When one dresses largely in black and belongs to a Wiccan coven on campus, having an older boyfriend who thinks he is a vampire almost makes sense. However, when Roselyn's lover Dryden becomes an actual vampire-albeit a reticent one-and her preternatural roommate Shane is mistakenly taken hostage in her place, it is up to Roselyn to take on the cockroaches of the daemonic world without ending up on the wrong side of a pair of fangs. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/writing/dansemacabre.php 09 May 2012 00:00:00 EST http://tinyurl.com/62xyhkc 09 May 2012 00:00:00 EST  

Not one hundred feet from our front door, Amber's car's check engine light glows. We cannot possibly proceed to Salem with this looming and unspecified threat - what we days later discover to be no more than a faulty oxygen sensor, but we cannot not take the risk. We retreat, load our luggage into my car, and start out again, only to find that the GPS wishes to take us exactly the wrong way. We navigate thirty miles by logic, memory, and cell phone before the gadget rights itself.

If I were the sort to ascribe malevolence to inanimate objects - and I am, it's called "resistentialism" - I would swear something wants us close to home, not to spend a few days on the ocean. However, the time for omen-based cancellation is days passed. I am not about to pay to not go on a trip.

There lingers a sense of unreality to our drive up. We sing to the radio and listen to the first part of my Good Omens audiobook as a counterbalance, but I cannot help the sensation that something is awry. When we pull into a rest stop, I can't help feeling we are being watched, not by some predatory force, but by a curious outsider who is considering what bits of the experience so far ought to be spliced into the road trip montage.

Luckily, the trip is as uneventful as a traveler can hope for. We pull into the driveway of a barn red building that screams quaintness. As we exit, we see a white haired man, who approaches the car with curiosity and smiles. I extend my hand and greet the man I presume to be one of our inn keepers, Bob or Marcel. We knew little about the inn, but assumed from the rainbow flag on the inn's webpage that our hosts are partners in more than business. The man endures my greetings for a few moments more, his smile growing more perplexed, before he directs me to his son inside, as though it should have been the most obvious fact in the world that he is not a homosexual innkeeper.

Bob - when we find him - has an unmistakably Canadian accent, the sort that always sounds somewhere between an excited dog greeting a new friend and an apology for an unnoticed slight, which works in his favor as an innkeeper. He directs us to our quarters - a small room on the second floor, with a private porch entrance - to get settled and goes to tend to a newly arriving guest.

Amber quickly sets to work obscuring the vision of several of the colonial themed dolls that adorn the room, before we can properly blind them with our affection. I unpack sloppily, claiming swaths of the wooden floor with my bags and clothing while reading over the various rules provided to us: We mustn't use the provided television before eight in the morning or after eleven at night, and even then it must be kept very low so as to not disturb the guests. (Not, of course, that there would be much of a point as the set gets only a few channels; one does not come to a bed and breakfast in New England to watch television.) Breakfast begins promptly at eight thirty and ends at a sharp ten, after which guest are kindly invited not to bother the innkeepers with their grumbly bellies. There is complimentary water in the mini-fridge, a computer we are welcomed to use if we do not too terribly mind Windows Vista, and a coffee maker. Signs in the bathroom ask us to save the planet (read as: the inn's water bill) by refraining from requesting new towels and sheets, though I choose to believe Innkeeper Law (or the health department) insists the beds have all new linens before I can see the room. Should there be a fire, there are several obvious exits. If we fail to utilize them, we are kindly welcomed to keep our burning to death to a dull roar.

Or that.

While perusing for suggested fines or loopholes, I overhear Marcel directing the new guest to her room and suggesting some activities in town.

"Oh no," she says, "I am going to stay in my room and finish writing my book. That's why I'm here."

Instantly, my dander is up. We writers are territorial sorts and I growl to Amber speculation about what sort of book she could be writing and asking what sort of person takes to a bed and breakfast to work on a book when a secluded and dank hotel room would be far less distracting. To my paranoid writer imagination, she is intending to pen a bodice-ripper or the next Twilight and is here to steal my inspiration and make me feel guilty for my recent indolence, as one does.

"A rich one," Amber suggests to my question and I cannot deny the truth of it. This bed and breakfast, the Morning Glory, is more expensive than most others we looked at. I am not actually sure why I thought we needed a bed and breakfast when a hotel would have been perfectly serviceable - we are capable of foraging for our own breakfast - but we selected it nevertheless and uncharacteristically. All of this adds to the sense that we are perhaps meddling in a fate which was not originally ours and is being hastily tailored on the fly.

This first evening in Salem is given over to getting the lay of the land. It has been several years since either one of us has been here. Our respective memories are rusty and could do with a bit of brushing off.

We poke about the cemetery, as tourists must, noticing the unambiguously Pagan people reverently caressing the centuries old tombstones.

"Do you feel anything here?" I ask Amber as neutrally as I can manage.

She considers the air for a moment. "No... nothing more than I would in any graveyard."

"Right, exactly. Salem has become this... Mecca for Wiccans, but no witches died here. Aside from Tituba, nothing like witchcraft was practiced anywhere near here in colonial times. It was a bunch of bored Puritans who thought killing their neighbors at the behest of teenage girls was a fine, Christian form of entertainment. These weren't my people, but now Pagans gravitate here because of... of an advertising scheme based on political murders. It would be like Jews intentionally moving to Auschwitz."

"They visit. And they did die there," she says, because I have not made my point well.

"Yes, but they don't pose behind plywood cutouts of 'storybook' Jews, with peyas to their knees and hook noses. They don't have kitschy museums where tourists can watch a real live Jew conduct a Jewish ritual," I say, motioning to the nearby Witch Museum that offers both of these for witches. "My beliefs do not exist to be milked for tourist dollars."

No witches are buried here.

Amber is too polite to remind me that my beliefs apparently do exist for this reason, as I am visiting Salem and not another tourist trap because we happen to be witches.

Everywhere tourists are encouraged to go has a red line leading to it. There is a distinct feeling - nothing any local says to us, but an undeniable sensation - that it is assumed tourists have no business leaving their lines. Being a touch oppositional, I want to go to the least touristy place I know of in Salem, somewhere actually authentic.

I try to lead us to Gallow's Hill, the site of the Puritan hangings. Amber's phone will not oblige us by giving us directions, though it may be simply that we are asking it in the wrong fashion, so we instead wander in concentric and intersecting circles without finding any landmark I can recognize from my jaunt years ago.

Our lack of direction is at one point so bad that we look at a street map to find the statue of Elizabeth Montgomery portraying Samantha Stevens from "Bewitched", wander for two miles, then find ourselves back at the map. It is only then that Amber looks across the street and notices the statue, her bronze grin mocking us.

Walking the town at night, listening to the traffic and the surf, I have a pleasant sensation of rootlessness (and not simply because I delight in being lost when my salvation is no more difficult than a painted red line that will eventually place me back before my inn). It is not necessarily that I wish to live in Salem - it is a lovely, small city and I do not doubt I could - but that I do not need to live where I do. I love my family and like being near them, of course, but I do not feel my fate is in Red Hook (however often my novels find this town as the center of their gravity). I could shake loose the soil of the Hudson Valley and sun my metaphoric leaves on beaches or rooftops, so long as I am nowhere too rural or urban. So long as I have Amber lost beside me, fidgeting with her phone until it tells her where we rest our heads tonight, I think I will be home.

We wake the next morning and head down to breakfast half an hour after it had begun - we are not on a vacation to get up any earlier than is absolutely necessary. Aside from the blonde writer I overheard last night, there is a woman of comparable age with the air of a snarky librarian seated beside an older and jovial man (the sort who one cannot help but imagine has lustily told personal anecdotes about nights with Marilyn Monroe), across from a ostensibly slightly younger man in owlish black glasses, avidly discussing some minutiae of his deceased grandmother's life as though it were a recap of his favorite movie.

Best place in Salem is where she is.

Amber and I slip into chairs near the writer as Bob asks us if we would like tea, to which we nod. As he brings us individual porcelain teapots, Amber and I assess the quality of the breakfast. One of the reasons we chose this place was that the food looked amazing, in contrast to the store bought bagels and other traditional fare of the continental breakfast I remembered from the Salem Inn years ago. There are baked beans with bacon, a bread full of nuts and fruit, another cinnamon bread with chocolate chips, and yogurt and granola. I take a slice of each bread and make myself some yogurt, intent to fill up as much as possible on included before we continue our wandering.

The bespectacled man, Alan, speaks with few pauses for half an hour. He has so many details told so theatrically that I later wonder aloud to Amber what embellishments have been sewn on for the sake of the narrative. The other guests are keenly enthralled but I, not being the owner of an Italian grandmother living or dead, just analyze his stories for omitted footnotes and allusions to books I may have read. He has a new story for every question put to him, from her yards long rope of pearls with which she went to her grave, to her generous bosoms, to her disdain for the Southern Italians. He mentions, perhaps tellingly, that he has no such stories about his mother. "I know her maiden name, nothing more."

Into the second half hour, the snarky librarian, Beverly, makes mention that Alan is the curator of the House of the Seven Gables next door, where she will be speaking this evening on power dressing in the eighteenth century. Beverly is herself a curator at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC. Her vocation (or avocation, since Amber believes she overhears Beverly say this effort is voluntary) is to photograph all the lace elements in the displays and make sense of them. For me, this would be a curious tedium, but one is given the definite notion that few things are more interesting for her. Lace, she informs us, was the jewelry of its day (she uses the word "bling" several times, but there is mild disdain in her voice, as though she might simply be using it because she mistakes both Amber and my ages and level of connection to urban culture). Some lace could be worth the equivalent of three thousand dollars a sleeve and women would go out of their way to wear five or six sleeves to demonstrate their ostentatious wealth. All this time, I assume lace was just a bit of fluff at the end of shirts to look particularly fancy, but I find myself interested.

The innkeepers left it this way. How adorable are they?

Her husband, Peter, prompts her when she tries to politely demur. This prodding has the air of a dynamic to which they are quite accustomed. She patently has a frighteningly deep knowledge of a subject about which few people are even aware exists. He seems to love few things more than getting her to expound in detail, which charms me. I am all the more won over when Beverly, perhaps feeling he is boasting of her too much before strangers, explains that he happens to be one of the foremost authorities anywhere on Sherlock Holmes. If you are a lace curator, who else but a premiere Sherlockian do you take for a partner?

Eventually, the assembled breakfasters asks what Amber and I do, assuming us to be college students. I tell them that I work with adjudicated minors in a kiddy prison and am a novelist. "What sort of novels?" Sandy - the blonde writer - asks. It turns out that there couldn't be less competition between us, as she is writing a psychological parenting book, having raised a comedian, a musician, and "one who has a job".

"Contemporary fantasy," I say, adding by way of genre clarification, "Do you know Neil Gaiman?"

Beverly and Peter say that they do and I tell them that he is the one who is always two steps ahead of what I want to do. In my first novel, I created a character - Wick - who was the dour and taciturn son of the African god Anansi, as I assumed this was a sufficiently obscure god. Before We Shadows could be published, Gaiman published Anansi Boys, a novel I refrained from reading until I was well and truly done with my book, which stars the sons of Anansi. (Fortunately, our characters ended up very different, so I feel no worry that anyone would find Wick derivative.)

"We actually know Neil personally," Beverly corrects from my misapprehension. "And I have bad news. He sent us a letter, telling us that he is giving up email so that he can write more."

Of course. Of all the people in the world to which I could have divulged this, I had to mention my envy to Neil Gaiman's personal friends. And of course Neil Gaiman would be friends with a lace curator and a renowned Sherlockian.

