A Toast to Employment... but only one

Well, I got my wish.  I have been hired to write a screenplay.  It's been a very long time since I was under employ as a writer, and I am pleased to say that I think I have benefited from the length of time.  Two kids and lots more time writing for say, only self-imposed deadlines, really shapes you.  That and I decided I was scholastically under educated in writing, writers and the literary form as a whole so I took a few night classes and nothing motivates you more than a whole generation of writers who have read more books than you, write more than you and frankly have all that time you used to have to dick around and that's exactly what most of them are doing... dicking around.  Although to them, life is a major strain, man, the j-o-b at the Super Sub, babysitting and the class load.  And would their parents stop buying that food they don't like, geez, the indecency.  I decided currently, with my scant time, I need to rocket through the lost years, and make a major play for the next half of my life.  


The screenplay is a hot topic.  As my lovely new Berkeley friend Val said, "So you are writing a screenplay from scratch about France, Muslims, Jews, anti-Semitism and torture, in 6 weeks... do you know about any of these subject matters?"  This was a cruel question coming from a woman who would be my drinking partner through all this grueling balls to the wall work except she had to go get knocked up with her 3rd kid and cease drinking for 10 months.  False promises, Val!  


Sobriety is the best state for writing.  I don't care about what frame of mind Hemingway wrote in, or Hunter S. Thompson.  It's fine to blather on about how weed can open the mind, make it funnier, more observant more poignant.  Anything I have written stoned and then read later is just a bunch of self-satisfying glop.  The drugs and the alcohol are to deal with the intensity and the anxiety an artist will feel when they are trying to assure themselves they are in fact writer material.  They know in their heart they are, they sit down to do it, words end up on the page, but is it just a bunch of self-indulgent shit?  This is where alcohol and drugs come into play to make the artist feel like they can have that release from the stress that weighs on them every day they sit down to write.  They are able to chill out, although I find that I just get paranoid that I didn't do enough and I am just wasting time away.  It could be a form of PTSD from when I used to actually waste a lot of time worrying about everything and nothing, because I surely know with confidence right now in my life, I have little time to do anything including trim my cuticles or buy healthier food to eat besides tubular pasta with vodka sauce (gotta get some alcohol in there somewhere).


I am very excited about this screenplay.  It is noble and daring, and bravo to the producers who decided to pony up the cash to engage me to do it.  I am so thrilled to have a job, they are getting more bang for their buck than they know.  But none of that matters if the script is shit.  Really, no one cares if you worked every night and weekends to produce lines of doo doo.  So light a candle for me, say prayers of sobriety and illumination.  Karmically, your support of me could get some good karma for you back.


I am aware that I have made numerous references to parts of the male member in this post.  I am not sure why.  I have spent a lot of time researching a very male-dominated suburban Paris, and perhaps the proverbial cock is on the mind.

The Sound of Your Work Disappearing

My computer just flat out stopped working on Mother's Day.   Anyone who tries to tell me this was a sign I need to slow down will be beheaded with a dull kitchen knife.  The computer screen was just black, no happy loud stereophonic bing bong, no flash of aqua light.  No sign-in page.  To make matters worse, the back up hard drive I was relying on was on the fritz, and had been for a while, so the back ups were spotty and from about three weeks ago.

Here is the lesson to the writer.  Back up your freaking work everywhere and if you feel you are being manic about backing up your work, back it up one more time.  Print the goddamn 200 pages of work.  You deserve to consume this much printer paper after sorting through your recycling to make sure the plastic blueberry container is in a different vessel for the sanitation department than the tin foil.   And don't use the backs of other previously printed work for these precious back ups.  There are always the hidden staple, rough edged three hole punch or paper put in upside down that will jam your printer and suck three unnecessary hours out of your day thus preventing the execution of the other nine back ups you need to do for your work.

