Writing: First Date

Caroline Childs had a date.

She was terribly excited, but she was also terribly nervous. Caroline hadn’t had a date in fourteen years. She hadn’t had sex in three, and for twelve years before that, it had always been with the same man. Her husband—ex-husband, she reminded herself—Lorenzo DeGrazie, had been carrying on an affair during the last two years of their marriage, completely behind her back, while she took their three children to and from school, cooked his mother’s Italian recipes, and kept up her figure—no small feat, considering the three children and the Italian recipes. Lorenzo, meanwhile, had gotten fat, bald, and smug, and one day he came home from the office with divorce papers.

That had been a year ago and the proceedings were at last complete. Her girlfriends at work had convinced her to have a divorce shower, complete with a gift registry, on the pretense that she hadn’t had one for her wedding (they had eloped). She registered at Bloomingdale's because, even though none of her friends were rich, she felt she deserved, for once, something nice. At the party, after drinking two cosmopolitans and approaching tears at each toast, Caroline was asked whether she had been out on any dates yet. Quickly, she said no, of course not, but after a bit of teasing, she admitted that she did have a crush. He was a single dad; she had seen him walking his daughter to school often. They lived in the same neighborhood and took the same route.

Everyone had gotten excited and asked what did he look like, what did he do, what was his name, how did she know he was single? He looked tall, dark, and handsome, ha ha, she didn’t know what he did, something with restaurants and wine—he had given her his card—his name was Eduardo, and he was single because he didn’t wear a ring, and the one time she hadn’t seen him and his daughter walking to school for a week, and then saw him again, she had asked where they had been, and he had said that his daughter had been away to her mother’s in California, where his ex-wife’s mother was sick.

But he might not be single, just because he’s not married to her any longer. He might have a girlfriend.

The girl who said that got kicked in the ankle for being negative.

But he was single, because he had, finally, after months of banter two or three mornings a week, asked her out. There was a strange coincidence, or perhaps it was just the coincidence of Spring Break, that his daughter was going to be in California again, and her children were going to be with their father’s family in Jersey. Do you like wine? he had asked her, his dark eyes drilling into hers. Ha ha, my ex-husband is Italian! she joked, before she realized that had been perhaps the wrong thing to say.

But he hadn’t minded, and now they had a date, for Saturday, which meant she had a week to get ready. She hated all of her clothes, needed a trim and a manicure, and had no idea what they would talk about over dinner. She was afraid to eat in front of him, worried that her underwear wouldn’t be sexy enough, and uncertain whether she was supposed to even let him see whether her underwear was sexy at all—though, to be honest, she didn’t think she’d be able to help herself. It had been so long. She was ready to just invite him over to her house for cocktails, but all the girls at work said no, no no, you can’t do that.

The girls at work were very helpful, in fact. They told her all sorts of things she hadn’t any idea about. One girl, in her twenties, told her that she had to, absolutely had to, have a Brazilian bikini wax if she was even considering letting him see her in her underwear. Caroline was comfortable with her body and ran on a treadmill at the gym every day, but she had never had anything waxed, and had never done anything at all to her personal hair, except soap it in the shower. She had seen some of the younger women at the gym with all kinds of strange configurations—disturbingly neat triangles, the stripes that Cosmo called “mohawks,” and even perfectly hairless mounds that looked as chilly as the Roman statues at the Met. But she had never thought that any of that was an option for her, she just hadn’t even considered it.

The girls asked her even stranger, more personal questions. Did she have vibrating condoms at hand? Flavored lubricant? They told her to go downtown to a store called Toys In Babeland and buy a butt plug. He’s European. He might like that. Caroline was horrified. She didn’t even know such a thing existed. No wonder Lorenzo had left her for another woman; he was European, too! (Eduardo, it turns out, was South American, but no difference.) They asked her what she did for birth control, and she laughed and said nothing; one of the girls, in a stall of the ladies’ room, showed her how to use her mouth to put a condom on a banana, which she had then eaten for lunch. I do it every time I go out with a new guy; it drives them wild! Caroline mustered a grimace that the girl thankfully took for a smile of gratitude. It’s gonna be great! she promised.

