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 

Overheard on Clark Street

Two guys, smoking in front of Charlie's:

"There is some kind of fire that just burns in Eastern European women.  Makes them crazy."

On the Weekend

I wore my poison lipgloss so he would cry when we kissed.

Sing, Goddess

"She said 'Cassie is a total dicktease in those shorts' "

Daphne looks over at me sideways to gauge my reaction as she takes a long drag on the cigarette -- her third since we've been down here.

I look down at what I'm wearing to the second day of ninth grade.  T-shirt, tights and boots: all black.  And the rolled up jean shorts that offended Diana so much.  They're leftovers from junior high.  The rule is, no new clothes the first week of school.  You look like you're trying too hard.

"Why?  Why would she say that?" I make it come out like I'm mildly irritated, but inside, a prickly Oh FUCK is rising up my throat.  I try to tamp it down with another fake-inhale of the Camel Light I've mostly been holding and flicking against the soles of my Docs.  I know enough to hold it in for at least 15 seconds and make sure to exhale a little out my nose, so it looks like I'm really smoking. 

She shrugs and scratches her flaking eyeliner with a chipped pinky nail.  "Who knows?  Maybe because of your dad?"

"My dad?"

"Well, yeah."

"He's just the mayor -- he's not a king or anything."  Now my hands are really shaking, not just with nicotine and Mountain Dew.  I haven't been here long enough to cross Diana and Leah -- senior girls who would punch me in the locker room just to make a point.   

"Yeah, but he's all over TV and stuff.  I don't know.  They were just saying that you seem a little stuck up." she takes another long, dramatic drag before flicking the butt off onto the tracks.  She looks over at me "They're probably just acting like that because they want to fuck your brother."

"Then they should quit being such bitches behind my back.  They don't even know me."  I'm too wound up to concentrate on my cigarette anymore.  I grind it out on the cement ledge.

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)   

Midwest Living

Scene:  Home, preparing for Angelica's sister Ariel's high school graduation party.

Frenzied, pre-party activity.  It is 12:45 pm, 15 minutes prior to the beginning of the Sunday afternoon open house.  Subway sandwiches have been ordered and set up in the kitchen.  Cake from the Blue Ribbon Bakery proclaims "Congratulations Ariel!  2010"  in white and yellow frosting on the dessert table in the dining room.  

Angelica is transferring two sheet cakes -- peanut butter and Texas chocolate -- to the remaining space on the dessert table.  On the opposite side, pushed against the wall with the stereo that's blasting Michael Buble tunes, is a separate table loaded with cheese trays, deli meats, veggies and dip, potato salad and pasta salad.  Angelica's hair is puffy with the humidity of the June day and 30+ years of exasperation with her upbringing.  

Ariel and her best friend Chelika have put together a bowl of "Oreo Fluff"  for the event. Oreo Fluff consists of two extra-large packages of Oreos crushed up and mixed into four tubs of Cool Whip.   

Mom:  Why did you put the Oreo Fluff on the dessert table?

Angelica:  Because...it's a dessert?

Mom:  Some people consider it a salad.

Angelica:  It's Oreos.  And...Cool Whip.

Mom:  I know.  But some people consider that to be a salad.

Angelica gives a long stare

Angelica:  Well, then I feel sorry for those people.   

-fin-