May 2008 Archives

I was supposed to be in town just for the day on Friday for a meeting but after missing a flight and making a measured decision to be more spontaneous, decided to stay the weekend and come back Monday night.

I don't know what happened. I've always liked London, I've even loved London before. Over a year ago I secured a visa for myself, which was one of the hardest things I've ever done--it involved compiling over 100 pages of original documents and affidavits--and then never moving. It wasn't an easy breakup for me, but I thought Dublin was a more stable relationship; Dublin would appreciate me more.

But then after seeing London again, so dashing, so handsome, I've started to reconsider. Things haven't been going well with Dublin for the last little while. We don't have any serious problems, but it's those day-to-day issues that are the ones that I can't handle. It's the things that I initially loved that are starting to irk me. It's too small. It's too laid back. There's no Ikea. We're just not as compatible as I once let myself believe.

But then I start to wonder--is this about me or Dublin? Why haven't I lasted anywhere, settled down? Since leaving my parents' house at 17, I've moved to New York, to California, to New York, to California, to Dublin, to California, to Dublin. I've never lasted more than a few years each time. Is my inability to geographically commit an endearing foible or can I just not keep my wanderlust in my pants?

One was in that bastion of consumerism and the free market economy, Target. I've learned that places like Target don't seem to exist outside of America. That part's not a surprise, I guess. The surprise was when browsing the dollar aisle at Target, I nearly burst into tears. Whether it was due to the sharp decline of the dollar or my own mortality, I don't venture to guess. But needless to say, Target evoked a deep yearning, a hole in my soul that Marks & Sparks cannot and will not fill.

On this trip, it was a day in the People's Park in Berkeley. In general, I sneer at hippies, but on this day, they made me nostalgic. In Dublin, naked men in their sixties with tattoos do not smoke marijuana in public parks. In Berkeley, they do not only this, but at the same time they bend over and do stretches so their old man balls jiggle and they have looks of proud contentment on their faces. When my eyes weren't arrested by the senior testes, they were focused on the stage where a quadriplegic with a stick in his mouth was pointing to letters on a chart and a woman next to him was reading his words aloud.

I A-M am, I am, H-A-P happy, I am happy T-O to B-E, I am happy to be, H-E here, I am happy to be here, I- in T-H the P-E-O-P, I am happy to be here in the People, P-A-R-K, T-O-D-A, I am happy to be here in the People's Park today! Weak applause all around.

The quadriplegic, as it turns out, is running for president of the USA. (Watch his YouTube video here) Between the dogs named after characters in Greek mythology led around by gutterpunks with tattooed faces, the overwhelming smell of patchouli and pot, the mentally ill man screaming randomly and thrusting his middle finger high into the air, the sagging, naked men, the overweight lesbians waving pink flags of solidarity, the dreadlocks, oh so many dreadlocks, the pot brownies and politics that didn't include Hillary, Obama or McCain, I thought to myself, welcome to California.

But really, it was the weather that got me on this trip. I've been in Ireland for over a year, and I can remember one really nice, sunny day. Sunny enough for a sunburn almost. This isn't saying much as I get pink if I stand too close to a toaster. But there was a sunny day last summer. June 9th, I think. After that, it rained 70 days in a row, and that was my summer. These last two weeks in California have been painfully gorgeous. The weather is the one thing that I think will stop me from staying in Dublin forever. I miss the sun.

Other California moments. I stayed in the Tenderloin which is rather strangely, the home of all of the mentally ill people in the country as well as a large portion of its crack, and most of the nicest hotels in San Francisco. I saw a man walking around in a fur coat, a woman sitting on the sidewalk trying to slyly smoke crack with a coat covering her head, another woman sitting on the curb, stripping wire that trailed seven or eight feet behind her, a man sleeping contentedly in a puddle of his own urine, crack dealers standing on corners five deep, a woman standing in an intersection, eyes rolling crazily all over the place as if they hoped to escape this cracked out, insane body that held them captive as she gyrated her hips wildly, hoping to pick up a date, a few dollars for more rock, completely unaware that her tube top had long since slipped to far below her navel and that her nipples were also wall-eyed.

