All That I’ve Written

All that I’ve written

is waiting to hear me say

just once just thank you

Acceptance (Two Haiku)

All I can see now,
light glimpsed through slats of fence. 
No, all I can say.

*

Still: even so. Still:
after all this time. And still:
spring snow silent, still. 

A Man, a Ship

Oh, it turns out today is the 11th anniversary of my blog (I thought it was the 5th). Some relationship, with my months-long absences! The blog's guiding principle from the start, which I've had to remind myself of more than once, has been to "put sentences together." I've done so in other ways over the years, but I'm trying to recommit to this formerly fashionable genre. So many muscles in my life have gone slack. This is one.

My previous post was rudimentary thoughts that have been preoccupying me. I don't know yet how they might ultimately connect, particularly the piece about the doctor who delivered me, which in my mind, if not on the page yet, is key. I don't quite know why I'm as obsessed with him as I am. In fact, "obsessed" is not the right word, so I used "haunted" in the post. Actually, neither hits the mark; the truth is somewhere between the two. The ship is important as well. I need to do more thinking and writing and research. Regarding the last of those, I've owned the book above for three years and have yet to open it up. (Isn't that interesting?) I will now.

Getting my thoughts down helped me see there might be something. I had no idea Bobby Vee would drop by! I certainly had no conscious awareness, until I reread it, of the echo between his name and Dr. V., the doctor's real initial. Although I'd first researched him a year or more ago, I discovered only this week, when I revived my Googling, that he'd been on the same ship my family had. 

Wanting to know, as my mother neared the end of her life, about the guy who delivered me was mystifying—well, it is still, but when the SS United States (another obsession of mine in the last few years) edged into his story, it felt like a gift.

For now, the sentences, the surprises, are enough to keep me thinking.

Slut (Affectionately, of Course)

Sometimes my job as an editor gets a little personal. For instance, one phrase I detest is "start a family," when what's meant is "start to have children." Whenever I come across "They wanted to start a family," I either change it to something like "They wanted to have kids" or, if the wording doesn't fit with the tone or I have reason to think the writer could stand to be educated, I'll tell him or her that two people in a relationship are a family—and saying they aren't until they start reproducing devalues not only them but other couples who don't have offspring. So can we please come up with another way of saying this?

Last week, I was copyediting an article—that is, doing a second read after the assigning editor had done the main job. And also after our boss had read it, come to think of it, so two people had signed off on it before me. It was a somewhat irreverent piece about a hairdresser who happens to be openly gay. At one point, the author says the guy "goes through men like Kleenex," according to his gaggle of loyal female customers. 

I first queried the editor, saying I found that phrase unnecessarily judgmental. "So he sleeps around or has lots of boyfriends or whatever," I said. "Does this mean he 'disposes' of them? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. Does [the author]—or these women?"

The editor said to ask the writer, which, because she's normally very opinionated and hadn't hesitated to address my other queries about the article, I took to mean either she thought it was a good question but wanted the author to come up with the actual rewording or she considered it a dumb, nitpicky question she didn't have the patience to address. So I asked the author, using pretty much the same words I'd used with my colleague.

The writer replied: "This was actually one of the milder descriptions. Someone else used the term 'slut,' affectionately of course—and just during my time with him, I was on hand to see one relationship go from prepping for third date (the sex date, he reminded me) to crazy love to kaput. But maybe something like: 'His clients say you need a program to keep up with his love life.' "

I forwarded that note to the editor, and since she'd been noncommittal before, I underscored my concern (just in case she was considering leaving it as is): "I still strongly feel—no matter what the women said—that it seems gratuitously judgmental to use the 'like Kleenex' line. So I favor the rewrite, or something like it. If it were a quote, I actually would have no problem, because then it would be specifically attributed to one catty person, but 'his clients say' he goes through them like Kleenex? That's a very specific simile attached to a not-at-all specific group of people."

We decided to change it, with the tweak of "you need a flow chart to keep up with his love life"—my idea since we agreed that "program" was a vague, bland word. I was fine with a vivid description of his love life—it was the shaming attitude that was uncalled for, and downright annoying. 

Do I think many straight people (which my colleague and the writer, a freelancer, are) are often clueless and Puritanical in their perception of casual sex, particularly among gay men? Yes, I do.

