Phoebe Kate

As one grows older, birthdays become occasions for reflection — and I’m not talking about the one in the mirror that makes you wince and wonder where the hell that forever-young 18-year-old you still feel like has gone to.

What I’m referring to are the life reviews that tally up what the years have brought you — the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful and everything in between. There’s a reason for this periodic introspective assessment — I figure if people do regular life reviews, then there won’t be any nasty surprises on that last day, when our whole lives flash before our eyes in a split second and we (hopefully) go toward the Light.

This week, I enjoyed (ha) one of those “scary milestone” birthdays. Age, to me, has never had much significance before. I always thought it was not the years in your life but the life in your years that counted. It was a matter of attitude. There are people in their 20s and 30s who have the inflexible, dogmatic, buttoned-down, closed-door mindset of an old curmudgeon, and Golden Oldies who’ve retained the joi de vive and devil-may-care spirit of a teenager.

But this year, for the first time in my life, the number attached to the birthday delivered a TKO punch that sent me reeling…at least for a little while, until I made a cocktail and took a deep breath and reminded myself that I neither look my age (nor act it…just ask my family and friends.) And hopefully, I never will.

In reviewing the ups and downs of several decades, I found myself pining for a foolproof way to make decisions and plans other than gut instinct, the advice of so-called “experts” and whatever wisdom we think we’ve acquired in the infamous School of Hard Knocks. What do we really need to steer us from committing as many faux pas in midlife as we did in our youth?

Leave it to my 22-year-old daughter to come up with the answer. And just what, you inquire, is this mysterious and elusive secret to success and happiness?

Theme music and “life lights.”

Yup. You read that right.

Our time on this earth, my daughter and I agreed, should be like a well-crafted film. Let’s face it: our own personal human interest stories utterly lack any production values whatsoever. We’re a cheesy, low-budget flick…no wonder we screw up and get mixed reviews from others and our own selves.

Movies are loaded with musical cues. The main theme sets the tone and defines the main character (think “Moon River” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s — Holly Golightly’s not really a slut who rents out at $50 a pop, but a little lost girl looking for love in all the wrong places.) There are upbeat tunes when things look promising and dark minor key chords when things are looking bad and edgy music when the main character is about to blow it big time.

Lighting in films conveys definite messages. We never mistake the house that will turn out to be inhabited by demons or where bad things will befall the protagonists with a piece of real estate on HGTV, do we?

So, just imagine if there were theme music and special effects in our everyday lives…

Everything that’s good for us would have a rosy aura around it that only we could see. The loyal and true friends, the schools we should attend, the perfect dates, the ideal mate, the ads for the right jobs that will bring us success and personal satisfaction — all these would have a warm and inviting spotlight on them so we couldn’t miss ’em even if we tried. The theme music of our life — heard only by our ears, of course — would crescendo and we’d remember the marvelous destiny awaiting us. We’d have no adolescent angst or midlife crises or geriatric blues and befuddled funks to contend with.

Conversely, gloomy fugues and dark shadows would unmistakably show us the pitfalls to steer clear of — the Romeos and Juliets who’ll turn out to be creeps and stalkers, the college degrees that will prove useless, the dead-end career paths, the apartment where we’ll be robbed, the street where we’ll be mugged, the marriages from hell, the dream home that will turn into a money pit, the investments that will bankrupt us, that clever (or so we think) idea to become an ex-pat in a Third World rain forest –

Oh, the things that the theme music and life lights could do for us.

If only…if only…

Damn.

~ phoebe kate

Filed under: Uncategorized on September 11th, 2010 | No Comments »

Maybe it’s a case of my not having consumed sufficient caffeine before beginning to read. A couple more cups of coffee and it all would have made total sense to me.

Or maybe it’s because I actually do “live in a cave,” as I sometimes joke when assaulted by too much pop culture nonsense that no one who’s talking about it today will remember a year from now.

Or maybe it’s because the people responsible for the following should seek another line of work. Soon. Like, immediately.

So here. for your reading pleasure, are some headlines from news web sites today that made me sigh, scratch my head and wonder what kids are learning in journalism class these days. The headlines did not, however, cause me to actually click on the links and read the articles. Little wonder, eh?

