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Internet Love-Hate and A Future in Goats

imagesPygmy goats. That’s the latest idea R and I kicked around over brunch at a diner yesterday. They’re adorable creatures and of course, small enough that we might even be able to get started on our .24 acreage in this urban-suburban town. We could make soap and cheese.

There’s great inspiration for other ways to live, to be found in cyberspace. This wonderful blogger in England who left the rat-race and made a lovely life for herself and her beloved cows is one of my favorite. And thank you, Eileen, for reminding me about The Fabulous Beekman Boys and their goats. They certainly made a go of it.

With the book business being in such turmoil, I’d be foolish not to think about other options, even if they are mostly fantastical at this point. (health insurance from the pygmy goat association?) Commerce continues to move online. How can booksellers, writers, musicians, travel agents and, as you’ll see, to a lesser extent, even auto mechanics make a living these days?

How can a store be sustainable with the internet, in the age of the ravenous AMAZON? Just last week a customer rudely reamed me over the phone when I told him that the price of his book would indeed cost more if he bought the book in the store instead of  online. I get how that seems crazy to a customer – but then again, if you want bookstores, you need to support them. Since the days when we were considered the big bad wolf of the industry, I have said that it is the customer who has the power, who makes the choice to shop one place rather than another. We sustain a store or not.

If people don’t care about stores, if they care more about saving a few dollars, then the store will go away. We can shop at the little guys and even in a big chain like Stop and Shop and Home Depot, we can choose the human over the self-checkout.  We are still people who work in these places – and some of us, many in my place, have a fierce love for the products we sell. I refuse to shop at Amazon, preferring Ebay and Overstock or Craig’s List for my bargains. It bugs me that so many authors websites and blogs link to Amazon for their books. Amazon sells cameras and vacuum cleaners — of course they can undercut everybody else.

Electronic books have made it even tougher to sustain bricks and mortar. The price points of books is so low already and the measly profit must then be cut up and shared by author, publisher, vendor.

So, over eggs benedict at the diner yesterday, I pondered with R, how to make a living in this crazy computer age? What jobs will be left to us? The waitress brought us our check. She was a little older than me. Waitressing was my first job at sixteen and I did it through college and beyond. The thought of ever again rattling off a list of salad dressings, makes me cringe. But I could do it. Food depends on people. So there — we are back to goat cheese.

In the parking lot, R’s Jeep wouldn’t start. He put the key in the ignition and nothing happened. The lights came on, the radio worked, but the engine did not even groan. I called AAA for a tow. Then, on a whim, I googled, “Jeep Cherokee key won’t work in ignition” on my IPhone and read through the comments. “Hit key with rubber mallet when in ignition”. R reached into the back seat (his office) and grabbed a hammer and whacked the key and turned it. The car started. I called AAA and canceled the tow order and laughing, we pulled out of the parking lot, marveling at the wonders of the world-wide-web. We’ll have to have a really great site for our goat products…

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy.

The Sunday New York Times this week has three front page stories that disturbed me:

President Claims Shooting as a Hobby, and the White House Offers Evidence

By  and 

Pete Souza/The White House

In a photo released by the White House on Saturday, President Obama is shown skeet shooting at Camp David in August 2012.

This somehow feels like pandering to the creeps. “See, I shoot guns too!” Ugh. But then, I suppose this is what is necessary to reach the level of ridiculous but scary, gun people who cling to this archaic 2nd Amendment of the Constitution. Whatever.

In Hard Economy for All Ages, Older Isn’t Better … It’s Brutal

By 

David Maxwell for The New York Times

Susan Zimmerman, 62, has three part-time jobs.

Then this article – of course struck close to home because, um, that’s me they are talking about, at least, could be. Of course, as that annoying mantra goes: I’m “lucky to have a job”. In fact I am lucky to have a job that I love – but when I thinking of my fellow ‘boomers’ under or unemployed and struggling, it sucks. And, as bookstores struggle to survive against the Amazon tide, who knows how soon it might be me.

Drowned in a Stream of Prescriptions

By 

Before his addiction, Richard Fee was a popular college class president and aspiring medical student. “You keep giving Adderall to my son, you’re going to kill him,” said Rick Fee, Richard’s father, to one of his son’s doctors.

But this article affected me the most. Beautifully, it was given front-page-center.

Unlike Richard Fee’s, my husband’s addiction was kickstarted not by doctors but by the choices he made during his life-in-the-fast-lane 1980s. But the story I share, along with so many families across the country, is how we were so badly failed by the professionals who were supposed to help us, and how tragically undermined we were by the pharmaceutical industry.

