As of June 3 I'm moving How It Feels to Be to stevenwingate.wordpress.com, which offers RSS (and therefore better access to others in the writing community) as well as the opportunity to connect some information permanently to the blog. I hope you'll sign up there—you have both email and RSS feed options—and that you'll contact me if you have any trouble getting there. My email is on the main website (www.stevenwingate.com).

Thanks for sticking with me through my initial get-the-feet-wet blogging experience. The next version of this blog is going to be significantly more literature-based—less about my own ...<< MORE >>

    I’m not much of a TV-head; most of my exposure to the medium comes from watching sports events (yes, I do that—see my posting How it Feels to Be an Artsy/Intellectual Type who Actually Loves Sports) or from passing glances that occur elsewhere than my home. The other day, for instance, I saw the news and heard all three of our presidential candidates talking in the space of two minutes. Blah! Blather! Undignified, like teenagers in a junior high popularity contest. I’m already sick of the voice of our next president, even if it’s Obama. ...<< MORE >>

    This will be a quick one, almost epigrammatic in its efficiency, because I’m tired and grouchy and grading too much and miserable about it.
    I was heading for my place of employment the other day and thought to myself I need to get all my stupid busy-work done so I can do some exercise and get my flabby carcass back into shape.
    Then I thought to myself No, you idiot. You need to do some exercise and get your flabby carcass back ...<< MORE >>

    Those of you who know me—heck, probably 90% of the people who are going to read this—know that (a) it’s my birthday today! and (b) I’m not much of a Mr. Fix-It guy because I’m not a very patient kind of guy. Apparently this is a genetic trait; I learned to swear by being near my dad while he worked on cars and did household repairs, and no doubt my sons are doing the same.
    As well they should, dammit! Shouldn’t boys learn to swear from their fathers? There are two kinds of boys in ...<< MORE >>

    Jenny always said I had it, and after tonight I’m starting to believe her. Although maybe I don’t have sleep apnea at all, and am writing this at 3:57 a.m. because Landon, sleeping on the big bed because he has yet another ear infection, spent a full hour head-butting me in the back approximately every three minutes. I have felt a few little gaps in my breathing over the years, usually after I’ve quaffed one sip too many of my favorite beers such as Pacifico, New Belgium’s 1554 Black Ale Stella Artois, ...<< MORE >>

TO: Dear Agent and/or Editor
FROM: Dorian McClaslow (age 9 1/2)

re: many entertaining possible false memoirs available to you

Whether you already have the moniker “soon to be fired” attached to you, or it has yet to settle upon your glorious person, you have no doubt noticed recent opportunities in the exciting new genre of “false memoirs.” I have a number of works in this genre available to you for immediate granting of obscene advances, and they are sure to generate much publicity for you and/or their ultimate publishing house. Samples include:

My Game was Called Surviving: My ...<< MORE >>

    Mea culpa, my darling masses out there in the internet ether who have been wondering where I’ve been for the past month. Mea maxima culpa. But it has been dreadfully hard for me to write this blog, and not because of the usual excuses like being busy preparing to market myself when the book comes out, grading too much, having sick kids, etc.
    No. It’s because a while after my posting on January 17, “...the Idiot who Faints at his Own Wedding,” I got an email from my ex-wife that began a sweet, let-bygones-be-bygones conversation that I hope will continue.
    So you might see, dear reader, how this would blow my mind more than a little bit. My ex had been at the top of my “Do not speak to under any circumstances” list, my “person who shall not be named unless X amount of alcohol is consumed” list, for seventeen years. But all she had to do was say I’m sorry for how it ended and pretty soon we’re sending each other pictures of our respective kids. Pretty soon we’re making plans to see each other in southern Vermont when my family and I pass through this summer on the way to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
    This new development is really quite wonderful when I consider how much energy I’ve wasted over the aforementioned seventeen years in being angry at her. If I hadn’t been angry, what could I have done with all that energy? Advanced the cause of world peace, written more productively, smiled more, invented something that would eradicate a disease and/or make me perverse amounts of money, etc.
    Obviously it’s too late to think about what I might have done, since that energy is gone—wasted long ago. But how nice it is to feel like that energy doesn’t need to keep reproducing itself! To let it go and be able to wish happiness on someone I loved!
    Thus explains my absence from the blogosphere. I knew I couldn’t blog another line without getting this off my chest. I shall now commence to again regularly regale you with tales so improbable and/or true-to-life that, while reading them, you will briefly feel the firmament of heaven open before you click away to another page.
   