“BRAIN SURGERY BOOT CAMP”

“CHARITY’S LAST HOURS: BRUTAL BEAUTY” (Charity who??? Is that Sonny and Cher’s daughter? No, wait…that’s Chastity, not Charity…)

“DO CITIES ATTRACT HURRICANES?”

“AMANDA KNOX WANTS TO ADOPT” (Amanda who??? Is this a household name for everyone else but me?)

“WHY DID 2 LITTLE BOYS HAVE TO DIE?”

“SOMETHING BEYOND IMAGINATION IS HAPPENING”

“TANGIBLE SIGNS OF LIFE ARRIVE AT 9/11 MEMORIAL” (that one’s just plain too creepy for words)

“WHY ISN’T THERE MORE QUICKSAND IN MOVIES?”

“AFRAID OF BEING LAUGHED AT?” (Nope, not me. I write this blog, don’t I? ‘Nuff said. I rest my case.)

~ phoebe kate

Filed under: Uncategorized on August 28th, 2010 | No Comments »

Being a writer and a dedicated watcher of people and the passing scene, I’ve long been fascinated with what shoppers have in their carts, especially in large WalMart-type department stores. What you see is often bizarre, believe me, and it’s fascinating to ponder exactly what plans the buyer has in mind for his/her purchases.

Consider the case of a well-dressed, very chic and obviously affluent woman in the checkout aisle buying several boxes of expensive imported English crackers, a dozen cans of Fancy Feast liver pate cat food, a huge jar of green olives, a huge jar of maraschino cherries, a large package of cute little cocktail umbrellas, 2 dozen “faux crystal” plastic cocktail glasses and a case of rubbing alcohol. Hmmm… I was just thankful I wasn’t her BFF and at the top of her guest list for her upcoming party.

Before you remark that it’s painfully clear I don’t have anything better to do with my time other than snooping around and spying on strangers and engaging in idle (and utterly pointless) speculation, let me say that I’m not the only one who does this kind of thing. Today, while surfing the ‘net, I discovered a writer who actually salvages discarded shopping lists from store carts and publishes them.

So there. I’m not crazy. It’s a legitimate creative activity. It’s an art form.

Anyway, here are some of the lists that writer has found. Real people wrote these — thus proving that truth really is stranger than fiction and our lists reveal more about us than we ever suspected.

“Eggs, baking powder, boxing gloves, cat litter, whiskey, brass knuckles.”

“Cigarettes, nicotine gum, gallon of wine, 18-pack beer, extra-strength Tylenol.”

“Decafe green tea, all-natural peanut butter, brewers yeast, wheat gluten, wheat germ, organic veggies, 5 lbs. lard.”

“Stuff for juicer (mango, pears, carrots, grapes), organic vegetables, granola, soy milk, tush cleaner.”

“Salad dressing, cooking oil, honey mustard, dog bacon, cat sausage.”

“Enfamil, Pampers, baby vitamins, Marlboro Lights.”

“Groceries.” (only notation on large piece of otherwise blank paper)

“Oleo. Soda. Buttmilk.”

“Gin (Tanqueray) and candy for work.”

“rost befe, pretsils, burd fude, freser bags, Clenex, hare sope, wypes, drier shetts, londi sope, krakers, sota pop, MSG.”

“Shells, knife, hunting license, bird holds, cell phone, coolers, Amstel Light, Killian Red, say goodbye to wife.”

“Prozac, kid hair de-tangler, Ibuprofen, Fiber-all, Sensodyne.”

“White bread, ice, vanilla schnapps, beer, chips & junkfood”

And lastly, my two favorites:

“URGENT! NEEDED! Hatchet and sheath” (scrawled on an envelope with a return address of Christ’s Gospel Fellowship)

“Sub Folder, Kitten Faces, Wands, MEE”

~ phoebe kate

Filed under: Uncategorized on August 27th, 2010 | 2 Comments »

I’ve been away from Blogdom for a while, as you may have noticed (well, at least I hope you did…) As John Lennon observed, life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans.

