Knobby and the xylitol squirrels
You've got the wrong Jennifer Trinkle. Or you've got the wrong Fred. You've got the wrong both of us.
George "Knobby" Michael?
You can try to get to this
blog directly by searching on just my first
and last names, but Google won't send you
here. Despite the fact that writing to
survive is mine and I have the metadata to
prove it, most people who are looking for
Jennifer Trinkle arrive by way of my guest
post at La Belette
Rouge or via
PublicLiterature.Org.
At least Bing puts writing to survive on the
first page of results when you search for my
name. But the blog itself doesn't have enough
Internet power or back links or whatever it
takes to convince most search engines that
it's mine.
Some people who end up here via Google or
Yahoo are looking for information on
myelofibrosis. Although I did write a post
about Kevin's
death from the disease, I want
you to know that his ending was dramatic.
Atypical. He lived almost ten years after
his diagnosis, which is also very unusual
for someone who was diagnosed relatively
young. Kevin was waiting for a stem cell
transplant when things fell apart, which
may have saved him, but might have
hastened his death, too, if it hadn't been
too late anyway. Every time someone lands
here looking for information on the
disease I feel guilty, since the ending of
his story was so idiosyncratic and
terrible. It's not like this for everyone.
It isn't, really. There's hope.
But at least these searches make some sense,
are tied to a particular name or a disease
that I discuss in a bit of detail. And the
searches for writing
prompts or writing to
survive have led people to the
right place, though I think that the person
searching for writing prompt using a
toaster really needs to visit one
of koe's
blogs. Based on the keywords,
however, a lot of you who end up here
through an Internet search leave
disappointed. Writing to survive is a
friendly place. I want to answer your
questions, want to give you what you seek,
so once
again, I will attempt to
provide clarity, to transmit information.
Yes, this is not a squirrel blog.
Perhaps you were looking
for birching
stories, or variations on the
theme (victorian birching
stories, birch corporal punishment, bad boys
birching stories). Or you were looking for
information -- or something else --
about drunken teenage
hookups. One person arrived by
searching on the domain name
submissivelouise.com.
There are no birching stories here, though I
did once mention a neighbor's
birch tree, and while I took part
in more than one drunken teenage hookup
back when I was a drunken teenager, I
don't tend to write about such things, at
least not in the way you might hope. As
for submissive Louise, I wrote a brief
post about a dog with
that name who was not the dominant
type.
Some searches are from people looking for
answers to matter-of-fact questions:
Why is
George Michael's nickname Knobby?
(Beats
me.) Can stork bites
spread? (Not the birthmark
variety.) How do puffins survive
in the cold? (Sweaters and
booties.) Can one survive on
writing? (Not alone.)
Other queries get me wondering: How
did Duran Duran's John
Taylor cut his foot in
1984? Was he badly hurt? Was
the search on an interesting story
about me is i was 8 i was trapped inside of a
burning building. it was about 2:00 a.m. when
my father smelled smoke in the
kitchen a misplaced copy and paste
or was this person hoping that someone else
in the Interlands had written about his or
her private life story? Who
"gestures
and halts and falls"?
Footsie, neighbor?
I can tell you the good and bad about
xylitol. Bad: it can kill your
dog, though our dog
survived her small exposure. Good: it is
low in calories and oh so sweet. Will it
make your gerbil listless and
cold? Perhaps. But I don't
know a thing about xylitol
squirrels and this is definitely
not a squirrel
blog (Or a blog about
autodidacticism).
Google leads you here, seekers of
information. You are hungry for stories, for
hard facts, for the light of knowledge. But
once you get here, do you stay? Do you note
the address and come back and visit from time
to time? Not necessarily. I need better
keywords, need to provide the right
breadcrumb trail. I need better search engine
optimization.
I need clarity.
Confidential to
I'm in
love with a childhood
friend: Most of us have all
been through it. Examine your feelings
and figure out what's really going on.
If it is really love, fess up and get it
over with. Good things may happen. Maybe
you can become footsie
neighbors, or at the very
least, you can move on with your life.
Squirrel image from here.
Foot image from here.
Thanks for the memories
To scrape your memory
clean, you need only a handful of pills
washed down with gin. You need a good wallop
to the head, a fall on Mexican tile or sharp
granite. You need to take the prescribed dose
of anti-malarial medication before the trip
to the tropics. The combination of drug and
sun and strange circumstance will have the
desired effect, the wake-up in a stranger’s
room, the philosophical conversation in a bar
strangely devoid of smoke, you speaking in
tongues, memory gone.
But without my memory I am nothing. There is
no story, no me. You could tell me about my
life and I would smile and nod, sometimes
gasp. Maybe I wouldn’t believe parts of it,
just like I don’t believe the stories you
tell about yourself, about first grade and
that teacher with the wheedling fingers. He
cornered you in the empty classroom and you
knew something was wrong and then you let it
happen again and again. OK. I can believe it.
