Category Archives: writing

Night-blooming datura

Posted on September 27, 2010 by bipolarlawyercook| 3 Comments

It’s the time of year when the night-blooming datura starts flow­er­ing again.
On the cor­ners of West Selden and Mor­ton,
right next and across from to Apollo’s Fine Fur­ni­ture,
where you can “Rent-2-own, down-pay or buy.“
The smell of Pit Stop B-B-Q’s char­coal per­fumes the air,
that and motor oil and ozone from the auto­mo­bile shop
whose bay doors stand open, even at eleven at night.

You’ve never been able to drive in the right lane,
not just past the night-blooming datura– you’ve got to switch to the left,
because the col­lards at Pit Stop– they are amaz­ing.
(And don’t get me started on their chopped beef.)
The double-parked cars in the right lane,
the ones that don’t use their haz­ards?
They’re there for good rea­son, all down the block.

When I first started dri­ving through this part of town,
the weedy patch was just one or two flow­ers,
flopped-over white tubu­lar blooms,
deep green palmate leaves fad­ing into the black of the night, the dark of the dirt.
(I don’t think the peo­ple who planted it could afford the grass seed for the cor­ner patch, too.)
The cops were always out, deal­ing with some shoot­ing,
a staged crash, a domes­tic or some­thing, while cur­tains twitched shut and store­fronts stared empty.

Now, though, there are new awnings, beauty par­lors and restau­rants, phone ven­dors and “all ser­vice” places.
Peo­ple sit out on their stoops.
And while you still can’t drive in the right lane–
(the mac and cheese is as good as the col­lards, and did I men­tion the chicken?)
The night-blooming datura has spread from those first three weedy flow­ers
on one cor­ner to two– thick, vibrant patches, knee high and wide, spread­ing over the bounds.
Someone’s planted more night-blooming flow­ers in orangey col­ors, and the night isn’t just black and white anymore.

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Posted in memory, poems, writing

Now presenting (the invisible past)

Posted on September 6, 2010 by bipolarlawyercook| 1 Comment

She doesn’t get why the girl who’s been shar­ing the seat gives her a glare when she gets off the bus– at least not until the girl– pretty in a red and pur­ple vin­tage style wrap dress, zaftig though more so than Mad Men’s Christina Hen­dricks– says to the friend who’d been stand­ing next to the pole dur­ing the ride–

“Skinny bitch.  She shrunk over like fat was contagious.”

Oh.  No, see.  Wait. She wants to get up and chase them, explain, but if she does she’ll be late for her doctor’s appoint­ment, the one she’s going to to fig­ure out why she keeps los­ing so much fuck­ing weight.

See, she slid over because she wanted to get her own body out of the way to give her seat­mate some room– her big thighs, her broad shoul­ders, the way she has to stuff her­self into XL jack­ets and sweaters and her arms look sausage-like, legs look like hams.  Porky, pig-like, right down to the way that she blushes bright pink and sweaty in shame at how she can’t lose the weight, how it’s been a fight all her life– bio­log­i­cal des­tiny, even.  In the pic­tures from her brother’s wed­ding, at 225 lbs, she looks like a not-so-young, sad, tired ver­sion of her sad, tired, 65 year old, 300 lb. mother.  Noth­ing sep­a­rated them what­so­ever but thirty years and the two peo­ple stand­ing between them.

That’s the invis­i­ble self she car­ries around in her head, even as she shifts and squirms on her seat on the bus, curls her back in and away from the “cush­ion” and sits on only one hip, because the hard plas­tic jolts against ver­te­brae, ilia, scapu­lae, every time the bus bumps over train track and pot hole, the to-be-expected ups and downs on the jour­ney of life.

She’s for­got­ten (again) that how she looks on the out­side isn’t how she feels on the inside.

Of course, there are reminders, and not just in the baggy size twelves and larges she wears and the scale that dips under 160 if she eats too much gluten and it roils her guts, so that for a week she needs to con­cen­trate on cram­ming food down to pack it back on.  (How ironic, try­ing to keep the weight on when she was a teenage bulimic.)  But the nutri­tion­ist has made good sug­ges­tions and so far, so good, espe­cially now that they’ve fig­ured out it’s her anti-depressant being depres­sant of sys­tems that just weren’t meant to be so affected.  Now that she’s off, she’s sort-of-hungry again.  Of course, her mood sta­bi­lizer still keeps her appetite down, com­pen­sa­tion for how the last one made her bloat like a bal­loon, but at least now she can eat with­out heaving.

