|dəˈzī(ə)r|
noun
a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen : [with infinitive ] a desire to work in the dirt with your bare hands.
• strong sexual feeling or appetite : they were clinging together in fierce mutual desire.
verb [ trans. ]
strongly wish for or want (something) : he never achieved the status he so desired | [as adj. ] ( desired) it failed to create the desired effect.
• want (someone) sexually : there had been a time, years ago, when he had desired her.
• archaic express a wish to (someone); request or entreat.
ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French desir (noun), desirer (verb), from Latin desiderare (see desiderate ).

Here’s what I wrote in response:

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Do me a favor, okay? Don’t tell me you’re on your fucking honeymoon and ten minutes later invite me to join you in the hot tub with your new hubby. It’s confusing. So you’ve been together thirteen years and you say it was “just a Civil Union,” and you bought the rings in 1999, nine months into the relationship. And you are the less shy one, which means—as your hubby later says—that you do the choosing and he joins in, and it’s not that I don’t find you attractive, but the truth is, I’d rather sleep with four other people at this party, and here’s the deal: don’t call it a fucking honeymoon, Honey.

Because I’m dragging enough hypocrisy and confusion around, trying to define what it means to be a boyfriend, or a lover, or a partner. And I have a withering fantasy that involves an Arts & Crafts bungalow and a husband who’s good with his hands, who loves dogs, who doesn’t want to shop on our post-Civil Union vacation for another man. I’m sitting here on a square, white ottoman, next to a fantasy whose skin is warm and slightly furry (and very soft); I’m sitting on Sunbrella fabric holding in my little belly, trying not to look too intimate, with pale legs and a mostly authentic smile. I’m sitting here working on my higher self, the one who suspends judgment and remains easy and open, the one who knows it really is all right no matter what, as long as it feels safe enough, as long as I’m not feeling shitty or used or treated like an orafice.

Because I’m not your blow-up doll, or your exotic one-night stand; I’m flesh and bone and a heart filled with desire pumping blood—I bleed—but I’m working hard at not getting sucked into that old familiar longing for MORE, more than I have right now, or getting lost in a new fantasy, or worst of all, letting go of all authenticity (except of course, for this sometimes smile, which is part polite and part public protocol). I’m sitting here sober, with my J-Lo butt, wondering how much objectification is okay, wondering if I really know anything about relationships between men at all—the power struggles, the posturing, the need to feel desired and the need to feel independent, inexplicably balanced in the most complicated ways.

You’ve had too much to drink, and you’re clinging to what remains of your beautiful body; I can see myself in you. We even look alike. You might be a mirror, and I’m not sure I like what I see. But mostly, you’re pushing my “What if what I want doesn’t exist anymore?” button, and I would like it if you would just wander off now.

It’s a compliment, this attention, I know that. But that word, Honeymoon: how I wished you hadn’t used it. How I wish I you would just close that pretty, ugly mouth.

We’ve also been falling in love with lots of dogs, eating artisan chocolate-covered bananas, and gathering recipes from the cook at our house, Ana.

I thought it was only fair that I should share the group’s overall favorite Ana recipe so far: Coco Pie (Coconut Pie, in English).

And since this is blog is dedicated to writing and writing prompts, and I’m officially reporting from a writing retreat in Mexico, it seems important that I include writing prompts as well.

Here are a few that worked well for us this week; Ana’s pie recipe follows the prompts.

Prompts:

Traveling without chocolate

He’s/She’s a good little traveler

She/He doesn’t travel well

Generally awesome

Ana’s Coco Pie:

For the crust:

One package Maria’s Gamesa butter wafers, pulsed in a food processor or blender until they are fine crumbs

In a bowl, combine the crumbs with one stick butter (1/2 cup) melted

Add 1 oz +  hot water, as needed, until the consistency is smooth and easy to press into a a pie pan

Bake at 250 F for 15 minutes

For the filling:

Grate one small, fresh coconut, using the large size on the grater

Cover the freshly baked crust with a layer of the fresh coconut

In a blender or a standing mixer, combine one 12 oz can of evaporated milk, one 12 oz can condensed milk, 4 eggs, and one stick (1/2 cup) melted butter

Pour mixture over coconut and bake at 250 degrees for 45 minutes, checking to make sure the crust doesn’t burn.

