If you write anything at all:

Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out and for no other reason.

If you write anything at all: stories, poems, lyrics, melodies, symphonies, speeches, scripts; anything at all, I beg of you to read JD Salinger’s Seymour, An Introduction.

You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it finished. I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you’d remember before you ever sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world you would most want to read if you had your heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.

 

not a book review.

I read Heroin Diaries this past week. I’ve had mixed feelings about it, best summed up in this conversation:

When it comes to how tragic some rockstars are in their personal lives, there’s a certain level of amusement, and a certain level of sick admiration (easily disguised as curiosity.) I was relieved that that’s not what Nikki Sixx was going for–I appreciated that, though I generally still resented him (and his friends) the entire time I read the book.

Judging from his diaries, I probably would have been his friend, but he most likely would have ignored all my calls. That type of thing.

Turns out JD Salinger is a regular genius when it comes to understanding people like Nikki Sixx, the rest of the Crue, their contemporaries, all musicians everywhere, and me.

Salinger says it best in this simple statement:

But young poets beware. If you want us to remember your best poems at least as fondly as we do your Racy, Colorful Lives, it might be as well to give us one good field mouse, flushed by the heart, in every stanza.

 

hip kid rock

the playlist for the afternoon, affectionately named, “hip kid rock.”

i can hear you judging me quietly for this. don’t look at me like that.

 

accessories

One of my roommates just commented to me that she liked my scarf and earrings, and I realized that both of those items were gifts, one from each of my sister-in-laws. And I thought that was pretty cute.

Thanks to Michele (and Josh) for the scarf. It’s from Paris.

And thanks to Mere for the earrings. She made them. She makes jewelry, check it out.

 

An Angel with a Switchblade.

One day, during approximately second grade, I was riding my bike home from my friend’s house. Like many little girls, I occasionally had the dreadful experience of unknowingly wrapping my shoelaces around the pedals of my bike. Never in my life have I heard of this happening to boys, but for whatever reason, almost every girl I know can tell a story of a bad fall on a bike due to shoelace wrapping gone unnoticed.

A phenomenon, perhaps. A curse, more likely.

Back to the story. One day, while riding my bike home, my shoelaces began to wrap around my bike pedals. I was riding my bike on the street, and there wasn’t a soft landing point for about another half of a block. I knew I was already past the point of no return–both feet were fully attached to my pedals. I had to decide: fall on the pavement and maintain the ability to manually untangle my shoelaces, or pedal further and magnify the tangling, but attempt to reach the grassy ditch at the end of the block for a softer landing?

I recall this entire decision making process quite vividly.

I decided to go for the ditch at the end of the block. I knew I wouldn’t be able to untangle my shoelaces without help, but it seemed better than falling on the pavement.

I barely made it to the grass.

By the time I wiped out on the grass my shoelaces were wrapped so tightly that I couldn’t even get my feet out of my shoes. I was literally fastened to my bike and completely helpless.

Luckily, I chose the ditch across the street from my friend Amber’s house. Even more luckily, she came outside while my bike and I, now a single unit, sat in the grassy ditch.

I called her over, and told her I needed her dad to come out and help me get my feet out of my shoes. Like a really good friend does, she told me her dad was busy and that he couldn’t help and went back inside. And left me there.

To die.

And then it started raining.

Of course.

By now, I was rather upset. I had been totally and completely abandoned in my time of need. I couldn’t move, and I didn’t know what to do. Plus, I had just taken a pretty bad fall. Little girls cry when they fall off bikes. Only I didn’t even have the luxury of falling off.

There I sat, alone in the rain. Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, an old beater car pulled up next to me on the street. It was a really scary looking car, and inside the car was a really scary looking man. I remember he had a lot of chains hanging from him, and looked about 40 years old. He had long hair and a long beard–he looked the part of a stereotypical biker. Leather. Chains. Tall and scary.

He stopped the car, and simply looked at me. I was instantly terrified of him. I said every prayer in the book that this man would go away, and fast. A few seconds later, my prayer was answered and he drove off.

Relief.

Now, back to the issue at hand. How am I going to get myself out of this ditch and out of the rain and how am I going to get Amber to come back outside and help and—OH NO, HERE COMES THAT BEATER CAR WITH THE SCARY MAN, AGAIN!

That’s right, he was back.

This time, he stopped his car and got out; still tall, still scary, still leathery. Then, he reached into his coat and pulled out a knife. From my perspective, the knife was a giant switchblade, about five feet long. It might as well have been a sword, because I was a little girl, and a scary man in a scary car just pulled a knife on me.

