L U N A T A L K with Eva Moon

Tough Love

My baby was laid out on the altar, helpless and exposed. The others circled her with glinting knives.

“I don’t get it. Is it about environmentalism or BDSM or what?”

“Cut the middle verse and repeat the first verse.”

“Dog Chow from China? No one will get the reference in a few months.”

“Nah. Not latin. How about funk?”

“Too tame. If you’re gonna do it, go all the way. Be outrageous.”

Most of the time I like being a band girl. My band is my second family. But like most families, they are not just my main support but also my harshest critics. One of the toughest things I do is lay a new song on them. On one hand, I’m excited and impatient when I’ve written a new song. It’s possible to sing alone, but it’s masturbation: A substitute for the real thing. When you sing to someone, it closes a loop. The song goes out, but it comes back, it’s meaning amplified by the response of the listener. It’s sex.

Sharing a song with a band runs the gamut from group sex to mind meld to all out war. Whatever the result, it’s on another plane of intensity altogether. Prodding your toddling little baby-song into such a dangerous playground can be nerve-wracking.

This new song met a harsher fate than many in the past. She was dragged from one style to the next, stripped, examined, slapped around, and found wanting. It’s never easy to take, but sometimes rough is good. There’s a fine line between bending and breaking.

In the end, the only thing that makes the torture bearable is trust. These people I play with want everything to be not just good enough, but great. They push me. I struggle and fight. In the end I’ll rewrite. Salvaging bits and scraps where I can, taking some suggestions, deciding against others.

It will be a better song.

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The Day the World Changed

It’s raining.

Not that that is exactly a rare occurrence here in the Pacific Northwest. I’m cozily ensconced in a cabin on tiny Lummi Island sitting by a blazing wood stove. We’re here editing our novel. It’s hard to believe we’ve reached a point of having an actual beginning-to-end draft of the thing. It stands at about 105,000 words and is far from ready for publication, but with nothing much else going on and all this rain, we’re about a third of the way through the first complete edit and it seems to be coming together. I hope I’ll be this optimistic on the seventh edit pass.

Sitting here watching the clouds reveal and hide the mainland like the veils of some meteorological Salome reminded me of a day when another rainstorm changed my perception of the world.

I was a kid. We’d been visiting my grandparents and it had been raining all day. On the way home, the rain stopped. My father commented from the front seat that it was likely still raining back at Grandma and Grandpa’s.

This was a complete and stunning revelation to me. Up until that moment, I’d never once thought about geography away from my immediate surroundings. It was either raining or not raining. The idea that places existed and had things going on in them when I wasn’t there was profound. It changed everything. Suddenly, I was not infinite. My parents were people who had lives that didn’t have anything to do with me. My grandparents had rain when I didn’t. If I died, people would still have dinner and birthdays and school.

Of course on some level, I already knew this. But I’d never thought about it before. For the first time, I understood and the world took on a shape and an existence in time that I was one small part of.

The rain has stopped here for the moment. Looking out over the Sound, Mt. Baker and Bellingham have disappeared again. I wonder if it’s raining there?

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Hand me that Dutchman

There’s a scene near the beginning of Shogun, where Dutchmen are boiled alive. I have increased sympathy for them today, not that I delighted in their suffering when I first read the novel.

We have decamped to Lummi Island, a lovely wooded little island within sight of Canada, for three days of intensive editing of our own novel. The cabin is secluded, tucked into a cedary hillside with a view of Puget Sound. It’s one of those cabins that’s all knotty pine and antlers, heated by a big pot-belly stove and decorated with ducks. The kitchen window frames Mt. Baker with an assortment of silly glass pendants. We’re cooking on a 1919 gas range and boiling water for tea in a pot over a gas flame of all things. I’ve landed in Grizzly Adams estates. With wifi, thank you very much. (Chris, if you’re reading this, you and V have got to come stay here. It’s so you.)

Lummi Island is the most northeasterly of the San Juan archipelago. Located near Bellingham, it is served by a small ferry which makes the crossing in six minutes. Right now the car ferry is in dry dock, so we went by boat, dragging our suitcases and ice chest. The island is wooded, rural and has no RV parks, campsites or state parks. There are a total of 18 miles of quiet roads. It’s what you call a getaway with a great deal of away in the mix.

The local natives, the Lummi Nation, did not originally call themselves that. When the Spaniards first arrived and saw the locals’ bonfires, they gave it the name “Luminara” which the Lummi later adopted. (And here I thought they used ‘lectricity for lummi-nation. Ar ar. I just kill myself.)

But back to simmering Dutchmen.

One of the highlights of our little abode is a home-made outdoor hot tub. It’s a Japanese-style wooden cylinder lined with blue plastic. A wood stove sits along one side, immersed in the water. It’s very effective, although there are certain differences between this and the hot tub we enjoyed on our last vacation. For one thing, we have to stoke it. After several pounds of damp newspaper and twenty-nine matches, I felt like Jack-Freaking-London in the Yukon, but we finally got it lit. Then, it takes several hours to heat. And, since there are no whirlpool jets, you stir up the water with a boat oar. It feels very much like tending a big soup pot and I hollered to Mike to send up the first victim.

