I needed a haircut. I’m usually rushing around so much that needing a haircut is my usual state.  Also, being a kid in the seventies, my internal tolerance for shaggy hair is pretty high.  My spouse, who is a few years younger, does not share that same tolerance.

“It looks like it’s getting to be that time, again,” she said.

Now, if I had really wanted to grow out my hair, I know that she would never stand in my way, but that was not the case.  I mean, I had grown my hair out in the past, but it doesn’t ever grow down.  It’s so thick it just grows horizontally outward until I become a big blob of hair, with a nose sticking out of it, just walking around.  Not a good look.  Trust me on that one.

So, I happened to be on vacation in Stockton (Yeah.  That’s another story) and decided to go to one of the barber shops there.  Everyone was very nice, but I noticed that all of them, the barbers, and the customers, all had the same haircut.  The back was a fade and the top, just a mop.  I’d seen that haircut before in the Bay area about two years ago.  It was very popular for a little while, and then went away.  Apparently, it was still going strong in Stockton.

“I’d like a scissor cut, please.”

The barber looked at his electric razor.  “You don’t want me to use this?”

“Um.  Maybe on the neck, but, no, not really.”

“No?”  Tears welled.

“A scissor cut,” I repeated.

The barber picked up the pair of scissors as if it would bite him.  He looked at the older, more seasoned barber next to him.

The other barber smiled and said, “You’ll be fine.”

I came home and walked into the kitchen.  My spouse stared at me without blinking.

“It’ll grow out,” I said.

She burst into laughter.

For the rest of the week, at random times, I’d catch her staring at the top of my head.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She’d say, grinning from ear to ear.

I came back to work.

“Nice haircut, Art,” someone said.

“Really?”

“Um.  Yeah. Nice.”

“It’ll grow out,” I said.

“Sure,” they said, but refused to make eye contact.

At every meeting I went to, which was quite a few, people looked me in the eye whenever I spoke, but, inevitably, their eyes would float up to the top of my head.

It’ll grow out, I thought to myself.

Now, at last, three weeks later, it really has grown out.  It’s even, shorter in the back and sides, and longer in the front.  It actually looks pretty good.  I mean, for me.

But there’s only one tiny problem.

“It looks like it’s getting to be that time, again,” she said.

At long last, I’m returning to my blog.  I’ve been writing and living and avoiding the blog for some time now, and, hopefully, I will have stored up enough interesting stuff to write about.

There are a few things I’d like to get out of the way:

1. I hate to blog. Just saying. I’m a pretty private person, so writing the truth about my life is uncomfortable.  It also feels narcissistic, and, frankly, kind of whiney.  Why do it, you ask?  If there’s one thing I’ve figured out about my life it’s that when I focus on what makes me uncomfortable, and directly confront it, Giants are felled, Demons are defeated, and it all seems so easy that I wonder why I hadn’t done that terrifying thing before.

2. I won’t write about work. I mean I probably will, but in shifting, surreptitious ways.  People have confidence in my professional ability to keep my mouth shut.  Good thing I’m typing.

3. My wife. I love her. She is super private and would kill me if I revealed anything about her on this blog.  If you see her, please don’t tell her.

See you soon (I hope).

In our early history, human beings banded together in groups in order to survive.  As a group, we were able to defeat large predators and became the top of the food chain on this planet.  Being part of a group has been essential to who we are, and how we live.

Within a group, it is, and has always been important to know who is our friend who will share food and protection, and who is our enemy who will steal from us and cause us harm.

In order to make these judgements, we have developed a high sensitivity to body language, emotional intention in others, and hidden meanings behind speech.  Most of these processes seem to be outside of our ordinary awareness and happen without conscious application.

I believe that the way we read other people is also the way we read books.

The reader scans the page and tries to interpret what is the true intent behind the external form of dialogue.  The same thing happens when they read action and description.  There is an expectation that everything on the page is more than what it appears.

This is why all dialogue must have a subtext, exposition needs to be delivered in sometimes subtle and dramatic ways, and the world needs to be shown not told on the page.

