Another Coupland Interview Post

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On Reading

I read Requiem for a Dream during my last winter break. In my opinion, Selby is an author that should be pulled into the canon of American Literature. The text’s focal point is a bastardization of what we consider to be ‘The American Dream.’ There’s something intellectually masochistic to the downfall of the characters. Given the nature of Henry Rollin’s work and his perpetual cynicism, I can picture him identifying with Selby’s writing. In the video above, Rollins talks about suffering from writer’s block. While we all don’t have the ability to look for our favorite writers in the phone book, I think it could do a writer justice to remember where they’re coming from as readers. Maybe revisiting their work is just the best we can do.

One of my professors once told me that he identifies first and foremost as a reader before either a teacher or a writer. Reading through all of this theory and criticism this summer, I’m really starting to reshape what I consider the role of the reader to be. ‘Reader,’ when you lift the lenses back, is synonymous with self. I don’t think the reader is actually a role, but the text is an experience of the reader. It’s a definition I want to play around with some more.

Last week, I finished reading McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. Captain Jack, who is an Irish lit enthusiast, had been prodding me to finish it for a bit. While the Captain and I could probably be categorized in a similar niche, we both read this book completely differently. Both of us have rejected our catholic heritage, but I was generally more pessimistic and made extremely rude comments on the role of religion and pride in the novel. I complained about his final confession to St. Francis—probably one of the most pinnacle moments in the novel in terms of Frank’s development, but I didn’t like that religion was still being curtailed into his life and that it ultimately followed him on his way to America. Jack asked me what I thought the ashes were. I argued for shame, but he thought it was Angela’s solace. For either of us, it wasn’t the same experience. Somebody once said that English majors just read a bunch of books and talk about their feelings. Is there any truth to that? I think one of our responsibilities is creating somewhat of a textual collage of experiences. Which will inevitably help us understand ‘the experience’ or something.

I’ll get to ‘Tis at some point, maybe even by the end of the summer. Right now I’m reading through Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and Mark Vonnegut’s The Eden Express. I’ve been trying to get my hands on Calvino’s stuff for a while and my girlfriend gave me Vonnegut’s book for my birthday. Both of which are very optimistic, despite the two styles of desperation the works are showing. I’d like to write about both.

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Personification

A poster in the break room holds a photograph of an employee I’ll never meet. He won the national service star competition. Beneath the picture of this smiling man, who could probably pass for our senior discount, a caption tells me that he personifies the ideals of the company. Personification. Yes, national grocery distribution outlet, what’s being personified are your ideals; the ideals which posses a more defined human identity than your workers, if we’re using the word in association with its meaning. Read correctly, I think couple associates would agree with the dismal outlook the store is projecting upon its employees. As much as I don’t trust the dictionary, there’s almost an Orwellian undertone to changing the meaning of a word. The act of personification is linguistically beautiful, projecting life onto not-life, but I feel this is another case of swapping authenticity for style. What’s lost when the gears shift?

Sometimes I’d like to stick a bucket under the leaking faucets meaning. Not only would I’d like to see what condensates on the outside of the pipes, but to learn just where the sprockets are loose. The leak exists only if there’s a flow. I’ll brew some coffee with the murky water.

Earlier this week, I took a ride down to the University of Rhode Island in hopes of gathering some more information about their graduate program. This probably would have been one of my more productive days if I had found the initiative to actually leave the car when I arrived. I sampled the commute to Kingston, a cozy farm town with Dunkin’ Donuts only a block from the campus. But this isn’t enough. If I’m serious about the pursuit of graduate studies, here or anywhere, I need to start communicating. I feel that my research into different programs involves more looking into what people are saying about their programs than actually looking into different schools themselves. I’m doing more eavesdropping than asking. It’s time to send some emails.

Why the fixation on URI’s Composition and Rhetoric program? This is a question I really need to be asking myself. A short answer is that it’s a moderately applicable field that sort of transcends the literature teacher option, which I do like. Maybe what appeals to me the most about composition and rhetoric is that they’re what I struggle with the most. Looking back at the essays I’ve written as an undergraduate, I can see a lot of sloppy patterns and more weaknesses than strengths. And considering the way I verbally communicate, I’m known to mumble incomplete phrases, ending just about every sentence with and, settling for incomplete thoughts. Maybe it’s another pursuit of self. Maybe that’s what a career is.

I don’t know what I’ll be doing with the rest of my life. I’m sure there will be words and meaning, maybe a cat or two.

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granny smith apples are okay I guess

The bathroom at store smells like granny smith apples. If there is one stable aspect of working here, it’s that the bathrooms will always smell like apples. One of my coworkers is utilizing one of the stalls. He’s telling me what he’s doing. I really don’t want to know he’s doing. But I can’t leave while I’m washing my hands. The soap even smells like apples. The mist from the diffusers not only clings to the surface of the black tiles and cardboard-thin walls, but somehow sinks in to everything, fading.

