Monthly Archives: October 2012

Stormy weather

Baltimore, where I live, and sit writing now, is bracing for the “Perfect Storm.” As in communal disasters of every shape and form, I am mainlining information from my syringe of choice, CNN. It’s going to be terrible, ie: “perfect”. And even though it looks, as of today (Sunday evening) as if Baltimore’s hit will be a little less terrible than it might have been, meaning our flood surges will be manageable and property damage may not be as widespread as it could have been, Baltimoreans will nevertheless be pretty damn grouchy over the next few weeks and I will be one of the most supremely grouchy of all. Because I heard today on the radio that our area is looking at a possible two weeks without power.

I do not choose to get all twitchy and psychotic when I have no electricity, I just can’t help it. I have developed an extremely high tolerance to large quantities of comfort. Light, food, warmth? These are just your base levels of comfort. People were actually able to meet these needs before they had electricity. I have no idea how, but I’ve heard about it. I, however, have lived my entire life under the influence of electricity. My mother used electricity when I was in the womb. I’m like a crack baby; it’s in my genes.

Don’t misunderstand me. I can withstand some levels of hardship; like I tell my family, having FIOS and being a customer of AT&T are character building. But when it comes to my mental health, in spite of the marvelous advances in pharmaceudicals, I admit that moderate levels of advanced comfort are required for me to maintain my equilibrium. I feel shaky even writing about it, but this storm has the potential to inflict massive damage to my psyche.

The worst part is knowing what lies ahead. I’ve been through this before. The first twenty-four hours I will coast on the residual effects of electricity already in my system. My hair is glossy and blown out, my clothes are clean, my appliances charged and able to sustain long periods of use. The inital crash will also trigger some extra adrenaline and endorphins that see me through. Candles, flash lights, batteries, fire in the fireplace in the winter, late hours drinking wine with the family outside in the summer. It’s not so bad. The first day I have hope.

The second day, I’ll be jonesing a little- making phone calls to see who has electricity, where I can get some, when my own supplier will be back up and running. Third day, I’ll still be flicking lightswitches when I walk into a room, phoning my supplier every five minutes like a love sick fourteen year old. The clothes I wear will be the ones I wore yesterday and slept in last night. Withdrawal is starting to drag me under. By the third day nothing in my house will get put away, dishes will lay where they were last used, clothes will be draped on furniture and sluffed into piles on the floor, cans, wrappers, bottles will litter my suburban homescape.

Fourth day, I will congregate in communal spaces with the other suffering junkies; we will stare into space, share our meager rations, and trash talk our supplier. Fifth day, I will look exactly like the street lady downtown and won’t give a rat’s ass. I’m a writer. I don’t have an office to work from. Inside our house, nightfall arrives at 2:30 in the afternoon. I will spend long stretches of the day in bed.

Day six, I will be angry, bitter, a little delusional. I resent that there are places in town, friends, neighbors who are getting their regular electricty; and I’m not talking about the weak-willed phonies with generators. Please. Don’t even talk to me about generators. Generators are like methadone. People with generators are still in the grip of their suffering, still wanting sympathy, still clogging up the supply chain with their selfish needs, and won’t even appreciate the purity of the rush when they finally get their fix. Day six I will be plotting revenge.

I got straight once. I took my four small children to South America to live in a city on the edge of the jungle one summer. The city conserved power by never turning it on. I went cold turkey for the first week or so, thought I would lose my mind but didn’t, and then came out the other side. I was happy to have a lightbulb that sometimes worked. I used it to iron baby clothes. I would sit outside our apartment in the scummy, humid evenings and mend socks by the light of the moon. I was happy. I was happy. Then I flew home to the United States. Being back in the United States was like a hallucinatory mind trip to paradise. So, of course, I started using again.

So here I sit, staring into the abyss. This storm is coming, and all I can do is wait. You can shame me all you want, but I’m telling you it’s going to get ugly.

My name is Lara, and I’m an addict.

Hello blogging. It’s me, Lara.

Sitting across from Lauren Cerand in a cafe in Soho… she’s having sorbet, or maybe I’m having the sorbet and she’s having something else, but she’s saying I should blog. And I’m thinking yes, I will blog. I will enjoy blogging. I will be good at blogging.

Since then, I have been to Venice, to Athens, to Crete, to Mykonos, to Santorini, and in all these places I have thought about blogging. I have blogged in my head. I have blogged about art, about traveling, about the quirkiness of the human race. All in my head. To great success, in my own head. In my own head I have been amazing and articulate.

So now, back in Baltimore, I sit down to blog. First I design my page. I pick colors and fonts. Then I will blog.
It is lunchtime. I change the colors and fonts. It is dinnertime.
It is tomorrow. It is next week.

I sit down to blog.
I have nothing.
This will take some practice. Some discipline. Some courage. Some thought.

Of all the threads of life and work that I muse on all through the day, how can it be when I sit down to write I have nothing? Emptiness, nada, junk, worthless white noise.

Writing is like meandering down a wooded lane. You can be thinking about something, but then a trail of tiny beautiful color rises impossibly out from between a crack in a paving stone, or from the middle of a bank of snow, and you are suddenly thinking about possibilities, about risk taking, about reasons for continuing life in the midst of overwhelming circumstances, and you want to stop walking and put all those beautifully coherent thoughts down on paper immediately. But you can’t. Because there is a reason you are walking down the wooded lane. You are headed to an appointment. Or your computer is back at your home and you are outside of your child’s school. Or you are insanely hungry and must eat before doing anything else, even writing. And so that coherent gem of a thought, that perfect essay or story or poem that presented itself so generously and spontaneously, like a gift wrapped kiss from a lover, is by the time you get around to writing it down, gone. Like the wisp it always was, the merest grazing of neurons in your cluttered brain, a hopeful synapse with no blueprint or recipe for how to recreate it.

Writing is like sitting down to a gourmet kitchen full of ingredients after you have just binged on a Big Mac, and attempting to create an exquisite meal. You must find a way to make yourself hungry again before you can summon the imagination to assemble the ingredients into anything palatable, much less remarkable. Writing is wrestling with the lazy donkey in your stable in order to get him out to the field to plow a furrow in which you fully intend to plant seeds that, when fertilized, watered and weeded, have only the slighest chance of becoming the garden that is the vision in your mind. But meanwhile, you partake of meals that elevate all the senses, you walk through the breathtaking gardens that other people have cultivated and you think, it can be done. These people have done it.

Writing is like that. It is messy and boring and unending and hopeless and insanely optimistic.

I have no idea what blogging is like, but I’m going to find out.