Ode to the Early Riser

(This poem might not rhyme):

How doth the little butterfly
Kiss me quite insane
In between the sheets
Where the dull brain that perplexes and retards---

Shoot, those are all lines from other poems. Begin again!*


When morning grabs your pinky toe
And yanks you out of bed at its inordinate hour,
You must be a wimp to not kick it back in its face and go to sleep.

Too verbose.

In China, kids are still sleeping.
This is a democratic society,
Not a communist one.
Still, you have to wonder,
If they have some things right.

Bingo!

This morning I cracked an egg with a double yolk. Aberrations in nature truly freak me out.

Speaking of aberrations, I put my cats on a diet (for their own good!) and they feel betrayed, traumatized, etc etc. They have not revolted and clawed me to death--yet. But Peter Pan, the feline of the more formidable girth, did spend half an hour this morning opening and shutting the cabinet door (where we keep the cat food). Open, shut, open, shut, pretty good for a creature without opposable thumbs! But it was at 7:20 am, and it surprised me, made me feel guilty, that I wasn't as tired as I thought I would be. In fact, I was a little groggy, but I probably could have risen (proper English?) at that hour. For about twenty minutes I debated getting up. Being one with the sun! Making breakfast in the cool blue silence of morning! A head start on the day! Not feeling rushed and panicked, like, I realized, i feel every morning when I wake up. An early riser: one who has time to take all possibilities into consideration! An exhilarating prospect.

I went back to sleep for another couple hours. Now, it's almost noon. And what have I accomplished? Zero, zil. An abnormal breakfast and so forth. I will pay someone to wake me up early.

Attached picture: this is what cats do when you put them on a diet for the sake of their own health and longevity. They cuddle up in your lap purring, refusing to let you do work, and also stealthily berating you for your own lack of drive, motivation, etc, in relation to the ample opportunity made to you, potential wasted and so forth. You can't tell from the photo, but he's really racking up the guilt in this moment.


*Bonus trivia: can you tell me what poems (and in one instance, a play) I appropriated and maligned those verses from?

Sickness

Yesterday, I was sick. Today, at first, I was sick. But I'm not sick any longer. I broke the sickness with the Feast of the Burrito.

Every sickness I have ever had was broken with the Feast of the Burrito. There was this one time, that I was love sick, and since I ate burritos with this boy I found it hard to recover from the heart sickness with the feast of the burrito. But I did it anyway.

While I was eating this burrito I thought of all the previous burritos I had eaten. I ate one burrito in the summer time, on the beach, when for some reason my face looked swollen and possessed, like a disfigured Mr. Potato. I was very sick, and found myself in the back of a car, and then, inexplicably, at a fair. I don't remember why I was there. But I wandered and decided to eat something, and got a gargantuan burrito. There is no way I will finish this, I thought to myself. But I ate it, all of it, and afterwards was very surprised at myself and my hunger. From that day on I was no longer sick. That was the first Feast of the Burrito.

The magic of the Feast of the Burrito is the ritual. The ritual causes you to think or realize things in a different manner than you would ever have thought or realized them before. The thoughts you have during the Feast of the Burrito are very significant. This feast, I thought of this one girl who I saw in the dining hall when I was an undergraduate, who was probably an anorexic. She was very very skinny. She never ate anything and she looked sad most of the time. I remember one time I was walking by her and she had in her tray a whole pizza. And she was smiling, the type of smile that threatens to levitate one if you're not careful. She looked beyond happy. After she left the dining hall she looked sad again, and I noticed she hadn't eaten her pizza. I thought about this as I ate my burrito, I don't know why. I will always remember the way that this girl smiled, and she probably will never remember it, not having seen herself with the smile, or even knowing who I was and that I saw her there every day, not eating and so sad because of it.

I can't remember what other thoughts I had during the Feast of the Burrito. While I was waiting there was a girl who was being very rude to the man making the burritos, and I wished that I could trip her without her knowing it was me. It was a ridiculous thought because I couldn't possibly defend myself against this girl if she found out that I had tripped her. She wasn't that much bigger than me but I couldn't ever get in a fight if I were the instigator, I know I would lose. I will probably never be in a fight, and I don't know how I feel about this. There are definitely days when I wish a good ass-kicking upon someone, and I imagine that I would be okay giving the ass kicking. But in reality fights are dirty and nasty, at least the ones that I've seen. I don't exercise or condone violence, but I don't think I'm a pacifist. I think most people who claim to be pacifists simply don't understand violence.

When you're in sickness you feel yourself wavering, in between two worlds. This is called, being on the threshold. The threshold is a special place you can only inhabit when you're sick. Since you're not there that often, you feel strange while on the threshold, and this strangeness could be the strangeness of the threshold, or the strangeness of you, or just the impossibility of what's to tell. It causes you and the threshold to be one, and all activities that transpire in the threshold are significant.


I've probably had at least five of those gargantuan burritos, and I have to say each one is revolutionary. It requires a lot of energy to digest, so I'm going to depart. I'll be back later with real news.

It's Been a While, or, What Happens When you Hatch a Plan too soon?

Outline for this post:
1)ego destruction,
2)a great sense of tiredness,
3) disgust and resignation caused by extreme ineptitude/non zen states of being.

December 1st. I remember a day, one fall ago, when I received a fateful email saying I would have to be in a novel writing workshop. I panicked. I danced around the room, shrieking obscenities and blocking the television, and then I sat down and wrote.

A few months later, I showed (and here, I want you to imagine a project done in haste and with little good will as a conglomerate blob of several types of clay, many instances of dried up play dough, a few bits of metal that were lying around, and those googly eyes used for sock puppets stapled on at irregular intervals), I showed this makeshift sculpture to my fellow work shoppers. It went over better than I thought; they gave the formation a name, spoke of it in coaxing words and with gentle syllables. I went home, cradling my monster. Perhaps it was something new, fresh, alive, and worth writing towards.