He asks me if I remember a time when he had long, black hair. I do. I ask him if he’s ever going to grow it back out again and dye it, because the blonde-going-on-gray is something I’m not used to from him. But he says no and explains to me that it’s too much maintenance. He continues on to tell me about his scalp. I don’t want to talk about his scalp, but he brought up an interesting point of beauty and I push the conversation a little more. Talking into the empty apple-scented room, I mention Darwinism, how hair maintenance equates to survival and survival ultimately equates to beauty. But he doesn’t want to hear about survival, especially not in the grocery store bathroom while we’re killing our lunch break, not even looking at each other. He just wants to talk about his scalp. Which is cool. At least we found some middle ground. Maybe this moment is something I could blog about later.

Blogging, as of right now, is the only writing that I’m currently sharing and exposing others too. I’m not in a workshop environment, I haven’t submitted anything serious in a while, and I don’t really pass around my stories (although, Captain Jack has been asking to see some work from me). So to give these little moments significance outside of myself, I turn to saving the anecdotes amongst my list of how many bananas the produce floor needs (which is always between two and four).

What do I blog about and why? Aside from obscurities, I can see three major topics that I subject any reader to. These include my employment at the grocery store, my role as a student enrolled in my current program, and major life issues articulated through the lens of either of the first two. I wonder if all of my writing consists of trying to settle internal conflicts through these pseudo-sociological roles.

When I’m writing a post, especially in the last few months, I try to consider things like merit, patterns, and focus. Earlier, I flipped through a folder I have on my computer’s desktop and looked at a bunch of unfinished blog posts. With my writing and most overlying issues in my life I tend to get overwhelmed with what I jump into and quit. Easily. I get apprehensive, and it’s not good for what Annie Dillard considers, ‘the flow.’ Polished writing will have its place. Maybe one of these days I’ll even finish this short story I started a month ago. Or maybe not. It’s not indifference, maybe it is a bit of me lacking discipline, but it’s more so me being okay with being the jeans-and-t-shirt-Andrew, the one who wrote blog posts before short stories and unfinished novels.

So as I sit here, drinking Guinness out of a New England Patriots mug that my uncle gave me as a birthday gift, I can look at this writer’s block and shrug. I can take a sip, pretending to be a Patriots fan, and give these patterns and moments of literary potential a mildly interested glance and say, “Whatev.”

I’m going to blog about stupid shit and enjoy it.

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Caught Between a Rock and the Potato Cart

At Hannaford, we used to carry some generic multi-department products called Hannaford Inspirations. These ranged from hotdog buns to processed deli meat. Customers seemed to dig them. I never went out of my way to try them. Now, what was once the Inspiration line has been replaced and changed into the My Essentials brand. To my knowledge, My Essentials is distributed by the same entity that originally carried the Inspiration. It’s the same product. However, now under a different name, it can be marketed by the Delhaize Group, which owns Hannaford, but also a handful of other chain stores. I used to have a keychain with their lion logo on it. My manager gave it to me. It almost felt significant. Without the Hannaford name on these products, they can now be carried by the other stores owned by Delhaize. A good business move, I guess.

What does Essential signify to the buyer that differs from Inspiration? Essential implies the necessity of the item. In most cases, I believe that we as customers have the cognitive strength to see the product beyond the word juxtaposed on a clean, white background. But I think marketing really considers trying to get a foot in the door of the relationship we have between our body and our mind. Both negotiate what is essential with what is possible. From what I understand in my studies of literary theory, language not only dictates reality, but embodies it. Consuming food is essential. Seeing a product with the word Essential on it might shake up the nodes in our brain and build an association. But across the store, from the hot ovens in the bakery to the cold walls of produce, nobody really cares in this wasteland of apathy.

I’m happy for the new product. Not enough to buy it, but it takes the word Inspiration out of my time spent on the floor. Inspiration is a dirty word. I don’t use it lightly. It’s used to charm and destroy. The act of inspiring is beautiful; when one is able to tap through our membranes of indifference, anxiety, and the warm prejudices we wear to truly motivate another. But I feel it’s become something different in language. A stencil. An example. A drawing that book that encourages the young to trace the lines they can see through the paper. And settle.

The department is shifting this week. We have an associate leaving, an associate joining, and customers trying to find the perfect bag of limes to go with their Memorial Day Coronas. Standing beside the mess of our potato cart, I see it all. We’re falling behind the rush. The banana shrine is running down faster than we can fill it.

Here at the store, my past follows me. This statement is generic. The past follows all of us at all times. It’s nothing new to write about. It’s a shadow cast by the stance we take in the light of the present; what we see and what we let ourselves see, it’s almost an art. Like shadow puppets. But here in a grocery store, an essential establishment, I see the faces of old friends, coaches, and teachers. Some are more welcoming than others.

Pricing up some 5lb bags of California White Potatoes, my old guidance councilor approaches me. Our eyes meet and she calls out to me. She moves in close, really close. It’s as if she’s expecting me to hug her. I stand awkwardly and I smile. What face should I be wearing?

