I’ve been staying in a hotel during a short interim while I decide where to move.
While I am in the hotel observing guests, their mannerisms, conversations, and facial expressions, I have come to the conclusion that we are not only on a fiscal cliff, we are on a sinking shore of wet sand. I see guests who’ve come for gambling, visiting relatives, exploring Upstate NY, and lapping up a vacation as if it were their first. They are thirsty for living the essence of comfort, congeniality, and the aspirations of autumn. Shed the withered and welcome the wild. I see giddy faces and sluggish bodies weighted down by heavy tote bags. Some seem to shuffle like the very old or weak, from the pathway to the lobby. I was not excluded; by the time I checked into the hotel, my body was withered from having to move out of my home of twenty-five years. All I wanted to do was sink into a bed and hang the Do Not Disturb notice on the door. Several guests are annoyed by too much information, too many alerts, too many scandals, and too much uncertainty.The adventure of livingness has a trajectory marked by misadventures.
In reading the WordPress posts, I’ve discovered the Travel blogs are the ones that revive my interest in the world I haven’t seen. These are the ones I read because they spark my passion for travel, rather than comfort and complacency. The Mediterranean has been stirring in my imagination ever since I researched the coastal splendor of all those portside villages. Thanks to you, travel bloggers, I made the decision. This is the year for Italy. Now that it’s written, I must follow my word.
Writing feels rusty today. I plow deliberately through the blank mental soil to find a blade of substance in a week of tragedy and cultural chaos. In conversations with men and women about our fractured culture.
” It was never like this when I was growing up,” that is from a fifty-year-old,
” I won’t get on a plane, no way?” from a forty-year-old.
” I don’t talk about my views with anyone at work or out of work, except my family and friends.”
I replied, “Yes, we have to talk niceties, bland boring conversation. “
When I was growing up, there was more joking, laughter, and confessional conversation. I was thinking about my high school years; we talked a lot about emotions, our parents, our dreams, and our fears. I don’t recall restraining what was on my mind. Perhaps that is why the majority of the younger generation prefers social media friends, as they can be easily deleted or blocked. On my FB page and feed, not one follower or friend reveals their political views, including myself. Isn’t that so contrary to humanity? And political violence, I keep hearing we won’t tolerate that on the news, but we are tolerating it. Do we all need drones over our homes for security? An optimist would say, We can do better, and we will; a pessimist might say, I think it’s going to get worse, and a nihilist would say, Life isn’t worth fixing; it’s just worthless.
I canceled my utubetv cable account, because on most days anxiety is at full tank without the news. ย In this new state of freedom from home; maintenance, repairs, showings and tenants, time is on another clock.The one that ticks as a writer in progress who is dusting off the least truest of thoughts. ย ย ย ย
Scintillating in luxury and comfort is therapeutic if mastered with moderation. So, my second week here in the hotel, I opened the thruway to discerning tasks: a deep dive into publishing my book, rewriting the ending so art isnโt imitating life, but the other way around, searching for part-time employment, a seriously pragmatic approach to where to move, and writing my pop-up columns.
It is tremendously easy to write from this hotel room, without those damn barking dogs next to my home, the constant vibration and noise of mowers, blowers, and city works.
On my desk is Henry Millerโs book, On Writing, and every page moves the mental nerves in some way. โThe writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become the path itself.โ From living in isolation in my home, my tenants are cordial but reserved; I am now swept like a surfboard into a wave of public swells. It is their stories that come out of this experience.
I begin with the Casino, attached to the hotel lobby, and open at 11 am. Arrivals begin: gamblers shuffle inside, some in wheelchairs, younger men with speedy strides, couples, single women, a plethora of humanity in common, with one mission: to win. I take a seat at the bar, and eye wonder at the slot machines. I havenโt counted them, but the room for walking is limited. There is one machine with the motif of a bull, and when someone sits, the bull grumbles loudly, so I pull out my earplugs. I watched one man win, and after he left, other players who heard the winning clang took his seat. It is a popular machine.
The casino looks to be around eight thousand square feet, with seventeen hundred gambling options. The path to get back to the hotel, I have to navigate around and around. The first time, of course, I went in circles as my sense of direction is like a butterfly’s.
โ Excuse me, can you tell me the most direct way back to the hotel?โ
โ Lost are you? Follow this carpet pattern, the one in the middle, and it will take you back.โ
Off I trot, staring at the paisley pattern, through six different arenas to the hotel. I went outside and took a seat on the bench. A woman passed by and stopped, โ How are you?โ
โAdapting, Iโve not been here but a few days.โ
โ Oh, weโre just checking out. I canโt wait to get home to my Pomeranians. I have two. I rescued them, and they are my babies,” she continued, talking about the dogs. As she spoke, I noticed how immensely liberated she was in conversation, and how her hair matched her outfit. She smiled while talking.