Fast forward another month. Not much time has passed, barely enough for me to meet with my professor and discuss the being that I slapped into life. I'm being workshopped again. Nothing big, something small, like a chapter describing the protagonist's relationship to her father. A moment of lucidity, in the madness, like what she eats for dinner. An inkling that, perhaps, out of this mass of clay I will wrest a living being, shivering and alive, drenched in the culpabilities and possibilities of all living things.

Two weeks later, I find myself again on the platform of judgment. The jury is weary: they have seen this all before, and they know now that the googly eyes are googly eyes. Their pens tap, and then jump out of their hands, splattering ink all over the floor. I don't turn away. I know what this all means.

KABLAM! KA-BLOOEY Loss! Pain! Remorse! A sense of complete and utter despair, coming home late at night and talking instead about things like the weather, trying to explain a joke you told in class but instead giving up, hands falling flat, dreaming of sentences that you forget to write down before you woke up, taking long walks where the characters shimmer and emerge in the reflection of the sidewalk, floating towards empty cigarette packs--thinking that maybe, somewhere on the other side of the veil, Miranda, Mike, the Mother and Father exist, that they beckon and wave towards freedom, and that you will make a collage for each of them, yellow and lace for the mother, orange and steel for Mike, red staircases for the father, and purple for Miranda, with kaleidoscope chips...all to hang above your workshop space, to keep inspiring, rejuvenating, and understanding who they are--

But the colors collapse into complete deflation. The sense that the world is a balloon and all the air has been let out, or stepped on by your brother. Words sputter and spin like the last bit of gasoline in a tank. Going nowhere. Getting out to push, wasting your strength. They eye you on the subway, they shouldn't be looking at you that way. Cradling the carcass in your clumsy hands. Alliteration--what folly. Metaphors--for the weak. All forgotten, now. All betrayed. I'll see the pages flying up to me, on the train tracks or in a dream.

The semester is almost over. I've been workshopped three times. I am completely spent. I refuse to show it to anybody else, to waste anybody else's time. A warning: never show people a project before it's ready. Your hoarding instinct, for once, is right. Showing a project to criticism and praise before the time is due--will destroy you.

I don't know how I describe it at this point. and don't think I will. 120 pages? How can I say that's accurate, when I will rewrite all of them? First person narrative? How can that be true, when I don't know if it's the voice of a 12 year old a 24 year old narrating the story?

For the sake of jest, I'll tell you what I have. It's a first person narrative. Miranda, a 12 year old girl. I wanted to name her Vicki, but the name came out differently, for some reason, and someone mentioned an illusion to Shakespeare's the Tempest, with the Miranda who is a dreamer. So be it. My Miranda, too, is insulated in her own world, with a lexicon derived from rock albums and the shadows on the walls. She is an only child, and lives in her own head, idling away the hours by drawing the shapes in her head in the shade of her bedroom.

Her father is a beekeeper. He brings her along from time to time, and she marvels at the order. Nature, with its own algorithms. Her father enters the hives bare, but she wears a mask. Strange, for she understands everything about herself and little of him.

Her mother is pregnant. A 12 year age gap, a woman idle and depressed with the monotony of her life, and she finds she is with child. Rejoicing.The buying of quilts, bottles, and maternity clothes. The opening of windows; dusting of the shelves. A cleaning that becomes compulsive with time. Also, a fixation with her health. She goes to the doctor often, for reasons unexplained. The father is in the beehives, the mother in the house.

Fast forward. Miranda, in the hospital, at the same time as the mother. Like sisters, they share a physical pain. Miranda sees her brother for the first time, and notes that he has the blue eyes she had always wanted. The mother is exhilarated; the father is nowhere to be seen.

That's what I have so far. A sermon, a joint, a few instances of humor and a bunch of unresolved tensions.

I'm glad the semester is over, and sorry to all involved. I'll start posting again regularly, now, but right now I'm spent.

Outline for the next post:
1) Disorganization
2) Elevated heart rate, adrenaline release at the mention of the words "voice"
3) a strong and sudden dislike for anything written in a stranger's pen

PS PS PS PS:
For the record, for anyone (and those numbers are very few) who is familiar with my work this semester and this blog:

1) the matter of voice: people criticized the voice as fluctuating between a 12 year olds and a 30 year olds. True, true. It does fluctuate drastically. It should be more consistent. I am in the process of ironing it out, making it as smooth as a linen setting. But also, on a certain note, this is how my voice sounds. Caught somewhere between an adult and a snot nosed kid! I use big words! I call using big words, using big words! I sound like a 12 year old, in real life, a lot of the time! Am I fundamentally flawed, or what? Doubtful--I doubt that I'm fundamentally flawed. But, by the end of the semester I felt like an old man in a young person's bar, saying why, what? Does age matter?

2) The matter of truthfulness: in truth, I am not an only child. No, I have five brothers! I am almost the opposite of an only child, if such a thing exists. It is true, I grew up without sisters. And, I spent much of my time by myself, in my room, reading and yelling at my brothers to get out. So--I both could and could not understand what it would be like for Miranda to grow up an only child. Why did I make her that way? Beats me. I think I just didn't want to do the work of writing out five people's characters.

3) The matter of character: If only, if only, what everyone told me wasn't true. But it all was. The father--conflicted. The mother--not depicted. Miranda--a mess of thought. Next fall, this will all be fixed. But not a word more till then.

4) The matter of humor, or why its not funny: je suis fatiguee.

More to come, as I try to nap and fail.