the best things in life....

...fair warning this is a LONG LONG entry because I have been meaning to do it for a looooong time and I admire everyone mentioned here as well....thank you Mr. Tod Goldberg, Ms. Caroline Leavitt, Mr. Jim Kokoris, and Mr. Allison Burnett for contacting me and making me smile. Special thanks to Tod for being so human, so real and so not a dissapointment to my admiration from afar viewpoint on who you might really be. You far surpass my prior thought that you were clever beyond belief. (now send me your autograph, your old used straw wrapper, something...something...c'mon anything I can frame and brag about to all visitors of my humble abode..) I decided to decorate my kitchen wall with posters/pictures etc of all the people I admire and just "LIKE".

The best thing about my having my website and diary can be read as follows.....

>From: TodGoldberg@#####.com
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: fake liar cheat
>Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 03:09:31 EST
>
>Hi --
>
>Thanks for the props! Any time I can get mentioned on the same page as The
>'Mats (Skyway is my favorite...followed directly by We'll Inherit the Earth)
>and Dramarama (Scenario is my all time all time all time fave...unless Baby
>Rhino's Eye from Box Office Bomb is...) I'm pretty damn happy. Shoot, I'm
>pretty happy to be mentioned with Lloyd Cole, so much so that I went from
>your site to music site and downloaded one of his old albums so I could hear
>"perfect skin".
>
>Thanks for putting me on your list...watch out for Living Dead Girl, my new
>novel, in May 2002.
>
>Best,
>Tod Goldberg
>
>Visit FakeLiarCheat.com (its www.todgoldberg.com now!!!)

>From: #####@aol.com
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: thanks from author you quoted!
>Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 14:00:10 EDT
>
>Thank you, thank you, thank you for quoting from my novel
COMING BACK TO ME!
>I was so thrilled to see it in your wonderful site! (Which I'll be coming
>back to--it's fantastic.)
>
>I was having a hard day writing, feeling like a failure and a fraud and then
>I saw your listing and saw the quote. Bliss!!!!
>
>Thank you, thank you again!
>
>Caroline (Leavitt)

>From: "Jim Kokoris"
>To:
>Subject: the rich part of life
>Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 12:01:14 -0700
>
>Hello:
>
>Just surfing the net because I don't want to write.
>
>Thanks for buying my novel The Rich Part of Life. I hope you liked it.
>
>Take care,
>
>jim kokoris

>From: #######@aol.com
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: your reading
>Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 11:22:37 EDT
>
>I wrote Christopher.
>
>I hope you achieved your goal on 6/10 and read it.
>
>If you did, please write to me and let me know what you thought.
>
>Allison Burnett

WOW! Can you say WOW??? I am a girl that has a few true passions. They are as follows.

1. my son, this is a given. He's ten years of wonderful. He's the most amazing person I know. I am blessed for every single day that I have had with him. I am a very lucky girl to have him.

2. Rick. This also goes without saying. Today when I cried he was there. He's the first person in my life to hold me when I cry. And he never rolls his eyes at all my piles of books around the apartment. He also doesn't make me feel I have to hide my Barnes and Noble/Borders bags either. For that and that alone Rick...you rock!

3. Chloe. My new dog. She rules. I have a song just for her. "Chloe Chloe with a big C on her shirt, if she had a shirt but she doesn't have a shirt so she gets a big B on her Body for bad girl bad girl." Makes no sense but she loves it and knows its me singing it to her.

and...last but never ever least......

4. words, all words. I have a passion for lyrics, poetry, quotes, the art of placing words like puzzle pieces to acheive something amazing in the end. I have always had this passion. It is the one constant regardless of everything else in my life. I know that I can get lost in a novel. Not all novels provide this escape. Not all novels are written well enough to achieve the kind of high that I imagine coke addicts must seek. I have never been a drug user (outside of my Zoloft....) and so I wouldn't know this. But my drug of choice is a bookshelf full of possibilities. I love books. I love authors. I love artistic people. I love these things with a passion. Words are art. In my world they rank high.