The reminders are there in the way the “fat” girls give her a glare as they get off the bus.  It’s there, too, in the way more peo­ple flirt with her at the store, whether or not they’re mar­ried, whether or not she’s mar­ried too, and her rings are right on her hand.  It’s ironic and kind of gross, because she’s always tried to be nice– polite– pleas­ant to peo­ple– but she sells more mem­ber­ships, too, on the days she wears makeup and since she’s lost weight– sells more e-reader gad­gets in skirts than in pants.  And it’s there in how a half hour in the tub requires more shift­ing around because there’s less of her between her and the enam­eled cast iron– just hot water and bone, a thin layer of skin to go with the steam and what­ever book that she’s read­ing, that and how cer­tain tops slip off her shoul­ders, expose upper ribs and clav­i­cle bones in a way that maybe some find attrac­tive but she looks at in the mir­ror and thinks– well, she doesn’t know, the last time she was this weight she was in high school.

She does know one thing.  When peo­ple offer her a bite of dessert and she declines, it’s not because she doesn’t want to get fat.  It’s because it tastes lousy, waxy, like paste, another effect of the meds.  She’d take it and eat it, she would if she could– it’s calo­rie dense and would help keep the weight on, after all.  But what she can do now ver­sus what she’d do in the past– they’re two dif­fer­ent things, and if she stopped to explain how things are, how they were as con­trasted with what peo­ple see every time?

Maybe they don’t deserve that much expla­na­tion.  Maybe they do.  Maybe she does.  But energy, time, they’re all fleet­ing things– shed almost as quickly as calo­ries, at least for her, nowadays.

–

There were two recent arti­cles in the NYT about being “fat” and its con­trast.  The F Word, a thinky piece on fash­ion and fat and whether zaftig’s a good thing or not– it’s very well done, and it makes me want to choke down lots more dessert and but­tered baked pota­toes, what­ever I can man­age to eat, so I can fill out my jeans a lit­tle more fully.

There is also this arti­cle about the small-busted, of whom I have always been a mem­ber, no mat­ter my weight.  It points to a wholly dif­fer­ent chal­lenge of fash­ion, i.e., the refusal until only recently to acknowl­edge– gee, really, women come in all shapes and sizes and dif­fer­ent peo­ple find dif­fer­ent things like that attrac­tive and might want pretty under­wear to com­ple­ment that attrac­tive­ness, too?  (Set­ting aside the friv­o­lity of expen­sive under­wear for the moment, and assum­ing instead that the small busted con­sumer should have the right to blow as much money on lace and sheer nylon as Heidi Sontag.)

It’s an old whinge, but a good one.  Design for us all, god­damnit to hell, and in the mean­time, ladies, learn to live with the bod­ies you have.  Take care of your phys­i­cal self, sure, the best that you can– but nip­ping and tuck­ing and tan­ning and stuff­ing your­self all full of botox and sil­i­cone and syn­thetic shit because Karl Lager­feld and Miuc­cia Prada don’t like the way that you’re shaped?

They don’t know you– don’t see you– don’t know all who you’ve been in the past and are right now as you stand there, try­ing on clothes, try­ing to make some­thing fit in the present, try­ing to make room for all the other girls on the bus whose vin­tage style red-and-purple dresses you really like, the ones who are pretty like Christina Hen­dricks, zaftig, just a lit­tle more so.  And that’s fine with you.  Though not with them, because at present, they have their own pasts in their heads.

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Posted in Deep Thoughts, bipolar, food, links, medicine, memory, mom, writing

On writing and reading

Posted on May 31, 2010 by bipolarlawyercook| 2 Comments

The Sun­day Times Book Review has an arti­cle about a new book– a tran­scrip­tion, really, and I’ve read the advance copy, it’s well worth the read– of an inter­view between the late, great David Fos­ter Wal­lace and the Rolling Stone reporter and writer David Lip­sky as Wal­lace is doing his book tour after Infi­nite Jest had come out.