โ Iโve seen you before. I noticed your style; you were wearing such a pretty outfit”, she said earnestly.
โ Well, thank you, and so are you.โ
โ Are you alone? I think you are, but donโt let that get you down.โ
โ I wasnโt ready for a very long time. I’m crossing over that mountain, only Iโm not like you. I canโt approach people the way you just did.โ
โ I used to be like that! Now I donโt care, and you shouldnโt either. God loves you, we are all his children, and we need to love each other.โ
I let her go on and thought any minute she might bring out a bible or a cross and start praying for me.
โ I bet my husband is looking for me; heโll be mad, not really, heโs used to it. Weโve been together forty-five years.
โ Remarkable. Whatโs your secret?โ
โ Love, respect, and compromise, itโs really very simple. You’ll meet your honey, I feel it, you want that, donโt you?โ
โYes, when a man tells me everything is going to be okay, I settle down. Iโm emotionally overweight.โ
โYouโre funny, see that is another quality that gets you through life.โ
โ I see a man approaching, and she introduces her husband. He is tall, and emulates a calmness and contentment as he hedges into the conversation about going to Lake Placid.โย
โ Have you been there?โ he asked.
โ Years ago. Itโs beautiful.โ
โ I turned towards his wife. I didnโt get your name.โ
โ Donetica, Italian, my friends call me Dee.โ
โI’m Loulou, and thank you for stopping by my bench.โ
She giggled, blew a kiss, and said in parting, โ I love you.โ
As she left, a woman exited the hotel in a state of exhilaration.
โ It looks like you had a good day,โ I said
โ Yes!ย I won eight hundred dollars. She swung her purse and skipped off. ย
Hmm, I wouldnโt mind winning at all, but Iโm in enough ambiguity to play against those odds. To be continued.
With every turn, right, left, or center, I observe novelty, unfamiliar faces, facades, and finery.ย The conversations that linger over the opulent surround sound lobby release a fusion of shouting and laughter.ย New Yorkers are not whisperers, and my annoying sensitivity to sound, forces me to go in and outside a dozen times a day. That is when I meet the guests, perched on benches and rocking chairs. In the six days Iโve been, here Iโve accumulated dozens of conversations, not just niceties but life stories expressed in thirty-minutes.
The first day of arrival began with a dining hallabaloo organized by the best broker, Scott Varley, who sold my home. ย ย At the table, Scott and his friends, who ย knew the bartender’s, waitress, restaurant manager, and a few guests at the bar, so our table became a Musso Frank sort of mise en scene. I, as usual, was punctuated with awe, as this is a new kind of adventure in livingness after Ballston Spa. Drinks arrived with the speed of a remote, and as we all filed in for the liberated moment, when we exhumed our true selves.ย Lynn, the woman next to me, was a beautiful, statuesque, stylish woman whose poised and confident aura emanated from her.
โ I hear Scott sold your home. Is that a good thing for you? Itโs not always.โ
โ Yes, a few days ago. ย Well, a paradox, I loved the home, a Victorian, but it was also most of my income.
โ What will you do now?โ
โ About what?โย She laughed and tilted her head back.
โ Where are you moving?โ
โ I donโt know yet.โ Her eyes widened, and she responded flatly.
โ You donโt know? You have to have some idea.โ
โ It depends on the proceeds, an ex is involved, itโs too complicated over a martini, and all this talk. I can barely hear you. โ
โ An ex is always involved. How long are you staying at the hotel?โ
โ Youโll love this..
โ Donโt tell me, you donโt know. Youโre adorable.โ
โ Thank you, and I sense you are very strong.โ
โ You bet I am.! She punctuated that with a fist to the table. โ
The night zigzagged, with Lynn and Scott scurrying into the casino, while I remained, as casinos mean, the genes of my father may flare up. The bar was baritone loud and after what seemed four hours, I returned to my room, quite comfort, marvelous pillows unlike Iโve ever felt, ย โ I canโt fucking believe this.โ ย ย To be continued
Five mass shootings in one week, and all I hear is prayers. Please forgive me, but I am enraged with the absence of humanity, accountability, and chat all day about how to be famous and healthy. IT IS CALLED MENTAL HEALTH.
