4 February 2012 - First workday in trailer, after a couple of trial afternoons. Started the barn heater running early while I made my breakfast in the house with brotherB. Then, once everyone was fed and settled, I gathered up more Trailer Stuff - notebooks, thesaurus, coffee cup, sardines, etc. - and dragged myself out here. The water in the little cat bowl I put out for Greta yesterday froze solid overnight, but the food and water I stashed in the trailer's nonfunctioning "refrigerator" did not. It was not warm in here, particularly, by then, but the sun through the big window felt wonderful, and a jacket and blanket saw me through until we reached a comfy temperature. Now the heat comes from just sunlight through windowglass.

Here's a quote from Robert D. Richardson's First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process:

We need the power to write, but that is only the beginning. We also need the resilience to rebound from our setbacks, the willingness to finish what we start, and the strength to hold out for performance over intention.

***

Here's a new wrinkle. Now that I am outdoors in my own little hut and freed from the need to wear headphones and able to listen again to the fine noises the world makes, some neighbor has acquired a new dog, sounds like a German Shepherd, and left it to bark all the day long. On again go the 'phones.

Damn.

My first note typed into my iPhone from my Bluetooth keyboard while sitting at the table in my writingtrailer. I'll burn some incense, and tomorrow, my first real workday here, I'll smudge and sing. I am thrilled to have this space to myself, this little sanctuary. No more headphones, no more affectionate little pets reclined on the keyboard or pinning down my writing hand. Too wonderful.

The reasons longhand scribbles on paper make the best first-draft medium: first, those simple pages are so much less demanding than the empty windows of a text editor, with its cursor blinking like tapfoot impatience. Second, your handwriting tells a tale all on its own, provides a perfect diagnostic tool for how you really feel about the subject at issue--the leftward lean of fearfulness, forward slope of confidence, squat loops of self-indulgence. Large = excitement, small = anxiety. Et cetera.

Now, the undeviating selfstandardized script of the perfectly integrated mature human being ... I imagine there's profit in watching even that unfurling under your hand.

Just received a little (11 x 5-inch) keyboard in the mail. It pairs with my smartphone (in my case iPhone) wirelessly and lets me use it as a word processor.

At this point computers, for me, are officially redundant.

In this one little device I have radio, TV, DVD player, newspapers, magazines, books, phone, camera, video camera, voice recorder, music editor, stereo, calendar, clocks, web access, research library, post office, gadgets such as levels and plumb bobs, tarot decks, meditation aids, yoga timer, dream interpretation references, I Ching coins and book, shopping mall, bank, bill pay software for all household utilities and insurances, blogger-tweeter-pinner-poster—I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

Permaculture apps and resources, political action connectivity ... I will not feel guilt about this. Come the apocalypse I am fully prepared to forage and scrounge to survive, but until then this single tiny device replaces so many electronics units and libraries and tools that I can't help but consider it the environmental savior of the planet. Absurd as that sounds. But really, if it cuts electronics consumption by 90%, isn't that what it is?

Phone taps continued ...

& when the cloud moves again or a spot thins to a hole in the overcast, the sunbeam bursting through, I set aside my Kindlebook & bask my face some more, trying to be healed of heart. But can the light sieved through skylight glass have spectrum juice enough to heal? Don't know. It just feels good.

& then 11:51 the sun moves - earth turns - enough to shift the beam away for the rest of the bedroom day.

***

1pm now and breakin' - down the stairs to the cold back bathroom because Husband's using my warmer ornate sanctuary upstairs pissoir - so much for refuge - but lets me feel generous, not martyr.

Next heating a pan on the venerable Corning hotplate, & grating jack&cheddar cheeses from the just-bought 2-lb block, slapping over the hot corn tortillas & cheeses then splashing Tabasco & scooping on heaps of mealy hothouse out-of-season tomatoes I'd chopped. Hit two glasses of water with shots of grapefruit juice and there, luncheon for brotherB & me.

