This Afternoon In Drama

Grief

Tomorrow is technically the year anniversary of my dad's death, except it feels more like today because it happened on a Saturday and probably the only potentially bullshitty spiritual thing I believe in relationship to my dad's death was about it happening on a Saturday.  With all the bizarrely insensitive hospice nurses coming through his house and pushing born-again agendas and various beliefs about the afterlife, the lone questionable pronouncement that made sense to me, spoken by my dad's wife, was that my dad had waited to die on a Saturday because he liked working so much and wouldn't quit until the weekend.  If doctors think that sometimes people can hold out for birthdays or anniversaries or some event that they've been waiting for through sheer determination, then I didn't think it was totally unlikely that my dad would have insistently finished out the work week.  

Last night was hard for me because it was Friday night last year that I took the shift staying up to watch my dad all night.  He was in a bed near the windows and sliding door out to his yard, and I was lying on the couch, watching him, with my dog curled up against my side.  I wouldn't say I believe in god, but god bless dogs.  This would be my dad's last night and obviously, I didn't know that, but I did, sort of.  His breathing had changed and the days had gone by without him eating or drinking, and the morphine was really accruing in his system.

While lying there, watching him, I thought a million times that I should go pull up a chair next to his bed and just start telling him a million things.  I think my dad knew I loved him, and I think he knew I was appreciative of how much he loved me, even though I would get exasperated with him for OCD-calling for the fifteenth time in a day and not leaving a message.  But I kept thinking that he should know more.  That he should really understand how thankful I was for how great of a father he'd been.

Except I couldn't do it because I was filled with terror that he'd hear how much I loved him and how devastated I was that he was dying (and dying so early), and then he'd be, even if just momentarily, woken to the unbearable sadness of this "being it" and the panicky awareness of the end.  In the past few years I've developed a pretty serious fear of flying and when people try to run stats by me and tell me that I won't even be conscious when the plane hits the ground or blows up, I have to explain to them that it's not the actual death.  It's the seconds or minutes of horror of knowing that something has gone wrong, and not the end result-- just the horror inside the capsule.  And that's what was gutting me as I tried to go tell things to my dad that night.  Not that he was dying, which was its own sadness, but it was the horror of him contemplating everything that was going down, having to live his last night feeling his grief and even worse, mine.  I was his youngest and his only girl and he wanted to protect from everything, and I knew that.

So I never ended up pulling over a chair.  I've thought a lot about that decision over the past year because I churn over whether he knew how important he was to me and then I churn over what happened when I began to do the summary of our relationship while he was still conscious in the hospital.  I tried to start telling him what he meant to me and how right he had done by me, and I made tears begin to stream down his face, and I think that killed both of us.  Friday night a year ago, I just half-woke him every few hours to administer the morphine and his eyes would open for a second and I'd say, "Hi dad" with a lot of love.  It crushed me to think about wringing anything more out of those moments. 

Candy Spelling Can Eat My Wrapping Dust

I've been away from the blog because we've been moving into our new place, and you know, moving takes a lot of emotional energy and at the end of each day, all you really feel like doing is watching people be broke ass idiots on Pawn Stars and dipping some cheese naan in the take-out chicken tikka masala.  That's it.  But now we're getting settled and I'm realizing that all the things I thought I was going to like best about this place maybe aren't even my favorite parts.  It's like how when you buy jeans, you never know which ones are going to be the jeans that, when they rip, you're going to consider spending $300-500 recreating via L.A. custom jean makers because the brand doesn't make that style anymore and you can't live without them.  In the store, you didn't know they were that level of jean.  It took some time together.

So while I'm still totally happy about all the things I was originally excited about in this place-- like it's still great that we finally have our own closets so that Brent doesn't have to keep his socks in the hidden part of the ottoman, sure-- some other hidden pleasures have really been making strides toward center stage (or center condo, if you will).  And so as of today, I've compiled my 3 favorite things about my new place of living.

