or, maybe it’s just liver season
Sunday 7 February 2010 | I like a cookie
I mean, it is liver season. And I’ve been drinking this detox tea for springtime, and maybe that’s what’s making me want to rip phone books in half (as Herself used to say of, well, herself, when around mid-sesshin she started feeling the joriki—or maybe I used to say it—I do recollect her admitting, “I feel like I could put my arms around a huge tree and just pull it up! By the roots!” But maybe that was me too. I’m old, I can’t remember jack shit anymore).
Anyway, since I’m mentioning this tea which is maybe helping make me into worse of an asshole than I already am, let me at least show you the insanely pretty thing out of which I’m drinking it. Pictures fail to represent it, though.
This vessel was a decadent splurge on my part—I fought it for days, because of corporate evil Stbx plus made-in-China plus everything else, but dude, in the end how could I not, because OMG RARE PURPLE CLAY. Also it’s called “Gobelet Magique,” for chrissakes people what do you want from me.
Anyway I caved and bought it and it does keep my tea warm and it keeps me off the streets. That is, I suspect that in difficult moments, contemplating its beauty meditatively in the classroom keeps me from being unnecessarily viciously sarcastic with my more racist/sexist students (also I put the Third Step Prayer on a little card where I can see it and I take deep fucking breaths and grin a lot, unnaturally, disingenuously, like Tony Blair). Remind me sometime to tell you about the final project which one student submitted last semester, to which project my officemates and I now refer as “Big Bag O’ Racism,” and which we show to current students as an example of How to Not Get an A from Us. Hint: it has a feathered Plains Native “headdress” in it, made of dyed chicken feathers and construction paper. And the student who made it is Persian.
She’s lucky I was in the hospital and the department got someone else to grade my papers, otherwise I would have failed her overachieving Asian-American pre-med ass. As it was I think she got a B-minus. She’s a good kid; I just clearly didn’t teach her anything. Do they make a tea for that?
fuck it
Sunday 7 February 2010 | I like a cookie
I mean, everyone else is doing it, so why not me?
Does that mean we’ve finally succeeded in killing Faceborg? So much of me wants to walk away from this crusty rusty disgusting ancient thing, and hook up with my shiny new URL, and hide from those of you whom I don’t want to know certain things, and from whom I don’t want “feedback.” And at the same time I feel too old to care, like when I wear my plastic reading glasses in front of my students and stick my unwashed hair up with a pencil. I mean, I’m forty already. My favorite people keep dying. And in the immortal words of the late Mrs. Richard P. Feynman, what do I care what people think?
Not bloody much. The Brujo and I are on the rocks and have been since last summer. I was in and out of the hospital again the first week of December, and was prescribed a bunch of meds which were great at first and then fucked me up even worse all through January, and am not on any meds now even though I almost certainly should be, and am almost certainly therefore headed toward another mental bust-up again; as a result of all this chaos however I emerged with a really stunningly good new therapist and a pretty decent non-crazy AlAnon sponsor (as opposed to the last one, who was like, a mega-Protestant Jesus-lady who wanted me to get a prayer partner and I just could not cope, try as I might; and as opposed to my awesome original temporary long-distance sponsor, who was so wonderful but was a) long-distance and b) male).
So that happened. Then it also came about that (in a disorganized nutshell): my Arizona friends proved to be just totally fucking stand-up, and likewise my beloved long-distance friends (some of whom are now more long-distance, since Persephone moved to Germany); my thesis is due by April 8, and I’m defending on April 22, and have to finish my comps (written exams) by March 12, as well as an incomplete (thank to the whole December escapade); I have 42 second-semester composition students and an equal number of drafts to be commented upon by tomorrow, so we’re back to that again; I’m waiting to find out whether USC will take me for their PhD program in poetry (though it’s pretty unlikely, given the volume of applicants) and if they don’t (should know by the end of February) I’ll start looking for a job teaching lit (but how? where? with what credentials? God, don’t bloody ask me); I don’t know where the Brujo and I will move or if we’ll be able to stay together; my wrist/arm tendons and back/neck muscle spasms are of course flaring up; my eyes are disintegrating and apparently I suddenly need progressive-lensed trifocals? (or just three separate and unique pairs of prescription glasses for distance/computer/reading); my car got totalled just before Thanksgiving (but I wasn’t in it; my neighbor backed into it while parked, with his F250 truck, in a hurry one Monday morning) and I haven’t yet replaced it; my parents are completely and deliberately kept in the dark about pretty much the entirety of this, but especially about the fact that I stayed, on and off last summer/fall, with people other than the B. and at places other than my home, and that I asked the B. to leave for three weeks in October—about that they know nothing, and about my hospital stay; the logic board on my iMac is failing and have to buy a new computer, which, whatever, I should shut up because at least I can afford to do this; Fiona died, a really harsh and messy death, which I’m hiding in here like it’s not that important, but, dear God; the Brujo got back into recovery and I think is doing better, though he said he was doing fine before, so who the hell am I to say whether he’s doing better; and I’m in the middle of writing a long-ass, weird-ass, angry-ass poem in which Mary is a porn star and Jesus is a porn addict and it all has something to do with candy-flavored lithium citrate syrup and Vietnamese Zen monks.
And none of this is in any order.
And I refuse to edit it or apologize for it or rearrange any of it to be softer or prettier or more rhetorically effective; and if you don’t like it then would you please just not read it, okay, and just go away.
There were brilliant, brilliant, things that happened in 2009, and I don’t want to overlook them, and the main one was probably reading Infinite Jest, and various other stunning pieces of writing; but there were others; and there were amazing friendships, for which I am falling-over grateful, forged out of the muck of my lunacy and their generosity of spirit; and when I am less pissy-sounding I’ll tell you about them. Overall Al-Anon has been a damn good thing, and I think so were my dabblings in CoSA and CODA and pretty much any fucking -Anon I could find (I looked for Brujo-Anon but they don’t make it. Yet.). None of it, though, was able to keep me out of the ER and off the goddamn locked unit from roughly December 1-8, but there’s only so much a crizazy woman can handle before folding entirely, even with a decent (but not great) DBT therapist, even having had all the tenderness and all the advantages this one has had and still gets.
It’s weird how “little” stuff like not being able to see properly, and not having a car, and finals week, can throw a privileged body into quote “catastrophe.” Not to even use that word, really, because, hello, Haiti, and serious luxury problems, and my discovery that I use the adjective “homeless” as gratuitously as my parents say “black,” and all the other bougeoise hangups which I put on with my Old Navy jeans every morning (when I get dressed). Some people are in prison, some people use, some people are never going to be even as okay as I mostly am, some people wear hotel uniforms and clean up after me for no reason other than, they got stuck with it. My laughable middle-class problems are whatever, really pretty abhorrent, but that doesn’t make them go away and we all already know this why am I even bothering to say it. I type just waiting for this Mac to crash again, it’s already done it ten times today, and you know I only hope that if they find me dead at my desk like Robert Parker, I’m actually writing and not just looking at handbags on fucking etsy. Or if I keel over at ninety in my miserable (bravely self-chosen?) isolation like Jerome David, may there actually be something inside there when they finally blow the safe.
