A retreat into work

I've always had kind of a knack for retreating deep into my work, creative or otherwise, when the world gets chaotic. And truth be told, I've always been kind of grateful for that. When the going gets tough, I create tomes worth of writing, mountains of songs and get really, really great at cello, piano and singing ... or at making Excel spreadsheets, organizing a massive workload or writing 100-page marketing manuals in two hours. This flurried and wonderful productivity hasn't been the case the past few years, as a serious case of horrible writer's block has incapacitated me from doing just about anything creative except half-assed songwriting, straight-up autobiography or work for clients (and I've questioned my successful completion of even these tasks). It surprises me I have been less than productive given the catastrophic changes that have been happening all around me. It has been a confusing time filled with some of the worst and best events of my life and almost no stability. I often feel a quarter-straw away from a completely shattered back, a millisecond away from completely disappearing, ceasing to exist.

Regardless, I seem to be back in a creative groove.

Here's a short story I wrote a while back and completely reworked this weekend, somehow, amidst a flurry of paid work and not a lot of sleep. It's still not where I want it to be, but that isn't the point. The point is, I'm writing again.

______________________________

Gymnastics

          I work a lot, but it really gets me nowhere, at least that’s what Harley says every night when I burst through the door like a striped rocket and slam the keys down on the table with so much gusto that my hand almost bleeds. He doesn’t know why I work so hard; we’re both students with obsess grants and nothing to do but sit and stare at the dark spaces in the dust-bunny-infested corners of his filthy apartment. Those corners are all about procreation – mini sex education lessons twenty-four hours a day with linty body parts flying every which way, asexually pornographic.

          I come home from my job and take off my yellow sweater – his yellow sweater that I stole, or borrowed. He has never admitted he gave it to me, but I realize it’s not his favorite, so I think if I ever mentioned it, he’d just pass it off as “no big deal” with a slight shrug of his shoulders and an aversive glance that would make him look like a swimmer forcing out his ram-jet adrenaline behind the blocks, seconds away from starting his race. But adrenaline is something energizing, and what Harley has is heavy as a globe on his back, strapped with burlap and thick-skinned leather, possibly shaped like a cross, if that is obtrusive enough to magnetize an eye or two. As I throw the sweater on the used red garage sale couch, I remember I once read a story in National Geographic about a group of people in Jerusalem (or maybe it was right here) who carried seven-foot tall crosses crafted of oak and wore thorned crowns for a thirty-mile hike to simulate Jesus’ final walk. I admire their dedication, but still can’t help remembering how hard I laughed when I read a quote from one of those robed Supermen Faithfuls:  “By the time we got to the church, our crosses weren’t touching the ground anymore because they’d been worn down from all the cement we’d encountered.” (Modern living is a bitch, and so is friction.) Now I think of Harley wearing a robe and a crown, carrying a cross, and the image doesn’t really send more than numbness through me. And martyrdom loses more ground.

          I throw myself onto the couch like a grammar school high jump junkie who has perfected her Fosbury Flop and grab a literature ‘zine from the metal slab that is a coffee table. I know over the ash tray and am reminded I want a cigarette. But I don’t want to smoke all mine. (I buy the cheap ones that taste like the floor of the subway station … not that I’ve ever touched my tongue to it.) I want the expensive ones that come in either blue or red, both with gold coats of arms and fancy calligraphy embossed on them, the ones that Harley smokes beyond his means.

          I fly up onto my feet with so little effort that I almost believe myself to be the first Guinness human being to able to stand straight up from a prone position in one jumpy movement. I run around, a little twitchy white mouse who quests for the nibble of stale cheese in a dark corner of the labyrinth and begin to rifle through drawers that my fingers probably shouldn’t touch – drawers I imagine might explode with weird, oblong devices of sexual torture, caverns that are only stuck shut by accident; one little tweak could send them flying open with a “Gasp!” and a long burst of tabooed fantasies.

