I sent the link to the collage piece I wrote in June to a friend tonight, with the disclaimer that keep-this-chuck-that works out better in metaphor than in real life. Few know that better than he.
Thing is, there are plenty of things I'd love to throw away and can't. And when I write, I'm sometimes paralyzed by a desire to tell the truth, the whole truth. A good finished piece emerges when I sit around with the scraps of my life long enough to know what that is, and how to arrange it, what truths are not relevant to the matter at hand. Sometimes the truth is so big and so hard that I don't know how to begin to assemble it, and it takes up space and I don't know what to do with it.
These are the pieces I'm going to share right now:
My mom died in July.
She was 54.
I moved into a new house when she was in the hospital, and sedated, for the last time. I had mono while I was moving. I never got to show her pictures of the house. I'm taking care of her cats. One of them is 11 years old; he was born when I was in high school, and I remember when he fit in the palm of my hand. All his life he was nearly feral, keeping a safe distance, rarely in the house and hiding when he was, watching you with his half-wild nearly-gray green eyes. Now he's deaf and arthritic and otherwise falling apart and for a long time terrified to leave my room. Every breakthrough he makes breaks my heart -- not just because she's the person who would care the most and because I can't tell her, but mostly.
Mom shared my ridiculous memory, and in particular, she fetishized dates. On long car trips she would ask my brother and me to tell her a date -- we couldn't specify a year, just a day, but she'd tell us something that happened that day and on what year it happened. On October 1, 1980, she told my older brother we'd put up the Halloween decorations when the baby came. I was the baby. I was born on Halloween.
And once, we nearly got thrown out of the grocery store for punching the Brawny man -- as in the fella on the Brawny paper towel package. It's a surprisingly satisfying thing -- the paper towel rolls offer just the right amount of give and cushion. And she started it.
Guys?
I'm confused.
So very confused.
Paris Hilton has made so many attempts to redeem herself through self-parody that I get dizzy trying to count them. Thing is that, until this morning, every single one of them fell absolutely flat. It's one thing to be famous for, you know, nothing at all, and quite another to increase one's fame by repeatedly calling attention to the fact that it is entirely un-earned. And even if the joke had been that funny to start with, isn't it, like, five years old by now?
So this morning, when the Tubes called my attention to its latest variation, I expected that I would once again be underwhelmed, and then homicidally irritated:
But um, no, I actually think this works. I even think it's funny.
Terrifying. Terrifying. Terrifying. I need a hug.
It's pretty great, when your body is acting just slightly mysterious, to go to the doctor's office and get an answer within an hour. The fatigue and confusion? The oh-damn-I-forgot-to-eat business?
Apparently, not merely attributable to stress.
Apparently, there's this virus called Infectious Mononucleosis that I dodged no fewer than three times in college that just hit me like a damn bat.
That is not pretty great at all.
Universe, you probably think you're funny but you're so, so, so not.
This spring I created a ritual of setting aside every Tuesday night for a Solo Happy Hour Writing Date. I'd find a quiet spot (preferably one not frequented by any of my friends), take the laptop or a notebook, buy an appetizer or two (enough that I would not be hungry anymore, but not enough that I'd feel sleepy), buy a drink or two (enough to loosen the tongue, hopefully not so much as to compromise my typing or handwriting irreparably) and write, write, write. Generally the project is the fabled Novel in Progress; there are a million smaller projects I've been kicking around that I'd love to get to, but I gotta keep my eyes on the prize.
But I haven't done it for at least a month. Now, I've been spending Tuesday nights in a class for the last few weeks, but when that started I rolled the night over to Wednesdays and kept that appointment somewhat faithfully. Then, yours truly -- who spent her last post belaboring her exceptional memory -- spaced it. Just completely forgot about it. And it was in my damn Google calendar.
There are Reasons, of course. I'm in the middle of moving, and the logistics and anxiety involved in finding a new place, and a roommate, and timing the move -- these have crowded out just about everything in my brain. In mid-June I took a short business trip that sent my sense of Weekly Routine straight to hell. Another reason has to do with some family matters which I'm going to be a big girl about and not discuss out here in public.
Suffice it to say my head is so full of Other Stuff that I barely even think about non-work-related writing these days, not even to tell myself It's OK to Take a Break To Deal With Real Life. Then again, for several mornings last week I woke up with atrocious headaches which took hours to shake. I considered all the awful stuff I do to my spinal column (the reclining position from which I write this is gonna put my LMT's kids through Harvard), the ongoing stressors, etc. but realized that all of that is relatively old news, but this feeling that I was walking around inside a giant vise -- that was new. And then I remembered that back in my old life, when I wasn't preoccupied with the contents of liquor store recycling bins, I was the kind of person who had to eat every three hours lest she become stupid or insufferable and on a good day, both. (I've never been checked for hypoglycemia, but I describe myself that way because it's a reasonable hypothesis and most people understand what that means -- unless they're idiots, or assholes, or otherwise dated me in college.) And I inventoried how well I was eating in the evenings and, uh, hey, I'd been having light, early-evening meals with no pre-bedtime chaser. So if my typically-diligent body just failed to send me Time to Eat reminders, can I believe my brain when it tells me it doesn't even miss writing, or the characters from the novel, not even a little bit?
Probably not. So I suppose I should do what I was doing the last time Real Life threatened to lock me out of my precious, fictional world (I realize most writers of fiction sound creepy and delusional when they talk about their work, and I sort of wish I were podcasting this so you could get the full benefit of my sarcasm speech impediment, so you know I'm META and not just creepy, delusional and self-absorbed), and start taking a few minutes here and there to make notes until I finally feel I have time to take back my Tuesdays.
