Sunday, November 22, 2009

oh, that's right. this is here.

What I am doing is lamenting the cold. North Carolina has spoiled me. This weather would be practically balmy by the standards of central Pennsylvania, but I am grouchy because I can no longer walk around barefoot all the time without fear of losing my toes.

What I am doing is writing an essay about synesthesia. (Or synaesthesia. Why do I like it so much more with the a?) To get myself in the mood, and to postpone cracking open the serious neurological research, I reread Jeffery Ford's short story, The Empire of Ice Cream. It is this wonderful, muted piece of magical realism about loneliness, and art, and friendship, and betrayal, and gifts that isolate, and sacrificing crucial parts of one's identity for the sake of acceptance and understanding, and whether that kind of sacrifice ought to be seen as tragic or as necessary or as something of both-- as seen through the lives of its synaesthetic main characters. Beautifully written, and a lot more complicated than it initially seems. Unfortunately, it hits very, very close to home for me, touches on a lot of my secret fears and anxieties (even ones that are connected to deeper things than the fact that I unfailingly taste something like sweet milk in my mouth when I walk barefoot across a cool, smooth surface), and I've learned that it's an absolutely terrible idea to read it if I'm already somewhat angsty on a particular day. To do so is only a recipe for tears, inertia, overwrought guilt, and bad haiku.

What I am doing is waiting to be brave.

What I am doing is thinking about how player pianos are never as good, how everything looks different on the other side of the camera, how I love bright colors but black and white makes the world seem so much sadder, so much more mysterious, so much more like it is crumbling away, but that the apocalypse will, at least, be a stately and elegant one.

What I am doing is breathing November, and letting it infiltrate my blood. I don't know. This is how I feel when everything begins to turn gray and brown and it gets dark early. Though, if there aren't too many clouds, the early darkness means that I can see the stars for longer, and they are very clear here. I watched part of the Leonid shower, and I wished on what I saw even though I don't really believe that wishing does anything but make your chest feel full of birds, but it would have been as good to simply stare up at the constellations, how they've shifted since June.

I should talk more. I should type more. I should say things. I should think about them first so they'll come out the way they should, the way I imagine having them enter the world, perfect and pointed as arrows. I should climb more trees. I shouldn't stop singing just because someone else walked into the room. Next time some blue-haired, steel-toed-booted, nineteen-year-old hardass starts in about how humans should all just fuckin' kill ourselves, how we're everything that's wrong with the planet, how pretty soon there's bound to be a big die-off because our current population is not sustainable in the long term, Malthusian catastrophe blah blah blah, but it'll be exicting and cleansing and tasteless joke about offering free razor blades to depressed students, I should stand up and take him to task for being a callow idiot with no sense of his own privilege, and also maybe throw in something about how I think misanthropy of that caliber is generally cowardly and small-minded. I should do that instead of just looking away and shutting my eyes and shaking my head very slowly and slightly.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Happy November!

It's a full moon tonight.

Did you know that in certain Balkans folkloric traditions, inanimate objects left outside beneath a full moon will turn into vampires?

(Vampire boots. Vampire bikes. Vampire umbrellas.)


My Halloween was dreary and damp, but I did get invited to the library staff's party. (I spend so much time in there, I think a lot of people assume I am an employee, or else extremely studious.)

We ate owls:


They were by far the best owls I have ever eaten.



Costumes I saw:

Captain Kirk, Malibu Barbie, Eddie Munster, zombie, zombie cheerleader, zombie Catholic schoolgirl, zombie park ranger, Pippi Longstocking, medieval Batman (actually just a knight costume with a bat motif, according to its wearer, but I prefer to think of it as medieval Batman), zombie with a classic "bedsheet ghost" costume draped over top to create a terrifying zombie trick-or-treater, the Queen of Night, dragon, Artemis, fairy, zombie fairy, Mary Poppins, zombie Celtic warrior, zombie housewife, Tank Girl, Gogo Yubari, "lipstick librarian," spider, gypsy fortune teller, werewolf, candy corn, zombie UPS guy, princess, zombie princess, Link, Max in his/her wolf suit and crown (the character is a boy, the person in the costume was not), zombie waitress, and, of course, two-bit floozy with animal ears.

I was lost things. Mainly, this involved wearing the sort of clothing I normally wear, but sticking all the lost things I found over the course of the day in my pockets, or safety-pinning them to my jacket.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

will i question every answer?

I cannot write a manifesto
Nor type a holy book.
All my thoughts are doubt. I don’t even trust the sky
Or the soft engine of my heart, or these words,
Or that written somewhere in the Milky Way is even one
Objective truth. Sometimes certainty slips through my pores
For a moment, and fills my skin with its tangerine presence,
But that bright whisper never comes when my fickle heart
Feels full of rain and I ask with my eyes and the line that runs
Between my nose and the corner of my mouth how I should live,
What good a person like me could ever do. What good?
No, my absolutes are less useful by far:

Silver is always beautiful.
The tide is important.
The sea can swallow me like a little yellow pill.
It is sad when birds fly into windows.
I like eggs, unless they’re philosophical
Or fertilized. It’s that simple.
My constituent atoms will go on to better things
One day. All things, in fact. Someday
We’re all going to die. I think. Perhaps.
Maybe. You see? I’m no authority. But I do know
That limes prevent scurvy, that they are sour
And green, small and solid in the hand.
I love the smell of fresh, unscented soap.
It is better to sing than not to sing.
Hair can be cut off painlessly,
Unlike most other attachments.
The wind against my scalp, I know,
Is soft and cold, like a drowned girl’s kiss.
True things are slippery in my arms, reluctant
To be cradled.

And my fingers refuse to cling.
They slide from my grasp more easily than split seconds.
I don’t know where they go, and I suppose it doesn’t matter
How they spend their days away,
Whether they ever slink back in to return the keys,
Put their feet up between my memory and my suspicions,
Watch confused dreams whirr behind my eyes and teeth.
I can’t stand up on an overturned wooden crate and shout
To all creation that humans are very small compared to the cosmos,
That to look at the wings of fruit bats or to imagine the wild orchards
In Kazakhstan, with apples in every shape and size you can imagine
Makes me feel as though my very marrow
Is blossoming. Bone petals. Bone flowers. I can’t write
On a sandwich board that complimentary socks are as good as
Or better than a perfect match. I cannot write a manifesto
When I have no passion but everything I see, unless, of course,
I deny that, too.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

spamming you with notsogreat photographs




State College, Pennsylvania.

The leaves were really this red. I did not photoshop these pictures at all, apart from some minor cropping. Aren't they beautiful? Nothing else is quite that color, except maybe sometimes Jell-O, or crayons, or this skein of yarn I saw once that was dyed using some special method I forget the details about, or certain NASA pictures of certain nebulae. And, well, probably some other stuff, too. I still like it.



Some of the light fixtures at my friend Spackle's house. Everybody should have a disco ball in their kitchen.

There's a guy at my college who always, and I do mean always, wears a homemade deerskin tunic and a big deerskin rucksack on his back, with bluejay and hawk feathers stuck in one of its fasteners for decoration. It's strange to see him wearing this with jeans and sneakers, while using one of the computers in the library.

I don't have anything made of deerskin or feathers, but I do have the best purple and silver dress ever to come out of the half-off bin at a used clothing store:


I also have a hideous linoleum floor in my dorm room!

(The weird bunches in the top picture come from the sweater I've got on under the dress, which isn't really a mid-autumn in the mountains sort of dress.)