          My grasping fingers choke on a folded-up piece of paper at the bottom of the kitchen drawer – at least it feels like paper, but much thicker and with a suggestion of glossiness. It is forced into a square, when it clearly wants to be long and rectangular. I peek beside it, my thumb still fixed to keep it from taking flight and notice my treasured cigarettes – the fancy red ones – right there. I take my finger off the smooth square and mumble, “Stay …” with my palms to the ground before I pull a stick from the package and flick it lit with the lighter from my pocket. I stare at the shape in the drawer again and consider while I draw in puffs of smoke through my teeth. I back away, step forward, back away, step forward … until my face is directly over the drawer, and I have to look down at this undefined, glossy “thing” over the tip of my nose. It pushes back at me as it lies there on the brink of unfolding, of blossoming. “What are you?” I say, although I feel it is something hidden, like a dark, deformed child locked in the attic.

          I begin to reason with it.

          “You want to be set free, don’t you?”

          No response, save a slight and slow bend upward, which translated means “affirmative” in square, robotic tones.

          “If I set you free, you can go back to hiding once Harley gets here, right?”

          No response, but another painful twist to the right. Maybe it is just thinking.

          My head cocks to one side, then the other, and I twist my hips back and forth to pry myself free from the tension. I hear a loud “pop” and feel my fingers explode onto the square, kidnap it from its comfortable prison.

          “Aha! Gotcha!” I let out a cackle and begin to unravel the square, layer by layer, until something grander begins to appear. Amongst the creases I begin to glimpse bits and pieces of a thigh, a nibble of a breast, an uncovered cheek I unfortunately recognize as something gone wrong in the now whorish middle of the kitchen drawer. I meet eyes with the woman in the picture and her familiar cohort, and I can only think of one question I want to ask her; the pondering beats at the back of my skull, flaps around like a clipped-wings pigeon in a dusky attic. I struggle to formulate the appropriate words, and my hands shake as I turn the picture around to examine its fleshy layers from multiple skewed angles. My eyes squint to decipher the scene behind the matte finish, a contortionist nightmare fit only for a “making of” documentary. The smiles on the subjects’ faces are intimate, too close for me to answer my question, too distant for me to ask it. But as I flip the photograph over, my index finger and thumb poised on opposite sides of a crease, I gather up bracery like a foreign skirt around my brain:  “How did you get this shot?”

          I begin to rustle in the nearly empty drawer again, my cigarette dangling from the side of my mouth like the cigarette of a hustlin’ cowboy who wants to spit defiant tobacco juice all over this floor through clenched teeth. I know there must be a second photograph somewhere either with another woman … or another man in it. The existence of a third party is the only way to explain the artistry of the shot, the way all the right parts are bathed in shiny, surprising, savory light … the general lack of arms or hands outstretched to hold up the camera-invisible camera. I stretch my arm into the back of the drawer until the crevice of my elbow jams up against the smooth flecked bottom of the Formica countertop. All I feel is a vast and mysterious emptiness, the place where the drawer is too short for its container, the spot where a gap forms and anything can fall into the nether regions of the whole kitchen structure. (I have been missing a lot of socks lately.)

          I hit my funny bone against the blunt counter edge on my hand’s way out of the drawer. “Shit!” The cigarette dangles hazardously, and I stop my antics long enough to sip more smoke, tap the long ashes into the sink. I thrust the cigarette back between my lips and pull the drawer off its hinges with a Neanderthal grunt, place it on the ugly pea green linoleum. I stare at the colorful flecks on the floor, encrusted like millions of jewels on a makeshift palace gallery, the same gallery in the picture. I look for the exact spot it was taken, count the visible dots, but can’t make out any defining features. The floor reflects my own envy, and I scowl at my past mattress positions during my long reign as the Queen of Sheets and Dormy Lava Lamps. He must think I am a perpetual co-ed, that my cheerleading uniform is just stuck at the cleaners right along with his ripped letterman’s jacket.