There's a game they play in the Tenderloin called "That's Not a Crack Rock." When you see someone crawling on the ground, picking up any little scrap of dust, jibs of dirt, rocks stuck under people's shoes and then smoking it, they are a contestant. I once saw an interview with the woman whose life the movie Rush was based on, and she talked about how as a undercover police officer, it was the moment when she found herself crawling on the floor of a hotel room searching for jibs of crack that she realized that she had hit her bottom. In the Tenderloin, they hit their bottoms before lunchtime.

When I was on the BART train a man walked on wearing a sandwich board that said in two-inch high letters "THERE'S POOP IN THE MEAT." He was passing out flyers for a vegan action organization. Next to me, a man popped out his jewel-encrusted gold grill, and meticulously cleaned it with his BART card, nonplussed.

Later that night, as I drove through the 24 hour Taco Bell at 2 am while listening to 2Pac, I thought to myself, now this is California.

When I was in elementary school, I found my two favorite authors the same way. Both of them had covers drawn by Edward Gorey, a gothic-style illustrator who is best known for his morbid work detailing the gruesome deaths of children. We had an anthology of his work at home, which I would pore over, aghast, and have since stolen from my parents.

John Bellairs and Joan Aiken both had Edward Gorey drawings on their covers, and I bought both of their books initially based on this fact. As a hopeful writer, this sort of frightens me, because I've been told that writers have almost no input on the covers of their books. Especially for youth, the covers are more important than anything else. John Bellairs wrote spooky mysteries about orphaned boys exploring gothic New England and there was a fair amount of magic involved, but spooky magic, not geeky magic. I re-read two of them while I was home, and they weren't as great as I had remembered, but were still pretty wonderful. I remember in around fourth grade that I used to come home from school and make myself a pot of Top Ramen and read John Bellairs. I had some theory about these two things going well with one another. Despite slightly matured taste in both literature and foodstuff, I can't say that I was wrong.

Joan Aiken was my favorite author as a child, hands down. So much so that when I was thinking of moving to London, I had a serious look at real estate in Battersea because of her book titled Black Hearts in Battersea. I'm not kidding. Aiken wrote fiction for children that imagined an alternate history of Britain under the rule of James II. As a California-educated tot, this was my first and practically only exposure to the English monarchy, and was very confused in later life to learn that the Hanoverians had won and that the Romans never invaded the Americas.

In retrospect, Aiken's books were so rich and wonderful that I'm shocked that so few people my age had ever heard of her. Maybe it's an America thing, but I've never met anyone that has read her books. In fifth grade I got a copy of The Stolen Lake and after hurdling through it, wrote on the inside cover, "The Best Book in the World" and my name with a flourish. I even went on our local radio station's book show, on the week that they featured kid's books to review The Stolen Lake. I remember having my mother coach me beforehand on the pronunciation of "Aiken" and "Dido Twite," the main character. In my head, I had been calling her Dee-do.

I've re-read Aiken's books, and I still love them. Just a few years ago she released two more in the same series, The Wolves Chronicles and somehow I found out and got them. I pre-ordered the last one. I didn't even realize that Aiken was still alive, but was delighted that more of these books were coming out. It was only this week, when going through my childhood books and doing some subsequent Googling that I found out that she had passed away before the book I had pre-ordered was released. This made me sad. I loved her books so much that I wish I had written her a letter telling her so, or sent her a recording of my radio plug for the series. Somehow I managed to write to Corey Haim and join his fan club, but not to Joan Aiken.

During my time-wasting, I also found a picture of Aiken, and she looks very different that I think I would have imagined, but absolutely perfect. She looks like a tough-talking, no-nonsense English woman who would write books for children that were absolutely beyond their comprehension and yet completely and utterly absorbing and thrilling. I'm going to read The Stolen Lake again, and then on to my next favorite, Dido and Pa.

I just looked up this series on Amazon and saw that although most are out of print in the US, they are all currently in print in the UK. Which is, of course, great news for nerds like me. Most interestingly, some of theme appear to be really popular on this side of the pond. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is even taught in schools over here! The sad news? They've given them all new, matching covers and done away with the Edward Gorey drawings that had originally lured me into the series.

