You may not write I Love You

You mustn't lie about one of the most famous drunken writers of our time

These are excerpts from the bio in the back of the current Vintage Crime edition of Raymond Chander's The Simple Art of Murder:

Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago..,but spent most of his boyhood and youth in England, where he attended Dulwich College and later worked as a free-lance journalist for The Westminster Gazette and The Spectator.... In 1919 he returned to the United States, settling in California, where he eventually became director of a number of independent oil companies. The Depression put an end to his business career, and in 1933, at the age of forty-five, he turned to writing....

I've read too much about Chandler lately, so that I've become as woozy from his difficult life as I was by Katherine Mansfield's that time I endured D.H. Lawrence's love/hate insults, her family's coldness, her husband's what's-his-deal-ness, her lost pregnancy in a German pension, Ida's mule-like devotion, and fatal TB with her. It's too much, is what I'm saying.

With Chandler, it's too much booze and too many moves from house to house and too many years between him and his wife and too many worries and too few friends and too much of his beloved elderly wife fading away. And then more alcohol. And some shots to round it off. How could a man who loved his cat so much have such a rough time of it?

So this bio struck me as odd because it made him sound too normal and his transitions in life too smooth, when in fact it was all a fucking mess. By his own admission he worked as a "free-lance journalist" in England for about a week. I'm sorry to admit that I've exited jobs after a week or two, and I wouldn't want my bio to read "worked as a free-lance contractor at the Mustang Ranch." Look, I was barely there long enough to get herpes!

And though he was a director of oil companies, at the end of his time there he was skipping work to have sex vacations with secretaries, and when he did show up, he was drunk. So you could argue that a depression "put an end to his business career", but not The Depression.

Why sugar-coat it, Vintage? We love dissolute geniuses!

The Universe guided me to the floor

I decided to do one of those things wherein you let The Universe(tm) guide your actions in life by asking It to give you a sign as to the direction your life should go.

Over the years I have met many actors who had been guided by The U to become actors, but I've not yet met a accountant or a librarian or a packaging company account executive who was similarly guided in their paths. Although, to be fair, they may just not be as vocal about it.

Anyway I was in the library (because my life is action-packed like that) and asked T.U. to lead me to a book that would lead the rest of my life. I wandered, then blindly stuck out a hand and grabbed a book.

"The Complete Book of Floor Coverings -- a guide to buying and installing carpet, tile, and linoleum" by Robert Y. Ellis.

Hmmm. The last floor-related issue in my life involved the concrete floor that we had laid down on the first floor of our house. Is Uni telling me that we should've gone with carpet, tile, or linoleum? Are there terrible spiritual consequences to having a concrete floor? But, Universe! It's so easy to clean!

Perhaps I'm being too literal. Floor. The base. The foundation on which you stand. You need to think about the ground on which you are standing. You can only jump off from there. Is it firm? Is it solid? Is it teetering on the edge of a plunge into blackness? Is it carpet, tile, or linoleum?

Very deep, Verse-Man. I'll have to ruminate on it.

I just wanted a definition, but I got a dysfunctional family

I looked up the word "travesty" using my Mac's built-in dictionary widget, and got this definition-cum-tale of family resentments:

noun
a false, absurd, or distorted representation of something

verb [trans.]
represent in such a way: Michael has betrayed the family by travestying them in his plays.

Geez, Michael, why you gotta be writing mean little plays about your momma, huh? You hurt her so much that she couldn't get it out of her mind even when sitting at the office working on computer dictionary definitions. Way to go, Eugene O'Neill.

And you, Momma! Put down the drink and get back to work!

Now is as good a time as any to show you my O.J. Simpson autograph

When I was a kid I bought a book that told you how to collect autographs and included addresses for famous people, including future murderers -- oops, I mean kidnappers and armed robbers.

I'm not sure where to display this photo. Next to the ones from Margaret Thatcher and Madeline L'Engle? Under the one from Shirley Temple? In a collage with the one from Johnny Cash and the one from "let's play two!" Chicago Cub Ernie Banks?

Maybe not.

p.s. I wrote Shirley Temple a poem. A poem! Ah, childhood.

I am surprised that a pimp would be manipulative

"Nightline" producers and I must read the same newspapers and magazines, because they frequently air stories about things I just read about somewhere else, like when they went to visit some of those isolated tribes in the Amazon jungle that had been pictured in Scientific American via info on Survival-International.org.

So I wasn't surprised when they did a story on how the economic crisis is affecting legal brothels in Nevada, since I had read a good article about this very thing in the LA Times at the beginning of this month.

But unlike the LA Times, "Nightline" did a crap job with the story, since it came off as more of a publicity piece for the particular brothel they profiled. The ladies are so nice! They provide a "stress relief" service! Business is fine, mostly! The Madam is a shrewd business-woman with a Suze Orman haircut and a black pantsuit who just happens to take her vicious German Shepherd with her everywhere she goes!

