I’m so very pleased to announce that THE LIAR’S MARGIN will have both  German and Japanese editions!

We’re in the slot for February 2013 from Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books, and after that I’ll be getting books I wrote that I cannot read from the wonderful folks at Luebbe Publishing in Germany and Hayakawa in Japan. So thrilled!

I had certainly heard of India’s rich fables and parables, particularly, the Bhagavad Gita. But I didn’t know of its larger contextual epic, The Mahabharata. And I also didn’t know that I was poorer for it.

I had read Sharon Maas (writing here as Aruna Sharan) several years ago. Her gorgeous and riveting, OF MARRIAGEABLE AGE, is a treasure to me, as it is currently (but perhaps not for long) out of print. I was delighted for the opportunity to read a new work of hers.

SONS OF GODS: THE MAHABHARATA RETOLD is kaleidoscopic in its beauty and intricacy. The hurdle of the tale’s massive scope has always daunted translators, and the difficulty of prising the right tone from an ancient grand epic to suit a modern and Western audience has relegated it to largely academic obscurity.

What’s saved it for us is that Aruna Sharan knows full well that love, betrayal, lust, envy, pride, devotion, and heroism never go out of style. SONS OF GODS is a literary soap opera with a soul that spans the full horizon.

Love for the panoramic story itself and the patience of more than three decades of careful crafting has solved the literary puzzle of how to present it for an audience in the digital age. Aruna Sharan is well-suited in both talent and passion to deliver a new classic for lovers of mythology.

The unique category of mythology also makes SONS OF GODS a clever fit for Amazon’s Kindle publishing as a proving ground for its appeal. The price is incredible for a work of such excellence. Still, I hope for the day to hold it hardbound in my hands, as well. This isn’t just a book, it’s the Universe explained.

Now I like Carolee slightly more than I like Booker’s Small Batch Bourbon, but that’s only because if I emptied her out, she’d be gone forever. She’s unavailable at the liquor store and, as far as I know, they aren’t making anymore. So she’s precious whereas Booker’s is merely ridiculously good.

Off with you, then. Go read up and tip a nod to Carolee’s health at your first sip.

I’ll still do my daily nose ablutions, BUT I’ll be boiling the water every time. (I tend to do this anyway to steam off some of the chlorine.)

It seems that two deaths in Louisiana are linked to a rare amoeba infection delivered by neti pot-ing with contaminated tap water. Yikes. Double yikes. All the yikes, actually.

I still don’t understand how the brain is exposed to the amoeba. Personally, mine’s all covered up with my palate, sinuses, and meninges. Safe, not sorry, I suppose will have me boiling up the water first from now on…

I’ve wanted this so much, for so long, that I don’t quite recognize myself without the pangs of worry over it. I’m also having a hell of a time getting rid of the aftertaste of despair-flavored hope. I’m gonna go buy a tongue-scraper while I wait for 2013.

If you have a cocktail sometime in the coming days, raise a toast to dreams come true and I shall be with you in spirit and spirit.

Still dedicated to the process, but have updated for caution. (Click here)

Over the past four years, I’ve become an evangelist of sorts.  What I’m preaching certainly won’t save your soul, but then again, if you’re not sick at home and confined to bed, you might just be freed up for doing whatever it is that will set you on the path of righteousness.  So who knows?  I could very well be an instrument of Mysterious Ways.

As it stands, no one our household has suffered a headcold or allergic discomfort in nearly five years, which is especially impressive when you consider that my daughters spend five days a week in the petri dish of public school.  We’re generally healthy and hygienic people, but I have to attribute a great deal of our successful run to the regular use of a neti pot.  Once I’ve gotten into my sermon, at least four times a year,  I get asked, “What’s a neti pot?”

So, here is my take on the answer to The Answer:

As my layman’s understanding guides me, it’s basically that allergens – dust, dander, pollen, what have you – settle in your sinuses and cause an inflammatory response.  This manifests as stuffiness, runniness, and pressure, which causes headaches, earaches, fatigue, and that general crap feeling that sends us to the bottle or blister pack of our favorite antihistamine.  A dose later and you are, in effect, trading one rotten feeling (sleepiness and loopiness) for another.

Rhinovirus (the common cold) works in a similar way, but it also hunkers down to the business of replication, turning your front sinuses into an evil incubator until, in addition to the aggravated inflammation, your body also has to produce fever and marshal up the rest of its attack force, which brings on aches, pain, fatigue, and lots of mucus.  And, of course, more over the counter medicine that switches out symptoms for side effects.

The neti pot is a thousand year old remedy that allowed Hindus to practice their ritual breathing comfortably, but it works on a brilliantly simple premise: rinse out the allergens and rhinovirus and they will not have a chance to irritate and replicate.