Maybe it happened; you wouldn't be the first.
But the one about your mother, her fingertips
coated in lotion, rubbing your bare chest as
she tried to erase your budding breasts? The
chair was cold, her hands were warm. You were
obedient, pulled between pleasure and
confusion.
Are you sure that you're not confused now?
I don’t need my memory to tell me that I am a
skeptic. It's built-in, a defense mechanism,
maybe, or just hardwired into me. So you
could tell me about my life, the room done up
in pale pink, my chenille bedspread soft
against my cheek. You say he came in through
the window after I went to sleep and the
image is so surreal it could
be fantasy, the
fluttering curtains, the dark shadow of
stubble on his familiar cheeks. And then,
seven months later, in the same room, the
push and shove of labor and my mother
screaming. The silent bloody bundle that
neither of us knew what to do with.
Or you could lean across the table and tell
me my secret, say that I let him in, did
nothing to prevent it. The curtains didn't
billow: the windows were closed. I unlocked
the door and held out my hand for his. You
could cup your hands and whisper, "Some girls
get the ending they deserve."
No.
You could tell me and I would be polite about
it, would raise my eyebrows in mock surprise,
but inside I would fold your stories on top
of themselves, like the handkerchiefs I wash
and fold for my husband. I would make them
smaller and smaller. I would compress them
and leave them on the table for someone else
to put away.
Prompt: In the blink of an
eye (heavily edited from the original and
then avoided for a few weeks).
Image: Chair outside the Little
House, Fall 1986.
Never tasted so sweet
Tanning butter. Warm sun, a plunge into
comfortable water, like being in the womb, no
difference between you and what surrounds
you. Afternoon nap in a hammock with your
hair giving off a touch of chlorine. Dinner
by candlelight, light ocean breezes
flickering the flame. The fish on your plate
stares back at you with a dulled eye. Fish
never tasted so sweet.
Creamy potatoes with a layer of crunch.
Haricots verts steamed and tossed with sesame
oil and ginger. You tap the skin on the crème
brulee into shards, take a deep drink of
Sauternes.
In the dark he comes to you, smooth muscles,
breath underwritten by cigarettes and mints.
It isn’t a surprise. It isn’t expected. It
just is. You accept the gift, a kind of
reawakening, the necklace of kisses, his
rough voice, the burn of an unshaven cheek.
You interlace fingers and he speaks of your
beauty, your irresistibility, how you taste
like papaya. He has been watching you all
week.
Morning brings an empty bed, a
freshly-plumped pillow, a trio of hairs
tangled on the sheet. In the shower you sigh.
Remember. Anticipation only lives once.
(Soundtrack:
La vie en
rose, sung by Yves Montand.)
Image by besia.
From a prompt: Just
imagine.
Because I am hungry for art
But worse than feeling the real world slip away is the feeling that I get when I don't write. It's a kind of lovesickness, an ache of not-having. The only way to feel better is to sit down and start typing. Even if it's painful to write, even when I procrastinate, when I avoid turning on Freedom for the Mac and bop around the Internet looking up information on John Quine or Anya Phillips (I've been re-reading Please Kill Me and the 70s punk scene is haunting my brain), eventually I get around to writing. Because I have to. It fills me. Without it, I am empty.
I want to write all night, sipping on red wine and smoking the occasional cigarette. I want to go to sleep at 3:00 a.m., sated with language, and wake up for a light lunch of mineral water and salad, of warmed baguette slices smeared with roasted garlic and chevre. After lunch, I want to linger over a book, sip a cup of muddy espresso in preparation to wrestle with words on and off into the night. I am up at 3:00 a.m. these days, listening to a frustrated cat howl, staring at the billowing curtains as my mind forces me to consider various bleak scenarios, feeling the heat of a feverish, fitful boy as he pushes me off the cliff's edge of the bed. A week of just the two of us -- me and the words -- would cure my angst. One week of writing in a dark room, embraced by a circle of lamplight, feeling the sediment on my tongue as I drain a final glass of wine, letting my mind dance with the headrush of unfamiliar nicotine. Just a week. I would take the time to focus on this useless fantasy in order to discard it before returning to the here and now.
The Round Robin, with its daily prompts and sweet feedback, helps, but sometimes I still feel like I'm bouncing around in my own mind, where (as usual) it's all about me. Other times, though, I create something that I can't explain, but I like.
So here you go, a piece that is a mix of homesickness and the past and an attempt to transcend. And let's hope for a few weeks of health and clear weather, of writing and creating. Of sanity.