Plotting plans, reading and listening on headphones to Pandora cinema soundtrack music perfect behind all the mental Sturm und Drang of this silly life, chasing a furtive handful of chocolate chips with a swig of grapefruit water.

This morning 7:54 raven called three times softly at my bedside window. Blessed Raven.

All night I dreamed and dreamed and I recall not what of.

Cloud cover warmed us overnight. The gray outdoors. So I can crack the window here and get some air, opened just enough--just so--that the bit of wind flutes past wooo-woooo in that lovely way.

I wear my earbud piano music now to blot out the downstairs TV yet still I can hear it, and catTed's obese wheezings from his nap on the landing, and the light plastic bing-bang and rattle as Husband downstairs forages among the prescription bottles in his kit bag. And now the local lumber train passes.

***

I stopped work 1/2way through the first edit of the little book I wrote. Derailed. I'll get back. Yesterday and today I return to my Annotated Notebooks adding to each volume. Years 1998-2007 come to 625 manuscript pages now, and 2008-present is over 500. I may have to break the volumes into Parts before all's said and done.

Anyway, the compiling and editing of things are far more similar to my work habits as editor 25 years, and familiar, comforting, absorbing. And sweeping through the old notes is a wonder to me, of growing sons and lurchings from home to home and heart to heart. Mostly it doesn't make me sad to do it anymore. There are transcendent moments in plenty.

Nice meditation, 23 minutes--thanks to visualizations that kept my mind's attention. Even so, I came out before the journey was half over. Ah, the ADD of it! Practice, practice.

Time now with balanced Husband is like a second honeymoon. We get stronger day by day. I can look at him with such happiness: he is well and will stay that way; neither of us doubts it. The excitement and delight are palpable. We walk in beauty.

I am half-done with the first revise-and-edit of my pages, a little discouraged by the Amazon Singles process (having read the new rules). Perhaps I can market it on my own through the site, as an e-book seller. Any Kindle can read a .pdf, after all. On the other hand, I suppose the proprietary format prevents the thing from being shared willy-nilly.

I hate complicated.

In other news, I have discovered the meaning of a persistent dream image. For years my dreams were visited by goldfish in bowls or swimming through the air. Often they had been neglected or forgotten and came to life when I rediscovered them, healthy and mobile. Recently I was flipping through some old journals and saw where in recording one of these dreams I miswrote "goalfish." Huge a-ha moment for me in spotting that word. My dreams are particularly riddled with puns and the like. And this makes perfect sense.

Careful, careful, already distracted by email. Don't go there just because it comes up on the screen.

Brilliant morning. Intend to plow ahead now with lengthy worktimes. The words are Down. The structure is there. No, one can't have the same vision twice, but one may enter a skeleton and give it flesh and breath and set the heart to beat. As I will now in this phase.

Dipping into the books accruing on the nightstand, including a little heap of things by and about the elder poet Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), writing here between the ages of 97 and 99:

The storm we had the other day was rather spectacular; I felt it was somehow a message. It seemed so threatening at first, and then suddenly it was just a little downpour. And it dissolved into a quite peaceful late afternoon. I interpret it positively. I had felt a sense of foreboding, certainly for the past few months, and psychologically this seemed to say, "Stop thinking negatively about whatever's happening now. Find out what you can do and do it."

And

When the skies are ablaze, it's hard to focus on anything else. We've all been through so many storms, they all seem to merge into a single great storm, lashing across.
           In a similar way, when you have an overwhelming emotional or psychological crisis, the taste of it is so full of memories it encompasses the whole history of losses.--Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden

Ah, the sun is early today in the skylight. So warm against my eyelids, soothing on my face. My forehead unclenches and I had not realized it was furrowed.

