a sampler on the wall of every room (and how many would that be? Each wife has her own self-contained apartment, though nobody explains where they'll stash Wife #4). The truth is, Kody, who complains all the time about how tired he is (all that crawling from room to room?), will now have four flavours to choose from every night, with his only problem being keeping his "schedule" straight. It must be nice to be able to ejaculate on cue. Meantime, these sweet sisters have to grit their teeth and wait for their turn.

They're the unpaid help in the harem, programmed from birth to obey male-imposed rules in a patriarchal culture that withholds any control over their intimate lives. Though one of the wives (which one? Damned if I know, they're all blonde/bland) insists they don't "do weird" (i. e., Mormon orgies of four people rolling around on a king-sized bed), the whole premise of the show is more cringe-worthy than that last episode of Hoarders, where the old lady's house was so fouled with cat-shit that it had to be gutted to be made inhabitable.

So why do I watch these things? There isn't much on that's watchable besides Mad Men. And I will admit I have a fascination with the bizarre. I had no idea there was such a significant polygamous subculture in the States: I thought it was the province of crackpots who lived out in the desert with fifteen wives and a shotgun.

But is this Kody guy, this smarmy long-haired creep who oozes a sense of entitlement, this lone rooster in the henhouse, any less off-putting? While the family tries to figure out where to put the new wife (maybe Kody will build a shed for her out in the back yard), I contemplate the dynamics of other polygamous cultures in which the first wife always has the upper hand, the most power in a nearly-powerless situation.

Each succeeding wife has less control, and the last one, the little sister, has practically none. She is merely a sex toy for the husband, who has grown tired of all these breeding cows mooing around the place.

OK, so how long until she gets pregnant? Stay tuned.

Those dancing feet

Gosh-damn, what do you write about on a Monday?

A Monday after a particularly choice grandmother weekend, making videos of old ads (for 7-year-old Caitlin loves watching vintage commercials for Chatty Cathy and Tiny Tears, then staging her own demented versions), plunging into cookie dough up to our elbows (or should I say "cookie DO", in keeping with the newly acceptable and even universal spelling of "donut"), and general chasing around. It was good, it was exhausting, they're home now, and I have the Mondays again.

But that's OK. Because there's always something to write about, isn't there?

If anybody follows this blog, they'll catch on to the fact that I like to probe the layers of my collection of old books like an archaelogical dig. Yellowed paperbacks are my favorite, because for some reason I seem to remember more about them, even books I read decades ago.

This one was published, gulp, thirty years ago. I couldn't believe it came out in 1979, but there it was. It has the strange title of I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can, a memoir of Valium addiction, withdrawal and "psychiatric triumph". Oh, sign me up!

It's even more interesting to note that I marked up this book plenty with marginal comments and underlines, and highlighter so old you can barely see it any more. It sort of soaked through to the other side and marks passages that aren't relevant at

all.

At the time of the Valium disaster, Barbara Gordon was a successful (read: Emmy-winning) TV documentary producer with a wonderful life. Wonderful enough to inspire this description of her marvelous live-in lover, Eric:

"Eric made love like no man I had ever known. He was strong, tender and totally uninhibited. He touched, he felt, he laughed, he talked. As I fell asleep in his arms, I silently thanked my guardian angel for all my happiness, for the richness of my life."

Right. At the same time that she's rhapsodizing about how swell everything is, she's experiencing sweating, hammering panic attacks every day that force her to swallow copious quantities of Valium. Eric's little flaws (total financial dependency, no friends at all, two mentally ill ex-wives and a child he is forbidden to see) just sort of blur by her.

And yet, even consuming an astonishing 30 milligrams of Valium a day, she is able to function so well at work that she wins national awards.

This is a curious memoir, and I was only to find out later that Gordon took huge liberties with the facts, moving events around in time and changing a lot of what she calls "details". When she goes cold turkey on the Valium, her doctor reassuring her it isn't addictive, she describes violent spasms of withdrawal:

"My scalp started to burn as if I had hot coals under my hair. Then I began to experience funny little twitches, spasms, a jerk of a leg, a flying arm, tiny tremors that soon turned into convulsions."

Still she insists she doesn't need to taper off. She wants to do this, womanfully, in one go. Eric cheers her on and feeds and supports her and listens to her endless weepy monologues about her unhappy childhood.

At first. And then. . . and then, inexplicably, things change. More to the point, Eric changes - into something unrecognizable.

This hideous metamorphasis into monsterhood happens after five years of cohabiting in apparent bliss. Barbara describes him as "nearly six feet tall, with a head of thick black hair, graying slightly at the temples, a gentle smile, a marvelous mixture of man and boy." Well, maybe this woman was more drugged-out than she thought, because (according to her book) this marvelous man-boy would soon be verbally slicing her into pieces, cutting her off from her friends, tying her to chairs and punching her in the face.