I sound like a bitch and probably am. I blamed the Brujo for his behaviors and choices and at times wanted to strangle him, and then definitely wanted to strangle myself (because who would be such a murderous evil thing? she should be strangled) but you know I wouldn’t just walk away from it. If equal affection cannot be, let the more fucked-up one be me. Whatever. I don’t want to talk about it. Why am I talking about it? I seem to want to talk about it, but just not to want to hear what anyone else has to say back about it. I don’t want to hear what you have to say about it. But I want to say it in public. That’s obnoxious and that’s why I’ve been writing poems the last year. They’re better than they were, but they’re not great or even good. But I can be a contrarian cunt in them and no one sends me email afterward. Only just various professional readers are all, um, yeah, so I don’t understand these, you can obviously write a clear straightforward prose line thus why are you hiding and intentionally convoluting and being wilfully obfuscatory? Why can’t you just write and quit with all the fancy lacy lazy ornamental fa-la-la you-don’t-see-me-I’m-not-here gorilla dust—
Fuck if I know.
And now, beautiful irony, I’m going to drive el B. to meet with his new sponsee, so that I can have the car, because I don’t have my own car yet, and I don’t even know why I want the car other than to go to Al-Anon at 7:45 and sit there seething and resenting everything, starting with my job and my recovering-alcoholic boyfriend and my shitty poems and just moving on from there to further glories. Which is, yes, pretty much the antithesis of Al-Anon, and being grateful, and Receiving the Priceless Gift of Serenity. But that’s how it is half the days, which is better than all the days? so hey.
I have a bunch of pictures for you (who are you?) or for me, or someone, and a zillion links, like a year’s worth; but I don’t even know. I can’t even write this.
This is just an attempt. Don’t expect anything. Seriously, just stop. Don’t expect any more. I’m again lucky to be alive again and I don’t know what any of us will get out of any of it. Read other better blogs which are uplifting and inspirational and good and true; and woud you just leave me howling alone. Get out of here.
Yes you. Go on, now, beat it. Vamos. Scram.
thank you for playing
Friday 16 October 2009 | 3 cookies in the jar
I apologize to the few of you out there who were still faithfully reading and got your hopes up (or had them dashed): This blog is officially done for—archived, no longer open for business, and pining for the fjords. There will very likely be another at some point, presumably labeled with a postgraduate Real Name™, and if so we will certainly let you know. The Unnarrator had a good innings and we thank you all for coming to the party—you made it be what it was. Never change. Well, or only your clothes, sometimes. When they get a bit musty.
shut up and drive
Thursday 15 October 2009 | I like a cookie
we’re never going to make the light
but it’s all right
tonight you will be mine
tonight the monkey dies
“At the 2008 End of the Road festival in Dorset, Sparhawk abruptly ended the band’s performance by ripping the strings and lead [sic] out of his guitar, throwing it to the ground and then hurling it into the crowd before exiting the stage. He had earlier informed the audience that it had been a ‘crappy day.’ ”
Also sprach Wiki. Which maybe explains why his intonation is so off throughout this performance. But I still love Mimi’s drumming, and the ending, starting around 3:15 (though the snare sounds too high, live). I know there are people who find The Great Destroyer way too accellerated (including me). But its bleak surly denunciation of using—the way it informs addiction, unapologetically, that the grudge-match is on—worked for me as I drove to tonight’s meeting, knowing perfectly well that there is no night, ever, when you can make the monkey die. Not even if you’re a Mormon.
multiform
Thursday 15 October 2009 | 2 cookies in the jar
A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world. (Marcus Rothkowitz)
Now where was I, before I so rudely interrupted myself?
This is going to be harder than I thought.
Maybe the way is to sidle up to it. Not try to tell you any coherent story of the last few months (as if such a thing were possible anyway) but just tell you about last night. Which is fairly straightforward. Maybe.
(I type this while also tentatively picking at a piece of blueberry cheesecake, which I could only manage to take a bite of last night, and drinking a cup of rooibos caramel tea, cos it’s finally cool enough for tea, and can you believe I’m wearing sweatpants? and my beloved blue-gray hoodie, gracias a October.)
So last night, I would normally have been teaching the free community poetry workshop from 4:30-6:30 (which only has three students, but they are all three so loyal and committed and, well, desperate for poetry that I couldn’t bring myself to cancel the class, which we’re supposed to do if there are fewer than five students who sign up, but anyway)—but there was a reading by a really lovely poet instead. Having been bone-tired for days due to and so I decided not to go to the reading either (but you can hear her read a haibun, a hybrid form I am excited to screw around with in calmer times, when those return). That meant I could 1) go see Bright Star on its last night, 2) stay home and watch a Michael Winterbottom film lent me by a thoughtful friend, about which film (Code 46) I know next to nothing, or 3) stay home and read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I bought over the summer at the thrift store for 50¢, Mandarin having recommended it highly to me in 2005, and to which I am suddenly and most completely addicted, because of its brilliant period spellings (chuse, surprize, scissars!) and because it is like Jane Austen, only except if Mr Bennett and Mr Darcy were, you know, practicing magicians.
But instead of doing any of these things, at 7 pm I abruptly decided to go to an Al-Anon meeting—which is how I spend a great many of my free evenings, starting July 3, when I literally dragged myself kicking and screaming to my very first one, probably partly as a result of reading Infinite Jest, but perhaps more as a result of realizing that I was in imminent danger of strangling the Brujo. (But still I refused to raise my hand when the chair asked if there were any newcomers, a refusal which I justified by telling myself that I’d been to CODA meetings in Santa Fe and they were practically the same.) I don’t normally go to the Wednesday night meeting, for the reason given in the previous paragraph, but also because I don’t much like that meeting—they give out tickets for sharing, which I don’t think they wouldn’t have to do if the business announcements didn’t take up twenty minutes of the meeting, but anyway—
I went. And as I drove down to some church or another (it’s disconcerting that the meetings are always in Sunday school classrooms, decorated with moralizing posters of how to sneeze and cough and display other virtues, and then these sinister-looking crayonings of freakish “people” hanged from the ceiling by clothesline, e.g., or in another room a wall-chart with the bizarre header, HAVE YOU EVER FOUND ANY MONEY, and then “Yes” and “No” columns, placed at about kid-height, and many scrawly names under the “Yes” but none under the “No,”—)
—and so as I drove, since I now go everywhere now with iPod firmly grafted into brainpan (THANK YOU GORGON), the better to keep me from Thinking, I found myself, through the beauty of the shuffle, listening to a song I haven’t particularly liked since college, so roughly, what, 15 years ago, and here it was now, and now I was listening to it, and I heard it. And wanted you to hear it too.
the blue it speaks so full
it’s like a beauty you can barely stand
or too much things dropped in your hand
and there’s a green like the peace in your heart
sometimes
printed underneath the sheets of ashy snow
and there’s a blue like where the urban angels go
very bright
•
So obviously the Brujo and I are, are, isn’t not, we’re just, um, yeah. Obviously.
