As to marriage, we officially hit one year two weeks ago! We celebrated this weekend with a trip up to Blairsville in the north Georgia mountains. We’re both fall-o-philes, and have missed autumn quite a bit here in the south. True, there’s some color, and it’s gotten chillier. But there’s no midwest blaze. North Georgia handed it over in bushels of color though. If we’d remembered to take our camera, I would show you right here. In fact, I’d also have take pictures of things like Booger Hollow Road and the Booger Hollow store - complete with the animated booger logo. Truly.

And I would upload picture of the ladybugs in these pixels right below. ‘Twas, apparently, the height of ladybug season. Our cabin was infested. A few are sweet. It’s not like having mosquitoes or roaches. But the beasties swarmed in around the double-bedroom doors from the deck in droves. There were literally hundreds of them crawling the ceiling, clinging to the drapes, skittering over the floor. After 45 minutes of trying to sweep them out (as they seethed back in), we finally gave up and shut off the room and retreated to the bed in the loft.

I will show you a photo from Brasstown Bald, though, through the resources of a handy google search. We headed up the highest peak in Georgia, which, while it’s no Rocky Mountain peak, tops out at nearly 5,000 ft. and gave us a breath-taking view of four states:

Next time, we’ll take the camera. Promise.

We planted three camellias last weekend, in the spots at the front of the house recently inhabited by three deceased azaleas.

When faced with the quandary of what to plant in the open spaces, I should have called my mother. She understands roots and soil and foliage and drainage and all of those important variables. But it was late last evening when I was planning, so I turned to google instead. It suggested laurels as a good fit for north Georgia.

So I headed for the nursery this morning, intending to find some laurels or task an attendant for advice. Instead, I came across several rows of camellias. When we were growing up in the old white farmhouse with the tin roof at 20 Miller Road in Virginia, there was a massive camellia scaling the side of the house, rollicking out into the lawn. Maybe it was actually several bushes. A cat could disappear inside the brush for days. And dark shiny green tentacles would reach out to grab you as you skipped up the narrow bit of paved walked, barefoot, trying to avoid the shimmery slug trails.

I purchased two small autumn blooming camellias with fat buds and a larger winter flowering plant. They’re now in the ground, roots swaddled in the kind of nice, dark composted earth that, were I my mother or sister, I would have had on hand already. Mine came in a plastic bag. (Note to self: now that you have a backyard, start a compost pile.) It’s the kind of earth that I took a big bite of in the garden when I was five or six, because it looked so rich and tasty. To be honest, I don’t remember exactly what the sensory effect was. But I do recall that a few months later, when we were handed cups with “dirt” in them at a birthday party, I was rather disappointed to discover that it was chocolate cake rather than the real earthy deal.

Somehow, 18 years of enforced service in the garden have faded into the mists of my brain. The weeds ripped from the earth, the knocking off of potato bugs (those were lucrative: a penny a bug), the vast numbers of beans picked, the branches hauled to the brush pile, the mulch shoveled and laid, the chopped wood transported to the shed, the corn shucked, the mounds of apples poured into the victoria strainer to be transformed into applesauce, the whens and whys and wherefores of planting and watering…at 31, I’m starting from scratch.

Scratch being what Nina did to bush #1 as soon as it was in the ground. I believe she also sat on it. So far, though, it appears to be a hardy camellia, immune to the imprecations of a dog drunk on the joie de vivre of an autumn day.

On that note: meet Nina. If virtual tongue-baths were possible, you would be receiving one now.

When we discovered that we needed not only proof of residence, previous licenses, marriage license, and SSN - but our original, certified birth certificates, too! - to transfer our licenses to Georgia, we expected the worst. After pleading calls to our mothers (I felt like I was back in college) to track them down and send the proofs of our existence via registered mail, we finally had it all assembled and braced ourselves for the excruciating task ahead.