I have a con­fes­sion to make.  I have never read Infi­nite Jest, for no par­tic­u­lar rea­son except that I was in a Dou­glas Cou­p­land phase at the time it came out.  But– I have read (and re-read, and re-read) Broom of the Sys­tem, Wallace’s very first book, in an advance copy, because my aunt designed the book when she was at Crown or Har­court or whomever first pub­lished that book.  And I have a first edi­tion hard­cover copy of Broom, prob­a­bly lit­er­ally hot off the presses, because I raved to my Aunt about what a great book it was, how it blew me away because at age 14 or what­ever I was when I read it, I was blown away by the author’s refusal to pan­der, to not avoid dif­fi­cult things, intel­lec­tual things that might make the reader take pause to look up things with which he was unfa­mil­iar.  (I spent a whole after­noon look­ing up Wittgen­stein, for exam­ple, and went out and bought an Everyman’s Library primer to get myself more acquainted with his ideas, Wal­lace had so affected me with way he’d woven the ref­er­ences inside the book.)

This arti­cle brought it all back, and reminded me again of some of the things I’ve been learn­ing and decid­ing for myself as I try out this whole writ­ing thing.  I’d men­tioned a while ago I’ve been play­ing around with fan­fic­tion– though it’s not really play­ing, because I think any writ­ing deserves to be done seri­ously, even if I’m work­ing with some­one else’s orig­i­nal char­ac­ters.  But it’s given me a chance to work with voice and nar­ra­tive struc­ture in an envi­ron­ment where peo­ple tend to be mostly sup­port­ive and there­fore have given me the courage to write some­thing orig­i­nal of my own– and what’s ref­er­enced in the arti­cle– it’s funny.

The ten­sions there between “dif­fi­cult” fic­tion– the kind that pro­vokes the reader to think, to do some work, to be chal­lenged on an emo­tional level– and the allure of escapist or pop­u­lar fic­tion, the kind of pulp guilty plea­sure we all enjoy every once in a while–it’s some­thing I’ve even come up against in writ­ing in the fan­fic­tion world (which a lot of “seri­ous authors” scorn and treat as a bunch of abom­i­na­tion vile ripoffs), and while I’ve been lucky to become a semi-popular writer in the fan­doms I write in, I’m not the most pop­u­lar of all– because I don’t write the cute easy themes, and I tend to visit dark places in some of my sto­ries.  I use big words, I play around with chronol­ogy, I switch the nar­ra­tive stream– I don’t make it easy on read­ers, in short.

I took part in a several-months con­test of late, and while my entries always placed high in the vote with my team, gar­ner­ing lots of pos­i­tive com­ments, I never won.  I’m con­vinced it’s because I wrote things that while true to the par­tic­u­lar prompts, my sub­jects tended to be harder, more emo­tion­ally honest/brutal approaches to things than some read­ers really wanted to deal with.  And they rarely were fluffy or cute– and even when they were, there was always still some larger, dark point to be made.  It didn’t make me a “worse” writer than the peo­ple who won– just less “popular.”

““If the writer does his job right, what he basi­cally does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is,” he says. Wal­lace con­trasts lit­er­a­ture with the elec­tronic media, espe­cially tele­vi­sion, an amuse­ment that is his own per­sonal weak­ness, an actual addic­tion. “One of the insid­i­ous lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of per­son who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy.””

That’s how Wal­lace describes the ten­sion at one point in the inter­view, and while it’s a bit reduc­tion­ist– some­times we’ve had a hard day and we deserve a light laugh– his point remains true.

Every day in the store, peo­ple come to me to ask for rec­om­men­da­tions, and half the time, they’re ask­ing me if I’ve read some­thing I think is absolute trash.  I mean– Twi­light?  Dan Brown?  Come ON.

There are romance writ­ers who write bodice rip­pers who still man­age to write female hero­ines who’ve got spine, spunk and brains who I can rec­om­mend with a con­science.  Fan­tasy and sci-fi writ­ers too.  Same thing with mys­ter­ies and action.  There are pulp genre mass-market writ­ers who gen­er­ate entertainment-type beach reads that are still good writ­ers, and by that, I mean, they work in some kind of emo­tional res­o­nance, try to make their char­ac­ters peo­ple who learn some kind of intel­li­gent les­son or do some kind of good in the world, whether or not most of it’s fluff.  But there’s so much trash out there that just turns my stom­ach, and I think of all the peo­ple who read this mind­less trash and think that it’s good or just don’t think at all and just keep buy­ing it over and over with­out pay­ing any atten­tion to all the real writ­ing out there, the things that might chal­lenge them, make them do some work in their lives, do bet­ter, be bet­ter, learn some­thing about the larger world that they’d never known before then.