Okay, I spiral but for good reason.  It is shocking how I, and I assume many of you out there, do not amply back up my work.  What is the point of spending gobs of money on babysitters, standing up to your husband and children for your free writing time on weekends, clawing through the guilt of making no money at this time to speak of on your craft, if you write a 155 page novel and it disappears instantly like bad bubble solution due to a fried logic board.  Sure, sure, we're all hamsters on a wheel.  Kid gets a middle ear infection and suddenly the new focus is the antibiotic,  the run to Target for countless boxes of tissues for a snotty bubbly nose,  the lack of sleep and the second kid jealous of the attention paid to the sick kid sucking up your time and causing you to bellow more than usual, producing a kink in your neck that jabs every time you back space.   BUT despite the ever-present demands of domesticity, I have to make the time to back up my precious writing efforts in three places: a new zip drive, a small portable drive and an online storage source.   I plopped $139 without batting an eyelash down on a new drive at the Mac store, and plan to check out a web site my friend suggested for online storage.  I will post here more details once I investigate that further.  And,  next to the sign on my wall that says "Write 10 pages a Day" I will post a new sign that says "Back up your work three times".  I suggest you do so!  Don't let the possibility of becoming a published writer disappear into the inevitable disfunction of technology!

Cheese Nips

There very well could have been a blog entry for today but I tried to write late at night after an exhausting day dealing with the baby's insidious middle ear infection and managed to somehow delete the entire top half of the laboriously edited blog entry, panicked, hit Paste, and all I had remaining of that large portion of my writing was "Cheese Nips".  I hit Paste again and thus had two "Cheese Nips" in a row. ('Undo' my husband has now informed me was the correct command, and is control Z on my keyboard, and I have it on a post-it in Sharpie in the middle of my cork board as the great message and the only message vital to my sanity from this day forth.)

Now I am going to bed angered and frustrated, but a little relieved that I was able to share my pain.

The Luau

Larry could feel the day heating up through the thin soles of his cheap plastic drug store flip flops, and see it wavering off the rooftop asphalt like a mirage.   The pretty girl in the elevator from the 10^th floor life insurance office had told Larry in a hushed tone about the luau on Sunday on the roof.   She clearly didn’t want the other secretaries in the elevator invited, although they could care less, prematurely aging black and white women stuffed into their professional poly-blend shirt and skirt sets, clutching their Egg McMuffins which they would quietly and insistently devour while checking office voice mail.

“Just bring some lemons.  A bag will do,” the girl said when he politely and quietly asked what he should bring. 

He tried to mask his excited disbelief that this perfect pretty girl was offering an invite to him, a mail clerk, for a taboo weekend party on the office building rooftop.

 

“We do it all the time,” she said.

“Oh yeah, it’s cool,” he said, angry with himself for not completely disguising his ignorance.

His usual train route ran only local stops on the weekends so it took a one hour ride, plus the usual two bus transfers, and a three stop subway ride to get to the office building.  He had an entry card and the security guard only mildly viewed the lemons as he signed in.

“Preparing for an early AM staff meeting,” he told the guard who would buy any story from someone with legitimate access.  He did not get paid enough to get shot.
 

And now Larry waited on the roof top with his bag of lemons, sweat beading up on his forehead, pooling in his pits and between his upper thighs because there was no shade under which to retreat.  No gauzy colorful green and pink umbrellas secured in buckets of sand.  He struggled to not accept the obvious reality that there was to be no luau on this roof at any time on this summer Sunday.  The party, or at least when she told him to arrive, was to start at 1 PM and he had come fashionably late at 1:43 according to his accurate digital watch (well, he actually was nervously a half hour early but the C train came fifteen minutes late and so he thought he had actually benefited which made the out-of-key Creole disco keyboardist in the station that much more pleasant to hear).  There were no tiki torches, and mismatched chaise lounges from people’s homes, Coleman coolers spilling with iced beers, and coals hot and ready under the Weber brought by the cool account managers from the office systems company on the second floor.  Faces from the main lobby always shrouded in the mask of the daily grind would now be washed in weekend levity, and the interaction would be open, human and social.  From this luau forth, the working world of the 9-5 Manhattan lower-middle class in his office building alone would be alleviated by a familiarity.   He wasn’t expecting to walk away from a few shared cold brews while island music blared from a boom box with best friends forever, but he would have names to the strange faces that  frowns and smiles graced for the last anonymous two years.

A helicopter intruded the air space above and circled quite low over the rooftop, the roaring of the propellers deafening him.  He clasped his hands over his ears and shut his eyes.  It did not sound like a helicopter with his ears covered but rather a native luau, where young nubile female islanders in grass skirts and coconut bikini tops pounded the ground in their enthusiastic celebratory dance while he sipped a pina colada from a mango.  He didn’t want to accept he would need to leave and start his disappointed subway, two bus, long train ride home to his rat hole college town apartment shared with blubber butt Jerry the perpetual grad student.

