August and Everything After

It's the tail end of August, but today it was cool enough in Chicago to wear a sweater over my short sleeves. Tonight, after much wriggling, resistance and gnashing of teeth, I did some writing and began to make a plan in my mind.

I can't help but think back to last year at this time. I started the September Blog Challenge, began a class on novel writing that helped kick my book in gear. I even outlined the entire book in one feverish session on a caffeinated Saturday. So much was coming together.

And then my Dad's death slammed into it like a car through a plate-glass window.

Don't Wait Too Long

I tore out this picture of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan from last week's New Yorker and tacked it up above my desk. 

I did this for two reasons. 

September, je t'aime

Today was one of those weird days where you can see the moon in broad daylight.  Staring at it, I felt like an alien who had landed here, taking in the skyscrapers against the clear sky and wondering where it all ends up.

September's over.  I'm back at my desk in my treehouse (or, as I sometimes call it, the Kit Kat Club)  The computer situation is partially...mostly solved.  I've been ripping out recipes for braised pork shoulder and spiced cakes and pasta dishes heavy on mushrooms and red wine.  Looking forward to October, to writing my damn book and to hot apple cider with whipped cream.

Technical glitch aside, writing here every day has been great, great fun and good practice for me.  I may not be back every day, but if a week goes by without a post, by all means -- give me the business.  Sitting down and forcing myself to write something, anything before midnight comes has been a better exercise than I anticipated.

Big shout-out to JP at Buttered Noodles for hitting the big 3-0 (posts) today, too.

Bloggus Interruptus

I did not forget to post yesterday.  I wrote very dutifully about Little Ed and my crazy upstairs neighbor last night.  But posting was thwarted because my computer is infected with a virus or some type of malware (which is a very badass word). 

My five year old computer has been dying without dignity since January.  I'm taking her in the shop again tomorrow, but I fear the end is near.  I am posting this tonight from the free public computer at Winston's -- the leather-bar-turned-24-hour coffee-shop a couple of blocks down.  I may be the first patron in the establishment's history to use this computer for something other than cruising "HoTT BuTTs" or "Sinagaporean Sloppy Sluts." Or, you know, Facebook.

Anyway.  I will be back on track through Thursday, either on this borrowed machine or on my own computer now living on borrowed time.  Say a few Hail Marys for us, won't you?

Coffee

Fixing my coffee feels like preparing a baby's bottle.  Sugar, lots of cream, get a spoon from the drawer or a thin wood strip from the bin and stir until it's toffee tan.  Don't skip a step.  Can't drink it if it's too hot -- I like to take big, bitter gulps to get it through the oblong hole and into my bloodstream as quickly as possible.

When someone tells me they don't drink coffee because they don't like the taste, I always say "tastes bad, feels good."  I get my personality from a bean. It makes my words flow, unsticks them from the tired places.  It makes my heart go and my pee smell.  Always keep my bag stocked with Listerine strips to wipe off the tongue filth it leaves behind, so I can speak to the bus driver or the man at Borders without broadcasting my preferences or my afternoon whereabouts.

I used to call bad days at work "40-ouncers." Two Starbucks ventis from the Senate Chef: morning and afternoon.  They were days I couldn't afford to go without the fight-or-flight feeling to carry me through the news cycle and into the night. 

Sitting in the coffee shop, music piped in and a cup on my table, I feel like an artist, a visionary.  It drags me out of my own brain.  It feels like a reason to live.

Sweaty

Days like this, I want to take off  my skin and leave it piled on the closet floor for the cats to nap on.  I want to peel off my muscles and shake out my organs, then run -- all bones-- lightly through the streets.

Electric Eel

I find myself sucking at the dregs of my old life.  Slurping and lurking in the corners of it, like a barbed and whiskered fish lip-suctioned to a dirty glass tank. 

Two-thirds

Today was a good day because I met up for a writing date with JP at The Book Cellar and actually banged out a story start-to-finish before we were both fried for the day. 

I have this terrible habit, in writing and, I guess in life, of powering through the first two-thirds of something and then dragging.......to.....a.....stop.

I've been kicking an idea for a graphic novel around in my head for more than a year.  One night this summer, after a long walk on the lake path, I came home and outlined it on page after page with a black Sharpie.  But then, weirdly, I stopped at a point a little more than halfway through the story.  I have 2/3 of a short story done. The whole thing is outlined, I have read it multiple times for my writing partners, but I just can't sit down and finish it.

What I wrote today needs a ton of work.  But, I'm clear on the beginning-middle-end.  That's a big deal for me. 

To celebrate, JP and I pretended we were in France and had a delicious dinner of wine, cheese and chocolate.  Just for fun, I've been asking myself this question every day:  "If someone came and said, 'you can go anywhere in the world right now -- money, obligations and reality are not a factor' where would I go?"  Recent popular answers have been Maine (in a cottage by the sea, eating lobster and writing) Alaska (watching grizzlies...from a safe distance) and Thailand (laying on the beach). 

Today it was France.  How can I make it happen? 