1.  My wrapping bar.

Tori Spelling's mom can suck it because I have my own designated wrapping area now, and I heard she's putting her mansion with the wrapping room up for sale, so maybe she's going someplace where she'll have to wrap alongside, like, the washer and dryer.  How gauche!  Maybe to you the wrapping bar looks like a wet bar, but that faucet is actually for washing off my fingers when they get too sticky from handling the Scotch gift tape.  The bottles of wine are also there not because that's where we're going to serve people wine, but because those bottles are all gifts to us, and so they belong.  That's their home.  Especially the bottle with the gift card from Ben Stiller.  So maybe it's not actually written to me and it was actually given to Brent; sometimes Brent and I laugh because we're almost like the same person, except I'm the one who doesn't get all fucking nerdy in front of the History Channel for ten hours when they have a "Life After People" marathon or anything on about ancient Greece.

Anyway, I love this wrapping bar.  I'm going to do a lot of wrapping here.

2.  I had some kind of idea that once I moved, I was going to be swimming a lot because we live right over the pool and the pool is a very nice one, but I probably should have known better-- having lived in a place with a pool before-- that what I actually like about a pool is seeing it glow at night!  I believe there is no better color on earth than an electric blue.  I mean, that's the entire reason why I bought my truck and didn't care that the gas pedal can stick and kill you.  So one of the really beautiful things about the new place is that our big bedroom window overlooks the pool, and so when I go in there at night and the lamps are off and the pool is glowing, I have an incredible sense of well-being that stems from the fact that that color not only exists, but is lit up.

It's daytime right now and I'm too impatient to wait to get a picture of the pool glowing, so please just use your imagination.

3.  This third thing I don't have a picture for because it's an audio thing, so you'd need to hear it.  And I don't have a sound clip up because I have no idea how to put an audio thing up on the blog.  But it's this: our neighbor in the condo to the right keeps a fountain on her terrace, and she never turns it off.  THEN, additionally, there is also an artificial babbling brook down by the pool.  What this means is that when I'm lying in bed at night, there is always the sound of trickling water.  In my bedroom, it always sounds like it's raining.  And rain at night is probably my top favorite sound to go to sleep to.  Maybe if we had lots of huge bills and Brent liked to count them in bed at night, that would usurp rain's place.  For right now, though, I feel pretty confident giving it top position.

What's especially great about the illusion of the rain is that it's not generated by me.  Sure, I could have bought a sound machine or my own fountain all these years if I wanted to hear some trickling.  Except then I would have woken up in the middle of the night and been like, "Yeah, there's my fountain going."  But because I'm not responsible for either the fake brook or the fountain on my neighbor's terrace, I'm able to keep alive the illusion that the sound is natural and the world is right, and that's worth its weight in covered parking.

Someday I just might wrap up a gift on my wrapping bar and walk it over to the lady next door for being so giving with her fountain noise (and electricity).  It will have tiiiight corners.

UPDATE: My phone camera makes it look more greenish, so just adjust your monitor.

My Book In Your Bed

My new book, The Kid Table, is out today.  I think it's good.  I think it's enjoyable.  I see other authors announcing their books like, "Buy my book so you have something to use when you get diarrhea," and I just want to murder them (in a way I won't go to prison for) because it's bullshit to act like you put something out that you think is worthless but want people to buy, unless you're Spencer Pratt.  I'm not saying everybody on the planet is going to go apeshit over this book.  I'm confused all the time over things that people love (neti pots) and then sometimes I'm like, "I thought Funny People was one of the best movies of the year," and everybody's acting like Adam Sandler put out a three-hour snuff film and the closing title read, "Fuck Neti Pots!"  It's hard to say what any given person will respond to, but I can say that the book was written with thought and care.  And that means that it wasn't thought up or worked on from a cynical place.  So aside from whether it will speak personally to you, I wrote it genuinely and I'm proud of it for not approaching its readers- especially its YA ones- like they're monkeys hitting buttons for banana chips, or electrocution.  I'm also proud of it because I worked on the back end and edits during maybe my hardest year of my life, and now it seems like it has more to say about growing up because I lost my dad and because of that loss, was never sadder about a birthday.  Again, whether or not that perspective will come across or even have meaning for a reader, I can't promise, but regardless, the book wasn't some waste of time.  I don't believe that it will be a waste of time for you either.

All that said, I would like to ask you to consider buying my book, which should be available most places as of this typing.  My sincere gratitude to those who do.