...Oh! And! I saw Where the Wild Things Are a couple of days ago, right before I came back from my break week. It was gorgeous, gorgeous eye candy, which I expected, and the story was poignant and actually fairly interesting, though a little aimless and slow-moving. I'm not sure whether the average seven-year-old would enjoy the movie (I suspect I might have, but my favorite movie at age seven was an Icelandic retelling of East of the Sun, West of the Moon that was over two and a half hours long and featured one of the least convincing animatronic polar bears ever committed to film as a main character, so clearly I was slightly peculiar), but I think a lot of teenagers and adults who can still remember what it was like to be seven will appreciate it. And the monsters are all actors in suits! Only their faces are computer animated. That's fantastic.

Monday, October 26, 2009

at least it wasn't robo-gonorrhea

Actual sentence from self-published space opera/erotica, apparently not meant as parody:

" I should probably tell you I have space herpes."

Sunday, October 25, 2009

part the second, still beginning


Part One



On the fourth day of the week, Selina helped her mother fill baskets with spare parts, tether mechanical birds to metal perches where they creaked and chirped, and load everything into a rickety truck, which broke down halfway to the heart of the City as often as not. After a half-hour of swinging her legs on the torn, dusty passenger-side seat and watching her mother run greasy fingers through her hair and tool around the vehicle’s guts until the engine began its phlegmy purr once more, Selina would be all the more excited when they finally reached the City market. She loved to look up at the buildings, crammed together close, full of windows and almost as tall as the walls at the edge of the world (when the edge of the world had walls). The City smelled bad, like oil and smoke and outhouses, Selina thought, but it was full of paper lanterns, men and women wearing bright colors or fine dark suits like the man in Selina’s photograph, their fingernails short and clean, or painted purple. The market was cluttered with such people, from children younger than Selina to those bent nearly in half from age, their faces like rumpled laundry. They moved among the many stalls like a long, winding snake of limbs and eyes and grasping hands, whispering and shouting in a dozen languages. Selina looked from a boy with metal hoops and hooks stuck through his nose and lips and eyebrows to a huge, fierce-eyed woman with bare feet and a tiny, delicate deer-like creature on a leash. It had pearly cloven hooves, gold eyes, a tail with a tuft like a lion’s, sharp teeth. The unpleasant odors that permeated the rest of the City were overlaid with the singed, fatty scent of things being fried, the tang of citrus juice, the smell of sugar and salt and rising dough in portable ovens. From kiosks, stalls, trucks, carts, and blankets on the ground, merchants sold their wares with varying degrees of aggression. Selina observed a man selling real, living parrots and finches and nightingales with interest. His birds seemed rather drab and droopy in comparison to her mother’s, though one parrot had tail feathers the shade of a twilight sky and swore vociferously as they passed, slowly, in the sputtering truck. Selina laughed and shouted the words back to it. Her mother’s mouth turned up slightly at the corners, though the bird-seller glared disapprovingly beneath his imposing wig, which had a tiny model of a sailing ship stuck in it near the top.

After the truck had been maneuvered into the spot reserved for it, the birds and baskets unpacked and artfully placed on a tarp-covered metal folding table, and the big plywood sign stood up (JANE JOSLIN, SMALL APPLIANCE REPAIRS, SPARE PARTS, MECHANICAL CURIOSITIES & SUNDRY), Selina was allowed to wander off to explore the market while her mother plyed her trade. She was supposed to stay within her mother’s line of sight at all times, though, and suspected that she was allowed to wear as many brightly-colored ribbons in her hair as she did mainly to make her easier to spot. Usually, Selina walked slowly and aimlessly between the nearby stalls, watching, listening, and perhaps buying spun-sugar candy or a sweet, fizzy drink if last week’s take had been good enough for her mother to allow her a dollar coin as pocket money. Sometimes she saw other children talking together, chasing one another through the crowds, lining up for spun-sugar candy, throwing spinning discs, riding the shoulders of their fathers or older brothers, but she never tried to speak to them, or introduce herself, or make friends. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to run and shout and stomp up clouds of dirt with them; it simply never occurred to her that she could. She had never known anyone well apart from her mother and herself and the mechanical birds. She felt as though everyone in the City had known one another since the world began, that the City was its own entity, whole and running as smoothly as a tin turtledove with clocks in its belly. There was no room for outsiders from the edge of the world, not really, not to talk or stay or race or go inside one of the tall buildings. It would have been as ludicrous as trying to put the whole market in a sack to bring back to the piebald beetle-house.

Only today, someone was grabbing hold of the orange ribbon that wound its way through Selina’s left braid, tilting her head involuntarily backwards, and asking her questions all in a breathless rush. “Wow, what is that, is that real silk, where did you get silk, aren’t you just the junk lady’s kid, I mean, the mechanic’s kid? I thought you were poor and that’s why you live out at the end of everything. Do you like orange? Orange is my favorite color, I like to eat oranges too, only I don’t get to all that much because they’re so expensive on account of coming from way far in the south, you know, where there are tigers and things. Tigers are my favorite animal, probably. They’re kind of orange, too. Hi! What’s your name? I’m Cecy because Ceciline takes too long to say.”

After a few moments of stunned silence during which Selina struggled to make sense of what had just happened, she managed to answer, slowly and carefully, without moving her head or turning around. “Hello, um, Cecy. I’m Selina, but it isn’t short for anything. Sometimes my ma calls me Lina, but I don’t like that. I don’t know if the ribbon is silk. I think maybe it is. I don’t know where it came from. It just turned up. I don’t think we’re poor. I like orange, but my favorite color is…maybe green. Or blue. Or white.” She thought of the shifting sea that sometimes rolled outside her window and sometimes did not. She felt a lightness as her hair was released. “What’s a tiger?” she thought to ask, before Cecy bounced up directly in front of her and she got her first look at her new acquaintance.

Cecy was either a little younger than Selina, or very small for her age. Her hair, dress, eyes, and skin were almost exactly the same shade of light brown. It was odd looking, especially when contrasted with her pale orange boots, and her red-and-white striped tights, which sported conspicuous holes in both knees. She had an extremely pretty face, though, when she wasn’t contorting it into exaggerated expressions to accompany her rambling chatter. “Oh! You don’t know what a tiger is? How do you not know what a tiger is? Don’t you ever read books?”

“Yes,” said Selina, who had a book of illustrated fairy tales that she had pored over so often that the binding was beginning to fall apart, and who often snuck into her mother’s room to look at the books her mother kept in a cardboard box behind her tool shelf: musty-smelling paperbacks with yellowed pages and cover paintings of women with large breasts swooning in the arms of men with chiseled jaws. She didn’t understand everything that went on in these novels, but they were improving her vocabulary greatly.

“Okay, well, a tiger is a kind of big cat. Big as a bear. They have orange and black stripes and really long fangs and they live in the jungle, way far away in the south, and they can sneak up on their prey without a sound and then they pounce and eat it before it ever knows it’s dead. Sometimes they even eat people, but if you wear a mask that looks like your face on the back of your head, tigers won’t be able to tell which way you’re looking, so they won’t know which way is behind you to sneak up, and you’ll be safe. Tigers are good swimmers, though, and they have beautiful eyes, like gold. Would you like to come with me? I’m going in back of the puppet theatre to play with these other kids I know. You’ll like them. Kieran’s da is the puppetmaster, and he does fire-eating at night, and his ma is a seamstress and sometimes she gives us bits of cloth to make stuff out of, or ribbons like your ribbon, and sometimes we get to try and make the puppets dance on their strings.”

Selina hesitated. The puppet theatre was well away from where she’d helped her mother set up. When she looked back, though, her mother was engaged in intense haggling with a thin, bald woman and a beefy man with an enormous mustache. A copper and brass macaw sat on the table between them, alongside a small record player. Selina decided it couldn’t hurt to go with Cecy for a few minutes. Besides, she’d never played with kids her age before! Her heart was already beating faster, and she felt slightly giddy. “All right,” she said. Cecy shouted with joy, grabbed her hand, and pulled her deeper into the market with surprising strength for such a tiny girl, out of her mother’s sight.



