Jamie Mason

(reprinted from my article at AuthorScoop)

“Excuse me, sir. Grab that big heavy bar, will ya?”

“Okay. Got it. What do you want me to do with it?”

“Lift it up over your head. A little further… a little further. That’s it, push it. Great. You can put it down now.”

“Phew.”

“Would you mind doing that again, nine more times?”

“What for?”

“It’s good for you. And you, ma’am, grab your ears and try to touch your knees to your chin. Excellent. Do it a hundred times. Over there, you! Yeah you. Run around in a circle until you want to die.”

***

There was a time when filling our bellies and keeping the rain out of our slack, sleeping mouths was a full time job. Life was exercise. There were no flabby hunter-gatherers and pioneers didn’t need Pilates. But as our conveniences got cleverer, we went soft and weak. It’s not an indictment, it’s only the truth. And who would go back to the days of crossing the room to turn up your stereo?

Everyone knows there’s value in power-walking over a wide rubberband that’s looping on rollers, and we don’t question the ridiculous practice of grunting under disks of metal lifted to nowhere in three sets of ten reps each. In our modern lives, there just isn’t demand enough on the muscles and tendons to keep them strong and healthy. Survival, for the most part, doesn’t test our capabilities anymore. So we invented Jack Lalanne.

Life also isn’t big enough, or long enough, for most of us to ever know how we’d react to an alien invasion, or what we’d want if we grew up as best friend to someone socially off-limits. The range of our experience, even among the most traveled and tormented, can’t cover all we could do, given the time. Our personal dose of drama often isn’t sufficient for the vast capacity of the human mind for empathy, outrage, heroism, and debauchery. So we invented fiction.

Just think about that the next time you feel guilty for wasting time between the covers of a novel. The benefits of mental and emotional calisthenics play out every day. Pure fantasy can lay the paving stones for journeys we have yet to take. And if it’s well-written, forewarned is most reliably forearmed.

But if you’ve been sitting there too long, just raise the book over your head. And one and two and - don’t lock those elbows - three and four…

Smelling the Roses (or WhyI'd Hate People Less if They Read More) (back to top)

I have a low personal-turbulence tolerance. Or at least I did. I very accidentally on purpose engineered my life to buffer me from the world with an impenetrable wall of placid people. I hand-picked them for their blood-pressure. Then I filled the moat with their cheerfulness and serenity. Not that they’re boring mind you, they’re brilliant and essential, but my long-time chosen companions are polite, or at least willing to simmer down when it’s required. They are self-possessed and disinclined to get all lathered up unless a 911 call is imminent. They aren’t petty or caustic or prone to capering. My old friends do not get arrested.

A sense of humor was always a must, but they had to have all their dials and buttons firmly in hand. None of my friends was ever likely to go to eleven. I was content to be the eccentric in the bunch, my brand of rebellion being all talk and no warning labels. I am as safe as toast.

Then I got this crazy idea that I wanted to be a writer. It felt almost inevitable. I had lived in books and stories. I had narrated in my head nearly constantly since I was seven years old, but it wasn’t until recently that I realized not everyone did this.

So I sought them out, the writer people. They are magnetic, imaginative, and a good few of them have unpredictable fuses so microscopic they might as well be stored in lead-lined boxes and labeled ‘Explodes on Impact’. They’re argumentative and dramatic and sad and wildly happy and, well, exhausting. I’ve learned much about myself. I’ve fiddled with my own settings and expanded my capacity for feeling things. But I’m no match for them – all those writers I’ve come to cyberknow. They’re mostly all crazy and I’m still just slightly burned bread.

So why do I stay? Why do I suffer fits of outrage and boil in arguments and pine for acceptance and thrill to their encouragement? It’s certainly not what I thought I’d do.

My recent vacation sorted all this out for me. I also learned what my pre-writing friends have in common with the writers I’ve latched onto: they don’t take things for granted.

Large anonymous crowds do not bring out the best in me. If I’m honest, I don’t like people much. Civility, appreciation, and common courtesy have, as a result of Global Warming I’m sure, melted into the highways and sidewalks. They have taken a terrible trampling. As much fun as I had on the trip (think bushels and barge-loads) I’ve never been so disgusted by people in all my life.

My limits were tested in minutes, not hours or days, by rude, sulking, intolerant people paying good money to shuffle past me with grumpy, hang-dog expressions on their furloughing faces. They barked orders at their fellow human beings, who were obviously working diligently in the service of their holiday. No ‘please’. No ‘thank you’. They talked over presentations they'd stood in line to see, and didn’t turn off their cell phones – even when asked to. They didn’t clap for the performers efforts (which were excellent) and they didn’t smack the snot out of their surly children who sighed “I’m glad that’s over” within earshot of those who would be wounded by such comments.

I think, although I could be wrong, that the writers I’ve forged bonds with wouldn’t do this. They notice things. They appreciate things. And they love to tag experiences with superlatives, from both ends of the scale.

I’d suggest that a decline in recreational reading in our culture is contributory to what upset me so on this trip. When you open the cover of a book, you agree to swim the minutia therein. Appreciation for what happens or how it’s told is all there is in a book. There’s no laugh track to goose you into a response, no eerie music to herald the suspense. You have to do it yourself. A book is a transaction with the devil – the one in charge of all the details. And he’s a good tutor. Readers are better students of life.