Temperature control turns out to be something of an art - an art we have not mastered. We’d built the damn fire, tended it for three hours and goddammit, we were going to sit in the water if it killed us. Which it damn near did. After the first abortive attempt to force a toe in, I ran cold water into the steam, stirred it up, damped the fire, waited. But still. Fuck. That was some seriously hot water. I’ve been out for an hour and I’m still pink. I hope my skin stays on.

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12 Signs You’re at a Dive

I was pretty sure it was a dive. But it’s been so long since my dive years and suburbia creeps into ones cracks and crevices so stealthily you don’t even notice until one night you find yourself in a dive bar saying stupid things you’d never say if you were really still dive cool. But more about that in a bit.

I contacted my friend Squid, who knows dives and he gave me an excellent check list. I recommend you print it out and carry it with you if it’s been more than five years since your last bar crawl:

1. Beer. Lots of it. And not microbrew, neither.
2. Harleys. Lots of them.
3. An excess of gaudy neon, preferably for brands of beer that are no longer available.
4. Those strings of triangular flags hung up around the top of the walls for a sporting event from at least 3 years ago.
5. Either no door or a door that won’t latch on the bathroom stall, so ya gotta hold the door closed with one leg while ya go.
6. The toilet seat does not fit the toilet it’s bolted to.
7. The owner of the bar is also in some sort of service business, such as plumbing, HVAC repair, or metal fabrication.
8. There’s a stuffed animal head of some kind on a wall in the bar, preferably with a baseball/cowboy hat on and sunglasses. Extra dive-ness if there’s a Jackalope head above the bar.
9. The jukebox contains Georgia Satellites, Bob Segar, Lynnard Skynnard, Molly Hatchet, Allman Brothers, Kid Rock, Hank Williams Jr., or Nazareth.
10. People fight over mat drinks.*
11. There’s a pay phone.
12. Happy Hour starts at 9 A.M.

So, yeah, it was a dive. And even though I was trying to be cool and all, I couldn’t stop the burbs from slipping out. The barmaid comes over to our bit of peeling Formica and asks what we want to drink. My first mistake: I shoulda ordered beer. But I wanted wine. Second mistake? Opening my mouth:

“Do you have a house red?”

She looked at me blankly for about a week before the light finally flickered on, “Oh, you mean wine?”

I nodded.

She grabbed a menu and peered at it, mouthing the words as she read. Then she found it.

“We have a car-bo-nay.”

“Fine,” I said, “I’ll have that.”

*Mat drink: An alcoholic beverage consisting of everything that slopped onto the bartender’s mat poured into a glass at the end of the night.

What would you add to the dive check list?

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Redmond Needs More Crime

Not the major antitrust litigation kind. For a small town, we have more of that per capita than just about anyone, thank you very much. No, when I say crime, I’m talking the ‘call the cops’ kind. A little more breaking and entering would be an act of the greatest charity for our poor, neglected men and women in uniform. I imagine them sitting morosely at the station, willing the phone to ring, like a squad of Maytag repairmen… Hoping for something to do… Anything to relieve the endless tedium.

Ring…

Sorry, wrong number. Sigh.

I can’t think of any other reasonable explanation for getting pulled over for driving down a streetlight-drenched avenue at dusk with… my headlights off. Pulled over! WTF?

Bored and without purpose or direction, our police are like gangland youth, spoiling for a little action. I know they say ignorance of the law is no excuse, but what about ignorance of the dark? It was so bright in the parking lot and on the street, I couldn’t tell they were off.

Or perhaps I left the lights off out of kindness and an urge to provide a bit of excitement in their sad, empty lives.

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Deranged Atheist Sock Monkey

There’s an inherent conflict when a celebrity attempts to write a novel. The reader can’t help but hear the celebrity’s voice. This may be a good thing for the celebrity, but it is rarely a good thing for the story. I suspect celebrities also tend to be resistent to editing. I am a fan of good editing. (Not of our own novel, of course, but it’s an admirable quality in others.)

I just read “Sock” a novel by Penn Jillette. I’m a fan of Penn and Teller and I enjoy Penn’s rants immensely. I wish I could say the same for his novel.

“Sock” is the story of an NYPD diver who pulls the body of his former lover from a river and becomes obsessed with tracking down her killer. The story is narrated by the diver’s childhood sock monkey. It’s a promising premise and the sock monkey is an entertainingly deranged tough guy with miles of attitude.

Elmore Leonard, in his excellent essay “10 Rules of Writing” says that good writing is not about the writer, but about the story. The writer must remain invisible.

This book is full to overflowing with the writer from start to finish. The story is buried in steaming piles of writing. Even the sock monkey, who had such a distinctive strut at the start can’t stand up to Penn Jillette’s overpowering need to be in the book. He adopts a cute gimmick of punctuating a scene with a single line quote from a popular song and then goes on to end virtually every paragraph that way. After a while, it becomes a game of “Name that Tune” rather than a novel. (Though I’m curious to know if he paid for the rights to quote the songs. There’s not even an afterword with credits.) He breaks completely out of character to talk about the process of writing a novel - including tossing in advice to other aspiring novelists on how important it is to have a consistent narrator’s voice!

In the end the book is not much more than an anti-religion screed. No problem with that, but when I read a novel I want the author to have enough respect for me to trust I’ll get the point through the actions and dialogue of the characters.

Tempted to cudgel your readers with your thesis? Please put a sock in it.

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