When I left my office this afternoon, there was some ice on my car. An icy car in Calfornia. Then it started first snowing and then hailing on the drive home. I moved to California to escape the snow and now it's snowing in California. What is our world's weather coming to?

Just heard on the radio that there were quakes in Southern California near Simi Valley. But people have been calling in and saying it's typical for the area.

I hope it doesn't snow tomorrow because I hate driving on icy roads. The last time I drove in snow was in New Mexico. I was vacationing in Santa Fe and I had reservations to stay at another hotel in Taos. The morning I was leaving Santa Fe, light snow started falling. I hopped in my rental car and drove up to Taos anyway. I drove right into a big snowstorm. It was wild. I hadn't driven in snow in years but it all came back to me. The snowstorm was so sudden, the snow ploughs weren't even out yet. Somehow I made it safely up the mountain but then I did have help. A car passed me and then slowed down and I followed this car all the way up to Taos. I never got a chance to thank the people or person in the car, because they just drove off. Maybe they saw that I was a tourist in a rental car and they felt so sorry for me. When I drove back down later and was able to look at the road, I was shocked by how dangerous the roads were. I guess I could have easily driven myself off a cliff in a snowstorm. Was it an angel car? Who knows. When I got to Taos, I checked into my hotel and then found the time of the next church service and drove to church to thank god for getting me through the snowstorm and to Taos.

I'm trying to buy a mini laptop for myself on Ebay because I'm finding it hard to just sit down at my computer and write. I could write by hand, but it's more efficient to type directly into a document.

I thought bidding on Ebay would be easy. I've bought three items in the past and didn't have a problem with being outbid. I was outbid once, but then I found the exact same item and bought it for a cheaper price. But my buying binge on Ebay was in 1999/2000. Things have really changed since then.

I was outbid for the first mini laptop, but I didn't care because when I emailed the seller for information, he told me that he bought it used. Twice used is never a good thing in my book. There wasn't another similar item to bid on, so I went to my second choice. I thought I was about to win the item, when five minutes to the end, someone starting outbidding me and in the end, I lost by $5. I was devastated because I had spent the whole day Saturday online to make sure that I wouldn't be outbid. I had to some serious soul searching about why I wanted the item and how money I was willing to spend on it. I mean, it's not like I don't have the money to buy one, but I have a budget in mind for what I want to spend and I was intent on sticking to that budget.

Today at work, I decided that I wasn't bidding the right amounts for mini laptop choice #1 and #2 and that's why I was losing. I decided to use a straight three year depreciation and since the two mini laptops I wanted came out in December 1998, I would pay 1/3 of the retail selling price plus tax. This new calculation considerably upped the amout I was willing to spend, but I am convinced that my new way of pricing is fair and should work to my advantage.

I think bidding on Ebay for popular item is kind of like poker. You can't show your hand too early. I also think that I need to be willing to bid for an item at the last minute with my maximum price to assure my chances of winning the item I want. I can't believe that I am plotting such a complicated strategy to bid for an item on Ebay but hey, if I want it, I've got to plan a strategy to get it, don't I?

The problem with the mini laptop market is there aren't very many manufacturers in this market, so there's not alot of incentive to make less expensive units. As it is, the two units I want, the LG Phenom Express and the HP Jornada, have both been discontinued. I've only ever seen the LG Phenom Express because a friend of mine has one. I've never even seen the HP Jornada but it's two inches wider than the Phenom, so I can only assume that the bigger keyboard would be easier to type on.

I just bought Julia Cameron's book, The Right to Write, and she says you have to have different stations where you can write. I'm hoping that a mini laptop will do the trick for me. I want to get this all wrapped by the end of January and I just hope to god, there's a mini laptop out there on Ebay with my name on it.

I'm catching up on my blogging because most days I feel like I have nothing to say, although I know this is untrue.

My birthday was on Thursday January 24 and I had that day off. Friends of mine were taking me out to Chez Panisse in Berkeley for dinner later than night and to avoid rush hour traffic on the bridge, I left San Francisco at around 1:30 pm.

Berkeley, what a strange place. There's this big push in Berkeley by the merchants to get people to shop there but parking there is such a pain in the ass. I wanted to park near Chez Panisse and just walk around and check out ths shopes or go to a movie or something but there are no parking garages in that neighborhood and you can't park for more than two hours before getting a ticket. Berkeley is such a user unfriendly city. People talk about San Francisco being dirty but downtown Shattuck is filthy as well, if not filthier.

It's hard to believe Berkeley is even a California city because parts of it look like a bordered up Northeastern town. It's really sad because I remember downtown Berkeley in the 80's as being such a nice place to visit. It's not that way anymore. Berkeley is not even a big city, but it's dirty as any big city I've ever seen.

So I ended up parking near the Berkeley BART so I could see a movie, but the only movie that I had time enough to see was "The Brotherhood of the Wolf". I had seen the commercials on TV and was very intrigued by them.

It's kung fu martial arts fightibg set in pre-revolutionary France. The movie is long and the plot is unbelievable, but the main star is so cute. He looks like this guy I used to date, who is half irish and half french. Both men were blondes with big noses and big brown eyes and nice strong looking jaw. They even had the same kind of bodies, nice and big, and they had the same kind of personality, flirty and always on the make for a woman. Actually now that I think about it, the two main characters in the movie were like froggie version of The Lone Ranger and Tonto. The french guy has an indian sidekick, who just happens to be an expert in martial arts. He's indian in the movie, so I guess that makes sense for the french. The indian sidekick is actually some famous martial arts guy from Hawaii.

The movie is based on a true story about some animal/monster that killed about 100 people in the time period and other reviews say that french have been obsessed with movie ever since. Th Brotherhood was one of the biggest grossing movies in France last year, so at least the french liked it.

I did enjoy the movie, but I think only because I grew up watching badly translated hong kong kung fu action movies. French, chinese, what's the difference right? The movie was beautifully filmed with gorgeous and eerie scenes and chock full of interesting camera angles. I got into camera angles after Pulp Fiction. Since it's a period movie, the costumes look authentic and are gorgeous and if you're a wolf fan, there are a ton of them to look at.

Maybe because it's french, there's also some fun sex scenes in a bordello including lots of nudity shots and a nicely done sex scene with hunky main guy, who's the cutest bikkie I've seen in a movie in a long time, and some italian/french whore, who turns out to be more than just a prostitute. Don't all prostitutes in most movies turn out to be more than just whores? I would definitely do the french cute bikkie anytime.

The fight scenes were also very good and the french hunky bikkie boy was a martial art kung fu guy at the end of the movie. Was it a good movie? I don't know. I enjoyed it but then any movie with lots of fighting and with a cute hunky bikkie boy main character is a good movie to me.

I think I mentioned awhile ago that I've been wanting to write a story about a young girl who gets beat up in a concentration camp in WW2 germany. I had a discussion on Tuesday with my writing group about authenticity and after hearing Dean Koontz talk about the theories of quantum mechanics, I came up with a different way to write this story.

I think I may be riffing off my friend Mel's Picasso story, although I've never read it and only heard her talk about it.

I started freewriting the story last night and this is my sketchy plot. A woman goes to one of those free psychic fairs and has a past life reading done. The past life reader tells her that she had a past life as young german girl in a concentration camp in WW2 germany. As a young german girl, she was beat up by the Nazis and subsequently died later of her injuries. Most of the young girl's injuries were in the hip, legs and feet. The modern day woman has the same pain and the pyschic reader tells her the pain is from her past reincarnation trauma. The psychic reader tells her that the woman is experiencing the trauma because there is something she needs to learn from that incarnation. What the woman needs to learn, the psychic reader cannot tell her.

The woman is a skeptic when it comes to psychic stuff but after the reading, she starts see images of the girl everywhere. One day as she's looking into a mirror at herself, she sees the young girl and the young girl in the mirror sees her. The woman reaches out her hand to the mirror and the young girl does the same thing. The woman, magically, enters the world of young girl but as her imaginary friend, since only the young girl can see her.

I'm envisioning three scenes with young german girl right now. The first time she meets the young girl is before the family is thrown into prison by the nazis. The second time is life in the prison camp, and the third scene is after the young girl gets beat up by the nazis. That's as far I've gotten with plot and I started writing the scene where the woman is at the free psychic fair in GG Park. I have to figure out what the woman needs to learn from having this experience. I was thinking it would be fun to have her go to a church and find a magic portal, but I would have to find a lutheran church with what looks like a magic portal and I'm not into doing that kind of research right now.

I like this story and I keep thinking, I want to have this kind of experience happen to me. I want to go through a magic portal and enter into another world. How cool is that? This story has all my long time interests too, reincarnation, WW2 germany, religion, magic, weird stuff.

Does this story sound too derivative of other fantasy stories? I wish I knew what she needed to learn but maybe I have to write the story to find out.

I just finished reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. The writing is beautiful and very lyrical but it's very dense and not an easy read. I shall probably have to go back and reread it again just to see what I missed the first time. It's fun for me to read a book then go and look at all the reviews about the books just to see what other people say about it.

There is a lot of violence in the book but because the writing is very stylized and lyrical, it cast an artistic sheen for me over what I think others would considers overwhelming and grotesque. I dislike violence in real life but in wriitng, plays and movies, violence if done right can actually be quite beautiful. I'm not surprised by the cruel and evil acts in this book but then I read this book after the tragedy of 9/11, so maybe nothing violent shocks me anymore, nothing man can to do to other men shocks me anymore. What's that famous phrase, man's inhumanity to man, a phrase that is so descriptive of the characters in Blood Meridian.

