Slow cooking.

I put everything in the slow cooker for the soup, and I spent the afternoon writing. The soup was done when I was done. Oh boy, it was good. With it, J. and I had an organic South African cab (the same wine I used in the soup). Yum. And crusty bread.

Here's what's in the soup. I started with a recipe in Everyday Greens and added stuff:

sauté:
sweet onion
celery

deglaze with:
red wine

add:
a spice blend of toasted cumin, coriander, black pepper, cayenne, and cinnamon
garlic
fresh grated ginger
chick peas
canned diced tomatoes
vegetable stock

simmer till the tomatoes fall apart (a long time)

add and heat through (because they were already cooked):
sweet potatoes
beet greens

and garnish with:
chopped cilantro

I've written about 30 pages, which is roughly the first act. All the characters are in there now, doing what they do. The story is set up; I just have to run with it now.

Freaky weather.

It's downright chilly this morning, and the paper says it's going to get down into the 30s tomorrow. Just a couple days ago, I was sure it was summertime already.

I cooked a big pot of chick peas yesterday thinking I would make hummus, but in honor of the temperature drop I decided to make Moroccan chick pea soup, with garlic, ginger, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, tomatoes, red wine. It's a Greens recipe, and I'm adding some diced, roasted sweet potatoes, and some chopped beet greens. Because they're here and need to be used up.

(I saved some chick peas to make a small batch of hummus -- it was a big pot of chick peas! I know because I put them in a bowl in the fridge to cool, and later when I went to grab something else on the same shelf I snagged the bowl and spilled all the chick peas and liquid onto the floor. I scooped them all up and rinsed them off, but our soup may have a couple cat hairs in it.)

Presto chango.

I just realized that I haven't blogged about my big attitude shift this week.

All this back and forth about the drug studies recently -- first I'm in, then I'm out, first it's $7000, then it's $3500, first it's April and May, then it's not -- making me crazy about my financial straits. For the last couple of weeks I was feeling more and more strung out. I was anxious about my evaporating bank balance, but that stress reproduced asexually and suddenly I was worrying about my writing, about the garden, about Z.

The weekend was bad, I drank too much on Saturday (apparently, though I only had 3 beers), was sick on Sunday.

I hadn't smoked any marijuana for several weeks because, for the drug studies they test for "illicit" drugs as part of the screening process, and pot can stay in your urine for weeks. But Sunday night I said fuck it and I got high. God, I feel better. Ever since, I've been relaxed and cheerful and focused.

So I'll smoke for a few days and then give it up again for a couple weeks before I start looking again for a drug study to take part in. These drug studies are always going on, there are always more of them coming. My financial situation is not going to be any worse two weeks from now, so I might as well relax and make the most of this time I have for myself.

I'm a firm believer in the medicinal use of intoxicants!

Go!

I'm burning through the first draft of my screenplay. As I'd hoped, I had written enough scenes and bits of dialog and done enough pondering and considering so that, once I started putting it into screenplay format, it's all just flowing out onto the page. I've spent several hours every day this week writing -- about 6 pages a day.

The numbers are good too. I have 18 pages written, which is 5 scenes, which averages to 3 pages per scene. In my outline, there are 40 scenes, so that makes about 120 pages, which is just right for a feature screenplay. Of course it's still very, very rough, but to be in the ballpark is encouraging.

Moon & Stars.

I feel much better about the garden.

Z. seems to know everything about horticulture. I haven't known him very long, so it's possible he's a psychopath posing as someone who knows everything about horticulture, but my intuition tells me he's for real.

He told me the small patches of mildew on the cucumber leaves are minor, nothing to worry about. The one soybean plant whose leaves are turning yellow can be doctored by putting some coffee grounds around the base of the plant.

The herbs will be fine when it gets warmer and drier. Basil always gets brown spots on some leaves, they just look worse now because the plants are so small. The beetles on the Meyer lemon are, as I hoped, probably there to eat aphids. At any rate, it doesn't look like they're eating the tree.

And the yellow spots on the watermelon leaves are supposed to be there. I planted an heirloom variety called Moon & Stars which has yellow spots on the inside and outside of the fruit as well as on the leaves. Duh.