Look! Two witches in Salem!

Upon my revelation that I am not simply an author, but a serially published one, Beverly mentions that she has a friend who collects signed books with suggestive inscriptions - "Last night was fabulous" and the like, but nothing overt - and says she will have to have me sign my books as such the next time we meet. I cannot deny smiling at the thought that my life my again intersect with those of such fabulously curious people.

There is a certain class of people who decide to fork over oodles of money for a mid-week, New England get-away at a bed and breakfast. Moneyed and rather educated would be a far assessment, and I feel like neither in their company. If one has the resources to pursue this manner of leisure, it is a far bet that one has the ability to devote oneself to such narrow fields of focus as lace and the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that one has managed to raise a comedian daughter who is getting flirtatious texts from Charlie Sheen after roasting him and is now writing a parenting manual. With infinite resources, I can't quite imagine what level of peculiarity would become my life's focus, but I would definitely publish more than a book a year.

Before Alan leaves, he invites Beverly and Peter for a private tour of the homes next door. As breakfast is being cleared, I sidle over and ask Beverly if Alan would mind terribly if I should try to invite Amber and myself along. She hardly thinks but she assures me that this should be fine.

We pack my satchel full of sandwiches, jerky, popcorn, drinks, both to defray some of the rising costs of this holiday and so as to have no need to stop our activities for lunch.

We make our way to the Salem Witch Museum, at least partly because it is the most visually striking and therefore (it is hoped) more authentic of the offerings, occupying what seems to be a decommissioned church. In the few minutes before the doors open, I try to scribble down notes of what I should be writing about the trip so far. I can tell this is all supposed to be important, but do not yet know the direction it will end up taking. Things are brewing.

When the museum workers let us in, we are treated to dummies whose vignettes light up as we hear voices overacting scenes from the witch trials. I've seen this spiel at least twice before and, even if there are changes, I wouldn't remember. The story of the witch trials is drilled into the heads of middle schoolers, so I would fill in whatever has been modified or omitted.

After this, one of the workers brings us into a room with more dummies, these meant to represent witchcraft today. It goes from a medicine woman of old, to the Wicked Witch of the West, to a couple of mannequins dressed as Neopagans. It is all overly apologetic, as though Pagans today might choose to hold a grudge against the great, great, great (many greats) grandchildren of the sole unrepentant judge. For one thing, the Burning Times in Europe were exponentially worse (supposedly in the hundreds of thousands to millions compared to Salem's sixteen). For another, the Neopagans are so embarrassingly accurate in their velour cloaks and pretension that I have a far more modern and specific grudge I do not voice owing to my embarrassment.

"Would it kill them to put the male in a business suit? We can manage to do without Hot Topic," I grouch.

"Or go in the other direction and have them be skyclad," suggests Amber.

"Exactly. Go all the way."

We realize our time is growing short before Alan's tour and dart to the Peabody-Essex Museum (being in love with an artist, I know that it is impossible to avoid going to museums if one happens to be in walking distance). The docents all but growl at me within seconds of paying admissions that I need to check my bag, meaning I will be unable to dine while surrounded by nautical art. I can't imagine what harm they think my satchel is doing, but I have neither the time nor the temperament to argue the point.

As has been chronicled, I am finicky when it comes to art. It must resemble what it is supposed to represent, and yet not be boring. Old ships rigging and model ships are not art. Teepees made of Christmas lights, the floor of which is an animal skin being projected with a student made gay porn (sensitively featuring very white people acting stereotypically Native American, because... commentary, man... whoa), is not boring but it is also not compelling or original enough to call art. There are a few exhibits I want to see in a bit more detail (some puckish looking Native American trolls, a whale skeleton made of lawn chairs, a body modification photo with beads instead of blood, a piece from a Native artist tired of being asked to participate in "spirit" events heartily telling off galleries), but we don't have enough time before we must eat and get to the House of the Seven Gables, with promises that we will run back to the museum to finish our visit afterward.

Outside the museum, we sit on landscaping boulders and break out our meal. The day is a bit too cool and I already feel this trip slipping through our fingers. I look around to try to actively take it all in, so I can remember more vividly.

A man dressed as a ghoulish clown roams the streets. No one seems to pay him any mind, underscoring the idea that he is just one of those things that happen daily in Salem. What on earth he has to do with anything is beyond me, aside from a vague "witches are suppose to be scary and clowns certainly are" vibe that gives license for there to be three haunted houses within three blocks. When he circles back, he commiserates with a bus tour guide, who himself is busily trying to chat up a Russian tourist, either to take his tour or give him her number.

Sated by our quick lunch, we arrive minutes after two and I am relieved to see that Peter and Beverly are still in the waiting room, assuring the woman behind the desk that they are Alan's guests and need no more help from her than for Alan to appear. At Alan's name, she offers them tea or coffee, as though his name is enough to frighten them into unnecessary subservience. As we wait, Beverly speaks to us about the displayed lace bobbins, which suggest that lace making was such a tedious undertaking as to cause any amount of money to be too little for me to want to take it up. She then regales us with a lace related riddle about a ten inch slip of lace collar that perplexed the Smithsonian. "Do you know what it was?" she asks, smiling at the coming punch line.

All I can think are dirty suggestions for what on the human body could be about ten inches and opt to say none of these, but instead look at Amber and hope she can come up with something less inappropriate.

"A choker!" Beverly says, to my relief.

Peter interjects some of his interest in Sherlock Holmes. Aside from a quick reading of "The Tale of the Speckled Band" to clarify a baffling play put on by the drama club at my school for the learning disabled and decades ago read of "The Hounds of the Baskervilles" ("because I heard it was the spookiest of all Doyle's stories," I tell Peter and feel cowed by my own seeming lameness), the extent of my knowledge of this literary figure falls to the general saturation of pop culture. Sherlock Holmes is one of those figures everyone knows about, but not many people bother to read. I have avidly watched the first two series of the BBC program, and try to steer the conversation in this direction so as to not display my gross ignorance of a subject about which this man is far more than conversant. He seems not to mind that I know little about Holmes in detail and I am again relieved to have not made an utter ass of myself before people I somewhat liked and respected on sight.

Peter spies a flyer the museum made for Beverly's talk that evening and is jubilant. "Your first eight-by-eleven!" he proclaims, nearly launching it into the air in his joy. "We should have this bronzed."

I give a laugh and he explains that this is eminently possibly, involving acid washes on aluminum plates, much as is done on trophies, suggesting his idea is not said merely for emphasis.

When Alan comes out, he informs us that his lateness to meet us has to do with the fact that he just put in his resignation, effective at nine tonight, after Beverly's talk. I feel awkward to have imposed myself on what has turned a bit solemn, but he does not seem to begrudge our presence. Still, my urge is to hang back and listen rather than participate as fully as Peter and Beverly, both of whom can at least claim to have a working knowledge of Hawthorne's book.

Alan explains the intentions behind every design element, a sharp contrast from the snippets of rote memorization I overhear from the tour guides. For so many of the carefully laid out rooms, he says that they had actually been closed up or full of irrelevant furniture. Hawthorne's furniture was on the property, simply left in attics rather than on display. It was his idea to recreate the rooms as mention in Hawthorne's romance House of the Seven Gables, as Hawthorne was inclined to discuss details such that a single description could take up several pages. I am taking Alan and Peter at their words about this, as the only Hawthorne I had ever bothered to read was "The Minister's Black Veil", and only then because I was teaching it.

Peter and Beverly inquire about this or that scene from the book. Amber and I follow in mute silence, intrigued but ignorant, especially when Alan implies that Herman Melville had or desired to have a more than friendly relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne. The only time I open my mouth for something more substantive than a "wow" is when I notice a card explaining that Hawthorne's wife, Sophia Peabody, burned almost all the letters he had sent her. "Why would she do this?"

"Because she was an idiot," Alan says dismissively, but then amends that it was more likely that the letters were simply not intended for eyes other than hers. I formally grant permission to future biographers to root around my old hard drives for information that will elucidate my character, so long as they judiciously ignore any porn accumulated when I was a teenager and which may lie dormant on dead hard drives.

Unable to satisfactorily thank Alan for our addition to what was meant to be a private tour for his friends, we bow out when the tour is at an end and he hints he is going to rest before the talk tonight. Time has grown short before the Peabody-Essex closes, so we all but run there to dash through the exhibits before the docents boot us out the front door. In the process of this, we end up walking up a back staircase and find ourselves before a woman making the final preparations to turn a floor into a dance hall.

She takes no notice of us at first, so I walk up to her. "Are we, in the strictest sense, allowed to be here?"

She considers my presence before her, as though I have just materialized but that she is quite used to this. "No. You aren't," she says slowly, as though she does not really mean it but is supposed to say this.

I feel that, if I apply a little pressure, we will be invited to crash some gala to which we will be underdressed. It is just that sort of trip, where we end up wiggling our way into places to which we are not invited, but nevertheless should belong. However, we have other plans.

We sneak into Beverly's talk "Power Dressing in the Eighteenth Century", again slipping by anyone who might keep us out of where we feel we belong. It does feel a little odd to be crashing a lecture, but I am drawn to finagle more time around Beverly, Peter, and Sandy (who emerged from her writer's cocoon to take in the lecture and who emphatically waves from across the room). Beverly and Peter are pleasantly startled to see us, as though we would miss this simply because we happen to be in the Witch City. I will not bore you by trying to recount the talk, except to say that Amber and I were remarkably captivated and that alone is a testament to Beverly's passion for this arcane subject. She was so authoritative and cunning that she caused a few colonial reenactors in the crowd (who likely forked over the $15 admission that Amber and I neglected simply by walking in as though we belonged there) to huff and fail to trip her up with their pointed questions.

Look, we did find it!

The night is not exactly young when we emerge from the talk, but it is warm enough that I ask Amber if she would mind having another go at finding Gallow's Hill. This is, after all, our final night in Salem and I will feel unresolved if I have not made the pilgrimage, however much I acknowledge that the Puritans were not my people.

We walk for miles to Gallow's Hill. I will later realize the journey felt so much more direct because the inn at which I last stayed is a mile and a half nearer. We stroll through what must constitute the ghetto of the city, abandoned factories and rusted cars, torn open fences that just scream "opening scene of a zombie movie", discussing our life and the relationships of our friends to distract from the idea that we are following the hunch of Amber's dying cell phone and trusting we will be able to deduce the way home without it.

We take the creepy walk up a dark hill, my hands raised in the non-defensive posture drilled into me at work, in case a Salem teen should be intent on getting jabbed in the nose for the sin of jumping out of the woods at us. None does and I am hardly ungrateful to avoid the need to defend myself and my loved one.

Having reached the apex, I expect something a bit more startling, even though I remember the playground well enough from my last trip to Salem. It is eerie, yes, but would have been exponentially less so had I been ignorant of its history. Though, knowing this hill was chosen by "good Christians" to display swinging corpses for miles around, it is a bit unnerving to see strands of black ribbon tied to the nearby tree, what I do not feel I am incorrect in assuming are references to the killings. I walk Amber over to where I imagine Gallow's Hill's infamous hanging tree to have been, which is now a basketball hoop. Someone has helpfully spray painted the word "TREE!" on the metal pole, ostensibly validating what I assume. Having come this far, we have to admit that there is little more to be seen and we are reticent to be seen ourselves. The journey was the point. Though tourism keeps this town afloat, I do not doubt that the cops are less generous in dealing with trespassers, even trespassers in the midst of polite funereal rites (which have been done so often by so many as to render ours a drop in the metaphysical bucket).

