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Screaming

You're all busy pointing fingers. She's at the football game again. How dare she fly a private jet. How dare she be (more) successful (than me)?

They won't spend the money in the right ways. But I (you) wont bother paying attention and getting to the polls.

Some people's children, amiright? Some people shouldn't have children and they're the ones pointing the loudest at the ones choosing not to in an actual hellscape.

I try to surround myself with art. I swear to the gods that I do. But the blood of the world sinks into my vision no matter how tightly I shut my eyes.

Tuesdays are the worst. I genuinely hate the feeling of being left. But he's not doing anything he's not supposed to be doing so why

can't

I

breathe.

Is this screaming into the void? Is this what you wanted? Who's listening? Who cares? Is this who I've always been? Why do I feel weaker than I've ever been when I'm armed with years of coping skills and what are they again? I forget every time.

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Happy Year of the Dragon!

I love the idea of kintsugi so here's a porcelain dragon that highlights the broken seams with gold. Despite all the pains of hardships in life, we are beautiful.

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Cream

First, you awake. Not because your story must commence at consciousness, but because this part of your day does. You can’t help but be awake. After all, your noisy neighbor is up at this hour and their floorboards serve as your routine alarm.

Your body is in withdrawal, and you shuffle toward the french press. The kettle bubbles like an overexcited lava lamp, and you pour the liquid into the soil and wait for your potion to sprout. The water morphs into a runny golden honey that deepens to impenetrable bronze; the steam tosses coffee particles at you and you inhale the acidic earthiness that promises at the least a sweet start.

You add cream.

There’s something impossibly comforting about adding cream to that sizzling cup. You choose precisely the amount that you want. You don’t consult anyone else. You don’t compromise. It’s the easiest decision you’ll make today. It doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s liquified comfort, and it’s purely yours.

10.06.20

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April 25: Moving Forward

I hope to be brave.

Being a writer takes a specific sort of courage to fail. It takes courage to fail and it takes courage to fail again. And then again and again after that. Putting yourself and your work out there at all is more than a little bit scary. It means what you’ve created might be (or will be) seen, read, judged, loved, masticated and torn to shreds by anyone with a freshly sharpened keyboard. It means writing a certain vulnerability into your work, a certain realness that comes from broken, bleeding places. I hope to be brave enough to write from those places and not let it hurt when someone (or more than one someone) rejects something that I tended to so carefully.

I hope to be brave enough to keep writing. It’s so easy not to. There are so many other things out there that want my attention, things that inject my brain with more easily accessible dopamine than the steady dedication required to write. But books, poems, songs, movies, zines, articles, cartoneras, musicals, tv series, video games don’t get written when you’re not putting words on to pages, and words don’t make it to pages when you’re playing Two Dots or swiping for miles down social media pages investing yourself in the published lives of selves outside of your own. Words don’t make it to pages when you’re too busy second guessing them before they get there. I hope to be brave enough to silence that inner critic long enough to put some words some place outside of my brain, brave enough to decide there must be someone else out there who does want to read them at least once.

In terms of form, (this is going to be so obnoxiously standard and unsurprising but) I would someday really love to have a novel published. If I could take a hardcover or paperback copy of something I put together and slide it softly into my bookshelf so that it’s jacket could caress those of Rowling’s and Gaiman’s, I might cry. I hope to be brave enough to try that someday.

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April 11: Field Methods

I must admit, possibly the only thing that felt somewhat comfortable was interviewing. At least with interviewing, the subject of inspiration was being made aware that that’s what they were. Even then, I was worried my questions would make my interviewees feel uncomfortable. I knew I was relying on their vulnerabilities and honesty in emotion to create what I hoped would be a powerful zine, but I felt awful knowing some of these questions could push dark thoughts to the forefront of their minds.

I enjoy observation and eavesdropping, but there is a part of me that’s concerned a story inspired from that method would somehow end up being read by the person I observed and would end up upsetting them in some way. Though, in all honesty if I could record an interesting interaction undetected, chances are they wouldn’t even remember having that conversation in that coffeeshop. I harbor a similar fear of writing creative fiction and/or nonfiction inspired by my own family, or my own true-life events. I often turn to the quote “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.” But inside me there still exists some sort of guilt.

