Category Archives: Essays – Non-Fiction

Back in late 2002 my friend Alana and I were chatting (via ICU instant messenger magic of the early aughts) about writing.  I was wanting to do more creative writing but I was struggling to do it.  She told me about this new online journaling thing people were doing called Blogging.  She suggested that maybe a new format with an audience as big or as small as the growing internet might inspire me.  She helped me set up my first blog which was probably on Blogger or some other very generic easy template sort of program.  This was the beginning of a very important part of my life.  I didn’t know it at the time.  That seems to always be the way, right?  We only know that a time period is important in retrospect.  A whole new world of bloggers opened up to me.  It was a pretty small world back then and I was blessed with finding some really amazing people during what we now amusingly call The Golden Age of Blogging.  What I was hoping for happened, though not in exactly the way I thought it would, but nonetheless…I started writing.  Writing on a regular basis.  I met other writer in the blogging world.  I made friends in the blogging world.  Good friends.  People I went on to meet in real life and am blessed to still be friends with to this day.  Alana always encouraged me to keep on writing.  She was an early participant in my yearly writing adventure every October (Writober).  When she was doing stand up we’d sometimes write jokes together either though IM or email.  She always had positive suggestions for me when I would get frustrated with myself for my chronic procrastination.  If those didn’t help she would make fun of me in the best possible way so that I would laugh and stop taking it all so damn seriously.  There were years when she would do tarot readings for me over the phone and I swear every single time I would ask some question about what I should be doing or if it was time to change jobs or how I could solve money problems it would always end up right back at Alana saying, “yeeeeaaahh ya know it seems like you should be writing”.  Over the years, Alana and I discussed everything at some point or other.  We talked about relationships, sex, politics, staying flexible both physically and emotionally, annoying co-workers, cats, puppy dog noses, and writing. 

When Alana got diagnosed with Stage Four Cancer two years ago I felt my heart break.  But, as Patrick Rothfuss wrote, “broken isn’t shattered.”

Last Monday it became clear that Alana had fought all she could and was slowly leaving her body.  That same day I got a notice from a professional writer that that I am fond of that she was teaching an online novel writing class.  I’ve never taken a writing class of any kind.  Not even in college, though heaven knows I should have.  I clicked over to the website for the class and read about how the whole thing worked, only 8 people in a class, 8 weeks long, must submit writing twice over the 8 weeks for crit and must do crit for other classmates writing.  I clicked to her specific class and saw it was starting THAT DAY…and there were two spots open. 

I thought about Alana.  About how she spent the last two years fighting that fucking disease and doing it with so much humor and grace and creativity.  She made a goddamned short film in the last year that is currently showing up in film festivals all over the country, while fighting fucking cancer.  I knew if I could ask her about taking the class she would have said, “Yes, you should…right now.”  So I paid the money and signed up.

At 7:20 this morning my sweet funny friend Alana left this world. 

Her name will be forever carved into my heart.

And I am writing.

So much swirling around in my head today.

My good friend Patricia managed to turn my old blog posts into a Word Doc that isn’t filled with all the coding info which is so damn cool. It’s pretty mind blowing to read what I was thinking and writing 15 years ago. The document is roughly 800 pages long and spans from 2003 to 2014.  What is most interesting to me is how regularly I was writing back then. That was the purpose of the blog, so it did its job. Every post wasn’t brilliant but some of them, upon review, I really like.  I wrote some funny stuff, some serious stuff and a whole lot of political stuff (no wonder it’s hard for me to write much of that now). Mostly I keep coming across bits of observation that I find amusing such as this, “But anyway, back to the older men at my gym. The ones that are minding their own business are kind of interesting. They are often reading a paper while they are using the cardio equipment. There are a couple of guys that look like they were all made from the same mold. They have gray hair and reading glasses that they sort of perch on the bridge of their noses…not like regular glasses that are firmly in place, these are glasses that seem to only be visiting their face, soon to leave. They seem a little annoyed at the need for physical exercise, so their reading seems to be an attempt to not be wasting valuable time. I assume they are business men, I have noticed that they are often reading The Wall Street Journal, but they could be school teachers or truck drivers or who knows what. I don’t really know why but I find them to be just the teensiest bit mysterious.”

I realize it’s rather meta to post part of a prior blog post inside a current blog post but that is just the crazy kind of world we are living in these days.

