7.4.10 independence

Tourists; I don't begrudge them the pleasure they find staring at the colleges and churches. I just wonder - do they lack streets back home? Or do they leave their common sense at the border?

Trinity Street is shorter than my grandparents rural driveway in Poulsbo WA, yet seems to host something like five or six thousand strangers all day, every day, from April to September. Summers in this town are a grind of trudging through impassable, teeming masses of people so I can complete normal errands. Like buying milk.

If I stood aside every time I encounter someone snapping photographs, I would spend my whole life immobilized on cobblestones in the city centre. I would be a statue, not a person!

The crowds won't even budge for busses, forget cyclists. When I first moved here I didn't understand all the aggressive bell-ringing, but now I am one of the agitated locals, one hand steering, one on the bell. Not to be mean (though I am often enraged), but to warn the clueless strangers who persist in bumbling into traffic without even turning their head.

My normal routine is to get the heck out of town, preferably out of the country, but this year I am trapped by immigration travel restrictions. Creative solutions are required!

Packing for a retreat to UK destinations more congenial I received email from Satnam requesting my presence at dinner. I was about to decline as I had a date with some robotic flying penguins, but then I thought for a second.

How many invitations have I had in this city? I've dined with Satnam and family twice. Don and Barbara five or so times, Sally and Steve about the same. There have been a few scattered other events with locals, and things were more lively when I hung out with students (Jean, Rachel, David & Sarah, all since departed for sunnier climes).

That is it. The sum total of my socializing over six years in this city is less than I would have done in a fortnight back home.

One of the tertiary reasons I left the states? The nonstop temptation to have fun. My Portland house functioned as a community center. My housewarming in Seattle was so crowded I couldn't even get in the door. When I go back I have almost no time at all to myself, and regard trips to the laundromat as respite. Unless I see people I know there too, which is about a fifty percent chance, no matter which city I happen to alight in.

When my children were little and I did public events people asked how I managed to get any work done at all, and I always answered I'm an insomniac. This is true, and the first thirty-three years of my life were marked out by large work projects accomplished in the middle of the night and on the run.

The whole thing felt claustrophobic, and I longed for solitutude.

Now I have all the time I could ever need. Every day is open, unstructured, without deadlines or commitments, no childcare needed or given, no friends to distract and delight.

What do people do with all of this time? Watch television? I'm struggling!

I accepted the invitation and cycled up to enjoy the hospitality of Satnam and Susan, who continue to make an astonishing effort to entertain. They host these dinners all the time; I gave up on this town years ago.

We talked about Seattle, agreeing the scant year and a half or so each of us lived there wasn't enough. One of the couples at the table offered up scathing critiques of all the things I hate about Cambridge: mostly the hordes of tourists, and the difficulty (twinned with necessity) of cycling.

They have a tidy solution: they move to San Francisco at the weekend.

Other complaints include the perpetual Town v. Gown division, river drama, and of course and always, the lack of decent restaurants or grocery stores.

Satnam ranted about all the effort required to assemble the delicious dinner he had just served. I squinted and said Why do you live here again?

He answered To be near my mother.

What a corrective tonic. Would my life be better if I lived in Kitsap County, or even, if I am honest, Seattle? No.

Because all of the details that bedevil my day are superficial. I left my homeland because I want to live in a place where all citizens have access to healthcare and a basic standard of living.

Whatever it takes, whatever it costs, this is where I am staying.... for now.

Happy Independence Day.

7.2.10 linked

I've always kept stats but never bothered to read them, as my sites are not commercial. If you aren't trying to make money, you don't really need to know where or why people click, now do you?

But recently I have developed a baffled interest because Google Analytics is so precise.

It tells me all sorts of irrelevant data about traffic sources, referring sites, keywords, etc. These are fairly consistent with what I know about the world - who links to me, who reads the stuff, how my name is misspelled in searches. And, since both search engines and the people using the internet are more sophisticated now, the strings are more basic and correct.

When I have an article or essay published I get spikes to the About and Books sections, and some wandering in the archives, but other than that all traffic is fairly straightforward. Oh, and very regional - American west, NYC, London. The interest from the provinces is scattered, with a few unexpected yet persistent viewers in the middle east and an obscure former Soviet republic.

The only really strange thing I have discovered is that one particular month (out of eight years) from the Foment journal gets a specific, routine amount of traffic. Not from the search engines because I've written something controversial, nor because someone out there has linked to it. The traffic is direct entry, a hit to that page and then an exit.