The rest of the memoir deals with Barbara's rescue, in the nick of time, by two of the dozens of wonderful friends she has (though they do seem to disappear in her times of greatest need). She ends up in a series of mental hospitals while doctors try to figure out what is wrong with her. They look right at the Valium and don't see it. Then, as now, that's the way psychiatry works.

Or doesn't work. What happens with Eric is even more disturbing: he wages a hate campaign against her, telling her friends blatant lies designed to throw them off-balance and poison them against Barbara.

Eventually she finds a wonderful, understanding therapist and spends months pouring out her childhood woes in true Freudian analytical fashion. More interestingly, she falls in love with a 25-year-old psych ward burnout with a prison record (involuntary manslaughter) from Riker's Island. My my, how this woman picks them!

All this is leading up to something I saw in a library in the early '80s: a book called Prince Valium, written by one Anton Holden. This was "the other side of Barbara Gordon's million-selling memoir", Holden's attempt to set the record straight. Instead, it ends up more twisted than ever.

Turns out Barbara's boyish boy friend "Eric" isn't a failed lawyer at all, but a film producer working in the same medium as Barbara. He's moderately successful, mainly for the Vixens in Chains kind of movies that drip creepiness. But he's smooth enough to hide his icy sociopathic core, especially from someone as infantile and utterly dependent as Barbara.

Holden insists that the dates in her memoir conflict wildly with reality, with a year passing between certain episodes instead of days. He paints himself as her would-be saviour, completely defeated by her narcissism and impossible demands. It becomes apparent pretty quickly that what this guy really wants is a piece of the action: he'd like to rake in some cash and fame of his own, while whitewashing what really happened between them.

But what really happened between them?

I wasn't there, but I can't see how a forty-year-old successful career woman could fall for a brute with a shiny surface, a man so parasitic he reduces his partner to voraciously chewing pills to deal with her anxiety: without her even knowing it. This is the thing that rattles my teeth.

Until her kindly saviour/psychologist enlightens her about it, she seems to have no idea at all that "Eric" is sucking the life out of her. He's so practiced a user, so smooth that she thinks she's happy.

I've never known a person consuming 30 milligrams of Valium a day who is happy.

Or even alive.

OK, so more is known about Valium withdrawal now, and many say it's because of Barbara Gordon's book. I won't say much more about Prince Valium now, though I may be commenting more on it later (I've just ordered a used copy. It's not hard to find, though I doubt if he broke any sales records: the book is too creepy, and loyalty to Gordon too strong).

The movie version of I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can, starring the then-hot Jill Clayburgh, drew only a tepid response, mainly because it lacked the edge and twisted, complex dynamics of the original. Liza Minnelli, whose then-husband Jack Haley Jr. once presented her with a gold-plated Valium tablet, eventually ended up in rehab.

Mother's Little Helpers weren't so innocuous, after all.

Gordon describes Valium not as a tranquilizer, but "a leveller". I'd say she got it wrong. This Eric/Anton/boy/man/incubus levelled her long before she ended up in a locked ward with a 20-something boy friend who had killed somebody. I wonder if she's still alive today (she'd be over 70); what happened with Anton Holden, if there were any legal ramifications; if her subsequent books made any money. One of them, Jennifer Fever, was about relationships between older men and younger women. Might as well title it, The Sky is Blue.

Contrary to what most people seem to think, the Valium didn't screw up Barbara Gordon's life. Going off the Valium didn't screw up Barbara Gordon's life. Not even Eric did. It was her own bad choices. Even addicts choose the poisons they put into themselves, and only they can choose to stop.

And nasty, brutish partners don't fall from the sky.

And now, for something. . .

It's only Thursday, but surely the weekend is at hand (?). Until then, something to cheer your soul. I love these: I'm watching the old Trek series again (this comes around every 5 years or so), perhaps prompted by the extremely hokey Weird or What? series on History Channel, starring the ubiquitous William Shatner in yet another of his interminable parodies of himself. Bring it on.

STAR TREK BLOOPERS 1960`s

Shatner visiting Nimoys house (the original)

How does it feel?

I think I mentioned yesterday that I was going to sneak away to see a movie: The Town with Ben Affleck (written, produced, starring, etc. etc.). Unless you like shoot-'em-ups, extreme violence, hateful language and interminable car chases, don't go. I only went to see Jon Hamm, who was dishy as ever (but he might as well have had a sign on him saying, "Good Guy". In fact, he did wear a shirt that said FBI).