“Young woman sitting on the books and typing, toned image”
The world we are living is not familiar; everyday it erupts with an inconceivable corruption, acts of violence, and viciousness against humanity. It’s not the Italian roast coffee that wakes me up, itโs world news.ย I feel less and less a part of humanity and more like a wild creature chewing on an old bone. ย My outlook on social clubs, synagogue and church congregations, membership clubs, group classes, and letโs meet up organizing makes a lot of sense now. Especially if you donโt have children or a life mate. The temptation to retreat into a decorous world of fantasy is irresistible. ย Experience taught me that losing it, giving up, hugging the pillow with film noir on the screen will revive me. It may take two days or more, permitting freedom to indulge in the abstract absurdity, tragedy, and comedy of life available to me.Two days are up: six noir films: Sleeping Tiger, Dangerous Crossing, Ruthless, Finger of Guilt, Wicked, and Cast a Dark Shadow. All suspenseful meandering around themes of greed, deception, romance, uneven love, and forgiveness.
Itโs a great big wide wide world if you leave the doors open. Now that the house has sold, I am fortunate that all those years studying real estate and proving myself by placing money in the boss’s pocket, trickled into my life. The first triplex I bought was in 2002, the one that sold, The Follies House. The rent provided income and paid the mortgage.ย For my Gen X and Millennial pals, I say this: buy a duplex somewhere you want to live.
Iโm feeling overwhelmed as I go through this four-story unit and decide what to keep, give away, and sell. Perplexed as I go through boxes of journals dating back to 1996. I assume I won’t live to preview them for new stories, but I sill feel a sense of belonging to them. I have learned after selling a dozen furnishings that once they are gone, it takes about a week to stop lamenting the loss.
ADVENTURES IN LIVINGNESS FALLS ON. An unusual time to be writing at four in the afternoon. The clouds drew me up to my writing desk, where layers of clouds forms teased me into believing it wasnโt hot and humid outside.ย I decided to write the column.
I knew I shouldnโt write on my laptop because it is deconstructing. I can’t part with this laptop until I outline my next book. The sky drew me to the desk, and so I worked around internet outages.
I only had a few paragraphs from the afternoon, and when I returned to the column after dinner, the whole piece took another course, and I was writing not what I intended, but it was like sailing on a perfect course. It was writing without the editor, meaning the inner editor that sometimes swoops down and cuts your nails off. I was writing about many things that happened. When I finished, I went to save the document and the laptop responded negatively. It vanished. I thought about trying to recapture the column, trying to reinvent the stream of consciousness that seemed to be marathoning through my soul.
There were so many voices speaking all at once. I had to figure out how to connect the moment the leaves reminded me of Saratoga Springs, and how we must place our print on the tablet, on the screen, and dismiss the reader who judges where writing takes us. Sometimes, a reader knows me from the halcyon days, when my light was neon and my spirit a flame. They don’t want to see me now, draped in muted gray and hardship hardened. “Nobody loves you when you’re down and out.” Jimmy Cox
ADVENTURES IN LIVINGNESS IS ON A HIKE. Not the physical kind that was once a weekly episode in New Mexico, these days I hike in my head, it’s as wobbly, uneven, rocky, and dangerous as a hike down the Gorge in Taos, NM.
The path I’m hiking is set off by relocation, once the house sells, which is on the fingernail of being sold. Each morning as I wake to my dreamy bedroom, I am deranged by the thought of leaving twenty-five hundred square feet of Victorian victorious comfort.I will be downsizing to a six-hundred-square-foot studio. I used to love studios, but this house has drained that love, and now reality is staring me in the face, a word I despise as an admitted non-realist and dreamer. The path that follows this is where I am relocating to? Relocation is a trend, according to some minor research. Boomers move closer to their children. If you donโt have children or a partner to bring out the compass and use a methodical ruler to figure this equation out, it comes down to finance. Thatโs the ticker that keeps bringing me back to reality. I should not have left Del Mar, CA. Have you ever said that? Itโs the inkblot on decisions when I thought everything I did would work out until it didnโt. And Iโd turn the steering wheel back to where I belong.ย I do not belong here, and thatโs not because of aversion or harsh judgment. Itโs a marvel if you like three courses of simple conversation, activity, and entertainment. ย ย The weather and I do not get along, the summer is sticky, humid, and last week we were in double digits, one hundred. I spent a few days next to a non-effective window air conditioner with an ice washcloth on my head. In the winter, Iโm in battle gear with four sweaters and shawls and all of that, not to mention the ice and snow that kept me frosty for months. You can take a girl out of Southern California, but sheโll come back.
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Borrowing from a post on FB, you spend the first thirty years of your life gathering possessions, and the next thirty years eliminating. Iโm eliminating, sort of, I cruise by my ten boxes of books, and every day itโs on the list to tape them closed. Then there are all the antique figurines, gambling paraphernalia, dรฉcor from the vacation rental days, and I think at last count, fifty hanging prints. I donโt need to measure anything, this will not fit in a studio. Plus, I still have a storage unit in Santa Fe, filled with items I cannot remember. Is there such a thing as relocation therapy?