Yesterday I wrote 648 words for the final chapter--7. I need add only a dollop more today and the first draft will be ready to embellish, prune, polish, and publish at Amazon Singles--as my trial balloon. The best things to come out of this project well may be a renewed habit of daily application and a sensation of completion. Thrilling, really. And if I continue without pause I can finish the two other parts for a trilogy that can make up a volume lengthy enough to be an actual book.

So, yay.

Otherwise I have nothing to report. Little has been accomplished this day. The sun shines again, and still. The world outdoors is brown and arid and very very cold. Seed packets still arrive in the mail. I have named the writingtrailer Sylvia. Someday she will be parked on a plot of land in the woods and I will go there for extended stays and have more to report than I do now.

I don't know how to make stuff up, as Spalding Gray said. I know only how to deliver my experiences. Key here, then, is to cultivate the experiences.

Bright beam full in my face.

Unfortunate noise on the headphones, what the--oh, Janacek, Taras Bulba I. Noted.

I start writing the final chapter in the little book today. Finished Chapter 6 yesterday with a 700-word burst.

Yesterday we walked out, all three of us together, to Cemetery Street (as I call it) and down to the end of the public road to where it becomes some rancher's private drive. We in fact entered the cemetery and strolled a couple of laps. Holding hands. BrotherB running ahead laughing.

What did we see? The cemetery deer herd grazing in the fallow fields across the way. Graveyard blossoms cloth fake flowers, wire stems plunged into the soft earth near their headstones, brilliant reds and greens against the dormant winter lawn. Warner Mountain Range to the east so brown and dry and patient waiting for drought to end. Our eyes his blue mine brown gazing steady and well, each into the other's, and recognizing the pure spirit again. And hear? Only our three voices entering and leaving us. What did we feel? Our hands, my left his right, clasped tightly together.

Our hearts soaring.

Never having heard of him until he died last year (well, surely I heard of Riddley Walker, but I paid it no mind) and I read his obits in the literary news, I ordered a sampler of Russell Hoban's writing--A Russell Hoban Omnibus--and it arrived via UPS at 9 a.m. today. I opened it at the first page of the first novel, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, and read the first sentences and swooned.

There were no lions any more. There had been lions once. Sometimes in the shimmer of the heat on the plains the motion of their running still flickered on the dry wind--tawny, great, and quickly gone. Sometimes the honey-colored moon shivered to the silence of a ghost-roar on the rising air.

Russell Hoban where were you all my life and why did I not know you until after you were dead?

***

Drought continues hereabouts. We have a fraction of the precipitation we normally get--a fraction of a very small amount, in other words--and it is alarming to look around at our mountain surround, usually white-blanketed since November, and see not even a spot of snow, only brown. If we do not make up for the shortfall in February-March we are in for a fiery 2012, and that's for certain.

Our January continues warm during the day, 40s and 50s F., dropping to 10 or 15 at night.

Little packets of seeds keep arriving in the mail and one afternoon I will plant the cold frame I readied last fall. I bought big hot Christmas lights half-off at the hardware store last week, and I'll suspend them in the cold frame and cover it with the otherwise useless rat-gnawed pads from the trailer to keep it warmish overnight, and we'll see if we can't grow mesclun and radishes.

My step-grandmother's favorite breakfast--fresh red radishes with brown bread and butter.

Here comes the sun.

Another full moon, another night brimming with forgotten dreams--except the last one, which came to me this morning after sleepus interruptus. It was not a Big Dream, nor even meaningful particularly, But my brother in the dream looked just like Gregory Corso sitting cross-legged on the floor looking unhappy. He wandered out the door while I was distracted by a gentleman caller, and who later I found sitting cross-legged on sidewalk staring at grocery-shop door waiting for me to open it: running the shop was my job in the dream and many customers were preparing to leave because they were so tired of waiting in the cold dark shop. I ran to turn on lights, called frantically after departing customers wait! wait! and a man said someone named Ari (the owner! oh no!) had telephoned repeatedly to ask whether I'd opened the shop on time.

