two years later and I'm in Fresno

our backyard

 And I'm retired. And we own a house. A house that the gardeners are busy around as I type. A house that apparently came with a cat. A cat that has moved in, but who would like to go out occasionally. 

It has been, as they say, a lot.

Buying a house in the middle of a pandemic is not a thing that I recommend to anyone, ever. We were extremely lucky in our realtor and extremely lucky that we bought when we did. Prices are going up and up still and there's not a whole lot out there apparently, (This appears to be nation-wide, not just California, but California is insane. We did plan to get a house before I retired and the plan was to do that before I turned 70, so that I would get the full SS. The rents kept rising in the Bay Area and it was clear that there was no way that we could live there and have anything like a house. I am pretty flexible about neighbors and noise, but Laine is more sensitive. But to be honest, I don't know how I'd do after years of not having someone completely audible a wall of sheet rock away. 

A house is what we both wanted and a house is what we got. We also got a completely new landscape and a new context that I am still trying to understand, close to a year later.

But why fire up this blog after two years, especially since I'm not writing about anything particularly urgent. It's because I needed to read someone else's blog to get ready for a writing group tonight. That got me thinking about blogging, which is a way of procrastinating about what to say about the thing I had to read because I really do not know where to start with that.  Blogging is where the personal essay of the 21st century took root and now it's kudzu across the internets. Every style piece, lots of opinion pieces, interviews, what have you, that get published, sometimes in legacy media  - all of these are personal essays. Is it bad? Sometimes. It's hard to use your experience as a lens and either be so deep in your pov, that you completely whiff on how an audience who is not you is going to read it. (The recent Heather Havrilsky thing on hating her husband was one of those.) The other way of not working is for the personal part to be a transparent hook with only an minimal relationship to what you are really interested in saying. 

Blogging has been great for me because I don't expect anyone to read this. It has always given me a place to stretch out and to discover what the fuck I am thinking and sometimes what I am feeling. It gave me writing practice, which might have been important for the writing I'm doing now which is short(ish) fiction. 

Which is why I'm in this group tonight and why I have to read and reread this long ass post so that I have something useful to say about it in four hours. It's a memoir. I don't much like memoirs. I rarely read memoirs. That's one problem. The other problem is that the piece rambles and meanders and there's not a particular point to it. It's a description of a difficult Easter. The narrator has to go and see her stepfather who has broken his hip and is in a rehab place. He's also beginning to suffer from some cognitive decline. The narrator's mom usually goes along, but she is blowing it off because there's something more fun for her do to where she is. There's some humor about her partner and her relationship with their kid, but most of it is the slog that the day must have been. There's also a simmering resentment which is never far from the surface in these pieces and I've been reading them for a couple of years now. 

In than way, maybe it's a success? It is close to unbearable to read. I think that one useful thing I can say is that the emotional center of this is in that dialog and that maybe that's where she can do a little more to show what he's looking like (I'm guessing confused) as the back and forth go on and find some way to mark her growing frustration.

Maybe.

I am not sure it will help. I'm not sure what help she actually wants. She's been working at this memoir for a number of years now, in workshops, in groups, with coaches and it never seems much furtherer. I suspect that is because the reason she gives for writing it, wanting to be published, is different from the reason that she actually writes, which is to talk about her life, the good things, the disappointments, and how hard it is to care for a mother and stepfather, who didn't care for her when she was a child. This is a way to express that frustration and anger. Feelings that she only lightly covers with self-deprecating humor. 

I am not going to bring that up.

I am going to ask questions, then many point to the dialog as something to zero in on. 

A thing that writing groups have taught me is that people write for all sorts of reasons and most of us have no idea what is driving us, only that we are, one way or another, driven.