I write in red, blue, green, and orange. And I write in one, two, three and four. I do not write in "one." The beat is like a death march.
Clap. The. Sound.
Dull as thuds that knock in a shot vent. No stairs of words for the ear to climb. "Cut the fat," Beth says and I can see her smile. I scowl. For years, folks have tried to throw my parts of speech in the trash like gross meat stuck to a brown bone.
"Use Strong Nouns and Verbs."
The parts of speech that make clear a noun or verb, you should kill. Twain should know his stuff. A noun can stand on its own, if it is a hale sort of noun. Say "elm" and then shut up.
I would miss blue if this rule were to be broad. I would miss the age of a child. I might like to know that a thing was done in a quick way or a cruel way. I'm odd that way.
I think I can live in one count for the length of a blog post, if I keep things short, but I would not like to go to the zoo. Here is a thing, I'd say, a live thing that is not a plant. It bears live young and wears some hair. It gives some milk to its calf. Its skin is in folds like bark—grey as a dull steel. The nose of the thing is a tube like a snake that moves with the spell of a song. The thing has a sad look and teeth that need a trim—long swords of white that are no help to it here. Its ears flap like flags.
Say it so and you feel grim. So much more the ease to just say its name.
People hate Facebook ads. It's the idea of somebody watching us, I think. How dare you follow my activities on your free site and use this information to make a profit? Nothing worse than a plutocrat with a bit of tracking technology. Next these capitalist spooks will be positioning books I specifically like at bookstores to make it harder for me to treat them as nicer libraries. It's 1984 all over again, but without the leg warmers. Tell me if I've got that bit confused.
Personally, I love Facebook ads. Driven by a dilettante's interest in sociology, I can't wait to discover what categories of product Facebook believes that I will buy, what group that I will join. The algorithm of my unique personality is displayed in icons neatly on the right. Featured upon my page are currently these suggestions: Sleeping. "22,978,738 people like this," it is explained. Eating, it additionally suggests, is only liked by 11,719,551—probably due to the high incidence of rat parts in food. Facebook thinks, quite reasonably, that I might want to "like" both a superior sounding atheist society and a web ministry for Christ. I am finding myself tempted to join neither, but ModCloth beckons to me with their discounted "perfect party dress." What better gift to get a solitary house troll who despises parties and spends most of her life lightly dusted with cat hair and straw? I will have to drop a hint to my husband. A ball gown for the chicken yard, I say. Facebook ads. They show us what we didn't know we needed to want.
Sometimes they're right.
I am thinking about David Sedaris. Facebook cleverly inserted him on my sidebar, after watching my status updates and evaluating them for evidence of appreciation for dry wit. Also, because I had helpfully stated that he was one of my favorite authors when creating my profile several eons ago. "David Sedaris at the Lensic. November 28," said the ad. OK, I'll bite. I have read several of David's books and they remain some of my favorites. If you haven't read him, here is an excerpt of his writing for you to enjoy.
In addition to simply liking David Sedaris, I have shared him with my son. For years, I watched him, waiting for exactly the time when I thought that he was old enough to read about a hitchhiking episode wherein a truck driver with a natural cleft in his forehead offers casually to deliver oral sex. This is an important decision for every parent, I suppose—when to start offering literary fellatio references to their child of the opposite sex. I was patient. You simply cannot rush these things. Some time when he was around fourteen, he came to me with a number of Lonely Island videos that he wanted me to watch. Ah! My little boy is growing up, I thought. I had limited his media, sent him to public school, and he had made friends, just as he was supposed to do. The result, quite naturally, was that he had now developed a working vocabulary for the discussion of various sexual acts, drug paraphernalia and other useful slang, all without my active corruption of his mind. What would we do without public education? It takes a village. I smiled and handed him Me Talk Pretty One Day. He read this avidly.
"Do you have anything else?" he said.
