CARLY SIMON INTERVIEW on HER EXPERIENCE WRITING AND PUBLISHING HER MEMOIR BOYS IN THE TREES

RUSSIAN SOLDIERS COMMIT AUTROCITIES : THE HOMELESS ARE OUR REFUGEES FIRST : THE RACE FOR LOS ANGELES MAYOR

I've been dog/ house sitting the last few days.  Friends headed north for a long weekend.  A much needed change of scene and pace.  I sure hope they come home renewed.  

I'm caring for their dog along with mine, both oldsters. Theirs is more peppy. I love their dog despite her many bad habits that they never expect her to change. One day when I had to be away, I came back to find my dog, unused to me being away for so long, had been sitting by their gate and crying with anguish for hours. I saw that their dog was beside her, however, and as I came through, their dog used her nose to tap the face of my dog, to comfort her and say, "There she is. I told you she would come back. You have not been abandoned." Their dog is aware that my dog is going blind. Their dog held out faith that I would return, watched for me, was there for her. So how can I hold it against their dog that, after I gave both of them baths, she ran for the freshly laundered bed that belong to my dog, and spread herself out on it? Leaving my dog on the floor. That she runs for my dog's food if my dog stops eating for a moment? That she is fat and mine is too thin. Mine gives her warning barks about the food.  Mine barks a lot to tell on her when she is invading to get treats.

I hold their dog and I tell her that I know that she starved in a past life.  I hold their dog and tell her that I know that she poops and pees on their bathroom floor to make a point: she is actually a human and humans do use that room to do their business. 

Right now the two of them are trying to distract me from writing by tail wagging in hopes of walks and food. "When I finish my essay!"

Outside birds are chirping. An early spring nest, perhaps, is in their tree. It is a cold morning. I'm under the covers and don't feel like starting my day. I'm enjoying the quietude of a house empty but for me and these dogs, at least until the end of the day when they return.  I'm fortunate in that way.

Do I, you wonder, write every day?  Have some sort of routine or schedule for writing?  Overall, the answer is no. I do write often.  I do write for hours. I do still hand write, though I get more done typing. I don't publish on this blog or elsewhere most of what I write.  Some of it is just for me. Some of it is experimental.  I wrote a short short the other day, the first time in a long time that I wrote a short short. 

I remember in my writing program there was a student who wrote a children's book that I thought was charming in its imagery.  This student was warned by the university that he needed to get on with finishing his projects as he had acquired too many units and might have to go without completing a degree.  He was procrastinating his final paper.  He was in therapy for writer's block.  (Probably also he was procrastinating because he knew that once he graduated he would probably have to move somewhere and find a job.)

I could not imagine that. I think, however, that many writers are suffering the specter of Cancel Culture, of being told that they may not write about something they imagine or research, that they must stick to what they "know."  Imagination and research are being cancelled in favor of testimonials. Cancel Culture has been brewing for at least twenty years at college campuses.

Ideas come to me all the time. Often I forget the idea because it comes to me at a time when I can't stop what I'm doing at the time in favor of writing. It is like forgetting a dream one just woke from, knowing it was a memorable dream.  You hope you will dream it again.

The first thing I do these days, before I'm even out of bed, is check the news.  Specifically the hard news, the war in Ukraine. The atrocities of war crimes committed by soldiers of the Russian army against civilians.  I wish the Power of Hate worked like magic because I despise them, I loath them, I want them all to spontaneously combust from their own evil.  I want them to get the hell out of Ukraine. (I wish I could be more spiritual about this.  I watched the Pope's Consecration of Ukraine and Russia - careful to include all the countries in the world - with interest. Will that white magic work?)

The torture, the rape, the mass graves that testify that genocide is being committed, make me feel upset and also helpless and hopeless but I feel - maybe you do too - that not knowing would be worse.  I'm so impressed with the way so many millions of people have been giving of themselves to help others but a question I have is, how can we collectively continue to afford this?  Is my imagination too small? Have I no idea just how rich, rich is?  

Well, what about our refugees here in the United States, the homeless? 

Years ago I was told that anyone without a permanent address is considered homeless. I was surprised because, like many people who immigrated to Southern California as the land of opportunity from other parts of the United States, I relied on others who had moved here first to receive me and shelter me until I could find a job and my own apartment. I was three different places before that happened, though I did make it happen within three months. At the time there was a feeling of optimism in the air, that there was enough for everyone.  People still walked into places they wanted to work to apply in person.  People might find jobs other ways, such as personal networking, but I didn't have a network.  When I walked into a place that was not hiring, and people actually told me about other places that were hiring. 