I mean, obviously that’s why I quit blogging. Nothing else would have really stopped me. Well, maybe it’s not obvious to you. It’s only obvious to me. And would you look at this, I can’t even write about it yet. I just discovered. My stomach started churning typing this much, and my palms are suddenly shvitzing something ghastly. So I have to type about other things. This should be entertaining. And fragmented. Because I am, right now. Completely in, little disparate, small pieces.
•
your behavior is so male it’s like
you can’t explain yourself to me
I think I’ll ask renoir to tea
for his flowers are as real as they are
all the time
and the sunlight sets the furniture aglow
it’s a pleasant time as far as people go
(how far do they go)
his roses are perfect and his words have no wings
I know what he can give me
and I like to know these
things
•
So Dar’s “Mark Rothko Song” (which I think she ruins innocently, her own song, as many of us do, just because of being in her glib twenties, and I think I cover it much better, at forty and coarsely speaking it over a very plain piano line)—but it made me think of many things, but the one of which it most made me think at that moment, standing in the graveled unlit parking lot, in the shadow of some hideous yellow-brick Protestant 1970s era structure or another, waiting to go into the room with the taped paper sign AL-ANON SPOKEN HERE, of David Wallace. It made me remember how petulant and shut out of non-traditional fiction I used to feel, for decades, how impotent, how shaking my delicate fist at its tightly shut door. Exactly (as the songwriter puts it) like a woman, or like me, when I recite the DBT question listed under Interpersonal Effectiveness as “Turning the Tables” (quoting it word-for-word, because I’m too terrified to think of my own words, so I fall back gratefully on the overlearned scripts): I’m not able to accept this behavior (heart pounding again) and yet you really seem to want me to; what do you think we should do?
And the gentleman in question looks away, or says I don’t know, or says we should talk about it later, and later turns into weeks which turns into a month or months, or he changes the subject and I permit this, or he points out something suddenly very interesting happening elsewhere in the landscape, such as at the city park where people are winding themselves up on the big black tractor-tire swings and then releasing the chains in a wild circle, laughing like hyenas, and he says They are going to be so sick! and I wonder despite myself, Do I exist?—(and the churning stomach again, will he read this, will you read this, will anyone be mad at me, will you think you know what I am saying, will you foreclose on what I am still trying to say, just what do I think I’m doing, will your suffering be increased by what I say, how can telling the truth be so harmful, we made such amends except where to do so would cause further harm to them or others, should I move this blog, should I axe this blog, should I mercy-quash it the way the Brujo this summer had to step forcefully on a half-crushed baby salamander to put it out of its wriggly suffering, only its nervous system was still twitching, the thing was dead already, should I go back to paper journals as I have done all summer, what do people do, how do they start anything, how do they stop anything, how do we move, how is it that we are able to go on, to go about in the world, to make anything at all)—
I conflate incidents, I rearrange mutually agreed-upon observations to suit an invisible aesthetic of my own, it pleases some and displeases others, it makes my heart race and my stomach pump out extra hydrochloric acid.
On the outside we are clean and on the inside everyone is full of vomit.
And in general nothing happens. Watch the movie with the sound off, a person with a lot of sobriety advised me; and when I do that, it is all very clear. To me if not to you. There is no you.
You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, you can’t change it. In Al-Anon this heuristic is called “The Three Cs” and I have half-a-mind to declare that the Three Cs are useful when it comes to reading non-accommodating recent literature (Annie Dillard’s “contemporary modernism”) too. You can either be in the relationship with that book exactly the way it is, or you just can’t.
The funny thing is how, with exposure, the incomprehensible becomes totally translucent. The first dozen pages of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which I literally couldn’t see in 2003—I remember black squiggles on white paper, and meaninglessness, and frustration, and crestfallenness, like when your lover is forced to stop you and tell you gently, I’m sorry honey, all that work you’re doing, all that trouble you’re going to down there? is really doing nothing for me,—but then at some point something changes silently in your brain, or your birth-chart, or just you’ve been in this body a certain length of time, or whatever, and then the impenetrable text parts before you like two halves of a buttery ripe peach and you dazedly enter and everything is Easy.
It was that way with me and Infinite Jest. It was as straightforward to me as a Dickens novel, and I’m not sure why people, i.e. me, got so bent out of shape about it.
Yes, I do like to know these things, these definite roses, this furniture. But I also like when I don’t know what it can give me, too. That is being a person, surely. To both like what I already know I want, or anyway think I know I want; and also to like what I don’t yet know that I like. Think about the first time you ate an olive.
•
I met her at the funeral she said
I don’t know what he meant to me
I just know he affected me
an effect not unlike his art I believe
the service starts and we are in the know
he had so much to say but more to show
so we weep for a person who lived at great cost
but we barely knew his powers till we sensed what we had
lost
•
There’s always shame. Plenty of, buckets and ponds and bathtubs overflowing. That of being a tourist at one man’s death, a tourist in his oeuvre. Then there are the ways in which I’ve been a tourist in my heart. Not showing up for my own consciousness, because I haven’t exactly even wanted to wake up to what I’m seeing and feeling. Easier to tell myself I have no right to observe it or let it affect me. I’m ashamed of the complicated furious rationalization which masquerades as thinking.
At one point I had a whole line of fancy mentation going about how, if I went to Al-Anon meetings because the Brujo needed to go to AA meetings, then wasn’t I just going for him, as his proxy, instead of him, taking that burden off him and therefore becoming the one to carry the responsibility of Going to Meetings, and just making it easier for him to not? And I told the Brujo all this, because I didn’t yet know to whom else I could tell it, and he listening, throwing the red tennis ball for Fiona, and finally said, quite sensibly: Well, if you’re not going to meetings because you think that would stop me from going to meetings? Then that’s probably a sign that, um, you really need to start going to meetings.
I laughed crossly and agreed. Then I did. On the first Friday in July I went, seething with resentment. But only because the alternative would have been (in my mind), lying in the spare bed in my office staring at the wall and listening to him typing on his computer and cultivating a fine case of the mean reds.
Right away I started seeing some of what I had been very hard at work trying not to see.
I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones, its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture that does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me. (Rothko)
•
a friend and I in a museum room
she says look at mark rothko’s side
did you know about his suicide
some folks were born with a foot in the grave
but not me of course
and she smiles as if to say we’re in the know
then she names a coffee place that we can go
up town
now the paintings are desperate but the crowds wash away
in a world of tired pedestrians who’ve seen enough today
The painting is desperate. The writing is desperate, by nature. It begs to be seen, it demands to be taken in. I insert the sentence into a poem: You have to read this. (Having stolen it from a fine painter and a truly killer temporary long-distance sponsor, who just happens to turn up in my life 20 years after we first meet, exactly when I need to hear exactly what he has to say.) I say this sentence now triumphantly, even cruelly: I am making you read this, I am making you see these words and know what they mean whether you wish it.
There is only one way to not read it, and that is not to buy or even open the book. If you type the letters “theunreliablenarrator.net” into a vacant field, the machine will obediently bring you here. Don’t come here. That is the only prophylaxis I can offer. Don’t go there. Or, read this page with your eyes closed. Or blindfolded. This will also protect you. I am telling you this now.