          I try to stick my whole head into the void where the drawer is, but it won’t quite fit, so I peek in through the darkness with my fingers curled over the edge. The only thing not in any drawer in the apartment is a flashlight. I begin to wish I had superheroine eyes – eyes that shot out light from the sockets to provide an ample light source for friends, family and anyone else in need of a little illumination. My insistence that the third-party photograph is back there petrifies me. Still, I want to know the whole puzzled story, not just the in-a-nutshell story told by this one-flash piece of formerly-folded-up art.

          “Damn … no one could get this shot alone!”

          I spend a majority of my early evening in a thrashing, full-body seizure to get everything back out of and into its place, except the picture, which I tuck into my back jeans pocket. My black shirt is covered with yellow fuzz, downy remains of him, so I put on the lemon sweater. The absence of that garment, which I wear all the time, would divulge the secrets kept between the photograph and me, the elusive, clandestine interpretation even the image itself hasn’t quite discovered. The clock reads 8 p.m., and I know Harley will be home soon from his job, which from what I can tell just involves a lot of existential hanging out in a coffee house. I don’t even know whether or not he receives a paycheck.

          At 8:01 p.m., the landline phone rings. Is it the centerfold … or perhaps the mysterious, omnipotent voyeur? My jumping jelly bean innards jolt.

          I gather up my courage to answer. “Hello?”

          “Mitzi?”

          “What?”

          “Can you meet me near campus, because I’m tired, but I want to see you?”

          “Why can’t you just come here, where you live … and where there is a mattress and everything?” My voice drip-drops.

          “Mitzi?”

          “You’re going to actually make me ride the subway alone at night?”

          “Mitzi?”

          I sigh and hang up, because the conversation will never progress until my butt is stuck to a plastic seat, hurling towards the now-forbidden future. I still have the photograph, with all its creases and crawly crevices. I grab my discarded pack of cigarettes from a table, shove them into the abyss of my left front pocket and take one more of Harley’s for my trip.

***************************************

          “May the Lord bless you.” The man sitting next to me on the above-ground train platform bench has eyes that poke through me, and from his hand dangles an unsmoked cigarette on the brink of lighting. His irises are invisible next to his dark, unbathed skin, covered with station soot and snowy dandruff from his salty-peppery hair. His black coat is ripped under the arm, and I stare at it to avoid those white-with-bits-of-yoke eyeballs. He picks his nose, gets up and wanders around me like a participant in some mystical ceremony, a dance to bring down the rains of an unknown power upon every person on the subway, but especially negative-energied me.

          “May the Lord bless you.” His eyes get big, and he sits down next to me. I touch the picture in my back pocket and think of Harley. 

"A Novel Snippet" Part One Thousand (and Hopefully Counting)

Tonight I finally found a home for this bit of writing in one of my novels, which seems to have ushered me through a long and excruciating writer's block in the novel department (years and years). I wrote this snippet initially quite a while ago as a short short story ... but when I rewrote and rearranged it tonight on a whim, it suddenly just fit right into what I was working on like a destined, missing piece.

It might be somewhat out of context in the absence of the rest of the world, but I find the words pretty savory:

___________________________________________________

The night Scott and I initially met in Chicago, blind but vocally and wordily knowledgeable, was magical dust thrown into the fan, scattered. I had an inner-narrative flash of the night scarred on my brain the moment it began, continued, ended, presently tense, tensely present, our voices melted into one force:

“Everything is electric, on. His face is a Gerber daisy with a scare of black gravity hair that rocks with molten power above the apartment’s slicked-back hardwood floors,” I said.

            “An electrified knock, and I turn the light on. She is behind my cracked door, an exotic flower in red, a pleasure-meeting, melting first-time. I might have already been waiting for her on a travel-crowded street, passing her El platform in a whirly whizz of colors, her face shooting refracted rainbows through each flourescent-lit window,” he admitted.

           

            “We have chamomile tea in a dungeony café, laugh-lifting lead-laid cups that camouflage our faces each time they rise, tone biceps with ludicrous weight. I keep disappearing, becoming a white round with tight-pressed moony fingernails,” I remarked.