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I watch film noir with an admitted addiction. The grainy black and white stillness, the music scores, the cinematography satisfies more than current cinema . The message comes through, live gracious, selfless, forgiving, brave, and passionate? As I feel these thoughts streaming along, the one that stabs like a knife is passion. That visceral sensibility has driven me throughout my life: about men, mystery,adventure, accomplishment, art, music, dancing, unfamiliar places and faces, and cafรฉ society rendezvous. A temporary grasp of glee. And when it ends, it goes like this.ย ย
Undisclosed strangers will walk in our paths. Cross our hearts and Tread on our minds ย
Uncertainly We traverse our heart’s discourse Shooting for dreams of undiscovered lands More weightless plans I donโt know if I can see ahead My steps, like pebbles, follow the rush in the river On the edge of the quiver
Skipping towards freedom In summer, rays of light Like a leaf, I break free from the branch,
Writing somberly is parallel to writer’s block. It’s not a block, really, more like a resistance to engaging feelings. ย If I place all the options on a puzzle board, this leads to the center. A fractured life impacts emotional posture and is not unlike physical posture. We slump or stand tall. We love instead of neutralizing, we are inspired instead of stagnant, we romance our passions, and we live to love. My heart is at the starting gate to love again, but the racetrack is missing. I’m undercover! I watch Blacklist or some foreign film in the evening. Most weekdays, I’m circulating between finance, selling furnishings online, shoveling snow, and researching acronyms because the news uses them so often.
The vortex of discontent is a punctured life.The windows of my home reflect the splendor of nature that plays all day long in the winter. ย I’m spending more time watching sky stage plays: clouds still, clouds moving, colliding, changing colors, sculpted into aberrations of animals and faces, than cognitive thinking. My collection of records and CDs accompanies the scenery. When I’m sorrowful, I listen to Ennio Morricone; when I need a lift, Vivaldi, Sundays it isย Turandot or some other Opera. When I’m a go-go girl, Swing, Salsa, or The Stones, when I feel alone, Sarah Vaughn, Nancy Wilson, and Etta James, for writing inspiration Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Annie Lenox.ย
I don’t see any remedy commercials for a fractured heart. By tomorrow, the despair could vanish, like the rain that puddled us for the last two weeks.Everything Iโve experienced is good in the beginning. So, to begin, I will listen to Begin the Beguine.
“Begin the Beguine” is a popular song written by Cole Porter. Porter composed the song between Kalabahi, Indonesia, and Fiji during a 1935 Pacific cruise aboard Cunard’s ocean liner Franconia. In October 1935, it was introduced by June Knight in the Broadway musical Jubilee, produced at the Imperial Theater.
Henry miller writes in his book, โ Henry Miller on Writingโ โWhoever greatly suffers must be, I suppose a sublime combination of a sadist and masochist.โ I suppose that a few of my friends have aligned me as such, and now that I write this, as in all writing, answers blink at you, and then the soul receives them like a wafer of wonder.Perhaps I am, but where that evolved and manifested, I have no time to think about it because the sun is out. I must sit in my newly designed sunroom, a small book library alcove that receives the sun at noon. When I returned with my phone to snap a photograph, the sundisappeared like a footprint in the sky. Every moment needs attention. It’s twenty degrees outdoors. I am modestly adjusted and receive a thousand weekly warnings to get a flu shot. My doctor has tried persuading me to get a flu shot for three years. I responded that I’d never had the flu and that my last cold was in 2012. He chuckled and asked the next question.
Uncertainty We traverse our heart’s discourse Shooting for dreams of undiscovered lands More weightless plans I donโt know if I can see ahead My steps, like pebbles,follow the rush in the river On the edge of aquiver
Skipping towards freedom In summer, rays of light Like a leaf, I break free from the branch
The subject pierced me yesterday morning and came from Anais Nin, a passage in her diary.ย โEach friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.โ โ Anaรฏs Nin, The Diary of Anaรฏs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934.
ย ย Today, the first in several months that the atmosphere is ripe with thought, and has brought me back to the writing of the moment. The delivery trucks have not opened their doors, and dropped their ramps, the garbage trucks have already passed, and the traffic is so slight as it is Sunday.
Spring is brushing nature with a varnish of subdued sunshine.ย I sit at my desk and listen. I hear some cheerful shouting on the sidewalk, a horn breaks the sanctuary, and then a sparrow lands on the terrace, and we watch each other.ย I breathe deep, close my eyes, and feel my oatmeal breakfast thumping in my belly.
The stream of consciousness is threaded into the deeper blanket of anxiousness. I am in the circle of chaos that seeps into everyday activities. Tempers are flaring, rousing combative street encounters. Business owners and employees are jumping ship everywhere. People are relocating, selling possessions,ย or using succulent lips and breasts to lure men for financial support. We are all edgy.
ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS 
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