Friday, January 30, 2015

Little Fish: A First Draft Begun

Here is the rough opening of my new story inspired by the lionfish, an invasive predator who evidently makes a great ceviche:



Killing him could be easy…just a matter of lowering the salinity to a certain level in the tank. Pour some faucet water in, maybe disable the monitoring contraption on the side. Heinrich’s parched cells would absorb water until they drowned and floated upside down to the surface. He’d bloat a bit and become taut at the skin, but wouldn’t explode, as I might have hoped. How satisfying to watch him dart from side to side instead, panicked, whipping his brilliantly striped spines in and out like some southern belle snapping a brisĂ© fan. Not so easy though to spear the asshole through his gillhole with a carving knife, my least favorite knife. My father kept it sinfully sharp. All of his knives were kept in white paper sleeves and never washed in the dishwasher. Now used by the daughter he abandoned to slaughter his only friend. Heinrich the dickhead lionfish.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Ann's Memoir Chapter ?: The Pine Needle Story

Every writer should also write a memoir, yes? I am an incredibly boring person actually, but there is one story that my friends beg me to retell, and it's about a cat. A story about a cat is the most interesting thing about me. This is why I resist the notion of writing a memoir. Coherence wouldn't be possible either, but I've seen some pretty episodic bio-writing of late. Maybe incoherence is fine. Having said that, I am about to tell a story about Lipo, the pine needle-eating cat. Here I am with the beast itself:
I have also seen a lot of comedy acts lately who put images of themselves in the background. Note the apartment details for yourself. The expression definitely. The box of random shit in the background. The dolphin clock. Bjork staring out from the background. Trainspotting. The puffy black coat. Parliaments.

And now, journalism.

The summer before I went back to grad school, my best friend Sybil (calling her that to protect her identity and because I've been watching Downton Abbey) went to rehab. She was to spend the entire summer at Dawn Farm in Ann Arbor, so my dearest friend, who I was sharing a bedroom with, was not going to be back until days before I would be leaving for Milwaukee. Also, my boyfriend wanted to break up, since he was getting dumped anyway. I get that, I do. He should at least be allowed to start sleeping around. Anyone would want to. But at the time I didn't follow the logic. To be fair, I had just gotten home from Las Vegas, and he was vile to me in the car. He didn't call me for two weeks, and I had to be the one to call and say I was outta there. Really, I wanted to break up too. But I was afraid of being alone.

Sybil had a cat named Lipo. A blonde, gigantic, Maine coon nightmare. He knocked things over. He bit. He lunged. He spat. He clawed. He begged. Demanded. He had a high-pitched girly meow. This combined with his swishy walk, which accented his fluffy back legs (they looked like bloomers), made us suspect he was a gay kitty, which would be fine. But he was totally untrained. He was Sybil's master. If I was going to spend the summer alone with it, this was going to have to change.

At the time I was working as an editor for SGI Publications, the organization that printed The Current, Ann Arbor's free event mag, back when things were printed. Good old times. But poor times. And scary times, since I had made a decision that I might learn soon to regret. I was probably depressed, and I'll be honest, a little addicted. Sybil and I had both been in programs. Going back to school was the left turn I needed, and the Farm was what Sybil needed. It occurs to me now that Lipo's survival may have depended on whether be learned to behave like a normal cat. Anyway, I was determined to train him so he wouldn't be so goddamned annoying.

The neighbors at our complex, Golfside Lake, called Lipo Henry. Lipo would demand, by way of screechy, incessant meowing, to be let outside to wander about the grounds. He had his claws, but it still made me nervous. Sybil couldn't go to bed until he returned in the evening, which could sometimes be in the middle of the night. I'd try to stay up too, but passed out on the couch many a night. Sometimes Lipo wouldn't come calling (and it was really calling) until after 3am. Once it was after being skunked. That might be another story. More adventure than two drunks need, let's put it that way.

I trained Lipo out of many bad behaviors. Getting up on the coffee table. Getting fed in an unlimited capacity throughout the day. (He was obese. My friend Hammy said he saw him trip once.) Lunging at your leg and clamping on with claws and teeth. No more of any of that shit. Mostly it was a matter of ignoring his yawling, and sometimes a matter of standing up in a grizzly-attack posture and saying fuck off loudly. I did let him outside during the day. Even though he had once digested, then regurgitated, the hind leg of a king-size bullfrog on our floor. (I was hazy and didn't have my glasses on when I found it. It looked like a chicken wing.)

But the cat hated me. I could feel it in his gaze.

One night, after he'd been out, he shit his bloomers. I didn't know why, but when he stepped out of his state-of-the-art litter box, his back leg fur was just obliterated with brown wet shit. This meant I would have to bathe him. Sybil had regularly bathed Lipo, which turns out, as Reddit shows, is a thing people do. But Lipo had claws, and strong strong arms. Giant paws. Sybil never finished bathing him without bleeding, sometimes bandage-worthy bleeding.

