A Writer's Struggle

1947 Continental
photo by olivander.

Let’s assume now, for a moment, that I will be able to focus my energies enough this evening to sit down and write. I have blocked off the evening, eaten dinner, avoided any stimulants of alcohol or medication so as to clear my head. The laptop now sits upon my desk, rather than on the Ouija board on the ottoman by the leather chair. This is serious.

[5 minutes later] Presently, I am cooking a butternut squash, on the recommendation from John Felling. The shepherd’s pie was not filling enough. After I eat that, and brew my tea, and tidy the apartment for it is simply an external reflection of my state of mind, I will begin to write in Stuttersville. Don’t be intimidated that Edgar is approaching the house of his uncle, and that you do not yet know how to handle the potential secrets to be uncovered there. It will all flow naturally once you fill Edgar’s shoes and begin to roam the house. You’ve seen it now, that Germanic village house atop the hill, circled by pines. Not a mansion by any means, but the home of a wealthy bachelor, with a sense of taste, not lavishness.

What time of year is it in Stuttersville, right now? Are there gardens out back, or the skeletal trees and trimmed back flowerbeds, the covered rosebushes. Yes, it must be fall. Pre-halloween? Oh shit, I don’t know.

[15 minutes later] I still believe that writing may be possible this evening, especially if I toss aside any pretensions of publishing it some day. This way I lessen the pressure of getting it right. Don’t forget that Stuttersville is intended to be a sandbox, a place in which I can retreat, and think and feel and narrate anything, even my own trouble as the writer trying to wrench it free from obstacles. Ready…set…go!

He spent nearly a decade chasing down the facts of his uncle’s death. What became of the doctor that had signed his death certificate? Why had the authorities shot down family requests for an autopsy?
For more years than family historians could trace, there had been deep rifts within the family. Not as simple as a sudden branching out of the family over the disagreement of two brothers. It seemed to be a genetic flaw that cast the members of this family against itself for generations. It thrived on conflict. Each member contained within themselves a voilent urge to scratch out the eyes of their brother. Others grew inseparable, every secret shared, lives entwined, homes no more than blocks apart, or children living with their parents well into their forties.
[10 minutes later] Okay writer, you’re struggling…the light is starting to fade….run ahead to catch up with it!

With the increasing years of decrepitude, one boy rose up out of the poverty in which his family had fated him. His boyish exuberance had caught the attention of labor owners, of warehouse stockmen, of dockworker supervisors. He didn’t have any brains, they knew, but he would give 100% of himself to slave away at a task, and all he looked for in return was a little beer money.

[10 minutes later] Crap, it’s all falling apart now. You see it, don’t you? The narrator has grown sleepy and his rationality has taken to drink. A glass of port sits beside me, a treat for having sat at my desk in the den throughout the evening, in the similitude of writing, even if the words were wasted on the wrong story.

Boot up, Tune in, Log Off

Whew, I finally dragged myself off the internet, and it feels like I can breathe again. Why do I get so obsessed with things, like browsing the internet, reading movie scripts, browsing Flickr photos, reading blogs of friends, rereading my blogs? Can I say blog one more time?

I come to my big leather chair by the window and my laptop resting on the Ouija board with the idea that I’m going to write. But I look out the window and stare over the dead gray city and realize I don’t want to write at all. I have nothing to say this morning. I can’t imagine pulling two characters together and figuring out what they have to say to one another. But I will not give up. I’ll just keep typing here, right? Isn’t that the important part of the word “Stream-of-Consciousness Journal?”

When I move about the apartment in the evenings, I am filled with ideas. Wonderful turns of phrases, situations of intriguing conflict, a desire to slip into an imagined world for a little while, but I’ve got to put the dishes away. I’ve got to sort the real mail from the junkmail. I’ve got to brush my teeth and go to bed.

I remember some of the ideas now, but they lay limp in my hands like dead fish I’ve held out of the water for too long. It’s like that Tenacious D song “Tribute”: “This is not the greatest song in the world. It’s just a tribute…to the greatest song in the world”. Things like a comic entry about how I keep piling the recyclables on top of each other in the grocery bag in the closet. It becomes like a reverse version of Jenga, and I come up with strategies of how to nest cans within one another, then a bottle, then an upside down can clinging to the bottle neck. Anything to avoid having to take the recyclables down to the bins in the parking garage. Like I said, this is just a tribute.

Or the entry about how I’ve got a crush on the surly Latino woman at the Turtle Bread store. I love her smoldering eyes, not an ounce of fake cheer or sense of customer service. She’s young, short, plump like a loaf of bread just beginning to rise (I’m sure she’d love that simile... and you wonder why I’m single!) When I get a flicker of a smile from her it is appreciated so much more, a small crack in her shell. But then it’s gone again, and I realize I don’t want her to smile at me, because I love her for this crossness and “piss and vinegar”. My god, is that a real phrase?

I wanted to start a blog titled “Squidup!”, or use that as a chat name. It’s from the Cable Guy movie when the Cable Guy is doing his Dizzy Gillespie impression.

I wanted to write about my tour of the condos and lofts, and why do I always get a crush on the sales women showing me a place? I feel this odd flirtatiousness or connection with her as we walk quietly through the empty rooms. I’m sure I’m imagining it, but I feel like they too are aware of this sexual tension between us.

Ah, see; I’m tempted to log onto the internet again. Restlessness draws me there. I thought for a moment that I would like to work more on my personal home page rather than my blog. It’s like wanting to work on your home, build it out, make it more presentable. Your own little space on the web, gardening for people without a plot of land, but I would probably be a better person if I disabled my modem. Somewhere Timothy Leary is chanting “Boot up, Tune in, Log Off.”