Another reason why I stopped writing here is just that I started writing elsewhere, of course. Like right now, it’s 11 am, I started this around 9 am, and I didn’t write the poem I was supposed to write today for forms class (a villanelle, but at least I did get an idea for one yesterday—a nasty corruption of Sexton’s ballad refrain: “At night, alone, I bury the head.”)—I kind of would like to graduate from this program this time, unlike with Boston (because I still owe them $2400, in that case; but still). So I don’t know. I should maybe only post every few days or every week or something. Because I am writing a thesis.
I don’t know what I’m doing, I told the Brujo with the blown-open candor which seems to mark many of my utterances in the last week or so. I’ve never done this before, or anything like this. It is terra incognita, he agreed nervously. Part of what is unknown about it for me, is that I have in some sense apparently stopped trusting him, or have paused in my trusting. I don’t know if trust is a feeling or a belief—presumably the latter, in which case, it can presumably be reconstructed. Rudolf Steiner wrote:
Create for yourself a new, indomitable perception of faithfulness. What is usually called faithfulness passes so quickly. Let this be your faithfulness:
You will experience moments—fleeting moments—with the other person.
The human being will appear to you then as if filled, irradiated, with the archetype of his Spirit.
And then there may be—indeed will be—other moments. Long periods of time, when human beings are darkened. But you will learn to say to yourself at such times: “The Spirit makes me strong. I remember the archetype. I saw it once. No illusion, no deception shall rob me of it.”
Always struggle for the image that you saw. This struggle is faithfulness.
Striving thus for faithfulness, we shall be close to one another, as if endowed with the protective powers of angels.
Just prior to last night’s meeting, the aforementioned temporary/long-distance sponsor-shaped person had suggested to my hysterical ass that I read all the entries under “Detachment” in the reader, Courage to Change. I read a couple and sighed inwardly and gave up and drove to the meeting. As I walked in the door, the chairperson was in a dither because she couldn’t find a copy of the book from which she was supposed to read and share (it was what’s called, amusingly enough, a literature meeting). Another group member randomly suggested she read from Courage to Change. “Why don’t you read the readings on ‘Detachment’?” I sat down resignedly in my ugly taupe metal folding chair.
I can’t even describe to you the facts of what’s been happening, because half of the story isn’t mine to tell. I can only tell my internal perspective, with half-sketched or hinted-at externals, or no externals. Like a stage set for a play by Brecht, or Dogville. My part is that I am devastated and sick, and am not sure how it is possible to live as a couple again, and am not sure how to get help or to move forward, or where to move in any direction at all, and I go about my M-F schedule in an automated manner, and I suddenly read a bunch of books with hideous avocado-green 70s covers and typography, and crushingly chastening titles like, The Dilemma of the Alcoholic Marriage.
None of it would be possible, the humility to say nothing of the humiliation of entering this jargon-riddled program filled with toenail-polished, frosted-haired Christian ladies with capacious handbags, were it not for Wallace. That’s just true. I am Roy Tony, and Don Gately. I do whatever they tell me to do.
They say to pray on my knees every morning so I do it. I hope it’s okay that I imagine God as looking a lot like Hannah Arendt, world-weary but sage, smoking her cigarette. I think of her as like my analyst or something. And I always end the prayers, lamely, “…and I hope You have a good day too. Call me if you need anything, okay? Love you—bye.”
They say, live and let live. And one thing I already discovered is, you have to live, before you can let live.
So being unreliable here will look like this, now, because it is living.
I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one’s arms again. (Rothko)
game on
Tuesday 13 October 2009 | 3 cookies in the jar
Though more of each day is dark,
though he’s awkward at the job,
he squeezes paint from a tube.
Hazard is back at work.
(William Meredith)
throat-clearing
Saturday 9 May 2009 | 9 cookies in the jar
And if you don’t want to hang around for the sound check, no one would blame you a bit. It’s just that, classes being officially over (though I haven’t read or graded my students’ final papers yet), I have a bit of free time to, you know, brood copiously and spangle your feedreader with pretty pictures.
But first of all…who are you, mysterious Vancouver reader, who is patiently trudging through all the dreary ancient entries of my blog? I’m worried about you. If you’re reading this I want you to stretch, stand up, and walk over to the window and look outside for a moment, breathing deeply. Go on. I’m watching. It’s just that I myself have so many brain-in-a-jar issues with attempted cyborgian meshing, with all the attendant forgetting to eat and forgetting to pee and forgetting I even have limbs—and I want you to live to read another day. You are so kind to be reading all this at all.
It’s six a.m. and the house is quiet and the world is calm. Well, okay, the air conditioner is roaring and the fan on the Mac is roaring and birds are tweeting outside with some perverse kind of aggro aestival cheer. Pyewacket is sacked out flat on the carpet, completely relaxed, her fur blowing in the icy draft of air from above, her ecorexic owners having finally given up and turned on the a/c, accepting (however resentfully) that summer isn’t really so much a-cumin in as it is actually now in fact here, particularly when I insisted on baking batches of cupcakes last night for three hours at 350º. Because we had a party.
We had a party! It was the usual silly annual affair, observed faithfully, marked by my deciding to do everything at the last minute, everything in this case including making red velvet cupcakes and buttercream frosting from scratch (for some reason they turned out kinda dry, though—maybe because I cooked them forty minutes instead of twenty? do you think?), and enormous platters of “sushi” AKA nori rolled around sticky rice etc., which rolls an amiable colleague suggested be called not futomaki but pseudomaki: avocado, cucumber, red and yellow pepper, daikon sprouts, smoked salmon and cooked shrimp, and half-a-pound of slivered fresh wild ahi. The other traditional hallmarks of an end-of-the-schoolyear/belated-birthday unparty include emergency trips to the grocery store and my begging the Brujo for various last-minute housemate favors. He’d had the day off, wandering around comfortably shirtless and playing online Scrabble with youtube soundtrack (Primus, David Byrne, Beck, Butthole Surfers, and our latest obsession, M2OH) (and if Ms. O’Hara’s new to you, we suggest starting here and then go here); so he obligingly vacuumed up black snowdrifts of dog hair and fiddled with extension cords, me having some kind of frantic but apparently necessary personal compulsion toward and subsequent revelation about the Xmas lights (always meticulously tessellated away in their tiny boxes, as if by a particularly tidy packer of Xmas lights, i.e. me, and none of which ever work, because they were all culled from various dumpsters and street corners whence their former owners wisely discarded them, because they don’t work, and I’d like to think I’ve now accepted this, only I seem to go through the exact same process of acceptance every six months without any evident increase in practical wisdom, and without ever getting new fairy lights).
Now the kitchen is dark and cool, countertops stacked with dirty plates and half-full glasses and sesame-seed-speckled pseudomaki platters and encrusted cupcake tins and mixing bowls with dried red drips of gory batter. Before I went to bed, I cleared a path to the coffeemaker so as not to awaken to the Brujo’s cursing. When, instead, Pyewacket woke me at 5:00, crying plaintively for companionship, I tiptoed in and pilfered a cupcake from the fridge.