“Hey!” I say in an attempt to find the right pitch. My voice is loud, indifferent, and comes out with a mumble. I sound like a jackass. This is the individual who found the program I’m currently enrolled in for me. You’d think I would be more appreciative.

She begins asking about my semester, stringing together bits and pieces that she’s heard from my siblings. She says that I have an excellent GPA. I don’t tell her that it dropped. Among a few other things, my mind is on potatoes. Not college.

“Very nice,” she says to me, trying to cut through my stuttered words. “We have two students enrolling in the fall semester there. Now that we’ve seen what your program can do—”

Two. What this program can do? I tell her that it’s expensive. I tell her that it’s not for everyone. I tell her that it’s a very different environment for each student. I’m doing just the opposite of what I should be doing. I’m trying to turn her off of to the college.

“Well,” she says. “All roads lead to the same goal.”

All roads? Same goal? All bluntly evokes a sense that there are more than one and for the sake of this ‘same goal’ it throws a cloak of safety over everybody and their lives. Like they all have merit or something. Like they’re all capable of attaining this ‘same goal.’ But what is the ‘same goal?’ How can we see it? If all roads are leading to it, then we should just look to where a few of these roads are leading. But leading is different from being followed. The word projects its binary opposite. Not mislead, but ignored. We can’t trust all examples if we know some travelers are deliberately going the wrong way. At what point can we trust any story? Maybe there’s signs or symptoms to the mislead life. Like the hives of deception, or anybody with bad knee can be diagnosed with the unenlightened path. I’m thinking way too much about this. I mention loans. I always do. It’s like an embarrassment I can be proud of.

“You can’t measure it all in time and numbers.” I hate this phrase as soon as it leaves her mouth, but I know I’ll be quoting it later.

I talk briefly about the idea of going for a Masters, or even a PhD, but my words are unsure, or maybe just afraid. I once sat in her office and told her I wanted to be a writer, despite what my academics told of me. I wish I retained that certainty. She rewinds the conversation, as if the anxiety and tension were just the bad parts of a movie. We talk about the two students coming into the humanities up in Vermont. We talk about how helpful it can be for some to have the smaller environment and what it can cultivate. And, as my eavesdropping coworkers huddle beside our green bean display, she says, “You’re an inspiration.”

I think I’m going to be sick.

We exchange some goodbyes and I pull my crooked produce cart back into the freezer. I shiver a little while I throw some boxes of summer squash on top. The conversation is resonating like sugar crystals melting into a hot cup of coffee. Reflecting is the only way to taste if you’ve used enough. I think I’ve been drinking it black lately because I don’t trust anybody but Dunkin’ Donuts employees to put the right amount of sugar in. Especially not myself. Okay, maybe I do have a few issues.

I pass one of my coworkers on my way back out to the floor. He’s trimming bottoms off of some Romaine Lettuce, and then leaving it in some water to prep. The cold water opens the pores for the greens. Through this method they retain a level of hydration a few times a day. But we have to shave bits of the vegetation’s heart off every time we do it. Sometimes one will get too small and we simply have to cull it away.

Back on the floor, I zigzag around customers. I’m not a people person, and it leaves me caught by the potatoes again, waiting for a few carriage-pushers to finish what they’re doing. A man with dark hair that falls down to his shoulders is finding the eggplants a bit too interesting. And he has every right to. When caught, I’m too quick to anger. Even if it is just internal, it’s still anger. A potato that’s rotten on the inside is still rotten. And just like that, looking into the russet potatoes, I embrace the consequences of the path I took and walk on to the squash. Or at least I try to. Another man cuts me off.

When the Red Sea of customers parts for me, I sneak my cart up against the wall. It’s not a parking spot. I can’t stay there forever. So I hurry a little. The cardboard of the boxes are covered in wax. They can’t be disposed of with the regular recyclable cardboard. In a tug, no different from any I’ve ever made in the past, my knuckle is caught on a staple. I feel the skin peel off. It’s cold. The first moment of every cut has a bitter w chill until it bleeds.

I ruin a single piece of summer squash with my blood. Only one. Seeing the plasma cling to the hard, yellow surface is a little disturbing. It’s bad news to spill blood by fresh vegetables. It’s bad news to bleed in front of people. Embarrassed, I try to hurry and clean up.

I reach with my bleeding hand for a roll of paper towels left above a nearby flower display; courtesy of our one-person floral department. I frequently knock over her flowers and spill water out onto the floor. To be fair, they buckets were in my way. I’m trying to wrap it so I can walk back to our prep-room and snag a Band-Aid. My old guidance councilor walks by again. She’s holding a circular tub of something that she probably snagged from the deli wall. It looks like blue cheese. I think I’m allergic to blue cheese. She notices me again and looks a little disturbed. She asks if I had a little accident. It happens, I say. She holds the cheese up and says that she forgot all about it and walks off into the otherworldly path of aisle one. Something like this would happen. This isn’t the first time that she’s seen me bleed.