Proclamation of Decadence

Scrape me
photo by bekon.

Submit to your addictions, your weaknesses, your every libidinous urge! Let the devil run rampant through your homes, your government offices and citadels! We have held ourselves in check long enough. It is the time to celebrate the body, the instinct, the animal pantheon spelled out in constellations across the night sky. We drag out our dictionaries of the profane and illustrations of decadence. We make new national holidays of crime and atrocity. We teach our children the balance of the blade, the angle of the wrist when snapping a whip across the buttocks of their nannies. Turn out all of the animals from our zoos, release mice into the backstage dressing rooms of the opera houses. Mayhem, licentious laughter, sinister smiles on lips beaded with blood. Rub your palms together, feel the tingling in every limb, cry out your allegiance to the celebration of the unholy.

Love Note

The cynic in me says "Someone's going to get laid tonight". The romantic says "Why didn't I think of that?" The analyst says "look at how he measured off areas of the lawn first, to be sure all of the letters fit right. That guy could design crop circles."

Why?

Cookie
photo by waffler.

I was in my favorite tea shop, eavesdropping on a conversation between addle-brained Christian Fundamentalists about experiments being done on prisoners in Duluth in which a machine fixes their “mental problems” when I noticed that the tea shop manager, Lisa, was standing just at the periphery of my vision. I realized she had asked me a question.

“I’m sorry?”

“So why are you going to Mexico?”

It seemed a very odd question to me. Why was I going to Mexico? I didn’t know that I needed a reason, but evidently I did, and couldn’t think of one. “I wanted to use my frequent flyer miles and Marriott points.”

It wasn’t until twenty minutes later that I realized all that was expected of me was the answer “To relax.” But during that twenty minutes, I was perplexed with the question: Why am I going to Mexico? Why Puerto Vallarta? Chaos and chance; it was merely an alignment of the stars, or more accurately, an alignment of available dates for frequent flyer miles and hotel points. But why go on a vacation at all? I was dumbfounded by the brilliancy of her question, as simple as a child’s: Why?

I sipped the dregs of my tea and looked at the shocking beauty outside: a spring day in Minneapolis, bright sun, melting snow. A pair of Canadian Geese came flying in low over the city, wing tip to wing tip. I craned my neck to watch them pass overhead, bottomless blue parted by a pair of geese cutting across the sky.

Beside me, a little boy sat at a table with his grandmother. He ate a giant M&M cookie, crumbs on those pale cream cheeks, grandma smiling down on him. He bounced in his chair, enthralled with his cookie and the bustle of the tea shop. I want the same kind of thrill out of life, but I am no longer satisfied by a cookie. Maybe that is a better answer for why I am going to Mexico. Because cookies just don’t cut it anymore.

Bound for Mexico

Ah, sweet relief. I'm off to Mexico for six days at the end of March, courtesy of my frequent flyer miles and Marriott reward points (thank you BMG and Nextel for those long-distance projects back in 2000). I'm staying at the CasaMagna Martiott Puerto Vallarta Resort. I've never vacationed alone, but I'm looking forward to it. Now...do I want to plan a bunch of outings, or sit on the beach with a margarita and Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night".

NyQuil for the Soul

My teeth are stained green from the cold medicine that I drink. My mouth curls at the sickeningly sweet syrup, the caustic bite of the liquor, and then the more subtle strains of narcotic laced in this bright green concoction. Why do they make it so green, I wonder? I’ve also seen it come in bright blue. Perhaps so that once the narcotic starts to take affect, you peer at the bottle in the medicine chest, at its magical color, and you’re tempted to take another drink, as though sipping the sky.

My body has convinced itself that it needs medicine to be healthy. Or rather, the moment that my bloodstream has worked itself clean of any medicine, germs and viruses quickly descend and take over my body. And so I desperately tip back another shot of it, curl my mouth, wince with tears in my eyes, but instantly, beyond all physical possibility or reason, I experience relief pass through my gut to my limbs, my lungs, my mind. Everyone needs this, I think. A cure, a medicinal relief from that which ails us.

The Whale, Inc.

Jonah was swallowed by a large corporation and took refuge in its belly. He waited to see in what part of the world the great whale would spit him up, if ever. He lit fires in the belly and made shadow puppets on the walls of the stomach, while he waited. And waited. He would have completely forgotten what the outside world was like if not for the items the whale swallowed from time to time; a bicycle, a kite, a high school marching band, sometimes an outside consultant with tales of what life was like in other whales. Jonah wondered if life was better in another belly, if the perks were slightly better or the pay. And yet he always felt gratitude to the whale when, with a great upheaval and expurgation, it would expel from its gullet everyone it had collected over time, including the consultants, while he remained. Gone were those who were nearing retirement, those deemed redundant, those less emphatic about the greatness of the whale.

Jonah fumbled around in the dark for a time until he had gathered enough materials to light a little fire again. New people came splashing in the next day; young professionals fresh out of college, wiping water out of their eyes and trying to get their bearings. Their clothes were nicer than his, he noticed; silk ties and Kenneth Cole shoes and sweater vests, but he knew that given a few weeks in the digestive juices of the whale, they would look as disheveled as himself. And they did. With a trapped look in their eyes, some of them started searching the linings of the belly for ways to get out. They irritated the whale just enough so that they were either spit out or forced further down its digestive tract. Not Jonah. Maybe he was clever for having learned how to ride the corporation for all it was worth. Maybe he should have been ashamed with himself for having lost so much of his self respect and identity that he found himself content with life in the belly of the whale; but there it was, printed on all of his business cards, his stationary, even on the logos of his clothes: The Whale, Inc. Sometimes it felt safe to be so utterly consumed.