What am I saying. What am I doing. I don’t know. Bear with me.
A poet has died, far too young, not an acquaintance but a good friend of good friends and as I sit reading the last news of him, someone else’s tears plop into my lap and I puzzle over them as over deaths; that’s what they’re for, I guess. They’re can’t be, they’re certainly not, any good for anything else.
The big black dictionary another poet gave me falls over, as I’m struggling to sort through and relocate the toppling stacks of accumulated books making my desk unusable, and it crushes the robin’s-egg shell I found a month ago in the grass. I ruefully inform myself that this is not a metaphor. But then what is? I don’t think they’re allowable. Or should be. Either metaphors or deaths.
When his first book came out, we got a review copy in the magazine’s basement office and I took it home with me that night to read, admiring it in my hands. It was such a beautiful slim thing, that book; he was so young, only a year older than I; it was so minimalist and white and delicate, itself like a paper shell. I swore to win the Yale prize myself, could barely read the poems through the fog of envy. A decade ago.
A day comes when G••gl• searches on our names yield more information about our deaths than all we wrote. Then that too passes.
Several books, their particular topheavy stack (Mailer, Kesey, Ellison, Pynchon) shorter than the rest, must be dealt with by Wednesday, when their paper is due. Some of my colleagues, who wrote this paper in the past, claim that their final version numbered more than sixty-plus pages in length. If I can keep from dragging Sontag and Wallace into it, I can maybe escape with twenty or thirty. Of course I haven’t begun it yet—not properly, though there are scores of pages of handwritten notes. There’s some kind of slip betwixt the cup and lip at work here—all my life, but the last few months in particular—an ellipsis or haitus between private and the presentational, that fit for public consumption. Private equals pleasure, social equals shame. Doesn’t everyone know that? But actually as that slip keeps happening, as days slip into the gap and leave no track—
Throat-clearing. No more metaphors.
What is private, what social. The tasteless, the classless. The impolite. The rude.
There are bits of writing still to be written for Walt Whitman also, which I should have finished in the fall (Frost, Stevens, Auden, Jarrell); and writing I have been promising to the Duende all semester (short fiction in longhand which I do not set in type, for reasons which only seem complex and mysterious but which are in actuality fairly dispiritingly straightforward).
In recent weeks I’ve somehow managed to convince myself that the slithery slope between brain and pen is a mere problem of techne, of upaya, and would be solved in a fell swoop if I once again had a typewriter—a cast-iron indestructable Smith Corona like the one on which, at seventeen, I wrote my tinselly villanelles and stolid book reports on John Steinbeck. Even then I did most of my (real? best? most precious?) writing in my head, having been accustomed to this practice since I was maybe eight years old. Other technical solutions proposed by my tirelessly procrastinating brain have included literally tying a notebook and pen to my arm, somehow; fastening a mini tape recorder around my neck, like those handy librarian-glasses-on-a-chain; or giving up writing on paper entirely, and accepting that I am a mental novelist only. Ambiguity intentional.
SEVEN REASONS NOT TO TRANSCRIBE THOUGHTS INTO TYPE
1. The Duende won’t like it/them. [This is true.]
2. I can’t ever publish fiction (at least not under my own name) because my parents would read it and stroke out. [Also true.]
3. God will punish me. [Possibly somewhat less true.]
4. I’d have to curtail my other pseudo-writing activities severely, particularly social ones. [Certainly seems true.]
5. Other people are better writers. [Indisputable.]
6. Who cares? [Rhetorical.]
7. I would have to accept the words’ own inadequacy, rather than placing the blame for their inadequacy/nonexistence on my poor work habits. [...]
Of course the understood clause following each sentence, implied but not explicitly stated, is “…and then I’ll fall on the floor and then I’ll die.” [Highly unlikely.]
Finally, there’s a line of “reasoning” which goes something like this: Typing up writing makes it so it can be distributed and others can read it. When others read it, they often don’t understand or like it. When they don’t like it and they tell me so, I have, in the past, stopped writing. Solution: Never write in the first place! Then I won’t stop writing. [Puts head in hands and moans gently but comprehensively.]
The bitch of it is that, as we all know, if you don’t honor and treasure their gifts, the faeries will quit bringing them to you—you are by now tired of hearing me observe this. Lately the faeries appear to have upgraded their hostage demands. Mere longhand scrawl no longer propitiates them. They want bylines. They want a daily word count. They want twelve-point Palatino or Times New Roman.
Or is that something else, and not faeries?
“My heart is what isn’t my ego,” Don Share says Artaud said.
Whatever it is, or they are, they’re also very unhappy that I’m not writing about—how did David Mitchell put it to the Guardian?
It’s a rule of thumb that precocious young novelists start off with something loosely autobiographical…but three books into his career, David Mitchell has revealed very little of himself. This, of course, has never been his point, and until recently he had almost no interest in delving into his own life story. By the time he started writing seriously, he says, he wanted “to write the world, underlined three times, three exclamation marks.”
I stood on the back step yesterday, right by the grassy spot where I found the robin’s-egg shell, and looked down at my feet contemplatively. I was wearing thin white sport socks awkwardly tucked into the rubber crotch of my flip-flops like tabi. Where the socks normally say in gray letters “liz claiborne” I could only see “borne.” But actually the socks don’t say anything, that’s a figure of speech. Socks are very quiet. This made my toes hurt. Not the quiet socks, but the fake-tabi effect.
Later I tried to go to a mall, to buy underwear. Well, I didn’t try—I did go to a mall. But what I discovered about the mall is that it’s like those big-chain grocery stores, like Albertsons or Bashas’ or Fry’s or any of those other puzzling permutations of plurals and possessives (which is too alliterative, but what can you do). Anyway, what I long ago learned about the grocery store is that it’s this big building full of stuff, but there’s no food there. They don’t have any actual food, that you can eat. They have plastic bottles of stuff, and boxes with stuff in them, and bags and tubs and other containers and arrangements of substances; but not food. And thus after three-quarters of an hour popping in and out of shops I haven’t entered in decades, if ever (Macy’s? Dillard’s?), I concluded that the mall has lots of stuff, but no clothes. It just has clothes-shaped objects hanging deceptively on clothing hangers, items made of some papery or plasticky stuff in clothing-like colors—though generally the colors are just a little too bright or combined in a way that’s just a little too noisy to be plausible. (It’s like Douglas Adams said about Bach: If they wanted you to believe that just one guy wrote all that music, then they gave us rather too much of it for credulity.)
