In November 2004 I traveled on my own to Australia and New Zealand. The handwritten journal I kept during those five months of backpacking became the foundation of Love Song Journey. My photography skills back then were even more amateurish than they are now, plus I still had a film camera, which limited how many pictures I could take conveniently. Luckily I came across so many gorgeous sights that I still ended up with lots of memorable images, some of which are posted below. (You can also view the complete photo album on Facebook. I'll get to New Zealand at a later date.) A flock of rainbow lorikeets taking a birdbath in front of the Raglan Tavern in Queensland:
The waterfront in Cairns:
The Devils Marbles in the Outback:
The aptly named Remarkable Rocks on Kangaroo Island:
Eucalyptus trees at the Bay of Fires, Tasmania:
A very, very content Tasmanian devil:
A jellyfish washed up on Maria Island, off the coast of Tasmania:
The ruined church at Port Arthur, a 19th century penal colony in Tasmania:
While I was finishing the rough draft of Love Song Journey in the spring of 2006, Kim was reading a newly published memoir called "Eat, Pray, Love." From the way she described it, it sounded sort of similar to my book: The author took an extended leave of absence from her unhappy life to travel to several foreign countries, then came home and wrote a book about how the experience had changed her for the better. I was intrigued but didn't read it because I didn't want it to affect my writing.
A year later, after "Eat, Pray, Love" had become a bestseller and everyone and their sister was raving about it, a co-worker gave me her copy. Reading it proved to be quite unnerving; I had to make a list to keep track of the details in the author's life (and book) that matched mine:
--We both chose the number of chapters in our books intentionally (hers 108, mine 42). --We both include our dreams, poems and journal entries. --We both compare our joy in travel to a friend's joy in having a child. --We both mention having eight-year-old nephews back in the States. --We both describe our first halting attempt at prayer. --We both include a list of countries that begin with "i." --We both quote REM's "Losing My Religion." --We both like Bruce Springsteen and Bill Clinton. --We both get in digs at George W. Bush, Iraq and the 2000 election. --We were both single, divorced, childless, white American writers born in 1969 who left home at 34 to travel the globe, turned 35 while overseas, and found happiness by sleeping with a Brazilian at the end of the trip.
Creepy, innit? I wrote to Elizabeth Gilbert's agent in case she wanted to represent a similar story from the male perspective. Her agency sent back a generic rejection the next morning. Of course, there are also significant differences between our books. Gilbert sold hers ahead of time and traveled on the advance payment; I had no book deal and financed my travel with savings. I chose to use a fictional name for my protagonist, which allowed me to create composite characters, move events in time and place, alter details and make up dialogue without too much worry about "getting it right." My book focuses heavily on the backstory before the overseas trip; hers only references it here and there. My book is occasionally pornographic; hers is strictly PG. My reclamation of sexual freedom is a stereotypically male happy ending; her falling in love is a stereotypically female happy ending.
And the biggest difference of all: "Eat, Pray, Love" has sold over 4 million copies, and Julia Roberts is making the movie. I published "Love Song Journey" myself, and so far it's sold approximately nine copies.
Am I envious? Hell fucking yeah. But not so much that I won't get over it. If my self-esteem depended on book sales, I would be in no better condition now than I was during the period I wrote about in the book itself, when I was absolutely miserable but tried to convince myself I was a worthy person because my salary afforded me fancy vacations and other material acquisitions. For the past several years I've been content with my life, and writing "Love Song Journey" was key to changing my perspective. That's what I call success.
So good on ya, Mrs. Gilbert. Kim and I will put "Eat, Pray, Love" in our Netflix queue as soon as it comes out, and I'll be celebrating your happy ending with the rest of the audience.
I won't claim it's the Great American Novel -- or even a Grape Bavarian Hovel, which I vowed to create as a teenager. But it is a good book full of sex, love and rock & roll. It's got epic travel stories and relationship dramas. It's got way-too-personal diary entries to please voyeurs. It's got poetry worthy of any modern anthology (I spared readers the bulk of my early work). Here's the blurb on the back cover:
Follow Edward True as he moves from college to the workplace, from relationship to relationship, and to the far reaches of the globe in pursuit of ultimate answers. Why is he still alive? What is happiness? Is sex necessary? Picking up clues at home, abroad and within, he starts to piece together a larger picture of who he is and where he's headed. Sometimes the journey is the destination.
Doesn't exactly scream bestseller, does it? This was one of the problems with not getting a traditional book deal: I had no one to advise me on writing jacket copy. An expert would probably have said, "Mention the hookers! People will buy the book if they think it's got herpes, hookers and hand jobs."