It delights in interrupting our nice long soak in the tub, peaceful meal, good night’s sleep, fun time with friends. It plays havoc with our to-do list and keeps us from ever getting around to those important “musts” on our bucket list. At its worst, life derails everything and our days (and weeks and sometimes even months) resemble a particularly nasty train wreck with no rescue teams on the way to help survivors and clean up the debris.

If you’re a creative person, your artistic spirit becomes lost in that wreckage. You don’t have the time or the energy to take a deep breath, much less paint a picture or make some pottery or compose a song or pen a poem — or write a blog.

We like to talk about what we fancy to be “normal” life. With every passing year, however, I become less and less certain what that rare beast actually amounts to, if indeed it exists in anything except our imaginations. How can you define something that, like a creepy shape-changing creature in a sci-fi movie, keeps taking on strange new forms before your very eyes?

The fickle finger of fate, the inevitable aging process, the kaleidoscopic influences of contemporary culture, the unpredictable weather of history-in-the-making, random circumstance and our decisions (great or small) alter the meaning of “normal,” potentially on a daily basis. The status quo when we went to bed last night may very well not be the status quo we wake up to the next morning.

Though we understand the principle that everything changes and nothing stays the same, we’re still genuinely taken by surprise when it occurs. I remember the reaction of a 72-year-old relative of mine when his 97-year-old mother died after a long and awful illness. “Why? Why? Why?” he kept repeating for weeks — months — no wait, it actually was for years — after her passing. “Why did Mama die? Why? Why?”

Obviously, reminding him that the poor woman was older than dirt and sicker than a dog wouldn’t have done any good. None of us is prepared for unforeseen events — but are any of us ready for the expected when it happens?

We have a very hard time accepting the ever-changing New Normal as it reveals itself. And it’s not just bad things, like loss and accident and calamity and catastrophe, that throw us for a loop. It’s ordinary, everyday stuff and even good events.

Kids have trouble adjusting to every school year from K through 12 and on into college and grad school. Adults have difficulty adjusting to being married, having children, changing jobs, retiring from work, moving to a different house or town or state or country. Unhappily married people get divorced and then have problems adapting to being single again.

Even lottery winners reputedly have a terrible time dealing with their stroke of luck and new-found fortune. And all we have to do is glance at the tabloids on the supermarket checkout line to see the havoc that fame wreaks on the illustrious Red Carpet walkers.

My father, a colorful ranconteur and keen observer of life’s vagaries, often remarked he’d gone through periods so perfectly awful that he wished not to die, but to crawl back into the womb. With the increasingly dicey quality of our 21st century world, it’s a very good thing that’s not an option — otherwise, there’d suddenly be thousands and thousands of post-menopausal women toting around adult-sized fetuses in their bellies until their great big second-time-around babies decide it’s safe enough to return to the precarious world outside of Mommy again.

Years ago, I had an old house and an electrician who was a philosopher and a prophet. Whenever he came to repair the faulty wiring or fix a broken-down appliance (which was several times a year for over a decade), we’d compare notes on how life was currently treating us. It didn’t matter whether things were going great or going terribly for either of us. Invariably, he’d nod and with an inscrutable smile say in a momentous sort of voice, “You know, everything… will…be…different…next…year.”

And he was always right. Every single time.

Wise man.

~ phoebe kate

Filed under: Uncategorized on August 26th, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Cowboys, Bull Riders, Bronc Busters and Rodeo Fans, Sisters and Friends

It’ll take us a few days to come up with a new blog theme OR to import the old one and update it — so hang in there, dear readers…

and enjoy the generic quality of this temp look.

And remember to brush your teeth and say your prayers…

Kisses,

Phoebe Kate and Valerie

Filed under: Uncategorized on July 8th, 2010 | 1 Comment »

So the other day, I posted as my status on Facebook this quote from Voltaire: “Life is a ship wreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”

It elicited quite a good response from friends.  That was gratifying, of course.  Maybe it brightened their day.  I hope so.

But this morning, I got up and thought, “What if there aren’t any lifeboats?  What if you’re like the people left on the deck of the Titanic?”  That was a gloomy enough thought.