(This installment of my story has absolutely nothing to do with Sunday Scribblings.)

(If you can help me think of a title for this thing, I'll be quite grateful.)

Friday, October 23, 2009

random jottings

My little brother is eighteen. That's kind of weird. In my head, I'm not even eighteen yet, really. (The rest of my body arguably agrees with my brain on that count.) When I picture Charlie, I still think of a twelve-year-old kid, several inches shorter than me, who gets the punchlines to dirty jokes wrong because he doesn't understand them. And now he is a good head and a half taller than I am, and all kinds of impressively good colleges want him in their biology programs, and he sees sexual innuendo even where it probably isn't (like most teenage boys), and he's on the cross-country team, and ain't it strange how people just keep growing up?

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

It bugs me how often I need new socks. They get full of holes so fast. Or they disappear in the dryer, and as much as I search in and above and below and behind the machine-- they have to have gone somewhere-- my socks are lost forever. Except part of me really likes sock shopping, if I can find someplace that sells the fun kind of socks instead of plain, utilitarian, white or black or gray or beige 5-packs. Part of me takes great satisfaction in being able to put pink cotton ice-cream cones on one foot and red & orange stripes on the other, and have my heels and all my toes covered instead of poking out through gaps.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

I'm not that interested in seeing this movie Adam, partly because I'm not that big a fan of romantic comedies in general, but mainly because the director has been quoted as saying that he views Asperger's/autism as "a metaphor for the human condition." Maybe I'm overreacting to that statement (my mother certainly thought so, when I tried to explain this to her), but it bothers me-- I'm a little tired of how autistic people, and disabled people in general, in fiction almost always seem to serve principally to teach "normal" people (whether other characters in the story, or the story's intended audience, or both) important lessons about What It Means To Be Truly Human, or How To Live Life To The Fullest, or something similarly glurgey. Either that, or we're freaky, inhuman monsters or enigmatic, oracular waifs. One reason I liked Mozart & the Whale, despite its many flaws as a film, was that almost all its major characters were autistic, and it presented them as very real, whole, human, three-dimensional individuals who had their own interests, skills, goals and problems, not all of which were related to their autism or cast in diagnostic terms. There were a few scenes that I thought slipped into a "look how bizarre and quirky these people are! It's hilarious, because they're highly intelligent adults with the emotional maturity of six-year-old children! Wacky!!" kind of gawking, which really put me off, but for the most part I appreciated the nuanced portrayals and the recognition that autism spectrum disorders are more than a series of DSM entries and tick-boxes of symptoms, or a metaphor for the condition of "normal" humans. I mean, this is my human condition, or a large part of it. I hear electricity in the walls and I don't like to look at people's faces much when I talk to them because the skin and small muscles move around too much and I can't screen it out, and I ascribe personalities to inanimate objects, and I would rather write than talk most of the time, and I have an unusual, haphazard body of general world knowledge even now, because I was mainly in special education classes from about the third to the seventh grade. I can tell you what color a song is. If you turn on a vacuum cleaner or a hair dryer without telling me first, be prepared for a high-pitched scream and a small green and gray blur as I rush from the room with my hands jammed over my ears. Standing on tiptoe feels normal and natural to me, but sitting up straight in a chair, with my legs hanging down, does not. I can't do it for more than a few minutes before it becomes intolerably uncomfortable and I start shifting around. I'd honestly rather stand, or lean against a wall, or lie bellydown on the ground. I would honestly rather discuss philosophy than have sex. I would rather walk alone in the rain than get drunk and grind against complete strangers to the strains of bad hip-hop. (I like the rain.) Sometimes I forget exactly where my body is located in space and run into doors because of it. That is not a metaphor. It's how I actually am in real life. I guess trying to make it otherwise feels like a sort of appropriation to me, a theft, almost. But perhaps I ought to watch the movie anyway, and see if my worries about it are validated.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Current movies I do want to see: Ponyo and Where the Wild Things Are.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

It was gray today, except for the phoenix colors of the dying leaves. Rained a little, stopped, rained a little more. Quintessentially October, I think. It smelled smoky and musty and a bit like new pennies. I went to aimlessly loiter around my friend's house, which is a collective living place with great old sofas and an organ in the basement. (The keyboard instrument, I mean, not, like, someone's heart in a jar.) It matches the season, and the day.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

i am a good little clock

This picture comes from Animal Sleep Stories, the website of artist Daria Tessler, whose work I've recently fallen in love with. Her illustrations remind me of pictures in the 1970's back issues of Cricket magazine I used to obsessively pore over back in elementary school. (There was a supply closet with several cardboard boxes full of them. I used to hide in that closet when I was cutting class.) Kind of blocky and flat and simply colored, but highly detailed and surreal. Children playing with realistically drawn animals or odd-looking monsters. I especially like this one, with its cephalopod, pelican, seaplants, and androgynous, vaguely Audrey Hepburn-ish reclining figure smiling amusedly at the wild things surrounding her (his?) bed.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Back in Pennsylvania (with my parents, siblings, dog, and the German exchange student they're hosting for the month) for Fall Break week, I've been luxuriating in the purple-painted, poster and postcard-collaged walls of my room, a floor that is not made of linoleum, a fully stocked refrigerator, ect. All the things that're scarce in college dormitories.

I have these boots, brown, sturdy, that I bought in a Chicago thrift store one year, seven months, two weeks and I'm-not-sure-how-many-days ago. I have this thing where I kind of perseverate on shoes, so that even though I probably own more than one pair at any given time, there will be one pair that I default to, that I wear far more often than any of the others, that I'll be reluctant to retire or leave behind. That I will, generally, wear to pieces inside of three years. My Chicago boots were doodled on with liquid paper, paint, and sharpie markers. They explored abandoned train stations, grocery stores, and farm houses. They walked me all over Germany, protected my feet from rain in North Carolina and snow in Pennsylvania and broken glass in Tennessee. Ran with me to catch up to a hundred departing busses. They've served me well and true and faithful, my boots. But, see, the soles are worn down now to the point where they've lost almost all their traction. The lining inside the shoes is just a few tatters of black fabric. There are small holes around the toes where stitching has come undone. They're still basically wearable, but they're aging fast. I knew it was time to start looking for new default footwear, but you can't force that kind of special bond with an object. It has to be a spontaneous connection. I find I can really only get it from thrifted shoes, stuff that's been worn before. I don't know why. Maybe some ghost of the previous owner lingers in each shoe, endowing it with personality. Maybe I'm just so used to secondhand clothing I can't really feel at ease in anything else. I don't know. Anyway, though, I went to the local Goodwill yesterday to look around, mostly as an excuse to take a walk in the gold October sunshine, not really expecting to find anything good. I did, of course. Look, aren't they lovely?

They're like Alice in Wonderland shoes. Or little girl Frankenstein's monster shoes. They're black and shiny and they've got little buckles and even this stippled fleur de lis design on the toes (you can't see in in the photograph), but they've also got some seriously thick soles and aren't remotely flimsy or hard to run around in. It is like magic, when you're idly poking through a rack of children's flip-flops and ugly men's basketball sneakers and giant fishing waders and you find some really neat shoes that seem like they got stuck in there by accident, and then they actually fit you to boot. And they're seven dollars.



Well, boots, it's been good, and I'll probably keep you around in my closet for a while yet. But I think you have a replacement, for all intents and purposes.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Here, have another Daria Tessler drawing for the road:

I want to write a story about this one. It seems to ask for one, don't you think? Something about that overflowing knapsack of tangerines...