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This American… Discursive Structure

Ray Bradbury once said in an interview that if you stop writing for a single day, the only person who feels it is the writer themselves. He went on to say that if the writing ceases for a second, the editor begins to notice; in the midst of the third day, the reader begins to get the hint. I think that we can draw this into something deeper than just writing. Or maybe it’s just that writing is something deep in itself. It’s all theory. Theory is dangerous. Political.

One of my coworkers, the self-proclaimed ‘Captain Jack,’ was telling me some stories yesterday about his life. The two of us have very little in common. He’s over fifty, married and experienced the children thing, and is a very extroverted individual. I’m twenty and creep around the department with my head in the clouds. However, Jack talks about having left a path he was once on toward law school to pursue his life as a painter. A few times over the citrus display he’s told me about how his years have echoed that of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. He’s got a thing for Joyce. While we disagree on just about everything, I love his appreciation for the humanities. And one way or another, all of his stories seem to weave back into his painting, back into his art. Last week he handed me a small packet of poems that he’s put together throughout the last two decades. In them I saw some things I enjoyed. In other areas, not so much. But it felt good to be talking to somebody outside of the college environment about the writing process on a personal level. In the negotiation of response and intent, something almost intimate exists. Maybe getting a glimpse into another’s creative spark is a reminder that you might just have one of your own.

I’m flipping through some documents to find some work to share with him. Everything is scattered throughout my hard drive. I can’t even find a final copy of Trash Picker’s Requiem, a piece that I’m mildly confident in. Despite living on the computer, I don’t have an organized writing folder. I once defended this to a professor, saying that the Zen Buddhists draw amazing pictures in the sand only to erase them quickly once they’re completed, usually unseen. He shook his head and replied with something along the lines of, “Dude, save your shit.”

I tried writing after my shift this afternoon. It’s the second time this week I’ve attempted to dip back into it. After 200 clunky words, I closed the document and went for a long walk. There are many things that haunt my process, but I’ve never actually accepted the idea of ‘writer’s block’. I’ve always just settled with the conclusion that I am indeed lazy and any lack of progress in my writing is a result of disinterest, glamorized fatigue, or seductive distractions.

At the end of the semester my professor pulled me aside for a serious conversation about my writing and performance as a student over the past year. I’ll spare the mess, but it became a montage of life gets in the way and this isn’t who you really are. But who am I really? While one of the issues thrown around in the office was my obsession with postmodern thought, I wasn’t ready to defend it in the way that I needed to. I wasn’t ready to defend myself. This ‘postmodern’ thing. I know what it is. I know where it comes from. While the modernists lament the death of a master narrative, I will always be there to spit on its grave. I find beauty in the fragments. Little bits of story. Different stories. Center or no center. Idiosyncrasy. Our stories aren’t puzzle pieces. We aren’t preconditioned to fit a role. The world as an anthology of the human race is a reaction to what and who we are, not any other way around. I think I’m ready to defend that, and yes, this is where writing and theory gets political. But I’m not afraid of that word any more.

I still have the portfolio from the class I wrote Trash Picker’s Requiem in. I reread my introduction and some reflections I wrote on the nature of writing and editing. It’s foreign, or at least distant, like musings that a real writer might have woven together. Maybe that semester was my ‘Portrait of an Artist Moment,’ the one Jack describes. I remember being pulled aside by one of my professors. I was compared to another writer in the program, one that I really admired. She used the word ‘cerebral.’ I had to check the definition of it in the dictionary. I’m not ashamed to admit that.

As Jack finished one of his stories, he told me about a method he uses to break through hard times. Beside our display of summer squash, he enlightened me.

“When you’re caught in a rough place. Now this can be anything. Anything at all. Just pull a random book off the shelf and open a random line. It always works 100% of the time.”

I don’t believe in random.

“Well,” he clarified, pulling a bruised eggplant off of the shelf. “Sometimes there’s a variable. There can be variables. 97%. Trust me.”

What could it hurt? I blindly pulled a book out of pile beside my computer. It’s Coupland. Jesus Christ. It would be Coupland. The yellow cover made the black words pop. Generation A. If I need a defining line, the universe would point me to Coupland. I let my hands chose the page, 135, and pointed to a random line of text: I hesitate to say this, but at that point she dragged me over to the bed and straddled me. Really? 135 is a lame number anyways. Coupland, in an interview with QTV, said that random is merely the inability to identify a pattern. I should trust the patterns I know. But Jack’s advice still lingered.

I stood away from the computer and walked over to my bookshelf. I closed my eyes this time. I completely trusted what I couldn’t see. Reaching over an alignment of plastic dinosaurs, I pulled The Lively Art of Writing. Another yellow book? I leaf through to page 65 and read: Obviously, the trouble is not merely with “there” but with “there was.” This was the obvious answer to my writing problem, right? “There was.” No, there wasn’t. I tossed the book into another pile and reach for another with my head turned. It’s a book of poetry by Alexandria Peary. She’s a professor of rhetoric and a poet that visited campus earlier this semester. The book I purchased from her, Lid to the Shadow, echoes a lot of the ideas of Carl Jung in the sense that she toys around with the connection between language and meaning. I opened to a random poem. It’s called “One Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry.” The first line I point to, three stanzas in, reads: People name their children all sorts of things/ these days. They really do, don’t they?