I could not let this cat bleed me, so I thrust him in the tub by the neck - no plug in the drain, warm water running - and frantically splashed water onto his hind quarters. Pinning him down with my elbow. Cursing. Both me and him. He growled. He snarled. He hissed like a cougar. When he tried to scratch or bite me, I pile-drove him face-first into the water. He got me, but not much.

He was almost clean, except for this pine needle that just wouldn't splash off near his rear. I couldn't believe how obstinate this pine needle was being. I didn't want to touch the cat with my fingers, but now it appeared I had to. I have a mortifying aversion to feces. But don't we all? What are our thoughts and feelings about touching shit? Isn't that why we go through so much toilet paper? Is it really so irrational that I thought I should balance myself on the edge of the tub at my hip, and pin down with one arm, and just throw water with the other?

So I gingerly picked at the thing. It still wouldn't come. The cat yowling. Me yowling what the fuck why is this so difficult to do? Can't one thing be easy? Lipo crying. Then I realized that the end of the pine needle was inserted directly into the cat's anus. That was why he pooped his knickerbockers. He was trying to shit out this object. (This reminds me of a funny Jim Jeffries bit. This isn't it, but it's the same show.)

Now there are several species of conifer to be found in Michigan: scotch pine, jack pine, white pine. The species that grew at Golfside was red pine, which I forgot temporarily when I reached out and pulled on the needle. I extracted about four inches of red pine needle from that cat's rectum. I'm not sure how to describe the sound he made. The O Long Johnson kitty reminded me of it.

After I flung the pine needle away in disgust, I realized that Lipo was no longer fighting me. I let him out of the tub, all clean, and didn't get bruised in the process of drying him. Not only did he not bite me, he purred. I dried him thoroughly, and he waddled away in shame, his pom-pom legs curly and damp. He didn't persist at all in his meowing for food, or to be let out. Even through his training, he'd still give it two or three tries. But he was quiet. When he started getting dry, he curled up on my belly where I lay on the couch. Never ever had he done that before.

From then on, we were much better friends. I spent the summer indulging heavily with a younger friend, a co-worker of Sybil's. At the end of it, Sybil returned. She hadn't embraced sobriety yet, and I probably didn't help that along, but she did eventually. She has. I'm still testing my bottom, but I do have a PhD. Sybil ended up having to give Lipo to a friend after all. Being sober meant a commitment that didn't allow for having a cat. The friend put a pink collar with fake rhinestones on him, and renamed him Oscar de la Rentay.
The end.

Look at the mess we had in that place. Nice place for a mirror though.



Aim: the cheapest toothpaste for those who are giving up. And peroxide, for cat servants who give baths.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

Eulogy for Chris Performed by an Ode to the Guy from CarnivĂ le

I just wrote the first draft of a poem. Now I'm ahead of schedule.
This is my friend Chris Hamm:

We are at his apartment in Ann Arbor, where I remember apartment complexes being pretty nice. My friend Marie and I spent many an hour hanging out with this guy, watching TV and drinking and laughing. In particular, we actually watched the series Carnivale on HBO, which Hammy took illegally from the complex box. Hammy was hilarious. And a dear friend. And a free spirit. He had his faults as do we all, but it's a true friend who lets you see who they really are. I think he would have taken a bullet for us. He passed away this summer of cancer, after
Marie's sister Rachel and before my mom. His death is sandwiched into a time in which I feel my memories outweighing my future. 

Below is the first stanza of a poem that has been drastically evolved from something that exists in an earlier post. A poem dedicated to Nick Stahl, who played Ben Hawkins on Carnivale. My memories of Hamm are forever tied to that actor and that show.

Rest in peace Hammy. I miss you.



Eulogy for Chris Performed by an Ode to the Guy from CarnivĂ le

b


orn in a baggage trailer torn through with
 dust chalked as a horned lizard but slick as
a skink cacti wrapped in fiberglass faced
turning up from the depths of a nineties
television after five it is safe 


to steal the cable... 


 

On reading The Goldfinch

Finally finished reading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, which took about two seasons. Normally I think an author who writes a piece 771 pages long is being self-indulgent, not reigning in the prose for their audience. But Tartt is one of my favorite authors, and not a big producer. I got excited when this FINALLY got released, because I loved The Secret History, and I ADORED The Little Friend. Yes, it's a little self-indulgent. But still damn good. And if I wrote like Tartt I'd indulge myself a little bit too.
The book is about a man who loses his mother (appropriate) in a freak accident and winds up with a priceless object that he's never able to let go of, namely "The Goldfinch," a painting by Carel Fabritus. It begins when he's a young boy and spans his entire life...like SH it's an epic, sprawling narrative. But her winding sentences and gorgeous, luxurious description of place kept me with it, except for a couple of stalling breaks around the time of my mom's dying and the holidays.