Stained
I want
a cylindrical room made of factory glass, the
door a piece of carved mahogany salvaged from
the She-Wolf, Lord's old boat, the one that
is sitting on a trailer in the backyard, the
hitch supported by a stack of cinderblocks.
Against the cool glass, set into block, the
mahogany will seem rustic, warm to the touch.
I will rub my hand against it before I enter
the room, think of the times we went
waterskiing or just bobbed around in the
muddy waters of the Elk, my wet ass spreading
a dark stain on the boat seat.
Even then that boat was a piece of shit. Lord
wasn’t paying attention to it. He let it sit
in the water all winter long. The varnish
wore off, the gleam melted away. Every year
he bought cans of teak oil, stacked them in
the shed, and let them sit. Barnacles coated
the She-Wolf's hull. They were rough against
my hand, cut into my feet as I pushed against
the boat into the heavy water.
So, the room. It is lit from within, white
light/white heat. Even the ceiling is made of
factory glass. The floor, too. It is empty. I
will go inside, lock the door, and remove my
clothes. I will press myself up against the
glass. See if you can tell me what you are
looking at, my blurry image refracted in each
square. I will light a cigarette, will snuff
it out on the rounded wall, again and again.
You will see flesh, the death of ember, the
end of the spark.
Lord is dead now, too, washed away, though
not in the way you would expect. It had
nothing to do with water. It was emotion. The
dike broke, his water wings deflated, a big
hole opened in his roof and the house filled
with rain. You want me to tell you about it,
to be more direct, but I won’t. I have his
boat and my plan. Every weekend I sand down
the mahogany, try to remove the stains, think
about my cylindrical factory glass room. I
picture Lord on the other side, horn-rims
slipping off his nose, one hand marking his
place in the book. I mystify him and he likes
that.
Image by
Vinje.
While your heart still beats
The pavement was slick and
there were potholes and too many trees by the
side of the winding road. The first to go
were two juniors who were cutting school,
doing what teenage boys do, driving too fast,
maybe drinking or passing a bowl while the
tires screeched and the car fishtailed. They
ended up upside down in the creek that snaked
by the road. They died. There were others in
high school who died in car accidents, too,
though at this point I mainly remember the
names of the survivors (thanks,
Facebook,
with your updated images of people from the
past).
Since my grandmother
died, I’ve developed a
strong sense of mortality, of my own, of
other peoples’, of the various cats and
dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes
it hits me more than others, generally
when I’m feeling low and isolated, when
the sun hasn’t been out in weeks. It
doesn't help that I've been spending an
hour or two a day writing out the details
of illness and death for my novel
manuscript. And I’ll have
dreams about
these people, the dead from high
school, usually as represented by David
Anderson, the last one to die, the one who
made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the
time the book was printed.
There are other “deads” as my son calls them,
like Carolin, a friend from college who had
some sort of birth defect that we never
discussed. She’s been gone for seventeen
years, sometimes still visits me in my dream
version of our college dorm. My grandfather
shows up less and less now as I deal with the
past, though I am sometimes reminded of how
much there is to deal with (another nod to
Facebook, where people who knew me
peripherally during one of the darkest times
in my life show up, and I remember just how
bad it was and I want to die with the
memory).
As I was wrestling again with that long-ago
past, something that I keep thinking should
be a “dead” itself at this point, as I was
having a good cry after washing the dishes
Thursday night, Nora, our Russian squirrel
hound, came clicking into the kitchen. She
likes to comfort the sad and inexplicably
lonely, especially if it involves a pat or
two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest
and was struck again with memory. There I
was, ten years old, in what used to be my
grandmother’s room, petting Greta the
miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur was warm and
soft. She groaned as I scratched behind her
ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't
stop." At the time, I was struck with the
exquisite transience of it all, the way a
heart stops and the lungs give out, the
vulnerability of our soft bodies and delicate
skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams into a
tree and then into you. You ignore the deep
cough until it is too late. No matter the
trajectory of the story, we all know how it
ends.
Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when
I was in seventh grade, about six months
after we left my grandfather's house for
Wilmington. He let her out when he was
getting the mail. As he limped to the
mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard.
She was halfway across the street when a car
came tearing past and knocked her into a
ditch. Either the driver didn't see her or
didn't care to stop and my grandfather caught
only a glimpse of the car's tail lights. It
was the violent conclusion of Greta's brief
story.
I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora,
and added up the dead. I felt their hands in
mine, the touch of a gentle paw, the sound of
a meow. Greta and I sat together in the dusty
sunlight, her eyes brown and serious, her
heartbeat strong. Sidney played a game of
capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under
the door. Louise
curled up on
the dining room table, a dog pretending to
be a cat. I brushed against a boy in a
hallway as he ran by, late for class. And
my grandmother croaked out "Tie a Yellow
Ribbon" while I giggled from the swing
that hung from the maple tree. Even the
tree is gone now, but like the rest it
exists in my memory, in the stories I
tell.