But what does this accomplish? Somebody was straddled. “There was” is bad. And people pick relatively strange names for their children. I don’t believe in some divine driving force in the universe. However, I believe in grace. But something in that word, ‘grace,’ if we deconstruct it far enough, we’ll find something synonymous with ‘deliberate.’ I lived plucking things blindly for too long. I can’t write without intent.

Before the descent, before all of this madness took place (could there ever be a ‘before’ if all patterns lead in and out of each other?), one of my writing professors assigned the book The Grace of Great Things by Robert Grudin. I don’t remember a lot of what it talked about, but I remember appreciating it. I don’t retain a lot of what I read. I’m pulling it off the shelf right now. I see some underlined passages, breadcrumbs left behind to return to a previous thought, a previous value, or something I might not have understood. We don’t grow just waiting for the light to hit us. Even weeds know to reach out in the direction of the sun. The process is the center, or at least one of them. Grudin writes on the idea of creative product without an engagement in the process: The apparently desired goal is served up without a fuss or sweat, but divorced from the labor of attainment, it may seem hollow, almost prostituted. I’ve been afraid to struggle with the ‘writer’s block,’ and as Bradbury suggests, the longer I step away the more apparent it becomes. Maybe admitting to the block would be admitting to the title of writer or some shit. I don’t do titles. I consider writing, as well as all verbs, a reaction to the ‘self.’ And as with every other sentient being I’ve had coffee with, the blocks are inevitable.

I’m ready to take my writing seriously again. Deliberately. And I’ve found my Muse.

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Postmodernism: A Defense of Self?

I was flipping through some old Facebook statuses last night to find a link I posted back into 2008. Was it worth the search? Absolutely not. Most of my old posts from 2008 and 2009 contained me complaining about my workload as a freshman with my undergraduate studies. I scoured over different Andrew Gormans complaining about how difficult writing a paper for my fiction class was. What did I gain from projecting these complaints? Were these messages to the world the biggest problem I could put forth? My workload now is a lot heavier, but I don’t find any desire to broadcast it. Maybe this is because the academic work flow has become part of my actual process. I think we only complain when the pattern is new, or maybe breaks. Regardless, my work ethic in itself isn’t much different. Assignments are still left for the last minute and I spend the majority of my time in the West lounge, slacking with friends. There was a status in particular that came about right after my freshman year ended. There for the world to see, I boldly stated that, “I think that postmodernism is my calling.”

It received no comments, but I can just picture how many sets of eyes were rolling at this undergrad’s attempt to be an intellectual or something. I’ve always been concerned about the authenticity in my interest surrounding the subversion of metanarratives or pinpointing the intrinsic worth of the words in which we play with. What if this is just another façade? What drives somebody into something like postmodern theory if it isn’t just a scholastic trinket that they can pin onto their identity? In my own defense of self, I think I need to connect the dots.

Like all great things in my life, it began with The Matrix. I think it started late in high school. I wasn’t an academic, but I do remember watching the first Matrix film every single night for an entire summer. You’d think I was obsessed or something. I fell asleep to the VHS tape playing out gunfights between Neo and the Agents. I memorized lines, discussed the plot with anybody who was willing to listen, but more importantly, I started to push to find the significance behind this testosterone-laced hero’s journey. It wasn’t until I was a freshman in my current undergrad program that I purchased a copy The Matrix: Revisited. This was a documentary pressed after the success of the first film which presented an extensive overview of the film process in its entirety. It was in one of these segments that I first heard Keanu Reeves discuss the books he had to read before he was even allowed to pick up the script. The Wachowski Brothers had the cast reading works like Evolutionary Psychology and a canon of other major psych works. Also, they were asked to read Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations. I wrote these down into a notepad with no idea as to how much it would affect the way in which I lived the rest of my life. Baudrillard put to words things I could only dream of trying to articulate—signs referencing signs and the steady decay of associated meaning. While Baudrillard is catalogued more closely with post-structuralism, his work is what kick-started me into the works of other theorists like Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida. I won’t even try to argue that I comprehend everything they put forth on a graduate level, but I’ve been on a steady path to pursue their work.

But this is just connecting the dots between influences, right? To what end does it serve to dwell on the patterns of academic interest? Sometimes I get worried that the ideas in my writing and my life are just plucked from these other theorists and exhausted for my own creative process. It can make one feel like a thief. If one’s only an imitator than how do they step into the role of the artist? (I hate the word ‘artist.’)

Recently, I uncovered some of my own artwork from high school. It wasn’t stashed away to be hidden from the world, but when I’m in my parent’s house I seldom go doffing through the past. However, in what has now become my friend’s room, hiding behind an old desk was a painting I finished in one of my art classes. I lacked any artist talent, but I think because I fit the mold, the public school system easily placed me in art. For four years. While I lack the ability to paint even the most basic stick figures, I was somewhat proud of what I completed with here.