What if I get the story wrong? What if it starts out inspired by someone real, and then I have to twist that character into even more of a villain? What if I make the wrong assumption? What if I don’t do enough research? What if I come across as sounding too cynical or too angry? Who would want to read that?

I realize these are simply insecurities I harbor as a writer. Excuses. Things that hold be back, probably. As a reader, I’m drawn to stories that are authentic and feel vulnerable. I think to be a successful writer, you have to confront or understand your own vulnerabilities in a way that allows you to then write from them. After all, people like Superman, but audiences as a whole have a difficult time connecting to someone so faultless. We’re drawn to the pain that we share, because we can see our imperfect selves within that sort of story.

I think something that could be helpful for me to overcome this flavor of anxiety might be to study more of David Sedaris’ work. From the clip we studied in class, I felt that he had a way of including his observations about the world around him that were non-threatening, informative, and humorous.

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April 4: Interview

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March 28: Mrs. Giovanna

Mrs. Giovanna couldn’t have been more than five feet tall with thick blue-black hair that fell to her hips. She was my mother’s mother’s friend, before she was my mother’s friend, and then she became mine. Whenever I asked Mom about her, Mom would say they hadn’t caught up in a while but that they surely would once Mrs. Giovanna was back from [insert destination here]. She danced in the clouds until they brought her someplace new and left when it started to rain.

When I was younger, I remember she was booking appointments as a hypnotist and prescribing flower essences to her clients that were custom made during their sessions. I was given my very own flower essence at the age of 9, and cherished the rosy, alcoholic taste. It came in a tiny sapphire glass bottle with a glass dropper to distribute the potion onto my tongue. I remember her teaching me how to make a pendulum swing in the direction I wanted it to without moving my hand, and for my bridal shower she bestowed upon me the most beautiful set of tarot cards. It was unclear how these small bohemian side jobs could fund all her whimsical adventures that seemed fall one just after the other like dominoes, but I could only assume that they did. She never seemed to be worried about money.

Whenever Mrs. Giovanna was around, she would find a way to drag us all into this world she breathed: booking us yoga classes in abandoned churches, taking us on eye-watering New Year’s Day hikes through ice-crusted snow, and treating us to afternoon tea in cozy snug hole-in-the-wall coffee shops. One thing you could be sure of on a visit with Mrs. Giovanna is that there would always be good food. Even before your bum landed on the curved wooden seat of her kitchen chairs, Mrs. Giovanna was setting something in front of you. It was often guacamole in the summer, but in the winter it was always thick, spicy, dark hot chocolate.

Mrs. Giovanna was a shamaness. She knew which stones to put in your pocket or wear on your finger for any occasion. If you needed inspiration, she would remind you to keep amethyst nearby. If you were going in for a big exam or job interview it was always tiger’s eye and quartz—the tiger’s eye would keep you grounded and quartz was for clarity. And then of course, there was love. Rose quartz was the stone to keep in your pocket while you waited for love to find you. Keep it warm and keep it close, and don’t forget to set it on your bedside table at night, she would tell you. If you thought the stones weren’t working, she knew how to fix that too. She would ‘clear’ the stones through a complicated ritual involving incense, moonlight, candles and cards. And she would always remind you to wait for the universe to answer your questions. The animals will tell you, she’d say. Wait for their sign.

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March 18: Zines

What I find most interesting about zine publishing history is that it was a sincere attempt for what we now call “fandoms” to connect, prior to the advent of the internet. This is supported by Stephen Duncombe’s research, pointing out that zine culture was thriving during the Reagan administration and hit its “peak period in 1997” (58). As the internet became available to the public in 1991 and then social media took hold in the early 2000′s, small press publishing was forced to take a backseat or redesign to stay relevant. Even large press, large-scale publishers have had to adapt and create virtual subscription options to remain afloat as many people now obtain their news via digital media platforms. I think the idea of zine culture as a stage for early fandoms is especially obvious when you consider that it has roots growing from the science fiction “fanzine” community and culture. There was obviously an interest in sci fi, but it wasn’t a universal interest, so how else were individuals who were so spread across the continent communicate with one another? To come together over Star Wars and Star Trek and other interstellar stories with futuristic technologies? Through zines.

