i obsess.

Where First Grade + Riding the Bus Does Not = Fabulous Photo Opp

First it was confusion yesterday with the bus.  It ran late.  I registered him only a few weeks ago.  I followed the guidelines on the school's website, went on the day listed that they would begin to register kids for fall, as the school office had just reopened from its summer holidays.  My son went with me.  We took the trolley, with its futuristic wind-whistle sounds, and walked the last six blocks in the unshaded sunshine streets of August.  The school secretary complimented me on my being so prompt with our registration.  Said there'd be something in the mail to inform us about his classroom and teacher.  We walked back down the wide, gray cement stairs, admiring the grounds and play structures. 

Taking a last-minute trip to LA interfered with the school's ice cream social last Thursday, where we would have discovered his placement and gotten a chance to see the room and meet with the teacher.  Instead, we would have to wait to get home to find out whether they'd sent the information in the mail as promised.  Sunday afternoon I worried while the people milled around me in the miniature Long Beach airport, I worried as our son bolted ahead of us on the tarmac, climbing wildly up the steps to the back of the plane as we hollered above the din of the plane's engines to stop! Stop! STOP! Running so far ahead, not to weave amongst the immense blue safety cones towering over his narrow four-foot frame, to stick with us.  I yanked on his gray, stained seat belt as he gaped at the screen mounted in the seat in front of him, reassuring myself.  The mailer would be there and we would know his room and teacher in a few hours' time, so worrying was a waste of precious brain-doodling space. 

No mailer.  There was plenty of other junk, flyers and ridiculous items forwarded from our house, things involving FHA loans for a home we no longer own, flyers for pizza and Clorox bleach and Disney figurines, along with the requisite bills, and there was a whole slew of items from the insurance company for my crazy ass (brain), but there was no school-stamped mailer.

Shit.

We had this half-cracked plan to see if the bus driver would let one of us ride along with him yesterday morning, and the other one would follow in the car and that one would get to the school early enough to confirm room placement.  We went to the prescribed bus stop across the street from our building a full ten minutes early.  7:20.  He was all prepped to take the bus.  He talked about it all morning.  "I'm taking the bus.  It's what big kids do, mom." 

7:29.  No bus.  All the moms and kids stood around, looking down the tunnel of street and cars, watching. 

7:36.  A fourth-grade kid in a long, lean line of freshly-lanky growing boy, next to his mom said, "Mom.  It's late.  I think it broke down.  Does that mean there's no school today?"

7:41.  We looked at each other and I said, "We need to take the car and we need to haul ass.  We don't even know if he's registered.  What if they didn't even register him?  WORST PARENTS EVER."  "Not the worst parents ever.  Just -- kind of shit ones."  "Fine.  Shit parents.  LET'S GO."

7:50.  Running from the car into the stream of people walking with their kids through the half-way sunlit morning, up the walk near the busses lining the road, my hand gripping his small hand, his feet continually catching on uneven sidewalk, my teeth held together in an uneven line.  We race up the wide, gray steps and are swept along with the uneven crowd of adults in business casual and children in first-day purples and oranges and greens and bright denim, voices bouncing around us like sharp bubbles, pop pop pop, I spy easels set up with lists for various grades and room assignments and names.  Fifth grade.  Fourth.  There. First grade.  Scan, scanning.  Woman with smooth, brown hair and a nice, businesslike smile next to the lists.  "Can I help you?"  Oh.  No, thank you.  I've found him.  We're off.  Down the hall.  Around the corner.  There's the room.  Lots of parents and kids buzzing about the door.  We hang back.  We hug.  We smile.  We remind.  He blinks.  He clings.  I take his hand and walk to the door and point into the room, and my words sound far away from my ears.  Something about love and fun and recess.  He begins to sob.  A man along the wall behind us says, "my son's first day is today, too.  You'll be okay."  He smiles.  It's warm.  He's wearing a blue button-up shirt and his hair is graying.  I smile above my son's head, thanking him for his attempt.  It is fruitless, but it's kind. 

The boy in front of us in line turns around and says his name.  Smiles grandly and tells my son he's glad to start school.  That it's his first day.  I say my son's name.  I smile.  I prompt my child to acknowledge this other apparently perfectly-adjusted, prepared boy.  He refuses to look.

My husband takes him by the hand, then picks him up into a full-body snuggle.  He is weeping.  Sobbing.  Wracked.  Everyone has already entered.  The room is full.  The teacher is by the door, holding a name tag with my son's name in blue Sharpie.  She says his name, pokes her head out into the hall.  I am draped like first-grade art along the wall just inside the door, my face full of staples.  I watch her approach him as he arranges himself along my husband's legs, his sobs and shrieks mingled in a cracking way.  She says her name.  She has a kindly device by which to encourage the kids to remember her name.  It's endearing.  My belly is warm and full of iron.  He looks up, slowly, nodding.  She says, "I need an assistant today.  Can you be my assistant?"  "Yes."  "Great.  Why don't we go inside?"  "Okay."  We watch.  We are stricken.  Our faces our full of staples and impassive looks.  We inhale short, shortish breaths and, after a single beat, step onto the imaginary people mover in the hall that takes us back around the corner and down the gray stairs and along the walk.  There is a girl amidst other children who was at the bus stop, the one by our building.  I'm relieved to know a bus monster didn't descend on our son's bus.