You're As Young As Your Newest Artificial Part

Just as my essay on living in the servants' quarters of the Zane Grey mansion goes up on Writers' Houses, I'm packing to leave the apartment.  There's a lot of sadness about the coming move because this is a truly special place-- I mean, how often do you get to live not only on a historical landmark, but one that has baby goats to pet when you start hating the entertainment industry so much you start fantasizing about leaving for Georgia, a state you've never even been to?   I'll miss seeing the chickens running along the back walkway because chickens look hilariously dumb when they run; it's so great for a depressive.  I can only hope that whoever moves into the quarters has an appreciation for the house, its history, and the backwards-swastika (doesn't mean the same thing!!) pendants hanging from the lanterns in the upper lounge.

So why would we leave a place filled with so much charm and character and detail for what basically amounts to a retirement condo celebrating the heyday of 1986?  Well, there are two sets of reasons for the move, one having to do with tangible needs and the other mostly having to do with magical thinking.  In the first category, we've come to understand we should acquire an extra room on the off chance that someday we want to have that bastard child.  The second set of reasons starts with the realization that I've written each of my novels, including the secret third one that will never see the light of day beyond Geoffrey Litwack's room, in different apartments, resulting in the belief that if I don't move and write my new book somewhere new, I will fail at life.  Also belonging to this second set is the belief that this house has become too personal and has too much personality, and that what's needed is a blank space where I can successfully impose my psyche on my environment and not the other way around.  (Reading that back, I sound kind of like a serial killer, but of apartments, not people.)  A.K.A., an IRVINE.  Sometimes in interviews people will ask me if growing up in the planned community stifled my imagination, and I say no, no, not at all because it was a place that refused the outward expression of individuality, and so it was also the cleanest slate I've ever known.  Fellow hometowner Will Ferrell has brought up the same idea about Irvine in some of his interviews.  It's a non-place that lacks the ability to interfere with the mental room needed for creativity.  (Irvine, if you like that for your city motto, go ahead and print that shit up on the welcome signs.)

I responded to the same blankness in the condo, with its white walls, its grey Berber carpet, its brass wet bar, its track lighting, its white shutters, its sliding glass door, its green frosted glass pendant light in the dining room, and hey, does anyone smell butter, because there's popcorn on the ceiling.  While the condo isn't strictly part of a retirement building, when we walked down the corridors most doorsteps boasted either 1.  stone critters (bunnies, ducks, so on)  2.  signage that indicated the inhabitant was 'taking it easy' or enjoying being a grandparent 3. a welcome mat in a country font  4. a dried flower wreath or 5. small potted plants.  The owner of the condo, a senior himself, nervously began to tell us that he thinks there's a couple "somewhere around your age" in the building and he's pretty sure there's a single mom who lives with her teenage son.  "That's okay, we don't like to party," we assured him.  When Brent and I got home and admitted to each other a weird longing to live in a totally depersonalized space, Brent immediately began Googling accessories for our own doorstep because we knew we'd need an "I'm retired, so don't ask me to do a damn thing!" sign if we were really going to do it hard.

The condo overlooks a pool, and I plan to take morning swims to 'improve my circulation.'  I'm much more likely to swim in this pool than most others in Los Angeles because the simple fact is, I've got to have one of the better bodies in the building.  So ogle away, neighbors.  My boobs are up here.  We're not going to take to separate beds like other couples in their Golden Years, but we have discussed each taking a bathroom so we can brush our teeth separately.  (That's right, I'm braggin' a lil bit about still having all our teeth!  Well, I have all mine.  Brent's kind of another story.)  For just a moment, we became fearful that we were responding to childhood memories of the Reagan-era aesthetics of our moms, but then we came to terms with the reality that both of our writing has a lot to do with nostalgia, so we decided to embrace it and maybe become younger at heart in the process.  (Besides, 1986 was a good year for me; my school realized I was gifted.)

If you are in the Los Angeles area and do not possess psychotic beliefs about the ability of a place's character to sneak into your head (look, Billy Bob Thornton feels the same way about antiques as I do about apartments, so I couldn't be in better psychological company) and are looking to move come October, feel free to message me about living on the estate.  A Craigslist post will be going up advertising the apartment in the next few days, so this is a chance to get a step ahead of the plebs.