God how I wish I could do place like this (here, Amsterdam), in a way that captures sensory details and the narrator's distressed, drugged mental state:

"I took a wrong turn on the way to the hotel and for several hours wandered aimlessly, shops decorated with glass baubles and gray dream alleys with unpronounceable names, gilded Buddhas and Asian embroideries, old maps, old harpsichords, cloudy cigar-brown shops with crockery and goblets and antique Dresden jars. The sun had come out and there was something hard and bright by the canals, a breathable glitter. Gulls plunged and cried. A dog ran by with a live crab in its mouth. In my lightheadedness and fatigue, which made me feel drastically cut off from myself and as if I were observing it all at a remove, I walked past candy shops and shops with antique toys and Delft tiles from the 1800s, old mirrors and silver glinting in the rich, cognac-colored light, inlaid French cabinets and table in the French court style with garlanded carvings and veneerwork that would have made Hobie gasp with admiration - fact the entire foggy, friendly, cultivated city with its florists and bakeries and antiekhandels reminded me of Hobie, not just for its antique-crowded richness but because there was a Hobie-like wholesomeness to the place, like a children's picture book where aproned tradespeople swept the floors and tabby cats napped in sunny windows."

I mean breathable glitter? Cognac-colored? Come on. That's poetry.
This is my favorite kind of prose, too. Madman prose. But it's also about a secret object through which a story is revealed, which interests me as a teacher and scholar. It's also meant to be a written missive by the narrator, that is, he suggest that he is writing it as it goes. At the end, he claims to have kept a copies journal or notebook kind of thing consisting of letters to his dead mother, which accounts for the length and detail of the "memoir." Because I'm interested in diary-writing, this intrigues me. Is the painting the secret sacred object, or the book?

"...long obsessive homesick letters which have the tone of being written to a mother alive and anxiously waiting for news of me..."

What is the assumption of the diary writer about audience?

"...these epistles (dated and signed, in a careful hand, ready to be torn out of the notebook and mailed) alternating with miserable bursts of I Hate Everyone and I Wish I Was Dead, months grinding by with a disjointed scribble or two, B's house, haven't been to school in three days and it's Friday already, my life in haiku, I am in a state of semi-zombie, God we got so trashed last night like I whited out sort of, we played a game called Liar's Dice and ate cornflakes and breath mints for dinner."

Is it that a diary captures that state while we are in it, and forces a truthful reflection upon later reading? If the audience is dead and we alive, how is that like or unlike the dead author read by a surviving audience?

So my new year has started off like constipation...

My only resolution for 2015 is to keep this blog more faithfully. Every writer should keep up a blog, yes? I planned on every Thursday and was very vague to myself about what the posts should contain. I try to be realistic with my resolutions. But already I am two weeks behind. Which means I have not kept my resolution at all until now. My substantial winter hiatus has included a great deal of curling into a ball under a blanket on my couch and fading in and out of sleep. It's not even a very comfortable couch. My spine is a mess. But I tell myself that it is better than crawling like Gollum into the frigid cave of my bedroom and essentially calling it a night in the middle of the day. I don't know if it's depression. I do take pills for that, so all should be well. And no I don't want to up the dose because that could result in my getting fat, which would cancel out a resolution I had at age 18 that I have never broken and don't plan to.
In these times, I would normally talk to my mom on the phone for a while, and she would fill me with encouragement and shower me aurally with love until I felt better. Mom was a doer. A master of mind over matter. She never stopped working/playing/working at playing. She achieved. She ran a home. She stayed in shape. She moved things, people, herself. She made things happen, even when she must have felt run down. She never got fat ever. She allowed herself a nap now and then, yes. But what I'm doing is more like wallowing than napping. Am I even tired? Or just afraid?
Mom is gone now, and the thought is a stab in the heart sometimes, and sometimes just a dull ache in my eyeballs. I don't dream of her every night exactly, but it's pretty close. I'm resigned to the fact that this never goes away - so I'm told by all my friends who've lost parents. But I can't help thinking this is like the cold that temporarily kills a car's battery. Which by the way has happened with my husband's car already.
Yes it is Wisco winter. The awful deep dark misery of it. The soul-crushing invasion that happens every year and lasts oh so long. It could be that because of Mom's passing I don't have the energy to fight this for six months or however damn long it's going to be this time.
At any rate, I'm open to nondoing, as Mom was when she started combating her own anxiety, perhaps a little too late. This is her, and this is her poem:



Nondoing- How to
How to sit nondoing
Watch a Kingfisher sit
                Dive and enjoy.
See a Heron graceful
                Slow and gently fly.
Know that beach and flowers say
Its ok to feel.
Dive and enjoy-slow and gently fly.

Judy Thorburn
August 13, 2013