And now, the time had come. For her date. For her first date in fourteen years.

Caroline took a deep breath, tucking her hair behind her ears and locking the door behind her. She had done it all: the manicure, the trim, even the wax; she had bought a new black dress, a new kind of perfume, and opened a fresh package of nylons. In her bedroom closet was a discreet paper bag containing condoms, lubricant, and a strange, silicone cork still in its packaging—that she hadn’t been able to bring herself to touch, although she did find her waxed area strangely thrilling.

At the bar, Eduardo was a perfect gentleman. They were having a pre-dinner drink—martinis, rather than wine—and he told her about his business and his country and his life. He had traveled all over the world. Caroline smiled and sipped her martini, blinking her eyes up at him and wondering whether he would want to kiss her, or if she had done all that work for nothing. After she finished her drink, he ordered her another one, even though she told him she didn’t need it—she was feeling terribly tipsy. In fact, she wasn’t feeling very good at all. She needed to go to the bathroom, but she was afraid to stand up, she felt so tipsy. In fact, the table seemed to be falling away from her hands, first on one side, then on the other. She held onto the sides of it tightly, then let go because she was afraid he would see. He kept talking and smiling, his dark eyes drilling down into her. I think, she said, I think I need some fresh air. He helped her up and walked her out. She could barely pick up her feet. She could barely look out of her eyes in front of her. Everything was spinning. His arm was hot around her. Then, she was holding her key, and trying to put it in the lock of her door, but the hole was so small; she couldn’t find it. He took her key from her and opened the door, half-carrying her inside. Do you want a drink? he asked as they stepped into her apartment; she shook her head no and collapsed on the couch. Then he was upon her, like a panther, his body muscled and dark over hers, his tongue down her throat, his hands searching for a zipper. The couch swung wildly underneath her, first one way, then the other. Stop, she said, stop, I feel sick, and somehow, she pushed him—pushed him up, off of her, and out the door, locking it. So sick, she said, to no one, and ran to the sink where she puked and puked. So tired, so sick and so tired, and she dropped right there on the kitchen floor, and slept, until Monday afternoon, waking, maybe, she couldn’t remember, to pee and to puke, since she woke up in the bathroom, her head on the toilet seat. She thought it was Sunday, until she saw her answering machine flashing a message—her boss, wondering where she was.

Oh shit, oh shit. Without wondering what had happened, she took a hot shower and opened the closet to find something to wear. That was when she saw the brown paper bag, sitting where she had left it.

Writing: Feline Defenestration

I haven’t done it yet but I’m about to do it even though I know I shouldn’t do it. I know she doesn’t want me to do it either because she’s all fur and claws, all wriggling and writhing desperation. Holding onto her is hard enough; she’s never gone in much for holding. She’s always all wriggling and writhing and fur and claws when you try to hold her, but not desperate like now. Now she knows that something bad is going to happen, and I know it too, and I know I shouldn’t do it, but I’m going to do it anyway.

She’s all twisty and squirmy; I’m holding her right on the ledge, thinking about it, thinking about should I do it and what’s going to happen and will she do it, and her claws are clinging like mad to the aluminum frame, making a desperate, panicky clicking sound, a scraping sound I can’t stand, and she’s clawing at my hands and turning round her neck and rolling her eyeballs around in their neat little sockets. I want to know what will happen. I want to know will she land on her feet. I stretch my neck out the window and feel the wind outside on my cheeks. My mom’s car is parked in the driveway down below.

The thing is, she looks really big and fat, but it’s all just fur. When you grab her, which isn’t easy, you feel how small she is, you feel her bones, all rattling and twisting, and her tiny heart pounding real fast. You put you hand around her neck and you feel how it’s so tiny, how tiny her head is, her skull. So tiny, under all that big fur, just a tiny little motor driving those claws, desperately scratching at the window frame while I hold her out in the wind, through the window, in mid-air. I shouldn’t do it, but I do. I want to know, will she land on her feet. I let go.