We wake the next morning for a final breakfast at the Morning Glory. Alan, who is not in fact a guest at the inn, is not present this time to again thank. Marcel places before us pancakes drowning in maple syrup and covered in sliced bananas, strawberries, and crushed walnuts. Must we ever go home?

The actual basketball hoop from which only Wiccan basketball players catching air have hanged.

Bob listens to we five talk as if we are old friends, even though this is literally twenty-four hours after I have properly met any of them. I envy him his innkeeper position, though I cannot imagine all this guests are so inclined to conversational cooperation as we. Still, every morning, he gets to listen to strangers (in a certain tax bracket) unfurl their life stories for him over orange juice. It must be better than all television and most books. He does not have to be much attached, because we go away after a day or so. No time to wear out our welcome and we are somewhat paying him to listen.

Sandy mentions, apropos a seconds long lull, that she visited a fortune teller last night. She begins almost embarrassed, then corrects that it was not one of those "spooky, witchy" places, but one filled with mentions of angels and light. Given where we are, this is perhaps not the most tactful of distinctions, but we let it slide. I squeeze Amber's hand under the table and shoot her so quick an amused glance that I am sure it has not been noted. Sandy goes on to detail the reading, assuring us that it did not seem at all like a cold reading (a professional reader in Salem, as they require posted certification, would not be so amateurish as to fall victim to blatant hucksterism), but that the reader - Dmitri - says that she has adult children and that she is eager for them to have children of their own. I cannot begin to imagine how he managed to guess this.

Sandy and Beverly detail their own experiences with personal clairvoyance - including Sandy becoming quite irritable with a coworker who projected thoughts into her head in order to get a free muffin - while Amber and I quietly finish off our breakfasts.

We are gently pushed out of the dining room so that Marcel can clean up after us, saying that we are welcomed to continue our conversation upstairs. This turns into what Beverly and Sandy label a couple's therapy session.

Sandy tells us how she wept at meeting her son's new girlfriend for the first time, so profound was her joy at meeting this woman about whom she had heard so much and whom she loved on sight. "I gave my son my engagement ring and my mother's wedding ring to give to her. I meant for him to have the diamonds taken out and put in a new setting. When he got back from the trip, he handed them to her and said, 'My mom wants you to have these.' She and I have talked about it and have decided we might be engaged."

After we are done laughing, this segues into the story of Peter and Beverly's love. When they met over a shared love of Sherlock, Beverly was married to and rather enamored of a NASA jet pilot (because of course a woman like Beverly bags a jet pilot prior to catching the eye of the foremost Sherlockian). Peter valued her highly, but was never untoward. A while after her husband's untimely death, there was a mutual and unspoken acknowledgement of their feelings but Beverly felt she was done with romance. She finally relented after years, citing that she truly did love Peter and wanted to stay with him (despite his being sixteen years her senior).

Peter offers the advice, "There are three people in your life: your great love, the one you want to have children with, and the one who you can spend the rest of your life with. If you find that last one first," he says, touching Beverly's knee lightly, "you have it made."

Amber and I excuse ourselves to tidy our room up so as to not run afoul of the checkout time. As we are returning our keys, Beverly catches us at the door. "Sandy and I talked it over and we have decided that you two belong together, so good luck. If you are ever in Washington, I want you to look us up. Just find any Sherlockian" - a feat she seems to assume will be simply - "and tell them to take you to Peter." Off my doubtlessly politely amused smirk, she adds, "Peter is a much bigger deal than he lets on. He has given speeches all over the world on Sherlock, that's why he is so encouraging of my talks."

As we drive home, I begin to cry so silently that Amber is startled that my face is wet. It is not that I am sad at all, but rather just processing latent emotions to get toward catharsis. I do not miss Salem or mourn that the trip is over. It needs to be. I realize how unaccustomed I have grown to being with someone who so untroubles me, someone with whom near strangers feel I belong.

As you might imagine, the logic of my tears does not quite make sense to her (as it does not to me as I write this later), but she accepts it. It has been a peculiar trip on the whole and my outburst is hardly the strangest moment. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/journal/20120413.php 27 Apr 2012 00:00:00 EST https://www.facebook.com/events/146446185483090/ 07 Apr 2012 00:00:00 EST  

Amber is thrilled to get married. There are few days I return home from work that she does not have The Knot open in a tab, that she hasn't been researching wedding favors or tweaking centerpieces. I know what our colors will be (TARDIS blue and deep purple). I know what her dress will look like (no veil or train, skirt just below the knee, off-white with a sash). I know the sort of place we will be getting married (near the Hudson River, outside, with a tent). I know who will likely be officiating (Rhianna, in whose backyard Amber and I met). I know what we will be eating (catered barbecue). For her, this wedding is among her favorite art projects, one she attacks from every available angle.

The only issue is, I have not satisfactorily proposed (which is to say, I have repeatedly inquired as to why she is not already married to me and she has retorted that it does not count until I give her a ring while asking properly).

It is not that I do not intend to propose marriage. She seems like she will be a fine wife for me. I find her to be one of the most nurturing and sweet beings I have ever chanced upon and I know that I am damn lucky to have her kittenishly cuddled up on my lap while I am trying to write this. I do not wish us to rush into this decision, but it is something I want when we are ready.

But I am getting used to the idea of not starving to make rent each month. I definitely have not saved enough for a cruelty-free, heirloom (or possibly ouroboros) engagement ring. I do not know if I could ever save enough for a wedding, at least as she seems to imagine the concept.

I see the reasons one gets married. It is a legal declaration of a spiritual truth, that this erstwhile stranger has allowed herself by degrees to become a member of one's family. Two cleave from their birth families and conjoin to create a new unit. It is a proclamation that, damn it all, one is going to try to make a union work that is perhaps among the most maligned in our culture (however often people insist they are "protecting" it by keeping it traditional, which must mean that it is the loveless exchange of property for the sake of spawning farmhands and political alliances. My lover is not livestock). I can visualize myself getting married. Knowing that I am The One, that this person won't hit the road because someone else catches the eye of her insecurities (at least, she will not do this easily. I am aware that between forty and fifty percent of American marriages ends in divorce. I would rather never contribute to that statistic).

What I do not understand is weddings. I am supposed to go heavily into debt to show off my "wealth"? What the agricultural fuck is that about? I have no need to offer my Uncle Morrie (twelve times removed) the option between chicken and fish to prove that I love Amber. It is ridiculous pageantry, throwing a party for near strangers to get away with loving someone on paper as well as in life. My older brother had a simple town hall ceremony and no talk has ever been made in my presence of that not being "good enough". My cousin Kyle just married his Brazilian fiancee with identical humbleness (in small part to keep her in the country) and none but joyful words have been uttered about it. On the other hand, I have been party to a few extravagant weddings that were damned before the "I do", brides and grooms who could have honeymooned at the divorce lawyers' offices for the swiftness they were dissolved in enmity.

No one should train for a wedding, especially at the expense of learning to be a good spouse, and I feel that the former is the priority for too many. Our culture feeds little girls this image that, if a man doesn't nearly bankrupt himself for the almighty Hallmark, he doesn't really love her. Absolute insanity, but then a grown woman thinks she needs blood diamond encrusted napkin rings and roast kakapo on a platinum dish or her love - and by extension she - is worth nothing. Do the couple benefit from this excess? The families? Society? Not as I see it, at least not with comparable value for what is expended. The wedding planning industry gets to exist (also, quite possibly, the aforementioned divorce lawyers, since fiscal quarrels are one of the more popular reasons to un-pop the question). There is little other point to what should be a meaningful ceremony. We abide it because we are raised in a culture that tells us this is what must be. I am not certain that very many of us ask why.

Amber's father, who plays a once or twice annual role in her life, has reportedly said that he requires me to ask him for permission to propose to Amber. My suggestions that I have a bakery deliver a cake reading "I am marrying your daughter and there is nothing you can do about it" have not been wholly dismissed by Amber. Even if I bought into the patriarchal possessiveness of the request, it's been quite a number of years since he had a vote. (All this, of course, could be amended if he wishes to subsidize the wedding. I have no quarrel with him buying a vote.) I believe that Amber's mother has consigned herself to the fact that I intend to keep her daughter from moving back with her by any possible means.

"Do it now!"

Amber feels that weddings are, at their core, a ritual. This is a spiritual as well as legal joining in our eyes and I couldn't support that more. I have never encountered someone who more considered this joining with me a blessing. I do not see the wedding as a culminating event - as seems to be a popular outlook - but another (admittedly glowing) point on the continuum of our relationship.

While preparing dinner, I have a long, somewhat rambling conversation with Amber about how little I need to think of her. "The last two women I dated required me to justify why I was with them, justify myself even. To a lot of people outside the relationships, it didn't make a lot of sense that I was waiting for women who wanted to be anywhere but home, or who neglected me. I tend to be able to make excellent use of my private time, so I never minded much that they were elsewhere because it gave me time to write and wander about. Plus, if I put up with this, if I suffered, I must be really in love. Emily and Melanie were programs that took up my mental and emotional resources and were prone to crashing, so I had to frequently judge that I did not wish to uninstall them, as it were. I had to tell myself I was in the right, which is enough to program me to believe it in a deep way. It's easy to love someone who isn't there... But you are this amazing little program that works wonderfully and without an error, so I barely am aware you are installed. I don't require justification for you..." This doesn't seem enough and she is too quiet for me to be sure I've made my point, so I add, "When I taught my psychology class at Vassar years ago, some of my students did an experiment on their peers where they asked them to do a boring task, like sorting a deck of cards into order. They gave the successful a full-sized Reese's Cup, a mini one, or nothing. Guess who reported most enjoying doing it?"

"The ones who got nothing," she replies.

"Now? Propose now."

I point a spatula at her for emphasis. "Smart girl. They had to convince themselves their time was not wasted, that they chose to do the task, so they justified that it was fun. With you, I get this huge reward - all the Reese's Cups, metaphorically speaking - and I don't want to be ungrateful owing to some quirk of human psychology."

"You aren't," she says.

"I feel I might be, sometimes." I am still getting used to all the aspects of cohabitating with someone again, even four months in. I cannot deny that being with Amber combines the best parts of being with my best friend with being alone. Aside from the times she is being willfully pesty to be cute, being around her is like being on my own or, at most obtrusive, with a cat that would like affection. I am a writer, I do need solitude for my art to bloom and am continually surprised I can get this when she is only five feet away, turning destroyed books into flowers.

I admit that Amber does have the arguable disadvantage of having uncovered me when I had gotten over the lion's share of my issues (if, in fact, this is not all a different level of issues I am mistaking for being "cured"). I am no longer codependent and I do not foresee that changing. I do not need her and know I would function perfectly well without her or any woman, however much I appreciate love in general and hers in specific. I do not imagine I will ever cling to her like she is the last handhold on an otherwise sheer cliff. I have wings. I am ever here in this moment because she is where I want to be. She is not some inanimate savior, she has wings of her own to flutter and soar. I intend to fly beside her, to tumble through the air in loops and gambols, to carry her when she grows tired (she has pointed out that I currently carry her around when she goes outside without shoes, so there is a precedent), to keep her warm beneath them against raging winds. Our relationship will ever be two individuals caring for one another, not incomplete pieces hoping to find wholeness in the other's arms.