The Blight Man Was Born For

Some of you guys know that I'm working on a novel.  One of the major plot points and themes revolves around grief.  As someone who hasn't yet experienced a major loss, I wonder if it's crazy to try to put a character through it and to write about the grief that follows death in a meaningful way.  Sure, there has been serious pain and depression in my life.  There has been loss.  But for the most part, it's an experience that's more on the horizon than reality.

Grief and mourning and luck have all been kind of tumbling around in my head this week.  Last night, I watched Hotel Rwanda and struggled to imagine the burden of drawing a card like that out of the Universe's deck.  Even in our attempts to break genocide down and understand it on a human level through art and writing and documentaries, it's so hard to separate the individual lives involved from the capital-E Event of it.

About an hour ago, I finished Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which she wrote in the year after her husband John's sudden death and the catastrophic illnesses of her daughter Quintana.  This passage perfectly sums up for me the way our ideas about luck and grief are tangled:

Once when she was still at the Westlake School for Girls, Quintana mentioned what she seemed to consider the inequitable distribution of bad news.  In the ninth grade she had come home from a retreat at Yosemite to learn that her uncle Stephen had committed suicide.  In the eleventh grade, she had been woken at Susan's at six-thirty in the morning to learn that Dominique had been murdered.  "Most people I know at Westlake don't even know anyone who died," she said.  "and just since I've been there I've had a murder and a suicide in my family."

"It all evens out in the end," John said, an answer that bewildered me (what did it mean, couldn't he do better than that?) but one that seemed to satisfy her.  

 Several years later, after Susan's mother and father died within a year or two of each other, Susan asked if I remembered John telling Quintana that it all evened out in the end.  I said I remembered.  

"He was right," Susan said.  "It did."

 I recall being shocked.  It had never occurred to me that John meant that bad news will come to each of us.  Either Susan or Quintana had surely misunderstood.  I explained to Susan that John had meant something entirely different: he had meant that people who get bad news will eventually get their share of good news. 

 "That's not what I meant at all," John said.

 "I knew what he meant," Susan said. 

We are not supposed to live our lives with one eye looking wearily around the bend for the tragedies sure to come, and I don't intend to do so.  But they are coming.  They will be brought to us or brought on ourselves in a million different ways, big and small.  And it doesn't take an event like the Rwandan genocide or even a death in the family to remind us.

One of my favorite poems (and a really great YouTube channel):
"Spring and Fall To a Young Child" by Gerard Manley Hopkins 

In July

I pierced my own side.  And now I can only watch as it flows out furiously into pail after pail.

"Oh, but you shouldn't have put the hole there." she says.  "It shouldn't hurt so much.  You must be doing something wrong."  She smiles at me from her perch on the cushioned sofa and reaches down to pet the dog.

"If it wants to be told, the story will find a way.  It won't let you rest."

I'm not resting now!  I want to rage and throw coffee mugs at her as I rush to replace another bucket, full of gristle and horns and little tumors with sand burr hands.

I am leaking on the sidewalk.  I am staining your couch.  Making barnyard puddles all over the floor while my cat calls the paramedics.  The bathtub teems with swimming blood-guppies.  With warring Viking ships and 1980s child molesters.

"Yeah, I guess you're right." I say.  She nods smugly and turns her head as I spit shark teeth one right after the other into my tea.

September Blog Challenge

"Are you afraid? Don't be afraid."  -- Joan Jett, August 2010

A few weeks ago, I was crowded into a 7-11 parking lot with hot and sticky strangers to watch Joan Jett and the Blackhearts cap off this year's Market Days.  She was tiny, muscled and dressed in a black bikini top with jeans.  Stalking over to her guitar and slinging its strap over her shoulder, she led off the show with that question, "Are you afraid?  Don't be afraid."  and then the opening notes of "Bad Reputation" got everyone into a rocking badass frenzy.

Buzzed off vodka lemonade, standing under the stars, I was cut by her admonition.  Am I afraid?  Of course I'm afraid.  Fear is the motivating force in my life.

I work because I'm afraid I won't have any money and will have to go home and live in the small town I deliberately left behind.  I put off work and personal deadlines until it's almost too late, and then in a flash of fear and guilt, I churn out the press release or the fact sheet that could have been written weeks ago.  I pay the $4 processing fee to pay the RCN bill by phone the day before they shut it off.

When I worked on the Hill, I was terrified of fucking up.  I lived in fear of one of my catastrophic failures playing out on CNN and NPR for the whole world to cackle at.  It drew up knots in my back so deep that once a massage therapist said she wanted to guess what my job was at the end of the session.  Her two guesses were Department of Homeland Security or the FBI.  I was angry and brittle and prone to teary outbursts.

I'm still afraid.  Afraid that my writing sucks, that I won't ever do anything important or interesting.  That I'll make a wrong decision that can't be undone, like invest in a relationship that flames out spectacularly.  Or have a baby only to realize that I'm a terrible mother, suffocating myself and ruining that child's life forever.