I don’t—I didn’t—I don’t know why—what did I—

The sun goes black a moment when I squinch my eyes and I do not see whether she did it. Everything is hot, and rushing, and tears, and what did I do, and I’m running down the stairs and I’m crying and I’m shouting “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” and my parents are downstairs and I see them. They look at me and I run to them and I blurt “I threw the cat out the window,” and my confession is immediate and my remorse is immediate and my forgiveness is immediate and my father is out the door to find her and my mother is hugging me and asking me what happened and what did I do and why did I do it.

I cannot tell her that I wanted to know would she land on her feet. I cannot tell her that at school we sing a song that has a chorus that goes “and he threw her out the window, the window, the second story window,” which is not about a cat but is instead a silly song, with nursery rhymes, where Mary Mary quite contrary’s garden gets thrown out the window, and Peter Peter pumpkin eater’s wife gets thrown out the window. I can’t tell her that I wanted to know would she land on her feet, and I didn’t even wait to see if she did. All I did was hear a loud noise, a heavy thud, a bad, sick sound, and close my eyes and cry. My arms are covered in scratches that are bleeding. My mom asks did she scratch me. I keep crying and nod my head. “Did you do it because she scratched you?” she asks, and I keep crying through my squinched up eyes and nod my head while my mom hugs me and holds my hot face in the tender, forgiving darkness of her silk blouse, ruined with my snotty tears.

My dad comes back into the house holding the cat, who’s wriggling all around, wide-eyed and fearful, who has blood dribbling down her nose, but is otherwise very much alive. My dad tells us that she had run four blocks away but that he had caught her, and he takes her into the kitchen, holding her under his arm, washing the blood away, his hand at the tap. She is okay. She is okay. My dad says that he thinks the car broke her fall. He doesn’t say whether she landed on her feet. I think that if she had landed on her feet, her nose would not be bleeding. I think that if she had landed on her nose she would not be alive. He holds her for awhile and tries to soothe her while my mother holds me the same way. I do not have to tell him why I did it. My mom tells him that I did it because she scratched me. It is implied that I know that what I did was wrong in all my tears and shouting. I am not punished. We do not talk about it ever.
The cat hates me now. The cat was never nice; her mother was an alley cat we adopted when we moved to the new house and my mom saw she was pregnant. All the kittens were born in the middle of the night while I was sleeping; she gave birth inside a suitcase lined with my My Little Pony blanket, which got ruined from blood and placenta and tiny mewling hairless things: five of them. At night, I would sleep on the couch while they would play, climbing on the drapes and tearing them with holes, and in the morning I would wake up with a whole puddle of black and white fur snuggling in my lap. My mom said we could keep one and would have to give the other four away. She gave away my favorite one. Their mom had been mean and taught them all to hunt, to scratch and claw and bite. I remember how she got sick when we started giving the kittens away. She looked and looked for the missing ones, and made low, long howling sound in her throat. She threw up everywhere. After that she hated my mom, and got even more mean until she got hit by a car one day and died. Now her daughter hates me, and runs away every time I come near. Even though she’s okay, even though she’s lived almost fifteen years now since then, she remembers to hate me. Even though she’s too dumb to remember anything else, like her own name, or the whistle my mom uses to try and call her, she remembers to hate me for what I did when I was seven, in the name of science, of experiment, curiosity. It didn’t kill the cat.

My Devastation

I am small, but not so small that I should be drinking out of bottles anymore. I am old enough to want a bottle because I appreciate it conceptually; I appreciate that it enables me to drink while lying down, which a tippy cup doesn’t do. A tippy cup leaks. I am old enough that my mother has put an exasperated moratorium on bottles, and I am old enough to have taken a bottle, half-filled with pineapple juice, and, with the future in mind, to have placed it behind the heavy brown folds of the living room drapes, which go all the way to the floor.