I also relied on the kindness of a friend after graduating from college and having nowhere to live immediately. I had other 'friends' who could have taken a turn to have me, giving her a break during those months, but they were nowhere to be found. (And living in houses that their parents made possible.)

(If you are wondering, I've senselessly given, even to people who I came to understand were clearly not respecting me, within my means.)

However, now I'm hearing that agencies do not consider people who are sofa hopping or staying with other people temporarily, or even those who live in RV's, vans, and cars, to be homeless. No, now homeless means on the pavement.  I met a woman dog walking who told me that she had been sofa hopping for several years without any hope of help from these agencies.  By redefining, the count is actually lower than it could be.

Also the count is always an under-count and was suspended during Covid. I know the people I'm going to mention further in this post were not counted and do not want to be.

I currently know two people who have been living in vehicles for years, getting Social Security, who are terminally ill and wasting away. One is in stage 4 cancer. They are both rugged individualists and have some connection with others for the purposes of mail and showers.  One has been helped by an AA group though he has not been a member for many years. The other is still performing whenever possible. 

I currently know of four people who are staying overnight in a business where they work, with permission of the owner.  I know this because I'm one of the 'in-crowd.'  Two of them need surgery.

Out walking dogs I go to a park where there are people in tents, waiting on living in one of those tiny house villages. 

I hear my old neighborhood has a long stretch of tents.

Pre-Covid there was a woman who had two shopping carts that she would move several times each day, going from bus stop to bus stop, I suppose so as to not be accused of loitering. We would stop and talk to her and she would pet my dog.  I haven't seen her and hope she got in somewhere.  Whatever her mental illness might have been, she had clarity when we interacted.

There were also two individuals that I was so concerned about, I filled in one of those outreach forms on line. The one man decided to sit on a bench near a store and he sat in that same spot, but for going into the store to buy food and use the toilet, day and night for months, in the cold, in the overnight rain, when he would spread some plastic over himself. I spoke to him and he smiled and was mild mannered.  I learned other people were also concerned and trying to get him help. He is not there anymore. However, the other man I reported as needing help was far gone. He roamed wearing nothing but sweat pants and one morning as we were walking to the store, he proceeded to pull the pants down, squat, and openly take a shit. 

As I see people in Canada, a country in which previous Ukrainian immigrants have proven themselves, especially welcoming in any and all who want to come there, I'm impressed. I reason that Canada has space and that Ukrainians are already used to living in a cold climate. (Manitoa -15%, Sadkatchewan -13%, Alberta -10 % , Yukon -5%, British Columbia  5f% and Ontario - 3%)

On YouTube I saw an interview with one woman, who spoke with an American accent, who was a Canadian living in Poland who had taken in ten Ukrainians fleeing that war.  Asked how long she expected them to live there, she said, at least a year, or as long as it takes.  Even if the war ended tomorrow, the damage to the human spirit - of having endured rape - gang rape - seeing your child killed - knowing your mother was hung - never seeing your brother or husband again - all these things are much to cope with. So about 4 million Ukrainians are now refugees.  I won't say 'get over' because I don't think people get over these experiences. I think 'closure' can be a lot of B.S.

So why do we think that mental illness comes first and then homelessness? When homelessness is not just tough, but dehumanizing.  When homeless women especially are the victims of rape? When sex traffickers prey upon homeless teens?  When not sleeping regularly and not being able to use the toilet when you need to can ruin your health?  

What of those who commit these crimes? It is easy for me to think they are not operating with a soul.  Are they human?  Well then, I don't like humans.  There's a theory that rather than eternal damnation, a person must earn their soul while on this earth and when a person does such things, upon their mortal death they do not obtain eternal life, they are gone, blank. 

Which brings me to the promise of the title of this post.  The race to be elected mayor of Los Angeles.  As of yesterday Mayor Garcetti had not been approved to be ambassador to India.  (India is not willing or able to go without Russian oil.) 

I watched the debate with interest.

Rich Caruso, the millionaire property developer, has ads coming up on YouTube videos. He claims he will solve the homeless issue. It is impossible for me to believe him.  (I think there is corruption in City Hall because developers seem to get away with a whole lot.) This cannot happen unless a half a million apartments that average people can afford are build in Los Angeles County yesterday.  Average people are all in the pipeline towards homelessness. (Anyone on EBT is in that pipeline.)