            “I simply wait, wait for her ghostly eyes to glitter above the lipstick rim. There is a good-luck ladybug on the sill with a strange leg growth. She saw another one today that bustled into her car only to fly back out the window into the new crinkly-green autumn,” he pressed.

            “Two ladybugs dance, almost perfect save a broken brown wing. I watch his lanky fingertip tracing up-down, letting her leggy red alight. The insect rattles down the window and re-begins her persistent ascent -- Our Good Luck,” I sighed.

He noted, “We are walking hungry to a party. I want to touch her tornado static. Words that have been lingering on a black-cursored page are among us, whistle through winded ears, cyclone in hearts stimulated by shocking same-thought paddles.” 

            “We are leant up against a Kahluha-cream stove, turned-on. Emphatic fingers fondle burners, trace map paths through white and black letter jungles of mediocre magnetic poetry. His jeans are stuck like electric-dryer-sock thigh muscles clenching my hip. We are one energized unit with multiplied parts,” I exploded.

            “I am parking my car. She is using my bathroom. She will touch my things, my toilet paper, my faucet,” he insisted.

I shouted, “I may not be alone anymore, selfish or crazed or desperate. I might not rush each moment without tickling, tripping, adoring.” 

            “She is next to a photograph. I like the look of her life next to mine, how her hair curls around one ear, streaky with amazing sunlit citrus. She doesn’t know I notice her through closed doors, but I can see her x-ray straight through, me looking at her looking at me, keeping the calculated completeness,” he contemplated.

            “I might be incited, playing kitchen equipment games, glasses of calcium-enriched orange juice. His finger creeps and seeps supernatural, tangles my bracelet, dangles my kneecap. Hands clasped pray for a safe journey into the dark bed that overlooks an alley decorated by a flat-tired, hatch-back Honda Civic,” I breathed.

            “We are in the wilderness dark.  I may flick on the light. Instead I grab her, pull her turtleneck and touch her lips, suck upper and lower free while I tear her limb from limb, contorting her so we might climb inside melted bones,” he pressed.

That night, he was kissing me eruptive; our singed skeletons played Memory, flipped over card after card after card, all cherries. 

… Like a Motherless Adult Child

Tomorrow marks ten years without my mom, and I will admit, I am having some trouble wrapping my brain around it, in part because I still think about her every day and often still believe she is very close to me and not light years away in the great beyond (wherever everyone goes, if everyone goes anywhere).

This dreaded “decade mark” of being half an orphan was something I began to think about a couple months ago, for the first time ever as more of “that time of year” than just an isolated, passing day. I started to re-feel the pangs of everything – my old, uncertain 28-year-old life, that whole “final summer” when I fought with her over our usual frustrations while harboring secret guilt about it because I knew we didn’t have that much time left together. This weekend, I will admit I unfortunately revisited the horrible feeling of sitting in my apartment the weekend before she passed away, waiting for calls that kept delivering increasingly worse news.

Sometime in June this year, I rethought of her last visit in mid-July, 2004, when my dad and she drove to me from Chicago with a carful of way-too-big, only-suburban-suitable furniture to help me better organize my small city apartment. I struggled to balance my 12-hours-a-day-in-the-recording-studio schedule (I was making an album that seemed very important back then) with being able to spend enough time with my parents. The only things of substance we did together were going out to dinner once at my favorite neighborhood Italian place and watching a VHS copy of Some Kind of Wonderful to celebrate putting my new, behemoth entertainment center together. And when she was forced to leave two days early because she took an unexpected turn for the worse, I remember her telling me in the lobby of my building, while we were waiting for my dad to bring the car around, “You know, I’ve really had a pretty good run. I’m OK with this, and you’re all going to be OK.”

But was she right? This year especially, I’m not so sure.

Usually this August 4 date comes upon me by surprise, and the day hits me because of a note from my aunt (her sister) or sometimes, just because I am hand writing the date on a check. I’ve tried each year to do something special in memoriam, but sometimes the living and non-stop life get in the way, and that “something special” becomes five minutes of staring at a wall or, even paltrier than that practice, a quick errand that I pretend is something she would’ve been relieved I got done (like buying vitamins or depositing a check I’ve been sitting on for a month at the bank).