Or perhaps I give my small self too much credit; perhaps I had forgotten it there when I was caught, the week prior, behind the same drapes, my left fist full of crayons, my right hand adding red with the abandon of the late Abstract Expressionists to the mural I’ve been working on for days in cloistered silence, muffled in the warm folds of the drapes, their heavy woven stuff, brown with tan flecks, wooly, maybe even scratchy against my young skin.

I have a habit with warm spaces, dark spaces, spaces wrapped in fabric. When I am older, I will make “tents” out of blankets stretched over chairs, and I will stay inside all afternoon, with my books, with my snacks. When I am older, I will wrap the television in a baby blanket, blocking out the picture, but not the warmth or the light. I will sit and look at the glowing square of fabric, listening to the voices. But that is for another time. For now, I was discovered in the midst of the creative act, the curtain pulled aside, the room’s yellow light revealing my scrawls, red and yellow mostly, some green, on the smooth white wall.

My bohemian parents were not as forgiving as one might hope, and I had dropped the bottle and run away crying at their sharp words. Later, my mom will give me access to her attic studio, where I will decimate hundreds of sheets of expensive colored drawing paper and a four hundred dollar box of Prismacolor pencils in the electric pencil sharpener. But that is for another time. For now, I’ve rediscovered my bottle. It is yellow—a milky, pastel plastic—with white cap and pert brown nipple. The nipple is the brown of the drapes, and the early evening light that filters into them when I hide against the wall, tucked behind their warmth.

The living room is wide, low, avocado; the carpet is shag, mint with gold threads. My parents are doing something, who knows; I must not be so small that they know what I’m doing, because I’ve hidden myself behind my curtain, and I’ve found my bottle. I am excited, because I know that I am not supposed to have it. Taboo is as sweet for a small person as for any other. I don’t know that yet, but I know a thrill; there is a thrill in me when I see it, when I want it, when I know that I can have it, here, in this dim, warm space that is my secret again, that is all mine.

It is important to have space that is all mine, because the house is filled with strangers; downstairs, there is a family that does laundry and hangs it to dry in the backyard, where I will one day pedal my tricycle, with its plastic handlebar ribbons, in circles around and around the cracked and greenish cement. I do not play with the kids there because they do not speak English. Upstairs, there is a smoky room filled with plants that I’m not allowed inside, because someone else lives there. Here, I have my playroom, which has a Donald Duck record player, and dolls, and games, and toys, but the room is big, wide, bright; the carpet, minty shag with gold threads as wide as a field. There are no corners; there are no nooks.

Later, we will get a cat, and even she will be clever enough to open the accordion doors to my playroom, pushing her lithe body into the crack between them, and leaping up onto the dresser where my goldfish, Lolly and Bubbles, swim around and around in their little bowl. She will sit and stare, mesmerized, and then she will swipe, but she won’t ever catch them, because we will always catch her first; the fish will escape with a few scrapes, scabs that will heal. Later, the scratched fish, Bubbles, will develop a lump; it will be small, but it will grow, and she will die. But that is for another time. For now, I too have found something I oughtn’t have, and I am thrilled. It is my secret, in which to delight before I am caught.

When I was smaller, before I understood the efficiency of the bottle, and the ambrosial delight of pineapple juice, but had them all the time, I took my bottle into the kitchen, and dragged out the enamel basin my mother kept under the sink. I dragged the basin out into the middle of the room, removed my diaper and dropped it on the floor, opened the bottle and poured juice into the basin, and stepped in. My mother found me bathing in the sticky stuff, had to draw me a real bath. But today, though I am small, I am not so small that I will take this opportunity for granted. I see the bottle, the milky yellow plastic with its regulated ridges, the white cap, the brown rubber nipple, and I am thrilled.

