Blues

All writers – particularly all fiction writers – are fundamentally good liars. Because it’s their – not even talent, but responsibility to make people believe things that simply aren’t true. You present a story that never happened to people who never existed and say, “This is what really occurred.” And if you do it well, your reader will be swept along without ever questioning the validity of it. The key, though, is to believe in it yourself. You as the writer have to put on that delusional mindset that tells you the stories in your head aren’t just figments of your imagination, but could have been a story on the news or something you found in a forgotten history book at Goodwill, and it’s your task to tell it to the world.

If you think about it, it’s really no wonder that creativity was associated with mental illness. Sometimes I sit back and think, “I just might be going crazy,” because I have things floating in my head that are as vivid and real to me as reality itself. The conversations I hear between two characters that I have created are just as realistic as a discussion I had with my mom the other day. I can see the kitchen table they’re sitting at, the coffee cups they’ve filled with Braveheart Scottish ale that awkwardly tastes like grapes, the dead yak in the living room they’re wondering how to get out to the woods without the neighbors catching on. That’s half the creativity that goes on in between my ears: scenes, snippets of “reality” that are completely detached from a fully fleshed-out story. Which is why I have such a problem writing fiction – who wants to read a book of scenes that have nothing to do with each other when the writer can’t figure out how to tie them all together? This is also a problem because that makes them all the more difficult to separate them from real life. Because if you think about it, life is nothing more than a series of scenes – you don’t know the full story until the very end of it, and then it’s not even you reading the full story, it’s somebody else looking back on your story and seeing a complete beginning-middle-and-end structure.

Why do I write? I’ve answered this question before and tried to be very philosophical like so many others have before me. You look up quotes online about writing (attributed to authors who probably never said such things, somebody else just thought their words would be more readily accepted if it sounded like Mark Twain or Edgar Allen Poe wrote them) and you get all this melarky about “words are the window to the soul” and “record your thoughts for future generations” and some other such nonsense. And with respect to the penners of those words (whoever they may be), that’s bullshit. What pompous turd sits down with his leather-bound volume (only really posh people write in leather-bound volumes) and quill pen (again, only the really posh people) and says, “I’m going to write something today that is so profound, so groundbreaking, that people generations from now, long after I am dead and entombed somewhere, will still be misquoting it on the internet and inspirational classroom posters.”

Nobody – and I mean nobody – thinks like that. Do you know how much pressure it is to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and try to fill it up, much less fill it with something profound? No, thank you.

Other than the above universal statement that I have no right to deliver, I can’t speak for other writers. For me, though, the whole point to writing is to catch the bees of genius that constantly buzz through my brain and pin them down in a paper shadowbox. Not for anybody else to examine, not for future generations to look to for wisdom, not for people to see “the real me.” It’s simply a housekeeping procedure. How the hell am I supposed to be a contributing member of society and get done all the tasks I need to in a day when my head is surging with creative ideas that are neither productive nor helpful to me or anybody else? I have journals packed full of midnight rants, loose pieces of paper with conversations, my own quotations in the notepad app on my phone, sticky notes with ideas of stories that I will probably never write. Because if I don’t capture them when they flutter onto the tip of my nose, they’ll fly away and be lost to me forever. And my imagination, to me, is too colorful and interesting a place to let things like that slip past – like the little chip in a Magic 8 ball – without being acknowledged, even if they’re never used.

I am baffled, intrigued, frightened, confused, marveled, concerned, leveled, amazed by the things that float in an out of view in my own head. 

Plebians

I have 246 books in my little room. My four bookcases are jam-packed – I had to built another one and shove it in my closet. I have books everywhere: lining the back of my desk, books lying sideways on top of upright books, books in stacks on top of my ancient typewriter, books hidden behind other books. And trust me: there is a system. Novels are over the desk and dresser. The staunch-looking hardbacks are set aside on the desk (I’m particularly proud of the 1936 edition of Robin Hood addressed to “Eugene” from “Uncle Hubert and Aunt Helen” on Christmas Day 1957, a 1942 copy of Great Expectations, and a combined copy of Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from 1937). Biographies are in the closet with the seven Bibles I’ve accumulated since my first black KJV, issued to all new kindergartens at Middletown Christian. Textbooks (the ones that aren’t novels – English majors’ “textbooks” are more fun than everybody else’s) are next to my own meager attempts at literary genius.

