yes

"Dreams with Sharp Teeth" (Documentary on Harlan Ellison).

I'm not recommending this, although if you have any interest
in the guy or in outsized writer-personalities in general, you'll
likely get a kick out of it. I'm not a fan of him or his over-the-top
writing, but the film does humanize him, unexpectedly for me. I'd
looked forward to a portrait of a completely toxic obnoxious narcissist,
but I was sort of charmed by the cat. His rage seemed mostly transparent,
in a good way, and reminiscent of a stand-up comedian whose schtick
is rant against The Man. I hope I have his energy when I'm 73.

One funny part: Harlan's in the middle of an anti-TV rant and
he's telling the story of when he and his wife were watching
the Weakest Link, a game show. The female contestant is asked
a question about the film version of Lawrence of Arabia. The
clue is the letter "S" and the correct answer is Omar Sharif.
The woman's answer is "Naomi Campbell." So Harlan got a kick out
of this, how the answer was utterly nonsensical, how Naomi Campbell
doesnt even have an "s" in it, etc.
What Harlan didnt catch was that the contestant obviously thought
"Lawrence of Arabia" was a clothing designer, as in
"Valentino of Beverly Hills." Hence, the first model that came to
mind: "Naomi Campbell."

4 More Mystical Secrets of Writing.

6. Writing is focused daydreaming. Not focused,
but paying attention to the daydreaming
as it happens. As opposed to normal daydreaming
which is not paid attention to by the daydreamer.
Writing is observed daydreaming where the observer is
the daydreamer.

7. Don't worry about writing. You know what worrying
about something is. Writing is not worrying. If it
is a worry, it is not writing. If you are writing
and you are worrying, don't stop writing, merely stop
worrying. Do you worry about other things that you
enjoy while you're doing them? Try the same approach.
Everything you were told about writing in school was
a lie; it is the source of all your worrying about writing.

8. Written words are a blend of matter and time. They
issue from the brain and senses and writing instrument.
This happens in time. They immediately begin to change,
to evolve, like sea creatures emerging onto land for the
first time, as does the one who expressed them, as does
all matter in time. Time immediately begins to change
the meaning of the words and the condition of the instrument
and the perception and skill and intention of the writer,
strengthening and eroding at once, mystifying and clarifying.
In other words, it is impossible to control all of the fluid
variables that go into writing a sentence, grocery list, or
novel. Only when you see the utter uncontrolability
of everything to do with writing can you begin to relax and
waken and shape what it is you want and have to say and
daydream without worry and with perfect attention, "perfect"
meaning "alert, fluid, canny, innocent, practical, wondering,
and vigilant as a whale-watcher in the vegetable garden in the
rain."

9. The other day I thought it was Lincoln Day, and by coincidence
I had a t-shirt on that said, "I care not much for a man's religion
whose dog and cat are not the better for it." - Abraham Lincoln
I said to a person I didn't know very well, "I put this shirt
on without thinking what day it was." He read the saying and said,
"What day is it?" "Lincoln Day," I said. He said, "No, it's not,
it's Columbus Day." He was quite right, and I had made a number of
mistakes that were astonishing to him and intriguing to me. Both
states of mind are good to be in when writing.

10. I have the door open. It's raining for the first time in many
months. That is the cause of the above.

Moby Dick, Twittered.

UNTWITTERED:

"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."

TWITTERED:

"Broke, nothing to do, went sailing. Good 4 me. Depressed, pissed, want 2 kill you or me, I go 2 sea. You want 2, 2, admit it. Ishmael."

Sometimes I find a single solitary ant wandering the kitchen counter.

I assume he is a scout looking for food
to go back and tell his nest about.
I put him outside on the porch & wonder:
Does he spend the rest of his days a wandering nomad?
Does he join the nest that lives inside the porch?
Do they let him join or drive him out or worse?
Does he find his way back to his original nest?

On Not Sitting in the Garden ...

Again, from my most favorite quote well:
Quotes for Gardeners

Sitting in your garden is a feat to be worked at with unflagging
determination and single-mindedness -- for what gardener worth
his salt sits down? I am deeply committed to sitting in the garden.
-Mirabel Osler

Have you ever noticed how few sitting places you find in private gardens?
How seldom the versatility and importance of benches is considered? True
gardeners, with their peerless taste, dexterity and inspired planting,
never stop.... To sit is almost an offence, a sign of depravity and an
outrage towards every felicitous refinement that has gone into making a garden.
-Mirabel Osler

I found a wonderful small blue wooden chair, perfect for the garden.
I imagined myself stopping now & then & sitting to cool the sweat,
admire my handiwork, make contemplative decisions about what to do
& not to do next, and I've never sat in it once. Never sitting
in such a perfect chair for the garden makes it seem like the gardener
is a frantic entity who cannot stop for a moment of peace, but in fact
the industry, the business of gardening is nothing but peace, from entrance
to last light.
- Me

Teach Me, Your Bitterness, How Not To Grow Old.