Next swirly thought…I started listening to the audiobook version of Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, “Born To Run”. Bruce is the narrator which was a very good choice. His voice, both his literal voice and his voice as a writer, is so distinct and specific it would have been jarring to have someone else do the recording. He is a storytelling musician and he is brilliant at connecting his very specific, personal experiences to a wider communal experience so that when you listen to his songs you immediately and easily place yourself inside the narrative of the song.  Whether you are the guy racing in the streets or the girl being coaxed out for some illicit fun running around on a summer night…it doesn’t matter that you’ve never been to New Jersey, it doesn’t matter that your name isn’t Rosie, those songs are about you in some way.  His gift is in the way he imbues those stories/songs with universal emotions, the specifics give you a way in, the emotions give you a way to make the story/song yours.  I’ve only just started the book but he has a muscular relationship with words.  There is something demanding about the language he uses, mostly I think it’s because he thinks in poetry, as though he is most comfortable speaking in lyrics.  It makes sense, he doesn’t lose the narrative, but you have to listen along a beautiful and winding verbal path sometimes, then, suddenly, he’ll get to the emotional point in three short words.

It’s wonderful.

There’s a new version of A Star Is Born coming out with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga.  The trailer looks pretty damn good and it’s very likely there will be some exceptionally good songs that will come out of this film.  It amazes me how we never tire of this story.  There have been THREE previous versions of this film (regardless of what CNN’s Entertainment reporter wrote, Judy Garland and James Mason did a version in 1954 that is perhaps the most famous of all the iterations).  It’s a great story but it’s also deeply sad how ingrained it is that we know we will lose a percentage of our artists to crippling insecurity, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction and all the various forms that suicide can take. I think the heartbreak of that is why we keep telling this story, it’s almost as though we hope the ending will get different, but it hasn’t so far.  The story resonates with us, there is truth to it that we see all around us.  But I have to confess it pisses me off.  We don’t have enough great artists for this to be our society’s overall view and expectation for artists.  I realize that any given individual will have whatever internal issues they will have…but this story shouldn’t be expected, this horrible looming fate.  It also shouldn’t be a part of how artists see themselves because that just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom and despair and death.  At the same time I don’t deny that artists lean towards some of the darker corners of the heart and soul to draw out whatever it is they create.  I just wish that we would add a safety line to our societal story about artists…you know like rock climbers use…a safety line that would keep them linked to the rest of us, linked to a safe haven, a piece of stable ground, a safety line to help them find their way back from those dark corners.  A few years back Jeff Bridges was in a film called Crazy Heart.  That film is also about an artist descending into those dark places and the exceedingly high price for that descent…but he makes it out.  I don’t mind a dark story but I’m tired of all our great artists ending up dead at the end of them…I want more stories where we make it out alive.

Elizabeth Gilbert did a Ted Talk that speaks to this problem, I like her solution.

So I’ve been going back and forth about writing this blog post for a week now but I’ve decided to go on and write it.  My only hesitation is that some of my friends are about to find out something that happened to me recently via the internet/FB as a result of posting this and I generally think that is kind of shitty.  I am blessed with LOTS of friends who are scattered all over the world.  Friends from when I was a kid, from high school, from college, from all my years working in theatre, from my years blogging on the internet back in the early 2000’s, from writers groups on FB and so on and so on.  When something big happens it can be difficult to get everyone notified.  Hell it can be hard to get everyone you see/talk to on weekly basis notified as I have recently discovered.  But I am going to proceed because I think it’s important to get this information out to anyone who might actually read.  So to those of you who I love and who love me but are finding out about this event here, I apologize.  It all happened kinda fast and I did the best I could with the notifications.

So I recently (as in last week) turned 54.  Most of us here in the States know that it is generally recommended that you get your first colonoscopy done when you turn 50.  I put mine off.  Mostly because I didn’t have the co-pay when I turned 50.  It’s considered out patient surgery and thus my insurance at that time had a $500 co-pay.  Something I’ve discovered since then is that part of the ACA is that all co-pays are waived for cancer screening colonoscopies.  They did that because people like me put them off due to a high co-pay.  But if you don’t KNOW that it will be waived, if you are like me and instead of checking you just put it off…well you can’t find out about this very useful aspect of the ACA so you can proceed to use this brilliant medical test we have available to us.

