is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Pussyfire! And Old Letters.
Pussyfire! And Old Letters.
On Wednesday, as Gayle and I sat on my couch and spoke about moving and its toils, Hans Blix caught on fire! Dumbass jumped up on the coffee table and then sat down very close to a candle, and since his fur is so long and he is no slimjim, his left flankfur sparked up and emitted blue and green flames! He ran away, in the way cats often try to outrun things that are actually attached to their bodies. We ran after him. Luckily, his outer fur seems to be made of the flame-retardant stuff of which Kmart pajamas are made, and we were left only with the smell of burning hair and a laugh at his expense. Blix was left with a wound to his dignity and a patch of hair on his side that turned into little rolled up stinkballs and then fell off.
This week and last I spent quite a bit of time going through the most weighty of old boxes: the boxes filled with old letters and memorabilia from friendships, relationships, events long past. I have been keeping a journal since I was 8 years old, and I have all the journals I have written since I was thirteen years old (oh, for the earlier ones, to further my embarrassment when, in a cyclical fashion, I return to the old journals to see what they say). And I have always been a fan of letters and letter-writing. I used to be a much more prolific source of letters, and, since, when you write a letter to someone, that person usually responds, I have received many, many letters over the years.
Email has destroyed this to some extent. Not only does email tend to be short and more informational/less about relationships or life in general, it also doesn�t leave a physical trace of itself in the form of a letter (unless you print it out and stick it in a file). The physicality of the letter, the form of the paper, the drawings in the margins, the handwriting, and the way handwriting changes over time and with mood, all that is lost to email. Here�s something my Grandma St wrote in one of her letters, of May 14, 2003: �Dear Jill: I have decided that the art of letter-writing is dead. Email has taken away this lovely custom, and soon there will be no need for adjectives and adverbs. Eventually commas and semi-colons will go, but the period will survive to write .com. Daily I receive nothing but silly forwards that seem to come from illiterate ghosts who never include a personal message.� Then she told me she was proud of my Ph.D., punctuation and all.
In the midst of my nostalgic journey, Evany was telling me that, according to Feng Shui directives (or are they merely suggestions, with us here getting caught up in the space between advice and command�?), one is supposed to throw away all one�s old letters, things that keep us attentive to the past instead of the present. We both decided that this is why Feng Shui is BULLSHIT. Well, I�m sure it isn�t all bad. There is actually something sort of Nietzschean about not letting the past overtake the present. My point is that having these old letters is IMPORTANT to me. Reading them reminds me of all kinds of things I have neglected to think about, for better and for worse, but mostly for the better. The past can cohabit with the present, and it can even teach us things that might be useful for us to know about ourselves. (I did take Feng Shui-type advice and throw away anything that was weighing me down. I threw away all my high school and junior high yearbooks, and various things in similar categories. Why? Those things mean nothing to me!)
The surprising thing about my latest turn with the old letters (it has been more than ten years since I last moved, and there was a whole box of old letters that had never been touched during that space of time) was how much I had forgotten about certain things. For instance, the prize winner in the category of Most Letters Ever Written To Jill is Erik Rader. Erik was one of my best best friends during the mid-1980s. We wrote to each other constantly, when we lived in the same town, and when we didn�t, and sometimes even when we were in the same room together. But I haven�t thought of him in years, and I no longer even know how to find him to say hello. (Do any of you remember the band The Uptones, popular in Berkeley in the 80s, and poised, according to Rolling Stone at some point, to take over the musical world? Erik was one of the singer/songwriters of The Uptones. You see, I have never been able to escape musicians, having been born into a house with one and then surrounded by them all my life. But I suppose I have very rarely tried to escape them.)
You know who came in second place in the Most Letters Ever Written To Jill sweepstakes (in which there is no prize other than the gift of having been involved in a significant letter-writing relationship)? It is a three-way tie, between Heidi, Adam, and Halliday. Adam is my cousin, born when I was four, and we have pretty much been best friends since then. He is also very very funny, and has a quirky eye for details, as well as good taste in music. Every now and then he will send to me a letter I wrote to him at some point in the past, and that is always hilarious, to see what I was writing to my cousin at the age of, say, 15. Plus, we�ve always made it a habit to include lists of current music and reading materials. In a strange moment of kismet, this week he sent to me some things he found when he cleaned out our Grandma St�s desk recently when we sold her house. One of the things he sent was a collection of old postcards I had written to her, including one Adam and I had written together in London.
It was no surprise to find many letters from Halliday. He�s a great writer and we�ve had a longstanding friendship that often revolved around text, and argument. It was surprising to see how many letters I have from Heidi. I mean, she has been one of my best friends for a very long time, but she isn�t exactly known for her epistolary skills. I remember one time when she had a letter to me, written, but it was on a disk and she couldn�t get it to a computer with a printer. And then when she could, she couldn�t get it into an envelope, or find a stamp, or a mailbox�. That is the Way of Heidi. But she wrote me many many letters 1) when she lived in NYC the first time and had temping jobs and 2) when I was in Greece doing archaeology and she was doing my receptionist job back in SF. Both of those situations made the leap from computer to printer to envelope to postage to mail service as easy as it needs to be in order for Heidi to participate in the romance of letters. And she sent me many, many intensely detailed funny and engaging letters.
Third place: David. An ex-BF, and a musician. Not only did I get many, many more letters from him than I remember getting (this makes sense: he was a musician often on tour, so we were often apart), but I also had all kinds of funny notes from when he stayed with me, etc.
I had forgotten that my cousin Lloyd and I had been penpals. Lloyd is exactly one year younger than me, or at least he would be, if he were still alive. It was simultaneously sad and sweet to see his handwriting (such a palpable trace of a person! I recognized it right away even though I had forgotten that I knew it so well.) and hear his thoughts again, in this time, when he is no longer here to deliver them in person.
It was fun to read my Grandma St�s letters for the same reason. I even found a letter from my Grandpa St, who wasn�t such a writer, nor really a huge communicator. There was never any doubt of being loved by him, but he wasn�t much into putting it all into words, at least with his grandchildren. He expressed it by helping with things (this will elicit a laugh from anyone in my family, but not because he wasn�t helpful), and hugging, and teasing, and never letting you wipe the kiss goodbye off your cheek while he was looking. But he sent me a letter! And I saved it!
On Monday this week I went down to the corner bar where Sunny is currently bartending and drank a wheat beer and talked to her when she wasn�t busy. When she was working, I wrote a letter, hand-written, to Adam. Four pages. Then I wrote letters to my friend Nicholas the Antarctican (he and I used to write letters and then it turned into email, but his emails tend to be more like letters), and my friend Ian (another musician), and my friend Lou (she lives in Northern England, and is a very good correspondent, even in this age of email).
Tonight is a party at Evany�s. I just had lunch with Liz at Levon�s place, and Liz offered to come pick me up since I�m bringing baked goods over, etc., and am without car. Then I reminded her that it is GAY PRIDE weekend. This means that, come sunset, the Dyke March is going to be tramping its way up my block, and there will be no car access, no none at all, anywhere near my house, for some time. So she said: YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN! That�s fine. I hope they do at least some of their marching before I have to leave to get to E�s, because it is quite an awesome and inspiring sight to behold, the thousands of ladies (many of whom do not want to be called ladies, mind you), many of them topless no matter how cold it is, marching in solidarity and individuality at the same time. Ah, San Francisco.
4:16 p.m. - June 25, 2005
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