When I held it in my hand, I could see that I divided the painting up into two sections, one reflexive of the other. On the top half, I painted the dark silhouette of a scarecrow caught in a sunset. He stood perched in a field with crows overhead. When flipped, the bottom half of the painting depicted the famous biblical crucifixion scene. Jesus stood nailed to the cross with the two other men on top of the rocks. They stood against a gray afternoon sky in the same stance the scarecrow did. Two symbols. Juxtaposition. When I held the slopping painting I felt a mild reassurance. For some reason, maybe out of a desperate attempt at idiosyncrasy, I was relieved to understand that I had begun hunting for the meaning on my own.

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Snowman

It’s snowing. No. Not snow. These are little death-crystals descending from the sky. They exist only to slash up my face. I’m seeking shelter in the health service office with a friend, trying to keep out of the storm.  A few days of sunlight and fair weather perverts the senses. Winter’s grasp is here still—tightening.

 

I take a small pamphlet from the wall beside the transparent bin filled with brightly colored condoms. The pamphlet is smaller than a playing card. Each picture and text box is a light shade of purple. The target audience doesn’t need to be questioned. The title fits clumsily on the purple, stating If someone in your life is hurting you… you are not alone. Buzz phrases like it’s not your fault spark images of a frail female caught in a violent situation. It’s easy to sympathize, but impossible to identify.

 

I flip through the first few pages, watching it break down abuse into three categories: Physical, Emotional, and Sexual. Can you break a person or a relationship into three categories? They’re too vague. Is there no physical or emotional investment in sexuality? Are there no physical or sexual stimuli to somebody’s emotional condition? And are there no emotional or sexual catalysts that determine our physical actions? They’re more like three primary colors of a relationship, not categories. Or maybe I just don’t get it, or can’t get it. I’m a man, I think, and this pamphlet isn’t for me. The affiliates tell all: WomanSafe, Woman Helping Battered Women, and Woman’s Crisis Center. Each one gives me a different story, a different horror that I’ll never know and understand.

 

I’m drinking a cup of Blueberry Coffee. It’s delicious, but I could get away with dumping some more sugar in. I pocket the pamphlet, taking it back to my room to dissect. I consider how much information I’ve already gone public with. I’m not out to ruin anyone’s character or compromise secrets. I save those in folders scattered throughout my computer

 

When the sun sets I turn back to the pamphlet when I should be taking notes on the final acts of Hamlet. I think I’m looking for an answer or something, but it isn’t here. Like literary theory, it only proposes questions, not answers.

 

Has your partner been physically abusive?

I take a black pen from my pocket and start circling different bullet points. Patterns. I enjoy patterns in books, patterns in writing, and patterns in art. Not life. I can sit in class and argue about Hamlet’s mother and how through her patterns of speech, we can see is being manipulated by Claudius. Claudius speaks through her the way Polonius speaks through Ophelia. These aren’t only fictional characters, but they’re not males. No, the role of the male in this pattern is the abuser—the disruption of harmony in their partner’s quest for self-actualization.

 

Has your partner been emotionally abusive?

 

I remember sitting on one of the flimsy tables in one of the classrooms, whispering secret screams. Guilt, maybe shame, held my words back.

“Society,” my listener responded. “Makes it more challenging for a male to identify an abusive situation.”

But that’s part of Masculine identity, right? The challenge—the conquest?

“We need to talk somewhere you feel comfortable crying.”

Crying. Cry. CRY. cry C-R-Y c. r. y.

Three letters that form a symbol. A pattern is a measurement, maybe an attempt, to comprehend the reaction of these symbols.

Cry: verb (used without object)

1. to utter inarticulate sounds, especially of lamentation, grief,or suffering, usually with tears

Where is cry in the pattern? Recurring.

“Man up,” she said. “Stop Crying.” Cry = An absence of Manhood?

Man doesn’t inherit the role of the tear-bearer. It challenges masculine identity.

Has your partner been sexually abusive?

 

I still continue to type out (maybe obsess over) the patterns. This, I considered, is writing for self. Nobody has to read what I have to say.  I isolate moments in the pattern, kissing them with the bitter twist of memoir.

“If you can’t give me what I want, I’ll get it somewhere else.” And she did.

What is the role of the insufficient man?

 

Man: –noun

1. an adult male person, as distinguished from a boy or a woman.

Oedipus provides the sphinx’s riddle with the answer ‘man.’ That which what he embodies becomes the answer. Can we solve our problems with who we are?

In Symphony of the Night, Count Dracula proposes the question of what is a ‘man?’ This prompts the protagonist to consider an answer that doesn’t humanize that which he sets out to destroy.

 

But the pattern writes back. I lie through my teeth. I haven’t been too busy to drink—too busy to think. No, this is writing against self. In the safety of public, I can write these musings on the pattern. But in the documents I find little messages from one self to another, reminding me that this descent is my fault.