        

    I’ve just finished reading Sascha Feinstein’s Ask Me Now: Conversations of Jazz and Literature, a full review of which will appear soon in Rain Taxi. In it I ran across the names of two writers I met long ago, both of whom have since died—which I didn’t know until I read about it. The mention of these names got me thinking about the old days when I wanted to be a gypsy/bohemian/troubadour, living footloose off the opportunities my traveling, Beatnik-y life gave me. And it got me thinking about why I never tried that kind of life, or at least not with full gusto, and what I’ve missed by not doing so.
    First stop: 1992 or so. I found myself in Los Angeles, working grunt jobs in film production or accounts payable (which was worse?) while trying to sell my screenplays. My social life centered on the poetry reading scene, and I read my stuff all over town three or four nights a week. My closest buddies were part of a great bohemian party scene centered at the sadly-deceased Onyx Cafe in Los Feliz and a house at 1428 Nadeau Street, where lived a dynamic poet named Eric Brown with his manic energy and endless well of poems. Shit, this guy could write. Totally freely, too. Anyway I hung around with them, trying unsuccessfully to pick up on the bohemian girls who thought I was way too square (and were probably right, since I had an MFA by then and was trying to sell screenplays, after all). We read at laundromats and on the train to Long Beach once, two poets to a car. We put on a pageant to celebrate the end of the Year of the Monkey in an ex-factory downtown that had been abandoned after the Rodney King riots of 1991, and exulted when the fire department shut it down.
    Absolute heaven for Bukowski-wannabes, which we all were to some extent. I thought I could make it with that crowd, thought I could suppress the MFA and he desire for stability and the desire for a girlfriend who only did drugs occasionally for fun, rather than constantly out of an unquenchable emotional need she didn’t understand. 
    But then came the day that Jack Micheline (1929-1998) showed up at 1428 Nadeau Street, crashing at the house en route from one place to another. He apparently lived out of a small, ancient-looking suitcase—which I remember quite vividly (though probably wrongly) as yellowish-beige with small red and black stripes on either side. It contained a few clothes and a many manuscripts. He had bad teeth and gums and looked like he drank too much. Hey, just being honest here. No need to sugar-coat the fact that the gypsy/bohemian/troubadour life is hard on the body. I remember watching him move, sitting next to him on the couch and chatting with him (drunkenly—no memory left of actual details), and realizing THERE IS NO WAY I CAN LIVE THIS LIFE WHAT AM I DOING HERE GET ME OUT OF MY FANTASY NOW.
    At a certain point in the evening Jack Micheline read from those manuscripts in the suitcase, and he was dynamite. He put everything into his words in a way I only dreamed of. I asked myself if I had the balls to live the life he did, to sacrifice my teeth and my stability for my art, and the answer was definitely no.
    The boho girls were right. Too square. Within a few months I had moved back to Colorado and started looking for a real job.

    Next stop: 1996 or so. I found myself in Paris with a night to kill before my flight left from DeGaulle in the morning. I’d heard from an older writer friend, Ronald Sukenick (1932-2004), about a weekly gathering at the 14th Arrondisement (I think) home of a man whose name I can’t remember now. If you paid his cover charge, you got to hang out with a bunch of literary types and eat as much food drink as much red wine as you could handle. A salon of sorts. So I showed up, introduced myself to the host, and went looking for the only other frequenter of the salon that Ron told me about whose name I recognized: the poet, musician, painter, and former Charlie Parker roommate Ted Joans (1928-2003). Ted wasn’t hard to find because he was one of only three black men at the party, and the only one over fifty. I laid in wait for him until he went back to the buffet table to get some more food, then introduced myself and said Ron Sukenick sent me.
    “Did he say I was the Black Surrealist?” asked Ted.
    “Yup.”
    We shook hands, and I had officially met Ted Joans. One of the last surviving Surrealists, one of the last surviving Beats. Definitely the very last survivor of his own unique kind.
    We talked for awhile, until it’s somebody else’s turn with him, about his writings (which I just barely knew, thanks to a last-minute cram in anticipation of meeting him in Paris) and his travels. He’d been all over the world, it seemed, and moved around it with a casualness that I, as one who had aspired to the bohemian life for so long, envied. He had met everyone. He lived his art, breathed his art. He wanted me to tell Ron that he’d be glad to come out to Colorado and do a reading the next time he was in the States, provided we could pay him well enough.
    It should have been a disillusioning moment for me—not about Ted, since I had no illusions about him whatsoever, but about myself and my bohemian dreams. By that time, though, I had already lost some of my yen for the bohemian life. My pangs for lure of the road felt more like an echo to me, and left me slowly (just as did my desire to live in Manhattan after growing up in its shadow). I knew by the time I met Ted Joans that I simply didn’t have the balls to live the way he did, so it wasn’t quite the same shocking self-realization as I experienced when I met Micheline. It was more a sensation of Yup, those LA boho girls were right.
    And they still are, I guess. I like knowing where my next paycheck is coming from, like having an institution to be part of so that people can more easily pigeonhole me when we meet. Maybe my life is all the worse for never having tried to give up my fears and follow my art the way Micheline and Joans did. Maybe my art is all the worse, too. Every once in awhile I get a vision of who I might have been had given bohemianism a serious try: poet rather then fictionist, less domesticated, less lured by the trappings of stability. I like being able to see that other self, and fear for the day when I can’t see it any longer.
    So thanks, Jack and Ted, for reminding me of it. Rest in peace, or however you’d like to rest.