Writers collect details, because they have to – it’s the raw materials they work with. They’re less bored, and subsequently less boring, than a great wedge of society pie. I think I love them. I can’t think of anyone I enjoy who isn’t appreciative.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and only skin deep. But vanity is to the bone. Neck vertebrae C3 through C7, in my case.

I've been out of commission of late with this sometimes serious, mostly obnoxious, medical issue. It's had me worried. In theory, there should be another fifty years of fight in this old girl, but it seems my neck has outpaced me by about forty of them. That leaves me staring down a four decade deficit of head support; a problem indeed for someone with a melon like mine.

But it can't be that bad. I still manage my ridiculous nightly liturgy, my ritual sacrifice of skin cells and comfort to the God of Crowsfeet. First of all, I have to get my hair out of the way and, for some reason, a headband or hair-tie just won't do. No, I have to be the bath towel Sikh warrior, with a swirl of terrycloth rising a foot and a half off my noggin. And this is a bit of a challenge when I can't bend my head to load it into the turban. But still, I persevere. I should join the circus.

Smearing goop over my face and its traitorous stalk isn't a problem. My hands work just fine, even through the surges of pins and needles. It's the rinsing it off again that's a chore. Have you ever seen the brittle contortions a giraffe goes through to get its lips to the waterhole? Legs splayed, back tilted to an improbable angle, the clock ticking minutes rather than seconds off its life, just to strike the pose? Yeah, that's me at the sink, straining down to slap the acide de beauté off before I have nothing left but cheekbones peeking through shreds of muscle fiber. It's a sign of the times that I have to pause and think about which is worse – exfoliating myself to a grinning skull with eyebrows or conceding to the indignity of collagen-poor canyons running from the base of my nose down to the corners of my mouth.

I still shave my armpits, although I can't see them. Not even close. I raise my arms, shut my eyes tight and hope with all that's in me that those glinting triple blades aren't spiteful. Blow-drying my hair is a tedious exercise when I can't get the nozzle anywhere near the back of my head and I can't flip and fluff as I'm accustomed. But I do it anyway. And I'm fortunate I didn't put my eye out plucking brow arches with the tremors I had two weeks ago.

So, it's unpleasant. My head hurts all the time and it takes me half an hour to unload the dishwasher. I cringe at the predictions of Frankenstein pins and bionic disk replacements that await me in the inevitable, but nebulous, future. My nightly cocktail is at odds with my ibuprofen, scouring away at my stomach lining, forcing me into abstinence. But I'm thinking I can save the serious fretting until I'm too out of sorts to shave my legs. Honestly, it can't be fatal if I'm still willing to crane over the basin for a good view to ensure I snare all my eyelashes into the curler-thingy.

If A Tree Falls (back to top)

A tree fell yesterday. Several of them, in fact. And three people died within a four minute walk of my house.

I never heard a thing.

A Cessna 182 crashed almost in my backyard, on the ridge just behind me, and I cannot get my head around the fact that I didn't mark the moment the hundred foot oaks splintered, their arms catching the crippled plane and tearing it to pieces. Somehow I missed clamor of mutual destruction within sprinting distance of my own driveway. I was home when it happened. The Civil Air Patrolman told me what he was allowed to, so I know when and I know where, although I haven't seen the site.

It may have been when I was in the shower or on the telephone. The windows were even open. I drove on to my lunch appointment, past the ambulances and Channel 13's big satellite-feed truck, wondering what all the fuss was about; knowing that something significant must have happened. But the roofers kept hammering away on the house they're building across the street, so I didn't imagine it could be that bad. I had heard their industry all day, as I have heard it in the background every day for as long as I've lived here. Only Sundays and the rain keeps them from their work, and then all I hear is the variant sighs and patters of wind and raindrops, or a rushing gutter gurgle if it's a quality downpour. Sundays seem unnaturally quiet.

I don't feel guilty, exactly. There was no assistance I could have offered and I would have likely just been in the way if I'd walked over to spectate. It's only sitting here in the heat trail of disaster that I can't decide what to think. Three people ended, their last moments awash in terror, just above my head. And by the ripple effect, dozens are wrangling the stages of grief somewhere in Georgia today.

I know it's this way all the time. The people I pass, they feel things, and I push through their auras of elation, anxiety, boredom, preoccupation. I rinse the clinging bits of telepathic cobwebs down the drain each day. But I do care.

It's not that I want to share their burdens. I'm not that generous or that useful. I'd simply like them to know, all those colorful blurs at the periphery of my vision, that I can't feel them. I'm cocooned in my own swirl of distractions and wishes. My longings and disappointments elbow past the hopes and satisfactions in the queue for my attention.

I don't know what those others want or worry about, but I know that they do. And if I could, in the psychic dander I shed over their coat sleeves as I hurry by, I'd leave gossamer threads of acknowledgement, dustings of good will.

I didn't hear you crash or die, just as I can't hear your loved ones ache and cry, but I know that you were here and you stopped me in my tracks. The tree fell and no one heard it, but it most definitely made a sound.

Life is Very Long (back to top)

Life is very long. People will say it's too short to drink cheap wine and too short to waste on jackasses, or holding a grudge. But really, these are just words to gloss over uncomfortable spaces. It's what we say, with a haughty sniff, when we haven't the stomach for grand demonstrations of spewing an inferior vintage over the tablecloth, telling your boss to go pound sand and managing not to make the same mistakes with the same useless, unkind and untrustworthy people over and over and over again.

