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Beckett and Me

I have to get up at 6:30 to get my son up and to school by 8:00. That’s really early for me

and the bus is always packed and the bus driver won’t pull away from the curb until people move

back from the door which can take a while. People don’t like to move back in the bus, even

though they do it every morning so you would think they would learn. The bus driver always

frowns at us and doesn’t want to call out, “move back,” one more time and sometimes he just sits

in his seat with the bus parked by the curb until passengers start complaining that they’re going

to be late for work if he doesn’t proceed. I really think unreliable public transportation is why so

many people in the neighborhood spend what money they have on car payments and the streets

are jammed with cars, especially around the school. I always walk home even though the buses

are practically empty going away from the school. I don’t want to get anywhere near a bus after

the previous nerve wracking trip in which I was squeezed up against understandably glum

strangers who are unhappy with the people they’re pushed against and I’m always worried about

how Beckett will take the crush of bodies. When I get home, I go back to sleep and get up around

noon. I know that sounds lazy, but I finally get up and put on my robe. I begin to wake up after

some coffee that I make with a drip cone. Though coffee is bad for my stomach, I can’t wake up

without it. I really can’t. I pick Beckett up at 2:30 and we usually go to the playground for a few

hours, where, due to my grey hair I suppose, I am sometimes mistaken for his grandmother. We

head home and I start dinner after which he must do his homework and a couple times a week he

takes a bath which he always resists but enjoys once he gets in. He always has a lot of

homework. I do part of his homework for him because he’s only eight and I don’t think he

should feel this constant pressure to be competing with other kids which he often feels
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overwhelmed by. He doesn’t think in terms of competing for the best jobs. He just wants to be a

kid. I get him to bed by nine. I lie down for a while and then get up and stream movies until 3

AM before I try to get some sleep and then I repeat the same schedule the next morning. Even

though I retired early at fifty and I don’t have to go to work anymore, Beckett often feels like a

full-time job unto himself. He told me today that he was going to do whatever he wanted to, and

that I couldn’t stop him. He said that. At eight years old, he already thinks he should be equal in

decision-making to me and I must admit I am clueless as to what I or anyone else might do to

improve conditions in this country. I feel reluctant to advise him even though the matter might be

whether he watches cartoons or goes to bed on time. I’ve always hated getting up early and never

adjusted to it. Beckett doesn’t like it either and in the mornings, I must hold him under his arms

and walk him into the kitchen with his legs stiff and his eyes closed, kicking his heels to move

one foot forward and then the other, until finally settling him in a chair before his breakfast

which consists of a banana, a flour tortilla and half a glass of milk since that’s all he’s willing to

eat in the morning. He doesn’t like to get his hair cut and I don’t make him and it’s now past his

shoulders which actually looks good on him I think. He has red framed glasses, frames that he

chose himself that also suit him. He no longer likes school as much as he did when he was

younger. I can’t pack his lunch with sea weed, or healthy multigrain bread, even though he likes

those things because, he tells me, the other kids will make fun of him, so I usually make him a

peanut butter and jam sandwich with white bread. Baby carrots, the ones that have no skin and

are always slimy when you take them out of the bag are okay with his friends as well as

packaged bakery goods like mini-Oreos or Gold Fish.

Beckett likes to draw and sometimes I can get him to illustrate the stories I write. I don’t

try to publish them anymore. I remember listening to an interview of Deborah Treisman, the
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fiction editor for The New Yorker on YouTube and at one point she said, “I’m looking for a story

to do what it’s setting out to do.” This stuck in my mind, because my stories never do that, and

The New Yorker is considered the best place to get a story published. It will make your career,

and I really like some of the stories they publish. I never know where my stories are going ahead

of time. I feel that they’re never done until they take some turn I couldn’t anticipate. Maybe this

involves unconscious associations that form slowly while I’m writing and only come to me when

the story is near completion, or while I’m reading through what I had thought was finished.