We navigate the world on the page the same way we navigate the world we live in.

This is also the way, if done well, the world on the page becomes almost as real as the world we live in.

Soap, in one form or another, has been a part of my family for three generations, and now, perhaps, four.

My great grandfather, Arthur Edelmuth, began a soap factory in Frankfurt, Germany.  The factory made white soap and brown soap.  The white soap was cosmetic soap, while the brown soap was for industrial purposes.  They marketed to the Jewish hospitals throughout Germany and did pretty well for themselves.

I never saw any of the white soap, but my grandmother had a little chunk of the brown soap, which she used to wash dishes.  It lasted over seventy years.  That’s some soap.

The nazis interrupted the prosperity of the Edelmuth soap company, and my family, or what was left of it, fled to America.  My grandfather decided to cater to drycleaners and instead of the incredibly long lasting brown soap, he and his little brother made carbon tetrachloride and other nasty cleaning fluids.

My father Walter went into the family business, somewhat against his will, but it all came to a crashing end when he caught a wildfire fever that burned him away at the age of twenty-nine.

Heartbroken, my grandfather sold the company to Dow Chemical and the family soap story came to an end.

But now, a hundred and thirty-five years later, I’m thinking about soap.  Maybe I’ll make some.  Maybe.

Perhaps, soap is in my blood.  That would explain the bubbles.

It started when my darling wife wanted to watch “Wolf,” a movie from the nineties starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer.  Although it started with some promise, it was horrible, truly horrible, and I tried to figure out why it got made.  In my research, I found a remark from one of the writers, Jim Harrison, of how, after a falling out with the film’s director, he went to a wolf den and apologized while his dog hid under his truck.

I poked around and found out that he had recently died, but had left behind a huge trove of work.  I started with the book of novellas that had made him famous, “Legends of the Fall,” and my brain lit up like a christmas tree.  Now, wherever I go, I hear radio stories about him, or see reruns of food shows with cameos of him.

Jim Harrison’s writing is beautiful, and I’m still trying to figure out what makes it so good.  He is brilliant at narrative summary, and has written entire books of it.  His sentences are long and beautiful without fancy ticks and curly cues.

Also, there’s something about the way he lived his life.  He gave himself up to life and to writing with an almost spiritual passion.  He gave himself up to love and to hunting and fishing and to food and drink.  He looked like he lived hard, and his early death (Is 78 early?  To my grandmother, 90 was early.) may speak to that.

I feel like something  is trying to give me a hint, and even the ghost of Jim Harrison, at least his authorial voice and amusing video image, is tapping me on the shoulder about something that I’m just a little too slow on the uptake to get.

I hope I figure it out before too long.

I know we have to eat to live, but I want to live to eat.  

At the same time, I don’t want to clog my arteries, blow up my sugar count, and make my heart explode.  It’s difficult.  You see, I’ve been programmed to want fat and sugar in some deep reptile part of my brain so much that I’m ready to fight off a saber tooth tiger for its kill to get a piece of that nice buttery mastodon belly.  

Unfortunately for me, these days I can pick up a decent mastodon belly in most supermarkets near my house and there are no more saber toothed tigers to make it even sporting.  My reptile brain couldn’t care less about the lack of competitive predators, so it’s way too easy to go to the Safeway and return to my cave with armloads of crap that will kill me, slowly, but thoroughly.

I can’t outwit my reptile brain.  It’s older and more primitive than the rest of my head parts.  I just need to plan, plan, plan what I want, and hope that I can stick to my plan, despite the howling in my head that happens every time I pass the cake-cookie-candy, deep fried chicken/steak/what-have-you, salty snacks now with extra salt aisles.

Maybe my plan will work.  On the other hand, there’s that Mike Tyson quote:  “Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth.”

If I can just avoid Mike Tyson, maybe I’ll be okay.

I’ve been writing for a long time–years and years, actually.  During all of that, I’ve looked at writing as an escape from my real life.  Writing was a place in which no boss could deny my vacation days, no customer could become angry with me, no loved one was unhappy with something that I had done or said, and no parent could display contempt for me.

