You have to understand that my first glimpse of her was mostly obscured. The bar was dim and crowded, and I’d already had more than my share of scotch. And wasn’t feeling picky, having struck out three times already — so, after that first glimpse, I sidled right up and said the first slick thing I could think of, which ended up being something about how her dress caught the light. Only then did she turn to face me head-on, showing me what she was and exactly what I’d just done.
Leon drank a coffee with crinkly eyed, cookie eating car salesman Bob, Saturday afternoon at Desliles,
“Service is great at this altar of consumption,” Leon thought.
It was a few months ago he’d last met with Bob, and they’d discussed hats and bears as well as tales from the past and the quirky nature of circumstance. Bob never forgot anything, but this time, they didn’t mention clothes.
The man and woman were walking separately and Cowboy, his pit bull, was on his leash at his side.
Suddenly she half-crashed into the man, almost knocking him over, then pulling him back toward her with her strong, powerful, small arms while Cowboy jumped around on the end of his leash and watched the show.
I park Nate’s Mustang convertible on the darkest stretch of the bridge, far from the street lamps, where the wind hums an eerie tune through the rails and the thrashing current of the river drowns out any voice of reason. My cell phone shrieks and pierces the competing noises of the night. It’s him. I answer.
It’s an April Sunday afternoon, the long, wet, cold winter has not yet relented. Alan sits staring at the blank email on his laptop. He’s meant to be sending a newsy update message to his brother in New Zealand. The rain splatters against the window. His brother was wanting him to come to New Zealand on holiday. Apparently, there’s a beach on the Coromandel peninsula where a hot water spring bubbles up through the sand: you could dig yourself your own hot tub, and sit there watching the tide roll in…
No fuckin’ chance of the Coromandel peninsula this year, bro.
Boredom kills. Not just in stories but in life as well. When I was young I spoke of a distant future that would be enriched by callow memories of youth. For some reason it always involved sipping Jack while sitting in a rocking chair. Even then I knew that was bullshit. You can kill, maybe, an hour a week doing such, but you are still alive and require much more than forty year old stories to continue the experience. The young tend to shelve the old, even when the young are the old.
I am prone to boredom. We all are, but some much more than others, and I am too easily bored. Throughout life I have gone from one new obsession to another and, to date, I am the only one left standing. I am bedazzled with a subject for months then one day it is over. Rock collecting, astronomy and many other fiery enjoyments fell off my imagination, as did pressing wild flowers and, yes, the three week interest I had in the accordion.
That, however, is the way of children. When we become adults it is assumed that we will develop sticktoitiveness. Music has been in and out of my life for years, which makes it the Methuselah of my interests. I was keen for it from fifteen to forty then stopped listening, save for the jukebox in bars, for about ten years. It has come back only because I have given up on new music and I do not care what others think about that.
Writing has a strange place with me. It is immune to boredom but it has never been an obsession except when doing it. That is the difference, mainly the other stuff was heightened by my imagination of it, while writing has never had to pass the test. It is just there, something I can do (good and bad). But I didn’t take it seriously for a long time. John Boy Walton is to blame for that. On The Waltons it was clearly made that you must go to college to be a writer the same way you go to dental school to be a rapist, I mean dentist. It wasn’t until later that I finally learned that most people attend college to get drunk and have sex. John Boy lied.
Dorothy Parker stopped her schooling at age fourteen, probably the same for Shakespeare, and Capote didn’t finish high school. In fact the more I read the more I understood that writers are often smarter about life than are college students. You do not need to pay tuition to get drunk and have sex.
This was an eye opener.
To combat boredom I read at least three books at the same time (no, wiseass, not literally). I also have all kinds of stories and articles and even books of my own going at once. I counted and there’s over forty of them, but I only work on three at a time. I would have to not open anything new and write well into my hundreds to finish the stuff I have going now. That does not bother me. I still open new stuff. Changing constantly is useful against boredom. And so is humour, not the silly TV stuff, but actual almost organic humour that is found in the crash and thud of being.