I suppose the only slightly surprising thing for me was the ending, but I suppose what happened at the end was logical and inevitable and I congratulate McCarthy for taking the end to its most logical extreme. Very few writers do that.

I don't think finishing Blood Meridian and then going to see Amy Freed's play "The Beard of Avon" was probably a good idea. God, it was hard to sit through this very funny comedy of a play and to hear people laugh after spending the last week and half trying to get through what some critics have called the "great american novel".

I liked "The Beard of Avon", it was very cleverly written and very entertaining, but I found it derivative of all the sight gags and jokes in Shakespeare in Love. And Tom Stoppard is a much better writter than Amy Freed. I also found it annoying that Freed used the same device of putting cliche lines in the play like they did in Moulin Rouge. God, I found that so ghastly and annoying, but people in the theatre loved it and laughed at every old and tired line. I had a friend who saw Moulin Rouge when it first opened and she loved the movie because it used all those old lines.

I find it odd that this play was the most produced play in regional theatres across the country in 2001 but there are no backers for a broadway version. Why? I thought all great plays if they are that good are bound for Broadway. I don't know. There was a lot humanity in Shakespeare in Love, something about the wriitng of that movie touched a human chord in me and I think in many others who saw it. I saw no such thing in "The Beard of Avon". Oh, the play is very well written to be sure, but great, I'm not sure. For me, the play did not strike me deep in the heart like Shakespeare in Love did and for me to really like a play, it has to do that.

But the play is very funny and entertaining and part of me thinks I might have enjoyed it more had I not finished Blood Meridian the night before. I did a brief search on reviews for this play and found critics who thought the same. Isn't it gratifying when you find a critic who agree with your assessment. It makes me feel like I'm not crazy, especially when a respected reviewer has the same thoughts I have.

I felt the same way about that movie, Erin Brockovich. I really was not enamored of the movie and when I read Roger Ebert's review which nearly mirrored my own thoughts, I felt so much elation. An entertaining movie to be sure but not great art.

I did enjoy reading Amy Freed talking about her process of writing in the program though because when I do write, my inspiration is the same as hers. But of course, all the published writers say that to write great things, you must first write horrible things. But my question is, how do you know what' s good and what's horrible? Who's to say?

I had the weirdest dream this morning. I was on a yaht with of all people Russell Crowe. So strange. I think I had a dream about him because I am dying to see his new movie but I can't find someone who wants to see it. Most of my friends think he's a total pig and can't stand him. I think he's such a great character actor. I loved him as the fat corporate freak in The Insider. His walk, how he held his body, his facial expressions, everything was so perfect and he reminded me of many of the corporate VIPs that I used to sit across from in meetings.

I wasn't that impressed with him in LA Confidential, although one of my friends loved the "mook", the name we gave him for playing the hunky dumb cop. I wasn' even that impressed with him in Gladiator but The Insider really convinced me what a great actor he is and I think he won the Oscar more for The Insider than for Gladiator.

But who the hell cares if he's a pig in his personal life. He's an actor and he's an aussie actor and according to my aussie girlfriends, most aussie men are pigs anyway. Remember most of the aussie men in Muriel's Wedding. My aussie girlfriends tell me that those casual portrayals of horny stupid men were very accurate. So what's the big deal if Russell Crowe is being true to his aussie male roots. He's a very good actor and in a film that's really all that matters.

Anyway, in my dream Russell Crowe and I were on this yaht and he was my friend and we got to know each other and we started liking each other even though at first we weren't really attracted to each other. I don't think he's that attractive. I wouldn't kick the guy out of my bed if he suddenly popped in there one night, but he's not as attractive as say Keanu Reeves or Johnny Dep or even Tom Cruise for that matter. That's why it's so strange for me to have a semi-erotic dream about an actor who I don't find that attractive but whom I think is just one hell of a great actor. But then again, I did have a very erotic dream about me and Howard Stern. I don't think he's attractive at all, but part of me thinks it would be great fun to have sex with him just to hear his commentary afterwards on my performance. Sick, isn't it?

It's been a strange week anyway, this first week of this new year. I was in Target the other day on my lunch break and I came across this old couple buying laxatives. In November, Susan, my spiritual healer, said that my clairsentient ability was going to kick into his gear in the next three months. Clairsentience is the ability to feel things through your body. As I was standing in the aisle with the old couple, I got a flash, some kind of feeling, that the old man was going to die soon. Isn't that an odd thought to have about somebody? I mean, I don't go around thinking people are going to die every day. But I got this feeling with this old man and that he was going to die soon. Then I had another feeling that there were angels around watching him, like Nicholas Cage in that movie with Meg Ryan. The angels come and watch and take care of you when you're about to die so they can guide your spirit when you finally leave your body.

I was so creeped out that that I left the aisle, bought what I needed to buy and then went to the post office. Then in the post office, I felt the feeling of the angels again and I quickly looked around the post office but I was afraid to look at anyone's face because I didn't want to think that one of them was going to die soon.

I remember in college I had a friend named Karen and she was very psychic and could tell when people were going to die. She told me it was a very disturbing feeling and now I know what she means. Karen said she had started getting these feelings in her early teens but by her late teens, she had learned to turn it off. It's not a cheery feeling walking around knowing that random people who you don't even know are going to die soon.

In church, I had the same feeling but I quickly turned it off. I don't really want to know when people are going to die. It's really none of my business and it's an awful feeling because you can't tell them. I don't even feel like telling them because after all, those angels are there and I think that means that it's okay and all ordained, but still, how depressing.

The neurotic part of me thinks that maybe it's me the angels are visiting, and that I'm going to die soon, but I know that's not true. I think 2002 is going to be a wild year. I think it's going to full of trauma for people and if karma been speeding up starting in 1998, then it' s just going to go into overdrive in 2002.

I get the sense that great things are going to happen in the world, in my life but also great traumas, big decisions that I'll have to make, that other people will have to make. It's a bit frightening really, knowing that changes are going to take place and wanting yet fearing the change, because change brings new worlds and and an end to old worlds. I've read that one door cannot open until another door has closed. I guess my biggest fears are more to do with what doors in my life will close than what new doors will open. But whatever I feel, what's sure is change will come and all I can do at this point is pray that when change does come, I don't freak out too much

The New Year is here and that' s great isn't it? I was calculating my numerology year and this is year 2 for me in a 9 year cycle. It did sort of feel like a beginning last year, I suppose. I got my health in order and finished the last of my excruciating lemonade cleanses. It's true, it's really like ammonia going through your body and cleaning you from the inside out. I got rid of all my parasites, except for my yeasties, but I'm working on them right now.

My spiritual healer Susan called me this morning and thanked me for the Christmas card I sent her. She then asked me if I had gone to a party two days earlier, which I had. And she said, she knew it because when she picked up my card she felt all this residue and chaotic energy coming out of my card. So strange. She then asked me if I'd felt depressed and melancholy and I said yes, but I thought it was just a massive hangover. She said no, it was the chaotic energy but she cleared it and that I should feel better today. And she was right, I did. I even did an hour of yoga today which I haven't done in ages.

It freaks me out to wonder where I picked up all that chaotic energy. I knew most of the people at that party, old friends from my acting days, most of whom I haven't seen or spoken to in about a year. Something odd did happen though. A very good friend of mine, who is often completely negative towards me which I've put down to the fact that she's a native New Yorker, she still hasn't gotten over her mother and she really is quite jealous of me but would never admit it even on her death bed, hugged me as I was leaving, kissed my check and asked me if I knew how much she loved me. Very odd for her, such behaviour, but then she was on her 6th Manhattan. The instant her lips touched my cheek I felt instant coldness, an odd feeling to feel when being kissed like that by a very good friend of yours. Was she throwing all her negative energy into me with that kiss? I don't know. I just know it felt very, very odd for her kiss me on the cheek like that, so odd in fact, that it creeped me out then and creeps me out now.

It's hard to reconcile the feelings that sometimes your dearest, dearest friends are often your harshest critics, and they say and do the worst things to you, worst things than any enemy has ever done. And what's horrible is you really can't get back at them without feeling guilty. My friend is so negative towards me sometimes, telling me I'll never make any money as a writer, that I'll never have a child or even get married for that reason. Why she does it, I don't know. When she does do it, her voice changes and I get the feeling that she's just parroting things her mother said to her and I feel sad about that God, she'd just die if I ever told her that she acts like her mother. That would send her over the deep far end because she really, really hates that women still.

Ah well, what can one do about one's negative friends. I've decided to not hang out with her as much. We've sort of been drifting apart these last two years anyway and I've felt so guilty about that, even though it was somewhat mutual. But now that guilt over all that has been erased by her incredible negative behaviour towards me and that's a good thing.

It just proves to me once again, that everything in life works out very mysteriously for the best.

Here it is, December 18 and still no creative writing. Actually, I had to write two papers for my asian art history class and those took forever to think about and write. So I have been writing, just not writing my stories that's all. One of the papers was very creative though. I wrote a page from the diary of someone viewing the Taj Mahal in India right after it was completed. I pretended I was an indian man from the Kashatriya class, the farmer caste. Well, you can't expect a woman to be travelling alone at that time. I suppose I could have been the wife of some upper caste man but I didn't even think about that. Well here it is below, just to prove that I've been writing. God, I love asian art history. It makes me want to travel to see all this stuff. Too bad most of the great art are in countries where there's so much fighting going on.