Weekend, a really beautiful movie not
unrelated to the subject at hand.

I'm sensitive to this subject because during a particular period in my life when I was single, I had a lot of sex with a lot of men I met online. Sometimes now when I can't fall asleep, instead of counting sheep, I'll count the number of guys I hooked up with between 2003 and 2007. I always come up with a slightly different total, which is what makes it challenging—kind of like a sexual Sudoku. The number is less than my age today, but that's all I'll say. 

I'm determined to settle it definitively one of these days, but for now it varies: In one tally, I'll forget the silver daddy with the pierced navel ("a reminder to keep my belly in shape"), or the guy who lived over the coffee shop I got together with after Thanksgiving dinner with my family, or the very first guy I met on the first night after my ex and I definitively broke up—the liberating encounter that started it all. 

They were almost all, each of them, lovely: courteous, warm, considerate, affectionate men—whether, as in most cases, I never saw them again or, as in others, we had a few assignations. Nothing degrading or dangerous happened once. (Lucky? Maybe. But the majority of people are, I found, basically decent.) 

So yeah, I was having tons of sex. Would that make me a "slut" in the eyes of some skinny horse-country lady with straw-colored hair extensions? Probably. And what about my two coworkers (one female, one male, both straight) who read the hairdresser article before me and didn't pause at the extraneous and irrelevant characterization of a gay man as someone who supposedly treated his sex partners like "Kleenex," based on nothing other than the mostly anecdotal evidence that he had many of them?

I think they'd consider me a slut, too. So I spoke up for all of us. 

Drop Me a Line Sometime

I started teaching a new essay workshop a few weeks ago. My pace is down to about one class a year now, whereas I used to do three or four (each is eight weeks long, two and a half hours at a pop, which wears me out, on top of my day job, more than it once did). Last month marked my 22nd anniversary teaching at this creative-writing center for adults. 

I started taking workshops there myself in 1984, a year out of college, in my first professional job, feeling creatively antsy and looking to revive—or get guidance for—an interest in creative writing that had gone dormant after a bad experience during my first semester of college, when I was made to feel discouraged about my nascent talent by a grumpy old professor. I majored in German and wrote virtually nothing for five years. 

When I began taking workshops at the place where I now teach, I was amazed at the power of encouragement—I went from a column-writing class to a workshop called Autobiography as Fiction and Nonfiction to my first real attempt at fiction (I considered fleeing the room but mentally bolted myself to the chair) to more fiction and more fiction and more fiction (I couldn't believe I could actually do this!) to applying to MFA programs to quitting my job and devoting two and a half years to getting my master's in fiction writing and, all that time, swimming in the amazing soul-building pool of encouragement: encouragement of the pursuit of writing, the idea that it was worth devoting time to. Not the kind of encouragement that meant people said only nice things to me about my very imperfect drafts. 

The belief that to teach writing is to encourage writing has guided me since I taught my first fiction workshop to undergrads at my grad-school alma mater in 1990 and then—after gravitating back to nonfiction in my own work (almost immediately upon getting my MFA in fiction!)—when I started teaching the personal essay in 1993.

If you had told me 27 years ago, in the first year of my master's program, that all this time later I'd still be struggling with the up-and-down effort to integrate writing into my life, I'd have been, well . . . a little discouraged. In those days, surrounded every day by equally eager, literary-journal-submitting friends, I envisioned myself someday as an author, regularly publishing short stories, perhaps with a collection or two under my belt. 

If "regularly" can be understood to mean "occasionally, with wide gaps in between," then I am indeed a published writer, and proud of what I've managed to shepherd into print. But I long ago realized that I'm unlikely ever to write a book. (I'm not putting myself down, and yeah, I know, never say never. I get it.) Publishing a book requires a certain kind of motivation and doggedness, just in the writing, let alone in the right-hand-on-red, left-foot-on-yellow, right-butt-cheek-on-blue Twister game of finding an agent and publisher and then promoting the thing. It takes a particular sort of person with a particular sort of life and vision, and I'm not that guy. (Shhh, don't ever tell the 26-year-old me.)