So it came to me, surveying rack after dubious rack, purported to display wearable garments—at some point, they just stopped making clothes. Sometime in, what, maybe the early seventies, late sixties? They phased out women’s clothing altogether. In particular, underwear that actually fits your bum (without vanishing uncomfortably into it) and isn’t either hideous or made of melted-down tires and baby sea tortoises. And they just assumed we wouldn’t notice—that we’d accept the slightly too-bright color schemes, the fuschia and turquoise and navy and red with a lavender bow and yellow-green “lace”—that we wouldn’t suspect anything was wrong. It’s like those nightmares where your parents turn out to be complete strangers. I came to my senses pawing frustratedly through a Victoria’s Secret bin, looking for an elusive archaic relic of happier, less figmentary times—bikini, size medium, dark blue or brown or white or black or gray, 100% cotton or silk or something from a plant, no legible branding, no scratchy seams or constrictive, sinister-looking elastic, no “decoration” or “fashion detail” which will only remind me, every time I look at it, of the pricked fingers and burning eyes of some modern Victorian seamstress, hunched over a sweatshop table in Manila or Chiang-mai or Honduras, and do I even know the name of a single city in Honduras—? No. Oh, and also it would be nice if one pair of knickers cost somewhat less than, say, thirty bucks. But this thing, I realized with a flood of relief, no longer exists, here or perhaps anywhere. This entire “shopping mall” has no clothing in it.
Thus I fled Victoria’s Secret. I don’t even wear knickers when it’s over 100 degrees anyway. As I exited, a young woman in full purdah was trying, literally, to pull her (Western-dressed) male companion into the rosy-lit archway. “No, no; later, later,” he said uncomfortably, unable even to look up at the headless plastic-clad plastic mannequins. I could not catch her soft reply but as I walked away she was still pulling at his arm insistently.
Chelonian. Cartilaginous. They even have these weird slippery prosthetic-looking rubbery “molded” brassieres now, which have all the tactile appeal of swim goggles. I left the mall and drove home, knowing to my chilled bones what a hopeless dinosaur I have survived to be.
Case in point:
A laptop! is what, at one point, I decided I needed. To solve the whole brain-to-text technological conundrum. If I had a laptop, I could take it in the backyard, or the kitchen, or to a café, I reasoned brightly, forgetting that coffee makes me speed my brains out. And why would it be an advantage not to be in my study? No Internet access; writing would revert to private from being social or interactive. I would have wrested back enough privacy and anonymity to write the things for which I still apparently believe God wants to punish me (and the more I read about the Quiverfull movement, the more I remember why it is I think that. What fundamental, fundamentalist sense of my own unnatural wrongness is entrained and ingrained in me and can only be exorcised out through prose. If at all. Because the very thing I want to write about, is the very thing which tells me it is wrong to write. That if I write it, I will spontaneously combust here in suburban Tartarus, leaving only an oily ashen smudge on my little blue yoga ball). Thus demonically encouraged, I optimized various combinations of size and speed until an anvil of sanity fell on my head and I suddenly realized that I was contemplating spending more than a thousand dollars to achieve something I could, if I wished, achieve right this second by merely reaching around to the back of my current computer and yanking out a small blue cord from its plug. Besides, then I remembered that smart people have gone and invented this fucking wireless thing, so God is everywhere.
To be honest, I actually came up with a plan whereby, in order for me to be able to write properly, the Brujo and I needed a whole new house. So the laptop seemed less extravagant by comparison.
Thousands and thousands of dollars having been thusly saved, I revert back to the whole typewriter idea, and contemplate this skiey beauty. Added benefit: less neck/back/tendon strain, paradoxically thanks to the total-body engagement involved in vigorous portable pounding; whereas a laptop is how I injured myself in the first place, in 1998, and practically guaranteed to put me back in wrist braces again (plus I just had my last p/t session yesterday! and I do not want to go back to that awful, awful place—this “gym” they speak of). The thing is, though, I hold very little hope that it will help in the production of text. Because frankly, I suspect that eventually I will, still scrambling for purchase, fly out over the ledge and enter the empyrean with a very bad word on my lips. Because I didn’t have a pencil. Or a laptop.
Or, apparently, the loving discipline and passionate attention which allowed Craig Arnold to produce, for example, this.
[and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
you FUCKWAD]
It’s not my intention to co-opt, by definition sleazily so, the tragedy of a better writer and person for any purpose other than to illustrate the gravity of the situation in which you and I find ourselves; viz. to wit., none of us are getting out of here alive. And maybe even leaving traces makes no difference. But it’s too late for me, it’s good money after bad—too long ago I staked everything on, it does matter, it has to matter, something has to matter and I can’t think of anything else beautiful enough to justify our agape for it.
I dreamt another poet and I lay side by side in a tent, gazing into each other’s eyes. He was older, grey and wise with age, and our love for each other was exactly matched, whole and complete without action. He said to me slowly, “I would love to have an affair with you; it would be so incredible. But I won’t. I love my wife. I love my children.” I delighted in his fidelity; I would have been cruelly disappointed by any other response on his part. Our faces and bodies glowed in the filtered light as it came through the tent canvas. “Tell me,” I said taking his hands, “all about them. Tell me about your children.” He told me about them, a boy and a girl. We had all weekend to talk, which seemed infinite.
“Aren’t non-productive writers who piss and moan about how social relationships suck away all their time, or how this and that are obstacles for them, just being unconscionable pussies? Don’t they have only themselves to hold responsible for the fact that they aren’t writing, or don’t like what they’re writing?”
Yes.
“Didn’t Anaïs Nin’s analyst tell her to stop writing in her journal so she’d write more fiction—a piece of advice with which Nin wholeheartedly agreed and which she faithfully recorded…in her journal? And yet don’t we now recognize her journals as comprising, in fact, the salient valuable bulk of her oeuvre?”
Yes.
“Aren’t bloggers who only write about how they wish they could stop or start blogging boring? And don’t people who write about how they can’t write make you want to strangle them, because of their self-absorbed privilege?”
Um, yes.
“And aren’t you actually writing right now about—”
Yes.
Wisława wrote, “I apologize to time for the muchness of the world overlooked per second.”
She wrote, “I know that as long as I live nothing can justify me, because I myself am an obstacle to myself.”
Stuff you delete after you type out and print and review and mark up and revise the essay. Stuff you say at the beginning of your share, or your shy workshop comment, all the hedging and hawing of “It’s nothing, really, I just think…” or “Maybe this is just me…” or, “Oh, I was only going to say that….” An apologia for existing/breathing/having thoughts which I see all the time in female students, even those in their thirties. Perhaps just a rare American form of politeness, one of our few—it seems sometimes almost Japanese to me, like the formally humble things you’d say in an elevator or bath house. “Forgive me for disturbing you.” “Not at all! Forgive me for being here in the first place.” And then, upon departing: “I’m sorry I am leaving you here alone.” “It was kind of you to stay as long as you did.” Throat-clearing. 3,500 words of it, to be precise.
If you have time to clear your throat. If they give you that much time.
Poets should go where ordinary people can’t or won’t go to tell what experience is like. —Craig Arnold, 1967-2009
tongue-tied
Thursday 7 May 2009 | 25 cookies in the jar
“what I do when I miss you” [an unintentional guest post by oleoptene]
Wednesday 8 April 2009 | 3 cookies in the jar
Subject: What I Do When I Miss You
is I create a life-sized dummy stuffed with all sorts of books, Brodsky and Hugo and the Norton poetry anthology and a dictionary or two and all of the post-apocalisptic novels, and I dress it in striped socks and read it Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks” and we have a little tea party then, only I do your voice all wrong.
When will this semester be OVER I whine, very Pyewacketty-plaintively but like, without any reproach because I would rather you were getting the grading done than playing online. Only, I still have to tell you I miss you.
