Teen Self-Referential Drama, Plus Or Minus a Few Years

I wrote another installment of my San Francisco-to-New York travelogue. I keep thinking, like, maybe my entire career is simply rewriting every Judy Blume book in chronological order, as memoir. Except that, in my version, the 13-year-old girl is played by an overgrown boy with an overgrown beard.

In This Huge Universe, The Only Things That Matter Are G-d And Girls

That first day on the road we drove to Los Angeles, then past it. There were no monuments to communicate to us that we’d entered or left L.A., no skyscrapers or theaters, no ocean in sight. I’d spent the better part of a year traveling down there, writing my novel about a teenage Orthodox girl who got her own television show. It was half wish fulfillment, half daring myself to try to achieve that nightmare. Every few weeks for a year I left San Francisco and bounced back and forth along the California coast on a Greyhound bus, staying for a few days or a week, soaking up enough inspiration to get me through the next 50 pages.

On this trip — the same unending fields out the window of Elyse’s SUV, the same pasture halfway with hundreds and hundreds of cows stuffed against each other, mooing sadly and uselessly — it was an entirely different feeling, the last time I’d make this bizarre pilgrimage.

We passed the cows, and Elyse’s dog Joey howled at them in primal confusion, startled by the moving background, disturbed that these nearby animals were rushing by fast while standing completely still and that they were simultaneously unafraid of his braying. It was only natural for him to chase cows, and for cows to tremble at his presence. The very fact of the road trip was lost on him. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe this was the way he’d always lived, his mind only in the moment, never regretting the past or dwelling in left-behind places, always dealing with what was in front of him. Maybe we were the beginners, and he was to be our rebbe.

Why I Write about Models

Powells.com, one of the coolest bookstores on the internet, runs a series of original essays. They've asked Neil Gaiman and Dara Horn and Robert Thurman and now they've asked me...which is pretty damn cool.

It started as a dare.

The girl I went out with was friendly, funny, flirty — and all of this was confusing to me. I was a punk-rock kid on my better days, elegantly styled in unkempt hair and an artfully ripped t-shirt held together by a bare minimum of strands that kept it (barely) from coming loose from my shoulders, revealing something both embarrassing and dangerous, like my belly — but, more often, I was just a geek. She was popular, beautiful, successful — traditionally pretty, I mean, but actually beautiful, too. Except for the one random friend we had in common, there was no reason we should rightfully be talking to each other.

Except, of course, that we were.

What was weird was that we got along. Even weirder, we had similar things to say. Not about everything, but about a lot of things, including comic books (Madman, Hellboy, and all the X-Men spinoffs — the more melodramatic, the better), television (Veronica Mars), and food (vegan, lots of courses, served together and eaten separately). We weren't in lurve — we were barely in like — but we were intrigued by each other. We were interested.

And before we had the chance to question it ourselves — no, really, us? — she was sexually assaulted.

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Is God a Person?

From today's emailbox:

When you think of G_d, do you think of an "entity" (I know it's not the right word, hopefully you get what I'm trying to say) with a distinct identity, or as a bit more "formless"? More like a being or more like a force or power?

I think of God as an entity. I know I'm anthropomorphizing, and in my head, I'm always correcting myself -- think of it as the equivalent of an English teacher who knows how to speak textbook Shakespearean English but goes home and speaks in Ebonics. Further, in our tradition, there are some times when it's okay to actively anthropomorphize God -- when we say that God took us out of Egypt with "an outstretched hand," for instance. When we say that during Passover, is anyone thinking that a giant hand came down from the sky and just scooped the Children of Israel out of the desert?

But there's an interesting midrash that asks the question, when the Torah says in Genesis that we were created in "God's image" -- what, it asks, is God's image? By God's very nature, there's no such thing as God's image. God doesn't look like anything. Or, on the other hand, God looks like absolutely everything.

But then there's another midrash that says that, yes, God does have hands -- as well as arms and toes and a nose (possibly a Jewish nose, possibly not). Humans really were created in God's image...only, God's image is the original. Our hands are the smallest, weakest representation in the physical world of the metaphysical image of an actual Hand of God. There's something called a hamsa in Jewish mysticism that's a representation of this hand...and it, like many other mystical amulets, is meant to remind us of that greater world.

There's a line in one of my poems that says that I learned to picture God as a girl with "long, long hair and a short, short skirt," which gets all the righteous folks a little bit nervous. But it's just what I was thinking -- that I can't talk to anyone with the candidness and the openness that I used when flirting. (Uh, I wrote it before the marriage-and-kids part of my life.) Because, in the half-nervous and half-say-anything immediacy of flirting, you're talking about anything you can to keep her interested, you're not worrying about censoring yourself or holding back and, in that immediacy, you lose the withholding-ness and only say true things...and that, I've always thought, is what prayer should be like.

Of course, once it makes its way to God's ears (again with the anthropomorphizing), God's no more a hot girl than God is an old dude with a beard. But it's somewhere to start from. Just like we can't thank God enough for every aspect of Creation (yeah, by the way, thanks for creating the wood planks on the floor solid enough so that I'm not falling through it...oh, look, I just moved to another part of the room; thanks for creating that part solid enough, too), there's no way to adequately envision God, physically or mentally or eschatologically or otherwise. And so, to thank God, we grasp a few words and hope it's enough. And in order to communicate with God, we reach out for whatever medium we can find, and hope that's enough, too.