What I have succeeded in doing, and thriving in, for 22 years is being a teacher. It's stunning to remind myself that I have taught literally hundreds of people better ways to tell their stories. Many of them return to my classroom multiple times—the number is still in the hundreds even if you count those folks only once. I've forged connections among the various professional and personal areas of my life and enjoyed minimal degrees of separation from other interesting lives both modest and distinguished.

My current class of 11 includes four repeat students. One of those was a young intern at my day job 15 years ago; he's now a married father of two. A young woman, herself the mother of a three-year-old, was one of my students when I taught a class in literary journalism a decade ago at the university where I'd gotten my MFA. A student closer to my age has a teenage daughter who received a heart transplant at age three, a subject her mom wrote about in a previous workshop; several years ago, the daughter wrote an essay about meeting her donor family that I edited and published in the magazine I work for. Another student is the wife of a man who started in the graduate writing program with me in 1987; I remember meeting his baby daughter at an MFA event—she's 28 now.

One 74-year-old man in my class is the son of a famous classical musician. I get a kick out of my indirect connection to the kind of prominence I neither aspire toward nor will ever achieve. In my early years, I taught the wife of a well-known journalist. Teddy Roosevelt's great-granddaughter has been under my tutelage. A few years ago, John McPhee's sister-in-law took my class. Many students have gone on to publish books. My name appears on some very impressive acknowledgments pages! Am I now in the habit of turning first to the acknowledgments page of pretty much any book I pick up? Yes!

It's satisfying to help others tell their stories, to cheer them on in the undertaking with which I myself have had a love/hate relationship nearly my entire adult life. Writing, to me, is like a member of the family. (Not, in this case, a famous member.) Loved and loving, irritating and insistent, a source of both puzzlement and expectations, someone to whom I'll always be bound, whom I can never see enough of and from whom I sometimes can never get sufficient distance. 

I may not keep up the correspondence to his satisfaction, but he keeps writing to me.

Flame

Last night before bed, I picked up a guttering votive candle on the coffee table to blow it out and practically fused my fingertips to it, it was so hot. The remnant of wick, flaming out of proportion to its size, had migrated to the edge of the liquid wax and was leaning against the blackened glass like a hepped-up thug smoking in an alley. 

I'd had no idea how hot it was and spent the next 30 minutes with my fingertips submerged in a bowl of ice water (“You’re soaking in it”). As a result, I wasn’t able to indulge in the nightly bedtime ritual I’ve come to look forward to for practically the entire day: puzzling through a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday New York Times crossword. The day of the week is important because the crosswords get harder as the week progresses and Monday through Wednesday are just too easy to be fun—or relaxing. 

Strangely, I can't think of a more relaxing way to end the day. These are sometimes puzzles I've been working on for a week or two. Staring at the same spot over and over, mentally trying out each letter of the alphabet on an incomplete syllable ("--bow, --cow, --dow, --eow . . . ?), straining to remember the name of an Ingrid Bergman character in a movie I've never actually seen (so much of cultural literacy is hearsay)—these are not frustrating practices for me but meditative.

Anyway, I couldn't do it last night because the fingers of my writing hand were burned. So instead I watched Charlie Rose interview Martin Amis, who as it happens is the stepson of Elizabeth Jane Howard, the author of the book I'm currently listening to, Confusion (the third novel in the Cazelet Chronicles). Both his latest book and the one by Howard are set during World War II—his a Holocaust novel, hers about an upper-class English family whose staid propriety gradually, through each book in the series, succumbs to cracks and reveals turmoil, uncertainty, betrayals and, in the case of one or two characters, unerring goodness. 

I've never read anything by Amis, but maybe I should, if only to honor this minor coincidence triggered by a singeing of my fingers that for one night kept me from digging up words.

Window Dressing

Last night I dealt with writer’s block by shopping online—an undertaking of questionable equivalency. Nevertheless.

I got some fairly pricey men’s skin-care products: Body wash because I considered going for a swim last night at the '60s-era public-school pool with a '60s-era unequipped shower but I was out of portable soap, so guess what—I didn’t go swimming! (Though I did run.) And facial scrub because I’m starting to pamper myself more in that area. (I turn 53 a month from today.) I justified the expense of these non-sale items by finding a $30 summer fedora for only $9 to add to my hat collection (Lord & Taylor has great discounts on top of discounts on top of sales) and a crinkly, long linen-blend scarf ($44 reduced to something like $13). This last one is new for me, as I’m only a winter-scarf man like, I think, most men. But at this price, what did I have to lose? Given that the “beauty products” I got qualified for free shipping, I made out pretty well, even though it’s all filler for the real stuff swirling around in my head awaiting expression. (Yeah, I know, that's happening now.)

