lest I forget again (and again…)

In My Craft or Sullen Art

And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

-Dylan Thomas

Still alive

Just taking a break, although I am reading others’ blogs, I swear.

Just an observation

I am not complaining about not being able to write writing for once, just making an honest observation.

I come up with awesome first sentences to things that go nowhere. And the things I spend lots of time plugging away at? They all begin terribly.

This leads me to wonder if it’s just my reflexes as a poet, because poetry often starts all sizzly like that for me and the whole thing can be scultped out of that moment. Poetry, however, is so much shorter than prose and I think that’s where I am falling down.

Would this be such a problem if I’d actually ever bothered to learn how to write prose? Hmmm… Grad school might be a safe place to be during this recession… just sayin’

In which I admit my cowardice

It’s become ‘too hard’ under certain circumstances to keep carving out the time for my writing. I cannot be expected to have the time or the energy or the imagination to keep it up when I’ve got 50 other things breathing down my grill. Writing is kind of a luxary for me.

See how easily it slips from the fingers?

It’s a lie. A silky, common, and socially expected lie.

When writing doesn’t just flow, when it’s an effort– when I am between workable ideas and buried in the same few paragraphs (ones that seem good, but that don’t know what they’re doing), or when I have just come off of 8+ hours of fixing other peoples’ stupidity and am just so bone and soul tired…

Oh but it’s just this story. It has to be unworkable and it’s taken me 18 months to see that. Christ, if I’d only gone to school I would have noticed much sooner…

I try and wait for the weekends, hoping that not having the alarm and the office will magically open up some space in my head. Full-fledged stories will drip freely out! It’ll be amazing!!one!eleven!!! Who cares that I have chores! It will all just magically happen…

These are all lies that I tell myself.  My wrongheadedness has gone so full circle that I don’t even need to look for excuses anymore. These are so well-crafted and cyclical that they just spring up, unbidden, even when I don’t particularly need them to. They just fly out of me and circle around as inevitable and heavy as the wafts of the garbage barges at Ashland & Clyborn.

Here is the simple truth:

I don’t always have the courage to write. To try. To just keep plugging away at the blank page without thinking forward. Overthinking.

It’s a lot like my EMDR therapy. Even though its allowing me to do things I thought were impossible, I dread it. Sometimes even while I’m doing it. But I feel great rewards, just like writing. In fact, EMR is a kind of neurological writing. Rewriting, to be precise. I have the freedom to rewrite the past in my brain. I also have the freedom to rewrite the future, the possible, the almost not real on the page.

I am thankful for both, but I have a lot of trouble wielding these pens. I want to go all Johnny Wu style all over the place, but I need to make myself brave enough. I am hoping for courage.

interlude

I’m not sitting at the old piano this afternoon, merely across the doorway from it. I can’t bear to get up close to it, knowing how distracting it was last weekend. I’m hiding in the dark instead, trying to write about a place very far away. Trying to remember how a certain building looked, smelled, sounded in repose.

Outside, crocuses are exploding through the ground. So many in such a concerted motion that the noise must be deafening earthworms throughout Chicago. As if they weren’t deaf already.

Oh, The Great American Midwest!  The seasons here are so…Midwestern. Especially spring, for all that it comes draped in pastels and silence, spring is only another kind of storm: Thunder and hail and buds bursting green into tornado skies… and it always catches me unprepared.

Even if I really am ready for it inside myself. Even if I secretly enjoy seeing new life come with force equal to destruction. Even if I am always a tiny bit jealous of this wider fickle sky.

such a small and sympathetic resonance

I am writing from an unfamiliar location this afternoon. It’s raining cold needles today, so the trip to my usual weekend spot seems too far off. The bus stop is an inch under water.  Add to that the sad fact that my preferred (read: ‘closer’) weekend back up spot has been shuttered. Blame the economy. Everyone’s doing it. In the case of back-up spot, it’s actually true. They’ve written out the figures on the butcher paper that blocks out the windows.

At any rate, there were no chairs available here when I got in. None near outlets anyways, and I need one. I took what was available. I am writing on an old broken-down piano. One of those super old, super sturdy venue uprights. Built not only to spill, but to withstand decades of pounding drunken paws, spilled beers, and frequent moving. The thing’s like a mountain of sound, even with the cover closed. I can tell already how out of tune it is. How probably every forth string on the board is out of step with it’s partner. How worn the middle keys must be without looking. I know how much-loved instruments wear. I know the signs and I also know that if you follow the trails of scrapes and bumps— the wending pathways of paper-thin finish that you can almost hear the songs that are burned into each one.

Pretty good for a former percussionist, huh? I wasn’t in the back of the hall because I couldn’t read music, my dears. I was back there because, other than my voice lifting out of my blood and my belly, those were the simplest and most immediate tools for music. Besides, I would urge you all to remember that the piano is technically a percussion instrument. No, I can’t play very well at all. No, that doesn’t bother nor stop me.