It is possible for someone who develops property to care, but as I see it, unless he has detailed plan on how he expects to do this revealed soon, we can be pretty sure he will not solve the issue.

Mike Feuer is someone I briefly interacted with a few years ago and I was directed to fill out a form with one of his office personnel who was to get back to me.  No one got back to me. That said, he had the experience to take on the job, and frankly, has had a good reputation overall.

Around that time that I met Feuer, though I prefer snail mail, I e-mailed the same letter to every person on the Los Angeles City Council but for one.  The letter focused on the homeless issue as I witnessed whole families coming into a library asking the librarians for help on finding housing. These people were mostly in older and small buildings in the Valley area, were mostly of Mexican heritage, and that summer there were also many families on floors of friends and sleeping in cars around libraries and parks. There was a program in areas where young people were joining gangs and in an attempt to deter this, there were weeks where food was served nightly along with basic entertainments and things to do. I went one day to see how this was going and various politicians had booths set up. I spoke to the teens who were hired to cook, set up tables, and so on, and basically, there were homeless families there night after night.

Not a single member of city council got back to me, two people who worked for two of them sent an email back asking me what I wanted.  I said "If you read my letter you would know."  My impression was that LA City Council did not give a rats ass.

Joe Busciano appeals to home owners and those who think human beings in encampments need to be "cleaned out" and basically evicted from where they have planted themselves as they are 'moved.'  We need to equate this with what happens in war - forced migration - loss of personal property.  Not a chance in hell I will vote for him.

Karen Bass was a gentlewoman at the debate while the men pretended to love each other and be friends, while also slinging mud.  However, this may have come off as too timid. I will be learning more about her in the next few weeks.

I also do not know enough about Kevin DeLeon.

So right now Mike Feuer has my vote.

C 2022 Christine Trzyna

ALWAYS RUNNING LATE

There have been two people in my lifetime who would run late when they were angry, in general angry, or at me - though it was never expressed to me WHY the person might be angry with me and I couldn't think of any reason.

The person angry in general who was always running late would show up to get to a movie theatre late, drive too fast, expect a parking space to appear by miracle, have us physically running to buy tickets, and get us there just past the hypnotic induction to buy tubs of greasy popcorn, Milk Duds, Good N Plenty, and jiggly iced Cokes (which might have been a good thing). Still, it was not exciting. It was nervous. 

The other was usually on time. So when he'd not call to say he was running late, I'd wait, going through the stages of Concern, Worry, Upset, Anger, Confusion. (Did I get the time wrong? Should I call?).  More Worry (is he dead in a car accident?) and finally Relief. I wasn't sure what the protocol was when someone was teasing a no show. Why ask me to go somewhere?

Running late is being passive aggressive. 

A friend of mine once told me about the husband she was divorcing. "He'll say it's up to me but in the end he always has to have his way, whatever it is." She gave the example of selecting wall covering. Basically he had veto power. She ran around to stores, brought wallpaper books home and showed him what patterns she liked, whole color schemes for rooms running through her head, and his reasons why not ranged from dunno to full arguments. 

Really he wanted the house.

And got it.

//

I was subject to other forms of passive aggressive behavior. Like other psychobabble terms used in this mini series about crazy, I didn't know what the term meant for some time though I was experiencing it.

//

One person I knew would go into the one toilet bathroom at his business if someone came in that he didn't want to talk to. He hid. At some point the person waiting would go through the steps of realization that he was in there waiting them out. Maybe he'd even gone out the window.

Step one: No big deal. Everyone has to poop sometime.

Step two: Lord, I hope he isn't in there sick.

Step three: Is he in there cause I got other places to go and people to see.

Step four: Oh, I get it. He's not coming out because I'm here. He can call me, he has my number.

I saw this person make people Wonder. Worry. Get Mad. Feel Foolish. And Feel Confused - a few times, not knowing why he wasn't coming out.

Came the day when I was the one waiting for him to complete an enormous poop.

He never did call.

He let me wonder.

And go unpaid.