Monday, October 19, 2009

like Oz with more heart, or Narnia sans religious preachiness and racist/chauvanist undertones

If you haven't been following Catherynne M. Valente's excellent online serial novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, I strongly recommend it. I'm bringing it up because the story appears to be nearing its conclusion (I almost wrote "approaching its conclusion," then realized that was ridiculous-- there is nothing else to be approached, after all, it's only a matter of nearer or farther, a satisfying or an unsatisfying end), and I'm increasingly impressed by the growth of the protagonist, the way certain plot elements are being tied together, the mix of whimsy and nuanced emotional depth, the thoughtful deconstructions of or extrapolations upon common elements in fairy tales and children's fantasy stories, ect., ect.
This week's installment had a very, very well done twist (which I'm certainly not going to spoil here). It made a lot of sense, in retrospect, and there are very subtle hints at it in the preceding chapters, but I honestly didn't see it coming at all. (This is saying something. I am not a person who is usually floored by plot twists or surprises.) I will say-- or hint, or warn-- that it is a sad, even tragic, kind of twist, and that I cried a little.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is updated with a new chapter every Monday, and follows the adventures of a young girl named September, who voluntarily goes away to Fairyland when the opportunity is offered to her by the Green Wind, and ends up attempting to save it, and her friends Ell the Wyverary* and Saturday the Marid**, from a corrupt Marquess (who has a very fine hat). Once again, check it out. And yeah, it's technically free, but probably it'd be nice to donate some money to the author if you like it, and can afford to.

I don't like writing book reviews when I like the book in question so much that I know my write-up is just gonna amount to an advertisement for it in the end, but I really do think this one needs more attention. It's wonderful.



* His mother was a wyvern and his father was a library.

** Marids are blue-skinned warrior people who live in the sea and have an extremely non-linear sense of time, so that they experience past, present, and future simultaneously. They can grant wishes, but only if defeated in battle. That's in this story, anyway.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Junk, or, the very rough beginning of a story

Selina lived at the edge of the world with her mother. They had a small house made of warped wood, corrugated metal, bits of polished glass in the bright colors of hard candy, cement blocks, Styrofoam, cardboard boxes, stretched and waxed canvas, and swirly brown stone that Selina’s mother cut from the edge of the world, when the edge of the world was being a cliff, herself. It was a strange, motley dwelling, but it kept them warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and it stood solid and strong through even the harshest weather. Selina thought it resembled a huge fish run aground, or a glittering insect clinging to the earth. She loved it because it was her home, and because she could not remember living anywhere else.

The edge of the world was a beautiful, dangerous, peculiar place. It changed its face from day to day. Sometimes it was a cliff of caramel-colored, sandy rock that dropped straight down into the sky, down, down to no further ground that the eye could see. Sometimes it was a soft place where weedy plants and sticky, pale soil faded into a kind of sea, which was not quite water though it hissed and rolled and splashed like it, and which stretched onward and upward into forever. Sometimes it appeared to be a massive wall of silvery fog, which could not be seen through, and which might give slightly beneath the palm of a curious hand, but could not be walked into, would take on the weight and texture of jelly, and then wet cement, forcing any intrepid explorer back out to the patchwork house and the dandelion-studded mud lest she be suffocated. Always, though, odd junk, detritus that was sometimes wonderful and sometimes disturbing, found a way to turn up at the edge of the world, brought in from whatever lay beyond it.

Each morning, Selina’s mother woke as the sky began to pale, put on the goggles and helmet and thick, lumpy coat that made her look as beetlelike as her house, and went out to sift through whatever the nighttime wind and waves and fog had brought them. Some of it she would throw straight back from whence it came with a dismissive shrug of her shoulders, or a shudder and a shake of her wrist once the offending object had left her hand, as though she feared she had been burned or stained by its touch. Some of it she would pick up and examine closely in the growing light of the day, her mouth twisting in thought beneath the large, opaque lenses of the goggles. Eventually, she would either set it aside, gently, or take it home to fix a hole in a wall, or to become a piece of one of her machines. Sometimes Selina followed her mother in her work, in her own, secondhand goggles (which were so outsized that the straps needed to be pinned to her hair for them to stay on) and coat and helmet, but she could never quite understand the process by which her mother determined whether any given object was worthless, dangerous, or potentially useful. Attracted to the oily, rainbow glint of what might have been a piece of broken crockery, were it not for the thin black wires that seemed to sprout like plants from its edges, she might reach out a rubber-gloved hand, only to have it slapped away. “Don’t touch that one, Lina! Dear God!”
“It’s pretty. And besides, it’s only a piece of some bowl, Ma.”
“You have no idea what that is or where it came from, and nothing is ever ‘only’ anything, child. Eeeugh. Just looking at it makes me shudder. Here, I’ll show you: pick it up under the wires, in the middle—careful, don’t jostle it any--- and throw it back into the sea as far and as fast as you can. Yes, that’s right. Like one of those spinning plate toys they sell in the market. Good girl.”

Selina’s mother would often try to explain her methods, and whatever little she knew of the providence of the things she brought home or refused to, but for all that she could make beautiful clockwork birds to sell in the market, birds that could be told from real, living parrots and pigeons only in their tirelessness and in the slight metallic clinks their feathers made when ruffled, for all that she could build a house of trash and castoff pieces at the edge of the world that stood firm and strong, and live in it, miles outside of the City, she was a poor teacher. She became impatient easily, spoke too quickly, used very long words that she seemed to forget that a girl Selina’s age, not even old enough for school yet, couldn’t possibly be expected to know, and hated having to repeat herself. Selina found that the best thing to do during these lectures was to keep pace with her mother as best she could, nod seriously on occasion, and sneak her left hand into the pocket of her coat to feel the cracked, glossy surface of the secret photograph she kept there.

She’d found the photograph lying amidst a tangle of prickly, thin vines on a day, months earlier, when the edge of the world was being something like a dense, dark forest that ran to an impassible, thousand-foot-high hedge of cramped-looking roses and large thorns. It was damaged, but when she picked it up, she could make out the image clearly, for all the white lines and creases running through it, the torn-away bit in its top right corner. She stared at it, surprised and puzzled. The photograph showed her mother, unmistakable with her large, pale eyes, profusion of freckles, grubby coveralls, and dandelion-clock hair. But her mother was laughing, laughing in a way Selina had never, ever seen her laugh, with her neck stretched out, her mouth wide open, and almost all her teeth visible and gleaming. And she was leaning on the arm of a man Selina had never seen before, a tall man with dark hair, dark eyes, a dark suit, and a crooked nose. Except for the nose, he looked quite sophisticated, and out of place next to the rather disheveled woman at his side. He gazed down at her though, and smiled widely, and the expression was so warm that Selina felt a vague twinge of sadness in her stomach. How she wished someone would look at her that way!
Selina didn’t know whether the photograph had come from past the edge of the world (with real people in it, could that happen), or if it was a possession of her mother’s that had been carelessly dropped, lost (but her mother never lost anything unless it was on purpose). She tucked it away in her pocket, though, because she liked it. She wanted to look at the man’s smile and her mother’s laugh until she had them memorized. She decided not to say anything about the picture in case her mother decided it was dangerous and took it away.


(for Sunday Scribblings.)

Thursday, October 15, 2009

whimsical in the brainpan, and apologies for rusty segues

I'm done with my first quarter! Done done done done done! Now I can lie down with my almost-certainly-not-Swine flu and see how long I can hold out without taking an aspirin. I've had a fever since this morning, and possibly since last night, but I didn't really understand what was going on until, right after my philosophy exam, I started shivering uncontrollably despite feeling uncomfortably warm. Up to that point, I'd faintly registered that my joints and throat were stiff and tingly-feeling and hard to shift, that my thinking was fuzzier and my movements more clumsy than they should be, but my reaction was mostly mild annoyance and puzzlement. Sometimes, especially if I'm preoccupied, I get strangely dissociated from my body (that's a pretty Cartesian statement right there). It doesn't quite click that the peculiar sensation that keeps distracting me is hunger, or pain, or physical exhaustion, or a fever. It's weird. Funny and scary both. I'm not a self-punishing person at all, and if I'm fully inhabiting my flesh (again, I need to think of a better way to phrase this) I'll eat if I feel hungry and sleep if I'm tired and pull back from sources of pain and not push myself to work if I'm shaking and seeing things that probably aren't there. It's more that I only vaguely understand that I feel uncomfortable, and can't pinpoint the source or figure out what to do except ignore it, push ahead, and hope it goes away.

