The accumulation of doubt
16 May 2013 06:16 PM Categories: Graduate school
Never post on a full mind. Never post on an empty mind. Never post when in doubt. As I type, I don’t know where I stand on any of those conditions. Too full? Too empty? And what about the doubt? Does just asking prove my point?
I left early this morning and let distraction throw me off course. I handed in a paper that may or may not be what the professor expected. I sat with that unsettled feeling. I ate a waffle that tasted of caramelized sugar. I sat in a classroom with closed windows. I sat in a windowless classroom. I summed up my developing theory of counseling in 30 seconds. I stood on the 29 to Balboa Park and listened to the hollow bravado of young white dudes who took up too much space and didn’t move to the back of the bus. I got on the wrong train. I got off the wrong train. I rode the train to Richmond as far as North Berkeley.
I stared at my phone. I stared into space. I stared out the window. Between then and now, between the time I walked out of my house and walked back in, the skies had a little cry, the fog clung to the city and then abandoned it, the saturated air formed a protective layer over campus and the sun took it away. Blue reclaimed the sky. The wind picked up. And through it all, I wore my sweater and kept on my shoes.
I came home and I wanted to cry. Cry for self-acceptance. Cry for the sins I no longer let define me. Cry for the knowledge that I have caused damage that I cannot change. Cry because my only option is to make amends. Cry because it’s a tricky business. Cry in relief. Cry in forgiveness. Cry because what else does one do at the end of a long week with so much ahead?
Image by me, taken at the Daly City BART station. In what sort of emergency does one break the glass? And what does pressing the button do? I have no idea.
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Lipstick traces
13 May 2013 10:50 PM Categories: Friends
You can remove me with a click, pack me into a set-aside thought, make me a boxed-and-buried emotion, but you can’t erase me. I get it, the attempts to whitewash, to remove the stains, to air out the heart in order to rid it of the smell of cigarettes and perfume. I have been on hands and knees with a toothbrush – a toothbrush! – scrubbing what was left of other people out of my soul. I’ve lit the incense, burned the bridges, bleached the sheets. It was all useless. The others remained. To pretend they never existed was to deny a part of myself.
I understand the urge to excise someone’s role in the larger narrative, to go with the current story arc. We do what we need to in order to keep the peace. And many of the characters in my life story are long gone, some for good. But nothing has really changed since our first conversation, no matter how long ago it was (I know you remember it). They continue to exist in my sinuous trajectory, with its sidetracks and rebounds, with its stories that coil back on themselves. They are now products of my imagination, the best of my projections made “real.”
I am in your mind, too, shrunk to the size of a Barbie, handcuffed to the steering wheel of a toy car, hidden in a lockbox with the other untidies, saved for special occasions or just left to disintegrate over the course of a lifetime.
My extended narrative is crowded. It is slow at times, boozy and genial at others. D, J, and R are there (if anyone deserves the boot from my story, it’s R, but he played a key, if silent, part). I’ve got the pseudonym sisters Maureen, Martha, and Joan. A boy I made out with freshman year in college, who had the same last name as me and dropped out after a semester, is there, forever 18 and confused. P, the coworker who played it straight until he came out, remains the man he was before and immediately after. Sometimes people I’ve barely met are permanent fixtures in the storyline. M, who rocked my world, for example. I’ll always have a little place for her. The ex-wife of my ex-husband is crammed into a mental attic space, and we only spoke on the telephone once or twice almost 20 years ago. And then there are the those I once knew where we both pretend to forget. They are my wayward flock, the lost-never-to-be-founds. We are members of the Mutual Denial Society, each one of us skipping along alone, leaping over entire sections of backstory.
I understand denial. It keeps the story neat and tidy, the plot line on the straight and narrow. Denial removes emotion when emotion is inconvenient. It allows us to pretend we leave without a trace, that those we once knew were nothing but passing moods, clouds overhead that dissipated into rain before their remnants disappeared into the horizon.
Edited slightly in the gloomy light of morning.
