Lazy Summer Deadlines

Kage Baker was possessed of an iron will in getting tasks done. She was a prolific writer, and almost never neglected to at least try to meet a deadline. The times she screwed up were mostly because she had the wrong deadline date recorded – the worst one, she was 6 months off. That caused a major uproar and re-organization in our household, but she managed to get the novel in limbo completed within 60 days. It was a miracle.

We started keeping a huge white board with timelines on it after that SNAFU; all her projects were marked in different colours, to keep her interest. Kage was a sucker for coloured inks … that system worked pretty well; as long as I remembered to ask her at frequent intervals just what she had recently committed to produce. As long as I found out about it, I could make sure she did it. The trick was finding out …

In Kage’s favour, she tried to do the same for me on my own deadlines. But mine involved Faire rehearsal schedules, and set building, and mundanities like paying the rent. They were easier to keep in mind. Besides, it was mainly when it came to her own things – whether they were  entire novels or promised book reviews – that Kage’s memory went on vacation … even with the fascinating polychrome Reminder Board at her elbow, she had a way of casting an eye over the items and registering a total zero in visual comprehension.

I think it had something to do with the eye becoming inured to what it sees a lot. The overly-familiar tends to blur out of focus and vanish. On the other hand, knowing Kage, she might have been seeing something, all right – the race times at the hyppogriff track, or the featured dinner menu at Mrs. Smith’s Grand Hotel Grill in Salesh-By-The-Sea. Not that that was always a bad thing, mind you. She was often inspired to try one of Mrs. Smith’s recipes after those long blank stares. I recall Bandit Beef with Tangerines with especial fondness, and a luridly striped ice cream bombe complete with fuse …

Anyway. I did my easily-distracted best to keep Kage on track. And Kimberly now tries to keep me on track in turn. Of course, she has her own household, including a husband, a son and an ever-increasing menagerie to look after; she does her very best, but usually only manages to make sure I took all my daily pills and remembered my latest doctor’s appointment. Lately we have been pursuing the renovation of the back yard and the kitchen, and so the poor girl is also occupied with reducing the acreage of skunk-friendly cover while preventing me from keeling over from too much chain-sawing. (The chain saw is my very favourite gardening tool …)

This is not to say that it’s Kimberly’s fault I haven’t been up-to-date on writing lately. It’s totally my own fault. Between getting seasonally distracted by summer afternoons and plums, and using up my thimble-full of available energy beating back the carnivorous grape vine, I have left myself little time for bloggery and composition. Which is just plain stupid.

I shall do better. It’s mostly utter laziness lately – the soft weather, the burgeoning fresh fruit, a new China Mieville novel, innovative Pop Tarts with new frosting patterns: there is always something to distract a writer, there really is. I need to put up a picture of Kage looking stern, and maybe one of those photos of the lovely lads from The Avengers (thank you, Thena!) telling me to write … yeah, that’ll get my attention.

I Need A Mental Lint Filter

Kage Baker, as I have mentioned, resisted taking pain killers because they filled her brain with fuzz.

That was her description, by the way – she said they made her brain feel like the lint trap in the dryer. As anyone knows who does any laundry, after a load of towels the lint trap yields a fascinating felted textile with a texture like Angora wool, in pastel versions of whatever towel you just washed. Wonderful fun to play with, especially if you have some spare googly eyes lying around the place. You can also card and spin the stuff into a recycled yarn of amazing softness. It’s almost a self-made roving weight.

However, it’s not so great to have your thinking parts filled with the metaphoric version of this stuff. So I do understand why Kage objected to vociferously to clogging up her neurons with fuzz.

On the other hand, my kidney is being very naughty. In my experience, nothing actually masks kidney pain – even on very strong analgesics, you continue to feel the damned thing; it just becomes slightly more bearable. Anyone who has a recurring history of kidney pain knows that you learn to just live with the crap below a certain level, because otherwise you can’t do anything at all. A certain nephritic stoicism becomes a natural part of life.

At the moment, I am teetering on the high bar, balanced between a brain full of towel fluff and being curled in a cashew of pain. It’s cool; I am remembering all the old tricks of managing this absurd condition – I did my last two years of high school and my first year of college like this; with an A average, no less – but it takes some time. Luckily, I should hear from my doctor about the results of the visualization tests any day now, and then we can fix this problem. It’s probably just stones.

