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Time to go to work...
I eat a fried egg on toast for breakfast. Outside, the western hills glow with the reflected light of the rising sun. In the garden, the cauliflower is barren but pert. Its leaves are bug-eaten and they will wilt in the day’s heat. The zucchini is in flower, too soon and without bearing any fruit. In the back corner of the tiny plot, a single beet stalk, more eviscerated than the cauliflower leaves, protrudes from the clayey soil on its withered root, its wisp of fruit below the surface. I need to amend the soil and add fertilizer. Only the few heads of lettuce look hale.
I finish my breakfast and put the plate in the sink. I sneak into the bedroom quietly, so as not to wake Andrea, and I go to brush my teeth in the bathroom there. The tube of toothpaste is empty and I’m running late, so I take a mouthful of Listerine from the bottle, and sneak back out into the hallway. I swish the mouthwash through the gaps in my teeth, agitating it between my lower lip and gums. It burns. I spit it into the kitchen sink.
I gather my things and head out the sliding glass door. I take a closer look at the garden as I pass: at the eaten edges of the lettuce leaves, at the decimated beet stalk. I head down the cobbled stone stairs, stepping on weeds sprung up through the mortar in the gaps between stones. I walk across the driveway, where more weeds strain skyward through cracks in the paving. I walk along the sidewalk to the top of the street, then turn left, and follow the gentle curve of the sidewalk of that street, until it ends. I make another left, then a right, through a parking lot, then a left onto the main road. There is no sidewalk here, so I walk in the leaf-covered dirt of the shoulder of the two-lane highway, Highway 33. It’s less than a quarter of a mile up the 33 to the Ojai Rancho Inn, where I work.
At work, I set up the continental breakfast: coffee, orange juice, milk, oranges, coffee cake, cereal and oatmeal. I print out the list of rooms to be made-up for the housekeepers, who should arrive at 9:00. Around 7:30, guests start trickling into the lobby: for the free coffee, for a slice of coffee cake, to check out. I ask those checking out if they enjoyed their stay. Yes, they say, but the shower wouldn’t drain, or the remote for the television didn’t work. I’m sorry, I say. I tell them I’ll make a note of it for our maintenance person. I write down the complaints, on a sheet of scratch paper. At 9:15, the first housekeeper, Alicia, arrives, and I give her the print-out of the rooms to be made-up, along with the master key, which opens all the rooms. At 9:30, the second housekeeper, Cynthia, arrives, and goes to join Alicia. At 10:00, I put away what’s left of the continental breakfast. At 11:00, I call the guests who have not checked out and remind them that now is the time to do so.
At 1:30, the housekeepers finish cleaning the rooms, and Alicia returns the print-out, now messily annotated in black pen, along with the master key. I put the print-out next to the list of guests’ complaints. I read the news on the computer. At 3:30, Sally arrives. She says hello and goes to clock in. She comes back behind the front desk. I gather my things. I ask her how she’s doing. I show her the list of guest complaints. She sighs. It’s always something, she says, there’s always something wrong with this place.
May 25, 2009
After the rain, from the living room.
The most difficult thing about writing, for me at least, is sitting down to do it. It’s strange, because I enjoy writing so much once I’ve started, but I have a hard time clearing the time and physical space necessary to work effectively. One of the fatal errors I make over and over is failing to set my writing space apart from my living space in general. I’m writing this from the kitchen table.
This is a problem for my writing life, and my personal life. I start writing, but to Andrea, it looks like I’m just sitting at the kitchen table, surfing the internet or whatever. So she asks me the sort of inane question all people who live together ask each other, like whether or not I’ve seen her coat, and, in my feeble mind, she’s interrupting me in the middle of a torturous sentence. I lose my train of thought, I get mad, she gets offended, no good. Tomorrow, after my job hunt, I’m making myself a workspace in my grandparents’ bedroom, locked away in the unused back part of our borrow home.
The problem with setting up a dedicated workspace is that I share my writing instrument with Andrea and my other computing activities. Her computer’s on the fritz, so the problem is especially acute right now. I’ve been playing around with an old typewriter, but its quaintness and air of gravitas do not outweigh its inefficiency, at least not for me. So I’ll have to start kidnapping the laptop too. Sorry, baby.
This is a lot of bitching about the minor hurdles I have to deal with. Things are otherwise as good as they’ve been in a long long time. I’ve been vacationing in this house, where Andrea and I are now living, since I was a kid; these are comfortable surroundings for me. The house itself is beautiful, set on a beautiful piece of property with a creek in the back. The kitchen table is actually a great place to write from, I can see the birds pecking away at the feeder, at the food Andrea left out for them.
And here’s why I need to establish a good writing routine, a better life routine, in fact: I don’t want to write about San Diego. I mean, I want to write about, I want to get the story out of me, put it all on paper, sort it out, make sense of it all, put order to it, or write it off as a series of random events, but I hate to think about that city, and everything that happened to me there, and everything I did there, and the noise, and latent violence, heavy in the air as the humidity, as the smell of the ocean. I need the routine so that I can say I gave it my best effort. That I really tried to write that damned story. And if I still can’t pull a coherent story from the mess of my memories of San Diego, after I’ve really assigned myself to the task, well, then I’ll say, “It’s just too soon, I’m still too young.” And I can start writing a different story. But if I keep pecking at this book, writing when I feel like writing, instead of regularly, every day, I’ll be left with a pile of pretty vignettes and a knot of loose strands. That sounds much worse than having to borrow the laptop from Andrea.
Personal Note: Four days off the smokes and counting! Thanks Nicopatch! Kids, never ever start smoking. Ever. Seriously.
March 5, 2009
andrea. ojai. double rainbow.
Whew. Busy few weeks. Andrea and I just moved to beautiful Ojai, California, and between unpacking, cooking dinner, baking goodies and looking for a job, I haven’t had much chance to write. Also, I’m working on a new format, as, now that I’m settled here, this blog is going to be a repository for thoughts on my real project: a novel about San Diego. I’ll post excerpts when appropriate, but mostly I want to use this space to examine my process and to keep my story’s threads from knotting up in my brain. So. New posts coming March 1st, at which point I’ll have two weeks of work to dissect and discuss. Check back then (and before then) for more, and please please please leave comments! Feedback, love it.
February 24, 2009