Before I knew why my husband couldn’t keep a job, slept for 12 hours at shot, spent too much money and behaved so erratically, we went, upon my insistence, to a string of psychiatrists who prescribed a rainbow of drugs, including anti-depressants. He happily took them, adding them to his other cocktail of cocaine, Nyquil and whatever else. When I found out about the cocaine, we went to another shrink who prescribed more pills including anti-psychotic drugs that he popped at an alarming rate — I admit, I counted them. When I called the shrink, he brushed it off despite the dire warnings on the bottle. Once I brought went to a walk-in clinic and ranted at a doctor who’d prescribed oxycotin. “He’s an addict!” I yelled. “You just hand this shit out like this?” Yes, they do.

A few months after my husband’s suicide, the posh rehab place where my husband had spent a (useless) week, sent me a bill of a few hundred dollars not paid by insurance. I insisted they send me his records first, then I’d pay the bill. (If I recall correctly, I had to send them a copy of his death certificate.) Reading through the fat file was heartbreaking for it’s lack of information. Multiple choice boxes as diagnoses, rarely a comment and rarer, any insight. He had the doctors, (who I remember he said, he rarely saw) as he had me for so long, completely snowed. They’re good like that, addicts are.

I understand that an addict must want his recovery. My husband saw those doctors only because I insisted he do so. He wanted to appease me, to keep things going – the illusion of a normal life. I think he thought one day he would be able to quit, that he’d get his life back – but twenty years was just too many – the man he had been, might have become – was gone.

I don’t mean to bash the entire psychiatric or pharmaceutical industry as I have benefited from both — but I have many questions and suggest that everyone should.

Naked Suicide

Recently, the number of visitors to my blog increased incredibly.  Why? The piece on the Newtown tragedy perhaps? It wouldn’t be my Department of Motor Vehicle post…who from Columbia, Romania or Turkey would be interested in that?

No. The hits from countries around the globe were actually looking for a tattooed woman in (and out of) sexy underwear. Not me, silly. My flesh has no ink and I assure you, my lingerie is not even remotely titillating.

The search term that brought this wild number of visitors my way was ‘tierney suicide’.  At first I thought a famous Tierney (can you think of any besides the long-dead, Gene?) must have committed suicide.  Nope. Tierney is the name or moniker of a young woman who is part of the SuicideGirls. (here is Wikipedia‘s description if you’d rather not click on the link.) “SuicideGirls is the nationwide art sleaze phenomenon.”  according to the Los Angeles Times. I doubt many of these accidental visitors stuck around for long on my modest blog.

It may be generational, but the idea of posting naked photos of even the younger, cuter me across the world-wide-web, makes me squirm. In college I sometimes paid my rent modeling for life drawing classes in the art department so it’s not that I am really that much of a prude – just a bit of one. Besides, times are different – scarier, more exploitative. But I try not to judge. Hey, to some extent, I too ‘get naked’ on my blog.  The kind of writing that interests me, requires I reveal more than most people are inclined to do.

No, it’s not the nudity that disturbs me – it’s what they call themselves: “SuicideGirls”.  I get they want to sound edgy, alternative, cutting edge, but it is a weird association.  There are over 30,000 suicides a year in the United States and for those of us left behind, the word suicide does not evoke sexy. And if  suicide searches are bringing the voyeurs to my blog, the survivors in looking for some understanding and solace, must also be stumbling onto the naked-girl site. Hmm.

Avoiding the words or images that trigger traumatic memory is impossible. For the first year or so, the moment I found my husband seemed branded behind my eyelids. Time has help fade this picture but flashbacks are unpredictable. A new title faced-out in the history section of the bookstore I work in, features an image of a noose. I can’t tell you the title because that’s all I saw. A pit opened in my gut and now I know to avoid walking past that shelf. Even those seemingly benign ‘hangman’ games remind me. I’ve learned to swallow and move on.

I choose to still look into and explore my dark, sad place – but prefer to do so on my own terms, on my time. That kind of control is not always possible. I cannot hide book jackets or edit scenes of movies or television shows. Nor can I protest the name of this girly site.

After the horrible shooting in Newtown, a town only 30 minutes away from here, many customers in the bookstore complained about the piles of gun collector books long gathering dust in our remainders section. Rightly so, the company I work for doesn’t censor – but nor is it insensitive. We took the books off display.  It was a simple thing to do in this raw time.

Survivors learn to live with randomly provoked memories. We must: reminders are everywhere. What some see as amusement, sport or even ‘art’ — can painfully elicit our memories of tragedy, of violence and can be hard to swallow. I guess that’s why I’m not thrilled by all the passing traffic — it’s just that they took a wrong turn.

