Fixes

Here is a true story. 

Hummingbirds are fascinating to watch. Up close they're a lot more like big bugs than like birds; they're a bit louder than you expect and they hover unsettlingly, changing direction unpredictably. But through a window, there is nothing better to watch. They have weird tongues and their bodies change shape to a surprising degree when they're perching or flying and they're fast, fast, fast. 

Over the summer I started taking the trouble to hang a feeder outside my office, after years of not bothering (you end up needing to refill the feeders all the time and it can be messy and irritating to do so). In late summer, a goldfinch began visiting the hummingbird feeder, every day, mid-morning. Because hummingbirds are so tiny, it looked huge on the perching area, and I worried that it was scaring the little guys off. 

I went to the bird store and asked what I should do. The bird guy said he'd never heard of that, a goldfinch drinking sugar water. I shrugged and said well, it's happening. He sold me an inexpensive sock feeder full of nyjer (a tiny black seed), in the hope of moving the bird's interest to that instead. He asked me to follow up with him, because he was curious what would happen. 

The sock feeder didn't work, at first. I hung it outside my husband's office window, a ways down from the hummingbird feeder. Still that big ol' finch would visit to sip sugar water every day, setting the feeder swinging with its giant tail and bright yellow breast. So I went back to the bird store, where I talked to a different guy, and he, too, had never heard of a goldfinch drinking from a hummingbird feeder. I bought a much more serious feeder, a part-metal contraption with a yellow top and a huge cylinder to fill with nyjer. Which I did, fill it with nyjer. I hammered in a new nail to hang the sock feeder outside my window, two feet or so from the little red hummingbird feeder, and hung the serious feeder outside Matt's office. I hoped to graduate to only having the serious feeder, far enough away from the hummingbirds so as not to scare them off, and not to have to use the sock feeder (much messier and harder to fill) at all. 

A few weeks went by. Nothing happened at first, and then everything happened at once. Dozens of finches and other assorted little birds started visiting my patio, first in the morning and then all day long. Eight of them at a time would cling to the sock feeder, pecking out nyjer and chirping at each other. A pair of them sometimes sat on different sides of the feeder with their tails crossed companionably. They found the serious feeder, too. I bought bigger bags of nyjer and took video. 

Now, months in, my patio is stippled with poop and covered with expended nyjer seeds. Every time we go out there, a flurry of wings and panicked twittering greets us as we (accidentally) scare off the birds that sit and feast all day. Hummingbirds still hang around my patio, some, but the finches and sparrows are the stars of the show. 

I bought some little nests in the hope of slowing the damage they're doing to my flowering bushes via occupancy. I'm in the market for a large birdhouse for the same reason. And I bought a hook to hang the sock feeder over a planter so I don't have to sweep up so much. More stuff to try and coax the patio into looking how I want it to look, to keep it from being presided over by the damn birds. 

All this started with a single goldfinch who liked sugar water. In trying to solve that problem, I created a whole constellation of problems, and trying to solve those means repeatedly adding things to my life - buying solutions. 

Weeks ago I started believing this was a metaphor. 

I don't want to stop feeding the birds. That would be the simplest solution, to just stop, let the finches find another hookup for their nyjer, go back to having just the one hummingbird feeder. But I like them; they're distracting when I'm lonely and worried about my writing. Yet they trouble me: am I making them too fat? am I somehow attracting rats to the patio (I see them crawling along the wall in the evenings, and I found one dead, half-under our grill, earlier this week)? am I lowering the property value with a plethora of tiny poops? will my star jasmine ever recover? 

The Sopranos begins with Tony obsessed with the ducks in his pool. As a metaphor, it's neat; the ducks act independently of him, and he takes few actions to change his relationship with the ducks or the way he lives alongside them. No contradictory elements or uninterpretable events. I remember my husband telling me that his family would always scare off ducks that hung out in their pool, because they were messy, and there was a river literally on the other side of the house that was better for their needs. That's less a metaphor than it is a story about wildlife colliding with suburbia. Like seagulls that mistake empty parking lots for ocean: I used to see that as sad, paving paradise to put up etc., but now I think gulls just have bad eyesight and it doesn't mean much. 

What's going on with me and these finches is something else altogether, something to do with cascades or fractals or sheer stubbornness. Unintended consequences. Soured generosity. Capitalism and the nesting instinct. 

Coincidentally or not, at present a mental health crisis is slowly unfolding inside my head, doubling in size with every unfurled edge. With that lens I see this whole situation as a seminar in failure. At each stage, I guessed about what would help, or fix, and implemented those ideas. In helping or fixing one aspect, I opened the door to other challenges, none of which is more or less tolerable than the initial one but which require new and different fixes. Each new round, through my current lens, contains failure, and failure, and more failure. 