**************************************
March 1649, Agra, Uttar Pradesh

My dearest family,

I have made this pilgrimage to see what everyone has said is the most beautiful palace in India. Their descriptions are no exaggeration It is hard to express in words the wonders and beauty of this place, but I will try. I wish you could have all traveled with me to see the Taj Mahal and it will be my lifelong goal to be able to bring all of you to experience this amazing place. The Taj Mahal is located on the banks of the river Yamuna and you can see the river on the on the other side of the Taj.

When you first arrive at the Taj Mahal, you are confronted with a massive red sandstone gateway. They say it is 150 feet wide and nearly 100 feet high and faces south. The gateway is beautifully decorated with precious stones and jewels in a way that I have never seen before in my life; you can even touch the walls and the large jewels. They are cold to the touch but they are so beautiful and so big that one does not think they are real. There are writings on the walls, which I am told are passages from Islamic book called the Holy Koran. There is also a heavy door which seems to be made of many metals and studded with many knobs. I am told there are many rooms and hallways within the gateway but no one is allowed to view them. When you look up, there is a marvelous archway. From the gateway, you can see the beautiful tomb that Shah Jehan constructed for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. It seems so small when you stand in the gateway and you have no idea how large it is till you are standing in front of it. They say that the whole complex is on 42 acres of land.

As you leave the gateway, a large garden runs from here to the tomb. The garden itself is divided into four sections by two marble canals. Along the canals are fountains and the two canals cross in the center to “The Al-Kawthar” or “The Celestial Pool of Abundance.” Cypress trees have been planted around the edges of the grounds and along side the canals. They say that the cypress trees represent death but they will be beautiful to behold when they are grown. Each quadrant of the garden has been divided into sixteen flowerbeds. As it is spring, one can smell the scent of the flowers everywhere since they are just starting to bloom. I should like to turn some of our precious farmland into a garden like this. As a member of the Kashatriya class, even I am moved by this wonderful display of nature. In the great pool, one can see the reflection of the Taj. I have walked all around this wonderful garden and the way it is designed; you have an unobstructed view of the Taj Mahal.

From the gateway to the great white tomb, I believe there is a distance of about 900 feet. As one walks from the entrance towards the Taj, it looms larger and larger. I have been told that the Taj Mahal itself is almost 200 feet in height. The whole tomb has been carved from white marble that seems to change color when the light changes. Again, precious jewels and stones such as agate and jasper have been inlaid into the walls of this wonderful tomb in the design of flowers. The tomb itself consists of a huge white domed building flanked by four smaller domes. At each corner of the domed building are four slender towers. The main archway has been painted with passages from the Islamic book the Holy Koran. On the inside of the tomb, one sees the same type of decorations. Even the floors below are beautifully decorated in black and white marble tile.

On either side of the Taj Mahal are two buildings made of red sandstone. One is a mosque with three domes, which faces towards Mecca and is used for prayer. Four towers are on each corner of the mosque. On the inside of the mosque, the walls are decorated with calligraphy and passages from the Holy Koran. People here have told me that 539 prayer carpets have been marked out on the floor. There is also a small reflecting pool between the mosque and the tomb. The other building is called the “jawab” or “answer”. It looks like the mosque but it walls are decorated with flower designs on the inside instead.

This is such a beautiful place and as a humble Hindu farmer and landowner, I can appreciate that this structure was built with a husband’s undying love and devotion. I wonder if Lord Krishna will bestow on me such a love. I think even Lord Krishna himself would look favorably at this Mughal monument of love and I think that only in our great land of India could such a monument be built. Such exquisite craftsmanship could only have come from artisans who were descended from the Indian artists who created our great temples. Such a tradition of excellence in art, sculpture and decoration must have been handed down from generation to generation.

I don’t think it matters that it was built by the Mughals and not the Hindus for in end we are all Indians. Surely our Lord Krishna and his consort Radha and their love for each other must have inspired this Mughal emperor. I wonder what future generations will think of this place. If it is still standing hundreds of years from now, I am sure that a man visiting it today as I am will have the same reaction. And what will future generations think of the country that has produced such a building. Surely, they will look favorably upon us. The Vedas says beauty and love are timeless and eternal and this Taj Mahal is certainly living proof of these ideas.

I cannot but help feel a sense of pride that such a place exists in our country. To be forever associated with this kind of eternal love is perhaps not such a bad thing. The day has been long and I am longing for sleep. I will perhaps be here another day or two and will write another letter before I return for home.

Your loving son, Sujantra Ghose
******************************

I have a friend name Sujantra. He lectures around the world under the name SG McKeever. Nice guy, very tall and very good looking with beautiful blue eyes, SF native, SI boy, grand dad helped to build the GG Bridge, grew up in St Francisco Woods. He was living in San Diego the last time I saw him, but that was years ago now, so who knows if he's still there. I hope he doesn't mind I used his name for my story.

I thought I would keep writing after I finished the Nanowrimo but something inside of me has rebelled and I have been forced to take a writing vacation. I sort of feel guilty but I know it will be only be a short vacation since I am anxious to write. This one of those lessons I learned from doing this 30-day writing challenge; after reaching a goal, you need to recuperate before going on to your next project otherwise you'll get burnt out.

I did write an 850 word piece on my vision of hope for the new year for the church that I go to and I actually had fun writing it. The piece is emotional and maudlin and I don't think it''s very well written. I had to submit it to a committee to let them decide if they want to do something with it. They'll probably give me the big Ceasar thumbs down. In the piece, I said I support the US war efforts in Afghanistan, and in oh-so-left-of-center San Francisco, that's almost like telling people I'm a Nazi or an ax-murderer. A friend told me he's so over the flag-waving patriotism thing. And I think some people in California are definitely over it.

But I guess I'm not over it. I think I will be angry for a long time over what happened at the WTC and the Pentagon on September 11 and then the subsequent reaction of the radical left in the SF Bay Area, who said the US deserved it. No one deserves to die, not like that, without warning. Maybe I'm getting too conservative for San Francisco. Well, at least for the groups I've been associating with here. Conservative groups exists and despite what the media says, there are more middle of the road people here in San Francisco than there are left wing radicals. Don't believe the media hype.

During the 2000 election, I found out that the neighborhood I live in is 30% republican and I even saw signs for Bush/Cheney on my regular walking route through the neighborhood. The media would have the rest of the world believe that we are all left wing radical liberals, but that's so not true.

I heard an interview on the Pete Wilson show by this think thank in DC that's run like a new economy venture capital company. Two people from that think tank wrote a book called "The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics". I think this is where I am as far as my politics. I'm a centrist democrat and not a closet republican as I have been so often accused. Maybe it's because for a part of my working life I worked as part of corporate management and I had to learn to be pragmatic about making decisions. Maybe because I sat around in too many meetings where all people did was complain and complain how bad the system was but when asked how they thought they could make it better, they had nothing to say.

In my opinion, the inability of the liberal left to propose practical real world solutions to our every day problems is what has moved more towards the center. Sometimes when I listen to the liberal left, I scratch my head thinking what world do these people live in. I live in the real world. I don't live in academia. I'm a human being and I don't behave according to what the theorists say. I want solutions that work in the real world and won't bankrupt our government. Is that too much to ask? Fiscal responsibility combined with a caring but firm government. Not a big daddy government who bails you out when you get in trouble and keeps bailing you out so you never get a chance to learn. But a good parent government, who is there when you're at you're at your wit's end and who has the wisdom to know when not to help.

Most people around the country except on the coasts vote republican. Having listened to Rush Limbaugh on the radio a few times, I can understand why. Rush talks in plain simple language and he does it from a reasonable viewpoint. He says what he says in a logical manner and when he gives you his takes, they so appeal to your common sense. He seems to give you no nonsense common sense opinions. At least, that's what it seems like on the surfface until you really listen to what he's saying and when you do, only then do you realize that he's really out there. But he sounds so reasonable, so real world, so common sense.

When you listen to a radical left wing liberal, they sound so out there like they're on Mars or at least California. And what plays in California, doesn't always play outside the state.

My piece about my vision for the new year will probably be loved in any state in the US except California. I know that if I ever publish my writings, I will never be popular in the SF Bay Area. My stuff is just not hip enough, but then neither am I, so I guess it doesn't really matter. I know my writing will be appreciated, I just have to find my audience.

George Harrison died today and although I was too young to really know anything about the Beatles, I really loved their music and feel sad that he died. My older sisters were just starting high schhol when the Beatles came to America so their music was always playing in our house, so I know their music but I don't really know them.

Nanowrimo finished today and I made my goal and wrote 50,150 words. My novel is 25% complete and I think I will finiish it by July if I work on writing it three days a week. At least, that's my schedule for now. While I love the freedom of writing a novel, I miss the snapshot in time storytelling of a short story. With a short story, you capture one moment in time like a snapshot and for me it's more a more intense kind of writing. I have so many stories I want to write and I didn't let myself write any of them in November. Now I want to work on my novel part time and work on the my short stories the rest of the time. We'll see. Perhaps the call of writing my novel will win out in the end. I still want to keep to the 1,667 words a day schedule because that amount was definitely doable for me.

Below is another excerpt from my novel. This is the ending scene for the 50,000 words I wrote. Again it's rough so beware.

*****************
“Do I want to be Jake’s love slave?” Did I? The thought was exciting and dangerous. Part of me wanted to get up and rip the tie blindfold from my eyes and get the hell out of Jake’s condo and never look back. The other part was dying to become Jake’s love slave. And as so often happens in real life, the passionate side of you, the danger loving secret part of you always wins out. And who knows why?