Life's not short if you're saddled with good health, half a brain and a knack for avoiding fatal accidents. And nothing will drive the spiky point of this truth through your heart like a trip home.

I've spent two weeks of this summer re-laying my footprints all over Washington, DC and Alexandria, Virginia. I know I stood in the very same spot on the platform at Metro Center Station where I once choked back tears from the pain borne of convincing myself that a seven and a half boot would stretch to accommodate my size eight foot.

Everything that was my second skin of noise and light came back, like a happily-maddening itch. I'd call it a tingle, but I'm not that giddy. Especially when it's that hot. Urban summer tries to simulate nature and cool itself after sunset. I couldn't keep from smiling at the stroke and whisper of that very particular variety of warm, humid air skimming glass and concrete and strategically planted trees. It's a largely futile, but appreciated, effort under a low and wooly sky - all dark blue and featureless. Only the brightest can shine in a city. I mean the stars too, of course. It was a feeling that always pricked my senses to the many, many ways a night could go.

I walked and rode and drove and was startled time and again, raising my eyes to meet a long-familiar view that hadn't played anywhere but in my subconscious for years.

Some of these moments I had all on my own. Without a child's hand in mine or a husband at my elbow, I couldn't distinguish the me of 2007 from the me of 1987 or 1977, apart from the higher vantage point my eyesight enjoys nowadays. It was only in doing the math that I could grasp how very far away my retreating silhouette is on my own horizon.

I remember only snippets from my first decade of life. Ten to twenty is a blur of excitement and of wishing for the next big thing. My memory only comes online in sharper focus from twenty onwards. All of this could catch in my throat as terrible and poignant, to have all those years beyond my reach. But I prefer to wink back at the sparkly little truth buried under all that nostalgia: if I look at it a certain way, holding more or less only three handfuls of years in clarity, I'm only seventeen. I'm a baby. I've got my whole life ahead of me.

Don't we all.

Lynchian Moments (back to top)

I am not a fan of David Lynch films. Generally, I find his works to be annoyingly self-conscious and guilty of trying too hard to be weird. Kinda like most heavy metal music. But there have been moments in my life that I can only describe as 'Lynchian.' Instances when all of a sudden, I have to palpate my skull for caved-in spots just to make sure I'm not struggling to function through a drastic head injury.

For example, a while back, I was walking down my street when mine was one of only three houses here. I knew the other two homeowners and nothing in their habits would explain away what I saw this day. I walked to the corner, one foot in front of the other as I like to do it, when suddenly my right ankle turned, the ball of my foot wobbling off a something that wasn't smooth road. My left foot stomped to the rescue, only to be betrayed by a similar fate and I pitched and yawed for what had to be an entire two seconds (which can be quite a long time if you're trying not fall down.) The reason for my troubles was simple. And one of the oddest things I'd ever seen. Apparently, God's golf bag had broken and it had rained hundreds of baby blue golf tees. They were everywhere. WTF? Yeah, things like that.

Another such time came in the middle of a trans-continental red-eye journey from San Diego, on my way home to Washington DC. It was well past midnight and I was minding my own business in the echo-ey and largely deserted domestic terminal of the Dallas/Ft.Worth International Airport. I was reading, sitting alone in the middle link of a chain of rigid chairs in the waiting area at my gate. I'm pretty sure the seats were upholstered in folded pillowcases overlaid with all the black vinyl tablecloths Wal-Mart never sold. Not too great a demand for black table cloths. Someone should have told them. Ah well, their shortsightedness became my gain, as I could not complain, at least, that I was sitting on the bare steel frame. And apparently, it was just going to be me and the pilot on that flight. Everyone else had either got where they were going or weren't leaving 'til tomorrow.

It was because of this quiet isolation that I had a long time to contemplate the growing jingle-shuffle-thud that began so faintly, I first thought I was imagining it. But as the sound swelled, I started playing Name That Tune while scanning the dim hall for a-janitor-with-too-many-keys-and-a-gimpy-leg or a-flat-tired-wheel-barrow-full-of-teaspoons or a-clown-walking-with-coffee-cans-loaded-with-pennies-strapped-to
-his-big-clown-shoes. or maybe a-herd-of-metal-shod-chihuahuas-or a, huh?, a sawed off Magnum PI wannabe dragging Pigpen from the Peanuts comic strip, shackled at the wrists and ankles.

It is almost impossible to gawp discretely. My only salvation was that I kept swiveling my head to get a look at the film crew. If they were there, they were a platoon of ninjas. Magnum's runty brother swaggered in jeans and a giddy Hawaiian shirt, tugging his disheveled companion's lead whenever his smirk needed a refill.

I can't say I felt immediately compassionate in sizing up Pigpen. Call me cynical, but if you find yourself shuffling through a Texas airport, limbs chained to your belt, and the Bonneville Salt Flats puffing out of your pockets, I'm betting you have a penchant for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was pathetic: cowlicks saluting every compass point, dust rising off him like steam. He had only one shoe. And it was a flip-flop. Needless to say, he kept his eyes downcast.

