Why I Love Being Single

The end of this year was one of the very few times in my life I've had to buy a calendar.  As a Sierra Club member, I usually get one from them or from some other environmental charity (this year's was from the Nature Conservancy).  I don't know if I was too late with my membership fee or if they raised the amount you had to give to get a calendar this year, but all I know is that it's the end of December and no one has sent me a 2012 calendar.  This story does have I point, I promise.  Anyway, knowing that I would need a wall calendar for my "office" (actually just the desk area where I keep my computer and beer), I decided to get something that I would really like.  Now I like puppies and lighthouses as much as the next writer, but this year I decided to buy my very first shirtless model calendar.

Not that this is big deal in itself. I did it partially as a joke, partially because I actually like the calendar, and partially because it helped support an AIDS charity.  The photos are actually very tasteful, I think.  I wish some of the models had slightly less clothing, but it's cool.  But the reason I can get away with putting this thing up on my wall is that I am quite single, and no one is around to complain about what a deviant I am.

Hello, Mr. February.

I swear I'm not whistling in the dark here.  One of my friends broke up with his girlfriend a few months ago and then proceeded to tell me how much he "liked living the single life."  He was just a little too emphatic about it, and I knew that after talking to me about how great the single life was, he was going home and crying in his beer every night (okay, not really, but I suspect it was something like this).  But I've been thinking about this for a couple of weeks, and I have realized that I actually do have many reasons to be grateful I'm single.

1. Shirtless model calendars.

2. No one drinks my beer.

3. I eat what I want, when I want.  Tacos at midnight?  Salad for breakfast?  All good.

4. No one complains about my keeping bikes in the living room.

5. I come home whenever I please.  With whomever I please.

6. Two words: shaveless winters.

7. I am a huge fan of pungent foods.  Smelly Belgian cheeses, smoked mackerel, salmon roe, natto (fermented tofu), Indian curries that make you breathe fire, are all on my menu, anytime.  Alaskan singles can enjoy stink flipper (walrus flipper fermented in a hole in the ground) without upsetting a mate.

Single people food.

8. I enjoy long coversations with myself.  Sometimes I even do different accents.  When you're with another person long enough, you eventually end up talking about nothing.  With myself, I'm infinitely interesting.

9. The lid STAYS down!

10. I am a very clean person.  My stuff stays organized.

11. No arguing about what movie to watch.

12. No buying overly expensive gifts.

13. If there's a problem in the house, I don't have to go very far for the source.

14. I can eat foods that aren't necessarily pungent themselves, but due to their chemistry, lend themselves to pungency: e.g. beans, broccoli, cabbage, etc.  Seriously, I love beans more than a '49er loves gold.

15. No one bothers me about leaving my wetsuit to dry in the bathroom after a day of bodyboarding.
16. Law & Order marathons.  I love you, ADA Rubirosa.

17. Did I mention the shirtless model calendar?

Cons to being single:

1. Can't drive in the carpool lane during rush hour.  

Now I'm not saying that it'll be this way forever or that I envision myself dying alone in my house while my twenty cats eat my remains (I've sworn to not have more than three cats.  Maybe four). Perhaps I'll meet that special someone who will persuade me to abandon my hedonistic lifestyle. Just not anytime soon.

Of Ravel and Sea Ice

Back when I was in Alaska, I mentioned once that I listened to the Passacaglia from Ravel's A minor Piano Trio while flying over Kotzebue Sound.  The almost unbearable loneliness of the piece and crushing beauty of the sea ice in the sidelong winter sun was such that it gave one the urge to commit harakiri right then and there.

This summer I'm helping to conduct a seminar in writing about music, and I see how hard it is to put words to an essentially wordless phenomenon.  How is it that scattered sounds come together to tell their own stories, elicit unspeakable joys, draw out the loneliness of sea ice?  As a classical musician by both training and trade, I've had to write piles of academic papers on the subject, and it seemed like nothing I ever said was of any justice to the matter.  It was like throwing pebbles at a river and expecting to create a dam to contain all its fury.  But I've revisited a favorite author recently for another project, and here is what she had to say on the matter:

"Here is where I come to some trouble with words.  The inside became the outside when Shamengwa played music.  Yet inside to outside does not half sum it up.  The music was more than music - at least what we are used to hearing.  The music was feeling itself.  The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous.  Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life.  The music tapped the back of our terrors, too.  Things we'd lived through and didn't want to ever repeat.  Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprising pleasures.  No, we can't live at that pitch.  But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence.  We are aware.  And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it.

"Thus, Shamengwa wasn't wanted at every party.  The wild joy his jigs and reels brought forth might just as soon send people crashing on the rocks of their roughest memories and they'd end up stunned and addled or crying in their beer."

-Louise Erdrich, from The Plague of Doves, describing Ojibwe violinist Shamengwa

Last week I went to see a jazz band downtown.  The gorgeous tenor sax player played a solo that the word "haunting" doesn't even begin to describe.  I stared at the face of my own loneliness, stood on the edge of the blue-gray sea ice as it spread before me, aware of all I had and had not done.  I was thrust into "the river of my existance," as Erdrich put it.  I saw Arctic winter again, and I sat paralyzed staring into my gin.  I could barely applaud when he was done.  Much more upbeat pieces filled the rest of the program, probably to cheer everyone up after that.

Later in the evening I asked that tenor player out, and when he refused, I found myself staring at the sea ice of sunless winter once more.  