His anger was thick and hot, and when he saw the helicopter steer to the right and fly off towards the FDR, he took his palms away from his ears, letting back in the periodic cab honks, passing truck radios and hiss of city buses.  He could hear a lot up here above the fifteenth floor and only now he un-rooted himself from his sun-baked standing place and walked over to the edge of the roof.  There was no rail, just straight down, and he dared himself, pushed himself, to stand at the very very edge, where a centimeter of the tips his flip flops were over the edge, and look straight down.  Fifteen floors was not a tall building, rather modest for Manhattan, but tall enough to cause a sudden onset of vertigo when you looked down.  He almost toppled off the roof in surprise when he heard “Hey!” from behind him.

His arms spun in quick circles as he turned and took a big step away from the edge towards a guy in surf shorts with palm trees and a pink tank that said Do It In Daytona and a bag of pineapples.  Shit, Larry thought, at least I didn’t have to lug a bag of heavy pineapples all over town like this boob. 

“You surprised me,” Larry accused.  “I almost pitched over the side.”

The guy had now noticed Larry’s bag of lemons.  He had also clearly seen no party and no guests.

“You the only one here?” he still asked Larry.

“I think so,” said Larry with a sweep of his arm, his rage sudden and aimed solely at this loser jerk-off in his spring break get up.  Not a luau outfit at all.  This chump clearly did not know the difference between low rent Jagger shots in a faux island bar, and a sophisticated NYC weekend luau social on the roof.  Larry realized that maybe this guy had found out about the party, and when the cool set understood he was coming and ruin it for everyone with his uncomfortable overt frankness, they cancelled the party.  Of course, this had to be what happened and the hot pretty babe who invited Larry on that blissful Wednesday didn’t have Larry’s number to call him and cancel.  She was probably in her apartment somewhere in Hoboken in a little terry tunic and bubblegum colored toe nail polish fretting that Larry would make the long trek and be upset. 

“You heard about the party through the grapevine?” asked Larry hopefully.

“No, Charlene invited me.”

Larry’s heart sank to his balls, which by now were very itchy and uncomfortable and reminding him of how little of a man he was.

“She told me to bring pineapples,” the spring break meathead said.

Both men stared at each other.

“We’ve been duped,” said Larry, looking down at the lemons that shone freshly yellow in the penetrating sun.

“That raging cunt,” said the guy, extending his hand to Larry in solidarity on the tail end of the c-word which Larry never used.

Larry still shook his hand.

“I’m Dave B.” said the guy who still used his last initial with his first name even though the clarification was from long ago when there were nine Daves in his elementary school.

“I’m Larry.  Why would a girl do this?”

“I dunno,” said Dave B.  “Because she’s a dirty hole?”

“You know, I wish you wouldn’t talk like that about women.  It makes me uncomfortable,” said Larry.

“Okay, what would you call her then?” asked Dave B.  “Standing here like a stupid lame ass on a perfectly perfect Sunday with a bag of useless fruit?”  Dave B. paced back and forth in front of his brown double grocery bagged load of pineapples.  “Shit, and I thought chicks would be here wasted already in bikini tops and short shorts ready to give hand-jobs with suntan oil.”

Larry was deep in thought.  Although he knew he should leave, he was trying to figure out what he would in fact call Charlene if he could get nasty words to travel from his mind out his mouth as easily as Dave B.  A woman who would do this to not just one guy, but two guys on a rarely sparkling summer Sunday in New York had serious problems with not just morals, but with men.  She was also fearless and that scared the crap out of him so much, that he actually battled the belief that she could hear the horrid thoughts he would try to think about her.  She knew she was going to see them Monday in the lobby, snack shop or elevator.  And she didn’t give a crap.

“She’s probably getting me back for pinching her on the ass in the elevator last week,” said Dave B.   

“I’ve never done anything to Charlene,” sputtered Larry.  “Nothing of that kind!”

“Of course not,” said Dave B.  chuckling.  “She’s a crazy chick.  I’m sure you looked at her though when she was close, maybe leaned in a bit to see if she smelled as good as she looked.”

“Well…” said Larry without commitment.

“Charlene is hot enough for me to walk over here by the chance she actually was throwing a luau.    I only live three blocks away.  All I gotta do now is go home and watch baseball on rabbit ears and smoke a bong.”