Refrigerate for at least four hours.

The prompts this time were:

No, Really, I’m happy for you.

Maybe the Hippies were right.

AND

Coffee and donuts.

Read my piece below and guess which one I wrote in response to.

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If you haven’t been to Dynamo Donuts yet, be warned: once you have your first Dynamo experience, it may become a delicious habit.

Located in San Francisco, on the eastern end of 24th St, between Bryant and Potrero (2760 24th Street ), Dynamo is the home of the $3.00 gourmet doughnut: lemon pistachio, chocolate rose germanium hazelnut, cornmeal rosemary cherry, and the famous (or infamous, depending on your waistline), bacon maple apple.

You place your order under a green awning, from a counter that opens to the sidewalk. The staff is friendly, groovy, mostly pierced and tattooed, wearing the occasional funky hat—very twenty-something, and sexy in that easy, casually polite way. Inside, a few banquette tables face an open kitchen, spotlessly clean and painted in all variations of donut brown: caramel, sunny gold, bittersweet and cocoa. The flagstone back patio, with shaded tables and flowering potted plants, is the real jewel of that space: a quiet oasis, rare on this busy neighborhood thoroughfare.

The donuts are fresh and cake-like, made from scratch with organic ingredients. They have delicate flavors and rough-hewn, not-so-perfect edges; they are about as healthy and natural as a donut can possibly be. On my first visit to Dynamo, we met a man who was sitting down with THREE donuts, but I want to encourage you to be more prudent. A donut should be an occasional treat (we all know this, don’t we?), and the carbo counters among us can split one with a friend.

My warning is not really about the ingredients or the caloric content of the donuts. The real danger here is the seemingly innocuous Blue Bottle Coffee they serve: a wonderful, rich, smoky blend brewed strong, but never bitter. It’s not the coffee itself I want to warn you about (although I recommend ordering a small cup), it’s the combination of the coffee and the donuts that’s so lethal and lovely: sugar flour and caffeine alone could take you on a nice flight, but the Dynamo experience is unlike anything I have ever experienced at any other donut shop anywhere else in the world.

It’s euphoric. (But somewhat frightening.) Like the surge of Ecstasy, or that moment when you realize you are in love with someone for the first time, or suddenly quite drunk, or racing downhill on skis without falling, jumping off the high dive. You immediately want to repeat the experience at the peak of it, the crescendo, that perfect, blissful, buzzing moment.

You’re hitting that high note, scatting along with Ella Fitzgerald, driving at great speed along the highway. You’ve just finished eight loads of laundry or scrubbed the kitchen floor to a shiny brightness. You’ve finally finished painting the living room a creamy white, and—Oh God!—are you elated! Endorphins are surging through your veins; you’ve passed the forty-five minute mark on the treadmill; you’ve been dancing non-stop for three hours.

It’s an out-of-body experience, the Dynamo/Blue Bottle high, and hours later, after a sensible lunch of chicken breast and roasted vegetables, a whole liter of sparkling water, you will still feel the whoosh of the air as the roller coaster turns into that final 360 degree loop, those interconnected corkscrews, that roar down the last passage.

I’m telling you, it’s quite a ride. But when it’s over, you’ll want to do it all over again.

The words to say it

Why write?

Write it all down and rest for awhile

Here’s what I wrote in response:

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“Why do you write?” The question comes at me, champagne in hand, or fork suspended before lips. Interruptive. Direct. But what the virtual stranger at the party or the wedding table really wants to know is what have you published? I know this, because when I answer “Long fiction, and some poetry,” questions about publication are always the next out of their mouths.

This, I tell my students, my workshop participants, my friends and colleagues, is not a question to run from. Indeed, what have I published? Because those of us who read a lot know some of what gets published is unappealing: that’s subjectivity. Any judgements we have about the writing itself—in which we use words like “good” or “lousy” or that awful insult, “amateur” (which really means new and raw, and even has its roots in Amare: to love)—those judgements do not really matter when it comes to publication: work gets published all the time; some of it we love, some of it we hate. So what?