Certainly there is overlap. Some of them were purchased before I realized we had a copy hidden somewhere in the house. I bought my own copy of The Da Vinci Code when I was in Paris because 1) I ran out of things to read on a “mission trip,” and 2) how can you not visit the Louvre and then read the book that takes place largely in those hallowed halls? I accumulated a Dickens here and there before my parents gave me a GORGEOUS set of Penguin editions for Christmas last year. And I received a copy of Gone with the Wind as a birthday present a few years before one of my closest friends gave me another edition for a graduation gift: it’s a little battered and one of the pages is missing, but the fact that she introduced me to the story in the first place and the first page bears a handwritten note from her, that beaten-up paperback is as special to me as if it had been signed by Maggie Mitchell herself.

Once while I was drying my hair I went around and counted how many of those I’ve read. 117. One hundred and seventeen. The rest of the ones I’ve read in the last seven years (how long I’ve been keeping track) have been borrowed, rented out, or given away to someone else who would appreciate them as much as I did. I can look at almost every one and think of what I was doing, where I was, what was happening in my young life as I turned the pages. I read most of Huckleberry Finn out loud, mulling over each of Mark Twain’s accents to an audience of none in my bedroom. Charlotte’s Web was the first novel I ever read, and Peter Pan was the first novel I ever read in a day. A Tale of Two Cities took me three days, Les Miserables three years. I’ve blazed through Prince of Tides three times; the first time I read Water for Elephants, I finished it in a day on the way to a Florida wedding and had to get No Place Like Home from Walmart to tide me over for the rest of the trip. Captains Courageous, Treasure Island, and The Sea Wolf are the exhilarating sea stories I love so much, each one bearing a different tone that makes them whimsical, riveting, and sinister in their turns. The first three of the four Robert Langdon escapades were amazing, while the last one fell flat and was an unwelcome weight in my backpack in England. The Road and Life of Pi were philosophical and deep and made you read them upside-down to catch the meaning lurking just beneath the surface – a far cry from A Liar’s Autobiography which you have to read upside-down to catch the fact that it has no meaning at all. My Last Days as Roy Rogers, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-ya Sisterhood, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn only in the summer (just because it’s summer doesn’t mean you have to read beach quiki-mart shiterature); Little Women and Oliver Twist only in the winter; and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Kite Runner only if you feel like abusing your heart.

My brother found me six hundred pages into Gone with the Wind the other day and said he couldn’t see how I could read all the time. And honestly, I don’t either: how can anybody be content staring at a piece of paper with the same old words for hours? And I do mean hours: between a two-hour car ride and sixteen hours on an airplane I flew through nearly 800 pages of detail about the biggest bitch in all of literature. (I despise Scarlett O’Hara. Almost as much as I despise anything Jane Austen dreamed up: who wants to slog through three hundred pages of walking from room to room gossiping?) And I don’t like the Pinterest graphics that call reading an escape from reality, a chance to get away from your world to delve into another one. For me it’s merely an exercise for the imagination. Look at it from a writer’s perspective: the only way to get better at your craft is to write (no shit) and to look at other writers’ work. One of my writing profs told me last semester, “Don’t try something new with your writing: look at what other writers prove works and do that.” How the hell can you do that if you don’t look at examples of what works?

And when it comes right down to it, I do love a good story.

Ma

So a few months ago my creative writing professor asked us to write about ourselves. “Who are you? What makes you you? How are you different from everyone else?” And I had more of a problem with that than I thought I would. How do you define yourself – your worth, your being, your psychological composition – in two pages? That’s a lot to ask of anyone, let alone an exhausted college student.

I set it from the angle of “where have I come from.” I talked mostly about myself: coming from someone who passively let life happen to her to someone who stands up for what she deserves; coming from very small-minded and intolerantexpectations of how people should be to a broader point-of-view that allows other people to be themselves; coming from the scared freshman living with a stranger to the senior standing before you, ready to take on the world and see what happens.

I am a strong woman. I am a tough woman. I think this because I have a legacy of tough women to live up to.

My great-grandmother, Mary Isabelle, the feisty little woman who was dancing the Charleston at ninety-five years old, her arm cut off at the elbow from a work injury many years before I was thought of. In her, her grandchildren found an escape as she whisked them away for outings to the store, for ice cream, anything to get their minds off the house where they must return and endure. She has taught me that hardship should not be muddled through with a grimace.

My grandmother, Pearl , the quiet lady on the couch in her pantyhose and trousers who had survived a tyrant, a drunk, the judgment of a much less tolerant time, two sons who never realized – one from physical incapacity, the other from blatantrefusal – how much her heart beat for them. She crept on with quiet dignity, hidden talent as her hands with the mutilated finger danced across the piano, not from lessons but from instinct, limited though she was to only two keys. It is through her that I learned love is not something to be discarded even if it’s not idyllic.