Larry thought about Grand Central station and its lonely emptiness plus all the homeless people overdressed in everything they own that made him feel oppressed and hot and uncomfortably like he was always one step away from becoming them if he lost his job.    Dragging their milk crates of cracked and broken and ratty possessions around with them.  Larry did not want to be a lunatic homeless person!  He therefore cannot no matter how much he would like to make a scene with Charlene on Monday. 

“You want to grab a cold one across the street at McManus’s Pub?” asked Dave B.

“Sure,” said Larry.   He thought about the Asian guy whose face was black with dirt, and shoes without soles, singing Aud Lang Syne as he shuffled through the terminal.  “Why not.” 

They left their bags of fruit on the rooftop and made the oath that no matter how enraged they were when they saw Charlene on Monday, they would feign absolute ignorance to the joke played on them.  If she was so cruelly bold to ask “How was the Sunday luau?” - and they figured she absolutely could be - they would answer “Fun times!  The best rooftop party ever!  A summer memory for sure!” extra loudly and with a bit of high strung euphoria in their voices to render her speechless before they were able to ditch out onto their work floors.  If they encountered her together, Larry would pat Dave B. on the back and say, “Nice moves on the supermodel.”

As they walked through the building’s lobby, entering was a tall thin nerdy guy whistling a happy go-lucky tune with a crate of naval oranges.  Larry and Dave B. watched him sign in at the security desk with a flourish on his signature.

“What’s with all the fruit coming in here today?” asked the usually disinterested security guard.

“Oh, just an office project,” said the tall thin nerd with a sly smile curving on the corners of his lips.

“Hey guy!” Dave B. called out to the thin man.

The tall thin man stopped at the elevator and looked blandly at Dave, the smile quivering.

“You mean me?” he said.

“Yeah you,” said Dave B.  “When you’re done wondering what happened, leave the oranges by the lemons and the pineapples and join us across the street at McManus’s.”

Larry and Dave B. left the lobby to get that cold beer on that hot summer Sunday in Manhattan.  And the bartender even put little umbrellas in their beers for them.

A Rainy Tuesday Sermon

Stay-at-home mothers and fathers, I hear your prayers.  I am one with your deep despair and longing for the day when you sat idle in the sunshine, at a cafe at say 2:35 PM, chewing on a scone, your mind an empty vessel.

May you survive being projectile vomited on like I was this morning. Chewed up apple slices look like festive confetti when spewed across multi-colored shag rugs.

May you survive when your college-student babysitter finally arrives to spell you at 3PM and yet looks not fun and frivolous but wan and lifeless.  She informs you that the meds she is taking for the currently undiagnosed ailment only make her nauseous not dizzy.  She doesn't see any problem giving the small children a bath.  You suggest she go home and sleep after she completely over-boils a hot dog.

May you survive any ailment that then sets upon you in your weakened exhausted depleted state, because frankly, you will have to muscle it out with whatever is available and not expired (for too long) on your medicine shelf.  That is if you have enough remaining strength to unlock the child safety latch.  Parents have been found crumbled up against the bathroom cabinet, feverish in a fetal position, the lock in tact.  In my case, it is the hint of a soon-to-be-raging UTI that will remain untreated for a bad long time because I have no doctor here yet, and absolutely refuse to subject myself and my small children to an Urgent Care facility for sixteen hours.  Then again, at least there would be barf buckets there.

May you survive the rain that pours down on top of all these calamities, and not beat yourself up too much when around lunchtime you throw all your morals about television and movies during the day out the door and set your child down before the god of flat screen and finally get a moment to brush your teeth, or vomit, or cry, or whatever you will do...

God bless you if amid all this, you find time to write.

Reports from the Border of O-Town

Because we live on the corner across from a small playground next to a youth center that mainly caters to African American teens, and we are only four blocks from the border of Oakland, lately, when I leave my house with my two children for the day's events, a car will screech to a halt and a white, confident friendly mother hustles up to me saying with apologetic overtone, "Excuse me, excuse me, could I ask you a question?" "Of course," I say.  But by now I know exactly what the question is as this has happened five times in the three weeks I have lived here.   The question is a hopeful desire for me to affirm that if they buy a home in the area, on the street, because the price is right and wow, isn't the neighborhood so precious, that they will not be terrorized by some upheaval of racism prompted by their contribution to the gentrification of the area.

Now...   I wonder if I should tell them that I think the seemingly innocent basketball games played at the youth center are really a cover for the meetings of the Black Panther Teens for a White-Free neighborhood group that meet below in the basement, plotting their murderous plan to take out all yuppies buying up all the overpriced $700,000 homes that no one in this African American community (or me too frankly) can afford.

