My head just might explode the very next time I am forced to hear the phrase "deceptively simple." Especially as applied to writing. You, sir or madam, are the one who is deceptively simple.

(Note: Other beanbag surface features the image of a joyful, smiling Tammy Faye.)

Began this night quiet, at home, writing after going for a run. Pleasant. Nick Drake. Smog. Then silence.
Then there were people here. These people—my friends, after all—announced, “We have wine!” Kept writing for about an hour. Made a mix cd for my very oldest friend. Heard people in kitchen. The best thing, after all, is this: to have people in the next room, available, but you, still alone. Then emerged, so tired, happy. Drank wine. Talked. Joked. Drank more wine. Joked about: Billy Squier, Abba, Crash Test Dummies. Mmm-hmm-hm. (“Didn’t he die? Cancer? Oh god, I’m terrible.”)

A game of cornhole outside. Thwap, thwap. Terrible, tonight. Beanbags landing everywhere but the neat little circle cut out of wood. What do you expect, after three glasses? We stenciled these to celebrate the generous spirit of Tammy Faye Baker, for a party. The friends who lived here before had cornhole sets spraypainted to look like June and Johnny Cash. When I put the purchase of these naked wooden boxes on my credit card, my roommate said her dad would slap her for paying good money for a few pieces of wood, nailed together. I said, we don’t have time to go looking for the perfect cornhole trees. My goodfriendinWisconsin found the whole thing enormously amusing. On the phone, the night we stayed up really late painting them the night before the party at which they would be unveiled, he made jokes: “Your favorite thing in the world always was the cornhole out on the verandah.” and "Okay. Don't stay up too late obsessing over your cornhole."

Tonight, thought about practice. Decided I could do this just about forever. The same gesture, something calming. Casual toss, thwap. Casual toss, wonderful silnece of landing the beanbag perfectly. Decided: we should be the very best at this game at any party, since it belongs to us. We should be cornhole sharks. Thought about the drinking while playing as an advanced brand of training. Should be able to play, drunk. In fact, we should only be able to play drunk. Thought of my father, how he loves to grow wistful and sweet with wine. Thought: I am exactly the same. Thought, What a nice Saturday, after all. Realized: it wasn’t Saturday. What was it? It was this game, midnight. Traffic outfront and you should relax and wow, you are.

Everybody panics. That’s what she tells me, a gal who graduated from the program last year: “You’ll totally find a job after graduation. Don’t worry.”
A job?
No, I was freaking out about my thesis: that two-hundred page monster that I’m supposed to be writing, starting…last year? The reason I assuredly tell my thesis advisor I’m here? Sew, sew driven. Tres, tres professional. That’s me.

“Don’t worry, you can do it over next summer,” the poets tell me.
“Don’t worry, just get your ideas together and write, write, write. Don’t worry about whether it sounds good, yet,” the memoir-writers tell me.

No. You don’t understand. I don’t have any freaking material. Research-based project, here. Trips to be planned. Myriad interviews, books to read. And um, I’m not really sure I’m all that into my chosen subject. Gah-!

So, I haven’t written here in a while. So, that’s why.

What am I writing? Why, gems such as these, on student papers: “What’s the larger significance of writing about this acid trip? It seems like it could possibly be one layer in a larger story, but as it stands now, I’m left wanting more.”

“Your grandfather’s death is a great concept for this essay. What would make it even better: Some scenes. An exercise to try: Sit down and consider just one scene during this five year span you cover here.”

Truth: I’m not left wanting to read anything more about anybody’s drug trip, dead grandfathers or the puddles of tears “I could of swum in” tears and more tears dripping, dripping to the floor at their “pint sized feet.” Truth? I just want to be left alone. I think this is Phase Two of grad school. Phase One is a head-snapping adjustment period. Phase two is Leave me Alone with my Thesis. I think Phase Three might involve the acquiring of an eating disorder, or perhaps psychosis. Worth the thousands in loans a year by itself. Because those experiences sell books like mad.

Dutch television shows contain mystery messages.

So, I'm told by Blogger that as an honored user of Firefox, I can download some new application for this site that will play the song I'm listening to at any given moment I happen to be typing an entry or something.

Right now, I'm thinking that would be brilliant if and only if I could choose this song for every entry.

There's terror in paradise.
There’s this awful movie called Snake Island that came before Snakes on a Plane, about this island, see, and these cruiseship people who get trapped there, and, well, there are these snakes.
Tricky plot.
Well, it was while watching this movie that my friends and I were able to define the classic answer to the horror movie question of Who gets killed next? The answer is always the people who deserve it, because they’re either:
A – Having sex. Sex that’s enhanced visually onscreen with saline or silicone, and, more to the point, sex that’s frivolous and naughty, because we Puritans love to see the frivolous sex-havers getting their due.
B – Complaining. Tacky mustachioed whiners are always the second to get killed by the snakes. Followed by all other brands of whiners.