The passage of this much time without her is also feeling rather difficult to accept this year, because this is the year I became conscious of a troubling fact:  I have stopped remembering what it is like to have a mother. I see other people my age with mothers, and I realize I cannot even comprehend what my life would be like now with mine ... and I feel like an outsider. I wonder daily, "Would she be proud of me?" And then I feel hopeless, as I legitimately can't answer that question. And as icing on that gloomy cake, I am often not sure my memories of her are accurate, and the sadness of misremembering hits me as I grab desperately for fading moments that are ever slipping between my fingers:  Did I just imagine her?

Of course, this is a ridiculous question, and not reality. My mom and I talked literally (and in the real and not newfangled sense of the word “literally”) every day. She called me sometimes so many times per day that it got frustrating. If she knew I was out on the weekends, she used to stay up until I was home, calling into the night between my cell phone and house phone until I picked up, then pretending she hadn’t just called a million times when I would finally answer. The last day we talked was the evening of Friday, July 30. She called me from the hospital to find out what I was going to watch on TV that night so we could watch it at the same time. (Incidentally, it was Legally Blonde, which was airing for the first time on network television.) We hung up after the conversation as if the talking would pick up where it left off in the morning. Little did I know, she would go to the ICU the next day, and I would only talk to her one more time (and only through someone else).

The my-momisms I still use in my daily life, some of which have become famous among my friends, also affirm she once existed. As one example, she absolutely delighted in food (which should surprise absolutely no one who knows this daughter of hers). She loved the wonders of food so much that she would ask about the food you were eating while you were eating it, even though she could easily take a bite:  “Is it crispy? Is it crunchy? Is it chewy? What does it taste like?” Sometimes I still think this was her tactic to get you to offer her a taste without her having to brazenly ask for it. (Of course, when you were actually sharing an appetizer or anything with her, she would also repeatedly reject the last piece of it, claiming she didn’t want it until she knew no one else really wanted it or was looking, and then she’d eat it.)

While 28 is poised securely in adulthood, I must say with bluntness that there are many rites of passage that happen (and there is quite a lot of unpleasantness that also happens) after that age that would benefit from the love (of both the unconditional and tough varieties) of a mother. I’m definitely not going to go into detail, but suffice it to say, my road has not been easy. It’s common for all of us to sugar-coat that motherless feeling by saying, “She’s in a better place” now or “Let’s celebrate the memories we have,” but you know what? I’m going to be selfish and say that it definitely would’ve been even easier for me had she just not died. So this year, I decided to do what I try never to do:  Share a little real, albeit brief possibly uncomfortably human insight into how these last ten years have felt. (And believe me when I say, I am protecting everyone from the nittiest, grittiest details.)

I’m not going to pass off August 4, 2014 as a day to “remember the good times.” Instead, I’m going to acknowledge it as a day to “remember the reality” that was a complex and very important relationship in my life, the loss of which I still mourn more than I ever expected.

Do you hate your job?

Don't raise your hand if you hate your job ... please!

I've been thinking a lot lately about how much negativity is spread by everyone who regularly complains about how much they hate their jobs to anyone who will listen. And I've started to think that maybe it's because I just don't understand that concept (which could be caused by my fortunate upbringing by parents who believed you should do what fulfills you and had parents who also believed this ... plus my continued exposure to a lot of people who espoused these same "dream hard" values throughout my life). Why do people stay in jobs that become a source of daily pain and frustration? Why do they believe that whenever they are not as work is the only time they can really be themselves and find peace and contentment? You can call me lucky, but I don't see finding yourself in a job you love as having anything to do with luck. And doing what you love is not an anomaly. It has to do with strength ... and believing in the truth:  We have choices.

Sometimes we don't like our choices. God knows, I've been in plenty of situations where every choice was terrible, but there were still options. None of us are ever truly out of control in our own lives. We sometimes just don't believe in our own strength to go the way that might seem to be impossible now, but typically has life-changing payoffs.

