You would have thought I was trying to buy a condominium.

Office Desk - SF (artwork by A Munoz)

I stood at the meat counter and looked at every fleshy red slab of fresh meat. Although made inviting by lighting and sprigs of bulbous parsley, the meat itself seemed too spry for my state of being. Too free range, too reminiscent of happy little animals bouncing about the green Sonoma hillsides. It begged attention and careful preparation; my mind, by contrast, was sated with too much paying the rent.

Something simple, came the instruction. Keep it simple.

An adjacent glass case was filled with numerous selections of house-made sausages, pressed and filled by hand there on the butcher block, all of them lined up in enticing rows. They beckoned. Mild Italian. Hot Italian. Chicken mango. Andouille. Cilantro-onion-pepper…

“Does this one have meat?” I asked.

“We don’t have vegetarian sausage,” answered the surly little butcher in his perfectly white apron. I won’t mention his name or describe him further; he works with sharp knives for a living and is doubtless adept at slipping a weighted thumb upon the meat scale when you’re not looking.

Rogue little napoleonic butcher.

I tell him I’m not ready and he should move along, go help somebody else. I will wait for the butcher I like: the one who laughs at my jokes. The one who doesn’t have a relative buried in his backyard or a restraining order against him.

Adjacent to the sausages lie the pre-made goods: alimentation for the hurried. Pre-packaged, pre-sauteed, pre-herbified and tenderized chicken breasts…

I’ll pass.

Same for the meatballs doused in a flour-like substance. And the rolled fillet so stuffed to overwhelming with spinach and god knows what else that it wanted to belch on its own, never mind its unlucky ingestor.

Further down the line, opposite the fresh bread racks: Fish. It sounded a novel option, given that we’d had steak the night before. I stood before the case, my mouth agape to match the droll look on the faces of the whole fishes on ice. I muddled over my confusion regarding the pluralization of a certain fish: I always thought the name was Branzino, but here they rendered it Branzini. There were 4 of them – 4 individual branzino, in my book. Would they change the sign back to singular when there was only 1 left in the case? And what of the other fish – how come they were labeled in the singular and not as Cods, Halibuts, Salmons, Shrimps…?

When befuddled by indecision, and when inspiration has not so much fled as evaporated, one can often find guidance in the grape.

As a youth my preference was Chivas and cigarettes but I’ve since graduated – magna cum laude, mind you – to an appreciation for the liquid renderings of those tiny jewel-like beads of sweetness, their flesh a virgin green or virulent maroon – the timid one and the handsome abductor – their output the renderer of nighttime dreams. Long, languid, storytelling dreams.

Así fue.

Onward to Jesus Swede and the Junior Consultant from Cleveland.

Kona Village 2009

Christmas came early and it arrived in Kona. The Kona Village Resort » – which normally costs an arm and a leg – offers an annual Kama’aina special for locals in early December: about half off on lodging and food, plus discounted tickets for the Christmas at Kona food and wine benefit. All the rooms are stand-alone huts built along the seaside and the 1800 Hualalai lava flow with meandering paths connecting them. You carry no cash or cell phones; everything is charged to your room. It’s wonderful.

There was client work to be done that weekend. But more importantly there was a weekend of no interruptions that had to be had. Naturally there was residual angst at leaving things undone and going away; deadlines are always front of mind – a cerebral drudgery; druggery; disruption. However, at Kona Village life is unplugged and unpretentious. So for about 48 hours Living interrupted Work for a change. And it felt damn good.

We always return to find things undone. It is one of those inevitabilities. We create these inevitabilities by the demands we make on ourselves to enjoy a certain kind of life, to carve our proverbial beds out of dreams and lay in them before the sun goes down. Without ambitions we’d all be hermits in the woods. With them we always seem just a little bit….

Downstairs - Dec 2009

“Why would you complain about something you created?” asked Gary B as he’s cutting my hair. “That’s crazy. That doesn’t make any sense.”