        

    I stood by the inner entrance of the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in North Easton, Massachusetts, wearing the first-ever tux of my life. It was what they call an Indian Summer day in the south suburbs of Boston—mid-October, 80 degrees outside—and when I saw the minister closing the back doors to the church my entire body clamped up and said That’s not good. Then I walked up the aisle, past the four people representing my portion of the guest and the hundred-plus representing my betrothed’s, and stood by the altar waiting for her.
    The woman I speak of, by the way, is not the woman I am married to now—not the mother of my two irascible, maniacal sons. My fainting doomed my first marriage to an early end. Maybe someday I’ll write about the very juicy tales that surrounded the end of that marriage, including heavy petting with my then-wife’s girlfriend in the spacious font seat of a 1973 Buick Centurion.
    Piqued your interest, didn’t it? Like I said, maybe someday…
    At any rate I stood at the altar, waiting for my betrothed to walk past her family and friends and all the people she grew up with. And I sweated like a pig in my wool  tux, tugged at the collar for air, air. Couldn’t get any, because the church was full and the doors were closed and Why was I marrying this woman anyway? And on top of that I had made the mistake of sleeping the previous night—after flying up from Florida, where I attended grad school—in my future in-law’s house, which was home to a 13-year-old dog and a 17-year-old cat. That’s a lot of animal dander, to which I am quite allergic, and in preparation for it I had brought along a wide variety of antihistamines.
    I took several of them the night before but still woke up sniffling. And hell if I was going to sniffle my way through my own wedding! I took a bunch more in the morning, then a bunch more before the ceremony. One of them—given me by my best and oldest friend, M________, who had flown in from Colorado to see me get hitched—was called Seldane, and the FDA eventually pulled it from the market as unsafe for the liver or heart or some other important bodily organ.
     (M_______, I hope as you read this that you realize I bear you no ill will for what happened. We’ve discussed this before, right? Laughed about it? You and the Seldane you gave me were part of the infernal machinery of fate, just one piece of the perfect storm of heat, antihistamine overdose, and unadulterated anxiety about marrying my betrothed that ended in my wedding-day unconsciousness. To this day I thank you for your small contribution to it. Think how much happier I am now than I might have been with her!)
    So my betrothed reached the altar and our ceremony began in earnest. My older brother Tom, my best man, gave me funny looks as I started to sway a little—maybe rock would be the better word, because my weight shifted back and forth from my heels to my toes. People told me, later on, that I looked like I was moving to the rhythm of the minister’s voice. I kept rocking, too stupid to grab Tom’s elbow, and right before the vows began I fell backward, straight as a tree falling in a forest.
    And I even remember thinking about that question: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” Of course it does, I knew as I hit the floor. What a stupid question! Months later I heard a tape of the wedding, and the fall sounded absolutely thunderous. You could actually distinguish the found of my body hitting the floor from that of my head hitting the floor.
    Even more impressive were the gasps from the pews. Talk about shock and awe!
    Seconds later I regained consciousness, pulled of my tux jacket, stood, and shoved my arms in the air like I had just scored a game-winning touchdown. The guests who had been gasping began to cheer (which was also great to hear on the tape, and quite vindicating). Tom took hold of my elbow to keep me steady, the minister opened the doors as I asked him to, and we went on with the ceremony as if nothing had happened. Afterwards, in the receiving line and at the reception, people from my betrothed’s family who had never met me hugged me and slapped my back. “What an icebreaker!” a few of them said, or words to that effect. They thought I had spunk, though it was clear that my then-wife would never, ever forgive me. I put my best face forward, laughed more than I had to, drank too much, and put on a less-than-stellar performance in bed on my first night as a married man.
    A few days later we moved to Florida and everything started to unravel. My then-wife sometimes dreamed that we weren’t really married, that the marriage “didn’t take,” and it’s hard for me to imagine that my fainting didn’t have something to do with it. In truth, we weren’t supposed to be with each other in the first place. We’d gotten together too young, given up our virginity to each other, and stupidly believed that we could go to the afterlife having slept with only one person in our entire lives. At least I believed that—you’ll have to check with my ex for her side of the story.
    I must have learned some lessons from my fainting experience, but I’ve also forgotten them. Such is the beauty of life, no? Wouldn’t it be terrible if we had to remember all the lessons we’ve learned? Then we’d never have the pleasure of making the same mistakes all over again, or the equal pleasure of being able to flog ourselves over them. I, for one, couldn’t handle a life like that at all.
    Vive the river Lethe. All hail.