Maybe I’ve developed a new style of short story or maybe I’m just a crazy old woman who

doesn’t know how it’s done. If what you’re now reading was one of my stories as opposed to the

inner voice of my thoughts I wouldn’t know where it would go. In the interview, Treisman, when

asked, offered a list of the people who are first considered for the one unsolicited story The New

Yorker publishes every year. The list included stories sent by famous people or their friends,

stories sent by literary agents, stories sent by friends of the editors or the staff and friends of their

friends, friends of known authors and their friends, people who live in the same building as the

editors, someone the editors or staff met at a party or someone they went to school with, or

someone they met on a beach or hiking trail or secluded area of any kind, or a sports bar,

someone they shared a taxi with coming from an airport or sat beside on an airliner, basically

someone who moves in the same circle or inhabits the same neighborhood or someone who takes

their dog to the same dog run. I think there were a few more categories of people given first

consideration before they get to the slush pile, assuming they haven’t found anything yet for that

year. They tend to forget about the slush pile and the story I sent I’m sure would be on the

bottom of it. Beckett suggested that I get a dog and go to the appropriate dog run to meet one of

the editors, but I suspect that what he really wants is a dog since he specified the breed of dog I
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should get, one of those Australian cow-herding dogs like in Road Warrior which we probably

couldn’t afford anyway, and I’m the one who would end up taking it for walks since he has his

excuse, already, for me doing it to meet people. I can picture him telling me that he meets other

kids at school, but I don’t go to school, so I should be the one to walk the dog while he plays

Minecraft, so that I can meet other dog-lovers which I’m not one of. I like dogs alright, but I

don’t want to own one. And yes, I let him watch Road Warrior with me, but I fast-forwarded

through the more violent parts. Beckett doesn’t consider how the people who I would have to

make friends with to get published already have friends who themselves have friends and it’s

partly that they have friends of their own that make them a better friend to have. They already

have all the friends they need and they aren’t going to be looking to connect with an elderly

woman with no connections herself. All magazines are probably like that now, so I decided to

write stories just for my family. Beckett, for the most part, likes them. Sometimes it’s hard to get

him to sit still and do the illustrations, but I’m thinking maybe my stories will be kind of like a

photo album where you have these photos to remember people by, but in my case, it will be

stories, and maybe if Beckett has children he’ll pass my stories on to them. He’s the only one

who reads them. This idea of what to do with my stories is perhaps prehistoric, but maybe that’s

what a lot of us are left with since we don’t have anything to do with recorded history as the

preservation of people’s work. That belongs to people who we’ll never meet.

The last story I wrote is about a character called Bug Boy. He has Beckett’s head but the

body of a fly. He can fly around and go places and sit on a wall where you don’t see him. It

probably sounds like the horror movie, The Fly, about a person who gets into a teleportation

machine he built to try it out and he doesn’t know that a fly went in with him and when he

teleports himself into the second pod the fly’s genes become mixed in with his own, and they
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turn out to be stronger and begin to reconstruct him as a giant bipedal fly. There’s an original

version in which Vincent Price, as the scientist, comes out of the pod, if I remember right, with a

big fly head and outside there is a tiny—that is normal sized—fly with a tiny human head that

calls, “Help me, help me,” in this tiny voice that no one could hear unless within a couple feet of

this fly and I think that if I remember right this fly is sitting on a bush. I call my character Bug

Boy, not in any reference to this movie, but in part because Beckett is always bugging me to buy

him Legos or a box of Gold Fish, or ice cream in some disturbing red, blue and pink color.