Private Dick was a bit of a jokester too. In the empty stadium of the terminal, he found a view that amused him. With much yanking and tussling, he shoved the human dust mop into a seat that went immediately from black to grey in a fine powdering of wherever-he'd-been-rolled. Of course, that seat was two away from my own. Slickyboy grinned, gave me a nod and slid down deep in the seat next to me. I'm pretty sure I heard him chuckle into his crisp floral collar. Pigpen cringed and tried to make himself very small.

And I was simply too polite to change seats.

The last I saw of them was Pigpen stumbling ahead of a great many unnecessary nudges from Fancyshirt to their seats in the back of the plane. I took mine over the wing. I always get sat over the wing. I have no idea why.

I'm sure knowing the rest of the story would have made it a little easier not to wiggle around for a glimpse of the goings on back there. But I don't really regret my ignorance. There's nothing to make you feel alive quite like not having the faintest clue as to what just happened.

Make Yourself Useful: Why They'll Eat The Writers First (back to top)

Once the apocalyptic smoke clears, they'll go for the canned goods. We can breathe easy for as long as the Chef Boyardee and mandarin orange segments in light syrup hold out. Although, breathing easy is probably relative in clouds of radiation and billowing ash. No matter, once they get down to the beets and off-brand potted meat products, it's time to be looking for any light you may have been hiding under a bushel. You know, abilities - fixing things, building a Boy Scout-worthy fire, tying knots in cherry stems with only your tongue. Oh wait. There won't be any cherries. Better find out now if you can do it with a twist tie or a bit of shoelace.

Writing grammatically correct prose won't cut it. Writing even tantalizing, gripping, I'm-sorry-your-thumb-is-dangling-by-a-tendon-
-here-hold-this-dishtowel-to-it-I'm-almost-finished-reading-this-chapter brilliance will not keep you out of the soup for long. Sure, they love literature when their bellies are full and their bank accounts are flush and the sky isn't poisoned orange. But let the comet collide or an odd little man with too many incendiary toys have three bad days in a row, and, after a fortnight of licking gum wrappers for flavor, writers will be looking a little too much like milk-fed veal.

As much as we hate to admit it, they don't need us. Not in the way they need mechanics and engineers and guys who can tell them their tongues will turn purple and swell to airway-obstructing proportions if they eat that particular plump, pretty mushroom. If we ever ride the evolutionary pendulum back to days full of foraging and nights full of fretting, verb-tense agreement and snappy dialogue are doomed to lining everybody's boots against the damp.

Painters and sculptors and those able to craft 'art' from dryer lint and bodily fluids will be trying their best to look inedible too, snatching paranoid glances over their shoulders and sleeping in watches, but the rabble will go through the wordsmiths first. Let's face it, even the crappiest piece of visual art doesn't require an eight to fourteen hour commitment, all the while holding out hope that it may get better if we just give the artist a chance to find his stride. To be fair, poets generally aren't that demanding of our time either, but their status is jeopardized from the outset by the appearance of elitism. Being hungry is bad. Hungry and made to feel stupid because it's hard to grasp the connection between paralyzing angst and the sighing sun on indifferent hills is asking for a homicide. Homicide begets a roast, a stew and leftovers for sandwiches. And the wheel goes round and round.

The musicians are relatively safe. Damn them and their unkempt hair and bong-smoke.

You see, Nature is a competent painter. Chemical sunsets, I'm sure, will give us all something to gawp at as we pass the gas mask around for a few moments of respirational ease before the dark takes us all to bed. Highly developed linguistic capability not only separates us from the chimps, but ensures that even the dimmest hillbilly can relate a story or the news, more or less. So, artists and writers are a redundant and showy indulgence that we trot out once survival becomes routine.

Varied, complex melodies, however, are the exclusive province of man. Birds pipe and warble. Waterfalls crash. The wind hisses, moans and sends boughs clattering. The rainforest can deafen you, but not like Scheherazade or California Dreamin' turned up really loud. Even the Oscar Meyer Weiner jingle is pretty impressive when you hum it and compare its complexity to any natural symphony. They won't eat the musicians, because they just can't get Happy Birthday To You or Feliz Navidad from a gaggle of geese and any old seasonal change or meteorological event.

It sounds grim. It is. And it isn't. It's us against them over and over. Man against nature; dreamer versus laborer; words estranged from tangibles. The best ammunition in these wars is the acknowledgement of their existence. Everything is the most important thing in the world – to somebody.

So to the writers, write. It's not like you can help yourself anyway. But do master something of use, you know, just in case. Study the manual until you can fix a carburetor. Practice assembling an assault rifle blindfolded. And if you're built for it, learn to lap dance – they'll always need that. If you're not, learn to cook or sew or how to patch the blessed roof.

Above all, before the cataclysm, whatever you do, go out today and make yourself indispensable to a musician who knows Kung Fu. You just never know when you'll need a minstrel between you and a hungry machinist.

My Friend (back to top)

I have a new friend. He's hilarious and, if I may say, quite handsome. His office is close enough to mine that our acquaintance has blossomed friendly in a just a short amount of time. We're very much alike, my new friend and I. (I'm not implying that I think I'm handsome, but he does stare a bit; and I blush.) I don't think he'll mind if I talk about him behind his back. Although to be fair, I doubt he'd be able to tell one way or another. I don't think he can read.

My new friend is a hairy woodpecker. Not to suggest that he's unkempt. Like I said, he's a fine-looking fellow. Well, here, see for yourself . It's a stock photo of one of his cousins. If I lean far enough out the window to snap a proper picture of my friend in the actual feather, I risk falling twenty-five feet onto my head. Some might suggest that it could only improve my appeal. Piss on the lot of you.