So now, all you have to do is head to your local drugstore or upscale grocery (Greenlife, Whole Foods, Earthfare, that sort of thing.) The nice grocers are more likely to have the ceramic neti pots, which I prefer, but the plastic ones work fine too and are good for traveling. The premixed saline packets are handy, or the formula is 1/2 liter of warm water mixed with 1 teaspoon non-iodized sea salt and a pinch of baking soda. (The trick is to get enough salt – too little, counterintuitivey, burns like hell.) I prefer to boil my water first (see addendum at the top of this article – boiling the water is a very good idea), but many people do just fine with tap water. It sort of depends on the local chlorine levels and individual tolerance.  You can safely do several neti pots a day if you find yourself sick or particularly vulnerable at certain times of the year.

There are plenty of videos on youtube showing how it works, but really you just tilt your head over the sink, pour the water into one nostril and let it run out the other.  Halfway through the pot, you switch sides.  Here’s a good, quick video that manages not to be gross. Relief is nearly instant and there are no side effects.

The first few times, you may have to rein yourself in. It feels a bit scary, but my youngest has been doing it since she was four years old and she’s not particularly brave.

Here are a few tips that you should keep in mind:

- do get enough salt into the mix: 1tsp to 500ml of water (the premixed packets are good for one full neti pot of water)

-do not swallow while pouring the neti pot through.  This can force water into your ears and does not feel good.

-have tissues handy; blow gently when you switch sides

-if the water doesn’t flow freely, relax, that just means your sinuses are swollen. Give it a minute and they’ll give way.

-take your neti pot on trips (plastic ones and prepackaged solution are great for this.)  It is so easy to get sick on an airplane.  Do your neti pot as soon as you disembark.  Seriously, it could save your vacation.

I find it best to do every day. It’s like brushing my teeth and I just do it as a matter of course before bedtime.  It’s wonderful to breathe easily when you lay down to sleep.  But if you don’t make it a daily routine, do it at the *very first* sign of a headcold. Once the virus gets a chance to replicate, it’s an uphill battle. Same with allergies. (Two people I know have been able to completely give up their daily allergy medication after they switched to the neti pot.)

Hope it works for you!

(April 2007)

Lived.  Loved.   Wanted.

Was.

There is very little in this world more hateful than the past tense.  The verb is the word that grants shape to all we do, so that we can capture our energy and feel it in the space between our tongues and palates.  The verb that names the action is the word that lets us be it.  But weigh the word down with an –ed, or warp its spelling through some quirk of grammar, and all’s lost.  She’s not running.  He’s not laughing.  They no longer smile at each other.  Ran, laughed, smiled.  Requiem for a state of being.

Of course, this deliberately ignores what the past tense frees us from.  ‘Wept’ and there’s no more crying.   ‘Healed’ and the injury is over.  Some occasions are appropriate for optimistic pirouettes, and it can be a healthy thing to study the flip side of a coin.  But too often we powder over the glare of a hard and shiny truth: that sometimes it’s noble to feel the moment, to let the ache gnaw all the way to the bone.  That’s its job.  Who are we to thwart its purpose?

The past tense hurts.  The past tense skewers.  And the past tense is the thief of hope.

Recently, I attended a funeral for a young woman.  I didn’t know her well.  I went because people I know and care for were heartbroken.  I expected to be some small comfort; hoped to show her family that their daughter, sister, and friend was worth dropping everything for; that their pain warranted driving nine hours just to stand with them.  The reality was that I got knocked sideways only two steps into the funeral home.

Grief and loss frame the doorway to the afterlife.  The dead don’t mind.  It’s behind them, and it is what’s next that begs appraisal.  Only the living wail at the threshold they cannot cross.

I’d been to funerals where that grief and loss had dragged over me in waves, but I’d never felt the press of shock heaped on top of those as well.  It was crushing.  Theresa was twenty-one years old, beautiful, healthy, and loved by many.  It was far too keen, the reality of all that she would not do.  So, I took exception to the priest’s benign diversion from our wallowing with his attention to the biblical story of Lazarus. He seemed a very kind man, the priest.  Sincere.  I liked him.  And he has a job to do.  But so do I.

Neither the Bible, nor Christ himself, offers a reason for his resurrection of Lazarus.  The man and his sisters, according to the story, were close personal friends of Jesus and when Lazarus fell ill, his sisters sent for the one person they believed could do something about it.  The Gospel of John tells us that “Jesus tarried.”

Lazarus died and Jesus absorbed no small amount of rebuke from Mary, the more spirited of the two remaining siblings.  Jesus shushed her, and the crowd, by having the tombstone rolled back and calling to Lazarus, who came shambling out in his shroud to stand blinking in the sun for all their amazement.

God doesn’t do that anymore.  It’s been accepted as an anecdotal one-off to prove a point, and the certainty of Mysterious Ways would have us no more praying for Him to wake the dead than we’d stand in front of a vat of water and plead for wine.  Not these days.