So, Bug Boy ends up on the wall of this rich guy who talks about how he loves people

unless they cross him or sneer at him from across a room and then he will financially destroy

their whole family and he has the power and social connections to do this, and some poor little

girl does sneer at this rich man from outside a window she’s looking through to see the festivities

inside a huge room with a vaulted ceilings and gold fixtures. How she gets there I haven’t yet

worked out, but Bug Boy can see the rich man staring with contempt at the girl while talking out

of the side of his mouth to some aide who he asks to find out who this girl is and what relations

she has that the rich man can financially destroy. Maybe I’m thinking of Heathcliff, the stable

boy in Wuthering Heights, but change his gender to a girl. Sometimes I suck on one of several

small round stones that I found at the beach when I write my stories. It’s better for me to suck on

one of these stones than smoke or drink coffee and I tend to need something like what they call

in acting a secondary focus, something to take my mind off writing so that it will feel more

natural to be doing it. In my understanding of what’s expected of me as a writer I’m probably

supposed to keep in mind things like plot. Consciousness mainly serves to hold things in mind.

You could think of writing a story as one of those social practices where you’ve got your basic

story and you stick with it throughout the writing process. I’ve heard consciousness spoken of as
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a buffer and router by a man on YouTube. Let’s say you want to break down a complex problem,

like a math problem, by dealing with it in stages, consciousness allows you to be aware of each

stage before proceeding to the next, as opposed to unconscious parallel processing which can

compare a lot more stuff but it doesn’t allow for these sequential stages that have already been

established as how you should perform this particular task. These thoughts, if they’re going well,

prevent the impasse necessary for insight processing. You’ve got to be stumped regarding what

you’re thinking about for insights to occur to you. If you continue to assume that you know what

you’re doing, working with closely related information in a conventional manner, like a story

with a predetermined beginning, middle, and end, this will prevent insights from coming to you.

You end up with a very conventional plot which I must say doesn’t interest me. Writing is

sequential so maybe that’s why most people seem to believe that it must be a more conscious

activity, where you know the plot arc you’re going to follow, and figure out how to put it down

on paper, filling out the story with all the particulars, like describing the setting in which things

are taking place. I might describe me sitting in this room in my usual comfy chair with a big art

book on my lap which functions as a table top that I set my laptop on while I’m writing this. I’m

not supposed to have any new insights along the way regarding what my story is about, but still,

I rely on insights for what I write. This means that what you’re reading may jump around more

than you would like because I’m not following this already decided upon course of action, a

course of action which isn’t, anyway, how I think. Insights are more like a total rethinking of

what I’m doing rather than following a given plot to its natural conclusion.

Last night I drank a little too much Molly’s and Beckett and I danced to old Tool CDs

until 2 AM which I thought was okay because it’s the weekend. He’s an amazing dancer and

climber. I’ve seen him climb up the side of a building which provided little in the way of hand
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and foot holds which is also why I thought up the character Bug Boy from the things he does.

Other than him I’ve only seen bugs climb like that. The dancing we were doing felt rather tribal

and I wondered if our socioeconomic group is going to break up into various tribes with their

own interests and identities. I had a dream in which you had to belong to the right tribe to get a

job working for a fast food chain, or a cleaning or delivery company, but Beckett and I didn’t

belong to any tribe so we had to hide from everyone else so that we wouldn’t be beaten to death

by roving bands with baseball bats or golf clubs and I remember thinking this is something that

only used to happen in other countries, but now all the law enforcement people are working to

keep hungry people from trespassing into the large estates that single families live in with estate

managers and armies of employees, with the end result that it’s a lawless world outside these

private estates and this seems like a good plot for a dystopian movie where Beckett and I have to

find houses and stores that haven’t yet been raided and completely depleted of canned goods in

order to survive. I imagine it set in a rural area with spread out farm houses. I imagine tree-lined

brooks. I would like a dryer climate, like Southern California where I grew up as a child rather

than the damp air of the East Coast which often feels rather slimy even when its chilly out.