Or... I wonder if I should tell them that African-American young people are not smoking pot in their PMP-600s outside my daughter's bedroom window because they are hardly that covert.  They are smoking joints on the street, right on MLK Boulevard, while looking to see if any cops are coming because that's what dumb teens, white, black, Asian or what-have-you-in-your-melting pot city high school, do.  It's fun to almost get caught smoking pot when you are 16.

I also wonder if I should tell them about the white butch schizophrenic that walks past by my house at least three times a day who I don't fear or mind because she has taken to calling me the "pretty lady with the adorable kids".  (I will take a compliment wherever I can get it.)

When I learn they have children my daughter's age, and are available for play dates, I really want them to move in!  So I save my sarcasm for the blog and punch the mom's number into my cell phone.   There is a warm friendly smell in the air, as the youth center preps an afternoon BBQ.  Yeah right, we all know that it's a fundraiser to buy AK-47s...but shhhh, no one is telling.

Buy the food, eat the food, poop the food.  Buy the food, eat the food, poop the food.  Ever have days like that?

Monday In a nutty nutshell

My sister hates me so I don't have to worry about saying that on the blog because she'll never read it.

Moving to Berkeley and ripping my child out of the only world she knew in San Jose has manifested in her a phobia of elevators ("I swear, this is completely out of left field and new to me," I informed the worried passengers of the elevator at Target as my frantic daughter lurched from side to side in the back of the cart, desperately trying to locate the emergency button around the strangers' and my bodies).

Instead of writing on my novel and my screenplay today during valuable and expensive nanny time, I surfed other blogs and submitted writing and articles that would earn me a whopping .14 in revenue should I ever write 900 more articles under my log in name that are ever read by over 10,000 people.

The baseball field across the street from my lovely home office is really picking up the pace, with not just mishmash night games with blaring stadium lights, but full on professionally outfitted girl league games with lots of pumping up cheering and outfield hooting.  This could be a potentially worse distraction than my last office mate's extensive conference calling through rice paper thin walls.  I simply add this to yet another reason to not write and instead look for  glass options for our now glassless beveled coffee table (somehow lost in the move).

I almost made a movie with Andy Dick

Okay so the reason why I was thinking this as I was breastfeeding my kid while the other one watched Sesame Street in the other room was I am about as far from making a movie with anyone anymore never mind Andy Dick. And in his defense, with all the flack about him, the meeting for that movie was very professional and collaborative and it was a damn shame his musician friend with the financing backed out.

So today I want to write about the antithesis of Andy Dick. Corporate conglomerates. And my focus of the day is the f#@%-up conglomerate AT&T/SBC Global. Believe me, there are perks to be had from their rampant incompetency, like the first time they raked me over the coals when I moved from Los Angeles to San Jose, I had high speed dirt cheap for a year. This time, I have like 3 free months or something like that for fiber optic U-Verse but honestly, it was not worth the weeks of high-speedless pain and frustration.

It started on a sunny San Jose morning where I made a seemingly seamless call to a AT&T/SBC Global customer service rep to transfer my very basic service of a phone line costing $5 a month (to service the DSL) and DSL to my new Berkeley home. We chatted about San Jose, kids, what have you, and then she made the transfer to happen on move day. I even made it a day before so my husband who works for an internet entertainment company could have internet at home without a break in service. Aren't I considerate? I was given a transfer reference number, which I warn you, means nothing despite how official it sounds with its letters and numbers combination as they don't reference between departments and there are many many insidious departments in a conglomerate. "Just walk that little modem from one house to the other, plug it in, and Walla!" the sunny rep said. What is the opposite of "Walla"? Is it giving someone the "rasberry" or farting in a pillow case and throwing it over someone's head? Because the day we moved, we plugged in the modem and Walla, nada. Nothing. No parade of fun red and green rectangle lights. No surfing the net right away for information on our new trash day, placing postings for babysitters or Yelp for take out referrals after unpacking for 22 hours. No internet. Cut off. So now, without preschool, nanny and my life in boxes, I have to call AT&T and start again.