When I later mention I am going for a jog, she offers to walk beside me (she is not much for such vigorous exercise herself - a summer of soliciting donations door-to-door made her lose any taste for a good run). We end up exploring a dilapidated chocolate factory that has been portioned off into office space and she suggests ways in which I can incorporate this into my books. I smell the spring on her when we get back. We never are at a lack for things to discuss as we wander around, trying to find our way back from where I have gotten us intentionally lost. She accepts without reservation that she would rather be hopping beside me in the still too cool air, even when we happened upon voodoo dolls of hipsters. If this may be seen as a physical metaphor for marriage - her contentedly strolling beside me, no matter how weird it gets, as I get us lost - we are certainly suited to the task. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/journal/20120307.php 31 Mar 2012 00:00:00 EST  

At some point, I am certain that this trip to Howe Caverns seemed like a fine idea. A romantic night in a hotel, complimentary champagne and chocolates, a romantic lantern tour 156 feet below ground. It should be the stuff of memories.

The trouble is that Cobleskill, New York - the city congealed atop the caverns - is among the dullest places I have ever happened upon. If you happen to live in Cobleskill, my sincere apologies. Living there, I am sure you are beyond used to people saying "I'm sorry" to you, but count me among the sympathetic. I have sat in dental office waiting rooms more captivating.

I try to find excuse for the social doldrums of Cobleskill, but there is no off-season when your tourist trap is a hole in the ground that never varies from 52 degrees Fahrenheit. I do not doubt that the only draw to this town is the aforementioned holes, as their owners direct travelers from fifty miles away with colorful billboards. The motel can suggest nothing stimulating than rocks in their adjoining cave. Given that I annually used to go to Lake George, whose main draw was a wetter and thus prettier geological feature, I do not absolve Cobleskill from the responsibility of having t-shirt stands and costumed cave creatures cavorting. After seeing the cavern, there ought to be some reason to stick around and free ourselves from the burden of our money.

Our motel has doubtless seen better decades. Still, we are not precisely there for the accommodations - though, of course, we would not be averse to a degree of comfort beyond what is provided. The room contains nothing that would account for the money spent on the package, with a television from the 1980s and, bizarrely given the smallness of the room, two sinks next to each other outside the bathroom proper. (Is this so guests can be assured of the other's post-lavatory hygiene?) We are a bit disappointed to discover that the advertised chocolates are two hunks of nearly stale fudge from the gift shop and the champagne - as we realize once we later have exhausted all the entertainment potential of this town - contains only four conservative glasses of bubbly. For my own mental health, I will pretend I believe that the linens had been changed - or at least aired - since Obama took office.

We put the flowers to good use, though.

We showed up without time enough to have lunch, so Amber gnaws on some beef jerky as we walk up the hill to the entrance to the cavern. I promised her to buy her some bauble from the gift shop both to make up for the humbleness of our accommodations and to balance the karmic scales for how amazing she made Valentine's Day (I came home to a table set with cups and plates with our names painted on them, a pot of chocolate fondue with fruit and pretzels for dipping, followed by cuddling and breakfast-for-dinner). However, even the gift shop seems to have no urge to put in effort. None of their wares are either nice enough or kitschy enough to be worth more than a cursory glance. Where are the Herkimer diamond rings or the t-shirts emblazoned with the message "I wish my wife were as deep as Howe Caverns (or as wet)"? I attempt to coax Amber toward the section of the building where little kids sift through bags of dirt to get to tumbled smooth gems, but she nixes this with reluctance.

I had come to Howe Caverns at least once as a child and have vivid - if not wholly authentic - memories of a very tight section called Fat Man's Folly, enormous ceilings, a rushing underground river. This is not what we find.

We are led into an antechamber where an animatronic zombie of Lester Howe tells us of his borderline sexual appreciation of the cows who discovered the caverns. We mock it and no one in the group seems to mind. The robot has a painfully broken hand holding too heavy a cane, which was intended as a pointer, as he explains that nothing in Howe Caverns has really changed in the last ten thousand years.

Fat Man's Folly has been renamed something politically correct and innocuous. The ceilings are maybe twenty feet up. Large, but not unbelievable. The river is a still stream. The only time it raged was during Hurricane Irene, at which point the entire cavern was filled with water almost to the top.

If this is what SkyNet looks like, we are going to be fine. Unless we are cows...

Guy the Guide tries to engage us. He is affable and obviously knows the basic spiel, but he contends against childhood confabulations. He cannot possibly come out the victor. He explains, per my questioning, that no animals choose to make Howe Caverns their home. They have something in common with the people who live above, forced to stay in Cobleskill by the vagaries of a cruel Fate.

He leads us to a glowing limestone heart embedded in the brick path. When I was a child, I believed the heart was naturally luminescent like a sort of benign uranium, instead of the truth: translucent and lighted from beneath by a simple bulb to amuse the rubes. Still, Guy the Guy tells us the legend that any unmarried persons stepping on it would have a wedding within a year. With an impish glint in her eyes, Amber realizes her part in this play. She stomps on the heart and gives me a "What canary?" grin. I doubt she is the first - or the ten thousandth - to do this.

This would be a fine time to propose. I don't. I wish her the best on her February wedding and say I hope to be invited. Otherwise, I avoid the stone as though it might suck me in, refusing to lay a single toe upon it even when she tempts me with a kiss and tries to pull me on.

Yes, we are that obnoxious couple. I doubt the other members of our tour enjoy our shenanigans as much as we do.

Guy the Guide seems, at times, personally and retroactively invested in the state of the cavern. We come to a formation now known as the Pipe Organ, two walls form by millennia of limestone dripping. On one side, says Guy the Guide irritably, Lester Howe's visitors would chip off bits of the rock to take with them as souvenirs. "They didn't seem to understand that they were irreparably damaging the cave. But, on the plus column, they opened up this space right here." He ducks under the chipped away overhang. His voice is then sonorous and coming from everywhere as he continues to explain the acoustical accident their plundering created.

Shortly after, we take a boat ride on the placid river. At the end, we are offered lighted candles in coffee cans and warned, with all sincerity, that the lanterns can get rather hot. "I am turning off the lights now," Guy the Guide says. "You have half an hour to get to the exit before we will presume you are lost and will send someone to find you. Do not leave the path or go exploring. We will know."

With that, he flicks a switch and plunges us into a darkness broken only by our lanterns. If we are not permitted to discover nooks off the path for frenzied - if claustrophobic - snogging, I refuse to think this tour is especially romantic. We wander back the fairly straight path, our eyes adjusted enough to the consuming blackness that our shoddy lanterns throw more than enough light. All the same, we were barely accustomed to the subterranean geography when all the lights were on. We hold no chance of finding many formations, though we do wander up to the altar, where I obligingly touch the now dark stone heart so Amber does not have to get married alone.

"Doesn't count unless you step on it," she says authoritatively.

However will we escape this treacherous chasm?

"Who made you the arbitrator of what happens in the cave?" I demand with a grin.

In retort, she pulls me on the heart and kisses me hard.

When we exit a short time later, feeling a dankness that lingers even in fresh air, there are cookies and hot cocoa waiting. I do not care that the cookies were very likely not made by anyone's grandmother. I do not mind that the cocoa is conspicuously from a mix, with powdery remnants floating. I do not even mind that both are handed to me by a bored employee who is watching the clock with a passion I imagine he reserves for nothing else in life. It is a nice touch that makes me feel as though this were a slightly more memorable occasion. I feel this until I accidently quaff a bit of the scalding cocoa and burn off most of my taste buds in a fit of abject foolishness.

This sudden disability, treated with nothing more than the folk remedy of sprinkling sugar on the afflicted organ, is not that much of an issue given the paucity of dining options available to us in Cobleskill. We enlist Amber's smartphone to try to rally further choices in the area, but it seems we are limited to a Chinese buffet, a bar, a remarkably pricy European restaurant that seems not to be aware it is not in Paris, and a barbecue joint named (and I swear I am not making this up) Rubbin' Butts. What possessed them to name it this is a bit beyond us, but I work up a quick fantasy about Daryl Rubbin going into business with Clive Butts and the rest being a matter for culinary historians. Still, when given the choice between unappealing options, it's best to try the unfamiliar one.

He was a good sport.

After a traffic light that stretched to five minute of waiting, until I cry to Amber that this is clearly the method by which Cobleskill gets its new residents ("Well, it's clear that the light never changes. The only thing for us is to settle here and raise a family that will abandon us the moment they catch on there is life outside of Cobleskill."), we arrive at the restaurant. I feel a bit reticent in using that term, since a "restaurant" to my way of thinking involves things like waitstaff and cleanliness. This seems more like an overgrown ice cream stand, but we were too invested and hungry to turn back.

Amber noted that, for its faults, this place was surprisingly forthright in their advertising. (No, no butts were rubbed.) There are silhouettes of pigs - tail to curly tail - adorning most flat surfaces. "Most places try to be covert about the fact that a specific animal is on your plate. You know you are eating chicken or beef, but they don't ask you to focus on it. Not Rubbin' Butts. They don't let you hold illusions," Amber says, petting the two-dimensional pigs.

More like Rubbin' Butts! ...What do you mean "that is the actual name"? ...Seriously?

"My illusions could do with some gussying up," I say as I examine my barbecue chicken sandwich, nothing more than a whole breast, slathered liberally in sauce, thrown on a cold roll.

We eat with much zest, more because cookies and beef jerky represent the only things we have eaten in a long while. As we do, we listen to a man who was on the tour with us clearly but awkwardly running through a first date conversation with a middle-aged woman. When he brings up both his adult children and a noteworthy trip to the lavatory, I whisper to Amber, "So, is this a proper first date in Cobleskill? A tour of a dank cave and then some slopped together barbecue?"

"What else are they supposed to do?" she asks, hazarding a glance back. "Hey, do you think that's the only dank cave he'll be visiting tonight?"

I narrow my eyes at her and gesture with my spork. "I am eating!" I look over Amber's shoulder. "But, yes. He's too..." I search for an appropriate description before deciding on a neologism, "Cobleskilled for her to want another date."

Having finished my dusty bottle of ice tea, I ask the girl at the front counter if we could have two glasses of water.

"Uh... You can drink out of the bathroom faucet," the Cobleskilled boy sweeping suggests. "That's pretty clean."

Yes, I am certain this whole trip once seemed like a fine idea... ]]> http://www.xenex.org/journal/20120226.php 23 Mar 2012 00:00:00 EST

Before I begin this review and for the sake of full disclosure, I should say that the author, James Hutchings, sent me a copy of his book in hopes I would review it. It was a concept I could get behind and I am open to authors (at least those who have a basal comprehension of what I write/like) who can stand my criticism sending me something to review. I am considering doing the same with We Shadows, once I clear it with my publisher. That said, sending me a free book does not, per se, mean I will be equally generous in what I write in a review. If anything, it makes me more scathing because I am trying to justify giving a good review. (This does not mean that you brave authors out there should not offer me books in exchange for reviews, just accept that I will lean more toward tearing apart instead of relentless fluffing up.)

Amber, who read some of the stories while resting her head on my chest, referred to this book as The New Death... of Jokes. This was not, as you may imagine, a compliment. I retorted that I was inclined to subtitle this review "The food is terrible and the portions are so small".

The book is 44 short stories, some of which involve the same allegorical figures, and 19 poems. There is ostensibly no logic to the placement of any of these, so there is no real flow from one to the next. After a few of the poems, little more than doggerel retellings of stories by famous authors, I decided to stick with the stories. I have been informed by other readers that I should have skipped the stories and stuck to the poems.

I am willing to concede that I may not be the target audience for this book, even for ninety-nine cents. On paper, it might seem I should be. I like fantasy, though not sword and sorcery, which many of the stories are. I love genre humor, but more along the lines of Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Christopher Moore, or Douglas Adams (which I gather the stories are supposed to be, but fail to come close enough to do anything but remind the reader of his weakness by comparison). I like the idea of postcard fictions or fiction so short I could have it finished in less than three minutes. Yet, pureed together in this book, I didn't care for the taste. For all its brevity, it took me weeks to actually get through because I kept groaning and putting it away so I did not throw my Kindle.