Bugs, etc.

All kinds of problems in the garden, most of which I have no idea what to do about. The cucumber and watermelon plants have yellow spots all over the leaves.

My internet research didn't help. I think it's mildew, but I couldn't find any advice on what to do about it, except to do things I'm already doing, like not watering at night. All the herbs seem to be covered with mildew too. The basil is doing especially poorly -- all three varieties look sickly. It's been a little humid and rainy the last couple weeks but no more humid than Indiana where my mom's basil does very well every year.

The Meyer lemon is on the verge of blooming. I noticed some red and black beetles sitting on several of the buds this morning. They're about the size of lady bugs, but they aren't. I also noticed one aphid, so I hope the mystery bugs are there to eat the aphids. J. released some lady bugs in the garden last week, but I didn't see them this morning. I hope they're still around.

Something seems to be eating the leaves of the chile plants -- they have big holes in them -- but they seem to be thriving in spite of it. The jalapeños and Thai chilies have a few blossoms already.

I'm discouraged. Maybe Z. will have some advice for me. If he comes over tonight before it gets dark, he can take a look.

Entitlement.

A woman with whom I shared an apartment in New York in my early twenties, when we were both in art school, used to rail at me about my "sense of entitlement." This would be in the heat of an argument about washing the dishes or cleaning the bathroom, things she felt she always did and I never did. For the most part, this was true. I thought you cleaned things when they were dirty (sometimes really dirty), not just because it was Saturday.

I railed right back, against her characterization of me as a typical American male accustomed to having all the housework done by a female. I didn't see it that way. Compared to some of my male peers whose mothers had waited on them hand and foot, I didn't see myself as having been pampered. But now, looking back, I don't remember doing much housework. My mom cleaned the house top to bottom every weekend and did all the cooking and laundry. She didn't clean my bedroom -- maybe that's why I had the impression that I was a liberated male.

Anyway, my roommate and I were great friends for many years (though we've regretfully lost touch now). Her eternal feminist vigilance was tedious sometimes, but I knew she was usually essentially correct, and I learned a lot from her about how to root out those biases in simple everyday transactions. I miss her.

I think a lot about entitlement, my sense of entitlement, during these periods in my life when I'm particularly whiny about money and my livelihood and my frustration not being able to make a living at what I want to do. Because of course I know that, though I'm broke and anxious about it, my life is relatively luxurious. I'm comfortable, healthy, I eat as much delicious food as I need every day, often more. I complain that I don't want to get a job as a cook for $8/hour, knowing that there are many people who are grateful for jobs like that, or would be grateful if they could even get them. I'm surrounded by people whose struggles to make a living are much more dire than mine, not just on the other side of the world but right here in Austin.

Still, I complain.

I say -- and this feels true to me --that I am so strongly called to make art that if I'm not able to, I feel empty and useless. But is that true? Or is it my white American male sense of entitlement at the root of my opinion that I should be able to do whatever the hell I want to do and somebody should pay me to do it?

Plans or not.

A few years before the end of my career, my partner J. and I read a book, one of those "do this and everything will be fine" books about the music business. I won't mention it by name because of the negative impression I'm going to create. I think it's a fine book and it has been very helpful to a lot of people. In our case, it did a lot more damage than good.

The book sets out a method of structuring a career by making a 10-year plan, then working backwards to a 5-year plan, a 1-year plan, etc. I won't go into why I think this sort of planning is maybe wise for a restaurant or a computer business but not for an artist, except to say that it locked us into thinking about our work (or, to be more accurate, our lives, because there's no difference for an artist) as a series of goals -- goals which we were constantly not meeting, not because of a lack of hard, focused effort, but because of the nature of our work.

Anyway, thank god, it all came tumbling down soon enough. And out of the rubble of what I thought I wanted, I try to create a life as an artist without a business plan. I went from everything being way too planned to nothing being planned at all. This groundlessness is great for my Buddhist practice, but it's not so great for my emotional health.