The entire process: licenses, title, tags, the works - took 20 minutes. That included two separate locations. With only a modest exchange of cash, to boot.

So: thank you, Cobb County, Georgia.

Oh…and we were able register as Georgia voters. Which is a darn good thing, since Sarah Palin’s entry into the race has finally got me excited about this election. I’ve been enthralled by Barack Obama’s charisma and historical run since last fall - but I disagree with the man across the board on the basic fundamentals. In Palin, I see a similar charisma - and a far more solid foundation. There are two main characteristics I want from someone in the White House: character, and intelligence. She carries both.

(On second thought, maybe we should have maintained our Ohio licenses for a little longer and voted absentee where it would have carried more weight!)

So, the following bits, in no particular order:

1. We love our cozy new home in the woods…but not so much the encroaching roaches, spider webs, and poke weed. David has unleashed effective campaigns against all three.

2. Though we’re in a fairly heavily populated area just north of Atlanta, there’s plenty of green (a lot of it rampant kudzu!) and a national park just 20 minutes away with a nice-sized mountain for climbing and plenty of trails. We’re in the thick of Civil War history ranging across the flanks of the Kennesaw Mountain Battlefield.

3. I like churches. I mean, of course, the people rather than the building…as it seems half of churches these days meet in schools and movie theatres, anyway. I’ve attended a variety of churches in my moves, and for the past few years, it’s been large churches — mostly 3,000 and up. Now, we’re visiting smaller churches, looking for a place where it’s easy to connect in and put down some roots. And since moving, we’re two for two on small, welcoming bits of the Body of Christ where we could happily fit in.

4. Catastrophe struck last week when David’s computer (with five years of business and personal work and software) fried. Thankfully, we’d been planning on a new computer, but though much of the material was backed up, some vital things may be beyond recovery. It’s a glorious day, though, since the official Apple box with the new machine arrived this afternoon and is sitting in the office, awaiting David’s return from the film set he’s been on all day.

5. There is a Trader Joe’s within blocks of the Art Within office. Also, a Caribou Coffee and a Starbucks. This is a very good thing.

6. Advanced Cutter is not effective against Georgia mosquitoes.

7. If I may take a moment and brag on my husband, check out his very cool portfolio here.

More bits to come…

If you haven’t heard the news, we are under-cloud of a cinematic masterpiece. The Dark Knight is now the new standard of cinema classic - the greatest film ever made, by some accounts. Indeed, it appears we must rework the grading curve to assess the pantheon of film history. Consider, if you will, that Citizen Kane, Casablanca, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Godfather, Schindler’s List (and a hundred other important movies) all rank noticeably lower than The Dark Knight on the Internet Movie Database. At least Rotten Tomatoes—the alleged bastion of professional film critique—still has a modicum of perspective on some of these other films, but The Dark Knight remains high atop the heap there as well. Okay, maybe internet sites aren’t exactly cinematic imperiums, but one can’t help but ponder the audacity.

So while the critical world unilaterally spits up on itself, and fan-boys across the world stampede each other with orgiastic glee to see who can proclaim the “awesomeness” the loudest, could the rest of us quietly, and thoughtfully, consider for a moment just what this film is… and isn’t?

What it is: Entertaining. Exhilarating. Dark. Well-acted. Complex. Impressive. Tedious. Overly long. Full of holes. Full of itself. Overwrought. Silly. (more or less in chronological order).

What it is not: For the timid. Easy to follow. Uplifting. For the kids. A masterpiece. Subtle. Well-written.

Maybe those are too easy: swipes which work better as buzzy sound-bites than clear and balanced critique. But is the film good? Well, it’s not bad. I mostly had fun watching it. Does it belong in the top 10 films of all time? Definitely not. Not even in the top one hundred, I dare say. And why not? Because the standards by which the greatest films of all time are measured have nothing to do with the elements by which The Dark Knight is esteemed: showy special effects, mood, and acting. Great films do share one thing in common however, regardless of genre, subject or year of release - they’re well-written opuses that reflect the universal character of humanity, however great, however flawed. And while The Dark Knight does dress itself like a film concerned with these matters, ultimately it would rather be a wham-bang amusement park sensation that enjoys chewing up the audience and crapping them onto the parking lot, thanks for the $10.50, next in line please.