This morning, we are prepared.  We will wait.  The same people are there.  More of the children are playing together where yesterday there were groups.  Our son, the sole first-grader, insists he only wants to watch.  I talk sporadically with a mom, a woman with a strong French accent, whose family has just moved here from the east coast.  My husband begins to play the same game with our child that the other children are playing, but along the opposite street corner.  Suddenly, the bus is there.  Late, but not so late as yesterday.  The children all begin to line up.  I summon my son.  "Honey, time to get in line.  The bus is coming."  He runs up.  Stands at the back of the line.  He's moving forward, I'm watching.  I give him a quick kiss.  He's still moving forward.  Suddenly, there's a break in the line between him and the child directly in front of him.  He won't budge.  The bus driver has the door opened with the pulley in hand, his gray beard making his face blank.  The kids are all on.  There is no fuss, no disorder.  All are seated.  Ready.  My son stands on the sidewalk, and his sobs begin to crescendo.  I am smiling and unnaturally bright, I pull electricity out of my chest and inform my words and my face with it, I say, "look, honey!  The bus driver is waiting!  It's time to get on!  You need to go, now.  You have to go!  Hi!  This is my son!  May I ask your name?"  The bus driver says his name and smiles.  My son has his back to the driver.  He is imploring me.  Arms out.  "Momma.  Momma.  Please, momma.  Don't make me.  I'm scared.  I'm scared!"  "I know, baby.  But you need to go, and it's going to be fine, and I love you, and dad loves you, and it's fine.  You're going to be fine.  Okay?"

The driver says his name, asks him to sit down.  He finally manages his way up the steps, then scrambles back down them and almost off the bus.  I say, "No.  No, honey.  You can't come back down.  You have to stay on the bus."  My face hurts with all the electrical infusions.  He looks at me and turns back around.  He is shrieking like yesterday, and there is no one to help, no one to soothe.  A few other moms attempt to help.  The woman with the French accent calls to her son, probably to ask him to sit with my child, but he does not hear her.  Another mother asks me a question, but I can't properly understand her, because my ears are rushing with the sound of electrical noises and his shrieks.

He sits.  My husband's eyes are burned red.  He stands near me, hands in pockets.  We cannot wave, as our son is on the opposite side of the bus, his face against the window.  We watch the door close and the bus pull away.  The other mothers look at us as they move across the street.  We are smiling.  Saying "oh, well."  Our breaths are short and stoppered.  One mother in a pink shirt says, "tomorrow, we'll get the other kids to play with him."  "Yes.  That sounds nice."  My face aches as I long to discard the electric smile still gripping it.

I say goodbye to my husband at the elevators.  We wish each other a good day.  Multiple times.

There is no photo of the first grade first-time bus moment. 

I don't want one.

The Bridal Party, and Sundries

This piece resulted from the final assignment in my writing class from winter term; the assignment was to take a short story and rewrite it.  I reworked an F. Scott Fitzgerald piece, entitled (YOU'LL NEVER GUESS WHAT!, unless you read the subject line of this entry, in which case, ohai, spoiler) The Bridal Party (and: yes, it's now been a full term since I took the class, but I swear, I *have* been doing something other than avoiding this blog, namely, schoolwork! And -- other stuff! Oh! And I won an award for my writing! Which included money! Hence the explanation for all of these annoying exclamation points I somehow feel worthy of, suddenly! I apologize.

I will never exclaim again.

You know I'm lying).

Anyway.  The piece! For which you froth at the mouth!  Only probably not really! And more super-gratuitous exclamation points!!

 

**********

The Bridal Party

    She can’t for the life of her lay her mind on any reason that would bring him back to her city, but she knows without doubt that he’s arrived.  Sooz told her so.  Sooz said she saw him out at Crepe Five, and that he was with somebody.  They were together, Sooz said.  It was obvious, she said.  The way he handed her things at the table, that weird sense of mutual ownership people have in a relationship.  You can sense it from across a football field’s distance.  Sooz said he was wearing different clothes, too.  She said he looked weird.  Grown up.

    She walks down to the corner to pick up her dry-cleaning.  Jimmy is on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, which is how she knows it’s him, how he holds his arms.  A soft girl with gray clothes and brown hair, smooth, all eyes, holds him to her.  He looks clean.  Hair short.  His face is cinnamon-warm, the way he angles his head to look at her.  She is a bird, all head-tilts and chirps.  They’re headed to her, to her corner, where she has stopped.  She watches them coming.  He sees her face and smiles.  She looks at the smile and places it under a microscope and studies it, studies the missing element: love for her.  Her heart steals the plate of the smile from beneath the scope and wraps it in an afghan her grandmother made and settles it down inside its center, way way down.  She manufactures a smile to give back.  They bob and nod, while she dots her shirt with sweat just above the top of her bra where it meets her underarms.

    Kate.  The girl’s name is Kate.

    He wants her address so he can send her an invitation.  An invitation?  An invitation to the -- ?  Sure.  Sure, okay.  She says she’ll email it to him.  She knows he knows it, but she doesn’t point it out.  Not in front of Kate.

    They move beyond her corner, waving to her.  Kate’s feet are like little wings of gray leather.  She waves back.  She smiles some more.  She walks down the street to the dry cleaner’s.  Her smile never wavers.  She decides she isn’t going to stop smiling.  Ever.