So...when a girl from smalltown Pennsylvania (living in big beachtown, Florida) has a diary where she whines and carrys on about the injustices of her life, and throws in a list of books she's wanting to read, has read, loves....and gets these kinds of emails, its a nice positive thing that makes me smile for the day.

Furthermore regarding "Christopher - A Tale of Seduction - Allison Burnett", I am on page 99 and I love the characters. I have said for years that if you don't become the characters, feel the characters, care about the characters then no amount of talent when it comes to writing, stringing words together like christmas lights...will impress me. B.K. Troop ranks up there with ......

MY LIST OF CHARACTERS FROM BOOKS I WISH COULD WALK OFF THE PAGE AND INTO MY LIVING ROOM!!!

1. Lonnie Milton (Fake Liar Cheat - Tod Goldberg)

I wish I could go out to eat with Lonnie and walk out on the bill. Last night at IHOP with my boyfriend I witnessed 2 girls bail on the check and I thought about Lonnie. This reminded me of Lonnie. I thought to myself "that was a Lonnie move..." And that my friends is when a character is REAL. So real they become a part of who you are.

2. Ponyboy Curtis (The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton)

I rank him on my list of characters I'd most like to meet, because I'd love to smoke a cigarette, grease back my hair and listen to the "real" written down character Ponyboy read my favorite poem, "Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost". I have had dreams about this very thing. S.E. Hinton is in large part along with Judy Blume...the reason why I love to read.

3. Margaret Simon (Are you there god it's me Margaret? - Judy Blume)

Now this is a throwback to my youth, but to this day I recall this character fondly, almost as if she were a true part of my childhood and in the end she was. I'll never forget the way she "practiced" putting a maxipad on in her closet.

4. Patrick Bateman (American Pyscho - Brett Easton Ellis)

Patrick is a pyscho you love to hate. I wouldn't necessarily want to meet him in a dark alley or ever go anywhere with him. But I would love to visit that home of his, and mess up his row of suits.

5. Frank Bascombe (The Sportswriter - Richard Ford)

Richard Ford..Schmord..what's the big deal I thought when I read all the praise on Tod Goldbergs website. But Richard is the giver of life to Frank. Frank, the one man (if he were real) who I might be able to sit down and discuss my divorce and all its moments with. In the very first scene Frank meets up with his ex-wife and the nuiances and the way that Frank's feelings are described, he is real damn it. Frank and I could be happy damn it, if only Frank could walk out of those pages. Ford fans would love to know that he's currently writing more about Frank. At least that's what I've been able to gather from the www.

6. Sarah Miles (The End of an Affair - Graham Green)

I would love to actually walk into this book and plead with her to forget her pact with god and love him back. This book (and the movie) is amazing. The story is timeless and all of the characters are interesting to me. Better the second time around. Please Sarah, forget your pact!!!!

7. Jim and Abby (Vox - Nicholson Baker)

I love love love this book. Why? Because I've been on the receiving end of these sorts of phone calls in my lifetime. The kind of phone call that would take a chapter of your life away from you and yet leave you feeling fulfilled for having had it. I'm not talking about phone sex here. I'm talking about two people openly and honestly speaking about anything and everything. When Jim admits to his weird fetish over a woman who buys stockings, a nameless faceless woman, that's human to me. Characters made human are unforgettable.

8. Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

OK OK so she IS a real person, but she writes her books in the first person and you forget she's real and you believe she's a character and yet, you still want her to walk out of the book. So I have to list her. I also read More, Now and Again and again wished that she was one of my friends. It's not so that we could inhale drugs together, because I'm not a drug addict but it's because she's honest, real and direct. And those are 3 things that rarely happen in one person. I hope she's busy writing more memoirs, or at least I hope she finds this and comes over for coffee someday. Dream on....I know. If you don't know anything about Elizabeth go visit....
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0698/wurtzel/reading.html and listen to her read about Nicole Brown Simpsons death. Maybe she whines about her mental problems a tad much, but if you had asthma would you whine about the lack of breathing going on?