When J. and I first started talking about what we would do "after," it was terrifying but wonderful that everything was suddenly so wide open, that anything was possible. Opportunities soon fell into place. Producers materialized with money, and I got the chance to create a documentary about our career and be paid for it.

When that was done, I felt pretty insecure as the money ran out and I didn't have other means, but then a random meeting in a bar led me to the owners of the restaurant in Utah where I would go to live and work in the most beautiful place I've ever been for two seasons. Through one of the other cooks there, I met the executive chef at Greens in San Francisco who hired me to work for her. But on a cook's wages, I couldn't afford to live in San Francisco., which is one of the reasons I'm in Austin now.

I grew to believe that when you're not nailed down too firmly, opportunities arise, a path opens. The trouble now is that, yes, a path has opened and I've been free to follow it, but I'm not sure it is the path I want to be on. I got a job cooking in a wonderful restaurant, which led me to another wonderful restaurant, and now I can apply for cooking jobs, but, wait, I thought I was an artist. Why would I want to spend 40 hours a week cooking? That would suck just as much as my old job as a legal secretary and cooks make about a third what legal secretaries make. I don't want to spend 40 hours a week doing anything, if it's just to make money. I gave up the legal secretary gig a long time ago, and not a moment too soon for my sanity.

J. has a part-time job that he doesn't hate. It pays well enough that he can get by on it and still have time and energy for his writing. That would be okay with me.

I'll find out very soon if I have been accepted at U.T. If I'm a full-time student in the fall, everything will change. Even so, I still need to find a source of income that doesn't make me hate myself and my life. Not too much, anyway.

Toast and yogurt.

The study that I was screening for has been canceled. When I told J., he said, "So you wanna wake and bake?" Do I?! But I can't, because I need to keep trying to get into a study soon soon soon and that stuff takes three weeks to get out of your urine.

I went to the Chain Drive last night, had 2 or 3 beers, walked home distraught, wrote the blog entry below, didn't go to bed until 3 a.m. I was up and down with diarrhea until noon, feeling nauseous and chilly. When I got out of bed and checked my messages, that's when I found out about the study.

I've been eating nothing but toast and yogurt today. J. was a little stomach sick a couple days ago, so it's possible we caught a bug. But it's more likely psychosomatic. Emotional distress goes right to my colon.

Despair.

God I'm sick of this feeling. This encroaching despair as I run out of money. I have about 300 dollars in my bank account, not quite enough to pay the bills I need to pay. And I won't know until some time this week if I am going to be in this drug study that I'm counting on for my next infusion of cash.

You might say, well, if you're tired of being broke then get a job. But the reason I'm tired of being broke is that it's depressing, and having a job will only be more depressing.

I have lots of very nice moments, days that are great. Lately mostly having to do with working in the garden or writing or even blogging. But I want those moments to be my life, not just periodic relief from it.

I always feel like I have two choices. Ever since I was 20 years old, I have felt like I had these two choices:

Behind door number one: get a job. If I get a job, I either have to give up my creative life (despair) or try to hold on to my creative life but never have enough time or energy to give to it (despair). And even if I get a job, the jobs I am qualified for would not pay me enough to break even (despair).

Behind door number two: don't get a job. Keep doing what I'm doing. At least now I feel like I am living some semblance of an artist's life. I am writing. But I am constantly distracted by the need to again and again come up with money to pay the bills and I'm always just short of the bare minimum I need (despair, slightly less than with door number one, but, still, despair).

Nobody worry, I'm kidding about the noose. But I'm not kidding about being sick to death of these two choices. Sick to fucking death. Where's door number three? I need door number three. I am 46 years old and I am weary to my bones of not being able to provide for myself.

Black.

I did laundry tonight. A few of my t-shirts came out with big stains on them -- stains that weren't there before I washed them. The stains made me aware of how generally ratty and dingy all my clothes are, which made me want new clothes, which reminded me of how broke I am.

I think I'll go back to wearing nothing but black like I did in my twenties when I lived in New York. Wasn't everything easier when we were in our twenties living in New York and wearing black?

I'm just gonna lie down for a second...

