Friday 13

1. I'm copying Paula without shame.

2. I'm going to make these of single sentences, long and drawn out as they may have to be.

3. I may or may not be blogging less but I'm definitely journaling less because I've found that if I write more, if I write about my life, even privately, I become more stressed.

4. We (okay, I) tend to write more when there are negative things to process (cf. the typical Yelp review), and the act of writing draws attention and energy to that negative thing and ultimately gives it more power, whereas cheerily skipping along without documenting my travails actually helps them fade into insignificance.

5. I found some history pages on Facebook and have learned that there are hundreds of people as obsessed over the minutiae of local history as I am, and many even more so (San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, and California, in my case).

6. I just had some movies my grandfather took in the early 1950s digitized, of his work with the Dixon Game Conservation Club ... which is still in business, but I didn't do it for them, I did it for my friend's father, who's in his 80s and shows up somewhere in those films as a young man.

7. I gave her the CD directly after getting it from the video lab because she was headed to the airport to go visit him in AZ this weekend, and I wish I could be there when her father sees people and scenes from over sixty years ago.

8. I have a few more reels, not well labeled, focused mainly I think on trips to Washington and Alaska in the '50s and early '60s, that I'll have digitized "later"; as well as a shitload of color slides taken by both my grandfathers, my father, and my uncle going back to about 1950 -- I'm really looking forward to making the time to go through those -- as well as piles of photographs on actual paper that go back to 1900, more or less, too many to know what to do with, even though my father and his parents threw a bunch into the fireplace when they didn't know who was in them (which I wish they hadn't done because there are people who want those).

10. Sunya is an incredibly hard worker and has been losing a lot of sleep to work long hours in a studio far away to create and prepare art and deco for events and galleries, a series of efforts I support her in completely (and literally), though I should admit that at times I am feeling a little ragged, as the household's four minor occupants wind up depending on me for nearly everything ... but then I think, so many people complain about having a kid or two while they have to work, and here I've got four, and while they're dynamic and independent and spirited and smart (where'd they get all that?) and they have their wars and contentions as all kids do, they're all so fundamentally self-sufficient the job just isn't that hard.

11. Meanwhile I'm not only very proud of her, but very impressed as well, for not only does she keep her spirits up despite immense pressures from all directions professional and personal, but continues to innovate solutions to immediate problems, create unique and beautiful things, and shine as a gorgeous goddess of team-building and hard-partying while she does it (qualified unbiased opinion here) -- all on a serious sleep deficit.

12. Managing the ongoing mechanical needs of four old cars whose ages range from thirteen to twenty-six years is not an insignificant amount of work.

13. The lucky thirteenth item will be a paragraph of many sentences. My lifelong alter ego as a writer continues to slumber. I am driven, and have always been driven, to get the little things out of the way so that the big things will go more smoothly. As a good way of living this is often affirmed by experience, but it leaves little room for creative work. I don't know what childhood experiences and exposures led me to become this way, but I don't regret them. The reason, as you might expect, is because I can see how much worse things would be if I were any different. This bias is self-affirming and there's no getting around it. So, when it comes to being a Writer, I would need to lead the simple and narrow life of my childhood heroes -- Lovecraft, Howard, Chandler, etc. As a young man I started going that way, refusing college, having no social acumen. But then I caught the smells of gasoline and perfume and suddenly turned towards being a normal young man, and I've been closely associated with productive jobs and dynamic women ever since. The writing dream seems like a childhood remnant to be picked up, maybe, when I'm next self-sufficiently unemployed (retired, some call it); which, of course, is pretty much impossible to envision. Meanwhile I discover crowds of people who love historical fiction and crowds who love historical detail and I'm not sure where on the spectrum of interest in bringing the past alive I really belong, or why I wanted to Be A Writer in the first place. But when I read historical detail I do fill in the spaces with a lot of imagination, and wish I could bring you and you and you along with me and show you what I see, and learn to weave a tale that mainly uses the past to inform the present, using a trick only us historical detail wonks could pull off, i.e. shatter the readership's preconceptions about history by showing it was not as they thought, and carry that forward into reconfiguring some of their ideas about the present as well. I would love to do that. Next life I'll do something easy like become a university professor. (That's a deep-inside joke. At nineteen my greatest passion was history but I knew that a history degree would lead to me becoming a teacher and that any other degree was a waste of time so I dropped out of college, only later to take the easy cop-out route and study engineering.)