At long last, news from moi as opposed to news from so very many others!

Mom went back in the hospital for more surgery this week, so it's been sort of a scrunched schedule around here. But all went well and the weather has been staggeringly gorgeous around here the last few days. I even took time out from the endless, endless, ENDLESS attempts to make headway on the 500 page new novel to do a little gardening in what became a jungle out there in my backyard. (Thanks to the girlfriend, my front yard looks fabulous. She loves to work in my garden. I so don't understand this and glare at her kind of darkly when she's doing it and I wonder, "What the fuck is up with that? Why is she doing that -- getting all sweaty and stuff -- and for free, no less?" But, regardless, my front yard looks really great thanks to her.) And thanks to me, my backyard is starting to look civilized again.

Today is a big day for me. I am at long last getting a garbage disposal! My first ever as an adult. (Just FYI, most NYC apartments don't have garbage disposals. Just in case you were dreaming of moving there to live the glamorous life of a lowly writer and thinking you could dump all your table scraps down the sink -- au contraire! Cruel, cruel world.)

And the even bigger news is that the girlfriend and I have planned our first trip together. No, not a week at the George V in Paris. But 2 nights in a cabin in the woods at a State Park. I get very excited about staying in cabins in the middle of nowhere and it was really kind of like a dream come true to find out that so does she! Yay! Gone are the days when various "significant others" would stay with me in cabins in the woods strictly to humor me...

She said: "You mean you like the solitude of a cabin so that you can write there in the peace and quiet?"

Me: "No! I like to drink a lot of wine and have a ton of sex in the peace and quiet."

Suddenly she was on the phone, making the reservations! Go figure!

However, there is a catch: I do like to spend my "cabin" time cooking; sitting out on the screened-in porch drinking red wine; utilizing the bed as thoroughly as possible...but I think she's going to actually make me hike on all those hiking trails. (Wait! That sounds suspiciously like exercise to me!) Here's a photo of the cabin's living room:



Loyal readers of this lofty blog will no doubt note that it kinda looks like my actual family room and you might be wondering why on earth I would take a vacation to somewhere that looks pretty much like where I live all the time, but oh well...

Onward.

I am hard at work on a grant proposal -- those suck! You have to write those ominous STATEMENTS about your work and those statements have to basically be better than anything you've ever written in your entire life, and in only about 2 paragraphs. When I'm brushing my teeth, I'm formulating that Statement; when I'm making my many salads, I'm formulating that Statement; when I'm out back pulling weeds, I'm formulating that Statement. And yet, when I plop my quite comely behind in front of the laptop -- yes, you guessed it -- NOTHING comes to me! Deadsville, daddy-o. Blank stare time. Nothing but the lonely sound of crickets.

But I'm hanging in there. I am determined to get this gosh-darned grant.

And I am also working on that short-short story that is due by September 1st. (How did that happen? How did it get to be almost September 1st around here? Unreal how time flies.)

And last but not least, my apologies to those among you who prefer not to see photos of the otherwise quite photogenic Johnny Depp flipping the bird at the world. I just kinda liked it and felt like sharing.

I have not always been a Johnny Depp fan. In fact, he used to totally, totally skeeve me and work my last nerve. This is going way, way back to the 80s, though, which just goes to show you how indescribably old I am (and, for a writer, that's saying a lot: that even in the un-abridged edition of Webster's Dictionary, which is so heavy you can barely lift it, yes, even with access to all those words, I am still incapable of describing how old I am.) But, yes, Johnny Depp used to skeeve me. I remember actually being angry once that he was in the movie Cry Baby because I was such a huge Iggy Pop fan and a John Waters fan, too, and in order to see the movie I was going to be forced to sit there and watch Johnny Depp.

Me (angrily tossing the New York Times Movie section on Pamela Enz's kitchen table, back when we lived in the same tenement on E. 12th Street): "Fuck!"

Her: "What's the matter?"

Me: "It's that guy -- the one named after the hair gel. I just want to see Iggy Pop."

Her: "Well, maybe it won't be so bad. I still think we should go."

And then that Cry Baby movie poster, which was unavoidable at the subway stop where I used to have to get off at to go to my job at the Museum of Modern Art every day. I actually would refuse to look at that poster, it pissed me off so bad.

But we saw the movie over at the Waverly regardless and I actually thought he was all right.

I remember it was a very humid night. Not hot, but unpleasantly humid. I remember the night so well because it was the first night I talked to Mark Pritchard on the telephone. He called from San Francisco to introduce himself and to say he wanted to publish a story of mine, "The Urge Toward Jo." He was on my answering machine when I got home from seeing Cry Baby, so it was a big night for me. Up until then, only lesbians had published my short stories. He took a huge risk, publishing that story. My stomach was actually shaking when I was talking to him on the phone; I couldn't believe he was actually willing to publish it. In a lot of ways, that story put me on the map. Sadly, it has become an underground pedophile classic and it was never intended to be that. But what can you do? It's not as though I can travel the globe and try to retrieve all the Xerox'd copies of the story that have circulated over the last 18 years & tell people, "that's not what the story was supposed to be about"...

When I saw Johnny Depp at the Ziegfeld in Edward Scissorhands, though, I was floored; I think my heart exploded. I don't think I said a word all the way home in the cab. But I didn't actually become a "fan" until I saw Ed Wood. That said, however. It didn't keep me from being really rude to him one night on E. 12th Street in Manhattan. He was with a posse of guys and suddenly stopped walking right in front of me on the sidewalk and I could not get past him and I was running late for a meeting at the Cedar Tavern. I remember there was a full moon and that it was January.

Me (under my breath, really disgusted): "Get out of my fucking way."

Johnny Depp: (Complete obliviousness) (Yells something like "call me when you get there" to somebody else, but yells this right in my face.)

Me (rolling my eyes as I cross the street to get away from him): "Jesus fucking Christ, I am so fucking late!"

And once, my friend Joe Queenan gave me an issue of Movieline that had a great story of his in it and a photo of Johnny Depp on its cover. I was past my hating Johnny Depp phase, but loving him in Ed Wood was still a long way off. But still... there was a photo of him in the magazine that really intrigued me. I tore it out of the magazine and stuck it up on the wall over my desk. (I think it stayed stuck there for ten years; literally.)

What fascinated me about the photo was his expression; I wondered what it was he was thinking about. And I thought to myself, "If it were me looking that way, I'd be thinking about this." And then I wrote Neptune & Surf. (Yes. The mighty, mighty Neptune & Surf. The award-winner.) Seriously. It took me 4 years to write it, but I wrote it while looking at that photo night & day. I share it with you now to sort of balance out the photo I posted the other day.

Dream on it, baby!  Scribble away! See ya, gang! And thanks for visiting.