I'm ready to take all these scenes and scraps of writing and put them into actual screenplay format. I don't mean to say that it's done, or that I'm even very close to a first draft, but I'm ready to start working in the format, which is a big step. It means, to me, that I can finally, however dimly, see this as a coherent work of art. I realized this as I was falling asleep last night, and I woke up early because I was excited to start.

Just as I was finishing my coffee and breakfast and reading The New York Times on the web this morning, J. knocked on my door to tell me he had a hankering for lunch at Hoover's. It was about noon. Noon to 1 p.m. is my scheduled time for showering and meditating. I had already showered, since I got up early.

Hoover's is a big, bright neighborhood restaurant, super-busy for lunch, serving a mix of Cajun, soul food, and just plain Southern cuisine. A tall, stout black man who must be Mr. Hoover in chef's jacket and check pants greeted us at the door and told us it would be about 15 minutes for a table. It was.

Our fast, efficient waiter warned us away from the tuna burger, complained about the TV in the corner playing the Food Network ("we can't eat till the end of our shift, but we have to watch it and serve it -- I'm starving!") and recommended the cobbler and coconut cream over the sweet potato pie ("it's just like pumpkin pie, but not as good").

Both of us ordered the "4-veggie plate." (Me: jalapeno creamed spinach, macaroni and cheese, garlic new potatoes, and green beans cooked with bacon; J.: butter beans, mac and cheese, the same new potatoes, and ? I can't remember his fourth one). Each portion was served in an individual bowl and would have been lunch in itself. Good lord, good food!

Now it's 4:45 and I haven't meditated or started writing. I'm not going to say it's J.'s fault. Hoover's is one of those things that, once you've said the word, it has ultimate power over you and you won't be satisfied until you're so full you're sick. It's been a long time since I was already stuffed but forced down dessert anyway.

Now I just want to take a nap.

Dust.

J. got a wild hair yesterday, borrowed our landlady's vacuum cleaner, and vacuumed the whole house. Except my room, which I did. I hadn't noticed that it needed vacuuming until one evening when J. and I were watching a movie. There was only one lamp on, which for some reason illuminated the area under my desk.

I'm not much of a duster. The dust is not as bad here in Austin as it was in Jersey City when my windows were only a couple yards from a very busy street. Or southern Utah, which is pretty much made of dust.

Dust reminds me of Quentin Crisp. Quentin Crisp lived on E. 4th St. during the years I lived in the East Village. It wasn't really a boarding house he lived in, but it was a four story walk-up, all tiny, single rooms, each with a sink, and a shared bathroom on each floor. Two or three times over the course of many years living in the neighborhood, I went home to this building with a boyish man with white, white teeth and long eyelashes whom I met in Stuyvesant Park. (The two of us had remarkably compatible sexual tastes.) Quentin Crisp had violet hair. I passed him in the stairwell a couple times; he was coming up and I was going down. Quentin Crisp didn't believe in dusting; he said that after the first three years it doesn't get any worse.

That reminds me of Annie Dillard's amazing book For the Time Being, which is all about dust. Well, it's about other things too, but mostly it's about dust. (It's a shame about the word "amazing," another in a long list of ruined words, like "awesome," and "gay.")

Having caught the spring cleaning bug from J., I went on to scrub the mold off the bathtub, shower walls, and toilet. Let's just say the garden was not the only thing growing around here. I can tolerate a dirty bathroom for a pretty long time -- it's just a bathroom. But it sure is lovely when it's clean.

Drop it.

I was thinking while I was meditating just now that working with my mind is like walking a dog that keeps stopping to pick stuff up. I'm strolling along, suddenly I feel the leash pull, I look and the dog is holding something in its teeth, a piece of fast food trash, a dead mouse, whatever. I say, "Drop it!" He does. Back to strolling, half a block later the leash pulls again, and on and on.

And if you keep walking the same path, it's often the same damn thing the dog picks up every day. Meditating is just practicing dropping it. Every time. Over and over.

Something I picked up today on my walk was my view of myself as lazy. I guess writing about my schedule put me in mind of it. I've dropped this one a million times, and I keep practicing. When I was a kid, my dad used to tell me I was lazy. "Pick up your feet when you walk!" "Get out of bed!" etc.