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Some rights reserved by kcryder.Losing the plotline
12 May 2013 03:30 PM Categories: Writing prompts | Dreams
The press wanted to know how it started. So we told them. We both had a thing for costume, the riding crop, the velvet helmet, the spurs that had never seen horse flesh. On weekends, he would go out in tattered khakis, a faded oxford shirt, and lipstick, his hair slicked with product, while I wore overalls and wife-beaters, put on a beehive wig, shadowed electric blue in the space between lash and brow. Sure, it sounds like we were all about the fashion, the fabric, the hair gel, and the makeup, but really we were about the narrative, the stories in our heads, the stories other people made up about us, even if our narratives were mixed, the dots difficult to connect.
In the last few years, our narrative fragmented. He stopped caring, I stopped trying to impress.Today, I wear a tunic over tights, let my hair go wispy while I go barefoot. He hangs out in a bathrobe. You’d think we would be able to amp up the fantasy, but that’s all we’re up for these days, the suburban hippy, the apathetic ex-lover, stuck with one another because we don’t know who else to be stuck with. It wearies us both, but who has the energy to shift the plotline?
Happy Mother’s Day to all who have mothered or been mothered!
From today’s prompt (edited) “It’s time,” with a little bit of last night’s dream tossed into the mix.
Image (“Woman in Sun Dress,”) by Cindy Sherman from Joseph K. Levene Fine Art, Ltd.
The morning after
10 May 2013 06:30 AM Categories: Writing prompts | Memoir
The night the roof blew off Bennett’s liquor store, I was out with my boyfriend, D, to get beer, having (as usual) snuck out of my little cottage while my grandfather watched TV and my mother was preoccupied in her house down the street. Bennett’s was in the extremely small strip mall where Ed’s business was foundering. We pulled up right after the small tornado or whatever it was touched down and did its roof damage. So did Ed and his state cop friend, a permanently tan man with permanently bloodshot blue eyes.
They had a Styrofoam cooler, emptied of booze but with some still-serviceable ice. Ed was pumped up in a way that did not suggest being liquored up. He offered us their cold dregs: Want some ICE? Want some ICE? He repeated this enough times that it became an inside joke between D and me.
The next morning was a school day, and as my mother and I drove past Bennett’s at the beginning of our long drive to Wilmington, she noticed the curl of metal and the flapping blue tarp covering the roof. I had to play dumb, to keep mum.
It was just another night I held on to in order to protect us both.
*Not real names.
From today’s prompt “Ice.” And to keep it real, in more ways than one, I’m keeping last night’s lament, Temporary. I can’t tell if it is any good, I know it’s obtuse, but it’s representative of a certain kind of mood.
For another take on that time from the early days of the blog, read Would you like bloodworms with that?
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Some rights reserved by Furryscaly.Temporary
09 May 2013 11:00 PM Categories: The struggle redefined | Quotidian existence
Over the last week, I’ve filled up pages that were meant to be shared but never will be. A creature of habit, I wanted to send up smoke signals, to have a romantic tête-à-tête in the pied-à-terre with the one who pretended she could erase me. She left the country. Or she was never here to begin with. She was a whiff of floral perfume, the bouquet off butter infused with garlic, an intermingled scent of one on one, ineffable as a skipped heartbeat.
I borrowed people, made them my muses. I created lives and facts and motives because the stuff of my day-to-day bored. I was afraid to sit with emptiness, to sit with unhappiness, and so I distracted myself with fantasy. My muses were figments, which was just how I wanted them, pliable, taking up only as much room as I allowed, opining my opinions, gently tugging at my elbow when I needed direction.
I wrote about yearning because it distracted me from yearning. I wrote about being seen because it made me believe I was visible. I wrote to make the intolerable tolerable, to create meaning in the face of nothingness.
I fought my urge to write in sentence fragments. I sat in the space between silence and stillness, where the only sound and movement came from my hyperactive fingers on the keyboard.
I told myself that it would be better in the morning.
Image of “Holiday’s illustration (1876, cut by Joseph Swain) to the chapter “The Vanishing” in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.
Some rights reserved by Bonnetmaker.There is only this one moment
05 May 2013 07:30 AM Categories: Writing prompts
I pulled out of it. They helped me. Conversation helped. Getting out of the office and away from my computer helped. As usual, I knew it would be better in the morning.