Maybe it’s simply because you’ve been ignoring these impulses all these years and when they see an opportunity to come out, they take it and get out, regardless of the consequences. Maybe it’s because it’s like Allie says, that everyone has a secret death wish and that each moment you either choose life or death. Most of the time, you choose life but every once in awhile you choose death. Allie’s theory certainly explained why certain people go off the deep end. And it’s always the normal ones too; the ones who lead quiet lives, never hurting anybody, never calling attention to themselves. These people usually have families and children and parents who love them. Then one day, something happens, a choice is presented before them and they choose death and next thing you know they’re an item on the 6’o clock news with the lead headline; man shoots whole family and then himself.

Was I at a precipice facing a choice between life and death? God, I sounded like such a drama queen right now. But it really felt like that. I had the distinct feeling I was standing at the edge of a precipice with the wind howling through my hair and the air freezing cold. My shoes were half off the cliff and one false move and I would be plunging head long into the rocky crag below. I tried to look down and I couldn’t even see down to the bottom. Was Jake my metaphorical death? I had a vision of myself slowly stepping back from the edge and getting down on my hands and knees, trying to peer down into the bottom of the gorge. I couldn’t see anything but I could a voice even through the rustling noises made by the wind saying softly, “Come on in, it’s fine. You have nothing to worry out. Jump. You never know what’s going to happen till you jump”. The voice was Jake’s.

I could hear other voices crying my name and when I turned around, I saw my girlfriends in the distance begging me to come back. I was wondering why they couldn’t come any closer and then I saw that someone was blocking their way. Two people actually me. The first person looked a little like Jake and was dressed in a black suit, with a white shirt, black tie and sunglasses. The other person sort of looked like me and she was wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie and sunglasses, only her skirt was thigh high and she was wearing over the knee black suede boots.

I could hear and see them calling out to me but they seemed so far away and their voices were garbled and faint. The two guards stood there holding them back, firm and unyielding. I could see Allie’s face and she was crying and shaking her head. My poor Allie. Out of all of my friends, Allie was my favorite. She was so emotional and wore her heart on her sleeve, you couldn’t help but totally love her.

Then I saw a shadow fall across me and when I looked up, it was Jake. He was standing there looking down at me with the most beautiful smile on his face. But he wasn’t alone. Behind him was an older gentleman with a cane and what looked like crooked foot. I got up and brushed the dirt off my clothes. It was weird because Jake and I were wearing clothes, yet we weren’t wearing clothes. Our clothes looked and felt like imaginary ghosts wrapped around our body.

The older gentleman was peering at me from behind a weathered face. He had his white hair cropped closed to his head and a black bowler’s hat on. He kind of looked like a painting I’d seen in a museum especially with his black bowler hat, gray pin striped vest and old fashioned Edwardian jacket. When I looked down at his crooked foot, I felt a sudden wave of compassion because of his deformity. When I looked into eyes however, my compassion faded. The old man’s eyes were cold, icy and dark. There was no welcoming smile on his face. Instead he looked over my insolently inspecting my wares and stripping my clothes off with his eyes. I looked back at Jake but I saw nothing odd about him and I wondered who the old man might be. Warning bells were going off in my head but like my girlfriend’s voices, the sounds were far away and muffled. I wanted to ask Jake who his friend was but when I tried to open my mouth and speak, no sound came out. Strangely I wasn’t freaked out by this and just closed my mouth again.

Jake held a hand out to me and I stared at it because it was the biggest hand I’d ever seen in my life, kind of like one of those giant cartoon hands. I looked up at Jake and his wonderfully radiant smile was beaming at me like the sun had suddenly risen in his face. The light emanating from his whole face dazzled me. And it was ordinary sunlight either but something stronger, like an artificial searchlight. My eyes hurt and I kept blinking them because his light was burning my eyes and they felt raw.

I looked down again at Jake’s hand and saw that it had shrunk to normal. His hand looked so welcoming and looked like the only normal thing in this weird vision I was having. I put my hand in his and felt Jake’s fingers close around mine in a vice like grip, which oddly did not hurt. I mean, I thought that I should be feeling pain because I could see my hands turning white but no pain sensations were registering in my brain.

Jake turned toward the edge of the cliff and started slowly walking towards the edge. I had no choice but to follow him since he was holding my hand so tightly. I noticed that the creepy old man had stepped ahead of Jake and was now in front of him. We got to the edge of the precipice with the old man in front, then Jake then me. The old man turned around, tipped his hat off to me, then to Jake and then jumped into the void still holding his cane. I watched in horror as the old man disappeared into the mists below. I knew Jake was going to do the same and that he was going to take me with him.
Jake stepped to the edge of the cliff and made me stand along side of him. We both stood there and looking out across the voice at the mountains on the other end. Jake turned his head towards and I looked and heard him say. “Don’t be afraid Jennifer. It’s just dark down there. Just follow me and you’ll be okay,.” Jake sounded so achingly sweet and so comforting. What did I have to lose by jumping with him into the dark? I knew he would take care of me. I smiled at Jake and he smiled back and then he motioned with his eyes that we should jump. Then we jumped and all I saw was black.

“Jen?”. I heard Jake’s voice cutting through my reverie.
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?” Jake was whispering in my ear and nibbling. My ears were very sensitive to breaths, kisses and nibbles and Jake was sending shivers up my spine.
“Yes, master.”

*************************

Below is a portion of my novel. This is a first draff and as such very rough and wordy.

***********************
Torture. It’s such an odd little word for me. It’s a subject I’ve been obsessed about for a long time and something I keep secret. I mean, none of my friends even know about it, not even Allie. And it’s not that I don’t trust or anything like that. And it’s not like I think she would think I was some kind of nut or something because she’s told me some S&M and stories of her own. But that’s where she and I differ. To Allie and I think to most people, torture, S&M is something you do when you’re bored with regular sex. It’s different and it’s exciting because it’s so forbotten in our christian culture to want to be hurt or give hurt. But that’s not how I think about torture.
I think it all started because my mother was such a catholic nut and made me go to church with her several times a week. I mean, you can only look at the statue of Christ nailed on the cross with the blood trickling down his hands and his feet so many times, without wondering what that felt like. And then if you’re an imaginative young girl like me, you get into the whole catholic thing of wanting to suffer with Christ and hearing stories about stigmata. According to my American Heritage dictionary, and I should know because this definition has been reverberating in my brain since I was eight years old, stigmata is the mark or sores corresponding to and resembling the crucifixion wounds of Jesus, sometimes occurring during religious ecstasy or hysteria.
Maybe it was the part about religious ecstasy or even religious hysteria that I liked. All I know is that at eight years old, I prayed for stigmata to appear in my hands and feet. I wanted to be like Christ and I especially wanted to suffer with him. I wanted to be called to Christ like the Catholic nuns said they were in Sunday school. I wanted Christ to call me to suffer with him and make stigmata appear in my hands. My favorite time of the year was Easter because every Friday we went to Stations of the Cross Mass where you relive Christ’s journey to the cross. Every catholic church has scenes of this journey, fourteen of them in all, so the parishioners can suffer weekly with Christ in the weeks leading up to Easter every Friday after Ash Wednesday.
Looking back on it now, I think the Catholic Church does it to whip up hysteria so when Easter finally arrives you’re so glad that Jesus has resurrected because you’ve been racked by guilt every Friday during the Stations of the Cross mass. Of course, the Stations of the Cross mass is only attended by the very devotional like my mother and their children who they drag along because unless you have family or older children, Friday night is the worse night to get a babysitter. But even if my mother could get a babysitter, I think she’d still drag me along with her every Friday thinking it was part of my Catholic education. Perhaps it was her way of making up for the fact that she never wanted me to go Catholic school like all my other friends at church.
Mama always said that girls who went to Catholic school went in as innocent young girls and came out as chain smoking sluts who wore too much makeup. Mama went to a catholic school so I guess she knew about that. She said she was determined that I would never suffer the same fate, so I attended public school where I grew very cynical about the Catholic church and all of its teachings and doctrines.
But when I was eight, I was innocent and very catholic and I cried during every station, especially during station 11 when Jesus is nailed to the cross. I could imagine the force of every hit of the hammer as the nail went into first his right hand, then his left. The nail crushing through the skin, the tendons and into the bones and finally coming out the other side. And then the same procedure repeated on the left hand and then finally the nailing of the feet so he didn’t just hang off the cross by his hands.
Sometimes someone in the mass, almost always a woman, would wail and cry as if it was actually happening to her or as if she was actually there. And when I looked around, I sometimes saw other women with tears silently flowing down their faces through their black veils. My mother never cried. Her face was always the same, stoic and I often wondered whether she felt anything like what I did. I guess, she must have because we attended Stations of the Cross every Friday during Lent until I left home for college. Funny for a religious family, we never talked much about religion so I never really knew what she thought about the Stations. Except for than one time I asked her about Stations when I was fifteen years old and had stopped wanting to go to church with her on Fridays for Stations; one of very few of episodes of my teenage rebellion. My mother looked at me in the kitchen and said, “The purpose of the Stations of the Cross young lady, is to remind us of the effects of sin and salvation won for us through the suffering and resurrection of Jesus. You are supposed go to mass so you can think about your sins during each stations and then renounce them and Jesus to be your lord and savior so he can forgive your sins.”
“But mom, I’ve already accepted Jesus as my lord and savior when I got confirmed. Why do I have to every Friday night?”
“Because you are not sinless and neither am I?” I kept arguing but I knew it was useless; I could never talk my mother out of sin argument. My mother had a memory like a computer when it came to my wrongdoings and whenever I tried to get out of going to church, she would throw in my face every sin she thought I committed. After about half an hour of listening to a litany of my sins, I just gave up.
Of course, stigmata never appeared in my hands that Easter or any Easter after that. But I never forgot how I longed for the feeling of pain and stigmata and to be called by Christ. When I got older, I used to dream of being a nun like all good catholic girls, because that would mean that Christ had chosen me to “a bride of Christ”. Maybe he wouldn’t give stigmata, but at least he would ask me to his bride and suffer and shave my head and wear those hot and ugly outfits the nuns wore.
But like the stigmata, the call never came and instead boys and sex became my religion. The only other time that torture came up in my youth was in my ninth grade english class was when I had to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book “The Scarlett Letter. The Reverend Arthur Dimsdale used whip himself for his sin of having an affair with Hester Pryne. It was then that I found out that whipping was an acceptable form of self punishment for a catholic as well as a christian. It’s funny how that never came up in Sunday school. Maybe you had to go catholic school to learn that and that’s why my mother never wanted me to go to one.
When I researched it at the library, I found out that catholics and christians throughout the centuries used to whip themselves for their sins and do all sort of other sorts of self punishments to atone for their sins. After the whipping or other self-punishment, the person felt absolved and some might say achieved some sort of religious ecstasy through the process. After that I tried to whip myself once with my own belt, but I couldn’t quite hit my back and when I finally succeeded, it hurt too much. Self-punishment was definitely not for me. No, if I was going to be tortured I would have to someone whip me or make me feel physical pain in some way. I could never do it myself like Reverend Dimsdale and those early christians.
After freshman year in high school, I never really thought much about my feelings about torture. I mean, sometimes it would come up when I was having sex with a boyfriend but it just a sexual game like being blindfolded or being tied to the bed with ropes or having anal sex as some of my friends would say. But it was never anything serious; it was always just for fun. With Jake, I knew it would be different but I just didn’t know how. And part of me, maybe that part of me that’s still eight and still loved stigmata and wanted to know what it was like, really liked Jake for that very reason.