Yes, it’s cosmically unjust, racka racka racka and a hotch-cha-cha. But these things happen in real life, you know? Worse things could happen. I really am grateful nothing is wrong with my car, and that the Corgi and the skunks seem to be working on a truce. I am happy my doctor gave me a prescription for Percocet. I’m ever so pleased the kidney waited its turn, rather than deciding to get jiggy during my cancer treatment. I can deal with this.

And to begin with, I think I’m gonna get some googly eyes and pipe cleaners, and see if I can make a blanket octopus out of the fabric from the lint filter. And if that works, I’ll see what can be done with the stuff in my brain. I bet there’s some form of fluffy monster that can be built out of that, too.

Blanket Octopus, Flaunting Its Blanket

Habits of Pain

Kage Baker didn’t like taking drugs. She felt it blurred her edge; and unless blurring her edge was what she wanted to be doing – as sometimes it was – she didn’t want to take anything that just incidentally melted her brain.

Consequently, she’d rather suffer pain than take a pain killer, even one as mild as aspirin. She always insisted on waiting to “see if it goes away on its own.” Which it never, ever did, of course – I learned how to treat pain with accu-pressure and massage, because she would not take pills. Even in her final days, it took the argumentative skill of a Caesar or a Cicero to get Kage to take a pain pill. Sometimes I felt like Cato the Elder instead, fruitlessly hollering at the Senate to please do something, anything,  about Carthage …

I honestly think she only took the damned meds because she knew it would soon make no difference. Stubborn, stubborn woman.

Me, I can tolerate a high degree of pain – but I’d rather not. Pain sucks. Its only virtue is in its ebbing, and I do not believe it has any practical use at all. It doesn’t build character, it doesn’t teach you patience, it doesn’t assist your mind to a higher level of consciousness. Algesis is not an aid to spirituality unless you’re a masochist. Put that in your pipe and poke it in your eye, Teilhard de Chardin!

My kidney decided to kick up again tonight. It started during a showing of The Avengers; which, I must admit, was wonderfully distracting. What a great film! I challenge anyone to succumb to any physical or mental discomfort in the face of such splendid heroics. Especially while watching Hulk imbed Loki in a tile floor, like a huge green cat tossing a horned mouse around.

Anyway, after the movie it became obvious the kidney was in full cry. What this is (this time) has not yet been determined – scar tissue, stones, the old kink rising from the dead? A plague of little razor-clawed hamsters? Who knows? Not me, not yet; but I had an ultrasound yestreday, from a charming little girl who looked like a pea-pod faerie and had the pressure capability of a boa constrictor in her dainty little arms. I think she etched my ribs. That may be what has set the miserable kidney off tonight … I’ll find out next week.

My dear little doctor, though, is not one of those physicians who believes pain is good for you. She gave me a prescription for Percocet should the pain resume – and I’ve taken one, and whoo wee! I can’t even feel my waist or flank, let alone anything nasty in the vicinity. There’s a nice cotton candy and velvet void where an hour ago it felt like Prometheus’ liver-eating eagle had moved in.

Of course, my mind is dissolving. Kage was right – pain killers that work also eat your brain. But in some cases, like vicious demon-possessed kidneys, it’s worth it. I am going to eat leftover Chinese food and watch a couple of episodes of I, Claudius, and luxuriate in the absence of pain.

Tomorrow, when my mind comes back on line, maybe we’ll talk about The Avengers. Kage loved super-hero movies. She’d have liked this one immensely.

But for now, my damned kidney is apparently dissolving in chocolate syrup. Oh, lucky, lucky me!

Spare Time Hobbies

Kage Baker was not a repetitive-motion sort of person. Considering it, I’m a little surprised to realize it – but she just didn’t indulge. Not a thumb-twiddler, nor a desk-drummer, nor a rock-back-and-forther, was Kage.