But it was afterwards, as I navigated Vancouver during the busy time, that I had my memorable (sort of) experience. Normally I dodge panhandlers, for my own safety as much as anything else. They are ubiquitous on the street, and reach out to you with baseball cap in hand and "Spare change?" on their lips. Others sit cross-legged all day behind damp slabs of cardboard with mini-histories of personal disaster written on them in black marker.

But there's another sort of public approach: people asking the time, or for directions. Usually, these requests are on the level. People simply want some information, and are generally polite and grateful for the help. I'm hopeless about directions, since I don't live in Vancouver and am one of those people who has nearly no sense of direction. But for some reason, people always seem to come up to me.

The man approached me and immediately stood closer than I would have liked, bending toward me. He was short, with stringy receding hair and nondescript clothing. The first thing he said was, "Please don't tell me you're a tourist." I told him I wasn't, but didn't live here.

He seemed to have a legitimate question about getting somewhere. He told me "as an American and a teacher, I don't know my way around here." He had a map of the downtown in his hands. I didn't feel right, but couldn't put my finger on why. I gave him my muddled explanation and said, "Please confirm this with someone else. I don't want you to end up in the wrong place."

At the beginning of this encounter, the "American teacher", a stranger in a strange land, said something about having two questions, but the second one (I was trying to get away from him by now) wasn't a question at all, but something along the lines of, "About five blocks that way, there's a Blenz Coffee, and you better stay away from it. I just had my wallet, my passport and my. . . "

You could feel a breeze from me speeding away.

Even though I was standing in the middle of the sidewalk with people flowing all around me, I was shit-scared. With his ingratiating, slightly oily manner and offputting vibes, I wondered if he was going to pull a knife on me or something. I only knew I had to scram, so I quickly inserted myself into the pedestrian flow and turned into a side street as soon as I could.

So what caused this reaction? There were several things, and I only really understood them in retrospect.

He did not have the manner of a person who had just been robbed. There was none of the anxiety and fear and anger a normal person would feel. He gave off a slippery geniality. Not only that, he didn't lead with his problem, but softened me up first with his claim of being lost, a ploy to incite sympathy.


He kept saying he was "an American and a teacher". He said it more than once, maybe even three times. Why would I have any interest in this? Maybe because teachers are, well, sort of admirable, or at least respectable/harmless. The impression he was trying for was being powerless and disoriented in a foreign country with no friendly people in it.

But he had a detailed map of the downtown in his hands! Why did he need me at all? The map was frowsy and used, with yellow highlighter all over it. Not a tourist map at all. It was a prop.

His appearance didn't match his supposedly-respectable description of himself. For one thing, he had terrible teeth. I mean, really terrible. A front tooth was missing, and the rest weren't yellow so much as brown. They weren't the teeth of an American teacher, no matter how ill-paid.

I was both proud of myself for escaping the scam so quickly, and ashamed that I let him take me that far. I've heard the stolen wallet/new in town/hungry children thing before, and my radar is usually good enough to spot the swindle. (If you steer them towards the Salvation Army hostel or other resources, they look offended and walk away. My daughter used to try to give them McDonald's coupons, but usually they didn't want them.)

No doubt this guy would have hit on the next available person, asking for "directions" and hoping for an "oh, that's terrible! Let me give you $20.00 to tide you over" sort of thing. Or, better yet, a trip to the ATM to take out some serious money.

I don't know if this guy was armed, or just creepy. Maybe it was the violent Ben Affleck movie that freaked me out, I don't know. But the thing that really gave him away was the black hole behind his falsely ingratiating smile. The vacuum. Street people all seem to have this. It's a sucking void that pulls in anything that isn't tied down. Endless, voracious, insatiable need.

We're supposed to support the homeless, right? But what about blatant panhandlers with phony stories of being ripped off? If we "support" them, we'll end up even more ripped off, and being ashamed that we fell for it. In other words, abused twice.

My husband has a practical, if imperfect solution. "Support the institutions that help such people. Don't get out your wallet, it'll only go on drugs."

As I sped away in the crowd, I couldn't help but remember Dylan's mystery tramp, "the vacuum of his eyes". A void where there should be a conscience. And a human being without a conscience is the scariest thing in the world.

I have a little shadow

Both my parents were twins. Does that make me a quadruple, I wonder? Though the twin gene has been lurking around in my family history for generations, it hasn't expressed itself in a while. It may well be lying in wait. Grandgirls, beware.

Writers endlessly agonize (OK, this writer endlessly agonizes) about their relationship to their work. Is it a calling, vocation, burden, endless battle, or what? When I try to tell people what I do, it's awkward. I've had every reaction from "nice hobby, but what do you do?" to "yeah, right" to "what did you say?". A few exclaim, "Ohhhhhhhhhh! How wonderful!", as if I work magic, and assuming I have J. K. Rowling's income.