I've been having a sick autumn, I think. Maybe it's this school, students bringing in their germs from all over the country, all over the world. Maybe it's just bad luck.


R., the librarian's daughter, turned twelve yesterday. I only learned about it that morning, so I gave her a hastily scribbled-on postcard which displays Victorian-style illustrations of various human eye colors and ascribes to them personality traits, like irises are mood rings or something. (Green= mercurial, gray= mischievous, black= commanding, blue= wise, and so on.) There was a bag of microwave popcorn under my bed. R. likes popcorn. I can take it or leave it. I threw that in, too.

BK-- the librarian-- says that R.'s been expressing a desire for her eyes to turn violet. (They're dark brown/black presently-- she's of Asian descent.) Maybe she can get colored contact lenses someday, but I always think it's a bit sad when girls start feeling insecure about the way they look. Wishing to be taller, thinner, shorter, to have bigger or smaller chests, butts, hips; to have a "better" hair or eye color. (Usually "better" ends up meaning "WASPier." )

In R.'s case, though, I suspect it might be less the creeping, insidious influence of mass-media brainwashing that's made her want different eyes, and more that she's recently read Tamora Pierce's Lioness Quartet and wants to be like Alanna.

(And hey, in most ways that's vastly preferable. Maybe she'll learn to fence.)

(I like that kid.)

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

i know what my ears look like from the back now

Guess what I got today!

Go on, guess! I'll give you a few hints to get you started:



--It's on my head.

-- Six letters.

-- Rhymes with "joehawk."





That's right. A flippin' mohawk. One of a very, very few hairstyles that I'd never had before; I change my hair around an awful lot. I've always liked them, though. Mohawks. They remind me of horses' manes.


I go to a work college, which means, essentially, that students are expected to do menial labor and odd jobs around campus in order to help pay their tuition and "build character." This year, there was such a large influx of new students that the administration had to invent some rather creative new jobs and offices in order to keep everybody "employed." Among these was Haircut Crew. My college now has what amounts to its own barbershop/hairstyling salon, located in what I'm pretty sure used to be a broom closet. But they've got spinning chairs and blowdryers and everything, and the people on Haircut Crew actually are good at cutting hair...and best of all, it's a completely free service. I like free! I don't think I've had anyone besides me cut my hair since I was fourteen or fifteen, so the whole atmosphere, chatting with the girl who was shaving the sides of my head, not having to feel around the back of my own head to make sure everything's even, making the chair go in circles, having mirrors and soft lighting, was kind of novel and exciting. Jessica, who made my mohawk, also took these pictures. Thanks, Jessica!




Directly after getting my haircut, I had to go to the library to write a book report critical reflection for a class. While I was typing, someone somehow managed to stick a blue post-it note right on the corner of the computer screen without my noticing. Your hair looks amazing!
Loopy, girly handwriting, like even the hard consonants are giddily excited, you know the type. It made my evening.

Monday, October 12, 2009

we are on a rescue mission, not stealing from the candy jar, honest

The head librarian's daughter, who's around eleven or twelve, I think, and an assistant librarian and I played pretend today, you know, like kids do. Crawling around on the floor, talking in bad fake British accents, riding the elevator up and down repeatedly, hiding from bad guys in the mop closet. I'd forgotten how much fun that can be. Sometimes I think it's sad that people start feeling too grown-up or too self-conscious to play around like that, just imagination and a couple other people and a willingness to look sort of ridiculous to outsiders, once they get to be teenagers.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

things that go bump in the night

Sometimes I used to,
sleepwalking,
tripping out of bed,
opening windows, pushing screens
from their moorings, letting white moths
come in, and mosquitoes. I'd wake curled
in the closet, the pattern of the rug stung
into the skin of my face, my spine cramped,
my fingers bitten.

Vampires, of course, but only
on purpose, when they want to scare you.
They're too graceful to trip,
and can fly, besides. You have to let them in,
but they can look like bats, or friends, or white moths
so you won't know what they are until it's too late.
And they have hypnotic voices, besides, and mesmerizing
eyes. It's not a rule that can keep you safe.

But vampires
are so trendy these days. They're not scary
like they used to be. They play in punk rock bands.
They worry about their love lives.
They go to fifth period geometry
and doodle human circulatory systems and pierced hearts
in the margins of their black notebooks.
They live in apartments.
They wear silk.
They pour your coffee at diners.
Their fingernails are clean.
Vampires don't mean unbridled,
unrestrained, unapologetic, all-encompassing
hunger
anymore. We have zombies for that, now.
We make new monsters.
I suck the blood from my own fingertips
and I sleep on my back till the windows leak light.



(for Sunday Scribblings.)

Saturday, October 10, 2009

yellow

I remembered that the root was called yellowdock, or yellow dock. I don't know if it's properly one word, or two. The tea looks like piss, but smells kind of earthy and good. Not being able to procure any molasses, I drank it straight. Bitter, yes. Dirt and smoke and unripe fruit. It wasn't terrible, though, once I got used to it. I can't claim to like the taste, but when it's hot, it isn't so noticeable, and bitter is how you know it's good for you, Diana said. I'm going to take it for a few days and see if I feel more ironic. I mean, unanemic. I mean, any different in my veins and arteries, in my heart. Whatever.

* * * * * *

And I love bonfires more than most things, even the way their smoke and ash blows towards me and stings my eyes. I will sit around them and listen to other people prattle for a lot longer than I normally would, just watching the yellow and orange flames flicker and stretch themselves and sway, the logs crumbling slowly as they grow skinnier and more charred. Other people's conversations can be really interesting, but an awful lot of them seem to involve complaining about or making fun of people who aren't present, and sometimes that gets wearing and sad. And it's one of those spheres where I feel like I'm missing this big piece of Norms and Values Protocol, like pages 51 through 73 in my How To Be An Ordinary Human manual were replaced with random sections from a Japanese comic book and grainy photographs of spider monkeys as the result of a metaphysical printing error. I don't understand why refusing to drink alcohol automatically makes someone boring and unfun, or how to tell the difference between people who are Really Weird, For Real, But In A Cool Way, You Know and people who are only Pretending To Be Really Quirky, And, Like, Doing All This Weird Shit, But It's Just To Get Attention And Make Everyone Think They're Interesting and people who are simply Creepy, or Insane, or Freaks (pejorative), or Freaks (admiring). In the second category, I'm not sure I'd consider smoking a pipe ostentatiously eccentric, especially not at the hippie/geek/angry anarchist/ragamuffin/rummage sale reject/punk/oddball-filled college I attend. But apparently, I don't understand these things. Still, I love bonfires more than most things, stretching my hands out till they become silhouettes against the glow and the talk and laughter of the other girls fills the dark like fireflies emerging from the throat of a sleeping bird.

