It's Automatic. It's Hydromatic.

It's my latest post for The Heat Lighting.


That picture of Hilldawg and I talking fiction at Books & Books has nothing to do with it, but I wanted to jazz this up a little.

Besides, Khaled Hosseini came into our Bal Harbour store yesterday and needs a consolation prize for us being so low on stock of his books.

Ten Sweet Readers checking out this photo ought to do it.

Wild Wildlife

Coming back to the Treehouse after turning the air off and leaving it vacant for three weeks, I shouldn’t be surprised that the ceiling fans look like the chandeliers in Disney’s Haunted Mansion; we all know it’s essentially an eighty-year-old attic. Still, just when I think I’m familiar with the wildlife I’m living with, the Treehouse manages to surprise.

Here’s the tally:

- Lizards: two; one alive, one dead.
- Cockroaches: five, all thirty spindly little legs in the air.
- Drifts of Termite Droppings: one
- Drifts of Termite Wings: one
- Live Termites: three
- Millipedes: four, dead
- Beetles: three, living
- Bees: twelve, dead
- Spiders: eleven, alive
- Unidentifiable remains of bugs: three

If you were searching for the surprise on that list and spotted a dozen bees, give yourself a big fat pat on the back. I also have to admit the number of spiders was higher than I expected.

What brought bees to my bathroom to die? Opening the bathroom window, I found a bunch more in the window sill, so we know they came from outside the bathroom window. Probably the neighbors got scared of the hive hanging under the roof of their shed and - rather than calling a bee specialist to come and relocate them, or create hive for backyard honey – decided to bomb them. Several escaped through a nearby window, but they’d already inhaled fatal doses.

Or they were members of a bee cult who decided to perish together in a suicide pact.

Apart from speculating on why bees came to my empty apartment to die, there was also one fun moment while I was making morning coffee. A small cricket – a new addition itself and not part of my original inventory – hopped into the web between the kitchen window and the dish rack. I got to see the classic battle between predator and prey. The fascinating spectacle was never really in doubt, but it was still a fascinating spectacle; Circle of Life Breakfast Theater in my own kitchen.

Even in death, the cricket got the last laugh. This particular Miami native has extremely acidic blood, not unlike a lovebug. Apart from tasting terrible, their blood can be fatal to smaller spiders. Okay, I made that up. But the spider did become sluggish as he was biting and cocooning the little cricket. When I finally cleaned up, the cricket hung in the web, wrapped for safekeeping, but the spider lay curled on the counter, dead. If science doesn’t explain it, perhaps this is a cricket capable of cursing.

I love alliteration.

If there’s one good thing about how much funk accumulates when the Treehouse is empty, it’s the satisfaction of seeing it clean again. Basking in the smell of Febreeze-laden Swiffer wet (I’m not lazy; I mopped the weekend before I left) and Lysol multi-purpose cleaner, dustbunnies and cobwebs relegated to the trash, I can watch hours of TV on DVD with a glass of wine in one hand and not feel an once of guilt.

Except wishing I’d been able to get all the spiders outside without killing them.

Work It

“If there is a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
- Toni Morrison

There’s no secret. To succeed, you need to work your ass off. We know this, but we convince ourselves there’s something we lack. We admire her writing, his artwork, her fluency with languages, his carpentry skills, her guitar skills, his sewing ability. We wonder what makes these people so special. Instead of applying ourselves to the skills we admire, we envy those who have already mastered them.

Everyone might not have the potential to be world-class at a given activity, but who can say? I heard on NPR once that it takes fourteen years of effort. If you started playing piano tomorrow, it would be fourteen years of practice before you played a solo concert at Carnegie Hall. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell expresses this as ten thousand hours. The Beatles’ voices and fingers weren’t blessed, their minds weren’t filled with melodies and lyrics sent by God, they just practiced. A lot. Ten thousand hours worth.

I'm not sure if that relates directly with the Morrison quote, but I do like the two ideas together.

Let’s get crackin’.

A Year to the Day

Going back in my diary to be sure of the date, I’m amazed how much shit went down in the months before I heard her tell me she wanted to see other people, and she wanted to separate. I understand now why she texted me some months back, saying it had been a year, asking if I was happy. Not because she was using a different measure of when we’d separated, as jealousy and resentment immediately wanted me to believe, but because she had separated from me in her mind long before she said the words aloud.