Then, an even gloomier image appeared in my mind: that horrifying scene at the end of A Perfect Storm, with one of the poor crew members of the fishing boat left bobbing helplessly on a hurricane-tossed sea with no hope of the Coast Guard or anyone else coming to his aid.

That can be us, in our personal lives, if the storm is bad enough and there’s no lifeboat or last-minute rescuers to save to save the day and give us our happy ending.

And then I began thinking about other popular quotes designed to give us an attitude adjustment.  There’s nothing wrong with them, except they are predicated on assumptions and colored with a rosy irrationality, just like Voltaire’s quote. 

“If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”  But what if we don’t have any sugar?  Or a pitcher to put it in?  Life can be cruel and unfair in what it does or does not give us.

“Every cloud has a silver lining.”  Unless it’s a cloud that’s got a tornado in it and you are its random target du jour.

“Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.”  And being blinded by the light and not looking where you’re going, you’ll be rudely surprised and quite dismayed when you (figuratively speaking) walk into walls, slip on banana peels, fall down uncovered manholes into a rat-infested sewer or get hit by a Mack truck.  Life is full of walls, banana peels, uncovered manholes and Mack trucks.

So am I a pessimist?  No, because I don’t expect or look for trouble — but I’ve lived long enough to recognize that it’s a likelihood, even a sure thing, regardless of my upbeat attitude and best efforts.  And I’ve come to realize — no matter what Norman Vincent Peale, Zig Ziglar, Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Og Mandino and Anthony Robbins tell us – that the opposite of optimism is not pessimism.  It’s realism. 

There’s a very fine line between positive thinking and being delusional, between a look-at-the-bright-side mentality and deceiving ourselves as well as others.  As Lemony Snicket observed, “If an optimist had his arm chewed off by an alligator, he might say in a pleasant and hopeful voice, ‘Well, this isn’t too bad.  I don’t have my left arm, but at least nobody will ever ask me if I’m right-handed or left-handed.’”

~ phoebe kate       

Filed under: Phoebe'ocity on June 7th, 2010 | 4 Comments »

I was surprised to hear tonight of the death of the most outrageous of the Golden Girls.  Rue McClanahan was only 76.  If you’re 25, that seems ancient, I know.  However, if you’re over 40, let’s just say your POV on aging and your perspective on what constitutes “old” changes dramatically. 

In her role in Golden Girls, McClanahan was the original cougar and she certainly defined as well as popularized that particular predatory species.  She was the prototype –long before anybody had coined the term, before Kim Cattrall took the concept over the top on SATC, before the Desperate Housewives did their thing, before the word entered the lexicon and became not a derogatory description, but something desirable that women “of a certain age” should aspire to — and be fortunate to achieve.

The show was, for all practical purposes, McClanahan’s claim to fame.  It’s funny to think of a Hollywood celebrity as the sitcom version of a rock band One Hit Wonder, but that’s kind of what she was.  She’d done stage productions and soap operas for years; she was a working actress and that alone, in the biz, is a notable accomplishment. 

But it was her role on Maude, a spinoff of All in the Family, that led to Golden Girls and McClanahan becoming virtually a household name.  Her flamboyance as Blanche made her my favorite character — no, she wasn’t necessarily likable, but she gave the vibes that cruising Miami would be a blast-and-a-half with her as a sidekick and coordinator of the ribald fun.          

The last three years have seen the deaths of 2/3 of the Golden Girls quartet – Estelle Getty in 2008, Bea Arthur last year and now McClanahan.  That leaves only Betty White as the sole survivor — hardly an enviable role to be cast by fate to play when you’re 12 years older than latest GG to bite the dust.

McClanahan was an animal welfare advocate, a supporter of PETA and a vegetarian.  She also had five or six husbands, but who cares about that (except maybe her former spouses, I guess…)

Rest in peace, Alpha Cougar.  You have all eternity to prowl now.  Happy hunting, girl — grrrrrrrr.

~ phoebe kate

Filed under: Phoebe'ocity on June 3rd, 2010 | No Comments »

So, I’ve been talking the last couple of days about the strangeness of writers, but I’ve saved the most outrageous for last.  Marcel Proust took strange to a whole new level and I’m hard pressed to think of any author who has come close to topping him. 