I gave him When You are Engulfed in Flames and Holidays on Ice. My eldest isn't much of a joiner, so while of spend most our meager savings on his younger brothers' desires to dance, kick a ball and play "Hot Cross Buns" on every instrument they can, he rarely warrants an expenditure. His cynical nature makes him cheap. I decided to splurge on this David Sedaris evening for the two of us. Months and months ago, I bought the tickets. I waited and he read Let's Pretend This Never Happened. I tried unsuccessfully to interest him in the works of Kurt Vonnegut, on the purported basis that they included a drawing of his own asshole, but really because of Kilgore Trout and his pointy chin. Months rolled by.
Last night it was the night. We arrived at the Lensic a full forty minutes early to find David signing books. Naturally, we had left all of ours at home. A discussion ensued as to whether she should buy more books. There were two we hadn't read. Finally, we selected one and allowed that it was part of a Christmas gift.
"Go and get it signed," I told my son.
"Why?" he demurred. "Then it will no longer be in mint condition."
"Go," I told him.
Arriving at the front of the line, David surveyed Rowan with apparent delight.
"How old are you?" he asked.
"Fifteen."
"Oh, good," said David. "I have something for you." He turned and rifled in a plastic shopping bag for a period of time and turned back to my son.
"I imagine you like to wash your hair," he supposed.
"Yes," Rowan admitted.
"Do you condition it, too?"
"Yes."
"Well, I'm staying at this place. The Inn of...."
"The Inn of the Anasazi?" I inquired.
"Yes," he said. "They have this shampoo. "It is piñon-eucalyptus. I want to give it to you."
He handed the small bottle of opalescent liquid to Rowan and surveyed him pleasantly for a bit.
"I have something else for you as well," he announced happily and reached again into his bag. Withdrawing an attractive business card holder, he explained.
"These are nice because they're good quality paper. You can give them to people." He withdrew a card.
"It's great because it doesn't say 'Shut-up,' but you can hand them to people when you just need them to stop saying things.
Listen", he added, "I'm going to say a word. I will read out of my diary and there's a bit where I'm going to say 'What do we want? A cure for Tourette's! When do we want it?' When I say that, you should cover you ears. I don't want to be responsible for teaching you this word. It's a really dirty word."
Rowan agreed that he would. He didn't, though, and when the expletive was flung into the auditorium to uproarious guffaws, he leaned over.
"I already knew that word."
I know, I thought. And that's exactly why I brought you here. That and the brilliance of Facebook ads.
My cell alarm starts its jingle; I shower, already awake. Downstairs is the smell of dark grounds run through with hot water, tropics from a jar. Poured in a cup, it burns my tongue, a wonder in a mouth burned so many times before. Many years ago, it stopped tasting bitter. Now it tastes like morning prayer. Add soy milk, screw the lid and sit. Take vitamins and pills.
It will be dark for two more hours. I have stolen back a piece of night I was too tired to spend the day before. As every morning, I am up by myself. Just me and my computer, the coffee, and my words. I sip, I type, and I wonder when I first forgot how old I am. When did all the twenty-fours starts running together, blurring into streams of never-ending waking and repose? When did habits start to wear the suits of truths and set stubborn lines in my skin? Is this adulthood, this sense of static time?
When I was younger, I lay in bed, as if there would always be time to write. The morning attacked me, throwing sheets and buffeting pillows against my head. Everything interesting happened at night. Night, when no one wanted anything from me and I could do whatever I pleased. I was dragged with sandpaper eyes from sleep I was not finished with. Clothes were never clean, dishes never washed, and I kept having to go to school or work.
"Three hours," I'd groan to my friend as she drove us both to school.
"Three?" she'd say. "I got two."
"Coffee," we told the barista in the college cafeteria, and got the largest size. We forked over the rest of our meager earnings to buy breakfast potatoes with scoops of salsa and sour cream.
Very little writing got done. A great deal of dancing, though, and sitting at one of any of fourteen cafes in my hometown, also flirting with boys on motorcycles, and a certain amount of working at cafes. Tremendous scholarly work was done. Whatever could be gleaned from leafing untutored through The Joy of Sex, The Bhagavad Gita and The People's History of the United States. I researched and wrote a term paper in a single night and got an A. As my friend pulled up to get me, pages were still printing out. Endlessly, endlessly, I was chased by day. Give me enough time in darkness and I can conquer the world. (Or dance with at least one more boy.)