After immediately getting drunk to the point of sickness - a classic case of hitting exactly what I headed for - I spent three days in bed, paralyzed, watching the first season of the original Star Trek series on DVD. I couldn’t watch any movies because the context had shifted (did you know “The Wedding Singer” is a tragedy, under the right circumstances?). Bloom had loaned me Star Trek months before. Vaguely disturbing and seemingly endless, the boxed set saved me from having to feel what I was feeling.

I can’t believe that was a year ago.

I didn’t call work, but I did eventually go back. No questions were asked, which is the upside of working for an independent bookstore with no management system. I’d thankfully built up years of trust by that point, so taking a powder and working sporadically when I did show up didn’t lead to getting fired.

Just a year ago, but a different life lived by a different me.

This new life stopped feeling temporary two weeks ago. I took some laundry out of the dryer at Becky’s parents’ house and hung it in the corner. I realized that somewhere along the line of acting as if I was okay, that changing my life wasn’t all that traumatic, that I really was okay, and I no longer felt traumatized. No big epiphany, just a quaint miracle of good feeling.

I’m sure signing the divorce papers won’t be a frolic through the park, but the life waiting for me on the other side will pull me through.

Life is a series of doors; going through them is the thing.

Deadline

Come, the text read.  Live with me for three weeks in a house that isn’t ours. Please.


Becky lives with her parents.  For some people, this is a deal-breaker.  I remember when I worked at Starbucks.  My fellow baristas swooned over dark, handsome, buff, triple-grande-four-sugar-nonfat-latte after he left.  They watched him walk through the parking lot and stand at the bus stop, and a collective so-much-for-that wind blew through them.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah, pretty much,” one of them answered, while the others laughed.

I was new to urban life and Miami, unaware that the rules of attraction are entangled with economic success to the point where personality is an afterthought.

Now when I read a chapter of Sex and the City called "Bicycle Boys," I know exactly where I stand with a certain type of woman, a woman who is everywhere in places like Miami.

Thankfully, Becky is not that woman.  She’s also not the deadbeat who can’t move out, or the child who refuses to grow up.  She’s in a class with a few of my friends, people who flew solo for a time and crashed into relationship wrecks, or career derailments, and found themselves moving back home.
Miami is an expensive place to live.  You either need a place smaller than the living room I’m typing this in (like the Treehouse) or you need a roommate.   And what roommate in her twenties wants a five-year-old tagging along?

I’m typing this in a place bigger than the Treehouse, Becky’s parents’ living room, because Cleo Mater and Cleo Pater are traveling the Mediterranean for three weeks.  This gives Becky, Cleo Junior, and me a taste of what living together would be like.  Apparently, I would bake more and write less.  Much, much less.

“You’ll never live with me after this,” she told me.  “I’ll destroy your writing career.”  Which might be true, if I had a writing career.

“It’s an adjustment,” I told her.

I need my discipline back.  I can’t afford to snooze when Cleo Junior comes curling into my lap before seven (I suppose I could tell him I’m busy, but who the hell wants to be that guy?).  Two hours might be all I get, a world of time in the right circumstances.  I also can’t afford to watch DVDs into the night, unless I want to be a zombie the next day.  These are habits which can be adjusted, ironed out.  If the home is filled with love, everything finds a way.

Still, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried.

When reading at Books & Books a couple of years back, Jodi Picoult laughed when asked about writer’s block.  She has a gaggle of children (one of whose poor health inspired My Sister's Keeper), and any spare minute to write that she can squeeze into her day isn’t spent wringing her hands over ideas.   Diana Abu-Jaber recently adopted a child, and she’s been grilling writers on how they get anything done.   Waiting for author Chris Cleave to begin speaking about Little Bee, I saw her writing longhand on a legal pad.  I could be them soon.

Thankfully, I haven’t been lazy.   I’ve pushed the cursor hard, and I didn’t put my life on hold to do it.

Looking back, I probably put in all those hours in preparation for this time, when I’d need to make every available minute count.  I’ve always done my best writing pushing against something, be it a job, a deadline, or a self-imposed goal.  When I look back on these three weeks, I’ll realize this was the turning point, when a string of zero-snooze days stopped feeling like a victory and became habit.

More importantly, it will be the time I tasted my future and found it sweeter than anything I’d imagined for myself.