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the postless blogger

Posted on May 24, 2009 by Aly Hawkins

Holy smokes! I’m the guy who calls himself a writer but never writes anything. Except I have been writing, only not on ye olde blog. Here’s an update:

During the last seven weeks, I’ve been writing a book. Not my own book, a book for a man with many great thoughts and ideas and not a lot of time to write them down. In the old days, they called this “ghostwriting,” but now it’s en vogue to call it “collaborative writing.” The project was supposed to take a month, but what with one thing and another, it’s still not done. I’m crossing my fingers in hopes that by next Friday, the collaboration will have come to a close. And I will return in triumph to regular posting and once again call myself a blogger without blushing.

On top of 60,000+ words, we moved. Three-quarters of a mile from our old house. My brother, Tim, has taken over the meth lab and is living there quite happily with his 18-month-old Chinese Chow, Song. If Lars ever tries to return to his old digs and restart the business, Song will likely rip his face off. With her purple tongue.

Our new little cottage is fantastic. It was built, we are told, in the 1920s as part of a small fishing resort for Lake Casitas weekenders. It’s old-style wood shake and has a lovely, oasis-ish garden in back. Since we moved in, I’ve spent my spare free time not blogging but planting a kitchen herb garden. I used some of my very own fresh basil in a frittata that I whipped up yesterday for breakfast. I am occasionally domestically inclined, especially when most of the work has been done for me. I find starting with a bare patch of earth quite intimidating, but give me a garden that’s 3/4 of the way there and I will grow the heck out of it. An editor to the last, I suppose.

Welcome!

(The sign says “Welcome to Our Cottage,” and we really mean it.)

I live in hope that the never-ending book project will soon come to an end and we can all get back to the business of the blogdom. Until then, happy Memorial Day (pour one out for our veteran homies, God bless ‘em) and have a terrific week.

Filed under: blog news, life | Tagged: , , | 10 Comments »

into the cave

Posted on April 27, 2009 by Aly Hawkins

Posting will be light to nonexistent this week—I’m finishing up a project that feels unlikely to get done. But I believe . . .

Filed under: editing, writing | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

stories I like to tell: assaulting an officer in the name of love

Posted on April 26, 2009 by Aly Hawkins

[Previous posts in "Stories I Like to Tell" here.]

I really do plan on writing things for this blog other than stories I like to tell, but I keep thinking of great stories and, well . . . I like to tell them. Especially ones that involve run-ins with The Law.

When my friend Michael decided to propose to my roommate Gretchen, he enlisted help from Bryan and me, as well as from Dr. Smooth, the combo he played with at the time. Mike had decided to pop the question at Mugu Rock, and his hope for the evening was a surprise candlelit dinner and acoustic jazz, ready and waiting when he and G arrived at sunset. I’m sure he envisioned something like this, with the whole shebang going off at the westernmost end of the point:

Pt. Mugu at sunset

Pt. Mugu at sunset

What is maybe not obvious from the picture above is the 8-foot fence and the hundred yards between Pacific Coast Highway on the right and the point on the left. Both are there to prevent people from venturing to the end of the rock, because the State of California has determined that doing so is hazardous and morally repugnant. We, however, were all in our early 20s and pretty sure the law did not apply to us, and what were an 8-foot fence and a hundred yards hauling a full drum kit, an upright bass, a guitar and amp and dinner for two, anyway? Minor obstacles is what.

We toted all the gear to the tippy-tip of the point, which took us about an hour. Then, just as Rosy screwed the last cymbal into place and we tried to get the damn candles to light (it was a little breezy), we heard distant thunder. It grew louder and louder until the helicopter was hovering overhead, looming in a way that made us wonder if, perhaps, the law did indeed apply to us. When the helo, having made its point, finally continued north, we stood around in its wake and tried to decide what to do: We desperately wanted to make everything perfect as Mike requested, but were concerned that he and G might show up, start eating and get arrested. Which would be a great story to tell their future kids, but should that really be a factor in our decision-making right now?