It's not day chasing you, you idiot. It's Time.
Then here I am, a thousand years later, a million years old, encrusted with lichens and mold. I am up at ridiculous hours, taking vitamins from pill boxes marked with days of the week. My joints ache, and I can't stay awake until ten. I worry about college savings and I continually check my children's grades by use of an online device like a camera in a dressing room. "Power School." Like "X-Ray Vision." I have divided the days with a protractor into thin slices of flavorless pie. I call this "scheduling."
The part I like best is still this part in the dark, though, stolen away from duty and prescription, hidden away from work. I still research and write my term papers on the fly and publish them as people start to wake. I still live by the skin of my teeth and dance with strangers in the dark. If I wasn't a writer, I suppose I'd have to run away from home.
*Note: I will take a page from Tangled Lou and remind everyone that I like to play with ideas here, so please don't ever take anything I say as some sort of personal statement of my truth. It's more honest to say it's a kind of mental rabbit I followed down a hole. So, I do like my life and I am not running away from home. But I do love the mental world available to me through writing.
On some other occasion, a child cruelly labelled my cat and we cruelly took photographs.
My cat is back. He was gone these last three days. No one knew where he was. Camping, perhaps. A week before, he'd done the same thing—gone feral for a few days, a plump kernel of corn returning to native maize. Then, at 5 AM, there he was, at my back door, making his patented screech owl-choking-cry. I opened the door.
I want food, he explained. And I was so glad to see him, this cat-for-hire in search of cans of special urinary tract management food. He's back, I thought, truly as if my life were to be greatly enhanced by the continued presence of an enormous, long-haired cat who expresses his love through open-clawed massage.
And then he left again. Disappeared. I should have taken him to the vet. He's hiding because he's ill. Perhaps, now, he's already dead. Clearly, we needed to run hundreds of dollars worth of tests. Ma'am, your cat is just an asshole. There's nothing else wrong with him. Please pay at the front desk. I should have taken out pet insurance. Let us cover the mirrors and dress in black. Let us think of ten good things about Marmalade. Are there ten good things?
Mikalh made this:
This morning again: Mrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaoooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
He's back! This is starting to be fun, to have a ritual quality. Or to be dysfunctional, like a marriage that needs to end. I am going to insist that my cat get some counseling or I am leaving him. He acts exactly as if nothing has occurred, but wants two cans of the expensive food.
"Do you realize," I ask him, "the impact this has on me?"
He doesn't. Wherever he has been, nursing wounds or traveling the block, my feelings clearly did not enter into it. One can always count on the lack of empathy of cats. But, since he is here, he will not forget me. He has eaten, bathed, and done his yoga. It is important, he reminds me, to take care of oneself first. Now we can think of others. It is the time to sit in my lap while I am trying to type. He purrs like a muffled shekere, digs his knife-sharp claws into my thighs. Don't you like it? He bites if I interfere and raises his rear into my face. The tail goes under my nose.
Yesterday, instead of doing anything "productive," I pretended that I was at a TED Conference. I had recently figured out that I could stream TED talks on my Roku and that was essentially to be the end of things as they were. I am now hooked. During this particular orgy of ideas, I must have watched twenty talks, and each one of them blew my mind. I want to share this one in particular with you. This speaker, David Tammet, is an autistic savant and writer, describing his linguistic, numerical and visual synesthesia—a way of knowing that is starkly different from how the rest of us navigate the world. Numbers for Tammet have colors that exist not in the mind's-eye but in the external world.
This is bizarrely different, and yet I find that I can relate to large parts of what he says. I don't have synesthesia, but I am deeply familiar with the experiences he is describing with the written word. And these things seem not only natural to me, but obvious. So I begin to wonder: to what extent is some version of this the brain of a writer? Do you also have to write in a quiet room so that you can hear the rhythm of the syllables count out upon your brain? Do you, without analysis, understand that "hare" might be a superior choice to "rabbit" in a poem that you write? Or, for some of you, is the meaning itself all that is important, rather than the taste, rhythm, and texture of the word? And, if you are a musician, a scientist, a mathematician, is there something for you in what he says?