The board is loose on this thing, if I type too hard it starts humming, the haunting out-of-step tone settles somewhere in between an E7/D and Cm13. I wish it would settle, or that the bartender would turn up the Talking Heads because there’s no way it can resolve itself gracefully. I pop on headphones and pick through the beginning chapters of the novel I started almost a year and a half ago, realizing that I need to pluck out a sub-plot that never really worked, but that has insinuated itself pretty deeply into the thing. Much like the loose board of strings behind this piece of wood, its every other word is just a half-degree not right. I can’t hear the piano anymore thanks to my headphones, but I can feel the stray vibrations in my wrists. I can tell it’s still doing that. It’s so visceral that my ears hallucinate the sound all over again.

I remove two sentences, smoothing the spaces over with a smaller one, one more on point, but under my computer the vibrations keep rolling. I used to want to be a piano tuner. I would watch the old man work that the school always called. He’d pull down the casing and strum the whole board with his little wrench— blowing C on his pipe. He’d eye the whole thing like it was a vexing anagram and push his glasses down far to the tip of his nose. Then stubby fingers one by one would seek out the pairs and triads of strings to fix them. At any point if the vibrations from the whole board stopped, he’d strum across again. He looked a lot like The Silver Man does nowadays. I suppose that’s fitting.

This is not the way pianos are properly tuned, my friends. But it is the way that novels get written sometimes. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered to my dismay that piano tuners traditionally work on 1-3 notes at a time. I never ‘learned’ how to write, so I’m just going to assume that I am, like that old man, coming at this the hard way. The whole way. The way that requires me to pay far too much attention to the little ripples of sympathy each sentence might have somewhere else in the story. The long way.

Good thing there’s an open outlet by this workhorse piano. I’m totally going to need it.

A Public Service Announcement

We all hear the stories. Heck, it’s actually happened to many of us, but here’s the thing: we all know better.

The other day, my trusty laptop melted its own hard drive down to an unintelligible nub and I hadn’t backed up my newest project at all. My viable first draft of another project had not been backed up in months.

Yes, it feels like some part of my body has been amputated, but I think I am over the shock of it now. Or perhaps I am so far deep into shock that I sound rational. Who cares. I am just going to say it one more time and you all can ignore it at your leisure, but I hope that you do not:

BACK UP YOUR WORK.

for the more funk-minded out there, say it like this:

BACK YOUR WORK UP,

BACK THAT MOTHER UP!

I don’t care how you do it: Time Machine, expensive Windows utilities, send a daily copy off to Google Docs, thumb drives, mailing hard copies to yourself, whatever! Just do it. Make it a habit so that you don’t have to feel like I did a few days ago.

/lecture.

Things I should not see.

Sadly, this is the first installment of a new litany of things I should not have seen during my day.

Things I should not see:

A woman in a long fur coat in the checkout line at the grocery store complaining to the checker that the price of the pasta in her grocery load has gone up $.13 per packet. Also in her grocery load: frozen lobster, about a 1LB chunk of Parmesan, 6 bottles of wine. She’s pushing a shining new ‘SUV’ stroller.

Not only is she pointing out with alacrity that the pasta price has ‘gotten out of control’, she’s doing so to a shrinking teenager who probably (if he’s lucky) makes about $8 an hour, berating him as if he’s personally twisted a blade between her ribs. Her child, probably about 2 years old, wants to join in– squawking and shrieking with Momma at this checker.

Yet she doesn’t blink when that lobster rings up at $16.99 per LB, or at any of the bottles of wine that ring over $19.99. All of this at 8 AM in an annoyingly yuppified neighborhood where a cow in her fur coat isn’t alone in acting as if this kind of thing is justified.

Seeing that I survive partially on pasta, the $.13 rise is noted. Luckily that’s not enough to make me re-budget, but it’s noted. Then she invokes the name of ‘what’s right’ in front of me and the checker is biting his tongue. Trying not to say anything. Trying to hold it in.

I have been in his place before, and will be again. I don’t want to be there– nobody does, but it’s part of the way this all works. I will, however, never be in the place where I can buy lobster, parm, and a half case of wine all in one go. I begin to pout inwardly: I want some damn lobster! And a nice Alsatian wine as well!

For some reason, I get a little worked up. Stress is flying in all directions– teeth grinding, sour mouths pursing over indignation, then the kid is shrieking at top volume like some long-extinct flying reptile coming in for the kill.  My brain stills, lolling over one thought: I don’t actually want any of this. I want out of all of this.

I don’t want to be yelled when I am just doing what I have to do to make a living.

I don’t want to think that I am better or worse than anyone around me just because of my percieved level of comfort.

And for the love of all the Parmesan in the world, I never ever want to be in a space where I put on my mink and go around verbally bashing working people until my child is trained to be the same kind of monster that I am.

So that’s what I should not have seen. And what I do not want.

Choose your victories.

My weekend writing spot is a bit of a quirk even by normal standards. It’s a dedicated world beer bar with a grand selection, giant atlases everywhere, a pool table on the honor system, espresso, cheap bottomless coffee, a public terminal, and free wi-fi. Also, on weekends, there’s a free BBQ buffet. Pretty sweet, huh? They employ, partly for flavour and partly out of kindness, an older gentleman we’ll call ‘B’.