Let’s not use the word “community,” as zine culture prefers the word “network”. So these self-proclaimed losers, these geeks, they would find a network through creating zines together and then sending them via post or by placing them in cafés that belonged to these underground networks. And who doesn’t love to receive mail that isn’t bills or junk? I know even to this day, there is a special sort of feeling that comes from opening the mailbox to an unexpected letter or small package from a friend. Maybe these zine writers didn’t know one another personally, but they knew they had the shared experience of a love for a genre that was largely made fun of, and they loved the genre without shame together within the space of the zines they created.

Moving forward from there, zines took on a more punk aesthetic but they also continued to create a special way of crossing over arbitrary societal lines. It should be noted that many zines included a letter section or a contact section. Essentially, zines included something from at least one other person who wrote in and wanted to share something personal, or addresses from people who wanted others to write to them. This snail-mail connectivity shows just how isolated and lonely we all feel, how much we all yearn for connection with other people who share our interests. The zine network is a concrete example of how people are able to come together across generations, genres, gentrification, and general distances.

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March 7: Distracted

     I was looking down at the red and white plastic bag on my arm. With my free hand, I rifled through the bag to find the receipt that was evading my grasp. I wanted to be certain that the sale price hand rung up properly. My feet carried me toward the first set of doors. There! I snatched the wiggly receipt and it crinkled in my hand. The physical comfort of having the receipt was enough, I would check it when I got into my car. If there was some discrepancy at least I knew I could prove it. Then all I would have to do would be to find the time to file a formal complaint and wait the requisite three to five business days for the money to return to my account (Here, the friendly customer service representative would of course issue the disclaimer that different banks had different processing times and it could take up to ten business days at the very most, but of course, that rarely happened anyway so have a nice day!). I glanced up for fear of running into something while distracted. That would be mortifying.

     Outside of the building framed through two sets of automatic sliding doors was a fast-moving man with grey hair. He wore a coat that, according to the way he was hunched against the whipping wind, wasn’t appropriate for today’s stinging cold. He was rushing, gesturing frantically at someone I couldn’t see, urging them to hurry. A moment later a woman came running up from behind him. Her chosen method of defense against the weather was clearly speed. He looked back to see that she was heeding his order, and in doing so nearly walked smack into the outer glass door. I knew they wouldn’t open for him. You see, there was a red and white sticker in the middle of them that read: EXIT. He narrowly avoided the collision and with a bit of an unbalanced skip he continued to the doors waiting greedily to welcome him in. I kept my eyes up and watched where I went as I picked my way across the lot to my car, receipt in hand.

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February 29: Ordinary Shoes

After a quick tumble through the website Brevity, I landed on a beautiful piece of writing by Brenda Miller entitled “Ordinary Shoes”.

The beginning of this flash pulled me in with its relatability. It detailed the clumsiness of the narrator, something that we have all felt as humans at one point in our lives or another. We can all recall nights that were full of aching growth, followed the next day by the discomfort of stumbling through the world with unaccustomed height or breadth. The narrator of this story found that despite her bumbling nature, she was graceful once she glided onto the roller-rink.

I love how she described a photograph of her mother to transport the reader back to the past and then forward again to the present. It’s a graceful transition, void of stuttering phrases such as: ‘She thought back to a different time,’ or ‘She reminisced.’ She detailed her mother in her glittering youth as a competitive skater and how she is crumbling in her old age, overburdened with worry and health troubles.

The author also brought to life the character of the younger mother, as though the daughter could reach through the old photograph and bring her along so that they could skate together, “like sisters or best friends,” (Miller). The transposition of roles here is also relatable, for as we spend our lives in proximity to our parents our roles will likewise shift, and shift again.