    She emails him and says they need to meet, that there’s something new about her that he needs to know.  He says, okay, fine, but Kate and I have a lot to do in getting ready for the wedding, because it’s only six days from now.  She whistles when she reads the “six days” part.

    They’re in a coffee shop, not the one they used to always go to.  A new one.  One she’s just decided is not great, and serves the purpose of meeting with him there, so that afterward she can tell people she hates it there, or doesn’t really care for it, or loves it so, but the servers are strange; they’re assholes.  Hipsters with stupid attitudes.  Something like that.  She taps on the table’s round base with the tip of her black loafer.  He’s talking about Kate.  Kate is from Dallas.  Kate likes tennis.  Kate’s birthday is the best day ever invented.  Kate Kate Kate.

    “I finished the book, you know.  I’ve sold it.  I have a publisher and an agent and several blogs and a twitter account and a Facebook page.  It’s official.”

    He looks at her and smiles so big, and he puts his warm hand on hers.

    “I always knew it!  I knew it.  I’m so proud of you, Liz.  I knew you could do it.  That’s awesome news.  Did I tell you Kate and I put together a blog for our wedding?  It would be great if you could maybe write something about it, about us, afterward!”

    She drinks her coffee, her foot a soft staccato on the table base.

    “Love to.  Yeah.  Definitely.  Great.  Listen, I’ve got so much to do today, and it’s been really good catching up with you about everything.  Did I already say congratulations?  Congratulations!  Kate seems really great.  I’m so happy for you both.”

    “Liz, look, don’t worry.  You’ll find someone, too.  You will.”

    “Oh!  Don’t I know it!  I’ve already got about four someones lined up and waiting!  I’ve even considered buying one of those ticker machines for numbers, to avoid confusion."

    “God, Liz, you’re so funny.  Okay.  Yeah.  Great seeing you, too.  God.  I can’t believe it’s only been a year.  Gosh.  Well.  Anyway.  Take care, you!”  He rises and walks away after they embrace awkwardly, with her seated and him leaning down, after they each bestow a dry kiss on the other’s cheek, he drops his coffee cup in the trash on the way out.  She watches him go.

    Wandering around at the reception, where they play Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are” for the bride and groom dance, she finds herself wondering how Billy could sing that to, presumably, Christie Brinkley, and then, to think: just look how they ended up.  Over!  They fell apart!  They didn’t make it!  He loved her just the way she was, he wanted her to not go changing.  He didn’t want clever conversation.  He didn’t want to work that hard.  He said he loved her; that it was forever.  He loved her just the way she was.

    It’s all bullshit, she thinks, as she eats a piece of glistening white cake.  It’s good bullshit, the best kind.  But it’s still bullshit.

Writage

I wrote this piece for last term's fiction course.  The professor requested that we write on three different subjects and splice them together.  I didn't exactly nail the assignment, but I still like the effect of what I produced.  That sounds arrogant, doesn't it.  Does it?  I have no idea.  And no perspective.  I have ceased to be able to discern my own words.  I wrote so much last term and in such a hurry and I stopped being able to feel something about most of it, most of the time.  If that's bad or good, don't tell me.  I'm scared to know.

 

Danceaphobia

 

She watched Mitch pace back and forth across the front of the room.  His movements were arrhythmic and jumpy.  Occasionally he stuck his hands into the pockets of his jeans as he walked, and it made him look like a scarecrow being jerked about by capricious winds.  She didn’t think he resembled a scarecrow, per se, just that the movements seemed herky-jerky like one.  Like if a scarecrow could dance, it would dance irregularly.  Probably because they don’t have hearts to produce rhythms.  No, no, that’s the Tin Man.  By that logic, the Tin Man couldn’t dance either.  How did Dorothy stand those two?  What woman can stand a man who can’t dance?  Then again, the thought of seeing Mitch dancing sort of made her want to vomit involuntarily.  His hands just seemed so awkward.  Out of place within the framework of a rhythmic series of movements.  It seemed pitiable, sort of, which was the thing that brought on the involuntary vomit feeling.  She couldn’t force herself to imagine him as less than totally, wonderfully adaptable, almost magically so.  It hurt her to try. 

 

 

Dancelation

 

 

The troupe who would be performing for the audience gathered in the packed gymnasium lined up against the far wall, where one of the basketball hoops hung.  They waited.  The music began; it was a soft, three-cornered rhythm, with a metallic ring evocative of a kitchen instrument, like a wire whisk being banged around inside a pan.  Joining the metallic rhythm next was the drum, a steady da-da-dum, da-da-dum, urgent and soft.  The hands on the drum’s surface sounded as if they had been wrapped in flour.  The troupe began clapping along, all of them in their row.  Then out from the row of people against the wall leaped a boy wearing the same white pants and navy blue t-shirt as the rest of the male members of the troupe; he kicked out a leg, then the other leg.  He both swayed along with the rhythmic sounds and simultaneously leaped, kicking and spinning, then began no-handed cartwheels in the air.  The audience applauded in excitement.  He was joined after a few moments by another troupe member, this time a girl.  She wore the white pants but instead of a navy blue shirt, she wore a white, fitted tank top.  She spun similarly, but with her own, unique, dance moves intermingled.  The two of them spun around each other, kicking and swaying and leaping, spinning into various shapes of cartwheels and hand-stands and other movements that all wove together, beautifully, in their dance.  Shortly, another member of the troupe, another male, spun into their group and the first fellow departed.  The new man and the first girl spun and kicked and wove in and out, dancing and weaving, never touching but always interacting, until she was joined by another man, and she departed.  This happened again and again, sometimes with a woman and sometimes a man, and it was exciting and unsettling.  How did they never accidentally touch, never accidentally kick one of themselves or miss the beat?  Their bodies, all puzzled together so neatly, mesmerized the audience.  Everyone was clapping along, humming along.  There was an audience-wide enchantment.  People nudged one another, comparing and contrasting their feelings of astonishment at witnessing such impressive ability on that scale.