About that time, a Cal-Trans guy in a big orange truck showed up to tell us he’d just heard over the radio that sheriff’s deputies were on their way. That information tipped the scales, and we began the slow work of toting everything back to the other side of the fence.

We were mid-tote when Mike drove up with his not-yet bride-to-be. His face was nearly as thunderous as the helicopter—the poor guy was about to explode with nerves, and now this! I gave him a summary of events so far and suggested that he take Gretchen for a drive down PCH for 20 minutes or so and we’d have everything semi-perfect by the time they got back. Which he did. (G told me later that the entire drive was spent in silence.)

We were just about reset-up when the deputies rolled in. Yes, we were aware that the public is not allowed past the fence and yes, we were terribly sorry about the mixup and, you see, Officer, our friend was proposing to his girl and wasn’t that incredibly sweet? And also, please don’t arrest us.

The officers were very nice and highly amused and kind of amazed that we’d go to all this trouble for our buddy. So instead of delivering their warning and heading out to find some real criminals, they decided to stick around to see the “surprise.”

Just as Rosy re-screwed the last cymbal into place and we tried to get the damn candles to light (still breezy), Michael and Gretchen arrived for the second time.

Thrilled by his role in the whole business and bubbling with magnanimous good cheer, one of the deputies stepped up to Mike and stuck out his hand. “Congratulations, sir!” he enthused, pumping Mike’s arm as if to take it off at the shoulder.

At which point I snapped. Weeks of careful planning and hours of hard work down the drain, all because of Officer Emily Post’s Nightmare! Mike and Gretchen’s special night was an abject failure! Their relationship might never recover! What about their future children?! He had ruined everything!

I jumped on him. All 260 pounds of him, with 130 pounds of me. “They’re not even engaged yet, you nitwit!” I pummelled his beefy arms with my tiny, ineffectual fists. “What are you thinking? How could you?!”

Everyone else stood frozen with their jaws in the dust, but a chuckle rumbled in the deputy’s chest as he plucked me, still seething with fury, from his back and set me down. “Now-now, ha-ha, little lady. Ha-ha. Sorry about that. Ha-ha. Right. It’s just . . . ha-ha . . . so exciting.”

He glanced around the ragged circle of bewildered people and then cleared his throat, trying to regain his dignity and track down his misplaced Cop Voice. “Now,” he said sternly, having found an approximation, “you kids . . . ah, I don’t want to catch you kids trespassing ever again. And you . . .” he pointed a finger at my nose, “try to avoid assaulting police officers in the future.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the cruisers. “Deputy Gutierrez, let’s go.”

And they drove away.

We stood around looking at each other for a minute until someone burst out laughing, which sent us all into paroxysms of hilarity. We clutched our sides, braying and snorting, and the nervous tension was banished. As we caught our breath, Michael led Gretchen to the candlelit table and pulled out her chair, the band took their places and struck up a rather bouncy ballad, and Bryan and I melted into the twilight to stand guard at a suitable distance.

Gretchen said yes. And when they get a little older, I hope that Sophia and Josiah, Mike and G’s children, will like hearing about the day their parents’ crazy friend, Miss Aly, attacked a police officer in the name of love.

Filed under: life | Tagged: , , , | 11 Comments »

stories I like to tell: “we dursen’t!”

Posted on April 22, 2009 by Aly Hawkins

[Previous entries in "Stories I Like to Tell" here.]

Today is my big-little brother’s birthday. (Tim is my “big-little brother” because he is bigger and younger than me. I’m his little-big sis.) And so, I’d like to tell you a story.

The Hawkins family, when Tim and I were growing up, had both a lust for travel and very little money. This combination gave birth to the inevitable: road trips. We drove everywhere, and camped in a tent along the way. By the time we moved overseas when I was 15, I had visited most of the KOA campgrounds sprinkled north-south between Texas and Illinois and west-east between California and Georgia. We spent so many nights on the ground that the rare night in a Motel 6 was the very epitome of luxury, especially if one of the beds—all four of us stayed in one room—had a coin-op vibrator. Our parents told us that bed vibrators were to help people sleep, and we absolutely believed them. Even now, I don’t immediately associate vibrating beds with anything but a really good night’s rest.