We went to Robyn Hitchcock’s 60th birthday celebration at the Fillmore on Thursday night. It was a musician-studded affair (mostly musicians I did not know) organized by Colin Meloy of the Decemberists. Robyn Hitchcock himself was there, first resplendent in pink, then wearing the traditional black with white polka dots shirt to match his black and white guitar. Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler) was the MC. The Fresh Young Fellows, no longer young, but still sounding fresh, played a song or two. Neil Gaiman showed up briefly, wearing a faux straw hat (an introduction to Uncorrected Personality Traits, sung barbershop quartet style from the balcony down to the hoi polloi below). And, of course, Peter Buck of R.E.M. fame was there, too, with his grey pageboy, flat expression, and guitar talent.
I wouldn’t know about Robyn if it weren’t for my husband, a longtime fan since the Soft Boys days in the 1970s and 80s, and if you don’t know Robyn’s music (he’s never been a household name), it’s hard for me to describe it to you. It’s often described as psychedelic, though I don’t though think I’d go that far. His lyrics are surreal. Bob Dylan, the Beatles and early Pink Floydian Syd Barrett are influences. Robyn does not have a huge draw, but he does have loyal fans and I’ve become one of them. In fact, I have a bit of a crush – he’s intelligent, funny, and talented, and as I’ve gotten older I’ve acquired a thing for aging British musicians with white hair. Robyn Hitchcock and Nick Lowe: fellow Yep Roc-ers and members of my dream band.
The night has stayed with me. It is still turning around in my mind. It was the music, the talent, the variety of sounds and people. It was also the enthusiastic couple in front of us, her short, soft, rounded and bouncy, him tall, lean, pageboyed in the style of Prince Valiant or Peter Buck, wearing a Yep Roc t-shirt (“I still buy records.” on the front). As the night wore on and their marijuana consumption ratcheted up, the man because increasingly irritated with the dancing slackers around him. He dipped, he bounced, he stomped his feet, threw his fist into the air. He’d been doing this from the first bars of the first song, but then he started swinging around to sing the lyrics menacingly at those of us behind him who were not similarly celebratory. I Wanna Destroy You (dedicated to Maggie Thatcher) was the apex of his anger and then things calmed down.
All in all, it was a beautiful evening, another reminder of the necessity of live music. Something ineffable happens when people are up on stage creating something in the moment. It was hard to believe that we almost didn’t go, that I thought both of us would be exhausted and it wouldn’t be worth the sore feet and useless minds on Friday.
I was wrong. Not only was it worth it, the day after was efficient, like my dulled brain had been cleared by the creativity of others. And if we hadn’t gone, I would not have the haunting song Glass Hotel, performed on Thursday night by husband and wife Sean Nelson (vocals) and Shenandoah Davis (keyboard), going through my mind. I leave you with an acoustic version by Robyn, filmed back when his hair was dark. It’s a beautiful, sad song, more fitting my mood of yesterday afternoon than this morning. But even the dawn can accept temporary tears.
The bulk of this is adapted from the prompt “I found the silver lining,” written the morning after the concert.
Title from a line in Glass Hotel: “Well, there’s nothing in the future and there’s nothing in the past, there is only this one moment, and you’ve got to make it last.”
Image of Robyn Hitchcock a few years back, from the Interwebz.
Stripped to nothingness
03 May 2013 10:10 AM Categories: Writing prompts
At the end of my long days on campus, my BART ride back to Berkeley is distracted, delusion-filled. Early on, above ground, I look at the box houses of outer San Francisco and imagine myself there, believe I know exactly what it’s like to sit at the table in the postage stamp dining room, to stare at the clods of dirt in the feral backyard as yet another train shakes its way through my neighborhood.
Underground, if I can get myself to put down the phone, to stop checking mail or reading fluffy news stories, I pay attention to those around me by looking at their reflections. They’re getting to be obsessive, my sideways glances, my surreptitious camera work. Wednesday night, a woman in a black and white polka-dotted dress stood waiting to disembark. She had delicate arms and a lovely solid frame. I liked the contrast, the patterns, the way I could see her ghost self, clean and light in the window. As I discreetly aimed my iPhone, I accidentally turned on the video function. Now I have about four seconds of her polka-dotted phantom, its solidity interrupted by flashes of light from the tunnel.