So, to warn one another that we were about to start bitching and therefore probably deserved to get bitten by all manner of serpents, our shorthand became, “Okay, this is totally Snake Island territory, but…”

So, it’s Snake Island time. I've warned you.

Whatever I devote my attention to, I feel guilty; I should be doing something else. Whatever I’m doing becomes diminished in its importance as the responsibilities I’m not turning my attention to loom up and, just outside the corner of my vision, become these huge, amorphous shapes, impossible to gauge and harder still, to overcome; there will always be more.
I should be grading papers, I should most definitely not be grading papers; I should be writing, but writing what? Is it for my thesis? No? Well, then I should be doing research on my thesis, but that feels like nothing but noodling around on the internet most of the time. (And just what has this or that particular goofy little article to do with my focus, anyway? If the answer's not immediately clear, I'm wracked with anxiety.) So, soon I’m back to working on the paper due Wednesday instead. It’s cut and dry; six pages. Thesis, paragraphs, conclusion, all assigned, all straightforward, all utterly forgettable.

When I was in nursery school, I got this evaluation from a teacher: “Alice gets utterly absorbed in whatever it is she’s working on, but has a hard time moving on to a different task.” This was my problem as a reporter, too. I like working on one thing, not twelve. Grad school is like being a reporter, only on acid. No, I don’t know what I mean by that. I need to get back to work, now.

The D-Word
I think I’ve said here before that one perk of having moved to Beachtown is that it’s much easier to visit my grandmother, who lives about three hours away from here. She turns 92 this month. She’s lived the majority of those years independently, and willfully so, by herself in the same ranch-style house where my mother spent her teenage years.

I admire my grandmother more than I can say for this independence, and for her snappiness of spirit, her good sense of humor and her amazing adaptability when it comes to changing with the times. (“I don’t know, Alice, why—you know—gay people are like that, but I guess it don’t matter. I guess they just love each other.” This, out of the blue on any given afternoon while slicing up chicken for salad, the kitchen scissors held aloft in that way that you can tell she’s been chewing on this idea since she saw a segment on Larry King the night before. And this, let me remind you: from a nonagenarian who’s lived her entire life in a very small southern town whose major feature amounts to the tobacco, soy and cotton fields that surround it.)

What’s true about what’s happened to her is true even though I hate it, and I hate it because: 1. it seems so preventable in retrospect and also because yes, 2., it’s such a freaking cliché, and who wants to have the circumstances of her life or that of those she loves so easily explained and discardable?

I start and re-start this same sentence:
She had a fall
Since my grandma had a fall last spring, she’s
There’s no denying that my grandma
False starts. I don’t want to use the word “decline,” because it sounds so inevitable and I don’t want to believe in the inevitability of this. I want to get mad at the doctors for not figuring out what’s still making her back hurt her so, after so many months. For not getting it: This is Nona. You have no idea how amazing a woman you’re dealing with, here. She’s never been on a single medication on her life, and now she’s on this horrible merry-go-round of painkillers that she hates and which make it hard for her to keep up much of an appetite and that make her groggy and confused. It’s not her, I want to tell them. I feel angry at them for making her not her.
She had a surgery on her back a couple weeks ago, and I wanted to slug the nurse who shouted to her, an hour into the recovery room, in this horrible sing-song, “Nowww, Elizabeth, are we ready to try to eat something?” The lurch of pride and anger inside me, at this woman who looked at Nona and saw only her lack of hearing (hearing aids out), her grogginess at the drugs which caused her to move her denture plate around in her mouth as though it itself were food. This is not the entirety of who my grandmother is. It’s a moment; it’s not her identity. I wanted to tell Nurse Kindergarten Marm to stand the hell back: This woman’s worth three of you.

Maybe all this anger is in part, confusing messenger with message.

I guess you can’t prepare yourself for this. You can’t make yourself feel everything as hard as possible in the anticipation of what’s to come. Every time my best friend in the world takes off on a plane to a rainforest village in some Central American country as part of his job, try as my hamster-wheel mind might, I can’t make myself dream up every terrible scenario as part of some superstitious Terrible Event Prevention method. And I literally, cannot tell him I love him, enough.

My grandma knows what’s up. She’s scared of the physical pain and scareder still, of the increasing loss of independence it’s meaning. That hour after her last surgery, she really didn’t know up very well from down, but she was sitting up and looking for her shoes; she wanted to go home, now.

She is not afraid of death; at least that’s what she’s said for the last ten years: that she’s ready to go up and sing with the angels. It’s all that comes before. And what I’m scared of, in the end, is that same helplessness: on her part and on mine and on the parts of my mother and uncle: As she walks down this road, we cannot follow; we cannot fix. The most I can do is to be there through any decline that happens, pat her soft hand and tell her I love her, as many times as I want.