An interview with Gore Vidal.

I began to read this thinking about where I agreed & disagreed
politically with old outrageous Gore, but by the end
nothing seemed to matter to me but his overwhelming willful nasty
unhappiness. Whether he could have helped how he turned out or
not, I step back and learn from him, not about politics or art,
but spiritually. Yes, he's our Gore, and I guess I'm glad he's there
& still at it, but I'm glad I'm not him & that I don't want to be
like him. Through your hatred, do you truly become the enemy you hate?
Right or wrong, what a miserably unwise & mean old man.

I just saw the movie Pi

for the first time.
It was great until the last fourth or so, which
got a little too crazy, which I guess is the very point,
or one of them.

The mumbo-jumbo with the numbers is fascinating
on its own, the suspicion that there is an order
in nature, in reality, that can be found in
numbers, that numbers are somehow a part of nature,
that there is order in everything if we know how to
look, the suspicion that there is a key in numbers
that can unlock the mystery of life, or express
it, the idea that the true name of God is 216 letters
long.

Although the spirit in which we look for the solution
to these mysteries seems finally to be the real key
perhaps.

I would have very likely been living a life of
numbers instead of words had my father not died
when he did, when I was young, just turned 13.
13 years & 13 days, as a matter of fact. He was a
scientist, a mathematician, engineer in aeronautics.
And I was already headed up the same road. I might
have even been into defense contracting eventually,
as he was at North American Aviation.

The summer he died he went to Brussels for some global
conclave of aeronautical types, and I put together
a scrapbook of photographs of missiles & rockets
I had cut out of his Aviation Weeks, with pertinent
data alongside--size, payload, range. He had dozens
of scientists who attended sign the book for me. I
don't know where that might be today.

After he died I continued to think I would be
something of the same sort as him, because I was
good in math, it came easy. I dug it up to algebra, but
then hit trigonometry & said to myself, this ain't
fun no more, and there wasn't anybody around to push me
where I didn't care to go, if he would have.

It wasn't really until I went away to college at 17 &
had no friends that I started to write--letters back
home to family & friends, writing entirely different types
of letters & using disparate parts of my personality when
I wrote to my mom, sisters, guy friends, girl friend.
Communication is a problem, or a need, and the secret is
finding the way to get out what's inside in a way that
will unlock & awaken myself & inspire somebody else. But
how to find that way that is like nobody else. Fingerprints
are all so almost alike, but every one entirely different.
Like that, only writing, words, not swirls in skin, but
swirls in sentences.

Words offer the same temptation as numbers in a way,
the same suspicion that you will be able to put them
together in a certain particular way that will turn the
key that will open reality, that will explain or describe
it all, or a part of it in such a way that has never been
seen or heard before, that gives the idea or sensation that
it has all been explained or described or pointed to without
equivocation.

With numbers there is the added suspicion that the answer
is either there or not, either right or wrong. That's what
I liked about Pi, that the closer you get, the crazier it
makes you. I read a story about Bobby Fischer's madness the
other day & thought something along the same lines. I told
my wife tonight, watching PI, that I wished I were more
eccentric. She said not to worry about it.

Words offer the same enchanting promise, that there is one
perfect way to put each sentence, each paragraph, story,
book, poem, line, phrase. And there is, in a sense, in this
one moment, because the sentence is alive and what's perfect
today will grow into something differently perfect later,
when I'm a better writer, or in a different mood. It's like
trimming a tree so it's perfect, today.

So, the guy in Pi (SPOILER COMING!), after chasing the numbers
rainbow, ends up nuts & puts a hole in his head with an electric
drill, a somewhat extreme approach to letting off some
pressure from figuring out the universe, but apparently it
didn't do him too much damage, because while he can no longer
perform big multiplication tricks in his head (or simply doesn't
care to anymore), at least he enjoys the playful presence of a
little child & the leaves turning & trembling in the sun & wind
for the first time.

Write or Drink, Live or Die.

Alcohol, at the end, was my only companion, my
lover and killer both. It was me and the bottle
against life, the human race, God. I'd lost every
relationship, every friendship, every love, even
killed my talent to write, or at least sure felt like
I had.

It got to a point where it was either live or die,
go insane & give up any hope of writing again,
or somehow stop drinking, which I had no hope
of doing either. There wasn't room enough in
town for both me & booze. One of us had to go,
one of us had to be left behind.

