Suspended in Time
unwinding the clock
I heard a cute joke: the New Yorker got a cartoon with two guys in tatters surrounded by cakes, trifles, ice creams, and pies. When the editor asked the cartoonist what he meant by it, the cartoonist said, “I can never get that spelling right.”
Because I am currently running a nonprofit while also trying to set up a book launch, I have very little time left to relax in between. Both of my kids are home and have partners, so an apartment that is too small for three people now frequently holds five. But not on the regular - often one or another couple will simply appear or vanish (right this second I am alone in the apartment with a chatty feline that doesn’t belong to me).
When my family are around, they generally want to chat. Sometimes they want to be taken out for dinner. Recently we sat down and played Monopoly. All of this is wonderful and I do not begrudge it one bit - however - when I am pressed with deadlines and behind on work and then someone who normally lives across the country wants to spend an hour with me, I tend to favor the hour of face-to-face rather than the emails I haven’t read. This means there are more emails when I get back to it.
I think this is why people go away - it isn’t that I have too much to do or that my family is too large. It is the fact that finding a way to take a real break is almost impossible. Being AWK (Away From Keyboard) means that your messages pile up. I had a text-conversation with a colleague I was meeting, told her I was swamped with tasks but eager to see her, and asked her therefore to choose a place for lunch. Instead of her choosing a place, she kept sending texts for twenty minutes asking me if the many places she suggested were okay. I always said they were. She always came up with a “better” idea and asked if that would be okay. Twenty minutes!
The most recent upgrade of phone software now “holds” texts unsent until the recipient is actually online…. presumably kids today shut off their phones to prevent this kind of back-and-forth. This led me to the realization that very little communication these days is two way.
We are all sending out messages in bottles. Email, texts, whats-app, blog posts, social media posts, Discord, art, movies, novels…all of it is messages that are sent out with no knowledge at all of when or if it will be received. You have some idea of the “who” that you are writing to, but truthfully, even your most valuable relationship sometimes gets busy or reads only half the text. Even phone calls have lost information - people try to multitask when they are on phones or zoom calls. Their voices get a little hazy as they respond to a popup on their computer or scan an ad to see if it is relevant or glance at a photo that their neice sent them. Your work call turns into a social call when that photo is a birth announcement or other great bit of news.
The only reliable communication is face to face with phones down, and who has time for that?
So we swim in a sea of bottles filled with messages, and some of those bottles are messages written by machines or mass-produced by companies. Can we hope to read even a quarter of the messages bobbing around in our ocean?
WRITING NEWS
I wonder if anyone skips the essay part of this blog and just reads the writing-news part. You know, right? This blog was initially an email list so that I could tell my friends when something got published. The irony that people read only the essay is the whole reason for the name of this blog.
This week I talked to my publicist and have a marketing plan! It is exciting to offer ARCs to people who have a connection to the content of the book in some way - whether by being Lithuanian, LGBTQ+ (happy Pride everyone!), historians, musicians, or in some other way…. If you are any of these things and want an e-book of my book so that you can blurb, endorse, or review the book before it launches October 17, please reach out to me. Here is the link to the book so you can think about it.
I already got one amazing endorsement!
Ben Francisco, award-winning author, said:
"An inspiring and powerful story of LGBTQ identity, migration, and adolescence amidst the backdrop of the 1980s Cold War. THE BOY WHO LOVED TREES should immediately join the ranks of the 'queer canon' - and the world canon for that matter!"
In other writing news: the fabulous Richard Peabody accepted a poem of mine for inclusion in Gargoyle #14 (and yes, it was supposed to be in #13, but he had some kind of massive and horrific hacking of his website, so a lot of things needed to settle down.) While we wait for that issue, here’s an excerpt from my novel that was published in Gargoyle #2!
I’m working hard, folks! Getting ready for travel in July - going to read a poem at a ribbon cutting in Chicago and then I’m off to Paris to teach a class about Maintaining the Creative Life. FINALLY something I feel fully qualified to teach!
Random Final Thought
I pulled out my dad’s original Monopoly board to play “something mindless” with my kids. We ended in a deep conversation about capitalism and how well this game teaches it - we talked about how swiftly we all became mean landlords eagerly demanding our rent and gleeful when we had monopolies. We talked about how quickly tides turned in that game - and someone who forced a bad deal early in the game could be guaranteed to be shown no mercy at the end of the game. But that kindness is not rewarded and winning feels actually terrible….just not as bad as losing.
But my random final thought is that two of the people under 25 had never seen an original Monopoly board! They had played or owned Lego Monopoly, Star Trek Monopoly, Star Wars Monopoly, Princessopoly, and a few other versions. Not the original! My set still has the iron pieces. They made games to last, once upon a time.
I’m the doggie! What piece were you?
Great review!
Playing with the metal Monopoly pieces, I always took the ship.