Bread and Bread

1. first, let us meditate on how we suck I’m about to blog about yet another podcast. This strikes me as a problem—where are the books and movies in my life?—but arguably the bigger problem is that I think everything is a problem. During my Drama Years, I learned to be more forgiving of myself. I thought it was because I’d finally discovered the Meaning of Life or something, but recently my therapist suggested that I get really anxious about medical stuff because I think it’s the only thing I’m allowed to have Big Feelings about. Like, if it’s not a matter of life and death or a few central relationships, what business do I have caring? Doesn’t stressing about work just make me a banal cog in the capitalist machine? Isn’t my need for peace and a clean house and writing time just a first world problem? So instead I worry that seasonal allergies are cancer. I just did a mandatory transcendental meditation session—long, very Homeboy-specific story—and it felt so great and necess...

1. genius vs. more geniusy genius A couple of years ago I went all the way to Italy to learn that you can’t write a memoir by pasting together a bunch of journal entries. Even if they were pretty well written journal entries, if you do say so yourself, and even if you were kind of trying to write them from an imaginary point in the future as an exercise in convincing yourself you had a future…they are still not a memoir. Dani Shapiro kindly suggested that my journal entries might not be as useful as I wanted them to be, but her advice took another two years to sink in. It took two years to walk that much farther away from the events I was writing about (infertility-miscarriage-cancer, that old tune) so I could see them more clearly. Actually it's been forty. Recently my friend Dan and I started a writing group. It’s had a couple of hiccups getting off the ground. One member was pregnant and got intense migraines that kept her from looking at screens. Another got ...

Like all my favorite novels, the podcast Shit Town is about a lot of things: the tension between home and the larger world; the many sides to every story; what it m eans to care for another person; the curse of genius; depression; time; clocks. Like all my favorite novels, it's a mystery whose answers are both bigger and heartbreakingly smaller than the questions initially posed. It is a work of art, and you should listen if you haven't already. But today I'm blogging about Chapter VI: " Since everyone around here thinks I’m a queer anyway." Our protagonist, John B. McLemore, embodies many paradoxes (worldly hick, tender asshole), but he especially straddles a generational and regional divide between Out Gay/Bi Man and Shadow-Dwelling Pervert. I listened to Chapter VI with a growing recognition that was one part empathy, one part dread.  Uncle Bob was a redhead too. My Uncle Bob wasn't a suicidal mad genius. He didn't have gold buried on his prop...

From my travel journal: Thursday, our first in Mexico City, we kept it mellow and walked around Polanco, which all the guidebooks say is the "Beverly Hills of Mexico City." It's true that I saw a BMW motorcycle and lots of professional dog walkers, but Polanco has more urban flare than BH. We spent a lot of time at Lincoln Park; there's a statue of Lincoln here that says "a gift from the people of the United States to the people of Mexico." Nearby a store had hung a #fucktrump banner. Better than a wall. We stayed up talking to the friends we're staying with, Laura and her wife, Molly. I've known Laura since I was a little kid; our moms were good friends, and hers passed away recently, from Alzheimer's. Laura said that navigating her mom's illness would have been twice as hard without her sister Lindsay, and that's part of why they wanted a second kid (Cora is four, Evan is 20 months). It's sobering, but it did push me more in...

Dear Sarah Schulman, I'm writing my review of Conflict Is Not Abuse   as an open letter to you, because your book is about conflict and the importance of dialogue, empathy and repair (vs. disengagement, which you call "shunning"). So I feel like you'd be open to actually hearing about stuff I found troubling, as well as the stuff I liked. You draw parallels between conflicts on the personal, community and international levels, and you attempt to show how dividing people into the black-and-white categories of "abuser" and "victim" harms both parties and resolves little. I love me some personal/political parallels, and I heartily agree that us-and-them thinking leads to much of the world's shittiness. After all, I work for an organization whose mission is to tell gang members that they deserve love, and that they are not the worst thing they've ever done. I try to tell myself the same. Without repair, we don't have much hope as a spec...

At some point in my life, I decided that injustice was the only thing it was okay to get angry about. It could be a small injustice or a big one. It could be a boss blaming me for something that wasn't my fault, or it could be, like, homophobia. I still think it's a good goal not to be the asshole screaming at a CVS clerk because your prescription isn't ready, but you can probably guess that my "injustice only" stance on anger has run into some problems. Because 1) anger isn't a decision, it's an emotion, and 2) there's lots of shit to get pissed off about that is no one's fault. I spent many therapy hours and blog posts sorting through the rage that bloomed in the wake of infertility-miscarriage-cancer. None of these things was anyone's fault, but they were also categorically unfair and shitty. But weren't most of the good things that had happened to me (being born into a middle class life, having parents who loved me) equally unfa...

1. when in doubt I signed up to help with the Homeless Count because I have house guilt . (I’m also working on a story about homelessness in L.A. for Razorcake , because what is more DIY than building your own makeshift shelter?) As we’ve settled into our new place, the streets of Highland Park and Chinatown have filled with motor homes like the one my family camped in when I was a kid. It’s like a post-apocalyptic time capsule. Meanwhile my middle-class friends struggle to pay rent on tiny apartments, and a not-small percentage of staff and clients at Homeboy commute from Palmdale. It’s safe to say L.A.—despite all its blue-state benefits—has a housing crisis. Glamping? After watching two online training videos, I arrive at W.O.R.K.S. , an affordable housing organization in Highland Park. I actually emailed them a while back to volunteer, but I never heard back. Ah, nonprofits. W.O.R.K.S. will be the starting point for counting NELA census tracts. I see my former neighbors, ...

1. getting there is half the fun “It doesn’t even look like we’re on Earth,” says Janice. I am in a car full of writers I don’t know, driving toward wet black mountains half hidden by clouds. Today Donald Trump is being inaugurated as president. Our hearts and our friends will be at Women’s Marches around the country tomorrow, but we’ve decided to leave town and write. Cole took the train from Santa Barbara and met us at Union Station in L.A. It arrived late, so we sat in Janice’s Prius for an hour, watching the rain. Not long after getting on the 210 freeway, Janice’s tire blew. We limped to an off-ramp and waited for AAA.   Sporting a new used tire from Moreno’s Tires New & Used Llantas in Irwindale, we are back on the road now. Cole says she’s writing a book of lyric essays about uncertainty. I tell her I’m writing about uncertainty too, and proceed to tell my three fellow travelers “my story.” I don’t mean the story I’m writing, although I build a literary fr...