At any rate, 'hairy woodpecker' is his species, just as 'suburban housewife' is mine. But our labels never do us justice, do they? My friend wouldn't give his name. He's a bit coy like that. I call him Hugh, because I've run across two people in my life named Hugh and they both made me smile. So now it's two men and a woodpecker.

Hugh's tree is just to the left of my office window. It's enormous - sixty feet high - and quite dead. The builders killed it when they graded the lot and I'm up to the molars with ripe words for them. They don't want to lend a hand or a few dollars (well, a bunch of them) to ensure that it doesn't fall on my house. But that's another, and very boring, story.

Hugh's taken to pounding holes about halfway up the trunk, more or less right next to my office window. I may be flattering myself, but I think it was to get my attention. He may look ordinary, but he's got an eagle's soul. I can just tell. His camouflage is pretty spiffy. It took me ages to find him that first time.

I'm quite sensitive to rhythmic tapping. I hate it, in fact. I can't stand clocks to the extent I gave away a lovely wood and brass hall piece that was a wedding present because I thought it would drive me mad to have it chock-clocking away in the foyer. I moved it three times and I could hear it from anywhere I was once the house went still. Then it annoyed me to have it hanging there, sullen and wrong for all but two minutes each day, after I'd silenced it. It looks fine at my sister's.

So, I didn't like Hugh at first. I don't think he liked me either. I'm rather bigger and scarier than his usual audience of squirrels and butterflies. The first few times I bent to the window, he bounced across the bark to the far side of the tree to where I couldn't see him, and wouldn't come back until I'd gotten well situated behind my desk. But we got used to each other and I see there is common ground. He doesn't flinch anymore when I go to the window. Now we just stare at each other, his shiny little black eyes boldly glittering into mine. I think the seam in his beak stretching back into his little bird-cheeks looks like a smile, so I return the grin and he cocks his head. I must look better sideways.

He clacks away at his oak and I bang away on my keyboard. He beats his head against solid wood, literally, as I do it metaphorically. He probably gets bugs and mites for his efforts. I get the correct words to explain myself or my characters. We both devour the fruits of our jackhammering, although what he gives back for his successes, I don't want to know. Me, I write stuff down.

Just today I got the words to put to bed a bastard of a problem. I just wanted to say it right – thoroughly and clearly. The satisfaction was a feast. The kind you need to undo your waistband for and doze off in a comfy chair afterwards.

I'll be hungry again tomorrow and I'll have other things to answer for and there's always chapter thirteen to finish, but for now, I just hope Hugh got a fat grub. I can hear him out there. But he won't tell me. He never tells me anything.

Noise, Big Tires and Burning Eyes (back to top)

I hate billboards. I lived in Richmond, Virginia for a few years and I swear the sun never rose before 10:30 for all the ugly things. And I've never made a purchase after having been shouted at by one either. Until now.

I have just returned from The Southern Thunder Monster Truck Rollout.

You know how a bad date is almost as good as a great date for the bit of bitching you get to do afterwards? Ladies and gentlemen, hold on to your hats. If it weren't for beer and chocolate, I'd be relating this tale via séance. So, thank you Anheuser-Busch and M&M/Mars. What? Did you possibly imagine I meant good beer and fine chocolate? Guess again. But desperate times and all…

I did get to ride in one of these idiot machines. At seven bucks, it was a massive rip-off, but still the highlight of the afternoon.

I'll have to confess at the outset that I have no idea what just happened. I don't speak stadium reverb, but I'm pretty sure the announcer said, "I tell y'all whut!" a few times. You've no choice but to raise an eyebrow and let a Keanu-like "whoa" slip past your lips the first time one of these leviathans crests the line of junkyard castoffs. The first time. Only the first time. Honestly, if you've seen it once, you've seen it. But they just keep taking turns, driving up to the line and popping ear-splitting wheelies over these crushed cars again and again.

I liked the donuts, though. That was cool, because some of the trucks dance around on two wheels. Apparently, the steering column controls the front tires (each nearly as tall as I am) and the rear wheels are on a toggle switch that the driver fiddles with in his other hand. I think they all have three hands a piece, that being only one of their obvious mutations. The ability to drive while comatose is another one. I've never seen such a bunch of bored, lethargic, bowlegged goofballs in my life. Maybe they were just hung-over. I certainly would be if that were my job. I'm weighing the merits of a booze-binge just to settle my nerves tonight.

The machines themselves are simply a strange thing to do. I'm not sure how it ever occurred to anyone to jack a standard production pick up truck so high you have to climb the suspension to crawl into the cab, then modify it to something more suited to a Saturday morning cartoon than real life. One of the trucks, named Samson, had muscle-bound, fiberglass arms. That's just weird. But the effects are impressive. Fifteen hundred horsepower screaming in anticipation of bucking over a ramp of packed dirt and scrap metal will set your innards quivering and your own fight-or-flight impulse chasing its irrational tail up and down your spine. It'll also rattle the building from foundation to rafters, sending a shower of asbestos and paint flakes swirling around until you're pretty sure you're caught in a snowglobe on Satan's knick-knack shelf.