Drugs and alcohol are never boring but it’s a shame they turn on you, how they wear out their welcome, but they are not wholly bad. I have always said “forget moderation.” That’s the same as telling your spouse that you are willing to love her/him to a responsible degree but no further. If I loved someone I would want it to be reckless and mad. Nilla wafer love affairs, I imagine, are boring. Yet they lead to fewer restraining orders.
Winning the battle against boredom is why writers tend to live long lives, nowadays, at any rate. Also, effective treatment against tuberculosis and syphilis has raised the mean death age for writers as well. Moreover, writers seldom drink themselves to death today, the way O. Henry did (who was found as good as dead in a hotel room with nine empty jugs of whisky under the bed). Oh, we drink just as much as ever, but evolution has toughened up our livers. Call me a bigot, but I do not think that a person can truly write about the darkness in the human race (Ann Frank the exception) without having had some experience in alcohol, ongoing or in the past. There’s a special feeling that comes from waking in bed with someone whose name you do not remember. That sort of thing opens a lot of mental doors.
Suicide, though spoke of often is not as rife among writers. It has been a long time since Plath, Woolf, Hemingway and John Kennedy Toole voluntarily checked out. Musicians, so it seems, have taken over that department. Mental illness and boredom make a lethal mixture. You cannot do much about the first but the second can be alleviated if you are willing to use whatever mental illness and/or addiction you have as a positive resource to learn from; do not hide it as a dark shame that you have let people tell you how to think about. But this comes with a risk, people have their own problems, yours had better be interesting.
I think that there is an extra allegory to be found in Hawthorne’s nearly two hundred year old story Young Goodman Brown. For those of you who have forgotten it, Goodman went into the forest surrounding Salem around the time of the witch trials and discovered that every last Puritan in the village, himself included, was at best a basic hypocrite while most were evil hypocrites. The allegory extends to writing; you go into the woods full of writers thinking some to be superhuman geniuses and come out with the hideous realization that they, like you, were/are insane slobs with dark secrets. The job is to realize we are all insane slobs and accept it. I, for one, am rather comforted when I read about the “shortcomings” of famous writers. Twain (another non-college goer) had a terrible temper, Capote, when drunk, was a vicious little bastard, Dickens had family troubles and I would not be surprised if it were discovered that Shakespeare was not a fella to trust alone with your wife (nor the wife with Will). It is just fine by me that all are human, it gives our temporary moments of godliness increased esteem in my eyes.
Hmmm, again this part appears that it will end like smashing into a tree with Ethan Fromme at the wheel. Even a fancy literary comment fails to make the sudden segue from the opening topic to the wonderful Week That Was smoother. Alas, we carry our crosses uphill and the best you can hope for is an ending similar to the one the repentant thief got from Jesus. Barabbas? Or maybe that was just a movie. Hmmm, even a biblical anecdote fails to decrease the jolt. Oh well. So brushing this mishmash of pseudo philosophical musings aside, it is now time to re-visit the six wonderful performers of this Week That Was. They are far from dull.
Dale Barrigar Williams appeared on the second Sunday of the month, as is his habit. He knows about drugs and booze (enough to quit them) and is extremely well educated, but he hasn’t let any of that get in the way of his humanity. This month in his Eliot Behind the Mask, Dale once again merges his humanity with his PhD and presents TS Eliot as a real person and not a mummified great of the past. This is a perfect example of going out into the woods with great writers and seeing one toss a smoke bomb!
Monday delivered Man With a Shopping Cart by Tom Bentley-Fisher. Poor William has an obsession with shopping carts. But soon enough they fill with hard, even brutal memories. The metaphor should be obvious but Tom enriches the tale with images both wonderful and frightening. You can’t fit this one into a box.