I should be featured at a Customer Service Dos and Don'ts symposium at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for the next 22 days of hell. I spent time on my cell phone with a long line of customer service reps on the service side, and on the customer service side, in the three departments of phone line, internet and U-Verse. None of them talked to each other, none of the notes from one showed up on the screen of the other, and I had a notepad with Tami's and Brent's and Latesha's names crossed out faster than you can eat a grape. When I tried to get back to the rep that promised they were sorting this out and would get back to me, I would be told that there is no way to directly call them even if I know their name, ID number and location in Arizona. Finally, someone called me from an LA office with an actual direct dial number, and I think she realized after my 22nd hysterical message back to her, she had made a grave error in sympathizing with the customer. I was then informed there is no DSL in my area, there are no U-Verse modems in my area, my phone line is dead, my account was closed, there are two closed accounts in my name,it's Friday and the department I need is closed till Monday, and one rep even told me at the end of my long winded story told for the fourteenth time that I was better off with Comcast. Finally, Christine in LA saved the day, and steady sailing, got to the top of the management heap and had someone figure out what the hell had happened with my account. I got expedited U-Verse 22 days after my original request to transfer service. Word to the wise, I only went through this to not lose my email address since I have no time to change it over right now. Get a Gmail account and start using it. You may not be a famous writer yet with publishers emailing you lucrative deals only to get a failure message to your closed email account, but one day you may be!

Hot Sex with a Dolphin!

Just wanted to get the largest body of audience's attention as possible. That said, are the sort of people intrigued by nautical bestiality the kind of readers I want to attract? If they read my stuff and like it, hell yeah! Did Faulkner care who read his novels? Did Robert Louis Stevenson ever worry about the feelings of the pirates? Did Dickens actually give change to pan handling waifs?

Let me explain myself

I can't believe it. I'm a blogger. I'm sort of a mommy blogger because I'm a mom to two small kids but I'm really classified as a pining - writer blogger, and I know there are hundreds of thousands of you out there desperate to write but strapped by prior commitments. When you hit an apex in your life and you know your calling is to write and you can't find more than a half hour a day if you are lucky to do it, it is downright depressing. So I am here to lift your spirits which lifts my spirits, and inform you that even though you cannot even fathom more spare time besides flossing, or finally curing that foot arch fungus you contracted the last time you got a pedicure which was about the last time you pampered yourself (double fuck you), you can do it. Hey, I used to wear belly bracelets, drop obnoxious amounts of Ecstasy and live near downtown LA in Echo Park. I used to spend time actually ambling about aimlessly. What I would do now for a crumb of that wasted slacker time!!! Now I prep cucumber slices and baby carrots in tupperware for snack time and most of my Google and Yelp searches are for new playgrounds with cool water and sand features to keep my kids preoccupied.

I posted the short story Pop Goes the Cherry of mine as my inauguration to blogging because honestly, I sat at my desk, exhausted at 10:30 at night, and everything I wrote came off as cute, trite and telling you all about me in a kind of rambling way that only served to expose my true age (always always references to the 80's and 90's... when will that ever end?) Actually at this moment, I have to stop typing in this entry because my pre-schooler is hollering from the other room about getting up on a chair to get her piggy bank down, and is it okay that her baby sister is holding the chair for her? I love that that pre-schooler (almost 5) can sometimes watch her sister for a brief spell while I frantically write something down in my notebook, but I have learned that the baby has become very covert in disguising in her spitty mitt the one piece of sheet rock that the vacuum missed, and the next sound I will hear is a grinding crunching of cement on her front four teeth.

I managed to convince the 5 year old that she doesn't need to take money out of her bank to buy crappy plastic toys from China, but she should be saving to deposit the cash into her savings account so one day she can graduate from high school and see Europe. She is currently processing this information and will surely have a counter argument in about say, ten minutes... So that gives me enough time for the Thought of the Day. If you don't have a home office, make one, out of a box or section of a part of the house or apartment or room and call it your writing space, or go to a coffee shop for only a half hour, and even if that is how long it takes you to set up (like me with an ancient Mac powerbook that grinds like a floppy disk). It is making the act regular and natural that is the key to success. Sounds like the answer to marital sex too! Let me clue you in, it's a close second! I personally went on a crusade when we moved to Berkeley two weeks ago to put the 5 year old and the baby in a bedroom together so I could have an office in the house. It took some toggling, and reminding my husband we would give it two weeks before giving up and now it's like the den of dreams in there when you check on them and I have my writing space. Now that doesn't solve the fact that I currently have no child care to speak of, but at night, I drag my limp demanded upon food crusted self to my desk if only to write a bunch of crap I don't even bother to save. It's the act number one! I really owe it to my mom for the kids sharing a room working out. The minute she gave me body language like only she can that indicated she didn't approve, I was more adamant than ever! Mom gets a byline in the first novel! There are lots of you desperate to write! We hear you in solidarity! (we being me, but I love writing in that voice). God speed!