And yet I find a way to do it.

What I do complain about: Paying the Rent. To quote Emily in Hugo: “Nobody pays us to find our artistic souls.”

I wish somebody would pay me to finish the 2nd draft of Hugo; to start on Pearl St; to move on to the long list of other books that lie in digital scraps, on paper, in outlines, zipped up in corners of my brain undone. But they don’t. This is what I have chosen. This is the life I have created.

What I don’t complain about: The Rejections. They are an immutable aspect of my work. 4Q2009 rounded out with the last of 4 outstanding rejections.

• Ploughshares - Ravenous
• The Kenyon Review - Dearth of Ecstasy
• Zoetrope - Rapture
• Zyzzyva - Rapture

(1 holdout remains: an online journal that was reading but has again suspended submissions)

I read recently in the WSJ that an unsolicited manuscript has a .008% chance » of getting published in the Paris Review. In spite of these ridiculous odds you simply have to continue to work, to capture the light while it’s still inside or surrounding you.

Planting around the o'hia trees

And if you’re lucky, you get to do it all again the next day…

Puna Sunrise - Jan 2010

After picking up the latest rejection from my PO box this afternoon, for Rapture, I stopped into the Body Shop on Union Square to get some shaving cream. There were two chicks and a big bad ass security guard hanging out at the front door. Slow day…?

rejection: new yorker, oct 2009 - Rapture

I was still slightly reeling with delight that my rejection slip actually had a human being’s scrawl on it: “Thanks for the read” it said—my god, the electrons of a living body transmogrified through an inkpen into the manifestation of a sentiment…Body shock.

Then I went into that cursed store.

Of course I knew what I wanted and I wasn’t there for idle chit-chat or to run up my bill, so I grabbed a container of Maca Root shaving cream (shameless, almost unworthy plug) and turned circles looking for the register so I could pay. Just then a sales clerk appeared in my face: Those are on sale. Buy two get one free.

This one will last me an eternity, I told her.

So get something else. Moisturizer, facial cream…they’ll last for three years and you don’t have to come in next time you run out. Stock up. Get two or three. Why not.

This is all I want.

Judging from the disgruntled look on her face she didn’t comprehend the notion that I only wanted 1 of something. I’ll help you over here, she said in a surly tone. She headed toward a cash register in the corner of the room. She was still talking. I ignored every word until the brusque, rapid, “Got your birthday buyer card?” (Or whatever it’s called.)

No, I don’t.

When’s your birthday?

I don’t want one.

Your birthday month you get 10% off every purchase. Even if you don’t have—.

I left it at home. I’ll live without it this time. Thanks.

Through some divine intervention she took my 20 and gave me change: Want a bag?

Sure.

You can keep everything in it, she said (ie hate mail from the bill collectors and my latest rejection).

Thoughtful, I told her. Thanks. Seriously. Thanks.

When I got home and filed the rejection for Rapture in my folder I realized I’d been clinging to another rejection, unsure of how to package it. It wasn’t a difficult one; it came over a month ago, just as we were in Honolulu changing planes to head home to SF. It was the Esquire fiction contest. Ravenous. No go. Not even the finals.

What is it about a disgruntled 80 year old lethargic that editors find so unappealing? Truth is mighty and it comes in unexpected packages.

Like shave cream in an ultraviolet light-resistant, dark green plastic shopping bag??

Everything has come to a head.

There is no aspect of life that has not undergone some sort of turmoil; had to be evaluated; had to be dealt with. The balls were all tossed into the sea and now they have to be guided back to shore.