And in real life getting impatient to find large blocks of time enough to finish the book. Completed 400 words yesterday before spending the remainder of the day, a Sunday, with recovering and now almost fully present and balanced husband, what a relief! to have him back again. What a disaster that almost was, disastrous enough in its way that we had to figure out the source of his imbalances on our own.

And now I have a meeting to attend as rep for the county's In-Home Supportive Services workers, blows a big hole in this day. Rest of the week I will do nothing more than write, because the book, a small one, novella-like, is nearly done, will be done this week, and then just to polish it and get it into AmazonSingles with parts 2 and 3 to follow in quick succession.

There's that sunbeam. Gotta go.

Last night on my way into bed I stood under the skylight that framed the near-full moon dead center in the clear night sky and the moon showered me with its glow-white for a while. It was a freshening, and afterward I slept in fits and starts waking every couple of hours with a new raft of dreams receding. I slept late then (it's Sunday) and made the morning waffles and coffee and returned to officebed to work, all the while swimming in dream elements washed all together and bobbing to the surface out of order, and dropping below it again, confusing and weird.

***

Yesterday's game day was a great success. I lost badly in our first learning game of "7 Wonders" but it is the kind of game that involves building a civilization across three ages of time, and the building process is so absorbing one forgets to compete and it becomes satisfying just to experience the group efforts and support one another in commerce and so on. What is purported to be a 30-minute game took three hours as we laughed and conversed, a welcome respite from my normally silent isolated daily existence here at the Old Same Place.

I didn't work on my book yesterday, nor have I begun to yet today. I hope I don't fall out of step with it.

***

I ordered a bunch of heirloom seeds last week to put in the cold frame, cold-weather things to experiment with in this bizarrely warm and snowless winter. Now I have the new J. L. Hudson paper catalog and I can't wait to dig in for some exotic goodies to start indoors now for planting out in May or June. There is no space whatever for planting-pots and trays in these cramp overstuffed quarters, but I think I'll set up my desk for a nursery table under the skylight since I never use it anyway.

Spilanthes acmella. Artemisia absinthium. Galium verum Can hardly wait.

Jonathan Goldman Chakra Chants thundering in the headphones. Sunlight streaming in from skylight, kissing my cheek good-bye as it moves on along the wall.

First writing of the day. Glorious bright still day.

Must spend the afternoon with friends who come here every-other-week to play exotic board and card games, weirder the better. Group has been on hiatus for several months, it's our first Saturday back, and it will be a good time, I think. Today we play 7 Wonders.

***

Good dreams overnight I feel no impulse to record: moving among the friends from Central Casting, having long conversations, picking locks, opening doors. Several young persons I am friends with locally were there, and I was telling them with sudden dream-insight that they would go on to publish many books, that they were doing very well.

Made it up here before confronting needful morning conversation--got the porridge cooked and served to brother and me, fresh blueberries! affordable once again, and his banana and my huge glass filled with Sumatra coffee and cream, cats and dog fed and let out and let in again, then dashing up steps to my loftofficebed to eat and read silently in the blessed hoarfrost morning moan of gray January sky.

I took yesterday a long hike diagonally across the waste and vacant lots toward the highway out of town through the Brass Rail Trailer Park its Jesus Saves bumper stickers and satellite-dish tripods on cinderblock feet and barking guardbeasts straining at the ends of their tenuous tethers, and on past the Rim Rock Motel, to nowhere, more of it out there even than here if that can be imagined.

Wondering from time to time how it looked, grayhaired lady wandering among weeds and road trash (when in my head I'm 12 still in adolescent gawkbody and still as ever childcurious about the world).

Emptied out the gifted trailer. Years worth of rat nests stuffed in every drawer, pine needles composted with foam-rubber bits chewed from the mattresses and bench pads, each of which is missing sizable chunks to rodent enterprise. Too, mattress coverings drenched & dried in ancient cat pee and here and there a long wafer of dried excrement.

