I'm taking a break from blogging until the end of the month.

While I'm away, you might want to check out the back catalog with some of my best work. You wouldn't want to miss stories like All that jazz, Louise Peevish, or Heathen can wait, would you?

Until March (though you might be seeing me around here and there),

Jennifer

Tags: blogging break, Best of writing to survive

It hit last Friday afternoon, hit my son and me practically simultaneously, though he was first. The stomach flu. I had forgotten how thoroughly that could knock you out, though C seems to have an endless reserve of energy. I don't think I've ever seen a kid throw up and then go right on playing. And did I mention the two of us still have colds?

So I barely dropped an Entrecard, didn't even go downstairs for two days, just sat in bed, didn't eat, and spend a lot of cuddling time with my son while my wonderful (and healthy!) husband took care of us and everything else.

But that's not why I'm posting. My writing class has started up again. Back to the daily prompts, thank goodness, which provides a break from harrowing memoir, gives me something else to post. Today's selection is White. The prompt is first draft, untouched, warts and all. It seemed like an especially appropriate choice for this blog, which operates in shades of grey and distrusts attempts to whitewash the past. And for another blogger's approach on colors as prompts, check out the most recent stuff at Yoga For Cynics. He's always worth a visit, no matter the topic.

White

Can you think of anything more bland? White bread, white rice, white collar. Something devoid of detail; the absence of pigment, of nutrients, of personality. Or perhaps you think of purity when you see the colorless expanse, a bride in her virginal wedding dress, the priest’s collar, the petals of daisy. What’s that all about? Then there’s a blank page or screen, waiting to be filled, the background to the rest of our lives, the tabula rasa. Let’s smudge it or spill the ink, write dirty words or talk about sex, reveal all our secrets. Let’s sully the white.

Dirty snow. Image from TreeHugger.

White is too much pressure. Don’t you cringe when you see the white pair of pants? The white shoes that must come out after Memorial Day and go back into the closet at the conclusion of the summer? Suddenly I’m picturing a pair of white shoes I had in high school. They were Mias, 80s fashionable, flats with pointy toes that beat my feet into submission. How long were they white? By the time I tossed them aside they were scuffed, grey. They smelled like sweat. Inside, dirty imprints of my heel and toes.

“Do we really need these details?” you ask. “Do we really want the dirt, the skinny, on your white shoes? OK, we can move to other formerly white things, can see how writing about something muddies the page, dirties a secret life. Underwear stained with menstrual blood; t-shirts with their half-moons of brown under the armpits; ring around the collar.

I’m actually thinking about lies, though, secrets, the kinds of lives we say we have and the hidden world underneath. Everyone’s hiding something, is afraid to reveal certain details, has some shame. I say show it to the world, let go of your lily white fantasies.

They are totally unrealistic.

Tags: sick kid, writing, writing prompt, secrets, colors, white, whitewashing, shades of grey

This installment is less about Maureen, more about the time and place (and Dirk). I'm not sure what the next installment will bring, or when I will post it. These are hard to write and take time to do properly, with the pull between the macro approach, overviews of the time, and the micro approach, focusing on those pivotal moments. For example, next time I might want to overlap with this post and write about the night a neighbor saw Dirk and Rudy leaving the Little House. What are you interested in reading more about?

And -- this is written a year after I posted this -- rereading this makes me feel uncomfortable, like I've presented a story that isn't fully processed or finished. But it is mine and there is a truth to it.

Click here for Part 1.

As I pulled the wheel of the John Deere tractor to the right, the mower, wide and low to the ground, hit rock and screeched as it scraped the edge of the flower bed. Palms damp, grip tightened, I put the tractor briefly into reverse, then hit the gas and forged forward. Shit! The magnolia! I quickly swung around the tree, barely missing the azalea by the front door. Suddenly there was a clear path ahead of me, a gleaming expanse of green. The mower shot across the lawn, cutting another inadvertently serpentine swath.

"Jenny! Got a minute?"

My grandfather was gesturing at me from the kitchen window, summoning me in the usual way: by screaming out a nickname I hated and asking me a question for which yes was only answer.