But (the artist in me protests), it's not about those things, although they're in there. It's about life, and one person trying to make sense of that life. That's it. The rest is commentary.
Here are links to the book on Barnes & Noble and Amazon. It's also available oniUniverse (the publisher) as both a paperback and ebook. Thanks for reading.
~@~
PS -- The book has no dedication page because the entire story is my dedication (as well as my supplication and absolution). But unofficially it belongs to Meeko, my beautiful boy who passed away in 2004. This one's for you:
I've never made much of an effort to see politicians in action. I adored Clinton in the '90s and abhorred Bush in the '00s, but never did anything to support one or impeach the other. The closest I ever got to political activism was holding up a Dukakis sign when Bush the Elder drove by after a presidential debate on the UCLA campus in the fall of 1988. But in the past year I've found myself more engaged than ever before, and I don't know if it's a coincidence, a sign of getting older, or a natural part of living in the Midwest.
It started last summer, shortly after I moved from California to Minnesota. Kim and I happened to attend the Iowa State Fair the same day as John McCain, and I got to shake his hand and take a photo with him. It was terribly exciting, even though I didn't support his candidacy for president.
A few months later, just before the election, I went to a campaign rally in Minneapolis and had brief conversations with former Vice President Walter Mondale, future Senator Al Franken and current Senator Amy Klobuchar. But the biggest kahuna at the event was the Democratic messiah himself, Bill Clinton. He made his way along the barriers after the rally, and when he got to me he stood there with his arms outstretched in a Jesus Christ pose and let the worshiping masses paw him as he carried on a conversation with someone next to me. Charisma flowed from his body like loose electricity and sparked in all directions.
Last month Kim and I went to the Minnesota State Fair and met Senator Klobuchar again; this time I asked her to extend the soon-to-expire credit for first-time homebuyers because we're not ready to buy a house yet. The next night we went to a townhall meeting on healthcare reform held our representative, Betty McCollum. My ticket number wasn't called, but I was ready to ask her how Democrats could prevent Republicans from watering down the bill under the guise of bipartisanship and then voting against it anyway.
And that brings me to yesterday, and hopefully another Democratic messiah: Barack Obama. He came to the Target Center in downtown Minneapolis to deliver a healthcare pep talk in front of 15,000 voters who already agreed with him. There were numerous Obama shirts in the audience (including the one on me), and the energized crowd even did a synchronized wave, something usually reserved for rock concerts. Godspeed, Mr. President. Pay no attention to the ignorant, the fearful, the racists, the anti-Christians, the hate-mongers and the ratings whores. Keep fighting the good fight – for compassion, for progress, for the long arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice.
When I was a teenager and terrified of dying, I did the math and figured out that if wanted to live in three centuries, I needed to be alive on Jan. 1, 2101 – the first day of the 22nd century. So I began telling people I was going to live to 131.
I had no idea at the time what a drag it is getting old. I'm not even 40 yet and I can already feel entropy collecting its past-due payments on my physique, stamina and inner workings. I have colitis and asthma and probably a hernia. I no longer want to reach the 22nd century if it means being wheelchair-bound, eating through an IV drip, using a catheter and colostomy bag, having skin that rips like tissue paper, and losing all my memories of being young and immortal.
I don't think that growing dependent on technology and the kindness of others was even an option before a few hundred years ago. When you could no longer take care of yourself, you died. Prolonging life at all costs has become a prized goal in modern American culture, regardless of the quality of that life, and for a long time I wanted that for myself as well. But there's something to be said for those who choose to wander off into the forest on the failing strength of their own two feet, never to return.
I get the fear-of-death thing, I do. Nobody wants to die. Some of us fight it with exercise, diet and medicine. Some of us try to deny it with religion. Some of us try to trick it by creating art that will outlast us. And some of us simply shrug our shoulders and get on with the business of living.
I want to live as long as I can follow what's happening in the world. Have we stopped killing each other over gods and oil? Has the global population stabilized? Have machines overtaken us in intelligence and morality? We're all witness to the greatest story ever told, and I can't wait to see what happens next. When my time is up some other kid will pick up where I left off, and he’ll be just as in love with humanity as I was. It's not about me or him. It's about the story.
I love paying taxes, and you know why? Because I love getting free CDs from the library. And while I’m not a big reader anymore, Kim checks out several books every week, saving us hundreds of dollars a month.
