I feel it rising through
me
The pressure of words
taken back
and compromised
Their cries, resistance to
tearing, ripping
rearranging
or delayed realization
shake through my eyes
Only the tears fall
on the bed sheets
collar, bare skin
hands pruned by pain and time
The morning started with a vague sense of dreariness, most likely due to the fact I have four hours of work after two days off. Extended time away makes it harder to think “yes, this is my responsibility. let me break myself away from this freedom to choose what to do to go back to work.”
Granted, I was the one who called in for the last two days due to an emergency tooth issue, but it seemed urgent at the time I thought of it. That’s because the dreary feeling hasn’t just been an ailment for this morning. It had been more like a thread through me for the last three days. Bright red thread through the chest, out through the sternum, like floss, a tickle, sore, throbbing. Uneasy feeling in my gut.
The morning ended, around 11, with my clothes soaking wet on the right side and piled on the floor. The heat from a glowing oven eye sent the water into a frenzy while I stood naked in the kitchen grabbing a tea cup. As the whistle started, the change of clothes in the dryer warming, I decided everything so far today wasn’t a loss.
In between was a dash to a meeting I’d forgotten about, which, through the haze was like a fast moving hand grabbing me by the collar. It sounded like my Google Calendar reminding me I had ten minutes until the departmental meeting. The 8:30 meetings are mine to record. Afterwards, I sat with Rogan to catch up on everything.
Downstairs, the highlight of coming in, was Sedaris’s Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls Audiobook. Because of it, I got through some errands. Take trash to the bin, take donations to Goodwill, pick up birth control and finally return home.
Where I lock my keys in the car and have to lay on the water covered ground to get the extra key, a child holding a bottle down the sidewalk staring at me.
Next door little girl:
“Why are you wet?”
The resulting conversation ended with.
“Well that’s cool”
Yes, magnetic boxes with keys are cool indeed….
And I’m cold, I thought.
Hence the warm clothes and warm tea as if I was about to take in a cold, lonely stranger with no where to go…or about to help a woman giving birth.
Either way.
What Jordan didn’t expect was that the dirt would slip between his neck and sweat soaked collar, trickling down his back and lacing the inside of his boxers. Dead bugs, vegetation, worms, cold against his back that was hot with labored breath. Possibly pieces of dirt that had soaked up the gases of the dead, seeping out of coffins and rising to the surface. The coffin had been cheap, Jordan thought. But he kept going. It had bothered him that his brother had jumped from the top of his office building, after working 15 years on the second floor, straight into a closed coffin. No peek of the in between, no glimpse or visual deterrent, a warning sign of crushed bone and flesh, to tell him, the little brother left behind, that down wasn’t the way to go, even with all this responsibility coming down on him. Jordan stopped to catch his breath and shook the dirt off.
My only source of income currently is from a part-time circulation job at the local library. I came across Yoko Ogawaâs Revenge while straightening the shelves of the “New Books” section. Revenge is slender at 162 pages with a simple, in…
My book review on Revenge by Yoko Ogawa
Writing a novel (or a story, for that matter) is confusing work. There are just so many characters running all over the place, dropping hints and having revelations. So it’s no surprise that many a…
I’m on a bit of an Eleanor Roosevelt kick…and I’m watching the HBO movie “Eleanor and Franklin”. The way she is nervous around Franklin with his strong advances at a dance, nervous, shy, wondering why he is advancing though she tries to get away - there I am. Oh, hey, that’s me.
Him trying to propose and she’s like “what? you can’t love me. That’s impossible.” and he’s like “b**** please, marry me.” See for yourself: clip
Also noticed these small booklets around the wrist of the women at the dances. Curious, I tried searching “notes pinned to sleeves formal dances”, “formal dance notes” and “cuff notes”. Finally “formal dance etiquette introduction card” worked. They are called “dance cards”, an interesting detail in the whole production, matching wonderfully with the intricate lace work on the period dresses. I’m watching Part One and the lead actors are wonderful - Jane Alexander’s voice is great, matching the voice while being genuine and Edward Herrman so far is a very convincing FDR. If only he were shorter than she as FDR was in real life.
Nita — clown name: Sniffles — is dealing with some issues in her life. She’s pressured by fellow clowns to take on clown fetishes for high pay, lost her rubber chicken Plucky and future clown dog Chance (lost her Chance, get it?) and her heart seems to be on the fritz both physically and metaphorically. Landlord, also ex-boyfriend Herman, is shacking up with a muscle queen set on sending Nita packing from their share Co-op house and the advancements of a blonde, blue eyed cop make relations with friends tense. But damn is he charming, and with her boyfriend Rex (her “Clown Prince”) out of town, it makes the copper all the more enticing.
But at the heart of it all is Nita, a clown with a weak heart. And she couldn’t keep my blood flowing quick enough.
Bandages being taken off by unseen forces, unraveling onto the floor to reveal nothing inside; an empty shell of clothing writhing in the middle of the room, dancing and laughing as the cloth falls away. And now the pants and shoes, soon a floating shirt. When that collar hits the floor, he’s free to roam and terrorize your city, country, the world even!
This is the terror of the Invisible Man, aka Jack Griffin. HG Wells portrayed him as an albino scientist, seeking to make his way in the world. Stealing money from his father, who in turn commits suicide, Griffin seeks to understand refractive qualities of tissue and stumbles upon the secret to invisibility. Testing it on himself, a lonely journey begins that starts in petty theft and trespassing— and eventually lead to murder.
Need to finish up on HG Wells’s The Invisible Man by watching the movie to have it fresh in my mind. After that, I’ll be relaying my opinion on Monica Drake’s Clown Girl. Opposites, yes?
Tired of bland, unhelpful advice about creating effective writing habits? Here’s how one guy tripled his daily word count.
Creating documents on Google Drive, having it stored so that I can access it from anywhere. What a wonder of technology, this cloud structure that sucks up what I give to it and keeps it safe in its belly.
But there are several abandoned orphans in my Google Drive. Story bits created and left frozen, not growing or shrinking in size. Stale.
Being spring, with pollen and inch worm shit covering the hood of my car, the urge to straighten up and clean is upon me. The prospect of moving soon also makes me want to lighten the load. Cloud storage doesn’t have a weight but the presence of all those files with no folder structure makes me shiver.
So ….filthy! (above from Black Books show)
Mostly those orphans fit into the “Unfinished” folder. That does not carry the majority of my creations thankfully…but the “Projects” and “Short Stories” hide some other under developed science experiments.
Here is one such creation, a contemplation of where the characters I have created are stored in my mind instead of on the page:
Kurt Vonnegut’s classic lecture on the shapes of stories, now in an infographic.
We talk about these Vonnegut graphs all the time at Radiolab, but we usually just scribble them on a coffee-stained napkin. This is much nicer.
I seemed to spend a lot of time writing Man in a Hole stories…
(via vanessajanethompson)
Struggling to make effective cuts? This article walks you through four strategies for trimming, tightening, and focusing your work.
— Maya Angelou’s response to Belinda Luscombe’s question “Do you have any unfinished business?” in Time Magazine’s April 8th, 2013 edition
Simply this is where you'll find one 100 word story a day for at least a year from a "m.a.d" writer. There are dashes of memoir, horror, humor and tons of cracked pepper. An after dinner mint of advice every now and then.
Love,
Holmes
Email: sjmetts@gmail.com