My other grandmother, Nancy, whose past was riddled with dark secrets but we as children never saw them in her cooking, her playing duck-duck-goose on the back porch, her laugh that I can still hear in my head that continued even when her body was riddled with cancer and her own mortality was thrown starkly up in her face. Her death six years ago taught me that sometimes our childish, innocent memories are more important than what actually happened.

My mother, Tina, who has given me the best childhood I could have imagined. Through her I have learned the importance of hard work – the work itself is sometimes more important than the desired outcome. I have learned how to be self-sufficient, when your options are exhausted and it comes down to you and your ability to think on your feet (lying underneath a toilet with a Home Depot how-to book when Dad’s not home and we don’t want to call a plumber). I have learned to recognize your past but not let it define you or hold you back. I have learned to be tough, selfless, not to fall apart until everybody else is taken care of, but also to realize that sometimes you just need to have a break-down. I have learned to reach for the stars, but also topack enough fuel for the rocket ship to get you there.

I am from beaten wives. I am from dark secrets. I am from hours and hours of work at a piano that blossomed into a passionwithout which I cannot breathe. I am from stories in my head that churn constantly, especially when I sit quietly and try to push them away. I am from “Monty Python’s Flying Circus and amaretto brownies, “Hogan’s Heroes” and chocolate milkshakes. I am from dancing in my pajamas to 80s rock-and-roll while we got ready for church. I am from treadmill ranting with my Irish twin and duck-hunting stories with the man that I cannot believe is my baby brother. I am from keeping my heart to myself so intensely that I feel like I’m standing naked in a ballroom when I let somebody catch a glimpse of what’s behind the curtain. I am from secret writings, oddball traditions, questions of sanity, and moving to the realization that I am not nuts, simply myself.

And I have these women to thank for that. Mom Belle, Maw-Maw, Grandma, and my ma. You have taught me to proudly wear your names that have christened me, and your lessons have taught me to be a woman of laughter and a woman of bravery.

Happy Mother’s Day, and thank you.

Spray

The words aren't coming today for some reason.

Is there a difference between "strong" and "tough"?

Thesaurus.com says they're synonyms. Mental, physical, emotional. Able to bear up under great weights. Of great moral power, firmness, or courage.

I was called strong once. Twice, actually, and I didn't understand either time: once when I told a close friend that our friendship had to stop where it stood, and once by my adopted grandfather who had seen death and war and hell on earth and still saw something resilient in me. I didn't get it. I still don't. What's so strong about sitting on the edge of a couch sharing Reese cups with an old man? What's so strong about lying face-down on your bed shoving the comforting arm of God away after you've told a dear friend "no more"?

Strong people aren't supposed to feel remorse. Tough people aren't supposed to be bogged down by their emotions.

But seriously: is there a difference between "strong" and "tough"?

My mom used to tell me to "be tough" when she would brush, curl, untangle, de-gum, ponytail the mass of hair that hung to my waist until I was eight. Gingers have scientifically-proven more tender scalps than people with other hair colors, and I would fuss and fidget when she would rake a comb through the huge wad of red. She would say "be tough," and I knew to grit my teeth and not make a sound until she was done.

"Be tough" as the nurse sticks the needle into your arm.

"Be tough" as your dad wraps gauze around the elbow you've just shredded on the driveway.

"Being tough" didn't make the pain go away. The shot still hurt, the wound still stung, the hairbrush still yanked. But you set your face, shut your eyes, clenched your fists, dug in your toes until you were released.

Maybe it's the attitude you assume while you do either of those things. Or maybe it's how much you keep your true feelings hidden. "Strong" is a state of mind, a state of action: preparing for a funeral trip, watching solemnly as they lower your grandmother's urn into the ground, soaking your mother's tears into your shirt, smiling at the dying man around a mouthful of chocolate and peanut butter, not making eye contact with your melting uncles as their strength gives out, cheering with the rest of the crowd when your friends march across that graduation platform.

"Tough" is the facade so you don't add to a bad situation.

Wearing sunglasses in the Florida sunshine as an excuse to keep your tears to yourself.

Waiting until you're face-down in the rain to scream.

Locking your door and shoving the pillow in your mouth so the girls in the hallway won't hear you cry.

Waiting until your roommate is in the shower to grieve the change of your lives.

Sitting against a tree in the dark begging God to tell you what's wrong with you.

Wanna know a secret?

Being tough gets old after a while.

Eventually the countdown on your dorm room door will come down with twenty-nine days left because you're so scared to think how soon your life will change.

And

What happens in the in-betweens?

I turned to Ecclesiastes last night (and it wasn't the "everything is meaningless" that drew me there, thank you very much), and I noticed that all the stuff in the "time for everything" passage is a dichotomy: birth and death, reap and sow, cry and laugh, embrace and push away, love and hate. And I started trying to fill in the "and."

