a thanksgiving miracle

I needed a sign that my life wasn't as dire as I've been feeling. Work has gone into a major dive (no money, no money, no money). After all that optimism a few posts ago I'm feeling sad and lonely. Oh no! Another ALONE holiday season. Man, four years on the road and I've got no book and no lover, the two things I wanted most. Why do some things come so easy and others are so fucking difficult?

I'm going to my sister's home for Thanksgiving and I'm bringing brussels sprouts with maple syrup. It is a recipe to win over all those brussels sprouts haters. But I can never remember the exact recipe so I was just going to wing it.

I decided to turn on TV as I ate breakfast and as I surfed by Martha I saw her and Emeril steaming brussels sprouts. Emeril made the exact same dressing that I was planning on making. It's a recipe from the Silver Palate holiday cookbook and I couldn't help but wonder how Emeril could pass it off as his own. It's the same exact thing. Here's the link (skip the shallots).

Nothing like a little miracle--and a little BS--to lift one's holiday spirits. Enjoy.

isolation or socialization?

That is a question posed by a friend from Texas and I tell you what, I struggle with that one every single day.

I so badly want to live out in the middle of nowhere that it hurts. Yesterday I drove to a small town about 25 miles away to see the dentist. I passed through open range land with occasional clumps of trees marking a homestead. The dried grasses shimmered gold and mountain silhouettes added a bit of drama.

I want to live where I can see the sun set and the sun rise and trace the cycles of the moon. I want to see that thunderstorm approach and watch the sky as it changes from blue to red to orange.

I live in a bowl. My trailer is surrounded by hills and mountains and tailing piles. I've missed a lot of sunsets, full moons and rainbows.

But, shoot, if I'm lonely here, in town and with my Three Amigos, I can't imagine how lonely I would be under one of those clumps of trees out in the middle of nowhere. For me the ideal scenario would be if this piece of property was on the outskirts of town and The Landlord and various tenants were with it. Or if I lived with someone, a lover, in one of those homesteads. Passersby would squint at the sun's rays glinting off this shiny aluminum trailer now turned guest house. Yep, that would be pretty nice.

To that 11:11 guy I say, yeah, I know all about the Law of Attraction. The problem is, in order to attract, you gotta know what you want. Therein lies the problem.

my fourth anniversary

I will never forget the morning I left Portland. I was scared shitless. I was captain and commander of a fleet which included a one-ton van, a Vespa motor scooter, and an Airstream travel trailer. I had a couple of planned stops on my way to ... I wasn't sure exactly. All I knew was I was going to The Desert.

The weather that morning was glorious. Blue skies opened like a curtain to the stage production that was to be my new life. Oregon had welcomed me with sun and wished me a bon voyage the same way.

I was leaving good friends and a state I had lived in for nearly thirty years. I had no idea what awaited me. Where does one live, exactly, in a trailer? In an RV park? But aren't those for travelers, people passing through? Mobile home parks? Aren't those for mobile homes which actually aren't mobile? I had some vague notion that I would stay in an RV park for a month and then have to move on, that there was some sort of time limit. Well, I was wrong. Most RV parks welcome long-term residents (especially in Arizona when the "people who are afraid of heat" move back north). Most mobile home parks (the mostly-funky ones) are really "trailer parks" which allow any type of home on wheels to park there. The Home of Dashed Hopes was a combination of all those: RV, mobile and trailer park.

How I miss that place.

What I didn't like about my brief stint as a home owner was the isolation. It was the absolute loneliest time of my life. I liked living in apartments where there were people around. And that's why I liked THofDH. There was always someone to have cocktails with, new people cycling through the park and, yes, even someone to make love to.

I so appreciate The Landlord and my cheap rent. I appreciate the community of writers and my Three Amigos. But this isn't where I belong. Even though I'm in plan-avoidance mode, I'm pretty sure that come next spring, I'll be moseying out of this mining town to a trailer park somewhere.

Unlike my old life--where looking back on the past year at New Year's or my birthday sent me sobbing to my bed--I actually look forward to these anniversaries. I can't wait to see where I'll be come next November.

the 11:11 club

We meet at The Landlord's casita on Tuesday nights after dinner at the homeless shelter. Well, I have dinner there; the others all volunteer at the shelter: The Landlord, The Yoga Teacher, The Italian, The New Tenant. Other people stop by The Landlord's on Tuesday nights like The Dancer (who is now in Mexico for the winter) but a lot of times it's just me and the three guys, my three amigos.

