I don't have to worry about my apartment and I don't have to worry about my cat. Simon is going to sublet, and Orphan is dead. I got my phone hooked up and the first call I made was to Anita and she didn't say anything about Orphan until after I brought up the apartment, and it sounds like Simon was already chomping at the bit about that, and then she was like, "Oh, hey, I'm sorry but Orphan died." It sounded so out of the blue, I had to practically beg her for the details, which she was reluctant to give me because of my "condition," which seemed totally fucked up to me, but whatever. She was all guarded about it, and because of that I figured out that Simon was sort of to blame for Orphan's death, or his suffering at any rate. Orphan died from a urinary tract infection that came about after crystals completely clogged up his urethra. Simon told Anita he thought the cat was yowling so much because he missed me! (And I bet he was pleased about not having anything to scoop in the litter box for two weeks while Orphan suffered to death, fucking asshole.)
I was too upset to ask Anita about work, but I'll have to call her back anyway to get her to send me some of my files. I have an interview at the Chronicle (Austin's Village Voice) next week. I can't keep living off of credit cards -- though I just sent off an application for a new one yesterday (I can't, but I have to for now).
I also called and made an appointment with an "AIDS Specialist" at the clinic here on the East Side. I don't know what qualifications this person has but I assume it'll be a better experience than it was in Waco. This time around I stepped up (because it was on the phone and relatively anonymous and therefore safe...because that's always been my belief: ANONYMOUS=SAFE!) and said, "I have AIDS. I just moved to Austin and I need to see somebody." The young-sounding, African-American-sounding woman-sounding person on the other end of the phone put me on hold then came back a few seconds later full of confidence and set me up for an appointment with the "AIDS Specialist" who is there on Fridays. I asked for bus directions and she said she would look them up on the computer and call me back, and she did.
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Natalie Goldberg, author of "Writing Down the Bones" http://www.nataliegoldberg.com/
James Dean Jay Byrd, author of "august chagrin" (in progress)
Natalie Goldberg, author of "Writing Down the Bones" http://www.nataliegoldberg.com/
James Dean Jay Byrd, author of "august chagrin" (in progress)
Read the first two chapters of my novel!
My name is Jay.
I live in Austin, Texas, and I like it here. I try to be good. I try to eat vegetarian. I try not to do too much of the things that are harmful to me. I like to dance. I can't help but write and I usually enjoy it. Meditation is good for me. I'm gregarious but sometimes feel out of place. I'm constantly looking for community but often feel disillusioned. I need to go back to the dentist. My eyes bother me. Everything is subject to Change. I'm often confused.
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
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
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
At some point I decided to move to the West Coast, to
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.
I got an idea for a novel (brought on by regular visits to NYC, where my freelance job is) and went to BookPeople in
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
What I'm reading right now:
- Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, by Andrew Wilson
- One City: A Declaration of Interdependence, by Ethan Nichtern
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.
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.
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