Category: Ink Spatterings

A Meeting of the Mind 2

· Leave a comment ·

Sequels Are Always Better Than the Original, Right?

ME: Good morning, Every Part of My Brain. Welcome to this second and highly improbable gathering of the committee. Let’s welcome Dragon to the team. He gnaws on my free time like chicken bones.

DRAGON: Cease! There’s no time for kissing up.

ME: We’re going to skip the icebreakers. We all know each other, as last month’s axe-throwing social made painfully clear.

(cheers erupt as Hype Man roars and grinningly points to a massive scar on his forehead. )

ME: Here are the minutes from the last meeting, which I’ve canonized as “classic literature.”

CRITIC: So it’s achieved the distinguished state of being largely unread?

HYPE MAN: YEAH! Minutes! The sizzle reel!

ME: Right. Brilliant. Perfect start. (clears throat) Time is like a soufflé: delicate, prone to collapse, and –

DRAGON: – guarded by me.

MONKEY BRAIN: I call this meeting to chaos! All in favor?

ME: Hands down. FYI, this meeting was pushed to the 3rd quarter because –

MARKETER: – because I double-booked us with a webinar on “Optimizing Your Creative Brand in Twelve Excruciating but Photogenic Steps.”

DRAGON: (snorts a puff of smoke like an offended kettle) Pathetic.

ME: Next, Old Business.

ARCHIVIST: Every Business eventually turns into Old Business.

DREAMER: New Business is just Old Business we haven’t met yet.

CRITIC: Our Old Business hangs around like a bad smell, because none of you actually take care of anything. Except, you, Me.

(MONKEY BRAIN flings unwrapped Tootsie Rolls at everyone. Snacking ensues.)

ME: (bangs gavel) Yes, very good. Moving on. I’d like to discuss role consolidation. I propose merging Critic, Worrier, and Self-Doubter into one tidy Efficiency Pod.

CRITIC: Absolutely not.

SELF-DOUBTER: I don’t think I’m pod material.

WORRIER: I’m not pod-shaped.

ME: Fine. Separate disasters you shall remain. Please fill out your timecards accordingly.

DRAGON: You people waste time like it’s your job.

ME: Can we please talk about writing?

Archivist: Ah. The novel. How goes it?

CRITIC: Probably like an axe to the skull, right, Hype Man?

HYPE MAN: Uncool, but still, high-five!

ME: It, I am happy to say, goes well.

DREAMER: (rolling in a corkboard) I took the liberty of creating a Vision Board of our progress. Behold: a vaping dolphin, a typewriter made of ice cream, and Keanu Reeves in velvet singing Elizabethan madrigals.

ME: What on earth?

CRITIC: That’s not a vision board. That’s a cry for help.

HYPE MAN: Love it! Everyone should vape out of their blowhole!

MONKEY: BLOWHOLE

WORRIER: Is Keanu singing madrigals, or is it the velvet jacket?

ARCHIVIST: Actually, that’s corduroy, not velvet.

ME: Let’s all stop –

WORRIER: Stop writing?

ME: What? No!

DREAMER: Taking a rest stop on the cosmic highway!

ME: No rest –

CRITIC: No rest?Sounds like your characters need better working conditions.

ARCHIVIST: Please be sure to log all character reassignments.

ME: I’m reverse outlining and rewriting in loops. Plot, character, theme, setting, subplot, then back around again. Everything in some sort of organized heap, then, adjusted until it works.

DREAMER: Have you considered a treasure map subplot? Or a phoenix? Or writing it in second person? Should only tack on what, 1-9 months to the process?

DRAGON: I’ve barely allowed you enough time to inhale, and you want to exhale treasure maps?

ARCHIVIST: I’ll need to research whether phoenixes and treasure maps can coexist in second person.

MARKETER: Forget all that. Pivot to a cookbook. Cookbooks sell.

MONKEY BRAIN: Iguanas!

ME: No treasure maps. No phoenixes. No second person. No cookbooks. No iguanas. No cookbooks for iguanas or (holds up a warning finger to MONKEY BRAIN) cookbooks about how to cook iguanas. I like my story and have committed to it.

DREAMER: Have you considered switching careers and becoming an organ grinder?

ME: Like in a play-the-barrel-organ way or in a Sweeney Todd way?

MONKEY BRAIN: I’m suddenly uncomfortable

CRITIC: You’re all deranged.

ME: Chair agrees.

DREAMER: [leaps to feet dramatically] I propose we devote the next month to exploring the concept of time as a sentient being.

CRITIC: Opposed. Hard no. Like, concrete-after-a-Chicago-winter hard no.

HYPE MAN: Also a no, but great idea! Imagine the tagline: What if time was alive? Boom! Bestseller! High five!

ARCHIVIST: Seconded, pending a trademark search for “sentient time.”

DRAGON: [snarls] Time is indeed sentient, and it hates you.

WORRIER: Motion for catastrophic preparedness: deadlines missed, mockery, general and specific humiliations. And typos.

HYPE MAN: Opposed! Fear is the mind-killer, baby!

MARKETER: I propose we conduct a comprehensive market analysis before finishing the draft. Demographics, comps, audience studies.

ME: Opposed!

CRITIC: Motion to stop overthinking.

WORRIER: Counter-motion to overthink harder.

HYPE MAN: Counter-counter-motion to stop thinking entirely.