I was struck most by how many stories were told in this five-paragraph flash fiction. The story of the daughter as both a child and an adult, of the mother as a young woman and an elderly matron. The story of the relationship between them as daughter and mother, and the hinting of a transition in relationship, where the daughter took on a more friend-like, sister-like, or mother-like role. Finally, the story told in the past, the story told of the present, and the story that hadn’t really happened, told as a creative imagining.

As a writer myself, I hope to some day be able to say so much with so little. I think it’s essential to put faith in your audience, otherwise they will become frustrated and walk out. You must give them enough to keep them in their seats, but not so much that they don’t leave wanting to chew on it a bit longer, to wonder about it, to discuss it. If I could achieve that, I would feel I had succeeded as a writer because at that point, the work itself will have come alive.

If you would like to read “Ordinary Shoes” by Brenda Miller, you can find it here: https://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/ordinary-shoes/ 

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February 22: A box, a prism, a cat toy, a card.

In the living room you’ll see a box second from the top of a haphazard forest of corrugated boxes that was packed by a stranger. It’s short. It’s squat. It’s flat. There’s an orange tag taped to it with prescriptive type that reads:

JOB 24 – Tier Eno

Tier Eno Relocation

705 Country Road T.

NEW ENGLAND, WI 54960

Just below the that in clumsy black marker: Room 1.

I don’t know what Room 1 means. The boxes marked Garage go into the garage. The boxes without tags go into closets. Some things came in translucent plastic bags the size that might fit nicely into a yard sized waste can. Those were the easiest to understand, and the worst for the environment. Sacrifice in the name of convenience.

Room 1 could be one of the spare rooms from our last Home. If it was in order of appearance after entering the hallway, it would have been the guest room. I didn’t go in there often, unless I was cleaning and changing the bedding for an arriving or departing guest. There was a printer, but that was lost. What did we keep in that closet? I never went in there. Maybe I should just throw away this Room 1 box. It taunts me. I think I’d rather leave it taped up.

You might also notice a worn-out corner shelf to your left, but you probably won’t. It’s secondhand to me, maybe seventh or eighth-hand in its fully decorated life. There’s a square bit of lacquer missing from the very bottom edge that I hope won’t be noticed. I didn’t notice it myself until I attacked it with paper towels and cleaning solution. More convenience.

On a tile resting on this shelf sits a clear glass diamond prism. It’s upside down and the tip is angled up toward the curvy ceiling of this attic-apartment. It’s meant to bring light to hard-to-reach places. Light below decks was difficult to maintain in the days of ship travel, especially as those ships were once made of wood. Can you imagine the hazards of an unwatched lamp on a wooden ship? Anyway, someone brilliant developed these glass diamond prisms that were set into the planking of the ship to let in the light from above. I scooped one up during a visit to San Francisco because it was so beautiful. It used to hang in a lovely little pie-box window at Home. Here it has no place or purpose; the peppermint light of winter can’t reach to shine through the prism glass. 

Oops—not to worry, it’s just a cat toy you’ve stepped on. It’s a jarring sound I know. A tearing sort of crinkle that sounds as if something has broken. It’s just bits of plastic all pinched-up together into a small shimmery ball. Apparently cats like the crinkling sound. Sir Arnold prefers the little mice to crinkling toys, but the old dog likes to eat them. No, not real mice--the small, colorful, furry mice whose black eyes, pink ears, and little noses always fall off. I never know where they end up. Maybe Sir Arnold is eating them when I’m not looking. Cats and dogs are perpetual toddlers. They have a penchant for putting things in their mouths that they ought not to.