Pop Goes the Cherry

She was the last of her girlfriends to have her cherry popped. They’d entertained guys that looked like Patrick Swayze in their bedrooms for almost a year now when their parents were out of town. She wanted to tell her girlfriends that those guys were kind of using them because they weren’t that attractive, and kind of slutty and should they be giving it away to guys who really wished they were still fucking the pert little Catholic school blonds who dumped them to have sex with nice Catholic school boys that got them pregnant and went with them to their abortions while their parents were away? But they wouldn’t care. So one day she stopped wanting to be the one left in the living room by herself stoned and with a luke warm beer while Erica and Patrick Swayze did it in Erica’s bedroom on her pink and white Holly Hobbie bedspread with the eyelet lace ruffle, and gawky kinky haired Debby did it in Erica’s parents’ bed with her grown up construction worker boyfriend (who was actually committing underage sex with her but it was in the middle of the afternoon in a ranch home in Barrington, RI so who was telling?). She stopped wanting to be a virgin and began the quest for who would pop her cherry.


She met Dan shortly thereafter at a public school dance. Her friends went to public school, she went to private school. Dan was between schools. He’d recently moved to the small non-descript town of Barrington, Rhode Island from Los Angeles because his dad was no longer married to his mom, a famous actress from a big family of very famous actors, and she was too busy with auditions and recurring roles to care for Dan. Father and mother had decided that it was best that Dan live in Barrington where there could be some normalcy in his life, but according to Dan, they had not enrolled him in senior year because she was going to send for him to come back any day now.

Dan’s denial of his mother’s obvious abandonment mixed with his nonchalance about his famous lineage excited her. She knew she wanted him to pop her cherry in the first ten minutes they talked in the fluorescent lights of the school cafeteria during the dance. “Open Arms” by Journey blared in the background and couples made out in their seated positions around us, broken up finally by the proctor. Dan made her laugh, and possessed a youthful innocence underneath his adult-like stance. He was laughter, he was confidence, he was innocence and with these commendable qualities, Dan would lay her down and plunge into her his teenage dagger, and forever memorialize himself in her diary and on her memory.

It was a magical night. Their adrenaline electrifying each other through their tightly clenched hands as they raced across the abandoned hill on the coast to the construction trailer that she had dutiful scoped out as the location for her entry into womanhood. He laid his coat down on the bare floor and pushed his way into her and there was a pain and lots of blood. It lasted one minute. As she sobbed, her scabbed knees pulled up to her chin, he cared for her. He soothed her. He even made her laugh with a sardonic comment. He rubbed her shoulders and they awkwardly hugged, her knees still between them, gangly and unshaven. Then he drove her home, his hand possessive on her thigh, both of them nervously grinning from their accomplished quest; a boy who’d popped a cherry, a girl who was no longer a virgin.

They resolved eagerly to do it again. But no parents were away so they decided to rendezvous in the local town park the next night and do it there, perhaps by a tree in the dark. In retrospect, sex for the second time should have been performed somewhere soft and intimate and teen magazine-ish. She would have applied Very Berry lip-gloss before the act. Not in the park in the dirt, under the full moon with people milling about unexpectedly. She had no experience putting on a condom, and he had even less, and when he finally got it rolled on, it was dry as fuck, and when he tried to push it in, her bare ass literally slid back through the dirt. He got frustrated. ‘Fuck it. This is not gonna work,’ as he brushed the dirt off his pant knees. He didn't look at her, and hold her, and have that face of confidence of the boy who had popped the cherry and was tenderly going back for more. He had the face of a boy who was thinking about all the other cherries he could now pop, and why waste his time here in the dirt with a limp dick and an awkward condom when there are other girls with places to pop their cherry all laid out for him and planned.

"We could try again tomorrow,” she said.

“Mmmmhhhhmmm,” he responded. But he wasn’t listening. His body was turned away from her. She pulled up her underpants and her jeans and again, hugged her knees up into her chest, but this time she was ashamed. She was ashamed she was not able to make herself, the sex, the experience good enough. He was finished with her. They were done.