ME: All right, team. The plan is simple: cooperation. If we can work together, we will finish this thing, and maybe even start other things. Right now we’re like a rickety cart pulled by twelve horses in different rodeos.

SELF-DOUBTER: This is delusional.

HYPE MAN: Delusional? This is destiny! Cooperation! Teamwork! No rickety carts!

DRAGON: I know I’m new here, but this sounds like a waste of time. Considering…(gestures at the group, chews a charcoal briquette, then belches).

ME: We’ll continue to work calmly, one voice at a time.

MONKEY BRAIN: (waves squished Tootsie Roll) Guess what this looks like! Guess! Wrong answer, it’s poo!

ME: Why do I bother?

CRITIC: That’s the real question, isn’t it?

HYPE MAN: Because you love it! Because this draft is fire! Because we’re unstoppable!

SELF-DOUBTER: Or because she doesn’t know how to quit.

ME: One of you has got to be right. All right, meeting adjourned. Spirit Halloween wants this space.

On Loss, Language, and Andrea Gibson

· Leave a comment ·

I’m honored to share my piece in Midstory Magazine, framed by Steph Sprenger’s gorgeous intro and closing reflection.

Thrilled to be in Midstory Magazine this week with a piece about Andrea Gibson and what we sometimes find  — and sometimes lose  — in writing. Huge thanks to Steph Sprenger for shaping the space with her always-beautiful words.

The words are the point

Hemingway on Perimenopause

· Leave a comment ·

I have hunted lions. I have watched the sun rise on days when I was certain the world was ending and drunk enough whiskey to be sure of it. I have fought against the marlin, an enormous wet metaphor for my masculinity.

All of it was nothing compared to perimenopause.

I am a man, a matter of some regret in this context. I have observed and made notes. They are incomplete, as all honest accounts are.

It is unknowable, this Red Ledger of Womanhood, but I will explain it anyway.

Perimenopause, a word with too many vowels, is from the Latin for “the threshold between fertility and glorious cronehood.” It is a time when ovaries, like exhausted grenadiers, abandon their post and estrogen evaporates. Much like absinthe, for which it is also time.

Don’t bother deciphering if it’s happening or not happening. Most things halfway happen. You will know when you find yourself crying inexplicably in the grocery store as “Landslide” plays.

Having set down my credentials plainly, it remains only to tell you how it is in the borderlands between the era of spring-loaded hormones and the years that follow, which are less buoyant by degrees.

These are the things that must be endured:

  • Insomnia: The nights are the first to betray you. You will lie awake counting your regrets and your nemeses as a fisherman counts his catch, except you will throw nothing back. In the mornings you will feel like you’ve been hollowed out with a grapefruit spoon.
  • Bleeding: It will happen without pattern or mercy. It will lull you into complacency, then strike with malice. Like when you’re on your boss’s white office sofa. Do not speak of it to your boss. They can only pretend not to notice, and the awkwardness is yours alone. Soon enough, you will get to not miss this.
  • Hot flashes: A traitorous inner furnace ignites when you least expect it, which is to say, always. You will feel a powerful urge to strip naked in public and become visibly furious at the air. There is no dignified way to do this.
  • Moods: They will rise and fall like monsoon squalls. You will slam doors, then return and apologize. You will disassociate as the dermatologist removes questionable moles. You will bellow at the toaster if its settings are untrue. Know you are not hurtling toward operatic collapse. Probably.
  • Carousel of Other Indignities: Everything negative and mysterious you experience from now on is perimenopause. Physical discomfort. Metabolic chaos. That asshole who cut you off in traffic. Thinning hair. Itchy earlobes. People telling you to “let that sink in.” The betrayal of your bladder when you sneeze. Chi-Chi’s vague promise to reopen. Anything that causes the urge to hurl a shoe at someone indiscreetly.

You will seek a system to manage it all. It will fail because everything happens anyway. You will be tempted to try yoga, catalogue your ordeals in a leather-bound journal, or fill your online shopping cart with items terrible and proud.

Do none of this. If you must, cry behind a rack of discounted shapewear at T.J. Maxx. They’ve seen it all at T.J. Maxx. Just do not purchase the waist cincher. You will despise it.

Steel your resolve and proceed.

I hope to leave you with something other than recommendations to age gracefully. Perhaps punch a sandbag and, as you enter this season of dissolving composure, remember: it will pass.

When? A few months. A decade. Maybe longer than Friends, certainly not longer than Grey’s Anatomy. Don’t try to track it. Uncertainty is part of the process.

I warn you so you won’t be startled when chin hairs sprout like a cursed harvest. Fortunately, the forgetting will also begin, and you’ll be left holding tweezers. You will tweeze nothing. You will remember again when you touch your chin and wonder when you became late 1970s Barry Gibb. Those colorless bastards will be nearly impossible to remove. Your eyesight will also have gone to shit.

The point is, this is not the end of all things. Soon enough you will be alone with your pulse and the knowledge that no part of you was ever permanent except that tattoo you got one ill-fated evening with a guy known only as “Little Bowser.”

Perimenopause is natural. Also intolerable. This is the paradox you will ponder as you cry under the Zombie Wasteland Sewer Tunnel at any given Spirit Halloween.

That is the sum of it.

Now go and swoop through the world like a hormonally-imbalanced falcon, taking sweaty dominion over it all.

Or go punch a sandbag.