Turns out this is the best way to capture the energy of the double. I want to watch it again and again, to put it on a loop, just to feel like I am back there, weightless, the observer seeing the best of people, a witness to their stripped down selves who do no wrong.
When everything is beautiful, when the people on the train give me stories, I am at peace. When I pay attention and do not let my weariness pull me into the pit of my phone (the opposite of weightlessness, an eternal fall into a deep well, the mind acquiring a paradoxical heft, the body disappearing), I inhabit the seat, the place, the moment, the loveliness of unknowing, of taking in, where a woman’s scuffed appliqued sneakers and hair like wheat before the harvest show me her long-gone youth, the commune, the carob and granola, the never-ending nights of cooking and clean-up, the exploitation by hippie boys she eventually threw over to make her own way. I let the shadows reveal the plot, allow the allure of purity of form to seduce me. I watch as the polka-dotted reflection exits one story and enters another, all mine to tell.
Adapted from the somehow-related prompt “A bad habit.”
Image by me.
Reasons to (not) be cheerful
01 May 2013 11:45 AM Categories: Gratitude
I resist the lure of the lie of cheerful perfection, the idea that a happy attitude makes everything good. Approaching situations with cautious optimism is one thing. Totally erasing the negatives is another. According to The Longevity Project, based on an eight-decade study of 1,500 Californians, those with overly sunny dispositions tend not to be careful as serious folks and so, on average, live shorter lives (Carroll, 2011).* When you are busy looking at the bright side, it takes very little to wander into the darkness unaware.
Still, I am feeling unusually cheerful this morning. Maybe it’s the medication uptick, my unnatural brain bath of dopamine and norepinephrine (and here I give a shout-out to the psychiatrist, who in a matter of less than 20 minutes two weeks ago not only evaluated my mental state, but also told me I will have clients that I will hate and that she would never take on my commute to school because it’s so long). It’s cheerful with an edge, caffeinated, an in-your-face sort of energy. I’ve got a bit of moxie and am feeling like a smartass for no good reason.
This is the third and final day of my husband’s first business trip (one reason to be cheerful). The boy and I have done ok, though today is the challenge because I have to cobble together childcare from the time he gets out of school until I stagger home at 8:30 tonight. But we’ve got it together (another reason). I’m relying on the skills and services of other people this week (dog walker, cleaners, babysitters, food preparers [takeout/delivery]; their presence in my life is a third reason). I’m pushing through on my papers and feel pretty good about what I have so far (a fourth). The Round Robin is up and running (the fifth) and perhaps at some point I’ll have prompts that are appropriate to share in a public setting.
I’ve got the springtime attitude, but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost my mind. There are anxieties to mull, tasks to complete, unknown things to worry about. I can smile and still realistically occupy my life in the here and now, live in the middling gray, free of the burden of the unadulterated happiness that often obscures reality.
*Keep in mind that this study (Terman’s Termites) was made up mainly of urban middle-class white people, slightly over half of them male, with high IQs, all of whom were born in the 1910s. Not exactly a representative group.
Reference: Carroll, L. (2011, April 19). Cheery people die sooner, and other longevity secrets. Retrieved from http://www.today.com/id/42577652/ns/today-today_health/t/cheery-people-die-sooner-more-longevity-secrets/
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Some rights reserved by Creature Comforts.The cool, dark space of memory
29 April 2013 06:20 PM Categories: The struggle redefined
My grandparents had a cedar closet just off their family room. I sought refuge there as a kid, sat under the winter coats, breathed in the almost medicinal smell of the wood, which never darkened and always looked fresh off the mill. Last I heard, the house’s current owners added a second floor to the place. Who knows what they did inside, whether the cedar closet, framed in by my grandfather (like almost all of the house) still exists.
I wanted to take us back to that cool, dark space, return to 1976, 77, 78, the years when my grandmother was still alive, the long lazy summers, the winter and spring I lived there apart from my mother. I wanted to write that paragraph as if I was there, sitting beneath jackets and woolens, eight years old and seeking shelter from the humidity and the sun. I just couldn’t pull it off. I didn’t want to go there. It was difficult to idealize the time, to get into the feeling of pure childhood, where the moment (ideally) should be eternal, no thought of the future or past. Every association I have with being a kid is of preparing for impending loss, girding against the pain of missing. Anyway, I don’t go there much anymore, The Past.