I love paying taxes, and you know why? Because I love getting in my car and driving on the roads that stretch across the country. I have a map of the United States on which I’ve highlighted all the roads I’ve driven on, and from California to the Midwest it’s one big beautiful tangle of orange. I’ve got a decent head start on the rest of the country, but there’s still a lot more to cover.
I love paying taxes, and you know why? Because I like knowing I can call 911 and have the police or fire department come to my aid. I haven’t had a real emergency yet, but I did call once about a piece of furniture on the freeway.
I love paying taxes, and you know why? Because they enabled me to get an education until I was 18. College was expensive enough.
I love paying taxes, and you know why? Because I want the food I eat, the water I drink and the air I breathe to be safe.
Do you know what corporations want? The prime objective of a food manufacturer is making money, not feeding people. The prime objective of a health insurer is making money, not healing people. The prime objective of Wall Street is making money, not making YOU money. If our laws allowed poison to be sold to infants for a tidy profit, someone would do it. Hey, we're just following the law! Corporations are structured to survive and grow just like humans, and even murder can become the price of doing business.
Government may not be perfect, but it is composed of us. We can choose to have a tax-funded government that fights to keep its citizens safe, healthy and educated, or we can choose to have a tax-starved government that leaves everyone alone to fend for themselves. We can choose to regulate businesses so they don’t profit from serving us harmful food or denying us healthcare, or we can let them run roughshod over us. It’s our choice, but we can’t expect for-profit companies to ever look out for our best interests.
This article on Slate.com by William Saletan says everything I tried to say in this blog post a few months ago, only much much better.
To summarize (somewhat accurately, I hope): It starts with the fact that the universe obeys certain immutable scientific laws that can be observed and understood. Then it moves on to the fact that the evolution of life on Earth was also guided by a framework of principles we are still discovering -- such as similar but physically separated climates and geographies resulting in similar organisms inhabiting those niches.
And then comes the great leap forward: If the natural unfolding of the universe (chemical evolution) gave rise to organic life (biological evolution), perhaps humanity is now giving rise to the third stage of history: cultural evolution, in which information bypasses physical matter altogether and is passed from one generation to the next in the form of memes instead of genes.
Dude.
At a time when there's so much dumbing down in our culture, when politics has become an idiocracy, awesome articles like this give me hope for the future of our species.
~@~
As usual, Dan Savage is spot on (fourth letter down) when it comes to explaining the tragedy in Pittsburgh, in which a sexually frustrated, fucked-up middle-aged man relieved his pain by killing himself along with three women in a gym. Why does our country devalue sex workers? They are doing the Lord's work.
~@~
Brad Pitt had this to say when asked about T-shirts urging him to run for mayor of New Orleans:
"I'm running on the gay-marriage, no-religion, legalization-and-taxation-of-marijuana platform. I don't have a chance."
A screen shot of the cover art for my forthcoming novel, Love Song Journey:
The painting is called "Cloudy Day in Rainbowland," and it was painted in the late 1980s by an artist named Daniel Kam. I came across it when it was included in an art insert in the UCLA Daily Bruin, and I loved it so much that I cut it out and put it on my wall. The paper has gotten a little damaged over the past 20 years and you can see a wrinkle in the middle, but it's near the spine and I don't think it detracts from the image's overall impact.
From the time I started writing Love Song Journey four years ago, I wanted to use this painting as the cover. I tried Googling Daniel's name several times without success. When it came time to pick a cover a few months ago, I chose a backup painting that was centuries old and in the public domain, but in a last-ditch effort I emailed all the Daniel Kams on Facebook who looked plausible (i.e., not teenagers). Only one wrote back -- but it was the right one.
So I finally got permission to use the cover art I'd wanted all along, which wouldn't have been possible if I'd published any earlier. See, all that procrastination was worth it!
The book is going through final formatting corrections and should be available for sale soon.
It's been 11 months since my last white squirrel post, so I thought I should provide an update.
According to our building's managers, two white squirrels died during the winter. Despite those losses, there are still at least two that I've seen at the same time this summer, and the bigger one looks the same as in the link above. I haven't been able to get that close to him again, but here are two photos from last week as he moved through the pine tree next to our balcony:
And these are hot off the camera, just over an hour ago:
In the space of one week about a month ago, I was friended by two women on Facebook, and I friended two others. It’s what the four women had in common that made the timing so interesting.
