Sarah E. Moffett

Took a drive up America’s spine recently. It was one of those, “I can’t be here,” “me either,” kind of trips. So we threw hastily packed bags into the trunk, three dollar gas into the tank, and found ourselves driving.

We were on a road trip. We were off to escape. And we were “escaping” by crawling up the I-95 spine of East Coast America’s brown winter back to the smells of diesel and sights of bareness. We quickly learned that corporate America’s Alcatraz extends a bit beyond a single day’s drive. The only things that broke up the slag road and monochromatic horizon were the orange detour signs that peppered the highway and one billboard in Baltimore that read “Sprint. Coverage like old bay on blue crab.”

Nice to see someone’s creative mind was working. Mine, on the other hand, was not. 

The past month it’s been an attack of the T’s—trial, taxes, technology, temperatures, and TB (not really, but it felt like it). If one’s right brain doesn’t atrophy after weeks of corporate excitement, then it must already be gone. Thankfully, we live in a world of experiential defibrillators. Within hours, I was circling Rodin’s Burghers of Calais at Rodin’s Museum, sipping martinis with inventive names at the Continental, tasting flights of Filipino appetizers in a converted 19th century colonial bank called Cebu, walking cobblestone streets that legitimately qualify as old, and buying barrister bookshelves made on the right side of 1850.

But I wasn’t there yet. I was in the car, and this writer’s mind was overflowing with a world of non sequitors-Nietzsche was pushing against the status of Brady’s ankle (and now ego), James Dean was somewhere between Heath Ledger’s death and Van Gogh’s absinthe ingestion, and everything else was sandwiched between the sky of a Federal Rule 26(a)(1) disclosure due Monday and the earth of an impatiently waiting half done manuscript.

This, of course, means my mind tripped over itself straight into Kerouac’s lap.

“Where are we going Dean?”

“I don’t know, but it’s the open road man.”

“But why?”

“We just go to go.”

For the first time, I really got why Dean just had to go.  So we’re going.

And upon arrival, we were greeted with a massive billboard declaring, “Coverage like cheese on steak.”

I think it’s about time to start looking West.

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…for this week.

1. Trying to read Proust’s Swann’s Way
2. Trial
3. Miley Cyrus being inescapable
4. Congress.  I can’t explain it more specifically, they just annoy me.  Alot.
5. Wearing hosiery (anytime, but particularly due to skirt suits in winter)
6. Bad shiraz
7. Parking behind a mini cooper that takes up two full spots on H street
8. The very large man that keeps taking my treadmill
9. Eastern Market being out of smoked cheddar
10. Winter. That. Won’t. End.

Please feel free to add to the list as you see fit.

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Kinky Friedman. If you read his most recent column for Texas Monthly, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, he would be your hero too. That is, of course, if you stumbled across him after having just finished another trial, were struggling with writer’s block, were being “haunted by the waters” of Norman Maclean’s masterpiece A River Runs Through It, and otherwise suffering from TWSD—This Writer Sucks Disorder. This would be especially true if the standard fallbacks were painfully failing you—i.e. running or drinking or closet Harry Potter book tape listening.

But then there was Kinky.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child and, believe it or not, I smoked as a child. At the tender age of eighteen months, when my mother’s back was turned, a prescient if somewhat perverse uncle surreptitiously substituted a cigar for my pacifier. I don’t know if I should thank Uncle Eli, but 61 and a half years later I’m not only still smoking—I’ve started my own cigar company. I named it Kinky Friedman Cigars, or, as it’s become increasingly known throughout Texas and the world, KFC… After a lifetime of smoking I have only one or two taste buds left, but I can assure you, those little buds are having one hell of a party.”

Funny, insightful, witty, and disturbing. Just the way I like my writers.

This is hardly a “new discovery.” Kinky, who is also described in Wikipedia “singer, songwriter, novelist, humorist, politician,” etc., carved up America for 40 plus years. After all, the world must take notice of someone that describes himself as the “last of the Jewish Cowboys,” a name that carried through his 1970’s band, dubbed “Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys,” which came with band members named Little Jewford, Big Nig, Panama Red, Wichita Culpepper, Sky Cap Adams, Rainbow Colours, and Snakebite Jacobs. And in case you’re wondering, his music was no joke. He toured with Bob Dylan.

When he wasn’t crooning, he was writing. And I think even Mark Twain would’ve even taken a moment to flip open Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned or The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic. Then there’s my personal favorite, Kinky Friedman’s Guide to Texas Etiquette: Or How To Get To Heaven Or Hell Without Going Through Dallas-Fort Worth. Enough said.

