The Rigged Game

11 Aug 09, San Francisco

“To write, nine tenths of the problem/ is to live.”

– William Carlos Williams, Paterson

Monday morning, fog as thick as a winter snow drift (and colder because you can't ski it). A wind-swept weekend of chores: changed oil on Subaru, 3 loads of laundry washed, a hurried haircut from Anna, a walk to grocery store, a run on the hill. Only a little time for reading on porch and smooching with Anna and baby. (Did get in a Saturday afternoon bbq at K. and C.'s place, where I met the editor of Zoetrope magazine and had a good talk about what they’re looking for in fiction.)

But didn’t get a damn thing done with the agent search. I'm pathetic when it comes to online work. Like taking roundhouse swings in the pitchblack. If only the mission involved hammer and nails, then I'd build myself a mansion of a publishing house with yours truly as their keystone author, bust in the courtyard and all. But online research? That ghost-realm behind the screen evades me every time.

Another good tumble at soccer practice on Tuesday, which hasn't helped my back, slightly pulled from loading 5/8's sheetrock solo at the yard. The usual pain in forearms after a day of hammering rock back from door jambs yesterday. I'm getting nearly too old for this. I've got, I believe, enough brains to move up and become a foreman, but I don't want that. I want something else, yet it seems I'm not quite clever enough for that and so I'm stuck on the lower rung of a ladder I don't want to climb. Twain's quote, which heads this blog, darts to mind. Never have I dived right in for the three year test, though. Started with sawing wood and kept at it as a backup, but now I wonder if it the old block hasn't acted more as an anchor than a buoy.

There is this idea of progress, getting a little further along each day or week, whether it’s with writing or work or the household or life itself somehow. But life itself can’t be progressed, can it? The material things that make life more interesting or vivid can be tinkered with and accumulated, but even there, you’re dealing with the ephemeral nature of things. And if your objectives are strictly objects, then at the end of a measly two-day weekend all you’ll have to show for it is a laundry line of clothes flapping in the fog, four greasy quarts of used oil that need taking to the recycle center.

Maybe it's the idea of progress that's rigged. Isn't getting by enough? Isn't getting by with your family and friends, day by day together, enough? It should be. But here I am acting the stone-age romantic again, pining for simpler days, when around here the Ohlone natives fished the bay and strolled from village to village, doing more hanging-out together than anything else.

But the fact is I'm stuck with the modern, perhaps very American, belief that I should not only be getting something more done each day, I should also matter somehow in this world, be important. And I'm selfish and self-driven enough to believe that poison; to want for myself a role more distinct than merely as progenitor of the human condition.

So then I have to ask myself, what is this extra thing? If I get my novel published, will I have the extra in my hands then? Will the sight of poplar trees drifting against the sky be any more beautiful or any more mine then? The small things that move me won't be any different, but there's the very real danger that I will be, and not see those things anymore. The extra things are already with us, aren't they? What more extra do I need than Ada smiling in my arms, gazing right back into my eyes, making funny sounds as she tries to tell me something more important than I could ever write myself.

(And as proof of it: late that night, a little whiskey in me, holding Ada as I pace the bedroom, she quits crying and suddenly looks deeply into me with her sweet watchful eyes; the wise little creature, her soul still dewy from the other side, and she smiles and chawls out some sounds trying to talk, trying to tell me something, and she's saying, it's going to be all right, it's going to be okay, funny daddy.)