I grab it; I grip it; I stick it in my mouth and suck, and I am swarming. My mouth is swarming. My hands—my skin—it tickles, it runs, it recoils, it repulses; my mouth—my tongue scraping my teeth, my roof, spitting, sputtering, spewing, ants, everywhere, ants, in mouth on my face my hands my skin everywhere, inside of me and out, moving! Crawling! Running! Scurrying! Ants! Ugh! Ew! Blech! Feuy! I spit, spastic; I rub my hands on my dress; I rub my tongue on my hand; I shake; I shiver; I shudder. I’ve thrown it down instantly; the milky plastic is spotted with them where it lies on the floor, sideways. Half of them are crushed, the rest, half-crushed, struggle. Never again.

Never again will I go behind the curtain, now that I see them, on their trail, from a crack in the plaster against the window frame, down the wall, to where my bottle had sat, singing its silent song of sugar, of golden sweetness, to them as well as to me. Never again, the warm brown light. Never again the safety. Never again, this nasty surprise. Never again.

An Amy Hempel-style Story

When the knob of the drawer came off in my hand, I knew it was over. I had been looking for a picture—the one where he was standing with my pink umbrella—because I remembered loving the crinkles in his smiling eyes, and at the moment—for years, in fact—I didn’t love—hadn’t loved—anything about him, and hadn’t even looked for any crinkles in his eyes, smiling or otherwise. He never liked having his photo taken, so there were only a few, and they were hidden away with unused passports and expired library cards in stacks on shelves in cabinets and places like that—the kitchen drawer, where we kept the good scissors, the key to the safe deposit box, and all the department store credit cards we didn’t use. I had thought this picture special, though, so I had put it in the top drawer of my mother’s antique dressing table (not the maple one, but the smaller, darker one—the one I liked to think had been her mother’s, even though it hadn’t been, even though the one that had been her mothers was stocky and squat and inelegant, with a warped mirror I’d thrown away when we moved and relegated the dresser to the garage, where it still holds jars of nails and cans of dried-out markers and boxes of rubber bands and strings that he always refused to throw away). I had put it in a safe place, away from his angry hands. He saved everything impersonal, but rushed to destroy the tender things: photographs, poems, love letters. I keep an envelope full of withered roses from my high school boyfriend; anything like that he would have torn or burnt or simply left out on the curb, forty years ago.

My mother had bought the dressing table at a garage sale, I think, when they bought their first house. I remember its stern but voluptuous lines—Deco, I know now—sunk into some kind of acrylic carpet, low-pill and chemically scratchy, steel-wool silver-gray, and its weight’s impropriety against the paper-smooth sheet rock. Here, the walls are plaster, and I like to think that the hairline cracks add the kind of character that an old piece like this needs, the appropriate company. It’s legs reclaim their elegance against the dull herringbone floor. The knobs on the three drawers, simple brass plugs screwed into the pulpy wood, have wobbled now and then, but always remained reassuringly cool against the insides of my sweating fists when I tugged at them. But that day, the knob came off, with a sure and weighty plunk into my palm, and the drawer, stuffed with papers and bills and letters and desiccated lipsticks and powders and tubes of foot cream and Christopher with my pink umbrella—the drawer stayed shut. And I squeezed the knob in my sweating fist, and I shook my head, and I said to myself, “don’t,” but I did anyway.

Short Story: Suzie Q. Tuesday's Little Problem

Suzie Q. Tuesday has roaches in her apartment. It reflects poorly on her, but it's not her fault. She is upper middle class, and lives in an according neighborhood. She doesn't care much for dusting, but she doesn't much eat either, and is basically clean, if not neat.

Suzie Q. Tuesday tells her super about the problem, which is mounting. He tells her about the old lady living two flights up, who is the source of the problem, which has been spreading, slowly. He sprays her apartment and the others, and there is a sick, sweet smell when she comes home. There are also two dead roaches in the bathtub. There is also a living roach on the windowsill, which she slaps dead with a rubber flip flop left there expressly for that purpose, it being a high-traffic area. There is also one running circles inside the white plastic liner of her trash can, which she hasn't the skill to terminate.