The 7-Eleven Man

I used to think San Jose was the capital of 7-Eleven, until I found out today that Tokyo has the most stores at 1,713.  I'm pretty sure we even beat out Norway, though, which has one 7-Eleven for every 47,000 Norwegians.  There are so many 7-Elevens in San Jose that at the corner of Winchester and Payne Avenues, there's one 7-Eleven store on the northwest corner, facing Payne, and another at the southeast corner, facing Winchester (it's not quite on the corner, maybe down the road a little bit, but still less than a block away).  All in all, there are four 7-Elevens within two miles of my house that I can easily bike to, should the mood strike me for cigarettes, chocolate bars, or Playgirl magazines (though I assure you I don't smoke, and everyone knows that Playboy is the one that publishes short stories.  Jeez.).

For those of you that are unfortunate enough to lack 7-Elevens in your home state, I will inform you of the awesomeness you are missing out on.  7-Eleven is a convenience store, similar to what you'd find at a gas station, but usually with more stuff.  Need cat food?  Milk?  Don't forget to pick up condoms for your date tomorrow night, or a pint of Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough for when your date stands you up.  You can even get your weekly lottery ticket or bet on your favorites at Santa Anita or Golden Gate Fields.  They're even writer-friendly by stocking pens, notebooks, and beer (or Red Bull if you're pulling an all-nighter to meet your deadline).  They're called 7-Eleven because the original ones were open from 7:00 am to 11:00 pm, but now many of them are open 24 hours.

The one closest to my house is run by a Pakistani gentleman who always asks me how work is going, usually prefaced by "Long time no see!" or, "How have you been doing?"  At first, I was kind of flattered that he remembered me.  Isn't that what neighborhood shops used to be about, before we had all these big box stores that made everything impersonal?

But then I realized this: the 7-Eleven man knows you by your vices.  Pretty much the only time he sees anyone come into his store is to get their fix for their various habits or addictions.  I wonder if he catalogs this to himself.  "Ah, here comes Cheez-its-and-Marlboros!" he might say to himself.  Or perhaps, "Hey, Snickers-and-24 oz.-Asahi is back!" (that would be me).  Think about it.  Whether it's alcohol, chocolate, tobacco, dirty magazines, caffeine, or gambling, the 7-Eleven man has you nailed.  Perhaps, then, it's not such a good thing to be recognized by the 7-Eleven man.

And I wonder too, what it's like to be the guy who knows everyone's vices.  Does he secretly look down on us, with all our silly, self-destructive habits?  Or is he more of a laissez-faire guy?  Surely he must have some himself.  Maybe it's all relative.  Maybe I need to cut down on the chocolate so he doesn't recognize me anymore.  Nah.  It's not like I'm Woman-Who-Buys-Two-Packs-A-Day or Maxim-Dude.

Paper Sandpipers: Birds in Writing

     Recently I noticed that I use birds a lot in my writing.  A lot.  I went back into some old stuff and saw that nearly every piece work had a least one bird reference in it, and all this time I never realized that I was doing it.

     Sometimes, I'm just using a bird (or birds) as part of the scenery.  For example, one of my characters happens to look out a window and sees a robin on a redwood tree.  Pretty basic; the robin means nothing, other than as a visual cue to the setting.  Other times, I'm using the birds as a reflection of a character's state of mind.  In the same story with our friend on the redwood tree, there's a scene when the protagonist is looking at a bunch of sandpipers scurrying to and fro on a beach.  Their movements feel very unsettled, as are the character's thoughts at that point.   Most frequently, the birds are part of a simile or metaphor.  Raptors seem to be a favorite for this, as are various seabirds (and if they've got extensive migrations, then they seem to be even more desirable).  For example, if someone looks at you like a falcon looks at a squirrel, that's some scary shit.

Turkey vultures at Pinnacles National Monument

     All this has me thinking about why I use birds so frequently.  I'm no ornithologist and don't consider myself a bird fancier.  I even find some wild birds incredibly annoying (baby scrub jays screaming at 5 am drives me absolutely bonkers).  My theory is that birds are naturally fascinating to human beings.  Sometimes, it almost seems as if they are more extreme versions of ourselves.  How many myths and legends contain a bird character?  Ravens and other corvids are some of the smartest animals around; they use tools, solve complex problems, and can imitate human speech.

     Bird sounds fascinate us too.  Psittacines imitate; some can even carry on simple conversations.  Lyre birds and mockingbirds have some of the most complex repertoires in the animal kingdom.  People in temperate and subarctic climes look forward to spring, when the songs of thousands of warblers, thrushes, sparrows, and finches return after a silent winter.  Loons have driven some people to tears with their long and lonely calls (and "Pacific Loon" is the handle of this blog, incidentally).  Though seasonally monogamous (not for life, as many believe), loons will continue to call for their mate if one of the pair does not return, the same repeated howl over and over.  I remember being troubled for no reason I could see by the cries of mourning doves as a child.

     Consider migration.  The memory involved to be able to travel that distance and return to the same place year after year is astounding.  We haven't even begun to understand the complexities of avian navigation.  The lark you see at your southern feeder in March will likely be in Alaska or Nunavut by June.  The arctic tern, whom we're enjoying here on the coast right now, is the master of this feat.  Racing from pole to pole in its pursuit of eternal summer, an arctic tern will likely see more of the world in a year than you will in a lifetime.

     I wonder if any other writers out there find themselves with similar habits.  Maybe you use trees a lot.  Or celestial bodies.  What commonalities have you found in your own writing?

Continued...

After fielding many questions about this blog and hearing many requests, I've decided to continue posting.  I said earlier I wasn't a blogger; however, it seems some people are actually interested in what I have to say.    I've been thinking about what kinds of things I would write about, and found that most of them would probably be unique to the quirky lifestyle and geography of coastal California, hence the new title.  Stay tuned, my friends; there's more to come.

Although this blog won't be about Alaska anymore, it will always occupy a special place within my mind.