Being published simply means someone said, “Yes. I like this. I will.” It’s rather like having a marriage proposal accepted—nothing to minimize, that’s for sure—but being published doesn’t make us writers. Many talented people, some who are far better writers than I (there’s that subjective judgement again) many of these writers are not published. Does that negate that they are driven to write (sometimes on any scrap of paper they can find, or their own hand), or that they are in love with words? Punctuation? Rhythm and alliteration? I think not.

Still, there’s something important about sending your work out into the world. Sharing it. Claiming what you have to say and offering it up to others: to cajole, to provoke, to teach, to connect. It’s important to share your work. What is the overused axiom? Creativity abhors a vacuum? Something like that. Although Emily Dickenson wrote amazing work without much of an audience, so did Van Gogh, actually, and they weren’t focused on publishing. Yet their words on the printed page are now their gift to us. They have value.

Still, the question, “What have you published?” can be a meal intrusion, a conversation stopper, a drag. I could perhaps, present the inquirer with a publication list: some obscure literary journals, a spice blog, the back cover of a book about San Francisco, five years of on-line articles about dating, politics, and romance. Maybe I could get that clever iPhone app, and just bump a document over to them and get on with relaxing, eating, socializing, and flirting. I could go paperless and relax my vocal chords. But it wouldn’t deflate the enormity of the question or the issue at hand.

It makes me think—and it should— why haven’t I focused more on publishing? What am I avoiding? And in doing so, what gifts, ideas, dreams, lessons, hopes, am I denying those who might read my published work? Don’t I owe those potential readers something? Isn’t it my duty to them and to myself?

I invite you to ask yourself the same questions.

I don’t know what happened, but like the piece generated from a good therapist, I suddenly felt a wave of gratitude.

Here’s what I wrote:

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“Don’t you get tired of watching people cry?” That’s what someone asked me recently at a dinner party.

“Not everyone cries during a session,” I said, “and the ones who do are doing what they need to do.”

“Spoken like a true therapist,” she said into her Cabernet. So I thanked her.

I’m bound by confidentiality, so I prefer not to talk about my work, but what I wanted to say was this: It’s sacred, this job of listening, of witnessing sorrow and loss. In one day I can travel through the end of a forty-six year relationship, the death of a child, impotence after prostate removal, or cancer that has metastasized. Lost jobs, lost limbs, sex addiction, child abuse. The days sometimes weigh heavily on me, and I drive home in silence, not able to bear the news or listen to another sad song.

But there are also moments of elation: the birth of a child, struggled for for so long; two men marrying after fifty-five years of believing in never; new jobs, new homes, new bodies; drastic changes after years of abuse and neglect. I’m a scribe, keeping close records of their prose poetry—their songs—on big yellow legal pads. I’m their confidant, their parent, a bridge between the hopeless past and an undiscovered tomorrow, or next year, or adulthood, or old age.

On certain days I feel nothing but hopeful; a gold light shimmers around each leaf on the trees when I walk outside. On other days, I don’t think I can drive home without taking some time to center myself first. So I go to the cafe on the corner and order a Chai tea, add honey and soymilk, and sit in the corner seat where I can stare out the window.

Hundreds of people pass by while I cradle the hot cup in my hand. Some of them I know are doing terrible things to little children; some of them are walking wounded.

I can’t tell you how many people who’ve come to my classes and workshops over the years have said this to me. There have been so many. One woman—a writer who had published a successful non-fiction book that went into three successive printings—said this to me one night while discussing her ideas for a YA novel. “I don’t know how to do this,” she said. “I’m not really a writer.”

“Amy,” I said. “You’ve written and published a book.”

“I know,” she said. “But that was non-fiction. It doesn’t count.”

It doesn’t?

One woman, who attended a food writing retreat I led, said she wasn’t “really a writer,” although she had published eight cookbooks. Eight. “I had great editors,” she said, which seemed fortunate, but irrelevant. She wrote the headers and the copy in every recipe, an introduction, a section on “tools of the trade.” Her editors didn’t write those books, they edited them.