 

Dance

 

Grass grew up in slim tufts between the shale step-stones.  There was pea gravel laid between the stones, too, but the grass had once inhabited this place and it clung to its old routine and pattern.  Strawberries spilled along the edge of the stones and into the path, tiny and effervescent in their brilliance.  Their bottoms were all scarred from the slugs that had arrived and plundered before another could strike, but the tops of the berries shone and glittered in the bright day.  The lavender stalks waved a little, now, in the slight breeze, the scent blasting out over the rest of the garden.  A ghost-white butterfly moth wandered along the tips of the lavender, swooping down to investigate the strawberries.  It jerked and beat in its soft, little hovering manner, the sun so bright on its wings it nearly disappeared into the late-summer air.  The little white being came to rest on the top of a rust-orange Shasta daisy, drowsing in the warmth, for the briefest moment.  Then up, up, aloft on a criss-cross current, it burst like a bubble, jigging itself away, away from the lavender and berries and daisies and tufts of grass, born into the nearby green spaces it must visit in its daily haunts. 

This Post Is NOT About Huey Lewis OR Any Other Suspicious Eighties Icons

It must be finals week, because I have managed to do any/everything to avoid facing the paper due in my (thoroughly, insanely* awesome) Hawthorne class tomorrow.  I've changed the bedding, picked up the shrapnel from the floor in Jack's room, remembered to take my medication, cleared off the top of the dresser, including the stack of papers that have been sitting there since I came home from Blogher '10 and emptied my bag of papery things and placed them in that position, never to be more than shifted from one dust-squared space to another, UNTIL TODAY, and also?  I petted the cat.

I even considered vacuuming.

It all smells to high heaven of rancour and paper-writing fear.  And, fine, some sugar from the fluffy he-beastie.  Which I kind of needed after all that effort.

I sensed the return to school would occasionally prompt me to blog, simply as a reul-breaking maneuver (like JUST THERE, WHERE I DELIBERATELY MISSPELLED "rule," because FUCK YOU, SPELLING).  I was not incorrect.  It's fun to set my own parameters**.  Shit.  That looks misspelled.  I REFUSE TO MISSPELL ON ACCIDENT.  THOSE ARE NOT MY REULS.  THOSE ARE SOMEONE ELSE'S.  PROBABLY THE PATRIARCHY'S.

Listen.  I *have* been spending a lot of time within a modern academic setting.  If I didn't occasionally reference the patriarchy in libelous fashion, I think they'd suggest I wasn't doing it right, and then what?  THE PATRIARCHY WOULD EAT ME ALIVE.  Or some professors.  With a fine chianti.  Only, it'd be pinot noir, because hello, this is fucking Oregon, bitches.  WE CREATE THE BITCHIN PINOT NOIR.  TO DRINK WITH FRESHLY-SLAUGHTERED STUDENT.  LOCALLY SOURCED.

(Okay, so the all-caps thing?  Because I'm making my own reuls.  IT'S HAPPENING.  ALL OF IT.)

So.  I have this paper due tomorrow?  And I'm blogging to remind myself that I can move my fingers across the keys and whole, nearly-properly-spelled words will appear, because somehow when it's paper-writing time, I grow insensible to my formerly-acknowledged ability to write papers that nearly always garner semi-successful grades.  I do this because I care.  About myself.  And my grades.  Because I like A's.  I like the way they look on the white background.  It's the triangle, I think.  Is that a suggestion of my formerly-subverted urge to covet triangles, because I'm actually a lesbian?  Because dude, WOAH, INSIGHT: a hastily-scrawled ink-pen (ink blot?) B looks like balls.  ANDI HATE B's.  OH MY GOD I'M A LESBIAN.  Wow.  All I had to do to realize it was to go back to college at 38.  Because somehow my age is relevant to this.  In that it makes it sound like I'm trying to be serious.  I love trying to be serious.  It's my favorite.  What was I saying?

OR. SECOND, EQUALLY ENLIGHTENED THEORY regarding my love of the A: I'm narcissistically enamored of my own triangle, my own vag, and therefore I cannot love anyone, ever, and am destined for a psychologically disconnected freefall, a la Marion Crane in Psycho (why, yes, I am currently enrolled in a Hitchcock course). 

So what have we learned here today, everyone?  That I am either a lesbian or a rape/murder destined narcissist.  A's have meaning, is obviously the most important lesson.