Friday, October 9, 2009

two things and a theory

Planting tiny cabbage seedlings at the Black Mountain Community Garden today, I realized that my depth perception was off and my reflexes were a lot slower than normal and every time I stood up quickly, I'd black out for a few seconds, fainting on my feet. Or there'd be little colored dots obstructing my field of vision, and I'd feel myself start to tilt towards the soil, lightheaded and nauseated. It was similar to the physical effects of doing physical labor while severely sleep-deprived, or dehydrated, or when you haven't eaten in a day or so. However, I'd had both breakfast and lunch, plenty of water, and seven hours of sleep the night before. I'd felt okay for most of the day, and I'm not recuperating from an illness or anything. It was really puzzling and scary, and eventually I felt so bad (and concerned that the probability of my doing a faceplant directly on top of the baby cabbages was steadily increasing) that I went to Diana, who helps run the garden and was kind-of in charge, and told her I had to sit down for a while. She was very understanding about it, asked me what was wrong, was I sick, and I told her about the dizziness and disorientation and nausea. She hmmmed a bit, then said it sounded like I might have an iron deficiency.

I then remembered going to donate blood a few months back and being rejected because the preliminary blood test showed I was mildly anemic. Since I felt fine, and hey, the nurse said "mildly," I decided to ignore it. If I had anemia, it clearly wasn't having much of an impact on my health, so why make a fuss? I made a half-assed resolution to eat more raisins, went home, and promptly forgot.

Obviously, without a blood test, I can't know for sure whether I'm (still) anemic or not. But Diana dug up this root for me, this yellow root, I forget the name, and she said it's very iron rich, that if I put it in boiling water, let it steep overnight, mix the result with molasses (also iron rich, and apparently the flavor of the root is pretty terrible and needs to be disguised by something sweeter if it's to be at all palatable) and take a few spoonfuls every day, I ought to feel a lot better very quickly. I don't know whether I can get molasses, but I'm going to try steeping the root tonight. I'll let you know if it works.

For the time being, I still feel strangely woozy, though not like I'm about to pass out on the keyboard, thank god.

The garden was ridiculously lovely, though. Here in North Carolina, early October is still more late summer than fall, it seems. There's gold-green light coming through the trees in translucent columns and sparkling off the river. The grass is still alive and springy, the sky a flat blue with big fluffy cumulus scattered around it like dropped marshmallows. There were a few leaves starting to come down in the garden, and it seemed like they would all drop together in big clumps, which little breezes would swirl in to pick apart and scatter, sending leaves floating slowly through the air in ethereal drifts, waltzing soundlessly. It was like standing inside a painting. Monarch butterflies wending their way through. Mountains in the distance, older than any in the world. You forget places like that exist in real life.

Big, hard green walnuts were also falling from the trees today, though. Sometimes they'd hit me on the head or between the shoulders, and that was decidedly less pleasant. (Actually, it really hurt. I cussed the tree out every time it happened.)

* * * * * *

I spent a lot of the afternoon trying to submit poetry to the student literary magazine, Peal. Today is the last day they'll accept it. I had copies of the three poems I wanted to give them neatly formatted and typed up and paperclipped together, and I went to the Peal office to hand them to the editors in person, for reasons. They told me I had to submit by e-mail. I said I was sorry, I hadn't known, but since I was here now and I'd obeyed all the rules about presentation and formatting otherwise, couldn't I just give them the poems I was holding? Nope, they said. It has to be e-mail. No exceptions.

They were kind of snickering at me behind their hands, partly because I have this unfortunate nervous tic of fidgeting around like someone put squirrels in my pants, contorting my mouth weirdly while I'm at it.

I walked away feeling more hurt than the situation warrented, imagining myself as Miranda July's character in Me & You & Everyone We Know. There's a scene where she tries to give a videotape of her performance art to the snooty director of a local museum on an elevator, and is rebuffed. "Send it in the mail like everyone else."
"But I'm so close!" she protests, holding the tape out with both hands.

* * * * * *

My Theory Of Peanut Butter is this: Everything tastes good with peanut butter. Everything. Period. Pizza? Tastes good with peanut butter. Chalky chocolate sandwich cookies with preservativey, partially hydrogynated corn starchy, bright white filling? Taste good with peanut butter. Tacos? It probably depends a little bit on the individual taco, but in my experience, they taste good with peanut butter. Pasta? Pad Thai with peanut sauce. Tastes good with peanut butter. Strawberry yogurt? Tastes really good with peanut butter. Avocados, pears, grilled cheese sandwiches, breakfast cereal, ice cream, tofu, pesto, coffee, potato chips? They all taste good with peanut butter.

You know I'm right.

(Unless you have a peanut allergy.)

Thursday, October 8, 2009

tiny bites of seawater (kind of a memoir)

This is an essay I wrote for the Creative Nonfiction Writing class I'm taking. I haven't gotten my final draft back yet, but I worked hard on it, and I'm rather proud of the end result.

It took me a long time to get the hang of revising things I'd written, but I think it's finally starting to be something I can do effectively (and even, in some cases, enjoy, if in a slightly self-flagellating & masochistic way).




Ten Fragments From a Kaleidoscope of the Atlantic





Look

I must’ve seen it for the first time, once. There always has to be a first time. My family has never lived near any beach, but we went to visit the Atlantic on the east coast of North Carolina every summer for years and years. We’d rent a little beach house with my dad’s sisters and their kids, all my younger cousins, and run barefoot between the sand and the street for a week. How old was I when I saw the ocean up close for the first time, heard sea sounds, felt the salt and the sand and the back-and-forth pull of the water on my feet? I must’ve been very young, because I don’t remember. I can’t remember having never seen the sea before. It feels like something I’ve had in my head for as long as there’s been a me to hold it there.


Listen

I’m not a person who likes loud noises, on the whole, but I’ve always loved the crash of waves. The steady, grainy sound of the tide coming in to meet the shore, hitting it hard, and rolling gracefully away.
Hissss-boom. Like a rainstick being swirled. Like a drum. But really, there is not much that’s like it, not wind or thunder, not the sound inside a shell when one put it to one’s ear. The sound of the sea is the sound of the sea. Once, I was given an alarm clock that claimed not to ring or buzz or beep sleepers awake, but to usher in the morning with the noise of waves falling down on a beach. It wasn’t the same at all. It was like being woken up every day by television static, amplified in volume to almost intolerable levels.


Drifting

There’s a space between dreaming and the harsh alarm where I drift some mornings. It’s
watery there, or maybe womblike. I rock and float behind my eyes, in the dark. There’s a tide that sweeps me forward towards full consciousness, the weight of my limbs and my
waking and my senses of self and linear time, then pulls me back into the low susurrus of unconnected sounds and images that float into the in-between space from my
subconscious, then resubmerge. Back, forth. Back, forth. It’s gentle.

The sea is not always gentle, but it can be so.

I would run to the water, laughing, even before I could really swim, even when I was still afraid of the deep end of the pool, of having to jump off the diving board in physical education. I would splash past the foam, heedless of the cold and the sting of salt in small cuts. I’d let the sea lick my calves, knees, navel, waist, armpits. When it swelled, I’d jump so as not to swallow the gritty salt water, kicking my feet like a bird. When a wave was big, towering above me, about to fall, I’d hold my breath and take myself under, as close to bottom as I could get, eyes squeezed shut against the sand. Sand in my suit, in my hair. I’d shoot back up with a gasp when I felt the wave rumble over me and away towards shore. Sometimes, though, I’d try to ride them, to body surf, an endeavor which usually resulted in me falling head over tail, seawater up my nose, bruised ribs, coming to a graceless, tangled halt back on the beach and unknotting myself shakily, laughing.

Sometimes I’d just float, when the sea was calmish,, half on my back, legs dangling like bait. I’d close my eyes and imagine the dark blue water stretching away past all the corners of the map, myself tiny in it, tinier than tiny, not even a speck. I’d open my eyes and watch the big white clouds and the small black silhouettes of pelicans drift across the sky, and I’d drift too, with the sun on my skin, daydreaming of whales and sailing ships. I’d drift and drift and drift, letting the current carry me like its own daughter.