Several of the stories seem to go nowhere in particular, but are nevertheless pompous about getting there. I was infrequently drawn in to any, I was never immersed, because it feels Hutchings could not leave well enough alone when there was a "synonyms" button to abuse. Occasionally, this bad habit leads to pretty sounding words that do not mean what the author wishes them to. At other times, it seems that he does not trust the reader to reach conclusions on his own but must instead over-explain the meaning of his similes and metaphors. This is generally accomplished by the sin of telling rather than showing out of a commitment to be short instead of good. That is, except for the times when he uses analogies that sound good but mean next to nothing (e.g., "... in the flames of the campfire his face seemed to glow like a wolf in the night." Unless this is a Chernobyl wolf, wolves are not known for glowing in the night. Perhaps he means their eyes, but that isn't what he wrote). He cannot seem to make his character sound like distinct beings, rather he throws the same irrationally haughty language into every mouth, from medieval mages to boys telling campfire stories. Furthermore, his internal mythology is glaringly inconsistent at times.

This is not to say that all his stories are without charm, but the best of them end where a great story should begin. I am aware Hutchings is going for a laugh with most of the stories, not forming great literature, but it reeks of untapped potential. Going for cheap laughs (and that is the only laugh he is seeking) does not excuse literary laziness. He has some clever ideas, briefly explored, but either buries the potential under overwriting or blows his load in the first paragraph and hopes you don't mind cuddling a bit in the wet spot.

The greatest sin I can accuse Hutchings of - and one I do not imagine he would not proudly cop to - is that he is addicted to puns. There are a couple of stories that are, without hyperbole, nothing but puns - no plot, characters, theme, idea - Just pun after pun that your grandmother forwarded you in an email from her AOL account. Remarkably, in one of the entirely pun stories, he manages to contradict himself three times within four paragraphs because he honestly doesn't seem to care about what he is writing when he has the opportunity to make the reader groan. While I am not certain how copyright law applies to a collection of puns strung together to give the illusion of paragraphs, it does not seem sporting to consider that an original work. Perhaps worse, he interrupts the intermittent flow of his stories with relentless parenthetical puns, which seemed like a lack of confidence (and invited unflattering comparisons to masters of the humorous interjection and footnote: the above mentioned Pratchett and Adams).

Another criticism, though not on the writing, is that the formatting is frequently just wrong. Paragraphs will split in the middle of sentences without punctuation. Since I believe he sent me the same version that is for sale, this is a minor drawback for readers. I am used to wonky formatting (I used to use a Sony Reader 900 and Calibre to convert books, so I would sometimes run across formatting that would have made a new user go cross-eyed), but the rest of the book at least looks professional.

Overall, this book may be worth your dollar if you happen to like puns rather a lot, but I do not think it was worth much of my time. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/ography/newdeath.php 11 Mar 2012 00:00:00 EST  

Her death makes me wonder at my capacity for reasonable emotional responses. I have cried more at breakups or at those movies inclined toward heartstring-tugging than I do in hearing of her passing.

My grandmother had been unwell for a long time. Years ago, my younger brother Bryan - an over-trained nurse - explained that she suffered from congestive heart failure. To me - a novelist and English teacher - "heart failure" as a phrase equated immediately to "prompt death". As far as I could put together, if your heart no longer passes its constant tests, you are flunked six feet underground. But no, she hung on through her ninety-second birthday and her ninety-third. Not her ninety-fourth.

She was largely cogent even to the end, though her talk of seeing black dogs and nightly shooing dead relatives out of her bed had become so frequent to have transitioned from worry at how short her time was growing to fodder for sardonic jokes. What else were we her family to do for her, short of an exorcism or needless drugs? I was the one to break it to my mother that visions of ghostly black dogs had long been thought to be harbingers of Death, if myth could grant a valid glimpse into pathology or destiny. When my grandmother reportedly said that the dog would make a fine pet for one of my uncles if it were not dead, I felt horrified at her queer self-awareness.

My mother served as one of my grandmother's caretakers and housekeepers for almost as long as I can remember, certainly since she, my mother, nursed her father as he suffered a long and addling death. She is the one who found my grandmother, blankets kicked off, clothing that had begun to be torn off, breathing but otherwise unresponsive. My grandmother was rushed to a hospital, but it was too late. She died after two hours.

I do not believe that I mourn for my grandmother. By degrees, I had come to accept her death as an inevitability in the near future. Every time I saw her, I considered it a possible last time. The actual last time was on Christmas and she seemed small and frail, but no more so than had become usual. I could not have known this would be it, but I could not believe it was not.

To my chagrin, my first thought upon hearing of her death (after the obvious) is that this will severely impact my book signing at No Such Convention. I cannot very well skip the wake and funeral to sign books for steampunk geeks and remain a member in good standing of my immediate family.

My next thought is profound sadness for my mother, the sort of emotion that makes everyone behave awkwardly around the bereaved. She no longer has a mother of her own, a condition of which I cannot fully conceive and will blithely put off considering as long as humanly possible. This death and its subsequent stresses will likely be sufficient to estrange my mother from her siblings until long after the dust settles, whatever that phrase will end up meaning. My grandmother was the glue that kept my aunts and uncles civil, to the extent that her kitchen served as their meeting place, a neutral ground where they could manage to hold conversations while doing laundry.

At work, I let slip that my grandmother has died and they begin circulating a card for me. I do not feel this is necessary. They barely know me, they never met my grandmother, and I don't see how I am supposed to derive comfort from this action, but I cannot very well stop them. They ask if I would like to go home, if I will skip work the next day. This, too, seems unnecessary. I am fine. She was old and her death did not come as a great surprise. I might as well work and get my full paycheck, since my mother makes it clear that she does not require me at her house before the wake tomorrow. My father tells me that she nearly forced him to go to work, if just to leave her alone to process the enormity.

When I return to my apartment to change into something more funereal than academic the next day, I am aware and distantly bemused that my reactions are frankly wrong. I become irrationally annoyed with an actress, who appears in a video in my email advocating equality despite sexual orientation - a cause of which I am unequivocally in favor. I know she is undoubtedly a lovely and caring person - third-hand gossip of her behavior from her time at Vassar College notwithstanding - who played no part in my grandmother's death, but the desire to yell at a strange woman on the internet is suddenly consuming. I have to audibly remind myself that this makes no sense and that wasting a moment more on this emotional sinkhole will make me late to the wake, over an hour drive.

I get to the wake shortly before it starts, though it is impossible to delineate a proper beginning time. I find my immediate family and silently attach myself to them. We then mill around with relatives and people who I do not recognize. People ask where Amber is and I explain that her absence is by my suggestion, that she is selling my books at NonCon and fielding any inquiries from people I have invited. Most importantly, she has been preparing her art so long, I cannot ask her to be at a wake and lose the point of all her effort. In seeing how many of my cousins brought girlfriends or fianc�es, I do wish she had been there, both to deflect the questions and give me a hand to hold.

"When does it all happen?" I ask my father after fifteen minutes that seems to last three hours.

"When does what happen?"

"The... the wake portion," I stammer.

"This is the wake. We stand around and talk. Tomorrow is the funeral and pizza afterward."

I look at the forty people staring stunned at my deceased grandmother in a box. "What is even the point to this, then? Why have a wake?"

"In olden days, when someone might just be paralyzed with a poison mushroom, they would have a wake to see if all the loud noises would wake them up. If they didn't wake up, they were either dead or buried alive."

I glance at my grandmother, at the shade of lipstick a bit too pink for her face, looking five years younger than she did when she died. "I'm pretty sure the old girl has been embalmed. She's not getting up."

I mention to my father the theory that, the closer you get to a black hole, the slower time flows until it stops entirely for you. You are trapped, circling this vacuum, effectively until the black hole ceases. I look at my watch, several hours pass, I look at it again and it registers only minutes.

I see my cousin Katelynn and she has visibly been crying when she comes in. If we may consider their grief like oxidation, I am slightly rusting in a room full of the inflamed. I wander over to her, standing near a picture of my grandmother that was taken in her twenties and comment that grandma was quite the looker. My late grandfather, however, looks rather goofy in every picture. Katelynn ventures that this might be where we get our sense of humor, as he looks a bit like a cartoon duck, but she gives a smile that grants me some relief.

My father tells me that my mother has been wailing off and on since she found my grandmother dying. "She was watching some show where someone was telling a kid he would have a new brother. She looked at me and said, 'Do you think they'll bring me a new mother?'"

I almost cry for the first time upon hearing this. My father says that my mother is handling this death by metaphorically packing things into a box and that he does not look forward to when the bottom falls out.

Soon after this, I am holding my nephew Aaryn to give myself something to do to try to remind time that it had better not grind to a halt while I am in this funeral home. He asks when Grandma is going to wake up.

This is the second time I almost cry. I tell him she is not sleeping and that is sufficient for him, he simply wants a yes or a no. His older brother Aydan wants us to assure him that Old Grandma's feet are in the box with her, since he cannot see them.

My younger brother Bryan, who lives with my parents, tells me that my mother blames herself for Grandma's dying. My grandmother had seemed ill the night before and my mother had offered to stay overnight. My grandmother said no, claimed that she felt just fine despite looking ashen.

"How could she blame herself?" I demand, sideways, looking at my mother talking to someone across the room. "She can't. Grandma was ninety-three. She was going to die soon. Mom had to know that."

"She thinks, if she had been there, she could have brought Grandma to the hospital sooner. I told her there was maybe a ten minute window that would have made Grandma still alive right now. But she wouldn't be awake. She would be a vegetable on machines in a hospital, which wasn't how she wanted to die. She died exactly where she wanted, at home. I told Mom that. She doesn't want to hear it."

"She can't blame herself," I insist again.

My mother tells Bryan that he does not have to go to the funeral tomorrow, that he enjoys the job he will be doing and it is more important that he do that job than be there. I do not dare to ask for this reprieve and I am not sure I would accept it if it were offered to me.

I wander, seeking pockets of normalcy - my mother gossiping about a woman who does not really belong there, my niece Alieyah playing with her Nintendo DS - but they do not linger long enough to make me feel at ease.

I last two hours, though I swear it must have taken twelve. I am hungrier than I think I have ever been and the night air feels both lovely and painful. I waver between going home or going to catch a few hours of No Such Convention. I call Amber and ask if she needs anything.

"It's over?" she asks.

"No, not exactly. It goes for another hour. But I am over," I say. "I am stopping for dinner. I'll get you something, if you want."

"Chicken nuggets," she says, "but no rush."

"You haven't sold all of my books?" I ask, facetiously.

"I haven't sold any. One guy came around and was interested. I told him you were at a wake and he said he would be by to buy a copy from you tomorrow."

"Hopefully I get a pity sale out of this," I say and try to laugh.

I don't really remember the drive to Vassar, only that I feel oddly light in ordering my chicken sandwich and nuggets from a surly girl at Wendy's. I cannot place this feeling almost of levity. There is no cause for this sensation, except perhaps that I am not before a coffin right now.

I sit beside Amber at Vassar, cracking jokes while dressed in funeral garb. No one much examines our wares, though I sell a signed copy and she sells a few pieces of art. After a few hours, feeling buoyant but detached, I return home alone. I am asleep when she returns herself and roll over to acknowledge her with a nuzzle.

On my way to the funeral proper the next morning, my mother calls and asks if I will be a pall bearer. Not that I would be inclined to say no, but it is clear to me that I cannot refuse the honor.