I was close to tears yesterday, trying to think of a world in which everything would be

okay. I get like that sometimes but I can’t even consider suicide because of Beckett, at least not

until he’s old enough to take care of himself. He thinks he’s old enough now, but he’s not. He

doesn’t understand limited finances at all, and rent and things like that. He doesn’t know that he

doesn’t know much yet. I tried to teach him to do a parkour roll as I was instructed by the Tapp

brothers on YouTube. They are identical twins with red hair that they tend to wear different from

one another or different lengths so that we can tell them apart within a particular segment--but

not from segment to segment since they tend to switch up which one will have longer hair or use
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a hair band or comb it differently. Once one of the Tapp brothers had his hair swept straight back

and held in place with gel or hair spray that gave it a big mane look like Stalin or Johnny Cash in

his later years. You can ask a question or comment below so I wrote to whichever twin it was to

dissuade him from this particular look, and one of the twins wrote back to thank me, saying that

they always try to wear their hair different from one another so that they can be told apart and he

appreciated that I let him know that this one look wasn’t working. Since Beckett is only eight his

head is large compared to the rest of his body, and he had a hard time tucking his head at the start

of the parkour roll and therefor would hit his head on the ground, so I stopped trying to teach him

that particular move and he doesn’t listen to me anyway so the lesson wouldn’t have lasted long.

I content myself with letting him climb which he doesn’t need instructions for and he can also

tightrope walk along the tops of fences if they don’t have spikes or razor wire. This is something

I showed him which I’m also good at. Although some adults frown at such behavior in an adult,

others are more supportive, saying to their children, “that’s how you do it,” or some other

encouraging comment, but some people tell Beckett to get down and ask where his parents are.

Someone asked me if I was his mother while he was tightrope walking along the top of the fence

surrounding a playground and I said, “no,” and then sat on a bench and watched him go. I feel

that adults should find ways to exercise in a playground instead of just sitting on benches getting

progressively out of shape while their children run around.

I wanted Beckett to try on some jeans I bought for him and he went ballistic as if by

trying on these jeans he would be submitting to insidious mind control. He lectured me on how I

want to control everything he does so I finally said okay you can wear the same clothes you now

have until you’re an adult and he yelled, “Okay!” and threw the jeans on the floor. We have little

space in our apartment and often work together. Beckett faces me working on a TV table while,
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like I already pointed out, I have a large art book in my lap. It’s a monograph of Neo Rauch’s

early paintings that my laptop sits on, often with my legs extended past Beckett’s chair to rest on

a third chair. This is a rather cozy arrangement, but it can be difficult for me to concentrate when

Beckett loudly narrates everything he thinks. Right now, he’s wearing his lucky pants which are

four inches too short in the legs for him. They’re the only pants he’s willing to wear despite the

holes in the knees. Sometimes other kids make fun of his pants but he doesn’t care unlike with

his lunch. He calls them stupid or he points at them and makes a noise like in the original

Invasion of the Body Snatchers when a pod person sees and recognizes a human who hasn’t been

converted into a pod person yet and points their finger at this person and produces this loud

noise, and his noise is more ear-splitting than the pod people manage to produce, more like in

The Tin Drum when the boy who remains forever small, until hit in the head with a rock near the

end of the movie, breaks glass with the high-pitched noise he makes. So, other kids learn not to

make fun of his too-short pants. He doesn’t have the same attachment to other articles of

clothing, but I hesitate to buy him popular items. I bought him a nice black hoodie and he took it

off and laid it down the first day he wore it and it disappeared and it cost almost fifty dollars.

Beckett is studying different versions of Cinderella at school, which he told me about, so

in my story, I’ve decided that the rich man who Bug Boy is watching is the father of the Prince

from Cinderella, but unlike in Cinderella and many of the earliest novels—I’m not talking about

children’s stories now (most of these early novels were written by women like Aphra Behn

whose philosophy was surprisingly similar to Nietzsche’s regarding nobility)—I don’t simply

take it for granted that the Prince is a person with good qualities. Nietzsche said that long ago the

word noble was synonymous with the word good. If you were noble you had excellent qualities,

unlike common people, and so you should boldly do whatever you want. Maybe when
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Cinderella was written it was just assumed that the Prince was a wonderful guy, without any

need to go further into the matter. My Prince is an asshole who only cares about money and

media attention. He stays within the law, but doesn’t care about the intent of the law. He is