Obviously there are some that don't lend themselves to have an in-the-middle. But what do you do with the ones you can put in? The active ones are very definite: birth, death, plant, harvest, search, give up, construct, destroy - you can mark them on a calendar, send a save-the-date, narrow it down to the moment when you say "It's time."

But so much can happen in that little "and." The most I've ever grown is cherry tomatoes in a bucket, but there's a lot of watering, weeding, and WAITING that happens between planting and harvesting. In the middle of actively looking for something and abandoning the search, there are countless restless nights of "is this worth finding?" The waiting between healing and killing is just an unpredictable as waiting for bucket tomatoes, and infinitely more crucial.

And the "and" between the two most chaotic upheavals of a human existence - birth and death - is that exhilarating, terrifying, outrageous quest that we call life.

Where is the season for the "ands?" Is the "and" the year in which the seasons are constantly rotating? Are we constantly waiting, planning, being silent, contemplating, watching, living, and only making a big deal out of the seasons because they're a break in the monotony. Next to this passage, a younger me jotted down, "Life is not constant - you will always experience shifting circumstances." But maybe life is what remains constant. It's the drumbeat of our existence, ticking along through the whole song to the metronome of our heartbeats. Maybe it's the "times," the seasons, that provide the melody.

For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven:
A time to be born and (LIVE) a time to die,
A time to plant and (WAIT) a time to harvest,
A time to kill and (WATCH) a time to heal,
A time to tear down and (PLAN) a time to build up,
A time to cry and (BE SILENT) a time to laugh,
A time to grieve and (PACE) a time to dance,
A time to scatter stones and (LEAVE STONES - pick your battles) a time to gather stones,
A time to embrace and (STAND THERE) a time to turn away,
A time to search and (WONDER) a time to quit searching,
A time to keep and (REMINISCE) a time to throw away,
A time to tear and (PUT TO USE) a time to mend,
A time to love and (BE) a time to hate,
A time for war and (SURVIVAL) a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3.1-8

Danger

It's always a good day when you realize you forgot to turn in an essay TWO FRICKIN' MONTHS AGO. It's always a better day when your prof lets you re-do it and have it due on this Friday, on top of all the other mess you have to do.

One of those good days that makes you want to go to bed and binge-watch "Parks and Rec."

We started crew for the spring play last night, which was basically the highlight of my day. Except for the box of tea and a tea strainer from a dear friend after I told him I wasn't drinking coffee until Easter. (PS that noble venture lasted exactly FOUR DAYS.) Now my whole room smells like cinnamon spice gloriousness.

And the contraband vanilla lime candle I stuck on my coffee warmer. Because it's not actually "lighting it." And because a candle warmer is a fire hazard but a coffee warmer isn't.

It damn near smelled like arson yesterday - Sunday night I left my Christmas lights plugged in when I spent the night at my friend's house. Came back yesterday morning to find half the bulbs burnt out and BLACK on the tips.

Good life choice.

Actually, it was the SECOND potentially-disastrous event of the day. It's actually dangerous to shove a whole peanut butter-covered Saltine in your mouth with a drink - you could suffocate. Oh, and I almost got in a fight when the girl behind me on the way to the BTS was HUMMING and I damn near punched her in the face.

A red letter Monday if ever I saw one. I live on the edge.

This post, dear friends, has been nothing of consequence. AT ALL. But I needed a break from writing an essay about the almost-feminism in Katherine Mansfield's Daughters of the Late Colonel, four pages of which I cranked out in the wee hours of this fair Tuesday morning. The game plan (my ma asked me what my game plan was for getting all of my projects/papers/essays/meetings done between now and graduation....this makes it sound as though I have a game plan) is to finish the rough draft tonight between rehearsals for the play and two different directing scenes, then start working on the annotated bibliography/presentation due next week in preparation for another paper due at the end of April.

Oh, all in the same class.

Heavenly days.

38 days, friends. We got this.

Evening

For those of you who truly know me, you know that my language is less than pristine. So when we were told to write about something important to us for an Advanced Composition class, this is what I came up with.

Because I'm a master of the four-letter variety, I know when it's acceptable to use them. So fret not: I was conscientious of my audience when I wrote this.

~



On Swearing

So I'm at my friend's house. She's only one I know here, and now she's nowhere to be seen - she invited my in and walked out the front door with somebody else. And I'm sitting on the couch by myself, about to get up and walk back to my dorm. But her housemates are there. And they ask me if I want to play LIFE.