It's not a proper thing to do, at all, and yet so many people seem to want to do it.

I can't remember a time when I didn't write, when I didn't have this shadow dragging after me - or, more accurately, casting cold darkness just ahead of me, chilling my path. Somebody inside has drawn the shades, it seems, and I don't know why.

Is there joy in what I do? That's almost like asking if sex is enjoyable. Well, yes. . . and no. Sex gives us the best and the worst experiences of life, and it's both blessing and burden, something we really can't escape. It masquerades as grotesque whoredom in the culture, and still splashes buckets of guilt on women (and Catholics - sorry, this is just what I see).

Yes, and lousy, schlocky, tawdry memoirs and cheap formula-driven fiction sell like mad, whereas. . . "other" books disappear in six months.

So what is my relationship to my work? (I'm running out of time here, as I want to go see that new Ben Affleck movie co-starring Jon Hamm, who is one of the reasons I go on living). I am beginning to see it as my twin. I've never had a twin, and envy those who do. Identical siblings share the mysterious bond of having hatched out of the same egg. Much of their genetic material is exactly alike, and studies of identical twins separated at birth yield astonishing results: both siblings marrying on the same day, marrying spouses with the same name or profession, owning the same kind of dog (with the same name), having the same address in different towns, and so on.

I don't have such a twin, and my relationship with my siblings long ago devolved into some sort of horror designed to do as much damage to me as possible. I put up with this abuse for so long that I can't keep quiet about it now.

I have this silent twin, except that she's very noisy and won't stop babbling Truth and stuff like that. It's tiresome sometimes, and other times exhilarating. I'm stuck with it, for sure. I can temporarily suppress her, but she pops out somewhere else. Why do I have such a negative relationship with her (or him - it could be either one)?

I brood constantly about whether or not my work will ever again see print. I write about this all the time, ad nauseam it seems. This blog was going to be about the Joys and Challenges of Writing, and instead it's a highly eccentric substitute diary, meandering from subject to subject: but descending into rant whenever the subject of my "vocation" comes up.
I've been down this road so many times, and I know I should just suck it up and be optimistic, because I know I've got the goods. I also know I have a lifelong history of being ignored.

This is when I sit with my twin, and she takes hold of my arm, and drags me back to work.

Is this my new diary?

So anyways, I'm back from holidays on a pitiless, brutal dripping Monday, Vancouver at its worst. It won't let up for a couple of days, by the looks of it. I realize with a shock that I never write in my journal any more. It just doesn't occur to me. I've been keeping a journal since I was eight. I have let go of so much in my life that used to be meaningful, so much so that I don't dare tot it all up.

So I'm left with projects that might strike others as pretty weird. I'm always wanting to make something, from Wonder Knitter dolls (no pattern for these, as usual: they evolve in my hands) to unusual installations. I had these ice-like rocks, plastic actually, used for accents or decorations, and I wanted to display them. I put them in a glass bowl and thought, ho-hum. It just didn't work for me. So what sort of container could I come up with that would be completely original?

At the same time, we were cleaning out closets and turfing out things (fall cleaning, I guess) that we didn't need or use. We found what seemed like hundreds of old cassette tapes that we never played, or couldn't play due to oxidation and age. So we had to get rid of them, but I began to look at the clear plastic cases and think, hmmmmm. . .

So I came up with these. I've since used crystal hearts in various colors, and will experiment with other things. But what's the point? I don't sell them. I'm not much of an entrepreneur (or however you spell that - it's Monday). Maybe that's why I can't sell my novel(s) and book(s) of poems. I can make the "product", but can't distribute it.

These might be seen as too odd, but the effect I'm after is: what are these things? They look familiar, and yet. . . Or, maybe people would just look at them and say, cassette tapes. How lame. I don't know. The voice of my older sister, forever undermining my creative spirit with caustic, withering remarks, still echoes in my ears: "You're weird, Margaret." "You're crazy!" (said in a shrugging, completely dismissive way. Jesus, how did I get on to this? Just how much damage did she

do?)

One reason I got turned off with my diary is that it had devolved into one big rant. The dissatisfactions in my life were being amplified, I think. I started tearing up the rants, but nothing much was left.

I have love in my life, and that's supposed to be all you need. I still feel creative. But when I presented my five-year-old granddaughter with the little 3" handmade doll I crafted, with the tiny knitted dress and beaded belt and braids, she threw it back at me. I'm not supposed to be upset, am I?

I look in the mirror, and I swear I can't see the kick-me sign. Is it invisible, but only to me?

Roughing it in the bush

I'm not much of an outdoors person, but I must say, some of my encounters on my Alberta holiday were interesting (especially the very tall Mountie). It's also very hard to catch a moose in uniform. Pretty cool.