The smell is interesting too. They burn primarily racing alcohol which ends up reeking like incense. I think it's mildly intoxicating, because I assure you, Bud Light is not. The hippy smoke wafting through the air was distinctly at odds with all the John Deere ball caps. I'm still very confused.

There are other things, too. There are Confederate flags and Jolly Rogers for sale. They have earplugs, thanks be. They have ATV races, but half the field was wearing red and black, so I really don't know who won. They ran one race, then brought the trucks back for a few thousand skips over the flattened family sedans, and then ran a second ATV event. I'm thinking all the over-21 ATV jockeys had three or four shots of Jagermeister in the interim and the juniors huffed some glue, because the second go round had much crashing and spinning and forgetting which way to go and ended up in a fist fight. They were still all wearing red and black, so I don't know who won the brawl either.

They had fire, er… dancers. Well that's what they called them anyway. They looked more like a bunch of doped out Emo freaks woozing around, trying to earn their bus fare to Black Rock. But, it's not everyday you see a guy on stilts with a flaming whip – though, to be true, he was no Indiana Jones. I'm practically Catwoman with my dishtowel compared to this drowsy chap. The girls with the flaming hoola hoops were something and it was a giggle to watch them get their heads and hips 'put out' by the extinguisher-towel-boy at the end. I think they should do that off stage, as it takes all the magic out of wondering if they walk about in conflagration all the time.

If you can't tell, I'm glad I went. And if you get the chance, don't say no, but don't say I didn't warn you either. It was a hoot and I'm now sure, without a doubt, that the appeal of Monster Truck Rallies is beyond me. But you never know until you try.

Past Tense (back to top)

Lived. Loved. Wanted.

Was.

There is very little in this world more hateful than the past tense. The verb is the word that grants form to our doings, so that we can hear them in our minds and feel them in the space between our tongues and palates. The verb that names the action is the word that lets us own it. But weigh the word down with –ed, or warp its spelling through some quirk of grammar, and all's lost. She's not running. He's not laughing. They no longer smile at each other. Ran, laughed, smiled. Requiem for a state of being.

Of course, this deliberately ignores what the past tense frees us from. 'Wept' and there's no more crying. 'Healed' and the injury is over. Some occasions are appropriate for optimistic pirouettes, and it can be a healthy thing to study the flip side of a coin. But we often powder over the glare of a hard and shiny truth: sometimes it's noble to feel the moment, to let the ache gnaw all the way to the bone. That's its job. Who are we to thwart its purpose?

The past tense hurts. The past tense skewers. And the past tense is the thief of hope.

Recently, I attended a funeral for a young woman. I didn't know her well. I went because people I know and care for were heartbroken. I expected to be some small comfort, hoped to show her family that their daughter was worth dropping everything for, that their pain warranted driving nine hours to stand with them. The reality was I got knocked sideways just two steps into the funeral home.

Grief and loss frame the doorway to the afterlife. The dead don't mind. Who gives much thought to the door you just went through? It's behind you, and it is what's next that begs appraisal. It's only the living who wail at the threshold they cannot cross.

I'd been to funerals where the grief and loss dragged over me in waves, but I'd never felt the press of shock heaped on top of those as well. It was crushing. Theresa was twenty-two years old, healthy, and loved by many. It was far too keen, the reality of all that she would not do. So, I took exception to the priest's benign diversion from our wallowing with his attention to the biblical story of Lazarus. He seemed a very kind man, the priest. Sincere. I liked him. And he has a job to do. But so do I.

Neither the Bible, nor Christ himself, offers a reason for his resurrection of Lazarus. The man and his sisters, according to the story, were close personal friends of Jesus and when Lazarus fell ill, his sisters sent for the one person they believed could do something about it. The gospel of John tells us that "Jesus tarried."

Lazarus died and Jesus absorbed no small amount of rebuke from Mary, the more spirited of the two remaining siblings. Jesus shushed her, and the crowd, by having the tombstone rolled back and calling to Lazarus, who came shambling out in his shroud to stand blinking in the sun for all their amazement.

God doesn't do that anymore. It has been accepted as an anecdotal one-off to prove a point, and the certainty of Mysterious Ways would have us no more praying for Him to wake the dead than we'd stand in front of a vat of water and plead for wine. Not these days. So, unfortunately, Lazarus and his sisters enjoying an extended time together on earth does little to comfort modern mourners keeping vigil at a casket that will not rattle with promise. What's done is done.

That being the case, I submit there is a time to let the tide carry you away and that it is inappropriate to tell the newly bereft that there's a bright lining, if they'd only look at it a certain way. Time heals all wounds. All of them. Whether we want it to or not. Sometimes it feels like the hurt is the only link we have to the thing we miss. Deep down, we know that the first morning we wake up feeling fit is the day it's lost to us forever.

There is no bridge from the time life is a misery to the time life is back to normal. But there is a moat. It's deep and it's cold and the opposite bank's upward slope is so terribly gradual. When we find ourselves wading into the water or thrown in, headlong and unsuspecting, I think it only right to shun the platitudes and pay full, wrenching homage to the disorder of the universe. I don't believe clergymen or therapists or garden variety well-wishers should try too soon to distract from the suffering. The one we loved was worth it. The acuteness of the pain will end in its own time with or without premature stories of Pearly Gates or how life goes on.

The past tense is inevitable, for good things and bad. It's omnipotent. As such, it deserves its due like any devil, and it deserves its deference like any god.