***********************

Day 17, almost 18 of this National November Writing month challenge and I'm a day ahead in my word count, YEAH! I was so tired on Friday, I didn't write but I made up for lost time and wrote over 5,000 words today. I'm glad it's Saturday and I had the luxury of spending five hours on writing. I wanted to be ahead in the count because I don't want to have the 30th roll around and me panicing about not having 50,000 words written.

I felt really guilty about not wanting to write on Friday, like I'd broken my 15 day writing streak. I wrote every day for 15 days straight and I'd never done that before. It's been harder to write because starting this week, my story was diffcult to write on my breaks at work. It was easy in the beginning to write at work because I was just getting into telling my story. But now, the story is really starting to go somewhere and I'm in the middle of it and I feel better able to write it at home than I do at work. I just can't give the story my full attention at work, even if I'm on a break. At home, it's just me, my computer, my music and my own thoughts. There are no distractions like there are at work.

Thanksgiving is coming up and I have the day after Thanksiving off as well and then the whole weekend to write. I'm going to try and devote the same kind of energy I had today to my four day weekend. I should be able to get a whole bunch written and maybe even finish earlier than on November 29 as planned.

I think I was afraid to write on Friday because my story is startng to come across as boring to me. Like my characters are in this rut of a world that I've created and I was running out of a story to tell. But tonight, the story kept going on its own and I made it to over 30,000 words. Maybe I just have to get over the thought that I can't write unless I feel like it. I think I'll be able to sit down and write no matter if I feel like it or not, kind of like how I am at my job. I do my work even though most of the time I don't feel like doing it. And my work comes out well, despite my atitude. Perhaps writing will be the same way. At least that's what I hope. I don't think I can wait around for the feeling to hit me to put me in the mood to write. If I did that, I'd never write. And that's been my biggest problem, up until now; I wasn't writing every day. At least now I am and even though most of what I'm writing may not be very good, I am writing every day and tha't s what really counts for me right now.

Day 11 of this National November Writing Month or Nanowrimo as the website says. I am still on target to finish 50,000 word by November 30. My current word count total for Day 11 is 16,675. I am keeping to the schedule of having to write 1,667 words a day. I write sometimes a little more but not much. My goal has always been to get to the 1667 word count for the day and so far this strategy has worked.

Unfortunately, keeping on this kind of writing schedule seems to zap my creative energy and I really feel tapped out to write anything other than my novel. I haven't been writing in my own personal journal and I haven't been writing in my blog. Of course, I've also been on a 3-day lemonade cleanse again, which was really, really hard on my system this time and made feel really tired, so maybe it was the double whammy of cleansing and forced writing schedule.

God, writing 1,667 words a day is exhaustive. I feel really drained after each period of writing. Some days I want to write more, but I stop myself. The goal was to get to 50,000 words and to develop the habit of writing every day for a set number of pages or words. I know that if I get ahead, I'll start slacking and stop writng thinking I've earned myself a break and I don't want to do that. I really would like to develop the habit of writing every day on a piece. I seem to be in the habit of writing every day in my journal, I'd like the same habit for my story writing.

I was at a seminar today and I met another women who writes and all of a sudden, felt inadequate about my own writing. This woman seemed so accomplished and so creative and when she told me she'd won some editing award in high school, I think I freaked out. I started thinking that my writng really sucks rocks and it's just bad, really bad and that no one is every going to want to publish anything I'd wrtten. I felt like the village idiot next to this women. I don't why I do it, but my self esteem just takes a nose dive to the seven lower worlds when I meet another women who writes.

I heard noise outside my window and went to take a look and there' s a bunch of people riding around in motorized cable car hooting and howling in the rain and playing the theme from "Flashdance". Since it' s November, I think it must be people from some kind of homecoming football game I think. Either that they're couple who came of age in the 80''s who just got married and they're playing their favorite high school/junior hgh music or something. I mean why else would the be playing the theme from "Flashdance" - What a feeling by Irene Carra.

Anyway, back to writng. Meeting that women, who was the by the way very, very sweet, just made me feel like I had the writing of two year old. I don't know why this happens it just does. And I know people have told me that my writing is good, but it just never seems to ever sink in. I've been told that other writers feel this way, even the ones who write perfect prose and are considered literary geniuses, but that's small consolation. I mean, my writing may just really be bad and I'm just living one big ass fool's dream thinking I'm going to be published writer one day. My friend Mel, from my writing group, says that if you want to get published you can, there are ways. Mel says that's not the problem. The problem is getting people to actually read your stuff and then god, make a living at it, and a damned comfortable living at that.

I think Mel may be right. I mean, I don't know if I'd even read my own stuff. I doubt it. I've never been able to watch myelf on film or on video without freaking out and thinking, god, that woman is a bad actress. I honetly don't think I'll ever be able to even pickup one of my books and start reading it, without having the same kinds of feelings of revulsion.

I did it again. I typed a whole message and something happened and I lost it. When will I ever learn? I just hate when I do that because I don't think I can recreate what I just wrote. But I guess I'll try, because I do want to post something tonight.

Day 3 of this National November writing month challenge and I've written 5,126 words. I'm on pace right now to be able to complete 50,000 words by November 30.

Writing a novel is very different from writing a short story. Usually, I've been in a class and writing a short story with a ten page limit. When you have a page limit, you really have to organize your story and start write in. You also end up leaving out alot of detail. You don't have to necessarily do that in a novel. You can more or less write about everything in detail and your story doesn't have to be as organized when you first write it. All that comes later in the editing process.

When I write a short story, I pretty much know what's going to happen and in what sequence and I know what the ending is going to be either. In this novel that I'm writing, I only sort of know how it's going to end but I don't know how the character gets to the ending and I'm finding out as I write. I have been thinking about trying to put together some kind of outline, only so I know what to write about from day to day and I still might do that. Right now, I'm just reveling in the freedom to write whatever is coming out of my head. It is just so vastly different than short story writing.

In some ways, writing without a care to length and plot is freeing and at the same time it feels like all I'm writing is crap. My short story writing is very efficient. I write the story and I don't make many revisions other than grammatical and some tightening or a little more detailed explaining in a section that's confusing. I don't feel efficient at all in this novel. I feel like I'm writing alot of backstory that will most likely be thrown out in the editing process. This thought freaks me out because part of me feels like I'm wasting a lot of time. I have to tell myself that this okay, that it's better to overwrite than to underwrite and I can always edit myself down later into a tighter story. But god, the garbage monitor seems so high. I guess I'll just have to get used to it.

I wanted to watch the world series today but I was afraid to watch because I just did not want to see the Yankees win aother world series. I know, I'm supposed to want the Yankees to win for the sake of New York City and what it's been going through after the September 11 attack. But I can't. The Yankees represent everything that's awful to me about professional sports. The Yankees are the team with the highest payroll in the league. They're also in the biggest television market in the country. The message this sends to small market and small payroll teams is that they don't have a chance in hell of winning the world series. And I think that's the wrong message to send about America's supposedly favorite sport.

Why can't major league baseball have a salary cap like the National Football league? It's worked really great for football. You never know who's going to be in the superbowl and it's really evened the playing field. Football manages at some stadiums to have over 70,000 fans. Baseball, even at the biggest stadiums, seat only 50,000. Why is there this audience discrepancy if baseball is supposed to be america's number one pastime?