Many are eager to proclaim the dark complexities, and complicities, of the film, as if to suggest we’ve never encountered the profound struggle of a superhero coming to terms with his crime-fighting persona, private and public. Superman? Spiderman? X-Men? Iron Man? Mr. Incredible? Bruce Willis?… any of these characters ring a bell? We’ve been there, and we’ve done that… repeatedly. Whatever hard themes The Dark Knight wants to challenge itself with are nothing new, and don’t really matter in the end anyway. It’s not as profound as it thinks it is. It doesn’t really “say” anything other than: “Evil is bad. Batman is good. Sometimes it’s confusing which is which, but that’s okay, ’cause Batman can still kick ass.”

I guess, for whatever it’s worth, that’s the sort of mantra that just feels sooo good to the modern moviegoer, awash in a miasma of crass, whiny, quirky and pointless post-modern movies. In the face of all that rot, the film does sweep onto the screen with an admirable confidence few films wear these days. I can appreciate that kind of cinematic punch to the face, but you’ve got to let the audience up once in a while. The non-stop intensity of The Dark Knight churns on relentlessly for so long that you simply wish the thing would end. Somewhere in the third hour I found myself studying the track lighting in the floor, sighing deeply, wanting to scream out “somebody please win and get this over with!”

And that’s really the most disheartening piece to this puzzle. Less really could have been more. And by that I mean intensity for substance. A simpler through-line with one villain (did we learn nothing from Spiderman 3?) a three-act structure and savvier instincts would have made for a smarter and better movie that might have cracked the top 100 in my humble opinion—maybe even the top 25. Instead we get “more is more”, as in intensity and mayhem for intensity and mayhem. You almost felt the director/studio croaking incessantly at the climax of every scene: “But wait! We’ve got something even cooler in the next scene!”, to which the film-going audience happily obliges with bug-eyed enthusiasm.

Sadly, this is the new populist art. No longer motivated by accessible and simple acts of humanity, we thirst for a salvo of pyrotechnic and FX-trumped madness—a thickly layered billion-dollar simulacra that points to nothing but itself.

Thanks, but I’ll save the hyperbole for the next truly great masterpiece, if one ever arrives.

As I pack up the remaining bits of my office, and life, and house, I want to pause for some reflections that have been working themselves out in my head these past many weeks and months. I don’t commit to putting these kinds of thoughts down like I used to, and blogging is a pitiable excuse for journaling (another entry), but it’s still a document. In the minimum, I at least want to say “here… this… now.”

About two autumns ago, while feeling a bit nostalgic, I took a short trip through an old neighborhood, running back over memories of school and friends. I wasn’t surprised by the cascade of thoughts that followed (how I had arrived at my current stage and its companion: “did I get here the right way?”) but I did realize, rather startlingly, that I’d now lived in Dayton, OH longer than I had lived anywhere else my whole life (at the time, 18 years). No glance in the mirror or ginger body ache made me feel quite as aged as that tiny, wincing moment… because I swear I just moved here.

The eventful parade of joy and tears, learning, love, hopes, dreams and visions crystalized in a second and I became the strange figure of a man I wondered about at 16 while slouched in the back seat of my parent’s car: “who will I be in 20 years?” Whoever coined the term ‘bittersweet’ must have been living through a similar moment.

And here I am again, making a mental inventory of the whole mad affair as I get ready to leave it behind for another chapter in a new city. One score of a man’s life, checked, catalogued and filed away—just dramatic and exciting enough to be interesting, just blessed enough by the hand of God to be a witness to His providence.