Suzie becomes a decent, if unwilling, huntress. Rubber flip flops are strategically left around the apartment. Each day when she comes home from work and turns on the light, there are at least two, if not three, black marks on her white wall, which freeze and then scatter according to an inscrutable rhythm all their own. They know her single room better than she does, tucking themselves under the lip of the window frame, beneath the moldings, and behind the radiator cover. Suzie Q. Tuesday curses that she had her hardwood floors stained the brown of bloody chocolate—a perfect camouflage for the invaders and a color that amplifies her paranoia. Sometimes she sees the floor moving, and it's one of them. More often, she sees the floor moving, or a dark spot on the wall from the corner of her eye, but as she runs, or as she turns, she sees that it's nothing, or that it's a mere chip in the paint, or that it's a small ball of dust. One night, she comes home and turns on the light and is certain that she sees something running across her white duvet—toward the pillows, most unfortunately. She throws back the covers with her lightest and quickest touch—the pillows, too—but finds nothing. That night, sleeping is difficult.

The next day, Suzie Q. Tuesday approaches her super again. He promises to bomb the apartment that day. Suzie has left some soiled lingerie lying around, but she doesn't have time to go back up and remove it. Vinnie will have to shield his eyes. She imagines him going up there with his bombs and being briefly distracted, pressing the apricot-colored ouvert to his face and inhaling deeply. She hopes that it will inspire him to do a thorough job.

When Suzie Q. comes home, she opens the door into a thick mist of stultifying poison. There are canisters on the floor to remind her that the bombs have been detonated. She opens the windows, packs a bag, and prepares to spend the night at whatever man's who will have her. Meanwhile, she sees a number of roaches clinging to the walls, paralyzed, their antennae wilted. She wipes them up and flushes them, satisfied. For a fresh start, she decides to take out the trash, but, popping the top and tugging at the white plastic liner, she notices independent movement. Disassembling the stainless steel airtight apparatus, she sees them dancing their sick scuttle in a ring around the bottom of the steel cage, which opens along plastic seams to the outer world. Nauseated, she leaves the house, wanders awhile, then passes the night sleepless on a hard mattress in a filthy hovel uptown, next to the hulking body of a snoring black man. For all its apparent squalor, the dark basement apartment is free of vermin.

Suzie Q. Tuesday goes home the next morning before work to dress and speak with her super. She tells him that he has to do it again—another bomb—with the trash can disassembled and its contaminated parts scattered across the floor. She tells him to removed the radiator cover and anything else under which they may be hiding. She tells him to be relentless.

After work that day, Suzie Q. Tuesday drinks two glasses of pinot noir at the bar with her coworkers, prolonging the moment at which she must go home and clean everything. When she does get home, tipsy enough to be excited about scrubbing with Lysol and Ajax, she opens the door to find no fog and no decanted canisters. Her super is gone for the day, so she cannot ask him why he did not do his job as directed. She changes to shorts, keds, a t-shirt out from oxford, slacks, pumps, and braces for warrior mode. She goes to the drugstore for Raid and more Lysol, adds a bottle of Clorox.

Back home, they are waiting. Fat and brown, the adults are lounging along the curvature or the upended trashcan like crickets in the Midwestern dusk. The smaller ones are running up the walls. She is systematic—crush; flush—and takes her time. For over an hour, she kills, sprays, wipes, kills some more. The fumes are heady. Occasionally, the carcasses stick to the bottom of her rubber flip flop, which she rinses in the toilet bowl and then the sink. She will not spend another night next to a fetid, shadowy body that wants from her, even if it means spending the night awake, alert, hunting. When every last one visible has been disposed of, she sits down to write this chronicle. Every few sentences, she looks up to see another one climbing the wall; she sets the book aside, stands—crush; flush. Somehow, they are coming only one at a time now, slowly and as if drunk; they are befuddled and easy to slap, winded from the fumes and unable to perform their usual dashing samba. But they do keep coming, nevertheless, one every few sentences—crush; flush.

