The Furious Spinner

Hope you all have been having the times of your lives. I have had a very nice few days off with Mario. On Thursday, I lounged around the house all day because it was raining. Mario made paella and cake. The night before I had gone to a local women's gathering and invited four of my friends over for my birthday dinner on Thursday, so at some time after five they began coming over. We ate organic salad and organic paella while we talked mostly about politics and the state of our world. The conversation was relaxed, intelligent, lively.

Afterward, we had cake and ice cream. I have not had cake for my birthday in about twenty years, so I decided it was OK to try it this year. We found cake and icing mixes at New Seasons—even the sugar was organic. We had regular ice cream for our guests and soy ice cream for Mario and myself. One truly appreciates birthday cake when one hasn't had it in two decades! It was my friend Evine's 83rd birthday on Friday, so the cake and the Happy Birthday song was for her, too.

Then we watched Enchanted April, one of my favorite movies, about four English women who rent an Italian villa for the month of April. It's quite lovely. My friends were charmed. When the movie was over, we all talked for a long while about many things.

I was supposed to start writing my novel Lady Liberty on my birthday, but I didn't. I needed to do more research.

Friday Mario and I dashed into Portland and bought books at Powell's. I love books. What can I say? Sometimes I just stand in Powell's and look around and breathe in all the stories. So many books. So many beautiful books and awesome stories. I looked for my book in the new fiction, but it was not there. I don't really understand my bad luck with publishers and publishing. I bought books on American history—more research for Lady Liberty, plus Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies. Since the White House is foaming at the mouth about this book, I had to read it. After Powell's we went to Thai Noon for lunch. It's one of my favorite ways to spend a day: with Mario at a bookstore, then eating great food.

Saturday I read the Clarke book while listening to the 9/11 hearings again. I had seen (heard) most of the hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday. I was shocked and appalled by the tenor of the questions. The commissioners seemed quite blood thirsty to me. I kept thinking of the international audiences watching these hearings. All their suspicions about us being a country of war mongers would have been confirmed.

Clarke's book was enlightening. Although I doubt Mr. Clarke and I would agree on many things, I thought he was fair—at least as far as I could tell. He showed that the Bush Administration wanted to attack Iraq long before 9/11. They also didn't seem to understand the terrorist threat. The facts presented in the book made me nervous. Although I have been extremely critical of Bush, I hope I am wrong about many of the things I believe about him. I was critical of Clinton, too. I thought he used force too often, but there are so many things I don't know or understand. I thought Clinton should have been impeached for bombing Sudan; at the time, I thought it was a "wag the dog" scenario to distract us from the Monica Lewinsky crap. According to Clarke, this was not the case. Anyway, if Clarke is to be believed, the FBI and CIA couldn't find the ground beneath their feet—and Bush has fumbled everything since 9/11. I wrote an essay about it. I'll try to post it later.

Today we returned to Falling Creek. The gate was still open, so we drove to the trailhead and walked to the waterfall. Ahhhh, bliss!

Now I'm sitting at my desk. Mario is in the other room reading Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. While we were on the trail today, Mario told me about the book—how Los Angeles got its water. Mario is good at retelling what he has read. Usually we don't talk much on the trail, but every once in a while, Mario has a book he wants to talk about. So while we walk through the old growth, my husband tells me tales. He is good at extracting the interesting parts of a tale. When we were first married and living in Bandon, Oregon, he was reading Christine by Stephen King. He would finish a bit and then tell me about it. The story was getting so good that I picked up the book after he had gone to work one day and started reading. I was disgusted and immediately called him to tell him that he and Stephen King were twisted and perverted. He laughed and said he had been telling me the good parts version. (I greatly admire Stephen King and his writing, but I can't read horror. I can write it, but I can't read it.)

I've spent most of the rest of the day eating frozen bananas and reading about how Americans lived during the 1790's.

So this is the long way of saying I have no news or no new writing tonight to share. The new Journal of Mythic Arts is now posted. Mario and I both have poems in it. You might want to check that out. And, of course, I have posted twenty more pages of Her Frozen Wild on my website.

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