I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the
moment, knowing I would think about it when
she was gone. And the sweetness of it almost
killed me.
Top photo by Jane
Underwood, Writing
Salon mistress and photographer
extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week
with us in 2003.
After writing this prompt and struggling with
various versions of it for the blog, I got
out my senior high school yearbook (theme: "A
Unique Blend." I had forgotten that high
school yearbooks had themes), just to check
on some of the facts. There was David
Anderson, still in with the living seniors,
but at the front of the book was a dedication
to three other people from our class who had
died, two of them in car accidents: Pat
O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and Joe
Lombardino. There were others who died while
I was at school, specifically those
upperclassmen in the first paragraph of this
post, though I could have some of my facts
wrong about the accident. They died in the
mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally
monitored, before you could have a Facebook
page even after death. The fact that there
was no trace of these young men made me sad.
It was almost as if they had never existed.
The slog and drag of the humdrum
Here are the things I don't
write about here:
My son's colds and coughs
Chores, like vacuuming up the fur, dust, and
sand that accumulate pretty quickly in a
house with three cats, a dog, and three
humans
The laborious process of rewriting my novel
(well, I may mention this in passing, but not
in great detail, since that would send all of
you to snoreland, but it is indeed laborious,
like work-on-the
same-three-paragraphs-for-six-or-seven-hours
laborious)
The difficulty of writing something that is
long-term, of continuing through it without
the instant feedback of blogging
Cooking dinner whether I want to or not
How we're figuring out
where the kid will go to school for
kindergarten in the fall
Tips and tricks for keeping
one's sanity after weeks of rain and
afternoons inside with an energetic
four-year-old
Coping mechanisms I use to see us through one
of Mr. T's business trips
My political views
Natural disasters
The pros and cons of having another child
The perhaps impossibility of having another
child
My anxieties about the quality of my writing
and the wisdom of my current career choice
RIght now I'm stuck smack dab in the slog and
drag of the humdrum. The novel is taking
precedence over the blog and I don't feel
like I have enough time to really shine up
any of my short pieces of fiction for this
space. I'm not sure that many people want to
read the fiction anyway. It seems that most
readers are interested in my personal pieces,
either angst from the past or my depressive
musings on current life. Not that my current
stuff is all darkness, exactly, but I think
my views are cloudier than the average
person's, cloudy with a little patch of blue
sky that expands as I examine it, which can
make the whole process hopeful, I suppose, in
a Jennifer Trinkle sort of way.
It feels as if my mind is preoccupied, that
it is working on something. I just need a few
hours with a keyboard to find out what it is.
But who has the time? I'd rather work on the
novel or maybe that just feels like the right
thing to do right now, a necessity, a way to
lose myself in words and justify my
existence.
So I'm not sure what to put in this space at
the moment, but I know my mind will crack
open again and offer itself up for material.
In the meantime, I may be posting more short
writing prompts, or perhaps reposting some of
the oldies but
goodies. We'll
see.
Image: Everyday me, as
recorded by my computer.
Swann song
I miss the tall ginkgos with their rotting
fruits, the way the berries felt beneath my
feet with just enough crunch, a pleasure to
step on. The sidewalk was covered with ginkgo
leaves, too, bright yellow fans dampened with
the rain. A storm had come through the night
before, had knocked the leaves off along with
the fruit. The air was full of the smell of
them, acrid, rotting, sweet.
We were lost and I was defensive about it,
but if you were going to be lost, this was
the neighborhood to be lost in. The street
was tunneled in by wide brick rowhouses,
voluptuous Victorians with turrets and
whimsical windows accented with stone. Each
house had a set of black iron steps, shiny
and slick, one-two-three-four, up to the
entry. The steps made little caves over doors
to English basements, a term which conjures
up mold and damp and a view of other peoples’
ankles, the angling of a dog’s leg as it
releases a spray of urine against low iron
window bars.
He got angry with me after I got angry with
him and we had an embarrassing fight in front
Martha, a hissy fit that revealed more than
we intended. A tense moment with the map
revealed my mistake and our luck: we were
three blocks from Adams Morgan, a short walk
to a few cold beers and a platter of
Ethiopian food. The three of us marched from
Swann Street to 18th Street, walked uphill
against a thin wind. It was getting dark,
people were bundled up against the cold. We
walked without talking, single-file past the
homeless, the crazies, the young people with
their know-everything attitude. And then we
shared a meal with all the awkwardness of
something being over, knowing we had years to
go before it would really end.
This is from a Round Robin
prompt this week, my (slightly edited)
response to a very different photograph.
Photo by
Antediluvial.