No Words

Reflecting on loss and moving beyond sadness is a theme of my writing, of this blog. The passage of time since my own experience makes it possible for me to write of it. Today, drowning in grief, I feel ill equipped.

Sandy Hook is not far from my home — less than half-an hour. Those parents are my neighbors. They are all of our neighbors.

The early news alert came to me as an email at work — a shooter now dead and one other adult also killed in a school. Terrible and crazy, I thought. So close and such an unlikely spot – an almost rural suburb compared to my city and other towns on the coast. I had not heard the full story yet and went about my morning. Less than an hour, news of the horror of the children’s deaths shifted everything inside of me to an impossible place. The intentional murder of children: unfathomable.

I know no words of wisdom on how to move beyond such loss. None exist.

A Memoir Excerpt Using the ‘Look Challenge’

My friend Gabi tagged me in her blog to participate in the ‘Look Challenge’. Click here for more details. I chose this excerpt from my memoir:

“Walking away from the Holiday Inn onto the open street, I imagined every sniper’s gun in Sarajevo trained on me. In theory, there was a ceasefire but the Holiday Inn was right on the front line and you never knew when a bored or drunken sniper might take a shot just for entertainment.  Wide as a boulevard, the street was deserted. It wasn’t far to the center of the city but I had never walked more than a few blocks in Sarajevo, and never alone.  I passed the towering, skeletal remains of office buildings, imagining someone watching from the dark interiors, sure a shot would ring out any moment. I wanted to run but feared drawing more attention to myself.

Ian had offered to drive me and now I felt stupid for walking alone, insisting I needed some moments of solitude before getting married.  Making my way across these sidewalks, I felt like a lost tourist who’d taken a wrong turn. In a sense, I was. I picked up my pace and tried to focus on breathing, gaze fixed on the mortar pocked pavement — these permanent marks in the concrete had been christened ‘Sarajevo roses’. How many of these scars marked someone’s death? Ian had earlier pointed out the block ahead where I’d be out of the range of the snipers.  I stepped up my pace.

I turned the corner, out of breath and steamy with sweat, heart pounding. A sign battered with shrapnel dents hung over a dark storefront.  ‘Frizerka’: hairdresser. Two middle-aged women in smocks sat on the doorway stoop.  Relieved, I greeted them, lifting my limp hair up hopelessly: “Dobor dan!  Ja sam treba hitna pomoc!”  ‘Hello!  I need emergency assistance’.  I mimed putting on a ring, and with a scramble of Bosnian words from my limited vocabulary, explained why I needed to look beautiful.  Laughing and  kissing my cheeks in congratulation, they ushered me through their dark shop to a basin in the corner. They washed my hair, scooping buckets of precious water either collected from rainwater or perhaps hauled in heavy buckets past drunken snipers. There was no running water in the city.

My racing pulse slowed. I was the only customer so both women, lit by the wan light breaking through the taped up windows, pitched in massaging my scalp, rinsing. We carried on chatting in snippets of languages.

By the time they finished I felt beautiful with my brown hair softly framing my face, blown dry with the help of a car battery.  The women kissed me again and wished me well, waving from the shop doorway. A little less nervously, I made my way down the deserted street and up sniper alley to get ready for my wedding.”

Light On Here

From our little house on a hill, the relentless, howling winds of the hurricane were terrifying. I dug out the heavy winter drapes to protect from possible storm shrapnel breaking through the wobbly windows. I left one curtain open just enough to keep an eye on the trees – the fine old trees on our little plot of land. They held up brilliantly as did this creaky old house. Damage was limited to only a few branches, the only casualty: the chimney guard to keep critters from crawling in. Our chimney is overdue for a cleaning anyway so this will force me to call the sweep.

We lost power for about 12 hours – the milk did not even have a chance to go sour.  In fact, I welcomed the reprieve from watching television news coverage of Sandy, the monster storm that just hammered us here on the East Coast. But now the lights are on again and I continue watching. Like a train wreck, I cannot take my eyes off the heartbreaking scenes. Amazing how much the footage resembles images from war zones. Blown transformers look like exploding mortars, images of residents returning like refugees to find their homes decimated in all too-often battered Queens neighborhood. Maps show huge swathes of color indicating areas across the Northeast without electricity. Pictures of stores show empty shelves. Lines, darkness, people filling plastic jugs from fire hydrants. These images bring back so many memories of Sarajevo.

But the endless press conferences with mayors and governors pledging government remind me we are not at war. Cooperation is the order of the day.

Switching the channel, news of Syria, the violence of man-against-man howling through the lives of the innocent every day with not a promise to be heard.