childish and peevish and lacks the attention span required to read a comic book from cover to

cover, but he nevertheless has great confidence in his abilities. Nietzsche would probably

conclude that I was jealous of the Prince and resentful of his noble lifestyle. Anyway, if any

dignitary or politician enters the palace, they are awed by the foyer because it’s as big as a

museum that on an average day would be filled with thousands of visitors, but there’s more

marble and lots of gold in this foyer that leads to an even bigger room occupied only by the

prince and a few servants and body guards. These dignitaries or politicians who enter this room

are thinking this is what success is about. It’s not about the best way to govern hundreds of

millions of people (though that’s inevitably part of it). It’s about a circle of friends who can

surround you with opportunities and wealth. It’s about private wood-paneled rooms. It’s about

feeling the admiration of underlings. They come to the Prince’s palace and they are in the

presence of someone surrounded by this opulence that tells you the kind of person he is, and

these politicians or dignitaries know that wealth can change how they look as well. It can

transform them into people of much greater worth. In their circles, the word genius refers to

people who are worth at least a billion dollars and there are three-hundred times the number of

geniuses in the US as there were twenty years ago. Those politicians who aren’t already wealthy,

once they feel what it’s like to circulate in this world, how big it makes them feel, along with the

power to do things money can give them, never want anything less. They come to despise their

constituency however well they hide it, however loudly they champion their constituency while

campaigning. They want to feel that they’re in the center of the world that matters as opposed to
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the majority who live in ignorance. This isn’t surprising given human nature, and this isn’t

necessarily what these politicians might have thought they wanted in graduate school or while

they were interning. I’m talking about pursuing the American dream of rising to the top. But

there is at least one person who doesn’t want that. Cinderella is an exception. Why? Because of

other qualities that extraterrestrials saw in her. She can refuse the attentions of people like the

Prince who the people in our government faithfully serve no matter how humble their

beginnings, won over by opulence and incomparable power and the promise of going places their

constituency back home could only dream of. Cinderella sees people like the Prince very

differently, you might say from the inside.

The extraterrestrials can scan human’s brains from orbit. It’s a complicated process

because neurons are always firing, so if you see some MRI scan they’ve eliminated the

background noise to see the new neuronal firing after they prompt the subject to respond to

something. The extraterrestrials don’t need to prompt people because they can scan them in their

natural environment. They created a basic map of the human brain from numerous samples, one

of which was Cinderella. She was lying drowsily in bed late at night, maybe three AM, and she

heard a skill saw or a circular saw, in the distance that she initially didn’t think much about, but

then she thought who’s cutting wood in the middle of the night? Just then the sound suddenly got

louder and shot right into her head paralyzing her on her back. She then heard a series of tones,

like entering a code into a lock, or maybe more like when you’re lying still while being scanned

in an MRI, those clicks and tones you hear. These tones were very clear and mostly different

from one another. Once the tones finished—and she had no idea how long it took--it was terribly

quiet. She couldn’t move a muscle. Her phone was by the bed and she played music on it to

provide company so she could feel less in the grips of whatever it was that paralyzed her. Bug
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Boy watched from the wall of her room, sensing that something odd was going on. He knew that

Cinderella was being contacted somehow by beings far above in some spaceship. I don’t know

what the extraterrestrials saw in her brain scan, but it must have impressed them because she was

the only human they openly contacted.

I suppose I thought of the extraterrestrial angle because my daughter signed up for Mars

One. She said she did it to meet someone. I told her that there are no men on Mars. It’s

uninhabited. She told me that of course she knew that, but she felt that a man who wanted to get

off this planet would probably be right for her and she might meet him in this program. Right

now, an ice cream truck is parked at the curb just outside our apartment playing “Pop Goes the

Weasel.” It’s been there for the last half hour. There’s no one in the driver’s seat and the side

window (or whatever you call the opening where the man takes the money and passes out the ice

cream) is closed. Whoever runs this truck often leaves it there, while doing something, maybe

getting a drink in the bar down the street since he does it around eight or nine PM, and he always

leaves the music on and the sound system must run on a separate battery, and it often amazes me

that he thinks that it’s okay to do that, or doesn’t think about the noise factor, just walks off with

this stupid music still playing, if you can call it music, blasting from the truck he’s responsible

for. He must listen to this repeating tune all day long and maybe he doesn’t like the people he

sells ice cream to, made with skim milk and a lot of sugar and says to himself, now they can

listen to this for a while.