When do we finally claim ourselves as writers? When we have a five-book contract and have been on the New York Times Bestseller List? When our play opens on Broadway to rave reviews?

“Everyone is a writer,” Pat Schneider says, but I respectfully disagree. Everyone isn’t a writer. Everyone can learn to write, and can improve his or her writing, but some people are natural storytellers, and some are not. Some people don’t use the written word as their mode of expression: they are photographers, painters, actors or dancers. Some aren’t identified as artists at all: they live in the world of numbers or chemicals. And that’s okay; not everyone has to be an artist. That’s not to say the accountant or the scientist or the lawyer can’t be a writer (actually, in my experience, lawyers are often very poetic writers), but they don’t have to be, nor do I think everyone has to be creative in some well-recognized art form. They may be creative in other ways, such as creating wonderful meals, or being amazing lovers: there are many, many ways to be creative.

But everyone is not a writer, simply because not everyone wants to write. Trust me. I have taught Freshman Composition for years—a required class that students have to pass in order to graduate from the university. Some of these students discover they like to write, or that they can write well, but only a small percentage of them want to write, feel the need to place words on paper, in a journal, in an essay, in a poem. The majority of them can’t wait for class to be over.

Not everyone is a writer, because the definition of a writer is someone who writes, not someone who is required to write.  In fact, a writer is someone who is driven to write. Writers write because they have no choice. If they don’t write something for awhile, they feel like they will burst. They are driven to write, nearly every day, something.

Once, back in the days when they were made of paper, not plastic, I wrote an idea I had for a story on a series of barf bags on an airplane. I was without paper or a journal, but I had a pen, and what I had to write about couldn’t wait (nor could it be sung, or drawn, or discussed: it had to be written).

I spend half of my working life sitting in a circle with other writers, listening to their words. I am transported to cliffs in Greece, where someone cries over a dead loved one, or restaurants in Sicily, where octopus is beaten to tenderness on the front sidewalk, or harrowing nights in a quiet suburb, praying that a drunken man won’t strike his wife, or stumble into his daughter’s room. I have been through thirteen-hour surgeries, given birth to a ten-pound baby boy, fallen in love with a beautiful young woman in Vietnam, even been the second wife in ancient China, all because these talented, imaginative, articulate writers have been driven to write and have read their work out loud in my living room.

Some of these writers move me to tears, and others have to pause for bursts of laughter. These story-tellers transform my reality in the same way my favorite novelists or columnists or playwrights do, and STILL I have to remind them that they are writers! Some of them are published, many of them are not, all could be, but that is irrelevant. A writer is not someone who is published; a writer is someone who feels compelled to write, is driven toward words; a writer is someone who writes because he or she has to.

Even when it’s out of obligation—finishing a piece on deadline, or a draft for submission to an editor (or a manuscript group)—it’s still a conscious choice. No one has to write: it’s a choice. It’s a choice. And I’m telling you here, if you make that choice, own it.

You are a writer.

Do I have to keep reminding everybody? I will. I will. But please, when I do, take it in. Listen to me.

You, reading this now, you are a writer.

The prompts this time were simply a few phrases:

Ghosts do leave shadows

To be free like that

I was young and unafraid

Here’s what I wrote in response:

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What’s at the core? I ask myself this on the days I am crawling out of the muck: self-doubt, fear, loneliness. What’s at the core?

I was an effeminate boy, but I  was never told to “act like a man,” or to “man up,” as my ex used to say. Mom never said, “boys don’t bake, or dance, or sing, or act, or garden,” and Pop never made me try out for sports, but came to my gymnastics competitions and let me do backflips on their bed.

At the core, I was fearless. I had self-confidence. I did well in school and was resilient when pre-pubescence brought name calling and I became the target in Dodge Ball. I had girlfriends who cherished my imagination, and siblings who protected me and told me I was witty or smart; I had a big gold dog and my own room. I had books and musicals and a record player.

At the core is that foundation, the house built on stone, bedrock—you pick the cliché. Solid.