When the Tuesday night gathering first started up again after a brief hiatus we wound things up around 9:00 or 9:30. Then one night we glanced at the clock on the microwave and it was 11:11. "Do you guys know the significance of 11:11?" I asked. When no one did I said, "I'll often glance at a digital clock, like on my computer, and it'll be 11:11. It's freaky the way that happens. Those are winks from our angels letting us know they're around." This led us to a talk on numerology and we all did our birth numbers. (I really should be saving our notes from those nights, like the flow chart I did in an effort to track everyone's marriages--or near-marriages.)

Now we don't end the Tuesday night gatherings until after 11:11. Last week, at 10:26, The Yoga Teacher made a move to go home but then changed his mind, figuring he could last another 45 minutes.

Needless-to-say, most of us are pretty hung over the next day from drinking Tequila all evening because once we make it to 11:11 we're usually good for another hour or so. But something strange has happened to me as a result of those Tuesday nights: I've given up my daily adult beverage.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that every single day for the past ten years I have had a cocktail or a beer or a glass of wine and I think that's okay. But lately if I opened a bottle of wine at night, I would drink the whole thing. Or if I went to hear music on Saturdays I would drink three gin and tonics and get schnockered. I didn't feel comfortable about that level of drinking so I just stopped. And it's been surprisingly easy. I mean, I couldn't fathom spending a whole night in my trailer, bored to tears, without a cocktail. Now I drink tea or snack on a few almonds. And here's another thing...when I met The Poet for happy hour on Friday night I had one shot of Maker's Mark with a little glass of beer as a back. And that is all I drank the whole night. It was great. The next day I could remember most of our conversation, I wasn't hung over, and I had spent only $6.

So, pay attention to your clocks. You never know what kind of messages you may be receiving from the 11:11 guardians.

writers' group

Boy, does this group run the gamut when it comes to people and what their writing interests are. For instance, two of the guys are doing army memoirs, one guy is writing a futuristic book, three women are penning memoirs, one woman does young adult pirate stories, another poetry...

So my question is, what do you do when you're asked to comment on books you have no interest in whatsoever? Take the pirate stories. I don't like fantasy. I don't like young adult books. I never read Harry Potter and probably won't unless I'm stuck in a foreign country somewhere and am desperate for reading material. The problem, too, is a time issue. The Futuristic Guy has given us his whole tome--nearly 400 pages--that he wants feedback on. Shit, with working, I barely have time to read a book I'm interested in much less one that I'm not.

The Poet and I are becoming friends and she says I'm stressing too much about this. She's been in the group a long time and she said that she often doesn't spend time on people's work that she's not interested in. But I have this raging ethic that says if I want feedback on my writing, then I have to be willing to give it back. The Futuristic Guy puts a lot of work into his critiques and I feel as though I need to return the favor.

The futuristic book sucks. Don't get me wrong, the author knows how to write, he's got grammar down pretty good--as do I :o)--and he doesn't write overly long run-on sentences (you know, like this one) but the book is b-o-r-i-n-g considering its really great premise (which I will not divulge).

Anyway, the writing group is part of the reason for my blogging absence and is causing my own damn writing to suffer, too, which is rather ironic. I think it's pretty much a time management issue and so being the diligent little Capricorn goat that I am, here I go...take a deep breath, call on the muse then go over to Word and rewrite that first chapter, then dig out the red pencil and open the futuristic book...

a nail to the head

"Finally I can breathe." I was going to start this post that way but everyone kind of beat me to the punch: Nora Ephron, Oprah, practically every single one of my friends.

I couldn't bear to blog until the election was decided. I didn't want to get snarly and irate. Besides, I didn't have much time what with my newfound addiction to Huffington Post and other more liberal sites.

So, whew! That's over and now it's back to normal life. Normal life like The Landlord getting shot in the head by a nail gun. His partner did it by accident. A 3" nail lodged in The Landlord's head just behind his ear. Apparently his partner was beside himself and useless in this time of crisis but The Landlord was rather calm. He said that as much as they tried not to, hospital personnel could not keep from laughing when they saw him. Maybe he'll let me post one of the photos of the nail in his head that was taken by our new tenant.

Let's see, what else? Javelina wreaked havoc as they roved through our place like a band of horned thugs, knocking over everything in their paths, banging against the bottom of my trailer (certainly they didn't need to go underneath), and then finally refusing to leave The Landlord's porch. God, they're brazen beasts.

So it's back to blogging time. I notice that a bunch of my friends also took a blogging hiatus and I hope they're back at it, too.