OH my god, I have just offended lesbianism.  Haven't I?  I mean, my entire fucking post is offensive, in that it's terrible and mind-numbing, and for that I apologize, but I especially apologize to lesbians for having included them in this terrible post, because I love lesbians.  I have occasionally been one.  Big fan.  (Thank heaven I didn't say what I was going to, just there, the thing I usually say, about puffy foam fingers.  That would've been awkward after having mentioned having been occasionally a lesbian, back in the day, when I was single and it was allowed.  By my singleness.  Because my husband isn't a fan.  Of my being a lesbian.  Or a heterosexual.  Mostly I'm expected to be solosexual.  With him.  HE'S SO WEIRD AND POSSESSIVE.  By which I mean, he's a normal dude.  Who enjoys pretending I was a virgin when we met.  WHICH I WAS, IF IT EVER COMES UP. )

Oh, my god, please don't ever tell him you know me.  The ribbing.  The RIBBING I will receive.  He likes to rib.  That sounds like a sport.  Or dinner. 

I haven't been sleeping well lately.

I have made up 98% of the items in this entry, by the way, so please to not crucify me for being insane or rude, as I'm mostly just terribly stupid and underslept.  And afraid to write my paper.

Does anyone else want to write it for me?  Because if you do, do me a favor and include the barest mention of Miriam/Hilda/Kenyon/Donatello/The Model from The Marble Faun, okay?  I think they need to be mentioned, but only in reference to how much The Marble Faun is an odious piece of suck in comparison to The Scarlet Letter.  Got it?  OH MY GOD I DON'T WANT TO WRITE THE PAPER I DON'T WANT TO DON'T WANNNNT TO. sob.

If you're still reading, give yourself a gold star.  And a pat on the back.  In fact, go get a massage.  On me.  Tell them I'll pay for it when my ship comes in.  (It's a pirate ship.  Which Charlie Sheen is helming.  OH GOD HOW?  How did he creep in to this?  I have managed to avoid nearly all contact with his name, even being on twitter nearly 'round the clock this week, and now this?  My brain is garbage.  Huey Lewis, I want a new brain.  One that won't suck.  One that won't make my crash my car, one that won't let me blog too much.)

There.  There are your Eighties references for the day.  Now let's put them back in their Eighties boxes and leave them there.  YOU HEARD ME, CS.  GET BACK IN THE BOX.  AND TAKE YOUR CREEPY-ASS HASHTAG FODDER WITH YOU.

I need to go write my paper, don't I.

Stop looking at me all accusatorily like that.  You and one other person are actually bothering to read this, so you obviously care enough about me to know I'm sensitive to accusatory looks.  I perform much better when I know people love me than when I think they think I am a bottomless pit of suck.  I am not the one who goes, "oh, you think I can't do this?  JUST YOU WAIT AND SEE."  I mean, I say that, and then I make you wait, and you see that I end up doing something else entirely and pretending I never said I was going to do that other thing, because FUCK YOU, AND YOUR FUCKING DARING ME TO DO SOMETHING I OBVIOUSLY CAN'T DO.  So just instead please believe in me and say I can do it, and mean it, you and the other you, the two yous reading this, and thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart.  I was going to say "stupid heart," but then I figured you'd shake your head at me for using the S word while making tsk noises, and I don't really think my heart is stupid, so it wasn't even the right word anyway, OBVIOUSLY, my heart is probably the smartest part of me since it knows what to do even when I'm rolling in filth and eating cat food because I couldn't find the fridge.  I think my heart is practically a genius.  I just wanted to say it because I like the way the word "stupid" looks.  And sounds.  It's chunky.

Yes.  Chunky.

Paper.  Um.  Yes.

Iloveyoubye!

 

* The reference to Hawthorne as being insane is rooted in his having questionable sanity issues.  Which I think is awesome, since I, too, have questionable sanity issues, and I like meeting other people with equally questionable sanity issues, QUESTIONABLE SANITY ISSUES TIMES INFINITY.

** Seriously, did I misspell parameter?  I don't want to know.  I've misspelled too much, lately, and it hurts.  It hurts in my upper arms.  Like a rubber band wrapped around my -- biceps?  Forceps?  My 'ceps.  There.  Around the ol' 'ceps.  Which is a TERRIBLY CONFINING AND UNCOMFORTABLE sensation.  I imagine.  Because I'm not actually experiencing it.  Nor do I wish to.  So don't make me.

I am never going to write my paper.  Please call my professor and tell him I'm dead.  Or living on Charlie Sheen's pirate ship.  Because I dyed my hair blonde.  Which qualifies me to be his next girlfriend.  Therefore, I am soon to be dead, so just tell my professor it's already happened.  It'll save time.  A precious thing, since I've wasted approximately 74% of your current expected lifespan in asking you to read this.  Also, please apologize to your therapist for me.

She knows why.

An Excerpt and a Small Side Dish of Dismay, Sprinkled with Quittery

Another assignment from the creative writing class.  This time, we were asked to select a sentence from a list of random sets of text and create a short story based around it.  I wrote something kind of unusual for my style, and my professor really liked it.  Which is either heartening or incredibly discouraging, depending on the way I choose to take it.  I'm still up in the air about the whole thing, is what I'm getting at.  Hell, I'm more upset about having to explicitly press the shift key in order to capitalize letters as I type this, because I'm so accustomed to my (newly retired) Blackberry doing it for me, than I am about the matter of whether my writing style is teh suck so far as my prof is concerned.  Basically?  Meh.  That's where I am about it.   Is that concerning?  I. Don't. Know.  Am I on the verge of making a massive mistake?  Probably.  Would I know if a massive mistake were slapping me in the face like an angry fishwife dressed in faded poplin and covered in boils?  Of course not.