I sit in near silence in the funeral home, refusing to let my niece Alyssah off my lap. It is not merely that I feel I have nothing to say - not that there is a sanctioned time for reminiscence while within the funeral home today - but that it stuns me to realize that nearly everyone in this room, some sixty people, is a direct descendant of the woman lying dead. The universe itself is changed by the fact that she lived. Without my grandmother, none of us would have existed, for one. And now, she has vacated her form for whatever comes after our last breaths and I cannot see how the world would not be less for that.

The priest comes out and seems no older than me. He apologizes for his cold and says we will have to forgive him if he begins coughing, winning us handily with his charm. I further appreciate him because, after a reading from the Gospel of Matthew he says, "And this is all made up... because we cannot possibly express the truth. Thomas, one of the disciples, asked how we would know what comes next, after death. We can't, it is beyond our reckoning. We talk about angels playing harps, pearly gates, but we can't know it. These are metaphors, to try to explain something that is outside our conception. Jesus talks of sharing a meal with us when we join Him, so we know that we will have bodies after death. It will not be a stuffy occasion," he almost laughs. "There will be all the foods we love and Jesus will welcome us to the table not as a god to his followers, but as someone who has loved us all our lives. I've heard about Iva's meatballs and spaghetti and I know that they will be waiting for me when I get to Heaven. I have that to look forward to now." I have been to funerals where it seemed the clergyman barely knew the deceased and - while it is possibly he has inserted my grandmother's name and food of choice into a template sermon - he doesn't preach what a wonderful thing her death is. He does not condemn us for a lack of faith, but admits that much is incomprehensible and badly paraphrased. He posits an afterlife not of celestial misunderstandings cribbed from Dante and Virgil, but someone warm and homey.

The funeral home employees - whose precise title or rank I am not going to bother to look up - ask those of us who are pall bearers to say our final goodbyes before the rest of those gathered. I walk up to the coffin and kneel on the mourners' bench, not knowing what to say. That is a body in there, my grandmother - the important part of her - is gone. I do not know that she is lingering now to overhear what is said, if what I say matters at all. I do comprehend that this is the last time I will see this body in my life. I look at the body and think a simple goodbye, because the part of her that can hear me is not likely to be impeded by a closed lid. I do not know any of this, but it feels true and I am more than willing to trust that.

My father, older brother Dan, and cousin Phil stand in the other room while other people say their goodbyes. The queue stretches more than the length of the room. Phil seems distant and we end up talking of anything but our grandmother's death - work, mostly, and how he is progressing as a marathon runner - until he seems more familiar. Once everyone else as gone, I watch the funeral home employees use a large device that resembles a drill to unfasten what keeps my grandmother's coffin lid open, then screwing it in place. I have seen movies galore involving the lids springing open in transit, but this seems an impossibility allowed entirely for dramatic purposes. Nothing can be left to chance on such a solemn occasion.

I automatically bring the flowers out when requested, packing them into the back of a vehicle without much thought. I am startled out of my fugue when one of the employees of the funeral home scolds me for bring out the wrong flowers, for daring to think that the vases were included in the request to serve as a floral transporter. I am the bereaved and I am allowing myself to be a pall bearer, some kindness to me over mistaken glassware would not be unwelcome.

Then comes the moving of the coffin itself. I stand against a banister and watch as it is wheeled out. I should be feeling something, I know, but I cannot summon up anything much until a mortician grumbles at me for being in the way and on the wrong side. I scurry to where he wants me and then lift the casket into the back of the waiting hearse, trying to bear as much of it as I can.

I ride to the cemetery in the cab of my father's truck, squished against a niece and nephew. I cannot fathom what they make of all this. I was young when my maternal grandfather died and recall only that there was food at the house afterward. For whatever reason, I was not at his wake or funeral. I do not know how I would have coped.

When we arrive, six additional male relatives are enlisted to bear the coffin up the hill to the grave. I am not thinking, simply acting as required. My cousin Jesse jokes to his brother not to eat the liquefying candy canes on an adjoining bush and I fake a smile.

The priest speaks again, while sprinkling water on the grave. I cannot connect, instead grateful that my glasses tint enough to allow me to study the other mourners without being noticed.

As the priest finishes, the church rings its bell eleven times to signal the hour. I would like to believe this was intentional. My mother asks later if the priest had a remote than controlled the bell. The employees from the funeral home who have followed us to the cemetery now make it clear that we had better go elsewhere. I am not certain why they are in such a hurry, but I do not think anyone present wishes to dawdle in a graveyard.

We return to my grandmother's house, which seems curiously usual. I want it to be bare, to have been stripped of all that is familiar so it will cease to be a home to ghosts and will instead be only a space. But no. There is the bed where she was found. There, in the bathroom, the silver art nouveau wallpaper that constituted the first naked women I had ever seen. The table where we had Thanksgiving meals. The roll top desk where I wrote as a child. The hutches, the creepy porcelain dolls, the lace curtains. All that is missing, aside from my grandmother, are her finches that were taken by my mother to arrest any further mortality. Everything seems so untouched that, when I see a white-haired woman settling into a pink easy chair, my brain momentarily mistakes her for my grandmother.

She was loved

My extended family is gathered in force, drinking beers and joking around while waiting for pizza to be delivered. It could be any birthday or holiday. We should be abused by our grief, hardly able to form smiles. I am not suggesting that this is what my grandmother would have wanted for us, but that several cases of beer strikes me as the wrong timbre for the event just behind us.

I realize at this point that I have left my coat inside the mortuary and run to get it, but the doors are locked. I do not know if they are prepping for another funeral - they do seem like the sort of organization to be nearly double booked - but I need my coat and do not wish it to be buried with Mr. Johnson down the street. After a few minutes of pondering how to quietly break into a funeral home - rocks are out, but maybe there is an unlocked door someone inconspicuous? - when a man glimpses me and asks if I am here about the coat. I joke with him, but get out of the funeral home as quickly as possible.

I return to the gathering, where people are still drinking, chatting, and laughing but I can't stay, however much I feel that I maybe should. I told Amber to assure those seeking my book that I would be there by one and intend to keep that promise as near as I can. Also, though I don't care to articulate it, I feel as though I am out of place with the mourners.

My mother boasts to anyone who will listen that I am leaving early to go to a book signing. Cousins and aunts wish me luck as I flee.

I remember little until I am at Vassar again. Being with Amber soothes me, though I do not know that I need soothing. I sew tears in my jacket to pass the hours. I read books to Amber. I sing with her. I watch strangers in silly costumes wander by, not buying things. Strangers for whom I traded time my mourning and pizza (though one does buy my book out of the blue, without looking at the back cover or asking anything about it). Further, Amber reports that the self-published author invited to officiate two panels takes time out of his busy schedule to glare at my table whenever I am not paying attention. While on one knee to get something from my bag in the midst of talking to Amber, I tease that I am about to propose. She begins crying with joy and it is all I can do not to fracture as I assure her I will not be popping the question at NonCon, hours after the funeral of a loved one.

I cannot write, though I try to. Nothing substantive will come, not even editing of the sequel I should be writing to Danse Macabre. It feels as though I cannot quite fill my lungs, that my breaths get shallower with each attempt. If I could just get my fingers moving, this sensation could abate at the thoughts and emotions building in my head found their purging on my keyboard, but it isn't time for that.

People nose at my book, occasionally startled that it is actually a book and not, I suppose, a cunning place to hide a flask. They do not buy, nor does the tiny, hyper girl who insists it is the best thing she has ever seen in the entirety of her short life. The stated purpose of my presence there and I may as well have stayed home for all the good this is doing me.

It all begins to collapse upon me an hour before we leave NonCon for the night, around ten. I am unable to find distraction anymore and suggest - but only suggest - to Amber that we should pack up. I can't say what I am feeling because I can't breakdown while surround by Vassar students badly dressed as Homestuck characters.

As we walk back to the car an hour later, Amber interrupts her idle rambling to ask what I am thinking.

"I am trying not to," I say, curtly, not sure if I want her to leave me alone or prod me more, not sure which will hurt more.

We drive back separately. I yell at the radio for refusing to provide me musical distraction when I need it so badly. I am aware even in the moment that these are not my authentic reactions, that I need to express something intense and profound and my emotions are pushing for the nearest exits in irritation.

When I get home, I feel nearly mute. I check my email, hoping for something positive that will lift my mood from this abyss. Instead, I get a letter from my publisher registering sales so low as to make me feel fraudulent for calling myself an author.

Amber gets home ten minutes later and I have nothing to say to her. I pull up the file about my sales, point, and glower.

We get ready for bed in near silence. I climb in and cover myself up to my neck. Let this day end and never be revisited. She crawls in next to me and cuddles against me.

I feel her weeping rather than hear it.

"Why are you crying?" I demand after a moment.

"Because you are so sad and I don't know how to make it better," she moans.

There is no making it better. My grandmother is dead. I had to carry her up a hill like furniture. I have lost a connection to the past and it can never been healed. I had to maintain through this day, putting thing after thing into this emotional box. I can't fathom how this can be ameliorated.

I break. The uncontrollable sobs, wet and animal, wrack my body. I do not remember crying like this since I was a child, maybe not even then. I cannot control myself any longer and tell her everything I can manage between explosions of emotion, the fire finding me all at once and burning me up.

"You could have told me sooner."

"Impossible. Not there. I couldn't... I didn't think you realized how I felt before."

"I was trying to hide it... I ramble when other people are sad and I don't know what to do."

We talk of her grandfather dying, of my other grandmother. What I remember about my grandmother, memories of playing in her yard or stirring the ice cream she gave me into a lactose sludge, of scolding us when she caught us watching The Toxic Avenger when we were far too young to process it. My grandma was in her sixties when I was born. I never knew her as anything other than old.

"We weren't close. She didn't know me as a person and I didn't put any effort in getting to know her. I was still that little kid to her, no matter what I did, and it was easier to stay that way than explain who I actually am. And she was just a grandmother to me, this old woman whose house was the axis around which the lives of her daughters rotated."

I cry until I am empty, but I no longer feel divorced from human emotion as Amber holds me and lets me flush out my grieving without fear.]]> http://xenex.org/journal/20120218.php 08 Mar 2011 01:00:00 EST

Since I moved, it seemed impossible to affordably find loratadine, the generic version of Claritin. Since it is technically winter and I am less frequently around my mother's pets, I decided to go without. As the days elapsed and the medication clears from my system, I noticed a curious ease of thought, an ability to remember more and longer, the words I wanted coming instantly to my lips and fingers without having to search for them. My dreams grow more vivid and frequent. Further, I seem to heal more quickly (not in any unusual sense, simply that the dozen careless cuts I seem to acquire every month erase in a reasonable amount of time now).

The signs of these side effects were there, but I did not attribute the right causation. How I would feel so inspired before I ate in the morning, what I credited to some intellectual languor inherent in corn flakes and soy milk and not because I took my pills with food. How negatively Melanie reacted the one time I gave her Claritin. How hazy I felt when exposed to two antihistamines in the same day. How severely an unrelated supplement impacted my mental health a year ago. My biochemistry, it seems, is delicate and I daily tipped it for the negligible gain of possibly being less sniffly.

I do not blame my parents or even their pets, though the latter were the impetus behind my discovering and using Claritin. The blame, as I see it, falls between the molecule that dampened my acuity (along with my reaction to allergens) and myself for failing to realize it sooner. I acknowledge that it seems to be effective for other people, apparently without the expense of a few IQ points and normal healing, but it is not worth it to me.