Why? Is it from one of the people mentioned, reliving past glories? Or is someone jerking off to the photographs of me half clothed and Bethany stark naked?

Huh. Whatever! That was such a peculiar month, one of the best and worst of my life; I can hardly read the narrative.

August 2007.

7.1.10 assignment

I've been sorting through old files and found all manner of oddity, including but not limited to any email sent or received since 1993; full backups of every website I have ever designed or administered; and the contents of the computer stolen from my house a decade or so ago. The lost manuscript? Three or four other books I have elected not to publish? The controversies and hatred that destroyed the HM boards? Photographs of hundreds of people in various stages of embarrassing development and fashion? I have it all, sitting right here in front of me.

Of course I'm not going to look at any of these things. My archives serve no clear purpose, except to clutter.

Though I have been reading old journal entries to piece together an essay on topics that have faded in memory. In 2003 I was apparently obsessing about not just my wardrobe but more pertinently, the ethics of narrative nonfiction. I was worried that publishing the stories eventually collected as Lessons in Taxidermy was somehow "wrong" - though I could not quite identify the nature of the crime.

The concerns centered on the notion that I had a clear understanding of the facts (what happened) and an imperfect grasp of the importance (why it happened, or what it means).

Now I would say the real danger is that I was convinced of my own indifference to how other people feel about the events described. Feelings are sticky, sloppy, annoying. Someone hit you upside the head with a plank? I only want to know how many stitches you needed, not what you think about the scar.

Well, it was a good theory.

I thought - and still believe - that telling the truth, no matter how hard or frightening, is mandatory. When I published the book I was also young (or stupid) enough to think that truth was somehow illuminating - that incurable pain could be relieved with sufficient doses of honesty.

I was wrong.

While assembling the stories I was cautious, using only the elements beyond dispute. Everything in the book (aside from names) can be proved. I have the records. It all happened, exactly as stated. If you refer to witness accounts, medical files, or any other source, you will find that I did not elaborate, embroider, create. Instead, I edited - leaving out years, events, people, and always, feelings. The most bitter fight I had with my publisher concerned a profound lack of adjectives.

At the time I was fixated on the question of who owned the story - my story. My body. My life. This is a reasonable sort of line to follow; the problem is that a life is not a singular experience. People are entwined with each other. I may have been lonely, but I was not alone.

Somewhere underneath the burbling about ethics I was scared that I would hurt someone by telling the truth.

Hurt? Try taunt. Torment. Enrage. Words like "destroy" might be too harsh, but several important friendships ended, whether I wanted them to or not. Other relationships changed in traumatic ways. There was no reconciliation, no redemption, no reunion. I accumulated positive reviews and lost friends. I wrote something down, guaranteeing I could never speak of it again.

Would it have been easier to keep the secrets? No. But this does not change the fact that I hurt people. It doesn't matter if they hurt me first.

Since 2003 my circumstances have changed dramatically. I was poor, sad, trapped. Now I have money, joy, autonomy. This life is factually better than that life. So why am I still thinking about these things? Why do I spend a significant amount of each day fretting about purely speculative concerns?

Because I know a couple of stories, and the urge to tell is more compelling than the fear of retribution.

When my beloved junkie auntie died my mother turned to me and said "Now you can write anything you want about the family." I didn't believe her, but I suspect it was meant as an assignment.

My agent and my children urge me to write the stories as fiction, but I retort that I have no imagination. My job would be so much easier if I did - but for whatever reason, I seem to be stuck with facts.

The 2003 journals remind me of the quote: Who said you should be happy? Do your work. -- Colette

Right now the question is not whether I will write the stories; it is, rather, whether I will allow them to be published.

James has been a close friend since we were sixteen or so, sharing everything imaginable as we ran away toward an obscure future. We used to talk or write every single day, and when I asked his advice in 2003 he said:

You are stuck on truth, which is real philosophy of the ethical moral variety. Fiction is something else, namely, the ontological, metaphysical sort of contemplation and assuming. Somehow I do not think you are about possibilities. Rather this other sort of wisdom: action and experience. You really care about remembering what happened; to the point of ruinous arguments over events. The problem is, though you often do not let on, you also worry, quite deeply, about what other people might think or feel about what happened. There is always doubt, and in that doubt, there are feelings - yours and theirs. And at the end of the day, regardless of what happens, you want people to feel alright. You want people to be better. That is your conflict. It is maybe also the point of your writing.