I’d work from project to project and hang onto the belief that I had written something perfect or perfectible, so I could stop thinking about it, and whistle through my day, transcending the petit suffering of my middle class white life.  

And at the end of each project, I would send its imperfect slouching self out onto the sea of the larger world where it sank without a trace.

I would always get what I secretly wanted–to remain in my perfect fantasy of escape from life.  If I ever got what I imagined, I’d lose the fantasy and become stuck in the existential “now what?” of the real world.

Only recently, I’ve come to a very different way of looking at things.  Writing is about being more engaged in the real world.  When I struggle with theme, character, and plot, I struggle with my own life.  I try to see if my struggle reflects the struggle of others.  Could anything I write be of use to anybody else?

Today we are surrounded by fear.  Tyrants threaten to save us through brutal hatred.  Powerlessness, hopelessness, and the death of innocence is the order of the day.

The writing now haunts every day of my waking life.  It is in the background of everything I do.  And the struggle is always about making it work better, speak louder, and be more true and relevant for other people.

I might succeed at speaking this truth, or I might not, but at long last, I am engaged in the attempt to write something real.

Here I am again, and again, I’m tempted to whine about my writing.  Frankly, I’m bored of complaining, so I’m not going to do it.  The writing is what it is.  I should spend more time doing it.  I also need to finish things.  And I need to get better.  Much better.  But enough about that.

The spouse and I just finished a popular thirty day diet in which we cut out most things people like to eat.  It was difficult.  I missed soy products.  I missed cooking with wine.  I missed cheese, glorious cheese.  Was it worth it?    Who knows?  In the end, I did feel better, not that I felt that bad before.  The best thing, I admit, was doing all that cooking.  I’m not at a point of combining flavors and proteins and inventing recipes, but I’m a lot better than I was before.  And I actually like to cook.  Who knew?

The one thing I learned is forget all of those Whole30, super paleo etc. recipes.  Just take the dishes that you like to eat and replace the forbidden gluten filled dairy frothing evil nastiness class of ingredients with something equivalent (or maybe nothing at all).  Who needs all that sugar?

So long, and I hope it’ll be less than a year before I blog again.

Your pal,

Art  

I haven’t been online in quite a while.  Most of my time has been taken up with avoiding being online.  It feels oddly like keeping a private diary and then putting it in a store window for everyone to read.  For me, it’s sort of like wearing underwear on the outside of your clothes.

At this point, my spouse would say, “Get over your precious self!”

“I will try, honey.”

I am currently between draft one of a novel and draft two.  This is usually my cue to dump the whole mother and start again.  I’m really trying not to do that.  The tough part is distinguishing what doesn’t work from what almost works, and not recoiling in disgust and hurling the manuscript out the window.

I’m peering beneath the skin and tissue down to the very bones of the story and hoping I can figure out how to fix it.

To calm myself down about this process, I do what everyone else does.  I search for some writing gospel that I can believe in.  Some answers to my eternal questions of how to make my writing into something enjoyable for others to read (or at least coherent).

There’s a ton of stuff out there about the mechanics of story.  I find a lot of it very useful, particularly during the rewrite process, when I’ve actually got my mound of clay to work with.

On the other hand, I think what I really long for is someone to show me the path that my story can cut through the jungle of material.  If only I could read the correct how to book, or blog, or fortune cookie, I will know what to do.

The horrible truth is that no one can show me that.  The other paths that have been cut are familiar and successful, but they are their paths.  Only I can find my own path.

There’s a moment in the movie “Stargate” just before James Spader is about to step through into the unknown.  It seems as if he is about to touch the face of God.  This is what it’s like when I happen upon a reasonable approach to understanding story.  My heart swells, I fall to my knees, and I cry like the true penitent believer that I want to be.

When Mr. Spader actually passes through the stargate, of course, it’s just more plot stuff.  And that’s what it feels like when, again, I come to the realization that no one can save my story but me.