Salvage

I had to be pulled back by a lifeguard more than once. I’d go out too far without
realizing it, or they’d see that I was thrashing in a wave, or lying motionless and being carried outward, and they’d assume: drowning. It never occurred to me that I might drown. Never occurs, I suppose I should say. The last time this happened, I was eighteen. Hands on my shoulders,
what do you think you’re doing? Come back to shore, now.


Mutability

Cruel and kind. Green and gray. Sometimes the ocean looks dark blue, sometimes
obsidian, sometimes the color of an empty beer bottle held up against a light. Sometimes, from far off, at sunrise or sunset, it seems silver, like a huge wash of glinting tinfoil undulating into the distance. Sometimes it seems still and smooth and flat. A sky below the sky. A floor or a ceiling. Floor for the birds, maybe. Ceiling for fish. Sometimes it thrashes and roars, chops and curls, rages, rages. It can turn on a dime, change in an instant, and even in relatively calm water a riptide could tug you under, fill you up with salt and brine and sand, stop your breath, break your legs. It happens. The sea is powerful. You can’t go thinking that you are its master, that it is your friend.


Weather

But. I am a foolhardy girl. Always have been. I tend to lose myself in things. I lose
myself best in water. One of my fondest, most vivid memories goes like this: it’s early
summer and I’m sixteen. I’m camping on Assateague Island with a church youth group,
which I attend largely because it means I get to do things like go camping on Assateague Island. We have seen wild horses run across the beach in strong-legged herds, feral in their knotted manes and wide eyes. We have at least tried to cook hot dogs over an open fire. We have sung slightly drippy, Simon and Garfunkel-esque songs about Jesus’ great and miraculous love for us and bowed our heads over our charred wieners. We’ve gone swimming. Only a few of the most appearance-concerned teenage girls are bothering to shower or shave. We have the whole Atlantic to keep us clean! It’s been sunny, till today. This morning we woke up to a slate colored sky, slate colored sea. As above, so below. It’s still hot and muggy, though, and it’s stayed like that all through the afternoon as the clouds up above have gathered and darkened until they seemed to sag towards us like sacks of pennies, or peer down like stern magistrates. I’m sitting crosslegged on a picnic table under that sky, my hair coarse and standing up in all directions from five days of much salt and no soap. I’m talking to an older boy in my group, an older girl, and the boy says something that makes us both laugh. I don’t remember what. It isn’t important. I remember the other girl’s pale throat stretched back, her pale teeth parted as though to catch the rain that suddenly dropped from those clouds in sheets and sheets and sheets, drenching us all in an instant. Cooling our skin. Thunder ba-roomed so loudly I honestly thought I’d lost my hearing for a moment after. It smelled of sea, that fishy, salty scent, and it smelled like clean water, like fresh rain, grassish, and it smelled like copper and ozone. Thunderstorm smell. If that were a perfume, if somebody stuck that in a little glass bottle with a fan-shaped lid, I might just swipe it behind my ears.

The good part starts here:

It’s raining. It’s thundering. People are yelping and whooping and running for tents and vans. Joel, the pastor, is trying restore calm and order, get everybody inside—inside something—but even his strong voice is drowned out by everything else. I lift my arms. I stand up on the picnic table and spin around. I shout into the thunder, trying to sync it with my lost voice, my open mouth. I am having the time of my goddamn life. It’s beautiful, wild, unapologetically inhospitable weather. I can hear the sea getting riled up, singing with the storm.

And then the lightning makes its debut.

My god.

I cannot describe this lightning to anyone who wasn’t there. You’ll think I’m
exaggerating. You’ll think I’m rhapsodizing in some hippy-dippy ambiguously stoned
way. You’ll think I’m using poetic license. No, I tell you, and no, and no. This is how it
was.

It was all colors. One flash would be green, the next a streaky purple-red. They filled the air, if only for a few seconds, lit everything up brighter than could be bourne. You had to close your eyes after a moment. They branched into skinny, twisting columns in the sky where you could see the shape of them, these lightning bolts. They ran above our heads in shaky, sparkling waves, incredibly fast, but detailed all the same. Their passage seemed to open up time and expand it. They burned themselves into the dark of our brains, or at least, of my brain. This lightning still comes down in my dreams sometimes. It went on, and on, and on, and the thunder followed it and heralded it and followed, and I stood there, I don’t remember how I was standing or how I was moving or what my face was doing with itself. I just remember the sympathetic swell of electrical feeling in my lungs and legs and shoulderblades, the joy in this cacophony and tumult, like I could be lifted off the ground, like I could be fried to a cinder or carried off and dashed against the rocks at the other end of the beach or drowned by rain at any time, any time at all, and it would not matter. It wasn’t quite a nihilistic feeling. It was more that, as long as the storm filled my heart and head, I was the same as all nature. It did not matter what became of the shock-haired bipedal mammal on the flimsy wooden table below. It did not matter. I never wanted it to end.

I told this story to the first man who ever fucked me. “Oh,” he said, nodding, “so you like to be overpowered, huh? You get off on it?”

Talk about missing the point. The weather is not a man or a woman, though maybe
teenage girls of a certain temperament can temporarily lose their minds in empathy with
it.


Ice Cream

There were twee little cottages and surfshops, sure, but once we’d crossed the dunes to
the beach, there was just beach. Us, seagulls, sand, sea, scattered sunbathers with pasty bottoms or weird tattoos or screaming toddlers. And the one, tiny ice cream stand at the end of the old pier. We’d pester our parents till they gave us quarters, then sprint over to order our red-white-and-blue rocket pops, our ice cream sandwiches, our Creamsicles, our Klondike bars. My siblings, my cousins, me. We’d run back over the seashells, ice cream in our hands, on our mouths, melting fast. If we dropped it, well, the grit just added some needed texture.

It was nice, having that one ice cream stand. When I was ten or eleven, I went to a beach with a real boardwalk for the first time and I was horrified. There was so much noise, so many carnival lights, all these people meandering around, throwing trash on the sand, in the tidepools, munching unidentifiably fried things, utterly unawed by the ocean stretching into forever before them. Beside them. It seemed obscene. I temporarily lost my appetite for rocket pops.


Below

You should be awed. Water covers most of this planet, and the oceans are deep, deeper
than you can really imagine. Deeper than the distance from your airplane window to the
patchwork of farmland stretched out beneath you. They are populated, those depths. It is not just a dark susurrus. Slow, singing whales, distant, behemoth cousins to goats and deer navigate their wet roads. A blue whale is so large that it would be possible for an average-sized human being to swim through parts of its circulatory system. There are cuttlefish, signaling to one another with beautiful bioluminescent light displays rippling up and down their skins. There are ecosystems that don’t depend on the light of the sun. Squids bigger than busses, animals that have grown to meet the challenge posed by the immensity of the space they inhabit. Scientists are unsure of all that lives in the sea. Creatures appear briefly in the lights of submarines, huge and bizarre, then vanish into the cold black water, never to be seen again. It’s like an alien planet. More is known about the surface of our moon.


Beginning

Life came from the sea, as we all know. Bluegreen bacteria discovered photosynthesis in
the salty waters of early Earth. Fish were swimming millions of years before anything
with a backbone crawled up on the ground and breathed in air. At one time, oceans
covered even more of the planet than they do now. Today, we find fossilized seashells in Appalachia. In a sense, we’re all the sons and daughters of the water. Trace the long lines of anyone’s ancestry back far enough, and you will discover a thing with gills and fins.

In many creation myths, the sea existed before anything else. Sun and moon must be
caught in a fishing net and dragged into the sky in these stories. The land must be built up upon a turtle’s back. A floating goddess cracks an egg into the infinite ocean, and the yolk becomes the world.