9. Delores Price (She's Come Undone - Wally Lamb)

Delores is a young girl and I wanted to crawl into the book and explain things to her so that they weren't so damn hurtful for her. I read this book because Oprah said to, well ok I didn't read it because of that, I read it because it was $4 at a used book store and I figured why not. But Delores is still very real in my mind long after I read it.

10. Will (Nightswimmer - Joseph Olshan)

Will loves the way all men should love. This book was a love story without being sentimental or gushy or just plain fake in your face nonsense. It's not a harlequin romance where boy kisses his lover on the last page. Will has lost his love, but has he really? Love is when love lasts even after death.

11. Tomato Rodriquez (Flaming Iquanas - Erika Lopez)

I believe though I'm not sure that Tomato is a lesbian or at the very least, she's bi-sexual. She's strong and tough and decides to ride a not so mechanical worthy motorcycle across the country. The book is about her journey, but not in the physical sense so much as in the mental sense. She's real, raw and says it like she thinks it to be. Lopez wrote a great person into my reality. Sometimes when I falter and wonder if I can be strong enough I imagine jumping a motorcycle and riding through torrential downpours and then I realize that I can surely crawl out of bed and face another day.

12. Fielding Pierce (Waking the Dead - Scott Spencer)

Scott Spencer is brilliant. He just is. I read Endless Love ten years after watching the movie five times and realized that for the most part movies will never do books justice. Fielding's girlfriend Sarah is the heart of this book, but I would love to be in that room when she comes back just to know if she's really there. This is an instance when I wish I could crawl in rather than have the characters crawl out. Fielding is a prime example of how all the success in the world will never erase lost love. Scott Spencer just released a new book, A Ship Made of Paper, and I can't wait to find the time to read it even though I have to go buy it first. ;-)

Furthermore, I would love to hug the male nameless character in "Seperation - Dan Franck" just once. I'd love to talk to Martha Ward of "Skin Deep - Diana Wagman" about wearing blue for a living. I would love to have Dan Underwood come fix up my computer, (Microserfs - Douglas Coupland), I would love to finger through Rob's record collection just once and show him all of my own lists as well (High Fidelity - Nick Hornby) I would like to write a novel in Coco's home. (Shanghai Baby - Wei Hui) and then after all of that I'd like to go for a stroll along the beach with Paul Luden and listen to him talk about Katrina for awhile. (Living Dead Girl - Tod Goldberg)

I would love to do these things because these people, places and events are a part of who I am now. That is amazing writing and that is what I have a passion for. I don't know if I'll ever get it together to write a book, but I will always bow down to the likes of an amazing writer, Especially when given the opportunity to connect with them thanks to the world wide web and find out that they are just real people with real talent who probably wonder from time to time about the real people out there that buy and read their books. You realize for them to find my little patterings about their novels, they or someone they knew well did a google search and found out I am sitting in front of my little pc in complete awe. Writing would be nothing in the end without a reader. Much like dancing alone is never quite as wonderful as dancing with someone you love.

Go buy a book.....read something amazing that will change the way you think. My personal thanks to every author I mentioned for taking me to new places without my having to pack a suitcase. Futhermore, thanks to "that woman" who writes the HP books for making my child excited about reading!! (we all know she'll probably sue me for using her name without permission so I'll skip it.....ha!!!)

-PoeticaL

One last note...I finally found 66 Laps in the library and someone please go tell Leslie Lehr Spirson that that book rocks. I wish I could go out to lunch with Audrey but instead I shared some coffee with her. Oh...and if you feel inspired and stuff...I have a wishlist on amazon...search for PoeticaL. (shameless shameless...) There's only one thing better than buying a book, and that is receiving a book.