I want to stop right here. To idealize my life and have you tell me I was lucky (I was lucky; I am lucky), but the story takes a nasty little turn. You’ve heard it before: the early onset dementia, the matriarch turning into a sick old lady who doesn’t cook or clean or drive anymore, who repeats the phrase, “I’ve done it all my life, and I don’t want to do it anymore,” over and over and over and over.

And you know what happens next: her dark hair (dyed black for nearly thirty years) grows out a thin line of sliver at the roots. She wears reading glasses all day long, but doesn’t read anymore, because “the words get all jumbled on the page.” Her eyes magnified so large that what used to be two cool blue lakes become great dark blue holes into a terrified brain full of tangles. She stops showering, stops listening, talks incessantly and has accidents in her polyester pants.

The core holds solid, but our little confident boy starts to lose his grip. Safety is eroding. (Look how I slip into the present tense: like the nightmares I had for years—and occasionally still have—waking up from the image of her naked body in the bathroom, holding onto the towel rack while I dry her off. I’m sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, waking up thirty years later, telling myself, “It’s over now.”) The confidence eroded (past tense now), but the core still solid in there.

Oh, but the muck that has to be cleared out daily. Except after those rare nights of deep, peaceful sleep, when I wake up thankful for her, for that safety I had as a child, the kind most children never get. That’s when I sit with the happy ghost of her, and she tells me how proud she is of me, of what we did together, of who we’ve become.

Sea Turtles     Green     Blackberries     Cliffs     Leaving

I had just returned from visiting a dear old friend in Hawaii. Here’s what I wrote:

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Some part of myself I left behind in adolescence comes roaring back, even as I struggle with the middle-aged body that hasreplaced it. The rotator cuff injury is healing—albeit slowly—and I can lose the extra weight I’ve put on if I just exercise regularly. But those thoughts don’t always curb the hopelessness that springs up some mornings, along with a stiff neck.

What does curb that hopelessness?

The unbridled laughter in my friend’s kitchen, recalling a character we both knew in high school; her spot on imitation of her nasal-voiced mother; sexual innuendo so inappropriate and absurd that we both go silent for a moment, then inhale deeply, breaking into stomach-burning giggles.

There we are: two sixteen-year-olds in forty-six-year-old bodies. Old friends.

Lying on the lanai, the aqua-blue bay in the distance bathed in white light, we touch on the wistfulness of being single and without children. We dream up a trip to Australia and New Zealand. We imagine foster children and a partner with a foreign accent. We make plans to collaborate on a Hawaiian yoga and writing retreat, complete with visits from sweet dogs who never shed and cats who kiss our toes with sandpaper tongues.

One night, we float in front of Waikiki Bay, and the Mai Tais go right to our heads. We deconstruct the melted fennel mashed potatoes with a Hawaiian waiter named Mary, while I enjoy her dimples. Another night, Tiki torches glow in the distance; the waiter with the golden eyes recommends the Opah and reminds us to save room for the chocolate soufflé. We’re in paradise, yet we somehow keep circling back to the kitchen table on Clifton Court, in the house where I was a teenager. We circle back to a lazy summer afternoon when we were only sixteen or seventeen. And there we are with my mother’s early onset dementia, her repetitious, nonsensical chatter. There we are only a few years after the death of my friend’s father. Two teenagers surviving loss with a cool sense of acceptance.

What a gift old friends are, I think. Standing witness for us for such a long time. Helping us see what hasn’t really changed in our lives, when so much has.

I tell myself, it’s the warmth of the place, the easy way of the people here, my friend’s no-nonsense attitude about living and growing and taking care of yourself. But it’s something else too: some part of me that was never broken. That brave young person who didn’t want to run away or escape, but instead, sat at the table with all of it—with all of them, now ghosts. He’s still here with her: that part of me that was always able to be present in the easiest, most authentic ways.