The Final Countdown

  UPDATED 8/25 (see below)

Just a reminder that the pear thong contest closes tomorrow morning (for details, see the post below this one).  Someone's already taken the approach of writing an essay that kicks off with how he has little to no interest in my book but is entering anyway, so if that was your tactic, time to go back to the drawing board.

Also, the first official review for The Kid Table is in from Kirkus Reviews, and I like it.  I like it a lot.

THE KID TABLE
"Ingrid Bell, one of six mostly teenage cousins in a charmingly dysfunctional family, is a psychopath, according to oldest cousin Brianne. Or perhaps it's just part of the jockeying for position that happens around the Kid Table. Ingrid's psychopathy (or calculated charm and a few dead pets?) provides the thread through a particularly tumultuous year as the family unravels. Ingrid’s first-person narration, especially in those moments when her calm makes the reader wonder if she is a psychopath, is fantastic, and the trials and tribulations manage to be both funny and sad (adult cousin Tish drinks too much, teen cousin Cricket has anorexia, Ingrid’s mother busily collects memories for her scrapbook but forgets to live and Ingrid’s in love with Brianne’s boyfriend). The episodic structure (a handful of chapters at major events throughout the year from not-Jewish Uncle Kurt's post-adultery Bar Mitzvah to a wedding) serves as a metaphor for the family: a whole made of several disparate parts with some unanswered questions. Weirdly whimsical, adult author Seigel’s (Like the Red Panda, 2004) YA debut delights."--Kirkus Reviews

In other book news, word of the Ivan Reitman film deal hit the Internet, with commenters everywhere bemoaning that this project isn't Ghostbusters 3.  So, hey, we'll just throw a ghost in it.  One of the kids at the table is DEAD.  And green.  Solved!

UPDATE 8/25: The winner of the contest is Rachel Jenkins, from the romantic-sounding (I like trains) town of Thompsons Station, TN.  Thank you to everyone who entered.

Hardcover On A Hard Body

Here ye, here ye, aye am announcing a new contest in which I'm giving away one hardcover copy of my forthcoming YA novel, The Kid Table, which will be in stores in a month.  The last giveaway for the galleys hinged on right and wrong, but this time I want the contest to be about self-expression.  I don't know, sometimes I'm a hippie.

So I thought of this one in the shower, where I do some of my most unusable thinking.  Below you'll find a photo of one of my tattoos, which I got a serious discount on because the guy who did it thought I was joking.  Clearly, it's a personally meaningful piece.  But what I decided is that I'd really like to hear from other people what this means to them:

 

The contest is this:

Write me 50-1000 words regarding what this pear wearing a thong means to you. It can be a poem, although I'm not really all that crazy about most poetry, so tread carefully.  It can be a story, an essay, a personal statement for getting into Harvard.  It can be a letter.  It can be impressionistic.  Whatever you want.  I just need it to be from the heart.

The contest will be open for 10 days, ending on August 24, 2010 at 8 a.m.  At that time, I will select my favorite entry, the winner receiving one (1) signed, personalized copy of The Kid Table along with a Perler Bead figurine of yourself (you'll need to send me a photo for this unless you just want me to interpret what you look like based on what I know of your email persona).  If you don't know what Perler Beads are, how sad for you since you didn't have a childhood, but for illustrative purposes, see the Perler figurine I made for my "friend" Dave Bernad, who didn't even come to the reading of my stories last week.

I'm opening the contest to everyone except the people who know me.  Because if you know me, then really, you should should be buying the book when it comes out because it's not only going to be better for me if I'm a success, it's going to be better for you too.  I'll be less moody during our interactions, and I will probably buy more expensive gifts for a wider range of acquaintances if I have a book that earns me some heavy cash.

Please send one (1) entry only to keyboardistslament@hotmail.com.  No preference will be given according to order received because I'm not going to read these things until the close of the contest.  That way if I'm suicidal while reading one, I'll be suicidal while reading all of them, and my frame of mind won't create an imbalance in the judging.  If size matters to you, then I refer you to the photograph below, which gives you an idea of the scale of the pear in relationship to the fork on the front of the book you'll be winning.