In other words, it's Debbie 1.0 all over again.  Whee!

*****

Grow

 

Hubert gave Charles and Irene a nice baby for Christmas.  It arrived as an egg, packed into a wooden crate, surrounded on all sides by mounds of golden straw, dry on the tips and warmly moist within.

Charles harbors suspicions of the egg.  He likes things to arrive in synchronicity, and this egg should have been preceded by something.  Anything.  A warning.  A phone call at midnight from a chicken bereft. 

Not only that, but Charles feels resentment toward the egg.  How dare it show its face without showing its face?  He realizes, as Irene coos over it, that it will eventually reveal itself.  But to refuse an initial introduction?  It only adds to his suspicions.

He imagines a machine that would allow him to see through its shell while he clicks on cells in an Excel spreadsheet on his computer in the room where he works, the smooth white walls around him, knowing there are better ways to do things.  Charles knows it and knows, too, that he lacks the singular capacity to create such a mechanism.   If only the shell were visually permeable with a Microsoft Office program.  He could do it like that.  Snap.  He snaps his fingers for effect.  The sound stays nicely contained within the walls of his smooth, white office.

Charles gets hungry when he’s inventing.  He pushes away from his desk and swivels toward the door.  He never dismounts from the chair until he’s right next to the door because that makes it easier for him to mount the chair again just as soon as he returns.  The chair stays put where he ditches it, at the mouth of the office.

Charles has arrived in the kitchen, where he drags his hands across the surfaces of the room, labeling, in his head, all of the accessories with small, white labels, names in typewriter font.  Fuck Helvetica.  He hates Helvetica.  He’s in the midst of a strong personal backlash against Helvetica and all those who profess love for its tidy dominance.  What was good enough for Hemingway is good enough for him.

He drifts in a starved near-faint to the room where the egg sits in its brown box and wet hay.  He looks longingly at it.  So smooth.  So damn smooth.  He rests his hand gently on its head.  Not, of course, that he thinks the top of the egg is a head.  He just pretends it is.  He holds its tip in both of his hands.  Irene would be so pissed.

He runs back to his office, his gold and black Nike high-tops pounding the polished cement floor, the floor he and Hubert had christened after they’d used all the expensive treatments to give it depth and striations of subtle color, because they were so drunk neither of them could make it to bathroom and one, then the other, had vomited, because they’d forgotten to wear the masks, and the chemicals plus the beer made them sick, he runs to his office.  His hands are shaking as he rips open drawer after drawer.  He can’t stop shaking.  Then he sees it, the thing, the very item, the tool itself, he grabs it up and runs back, gold and black feet blurred in staccato rhythm through the rooms with their smooth white walls, he is panting, he runs to the room where the egg sits in its box.  The egg is glowing.  Charles is glowing too.  He stands in the door of the room and begins to stamp something out using the tool.  Stamp, stamp, stamp.  It makes a loud clacking noise.  The room is filled with the noise of the clacks.  The egg is quiet.  Charles is sweating.

The tool produces a white slip of something.  Charles pulls it gently from the tip and carefully tears it away.  He sidles up to the egg as if to say, “It’s all right, Egg.”

The egg is quiet.

Charles places the slip, with its sticky underside, on the egg’s head.  Its crown.  He pats it carefully into place.

It says “EGG.”  In Garabaldi.

Something About Something

I wrote this for my creative writing course yesterday.  The assignment was to create a scene based on talking around the theme.  You know.  Elephants.  Rooms.  All that.

Anyway, I liked what I came up with (although I'm terribly aware of the overlong initial sentence and of my age-old addiction to indulgent overlong sentences and that I should've cut it).  You don't have to.  Like it.  Conversely, you're welcome to like it.  I DON'T CARE.  MEH.  (Except we both know I'm full of bull pucky, and that I am henceforth only to be known as "butt tube TM (pending)."  A butt tube TM (pending), if you must know, and you must, is my replacement word for pussy, because I don't like the association of weakness/lameness with a woman's vag.  I simply don't care for it.  Butt tube, meantime, forces association of weakness with the sack o' crap that everyone, regardless of gender, must bear.  You're allowed to use it, so long as you give me full credit.  LOTS OF CREDIT.  FOR BUTT TUBE. TM. PENDING.

What is wrong with me?

Ahh, yes.  I know what is wrong with me.  I am stalling.  So.  Fine.  Here's the damn story already.  READ IT.   OR DON'T.  FEH.  OR MEH.  WHATEVER.

(I'm having some trubs addressing the whole "critique" portion of the creative writing course menu.)

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She lay with her face pressed into the bed and she tried to cry, she tried to get it over with, the way you try to get done when you’re on the toilet and you don’t really want to be there, and nothing, no tears, which is exactly what she expected but was also really hoping she could push past and into tears anyway.  She wrinkled her face up and tried again, and still nothing.  The blanket smelled.   She inhaled deeply to discern the subtle elements lashed together within its fibers, settling on the prominent ones: cat and dirty socks.  The key turned in the lock on the front door and she lay and listened to the crumbly sounds, wondering if she should get up.