 

If each of these categories is part of the same origin, somewhere in the muted pits of self, then when they’re damaged they probably each retract there. You can’t heal one by trying to satisfy the other. The answer, had there been one, is at the core.

 

 

I’ve told friends that abusive situations are more about the individual wrestling with themselves more so than the partner. With this, I’ve also stapled phrases about trusting each other with ourselves. If you try to wrestle your insecurities alone they will consume you. Our insecurities are many, in all of us, like white blood cells trying to protect the body from a risky contaminant. We need them, but we have to understand them. Or something.

 

Grace. Reconciliation. Peace. I won’t find these in a bottle of rum.

 

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Coffee, Dragons, and Writing

I’m sitting in my parent’s kitchen. The table has worn green tiles, and in my absence they’ve invested in a new coffee maker. It’s beautiful, but I can’t make it do what I want it to. Such is the plight of all men. There are compartments all around its silver frame; one for water, one for the beans, two just to fuck with you, and a bunch of buttons that I will never have the discipline to understand. My mother, being just an avid coffee-drinker as I am, thought this would be a great investment for the house. It’s snazzy, standing out amongst our tattered appliances, but something just irks me about it. The older one still held its own. Yes, the hotplate was going to shit and every time I put a filter in, it became a vacuum for the grounds, dumping them all over the counter. But there was just something natural about leaning on the table and listening to it work, something about not having to dance through a bunch of façades for something I want. Natural, not simple. This one shrouds the clockwork in silver. I don’t trust things that feel the need to hide from me. Not often.

Regardless, there’s coffee in my mug and I’m digging through a bunch of writing. There are some half-written blog pieces I wanted to tamper with, but I spent the majority of my week focusing on a fiction piece. I tried to make a big deal about it, telling Scotty, a classmate, that I was going to live and breathe that story for the entire week, trying to perfect it… but that’s a bunch of crap. The more we talk about our writing the less inclined we are to invest ourselves into it. Now that it’s done (no writing is ever done) I feel like I have some merit to talk about the process. Also, I think there’s something perverse about glorifying our own work, especially if it hasn’t been done yet. We can try to achieve the best, or try to explore the best we’re capable of—only one warrants true growth.

I wanted to concoct a ‘story within a story’ type of frame, but the night before class was when I invested most of my time in the revision. Behind me was a mini-fridge with a few cans of Red Bull—a lover that told me it was okay if things got complicated. We had all night.

Around 1 in the morning, I made the decision that a break was in order. I stuck my pen behind my ear only to realize that one was already perched there. In the span of two weeks I’ve developed a bad habit of keeping my preferred instrument of writing there. I mean, it’s better than meth, but one day a pen will explode and dark ink will run down the side of my face. My break consisted of consuming an energy drink while visiting Scotty and James in the lounge. They were playing a card game, keeping score on a notebook. I considered vandalizing it.

James told us how to hook up with random men on Route 91, flashing our lights at the appropriate rest stop. I tried to toss a can in the crowded trash barrel, missing and recommending this for a road trip. I think Scott believed me.

I’ve been a ghost on the web lately. For the people who said that they missed my writing, you have no idea what that sentiment means to me. Praise makes me feel like a conman, but when somebody tells me they appreciated or took something away from my writing, I feel like I can truly communicate as a human being. Not many people who I talk to on the net have had to deal with me in person. I mumble when I talk and I don’t articulate my thoughts well, or at least not in a coherent way. In a way it’s helped me treasure these moments of communication.

Before I got wrapped up in this short story (which suffered through a 50% cut), I was walking in this shadow of self-pity. I guess this is what spun me on that month-long hiatus, not just from the blog but really from the internet. I really only checked my email and spent an ungodly amount of time whining on Facebook. I want to say that Scotty was one of the people that saved me, but that isn’t true. Sometimes we really need to save ourselves. I was sitting in his car a week ago, neither of us needing to leave campus. He just felt the need to let the engine run. He said it would make it easier for him to start the car later. Out of nowhere I put a heavy story on him, telling him shitty things that have happened to me and shitty things that I’ve done. The entire time he remained silent, listening as we watched the other cars try to sneak out of the snow. After a few deep breaths he turned, giving me the best advice anybody could ask for.

“Breath through your nose,” he said. “We look like dragons.”

We’re all going to be okay.

This coffee is delicious.

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Stage Fright & the Art of Removal

I once saw a folded bill lying beside our tomato display. Seeing its red tint, I could tell that it was a ten, with which I could probably have bought eight medium cups of coffee. I knew just how it was folded, too—the way the front of the bill was hidden, uneven and concealing Hamilton’s face. I tried to forget it was there, reminding myself that I didn’t have to get involved with the plight of responsibility. Instead, I started digging through my box of tomatoes. The vine cluster tomatoes give off this yellow-gold dust that causes irritation and can temporarily damage your skin. In the handbook, it’s recommended that employees wear plastic gloves to protect our hands. However, I learn better from watching and acting rather than instruction. It seems that nobody follows this rule. The trick is to just grab it from the base, avoiding the dust. The handbook also told me a lot of things, most of which I’ve forgotten. Actually, the entirety of my produce training brought on a lot of unnecessary anxiety. It became a lot easier to just learn by jumping into the mix than trying to take notes in a dark corner on why Basil and Oregano shouldn’t be stored in the freezer.