The summer I was 10 and Tim was 9, we drove from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to California, and back again. My mom grew up in Bakersfield, and believed that a summer without a visit to the Pacific Ocean was no summer at all. We loaded up the roof rack of our Ford Escort wagon with our luggage and camping gear, loaded up the back seat with Tim and me and our Australia healer, Chrissy (who had truly terrible farts), and we were off.

Planning for the trip, the four of us had discussed some fun things we could do together in the car. Tim and I felt strongly that we were far to old for the stupid car games we played when were kids—maybe I-40 was a good place for Dad to teach us to drive? In the end, we agreed that we would read aloud The Chronicles of Narnia, and we set ourselves this challenge: to complete all seven books before the end of the trip.

As Dad backed out of the driveway, I opened to the first page of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and began to read. That one got us to west Texas, passing the book around the car so we could each read one chapter. We followed Prince Caspian through New Mexico and eastern Arizona, where with the help of Aslan and the four Pevensie kids, he fought the battle to save Old Narnia.

Somewhere around Winslow, we set out on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. We sailed with Edmund and Lucy and their nasty cousin, Eustace, along with the whole crew of the Treader, both Human and Animal. About midway through the journey, we met the Monopods—or, as they called themselves, the Duffers. These one-footed dwarves had been regular bipedal dwarves until they were uglified by the wizard Coriakin, possibly on account of their remarkable stupidity. Horrified by their uglified appearance, they had then made themselves invisible.

To undo their invisibility, they needed a girl to go upstairs in the wizard’s house, where he kept his magic book, and read out the reversal spell. When Lucy asked why they didn’t just send one of their own girls into the house and up the stairs, they protested in terror: “We dursen’t, we dursen’t!”

I can’t tell you how hard this made us laugh. Okay, yes I can: We laughed so hard that Mom, who was driving, had to pull the car over to the side of the road. Which was handy, because I had to find a bush or I would have peed my pants.

“We dursen’t, we dursen’t,” from that day forward, became for the Hawkins family one of those secret phrases that every family collects over time that is utterly meaningless to anyone who wasn’t there when it was born. It became our mission to find new and more ridiculous occasions to use it. “Roll down the window, Chrissy farted.” “We dursen’t, we dursen’t!” “Put another quarter in the vibrating bed.” “We dursen’t, we dursen’t!”

More than 20 years later, it’s very difficult to pin down exactly what was so dang hilarious about “We dursen’t, we dursen’t!” It doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t have to make sense to be a totem of a family pleased with itself and each other.

By the way, we sat in our driveway for 20 minutes, after having driven more than 3,000 miles over the course of three weeks, to finish the last chapter of The Last Battle. Get out of the car before the story was done? You know the answer to that.

Filed under: life | Tagged: , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

stories I like to tell: the long road to and from the altar

Posted on April 20, 2009 by Aly Hawkins

[Previous entries in "Stories I Like to Tell" here.]

Tomorrow, my husband and I will have been married for eight years. To celebrate the occasion, and to give you some idea how thoroughly I adore my man, I want to tell you a story. This is the heavily abridged version of “The Long Road To and From the Altar.”

Bryan Ashmore and I came to college the same fall as freshmen. Bryan was fresh off the drive from 12 miles away, and I was fresh off the plane from East Africa. We were both confused by the experiences we’d had before college, eager to start a new chapter in our lives (and do our best to ignore the previous ones), and clueless about how adulthood worked. We had similar warped senses of humor and a shared taste for high drama. That was about all we had in common. By the following autumn, we were inseparable.

What unfolded over the next two years was predictable, but only with the kind of hindsight that comes with hours and hours of intensive therapy. I think we broke up and got back together eight or ten times. Every breakup was absolutely final, and every tearful, passionate reunion was the last five minutes of a John Hughes movie. That’s the way we liked it, though we wouldn’t have admitted as much at the time.