“You okay?”  He was obviously standing in the hallway, the way his voice came out over the sound of a coat being removed and hung on the hook.

“What?  Yeah.  I’m fine.”  The blanket was still pressed against her face so her words were muffled.

“Sure?”  He came in and sat beside her, resting his hand on her right shoulder blade.  Hesitant to move now that he was there, because she didn’t want him to get up, she held her breath for a second.  She had to flip over a little though when she ran almost completely out of breath.  It made him shift away from her.

“Eh.  I’m fine.  I don’t know.”  Grabbing a pillow, she pulled it toward her and lifted her head up with its bulk so she could be minutely closer to him.

“I talked to Richard about Heather today at work.”  He shook his head.  It looked uncomfortable, his sitting like that, she worried.  She leaned up so she could push him onto the other pillow.  She couldn’t look at him sitting all upright and awkward that way.

“Oh.  Did he say anything about Joanna?”

“Nope.  But guess what?  New baby.  They just found out last week.”

“Oh!  That’s hilarious.  Good for them.”

“Yeah.  I know.”  He stuck his hand on top of her hand.  The weight burned into the skeleton and the tendons and the veins, she could feel her veins throbbing.  She could feel them doing a dance.  It was a Katy Perry booby-shaking dance, no.  No it wasn’t.  It was Beyonce with the ring song dance.  Where you shake your hand and maneuver up and down.  Just like when she was dancing with John last weekend at the club with all of the gay boys and everyone was whooping and hollering because it was their favorite song, and they were all shaking their hands and moving up and down like they were on broken escalators and she was too drunk and she fell over, she fell off of her escalator, and she embarrassed John and she couldn’t stop talking to the drag queen who was that night’s DJ, she kept telling him how fierce he was.  He wasn’t even that fierce. 

“Hey.  Listen.  You already said you were gonna call and make an appointment with Amanda’s acupuncturist.  You’re still gonna do that, right?”  He picked up the wet piece of hair on her cheek and gently pressed it into the rest of her hair.  She nodded a yes.  She nodded a really small yes.

“Good.  I’m glad.  I think it’s a good idea.  Definitely worth a shot.” 

“Okay.”

“I love you, you know.”  He smiled down at her head. 

“I have to go make dinner.”  She stood up quick so he couldn’t see the lines from the blanket all squished on the other side of her face that made her ugly.

“I said I love you, you know.”  He pulled her hands toward him and she stumbled into him and kept her face turned a little away.  She cried.  She nodded again.  Small yes.

“Yeah.  I know.  I love you too.”  Her voice was shaky.  She laughed at how she sounded, she thought it was funny that she was being a little hysterical.  She sounded phlegmy.  She got up to leave.

“You sure you’re okay now?”

“Yeah.  I’m fine.  I gotta get dinner going if we’re ever gonna eat tonight, babe.”

“Okay.”

“Chicken okay?”  She said it over her shoulder as she walked down the hall into the kitchen.  The light in the kitchen was too white.  It felt too sharp.  She didn’t want it in her eyes.  She turned it off with a quick jab at the switch.

Flipping it back on, her hand resting on the button, she squinted around the room.   She had missed the light when it was off.

What Happens When Your Mantra of "No Regrets" Collides with All of Your Regrets?

I live with a heavy load of paranoia as part of my daily existence.  I take, and have been taking, medication for paranoid schizophrenia/bipolar disorder for many months, and it works.  Some.  Which equates to the following: the nagging sensation that everyone hates me has diminished.  It doesn't mean it's *poof* disappeared.  And even while it's true that paranoia plays a far smaller role in my current mindset, I'm still constantly encountering places from where my past bumps into my present and the paranoia that imbued itself in those places somehow evinces itself and frightens me once again with its strength and its cruelty.

(Does this make it sound as though I'm not taking responsibility for myself - for where I am, for how I've behaved, because of being routinely terrifically paranoid?  I hope not - I'm trying so hard to own my behavior, past-present-future.  But it worries me.  What if I'm handing off the blame?  And on and on.)

One of the recurring elements of my particular brand of paranoia is preventing people from having the opportunity to turn on me, or that is, preventing what is my perception of people turning on me, by disengaging from them before the opportunity arises for them to do so.  Let's say you're one of my sane friends: that must seem odd, that moment where I suddenly disappear and refuse all contact for a nonspecific length of time, only to once again reappear.  This is, of course, when the paranoia dies down and all I see is that I miss you. 

I'm ashamed of it, but what's worse?  I suppose it's being ignorant still of the behavior itself, of simply going through the routine of shunning people once I've worked out in my paranoia that they have taken a dislike to me, find me unworthy for all the reasons, grand and stupid, that I've determined throughout the years would make me loathsome and unlovable. 

So does that make me crazy?  I guess so.  I suppose?

What am I to do?

And the medication helps.  I've been able to be undeterred by paranoia to the point that I have gone back to college and am finishing my degree.  I'll be done by December of 2011.  I was thinking I might try for finishing at the end of summer, but it's too much, I would have to take five classes per term for the next three terms, and it would be harmful to the homeostasis of the family environment, such as it is.  (It's not perfect, that's for sure.)  I keep trying to predict my future, post-graduation, but I think it's best to simply keep my sights on finishing school.  At least I know I can do that.  Itself a huge marker of success.