I know that's what you all came here for. A discussion of my PROCESS. I suspect that not as many readers are as fascinated by discussions of PROCESS as many writers imagine them to be, and I assure you, I am quite deeply ashamed of myself. I promise to post something much less disgusting next time. Like pictures of my cellulite.
A few weeks ago I was dorking out to prepare for my boyfriend's birthday and, since one of his presents was a gift certificate (to American Science and Surplus) I decided to tuck it into a nice card, and then decided I should make that card. I bought pretty, heavy papers, scallop-edged scissors, some stencils, an X-Acto knife and a cutting mat.
I used to love collage. It might have been my first craft love, somewhere in the same mix as beadwork. I never got very good at the latter (though I made some cool, funky necklaces) but I think I had a reasonable eye and hand for the former. In high school, and well into college, I spent many a Sunday knee-deep in cardboard (cut-up cereal boxes or the covers of last term's notebook) and old magazines, making postcards to send to my friends elsewhere.
So once I had a final product I liked enough to tuck into the envelope and call it good, I started thinking: What happened? When did I do this last and why did I stop?
Now, that middle question -- I didn't need to ask. My brain's a Collyer mansion. I remember everything. Every mean thing anybody said to me at any age (six, nine, twelve years ago or last week -- it doesn't matter), every kind deed or gesture or word. Like a lot of hoarders I spend time sifting and sorting these memories, weighing their significance, but so rarely discard one that when I discover I've forgotten something, I'm exhilarated.
I hoard tangibles too. Collage was a great excuse.
So when was the last time I sat down with a stack of magazines and a pot of rubber cement? It would have been 2002. Seven moves ago. The postcard I sent accelerated a correspondence and friendship that became a delightful, doomed relationship that's now a startlingly durable friendship. We've all muttered "there's dust on my guitar, you fuck" one time or another. Have I discovered another symptom of Just How Badly That Whole Thing Fucked Me Up -- or is that a vindictive reading of circumstance?
Five -- no, six -- of the seven moves took place in the year immediately after I made that postcard. Wasn't that why I stopped hanging onto magazines, to particularly interesting papers, to foil candy wrappers or what the hell ever? Wasn't I tired of the haul? Wasn't the financial and emotional chaos that catalyzed and accompanied those moves the real reason I dried up creatively? And after stabilizing quite a bit, after breaking the anxiety-laden hoarding habit, why take it up again?
But when I sat on my bedroom floor a couple of weeks ago contemplating stencils and layouts, collage wasn't about this nauseous fear of forgetting, or of discarding, not anymore. Once, I thought throwing things away was both wasteful and dishonest. It isn't. It's about revising. Keep what you need or love. Chuck the rest.
I take 2002, 2003. I keep the bleach-white Idaho sun, the walks from Sun Valley to Ketchum and the big, unleashed, well-behaved dogs wandering the sidewalks unattended. I cut away the cold entitlement of the children I worked with, but I keep its funnier manifestations. I cut away the nastiness of nearly every young employee on the resort, but I keep the boy I had two long, substantative talks with and never saw again. I keep some of the fall -- the rain-soaked bike rides to campus, the watery Portland sunshine and the old-friends-who've-just met euphoria. I discard my (now former) best friend's heightened silences and the way she eventually, unceremoniously dropped me altogether. I keep the spring.
I think: Why didn't I play this years ago, this game of keep this, chuck that? I'm not pretending none of it happened. I'm admitting I no longer need it.
The other day my boss walked out of his office and said, "Christen, what's the German word for wishing ill will on people?"
I don't know if he asks me these things because I'm just conveniently located, or because it's so obvious that my head is full of goofy trivia, or that my head is full of a particular kind of goofy trivia, like German words for habits I happen to possess: schadenfreude was my gleeful, correct response. It's also a hobby of mine.
But that word, as I understand its definition, may be too small. I'm interested in the whole process of failure: where bad ideas come from and why they persist despite all evidence. It's a fun exercise, and it's not just about being a jerk.
But being a jerk is a big part of it. And there are some kinds of stupid that aren't all that interesting -- but that I can't get over, until I realize I'm guilty of them myself.
File the following in that category: Recently I stumbled (quite accidentally) upon two social networking site profiles (with attendant blogs), in quite close succession, by people who advertised themselves as writers, with books to sell, but told us nothing about the works themselves. No excerpts, no summaries, nothing to tease or bully us into buying it other than a brief admonition to do so.
The hell, people, this is Web 2.0. You've got so many free self-marketing tools at your disposal -- with pretty much unlimited bandwidth -- and you can't even bother to give me a glib 20-word summary about the product you're hawking? Selling Yourself Properly (hell, at all) is kind of a passion of mine. Others' failure to do so in the context of grandiose claims about their achievements or achievements-in-progress -- oh, these things keep me up late at night.
What keeps me up all night is my realization that the content on this website -- which I intended to be a much more professional, bloggy-style blog than the one I keep over at that teenage girl website with all the goats -- is scant and hasn't been updated for more than a year. And the protagonist of my novel in progress hasn't updated her blog in more than a year either, partly due to hosting issues I've been too lazy to address. So I'm just as half-assed as those folks I lost all those hours snarking at and disparaging.
Somewhere, I presume my doppelganger is rolling her eyes and shaking her fist at me.
That's right. I know two German words. So buy my book.