//

Perhaps the worst case of passive aggression (because of the ongoing insufferability of it) perpetrated upon me and another friend involves two sisters we first became friends with in high school. These two have lively personalities and seem happy in life. You'd never suspect the joy they must get from annoying and upsetting us for years on end. How? By sending very late birthday cards year after year, some which even say belated, as if despite the years of friendship they just couldn't get the date right, as if we were to be impressed with how busy they must be that they're running late in life. But really there's this test. Is this the year the friendship will be declared over?

I was the one to give up, but not without trying to keep in touch. The sister I was friends with first, ever since we agreed she had rights on a certain boy when we were too innocent to realize nobody owns anybody, would never get around to writing back when I sent her a (snailmail) letter.

Passive Aggressive people always seem to be gaming in some way. I think in some relationships the passive aggressive person is trying to make you jealous. Because then if you definitely give up they feel it and they come around again.

I gave up and she called me long distance to say she wanted to come visit me on her vacation. I said, "You can stay here but I have to work and use my car. We can do some things in the evenings. You'll need a car to get around so you can rent one. It's about an hour in traffic to the beach."

And then she never called back. Or wrote back. Did she come out, stay at a hotel, and not bother to get together with me for lunch?

This is a test. It is just a test. For the next 60 seconds...

C 2021 Christine Trzyna

PAINTED OVER - A MEMORY OF BEING AN ARTIST

I was known as "the artist" when I was a teenager, maybe the best artist in my small high school at the time. I became part of the art world early.

One time we had a substitute teacher in the art room.  She took herself seriously as an artist - beatnik. She showed up wearing a black felt tammy over her hair and a long white shirt.  She took her brush out and started painting over my painting of an imaginary landscape. Apparently my face fell.  Though she probably meant to show me a technique, with one of her own brushes, rather than the ratty old brushes my football obsessed high school managed to budget for, when my face fell other students noticed. They corralled me to tell me they saw my face and that it fell and commiserated.  How I must have felt.

So this was a small canvas that I was working on. The school budget was so dishonoring of artists that teachers had to go to thrift stores and buy used canvases they thought could be reused.

I was dating someone who had a car.  Maybe one of the few who had a car of his own and an allowance to put gas in it.  Apparently a lot of people called him for transportation.  One woman in particular.  When she heard he was dating me, she wasn't pleased. He wasn't on call for rides anymore. So one day she went into the art room and gessoed over my almost complete landscape.  I got there just in time to identify this canvas as mine and to wash the gesso off before it dried.  Painting saved.

So the painting was then exhibited in one of those glassed-in cases down the hall from the art room.  A student one year ahead of me apparently felt competitive.  He went in there and without permission took my painting down and put his up.  He was caught.

A teacher took his down and put mine back up.  (He would also compete with me to design his senior class play set. Actually his set was much better because the play he was working on was far more interesting than my senior class play.  He went on to be the set designer for a city theater.  He managed to give me a dirty look or act haughty when we passed each other in the halls for a year. Rarely was anyone so jealous of me.

My landscape I gifted to my boyfriend with the car.  His mother was proud of the painting or maybe even me. I watched as she got a nail and hammered it into the plaster.  She hung the painting up above the entrance to his bedroom door.  This was a very big deal.  His father had designed the house to have perfect thick plaster.

We broke up. I don't know what happened to the painting after that.  I have a vague memory of the size and composition of the landscape. I recall that I put a sun in it.  There were long grasses.
I suspect that one day my painting was thrown in the trash or maybe donated.  But you never know. It might still hang on a wall somewhere with my painterly name in the corner using a very fine brush.

C Christine Trzyna  2018

TONY HILLERMAN from SELDOM DISAPPOINTED answers "Where do you get ideas?"

Tony Hillerman
Seldom Disappointed - a Memoir
C 2001
Harper Colins Publishers

page 253

The answer to the "Where do you get the ideas" question is that writer's minds are a jumbled, chaotic attic cluttered with plot notions, useful characters, settings for events, bits and pieces of information, overheard remarks, ironies, cloud formations, bumper sticker slogans, unresolved problems, bon mots, tragedies, heroics, etc. One's memory contains enough stuff to produce three or four longer versions of "War and Peace" if only once could sort it out and from it into a coherent fable.

That leads to the next FAQ. "When do you write?" One writes while peeling potatoes, driving to work, standing in line, suffering through a boring mo vie, eating oatmeal, digging out dandelions, trying to drift off into naptime sleep. Finally when the sorting is mostly completed and the next scene is set in the imagination, one goes to the computer and types it onto the screen.