She did tend to tie vast, complicated knots in her own hair, but that may have been self-defense: there was such a lot of it, and it twined around things she sat near like copper ivy. When she was engaged in conversation or watching something, she would start twining a strand around her finger; then, gradually, into cat’s cradles and webs and radiating knots. She never seemed to notice she was doing it, until she tried to move and found she’d either macrame-d herself to her chair or couldn’t get her hand out of her hair. More than once, Kage knotted herself to the person she was sitting beside. She tied knots in other people’s hair, in gentleman-friends’ beards, in the fringe on garments, and in my knitting.

Other than this Arachne-esque absent-mindedness, though, Kage was not much of a fidgeter. She talked with her hands – probably couldn’t have gotten a coherent sentence out if you’d handcuffed her – but when she was silent her hands lay quiet and well-behaved. Except for the knots .

I’m the opposite. I like to keep my hands busy unless I am talking; years of training in debate, improvisation and motion isolation have taught me not to wave my hands around aimlessly. But I do … fuss. I run my hands through my hair, twiddle my glasses, beat little rhythms out on my knees. I do this while driving, and it always drove Kage insane – she was sure someday I would drive us off the road while scratching my nose. After rubbing my ear. After re-fastening my hair clip one-handed …

“Will you please for God’s sake keep your hands on the wheel?” she’d finally shriek as I was pushing my glasses back up my nose.

“I’m fine! My glasses slipped!” I would yell back.

“I don’t want to end up backwards on the center divider again, like in Santa Barbara!”

“Oh, bring that up again! I choked on a date -” ( True story, that. Absurd, embarrassing, but true.)

Anyway, I’d eventually settle down and drive for the next 50 miles fuming, with my hands resolutely at 10 and 2 on the wheel. Then I’d start sneezing, and Kage would  hand me a Kleenex. And all would return to normal. And at the next gas stop, I’d have to use a mat-knife to get her un-knotted from the window crank …

Where Kage practiced repetitive motion exercises was in her mind. Part of it was always working, running through memories and histories, selecting shiny bits and loose pearls and promising strands. Then she’d plait them together, experimenting and replacing and trying out various effects – hardly aware of what was happening up in the front of her mind, I think, where like as not some other story entirely was being fashioned.  Ultimately, some rare and glorious yarn would lie in a neat skein, all ready for use; and I’d hear her finally muse aloud, “What do you suppose it would really take to transplant a head?”

Or back-breed a relict animal? What actually happens in an auto-immune reaction, and what does the body pick on to suddenly hate? Do the strange ices that plate themselves across the faces of meteors ever survive the fall to Earth? Why does damage to a certain part of the temporal lobe always result in hallucinations of dwarves?

That was Kage’s thumb-twiddling. She never forgot anything, and in her idle moments she would sort through all that stuff – trash and treasure, emeralds and wrought gold and a nicely cut cabochon of beer bottle – and her long white hands would weave it into the textiles of imagination. Scheherazade with a loom and needles made of lightning.

I just knit socks, mostly. But I’m broadening my horizons.

Abhorring Vacuum

Kage Baker - on those rare occasions when she found herself with no plots or ideas burning in her brain – would lie back in her wingback armchair and moan, “Tell me stuff. Give me ideas. Inspire me …”

“How the hell am I supposed to do that?” I would grump, usually tangled up in some fiendishly difficult knitting stitch.

“I dunno.” Kage would wave her hands in the air like sock puppets. No one could be as boneless as Kage. “Caper and sing. Tell me jokes. Has something weird been dug up anywhere? Go look through your nerdy science magazines and find me an anomaly.”

“Oh, screw you,” I would wittily reply.

And the afternoon or evening would proceed on a gentle tide of bickering. Ancient disagreements might surface, and the many crimes of adolescence. (“Remember that time you ate all my chocolate-covered cherries?” “It was an emergency. My metabolic theobromos was dropping!”) We would discuss favourite old candies – Kage could lecture on old candies for hours. We’d discuss old movies and television shows – theme songs: see the candy comment. Kage never forgot anything and could sing those for hours. Hours, I tell you.