I think major league baseball has a tough year ahead of them. On Tuesday, the baseball owners are meeting on whether to get rid of the Minnesota Twins and the Montreal Expos. If they do decide to get rid of these teams, it will be very divisive for the sport The contract negotiations between the baseball players' union and the owners is also coming up. With Alex Rodriguez and others bringing in millions of dollars, I believe that those talks will very contentious and that the result, will probably be a strike or at least a walkout. I don't think major league baseball can afford another strike or walkout. Baseball as a spectator sport is barely recovering from the strike in 1994.

I hope the Yankees lose the world series tomorrow, just to show that a team with a smaller payroll can win. I hope this happens for the sake of baseball and its fans.

I signed for that National November Writing Month challenge. You have to write 50,000 words in 30 days, which people have calculated to be 1,666 words a day. Every three days you should have completed 5,000 words. It starts tomorrow on November 1 and ends on November 30.

I decided to work on the Following in the Dark novel, only because I've been kicking around this novel idea since 1998 and haven't ever written anything for it except a few odd lines here and there. I'm going to start it from scratch and just keep writing and hopefully I'll get 50,000 words of it completed. I think it might be longer than 50,000 words but who knows.

God, I'm nervous. I dont' know if I can do this but I feel compelled to do it just so I can start writing my novel instead of just talking about writing it. I don't think I can even hand write it because I don't really have time to type. I've been thinking I need to buy a little baby laptop but I can't decide what kind to get. I'd get a real laptop if I could get more than a 2 hour battery usage time, but the technology isn't there yet. Those baby laptops have at least an 8 hour battery life span and they're so small you can bring them anywhere and type.

I am looking forward to doing this writing challenge and whatever happens, at least I'll have my novel started.

I saw a preview of the musical version of James Joyce's 'The Dead" yesterday. I am an avid theatre goer, attending at least over a dozen plays a year. This new play is very good. I rarely cry at theatre performances. The actors have to really be very good to get me to cry and I teared up at least three times in this play. Part of me wonders if I am still emotinally raw because of September 11. I don't know and I'm not sure I'll ever know. It's just very unusual for me to cry at theatre.

I was surprised by how touching this play was and I am tempted to reread Joyce's short story. There were some very raw moments in this play. And by raw moments I mean, moments that are so true to emotion that it's almost embarrassing to watch. Very few playwrights show how life as how it really is sometimes; so painful that it sometimes feel like you got decked right in your stomach, where you hysterical and unreasonable, where afterwards you sit and wonder how you could have acted that way. And the actors let us see it all.

When I tear up at a play, for me it's a combination of great playwriting and a very good performance. I don't believe you can have one without the other.

Other thoughts floating through my mind. I've been watching TV sports today. When I was into my tennis craze in junior hight and practicing my strokes in front of a mirror, I thought Jimmy Connors was so cute. I was flipping channels and he was playing a match with John McEnroe. And much to my surprise, I thought he was still cute. I felt like I was 13 again for the briefest of second. Speaking of boys, Jim Haslett also looks very good looking to me. He reminds me of this guy that I dated in 1999 with his reddish blonde hair and soft voice and every time I see him, I think cute.

I've also been watching the baseball games and I've decided that Kurt Schilling is also very cute in teddy bear kind of way. I also like his story of how he came back and has become the great pitcher he is today. My A's have lost and now the Yankees are playing the Diamondbacks. My best friend from NYC says I should be rooting for the Yankees to win since it would be good for a city that will be mourning for a very long time. I like the Diamondbacks. I don't like them when they're playing the Giants because I am also Giants fan, just because I live her in SF. But for the world series, I like the Diamondbacks. I think they're a very good team, much better than the Yankees on paper. But you can't count the Yankees out just yet. They have so much experience playing in the post season, but it would be nice to have another team win the world series this year.

I really want to rewrite my Hot Day in Dallas story over and I'm thinking that a four part flash fiction story might work. Four parts to the story, all written in 2000 words or less or 1000, I think the more concise the scene is the better, so it would be like images on
on top of the other, but still creating a story.

No title yet but I've got subtitles for the four parts.

1) Right Between the Eyes - January
2) Reality - April
3) Expectations - August
4) Past History – March

Here's a few lines I wrote part 1.

***********************************
Right Between the Eyes - January

I got to know him before I ever met him through that wonderful modern invention called email. In my estimation, he was smart. His emails were always grammatically correct, worded correctly and polite, so polite. Each time I asked him a question he always had an answer that sounded good, even though I knew that he was sometimes totally full of it. If you were going to be totally fully of it, I think you should at least sound like you know what you’re talking about. Sometimes attitude is everything, even in an email. And Marshall definitely wrote like he had an attitude.

He was in my Dallas office and to me he was a new species of person. I didn’t know anyone from Texas, let alone a Texas male. My head was full of images of cowboys, Lee Harvey Oswald, LBJ, and George Bush Sr. I could imagine him wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat, tight jeans and rattlesnake skin cowboy boots. I pictured him tall with a handlebar mustache or some kind of facial hair. He’d like his women busty with big blonde hairsprayed to death hair, a big toothy grin and the IQ of a loyal puppy dog. He'd walk with a swagger and be bow-legged like he'd spent all his life on horse. I couldn't wait to meet my walking and breathing stereotype.

***********************************

My asian art history class went on a field trip to the Asian Art History Museum in Golden Gate Park before it closed. For our assignment, we were supposed to pick out a piece of artwork we liked and then write a diary entry of two or more pages double spaced from either the point of view of the artist creating the artwork or the point of view of a viewer at the time when the artwork was created.

This was a fun story to write, even though it was an assignment. The name of the artwork is the title of the piece.

Lintel – Reddish sandstone, Angkor Wat or early Bayon period – 12th Century CE Cambodia

Today the art school faculty is reviewing my work. I worked long and hard on my masterpiece and if I am lucky, they will choose my lintel for one of the great temples. Perhaps they may even use it at the great temple Angkor Wat. Although we are far away from the capital and north of the Dangrek Mountains, many works from our school are on temple walls. If they pick my lintel, I will be able to leave the school and apply to work at one of the great temples to be a full time stone carver. To be a temple stone carver at the age of 25 is unheard of, but I am confident of my own abilities. My father would be proud to have a son who is a stone carver, since I am the only son who does not own farm the land. I have dreamt of being a temple stone carver all my life and this lintel is my masterpiece.

I spent many months carving out the sandstone and even more months picking out what story from the Ramayana to depict. My mother told me many stories in my youth of the great monkey king Hanuman and his exploits and he is my favorite god and hero. Hanuman had to be on my lintel.

Reading the Ramayana repeatedly, I decided my favorite scene was the one with Kumbharkarna, evil King Ravana’s brother and King Hanuman. In this scene Kumbharkarna the demon, who is also called “Jug Ears because of his giant ears, is surrounded by Hanuman’s fighting monkey soldiers. The evil god cannot escape and he swallows two of the monkey soldiers but they escape out of his giant ears. I prayed nightly to Hanuman for inspiration and blessings and I hope I have captured the great Monkey King’s bravery and spirit.

In my design, I placed King Hanuman on the right side of the stone since I wanted to show him commanding his army. On his head, I gave him a crown, not a fancy crown, but a simple battle crown. I depicted Hanuman and his monkey soldiers wearing battle dhotis and necklaces of round beads. To show my prowess with stone carving, I carved each monkey’s dhoti with parallel lines. To carve such detail is difficult and I spent many days on these dhotis.

I gave the monkeys a uniform war bib in the shape of the letter ‘V’. On each bib, I carved circles to match the round beads of their necklaces, knowing my art teachers will appreciate the repetition of the circle forms.

I repeated the round curves with the serpentine arm and leg shapes of the monkey legion. I carved the monkeys bodies to be curving like a vine and if you step back from the piece, you can see their curvilinear shape and how they almost entwine.

I placed Kumbharkarna on the left directly opposite Hanuman and dressed him in ceremonial clothes for two reasons. One, Kumbharkarna is a king and should be attired as such and two, I wanted to show the demon god dressed in fancy clothes to reflect his arrogance and disregard for the power of Hanuman’s army. I carved Kumbharkarna‘s dhoti with many more parallel lines than the simple battle dhotis worn by the monkeys. I also gave Kumbharkarna a more intricately carved crown than Hanuman. Again, I liked the contrast between the two kings; Hanuman wearing a simple battle crown and the arrogant Kumbharkarna wearing a ceremonial crown, showing how he thought he could easily defeat his monkey foes with little or no effort. Kumbharkarna is also wearing ceremonial jewelry, which repeats his misplaced confidence in his ability to defeat Hanuman, not to mention my stone carving abilities.

I carved the figure of Kumbharkarna to almost the height of the stone to show the difference in size between him and the monkey legion. It looks very dramatic to see the giant King Kumbharkarna surrounded and immobilized by the monkeys who are as only as short as his leg. I also made Kumbharkarna very wide to further emphasize the size discrepancy between him and the monkeys.

Stepping back yesterday after I finished to admire my own art, I marveled at how the monkeys were so uniform in size and shape. I carved the stone down so the figures stick out from the flat surface. The monkeys look alive, almost three-dimensional. Their arms and legs are round and life like; it looks like someone placed the monkeys sideways in the stone.

I am nervous. I think my art is good but is it good enough for a temple. I don’t know. Praying at my shrine to Hanuman, I asked him to bless my lintel. I also prayed to the great god Vishnu to grant me his favors today. It will be up to the art faculty to decide whether I have captured the spirit of this Ramayana scene.

