The Wong Kitchen

Indelible. Diatribe.

Dahlia.

These are some words I like.

Here is something I overheard on my street not long ago: "That's the problem with Gypsies. They never finish what they start." I think, but I can't be sure, that the person who said this is ethnically (?) a Gypsy.

What am I at here? I'm warming up. Sorry, it's been a while and I feel like I've forgotten how to do this. This being: write as if I have something to say.

For me, writing is like exercising. I ought to do it; I need to do it. I start with great gusto and commitment - a determined stick-to-it-tivenes. And then I am undermined by "other things" - life and laziness and then lack of confidence. You know how it goes. We had a couch like this back at 77 Carlton - that's the apartment I shared with Herb and Lori when I first moved to Toronto. We called it the "couch of inertia" - How Herb misses that couch. It was our field of poppies; it just sucked every ambition out of your body until all you could do was lay back helplessly and watch rerun after rerun of Felicity. That is where my brain is and I just need to know, does she end up with Ben or not?

No. I'm fighting it. I am.

We are back from our visit from Baltimore. A trip somewhat like a haj - a physical, emotional and spiritual journey to the homeland which, while deeply important and meaningful, requires a whole lot of energy (not to mention the shlepping). Every fiber of my being before and during was lit with the requirements of this trip and so I kindof slacked off everything else. Also, Nate slept in the same room as the computer. Sure, there's my excuse.

Well, also, I've felt a bit shitty (for lack of a better word) and writing in this way requires something from me that gets lost easily when I am not at my best. My voice, I guess. It's not writers' block, more like writers' laryngitis. What I mean is this: So in university I was big in the creative writing scene. I had this advisor, a wonderful man named Peter Cooley, and I would come to him with all my post-adolescent angst about my worth and value and say things like "I just don't feel like I deserve to call myself a poet." And he would say, "Well, Jessie, if you're going to be a poet, you're going to have to get over that." Guess what - I write funding proposals for a living (not that there isn't some poetry there) but I didn't. Get over it, I mean.

I could not commit to writing in that sense - as a poet writes - because it seemed necessary to know something about life and the world; to have some experience or insight that was unique and worth sharing and as far as I could tell I was the most ordinary of persons with a fairly comfortable and easy life with no great risks or losses and who on earth needs to hear about that? The fact that I was good at it, that it came naturally, that it was a compelling force - maybe the only compelling force - in my life just didn't seem reason enough. Cowardice trumps passion: a tragedy.

Well, not a tragedy really. I'm quite happy with the way my life rolled out and things would certainly have gone differently (not necessarily worse, I guess, but differently) had I taken that other path. And I like what I do...knowing in a concrete way that what I write matters, that it has a purpose larger than and outside of me.

But that's not this. This is indulgent (isn't it?).

I spent a great deal of time in the kitchen today pureeing carrots and listening to the CBC. They were interviewing a writer, Rick Moody, about his work, mostly fiction, but he was talking about the one memoir he wrote: The Black Veil, which is somewhat about his search for his family roots and his struggle with depression, which he prefers to call melancholy (another beautiful word despite its meaning). Between spurts of the deafening hand-mixer buzz, I listened to him explain how difficult and painful it was for him to write about himself, how he hated it, in a way. Now this is a very famous and very talented writer. I am neither but I felt something like kinship to him as he spoke. He said that while he is so deeply uncomfortable writing about himself and his experiences that it is the only way he knows how to process his life and the things that happen to him. And that he doesn't understand anything about what he knows or thinks until he writes about it. I am that way too. I am a constant, silent narrator - explaining myself to myself. Putting it all in words, so I can get it. And maybe it is because that work is so private and intimate, it feels uncomfortable to put it out there.

So there you go, I'm sure I've burned off enough mental calories to have (another) glass of wine guilt-free. I'm back on track. If there's anyone still interested.

Tonight's Dinner:

Flattened Chicken (ask me about this if you don't know. you should know, really).

Mushroom Risotto

Spinach Salad

Pureed carrots & peaches, 1/2 an avocado (That would be Nate. He later threw up a good chunk of that. It was distinctly both orange and green, not brown as you'd think).