About the scarf: The slight do-I-dare aspect dates back more than 30 years to my junior year abroad, where German men wrapped long flowered gauze scarves around their necks year-round, even in summer, no jacket required. It was kind of hippyish, vaguely sexy, and cool. Some American guys I knew adopted the look, too.

Oh, the hesitation that has followed me through the years—I've written about it a lot. I even mentioned those German scarves in an essay I published a decade ago about my pierced ears. And about a year ago, I added a tattoo essay to my oeuvre. Life is short, I remember telling myself as I headed to one establishment. Progress.

The scarf I bought is nothing radical—not even much like the German ones, which had a distinct  femininity about them. On a very masculine guy (I'm thinking of a particularly hirsute friend back then), it was a mysterious, androgynous counterpoint. Mine will either look good on me or it won't. 

I just noticed that twice in a row now I've written about body decoration and clothing. Surfaces. It's a start.

The Scent from the Jar

The last time I blogged was five months ago—yet another wide gap in the Mantelpiece's well-meaning smile. Two weeks after that last post, I was in a serious bicycle accident of unknown, and irretrievable, cause (though I'm lately pretty sure it was a mechanical mishap, evidence of which got pushed aside in my mind in the initial aftermath). It was not life-threatening per se, but it could easily have been life-ending if, say, I hadn't been wearing a helmet (which I always did) or had fallen out of the bike lane and into the adjacent car traffic. 

I have no memory of the incident itself, just the moment I was surrounded by EMTs and everything else that followed.

I'm not going to recount the details of my recovery here—and I am mostly recovered (though still a member of the doctor's-appointment-of-the-week club: only a slight exaggeration and, yes, I do have one tomorrow morning at 9). It would take too long.

What would take even longer would be to describe how the accident changed me, because I'm still figuring that out myself. The bread is still rising. 

One thing it's been very hard for me to even contemplate doing is write. (And not for the first time—see previous gaps.)

It so happens that next to me right now lies a softly breathing dog whose final days are very likely upon me. I cannot grasp this. I try to talk about it intellectually, calling upon earlier deaths of loved ones I've survived, human and animal. 

Can't beauty and sweetness—the steady rising and falling—withstand anything? Have we really covered this before?

So I'm unable even to document my survival, it seems, without introducing impending loss. I've opened the jars, but they go back on the shelf. That act I've survived.

Wood and Clay, Bricks and Mortar, Iron and Steel, Silver and Gold

I see it was exactly eight years ago that I started this blog. At the time, my goal was simply to put sentences together. It remains so today, though it seems I manage to do it much less often. And it's no easier.

I sometimes feel like I'm entering an empty room every time I sit down to blog—or attempt to—whereas back then, a mere eight years ago in human years, I had a regular little community of readers and fellow bloggers almost right from the start: friends, friends of friends, people who stumbled across my Mantelpiece by accident. A conversation of sorts took place on any given evening. (In my memory it's always evening in bloggerland.) Commenting on one another's musings, linking back and forth, idly checking acquaintances' sites for new posts. It was cheerful and stimulating and revealing and fun.

Then friendships changed—fell away or morphed. Parents fell, got sick, were hospitalized, moved out of their longtime home. Work ramped up. Facebook came along. Like an attention-sucking extrovert at a perfectly good party, it grabbed the spotlight from humble blogging, at least in my circle. Now there are a lot of empty houses in my neighborhood. And noisy parties in that sprawling highrise down the street.

Yet here I am, still stepping into my quiet room, with occasional friendly visitors. The light is bright, the floors polished, the furnishings spare, but there's lots of space to move around.

I don't write about the minutiae of my day as much I did in what you might call the Mantelpiece's heyday. I guess I find myself going within more often than not, though it has never been a conscious choice.

The sentences are still there to be put together, those bridges made of—and between—words.