Maybe what I've done is cause dependency in wild animals, which is always a mistake. Maybe I've made my patio a haven for exactly the wrong kinds of animals (today rats, tomorrow coyotes?!) Maybe, in not just giving up and leaving the feeders empty, in continually trying to "solve" this, I've given myself a distraction, both when I sit in my office and when I make a shopping list for the home & garden section at Lowe's, from what I really need to be doing, which is producing new work. It's what I've needed to be doing for five months. Instead, I'm mucking around with finches and pruning my bushes until they start to die. 

That might be too harsh an analysis of what's happening here. In nimbler hands, this story would be a minor plot line in a comedy, like Bridget Jones's disastrously remodeled apartment (in the books) or the adventures of Maris Crane. Everything looks like Stalag 17 to me right now, not like The Apartment. But this metaphor, if it is one, doesn't feel tidy enough to be comic. It's sloppy and strange, as wild animal encounters so often are (or should be), and I don't know what to learn from it. 

Maybe nothing. Maybe we learn less often from true stories. 

My New Necklace

Last weekend I went to San Luis Obispo, and in the course of playing tourist, I found a necklace that moved me enough to spend more than I could really afford. It's a box locket on a heavy chain, and this is what it looks like.

No one has asked me to look inside it. I think this is because it appears to be an ornament on its own rather than a locket. This is what's inside.

I had hoped that I would be able to sit and look at this message at moments I needed it, but the chain's not long enough and the locket can't be positioned the way I imagined. Instead of feeling like a comfort, the message feels like a secret. I like that, too. It's just not what I thought it would be.

The necklace is heavy. The more I think about it, the more this feels appropriate. The heaviness of inhale and exhale, the heaviness of continuing to exist. Breath is not a lightness, not something to bear easily.

The woman who sold it to me said that she got it at an estate sale, that it's from the 1950s. I'm not sure I believe that. What's carved on the inside doesn't feel like a 1950s sentiment, and the design is wrong for that era. If it was once ornamented, and stripped down later by a jewelrymaker who put the message inside, sure. The silver could be old.

The hinge isn't very precise, so the edges impact each other and clink a little when I walk. It doesn't jingle happily like a different necklace I wear most days.

Nearly nothing about this ornament is what I thought I'd get when I spent more than I could afford on it. But it's what I have now. It's different, but it's still good. That is the nature of the endeavor, of the inhale and exhale. Very little is predictable. Most things are bearable, even if heavy. Some days it's a noisome burden. I sit with it, I read it, I carry it with me, I keep it close to my skin.

How to Read the Same Thing Twice

Three weeks ago I read a 1963 book called The Story of the Misfits by James Goode. (The Misfits in this case being the 1961 film starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift.

Not the punk band, 

nor the rival band

of Jem and the Holograms.) The book was more or less a production diary of the overlong, over-budget shoot that resulted in one of the oddest letdowns of that period in cinema. I don't know what I was hoping for from this book; more dirt and gossip, maybe, or a clearer window into the potent personalities involved in the film (John Huston directed and Arthur Miller wrote the screenplay) and how they bounced off one another. Whatever I wanted, I didn't get it.

Throughout the parts of the book that involved Marilyn, I kept having the feeling that this wasn't like I remembered it. No, I wasn't there - my mom turned two that year - but I was recalling the stories of these events from my main source for Marilyn inspiration and knowledge: Donald Spoto's exhaustive biography of her. It presents a whole woman, flaws and all, and offers carefully sourced versions of events in her life that aren't in many other books about her.* After finishing Goode's book, I reread the sections of the Spoto book involving The Misfits, and I was amazed at how different a picture was painted.

For example, Goode's book mentioned from time to time that John Huston was doing a lot of gambling throughout the picture's lengthy location shoot in Reno. If you asked me what Goode intended to convey by talking about this, it would be that Huston had a man's habits and a fool's luck at the gambling table, but boys will be boys. Something Goode failed to mention but Spoto pointed out was that Huston was gambling with the production money. Tens of thousands of (1960) dollars of it. Which he had to call around to Hollywood friends to try and replace before the shoot ended. I don't think that Goode's book tried to pin all the production problems on Marilyn instead, but it lovingly described her huge entourage of assistants and groomers and repeatedly brought up how her lateness made things more difficult and expensive.**

The Spoto biography also put into perspective that Arthur Miller continued to alter Marilyn's role in The Misfits as their marriage situation got worse and worse, twisting Roslyn into a character with less integrity and more flooziness, more of a soft female foil to Clark Gable's incontrovertible masculinity, as the shoot wore on and on. Goode did record that scenes were being rewritten all the time, but didn't mention any character shifts (not that he had access to such subtleties; if he even saw that Marilyn and Arthur's marriage was failing, he didn't say anything). He also spent a lot of time quoting Miller, who sounded to me like a pompous, conceited sourpuss, but I can see how you would mistake that for intellectual giantism if that's what you expect.