I cut the engine and surveyed the mower's wobbly wake. Three uneven rows occasionally interrupted by jagged patches of ragged grass; a mangled forsythia; two scraped river rocks; several crushed marigolds. Not the cleanest job. The air smelled green and bitter with freshly cut grass. In the maple outside of the kitchen, a blue jay and her mate traded a series of rusty squeaks, rustling the leaves as they hopped from branch to branch. Some other unfortunate up the street was wasting a perfectly brilliant Saturday on yard work. Their mower sounded wonky, chugging in fits and starts.

Here’s where the moment slows down, where we cue in Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a boy on a bike whizzing down our street in the direction of the river. College aged, tanned and blonde, wearing a black t-shirt and ragged cut-offs, he glances at me. His long muscular legs propel the bike forward and I can just make out the checkerboard Vans on his feet. The moment passes, the bike and passenger become a blur and disappear.


Documented: Dirk's Vans, Little House, 1986ish.

In a place where I know almost everyone, a place I’ve been a part of since before I was born, this person is totally unfamiliar. Cut the music.

Who was that guy?

"Jenny!!"

I hop off the tractor and go into the house.

It is June 1984, the beginning of a summer of new love for my mother and Kevin, the beginning of my time in the Little House. Back in Wilmington, I have a part-time job at a daycare center, but most weekends I end up at my grandfather's place at Hollywood Beach. It will be a year before my mother buys a cottage down the street, less than that before I become pregnant (in the Little House. Sorry, parents. That wasn't my story then, but it's the truth). Come spring my friendship with Maureen will end here, too. "Everything happens in the Little House," Maureen and I used to say, and that was before I gave birth there.

So this warm mid-June weekend kicks it off. Maureen's mother drops her off to spend the night and we immediately douse ourselves with baby oil and lie out in the sun, with no worries about wrinkles or skin cancer. Dinner is simple, pepperoni and mozzarella on Italian rolls. When night comes we get restless and decide to take a walk, to kill some time before Saturday Night Live.


Recent picture of Hollywood Beach. Looks like the old benches are gone.

Maureen and I walk about a half mile to the Elk River, down the shoulder of a barely two lane street, past little shacks and cottages built in the 40s and 50s, some expanded in later decades. The beach has trucked-in sand (the actual river bottom is mucky), with a small swimming area marked off by buoys and lines. Several benches face the water. The old folks hang out here at sunset, smoking their cigarettes and admiring the view. Behind the benches are sycamores and a grassy fenced-in area with swing sets, a merry-go-round, and shuffleboard courts, all dating back to the early 60s. The small parking lot has a single street light and a soda machine.

The soda machine stands against a small white clapboard building, the clubhouse, used for community events, the Men's Pancake Breakfast, the Association Potluck. Before the accident in 1966, my grandfather called Bingo here on Saturday nights. Back then he was handsome and charming, unfaithful and dissolute. I played the same game in the 70s, would come down to the clubhouse on a Saturday night with my grandmother. Skeeter Haines, a tall man with a shiny bald head, would call and I'd concentrate on my board. Sitting next to Mom-mom, I would kick my legs underneath the table, rest a hand on her solid muumuu-ed leg. I haven't been in the building since her death in 1979.

Tonight there are a couple of cars parked by the street light. A small crowd of guys are hanging out, leaning against the fence and talking. Someone is playing Led Zeppelin, Heartbreaker, and the not-yet-familiar smell of burning marijuana wafts our way. We walk up and greet the crowd. Rudy, the nineteen year old brother of a school friend introduces us to the boy on the bike, Dirk Nieubaur.


Interior of a '67 Chrysler Newport Custom.

Before we go on, I need a delusional interlude, a nostalgic montage of the future past that comes with its own soundtrack. It’s a hot summer night two years later and I am sliding across the wide seat of Dirk’s 1967 Chrysler Newport Custom, admiring my legs in the dashboard light. The sinuous strains of Ted Nugent’s Stranglehold are coming from the eight-track and I know that a Budweiser is waiting for me outside. Or we’re tearing down Town Point Road in that same former family car aka “The Beast.” Dirk has just restored it to its Motor City glory and wants to see how fast it can go on the straight pass between cornfields, before the road twists and turns through the woods. He steps off the gas at 100 mph, slows it down right before that first curve, ZZ Top’s Manic Mechanic blasting from the new tape deck. That’s us, kissing in the Little House to the White Album. He's thrown over his other girlfriend for good and the moment is sweet and warm, comforting.

OK. The former teenager in love hidden away within me is satisfied now.