The eighth or tenth breakup was final . . . for a year. Over the course of that 12 months, we both dated other people. And if you had asked either of us then if we imagined ever getting back together, we would have said no. (Funny side story: I went out a couple of times that year with the guy my pituitary gland had informed me was The Perfect Guy: smart, sexy, musical, incredible-smelling, theologically inclined. He had just gotten out of a similarly on-again, off-again relationship, and at dinner the first time we went out, we both agreed that we’d never ever ever get back with our exes. Bryan was my date to their wedding.)

The next fall, Bryan and I started hanging out again—on the sly. We had put ourselves and our friends through so much already that we didn’t want to upset the newly righted apple cart with more ’80s-movie antics. One gorgeous day in September, we skived off afternoon classes and drove down to Newport Beach. We lay on the sand and read to each other (Rilke, as I remember) for a couple of hours until a pod of dolphins turned up to play in the waves, not 40 feet from our spot. We hadn’t packed swimwear of any kind, but Bryan couldn’t resist: He stood up, stripped down to his skivvies and sprinted for the incoming tide. Later, walking along the canals in the dying light of the day, we slow-danced on the boardwalk to the faint strains of The Cars’ “Drive” (or was it Chris de Burgh’s “Lady In Red”?) spilling from an empty, candlelit restaurant.

When I got home late that night and my roommate asked about my day, I said, “It was okay. Nothing special.”

We didn’t break up again for three years, and that was a week before we got engaged. You see, even though we had so much history together and had discovered so much more in common than we imagined at the beginning, we still hadn’t worked out our shit. We were still scarred by the slings and arrows of mixed-bag childhoods, determined to ignore those scars in favor of fun and adventure (and drama!), and deeply committed to avoiding actual and emotional adulthood. It’s not as if we weren’t trying; it’s just that working out your shit takes a really, really long time.

It would be John-Hughes-worthy to tell you that a crisis arose, that we Made A Choice, and then the music swelled as we biked off into the sunset. And it’s true, in an un-John-Hughes way. The crisis that arose was a slow-dawning realization that we couldn’t go on together committed to avoiding commitment. We could either commit to going it alone or we could commit til-death-do-us-part; we had to choose, because an aversion to commit was part of the shit-that-needed-working-out.

A week before Bryan asked me to be his wife, it could have gone either way. Heck, an hour before, it was anybody’s game. But four months later, we stood up in front of God and our families and friends and swore that we’d work out our shit together, come hell or high water. (We said it more poetical-like, but that was the gist.)

That’s what we’ve done for the last eight years. That’s what we’re still doing. And I imagine we’ve got enough shit between the two of us to go on working it out together for another 50 or 60 years, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.

I’ve done a few things in my life that make me proud and happy, but none of them fills me with more pride and joy than faithfully keeping the promise I made eight years ago tomorrow: to walk hand in hand with the best man I know through the best and the worst life throws at us, and to never let go.

Making that kind of promise is one of the most demanding, most terrifying, most beautiful ways to work out your shit.

And that, my friends, is the beginning of “The Long Road To and From the Altar.”

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | 6 Comments »

spewing and spouting on torture

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Aly Hawkins

You might have heard that the Obama Administration today released memos written by the Office of Legal Counsel under President Bush (links). I’ve not yet read them all; they’re a daunting combination of legalese and horror porn—”John Kramer Goes to Yale.” We’ll see if I muster the spleen to stomach a full reading.

I have tooled around the interwebs to see what others are saying, and man—it doesn’t seem like anyone’s got a crapload of terrific ideas about what to do now.

