The Red Project

It must be the Catholic short story writer in me that tends to blog only when I can create a vignette or a sermon. I'd like to be a more frequent blogger, who plops down the detritus of the day but I seem to wait for something momentous to happen.

You've been exposed to my dating woes, for which, in some ways, I'm sorry. It brings out the whiniest in me. For a while, I was thinking of the couple of men I liked who did not seem to reciprocate as being "love poisoning". You know, you eat some shrimp & spend the next day violently ill & are shaky for a couple days after.

In the wake of my heart bug, I started a new project, The Red Project. Walking dogs can sometimes be so idiotically boring that I often carry my camera with me. It's gotten so that I've made some prized calendars of my neighborhood & of dogs, at least by people who are under contract to adore me. So in my fit of the blues, I thought it might help to have something ongoing, active, engaging to do, something about love but anti-disappointment.


I decided to start taking pictures of random red things. Some photos worked & some didn't. For instance, an abandoned red shoe made it on to the Brooklyn Heights Blog But some weren't worth the struggle of getting the dogs to hang on so I could snap the damn thing.

I like taking pictures. I can't draw a stick figure without a ruler, so it's amazing to me when my friend Anna, a painter & ceramicist, goes on about my "eye". Who knew? It makes me feel better to have taken a picture, as though I'd done something as creative as making muffins or writing a poem. There is hope when I upload photos into Adobe & then go in to edit them with my very crude abilities. Will they or won't they "rise"? Will they or won't they "rhyme"?

I think I've always liked taking pictures because I remember that when I was a college sophomore in Stratford-upon-Avon on Shakespeare's birthday, there was Moorish dancing on the green & leaning out of a third floor window of a Tudor hotel was a chef. I've never gotten over not taking that picture. It's been more than twenty years. Maybe I'm still trying to take that picture.

The Red Project has taken the pressure off my little foray into dating, although I might still be dating as well. The jury's out & I'm too busy with the book, dogs &, until yesterday, The Red Project to dwell on it too much. Then tragedy struck.

I had taken Boomer & Roger out for a walk in the snow and when we got back to Roger's house, I had to pee violently. I stripped off everything in a big hurry to waddle into the bathroom and my camera -- my primitive, beloved Fuji that my parents gave me a couple of years ago, went crashing to the floor. It takes pictures but the flash is busted & if I set the zoom, I can't move it without turning the camera off.

Last night I took a little tour through readers' comments at Amazon & laid down some, for me, Serious Money in order to reclaim my Red Project.

In the meanwhile, however, I have missed the following photo-ops:

An abandoned Spider Man umbrella in the trash.
A strip of Chinese New Year paraphernalia dangling from a naked tree.
Many wild rain boots.
A long line of men at CVS with armloads of heart-shaped candy boxes & truly awful stuffed animals.
A swatch of red leather hanging in the shoemaker's store.
A swarm of people at the local luscious flower shop making their Arrangements for tomorrow.
A woman with a Southwest Indian bag dangling from her shoulder.
The neon yin sign in the local fortune teller's storefront.

I contemplated buying a throw-away digital camera but I know that trying to upload the disk I'd get back would make me insane. & I have a month's free trial of Amazon Prime so it should be here five minutes ago. Still, Valentine's Day is nearly over & I won't have the knack of it even if the lines at CVS are even more desperate tomorrow evening.

It's kind of a great metaphor for dating. The photos I've seen in my head & haven't been able to take, the photos I've seen in my head that were hopeless when I uploaded them (the three red bottle caps, for example). The photos that are great but blurred. The photos, like the one above, that are almost red & too irresistible not to take & show off. My moderate skill that I've boasted about. The time they steal from the book. How I cheat just a little bit by adjusting this & that with Adobe.

A much more complete metaphor than love-poisoning.

Yep. Morris dancing. With white knee socks & everything.

Mid-spring dreams & dramas

Three moments have scared me in the last 48 hours, coming fullgrown out of my unconscious. I'm writing the most difficult portion of the book (I'll say this about every portion but remind that chapter two was a bitch) & I think, given how instinctive these two dreams and a response are, I'd better finish the bitch & get on outta Dodge to happier stuff.

Tuesday night's dream:

M. (who I've never met) & I went dinner at a fancy French restaurant where we were "seated" with another couple in conjoining bathtubs. Flash to after dinner: M told me he wasn't interested in me because (direct quote) "You aren't good enough for me."