End

Other stories, other myths, the sea is what rises up to drown the world, to purge it, when gods grow displeased with what they’ve fished up from the deep. Floods and tsunamis— there’s the great deluge of the Old Testament, of course, and similar stories are recounted in Hindu mythology and in the ancient Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. The ancient Mayans believed that our world was preceded by four others, each of which was ultimately destroyed by a natural disaster to make room for the next. One was covered by the sea, in the end, and one was drowned by ceaseless rain.

So many ancient maps show the sea circling the world, spreading from the known
landmasses outward to an edge, and perhaps beyond that. Who could have guessed where
it ended, or lapped itself, came around in a circle?

The Celtic peoples of Ireland once believed that the island of the gods and the blessed
dead lay on the other side of the Atlantic. I have stood on the cliffs of Moher, lain in the yellow flowers and trampled earth at the unguarded edge and looked down, looked out. I could see how the view before me might seem to be that crossing, that last road that can only be sailed in one direction and goes until the end of all things.

The sea is big. The sea is deep. The sea is wild, and awful, and majestic, and mysterious. It’s hard to believe that we, we puny little human beings, could ever have any real effect on it, could ever poison it or clog it with garbage, kill too many fish, kill too many whales, kill too many anything, shift its currents, which tug our boats and our bodies along so easily.

The island of the gods and the blessed dead turned out to be America, and my living,
mortal, not exceptionally virtuous or fortunate ancestors sailed there hundreds of years after their ancestors had forsaken that old religion in favor of one which points upwards to indicate the spatial orientation of heaven, in the sky with the clouds and stars.

And much later, a slight, freckled little girl opened her young eyes at Atlantic Ocean for the first time, from the other side, and fell in love. She did not conceive of the world as a round blue thing floating in the vasty emptiness of space yet, did not know that there was no heaven. The water was bright and a few shades darker than the sky and it seemed to go on and on forever. The air was full of wings and the crying of gulls.

Sometimes, lying on my back with the water on my skin and in my ears, I think it would
be a fine thing to float away as though I had sails, just to keep on going and going, not dying, exactly, but allowing myself to be carried off the edge of the known world, to a place no cartographer can describe. Yes. If it were possible, that would make a fine and fitting end.

Monday, October 5, 2009

naked for strangers

Eva has a post-apocalyptic steampunk spork. It used to be a normal spoon, but somebody, a guy she knows, she says, cut four little tines into the end and clumsily welded the handle to a thick screw to add length. The screw, in turn, is welded to a metal carabiner, like the kind mountain climbers use to attach themselves to their safety lines. Eva can attach her spork to her belt loops, if she wants. She uses it to eat takeout on the bus. It looks heavy and deep gray and serious, though, the metal of the screw and carabiner scratched and pitted, a thing that could double as a weapon if its owner were inclined to use it as such.

* * * * * * *

Walking with Freesia, later, and she asks me how it was that we first met. "You invited me to go skinny-dipping with you," I remind her.

"Oh yeah," she says. "You were just walking along all alone, and a bunch of us were heading down to the river. I'm glad it's that. That's a good story."

We walk a little more.

"I just realized," I say, after a minute or two, "that every person I have ever seen completely nude, I have seen nude within twenty-four hours of our first meeting." This is true.

"Maybe it's easier to be naked for strangers."

* * * * * * *

And Freesia and I have a theory. Or rather, I'd been mulling over certain concepts in a confused and hazy way, and talking with Freesia, listening to some of her thoughts, helped bring them into focus and cohere into something I can put down in words. Basically, it begins with the fact that I have noticed that most of the people I know who are unusually intelligent in one way or another also have some type of psychiatric disability or autism spectrum disorder or have no official diagnosis of anything but are noticeably more neurotic and eccentric than most of the people around them. This correlation does not seem to be just a random coincidence among my own acquaintances. Other people, both psychologists and neurologists conducting actual scientific studies and individuals who are not involved in any sort of brain-related study making casual observations, have observed the same thing. Since there are obviously mad people and autistic people and otherwise not-neurotypical people who aren't very bright, and since there are obviously some very bright people who are emotionally and mentally stable and not even especially quirky, I don't think it's likely that either factor causes the other. I think there might be some unknown third factor that causes both. I think people who are exposed to this other factor (or factors, plural, I suppose is more likely) develop a hyper-attunedness to the world. To senses. To emotions. To information. To everything a human being is exposed to on a daily basis. Such people, perceptive and sensitive, are obviously more likely to become very knowledgable, or very wise, or very skilled in some discipline or another. Such people are also, especially in the fast-paced, stuff-saturated, atrocity-filled modern world, more prone to break down or crack or keep going but in a rattley, off-kilter, she-could-blow-at-any-minute sort of way. They can't live day to day with the level of awareness they've got, screening nothing out, turned on at every minute. They must devise coping methods, ways of temporarily blocking some of that hyperawareness, or of whittling the world they exist in down to a size and shape in which hyperawareness is no longer a major problem.

Anyone who has this type of mind and who has survived through puberty has, I think, developed a coping method. No exceptions.

The coping methods fall into two basic categories. The first contains all those methods which seek to drown one's own thoughts and feelings and sense of individual self, making the world bearable to live in because there is not enough person to feel lost in it, or overwhelmed by it. The second contains all those methods which seek to shut most of the world out, leaving one with one's own mind and a small piece to contemplate and learn that won't hurt too much to understand. I'd say most people don't use methods from one category or the other exclusively, especially not over the course of their entire lives. Someone might use mostly first-category methods as a teenager and young adult and gradually come to favor second-category methods as she grows older, for instance. I do think that most people lean towards one or the other, though, maybe depending on whether they're more of an extrovert or more of an introvert. Whether they are more afraid of having to be alone with their racing thoughts or of being crushed and swallowed, inhabited and destroyed, by all the rest of creation, which is so very big.

Some of the coping methods (from both categories) are, ultimately, tragic and self-destructive. Others (from both categories) are actually pretty beneficial, and allow their users to channel their hyperawareness into something good and worthy of that great attention, or at least something harmless and safe. There's a broad spectrum. For example, self-destructive first category methods might include drug addiction, alcoholism, having a long string of passionate but severely dysfunctional romantic relationships. Okay ones might include becoming deeply involved in some kind of political activism or ideaology, or becoming a devout member of a particular religion. (I'm assuming a retention of some open-mindedness and a basic lack of zealotry when I call these things "okay" here.)

Becoming a hikikomori or one of those guys who die embroiled in online role-playing games because they forget to stop long enough to eat or sleep would be a self-destructive second category behavior, while becoming a highly dedicated, perfectionistic, moderately reclusive writer or mathematician or painter or electrical engineer would be okay. Perhaps not ideal, but it's worked out well for a lot of people, and whose life is ideal, anyway?

It's getting kind of late for me, and I'm not sure, looking back, that I expressed that quite as well as I wanted. Those are the bones of it, though, this theory that Freesia and I talked over as we walked around the farm at dusk.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

inaugural (the champagne post of little substance)

Hello!

I'm something of a compulsive writer.

This will be the spot on the internet where I keep the thoughts I feel like keeping on the internet. For now, at least. The title comes from a Chinese poem about loneliness, by someone named Li Ch'ing-Chao. I really only know about it because it was quoted (or a translation was quoted, obviously) in a Craig Thompson comic. But I thought it was a lovely poem. So.

I'm alone a lot, but not generally a very lonely person. Most of the time it doesn't occur to me that maybe I should be.

I had a different blog as a teenager, on a different site, kept it up for four years, but I'm twenty now, and I live eleven hours away from my parents by car most of the year, and I don't try to wear makeup much anymore, and I know I don't like smoking from experience rather than from assumption. It's time for a change.

It's time for a change.

If you are reading this, good evening. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good night. Hello, hello, hello. However did you find me here, and what's your name?