Scary shit, hunh?

I was talk­ing with the hus­band when we were away for the week­end, and say­ing how I thought that in some ways, rec­om­mend­ing a book was an incred­i­bly inti­mate act.  You’re telling some­one about some­thing that was impor­tant to you– that influ­enced what you thought, how you felt (even if you don’t come right out and say so)– and you’re putting into their hands a tool that has the power to affect them the same way.  Whether it does, whether it doesn’t– well, there’s no power over that except their own recep­tiv­ity and per­haps the power of your con­vic­tion at the time of your rec­om­men­da­tion, but still.  Words have power, if the per­son read­ing them is in a place to see and read them.  And while you have no power over how a per­son inter­prets those words, the mere fact that they’re read­ing and may see them the same way you do– well.  I dwell in pos­si­bil­ity (poetry or prose.)

Next week’s my extra 10% on my employee dis­count “employee appre­ci­a­tion” week.  I’ll be adding the rest of Wallace’s works to my shelf.  And feel­ing bet­ter about not tak­ing the easy way out, even if it means it takes me a while to write hard, orig­i­nal sto­ries that may take a long, good while for any­one to actu­ally like, much less want to publish.

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Posted in adventures in retail, book snob, books, links, writing

Um. Anyone want to read some short stories?

Posted on May 20, 2010 by bipolarlawyercook| 8 Comments

So… that wannabe writer thing?  I’ve been work­ing (qui­etly, shh, because even putting them here on the blog counts as pub­li­ca­tion) on some actual, real-live orig­i­nal fic­tion.  And I’ve finally got­ten the ovaries to start send­ing them out to peo­ple for rejec­tion con­sid­er­a­tion for real, live publication.

I do have a few peo­ple I can send them to for review­ing and edit­ing, but … for exam­ple, I send a flash fic­tion piece to my Dad, an invet­er­ate reader, and his com­ment was “you should con­tinue with this.”  Which is a back­handed com­pli­ment, sure, but it’s flash fic­tion.  1000 words was the point.

So, do any of you dear read­ers want to take some pieces for an occa­sional test drive?  You don’t need to feel the need to be an edi­tor, say– but I’d love to just get some feed­back about whether the piece feels real and sincere.

I don’t have any­thing right now that needs read­ing, but if you’re up for it, just leave a com­ment!  And thanks!

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Posted in writing

The works

Posted on May 5, 2010 by bipolarlawyercook| 3 Comments

The works, I say to the calm-faced atten­dant, the one who with clear, short-handed motions and just a few words– put it in neu­tral, no foot on the brakes– gets me com­pletely aligned.

It reminds me some­how of the way that ver­te­brae finally popped when I did yoga this morning.

The car moves for­ward on its own.  The latte-skinned man in the grey mus­cle tee smiles at me– a beau­ti­ful smile– and blue-tooth in his ear, swipes his big brush over the worst of spring’s sticky leaf-grease on my car.

Soap, pink, green and yel­low– the works, I sup­pose– spat­ter my wind­shield and win­dows as the track guides me for­ward with­out any hitch in the move­ment.  No paus­ing, no jolts.  The brushes whir, water sprays in mul­ti­di­rec­tional spurts, streams and splat­ters, prob­a­bly all sci­en­tif­i­cally proven to get my car cleaner than the basic $7.99 package.

On the radio, some New Wave-y band’s singing some song I like with some lyrics half-poignant that I can never remem­ber and today can’t bother to ache along to.  I’m too mes­mer­ized by the swirling of brushes and slide-slapping of blue-yellow felt ban­ners cir­cling the car– less like a blan­ket and more like some ring-around-the-rosy coven of blue felted fairies, the spray of extra-gloss coat­ing some magic pro­tec­tion against fur­ther ills.

Or at least against pollen and road grease for up to a week.

When I was lit­tle, we used to go to the car wash and watch from this long-windowed alley, like it was an amuse­ment attrac­tion.  I like the new-fangled way bet­ter.  Inside the car, inside its calm shell as the blue-felted fairies dance after the works are accom­plished, I feel like noth­ing might stick to me, either.

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Posted in writing