Man, did I rage. "You don't even have a master's degree," he said, to which I replied I certainly do, from Cornell University ("Cornell University"). "So do I!" he said but went on to disparage me for not being able to afford the restaurant, to which I pointed out I'd paid for my own meal. I think he then pooh-poohed me for walking dogs & having no intellectual life or something of the sort & I yelled that I'm almost famous, that he'd verified my voice with that of the CBS clip of me online.

He decided we should try once more, by having drinks at a hilltop fortress, a club sort of place, because the original restaurant had been a failure. I climbed & climbed in the fortress & finally found the bar, which had young clubby men & women in it but there was a terrace that led onto a huge green lawn, where I took a table and sat, waiting...

(The name of this blog, BTW, comes from just such a scene in Joni Mitchell's song of the same name -- He said he'd be over three hours ago/I've been waiting for his car on the hill.)

*

Phone call at 7.30 a.m. on Wednesday:

"G. went into labor last night & she's going in for a C-section now. Can you take Hero for the night?"

"Of course I can."

"I have another favor to ask. We're expecting a bureau to be delivered between 9 and 12 this morning. Could you be there to let them in."

[Hesitation as I think about morning dogs.]

"You can say no. We can ask somebody else..."

"I have four Labs this morning," I say. I can cancel Mellie but not the others.

"That's fine. You can take `em to our place."

"Four Labs, S. Think about it."

"They'll have a great time. Frances, I gotta go -- "

"Of course. Yeah, I'll be there. I'll lock `em all in the bedroom or something when the delivery comes."

"Hey, Frances -- you know we love you, right?"

"Yeah. I don't know why, but yeah."

*

Wednesday night's dream:

I have begged Alix to take me back and said she can pay me whatever she wants, less than the summer intern if she'll just take me back. She agrees and I'm given the least wanted, most trafficked desk in the office. But I have so much stuff to take home: suitcases of clothes & books, open jars of water to pack. How am I going to do it? I ask co-workers from my previous job. They're off to the Frankfurt Book Fare & have no suggestions, only more stuff for me to get home, Fare stuff like catalogues & galleys & rulers that say Heinemann or Loganesi on them. How will I ever get it all home in one trip on this one night & why am I working here again for yeoman's wages?

*

I'm looking at the dreams as being part & parcel of that hideous response to S: I don't know why he and G. would love me. I keep Hero all day and adore the fur off her head; I carry up packages & newspapers when I come in; I leave a running series of photos I've taken of her; I bring over my Big Sky Journals for the fly fishing porn; I gave Hero a George Dubyah squeaky toy for Christmas...

What's not to love?

Why would I beg to go back to work at a place I hated and felt hated? Why were there once-loved friends/co-workers in that office to witness my mendicancy? Why would -- or is "should" the correct verb? -- I argue my worth and my equality with a man I've never met who said this terrible thing (which he would, adamently, never do. If anything, he loves my brain)?

I found this overwhelming at about 1 p.m. this afternoon when I was stepping into the shower after two rounds of the dog run, saddening enough that when I snuck out on the three dogs, I couldn't get it together to do anything. It's not having three dogs here or the tiredness of antidepressants or even, really, depression.

It's the chicken and the egg of self-loathing. I can do everything in my power not to admit it to myself or show it to the world, but it falls out of me at night and in response to random compliments. It's keeping me from working on my book today and it's keeping me from thinking carefully about dinner, which is always a dangerous time.

And I don't like it.

And even if S. had said, "Hey, Frances -- you know we loathe you, don't you?" that's still not a reason to loathe myself. I grant myself that permission and what has my self ever done to me?

I'm looking at definitions of self:

1. The total, essential, or particular being of a person; the individual...
2. The essential qualities distinguishing one person from another; individuality...
3. One's consciousness of one's own being or identity; the ego...

4. One's own interests, welfare, or advantage...
5. Immunology. That which the immune system identifies as belonging to the body: tissues no longer recognized as self.

Of the five I like the last best, at least for the purposes of this blog. Take all that other stuff -- essential qualities, individuality, consciousness, identity, interests, essential tissues -- & I cannot recognize it as me.

Do I substitute food for "me" or "I"? ("Me" being the indirect object, the self that is acted upon, versus the subject pronoun "I," which does the acting upon "me"). Do I let depression become "I"? Have I substituted men (not a powerful current in my life right now) for "I"? Clothes, tchochkes, books, music, jewelry, mahjongg, obsessions like Christmas, eBay and housework for "me"? Even the dogs for "me"?

Have I substituted obesity and thinness for "I"?

Yeah. I don't know why, but yeah.

But not, quite, tonight. Tonight Daisy can whine a little as I finish this post. Tonight I'm talking back to all that stuff. And I'm saying "I" write.

I even took the photos.