I still drag my feet when I walk, and I still sleep in sometimes, but I've come to see these things as aspects of my personality, not moral defects. I'm slow, deliberate, and generally sort of still. Not lazy. But that piece of trash on the sidewalk is still there and still tempts me every time I walk by it.

Starting today.

Pema Chodron says, "Start where you are." What I would add is, "Okay, now again. And again. And one more time."

I realized when I was in the long slog of logging and editing my film Life in a Box -- the first and only time in my adult life during which I was completely free of outside work -- that I did well with a strict schedule. I had the day, and the week, scheduled down to the hour. Two hours for coffee and the New York Times, one hour journaling, one hour for showering and meditation, six hours of logging, and so on. It worked.

I had always thought, before then, that I was a little lazy and certainly not a morning person. But suddenly, with no extraordinary effort, I was getting up at 7 a.m. (with no alarm clock!), working at one thing or another all day, and going to sleep at 11. It turns out I was not lazy, I just didn't want to do a bunch of shit other people wanted me to do. I stuck to that schedule, more or less, for two years, until the money ran out and the film was done.

Even though, for the past couple of years, I've had to do various jobs to pay the bills, I'm trying to live by a schedule when my time is my own. Sometimes it works better than others. I have trouble recovering from any disruption. I plug along on my schedule for a couple of weeks, but then I do one of these drug trials and get all out of whack.

The drug trials are better than having a job as far as giving me time and psychic space to write. I have blocks of free time while I'm in the trial, and there's not much to do in the facility but read and write. I just have to nudge myself to do less reading and more writing. But it's been two weeks since I ended the last trial, and I haven't been able yet to get back on a schedule. Today, I'm starting again. At noon, I shower.

Fasting.

I was thinking I would get to bed early, so I can get up at 6 and have breakfast. I have a 1 p.m. screening appointment for a drug trial, and I have to have been fasting for 8 hours before they take blood. The first thing they do at these things is read a long consent form which we have to sign, along with all sorts of other paperwork, so it'll be at least 2 before they take blood. If I don't get up early enough to eat something at 6, I'll for sure have a nasty headache by 3 or so when I get out of there.

But J. and I just got back from Quack's, where we each had a cherry Danish (half price on all pastries if you go late), and two cups of decaf, which I'm skeptical of the decaffeinatedness of, since I feel a little wired. Well, okay, maybe it's the cherry Danish. So I probably won't be going to sleep any too early.

Tonight for dinner, I made a big pot of beans & greens (from Nick and Michael's recipe: white beans, greens -- I used the chard, beet greens, and kohlrabi greens from the farm -- lots of garlic and pepper flakes, cooked until it's soupy, salt to taste). I also made foccacia from a really easy recipe my mom sent me. It only took an hour from pulling out the mixer to putting the bread on the table. I topped it with fresh rosemary that I clipped from the huge bush in our front yard. And J. made jasmine rice. Perfect.

Between dinner and dessert, we watched a little French & Saunders. Dawn French is the funniest woman alive. Period.

Stormy Weather.

I'm listening to iTunes on shuffle, which is how I usually listen to music. I have the Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall recording (remastered a few years ago for a new CD release) which, on vinyl, was one of my favorite records when I was a teenager. I listened to it over and over and over. I'm still fascinated and mystified by that fact. I had no exposure to gay culture back then, didn't even really know I was homosexual, yet from about 14 I was obsessed with Judy Garland. I scoured the Reader's Guide in the library and photocopied every article I could find about her. Bought every record I could find. Poured over the TV Guide every week to make sure I caught her movies on the late show that week.

Anyway, it's still pouring outside, and Judy comes on singing Stormy Weather. Her arrangement is over-the-top huge, of course, building up to a big, sobbing bridge, and you can just picture her on the floor, pounding the boards with her fists: "Rain pourin' down, over every hope I had, this pitterin' patterin' beatin' and splatterin' drives me mad! Plop! Plop! Plop! Plop!" Then she slows down and gets all quiet and pleading: "This misery is just too much for me." And she kicks back in again, transposing up a step: "Can't go on!" -- and a huge thunderbolt cracks outside, buckets of rain are falling -- "Everything I had is gone! Stormy weather..."