Spoto takes every opportunity to sympathize and empathize with Marilyn, to show the reader the events from her point of view. I appreciated this enormously when I first read the biography, because I felt like I'd sat and talked to Marilyn herself for the length of the book, rather than reading about her at a remove. However, next to Goode's reportage, the style seemed downright simpering, as if Spoto was overly interested in making her sympathetic rather than serving the facts. I always felt that his biography was pretty neutral, not fawning, as he doesn't hesitate to talk about her mistakes and how her character failed her. But I no longer had that sense when reading about the same events from a different point of view.

All this is to say: I am astonished at how wildly disparate the same events - sometimes the same actual quotes coming out of the same person's mouth! - seem in different hands, in different contexts, with different attitudes. This long but fascinating article, which is about this very issue applied to a John Belushi biography authored by Bob Woodward, demonstrates this particularly well.

It's also the very thing I plan to get at in the wikibook. (I think I'm too ambitious about theme in this project, because I also want to get at how life on the internet works on people.) The central purpose is to write about how the real version of events, when the participants aren't talking or can't be trusted or all tell different stories, can never truly be known. How our perception of events determines what we consider the actual nature of those events when we are reading about them; how the unbiased reporter can (unwittingly?) become the biased storyteller. Rashomon, sort of, but with more petty arguments between Wikipedia editors.

So not that different at all, really

I'm trying to write a little on it every day, in no hurry at all. I expect this book will take me in the years rather than in the months. It's a much more meticulous, cerebral project than any of the book-length work I've done before. Last week went okay with it, but all spring I've been much more adept at avoiding it than writing on it.

In case you're interested, I was inspired by the death of Jean Harlow's second husband, Paul Bern. He probably killed himself, but we'll never really know.

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*She never slept with Robert Kennedy. She probably slept with JFK once. She died due to gross negligence over drug dosages/combinations on the part of her doctor, Ralph Greenson, not because she overdosed on purpose or the Mafia killed her or whatever. Stuff like that. I tend to believe Spoto's versions of these disputed events, because he clearly spent more time on Marilyn than most of her other biographers did. 

**For those of you who don't know much about Marilyn Monroe, she was pretty much always late for casting calls in the last years of her career, sometimes by a matter of several hours. I.e. if shooting was supposed to start at 10 AM, she might not show up until 1 PM, with no explanation. Spoto indicates that she was insecure and suffered from atrocious stage fright, and her lateness resulted from not being emotionally ready to perform. She also had serious sleep problems throughout her whole life, which meant that in the morning she sometimes had trouble shaking off the sleeping pills she took. 

Orderly, Solvable

One of the great pastimes of my life is Freecell. I realize how ridiculous that sounds, but I swear to you it's true. When I'm working on a knotty game that takes me more than a couple of tries to get through, I consider it serious work, a genuine problem that has to be solved, to which I have to devote time and effort. No different from an equation. It's a hobby, yes, but I don't find it incidental.

It was early, the talent I developed for Freecell. High school. I had a friend ask me once about a game that he'd tried repeatedly to solve and couldn't get to the end of, and I had it done within three tries as he watched. He was openmouthed. It's stupid, but I'm still really proud of that look on his face.

Right now I consider it a sort of in-between thing I like to do. When I need a break from work, whether writing or copy-edit work, I tend to play a game or two to remind my brain that I can, in fact, solve problems, so I can move on with the less mechanical ones that need solving.

Something I had to learn about Freecell is that you can't really succeed if you play it safely. There are times when, in order to move forward in the game, you have to jump, fill up all four empty slots with no certainty that you'll find a space for everything waiting underneath. If you are very methodical, if you take the time to sort through all the possible combinations, going one card to the next to find out what'll happen when and if you make the next moves, there's no real risk involved. However, I don't know about you, but I can't keep all those what-ifs in my head at once. (Not in this head, which can remember ridiculous Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon trivia but can't always calculate 20% without painful concentration.) Sometimes I just have to leap.

It's occurred to me recently that this is a life lesson, too. There are times when I can't be certain that what I'm doing next is going to lead to ultimate happiness, but there are just too many possibilities, too many potential combinations of cards atop each other, for me to make reasonable predictions. You've gotta fill up the slots anyway, you know, take the risk, or it's not life.

One of the other things I've noticed, about Freecell certainly, is that problems seem to unknot themselves more easily if you walk away for a little while and come back later. Sometimes I'll take an hour between a stuck-place in Freecell and the next time I look at the game, and it's just completely different. Why didn't I see that this move and that one, too, are possible? Poof, everything's sorted out and finished.

Matt looked it up for me once, and I think there's a single unsolvable Freecell game programmed in with the other 37,000. If I were a sincere hobbyist, I would probably make a log of all the ones I'd solved and try to do them all in my lifetime. But I'm really not that obsessive. I just like Freecell; I like its orderliness, and I like the way it helps everything seem solvable, with enough time and enough thought and enough ctrl-Z. I still tend to be skittish about permanence, but there isn't much in Freecell and life that you can't reapproach, can't try to solve a different way. If all else fails, sleep on it. It'll probably look different in the morning.

Among other items I need to sleep on this week, Matt was hired by Neversoft. We're moving to California.