 

Talk soon.

Rub A Dub Dub, Unsettling Family In A Tub

There are a lot of ways you could stage a family photo shoot, and "in the bubble bath" is just one of them.  If you were to crop the leftmost 75% of the following picture, you'd have a soapy, whimsical portrait of Joey "The Fat One" Fatone sumptuously bathing with his lookalike wife and their new baby girl Kloey (kind of like a little Joey, but with a K, and a vagina).

 

But then you have to take the remaining 25% of the photo into account, and that's when you realize that Joey thought it would be fun to be depicted taking a candle-flanked bubble bath with his NINE-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER Briahna.  I don't know if you were still bathing with your mom and dad at nine-- not just bathing, in fact, but bathing sexily-- but in my family, by this point in my life, we'd given up the communal dip.

The composition of the image is also interesting to note, as Briahna, floating adrift near the faucet, weirdly looks like she's drowning, except her parents are too busy beaming about the new baby to notice, so she's squealing through gritted teeth, "Please!  Please!" at some point realizing that her parents can't hear her over the Barry White music coming from the built-in bathroom speaker system, so she's just shut her eyes tight and is hoping that this will be peaceful, is thinking about how ironic it is that the Fatones have a huge pool out back, and yet this is how she's gonna go.

Maybe, maybe, maybe if we could see some shoulders and some straps and understand that Briahna Fatone jumped into the jacooztub after a big swim meet and that's not a grimace, but a smile on her face because she just nailed her heat, then I wouldn't think that this publicity decision was so fucking weird.  Brent is also disturbed by how "incredibly tan" the family is, particularly the baby, but that really doesn't bother me as much because listen, this bath is in Orlando.

Speaaaaaking of tubs, four actors will be reading four of my stories this coming Sunday evening (8/8/10) at the gallery in L.A.'s Barnsdall Art Park, an evening that you can read more about here (click on event website for online ticket purchases), and one of these stories actually starts in the bath!  No kidding.  (Sad face: I wish I'd had the foresight to put a Fatone in it).  Following yesterday's rehearsal, I feel compelled to note-- after realizing that writing about a gay mortician spitting in his palm before doing a goth teen under a DJ booth is made even more forceful by an actor spitting into his palm before an audience of your 70-year-0ld cousins-- that some of the material is probably not great for your lil Briahna's out there, so leave the kids at home, no matter how much they cry that they love to attend 80 minute literary readings.  Okay?

The Trailer Everybody's Been Waiting for, Besides The Harry Potter One

Making my very first foray into iMovie yesterday, I created a high-tech book trailer for The Kid Table that I think really captures the pathos and emotion of the novel.  I just hope the producers of Salt and Tron don't visit my blog because fact is, they've already hired some schlocky team to cut their trailers, and when they see what I'm able to do with my limited understanding of the default "Ken Burns" effect, they're going to be all, "Well, I guess we should have just burned the fucking money."

Read The Soul Of This Guy, Part 2: It Spoke.

 By Saturday afternoon, I was worried that the keyboardist's soul wasn't singing loud enough because no one had even intuited the right band.  I got a lot of Michael Bolton numbers and a lot of Barry Manilow and it was like, "Who do you think this guy is?  A fucking cheeseball?"  This man's a wanderer: the kayak, the wash and go hairstyle, the improvised power outlet, the world his very stage.  The fourth clue hinted as much, advising contestants to pay attention to the way in which his life appeared to be about traveling, about not being tied down to something as pedestrian as a piano in an apartment.  This guy was someone on the go, a guy who could deeply respond to the "highway run of a midnight sun."  A guy who knows "the road ain't no place to start a family" (though the dog park is a place to start a concert.)  A guy just sitting there in front of his car playing:

"Faithfully" by Journey.

("...loving a music man ain't always what it's supposed to be:"  SO TRUE.)

The first winning entry was a shock.  It came in at 5:49 p.m. yesterday from Kim Lash of Manhattan, NY.  She had not submitted a single entry up to that point, so the fact that she hit upon the song on the first try tells me I need to get the keyboardist her number the next time I see him at the park.  She can handle a music man.  I believe she understands the risks.  But she also understands the rewards.