So, unfortunately, Lazarus and his sisters enjoying an extended time together on earth does little to comfort modern mourners keeping vigil at a casket that will not rattle with promise.  What’s done is done.  That being the case, I submit there is a time to let the tide carry you away and that it is inappropriate to tell the newly bereft that there’s a bright lining  if they’d only look at it a certain way.

Time heals all wounds.  All of them.  Whether we want it to or not.  Sometimes it feels like the hurt is the only link we have to the thing we miss.  Deep down, we know that the first morning we wake up feeling fine is the day it’s lost to us forever.  And we won’t even notice when it happens, only realize it in retrospect.

There is no bridge from the time that life is a misery to the time life is back to normal. But there is a moat.  It’s deep and it’s cold and the opposite bank’s upward slope is so terribly gradual.  When we find ourselves wading into the water or thrown in, headlong and unsuspecting, I think it only right to shun the platitudes and pay full, wrenching homage to the disorder of the universe.  I don’t believe clergymen or therapists or garden variety well-wishers should try too soon to distract us from the suffering.  The one we loved was worth it.  The sharpness of the pain will end in its own time, with or without premature stories of other people’s miracles or how life goes on.

The past tense is inevitable, for good things and bad.  It’s omnipotent.  As such, it deserves its due like any devil, and it deserves its deference like any god.

For Tica, RIP

May 19, 1985 – April 16, 2007

(My lovely friend, Kim Michele Richardson, issues Valentine’s Day prompts. And so, I write.)

I am not very romantic. Also, I’m so selectively sentimental that I couldn’t fault anyone for wondering what manner of shabby, rusty-hinged strongbox holds my shriveled little raisin of a heart.

But I do love. Make no mistake, I love most fiercely. And I love most matter-of-factly.

Love, like most everything else outside of oatmeal and arch supports, has both a mystical and a practical side. What separates love from the summer wind, though, is that its workaday aspects are too often overlooked and, more importantly, too often underappreciated.

To be sure, lush verse on the kindness of a sun-kissed breeze reveals God’s own contented sighs, but still, no one seems to forget that a windmill can run your generator and a hurricane can blow your house down.

Love, on the other hand, is almost universally represented in glowing intangibles this time of year. The lofty promise of romantic connection gets tangled up in the hope of one soul relieving another of fundamental solitude. I would probably debate whether that is even possible and I’d likely take up the position that it’s not. Solitary confinement in our own heads is, I believe, the font of both creativity and madness, but that’s not a Valentine’s Day concern.

There is no finer feeling than the tingling gold geyser of requited attraction.  The magic in a dose of narcotic or the esoteric revelations after a thimbleful more red wine than you should have had also fall into that same category, albeit a bit lower down in nobility. And yet, these drugs come with warning labels reminding us of the danger in disrespecting the very practical chemistry that we’re playing with.

Addiction to a notion can be as toxic as dependency on a pill or a potion. But what anchors a dream?  What tips the high end of the fairytale seesaw so we can climb aboard? It’s reality that does it.  Hammers and nails. Bread and butter.  Death and taxes. Food, water, and shelter. And it’s not as sad as it sounds.

Love is most definitely that sudden swooping through your midsection when eyes lock across a table or a crowded room. It is the uncertain certainty that no one else could make you feel this way. It’s proof of a soul, if you’re looking for proof. It’s all of these things.

But it is also picking up your socks and not withholding courtesy.  Love is in the not snarling at the end of a tough day and it’s in making a shared space a better place than, say, the train queue or the PTA meeting or the wait on the tarmac for clearance from flight control. Love lives in the ‘please’ and the ‘thank you’ and ‘can I get you something while I’m up’. And, if you enjoy heat measured in Farhenheit (or Celsius) and not just its sexy metaphorical cousin, these things are as fine as all the soft-focus moments of understanding; just as good as all the fairy tales.

By all means, send flowers this Valentine’s Day. Have a candlelit dinner or add a plush teddy bear to the collection.  Tell your loved one of his or her beauty. But beyond that, love this Valentine’s Day. It makes the world go ‘round, but more in the nut n’ bolts way than a lacy greeting card might lead you to appreciate.

If you don’t love the daily maintenance of Love, I promise it will disappoint you.

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While I wait, tell me things:

1) Who taught you to drive?

2) How many cars have you owned? And what color (and make/model if you’re feeling chatty)?

3) Have you ever required the services of a tow truck?

4) Have you ever driven the wrong way down a one-way street?

5) If you could have any reasonably practical, drive-around-daily car, what would it be?

6) Are you the sort to park at the back and walk or hawk the front parking spaces until something opens up?

and

7) Do you a) let other people drive your car happily? b) allow it with a frozen smile of ire-and-anxiety-trying-to-pass-for-agreeability? or c) Are you? seriously? Are you looking at my keys? Do piss off and come back to me when you’ve regained your senses.