Secret Admirer (back to top)

I shared a cigarette with a friend the other night. He doesn't think I should write this piece; thinks it might be bad for impressionable kiddies. So, kiddies, first off – there is no amount of wishing that will make something good for you out of something that isn't. Poison is poison, no matter it wakes you up, calms you down, tastes like heaven or feels like love. The sooner you recognize that, the better. There is no glamour in watching yourself rot from the inside out, with only hell to look forward to for your own foolishness. (Strong enough, Steve-o?)

But in the matter of this cigarette I was sharing, these thoughts preceded my asking for a toke, not the other way around. I asked for a drag out of pure green envy. Smoking looks good. And I've thought so forever.

On the surface, I am not heavily burdened with vices. In fact, my veneer would suggest I'm the poster child for clean-living. Not antiseptic living, mind you – a little dirt is good for the immune system. But I could pass a drug test. My lungs are clean, my liver is pink and my pancreas is not overwrought.

There is simply something so human about smoking. We like to go on about our opposable thumbs and our ability to reason, but all creatures, within their identified groups, achieve to the limit of their capacities. I just can't think of any animal equivalent to the pointless eloquence of the cigarette ritual.

I once saw a man strike a match with such fury and burn the raw end of his Marlboro with such sadistic intent, that it didn't matter I couldn't pin a name on what sparked his rage. I knew exactly how he felt. And I trembled for the tobacco that flared just in front of his gritted teeth.

I've watched shaking hands soothed to competency by the torching ceremony and seen confidence bluffed successfully, just by giving the reluctant limelighter a graceful, practiced task to busy him. Urgency is broadcast doubly when the words flow out around a bobbing white wick; sadness seeps out in a grey cloud, veiling a bowed head. And a handsome mouth, lipping and pursing over the paper, makes me wonder… well, nevermind.

The thing is, there is artistry in movement. A heavy dose of agility and you're a dancer or an acrobat. But even just a little dexterity, with some rehearsal, can make a pageant of your moods and preoccupations. The smoker's sentence is punctuated for him – habit as performance art, especially at the lighting up and the stubbing out. I love to watch them. Generally from upwind, but still…

Southern Enough (back to top)

We all have two homes: the home we make for ourselves, and the home that makes us in the first place. Whatever you run to in life, or run from - literally or metaphorically - it all traces back to the homes that shelter or shackle your heart.

I've never had a mailing address north of the Mason-Dixon Line, but I've not identified strongly as 'Southern.' Digging a little broader, I can't say I've felt the compulsion to tag myself as particularly 'American' either. There's been preoccupation enough with having the label 'human' stick firmly, and that's pretty much used up the sliver of concern I've earmarked for these matters.

But the fact is, I am a Southerner. I know what okra is and I know how to cook it, or more importantly, how not to. I know the difference between grits and Cream of Wheat. I make a fine mint julep. And I know, above all, that "but it's a dry heat" is a poor apology for hundred and six degree weather. There is no consolation in suffering and shriveling to a strip of pale jerky.

I just don't trust a place if the very air is trying to suck the juice out of me. Take Las Vegas, for instance. The moral watchdogs of the land may worry that the gambling and whoring will scoop our souls out of God's reach. And CSI has a lot of people convinced that gangsters and serial killers cast armies of long shadows in the glow of all that Sin City neon. But I think those concerns run a distant second and third to the fact that the desert itself wants to drink you. From the moment you step off the plane, the wind drags at your skin and sips at your eyeballs. It swabs your tongue dry and sends tickling straws of heat into your lungs to wick away your personal humidity for its own. There's nothing to make you recognize your Southern-ness like feeling yourself turn to paper mache. Don't get me wrong, I love Las Vegas, but it's best to know from the outset when something is trying to kill you.

As little thought as I generally give it, I have to admit though, that I know what I want, and what I'll have nothing to do with, by drawing on my time in Virginia and North Carolina. It would be impossible to dissect and separate what influences are purely geographical from those things peculiar to individual circumstance. And I don't know that it would mean much in the land of iconic contradictions anyway. You can be Southern with a gift for music and turn out REM or Lynard Skynard. (Although, the latter are from Florida and I've never really considered that dewlap hanging off the southeastern tip of the country to be properly Southern. I'm pretty sure it was supposed to have fallen off and floated elsewhere, trailing a wake of gators.) And if I had to pinpoint where I fell between Scarlett O'Hara and Daisy Duke, well, I wouldn't know whether to shit or go dancing.

I've carried with me my Southern touchstones, gleaned from the good and the bad I've experienced in the home I did not choose. I've sought out the same in the whole world, as far as my small reach has extended. I've drawn to me (and pushed from me) the things that the American South, in truth or legend, has offered as nesting materials for the taking: friendliness, dramatics, a bruised wariness for bigotry tempered by an impatience for political correctness. I can pick and choose, and the abundance here has shown me how. I drawl the 'h' in vehicle, but take my iced tea unsweetened and my manners are something I wear like petticoats, something to please my elders and betters. But my, how they itch.

The home I build for myself inside my mind, the one they say is where the heart is, it's under constant renovation. It isn't particularly Southern in design, and I don't fancy draping it in greygreen cutains of Spanish moss or winding bolts of kudzu over anything that stands still for too long. But home will always be swathed in gentle, heavy air, because that is how I learned to breathe.