I'm taking a creative writing class this term.  Our first session was today.  I locked up when it was time to produce something based on a short piece of writing the instructor had passed around, something she concluded was themed on the lines of regret.  I ran with it, and wrote a thing I was entirely dissatisfied with afterward.  Of course.  How could I be otherwise?  I can't get outside of anything I've written for at least a few weeks.  I can't hear it as anything other than a bunch of rattly-beans-in-a-shaker set of sounds until after a set amount of time has passed.  But I volunteered to read it aloud anyway.  Just to dare myself.  Just to see if I could.  My voice shook and I nearly choked, but I did it.

It was really scary.

When I got home I wanted to write something more, but something concrete, something uncreative.  Blogging isn't supposed to be that, at least not these days, these days of flash and shine and ads and humor and entertainment.  I'm daring myself to write in incredibly monotous tones in a public forum, unedited to reflect how dull I can truly be.  So that I can prove to myself that it's okay.

It's really okay.

And writing with a pen is hard.  Much harder than with a keyboard.  Ow.

Before and After Photos

If this series of images could only reveal everything beneath what's been poured into them in their in-betweens, it would be much richer than watching me try to unbend and form them myself.  Instead I'm saving all of my words for papers and other writerly, University-related endeavors. 

* Did I mention?, I'd like to be an interior designer when I grow up, and I live in Portland, OR, if you're interested in hiring a totally untrained, totally impetuous lover-of-beat-down-pieces person who might redecorate your place to reflect the set of Mad Men, only without most of the awesomeness, replaced with double the musty scent.  Plus I love to paint with expensive Benjamin Moore prettiness, which I may as well point out (redundantly) is ridiculously expensive.  SWEET.

Before.

After.

Before.

After.

Before.

After.

  Before.

After.

Before.

After.

Before.

After.

 

Stolening From Myself

Ripping this with little care for its origin, I'm posting it here because I like it.  And want you to like it.  Do you like it?  Do you?  Check the appropriate box if you do.  See the box?  It's there, just below the invisible gila monster still gnawing my arm to bits.

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(Here's the original.  Don't bother visiting.  It's more plump with words but certainly no more satisfying.)

There was a girl who wanted to begin running. She would examine her eyes and her pimples and her yellowing teeth and she would run her tongue over the teeth and not the pimples though she would wish she could run her tongue over those, only they were on her neck, and thus a physical impossibility, but it didn't undercut her longing to do so, and she would superimpose the her-running over the her-teeth-licking. She, in cold, in rain, hair frizzled and grizzled, clothes flumping about her form, her awkward stomps, her breath bulleting out of her through all the places on her face that it could get free, even her eyes a little. Shorts sticking to her butt and pulling up between her thighs, her right fist sweating in its tightened ball of fury, her left hand open, dry, fresh, and free. Her right fist so angry, so resentful. Her left hand so happy to be bounced along with the rest of her.

The trees would whisper to her as she ran beneath them, some of them trying to hang onto her as she passed beneath, because they saw her, they really saw her and they knew she was something. They knew she could be their savior, but she resisted their thin-fingered grasps, ignored their imploring scrabbles, ducked. Sometimes they'd leave a gift of themselves nesting in the crown of her hair. It itched.

She ran on, in her mind, and the grass ran alongside her, it sang out, its mouth wet, glistening. She laughed. She knew the grass wanted to run with her always. She could hear the grass when it began to cry because she would not slow for it, not ever.

The cement did not care where she ran. And she did not ask it to.

The sky, the sky sent down little alarms, little bits of itself, it wanted to reassure her, and she, without looking up, told the sky in puffs and wreathes of breath, impulsively, that she would return the favor. When the time was right. It wasn't now. They were in on it, the sky and she, and they were gangsters. Pistolas loaded with words, with breath, with mouths wet, with explosions. Surprises.

The run itself spoke as she went, in a wavering line, it told her secrets, it told her of history and of future and of all things, of her crotch being itchy from the shorts as they rode up, of orgasms that shorts do not give, of hair falling into faces and ears that hear the organic arms of the world around speaking in a cacophony and of crickets, frogs, blossoms, dog turds, and squirrels who pin their paws to their chests in frozen stillness.

And then she crawled into her bed, fresh from the bathroom and the teeth-licking run.

the ever-shrinking ego inversely proportionate to the ever-intimidating subject line

This is how it feels:  it feels labyrinthine, it feels cluttered.  It looks like a table covered with objects, some of which correlate, some of which are a pile of fruit and vegetables on a round, red dish, where the dust has licked along its ruddy edges and left evidence of its path.  It looks like a nearly-empty plastic orange pill bottle with mustard-hued pills that want re-ordering, it looks like the rudderless head attached to the body of ills of questions of newfound hatred of commas.

It feels angry and dashed and it feels drenched to its core in shame.  Where is the shining All-American confidence?  Where is the rising above?  Not in the anger.  Not in the gutted homelessness.  Not there.

It wants peace.  Perfection.  It wants courage and steadfast consistent high-flung head strength.  It wants sex.  And desire.  And it wants its way.

 

It wants its way.