How much do you know about him?  Well, hang on because this is going to be a bumpy ride and you’ll end up being far better acquainted with him than you ever cared to.

• For starters, he sealed himself into a cork-lined room to write The Remembrance of Things Past. 
• He lived with his parents for the duration of their long lifetimes and they were his favorite guests at all his many, many soirees.  (This so appalled his friend Oscar Wilde when he was invited to one of Marcel’s dinner parties that Wilde locked himself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out all evening.) 
• Proust wore tattered, threadbare and conspicuously out-of-style winter clothes every day of the year, no matter where he was going or what he was doing.  His favorite accessory was a ratty old muffler which he never took off.
• He enjoyed drinking beer while eating ice cream.
• He was addicted to every known drug and stimulant.
• He was introduced to James Joyce at a party.  The two writers had never heard of one another nor read each other’s books, so they weren’t able to chat about their shared profession.  Instead, they spent the evening discussing their mutual problem with constipation.
• In an attempt to cure Proust’s practice of masturbation during his teens, his father packed him off to a brothel.  It was a huge fiasco — and costly, too.  Proust was so nervous that he broke a chamber pot and then was so flummoxed that he couldn’t do what he’d been dispatched there to do.  The madam sent a letter to his family, requesting reimbursement for damages – plus an additional fee for the prostitute’s second (and futile) effort to…ummm…get the job done, so to speak.
• Traumatic though his first brothel experience was, it wasn’t his last by any means.  He eventually financed a brothel featuring male prostitutes.  As a regular client of the establishment, to enhance his evening’s enjoyment, Proust always requested…uhhh…live rats.  And hat pins. 

Now that truly is more than we wanted to know.

I guess the caveat to writers –and everyone else, too – is: Keep your secret life secret.  We have a limited number of years on this earth, but embarrassing personal details and gossip material aren’t likely to go with us to the grave.  The “remembrance of things past” has a long shelf life and no expiration date. 

~ phoebe kate        

Filed under: Phoebe'ocity on May 15th, 2010 | 2 Comments »

I’m a writer and I admit I’m a loon, but the following luminaries of the contemporary literary scene make me feel positively normal in comparison, I swear.

Man Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel starts writing the moment she gets out of bed, before she speaks to anyone or has any coffee.  I can understand the silence bit, although that might make a person rather trying to have around for the rest of the household. 

But come on now, Hilary!  How you can write coherently the first thing in the morning with no caffeine is beyond my comprehension and certainly not within the realm of my experience.  Mantel also uses hydrotherapy when she’s got writer’s block: she jumps in the shower to clear her head and get her creative juices flowing again.  On a bad writing day, she must be the squeaky-cleanest woman in England and the major reason why skin moisturizer manufacturers enjoy fabulous fiscal years. 

National Book Award nominee Colum McCann forces himself to squint at 8-point New Times Roman type font as he types his drafts.  Why he puts himself through this eyestrain, he does not volunteer.  And he’s not the only one who finds inspiration by pushing his vision to the max and keeping a medicine cabinet full of Visine.  Turkish novelist and Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk writes his first drafts longhand on graph paper, of all things.  And Nicholson Baker arises at 4 A.M. every morning and writes in total darkness, setting his computer screen to black and the text to gray.  

My eyeballs are bleating and my brain is bifurcating even just thinking about these guys’ writing habits.

Moving onward to less painful but equally peculiar authorly rituals, the aforementioned Nicholson Baker conquered an unruly character whose literary voice was elusive by dressing up every morning as his difficult subject while he was writing the novel.  Booker Prize winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro “auditions” his characters by writing a few chapters from their POVs and finally picks the winner. 

In direct opposition to Hilary Mantel’s morning ritual of no coffee and no chat, Pen/ Faulkner Award winner Kate Christensen spends her mornings perfecting the grand art of procrastination, aka ”not writing.”  She does housework, answers emails, talks on the phone and has been known to play 30 games of Solitaire to postpone the inevitable. 