When did we become so afraid of risk? And when did we start to think it was the norm that we should be miserable, hate our lives ... and tell everyone on the planet about it, spreading that toxicity everywhere we go? You'd think that in a world that continues to open up so widely for all of us, we'd have more hope, joy ... and less fear. I know there are atrocities in the world. I know there are annoying people (and trust me, I love to tell stories about the many dark comedies of their errors and have fallen victim to them as much as anyone else has). And I know sometimes you have to bide your time at a job that is less than ideal while you work towards dreamier circumstances. But when did we become endlessly-complaining victims of our own circumstances?

I made the difficult choice a long time ago to do what I love. And a lot of the time it's been a back-breaking challenge that has left some significant emotional carnage. But when I stop to think about settling for less than what I was born to do, I know that I will always ultimately refuse.

I stopped entertaining humorless and victimized complaints from people who will not change their circumstances. If you're unhappy, you can always do something about it. If you're in a job you hate, at least have the decency to spend some time figuring out what really fuels you ... then go towards that light with everything you have. And if you're unwilling to make a choice to better your situation, shut up and take it like a man or woman, and please also take responsibility for the fact that ultimately, it is always you who drives your own bus. It's pretty simple.

I'm an extreme realist, so do not let any of this be misinterpreted as blowhard sunshine. I'm just urging everyone to stop the negative dialogue and rediscover some spark. It's not helping anyone if you have no reason for being here.

Belated Thanksgiving Gratitude

Although the past few weeks (really, the past many years) have been full of personal challenges and great failures for me, they have also been full of some triumphs. Still, it's becoming difficult for me to envision a time when there's less struggle, as that has become the norm rather than a short-lived exception.

That being said, I've been thinking, annoyedly, about something for a few weeks now:  I am incredibly thankful for my creative life and the community of incredibly imaginative people that have always gathered around me. In my personal and professional travels, I have met a lot of people who are an affront to creatives everywhere, taking advantage of them financially as well as taking advantage of their dreams and believing them to be "silly" and misguided in their principles (mostly because they do not understand what it means to create something beautiful, nor do they value what creative products add to the world, or what the world would really look like without them). I recently even met someone unpleasant who doesn't like music (he admitted he only downloads music in the Billboard Top 10, and only so other people think he is "normal") and believes that television, film, theatre and other cultural phenomenon is actually propaganda for a specific liberal political and philosophical agenda and conspiracy. 

Understandably, my mind was blown. His existence is an attack on everything I hold dear and everything that has supported me emotionally and financially my entire life and entirely shaped the person I am.

Ultimately, I am thankful that these people will never have the ability to shape our world. And there are people who would probably disagree with me, but they clearly just haven't looked at history and what creates lovely revolutions, magnificent changes of heart, new inventions and the change and progress that keeps the world interesting.

Note to the unbelievers:  Imagination always wins in the end.

Political Rant One

And now, a rare and sarcastic political rant. Oh goodie!

Now that a week has passed since Sandy hit, it seems we (those of us that have not had our homes torn away from us) can all go back to complaining about non-storm-related things on Facebook again. And after tomorrow, we can stop complaining about the potential problems that will ensue if [insert name of candidate here] gets elected and start complaining again about what he probably will not do while in office. 

aunt sandy is coming for a visit ...

I'll admit it:  I love hurricane names. I especially love when the worst ones are given pleasant names. "Irene" at least sounds like the bitchy old lady next door who tries to poison your dog when it won't stop barking. But "Sandy" sounds like a friendly aunt who comes to visit a few times per year and always gifts you the toys your parents can't afford for Christmas.

I plan to get a lot of work done today. I didn't think I would, but I got the itch to type when I opened up my computer. Let's hope the hurricane produces a maelstrom of ideas -- especially the ones I need to finish my website (which is launching, let's hope, on Friday this week ... after SIX LONG YEARS)! At this point, like any hurricane worth its salt, this very unread blog might die ... or at least change direction.