To Sit, To Breathe

Look what I found at a tag sale yesterday:

I’ve been thinking about meditation recently so this little zabuton is the perfect inspiration to get my ass positioned for a ‘sit’.  Reasons to do so are plentiful: relieves stress, inspires creativity and general well being.

Meditation is one of those things that I’m never sure I’m doing right. (Kind of how I often feel about writing…) Rationally, I know that this is nonsense-thinking, but still I doubt myself and I think I should really learn how do to this from a teacher. And then I remember Taniguchi-san.

In Kyoto in the 1980s, I met a Buddhist monk on a bus and we became friends. I initiated a conversation with the kind looking elderly man beside me (he was not in his robes so I had no idea he was a monk) because I was intrigued by the book he was looking at of these amazing little stone sculptures.

While in Kyoto, I fancied myself a sculptor and was so excited by these expressive, wacky looking little figures all lined up in endless rows that I said, “Summimasen, doko deska?” while pointing to his book.  Turns out, these nembustu were at a temple in Arashiyama not so far away. He introduced himself  as a monk who lived at a another beautiful temple and offered to take me to this place. Of course, I gleefully accepted his generous invitation.

A week later I met Taniguchi-san at his temple, Myoshinji .

We mounted bicycles and I pedaled furiously behind this 70+ year old gem, marveling for the millionth time at the wonderfulness of Kyoto. I’d been living there for over 3 years and had recently decided to move on.  Before I left, my new friend Taniguchi-san gave me a crash-course in meditating.

I met him on a beautiful spring day at Miyoshinji temple again and this time, I followed him inside to his quarters past simple gardens, silent but for the crunch of gravel beneath our feet, bees as we passed the cherry blossoms, buzzing in what seemed a chant. In a simple tatami mat room, Taniguchi-san talked about breath and paying attention.  Mind you, my Japanese was not great and he spoke only a smattering of English.  I searched my journals this morning to see if I’d made notes and found nothing. But I do have this:

As a parting gift, Taniguchi-san gave me this lovely stone – explaining I might, with eyes just ever-so-slightly open, focus on this rock. He knew I’d been inspired to come to Japan because of the rock gardens. For over 20 years this precious piece has graced my bureau.  I blew the dust off  setting off ripples of recollection as if this old stone had been tossed into the depths of my mind.  A cushion, a rock, a lesson remembered.  A return to breath.

Don’t Go to Bed Angry – A Lesson Remembered

Anger should not be allowed in bed at night.  Instead of disappearing into a blissful dream state, the grinding of my teeth is the only unconsciousness happening. Snippy sentences replay over and over, pithier responses conjured. Dogs I didn’t know existed bark relentlessly at distant thunder rumbles. When I finally manage to slip away, it’s into terrible dreams of violence.

I know this, but still paused only for a moment the other night before dramatically pushing the bedroom door shut. Rather than take a few minutes to end the ill-timed tiff with my daughter, I climbed beneath the sheets in a huff.  Our squabble was stupid, triggered by school work left to the last minute and made worse by computer failure. But my anger was too hot to touch and besides, I felt right. What a waste of good slumber.

In the morning, I woke from my non-sleep with shame and brought my beloved daughter an offering of tea and an apology. A few minutes later, she appeared downstairs with her own words of regret and a hug. Peace again. The only way to go.

An Inspiring Book

Sometimes a book just gets under your skin. This is one of those books for me.  Behind the Beautiful Forevers is almost like a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction. Of course these are real people and a real world that Katherine Boo writes about – but she doesn’t report, she immerses us in the lives of the people of this slum. Her book reads like a novel. Boo’s own voice is unheard, she remains unseen, no mere reportage here.  It is only in the afterward that she humbly describes how she went about writing this compelling book. I am inspired by just how many different ways there are to tell a story.  Boo is certainly a master.

 

The Moon’s Tribute to Neil Armstong

It was veritable party of flashing cameras last night at the beach, all of us hoping to capture some spectacular image of the well-publicized ‘Blue Moon’.  This is the best I could do…

Blue Moon

“It’s when there are 2 full moons in one month…” said one wizened fellow to another as they sat sentinel-like on the stone wall overlooking marsh grass and feeding gulls. I overheard them as I passed below, picking my away across the low-tide stretch, leaping over piles of dubious looking Long Island Sound flotsam and jetsam.

And I came across this weird tide pattern – like a quiet echo of the planet now rising on the horizon.  The evening, with this rare second-showing of luna and this strange, perfect circle in the marsh flats, felt like a sweet nod to the recent death of the first man to step and prance across that very distant rock-scape.

Mystical Tide Mark
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