Month: November 2019

“Not The First Dead Thing I Kept In My Freezer” … Overheard At The Coffee Shop

“Not The First Dead Thing I Kept In My Freezer” … Overheard At The Coffee Shop

A cozy corner, a cup of coffee, time to think deep thoughts. The clack of my computer keys is often an effective barrier, preventing strangers from intruding on the hatching of the whimsical notions I ply as my stock in trade. “I’m working here,” my posture shouts. “No time for idle conversations.” Clack, clack.

And yet, from the table directly next to mine, the words penetrate even the most resolute defenses. “… not the first dead thing I’ve kept in my freezer.”

The choice now is mine. Take a deep breath, store the overheard confession in the discarded conversations storehouse with thousands of other unwelcomed thoughts, or drop my guard, pretend to be cleaning the screen of the computer, and indulge in the guilty pleasure of purposefully eavesdropping.

I lean back in my chair, a writer stretching, nothing out of the ordinary, certainly not arching closer to the voice to my left. I extend my arms, strike the about to yawn pose, fold myself as one might in yawning extravagently and slide just an inch or two closer in time to hear the unexpected.

“I jammed him in while he was still warm. So devastating. Only fourteen. But beautiful in his own sweet way, right until his last shriek.”

OK, Jimmy Hoffa, D.B. Cooper, Amelia Earhart. Who, exactly, looked sweetly hot until the screaming ended? Fourteen? Fourteen? The mind goes where the mind goes. Jeffrey Dahmer’s fridge. Uneaten fortune cookies. Oh God!

The thoughtful reader will note that there has been no mention of intervening phone calls or cries for help. “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?” “Well, I can’t tell for sure, but I think the lady at the next table stuffed a dead fourteen year old in her freezer. Not the first time, either.”

But then, second thought. Not the first time for this body, or not the first time for any number of bodies? What are we looking at here? Casual, first timer in the freezer game or serial freezer feeder?

The perp at the next table continued.

“My last cockatiel made it to sixteen. Henry was more fit, a healthy bird. I hold myself accountable. I should not have over done the treats. That was all about me. Me. Not Henry. Henry needed leafy greens and fruit, and I was tossing coffee toffee in the cage. He liked it. Ate it anyway. Seemed fine. Then dead.”

The world just became slightly less grim. No children were frozen in the making of this conversation. I hunched back over my own table, ready to take up my endlessly amusing attempt to turn 1960’s brainless TV shows into Broadway musicals. Diverting as heck but apparently not of interest to anyone else. Hogan’s Heroes, The Musical? Come on, who doesn’t want to hear Sergeant Schultz warble, “I know Nussing” as the plucky prisoners prepare a drag act for the compound’s talent show?

Work. Work. And yet.

OK, cockatiel, but not the first? And why the freezer? Need time to prepare a formal farewell? Out-of-town relatives flying in for a service? Relatives of yours? Of his? Taxidermy an option? Is freezing the way to go if stuffing an old and beloved friend? So many questions, none of which were answered. Off they went on some other tangent. Saving the planet, whatever, blah, blah, blah.

I’m looking at my screen. Trying to come up with a musical number for Arnold Ziffer, a pig, the most sentient of the life forms appearing on Green Acres. Arnold first appeared on Petticoat Junction, the show that introduced Hooterville, a show which was, itself, spawned from an earlier laugh riot about country folk, The Beverly Hillbillies. Arnold is a wunderpig; he makes Wilbur, Charlotte the Spider’s porcine pal, look like the even-toed ungulate that he was. Compared to Arnold, Wilbur was lunchmeat on the hoof. The gag on Green Acres is that the whole town responds to Arnold as though he is an actual human child of Fred and Doris Ziffel, an academic standout who watches Walter Chronkite to keep up with current events and whose work as a painter if the school of abstract expressionism has won him the title of Porky Picasso.

Thus the dilemma. There’s no fun to be had in exaggerating Arnold’s absurdity; it’s already over the top. It was that sudden opening in the fabric of the universe – nothing to write – that brought a curious memory to mind.

I’m very fond of guinea pigs; we had one or more for years, until the pain of grieving the latest loss became too great, and we went without. All of the guinea pigs were named after islands – Samoa, Fiji, Java Lava, etc. I can’t remember which of them died as we were in the act of moving from Detroit to Connecticut, a horrific tale of misplaced ambition to be told elsewhere. The movers were an ad hoc lot; they forgot to move our bedroom, for example. Suffice it to say, the moving was not going well, and then we discovered that we had lost a dear pet and friend.

The truck is rolling. What to do?

We packed a shoe box with newspapers and gently place the departed in a comfy nest of papers, a nest he/she would have liked had he/she been capable of being alive.

Moving is hell. Boxes stand unopened for weeks, months on end. In this case, the shoe box was relegated to a side porch outside our new home, stacked on other boxes we knew we had to get to quickly. Somewhere in the first afternoon a new neighbor stopped by, not to meet and greet, but to snoop through our things, get a sense of who we were by hefting the things we owned. His thoughtfully designed plan went south when he opened the shoe box on top of the pile.

I’m pretty sure it was curiosity rather than responsibility that brought him to our front door. He stood, puzzled, shoe box in hand, and said, “Did you know there’s a dead animal in here?”