If I did that, I’d never get a damn word put down on a page.  Ever.

And for those of us writers who are so blocked we can’t think of anything to write about, the renowned Margaret Atwood has some advice: “Put your left hand on the table.  Put your right hand in the air.  If you stay that way long enough, you’ll get a plot.” 

However, when asked if she has ever taken her own advice, she replied that she hadn’t because (of course) ”I don’t have to.”

Oh, yeah.  Thanks a bunch, Ms. Atwood.  Sure makes the rest of us schleppy, half-assed authors feel a lot better about our cases of writer’s block.

So now, I’m beginning to wonder: if these looney, albeit highly successful, writers make me feel normal, then what the hell’s wrong with me?  I have no best-selling novels.  I don’t make thousands of dollars a years from my writing.  My name is not a household word.  No major publisher is wooing me with lucrative book contracts. 

Oh, dear..  Am I not crazy enough to become a truly great writer?

Ohhhh, God….

~ phoebe kate

Filed under: Phoebe'ocity on May 14th, 2010 | 4 Comments »

It’s common knowledge that writers are strange.  If we were normal, we’d work in an office or a store, or be a teacher or a real estate agent or a fitness trainer, or ply a practical, universally needed trade that earns us $100-plus an hour.  Let’s face it: you have to be strange to voluntarily spend your life alone in a room in front of a keyboard with no guarantee that you’ll see a penny for your hard work and creative genius.

It goes without saying that writers are neurotic, obsessive-compulsive, idiosyncratic, eccentric, reclusive and sometimes antisocial.  Do we become writers because we were born this way?  Or does our chosen profession slowly but surely turn us into loons?  I have no idea, but I do know that the Literary Greats are remembered not only for their impressive bibliographies but for their bizarre habits as well.         

For instance, Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up.  (I can’t imagine doing that  — oy! the varicose veins! — but must admit the technique certainly worked well for his career.)  Vladimir Nabokov was also a stander – except he did it at a lectern, writing on index cards, in his stocking feet.   

Anthony Trollope was so driven that he wrote 250 words every 15 minutes for three hours every morning.  (That’s a hell of a lot of fast writing — and a bad case of writer’s cramp.)  Stephen King is an author obsessed with high volume, too.  He writes at least 10 pages every day, 365 days a year, whether he’s sick or well or on vacation or it’s Christmas or his birthday or the end of the world.

P. G. Wodehouse pasted the pages of whatever story he was working on to his walls so he could edit it.  Michael Ondaatge, eschewing both the high tech of compters and the low tech of typewriters (and the use of walls as well), composes his prize-winning novels longhand, then cuts up and Scotch-tapes lines and paragraphs together to create a cohesive narrative. 

On the other hand,  Isaac Asimov reputedly never edited or revised as much as a single word of his works – his first draft was his final product.  (Enviable…)  Not so for Kurt Vonnegut, though, who would write just a single page at a time, then go back and rewrite it over and over again until it was absolutely perfect before composing the next page.   As for Don DeLilo, he writes only paragraph per page.  Even if his paragraph is just one sentence long, he starts the next paragraph on a new page.  (Interesting technique.  I think I may try that…)    

Honore Balzac relied on a dozen-plus cups of espresso a day to keep his creative fires burning bright.  Dan Brown keeps an hourglass on his writing desk and stops writing every hour to do sit-ups and push-ups and other exercises.  Pulitzer Prize-winning Junot Diaz exchanges the comfort of his desk chair for the edge of his bathtub while tackling difficult passages.  (Does the discomfort of cold, hard porcelain serve as an infallible impetus for a quick fix to literary snafus?  Hmmm….)   

William Faulkner — savvy Southerner that he was (and bless his heart) – devised a much simpler way to deal with the problems and frustrations that all writers face as they stare at that blank page or computer screen.  His constant companion as he wrote was his trusty bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

Hey, it sure beats having the caffeine heebie-jeebies or doing hourly crunches or getting hemorrhoids from sitting too long on the side of a tub, if you ask me. 

~ phoebe kate

Filed under: Phoebe'ocity on May 13th, 2010 | 2 Comments »