Dear J,

Well, my passion is unruly, J. I turned from writing to you -- telling you I was going to work on one piece -- to writing some other things, unexpected things, things that pushed forward to the front of the line. You know, I write a lot of what… Read full post »

Dear Imaginary Julie,

Well, actually, I'm gonna call you just Imaginary  J because I know several actual Julies and you have to be Imaginary Julie or you will get all mixed up in my head with those actual Julies. So you'll just be J. Imaginary J. If that's OK, even though… Read full post »

Big thought just hit me. I kinda have trouble writing for the blog. How come? dunno, dunno, dunno, then it hit: I had no idea who I was writing to. That's it! Also why advice column is such an excellent format for me: I know who I am writing to!

Try… Read full post »

While I was in the MRI machine today, I thought of my friend Tom Fowler, the artist who died because of lack of health insurance.

(Not the artist named Tom Fowler who is Mignon's husband -- a different artist named Tom Fowler.)

The MRI machine was taking pictures of… Read full post »

Greetings. [Having by some infernal and accidental use of the spacebar in combination with unknown other keys keys lost the first and brilliant iteration of this post ... I try to recreate, which means recreating the exact mental/emotional state ... fick fick fick!]

i don't remember

i can rem… Read full post »

Oh, what sky! Oh, what Tundra V8 power up Clipper toward Portola and toward the sky! Oh what reverence before rainclouds: Where in the built world is found that color gray? Can it be the sun-silvered look of weathered redwood fenceboards in the low, leaning fences of Sunset backyards? Can it… Read full post »

That's Marlon Brando in "The Fugitive Kind." He and Joanne Woodward drive out to a cemetery in the night and get out of the car and she says, "You hear the dead people talking?" and he says, "Dead people don't talk." 

"Sure they do," she says. "Chatter away like birds ...… Read full post »

I wonder what it's like to be in a burning building or to get hit by a car. Not that I want to get hit by a car but don't you wonder too? Don't you wonder what it's like in Antarctica and outer space? Being in surgery felt like being in… Read full post »

OK indeed, enough worrying about the Salon page vs. the blog. This is for me. It's for you. It's for healing. It's to process the grief from my father's death. Yep, yesterday he passed over into a realm he was quite familiar with, the realm of angels and aliens.

So… Read full post »

Well, so Sarah Hepola, my editor at Salon, called yesterday and asked if I'd mind if my Open Salon posts went up on the Salon.com front page, and I was pleased -- of course I wouldn't mind, it was an honor. I still feel that way after many years at Salon… Read full post »

Ain't it the truth? You deal with what you can deal with and leave the rest on the floor of the garage till tomorrow or till you can get the tools. A life is a trail of the mysterious unfinished. What did you have in mind when you welded this together?… Read full post »

After decades lighting up the screens of memory and emotion, revealing ghosts, making dormant patterns appear as if dusted with fingerprint powder, finding heat to make readable the invisible ink of preconscious inscriptions, decoding obscure languages spoken by personal archetypes, learning the many… Read full post »

Hi. I just got off the phone with Ruth -- Henrich, who like me is a longtime Salon.com employee. She called to see how I was. Nice of her to do that. She's a nice person. So we talked. I've been out of touch. I'm resting up. I have this couch… Read full post »

Driving home through the quiet Sunset with my noodles it occurred to me to blog. 

It was like an itch.

I hope it goes away.

That might be interesting sometime but not yet.

Meanwhile:

At five minutes to midnight Tuesday night I finished the vegetable tofu noodle soup from… Read full post »

Dear Reader,

As I write, it is Sept. 11, my birthday. Sept. 11 is not the best day to be wearing a shiny birthday hat and blowing out candles. But this week I hit on something: Use the cataclysm as a catalyst. So today, I call on all writers -- poets, prose… Read full post »

I would keep writing while traveling. We'd all be hanging out together. That was the idea. Not to write about death. Maybe The Problem of Focus and Boundaries in Writing. The gift of having an advice column. Now late at night in my silent hotel room

 I try to… Read full post »

Freeze. The familiar series of questioning thoughts and that old, familiar slumpy feeling of nothing to say and irrelevance.

OK. I came to Fort Walton Beach. OK, here is the thing. 

It was necessary to come to Fort Walton Beach, Fla., to help my brother help my dad. My dad broke… Read full post »

So my musician brother tells me this story about back when he'd just moved in to the Melrose Park house in Lauderdale and next door was a house full of skinheads with pythons in the shower stall. So one of the snakes gets sick and the skinhead drives it out to… Read full post »

The USO soldiers come and go with their shoulder patches and their boots and I consider the TGO Friday's vs. the Chilis vs. the Starbucks and find on the front porch of the TGO Friday's a snug little Samsung alcove with plush black leather chairs and an electrical outlet and try… Read full post »

and ... the elite and very special board, and those needing assistance board, and ... group 1 boards  ... group 2 ... group 3 ... group 4 ... and ... thank you for waiting group 5 boards ... and do I have any rolling luggage, and ... i made it, i… Read full post »

never fly again never fly again never fly again

never place my fate again in the incompetent hands of ...

Wait!

Gate 60 Miracle of interminable flight delay:

Look at the sunrise 7:04 a.m. over the mountains east of the Bay, look at the photo snapper in the Gate 60… Read full post »

On the road, in the airport, used to be you could cut it close, cutting it close was part of the thrill, you could run, you could catch the plane, not even cutting it close this time, arriving at 5:30 a.m. for a 6:05 flight, is that so unconscionable, but the… Read full post »

Could be me. Have a feeling it's Harper's.

Two things I'm doing. One, I'm organizing the Unemployed Writers Workshop in San Francisco. It's a free thing to keep writers's spirits up and such. You can ask me about that. We can do it together.

The other thing is the followup book: Stories from survivors of my advice about… Read full post »

Whatever wants to be written will be written. Whatever calls out to me will be a song. Whatever crosses the yard at night will be photographed and charted. Whatever crosses the sky will be remembered. Whoever speaks will be heard. Whoever listens will be repaid. Whatever clock is wound in the… Read full post »