They don't bother to ask if I've played before, even though I have - they just launch into explaining it.

Because I have never played like they play before.

You write down your life story while you marry and divorce other players and weave through life's little celebrations, like "sex change," "get hired as a stripper," "have illegitimate children." After I get married to Kadie and switch seats to sit by my new "wife," I see the "sex tape" tile on her side of the board. And I can't help but splutter, "What the f--- is that?!"

I have been welcome in their house ever since.

~

 

I grew up around "bad words." Not from my actual family - I didn't hear my dad swear until I was ten. But between John Wayne, country music, and "A Christmas Story," I had a vast (if not practiced) repertoire by the time I entered middle school. I could "shit" and "damn" my way around a barn like nobody's business when I was only fourteen. At first I reserved "the big one" for special occasions, like when I charged barefoot into the English Channel and remembered too late that French sea water is coooooold in mid-January. At nineteen when I cut my bangs to cover my eyes and shoved eight studs through my ears, I started using it on a daily basis, more times than I could count. Now there's no telling what'll spark it: breaking my pinky toe on the lawn chair by the pool, realizing that my flash drive is completely empty, discovering there are no more Reese Cups in my secret stash.

 

It just makes you feel better.

 

~

 

The fact is, no one really knows where "bad words" came from. The great literary deity William Shakespeare often gets the credit, but the "mother of all dirty words" appeared in print two hundred years before Shakespeare was born - 1475, to be exact, in a poem attacking Cambridge monks. While it was originally "a graphic euphemism for the act of copulation<" World War II soldiers gave it new meaning, new weight. Even today, swearing is largely associated with the military because of its apparent link to bravery, toughness, and courage.

 

"F---" has been taboo since the late Nineteenth Century - the editors of the Old English Dictionary were faced with a serious dilemma when it came time to print the "F" volume in the mid-1890s. It was omitted from most written publications well into the Twentieth Century, as most people considered it "unprintable," "best avoided altogether in polite company." Though the realm of "polite company" is being stretched by modern evening television programs, you still won't hear it on TV nearly as much as you would in a pool hall because broadcast media are actually under threat of fines if they don't fuzz it or bleep it. But when it does slip, "polite company" still sniffs, "How vulgar, how common, what a lack of education."

 

~

 

Look, I get it, we all do: it's still not culturally acceptable. If you stand in the food court in a mall and scream a four-letter word, you'll get stares. You'll get comments. You'll get mothers ushering their children away with their ears covered and glaring in your direction. "How dare you corrupt the pristine mind of my precious child, your filth will drag him into a life of immorality."

 

But that's the thing of it: I can rattle off words that would deck a nun without a flush in my cheeks or tingle on my tongue. But my integrity is alive and well.

 

"The mouth of a sailor, the morals of a lady."

 

There is no correlation between bad language and a bad lifestyle.

 

~

 

Swearing is universal. Billy Connolly says everybody understands what it means, from the jerk who just cut you off on the interstate to some numpty messing with your suitcase in an airport in Tibet.

 

Swearing is cathartic. When you smash your finger with a hammer, don't tell me the first thing that fills your mouth is "Oh dear, the searing pain, how gruesome it is."

 

Swearing is binding. It is the hallmark of blue-collar workers who construct intricate tapestries of profanity to create solidarity against "the man."

 

Swearing is definite. It is the truly educated who know never to use a paragraph when a single word will suffice.

 

Why would we condemn words that create community, solidarity, catharsis, unmistakable meaning?

 

~

 

At the same turn, why is it our go-to to use the words that have been called "offensive" and "vulgar" by our society?

 

Maybe it's our mission to "say what we mean." I've been told for years never to use ten words when one will do - why clatter through a paragraph of politeness when "damn it all to hell" is how you feel?

 

Maybe it's our inner desire to be rebels. My ma told me I didn't sound like a lady when I swear, now I curse in Received Pronunciation.

 

Maybe it's our drive to appear tougher than we are. My language fits my punky bangs, the punctures through my ears. "Don't touch me or I'll punch you back."

 

Maybe it's a combat technique against our crippling insecurity. Maybe I take my glaring eyes, my sullen face, my unruly hair, my shredded fingers, and hide them under a tarp of "shit."

 

Not "look at the girl with the jiggly frame."

 

"Look at the girl with the sailor-mouth."

 

~

 

I belonged when I dropped the "F-bomb" in the middle of a LIFE game.

 

I joined "the team" when I clattered into the loading dock at work "f---ing" and "damning" our common hell.

 

Maybe that's it.

 

Maybe it's just that first-grade yearning that never really leaves us:

 

To have a seat at lunch,

 

To be part of the game,

 

To fit.