        

    “Cut me some slack,” I wanted to tell my wife as she chastised me for waking up at 4:00 a.m. and angrily eating half a box of cereal. “My father died again today.”
    But she never came downstairs to give me a hard time, so I had to yell at myself instead. It’s this way every year, even thirty-three years after the act, though there’s no earthly reason why. It ruins Christmas, ruins New Year’s Eve and Day. Ruins my vacation from teaching. The whole holiday season is basically a run-up to January 10, when I wake up feeling like crap and re-live the creation of the gaping, stupefying hole in my life created by my dad’s death when I was ten.
    I should be over it by now, right? I’ve lived three times longer without a father than I ever did with one, so it shouldn’t be such a big deal. But once the hole is there, it’s always there; it will always seek ways to remind you of itself, and you will always seek ways to remind yourself of it.
    So I guess that’s what’s different about the 33rd deathiversary as opposed to the 32nd, and other previous ones. Every year I get grumpy starting about January 7—my father’s death took awhile, as he had a stroke and lay in a coma for about three days while his family waited for him to miraculously recover or die—and don’t really notice until the 9th or so, when I realize that “Oh yeah, tomorrow’s the day.” Then I’ll get sullen and quiet and extra-grouchy, sitting around and thinking a lot. Wondering why the feeling still hits me [italics important] this time of year.
    But deathiversary #33 is different. It’s shaping up to be the one that helps me recognize and embrace my own agency in letting this feeling return, even encouraging it on a subconscious, lizard-brain level. Because it’s not as if that feeling of missing my father exists in the external world like some kind of asteroid that periodically rotates around the sun of my consciousness and hits me [italics important]; clearly that feeling exists in my synapses, in the linguistic and habitual constructs that make up my psyche. I have to own the fact that I invite the feeling into my heart every year and embrace it, despite the fact that it makes me feel like crap for a few weeks.
    And apparently doesn’t do much good for the people around me, either.
    So the question becomes: why am I clinging to this misery and what is it supposed to be going for me? Is it simply habit? Have I been mourning for so long that I don’t know anything else to do this time of year? Mere self-pity? A routine that I’ve gone through so many times that the pain and sadness actually bring me comfort?
    Hard to say. It may all be working itself out right now in the novel I’m working on, which I won’t say the name of because I might jinx it (and because I might change it). But I suspect that I don’t really want to know my reasonings for this ritual remembering, this ritual misery, because I don’t want to get too greedy about trying to solve the mystery of myself. I like a little mystery in myself the way I used to like mystery in lovers, and not like some mystery in my family.
    But even as I write this down, it feels pathological—an excuse to keep clinging to the particular misery which defines me because I know that if I stopped clinging to the misery I would either (a) have nothing to define me, or (b) have to find completely new things to define me that would require an absolute change in my being.
    And who really wants to go through that?
    Sometimes I think that January 10 is my opportunity to molt, to go through that absolute change. And yet I cling to the old self, the sad, perpetually mourning self, despite whatever opportunity I have. Maybe January 10 really is an asteroid that comes around every year, and I’m just too scared to jump onto it.
    Round and round I go. Spinning in circles. Making new knots as I finally develop a strategy to un-knot the old ones.
    The mysteries of the cavernous human mind/soul/spirit. Best left unfathomed because the fathomers might get lost. Might enjoy all that digging, poking, and wondering so much that they never come up to see the light of day again. Like spelunkers who willingly lose themselves to the immensity of the earth’s one giant cave.
    There. Confession done. For another year, at least.

P.S.— I’ll write about my dad some more, I think. Fill in some of the blanks in this story as it now stands, such as why it really wasn’t such a bad thing that he died. But I’ll only do it when I really have to , when I’ve run out of interesting or quasi-interesting things to write about in the rest of my life. Because in all honesty, writing about my dad is like opening up the oldest, most dried-up latrine in the world, adding a ton of water, and stirring it until the stink is all-pervasive.