“We’re turning our beautiful country into nothing more than a condo association. Rules, regulations, and political correctness are strangling the best things America has to offer: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom to be who you are . . . Misguided zealots behind draconian smoking laws often fall back on the argument ‘It’s for your health.’ They haven’t noticed, apparently, that whenever you see a ninety-year-old geezer, most of the time he’s still puffing a stogie. But you almost never see a ninety-year-old smoking a cigarette. This is because we cigar smokers religiously follow the wise example of Bill Clinton: We don’t inhale.”

Anyway, thanks to Kinky and his writing, I have solved my recent life problems by reaching a simple answer. I’m going to Belize. To go sea kayaking and to learn Spanish. Because anything, absolutely anything has to be easier than conveying my thoughts in English. (And the sea kayaking, well, that’s a bonus.) Or as the great Kinky Friedman said, “What I want these people to put in their pipes is this: Spain, Israel, Japan, Italy, France, and Greece all have more smokers per capita than the U.S. They also have longer life expectancies than we do. What can we conclude from this? Speaking English is killing us!”

So is writing it, unless you’re as good as Kinky Friedman.

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When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing that you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Recently, I picked up A Moveable Feast. It was suppose to be another Hemmingway book to add to the shelves. Instead, it was part writer’s manual and part refreshing literary drink in the midst of penning book two. In other words, it was Hemmingway on life. In the simple, few pages, he speaks beautifully of handling writer’s block, having structured writing, embracing disciplined drinking, ignoring adjectives, reading the Russians, and channeling hunger. And he makes it really hard not to jump on the first plane out of D.C. to Paris.

Hemmingway worked on A Moveable Feat from 1957 to 1960, nearly forty years after the period it covers. It was published for the first time in 1964, three years after he committed suicide. The topical outline of the book covers his experiences living, writing, and loving in Paris from 1921 to 1926. It includes the Lost Generation’s famed Parisian circle, and recalls the opinionated stances of Gertrude Stein, the dining habits of James Joyce, the boxing beginnings of Ezra Pound, and a wet road trip from Lyons to Paris with F. Scott Fitzgerald after Zelda hacked off the top of the car.

The book begins and ends with Parisian flavor and flaws, and it glorifies simplistic living in a poverty filled with happiness and love. Of course, it’s hard not to notice these romantic reminiscences of hunger and adventure are only attractive on (1) the young or (2) the subsequently successful. Ernie nails both. That said, even forty years out, he does not romanticize how his early days in Paris conclude. (Think The Garden of Eden.) In the end, it’s that brutal honesty in sickness and health, poverty and success, love and lust that makes Hemmingway one of the best.

Or as he put it, “…I had tried to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe.” And so he does for both the writer and the reader.

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The Flu.

After a Saturday night with the girls spent taking on the pasta bowls of Filemeno and the bourbon list at Old Glory, we were riding high, we were drinking bourbon, we were on our way.

Two days later, we were down. Two of us to the to the flu, one to tonsillitis, and one to Miami. They’re all the same, really.

So here I sit. Surrounded by 100 plus temperatures and a reenactment of the 1900’s national epidemic of whooping cough.

It rocks, let me tell you.

CBS 21 broke with this revelatory news. “This year’s flue season is getting worse…” Got that memo. I go home, someone is dying on the couch. I go the gym, someone is sweating disease. I go to my friend’s house, and the air is, shall we say, moist. And here in D.C. everything is just toxic. But we already knew that. (See here.) The one thing CBS did clear up for me is the why—“This year’s flu vaccine does not protect against more than half of this year’s viruses. The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention says the current vaccine only covers about 40% of the flu virus going around.” Lovely.

The CBS article did leave out a few key points that I have recently observed. Nothing makes twenty-something, self-sufficient females call Mom faster than the onset of influenza. Or make a girl drop $80 bucks at CVS to buy everything and anything that may prevent further coughing. (See Sarah buy a childhood fall back, the vaporizer.) Or learn what “expectorate” means. God bless Wikipedia.

I’m taking two things away from this week of bubonic plague symptoms. Numero uno, pseudoephedrine hydrocholoride (read: Advil Cold and Flu) should also be marketed as the nectar of the gods. And numero dos, the flu, should carry the subtitled for “bringing families together since the original plague.”

Good luck to all of you stricken.  May your tissues be soft, your thermometer not warm, and your tea soothing. 

Or some other nonsense.

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Here’s a list of favorite “love stories.” And seeing as I find most love stories redundant, sappy, and ridiculous, this list is a not for the dime store paperback novel lovers of the world.

End of the Affair, by Graham Greene. See love, see love hurt, see love die, see love torment.

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte. Heathcliff’s speech as Catherine dies resonates in any warm blooded human being’s veins.

Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexander Dumas. Vengeance and love. Bring it.

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. Dagny Taggert and Francisco d’Anconia, Dagny Taggert and Hank Rearden, Dagny Taggert and John Gault…It’s Ayn Rand, what do you expect?