*Yes, I know this is Tower, not London, Bridge.

London Bridge* is falling down,
Falling down, falling down,
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair Lady.

Build it up with wood and clay,
Wood and clay, wood and clay,
Build it up with wood and clay,
My fair Lady.

Wood and clay will wash away,
Wash away, wash away,
Wood and clay will wash away,
My fair Lady.

Build it up with bricks and mortar,
Bricks and mortar, bricks and mortar,
Build it up with bricks and mortar,
My fair Lady.

Bricks and mortar will not stay,
Will not stay, will not stay,
Bricks and mortar will not stay,
My fair Lady.

Build it up with iron and steel,
Iron and steel, iron and steel,
Build it up with iron and steel,
My fair Lady.

Iron and steel will bend and bow,
Bend and bow, bend and bow,
Iron and steel will bend and bow,
My fair Lady.

Build it up with silver and gold,
Silver and gold, silver and gold,
Build it up with silver and gold,
My fair Lady.

Silver and gold will be stolen away,
Stolen away, stolen away,
Silver and gold will be stolen away,
My fair Lady.

Set a man to watch all nigh,
Watch all night, watch all night,
Set a man to watch all night,
My fair Lady.

Suppose the man should fall asleep,
Fall asleep, fall asleep,
Suppose the man should fall asleep?
My fair Lady.

Give him a pipe to smoke all night,
Smoke all night, smoke all night,
Give him a pipe to smoke all night,
My fair Lady.

Rainbows and Dust

Arthur Rothstein, Texas, 1936

Tonight I decided I didn't need to finish yet another so-so book. What sealed the decision was, of all things, a TV show—a rebroadcast of part 1 of Ken Burns's magisterial documentary The Dust Bowl, of which I'd previously seen most of part 2 when it aired in January. Riveted by the unstoppable tragedy, the dignity of its aged witnesses, the clear-eyed storytelling, with its sense of historical sweep and human consequence, I realized I was no longer interested in the rather inconsequential, padded, and self-involved contemporary memoir I was reading by Frank Bruni, a writer I otherwise admire. 

I expected Bruni to be a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize earlier this month, if not a winner (he was neither . . . this year) for his great New York Times columns in which, among other things, he determinedly hammers away on same-sex marriage and other gay issues. I loved his essay about his father's evolving acceptance of having a gay son:

"In the years before Mom died, I had my first long-term relationship, and I could tell that seeing me coupled, just like my brothers and my sister were, gave [my father] a new, less abstract way to understand me. I just wanted what they wanted. Someone special. 

"He welcomed the man I was with effusively. Took the two of us out to eat.

"Then Mom was gone, and all the parenting fell to Dad. He tapped reserves I’d never imagined in him. When I broke up with the man he’d been so effusive toward, he must have told me six times how sorry he was about that. It was a message—that he was rooting for my happiness, no matter how that happiness came to me."

But Bruni's memoir, Born Round, about his lifelong battles with weight and eating, doesn't have the feel of consequence that that single column has. So, thanks to The Dust Bowl, I'm not going to finish it.

Even the last book I read—courtesy of my old pal the Total Femme—felt more substantial than Bruni's: The Other Side of the Rainbow: With Judy Garland on the Dawn Patrol, an out-of-print sleeper by the surprisingly not bad writer Mel Tormé. The book—about the making, and unmaking, of Judy Garland's one-season-long TV show, which Tormé worked on—illustrates the frustratingly sad fate of an out-of-control addict with mammoth gifts who has not a single person in her life really looking out for her (including Mr. Mel Tormé).

I've been on a bit of a Judy Garland kick of late (which perhaps the Total Femme intuited), having seen the fabulous Broadway show End of the Rainbow last year as well as, more recently, Garland's underrated final film, I Could Go on Singing, in which she plays, wittingly or not, a spot-on version of herself in the last, frayed years of her downward spiral.

What all of this rambling adds up to is this: We all deserve to have someone looking out for us, whether a loving parent, the government, a colleague, or a perceptive friend.

Smoke and Metal

"He was asking for memories, too young to know that memories were only memories of memories. It was diamond-rare to remember something fresh."