I would explain planetary rotation and the precession of the equinoxes, with balls of yarn. Kage would explain how to mix Phthalo blues and greens to try and get transparency; which is hard in acrylics. I don’t think either one of us listened much to the other, except for the pleasant  murmur of a familiar voice … God He knows, I would give quite a lot now, to just have her low, cinnamon-and-honey voice in the background while I try to write …

This is not happening, though; not even in my mind. You might note, Dear Readers, the relative lateness of the hour – the day has rolled on by me, with any energy or inspiration that might have been garnered oblivious to my desperate, grasping hands. Also, apparently coated liberally with KY, ’cause I sure haven’t gotten anything. The news is full of fools and malice. The weather went hazy and dull today; no interesting neighborhood activities or sounds aside from some mysterious tumult down by the nearby railroad tracks that sounds like someone was demolishing a piano. It went on for hours, though, which I don’t think one could manage with an actual piano – on the other hand, I can’t imagine what would make such boinging and zinging and tormented harp-sounds as were coming from the tracks …

We had some brief excitement at twilight, when it was revealed that a Mommy skunk had littered in the garage – she was bringing her little ones out for their first excursion into our newly de-forested back yard. Apparently skunks, like true suburbanites, also prefer a nicely clipped lawn to a jungle …  and I must admit, they are illegally cute. But we’ve had to put the baby-gate over the dog door now, partly because Kim doesn’t want skunks in her kitchen but mostly because the Corgi wants to go out and herd the little things.

That way lies madness. Also, bathing a traumatized Corgi in Coca Cola. Which is not as entertaining as you might imagine.

It would have been be a great night for brain-storming. We could have turned on the Lava Lamps and the battery operated candles (earthquake safe!), and I could knit something simple in the breathing twilight while Kage sang all the verses of the theme to Robin Hood. The good old British one with Richard Greene, sponsored by Johnson & Johnson and Wildroot Hair Oil … which didn’t strike us as funny in our childhoods, but certainly does now.

Ah, me. Good memories. And memories of memories, of the times Kage reconstructed some part of our youth with the shadows of her hands on the living room wall. We always found something to talk about; and eventually some idea would lodge like a multi-coloured burr in her mind. And she’d fall silent, and then the next time she got up for a fresh glass of Coke, she’d drift off to the computer … and shortly the keys would start to sound, faster and faster, like rain on thirsty ground.

And my God, the things that bloomed!

Wandering In Circles

Kage Baker, though a faithful daughter of Los Angeles, grew weary of her hometown in her 30′s. I was thinking of that as I drove from Griffith Park to the Westside this morning, through the panoply of Los Angeles in early summer. It was a lovely morning, and I really enjoyed the drive – it was quite weird, remembering how frantic Kage was to leave this city when we did, in a hot May 20 years ago …

But things were getting bad and strange in Los Angeles back then. The 90′s were a pretty ugly time everywhere, and especially so in LA – the artistic industries of our city were trying out a new business model (producing crap); jobs were vanishing in the first early seasons of employment drought; civic unrest was evolving from letters to the editor to firebombs in the mini-malls. Architecture was going through a sucky phase.

Rodney King got beaten by the cops and taped by his neighbor. When the cops were declared innocent in an absurd trial, Los Angeles erupted in riots. We holed up in  our house in the Hollywood Hills for three days, watching our city burn on television – You Are There! But you’d never be There again, as Kage observed, because it burned to the ground. Our office was in Koreatown – the best sandwich shop, our favourite doughnut store, our freaking bank: all ended up as smoking rubble.

Mamma was in the hospital with some undiagnosed pain in her tummy, and she ordered us not to drive out to see her. By the time we could visit her again, the diagnosis was in – pancreatic cancer. She died before two months were out.

The insurance company for which we worked was put up for sale – and our new corporate masters chose to visit the day the riots broke out. They didn’t enjoy having to be evacuated, and promptly closed the Los Angeles office and moved anyone willing to relocate to South Carolina.  Kage and I couldn’t face that idea – but as the days went by, we couldn’t bear to stay in L.A. either.

So we ran away with the circus. Well, the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, to be precise: we joined the staff, and began a wonderful period of following the show up and down the state for the seasonal performances. Those years of wandering healed a lot of wounds, and when the Faire was eventually bought by yet more corporate masters – we quit, we middle-aged bacchantes, a pair of matronly gypsies …  We ended up in Pismo Beach, and Kage’s head was full of new worlds finally coming ripe and ready to be born. And the rest, as they say, is history.