My friend Judy's dad died last Wednesday. They discovered an inoperable brain tumor in mid August. The familiy knew he didn't have long to live, but I think they thought he would last until early next year. Brain tumors are like that; quick and painless. Judy's dad died in his sleep.

My ex mother-in-law, whom I dearly loved, died like that. Brain tumor diagnosis one day and three months later she was gone. Even the doctors at Stanford couldn't do a thing for her. Poor Lou.

She asked my ex-husband about me, you know. Asked my ex in her last dying days, about me and about how I was. Lou even told me ex how much she loved me. She was a great mom-in-law. I was really touched by her gesture, since I hadn't seen in her in five years.

The last time I saw Judy's dad, we were in Vermont and watching Monday Night football. He was a big New England Patriots fan and was lamenting about his team. He had gone up the day before to Canada to buy Molson beer and we were drinking beer, talking about football and watching the game. He was such a sweet man. Sort of high handed in his own way, but then I think all old dads are high handed. And boy did he love his Big Band music, the music of his youth Judy said.

Losing a parent is so hard, even though you're expecting them to die. My dad was in the hospital for two years before he finally moved on. Towards the end, I couldn't even go and see him. He was wasting away to nothing, paralyzed from the waist down and in pain, and just getting sicker and more depressed as the two years wore on. My family was relieved when he finally left since he was depressed and in pain, but it was still hard, very hard.

My friend Patti, from my writing group, is into writing flash fiction. I had to write one page story for a writing class I was in during the Fall 2000, so I think this qualifies as flash fiction.

Flash Fiction – Maggie and The Crying Freeman

It's late she thought, looking at her watch, almost midnight. Maggie stared at her notes again to see if there was anything she might have overlooked. Five killings were done assassin style. The victims were all males, between the ages of 30 and 50, found in dumpsters in the Mission district in San Francisco with their hands and feet tied and a note pinned to their chest which read, "The people have spoken and made their judgment. The accused has been punished in the manner befitting the crime". The note was signed "The Crying Freeman" and under the signature the killer had drawn tears as if he was sorry for the killing. Each victim was shot in the head at close range from behind. Each man had been wearing an expensive suit, had carried a briefcase, laptop, PDA and a cellphone. Each had held a top position at their respective dot com companies and they all lived in the mission.

Other than that, there was no apparent connection between each man. Maggie put her pen down and stared out of her hotel window gazing at the lights of the city flickering in the darkness. The Crying Freeman was a comic book character she’d found out. However, the murders were nothing like the comic books. If this was a copycat murder, she mused, then the assassin would use the same killing metho, but he didn't. Maggie leaned her head back and closed her eyes and thought about all the murders she had helped solved over her twenty-five year career as private investigator; not one resembled this case. She thought about the young kid she had interviewed at the comic book store. The killer must be a regular at the comic bookstore she thought and wrote a note to herself to question the employees again.

Suddenly there was a loud knock at the door. Maggie started and looked at the clock wondering who it could be at this late hour. She stood up, went over to her bag on the bed, and got out her gun. She looked through the chambers making sure it was loaded and then put the gun in the holster at her side. She put her jacket on and then went to the door and opened it.

"Maggie, Hi, I’m Oscar, the guy you interviewed today at Al's Comic Books."

"Oh yeah, hi, how are you?" Maggie wondered why he was here.

"Good. Listen, I know it's late, but you told me to come by your hotel if I remember anything and I have. Can I come in?" Maggie looked at the kid again. He wasn't a kid actually, she thought and guessed his age to about late 20's. There was something very sweet and eager about him.

"Sure come in" she said, "I was just go over my notes again." Maggie closed the door, undid the chain, opened the door again and gestured for Oscar to come in. She saw the kid's eyes look around the room and widen as he walked in. Her room was a big suite with a desk and a living room.

"Why don't we sit on the couch and you can tell me what you remembered", Maggie said walking over to the sofa and noticed out of the corner of her eye, Oscar fumbling for something in his jacket. She turned around and put her hand on her gun under her jacket, watching him. All of a sudden, the hair on her neck started rising. She caught a brief glimpse of the gun in his hand.

Maggie pulled her own gun out and yelled, "Drop it", cocking her gun. Oscar started for a second but didn't drop his gun.

"I said drop the gun or I'll shoot", Maggie yelled. Oscar stared at her and the gun. Maggie saw a tears roll down Oscar's cheek and thought to herself that he wasn't prepared for her having a gun and that she had caught him off guard.

"Why are you doing this?" Maggie asked, "Who the hell are you?" There was a long silence in the room.

"I said, who the hell are you.”

"I am the Crying Freeman," he said simply. Oscar lifted his gun and before Maggie could shoot, he shot himself in the mouth.

Dropping her hands to her side, Maggie wiped her brow. She felt her hands clammy with sweat and noticed that her blouse was also wet. She saw a small book that must have fallen out of his jacket. Maggie reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the rubber gloves she always carried with her, and put them on. Then she bent down, picked up the book, and flipped through the pages. There was a page for each victim, with their names, what comic books they bought, where they worked, where they lived, how they looked. They were all comic book shop customers she thought, that's the connection.

She saw another page. It read, "I am the Crying Freeman. It is my duty to rid San Francisco of those people who are responsible for its demise. I have been ordered to kill all those work in dot com companies." Maggie shook her head, went over to the phone called the police.

God, all this talk about anthrax. Who knows what to believe? I feel like I'm listening to the Y2K doomsayers again and Y2K never happend. People are so paranoid right now, even the experts. They're saying that these early cases of anthrax are just test cases and that we can expect a mass attack. Why do they do this? It's scary!!! They're talking about spraying biological and chemical weapons on money, on food, in our water supply, etc.

Whoever is doing this, I think they are very serious. But I believe in karma and it's really, really bad karma what they're doing and I think karma will take care of these people down the road. But until down the road comes, I'm afraid of what will happen to me, to my family and friends and to my country.

I honestly don't know what to believe. I'm listening to a guy who's scaring me about biological and chemical weapons and in the same breath, he's hawking his book about biological terror for $20. There's something not right about that somehow.

Here's a first draft, mistakes and all, of my "Crazy Eddie" story. I have 14 handwritten pages more of this story but they're not typed up yet.

I came here to his barren place, to shed any sense of normalcy I had left. That’s what happens I’ve read, when you’re in a traumatic event, they say you lose any sense of your life, your routine. And since I’m the kind of person, who likes to take things to their logical conclusion, although in this case, it seems, their logical extreme, I packed up, put all my stuff in storage, bought a camper and came here. I like the dessert, I always have. There is no one out here but sand, cactus and nocturnal animals, especially in the summer when the temperature goes up over a 100 degrees. The guy at the ranger station gave me a strange look when I bought my camping permit and warned me about the heat of the dessert. I smiled and told him I grew up in this area and I liked the heat. He smiled and shook his head and handed over the permit. He was right about the heat though. It is hot here. Most times I stay in my camper and it feels like I’m in an oven and I’m roasting. I sit with the window open and fan myself. Some days I just have to sit there and not move, because even fanning myself makes me sweat. At night it gets so cold and then I feel like I’m sitting in an icebox. I try not to turn on the heat or any use any electricity so I can conserve my energy supplies. The less supplies I use, the less frequently I have to go into town for supplies. I am so into my own isolation I don’t even like seeing or hearing other people. Every night I lie in my bed with all my blankets on and wearing every single piece of clothing I own and still I’m cold. It’s hard to sleep when you’re cold. Not that it matters, I can’t sleep anyway so I don’t really mind. I’m afraid to sleep. Every time I doze off the memories start – the sounds, the smells – they call, come back and I have to relive the whole thing again, like it wasn’t bad enough the first time. I can still see him lying there – smell the liquor that seemed to always be oozing out of his pores. He always smelled like stale cigarettes and cheap booze, that sickening stench you smell when you first walk into bars. He was lying there in that unnatural position, all sprawled on the floor, spread eagle, lying in his own pool of blood. God only knows how long he was in that position. I didn’t come home that night till really late and that’s how I found him. I don’t remember much after that. I was told by the cops that my next door neighbor called them when she heard me screaming over and over again. When they got there fifteen minutes later, I was still screaming. They tried to get me to stop but I wouldn’t. Finally one of them slapped me real hard and only then did I stop screaming. Then they said I fainted from the shock. Next thing I know I’m sitting in a hospital bed and it’s three days later. The cops came and interviewed me later and asked me if I remembered anything. I told them what I saw when I came in. Then they asked me if I knew about my boyfriend’s gambling debts and I said I knew he gambled at the bar but that was all I knew. The cops told me that my boyfriend Eddie, good old Eddie, had over $50,000 in gambling debts and when he couldn’t pay, they decided that they would teach him a lesson and kill him. Some lesson. I knew Eddie was trouble but I didn’t know he was that much trouble. Since it’s too hot to do anything during the day, I sit in my chair and I go over how we met in my head, over and over again. Like I’m trying to find the key to a door that might unlock why we even started going out.

I met Eddie on a Monday night. I was in my favorite bar having a drink at 10 pm when Eddie walked in. I don’t usually drink on Monday nights but I had a hard day at work. I was at work till 8 pm that night, helping my boss with her presentation that he waited to do till the last minute. I hate when he does that, waiting to prepare a presentation till the night before. You’d think I get used to it by now, since it’s been his pattern for the last two years, but I still keep thinking he might one day do something a little different. Fat chance. So there I am sitting at the bar having a conversation with Mark the bartender and Jeanne, a woman I had met the bar on a different occasion. I was a regular at that bar. I wasn’t exactly a resident, not like some of the people there, but I guess I was there often enough. Next thing I know this guy sits down at the empty bar stool next to me and joins our conversation. I took one look at him and I could feel myself licking my chops inside. The man was gorgeous. He had wavy dark blonde hair, hazel green eyes and a cute mustache and goatee. Everything about him screamed either construction worker or some other kind of manual laborer. I had a flashback of a coworker’s construction worker pinup calendar and I knew I was lost forever. I had never dated a guy like that before. Some of my friends had dated blue-collar type workers and I remember them saying they liked it. Not for very long, but they liked dating them.