These are two typically beautiful and apt sentences from a novel I finished last night, The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst (about whom I've written before). It's largely about memory and versions of a life (one life in particular, that of a World War I poet); the mystery of what we can never know about someone because we're at the mercy of what he or she chooses to reveal; and the secrets that the satellites of people around that person keep, which we're often powerless to pry open.

Here's another passage that rang so true to me. This scene takes place in 1967, outdoors in the shadow of a party; Paul has never been with a man before, and Peter has more experience. They're in their early twenties.

"He'd brushed against Peter uncertainly as he giggled; now Peter's hand was round his neck, their faces close together in the spidery light through bushes, their eyes unreadable, a huddle of smiles and sighs, and then they kissed, smoke and metal, a weird mutual tasting, to which Paul gave himself with a shudder of disbelief. Peter pressed against him, with a slight squirming stoop to fit himself to him, the instant and unambiguous fact of his erection more shocking that the taste of his mouth. In the fierce close-up and the near-dark Paul saw only the curve of Peter's head, his hair in silhouette and the ragged crown of bushes beyond, black against the night sky. He took his cue from his movements, tried to mimic him, but the sudden stifling violence of another man's wants, all at once, instinctive and mechanical, was too much for him."

It's been only a little more than four years, but D. and I already have different memories of the night we met, even argue about the date (easily—and often—provable thanks to calendars and journals, but still). What I was wearing, whether we actually danced that night or the next, when we kissed for the first time. I've written about it (not here but in an unpublished essay), and even I discovered—after I finished the essay—that I'd misremembered important details (specifically when D. first met my parents).

I'm not sure I can say how any of it really happened, what's metal and what's smoke.

So Runs the World Away

Thanks to Diablo for sending me the following poem by Mary Oliver, a resident, as it happens of Provincetown, where I recently spent a happy week and a half.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

***

I spent many hours with D. biking the trails in and around Ptown, including the magnificent Cape Cod Rail Trail, which we hope will someday extend all the way up the Cape to Provincetown. I haven't owned a bike of my own since I was a child but am on the verge of buying my first adult bike. This is thanks to D. and the roads we've ridden together over the last nearly three years.

While on the Cape, we had a very nice visit with a former grad school professor/writing teacher of mine and his wife. He retired a few years ago and moved up there about three years ago. I used to see him at least a couple of times a year at various social or literary occasions but hadn't talked with him at length since his move, so it was nice to reconnect. One thing I told him was that he was a big influence on my teaching, as, among many other things, I learned from him that it's okay to teach from notes, that no one will think less of you if you refer to them. In fact, I still write out notes before the first session of every workshop I teach, and later sessions if I'm teaching an essay I haven't taught before, but the interesting thing is that I refer to my notes less and less. It's the writing of them that imprints them.

One of the last times I spent time with my old teacher and his wife was at a Josh Ritter concert at the Birchmere, probably in 2006. Now in his late sixties, he's a huge Josh Ritter fan. As it happened, I had just downloaded Josh Ritter's new CD, So Runs the World Away, onto my iPod before my vacation. I was just listening to it the other day and was struck by its style, so different from his earlier, more classic singer/songwriter mode. It's kind of epic sea shanty meets art song. I need to listen to it more.
I started this post almost two weeks ago (through most of that last paragraph). And just tonight I bought a novel, Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, whose title reminded me of Josh Ritter's and then of this unfinished post.
The book I have to finish before starting that one is Rosanne Cash's memoir, Composed. I just finished a lovely chapter about six months she spent living in London at age 20 and 21, and that chapter ends on a note of wistfulness about friends and mentors she lost touch with over the years, some of whom she reconnected with later in moving and unexpected ways, some of whom died before she had a chance to.
I hope to see my teacher again the next time I'm passing through.

Bake at Moderate Heat Until Tester Inserted in the Middle Comes Out Clean

The other day I had one of those moments where I found myself saying something pithy and wise ;) that I didn't plan. I was talking to a writer over the phone about a pitch he'd made by e-mail -- a sketchy and unformed, albeit interesting, pitch -- and after we'd agreed that he should think more about the aspects we discussed and get back to me, he apologized (unnecessarily, as I know him and have worked happily with him before) by saying, "Sorry this was so half baked." I said, "Hey, you can't get to baked without going through half baked." He seemed to appreciate that.