So I got my first colonoscopy this past February on the 26th.  No big deal, everything went perfectly.  Until the GI Doc called and wanted me to come in to discuss my results.  We all know what THAT means.  Sure enough I go in and the Doc tells me they removed two polyps and one of them had cancer cells.  Now the way this works is if the polyp has cancer cells that are NOT up against the wall of your intestine then the removal of the polyp is the end of the event.  All good.  BUT if the cancer cells are found right up against the wall then that makes everyone a bit more nervous.  It’s possible the cancer cells have migrated into the wall of the intestine or possibly through the wall into the lymph nodes that are scattered along the outside of your intestines.  (Did you know there were lymph nodes scattered outside your intestines just hanging out in your abdominal area?  I didn’t.  The More You Know eh?)  Of course the polyp removed from my large intestine had cancer cells right up against the wall.  The GI Doc explained that he felt quite certain he had gotten everything but no one wants to take chances with this and as such the next step was surgery.  So that’s what we did.

The surgery was March 27^th and included a laparoscopic procedure that involved removing about six to eight inches of my large intestine (the beginning section of large intestine that runs up the right side of your abdomen) reconnecting my small intestine to the remaining portion of large intestine (we all really have miles and miles of it so not a big loss at the end of the day), and removing a bunch of lymph nodes to test.  The surgery went perfectly and I spent a few days in the hospital recovering and getting my digestive system to wake up after the surgery.

Just yesterday I got confirmation from my Doc that the pathology report came back clear of cancer cells in the removed section of large intestine and clear of cancer cells in all the lymph nodes.  Best news ever.

Now if they had found any I would have done some chemo and by all accounts that would have taken care of it pretty quickly.  I’m grateful I don’t have to do that but again, I’m also grateful that this is one of the most successfully treated cancers humans can get.

So here’s the public service portion of this post.

Please, PLEASE GET YOUR CANCER SCREENINGS DONE!!

I have no way of knowing if it would have been better or worse if I had gotten my colonoscopy done when I was 50.  But I do know that if I had waited three more years this would have been a much different story I’d be telling today.  I’m very aware of the short comings of the medical world and how it deals with people at the same time I am a HUGE fan of modern medicine and science and I want to make sure I use it to my best advantage.  Because the truth is things like this are a straight up miracle compared to what was available to my grandparents.

That’s my story today…I’m feeling lucky that my incisions are itchy and annoying because they are healing up.  I’m feeling lucky that I have a husband who showed up every day calm and loving and funny through what has turned out to be a small health bump rather than a terrifying mountain.  I’m feeling lucky to have family that was loving and calm and supportive.  I’m feeling lucky to have an employer who has been so supportive and allowed me to work from home last week and this week.  I’m feeling lucky to have so many good friends who sent me their love and support.  I’m feeling really, really lucky.

So I was chatting with my friend Alana last night.  I mentioned that I was trying to come up with some ideas for regular blog posts.  Mostly in an effort to get myself writing again…I said I had been super stuck.  But then I had to be more honest than that because “stuck” isn’t the right word.  I haven’t been stuck, I’ve been avoiding, I’ve just not made space or time for my writing, I’ve busied myself with other things…so naturally there has been no progress on any of my projects.  She, being a genuinely kind and generous person, commiserated with me about how that felt.  Then she asked me how I had shifted that situation in the past.  I confessed that in the past only two things had ever really had any impact on me when I get in this place of avoidance.  One was very involved and particular and required other people to just happen to offer up something that was uniquely designed for my needs.  The other was hand writing three pages a day of anything, just stream of consciousness writing.  Her response?

“Three pages it is.”

She laughed.  I laughed.

Then just as I started to make an excuse about how I couldn’t seem to make the time for this very, very small exercise I realized something that I hadn’t before…I have always thought I had to do that writing first thing in the morning.  Now the main reason for that is the same reason most people exercise in the morning.  If you do it first thing you don’t let other tasks derail you from it.  But mornings are tough for me.  They are hurried and involve a fairly long commute in my car so delaying leaving for work isn’t a good idea and the brutal truth is I’m not really a morning person.  I am already getting up as early as I can stand (which is between 5 AM and 6 AM which I really do find to be horrifying).  But it dawned on me that the power of the writing is not WHEN it’s done it’s simply that it GETS DONE.  So I admitted this to Alana and said that I was going to go home and do those damn three pages tonight.  Then she, again being just one helluva an awesome friend, said that I should tell her when I had done the pages and she would do a dance of joy in my honor.  Well I’m no fool…I am not one to turn down a dance of joy in my honor.