Confluence (10/3/8 - hilo)

Hugo
A day and a half spent in Hawi, in the northwest corner of the big island, yielded a thorough and disheartening reading of Hugo. It’s not that the book is a mess; it’s just not “right”, and for a perfectionist that’s a painful discovery. There are matters of tone and personality that have to be addressed. Dropped topics. Disappearing characters. A small cocktail gathering of different narrators…

Dearth
The latest rejection arrived after I returned from Hawi. Doug called on the day of my birthday party to read through my mail to me. I asked him the standard question: “Is there anything addressed to me, from me?” The answer was yes: DEARTH was rejected by Zoetrope. This one was my faithful hold-out. I thought for sure it was going to be a good match. (Let that be a lesson to all you optimists and dreamers.)

Taxes
A few days after arriving back in SF, an email from my accountant yielded shrill news on the economic front: my tax bill for 2008 is equivalent to all the money I’ve earned this year. Funny; when income is low we call it ‘nothing’. When it’s a tax bill we call it ‘exorbitant’. Still, it’s hard to draw blood from a stone, so I’m going to have to get creative in order to figure out how to pay it.

There’s this urge—and I can only speak for myself. It’s an urge to find in life a fundamental stillness that will counteract all the inevitable and inescapable noise. The search is complicated by ambition. It’s complicated by the bad habits we grew up with. The lack of training. Obligations. Struggling focus. Competing desires. Matters of faith and inhibition…

oak and broderick streets, sf

For me, Hawai’i is that stillness. Should be that stillness. But when there’s a daily stream of people working on the house—only 1 or 2 at a time, mind you, but hammers and questions and power tools that drain the battery bank; and when the house and garden project list grows and I don’t say no; when I break to swim when I should be writing for another hour or two; and when a client who wants to pay me a little money calls…All these things I appreciate and enjoy and don’t actually mind: when they come together as a steady flow of activity, though, their tiny distracting capabilities turn into a confluence of disruption.

There is a nothingness to writing that must be undisturbed and preserved at all cost. It’s the most difficult part of writing: trying to have a life while at the same time trying to write. It’s difficult to convey this to people. I suppose it’s hard for non-writers to understand that when the flow is broken it can take minutes, hours or days to recapture the motion. That tenuous, beloved rare confluence that comes from creating something out of nothing flees like a handful of fireflies and you’re lucky if you can re-capture at least one.

bed on the lanai - puna

Saddle Road stretches languidly between the two big volcanoes, their stately and ethereal landscapes passing by slowly, even as the car speeds by (18,000 cubic miles of material doesn’t escape the eye very quickly). Still, the wide stretch of road urges you to drive fast, and the last stretch heading down towards Waimea is a miles-long, downhill roller coaster.

Saddle Road above the Kohala Coast

Saddle Road was the site of Arvin’s first speeding infraction. We’d gone to Costco on the other side of the island to pick up a new tent for the tractor. On our way back—it was a compressed 5-hour shopping journey, not a leisure trip—he passed a slow-moving car and got clocked by an oncoming cop going about 20 miles over the speed limit. The fact that he didn’t have his driver’s license was gratefully forgiven, representing a savings of nearly $150.

Ticket #2 occurred a few days ago, on our way back from the beach. Passing through Laupahoehoe, again after passing a slow-moving car, he was going 67 and got officially clocked at 62. This time the good officer knocked the fine down to the cost of a basic over-the-limit ticket. Back in Virginia, 20 miles an hour over the speed limit got you a reckless driving citation.

Off to Hawi to write in solitude for a couple days. Will drive the limit, I suppose.

Still there were a few good waves with Felicia. Here’s one from the east coast of the island:

I’m calling this one.

The submission guidelines indicate that if the agency is interested they respond pretty quickly, otherwise they don’t bother.  Six weeks is outside the limits of ‘pretty quickly’, even by publishing industry standards, so I’m adding another red streak to my collection (see Hugo at the right »).

I did manage to write another story featuring my humorous curmudgeon (RAPTURE, a companion piece to RAVENOUS) and have begun shipping it out for consideration. It’s new on the Rejection Counter, as is the latest submission of RAVENOUS, which I sent off to a reputable contest. Wait and see…

Happy trails.