Oh, my!

Didn't it rain, little children?

It's been raining on and off all day, but now it's absolutely gushing. Big storm, dark sky, I love it.

From my desk, through the screen door, I can see from the back of the house, where my room is, along the side of the house to the street. J. moved here a couple months before I did, and I guess the side yard was kind of a mess. The wooden stoop at my door was rotted and collapsing because the kitchen sink drained right out to the side of the house under it. Nice, huh?

J. paved a narrow path with bricks along the side of the house from the front porch to my door, and he asked a friend to build a new set of steps. When I got here, we bought some plastic tubing and diverted the grey water past my stoop and farther out into the yard. (It's probably illegal for gray water to drain into the yard, but we don't want our rent to go up if we ask the landlord to fix the plumbing.)

There are no gutters on the house, so when it rains water pours over the edge of the roof into the side yard. J. and I have talked about rigging something up to catch rainwater for the garden, but there's only so much you want to put into a rental house.

That brick path still breaks my heart, reminding me that J. put so much effort into making a nice home for me to come to. We'd been apart for several years when we decided to live together again.

Um ... ?

Z. called me "sweetheart."

At Whole Foods yesterday, when we were buying food to take up to the roof for a picnic brunch, he said something like, "the half and half is right over there, sweetheart," or "I'm gonna pick up some yogurt, sweetheart," I don't remember the exact sentence. But it hit me like a tap on the shoulder. Or a poke in the ribs. I felt an urge to make a dry comment about it, but thankfully my wit failed me at the moment. We don't know each other well enough, I don't think, for dry comments about the progress of our relationship. (I use the word relationship in its less fraught sense.)

The word "sweetheart" makes me think of my friend Larry, who I used to proofread with on the graveyard shift at Weil Gotshal & Manges in the eighties in New York. There was a group of us who were temps working through an agency, but we were permanently assigned to this one firm and this one shift. This was in the heyday of big corporate mergers and junk bonds and all that stuff (remember?), when law firms were cleaning up big time, and they hired boatloads of temps who did a few hours of work a week and spent the rest of their time on the clock smoking cigarettes and reading magazines.

Larry was this sort of regular straight guy from Brooklyn. For some reason we became buddies. He used to call the women we worked with sweetheart, and a couple of them really bristled at that. They felt it was demeaning. It seemed affectionate to me, and charming. He never called me, or any man, sweetheart.

But neither am I in the habit of calling a man sweetheart, unless he is "my" sweetheart. Not even my dear friends. Is this deeply ingrained sexism? Or just a natural gender differentiation? My friendship with Larry was the beginning of my consciousness that all these issues of bias and discrimination are more complex than I had imagined. This was around the peak of my ACT UP and Queer Nation days, and probably the beginning of my disillusionment with those circles.

Larry pushed more than one button there. Near the end of my proofreading career, Larry and I hatched a scheme whereby the two of us would jump to a different agency, take our regular gig, and ask for a huge raise in our hourly rate in return for delivering several of our co-workers to the new agency. It worked, but a few weeks later, the economy tanked and all the big New York law firms cut way back on temps.

The scheme didn't seem unethical, just a little cutthroat, but still several people we worked with took a dim view of it. I still believe that those people judged the situation negatively because Larry was Jewish and he was driving a hard bargain.

Anyway. Z. called me sweetheart.

Damn.

I went to my screening appointment for the drug study, but found out when I got there that it's too soon after the last study for me to be eligible for this one. The waiting period is different for every study. I thought I had given it enough time, and I thought that the recruiter who signed me up would have told me if it was too soon, but I guess she missed it.

So ... damn. That $7000 was going to make life a lot easier for the next few months. Let's hope they post another big-money study soon.

The upside is that today will not be so frantic. I won't have to do laundry, prep and freeze vegetables, mail a package, pack, and go to the library to get books for a week-long stay in the study clinic which would have started tomorrow morning. Well, I need to do some of those things, but not all of them. And I can have coffee.