“Hey, buddy,” said a man in a yellow polo shirt, interrupting my thought. “I think somebody dropped this.”

He handed me the bill, asking if I had seen who dropped it. No, I didn’t. I asked the closest customer, an older woman who looked disinterested in our selection of Romaine lettuce, but I knew that she’d entered the area long after I had first noticed the bill. She just shook her head and pressed on with her shopping.  I looked back to the man in anger. It’s not that I didn’t want the temptation of the ten, or that I wanted it to return to its rightful owner, I just didn’t want to be pulled into having to make the choice. I needed right and wrong to be irrelevant. Left with no other option, I assured the man that I would bring the bill over to customer service. I wanted to tell him to just pocket it, saving both of us the trouble, but didn’t.

Walking to the customer service desk is like trying to walk across the interstate. During its quiet hours, you hear the melody of squeaking carriages approaching far off in the distance. However, most of the day consists of customers leaping out of every aisle, eager to cut one another off for a spot in the express line. This death race happens to a mixture of elevator tunes and whatever chunk of popular music the management has selected for the day. You haven’t lived until you’ve experience the chaos of ‘Senior Tuesday’ to a Katy Perry song. After completing this journey, I handed the ten to the girl currently stationed at the desk. She took the bill effortlessly between gold-painted fingernails, setting it aside and turning to an approaching customer. I returned back to the tomato cart, dodging carriages the whole walk only to find one blocking the display.

Despite having to make a decision that affected other people, I was satisfied with the resolution. It was out of my hands. Of course, when the universe was still being programmed, the writers of the code threw in these lines of command called “recurring internal conflicts.” Had the universe been written in Java or C++, we could easily see and identify where the issues are coming from rather that just seeing the error messages they leave onscreen. This error message came back a week ago when I was standing beside our strawberry display. They’re out of season and not even on sale, so there shouldn’t have been any reason for them to sell this fast in the winter. This is where Adam, one of the ‘higher-ups’ that hasn’t quite reached management yet, cornered me.

“There’s money for you in the safe,” he said, making eye contact not with me, but a specific white tile on the floor. “Don’t leave without taking it.” I followed his gaze to the floor, to see that it was indeed a pretty impressive tile. It fit right into place with the pattern formed in its relation to the rest, but damn, what a tile it was. He explained that I had brought a ten dollar bill to the service desk and it became public property after the owner neglected to claim it.

“I feel like that’s… unethical,” I said. No, I really didn’t care what it is. I just didn’t want to make the decision. He assured me that we didn’t have the resources to investigate who dropped misplaced it. I thought of the man in the yellow polo shirt, how I wish I could in turn pass it down for him to deal with, but he was long out of the equation. Asshole.  At this point, I don’t think it was the decision that irked me. The ten was a reminder of something I didn’t do, good or bad—that I didn’t want to have to integrate my decision making into real-world problems.

But the error is recurring.  A few days ago I was driving to the bookstore with my little sister. For some reason the stars were right and our days off coincided with each other. I wanted to purchase a paperback copy of a novel printed over twenty years ago, and for some obscure reason I expected it to cost me less than a full tank of gas. Annoyed and cursing the power of the publishing industry, I settled for a new copy of a Gibson book, with which the discount was disgustingly in my favor. When I checked out, the cashier didn’t give me any percent of the discount that was stated on book’s sticker. I was angry, almost as much as my wallet was, but I didn’t say anything. On the drive back, I pulled back onto the highway and told my sister about the neglected discount.

“Why the hell didn’t you say something!” she screamed, trying to rationalize my lack of action. I tried to explain to her that I have passive tendencies, and I don’t like integrating with the world.

To a degree, I believe that the removal of one from the world is glamorized. The idea of isolation is even present in what’s considered to be a ‘creative lifestyle.’ In my Creative Writing workshop, we were asked (though not many students did) to read Robert Grudin’s The Grace of Great Things. In this book he writes, “To think creatively is to walk on the edge of chaos.”  When this was discussed, the room erupted with students wanting to express their obsession with chaos, each eager to take Grudin’s words out of context. While I won’t doubt that each of my fellow students aren’t afraid to dance with madness and then reflect about it, my understanding that was that for some integrity in the creative process, there must be a willingness to remove oneself from the world to see and understand it.

Though, I think if we remove ourselves from the world for reasons other than analysis and understanding, we’re mistaking it for a hiding place. While just about everything about me can be considered ugly in the Western experience, the worst has to probably be my inability to integrate and become an active and independent participant in society. There’s nothing glamorous about living passive, and I can say that this is no result of the creative process in the least.

So now I’m left with this ten dollar bill. It’s still folded and tomato-irritation red. I put it in an envelope and wrote apartment on the side. While it only has $10, that’s ten more than it had in 2010.

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