Tuesday brought a second story that fled expectations that built within it. The First Thing She Notice Disappear Was a Kangaroo by Michael Degnan leaves a great many questions for the reader to consider. Michael also presents a well written, believable POV for the seven-year-old MC.
Wednesday’s Tilda the Ice Maiden and her life in the tundra 1785 bce by Linclon Hayes, opens with a rare, once in a lifetime sentence; the sort of sentence all writers crave to create. And the lives up to its opening; it hooks you into a world of surprises, as you might deduce from looking at the title.
There is a fantastic moment in A Eulogy For Us by Darleine Abellard, that catches you off guard and lifts this much higher than other funeral tales. The entire work is top rate, but the summation of grief towards the end raises this one to a new level of excellence.
We closed the week with Everybody Prefers Iceberg Lettuce by Genevieve Goggin. You know an author has done well when she reminds you, in spirit, of another writer. Here I got Anita Loos in mind, who created hectic and entertaining Lorelei Lee (played by Marilyn Monroe in a film that had to water down some of the wilder stuff in Loos’ prose). A century lies between the two writers but this one has the same special elan.
Congratulations to the Ladies and Gentlemen of the week. They kept our minds active and carried us pleasantly into the future.
Yes, I Close With Yet Another List
Sometimes I wonder how it all began. When did I figure that list making was for me? I think the David Letterman Show reinforced my list making in the 80’s, but I was already doing such before I first saw his nightly Top Ten. I do not recall making lists as a child, but ever since I was around twenty I’ve been writing them. Could be I was abducted by aliens way back when and instilled with a desire to make lists for reasons as unexplainable as the “Sacred Mysteries” of the Christian church. Who’s to say?
Regardless of the inspiration, today’s list is dedicated to short story writers of yore who often produced works well worth remembering. This list has been up before, but it contained other items. Some are still famous, some are unfairly buried by time. As always, please add your own suggestion.
A Pair of Silk Stockings-Kate Chopin
The Tell Tale Heart-Edgar Allen Poe
Victoria-Ogden Nash
The Egg-Sherwood Anderson
Harrison Burgeron-Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Jefty Turns Five-Harlan Ellison
A White Heron-Sarah Orne Jewett
The Killers-Ernest Hemingway
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge-Ambrose Bierce
Leaving the Yellow House-Saul Bellow
Leila
This week a bluesy song from (incredibly) forty year ago
Everybody prefers iceberg lettuce. That’s always been true, but these days it’s bougie to admit it. Before, if someone told you they favored romaine, or worse yet kale, they were lying, but at least it revealed their rank. I’m not white trash, they’d tell themselves. Iceberg is what you eat if you live in a trailer park, it’s what they put in gas station sandwiches.
William stands on the upper level of a parkade leaning on a shopping cart some employee had forgotten to rack up with the others. He’s waiting for a friend to pick up a jug of organic milk. He knows his friend will be forever and come up the elevator loaded with ‘two-for-one’s’ and any specials he can find on pasta, ice cream and pineapple juice, not to mention a stack of car magazines. William doesn’t mind waiting. It’s two in the morning and a beautiful night in San Francisco, the concrete rooftop a checker board of symmetrical parking spaces, the only vehicle on the horizon his friend’s sky blue Dodge Caravan, clean and American in its loneliness.
Alan stepped out of the shower, singing that he wasn’t going to work on Maggie’s farm no more. He threw on some clothes and headed off to the baker’s for a couple of Aberdeen Rolls (‘rowies’), well-fired. En route, he picked up a copy of the Saturday edition of the Press & Journal (‘Start the Day with the P&J’).
It was no one’s fault: a catch and a lurch as he sat in the back of the truck, legs dangling, half asleep. The planet stopped him or he would still be falling. No cars came by, but evening did – softly -as he lay there. A maple tree grew at the side of the road. The moon grew from a branch of the tree, detached itself and floated up to clouds where it became embedded in the misty horizontal filaments. But this was all a dream to him as he lay in the middle of the road.
literally stories 