This prompt involved giving everyone an “Adult” fortune cookie, which I bought in San Francisco’s Chinatown, at The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory. They weren’t exactly X-rated—they were saucy at best—but they were silly and great fun. We read them out loud and then wrote down some phrases or words that stood out to us. I wrote down these words, and then wrote what follows:

Watch out

Eunich

Panties

Copulation

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Her texts came early in the morning, one after the other, so my dresser started vibrating. “Grrrrl,” she wrote, “you’ll never guess where I am!” But her iPhone auto generated a GPS message, so I did know. “I’m at the top of the Eiffel tower!” The next message read, “And you’ll never guess who I’m with!” There was a picture attached, but I could have told you that the handsome bald guy with blue eyes was Officer Harvey, Jon Harvey. I knew him well. “Honey,” she wrote in the next text, “the sun is setting and I’m wearing real girl panties from the lingerie section of La Samaritaine!”

I turned the phone off at that point. I had to. I know it’s normal to feel as if your fictional characters have real lives, but when they start texting you from Paris, well, it’s just annoying.

The thing is, I like Shantel. She’s my tranny hero, but now that she’s been liberated from my psyche most days and is waiting in limbo in a blue file of raggedy-edged notebook paper, I think she’s getting impatient. Okay, that part of me— who is a six-foot tall Afro-Brit transsexual with a fierce weave and a tiny Amsterdam apartment in the Southern Canal Belt— is getting impatient.

“You’re working on a cookbook?” she asked me recently, not even incredulous, just annoyed. “What on earth for?” When I told her it’s a project I feel I can contain somehow, can envision as a whole, she simply said, “Darling, you have simply got to publish my story so I can become a screenplay character. I was born to be in the movies.” Great, I think. Who’s going to play you? Wendy Williams? But this is the problem with fictional characters: they live in your head, so she said, “I heard that, and it isn’t a bit funny.”

Maybe I’m just jealous. I went to Paris with a lover once, but my man and argued a lot, my favorite restaurant had closed for summer vacation, and we waited until our last day to see the Louvre: it was closed too. Readers take note: the Louvre is closed on Tuesdays.

Shantel’s all woman now, and she’s got herself a man who loves her. I don’t. She’s watching the sunset from the top of the Eiffel Tower and she’s wearing cute underwear. Not me. (Well, my undies are okay, but not panty pretty.)

Anyway, who cares, ultimately? She’s a figure of my imagination, right? She only goes where I imagine she goes, and only wears what I imagine she wears. Still. She’s having a lot more fun than I am. She’s having great sex, and she’s probably eating at Le Petit Prince tonight. They’re open for her, no doubt. Or maybe I’m just imagining that too.

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Dear Cindy,

Hi. It’s me, the desperate-to-be-hip aging urban homo, writing to ask you to come correct. Because even though I spent ten years in therapy, deconstructed Grimm’s Fairytales in literature courses, read about your happily-ever-after life through a feminist vs. a patriarchal lens, and often blame you for many of the reasons I can’t deal with the annoyances that come with cohabitation, you still evoke a sense of delight when I watch you on the silver screen.

Even though I know your fat-footed ugly step-sisters won’t fit into that ridiculous glass slipper, I still find myself singing along with the little mice and cursing Lucifer the cat, and laughing at your absent-minded fairy godmother. I like how the birds help you dress and how your reflection in the water puddle keeps you company while you scrub the floor. But even so, I’m not completely buying happily-ever-after. So tell the truth.

I want to know a few things, like if the Prince is good in the sack, if he delivers the goods. You need to tell it, to bring it, to drop the knowledge, girl. Admit to us that it ain’t that simple. That you argue sometimes, that he’s getting a paunch, that he falls asleep some nights when you want to make hot, sweaty, love.

Admit that you still call your step-mother on Mother’s Day. Even though she abused you for years, you’re still enmeshed. In fact, please give it up and admit that there is no such thing as a fairy godmother, that there never was a Grand Ball at a castle, that he wasn’t a prince at all,  but the son of a wealthy real estate investor. Tell us about how you’ve had trouble conceiving. Tell us that you drink too much at night watching Dancing with the Stars on Hulu, occasionally crying for that couple who dances the Quick Step or the Fox Trot without one mistake, because beyond that one waltz that brought you two together, you always wished you had learned the Lindy Hop, and you haven’t been out dancing in ages.

You still love him, but it’s hard work. Admit it: some days, you dream of the single life, and a hot Latin lover half your age.