Last night, after the lemongrass tofu bahn mi dinner (delicious, but a pain in the ass to make), I had an urge to listen to Prince’s Purple Rain. Maybe it was because I’d just seen a Facebook picture of my childhood best friend on the cusp of her 44th birthday. Maybe it was the inviting in, the continuing reintegration, of the teenage me. It’s a song I associate with the friend, with the time when life flipped from one thing to something different and lonely. I also associate it with the person who was the other responsible party in my pregnancy at 15 ½.
I didn’t seek out that song, with the vivid memories it conjures, as a way of jumpstarting tears or of connecting myself unhealthily to what can’t be changed. I listened in mourning. I listened in solidarity with the abandoned and the beaten down. I cried. And then I put my memories into a box. They went without protest, knowing their own truth and importance, their place in my story.
Tomorrow, I will order flowers for my mother’s birthday. I’ll choose Vivid Memory in a Cedar Box, a symbol for love with all its depth and complication, for the stories we keep together and the ones we’ve necessarily experienced on our own. Even better, I know she’ll each be amused at the concept, the conceit, of celebration by containment, our lively memories like fresh-cut flowers, perishable in their delicate beauty, usefully boxed for storage.
The Round Robin starts in interest tomorrow. Writing prompts on their way!
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Some rights reserved by Burnt Pixel.Recipes for ruminators
27 April 2013 06:06 AM Categories: Food
Rather than write about love, sex, and death, about splitting off parts of ourselves and using other people as stand-ins for those parts (it’s complicated and personal and impossible to write about here, but on my mind), I thought I’d share a few simple recipes that one can consume alone while thinking about the big themes.
There is no cohesive narrative tying these recipes together. I happened to have grapefruit and avocado on hand. I happened to remember the days at Andy’s, when I consumed many a Dark ’N Stormy, and I happen to enjoy the toasted cheese with dijon, dills, and jalapenos a few times a month.
Idiosyncratic? Yes. No more of the same old same old.
Dark ‘ N Stormy
Imbibe “Bermuda’s National Drink” while thinking of the old times and wondering where your youth went. Sure, five years at least of it went to stuff like this, the big cup, cool in your hands, easy to drink, thirst-quenching and relaxing. And the people back then were friendly, though so much of that time is blurry, the bars with their incessant dance beats or tinny instrumentals and whiny singers, the press of bodies, the gin and tonics sloshing on your hand, soaking your sleeve, splashing the girl in front of you who turned around, eyes narrowed. Pardon me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Coming through. Behind you. Oh, I’m sorry. Excuse me. Oops. Excuse me. WIth that final apologia, you were outside in the Georgetown air, wondering how and when your friends would find you.
2 oz Gosling's® Black Seal rum
8 oz ginger beer
lime wedge
Put on the Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, album(s) in whatever format works for you (points for actual vinyl or cassette tape). Pour rum over ice, add ginger ale, and stir. Garnish with lime wedge. Drink quickly and make another.
Grapefruit Avocado Salad
Savor this colorful mixture of unctuous avocado and tangy grapefruit while standing in the kitchen wondering whether we really know anyone anyway. Start with yourself. The beauty of the question is there is no answer. It’s as simple as that.
One large pink grapefruit, supremed
1 medium Hass avocado, pitted, peeled, and cut into large chunks
1 tablespoon chopped cilantro
1 teaspoon minced red onion (yes, you’ll have most of a leftover onion lying around after this)
Olive oil
lemon juice
Salt and pepper
Toss grapefruit sections, avocado chunks, cilantro, and red onion in a medium bowl. Add a slug or two of olive oil and a splash or more of lemon juice and toss again. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Return to pondering the unknowable.
Toasted cheese sandwich with dijon, dills, and jalapenos
Eat straight from the toaster oven tray as you stare into the middle distance, thinking of the days of real grilled cheese with tomato made on fluffy white bread griddled to a crisp, the cheese molten, the thinly sliced tomato still cool as morning, the simple mix from the time when you should have been more guarded. Remember the man who had “the finest toaster oven money could buy,” and relish your escape from an unexamined life.