Most people on the political Right aren’t saying much of anything. I can’t get a read on whether their silence indicates a tacit approval of the techniques approved by the Bush Administration or a fearful reluctance to acknowledge that these things took place. Vice President Cheney has, obviously, made an effort to publicly stand by the decisions that were made, but I don’t see a great deal of enthusiastic support for his most recent statements to the media—except, perhaps, from those whom I would consider to be on the hard-Right fringe (white supremacists, members of any organization with “militia” in its name, etc.). I don’t get it: If you believe the right decisions were made, why not say so? Tell us your reasons. Make your argument. You could be right! And if you don’t, why not say so? It wouldn’t mean putting your stamp of approval on the new president (God forbid); it would mean ensuring that any president’s ability to undermine the rule of law would itself be undermined.

People on the Left, in large measure, are demanding federal prosecution, to the highest levels of the previous administration. And I totally get why Obama and Pals are not excited by this option: It’s a political nightmare. It would be incredibly difficult to press charges against anyone from the previous administration without looking like a petty, partisan douche. On top of that—and this is the more salient, less Machiavellian point—even thinking about the logistics of mounting a trial of that magnitude is mind-boggling. Venue? Jury? Press? I really don’t think it could be done in such a way that a majority would be satisfied with the proceedings’ fairness. (And imagine the nationwide protests and counter-protests . . . nauseating.) Gerald Ford got a lot of flack (and no re-election) for his pardon of Nixon, but I bet his imagination was just as vivid as mine. He knew that it was better to let Congress pass a few laws curbing executive power than the likely chaos of the alternative.

Some are renewing calls for some kind of “Truth Commission” that would, presumably, ask everyone involved in the decision to use the techniques spelled out in the memos to come forward and tell their stories in exchange for immunity from prosecution. I guess this would be modeled at least to some extent on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission—which is to say, it would be mainly therapeutic. I think there’s a lot to commend in what S. Africa accomplished with their TARC, mostly because large numbers of people were involved in oppressive, abusive and inhumane activities, and there aren’t a lot of good ways for the state to punish large numbers of people without becoming oppressive itself. The problem in the present instance is that there doesn’t seem to have been large numbers of people involved in the decision-making process, making the prime motivation for such a commission somewhat moot.

That said, the last option seems to me to be the most promising—or, perhaps, the lesser of the evils. I cannot believe, with some on the Right, that doing and saying nothing is the way forward; we must bring these acts into the light of day and decide together never to allow them to be done again in the name of our “security.” I cannot agree, with some on the Left, that punitive and vengeful prosecution will lead to justice; I just do not see a way to get it done. I truly believe it would tear us apart.

Filed under: politics | Tagged: , , , , , | 31 Comments »

what happened on Sunday

Posted on April 12, 2009 by Aly Hawkins

It’s difficult to piece together what exactly happened a few days after the good man was executed. (And if what happened was what the man’s followers claimed happened, this difficulty makes a good bit of sense: It’s not as if dead people came back to life at the drop of a hat in first-century Palestine, just as they are not known to do so very often here and now. Explaining such an occurrence to themselves and to each other—if that’s what happened—would have been quite a challenge.)

Here’s what we know: Not long after the good man—a man who had said, in many different ways, “God is here,” and who had traipsed about the countryside doing things that really only made sense if you believed it—soon after he was executed, his followers began to live as if what he had said was true.

Before his death, by their accounts, they had believed him—enough to leave their jobs and families to go traipsing along with him, nodding their heads when he said “God is here” while trying to understand what that could possibly mean. They had many opportunities to go back to their old lives, but something about the man’s words and actions was irresistible . . . too good not to be true. And yet, they didn’t know how his words could be true for them; they didn’t know how to live as if God were really, actually, darn-tootin’, right-fracking-here.

Not long after his death, however, something happened.

It didn’t happen all at once. It couldn’t happen all at once, because becoming takes awhile. But their becoming started with what happened on Sunday: The stone door between the tomb of belief and life lived with God—here!—was blown off its hinges.

There is both more and less distance than you might think between believing and living; sometimes all we need to close the gap is three days, a vacant tomb and some breakfast. What happened on Sunday began to change the man’s followers into people who lived the truth that God is here.

What happened on Sunday is happening in me.

Filed under: life, theology | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

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