So I did my pages.

And they worked.  Just like I knew they would…by the second page I was thinking up plot solutions for one of my WIPs, I was finding ways to make the conflict work better and changing the relationships so that they mattered more and increased the emotional investment overall.

Then I texted Alana and told her I had written my pages.

She danced and there was more joy in the world than there had been a moment before.

I am one lucky woman.

I wrote this back in 2004 when a documentary was coming out about Rodney Bingenheimer.  He’s leaving KROQ as of June 5th so I thought I’d post it again.

“This is Rodney on the Roq and tonight we’re gonna hear from a local band called….”

I have mentioned before that I am an L.A. baby.  I’ve lived here almost my whole life (Those first four years in Florida hardly matter).  I have an older brother, five years older.  Older siblings can be very useful for bringing all sort of cool shit into the lives of younger siblings.

Mine was a great, great source for music and his source, eventually mine as well, was Rodney.

In 1978 I was a freshman in high school.  KROQ was this little punk radio station that only a few really cool people, such as my older brother, were listening to back then.  The big stations in L.A. at that time were KMET and KLOS.

But KROQ was….INSANE!  I remember sitting out on the pool deck and listening to them tell dirty jokes on the air and then having to come back on and apologize so they wouldn’t get fined.  The DJs were totally out of control but totally in control of the music that they played.  Something unheard of today.

Most importantly they had Rodney On The ROQ.  Rodney Bingenheimer.  The little nasally, whiney voiced guy who did NOT sound at all like the 70’s era velvet voiced DJs we were all so used to back then.  Rodney was punk radio here in L.A. even though he played tons of stuff that wasn’t punk.  But he sort of personified the idea of punk…the idea of do it yourdamnself if you want it done…sound however it is YOU sound…and listen to everything.

Rodney was our lifeline out in the Suburbs.  He told us what bands to go see and where to go see them.  The Motels at Madame Wongs East, Elvis Costello and the Attractions at Fairfax High, The Naughty Sweeties at the Country Club, X at the Whiskey, The Germs at The Mask…it was crazy and wonderful.

Did I see any of those bands in 1978…HELL NO!  I was 14…but my brother saw quite a few of them and brought the news from the front to us stuck behind in the trenches.  Then we swarmed up to Lovells, our independent record store and bought all the albums we could find by those bands.  We listened faithfully to KROQ….most faithfully to Rodney.

There’s a documentary coming out about Rodney called “The Mayor Of Sunset Strip”.  Here’s the thing about Rodney these days.  KROQ tried to take him off the air a few years ago but the public outcry was SO huge that they changed their minds… instead they gave him a shitty time slot.  His show is relegated to the wasteland of Midnight to 4a.m. I think, on Sunday nights.  The station is now such a fucking protected bunker that it’s almost impossible for an unsigned band to get a tape or a CD to Rodney (the only DJ allowed to play whatever he wants).  Which is one of the reasons that for years now he always announces where he’ll be after his show or even just on a regular basis.  I know tons of musicians who have walked up to him at diner counters where he was eating and handed him a tape or a CD and he has always been gracious and kind.  Rodney has launched and supported the careers of countless famous musicians…but he lives in a very modest apartment in Hollywood.  He’s not rich, I’m pretty sure from everything I’ve read over the past few years about him, he’s barely making it.  But, seemingly, he’s still living the life he loves…a life that is only about music.  He doesn’t seem unhappy, even if he is frustrated, like all of us, with the state of radio these days.

Just a few months ago a friend of mine got their CD into Rodney’s hands and he played it and said really nice things about them on the air.  Then, knowing that midnight to 4a.m. wasn’t gonna get anyone going….he got their CD into the hands of one of the other DJs at KROQ and he played it.