We did, but understanding in an instant that this shared reality could not have happened without some rifling of our boxes, we nodded, took the box, and asked, “You didn’t open the big box on the bottom, did you?

Farewell, blithe cockatiel. Here’s hoping a stranger sneaks into the freezer looking for ice cream.

Medically Proven Cure For Writer’s Block

Medically Proven Cure For Writer’s Block

Summers in Santa Barbara are or have been blissfully mild, allowing every sort of diversion or recreation.  I spent two as a Teaching Fellow at the South Coast Writing Project working with teachers who hoped to teach writing.  The Director, Sheridan Blau, brought in a host of writers, some nationally celebrated, some academic, some amateur, all of whom described the processes by which they got words on the page.  He’d build on their comments, set the class a set of assignments and wait for the inevitable throat clearing and, yes, dare I say, whining. “Why is this like opening a vein?” Sheridan inevitably barked.  The bark was delivered frequently enough that the class pitched in for a t shirt emblazoning the phrase surrounded by blood spatter.

Fetching.

So, Writer’s Block.  It’s a real thing. I’ve seen it for years and have had an occasional bout of blockage myself.  Over many, many years of reading the work that came from blocked imaginations, I devised and borrowed assignments that were intended to liberate the writer.  My colleagues may have insisted on quality; I wanted fluency. Revision is a separate and exceedingly helpful skill, but one that can only follow fluency. There has to be something to revise.  I won’t trot out every stratagem in one tip sheet, but I will explain one of the most effective and provide live footage (on paper) of a writer galloping down the path I suggest.

Borrowing from those who compose music, I’ve called this, “Writing In The Key Of And…” , by which I mean asking the writer to summon up a memory of any sort, any subject as long as there is some immediacy to it, then describe the event without using any punctuation – no capitalization,no pauses, ellipses, periods, question marks.  Nada. However, every separate thought or description has to be introduced by the word “and”. There’s some resistance at the outset, and many questions, but then the magic often happens.

There is something about a headlong rush through the describing of a moment that can bring breathless urgency to a piece.  Part of the process is that it shoves together the essential and the transitory, the observed and the imagined, self-reflection and the emotion of the moment.  I say, “Throw attentive self-editing to the winds. No room for doubt. Keep the pace. Go wherever your mind takes you. Then let’s see what you’ve got.”

My car’s battery died last week.  Not a particularly notable event. As it must to all batteries, last week death came to mine.  Here’s my Key of And:

“What the hell the car is just not working and lights are flashing and then not flashing and then nothing at all and I am supposed to be going to volunteer at the Hospice Boutique and I like volunteering and I hate being late and I hate ditching even more and I have ditched many many too many things in the course of my life and what the hell is the course of my life and is it a course as in path or is a course as in academic course and that’s exactly the sort of question that serves absolutely no purpose and the expression that comes to mind is tits on a bull and that is a vile expression and how do I get things out of my head that I do not want in my head and songs are among those things and I have a song in my head literally around the clock and I don’t know actually if I do when I sleep and I do know it’s there when I wake up and many of them are from God knows where or when and that put the song who knows where or when in my head and that’s not one I want in my head and I have to do a quick recasting of songs and I’m trying as hard as I can and come with que sera sera and that’s not much better in terms of existential panic and I do like the tune though and I can keep that on in the background and think about other things and one of those things is death and dying and that’s two things and maybe one after all and I won’t know until I know and that’s if I know and what am I doing spilling my guts here and where am I supposed to spill my guts and I wish I had a guru or master who welcomed gut spill and I actually really don’t want a guru or master foraging through my guts and I have to get out of this assignment and this will be the end.”

Cautionary note.  I am remembering how hard it is to return to a crafted sentence after having enjoyed the literary wind in my hair, and, of course, I am tempted to go off on a riff about my hair or lack thereof.  So there are some issues with fluency that will need attention. On the other hand, I am reading Anna Burns Milkman, a book that won the Mann Booker Prize and one that I find fascinating.  It’s not quite written in the key advertised above, but there are moments that come close.

From page 200, randomly selected:

“ ‘It’s creepy, perverse, obstinately determined’ went on longest friend, she said, ‘It’s not as if , friend,’ she said, ‘glancing at some newspaper as this were a case of a person glancing at some newspaper, as they’re walking along to get the latest headlines or something.  It’s the way you do it- reading books, whole books, taking notes, checking footnotes, underlining passages as if you’re at some desk or something, in a little private study or something, the curtains closed, your lamp on, a cup of tea beside you, essays being penned – your discourses, your lubrications.  It’s disturbing. It’s deviant. It’s optical illusion. Not public spirited. Not self-preservation. Calls attention to itself and why – with enemies at the door, with the community under siege, with us all having to pull together – would anyone want to call attention to themselves here’.  

Why indeed?

Some readers will have arrived at this point having read both passages, and some may come away with an appreciation of fluency as an end itself.  Others, not so much. All I can offer at the end of this exercise is that no veins were opened in the making of this essay.

I’m done, and it is probably not necessary to say that the last bit in the last sentence sent me to the exculpatory note at the end of movies in which no animals, they say, have been harmed, and from there …