What adds insult to this all is that I am not sure that Claritin even worked to alleviate my allergies anymore. I took the pills almost as a habit, assuming that it was better to take it than not, a sort of pharmaceutical Pascal's Wager. I still sneezed and wheezed in the presence of cats and dust and merely assumed I was reacting less severely than I otherwise would.

As I consider the last entry (I hid in a closet? Really?), I think at least some of my uncharacteristic churlishness was in reality withdrawal from this supposedly harmless allergy pill. Each morning, I lessened myself prophylactically. My body was so acclimatized to loratadine that my emotions were reliant the chemicals for equilibrium.

My writing this is not about this pill in particular but rather a mindfulness of what I put into my body. It is said - and not exclusively by people who have eating disorders - that all food is a drug. Who, after all, doesn't feel better when given a bit of chocolate at the end of a miserable day? To your brain, real chocolate mimics love. (For all its miracle, the brain subsists on illusions as much as it does much of the fat you eat. Chocolate provides a bit of both.) It is difficult to reconcile the various ways food affects us, since any meal is likely to be composed of dozens of largely inert ingredients, but it is a certainty that it can in ways almost beyond our ken. The chemistry of the human body is infinitely complex, a series of interlocking fractals of consequence that can be wildly different for otherwise similar people.

In the last few years, I've limited sugar, dairy, and caffeine because I do not like how they make me feel in excess (which is not to suggest that I would not be averse to an ice cream soda, simply that I will weigh how badly I want the experience of eating it against with how I will likely feel an hour later). It is not overtly for health, since I am not skittish about enjoying salty snacks. I simply don't want what I just ingested dictating my reactions - which might explain why I am not a drinker.

In middle school and high school, I self-medicated my allergies with soda, since the caffeine in it would open my airways and alleviate some of the disparate symptoms of living in a house with four cats and two dogs - along with various other birds and rodents who might have contributed to my unease with their flapping and skittering. This was, incidentally, before I acquired a taste for diet soda, so I easily weight twenty to thirty pounds more than I do now. Of course, the caffeine saw to it that my hormonal insomnia was markedly worse. You know what makes sleep loss less painful? More caffeine, perpetuating the cycle. The caffeine and insomnia made me distractible and dull, pretty much until I moved out with no expectation of return.

I have long heard people decrying the modern urge toward psychopharmacology. "What if we gave Emily Dickenson an MAO inhibitor to get her out of the attic? We would have lost some beautiful poetry!" I don't think it is fair to armchair doctor historical figures, but what if all that was pestering her was that she had a bad reaction to wheat? I can speak from experience that these little, unnoticed things can have a massive effect. (This is not to invalidate the struggle of the late Dickenson - about whom I know little more than that I can sing most of her poetry to the tune of "Gilligan's Island" and that she lived in an attic out of emotional necessity - or anyone else, simply suggesting the annoyance of chemicals that contribute to issues.) What genius might we be overlooking because she is too allergic to corn - which is unfortunately in most everything thanks to subsidies - to write down the sonnets she composes while feeling miserable in bed? I have known many people who are simply not built for the way we tend to eat and whose lives clarified when properly diagnosed and treated. Years ago, I interviewed at a school for adjudicated minors who turned the children around with little more than a proper breakfast, lunch, and dinner eat day. How many people's lives would be improved with that same advice?

Have you had an experience like this? An epiphany that maybe you were half-crazy because you ate peanuts or as a side effect of your morning vitamins? A realization that all that dulled your scholastic performance was starting your day with coffee and chocolate chip waffles instead of cereal and fruit? ]]> http://xenex.org/journal/20120206.php 25 Feb 2012 01:00:00 EST "Good" in this context means other than utter, soul-crushing madness.

For what it is worth from a novelist you probably do not know personally, here is my advice:

1. Partner well. Yes, I'm sure that fellow in the biker jacket, slamming beer cans against his head and yelling racial epithets at children, has a certain rustic charm. You are not stupid. You know you cannot change him and glare when reminded. You know it isn't romantic to think you can, however much media conflates love with suffering. However much you pretend you believe there cannot be affection without torture to earn it. I find it honestly regrettable that you find your stable friend - the one with a job, the one who doesn't beat you and insult you in front of his family - a bit dull. However, given that you hope to turn the "rebel" into the milquetoast through the power of your infatuation, perhaps we could call it even and you could spare yourself some time and much trouble? There are people out there with whom you will be better matched, even if you try to delude yourself that you prefer the challenge. I have been on both sides of this and know how agonizing it is when matched badly. And those relationships do end and almost always in the sort of explosion that leaves a crater and the flaming wreckage of your corpse. More seriously, I have to point out that relationships, even the best of them, require maturity, responsibility, and work. This work can either be the kind that you drag your ass to every day, griping the whole way (on which more soon) or the kind where you feel purposeful and fulfilled. This will require compromise. Yes, compromise on your part as well. Ideally, actually employ some logic to begin with and accept that you are not the exception to the rule. I'm sure it is a great lot of fun seducing people into cheating with you, but anyone who is willing to cheat with you is undoubtedly willing to cheat on you. Find someone you have no trouble speaking with, someone who doesn't bore you after you are done orgasming. If you can truly believe that this relationship can survive with its pants on, by all means, pursue longer lasting pantslessness. But please to not shag a succession of immature losers or put yourself in impossible and painful situations (which means, yes, you have to stop tupping married men because you "know they are capable of commitment" - yes, I have heard this) and expect this is ever going to result in happiness. Your full happiness won't ever be found in the arms and bedsheets of another person, but particularly not a person too busy loving someone else (either themselves, Superman, or their spouses) to ever love you.
2. Get a job you do not despise that pays you enough to live. This absolutely does not mean working a ninety hour a week job so you can have enough money to support your trophy wife (No! You skipped past the first point! Reread immediately!) and your seventh Rolls Royce. If you are working a job you hate solely for the bragging rights, I'm not impressed and you are not happy. No, the world cannot support nothing but buskers and painters, but there is a niche out there for you. Not everyone needs to be happy, so let them work themselves into an early grave to give their children (well, one is biologically theirs. The rest belong to the mailman, the pool boy, and the Jehovah's Witness) an inheritance that does not quite overshine their resentment. Your job will be one of those facets of your life that you have to face several days a week for the majority of your life. It is too important to let yourself vomit each morning because you are so disgusted with what you do.
3. Believe in something greater than yourself. I don't mean find Jesus behind the couch, necessarily. Just want something greater than your own happiness. Volunteer at a homeless shelter, tutor inner-city kids. You will be surprised how fulfilling not being a self-centered ass can be. If you are so miserable with your life that anything I am writing is striking home, you desperately need a distraction. Discovering a purpose to your life while thinking about anything other than the friend-with-benefits who gets all the benefits with none of the friendship or the third fast food job you've gotten yourself fired from this year can only make your life brighter. Just don't pretend you are a writer of supernatural fiction. That's my thing...
4. Have a creative outlet you allow yourself to indulge in as needed. Okay, fine, you can write. Expressing yourself, creating something lasting, carving out beauty from your pain, allows you to feel that you are being heard. It is the toiling in anonymity, feeling invisibly filed away in Section 8 housing, that invites despair. You will feel so much less alone, you will have another legitimate avenue to feed your self esteem, you will allow yourself to become more fully yourself. Seriously. I promise to read your blog or attend any open mic nights at which you are performing.
5. Cast off detritus to travel lightly. Yes, your breakup was horrible and your parents were bastards. Learn from it and move on. Do not make your life the altar of your revenge. You can't hurt them as much as they hurt you and any attempt to means you lost, that you are letting them cut you every day even though they have moved on. Stop losing, start living your life. Let go of hurt, let go of things you no longer need, your primordial identities that haven't really been you since the 90's. Stop attacking people because they are a friend of someone who hurt someone you know. This isn't middle school any longer.
6. Take time to be by yourself. You are the only person in your life that you cannot get rid of. Find out how to like yourself. Do things on your own with no expectations of company. Do things because you want to. This will teach you who you actually are and who you want to be without the magnetism of other people's mental impositions.
7. Drop the guilt/low self-esteem/etc. (I know how hard this is because I've faced it.) You weren't given a life so you could spend it hating your mother for calling you ugly. It sucks, I acknowledge it fully. I work with children who were underestimated and neglected and it cripples them. Now that we have both put our finger on the issue, get the hell over it. Seek therapy if you need to, but stop living you life feeling horrible. You aren't going to get another chance and you are wasting your time. The amount of energy you expend feeling like crap is considerably more than it would take to feel like a glorious member of the human race. So why do it? It isn't true. If you have the insight to feel terrible, you obviously have the mental faculties to realize the truth.

"I am going to hide in the closet now," I inform Amber. "And possibly cry. I haven't decided."

Retreating to rooms, momentarily pretending to prevent the other's entry, had been our game since yesterday. She would step outside without shoes, I would bolt the door until she tried the knob. She would dart into the bedroom and sit in front of the door to prevent entrance. It was a childish metaphor in action, a physical statement of "never forget, I am capable of shutting you out... but I don't want to."

I don't know why it is the closet I retreat to of all places, except why not the closet? It is dark and confined, a part of our apartment yet not one of its rooms. There is a reason that children assume monsters dwell in closets and the pubescent literati know it is the gateway to magic lands. I write in our closet sometimes, sequestered from distractions of the living room (overfull of screens), the bedroom (with dozens of sets of prying plastic eyes and the dual seduction of the bed), or the bathroom (which has a toilet and is therefore not where one should craft much).

She pushes her way in as I know she will, as I want her to even if I won't say it. This is a last stand of sorts and she will not have her role go to the understudy water heater.

"Why are you going to cry?" she asks, shutting the door behind her. I flop onto the floor and she sits more carefully across from me.

"I don't know. And I do. We both do." Things have been off between us for days. It is nothing that would have been perceptible to an outside observer. We have not fully treated the other person with the full extent of our loving kindness, which is one of the core aspects of our relationship. It has partly to do with a negative feedback loop, her hormones echoing against my stress. Partly, it is growing pains of living together.

We talk as we have not been doing.

"There is such an inner compatibility," I say, meshing my fingers together invisibly for the dark, "that we can operate on automatic most of the time. A little joke here and there instead of addressing one another as we actually are. Then we are so far away and we've missed out on the experience of being together. It gets superficial and that is the last thing we should be. I got so irritable yesterday, I think, because we spent hours trying and failing to beat that level on Left 4 Dead. This unseasonably beautiful day with the woman I love and I felt like we weren't even in the same building."

"You can tell me you don't want to play," she reminds me gently.

"I know that. I do. I am telling you now, too late to rescue the day but still. It's just a symptom anyway," I say. There is a silence broken only by my sniffling. After a minute, I rally my thoughts and continue, "I feel like I forget your depths."

I can't see beyond a faint outline of her face, but I hear her voice thicken and deepen with tears I hazard to kiss away, though I am not positive I deserve the honor. "I do too," she says. "I'm really good at hiding them under a laugh."

"I know that feeling," I reply. "God, do I know it. For the longest time, I was the actor playing the role of me in my life, but nothing was real. I wasn't me, I wasn't letting myself live because I would have had to change so many things in my life to... to live authentically. Emily's leaving helped kick that into gear... You know, I always get left. Part of me is still ready to come home to you packing your bags."

"I always get left too. I won't leave you, not ever. Living with you is such a good thing."

I joke, "You mean not living at home?"

"I mean living with you. Not living with my mom, that too, but this is the step I needed. A step with you."