I look forward to what awaits—new dreams, new hopes—but for now I drift back, considering with amazement what has been this speeding rush of two decades…

Here is a man as a kid, a new student, foolish and proud, ignorant and wise, a ghost of Holden Caulfield in his shadow.

Here he is as an artist—desperate and hopeful, hungry for knowledge, a stumbling tower of ego.

Here he is as a young man, his first true job spinning webs of promise and stagnancy, his first true friends planting stone and steel… his best friend all fur and obstinance.

Here he is at 30, meeting with God, grabbing hold of slippery and unrealistic dreams, still knowing, still believing.

Here he is as a husband, awkward and selfish, the stumbling tower of ego, torn down and rebuilt with new hands.

And all of it within this city, in just about every corner.

We look to another horizon, that will someday arrive with as much quiet surprise as this one has.

But for now, Farewell to you, good friend.

Don’t swallow up our empty space too quickly.

We have until Wednesday to corral the chaos, at which point we stuff it all into a 17′ UHaul. Assuming it all fits. Which is not guaranteed.

Thanks to all of you who called, texted, and emailed birthday greetings. I’m terribly sorry if I haven’t gotten back to you yet, but I will sometime soon! Though possibly not until Georgia.

More blogging to come. From the South…

In Italy it was the priests who appealed to Pope Clement VIII to have the use of coffee forbidden among Christians.  Satan, they said, had forbidden his followers, the infidel Moslems, the use of wine because it was used in the Holy Communion, and given them instead his “hellish black brew.”  It seems the Pope liked the drink, for his reply was: “Why, this Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.  We shall cheat Satan by baptizing it.”  Thus coffee was declared a truly Christian beverage by a farsighted Pope.

I like structure. Form. A framework. Let me craft the full skeleton before ever touching muscle or flesh to bone.

When I was a senior in high school, Mrs. U taught me how to write an essay. Her real name was Ruth Uyesugi, but decades of high school students shortened it to the affectionate vowel. She stood in front of the class with the Oriental carved ivory pendant hanging at her chest (she had married a Japanese man during World War II and internment camps, the blond Quaker and the dark-haired opthamologist; she knew how to play outside the lines) and she preached the three-point topical paper. Start with a creative, engaging introduction. Then a brief organizational paragraph listing the three points to be addressed. Following: the three points themselves. And finally, a succinct conclusion.

I wrote every paper through college and on into grad school by this dictum, and it worked for two-page book reviews and twenty-page finals.

When I stumbled into the mysteries of screenwriting, the month-long Act One program (and Robert McKee, author of the screenwriting bible Story) gave me a new tool to rein in the vast unknown expanse: the three-act structure. I clung to this life raft that read, at most basic, beginning, middle, end. Ten weeks with Janet and Lee Batchler hammered in a new set of skeletal bones: sequences to build the acts (three to beginning and end, six to the middle)–and three beats to a sequence. Thirty six movements, actions, to tell a complete story.

Now every screenplay I begin starts with those 36 points, fitting them into place, edging them around, pulling the shaky pieces, shoring up weak joints. And when the skeleton is complete, I am free to be creative, to juggle words and ideas, secure in the ending already written. True: the bones of a finished screenplay must often be broken and reset time and time again; even limb amputations and new growth. But even then–I reform the structure before I write.

Some would say that I am no artist. That I cling too tightly to the form of things, the established ways. I say…let them have their say.

Scripture says that God knows the plans he has for me. Over and over, I’m told He has predestined me for Himself, formed the bones of my life, the bridge that leads me from here to there. My free will, it seems, is the muscle and bone, the fleshing it out–but I build on this framework with such anxiety, such care–because I can’t see the framework. I didn’t craft it and I don’t know where this next bit of creating will take me, I didn’t write this ending, so how do I find it?

I know. I do know. The ending has been written.

I’ve read it. I’ve heard it.

So I know.

I do.