Okay so actually Oleoptene didn’t know this was going to wind up being a guest post, but it made me laugh ripsnortingly aloud in the graduate computer lab, and thus I am perversely sharing it with you. Because I miss her too; and y’all.
And I miss me, which is a weird thing to say, I realize, even for me; but there you have it. My new mantra is, May 6—when all the End of the World papers have been graded; when I no longer have whatever dreary respiratory infection has made my throat swell shut; and when the student who pitched a full-blown, unvarnished manic break/psychotic episode in class three weeks ago finally gets adequate mental-health care and stops sending me unnerving emails and/or showing up at my office all breathless to tell me about the approaching end of the world (2012) and the equation which holds the key to human consciousness (4.6 billion people times the smallest constant of time, something something something, I forget, it goes on for quite a while). Yes, these are but a few of the merry diversions which have kept me from you and from my own self. That and what Miss Bovary has correctly pegged as a terrible case of video killing the radio star. In the meantime here is a toonlet I tried valiantly to make. And I will see you very soon, in my stripy socks, and we will read Russian poetry and drink blueberry tea.
spinnerface: part II
Monday 23 March 2009 | I like a cookie
I gotta letter from the govamint
the other day
I opened and read it
it said they were suckas—
[public enemy, "black steel in the hour of chaos"]
It’s late Monday morning, three weeks ago, and the Brujo and I are loafing and inviting our souls in the backyard, because he has a rare day off and I don’t teach until 3 pm. He’s sprinkling water on pinhead-sized baby cacti and I’m sitting on the lawn playing with Cap’n Fatty (who rolls around wild-eyed, littering her fur with grass clippings; we guess this is for camouflage purposes?) when I hear the mailbox door open and close, and Fiona bark her daily dark warning. So I abandon my morning pages and hop up to see if I have any letters from Knopf asking for exclusive rights to my next five volumes of poetry, etc.
Instead it’s the usual suburban-hell mail. I generally open the post standing over the recycling bin and directing items straight into it, as they are immediately discarded. 3.9% APR on balance transfers; please order these large fancy boxes of hideous smoke-flavored cheeses, salami, dried apricots and petits fours; our church welcomes community members by distributing free Wal-Mart gift cards; there is a newly released sex offender living on your block (poor bastard—and they’ve always been in jail for molesting family members, so why would they OH NEVER MIND); and please come to an evening of expensive cocktails hosted by seventy-year-old alums from the college you dropped out of in 1989, during which we will drunkenly “discuss” Edwin Schrödinger.
Directly, as I say, into the recycling.
But look, what fresh hell is this—it’s a letter from the govamint. Now since I get these on a fairly regular basis and since they all say pretty much the same thing, they arouse no great excitement now that I have a fat file folder full of them. PAGE 4 OF 12…Federal Something Requirement Act…estimated reporting burden: one hour, seven minutes and eighteen seconds…you do not need to take any action at this time…please SAVE THIS DOCUMENT for your records. So I dutifully do, though I generally have not understood a word it said.
This one is just an envelope, though. Inside it is a check, and no letter. I puzzle over this for a moment. The Feds have already sent me the SSDI pittance left over after they paid back the state of NM for assisting me in my hour of crisis; I’m using it to pay off a small student loan I took out in my first semester, with which loan I paid off a credit card bill, which had things like rent and electricity and airline tickets and emergency trips to the vet on it. (Oh, fine, and presumably some fountain pen ink and lip balms too.) Then the Feds had very nicely explained how the Brujo and I together earn too much money and have too many cars (the 1990 Honda rolled over 200,000 this weekend! how cool is that!) for me to qualify for any further pittance, even though I am five kinds of crazy. Great! I applauded this wise decision on their parts (look at big government functioning efficiently!); and thus, what the hell is this check.
I turn it over and read the amount, and burst out laughing. Though it’s a kind of sick laughter. Ha ha ha! Ha ha! Ha! OH SHIT. Because there’s not supposed to be a check in the first place; and even if there were, it’s not supposed to have this preposterous number on it. Immediately I feel as though I’ve done something wrong. The number is an order of magnitude larger than any number on such a check should be, assuming there would be a check anyway, which there wouldn’t, because this is obviously a mistake and therefore I am not actually looking at what looks like a check, this check at which I only think I am looking.
Clearly.
I throw the rest of the mail away and totter into the backyard clutching it.
“Hey, babe? Could you look at something for me?”
The Brujo stands, dries off his hands, and takes the pastel-colored bit of paper. We stare at it together. The Brujo doesn’t laugh.
“Um, what is this?”
“I don’t know. A mistake.”
“I thought they already sent you what they were going to send you?”
“They did. I thought.”
“It’s a mistake.”
“Maybe they awarded me an NEA after all, and just forgot to tell me?”
He looks at me unsmiling.
“Yeah, it’s a mistake. I’ll call tomorrow and tell them.”
The funny thing is where my mind goes immediately. It goes like this:
- OMGOMGOMG I am in so much trouble.
- we could get a grand piano! (Why Artists Should Not Be Given Money)
- the Brujo now has no more excuses for postponing his dental work
- helloooooo trailer in the middle of nowhere/Bahía de los Angeles B.C.N.
- I don’t have to work a horrifying cube job this summer!
- we could live for two years on this in Thailand/Guatemala
- no, be practical—it’s insurance against the next time I chuck a mental
- I should be back in therapy, I owe it to them (?)
I turn off these thoughts with difficulty and go inside to prep for class. Most of them are just your general average run-of-the-mill seven-of-cups fantasizing, so I can dismiss them pretty handily (though admittedly the piano one hangs around for several days). More astonishing and clamouring is the conviction that I have done something wrong and am going to be punished. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s just a piece of paper and I haven’t even tried to deposit it. What, they’re going to arrest me because they sent me a check? The Brujo and I manage to joke about this over lunch—the Treasury Department, destitute, despondent, has conceived of this as a way to bolster the stagnant flow of currency by entrapping citizens and demanding repayment with extortionate interest!
Other thought-feeling complexes arise, a new idea in the place of each one I gently set aside, and are even more interesting. First there is an enormous, and by enormous I mean gushingly toweringly overwhelming huge, sense of financial relief, unbinding an anxiety I hadn’t even known I was tied around my chest. But something’s suddenly not there, and there was something pretty big there, and what was it? Oh right, it was me being scared witless that I will become at any moment unable to leave the house and/or that nice cosy haven underneath my desk, and therefore will lose my job/be unable to get another one, and have to eat cat kibbles until we run out of those, at which point maybe Pyewacket can snack on my CORPSE. Now there is a big missingness inside where, it turns out, fear has been hanging out for a long time. Interesting.