The beginning of the school year has always, for me, felt like the true New Year.  Maybe it's because I had teachers for parents or the fact that the summer-to-fall transition in the Midwest seems so dramatic.  Summer requires attendance at outdoor events, weddings, barbecues and rooftops.  Wasting it feels morally wrong.  Why sit and write when you could be running on the lakeshore or out on a camping trip?  (Even when I'm not actually doing these things -- it feels like I should be)  The mandatory recreation of summer makes it easy for me to let everything slide. 

So, in the spirit of the new year and all things turning, I'm starting the September Blog Challenge.  I will post here every day.  It may just be a couple of lines, but I will write something new today through the 30th.

Feel free to harass me to keep my word.

ETA:
JP over at Buttered Noodles is also taking part in the September Blog Challenge.  She's kicking my butt already with her September 2 post.  (just remember, I am nocturnal...most posts won't go up until it's dark out)   

Spring

Oh my, it's March.  Here's how I spent my winter:

• stressing about money
• getting a second writing gig
• looking for a cheaper place
• borrowing cash from everyone I know
• stressing about money
• getting a third writing gig
• finding a cheaper place
• PANICKING about money
• Fighting with Bank of America (seriously?  fuck those guys)
• packing
• inhaling bushels of dust while cleaning the old apartment
• working my ass off
• moving
• unpacking
• stressing about money

So here we are, three months later.  New place, new neighborhood.  The cats are ecstatic -- there are way more squirrels and birds and dogs to watch on the 2nd floor than there were on the 11th.  We live next to an old creepy cemetery, which makes me feel like I'm always on the verge of a grand Victorian adventure.  I'm working a lot, so maybe I'm not on the verge of being hauled off to debtor's prison.

But.

When I got laid off a year ago I was understandably freaked out, but excited.  I promised myself that I would take time off, rewire my life and focus on my own writing.  My own voice.

When the time came to start earning my keep in society again, I got really lucky and got some great contract jobs.  Now, I'm busy, I'm getting paid and back to doing a version of what I used to do.  But when I ride the Red Line downtown, I look at the girls headed to the Art Institute in purple tights and tatoos and think "she looks like an artist."  I'm just a new version of my old self.  A little broke-er.  A little shabbier.  Still spending my days getting letters to the editor placed and on conference calls.  Even the way I approach my own writing seems so businesslike and soulless.

I imagine that girl on the L - working in a studio covered with inked drawings and full of music.  Drinking beers and catching live shows.  Lots of sweaty late-night sex on a mattress on the floor.  Smoking cigarettes in the sunshine.  I want that to be me.  But it feels too late.   

Spring has never been my season.  Especially in the Midwest.  That first warm and thawing day tricks you, and by the end of the week you're shivering and cursing, waiting for the bus in a too-thin coat.  I never know what to wear, what to eat.  What was previously tucked away now lays bare and terrible in the mud -- old pens and takeout cartons and dog shit.  Nothing green to take the edge off., except for gaudy St. Patrick's Day decorations in bar windows.

That's how my life feels.  Akward and ill-fitting.  Wanting to be something else.     

Will Write (talking points) For Food

My first job in the Senate was answering constituent mail. Not just letters, but emails and (often irate) phone calls. There were about six of us covering our large Midwestern state, most in our early twenties, divided into issue areas. I was in charge of health care, abortion, and numerous “children and family” issues.

Our supervisor was a sweater-vested, mustachioed man who really would have been better off being a junior high algebra teacher. He developed a packet for the Legislative Correspondents that included a number of sample letters, tips and pitfalls to avoid. It opened with a quote from his own father (who I think actually was an algebra teacher), “Do not write to be understood. Write so that you cannot be misunderstood.”

Bullshit.

I worked on Capitol Hill for almost ten years. I graduated from writing letters to writing speeches and op-eds and press releases. And trust me – there are plenty of times in politics where you just want to hit that sweet spot between saying what you mean and meaning what you say. Ambiguity rules most of the time.

When I left government for the private sector, it was way, way worse. Absolute garbage like “suboptimal efficiencies” and “leveraging key stakeholders” seem to be of far more value to the corporate and non-profit world than real English. There is this limited universe of jargon and if you aren’t borrowing heavily from it, then you are regarded with suspicion. I have seen clients visibly relax when I finally break down and throw out something about “target audiences” or “messaging.”

I’m not naïve. I know that different professions come with different cultures and languages and norms. But as I try to make the transition to some “real” writing, I feel sort of like a Replicant going against her programming.

Ideas and phrases tumble around in my brain, but by the time I go to write them down, they’re all clenched up and scrubbed down. 

And I don't trust my own voice. Even up there, when I wrote "should have been a junior high algebra teacher" my brain immediately started scolding:  Well, that's just what you think.  Who are you to say what another human being should or should not have done with his or her life?  Just because he wore a lot of sweater vests doesn't devalue his work...

“Resist the urge to be fair,” said Stephen Elliott when I went to his workshop earlier this month.

I’m adding to that – “Resist the urge to write talking points.”