Cinderella walks around in a black skirt or pants and white shirt, and black tie, sometimes

with an apron, with a tray, offering hors d’oeuvres, or thin stemmed glasses of something, to

wealthy people. Sometimes she works the tables, but mostly she carries the hors d’oeuvres and

drinks. She must remember to turn off her phone. She saw a fellow caterer get a call while
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working and he was fired on the spot. She can’t wear fingernail polish on the job, but she seldom

does anyway. The people who she serves talk to about fifty other people on the phone every day.

She’s not allowed to talk to these people unless they ask her a question. At her last job, she

served hors d’oeuvres and stemmed glasses of Champaign to people in and around an exact

replica of Stonehenge set in a huge lawn. Stonehenge is basically a circle of stones. Each stone is

thirteen feet high and seven feet wide. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that each stone

weighs about twenty-five tons and there must have been about twenty to twenty-five stones. She

walked through these tall stones with her tray picking up bits and pieces of conversation. The

people she served believe that keeping the majority of people out of their world is how they

create heaven on Earth, interacting only with people who have great wealth and live in

unsurpassed luxury, except for the servants who mutely serve. If more people could participate in

their world it wouldn’t be heaven anymore. That’s the Christian definition of heaven, this place

that only certain people can get into, “the good people,” while everyone else is turned away.

Most people will feel helpless if they learn that government and business are interchangeable,

but not the people at this party. Cinderella overheard one of them say that he loves people and

needs tons of money to be plugged in socially. He said that people who don’t love people, like he

does, can live out in the wilderness shooting animals for food. No one sees what goes on in the

wilderness. He loves prominent people, and my sense is that prominent people have a love affair

with one another everywhere, whether liberal professors in prestigious universities or alt-right

lobbyists, they love their private worlds with people who are educated or indoctrinated to at least

give the impression of understanding everything they say. In the mansion of this rich man, there

are always servants watching to see if one of his family or guests uses a bathroom. That servant

goes in, after this person uses it. They wait for a minute to elapse before they go in. There can be
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no trash left in the trash can and the toilet paper must be tightly rolled with the end creased in a

certain way. All the products must be thrown away and replaced before they’re half-empty,

shampoo, hand soap, cologne, mouthwash. Half-empty bottles look bad. The tube of toothpaste

must be thrown away if it starts to flatten. Cinderella used to have this job. She asked her

supervisor if she could take the half full products home to share with her friends. He told her that

the problem is that if she throws this stuff away it looks like she’s cleaning, but if she’s seen

putting it aside for herself it looks like she’s stealing and he would be forced to fire her.

Why did the extraterrestrials contact Cinderella? If you think about what might pass for a

Fairy God Mother in our times I suppose extraterrestrials are a pretty good choice. They scanned

her brain and saw something they didn’t expect. When most people think about some problem

they generally do this within a global work space. Any area of their neocortex that might have

some useful input into this problem becomes actively involved pretty much of its own accord if

you believe the pandemonium theory in which different areas of the brain pretty much call out

their claim to pertinence and the closest fit become more strongly connected to the problem.