Rodney Bingenheimer is one of those rare people who knows amazing music when he hears it and will fearlessly play it on the radio.  There was a lot of brouhaha when Tom Petty put out the song, “The Last DJ” which many speculated was about another L.A. DJ who refused to kowtow to the Corporate Radio bullshit.  But that DJ only plays music that is 20-30 years old, that DJ didn’t play Tom Petty and Heartbreakers back in 1978.  Rodney played TP and the HBers back then, when they were new and dangerous.  Today he plays music that is new and dangerous and NOT a guaranteed hit.

If anyone is the last true DJ in this town….it’s the guy with the whiney voice telling you about “The Randies playing at the Key Club tonight” from Midnight to 4AM.

I wrote this a while back and periodically have to post it because apparently it still needs saying…

WARNING:  If this post resembles you keep in mind that I love and adore you and I don’t mean to offend you but I do get a bit resentful about this shit.

ALRIGHT!

We need to talk!

I’ve just about had it with the L.A. bashing.

Now honestly I understand this is NOT some perfect place.  I understand that it has a whole host of problems.  I’m pretty damn sure I know them even better than you folks do because I’ve lived here my entire damn life.

Yeah, yeah the driving can be a drag.  The traffic can be unbearable.  The lack of decent public transportation can drive you insane.  The endless sprawl of suburban drabness can start to melt your brain.  The lousy air quality can actually make you ill.

Then there’s the reason so many of you folks come here in the first place. The entertainment business.  Yes it’s horrifying how shallow the entertainment business is isn’t it?  Which spawns some pretty shallow and decidedly mean people.  But hey lets call a spade a fucking shovel here OK?  None of you came here for the fine art community, the theatre community or the jazz scene did ya?  Nope.  You all came here with an eye on becoming a movie star or a rock star.

Then y’all get bitter and pissy when what you find is a business filled with self-involved, self-motivated business people who want to make money….not art.  Then as you struggle to be an artist in the midst of a business industry you start to lose sight of what it is you want, what it is that is important to you.  You find yourself trying to write a KROQ ready single or dreaming of getting a national commercial selling dish soap.  You start to feel bad, you start to miss the way you felt when you were in college or even high school back in Ohio or D.C. or Racine.  You remember that at one time you just wrote the music you loved for no reason at all or you were a member of a small theatre group that did wonderful productions of American plays in the park.  You decide that the real problem is that this town is destroying your artistic soul, that Los Angeles is somehow responsible for you losing sight of what was important to you.  Well I take decided EXCEPTION to that idea.

I will agree that the entertainment business is not the best place for an artist, I also acknowledge how problematic that is, but don’t blame my home town for the effects of your own desires for success and one industry’s lousy ethics and lack of soul.  Not everyone who lives in L.A. is in the entertainment industry.  Not everything in L.A. has to do with the entertainment industry.

This is a city full of contradictions and a wealth of different cultures that mix and separate and mix again.  This is a city where you will see a wild coyote running down Hollywood Blvd. at midnight when the Santa Ana winds are blowing like crazy.  This is city where you will see a car driving down the 210 freeway in 78 degree weather with skis and snow on its roof.  This is a city where on January 1st you will find a large number of people surfing to ring in the New Year.  This is a city of teachers and garbage collectors and shop keepers and lawyers and doctors and factory workers and gardeners and maids and rich people and poor people and everything in between.  This is a city like no other city, with a subtly of seasons that it takes a lifetime to detect and a soul that can feed your art if you can figure out how to find it.

I’m not saying you have to like my town.  I understand how it might not work for everyone.  But that’s true of anywhere.  What bothers me is that I don’t hear anyone saying, “Seattle sucked the soul out of all my artistic friends” or “Racine killed her desire to be an actor” or “Chicago made it impossible for me to write any decent music”.  I’ve heard people say that the insider nature of the theatre community in Chicago made it hard to get started there.  I’ve heard people say that the snootiness of the indie rock scene in the Pacific Northwest made it impossible to get booked into a decent club.  But no one blames the city for those things.

All I’m asking is that you place your blame in the right location.  Tons of people don’t like New York because it’s a big dirty city or Minneapolis because it’s too cold or New Orleans because it’s too hot and there’s no clean drinking water or Los Angeles because it’s too spread out and you do have to have a car to get around.  But if you or your friends lose sight of their artistic soul then I suggest taking some responsibility for the maintenance on that soul because if you don’t nurture it yourself the geography won’t make a damn bit of difference