Writing: The Nine Day Novel Challenge**

Luckily, it is not a reality TV show (yet?!).

My friend, "I never actually do anything I say I'm going to do," has challenged me to a nine day novel challenge, in part as an attempt to save face over the screenplay debacle.*

The challenge is inspired by his airline reading of "one of those mickey spillane novels, which are fun but unbelievably lazy--at one point he describes a roomful of commies as 'they looked like commies from a cartoon, you know'."

No; I don't know. I don't know what commies in a cartoon look like (doesn't it depend on the animator?) and I don't know who Mickey Spillane is.

My friend goes on to explain, "of course, the reason why he was lazy is that he took about 9 days to do one of these....so, should we do a nine day novel challenge? it can be something pulpy (not of course some sort of crime novel or anything, as we can't do those)"

Hmm.

We actually are now talking about taking two weeks to do it (although Nine Day Novel Challenge is a more marketable title for the reality TV show), with a 100-150 page count. The loser is the one who doesn't do it (gee, I wonder who that will be?) and the punishment is that the loser buys the winner a pricey dinner (I don't think he and I have the same concept of "pricey dinner," considering all those $4 curries, but whatever). In the (unlikely) case that both parties presents a manuscript on the due date, a disinterested third party (who works at a big publishing house!) will be the judge, and the loser buys dinner for all three.

Hmm.

I am concerned. Two weeks for 100 pages is about 10 pages a day. That's a lot. That will cut seriously into my reading time, which will in turn cut seriously into my blogging time. Do I really want to do this? Also, the prize isn't that great. It's actually more about gloating power, and I'm not so big on gloating.

And how am I to write a novel in the style of Mickey Spillane when I have no idea who he is? Now I need to dedicate research time as well?! I don't know about this. . .


*Six or so months ago, "I never actually do anything I say I'm going to do" and I were having a chat over some godawful $4 curry or something, and he was describing his new get-rich-quick scheme. I actually adore "I never actually do anything I say I'm going to do," because even though he always has new get-rich-quick schemes, they are never ugly capitalist pyramid scenarios, or duplicitous web sites, or dealings with drugs and hos. They are always semi-intellectual/semi-artistic pursuits. This time, it went thusly:

INADA. . .: Did you know that you can get like $20,000 just for writing a screenplay?
me: "Just" writing a screenplay? Is it really so easy?
INADA. . .: For $20,000, yeah, it can't be that hard.
me: Well, why don't you do it, then.
INADA. . .: I think I'm going to.
me: I challenge you to do it. As incentive, if you do it, I will do my utmost to get it filmed (I have connections, and anyway, I know he'll never do it anyway).
INADA. . .: Excellent. I'll do it then.
me: You'd better. How long do you need?
INADA. . .: I don't know. . . three months?
me: I'm putting it in my blackberry. I'll give you a one-month warning.

Well, at the one month warning, he asked for a one-month extension, because his great Viking idea was taken already, but he had a new great Nazi idea or some such rot. Of course, he never did it, and thereby earned his INADA. . . moniker.

**Update: We are indeed doing the challenge, and I am publishing excerpts as I go along. See all blog entries titled "Excerpt: . . . "

A Quitter Starts

I am a quitter.

I quit writing a few months ago. I'm not shy about many things, but I do get flustered when people ask me about my writing, and what I write, because what I was writing was an incoherent mess.

When I started writing in high school, I was doing a sort of grandiose version of journaling. Narrating myself in the third person exercised (and exorcised) certain (melodramatic) aspects of my life, minimized the humdrums, and worked out whatever emotional and philosophical crisis I may have been working out. The more I read, the more my writing changed. I have a very porous voice. When I read Proust, my emails to friends become Proustian. When I read David Foster Wallace, my sentences lengthen to paragraph length, rambling over technical details, including parenthetical references and dependent clauses nestled like Russian dolls. I read a lot.