"It is a step for me, too. It's been so long since I lived with someone... and I get so paranoid that you are going to become annoyed with me because I leave you with so many dishes when I go to work, that you end up doing a lot of the work around the apartment while I am somewhere else. Then I come home and I just want to be with you and let it slip from my mind that I should vacuum. I don�t want the inequity in housework to be an issue between us.�

I think she shakes her head at me, but it is difficult to be certain. "You work. You are the one who earns us money so we can even have a closet to be talking in. It�s okay, I don�t mind cleaning. And I probably don�t do it as much as you think I do. This won�t ever be a problem."

On a roll, I discuss my fears, my insecurities. "I think sometimes that... that you will leave if I don't want children. Because I don't right now and I can't promise I will. I think my disinclination to have children was a factor in Emily's leaving me. Far from the top of the list, but it was there. Even getting into this relationship, I knew we had this fundamental disagreement. You want babies."

"We could have hedgehogs," she offers.

"Don't joke," I admonish, but crack a smile. "I don't want you to resent me because I am holding you back from eventual motherhood."

"You aren't. I won't resent you. I love you."

"And I love you," I say, feeling it more keenly than I have in days, "but I need to say these things. For days, you have been repeatedly asking if I am breaking up with you. I know all those times were ostensibly jokes, but I heard what you were saying beneath the words. I'm not. Not ever, if I can help it."

"We can help it."

We turn on the light and it is so bright after so long staring into the darkness that I feel for a moment blind, aching in a literal sense for the comfort of the dark. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/journal/20120202.php 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 EST  

I cried to Amber when I left my old apartment behind. She entwined her fingers in mine and let me vent.

In itself, I am glad to be rid of that place. It had black mold in the ceiling from a conspicuous lack of maintenance and pernicious stinkbugs that liked few things more than dying on my window sills. It was entirely too small, though it served as a decent quasi-monastic cell for a few years (alone, I do not need much more than a bed, bathroom, and space enough to write). I never had fewer than two humane mouse traps active at any time and lived in constant fear of a resurgence of bedbugs. The complex had uncanny luck for attracting the most stereotypically annoying neighbors such that most earned derisive nicknames within days, such as The Dealer and Child Abuser Barbie.

You're breaking out in sweat!

Still, it was in that second story hovel that I learned my cherished independence after a lifetime of codependence and abandonment issues. It housed the only time in my life that no one relied on me and I answered to no one. Most of my relationship with Melanie took place in its walls, for good and ill. It was the only home I have had on my own and I managed it even on the edge of penury. It would not be a gross mischaracterization to consider it akin to a cocoon from which I have since emerged, transformed if a bit nostalgic.

As I cried, Amber and I drove to our new apartment, the barely carved block(ed with cardboard boxes) that I was supposed to somehow understand as home. This psychologically feat alone seemed daunting, especially as there were so many external factors begging to be reconciled. It felt I had traded a cramped space on my own for a cramped space with my arguably still new lover who might need more than I would be able to give.

Like a wee bird

I had, both from necessity and inclination, grown accustomed to a large proportion of private time. Though Amber does not require me to entertain her, the fact remains that we would live in close quarters at least until I am made full time/Amber finds a job. She would almost always be no farther than the bedroom. As a Writer, solitude is my canvas. (Though, more precisely, downtime during work or when I am in a public place with appropriate distraction is my true canvas. When granted solitude, I generally exercise or waste far too much time on the internet.) I try not to focus much energy on the notion, but could not ignore the niggling worry that this cohabitation could go spectacularly wrong if we are not supremely compatible and respectful of one another.

Yet I almost immediately find that living with Amber brings many unconsidered joys: opening the front door to her gleefully cataloging new clays on the floor by surrounding herself with dozens of newly baked discs, our wandering to discover the landscape of our new town and stumbling upon both strange graffiti against the scenic vista and Moonies, her habit of perching in a tiny chair while working on her computer, how happy she is to kill zombies with me on video games (and how well we work together to banish the infected from our path), her single-minded focus while playing Dance Dance Revolution in a bra and jeans, that paintbrushes adorn our bathroom and kitchen sink.

Really, artists leave their droppings everywhere.

She toiled tirelessly to unpack and decorate while I worked for weeks so that, every time I returned, it looked a bit more like we belong here. I won't deny that I did half jokingly ask her once, a week into living together, when it was that she planned on going home. She replied that she was home and I could not disagree. Soon, it is hard to imagine that I ever did without her because she has so subtly overwritten my need to solitude.

I was willing to see what this might bring, in part because of my pride. I wanted to prove to myself that I could, by my effort alone, provide a life spacious enough to fit two. It did not much matter who the other person was, so long as she did not bother me too much as I pursued my private passions. It would have to be a girlfriend, I knew, and I had assumed for years that it would be Melanie - who will never be in the financial position to have to depend on anyone who does not share half of her chromosomes. I could enumerate the virtues and flaws that made her seem sensible, but they boiled down to the fact that Melanie and I did not need one another and I increasingly felt a need to prove myself worthy.

We did not get eaten by Moonies at this time.

I don't know that Amber needs me, though I do not recall having ever been surer that someone loves me. She still has her bedroom in her mother's house, untouched if a bit emptier. She has a safety net. Similarly, as she pays none of the apartment bills, I do not need her in any material sense. This allows for a purity to our arrangement, as we are here together because we wish to be.

Her mother questioned Amber whether she sufficiently earns her keep and - while I do not exactly keep a ledger in my mind - I can't imagine that anyone who had seen us together could doubt it. Without effort, everything seems to get done. When I was recently so ill I could not stand, Amber cuddled against me and read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making to me until the cramping subsisted. We have our symbiosis, even if she jokes that one of the reasons she loves me is that I let her live in my apartment and insist on calling it ours. She also admits that she is the crucial factor that makes this a home and not merely a place to live. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/journal/20120119.php 28 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST  

Daniel and his Canadian companion Eva say their goodbyes well before midnight on New Year's Eve. They, with Merrill in tow, had arrived to Tom's party less than an hour prior. None of them actually knew Tom, after all, though it turned out Daniel had a few coincidental associations among the other guests, none strong enough to overrule spending the rest of the night alone with Eva. I just told Eva that it was a pleasure to meet her (it was, albeit so briefly) and wished Daniel a nice night, since it is not for me to dictate the New Year's Eve plans of adults.

At least, this is true in principle, but New Year's Eve in no time for principles.

Merrill does not leave with them, as I have assured Daniel - to the extent he cares - that I can get her home. I drink no more than a few sips of champagne all night and therefore make for a damn fine designated driver.

Merrill chats with a man whose name I willfully let slip from my mind, but whom I will call "Moose"� for the sake of convenience. Moose, I am certain in context I miss, says that he has never had balls on his chin. Merrill parries this by noting this means he is heterosexual, then gives the point, "But are you single?"�

He is, he admits.

I turn from lovingly tormenting Amber - who I may be liquoring up with Jack and Cokes for my own entertainment - and say, "Wow, may I offer the slow clap here?"�

Merrill has been officially dumped in the last few days, though the breakup was one of those prolonged affairs that ran the gamut of social networking statuses. When last I thought to check earlier in the week, she was complicated and he, Henry, was merely single. When I checked before leaving for the party, prior to gussying myself up to suit the demands of a supposedly formal party (after finally allowing Amber reprieve enough from my affection to dress herself in a stunning and frilly blue number), she was single and he, quite notably, was not. Given this - and the fact that Tom's party had an open invite - I could hardly let the poor girl spend such an evening alone.

When she came in, she admitted that she had never before been to a party, which is one of those statements which practically begs for her to be badgered with questions. This is a party, though, and badgering is hardly festive.

I admit to not knowing Merrill well. She is above an acquaintance - we can talk, even if we do not make a habit of it when we are mutually out of personal distress - but I would not call her a friend. We may have first connected around the time of my breakup with Emily, because I was given to harassing people on dating websites for reasons no more in depth than potential friendship. It was contact enough that I recognized her and addressed her by her screen name when she met Daniel, Hannah, Melanie, and me for a salty lunch years ago. (It made sense; I met those three on the same site as I met her.) Merrill was perhaps more Daniel's friend then as now; they had apparently gone on a few dates that came to nothing more. As can be judged from the occasional photos she posts of him wearing pink feathered boas, he trusts and cares for her. With a few exceptions, I have ample cause to have confidence in his judgment.

A good crew

Despite and because of this specific lack in our emotional intimacy, I feel protectively toward Merrill and know even in the moment that I am projecting. In her shoes - to the extent I can imagine them given that this is the second time I have seen her - I know how vulnerable I would be feeling, how inclined I would be to stifle that voice in my head that says this is a bad idea for that cloying demon that reminds me that I have just be expelled from a relationship and aren't I entitled to a bit of a tumble (metaphorically or literally)? Merrill is an adult, I must assume she can take care of herself. And, though I know it might have seemed nearly indistinguishable from quixotic chivalry from the outside, this is not my attempt at white knighting. I do not believe that Merrill is in any way weak owing to the congenital deficiency of having a vagina. (Trust me, I adolesced alongside Buffy. Women kick just as much ass as men.)

She reports that he squeezes her into a sloppy and slightly presumptuous kiss at the stroke of midnight. She seems pleasantly baffled by this, as though wondering if this behavior was commonplace at parties. It is, at least, commonplace where there are attractive and flirty woman, alcohol, and men who see an excuse to steal kisses. I know, I've been such a man on such night.

But I go home with her

After midnight, as I note Moose's hands taking liberties that are improper not only because Merrill is freshly out of a relationship and he does not even know her surname but because he is in the middle of the party and being not even a little subtle, I suggest to Merrill that it is night about time we should be getting her home.

She looks at Moose. "No, I think I'll stay."

I glance at Amber, quickly conferring. "No," I say, "I think it would really be better if you were to come with us. Now. Please." I throw Moose a conciliatory smile, hoping he will loosen his grip on her inner thigh.

"He'll bring me home, won't you?" she very nearly coos to him. He, a bit ruddy with inebriation, agrees. Merrill then locks eyes with me, since I think she knows what I am attempting. "Don't worry."

But I do worry. I back off and ask Amber what we should do, since staying at the party to babysit someone who insists she does not require our services as chaperone or chauffeur is not how I intend to spend the remainder of my night. We decide that our duty is not to watch her get pawed, but that I will be antsy if I do not alert someone to the situation. I tentatively ask around until I am directed to a room of various partygoers, all of whom are tipsy at the absolute least. I explain the situation to Tom and then, to better suit the level of coherence of a room full of the appropriately drunk, break it down a bit. "Merrill got dumped yesterday. Technically, two days ago, since it's after midnight. I don't know her especially well, but I think I would be... not exactly in my right mind... in her position."

"So, you want us to cock block him?" Tom asks.

"I was more thinking of it as babysitting... Actually, yes. Cock block. She should not go home with him."

There is some amused hemming and hawing, some men asserting that the bond of testicular brotherhood mean that they are forbidden from directly preventing a fellow male from scoring with what seems to be an easy lay. I am instead pointed to the hostess, who knows the Moose in question, though it is implied they are not on good terms.

"So this is Tom's friend?" Kat asks.

"No," I reply sheepishly. "Her friend Daniel brought her, but he left hours ago. Tom doesn't even know Merrill. Once we leave, she will basically be on her own, but I think that's a bad idea. I wanted someone else to keep on eye on her."

"If her friend left her like that, she is on her own. I'm not interfering."

In concept, I can't disagree with that argument. And after midnight on New Year's, I am not starting 2012 by subverting the free will of others lubricated by alcohol, especially at the expense of getting home to my warm, cozy bed with my warm, cozy girlfriend. ]]> http://www.xenex.org/journal/20120101.php 22 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST