Coffee enemas, Sunday night hockey, Viagra jokes, & playing Scrabble with cats

Random excerpts from a writer's intimate diary

DG suiting up for the last game of his career.

As the subtitle says, these are random excerpts from a so-called diary, circa 2007-8. I started skimming through it the other day when I made yet another attempt to clean up my harddrive. I make no apologies. I am not one of those deep writers who think pretentious thoughts before going to bed at night. Last night I played Rise of Nations for four hours straight.

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A coffee enema just sounds counter-intuitive in some way. I can't quite put my finger on it.

Mother is looking very serious about going to bed and threatening to disrobe and scar me for life. She sleeps with bars of soap in her bed, which, she says, is an old remedy against getting cramps in your legs.

So I am waiting for Jake's choir concert to start last night and this woman comes up to me and we're talking and she starts talking about kid care and then her sister in law single mothering 3 kids under 12 and I say where's your brother and she says I thought I'd told you that (I used to be her son's soccer coach and I run into her from time to time at the gym). She then told me how her brother went berserk two years and murdered her parents and then killed himself. Then she told me about her depression in 2000 when she had shock therapy 6 times in a row which she said was good because it stopped her thinking. And I am thinking, sweetie, you'd better not ever wake up and start thinking again.

But think about it: the writer moving across the page dropping little smudgy dirty marks wherever he goes. Really a kind of icky thing to do. "Icky" was a term Freud used often, you know, in his private diaries.

I'm reading Dickens to Jonah. This line came up this morning: "When the quiet of the garret had been long undisturbed, and heaving breast and shaken form had long yielded to the calm that must follow all storms -- emblem to humanity, of the rest and silence into which the storm called Life must hush at last." Fuck me, makes me feel like closing my eyes and folding my hands over my chest and...

I've signed up for a Sunday night hockey league. Got out my hockey bag yesterday. My helmet snapped apart in my hands when I tried to put it on. Mice had made nests in my kneepads. Jonah says, Dad, don't you think you should see if you can still skate before you play hockey?

I hired a cleaning lady to come in once a week and this has improved my quality of life immensely (the domestic guilt is gone). And she's a character. She emails me during the week with her "plan of attack" for when she comes here.

I don't know why cats make me suspicious since I have a cat. I just don't feel like I need a cat -- I tell my cat this all the time. I say, "Hobbes, I don't need you. I don't want you on my chest drooling. I don't want you attacking the Dachshund. You've been on a diet for six months and you've gained weight. I don't think we have a meeting of minds here. Hobbes, why don't you and the Dachshund go for a walk in the woods and find the coyotes?" But what can you say about a man who holds such long passsive-aggressive conversations with his cat?

Last night I dreamed that I was fired from a job that I didn't really want anyway but thought I should somehow argue for with a smarmy man in a suit. In the car this morning, I thought: Dying is a bit like being fired from a job you didn't want in the first place.

I'm going to a friend's house tonight to watch a documentary film about the Helvetica type face. I think this says a lot.

I got up with the boys at 6:30, made breakfast, made Jonah's lunch, sent in money for play tickets, ran a wash, washed the dishes. Then my cleaning lady arrived. I'm getting a cup of coffee and she says, I have a couple of questions, okay? And I say, Yes. And she says, Okay, first question: Do you think it's necessary and appropriate in a relationship for someone to know your history of past relationships? Second question: What do you think about need in a relationship? Is it okay for someone to say, "I want to be needed by you?” We spend 30 minutes on this while her 10-yr-old homeschooled daughter watches movies on the TV in the background.

I had a big fight with my publisher today because they are doing a new cover for Elle, a woman with a partly exposed back and I wanted some butt crack showing and my publisher said Douglas, women readers do not like butt crack as much as you do. And I said I wouldn't read it unless there was a lot of butt crack. (I suppose people think the literary world works on a higher plane than this.)

I had to hide my eyes in No Country for Old Men. I hide my eyes during sex scenes, too, but that's mostly out of boredom. And snakes. Oh shit. Jacob made me go to Snakes on a Plane -- I saw maybe 30 seconds of that movie -- I only remember the part where the snake drops out of the ceiling fixture while the couple are having sex in the bathroom? I am scarred for life.

I played hockey last night for the first time in 12 years. I haven't been on skates in maybe 4 years. So it was okay except for falling flat on my ass in front of my own bench as I jumped onto the ice for my first shift (that was my benchmark, everything was better after that). Things have changed since the last time I played. This is co-ed Sunday night hockey and there was a cute girl changing in our dressing room with maybe 15 guys. I couldn't skate worth a shit, but I actually made some passes and had 3-4 shots on goal. And only knocked down 2 of my own teammates (on account of my inability to change direction). My knee started swell up in the middle of all this. And I fell down some more. A guy was coming off the ice. He said, "I need some Viagra. I was going in on goal, all nonchalant, and I had this plan to slip the puck to my backhand and flip it over the goalie's shoulder, then, what do you know, I couldn't get it UP."

A bit depressed maybe. Now I have the boys for the weekend and just lost a Scrabble game to Jacob. I was ahead till the very last word of the game. A humbling experience. I beat Jonah the other day. And, of course, I can beat the cat any day of the week.