The more I read, of course, the more I wanted to write some Thing. I do not (can not) write straight fiction. I do not like writing (or reading) much in the way of non-fiction, though some essayists are certainly fun (DFW, of course). Working constantly on bits (500-2,500 words) of semi-fictional memoir, and constantly aware that I was much too young to write memoir, I continued using writing as a way to distill memories of conversations and arguments and stories, blending them with the fantasies they had spawned in my mind. I have a very active interior life.

And so. The older I got, the more I grew into myself. I had always planned to connect all these little bits of writing into a novel of grand proportions (cf. Infinite Jest, etc.), but I noticed that I was writing less and less. I noticed months had passed without me writing anything but the occasional literary email. I tried to get a handle on this by giving myself structure - a friend began to give me weekly assignments of 1,000 words - just to encourage my mind to work in that way again. But these small duties had the opposite effect. Each sentence was a struggle, and the work that came out was overworked and stilted. So, I quit.

I also quit because of a new philosophical dilemma. Actually, it was not a dilemma so much as a realization. I was attempting to write the last assignment - a 1,000 word review of the newest James Bond film. About 750 words in, I realized that everything I was arguing so vehemently was, in fact, completely arbitrary. I realized that, in fact, ALL of my convictions were completely arbitrary. Therefore, I had no authority to write anything at all.

This may seem like a rather odd chain of reaction. Of course convictions are arbitrary (and by this I mean random and subject to one's particular past and intellectual/psychological/ spiritual/etc. development). We see proof of it daily (Sunni v. Shiite gets the Example of the Year award), but it doesn't seem to stop anyone from actually having, and living, and dying by these convictions. Getting into one of those absurd meta- spirals, even the conviction that all convictions are arbitrary is a conviction, and therefore arbitrary. (Crisis! Where's my copy of Godel, Escher, Bach?!)

I went for a nature walk with my parents around Crystal Springs Reservoir (where you walk a paved path under damp trees and hear the not-so-distant hum of freeway traffic) during my Christmastime visit home and we discussed this. My dad got tangled in a knot over the idea that convictions are arbitrary. He didn't agree with the word "arbitrary." He agreed, upon thorough discussion, that indeed our selves are subject to history - personal and world, being something of a historian himself (http://www.timelines.ws/) - but didn't accept that this fact thereby made our selves arbitrary, as I argued. My mom was more comfortable with the idea, having, like myself, a regular yoga practice, and generally being more open (conceptually, if not emotionally) to the idea that life is random and arbitrary (she has not taken the additional step that I have - that life is therefore meaningless).

And so. Some friends have diagnosed my current "Convictions are arbitrary" plus "Life is meaningless" formula as equalling depression. But I have seen depression and I know that I do not have it. I am actually happier than I have ever been - lighter - actually. I was an (excessively) goal-oriented perfectionist as a student, and I took for granted that existence had a certain pressure. Now I feel no pressure at all. Four months ago I quit my 60+ hour a week job selling real estate, which was competitive, commission-based, goal-oriented, and caused me to sleep with my blackberry under my pillow. I took a corporate 9-5 with an unassuming title and no stress. The hardest part of the job was convincing HR at the interview that I was NOT overqualified and over educated for the position (although I certainly am). I quit. I quit trying to be rich, I quit trying to be hip, and I quit trying to be high-powered. Then, I quit writing.

All that said, I am going to start blogging. I am hoping the ephemeral nature of the medium will keep this light enough that it suits me. I still read a lot of fiction. I would like to keep a record and a sort of book review forum, and this is a good way to do that. I see a lot of movies. Ditto. I like music. Tripio? Dance. Yoga. Art. Eating and drinking. This will be a forum for my meandering and reviewing. I also have a lot of interesting conversations, and I will include those here as well. Stories about my family (semi-fictional memoir cannot be held back). I will be working out the link between opinion and conviction, and working to accept the arbitrary. And I will be writing.