B’s kind of a barback, sort of a bouncer, and on weekends close to a porter. He spends most of his time cleaning up, shuttling glasses off of tables, refilling pretzel sticks at the bar, etc. When the BBQ arrives from offsite, he then begins yelling at people that get food before they buy their beer, or who go back for thirds and don’t finish their plates, and even at the occasional person who  tries to change the channel.

An aside– on my walk here (a normally short and pleasant one) in 6F weather, I nearly sat down and died. There is a kind of cold when you feel the blood stilling in your limbs, when the impulse to keep moving is the same as one’s pulse. As strong as the desire to keep moving, there is a point with cold (I believe this point has a name: “mild hypothermia”) where suddenly and undeniably, the best idea ever is to just sit down and go to sleep. I was fighting that ‘knowledge’ from underneath many layers. All thought was pooling in my head– trying to rise into the brittle sunlight but not able to find enough exposed skin through which to escape. One thought made it up and out: I’ve fogotten to take my meds! Of course! No wonder I was so loagy and awful. So I trudged on to the promising if a little wacky spot and promptly sat down in the warm chair.

If I miss my meds for a day or two, I feel slow and uninspired. Three days and I might be moody and tired. Four and five days will find me limp, lazy, and not sleeping well. Anything beyond that and all the wonderful physical hallmarks of depression will come rushing back to me. But I am lucky in this respect, my condition has an onset similar to hypothermia. I have plenty of warning. B is not so lucky. Apparently if B misses his dose, he’s aggressive, loud, crass and half-looking for a fight.

As soon as I sat down and opened my laptop, he came rushing over to me yelling at me to ‘get off the phone!” I wasn’t on the phone, nor were any of the four others in the bar. He stopped and  apologized, talking about how he could hear a phone. I distracted him. He smiled and mentioned that he’d missed the ‘pill (he) takes for (his) nerves’ and then toddled off to set up the buffet. I went back to writing.

About 20 minutes later I took off my headphones. B was in a fierce argument with another customer about whether or not that beer was paid for. I could see from my seat that the guy had a cappuccino and a shot of something. No beer. The food arrived for real and B set it up. Started yelling at me to eat. Apparently he is able to go home after the BBQ is gone, and he expresses that he’s nervous that he needs his pill. I commiserate– it’s not even a stretch. I missed my own and I know he’s got it worse. I can see him trying to control his composure. I suggest that he should tell the bartender (a nice young woman) that he needs to go home for ten minutes.

This is unacceptable to him, and he grabs my plate and piles it high with FAR TOO MUCH food and stomps off. The bartender is looking curiously at me, and when I go up for a refill, she says she thinks B keeps circling back to me to get calmed down. She apologizes for his behavior, I shrug it off. “It’s OK,” I say. “I’ve been there.” She asks if I mind. She knows I write in here and asks if I can with all this going on. “It’s OK,” I repeat. “It wasn’t really happening anyway.” She asks if I’d like a beer. “I’m out of cash,” I say.

I go back to my table, hook back in and B toddles back to me about a 1/2 hour later. He’s brought me a bomber of a delightful local brew and asks if he can hang out with me for a bit. We chat, and as we do, he is stilling. The tension slips away as he talks about his life– and it’s an interesting life. We get along. We curse and commiserate about everything: the weather, our pills, sports, etc.

So no, I didn’t get much writing done today. But I did have an interesting time. I feel like I’ve started making a friend, and I know I made someone’s day brighter and a little easier. Plus? I’m full of free food and beer. I’m going home now to take my damn meds and count my damn blessings. I’ll be a writer later. For now I am going to be an overfed happy mental patient.

Spectacles, Testicles, Wallet, and Comb…

I’m still here, at my weekend writing spot, trying to kick this dead-horse of an idea into form. In the wise if somewhat whiny words of Thom Yorke: “you cannot kick start a dead horse / you just cross yourself and walk away…”

My lapsed-secret Catholic side is already performing the necessary gestures. This poor writing project simply cannot be revisited until the site of inspiration itself has been revisited. One hour in Grampian, PA will undoubtedly bring it back to life. Since I am in Chicago, IL and broke/carless, that is just not going to happen anytime soon.

It sounds like a flimsy excuse, doesn’t it? That I cannot continue writing this without seeing the place again? I swear, it’s true!  The land and the feel of the land, the culture dying with the land, etc is more than the setting I’m working in. It’s a main character all in itself. And it’s huge, overbearing, and menacingly beautiful. It is my feeling of ‘home’. That complicated heart-stab that hits harder when I am there than when I am half a continent away.

Perhaps you’re reading this and thinking how it’s a newbie mistake to throw in the towel for these reasons, but I really don’t feel like I’m doing it any justice out here all the way in IL. I can’t connect with it for long enough to make things happen just *so* right now. So the shelf it is. Not the wastebin, just the shelf. It’s too important to me, and doing it wrong will be ten time worse than never having done it. I hereby slate this for my third or fifth novel.

The cantankerous novel that all four of my readers will eye suspiciciously as being ‘nothing like what she normally writes.’ The novel that sits in the back of the bus and makes lewd jokes and shoots spitballs. The novel I will love in spite of all of that. And because of all of that.