Write Like You Mean It
-
Hawk redux
Driving northward today toward my What Comes Next, I saw my friend Hawk. He sat calmly in I-5’s manicured median grass north of Seattle, surveying his dominion with sharp brown eyes. He saw me but did not look. We nodded briefly at one another while I sped past at 70 miles per hour, his feather-blur held sharp by stilled recognition. My thoughts, immersed in the grounded action of how my next few days will be spent, flew on speckled feathers to Black Friday last when Hawk spoke words of promise to me and brought me aloft with him into worlds dreamed of but yet unreached. My car flew silently on redbrown…
-
Resistance
I am an expert at recognizing my resistance. When it crawls wetly onto my lap from the briny deep of my soul I stare at it a moment and then hum tunelessly. I don’t hear you, I don’t see you, let me alone, leave me be. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, Resistance perched pertly atop my head with a Cheshire grin. Fine. You win. I am writing. Not-writing. I feel Resistance in the act of Googling. Now I know that Ganesh is associated with the first chakra, called Muladhara, and that mula means “original, main,” and adhara means “foundation.” Great. I needed to know that. I…
-
Keening
Her open mouth screams silent tears, gasping sobs tear her body into pieces that float above her, waiting to be sewn back together One thread drawing them tight and snug again, a sweater she can thrust her arms into gladly, wrapping warmth around her icy bare branches. Inside her, alien flesh pricks with tiny knives, razors opening sealed wounds that cry scaly tears and glue their eyes tight shut, denying their misery. Above her his spiky breath covers her hair, her ear, dripping down her neck with a snail’s undulation. She rises, tasting ashes in her mouth, and floats, now lost in a sea of misty grey, now lifted above…
-
Snowed In
Last week the flurries started. They really began on New Year’s Eve, the day I drove away from a warm heart and to a cold empty house that I wanted to fill with all my wishes for the coming year. Wishes full, I lay down at ten minutes to midnight, not realizing that the standard way to bring in a new year around here is with all the leftover July fireworks. Someone even torched a minivan just a block away that night. I’ve considered torching minivans myself, and might have had I ever actually owned one, but likely not as a way to bring in wishes for the coming year.…
-
Transition
A hospital bed stood in the center of the room, once a living room. Now it was a dying room, its walls covered with loved ones’ artifacts and memories. The man in the bed was tiny, shrunken, his body barely visible beneath the sheet that covered him. Only his feet and one hand created small hills in the otherwise nearly-flat landscape. His face was turned to one side and his eyes never left mine. Hold me, they said, I know everything. Hold me. The skin of the man’s face was surprisingly smooth, as if all the cells of his body had ceased their normal work and instead concentrated on making…
-
Yo, An Interview
You’ve been avidly following Neil Kramer’s Citizen of the Month Great Interview Experiment, right? Right?? This is where I get to ask another blogger incriminating questions and post the Q & A right here. Then someone else asks ME questions and posts them. A long chain of awesome. I love it. Introducing Mary Mac of Pajamas and Coffee. I spent hours stalking her. So should you. Go now. 1. So the Evil Queen is your role model. Have you ever slipped anyone a poisoned apple? More importantly, if you were to slip someone a poisoned apple, who would it be and why? The Evil Queen is hot. The princesses are…
-
Dear Anne LaMott
DISCLOSURE: I suspect I, uh, stole the idea for writing a letter to Anne LaMott from Andy Raskin. Oh, you don’t know Andy Raskin? I didn’t either until about a week ago when his book The Ramen King and I went home with me from the library. I suppose I would have known him if I still listened to NPR — where, apparently, Andy Raskin talks about things — but I haven’t listened to NPR since at least 2005, and in fact the listening to NPR, especially Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion (though I saw the movie — was that cheating?) was ceded to the Other Side in my…
-
You Know Something’s Wrong When You Never Even Check Your Stats Anymore
Or write a post. Or sleep. In addition to my regularly-scheduled activities, I’ve been writing content, editing, and designing a website. Which is technically “up” except for a major bug, so I’ll hold off on the announcement. But I poured my heart and soul into this thing. And Matthew spent the last two months doing all sorts of techie things in its creation, things that I don’t even know the complexity of, but doing them consumed all his time. And he is very very good at what he does, and is about 1000 times faster doing anything connected with a computer than I am (except Twitter. Twitter is totally my…
-
100 x365 #12: Steve J.
The question is this: does the fact that I also dated your brother (though not simultaneously—I have standards, you know) have anything to do with your sudden and completely unexpected urge to get me to go with you (I had to drive) to a Yes concert? And did my attendance with you at said Yes concert—which is remembered hazily, if even at all—entitle you to a front-seat over-the-gear-shift condom-fumbling session in my 1973 Honda Civic? I say nay. And afterward I couldn’t look you in the face, so that pretty well ended the dating. If you could even call it that.
-
100 x365 #11: Mossy Teeth
Pardon me for using that nickname; you probably were never aware of it. You were … enthusiastic. About a lot of stuff. Catching criminals, the high price of ball cocks (that always made me smirk), the terrible way the landscapers treated the grass. We worked together for over a year. Because of your willingness to parse the price of ball cocks, I got promoted and lots of good press for knowing how to put together a budget. Did you ever get to be a police officer? Or are you still stuck in a loveless marriage, plunging apartment toilets and changing locks?