Now Eddie wasn’t the most intelligent guy I had ever met in my life, but he could hold his own in a conversation, if you didn’t get too deep. Eddie had a lot of opinions on many things and he watched the news. Eddie was an electrician and it was interesting to hear him talk about all the things he could install. The rest of the night went by in a blur to me. Eddie sitting there, smoking and drinking screwdrivers, and me smoking and drinking light beer. We managed to talk all night till the bar closed, about what, I don’t remember. And then I remember Eddie driving me home, which was kind of funny since I only lived three blocks from the bar and it was a safe neighborhood. But Eddie insisted, and I found myself giving in. I must have really had a lot to drink that night because my next memory is of Eddie and me groping each other in my hallway and tearing each other’s clothes off. That was two years ago. Six months after that Eddie moved in. I didn’t want him to move in, but he insisted and I gave in again. I can’t stand when a man nags me, and Eddie was a constant nagger when he wanted something. Most of the time I just give in so I don’t have to hear the nagging.

I don’t know why I have go over and over again in my mind how Eddie and I met. I dated Eddie because he looked good period. He looked like he was out of a male pinup calendar and I never dated anyone that looked that good before. Eddie had other qualities but his looks were his best quality. There wasn’t anything that strange about him. So he drank a lot, so did I. He was kind of secretive about his life and his stuff, but not in a bad way. He was just secretive. And sometimes I think I didn’t care to know what his past was like. Some days it was enough for me that we had great sex, that I liked to watch him walk around my apartment naked and that I liked the fact that he fixed things around the house. I never saw Eddie as anything permanent and I don’t think he saw me as the love of his life. He told me he wanted to marry me, but Eddie told me a lot of things he wanted to do and never did. I knew Eddie gambled. He told me but he said it was just a hobby, not anything serious.

I keep thinking to myself there must have been something about Eddie’s behavior that should have been a tip off that one day I would find him lying in a pool of blood in my apartment, but I can’t find what that tip off was.

I am currently working on a story that I'm calling "Crazy Eddie". It's about a woman who comes home to find her boyfriend shot dead and lying in a pool of blood in their apartment. The story is told from the woman's point of view and tells her story, how she met the guy, what their life was life and what happens after she discovers her boyfriend's body.

It's an odd story but I'm kind of into writing it. I have no idea what is going to happen at the end of the story. Right now she's living in a camper in the Joshua Tree National Park, near LA, alone and drinking and going over and over in her head the murder, her life, Eddie and her life with Eddie. To her, Eddie was a little crazy but in a good way. He drank too much, gambled at the horse track more than he should have and didn't have a steady job. But, he loved her and in his own way took care of her and supported her.

Sometimes I wonder who the crazy person in the relationship is? The one who's doing all the wrong things or the one who is with the person doing all the wrong things. All the people who write biographies about married couples say that you can never tell what's going in a relationship between two people from outside of the relationship. Only the two people actually in the relationship know what's going on and they couldn't explain to someone else, let alone themselves. The biographers say all marriages and for that matter, any relationship btween two people, is complicated. People hook up together and consequently stay together for all sorts of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with love. I've also read somewhere that people decide to be in a relationshp on the basis of 1) opportunity and 2) incentive.

My female character thinks the key to understanding her dilemna is to understand all that's come before. She believes in the existence of a "magical key" that will unlook the door to answers about Eddie and their life together.

I'm not sure if she'll find the key yet. I have to keep writing the story to find out. I hope she finds the "key" to her life. Wouldn't it be great if we all could find the "key" to our lives?

I'm not sure there is a key though. I'm not sure certain events and experiences can ever be explaind properly. Some events just happen in one's life and there's no rhyme or reason for it and certainly no keyl

I ran into someone from my past while getting coffee on Sunday. It's been about 10 years since I've seen him and I was shocked by how he had aged. Gone was the strapping young enthusiastic happy canadian boy in his 20's and in his place was an older, greying around the temples somewhat bitter and tired older man.

Running into him, I wonder if I have aged as much as he has. I can't tell. Too me I look almost exactly the same, maybe a lot heavier, a little more wrinkled, but still the same. And I am more secure, more confident and happier than I was when I met this young man, so for me aging has been good in some ways. Not that I like aging. I hate it and I fight it every step of the way and spend way too much on time and money on ways to hold back the clock. But other than the physical ravages of aging, emotionally, intellectually, psychically, psychologically I feel so much better than I did in my youth.

Sometimes in unexpected moments, I mourn my past, but those times are few, so as not to even occur as an exclamation point in any moment of my life.

After we had parted, I wished that I could meld my personality back then to my personality now. I was so different in my 20's than I am now. I can't even tell if anything of me back then has survived, although I'm sure something has. I want the best of both worlds, but I don't know if that's possible anymore.

I was in a seminar where the leader said we live in an "either or" world. We're either this or that. He said that this either or thinking is just a mental construct and that we can live live in "and" world. We can be this and that and everything in between. I used to believe him, at least for the time, when I was in that seminar. But now, I'm not so sure. Can I still be who I was in my 20's and still be who I am in my 30's? Is there a compromise somewhere? I guess I shall have to find out.

So much as happened since my last post, which coincidentally were two days before the WTC/Pentagon attacks. I not only had to deal with the terror and fear the September 11 incidents engendered, but my best friend Amy had a relapse in her brain cancer and was put into a nursing home. Twin tragedies for me, like the twin World Trade Center Towers in flame.

I suppose I shall write about it more sometime, but right now I'm still in processing mode.

They say disasters come in three or is it pairs? I'm not really sure which. But here's a semi-disaster. I tracked my first love down on the Internet. On a whim, I typed his name into Google and found the website for a film production company he just started. I also found a review of some commercial/industrials films he produced and they said he was brilliant and cutting edge. There was a picture of him and he looked exactly the same as I remembered him. He doesn't look like he's aged at all. I don't why I consider this a semi-disaster, but somehow I do. Part of me really wants to get in touch with him and reconnect and the other part says now. I mean, do I really want to hear what a great life he's having, do I want to see a picture of wife and kids? For me, maybe it's enough to just know that he's alive and doing well. I don't know.

Then there's that small part of me that say the past is dust and besides, he was the one who walked out on me, walked out on our friendship, hung up on me after I told him I was living with a man, much to my surprise since by that point in our relationship we were nothing more than very, very good friends.

Men keep saying they don't understand women, well as a woman, I don't understand men or anyone who would walk out without explanation on a deep love and friendship. As you can tell, I still haven't quite gotten over his walking out on me. I want to get over it but to get over it, I have to understand it and I don't understand it all. I have a half written play about what would happen if were to meet years later by accident. I thought that I wrote about us meeting, I could speculate on why he walked out on me. That play was hard to finish because I wanted to write what was true, but I don't think I'll ever find out the truth.

And do you know what is the most absurd bit in this whole situation? He probably doesn't even remembe what happened. The incident doesn't even occur as a miniscule blip on his consciousness. Whereas in my life, I have speculated on it off and on, obsessed, paid thousands of dollars worth in therapy and group work to try and figure it out and I still haven't come to an explanation that makes sense.

My friends tell me that love doesn't make sense, that love can turn bitter, can turn into hatred and make people do mean things in the name of love. And I guess that's the part I don't understand. Love is supposed to expand you, to make you want to do good things, at least that's what it's done for me. It's never made me that mean, perhaps cruel for a few minutes but never mean. I've never said or did anything I couldn't take back. In fact, I've been accused of holding back my punches in the name of love. I've never wanted my love to hurt people, at least not consciously.

Speaking of love, many of my friends have an urge to merge, to couple, to want to have children. I've had the opposite reaction. I have, for the time being, lost my urge to couple and to have children. If my city is ever attacked, I think I will do better by myself because I know how to do that. I don't how to survive in a couple. And as for children, I don't know if I want to bring children into the world right now.

What future would a child of mine to have? I support our government's current response to terrorism. I don't think we were left with a choice. Whether we attacked or not, we still would have been attacked. The Taliban left us with very few choices. The problem is this war will take a long time, longer than four years, maybe even longer than eight years, no one knows. All I know is we will all be living with this war for a very long time and I just don't know if I want to bring children into this kind of world.

Speaking of the war, the peaceniks bug me, only because they complain about our government's actions but don't offer any workable solutions of their own. In this current world we live in, you can't just complain without offering a solution because then it's a waste of everyone's precious time. I support their right to protest, which is a freedom our country was founded on, I just wish their protests had some kind of relevancy. The peaceniks, I fear are in danger of protesting themselves into irrelevancy and that would be sad because their voices do need to be heard. But, they'll never be heard if they don't start making sense.

It is hard not to live in fear right now about what the future will bring, and it takes every bit of control I have to not freak out, but I know I cannot do that. If we all do that, then the terrorists have won. So I write and I keep writing and I obsess about small things like finding my first love's website, because these small things keep me grounded, keep me in control, make me want to keep going on. And perhaps at this point, to keep going on, is all that counts right now.