But all of it is history, really; and it’s all twined together in enormous shining Moebius strips and Gordian Knots of miracles and coincidence and outright lunacy. Here I am back in Los Angeles, just about in that season where Kage and I originally fled the place. And it’s beautiful! The weather has turned hot and the Basin smells of orange blossoms, barbecues, wet pavement, hot tar and roses. The hills are green-going-gold. Jacaranda trees are painting entire streets an hallucinatory purple with their sticky little blossoms; magnolia petals drift down like ghosts of broken china, and lie pale and exhausted on the sidewalks, smelling of lemons.

Perfume of heat, Kage called this weather and season. She loved it, until the damned city got too close up and personal with its ghosts, forcing her to flee. But ghosts don’t bother me as much – I don’t see as many as Kage did – and I’m glad to be back.  As long as I can remember how to see it through her eyes.

Oh, P.S. … saw the doctor today, and passed another 3-month check point with no signs of cancer. It is suspected my kidney has begun producing kidney stones. I have a nice prescription for Percodan, and a battery of tests planned for the amusement and edification of my doctors. Life staggers on.

Cat Food Interval

Kage Baker was well-acquainted with the eccentricities of my kidney during our teen-aged years.

She did a lot of writing and sketching with her notebooks propped up on me, where I lay on my back on the cafeteria table. She carried  plastic bags in her enormous ragbag purse, to hand to me when the pain in my side reached the “throw up or die” phase – and constantly assured me that dying was the worse option. Yes, it was, don’t argue, just aim for the bag!

When I was hospitalized for The Final Solution (ha!) Kage smuggled in an entire pizza for me. After being folded in quarters and stuffed into that same huge woven purse (I think there was a dimensional portal in that thing) the pizza resembled some form of Jovian flatfish with a serious rupture – but jeez Louise! It tasted wonderful! She sat with me for hours, she brought me stories – her own, and I cannot now imagine the courage it took her, at age 19, to leave those hand-written sheets in the custody of the drug-addled post-surgery moron I was for the first few days.

My personal plan, at that time, was to have the kidney removed and given to Kimberly. (She smuggled me in milk shakes during this.) Kimberly has always loved cats, and has usually always had at least one. I figured she could give the kitties a treat – fresh kidney! Alas, my surgeon did not agree. No surgeon ever has, though the damned thing was not totally fixed by that first surgery, and has plagued me at intervals ever since.

The latest fit started last week and has made my life miserable for days. The pain has waxed and waned; and while I’m duly grateful for the waning, the waxing has worn pretty damned thin. I am very tired of essaying some bit of normal life -like, sitting up for a half hour or so – and having a pound of caltrops materialize in my right side and start rolling around like marbles in a bag.

It hurts. That’s all the English language has to describe this ghastly sensation. And it’s inadequate.

Some medical sadist compiled a list of the worst pains you can encounter in the course of getting sick or injured. Kidney pain is in the top 3. Some “experts” rate it worse than labour, although I notice that all those “experts” are male … on the other hand, the pain of labour is somewhat ameliorated by the realization that at least a baby is going to be the result. None of us baby-producing folks enjoy that amazing feeling of trying to pass a bowling ball, but when it’s over – at least you have a lovely end product.

Not so with kidney pain. All you’re left with is the desperate hope it’s over for awhile. And maybe a left-over plastic bag …

So, anyway, I have mostly been lying down trying to be unconscious for the last several days. Now that I can sit up again, I can resume writing – along with so many past-times set aside while I lay miserably abed and argued with the cat over who had first rights to the cool pillow. (I lose that argument a surprising amount of the time. ) And tomorrow, I go to see my doctor. It’s just a post-surgical check-up (and I have no doubts all is quite well on that score) but she’s gonna get an earful over the resurgent kidney problem, and what can be done about it.

Something has to be. This cannot be permitted to once more establish its insane reign of terror over my life. I have a lot more to do with my time than when I was a callow 17.

So maybe Kimberly’s cats will finally get their treat. It’s sure as hell my first choice.