My Daily Bone: March 27, part one: dad (15 minutes)

(from Writing Down the Bones)

12. Describe a grandparent.

Dad is 93 years old. His birthday was yesterday. His party was Saturday. Family reunion in Bigtown. He's all alone now. It'll be two years comes July. He loves to pray, loves the Lord. Says "Father Lord" a lot when he prays. We and our cousins were the last to call him Dad. My mother's much younger brother's kids call him Papa. Seems like a weird name for him after everyone unanimously called him Dad for all those years. He sits in his rocking chair facing the TV, facing the fireplace. I don't think he watches TV much. Only to watch the PTL Club and the 700 Club and Fox news perhaps. He used to watch All In The Family. That's the show I remembered him watching when I was a kid. He had a hushed, repetitive laugh, huh-huh-huh, huh-huh-huh. Sounded like it couldn't quite get started, it wouldn't even go all the way down to his belly. He has lots of rituals which have seemed to become all the more important since Nana died. He has to take a nap at about one-thirty or two every afternoon. It is an exact time, I just don't know what it is. The birthday party grounded to a halt, everybody went outside to the patio or the driveway so Dad could take his nap. I went to visit my Aunt B. down the street. Not an actual relative, or so far removed as to not count, her mother and my Nana's mother were sisters. Still, she's my favorite aunt. I used to go home with her on Sundays after morning church and got brought back for the evening service.

Dad has scars on his skull and arms. He worked in the oil fields when he was young. Caught fire one time. I guess it was pretty serious. They had to graft skin from his legs. He used to bath in Lake Livingston. They had a piece of property there and put their little blue and silver travel trailer on it with a full-sized refrigerator attached to a tree outside in the yard. Eventually they built a big A-frame house. The whole family helped. Everybody in the family was involved in construction of some sort. The men anyway. Except for my mother's older brother C. But he brought his long-term "roommate" who was a chef, and he made all kinds of scrumptious foods and so nobody ever said anything about C. not helping out with the construction of the house. Not to where I could hear anyway.

The family has lots of secrets. Dad and Nana had a son who died on Halloween---

I am a writer.

I’m writing my first novel. I'm actually fairly close to the end of the first draft. But I'm struggling. Writing a novel is hard!

I’ve been writing all my life (well, since I was in first grade). Around eighth grade, it became therapeutic. Maybe it was all along and I just didn’t realize it. I started by writing short stories. I “wrote a movie” in the eighth grade based on an urban legend from the town I was living in, featuring a Goat Man who killed the teens he caught on Lovers Lane by removing their legs and leaving them to bleed to death. I didn’t know anything about writing a movie; it’s pretty funny to look back at the script/story now. The camera and music moved around the scene like characters (i.e., “The camera climbed the street sign, it said Evergreen; the music screamed!”).

I moved from Bigtown, Texas, to New York City when I was twenty-four, with hopes of writing musical plays. I loved Oklahoma! and Hair and thought that loving them was enough to make my dream a possibility. I joined a group of musical playwrights and was told I didn’t know anything about writing musicals. I started writing straight plays, short stuff, one acts, monologues. Most of it black comedy. I was fortunate to have several of my plays produced, one of which starred RuPaul; it was "an intergalactic one-act," sort of an "I Love Lucy" that took place on the planet Ramada. It was called "My Pet Homo" and it ran for a couple of months as a late-night show in a theater in the basement of a Methodist church. It got pretty good reviews, too, even though the two main actors usually flubbed their lines (some of the reviews were good because of that fact.

I met Steven in 1992 and he and I fell in love and started performing (simultaneously). He had a background in writing music for the theater and I was writing plays and we became a musical duo, a sort of Prairie Home Companion or Grand Ole Opry of two. We called our act "Y'all." We both wrote songs and we both wrote stories, but Steven wrote more of the songs and I wrote more of the stories. We turned the stories and songs into a faux autobiography of the characters we played onstage, self-published it and sold it to our fans.

The progression of our performing career started in the Gay & Lesbian Center in NYC, then progressed to Downtown theaters, rock clubs, random MTV and other TV appearances (one with Jon Stewart on his show before The Daily Show), Borders Bookstores (before they were so corporate and as they were becoming more corporate), folk clubs and coffeehouses, house concerts, retirement homes, and Unitarian Universalist churches.