Sasquatch, Ninja, and Ostrich examining the camera
Today the hens are still abed, wondering where I am. The kitchen lies in destruction, pie crust scattered on the floor. Everyone is sleeping. Everyone but me. In the hen coops, I will find the eggs the girls are just starting to lay. They will be small and pale, a rosy brown, some speckled, in a carton next to large, dark and perfect from my year-old hen. In my hands they feel like purpose. A wholeness that hums and breathes.
I spent the wee hours in bed with Lois Lowry, preparing to help my son to understand the use of symbolism so the world will open up to him. Blue is not just blue. Nothing is ever just what it is. Even the pie crust underfoot is a civilization obliterated by my heel. I am an alien in my own skin, invading the world of wakers who are stirring all about. I have to feed the dog, the innocent amidst the sinning fray.
I am struck by all this simple beauty. Skies that are blue in a way only southwest skies are blue. Hens that cuddle and cluck and leave breakfast for me in their house. A dog whose mammalian devotion has been the lifeline of agitated children facing bathroom beasts, who can fight malevolent gods with the power of his fawning glance. Words that sharpen into meaning, making us more than simply human, words that make us mages of the mind.
Eggs that are smooth and warm and weighty. Wholeness and potentiality in my hand. Life means well. Eggs are proof of that.
It is Thanksgiving and a local teenager has died. Another is in the hospital. In this small town, we are all connected by the Facebook accounts of our adolescent kids. Somebody's child was taken to the hospital and for another's it was too late. I can feel the haunting of another parent's nightmare tugging at my shirt. They start to look like vases, like china, these half-grown children. They clink like nearly-broken glass. You gasp and only exhale when you see that this time they are whole.
This is the problem with gratitude. The sharp edge on which it lives. I am grateful, grateful beyond words. I could fall upon their sleeping bodies sobbing, my prayer catching in my throat,
"Thank God it wasn't you."
There is something fundamentally animal about it. I am glad for what I have. Whatever I have, someone else must do without. If I have food, someone else is starving. If I have warmth someone else is cold. If I look on with pride at the living, chattering antics of my three children, someone else is sitting by a grave, trying to imagine how to live. Yes, yes, I am grateful. A thousand times grateful. But, I often wonder: is there really a religion to be made of this? Is this gratitude-shouting a practice that smooths the edges of my troubled soul? Is this worthy of the Facebook statuses of an entire month?
And perhaps it is. It is good to remember that I could be that mourner, that woman waking in a hospital to learn that my child has left the earth, lest I forget to kiss my child. It is good to remember that I could be without food, when I am angry that I am without kick-ass boots. But this seems a shallow place to stop, if there my feet rest in their tracks—this "I am grateful today for all I have."
I have to think that any gratitude of meaning would challenge us to do far more. If we are grateful for our wonderful food, what part of it might we share? If we are happy that we have our family, have we welcomed in those who have none? No, mostly I didn't and I haven't. Too often, I fail to practice gratitude—the gratitude of gifts and welcomes or the gratitude of the heart, too often I fail at both of these. Maybe it would do my heart some good to post a thank you each running day of November. But I don't. I won't. Because if I am grateful out loud to the Universe on Facebook for the life of my child, what am I saying the world meant for hers? I will keep my gratitude to myself and offer this thank you instead.
Today I thank the first nations whose gift we took without asking, that allowed every bit of plenty we enjoy today. I thank the slaves who never were free, the workers who toiled to build the nation, the immigrants who were called names. I thank everyone history has forgotten, who gave me what I have. I do not know your names, but I remember you today. For your lives I say a prayer. I thank the turkey and his farmer, the butcher and the growers of the food. I thank my husband for supporting me and my mother for helping me cook. I thank my children for chopped potatoes, for warm hugs and for the purpose of my life.
And I offer a prayer of tears in solidarity with the mother who has just yesterday lost her son. I will eat and I will laugh, but I will not forget. I will not forget.
It is Thanksgiving and someone else's child is dead.