I like the card the most, though. I’ll have to fetch it from the bedroom to share it with you. It’s made of a gentle, sturdy stock that’s soft and white. A candy red quilled paper heart is planted right in the middle of the cover. It’s so elegant and so cliché and it’s absolutely perfect. In gold, capital writing below the heart it reads, YOU HAVE MY HEART. If you fold open the cover to reveal the inside, the image repeats. This time, the red heart is tiny but below it sits more golden uppercase writing. And below that, his handwriting that begins with “Cher amoureaux” and ends with “Votre pour toujours.” The handwriting makes it his and makes it mine. It’s black and sweet and cursive. On the back there’s some type that says something about where the card is from, but it doesn’t matter to me. I should give the artist credit, but the only person it’ll ever be from to me is him. With him, this clumsy attic feels more like Home.

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February 15: Lydia Davis

The first thing I notice about Lydia Davis’ book, Varieties of Disturbance Stories is the translucent text and the fly on the cover. It’s rendered to look much like a real fly, and I do find it disturbing insofar as that I’d quite like to smash the fly that isn’t a fly. As to that cleverness: well done.

Davis’ writing does just as the title states, which is to say that it covers a variety of disturbing moments. The level of disturbing ranges from humorous to very dark. In her entry entitled “Idea for a Short Documentary Film” she offers up the image of a company representative trying (and likely failing, though that is implied) to open their own product packaging. Then, a few entries later she is talking about ways that love falls apart and can potentially be mended through “Forbidden Subjects”. In one of the darkest entries she travels into the emotional topic of her father’s death through “Grammar Questions”.

Her narrative quality comes across as diary-like, nearly stream of consciousness. The diary-entry form is supported also by the fact that some of the varieties are as short as one sentence, which illustrates how short an entire story can be while still evoking specific imagery. “Collaboration with a Fly” is only one sentence in length, but I could envision the scene of her writing or typing and a fly adding an apostrophe where he landed. Though you could argue that this sentence is only visualized properly due to the interaction of it and its title. Without the title, the story would be far more ambiguous, and it wouldn’t evoke as specific an image.

For me, this isn’t a book to read cover to cover in a week or so. It would be a book to read one or two varieties from, and then to chew on for a while before taking a bite out of the next. This is especially true of Davis’ shorter entries, as they can be vague and I’d like to spend more time on them than just simply turning the page. What I find the most compelling is her talent of making each word move the story in some way, usually forward. Her short-format style leaves no room for words that waste time or space.

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February 8: The Cacophony

A guinea pig was chewing on my ear.

I don’t own a guinea pig.

I opened my right eye to the soft, warm darkness of the morning; my husband, fast asleep just to my right. Something was still squeaking. I realize the sound is coming from outside of the apartment. And that it’s fading. My foggy brain decides that it was the serpentine belt (one that very clearly needs a mechanic) of someone’s car. My brain then demands that we abandon this conscious stream of thought to return to unconsciousness and starts to wander back into my dreams.

A trash can is dragged down one of the many long driveways that line the street like capillaries branching from a vein. I’m reminded that it’s trash pick-up and that once I do actually get up I’ll have to take out my own bins. Again, my brain rejects this logical list-making and requests that we sleep longer. I roll over, tuck the blankets tighter around me and—

Another trash can. Another driveway. Who designed these things? More specifically, who designed the wheels on these things? Why do trash bins insist on protesting when being pulled from one corner of the yard to another? Does no one put their bins out at night anymore?

Trash neighbor number one must have inspired the whole neighborhood, for at that moment the echoing clink of glass on glass and glass on aluminum fills the air. At least this neighbor is attempting to recycle their trash. An earth-friendly trash neighbor. At this point, both of my eyes are open and looking into the dark that’s shifting subtly from black, to charcoal grey. Things in my room are starting to take shape. I should try to get more sleep. I close my eyes.

A motor rumbles to life, and the walls shake. I didn’t know one of our neighbors took an XF-84H plane to work.

Downstairs, our neighbor opens and closes the two doors between her and the driveway as if they’ve been talking smack about her mother.

I plant my heels on the floor and hoist myself up in the direction of the coffeemaker.  

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February 1: The Smart Phone

I really should have said something on Tuesday.

I get comfortable in my Foreign Film Studies class, and a sandy-haired boy sits to my left. From the corner of my eye I see that hormones haven’t been kind to him, leaving their signature upon his face in the form of an angry red spackling. He places a navy-blue cup from the coffeeshop on his swivel desk. And nothing else.