I prep for class and go teach in a miasma of preternatural calm. I suddenly don’t worry about getting fired or making mistakes or being the Most Brilliant TA in the Building. I just go teach. It’s a lot easier and I probably make less sense to the students, but I’m calmer and nicer to be around, perhaps. I smile vaguely at my office mates instead of skittishly avoiding them (sunglasses are key) or performing witticisms. I am careful to thank clerks, I excuse myself when I pass others on the campus sidewalk or in hallways. I also go to the bookstore and, half-stunned, drop $30 on five used books (finally, my own copy of Oblivion, which I literally snatch from the shelf, fingers trembling—also Beckett’s novels, also Wittgenstein’s Mistress) and a new Miquelruis blank journal. I watch all this happening from the inside out. How would it be if we all felt this way, all the time? Why isn’t security and a sense of wealth this world’s inheritance to us anyway, or natural birthright, as much as the sense of lack and fear?
Right now in End of the World Class, we’re reading Carolyn See’s hilarious Golden Days and it’s weirdly apposite in its parody of est-like prosperity consciousness—that brazenly tacky Californian pseudo-religion which, tempered by nuclear holocaust, becomes in the novel a purifying, sustaining faith, an impetus for survival and a practice through which even crispy earless survivors of the LA cauldron can experience joy. OOOO-eee, I see abundance everywhere!
I drift onto and off of the light rail, make my way home in a daze, babbling at intervals to Mandarin’s voicemail. I think, I bet all I have to do is walk from my house to the train stop, and in three minutes I can find a dozen people who need this kind of support more than I do. I count them as I walk, and it is true. They just can’t speak and write English well enough to get it.
If this is not a mistake (although it is plainly a mistake), then I have to spend the summer as a literacy volunteer. Because I am already (oh seven of cups!) thinking about what I can do instead, if I don’t have to find and get and keep a cube job. Since I got passed over to teach composition.
Next, following hard on the heels of this relief, I watch anxiety being promptly shifted back to other objects: my aging parents’ health and what if I have to spend a decade in a doublewide trailer in East Texas mopping up urine and practicing tonglen like a motherfucker; the Brujo’s likelihood of contracting an expensive incurable skin cancer since he repeatedly fries his fair Irish hide in the desert sun (his spending spring break in Big Bend = SECOND-DEGREE BURNS people, but no I did not kill him, because why rush things?); and worst of all, I am an aesthetic failure and will die having published only derivative regional work, teaching five community college sections of developmental English per semester in some miserable dust-coated southern New Mexico town where I have to shake the vinegaroons out of my orthopedic shoes every morning.
Notice how all of these scenarios feature death. Because not all the pianos in the world can stave that one away. Isn’t that what the money fear has always been about, anyway—what Mandarin and I call “…and then I’ll fall on the floor and then I’ll die”? (The title of our forthcoming unhelpful-self-help book.)
I am, like the mother of God, still pondering all these things in my heart a few days later when I get another letter from the govamint. This one explains the absurd figure on the check which is, in fact, not a mistake. There are columns of other numbers and they all add up to the absurd number. Further, I am informed apologetically, there will be a small sum coming to me monthly. It’s about equal to our rent. And because my condition (five kindsa beans) is not expected to improve, really, ever, there will be a medical review in about three years.
I look over the numbers again. I get out the little calculator I use to do student grades. Suddenly I realize—the other was SSI. This is SSDI. They’re different. I further realize—why do you think so many people want disability? So they can get a couple grand to pay off a credit card? No, of course not. There wouldn’t be so many websites and so many attorneys and such an industry around it, if there weren’t some kind of payoff. Holy back payments, Octomom. And in fact, let me tell you something else (the invisible hands-on-hips woman inside addressed me): You only think it’s a lot of money, because you know why? Because you poor, fool. (Sadly enough, I really do talk to myself like this.)
I hunch at my desk flushed with shame. I am plainly more evil than any octuplet-bearing crack ho. All the flabby old bullshit, having been given fresh vitality, zooms around gaily in my cranium, cheering and singing lusty choral mottos. Deadbeat! Bloodsucker freeloader SLACKER! —You Gen Xers are all the same, you don’t really want to work. —Why don’t you stop sponging off scholarship money and get a job? —When I was in college, I never once got an extension on a paper. And of course, in re: Cambridge: Well it must be nice to travel around and not have to work like the rest of us. (It occurs to me, about ten years too late, that my mom was possibly trying to make a joke.)
Obviously, it’s only okay to be a social parasite if you eventually win the Nobel Prize. Or if you volunteer to help political refugees learn English. Or if you find a freaking therapist who does DBT in this godforsaken hellhole and WORK YOUR PROGRAM! Especially because another letter from the govamint includes what looks suspiciously like a Medicaid card. Good Lord, does this mean I don’t have to ask for partial prescriptions on antipsychotics at the pharmacy, when I next go down that happy road, which should be any minute now judging by how freaked out this is all making me?! Does it mean I could get DBT at the one consultation team in town, whose clinicians unfortunately refuse to work with the State School’s insurance company?! Shouldn’t I make an appointment right now?! Instead, I simultaneously panic and wrap myself in denial. I throw myself into housework and chores and trying to Smile Brightly whenever the Brujo asks what’s wrong. My office is finally clean, after a winter of neglect and piled-up papers and books. The sink is scoured, emptied of toxic slimy dishes. I do energetic physical therapy exercises with rubber bands, going for sets of twenty whenever I’ve been told to do ten. I mow and pull thistles and burr clover from the yard. I avoid my desk like there’s a terrifying check sitting on top of it.
It takes me three weeks and a lost blogpost. But I finally put the check in my purse, go to the bank (the one that doesn’t seem about to fail), and open a CD.
“Do you want easy access?” asks the clerk, clicking away at his keyboard.
“No!” I say with unnecessary vehemence. “I don’t want to think about it—I just want it to be like it doesn’t exist, for at least a year.”
“Okay, so the 12-month fixed-rate,” he says agreeably. And then: “That’s a really nice tax refund you got there.”
I stare at the check for, I realize with gratitude, the last time. Its hideous peach and aqua impressionistic blur, its soaring grayscale eagle. “Yeah. It is, isn’t it.”
This morning brings the news that Nicholas Hughes died on March 16, having hanged himself. Forty-seven is an uncannily popular suicide age, for men, these days. According to the Times article, Professor Hughes had just gone on leave from his faculty position to “advance his not inconsiderable talent at making pots and creatures in clay.” It would be funny, if you didn’t know exactly what that fucking meant.
There’s something cagey and canny in me. Something aging and bitter and sharp and wily and able to wait out things, now. A lot of things, anyway. Something merry and wry and wizened. Someone who hoots at turning forty because Sister, that’s nothing! So I think of Carolyn See, again—my hardback jacket of which has the original illustration by genius Fred Marcellino, an uncorked champagne bottle releasing a mushroom-shaped cloud:
And, of course, once we started feeling a little better we had bursts of what you’d have to call—although we didn’t like the word—strength. There was a day, in the middle of a spring morning, when all of us were outside taking the sun, when we were—you know, Denise was biting on her toes, and my friend Skip rubbed the skin off his legs, and the neighbor, Richard, watched some ants. I was doing sit-ups. I planned to be a very old lady, dark brown, the kind you could pluck up off the ground with a thumb and forefinger, a dwarf, an elf.
Birthday-with-a-zero in a week. Coming up fast on the thousandth blogpost. Non-alcoholic bubbly, anyone? Drinks are on me.