2 slices of bread, each piece buttered on one side
dijon mustard
1 kosher dill pickle (I recommend Bubbies), thinly sliced longways
1 to 2 slices cheddar cheese, depending on how cheesy you want it.
4-5 pickled jalapeno slices (unless you are feeling bold and want to use fresh, in which case, you’re on your own)
Spread the mustard on the unbuttered side of each slice of bread. Place one piece of bread butter side down on a toaster oven tray. Cover bread with sliced pickle (you will have extra slices left over). Add cheese slice. Cover cheese slice with jalapenos (or to taste). If using a second piece of cheese, add it now. Top sandwich with second piece of bread, butter side up. Toast on medium or until bread pleases you with its crispness. Flip and toast on medium again.
After that, you know what to do.
Top image some rights reserved by djwtwo.
Middle image by me (feel free to borrow with attribution, please).
Bottom image
some rights reserved by rachelkramerbussel.com.
There is no cohesive narrative tying these recipes together. I happened to have grapefruit and avocado on hand. I happened to remember the days at Andy’s, when I consumed many a Dark ’N Stormy, and I happen to enjoy the toasted cheese with dijon, dills, and jalapenos a few times a month.
Idiosyncratic? Yes. No more of the same old same old.
Imbibe “Bermuda’s National Drink” while thinking of the old times and wondering where your youth went. Sure, five years at least of it went to stuff like this, the big cup, cool in your hands, easy to drink, thirst-quenching and relaxing. And the people back then were friendly, though so much of that time is blurry, the bars with their incessant dance beats or tinny instrumentals and whiny singers, the press of bodies, the gin and tonics sloshing on your hand, soaking your sleeve, splashing the girl in front of you who turned around, eyes narrowed. Pardon me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Coming through. Behind you. Oh, I’m sorry. Excuse me. Oops. Excuse me. WIth that final apologia, you were outside in the Georgetown air, wondering how and when your friends would find you.
2 oz Gosling's® Black Seal rum
8 oz ginger beer
lime wedge
Put on the Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, album(s) in whatever format works for you (points for actual vinyl or cassette tape). Pour rum over ice, add ginger ale, and stir. Garnish with lime wedge. Drink quickly and make another.
Savor this colorful mixture of unctuous avocado and tangy grapefruit while standing in the kitchen wondering whether we really know anyone anyway. Start with yourself. The beauty of the question is there is no answer. It’s as simple as that.
One large pink grapefruit, supremed
1 medium Hass avocado, pitted, peeled, and cut into large chunks
1 tablespoon chopped cilantro
1 teaspoon minced red onion (yes, you’ll have most of a leftover onion lying around after this)
Olive oil
lemon juice
Salt and pepper
Toss grapefruit sections, avocado chunks, cilantro, and red onion in a medium bowl. Add a slug or two of olive oil and a splash or more of lemon juice and toss again. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Return to pondering the unknowable.
Eat straight from the toaster oven tray as you stare into the middle distance, thinking of the days of real grilled cheese with tomato made on fluffy white bread griddled to a crisp, the cheese molten, the thinly sliced tomato still cool as morning, the simple mix from the time when you should have been more guarded. Remember the man who had “the finest toaster oven money could buy,” and relish your escape from an unexamined life.
2 slices of bread, each piece buttered on one side
dijon mustard
1 kosher dill pickle (I recommend Bubbies), thinly sliced longways
1 to 2 slices cheddar cheese, depending on how cheesy you want it.
4-5 pickled jalapeno slices (unless you are feeling bold and want to use fresh, in which case, you’re on your own)
Spread the mustard on the unbuttered side of each slice of bread. Place one piece of bread butter side down on a toaster oven tray. Cover bread with sliced pickle (you will have extra slices left over). Add cheese slice. Cover cheese slice with jalapenos (or to taste). If using a second piece of cheese, add it now. Top sandwich with second piece of bread, butter side up. Toast on medium or until bread pleases you with its crispness. Flip and toast on medium again.
After that, you know what to do.
Top image
some rights reserved by djwtwo.Middle image by me (feel free to borrow with attribution, please).
Bottom image
some rights reserved by rachelkramerbussel.com.