Over 20 years of drinking & misery I brought on
myself & those I loved, but when the decision came
it was a pretty quiet event. Nothing disastrous. I just
saw with total clarity not only that that I had to stop,
if I every wanted to write again, & that I needed
help to do it.

Physically I had years left to drink I guess, but every
morning was like a little death. I was hurting everybody
around me until there wasn't anybody left around me,
to hurt or to blame.

I saw the future fitting me for a straitjacket.

Far as writing went, every night I'd tell myself I'd
have a couple drinks just to tap the spring & get the
juices going, but all I'd do was drink & produce
nothing except hermetic barely legible ravings.

When I got that help I needed & stopped drinking,
began to get connected to other folks with the
same problem, I didn't write a word for six months.
In fact, life was a dead empty bore, just exactly like
I figured it would be sober, but it was still better than
the insanity I'd been about to collapse into, so I kept
trudging along. And every once in a while found out
that I could help somebody else along the way.

At some point I started feeling a little bit better about
things, kind of slowly began re-entering the human
condition, getting aquainted with the sober me. In the
meantime, the old connection with alcohol was dying,
and I was beginning to emerge from a kind of grief.

But I couldn't see much point in living without
writing, & I still had no desire or ability to write
anything about anything. I was so used to writing
while drinking that I couldn't write without it,
even though it had been a long time since I actually
wrote anything worthwhile while drinking.

Desperate, I answered an ad & wrote TV crap with
a guy for a year or more. I hated it so much that
for the first time I could imagine enjoying writing
by myself sober. I tried it, starting with plays
& their emphasis on dialogue, something I've always
had an easy facility for. It was still too much
to ask of myself to describe a table or a landscape
to save my life. That all came back in time.
Everything came back, and better, in time.

If I hadn't stopped drinking, hadn't said goodbye to
booze, I doubt I'd be alive, much less writing anything.
I certainly would not be sane, as I am today, or at least
a reasonable facsimile of sanity, sometimes even serenity.

If I would have kept going the way I was, still
drinking & managing to be writing somehow, it would
be a bitter toxic spew that wouldn't do me or anybody
any good. And there's no way I would have ever been
able to write Mixed Animal or anything near it, with
its humor, hope, joy, wonder, & love.

Nobody likes to hear other people's dreams.

From Mixed Animal:

"Nobody likes to hear other people's dreams.
Unless they're in them, and then they only want
to hear that part. When Shane started telling me
one of her dreams I twisted around like a cockroach
tangled in a spiderweb.

"Other people's dreams are so looooong
and boring and full of obvious painful Fruedian details.
The one telling it can't see how embarrassing it is
because they're too close to it. They think it's a interesting
TV show instead of a direct look into their tawdry subconscious.
Why are you even telling me this? Don't you have any shamelessness?"

*****

The following are my dreams, not Lemuel's. I had them on successive
nights. They are short. They are not written to communicate with
anybody's conscious mind. If anybody figures them out, please don't
tell me, I got enough problems as it is. It don't have anything to do
with me anyway, it's about my subconscious. I always try to
mind my own business and let my subconscious mind its.

1. A tiger came out of the garden and looked at me
about four feet away. I had a dagger in my hand
and would wait for the tiger to leap at me and then
drive the knife up under its jaw into its throat.
I woke up. Looking back I see the tiger's face, very
human, and it was just watching me to see what I would
do, it didn't look angry or aggressive at all, just
curiosity and intelligence in the form of a tiger.

2. Also in the garden. My back to a chain-link
fence, a big crow came flying like a rocket just over
head-high at me. I thought it was going to attack me but
it didn't see me until it was almost at me and it put on the
brakes and landed on the fence. It was huge. I thought it
wanted to fight. I reached an aggressive hand to bat at
it and it pecked my hand, but playfully, and I thought,
Oh I'll have a pet crow, at which point it turned into
our black&white cat Jolly and it jumped off the fence
into the grass and I petted it.

3. I dreamed I was giving a speech and I realized I didn't
have any pants on. I was sitting at a table. I felt oddly
calm. The room was bustling with before-speech chatter. I
saw my pants to one side of the table. I wondered how they
got off me and over there. I couldn't get up and put them on
because everybody would see me. I thought maybe giving a
speech without pants on was a part of the format of the meeting.
I decided to give the speech, then while the basket was
being passed and everybody was preoccupied with their money,
I would get up and put my pants on relatively unnoticed. I
began to give my speech and instead of talking about whatever
I was going to talk about, I recounted roughly what I just said
in the paragraph above. In other words, I told them the dream
that I was in the middle of. It was a rousing success, with lots
of laughter and understanding.