What Even is Time?
Two unrelated and yet somehow connected facts:
1. I live in the Pacific Northwest now. Gig Harbor, WA to be specific. It isn’t exactly what I planned, but it also feels weirdly inevitable.
2. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I’d never watched TWIN PEAKS. Until now, that is.
A little backstory.
When I was a kid, my parents used to get me out of their hair during the sticky NYC summers by shipping me off to my maternal grandparents for a month. The Pacific Northwest was like another planet to a city mouse like me.
New York City is an extrovert. It’s bright, loud, unpredictable and unapologetically in-your-face. My grandparents’ quiet little neighborhood near Gig Harbor is more introverted. Misty, mysterious, sparsely populated and tight-lipped about its secrets.
I couldn’t go very far on my own here like I could back home. In NYC I was a fully self-sufficient, free range, latch-key kid. I could and did go anywhere I wanted any time I wanted. In Gig Harbor, I was reliant on busy adults to take time out of their day to drive me around. My bus pass didn’t work here and there was no subway. I could only go where my skinny little legs could take me.
(I’m sure that younger readers are probably shocked and appalled by the idea that a child could spend so much time alone with no adult supervision and not get murdered and/or molested, but that’s a whole other post.)
The one place my grandmother would regularly take me was to the library in Tacoma, so what I mostly did while I was here was read. Read and write stories and ramble around on the rocky beach and through the primordial forest searching for dinosaurs I was convinced I would find if I just ventured a little bit further in.
Which is basically exactly what I’m doing up here now, 45 years later. I guess time really is a flat fucking circle after all.
When my elderly mother’s partner died, I didn’t hesitate to uproot my life in LA and move here to take care of her and this quirky old house my grandfather had built. The house where I spent so much time as a kid. The house where my grandmother died, where my mom will die and eventually I’ll die too.
Life is weird. Post-pandemic life doubly so. I, like my home town, have always been a boisterous, wisecracking, occasionally annoying but never boring extrovert. But it feels like the pandemic flipped the script on all of us. That plus the strange, mutagenic effect of smart phones and social media algorithms on our brains and… well… (waves hands around at America.) Also, for me at least, the hormonal mosh-pit of menopause. All those things and a hundred others conspired to transform me and so many others into uneasy introverts.
Living out my third act up here in the Pacific Northwest, it sometimes feels like my inner and outer landscapes have merged into a rainy, evergreen David Lynch dream sequence in which nothing is what it seems and even mundane things are heavy with unfathomable meaning.
My mom and I will frequently stop in mid-chore and joking say “Do I know what I’m doing?” The answer is never yes, but we somehow manage to get shit done anyway.
Like, for example, this book I wrote.
Anyway, speaking of what the fuck I’m doing, here are some updates:
I’ll be chatting with my pal Jen Johans at The Poisoned Pen Bookstore on April 2nd at 7pm.
Also, the panel schedule for Left Coast Crime has been posted. Here’s mine:
Friday 3/14 at 11:30 am - Noir: How Dark Can We Go? With Mark Stevens (M,) Marco Carocari, James D.F. Hannah, Scott Von Doviak, and me.
Sunday 3/16 at 10:15 am - Visual Elements: Graphic Novels & Comics With Linda Joffe Hull (M,) Dale Berry, Christopher Chambers, and me.
I’m also honored to be interviewing Toastmaster with the Mostmaster, John Copenhaver at 5:15 pm on Friday night.
Plus, you can pretty much always come find me in the bar.
Anyway, thanks again for reading and let me know what you think!