I was literally paralyzed with fear.

He walked over to me. Neither of us spoke a single word. I don’t think he even looked me in the eye. He simply bent down, and cut my shoelaces.

He put his knife back into his coat pocket, walked back to the car, and drove away.

And that was it.

I brushed myself off, and walked my bike home. I never told anyone about the man with the knife.

I went to bed that night and wondered if maybe that was an angel sent to help me.

Maybe.

 

No Things

An excerpt from Billy Collin’s “No Things”

The leafless branches against the sky
will not save anyone from the infinity of death,
nor will the sugar bowl or the sugar spoon on the table.

So why bother with the checkerboard lighthouse?
Why waste time on the sparrow,
or the wildflowers along the roadside

when we should all be alone in our rooms
throwing ourselves against the wall of life
and opposite the wall of death,

the door locked behind us
as we hurl ourselves at the question of meaning,
and the enigma of our origins?

What good is the firefly,
the droplet running along the green leaf,
or even the bar of soap spinning around the bathtub

when ultimately we are meant to be
banging away on the mystery
as hard as we can and to hell with the neighbors?

banging away on nothingness itself,
some with their foreheads,
others with the maul of sense, the raised jawbone of poetry.

Man oh man I am loving me some Billy Collins right now. I read that poem yesterday when I was at Starbucks, and I was smiling so big by the end of the poem that I actually lifted the book to my face to cover my expression, long enough so that my expression faded to a size that my hand was capable of hiding.

Later, a group of young girls assembled nearby, and in my mind I played a little game called “Cheerleaders or Small Group?” A game not too different from another favorite, “Hipster or Homeless?” I was on the line about this particular group, but then they started reading aloud from an Anne Lammot book, each taking a page to read before passing it to the person on their left.

Small Group.

It reminded me of the days I spent sitting in a similar circle of similar girls but with way more conservative material–all fond memories, regardless. We were always reading relationship type stuff, namely, “When God Writes Your Love Story.” No, I won’t get all cynical on you in light of what’s been written about me thus far. Cynical is boring and lazy. I just wanted to take you on an awkward detour to get to the next quote I read yesterday. I can’t remember if it was from Dan Allender or from Elizabeth Gilbert (an unlikely pair of people to be confused, but I read from both of their books yesterday. And if you want me to be honest, the two really aren’t that different from each other.) It’s one of those things that will drive me crazy enough to actually re-read both books, just so I can find one quote. I’ve probably re-read Catcher in the Rye a dozen times, on that basis alone. I know the quote I’m looking for is on the left-hand side of the page. And that if you broke the words up into fifths, it’d be the fourth fifth. And part of the sentence is in italics.

Point is, it told me this: it’s much better to imperfectly be yourself than to perfectly be who you aren’t.

 

An honest day’s work; the sound of your own breathing.

One may make a unique observation or suggest a creative idea, and only those who do the same know right then that it was contrived. It wasn’t necessarily contrived in the sense that they are not unique or creative, but contrived in an attempt to prove that they, in fact, are unique and creative.

A lilac trying to be conscious of its own lilac scent in order to know that it is a lilac.

A dog barking to assure itself that it is a dog.

It doesn’t make them any less of a flower or an animal that they occasionally check in, just to make sure they are the same thing that they were the last time they looked inward.

 

On Ryan Adams:

 

J.D. Salinger

To the point: I happen to know, possibly none better, that an ecstatically happy writing person is often a totally draining type to have around. Of course, the poets in this state are by far the most “difficult,” but even the prose writer similarly seized hasn’t any real choice of behavior in decent company; divine or not, a seizure’s a seizure. In the wake of anything as large and consuming as happiness, he necessarily forfeits the much smaller, but for a writer, always rather exquisite pleasure of appearing on the page serenely sitting on a fence. Worst of all, I think, he’s no longer in a position to look after the reader’s most immediate want; namely, to see the author get the hell on with this story. …but I fully intend, from time to time, to jump up personally on the reader’s back when I see something off the beaten plot line that looks exciting or interesting and worth steering toward. Speed here, God save my American hide, means nothing whatever to me. There are, however, readers who seriously require only the most restrained, most classical, and possibly deftest methods of having their attention drawn, and I suggest–as honestly as a writer can sugest this sort of thing–that they leave now, while, I can imagine, the leaving’s good and easy. I’ll probably continue to point out available exits as we move along, but I’m not sure I’ll pretend to put my heart into it again.

 

honest thieves

honest thieves are most definitely my favorite.