And Neal Karlinsky, who is usually a good correspondent, was practically giggling through the whole thing. Geez, Neal, get a room! You seemed pretty amused with the orgy room, and it is 60% off these days.

Nightline's website claims that this was a story about how "desperate woman turn to world's oldest profession during economic downturn", since job applications are up at the Mustang Ranch. But the story was really more of a PR tour of the facilities, and that's not news, that's salesmanship.

Which brings me to my pimp problem. It was a madam in this case, but a madam is just a lady pimp with better marketing. Madams need a more pimped out name, like bertha. Like "Mess with me and my Bertha will break your legs, sucker!" Tough, like that.

So Nightline followed pantsuit Bertha and dog to the airport, where she and a doppleganger colleague (matching pantsuit) greeted a new recruit, a lovely young lady who applied to the prostitute job over the internet and, good news! she got the job! The Berthas swooped in as she came down the elevator so common courtesy would keep her from ditching the whole thing, and the Berthas had a black limo waiting to take her to her exciting and glamorous new life of having sex with strangers for money. Limo = class.

Nightline also showed us how the Berthas were kind enough to supply her with her own antibacterial soap and monthly HIV and herpes tests. Glamour!

After I watched this story, I got really incensed with the airport pickup and the limo and the black pantsuit. "What'd I do?" asks the pantsuit, but really, Pantsuit, you are part of the shenanigans. Don't act all innocent. That whole charade is a psychological snare to gloss over the nature of the job. It's like being interviewed in a fancy conference room where the free coffee flows when in actuality you're going to be working two floors down in a cubicle in the basement for 50 cents a mug. Only worse, because you have to have sex with lonely truckers.

I was so mad at Bertha I and Bertha II until I realized that they are pimps, and I can't be mad at pimps or Berthas for being smooth-talking and emotionally manipulative because that is what they do. That's how you keep the ladies down on the farm (ranch, in this case).

My mistake, Bertha! But "Nightline", boo to you. You totally got teased and released.

I saved democracy in Nevada

Walter at the field office.

I mean, I think I did. I probably did. My husband and I drove up to Carson City in order to volunteer for the Obama campaign in this swing state, and we weren't the only ones. The sign in sheets were separated between "California" and "Local", and they had plenty of volunteers. What I'd heard about the Obama people was true -- they were extremely organized, dedicated, efficient and persistent. They had five -- five! -- offices in Carson City alone, a city of 35,000 people. I think they considered us totally lazy Communist slackers for participating in such a small way.

We went canvassing on Monday and Tuesday to urge people to vote in neighborhoods that had already had plenty of knocks on their doors. BUT only one lady yelled at us for how many door knocks she'd gotten over the past week. Most people weren't home, but the ones who were were pretty nice, especially the people in their 80s. Everyone was voting for Obama already, since our lists were mostly registered Democrats, and the O signs in the neighborhoods we went to far outnumbered the McC signs. So we were really just harassing stragglers to get to the polls. It rained on us briefly and sprinkle-snowed briefly, and the scenery in fall was simply beautiful.

We also drove up to Reno to check it out and get a quickie divorce like women in 40s movies. We forgot to get the divorce.



The Casino up the block from the field office. Cactus Jack voted Libertarian, of course.


This is what I learned about Carson City and Reno Nevada:

1. It's Ne-vad-a like glad, not Ne-vahd-a like "Ah, I got a vahse in Nevahda". "I'm glad I'm in Nevada". Or Aaaaa! There's a neon sign after me in Nevaaaaada!
2. There are slot machines in the supermarket.
3. Everyone has a dog. I'd say 80% of the houses we went to had dogs viciously slamming their bodies against the locked doors (all dogs are non-partisan). The lady who yelled at us had a cat.
4. The USA Today that I read the morning we went canvassing said the high school graduation rate in the state is 45%.
5. I think kids maybe aren't seeing the importance of graduating high school when there are slot machines in the supermarkets.
6. It's beautiful. The Sierra Nevadas are amazing. Want to see a beautiful view? Look up.
7. There are 25 legal brothels in Nevada. The laaads come to Nevaaada. I learned this from a LATimes article I read on my blackberry while driving around there -- looks like the economy is hitting them hard, too.
8. Carson City does not have a lot of frills, lifestyle-wise. Reno, in contrast, has more cute little stores and coffee shop cafes and pedestrians and is just more swinging in general. It has bigger casino resorts and is more touristy.
9. We never did locate Carson City statehouse, and there just aren't that many possibilities of where it could be.
Bonus California 10. We spent a night in Death Valley and no one died. Letdown!


View from the roof of the very nice and worth-a-visit Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.


Not all Nevada forests are on fire, just this bit around Lake Tahoe. WL wanted to take my picture, but I wasn't sure of the proper expression to have even in front of a natural and harmless fire. It just seemed rude to smile, you know?


Natty when we got home. Pretty sure she voted for McCain; she looks pissed.