The second winning entry technically came in 8:06 p.m. that same night from Amy Lawrence of Memphis, TN, but it was her fourth entry within a 24-hour period, so I told her she would have to repeat her guess the following day.  At 6:46 a.m. this Sunday morning she resubmitted her latest soul reading and became the second winner of a Kid Table ARC.

Thus ends the contest.  Thank you to all participants, who shouldn't feel bad if they couldn't hear the music.  We all have different gifts, you know?

Read The Soul Of This Guy And Win A Signed "Kid Table" ARC

*UPDATED (Sunday morning: *CONTEST OVER*: see bottom)

I have a couple of Kid Table advance reader copies, and I was trying to think how I should give them away.  I looked at other authors' contests and they were, like, "Write a sequel to the book!" or "Dress up the book like one of your favorite characters!" requests which seem extravagant to me, so last night I decided that I'd instead hold a contest based on natural intuitiveness.

The basis for the contest:

A few weeks back at the dog park, I pulled up and this guy had made an awning out of his hood and he was just sitting there, alongside the parking lot, playing his keyboard in a very emotional manner.

 

You'll see that one of his dogs was sitting in the driver's seat, forced to stare at the other dogs playing in the park on the opposite side of the lot while this musician performed an impromptu keyboard concert for empty benches.  Two more of the keyboardist's dogs were in the back of the SUV type vehicle, the rear door raised so they could also stare longingly at the dog park.

The keyboardist had some kind of kayak affixed to the roof of the car.  As you can see, he has styled his hair in a low pony.  Moreover, he travels with seating.

Here is a slightly closer look at him:

 

This woman passing by on the way to the "small dog" (shout out, wha-wha!) side of the park is thinking, "Don't look over. Don't look over. Don't look over."

The keyboard is somehow plugged into the car's engine.  I don't know.  I'm not an engineer.

The man in the ponytail is playing with a startling intensity, particularly for the dog park, which is a mostly relaxed place and not known for its love of the arts.  If one of his dogs had been playing piano, then maybe. However, he is in his own world, so he seems to have no awareness that maybe this isn't the best concert venue, although the San Gabriel mountains are certainly beautiful and inspiring.  

And here is the contest:

"WHAT SONG IS THE MAN IN THE PONYTAIL PLAYING IN THESE PHOTOS?"

Maybe you're thinking, "How am I possibly supposed to know what song this dude is playing???"  Or maybe you're so intuitive you already know.

Regardless, I will supply participants with a few clues to get their sensitivities hovering in the right genre and era of song:

1.  This number was a Top 40 hit, but it did not go all the way to number 1.  

2.  It was released between 1975 and 1990.

3.  It is a lovelorn number.

4.  The content of the song is somewhat related to the manner in which this guy appears to lead his life.

I am opening this contest today, July 8th 2010, at 6 p.m. PST  in order to give you some time to get inside this guy's head.  At that hour, I will be taking a maximum of 3 entries from each participant via this email address: keyboardistslament@hotmail.com or Twitter (@andreaseigel).  The first two (2) people to land upon the keyboardist's choice will be sent personalized, signed Kid Table arc's.  However, if no one has been able to really see what this guy is about by Sunday at 6 p.m. PST, then I will release 3 more clues.

But just look into him.  You'll get it.

UPDATE: Friday, July 9: No one has even stumbled upon the right band yet.  A LOT of Michael Bolton entries.  So many Bolton entries, in fact, that I've decided to take 3 guesses per person, per day, since Brent has told me that the the keyboardist's heartsong is not as physically evident as I think it is.  3 more clues Sunday.

UPDATE 2: Saturday, July 10: Congratulations to Kim Lash, who has guessed the keyboardist's lament with her very first email entry.  She and the keyboardist must share a tiny piece of soul.  There is still 1 book available.

UPDATE 3: Sunday, July 11: Congratulations to Amy Lawrence, who guessed the keyboardist's lament via email at 6:46 a.m. this morning and won the 2nd and last galley.  The keyboardist's anthem will be revealed for all later on this blog.

Thank you for entering.