The first to friend me was a girl I had a crush on in ninth grade. We sat near each other in different periods of science class, and initially communicated by scribbling on the desktop. Eventually the writing migrated to notes we left for each other in a book under the desk. I thought she was the bomb but way out of my league. One day my mom dropped me off at a house the girl was babysitting at, and we spent the afternoon together…being nervous and doing nothing in particular. At one point we were playing with a rubber ball and fell together onto a seat, her with her arms wrapped around me from behind. If I had been trained for that sort of moment I might have known what to do next, but I was not, and I didn’t. So I got up and walked away to hide my, ahem, excitement. A year later I wrote a short story called “12 Notes,” which I still have – along with the original notes.
The second to friend me was another teenage crush – the first girl I ever French-kissed. She was 14 and I was almost 17. One night I walked a few blocks to her house while her parents were out, and we spent the evening together…being nervous and doing nothing in particular. When her parents’ return grew imminent we said goodnight, and for the first time in what would become a supremely uncool habit, I asked permission to kiss her. She said yes. I went home and spent several paragraphs describing the kiss in my journal. A year later we went on a single date, kissed again, and that was the end of that.
At the other end of the friending spectrum, I reached out to my ex-wife, to whom I had been a complete asshole, and to a very special ex-girlfriend, with whom I had a tumultuous, two-year, on-off entanglement. My ex-wife and I had more or less reconciled after the divorce, but I hadn’t talked or written to her in over a decade. I hadn’t communicated with the ex-girlfriend in over a decade, either. Both seemed happy to hear from me.
All four of these women are married and/or have children now. I’ve remarried. Life goes on. Time dims both crushes and the crush of heartbreak. The situation reminds me of Fleetwood Mac, where everyone slept with everyone else, broke everyone else’s heart, then reunited 20 years later and toured together. I’m friends on Facebook with a dozen women I dated or otherwise hooked up with (to use the kids’ parlance these days; we used to call it “getting together”).
Once upon a time, severed romantic connections were lost forever. But in the age of Facebook and MySpace, anyone can reestablish contact with anyone from their past. That may not count as progress for those who wish to leave their past in the past, but that's not how I roll. I have always been engaged in a constant, conscious struggle to integrate my past into my present, and every day there’s more past to integrate. Making contact with former crushes and lovers on Facebook gives me more information with which to form a more accurate impression of where I've come from, and therefore where I'm going.
And to learn that a girl I desperately wanted to kiss over 20 years ago was just as nervous as me? That’s priceless.
My laptop died last month and it's put a crimp in my blogging. My apologies to anyone who's gotten tired of checking my site and seeing Dick Cheney's bio at the top. We have a new desktop PC now and I'm slowly getting my photos, videos, music files and Word docs in order.
Videos? Yep, I've started shooting the occasional low-quality amateur video: singing at a Jain temple in India, prairie dogs tussling at the Minnesota Zoo, Charlie playing with the door stopper,that sort of thing.
Last week there was a fantastic dry lightning storm in the Twin Cities, and I went out on our balcony and filmed 21 seconds of it. I've never posted a video before, so I hope this works.
Dick Cheney was the 43rd president of the United States. The second George Bush needed a ruining mate, and Dick Cheney chose himself. When terrorists hijacked planes on 9/11, Dick Cheney tried to shoot one down. Then he invaded Iraq because it was a bad country with lots of oil. He liked to hurt people and fish. One time he shot his friend in the face, and the friend said he was sorry for getting in the way.
Dick Cheney had four heart attacks and went to the inauguration of Barack Obama in a wheelchair. He was a great president because he kept America safe except for 9/11, and the soldiers killed in Iraq, and the friend he shot in the face. The end.
A young couple meet in a European refugee camp after World War II. They are the only survivors of their respective families, who were wiped out in the concentration camps. They fall in love, get married and have children, who all grow up to have families of their own. Today the couple are in their 80s, enjoying their twilight years and spoiling their ever-growing brood of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
If you were to ask this hypothetical couple if they wished the Holocaust had never happened, what do you think they would say?
In a long-awaited report, the porn industry has finally acknowledged widespread physical and sexual abuse among its members, going back decades and involving tens of thousands of victims.
Oops, I meant to say the Catholic Church. I keep mixing up which organization is the holy one and which is profane.
On the last day of National Public Radio's fund drive last week, I finally caved in and became a sustaining member. In return for a monthly contribution, I get to not feel guilty for tuning in their free radio signal. I listen every day, so I suppose they deserve 50 cents out of my daily pay.
For the most part, our local NPR station in the Twin Cities does a great job of fair and balanced reporting. (Unlike the for-profit organization that came up with that slogan.) For example, they were very careful not to declare Al Franken the "winner" of the contested Minnesota race for senator; they said he "received more votes." But there's one topic on which the station reveals consistent bias: the weather.