I liken the writer to the bag lady pushing her stolen shopping cart through life collecting throwaway stiff, which, who knows, might be useful some way some day....

CHRISTINE TRZYNA MUSING on THE ACTIVE SIDE OF INFINITY by CARLOS CASTANEDA

I've been reading Carlos Castaneda's THE ACTIVE SIDE OF INFINITY, which is his "album of memories" (memoir) written in the year or so prior to his death from cancer and published in 1998. Carlos Castaneda is a controversial figure in the realms of literature, anthropology, academia, pop culture, and the new age - spiritual movements. I've read around him, reading the accusations and proofs he was merely a liar rather than a man taken on a journey into Yaqui shamanism in the early 1960's by a character named Don Juan and that he wasn't. But let's say I had never read anything else he'd written, had never read the controversy. I would still find THE ACTIVE SIDE OF INFINITY fascinating, a good read. (One book that pretty much accused him of being a liar on the basis that he had once the audacity to take a Creative Writing class at Los Angeles City Community College was just outrageous!)

Most importantly, I believe that the directive that Don Juan gave Carlos, that he write the album of memories as a series of story/events that had turning points in his personal development, to be an excellent one that any memoirist ought to consider. Thus Castaneda gives us stories large and small, each holding the realizations he had because of his experiences for the reader to consider. He is posed as the everyman in his memoir, humbled and awed, not as an egotist.

From all the Castaneda I have read, I have borrowed two concepts from him which may simply be a matter of word use. MOOD and MOMENT. In this moment I want to write my own album of memories. Both the mood and the moment at this time in my life are strange.

QUICK BOOK REVIEW : I KNEW A WOMAN by CORTNEY DAVIS

I KNEW A WOMAN
The Experience of the Female Body
by Cortney Davis C 2001
Random House, New York

Cortney Davis is a nurse practitioner and poet, and what she wrote, "I Knew A Woman," is a beautiful book that follows her professional and private responses to some of her patients at a low-income and homeless gynecology clinic. One reviewer, Sapphire, says it better than me when she calls this book "an extraordinary blend of memoir, fiction, and clinical detail." I followed especially the story of Lila, the homeless teenager pregnant and living in a car with her legal adult boyfriend, as she grasps independence to make a life with her just born baby. It just so happens that I know someone in almost this same situation, a young woman with few choices who makes dumb choices when she can, who has just passed through my life, and I felt some synchronicity was involved in my reading this book.

I tend to walk around a library and let books fall off the shelves to my feet begging to be read... OK, not really, though that has happened...

I see how I become interested in a book because of the art of the book at times, lured by cover art, typography, and that was the case with this one. I was in for a wonderful surprise of a book, one I could not anticipate, at once titillating my interest in Womans Studies as well as the secrets of the female body, one of which I am in this life.

I don't think I will ever quite think of a visit to the doctor (or nurse practitioner) the same. I know now that they are judging me and my health from the moment I walk in, even based on what I am wearing and my attitude, and that they may cloak what they are really thinking or know about my condition from me for reasons of professionalism. I will be more sure than ever that they intuitively know if I am sick and what my prognosis will be while also being willing to give hope a greater chance than there is reason for.

Cortney Davis too reacts to her patients relating their desperation or poverty in terms of her own life experience. Page 118, hardback:

"What if there had been a fire? What if someone had broken into my apartment - not an uncommon occurrence in that neighborhood - and found my son and daughter? When I look at Lila, I remember being alone and poor and at my wit's end. When I look at Lila, her swollen belly, her thin lips, her jangle of earrings and chains, I remember something a great poet once told me. "Poems that are too perfect," he said, "like lives that are too ordered, lack the human mistakes that make them real." Because I never forget the reality of what I've experienced, I can forgive many of the mistakes I see my patients make. Because I know that I am a different person now, I trust that they, too, will change; that the girl Lila is now is not the woman Lila will become."

C 2008 Christine Trzyna   Affirmed 2025

Quote From THE ACTIVE SIDE OF INFINITY by CARLOS CASTANEDA

The Active Side of Infinity
By Carlos Castaneda C 1999


This was the last book he wrote before he died, and it is a memoir, or more correctly, "an album of memories."

Don Juan said: "The memorable events of a shaman's album are affairs that will stand the test of time because they have nothing to do with him and yet he is in the thick of them. He'll always be in the thick of them, for the duration of his life, and perhaps beyond, but not quite personally."