The HEAVY rubber gloves. Hot water, vinegar for the stench of it, later (not combining) waves of ammonia and bleach in turn, not combining. Planned for today.

I emptied out the writing trailer late yesterday after first keyboarding 500 words for Chapter 5. I had started this project completing 1500 words a day, Now it's murder wringing out 500.

Hence, an analogy: my first two days of fastwalking I covered several miles and never was winded or sore. Since then, though, I crap out sooner and sooner. How does this square with building stamina? Husband, erstwhile drill instructor he is, explains that with much exercise after long slothfulness the body responds as though it were in emergency, and it hands you all the juice you need. But when a pattern of exercise forms, then the body adapts--this is the new normal--and returns to its pre-exertion levels of fuel and energy. So now I am winded after six blocks, now I pass out as soon as I get back home, and so on.

So with the writing: the emergency that carried me forward in the early chapters proves not so emergent after all, and now I have to build that muscle on my own. Ugh.

Let me find something pleasant to write about here.

My friend the artguy brought me the writing trailer, as I have said. He brought with it six sacks of VHS tapes--culled from his collection, now that he's done going over to DVD. So last night I sorted through them, have a sackful to give to the Friends of the Library thrift book nook. And a sackful of rarish Japanese and Chinese films, and a couple of Spanish ones, and some on Russian history, to mail to my friend LesLight in Sacramento, who is an art film person. There are enough westerns here to fill a sack--stuff with Charlton Heston and John Wayne and even cheapo recent things with Sam Elliot and Tom Selleck. These would have found their way to the thrift store, but Husband glimpsed them, and so ... My Brando collection has been enriched by six, and my Italian films by two.

Anyway, artguy gave us so many I think I can safely cancel my Netflix subscription for a while.

Best of all, he brought a boxful of persimmons just picked Monday night. A half-dozen are eatable now, so maybe I'll make persimmon pudding.

***

Sunbeam on my face now. Calm, calm. Feels so generous and kind. And of course warm.

My friend Artguy delivered a trailer to me today, which I have parked behind the house to be my writing shed. It is a dirty wreck of a thing and stinks of cat pee and rat nests (I think he preferred giving it away to cleaning it in order to sell it), and I am thrilled indeed.

"30 November [1914]. I can't write anymore. I've come up against the last boundary, before which I shall in all likelihood again sit down for years, and then in all likelihood begin another story all over again that will again remain unfinished. This fate pursues me. And I have become cold again, and insensible; nothing is left but a senile love for unbroken calm."--Franz Kafka, Diaries

***

CatLobsang hears the tapping of my hands on the keys and comes to engage--he will lie on the keyboard, or the mouse. If I pick up a pen he will lie on the notebook or rest his chin heavily on my writing hand as though purposely to stop me, calm me. As though my writing were a symptom he must treat.

Perhaps this is so.

Today is quite beautiful. Big puffy clouds scud about in the wind, which is high and blustery. The sunbeam is creeping into the skylight and should be full on my face in about 7 minutes.

Cat's head on my wrist.

"6 February [1922]. The comfort in hearing that someone had served in Paris, Brussels, London, Liverpool, had gone up the Amazon on a Brazilian steamer as far as the Peruvian border, with comparative ease had borne the dreadful sufferings of the winter campaign of the Seven Communities because he had been accustomed to hardship since his childhood. The comfort consists not only in the demonstration that such things are possible, but in the pleasure one feels when one realizes that with these achievements on the one level, much at the same time must have necessarily been achieved on the other level, much must have been wrung from clenched fists. It is possible, then." -- Franz Kafka, Diaries

***

Brilliant first day of what surely will be a pivotal year--for someone, anyway. I sit in the sunbeam from the skylight, which this time of year sweeps right to left across my bedpillows where I work, blinding me, and again I pause to search online for cheap raffia hats.