This being Minnesota, the local hosts discuss weather all the time, and they always assume their listeners like warm temperatures. When the forecaster says it's going to be cold, the host cries, "Boo, hiss! When's it gonna warm up?" When the forecaster says it's going to be warm, the host shouts for joy, "Huzzah!" As a public radio supporter, I hereby ask the on-air hosts to stop injecting their personal preferences into weather reports.
I've always preferred being cold to being hot. I preferred it when I lived in Southern California, and I prefer it now in Minnesota. I'm OK up to about 70 degrees, then I start fanning myself or looking for air conditioning. When temperatures drop I resist wearing more than a T-shirt because I actually want to be uncomfortably cold. Living in 21st century America has made me soft and weak, and I could use the toughening up.
I've thought long and hard about this, and I think my preference for cold is tied to my lifelong fascination with death. Everything alive needs heat to survive; everything living gets cold when it dies. The heat of the sun and Earth's molten core are the only reasons life exists in the first place. So while it's easy to enjoy the warm sunshine because our lives literally depend on it, I see enjoying the cold as a challenge. Perhaps it's a subconscious effort to unite both ends of the spectrum: I am alive and therefore warm, but someday I will be dead and therefore cold. By acknowledging the latter (the coldness of death), I more fully appreciate the former (the warmth of life).
So come on, NPR, embrace mortality and stop badmouthing cold weather. It makes the warm weather even better.
It seems to me that Darwin's fabled theory of natural selection needs a modern corollary: cultural selection.
Throughout the evolution of life on Earth, what was good for the individual was also good for the community. Individuals who took risks -- growing lungs instead of gills, wings instead of arms, leaving the safety of home and heading over the hills and far away -- either died and took their bad-risk-taking behavior with them, or survived and passed on their good-risk-taking behavior to their progeny. Species shed their unfit members and retained their fit members, making the overall population better equipped for survival. All very cut-and-dried.
Before humans, no land-based apex predator had ever reached the limit of its expansion through success. Tigers and bears would have loved to expand their territory as widely as humans did, but they couldn't because natural selection, in the form of inhospitable climate and competition for resources, picked them off. But natural selection favored humans like no creature before. They spread out of Africa and around the world, adapting to the topography, weather and nutrition of each new continent and ecosystem. Nothing stopped them until they reached Australia and Tierra del Fuego, and suddenly there were no more major land masses to colonize. They'd covered the whole damn planet.
And that was the beginning of the end for natural selection as the sole factor in determining which humans survived and reproduced. They had to infill terrain they'd previously passed over, and increase yields on land they'd already used, and form societies to tamp down their primitive instincts. They developed farming, writing, art, religion, warfare and Rock of Love with Bret Michaels. Natural selection started to be replaced by cultural selection, meaning: Reproduction is available to everyone adapted to the dominant culture, regardless of their ability to survive in the absence of that culture.
The transition is far from complete, but judgment day is on its way.
Yesterday Maine became the fifth state to allow gay marriage, following Iowa, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont. I thought it would take till the next generation for this to happen, but apparently there are enough rational thinkers among the middle-aged governors, legislators and judges already in power to get the ball rolling. God bless them, every one.
Marriage is a government contract invented by modern human cultures. There's nothing natural, historical or sacred about granting a set of arbitrary legal benefits to two people who sign a document saying they're "married." There's nothing in U.S. marriage law that says the two spouses must be able to procreate. They aren't required to have vaginal intercourse. They don't even need to live together, or have the slightest interest in one another. All they have to do is fill out a few forms and attend a brief ceremony, and the government grants them benefits.
That's what "marriage" means, legally speaking. Nothing about sex, nothing about love. Now some people want to add a religious context and say that married people have been joined by God, and their God only wants to join certain kinds of people together. That makes as much sense as preventing people of different height from getting married. Or, say, skin color. We created marriage and we can define it however we want.
If two gay people want to get married under U.S. laws, my God is super-duper cool with that. She's even down with marriage between straight people. She just wishes we would stop pretending that our laws are the same as Hers.
It looks like a computer-generated scene from "Willy Wonka and the Veggie Factory," but everything in this photo is real: bread for mountains, cauliflower for clouds, peas hanging from the broccoli trees. The pathway is made of cumin. The only elements Kim and I couldn't identify are the waterfall (salt?) and ladder (vanilla beans?).
The photo was taken by an artist in London named Carl Warner, and you can find many more of his "foodscapes" in this gallery and on Google Images.
I declared a "most beautiful photo ever" once before, but that was almost a year ago so I think I'm entitled to do it again.