Well, except for his bacteria-infested iPhone gripped lovingly in his right hand, which rests next to the non-recyclable coffee cup.

As we near the beginning of class, I expect the disease-ridden thing to be pocketed. Maybe even for a notebook or a pen to make an appearance. I guess I’ve just been out of higher education for too long because the scrawny inconsiderate little prick stays on his phone when class begins. He stays on his phone during and after attendance. He stays on his phone while the patient professor discusses the readings with us, and while he prefaces the film we’ll be screening after said discussion.

The lights go down, the movie comes up, and finally, finally the radioactive thing gets put away. I breathe an inner sigh of relief. Maybe I judged him too harshly.

Then he falls asleep.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, he wakes up and leaves for a third of an hour. At this point I hope he stays gone. I’m sure the social media gods need him to bolster his measly five hours of daily dedication by interrupting a very expensive education. I hope he has hemorrhoids.

All I could think about was how expensive that nap and bathroom break were. And about how this kid probably has no idea that he will be paying the interest off that nap for potentially the next ten years. Longer, if he manages to dip out of this institution not having paid attention, taken any notes, or made any effort to absorb any information whatsoever because I’m here to tell you that that is the precise recipe for failure. Failing out of classes doesn’t bode well in terms of degree acquirement. Not acquiring a degree doesn’t bode well in terms of loan repayment. And in case you don’t know, that shit stays with you until death do you part. Not even the credit crushing process of bankruptcy can forgive those nasty blood-sucking loans.

Next Tuesday, I’ll say something.

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January 25: The Imaginary List

I don’t leave the house without completing a checklist. It’s a fluid list, subject to change at any moment. It’s changed recently, in fact. Everything has changed recently. I’ve moved from the warm, beachy, sunny west coast back to a sloppy, biting, unpredictable Wisconsin winter. Out west, I didn’t have to think about heating my home much. The thermostat hung meekly upon the wall, telling me digitally that the home’s poorly insulated inside temperature mostly reflected the outside temperature. It tended to be a bit hotter during the evenings, when you wished it would cool down as fast as the rest of the misty world once the horizon turned away from the sun. Then of course, it was colder during the mornings, giving the air just enough chill to enhance the cute little curls of heat that rise off of your first cup of coffee. The point is that I didn’t have to add temperature management to my list while living on the west coast. Here it’s a requirement.

 My current checklist goes something like this:

1.       Blow out candles (to keep from burning the house down).

2.       Close the toilet lid (to keep Arnold from playing in the bowl).

3.       Turn down the heat (to keep the bill down).

4.       Turn the stove off (see item number 1).

5.       Close the bedroom door (to keep Arnold out).

6.       Make sure there’s water for Arnold and Koda (to keep them alive).

7.       Put up the gate (to keep Koda off of the carpets).

8.       Check pockets (for essentials, like those useful little plastic cards and my phone).

9.       Fill water bottle (to keep me alive, and to save the planet from single-use plastic items).

10.   Confirm keys are in hand (to keep from being locked out).

11.   Lock doors (to keep thieving at bay).

 If I forget an item on this list, I will be thinking about it for the rest of the day, so I endeavor not to. Which is a bit tricky, considering this list isn’t real in the first place. It lives in my head. In all honesty, I think this is the first time this list has ever managed to exist in a tangible way. So I follow this imaginary list because I’m convinced my life or the lives of beings I care about will be affected in mostly negative ways if I don’t. You should probably also note that I have driven halfway to work in the past, only to enter into a panic when I couldn’t remember if I’d blown out the damned candle in the bathroom. Why did I light a candle before work? Didn’t matter at the time. What did matter, was pulling a U-turn, driving back to my house on base, waiting in line, showing my ID, navigating back to my house, turning off the car, jumping out, unlocking the previously locked door, and walking through the hallway into the bathroom only to find:

 Nothing. Because of course I had completed my list before I left. After all, my life depended on it.