Memories in working memory have priority in this mental activity. I’m thinking Cinderella is

different. When she considers a problem, memories established as pertinent get tracked into a

mental workspace not unlike everyone else, but at the same time the problem is handled by more

extensive unconscious processing that associates vast amounts of less closely related memories,

searching for unlikely associations that could turn out to be important. I’ve already described this

as insight processing. Cinderella’s brain does this simultaneously with the processing that works

in consecutive stages. Most people’s brains only begin insight processing if they come to an

impasse, like casting about for more associations when the tried and true fails them. By contrast,

insights frequently intervene within Cinderella’s conscious thoughts. This can result in some
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rather quirky mannerisms which she does her best to hide in public and especially at work. She

might suddenly look like she bit into something sour, or wince, or she may look blankly into

space for a few seconds as if put on pause. Most people’s brains are very slow at producing

novel thought and highly susceptible to comforting delusions like that we’re capable of

understanding things on a large scale by chunking language or that we’re together with special

others in the center of the world. Cinderella is sensitive to domains and conceptual schemes that

don’t fit together. That’s why she can sympathize with people who are normally excluded from

some inner circle. She is aware of domains outside of the domain she is in. Maybe this is in part

because, through working in one socio-economic realm and living in a very different one, she is

familiar with dissimilar worlds. The extraterrestrials take it for granted that awareness of

multiple domains in a non-abstract manner, and the ability to think through different conceptual

schemes is important for understanding a complex universe. Your thoughts can get interrupted

by these other domains which break concentration and correct the misconception that one

domain is central and of utmost importance. The extraterrestrials can switch between several

different conceptual schemes within a single conscious thought. Cinderella can’t do this, but she

can think using different conceptual schemes at different times and her brain can compare

information from different conceptual schemes unconsciously. On Earth, attending to more than

one domain has always been a disability, since we like to specialize and ignore the rest of society

to feel that we are highly knowledgeable. The extraterrestrials, since they’ve been traveling

through the enormous distances of interstellar space, never feel that they’re in the center of

anything. And they often get an expression on their faces as if they don’t have a single friend in a

universe that goes on forever. It’s like if you notice someone all alone, leaned against a building

say, and they don’t know you see them, and they have a distant, lonely look on their face, and
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there’s something special about that, I think, impressive if a little sad. It’s an expression

reflecting all that we as individuals are made up of that makes us different from everyone else

and alone in that sense. Cinderella tends to feel alone more than others of her species without

that presenting a problem. For her it is as intellectual as it is emotional. That’s why Bug Boy was

drawn to her, and why the extraterrestrials think she might be able to relate to entities so unlike

the humans that she has been required to hide her thoughts from.

I especially hate it when Beckett does this thing with his hand, moving his fingers up and

down against his thumb to imitate a mouth talking. He does this to tell me that what I’m saying is

stupid. Maybe my story is too much for him. I don’t know what an eight-year-old will be ready

for. Maybe Becket would rather have the original Cinderella. It’s simple. Cinderella is a good

person willing to work hard for others and is rewarded by winning the affections and wealthy

life-style of the Prince, but in the original story we must assume that the Prince is good by virtue

of his being a Prince. I find this a lot to swallow without any evidence to support this

assumption. But maybe Beckett would prefer this simple story. Maybe he thinks that by making

it more complex I’m destroying a simple joy. He’s my son, but he’s also my only reader and he

doesn’t want to read my stories anymore. He said that. Writing is the one thing, other than

Beckett, that has stuck with me.

I paid for music lessons for Beckett, on the piano, the violin, the guitar, and his teachers

were always struck by his fingering, his ability to produce a clear note, in short, his potential, but

he gave up one instrument after another before long and I think it’s because he always felt that

they belonged to other people. It drives me crazy because he always does well initially and it

isn’t about any potential he has or doesn’t have unless you include that he doesn’t seem to feel

that anything he does will make a difference. He doesn’t think he’s entitled to anything that isn’t
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packaged and sold to millions of children. He’s such a cute little guy and he does have

compassion for other people. It breaks my heart when he quickly loses interest in anything he

might develop a talent for. He watches animated features that show little geniuses inventing

fabulous technology in seconds. Maybe he wants to skip around from one thing to another to

combine a lot of different learning like I do, but I ask myself, how long will it take him to realize

that he must adequately study one subject before moving on to the next?