Windows

The blinds in my living room have been pulled up for a few weeks now. I opened them to let the sun in, and the rule of entropy of my apartment dictates that when an action is performed upon any object in the apartment, it will not be changed for at least a week. If you leave the sugar canister open on the counter, no one will close it. If a poster falls off the wall, it will stay on the floor, blue sticky-tack up to catch the dust that drifts off the vacuum cleaner sitting in the hall from that time I vacuumed last month.
So when I opened the blinds to let in the light one fall afternoon, they stayed open. We never notice the window, anyway. During the day, it's like a Harry Potter painting; the trees move and the neighbors' dogs pass by, but to us it's just a colorful decoration on the wall, to stare at during deep conversations or when the TV is getting boring. At night it's a dull black square on the wall and an extra mirror. I forget that that thing on our wall is an opening into the outside world.
Other people forget that, too, I think, and I like to glance into the windows at night. I'm not watching, not even looking, really. Not hoping to see anything. There is a row of windows next to the sidewalk that leads into David dorm. I was always glad that I didn't live in one of the rooms that belong to those windows, because if you do, it means that there are just two panes of glass and three feet of air between your life and anyone who takes that sidewalk back to her room at night. I always used to look, though, when I was the person walking back. Tiny things catch your eye. The color of a brushstroke on a painting on the wall. The persistent tapping of a girl's hand on her computer mouse. The angle at which her boyfriend leans in the door to say good-bye.
I've heard it said that a lived life can be a poem, and I think it might be true, but life seems too big for that. Maybe at the end of it you can step back and look and see something whole. Maybe then you could condense it into words or into colors and make a poem or make a painting (because at their best they are the same). But in the middle of it, the most you can do is catch on to snapshot moments through windows. So I leave mine open.

after reading "Repeat After Me"

 I don't show my family the things that I write about them. You can never catch someone perfectly and set them out in words; people are too big for that, too detailed and contradictory. And there's always the thought that if you do manage it, if you get a word portrait or a fragment of one that is true to life (and by that I mean that it accurately represents your own view of a person), the person you've drawn will read your words and either won't find himself in them or, perhaps worse, will see himself all too clearly and the relationship that existed between you will be different.
Because the relationship between you and another person (your friend or your brother or your father) is a four-way relationship, always: the person you think you are, the person you think he is, the person he thinks you are, the person you think he is. This is complicated, and so we don't think about it.
I forget that the Rachel Boylan who exists in my own mind is not the Rachel Boylan who exists in the minds of my friends, my brothers, my father. I forget that on behalf of other people, too. If I wrote about my brother and I described him to you just exactly as he is, I would only be showing you my brother as he is in my own mind. That's who he is, but only part - only one copy, one reflection - and maybe I don't want him to see that, to see my own personal copy of who he is. It would make us different people and it would make our relationship a different character in the story of the world as we see it (because relationships are characters as much as human beings are).
Maybe I just don't want to do that.
It doesn't stop me from writing about my family.
But I don't show them what I write.

On being uninterested in gay-ness

Another one? I mean, I understand that the homosexual experience is an important, life-defining, society-defining sort of thing and therefore worthy of being written about.
And I don't have a problem with gay people, per se. I don't understand homosexuality and can't say that I think it's morally acceptable, but in the end the facts are simply:
1. There are people who are gay.
2. I don't really know any such people.
(I did have dinner with a lesbian couple once. One of the ladies looked like my grandmother, and although I found nothing to condemn, I didn't know how to answer when we parted ways and she said, "If we don't see you again here, we'll see you in heaven!")
3. Since the whole homosexual experience is so far removed from me, I can't muster much interest in it or see it as anything more than a distant and vaguely negative concept, like war or tuberculosis.
Maybe that is why I'm getting a little tired of essays about being gay, like Burl's. They tend to be repetitive and they rarely resonate except on an almost-voyeuristic level of abstract interest. And there isn't much of that, really.

Writers are people, too.

It's kind of like when you realize your parents are human. You know, that little pivot in time when your mother says something unexpected or you notice that your father looks lonely and suddenly you know that they have lives and personalities that existed before you did.
Well, it's kind of like that when you realize that people who write books and stories are human beings. Publication doesn't turn someone into a demigod incapable of any real faults; nor does an innate talent to write something publishable make the one who possesses it naturally incapable of being a really messed up person.
I think I'm not the only one who idealizes such people. It's hard not to; even when they write about the worst parts of their sometimes sordid lives, the words themselves make a barrier between the real person doing the writing and the real person doing the reading. Words turn lives into stories, which are separate and safe and not real, even when we know they're true.
I usually skip those little paragraphs about the authors that introduce each story, but after reading Torch Song and Embalming Mom, I flipped back a few pages and inspected them for some sign, some justification of the depth of messed-upness to which the writers confessed.
I don't know what I expected to find. A couple sentences, perhaps:
"Charles Bowden is best know for his non-fiction piece, Torch Song, which he wrote after working for several years as a journalist. He was admitted to a psychological ward shortly after its publication."
or:
"...he disappeared soon after it was written and has not been heard from since."
or:
"...he published no other major works and committed suicide shortly after the piece was written."
Instead, I found an italicized list of books Bowden wrote, magazines he contributed to and awards he received. He's writing yet another book now.
I can't quite believe that one human being can hold so much anger and sadness and dysfunction and yet still be undoubtedly, conventionally successful. Authors, like their stories (no matter how factual they are) are fictional constructs and must be either good or bad, perfect or all but insane. But of course they aren't. They are human beings as I am and as you are, simultaneously successful and severely messed up.