Here’s the darker version, the pre-bliss. Two nights later, alone, I go down to the beach to join the crowd. Dirk walks me home, holding my hand, pushes his bike alongside us. Did we kiss down at the beach, did he offer his mouth to mine? Did I breathe in the memory of pot smoke and too many Budweisers on his breath? These are the moments that are supposed to be marked in our minds forever, first love and all that. But there were so many similar nights, nights when he traveled in a haze of drugs and alcohol, when his breath was smoky and beer sweet, that this one no longer stands out.

"Everything happens in the Little House." I let him in, into the house, into me. It was my first time. I thought that casual sex was the way of twenty-year olds. They just did it (though perhaps not with fourteen-year olds, even particularly mature ones). I went along with without joy or desire, let the boundary be crossed without note. Before this moment, I had joked with my friends about the possibility of nuclear war, the potential Armageddon to come. Could you imagine dying, I'd ask, could you imagine some The Day After scenario in which some of us have been obliterated or are radiation-sick and dying, having never had sex? It turned out that sex was much more complicated than I knew, even in its apparent simplicity, the basic equation of one plus one. I wasn't ready.

After that night, Dirk and I became a strange sort of late-night item (in part because he is also dating Rudy's sister, Anne). He shows up at 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m.. I fall asleep watching late night broadcast television, awaken to his knock on the door. Maureen begins seeing Rudy. We start to drink the beers that are offered. I bring jars of gin, siphoned from Mom and Kevin's endless supply, with me to my grandfather's house, hide them in my massive pocketbook. Sometimes a jar springs a leak and I wonder if anyone else on the bus to Newark can smell it too. But nobody says a thing and my grandfather doesn't seem to notice when he picks me up at the bus stop.

When a neighbor friend reports to my mother that he saw two men leaving that Little House at 1:30 in the morning, saw Maureen in Rudy's arms and me giving Dirk a final kiss, I get a lecture, maybe even a cooling off period of one weekend away from the beach. But nothing changes. More importantly, my mother doesn't say a thing to Maureen's parents, though in retrospect I am not sure why. There is nothing to stop us from picking things up where we left off after my brief time away.

At the end of the summer, Dirk goes back to college. Mom and Kevin continue their relationship, with the threat of catastrophic storms to come. And I start tenth grade. Everything is different, from the music (cue in the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, the Dead Milkmen) to the make-up (from none to fluorescent stripes on my eyelids) to the cloves I've started to smoke. And it isn't going to get better any time soon.

To be continued.

Tags: alcohol, The Little House, friendship, Music

Revellian Dot Com: Reader Beware. Some of the time.

I can’t do it.

I can’t possibly sum up Revellian.Com. Even its tag line, Psycho-Linguistical Dialectology: From the Edge, while pithy and funny and in a sense descriptive, doesn’t do blogger Bobby Revell’s work justice.

I could say that one of the hallmarks of Bobby’s blog is his transgressional fiction, dark tales with vivid descriptions and on-the-brink characters oozing bodily fluids and squinting through a lucid haze. These stories may not be for everyone. As I write, the latest post on Revellian.Com is "The Demon Witch: Sexual Psychotropic," with lines like "Undulating intentions as she oozed, sticky slime slug melting atop as we engrafted–merging fluidic flesh. She hungered for my warmth and I for iced mucous–malignant sludge folding into one. Suckling human lozenge." Perhaps this is not your cup of tea (and you have been warned). But even a squeamish type–like me, for example–can see the humor and surreal eloquence in Bobby’s fiction.

To call Revellian.Com a horror fiction blog would be misleading. Balancing out the fiction are articles on blogging, with content that delivers. Bobby picks apart the world of money-making blogs and cuts right to the chase on Entrecard, arguing that while it helps raise stats, the quality of the Entrecard traffic is generally low, with most participants staying just long enough to drop. He also takes on the "holy trinity" of Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon.

Just when you think you've gotten this blog figured out, that it's a little transgressional fiction mixed in with informative blogging tips, Bobby gets personal, writing about his struggles with depression. He discusses philosophy. And to lighten things up, there’s twisted humor as well!

Revell has been writing most of his life. He is also (among many other things) a guitarist and a student of several martial arts and the practice of Zen, interested in "the mysteries of human thought and everything in between." He believes "in truth, not mythology." And his platform, Revellian.Com is definitely worth a closer look, no matter your predilections.

Tags: blog of the month