The Dressing Gown (back to top)

At the outset, there are a couple of things you should know about me: one, I am not sentimental in strictly normal ways, and two, I have a bathrobe.

A lot of people have bathrobes, I realize, but I never bothered with one until I was twenty eight years old, chiefly because I have a general disdain of sleepwear. I'm either dressed or not. Anything in between is usually an exercise in discomfort. It's either of the psychological variety (borne of the conflict of striking sexy while the lace scritches hives all over the bits it's covering - in its not-covering sort of way) or else it's the practical kind of annoyance. I do not care for being strangled by flannel.

However, being enormously pregnant and staring down weeks, if not months, of racing to the nursery six times a night in the altogether, I figured I should have a dressing gown. It was hideous - a Wedgewood blue, murdered bathmat. Maybe five bathmats. It was enormous. Believe me, it needed to be. But it was functional and sturdy and, for the first few weeks of each of my children's lives, the only thing they ever saw me in. They bonded to a bundle of coarse terrycloth with a milk machine inside it. It was my uniform and it cuddled me through the most exhausting days I've ever known.

Since then, I've become accustomed to having a robe for out-of-the-shower-puttering, nightly-face-washing and make-the-coffee-before-all-else-for-god's-sake mornings. I'm thoroughly domesticated now. But, not being much of a romantic, I've been callously looking to replace my tattered blue rag for ages. And that's another thing about me – I'm a hopeless shopper. I don't like it and I'm no good at it. Ergo, I've been wearing the same threadbare cover-up for years, well beyond its decency. I can't even grab the paper dressed in it on trash days for fear they'll cart me off with the rubbish.

Yesterday, I found a new robe. It's long enough (don't really see the point in being cozy from only the tush up), it feels like whipped cream and it's an excellent shade of red. And it was a bargain. I love it. My girls are at a sweet age where they still find me interesting, so late yesterday afternoon, we were all three cooing over and petting my purchase as I sheared the tags from it. It's that yummy.

I shook the old blue monstrosity free of its hanger and unceremoniously wadded it into a trash bag, reminding the girls of all that it had seen. It had been with me in the hospital for both their births. It had been cried on (by them and me), spit up on, peed on, and covered in strained sweet potatoes. I'd tucked them inside it for cold middle of the night feedings and slept in it on the floor when I was too tired to go back to my own bed, knowing they'd need me again as soon as my head had found the just-the-right-temperature spot on my pillow. I've worn it every Christmas morning for the last nine years.

"I don't want you to throw it out," said my oldest.

"It's a wreck," I said.

"No, I love it," wheedled the littlest, hugging its hem to her chest.

"How about if I give you a piece of it?"

They both agreed and I went to work, cutting a wide band of sleeve for each child. Then finally, they let me load the sad, ragged thing into the big garbage bin.

The little one wore her bathrobe blankie sleeve to bed, on her head.

What neither of them know is that the ratty old bathrobe has been without a right-hand pocket for almost five years. It's been snipped into two terrycloth hearts and tucked away in the box where I keep my special things.

The Greatest Invention (back to top)

I am a great fan of inventions that advance the cause of human comfort. Specifically, my comfort.

I've argued often and passionately for naming air-conditioning as the pinnacle of pampering ingenuity. I've bullet-pointed its superiority over the admittedly admirable elevator and the coordination-coddling automatic transmission. (I do like to eat and drive at the same time, so that was a tough one – but would I give it up to bake in my tin-can-on-wheels during a traffic jam in August? Not a chance.) I've considered the bliss of cool air sighing from a vent in the drywall as compared to the convenience of ordering delivery pizza over my cordless telephone. Threaten to take away my climate control and I'll dangle at the end of a springy tether on a rotary phone bolted to the wall any day – and I won't even cry about it. Hell, I'll even cook my own supper. And my dedication to internet access is boundless, but you'd likely get only sniveling and cursing out of me if I had to do it with my sweat-damp blouse clinging to my back and my lank hair tickling in the rivulets running down my face.

But all that changed this morning. And there is no Truer Truth than what's to be found in the guileless goggling of a four year old.

I was watching something on my computer and the smallest housebeast came into my office to ask a question. I missed the first half of her query because a) she started it halfway down the hall and b) I was looking at and listening to Jeremy Clarkson on my Windows Media Player.

She shuffled over to my elbow, still chattering even though the point was hopelessly buried in the last few seconds that my attention had been elsewhere.

"Can you pause that?" she asked.

So I did and answered the great conundrum of the morning, assuring her that it was indeed warm enough for her new shirt – the one with the butterflies on it. All puzzles solved, she and I were left contemplating Mr. Clarkson, frozen onscreen in an unfortunate droopy-eyed, skewed-lipped facial contortion. It's a rare man as looks good zapped to a standstill in the middle of a sentence. Which got me thinking…

"Do you know, we didn't have a pause button when I was your age?"

I was being silly, but the effect was perception changing. My daughter's face nearly fell off.

"You had to miss everything?!"

I realized then the true value of creature comfort. It allows us (or should, if we're paying attention) the easiest possible route to our generosity. The taped-glasses and pocket-protector set has afforded me every opportunity to have my cake, or my Clarkson, and eat it too. Altruism should be so much more accessible now that I can do almost anything, almost anywhere, at virtually any time of the day -- and it'll even wait for me if the baby needs a weather report.

The pause button is the greatest invention of all time.