For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemmingway. The earth doesn’t just move for Robert Jordan in this doomed classic.

Possession, by A.S. Byatt. Love transcends as a constant…disaster…but we can’t help it, and, really, don’t want to.

The Silver Pigs, by Lindsay Davis. A Roman Empire era Phillip Marlowe nearly gets killed by a woman and then falls in love with her. Classic.

Resurrection, by Leo Tolstoy. Redemption for bourgeois arrogance and the journey towards enlightenment. For the historical and socio-political savvy Valentine’s Day reader.

Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson. If you don’t shed a tear on the pages of this book, then you need to check for a pulse.

Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence. I was told to put this on the list. Threatened actually.

Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemmingway. Who said a love story can’t be between a person and a place? See Moffett buy a one way ticket to Paris.

Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. Live, learn, love, and die. I’m starting to see a theme here…

ANYTHING by Pablo Neruda. Don’t ask. Just read. Preferably not in public.

If I left one off that you feel should be included, please let me know.

Otherwise, for other favorites, check out the Washington Post’s list from a Book World blog exchange here.

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Me.

Living in Washington, D.C. means three things. One, your relatives think you are nuts. Two, everyone knows someone. And three, politics. The third component is a bit problematic for me, as I have taken to despising politics after two collegiate summers doing my best not to be the brunt of all Monica Lewinsky related jokes.

Regardless of my evasive efforts, election year means said unpleasantness is inescapable. One is not only stuck with cocktail hour queries, media saturation, sanctified littering via signage, but also a woman shouting “are you an Obama Momma?” to cars as they drove around a DuPont Circle political rally.

Seriously, how does one respond to that?

So I’ve given up on avoiding politics and instead embraced destiny—which in this case means plagiarism. Henceforth, when I am asked to which party do I belong, I will be quoting the good G.K. Chesterton.

“None. ‘The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.’”

And if one should inquire which candidate I think can cure the world’s wrongs, I’m going with the honest answer, “none of them. McCain, Barack, and Clinton cannot fix what is wrong with the world, because they cannot cure me.*”

Last, but not least, when asked why do I live in Washington, D.C. if I despise politics, I will answer quite honestly, “Because I’m stupid.” (Slight deviation from Chesterton on that one.)

*When The Times invited several eminent authors to write essays on the theme “What’s Wrong with the World?” G.K. Chesterton submitted the following:

Dear Sirs,

I am.

Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton If only we could all be so honest.

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Ever seen the equivalent of creative rocket science? Me either, until I saw the genius of Peter Callesen. Behold a few favorites.

For more Peter Callesen, go here.

*Callesen came to my attention via an e-mail chain describing these pictures as entries for an art contest at Washington’s very own Hirshborn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The rule allegedly was “that the artist could only use one sheet of paper.” I have not been able to locate any support for this e-mail, and it appears all the pictures circulated as attachments were of Callesen’s work. If you know of any other support for the e-mail, let me know.

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“Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery.” I couldn’t agree more with Bill Watterson, except to add that getting this D.C. slushy nastiness is more like having to pay back the lottery. After you’ve spent it.

Rumor has it that in some countries, snow is so rare, that it is worshiped. Here in the good metropolis of Washington, D.C., it falls into an entirely different category. The category just beneath Extra Terrestrial Invasion. Read: the freak out is ridiculous. I nearly lost two toes in Safeway to a runaway grandma who thought I wanted the last gallon of milk. Do I look like I drink milk? And I-95, there are not words. Literally. Words to explain that parking lot at 1:00 p.m. are not in the English language. And yet, I bet there were some good ol’ words in Webster for the driver that jack knifed his U.S. Mail tractor trailer across most of the southbound lanes.

Thoreau was credited with saying “I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.” Good for Henry David, but me thinks if he had to deal with DC’s twisted interpretation of snow, he might have stayed home with a good pipe and warm fire. And not just because of Zeus’s bad idea of a joke. Confession time.  I used to be among those that mocked everyone for rushing home at the possibility of snow. Then I realized they were smart. It’s not the snow that makes you need to get inside your own home. It’s the people.

*Here is more Calvin and Hobbes snow bliss. 

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It appears that the grey skies and short days of winter are not just rough on writers.  Imagine that.  Admittedly, I didn’t think I’d find solidarity for my winter wonderland writing woes at the Eastern Market crepe stand.  Then again, no one else shares the same passion for nutella with me…words, words, so many words, and what order we say or write or think or breathe them says it all or says nothing. Such hope and loss at the same time.  If you say what you mean, will the reader see what you believe or get lost in what you think? 

And if you have no idea what I’m talking about, you’re reading the wrong blog.  Write on writers and read on readers.  And eat a crepe along the way.  It helps bridge the holes between the spaces.

*Mitchell’s crepe stand at Eastern Market this past Saturday.

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