Links:
Wikipedia - Edward Gorey
Wikipedia - Joan Aiken
Wikipedia - John Bellairs
Guardian Article about Joan Aiken
Black Hearts in Battersea
The Stolen Lake
The Wolves Chronicles
Dido and Pa
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

The more obvious ones, like Harriet the Spy and Encyclopedia Brown I got from R.I.F., Reading is Fundamental. Once a semester or so this program in school would give everyone a free book. I still have some of these. I read recently that they're ending this program, which is sad. For a lot of the kids in my school, this was probably the only time anyone ever bought them a book. Luckily, my mom used to take me to the local bookstore and let me run around and pick out books all the time. Luckily, I was part of the petit bourgeois and was semi-literate.

When I was in third grade or so, I read Cheaper by the Dozen. I remember that I picked it because the reading level was fifth or six grade, so I thought it would make me look smart. Even at eight, I was an asshole.

I loved that book so much. I remember when I read the follow-up, Belles on Their Toes, there's a post script that says that one of the dozen children, Mary, died of diphtheria at the age of six and how horrified I was. The descriptions of the bobs and 20s fashions fascinated me. At the, I hated my brother and loved the idea of having a bunch of older brothers who wanted to help make me incredibly popular.

I read all of the Nancy Drew series at the library, and there were dozens and dozens. I read the originals and even started into the new series that made Nancy a little too modern for my taste. I remember her hair being described as "titian," a word I've never heard before or since.

I think I probably read read every middle grade book in the library. When I think about how much I read then, as compared to now, my head spins (not literally). Now, I read a book every six months or so. This is mainly because Google Reader has taken over all of my free time, filling it with tales of nipple slips and other salacious celebrity gossip.

Other books that I read during that time were delivered to my house in big brown grocery bags from the daughter of my parents' friends. Vida was older, cooler, and had new wave haircuts. I read every book she gave me. This was the path to coolness. One was The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids by Stanley Kiesel. This was the most unbelievable book ever, and there isn't even a listing for this guy on Wikipedia. I'm bringing this back to Dublin to re-read, because I suspect that much of it was beyond me. It was the darkest, most ridiculous piece of children's literature, ever.

(Big Alice is a girl who was raised in the wild by wolves or dogs or something, but has come back to help the kids win the war against the adults. Mr. Bullotad is the muscled, bullying gym teacher. Here, they are in an epic battle that Big Alice is winning.)

excerpt:

At some period in the past, during the times that Big Alice was given the privilege of participating in human, cultural affairs, she had been exposed to an Appreciation course. That experience had left an indelible mark on her mind.
"Na-chin-skee! Na-chin-skee!" she abruptly began to yell.
Mr. Bullotad was red as a beet and gulping great breaths of air. "What? What?" Mr. B. gasped. He was ready to collapse. "Na-chin-skee what?
"Na-chin-skee! Do Na-chin-skee!"
"Oh my God!" cried Mr. Bullotad. I never saw Nijinsky!"
"Na-chin-skee! Do Na-chin-skee!" continued Big Alice, moving closer.
"I never saw him, I tell you!" screamed Mr. Bullotad, tears in his eyes.
Big Alice opened her mouth and displayed her canines.
Mr. Bullotad executed a beautiful entrechat.

endexcerpt

* Didn't know what an entrechat is? It's a jump in ballet during which the dancer crosses the legs a number of times, alternately back and forth. I remember looking this up in the dictionary and giggling wildly when I read this book.

Absolutely effing hilarious. And as usual, I didn't actually get to the two authors that I had started this post intending to write about, but I'm too sleepy right now. To be continued.

A lot of people I know that didn't go to college like to point out incorrect uses of "literally" and "ironic." They like to say that Alanis Morrisette's song wasn't actually about irony. Rain on your wedding day, they say, is just bad luck. This did not occur to these people on their own, most of them heard it on talk radio during morning show drive time. Morning show hosts are exactly the sort of people that love to talk about this sort of thing. I like belittling morning show hosts because they are more successful than me. I like writing things on my blog about how dumb other people are because it makes me feel smart. Literally.