We started in New York City, then moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to try to be taken more seriously as a musical act, then moved into a 20-foot travel trailer and lived on the road for two years, which was freeing and difficult in many ways. Our personal relationship was pretty much non-existent until we met Roger at a concert in Joshua Tree, California, and he moved in with us and we started having a three-way relationship. Things got more wonderful and more difficult all at once. A fan/friend who had supported Y'all over the years suggested we make a Y'all documentary, and he financed it. It became more of a documentary about the end of Y'all and the end of mine and Steven's relationship, and our relationship with Roger.

We split up toward the end of 2002, went our separate ways, anxious to do our own things. Steven went to Jersey City and edited the three-hundred hours of footage he, Roger and I had shot in ten months into a documentary called "Life In A Box." Roger moved around a lot and settled most recently in Massachusetts where he's a yoga instructor full-time. I lived in a Florida beach town, played nanny for a friend’s kids, did some community theater and made up a board game.

Mostly I was depressed, though. It took me a couple of years to get out of that. I was thirty-eight years old and didn’t know what to do with my life. I thought moving back to Nashville was the answer. It was and it wasn't. Things continued falling apart for me when I got there (a good friend died of lung cancer six weeks after I arrived; the UU minister who had had a strong influence on me, left the church, left Tennessee). But Nashville was also the place where dear old friends lived, and I started to heal. I lived with a couple of friends rent-free; one of them gave me a job, paid me more than that position usually paid. Tennessee had a good health care program at the time, so I was able to get psychiatric help; I met an amazing doctor, David Campbell, and took medication for depression for a while (Zoloft gave me panic attacks; Lexapro did nothing; Cymbalta was the bomb).

I got into meditating. Roger had gotten us into this when we lived on the road, he had turned me onto Pema Chödrön (her book "When Things Fall Apart" changed my life). But I wanted to go deeper. I found a small meditation group in Nashville.

At some point I decided to move to the West Coast, to Santa Cruz, close to San Francisco, where Steven was living, but not too close. I was in a relationship that wasn't really a relationship; it was frustrating and unfulfilling. A cross-country trip was part of the move. (I still love traveling.) I stopped in Houston and lived with my mother for two months while her mother died. I have a difficult time with my family sometimes, and my meditation practice blossomed; I was meditating an hour a day in half-hour increments, sometimes longer.

I was still in huge debt from living on the road those two years and meditation helped me come to the realization that perhaps the West Coast wasn’t the best place for me to be if I wanted to get out of debt. Houston is a cheap place to live, but I knew I couldn’t live there. I went to Austin for a meditation retreat and loved it. I decided after Nana died to move to Austin and stay until I got out of debt or until I stopped loving it, whichever came later. She died a lot sooner than expected and I found myself in Austin as of October 2005. I loved it so much that Steven moved here in 2006.

I got an idea for a novel (brought on by regular visits to NYC, where my freelance job is) and went to BookPeople in Austin to look for writing books not so much to tell me how, but just for inspiration. I noticed a book published by Shambhala Publications, which is the publishing house of a lot of Buddhist books I’d read, and for that reason alone, I picked up the book. It was Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. And it really helped open up my creativity.

So that’s what this blog is, essentially, timed exercises taken specifically from Natalie's book or from other sources. (The basic idea of Writing Down The Bones is to write non-stop for the period of the exercise, be it five minutes, fifteen, or sixty; the idea is to get past the internal editor to the artist deeper within.) If you decide to read what I've written, I hope more than anything else that you are entertained.

-jdjb

The last book I read was...

What Is The What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, by Dave Eggers.

I love Dave Eggers. I find his writing style very inspiring. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, particularly because of the strong voice of Deng, and because of the history lesson it provides. There were things in it that made me cry, things that made me laugh. And there were things that really annoyed me, like the fact that for a while about three-quarters of the way in, there were quite a few evidences of sloppy editing, typos, words that didn't belong in the text. That shit drives me crazy! I feel compelled to mark the text and send a note to the author, but I haven't done so with this book, not yet anyway.

My Daily Bone

I'm over here now.

March 27, part one: dad (15 minutes)

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