in defense of stupidly long sentences

There is no defense, and I have no defense, but I plead guilty.

Therefore I must die.

Fuck.

a charming reminder

...of how we're all so fucked.

"Worms"
by The Pogues

The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out
The ones that crawl in are lean and thin
The ones that crawl out are fat and stout
Your eyes fall in and your teeth fall out
Your brains come tumbling down your snout

Be merry my friends
Be merry
______________

And then there's this song I used to sing in elementary school music class. It made me cry and obviously left a deep impression, as I still remember the words more than 20 years later.

Don't ever laugh when the hearse goes by
For you may be the next to die
They'll wrap you up in a big white sheet
From your head down to your feet
They'll put you in a big black box
And cover you up with dirt and rocks

All goes well for about a week
And then your coffin begins to leak
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out
The worms play pinocchle on your snout
They eat your eyes, they eat your nose
They eat the jelly between your toes

Then a big green worm with rolling eyes
Crawls in your stomach and out your eyes
Your stomach turns a slimy green
And pus pours out like whipping cream
You spread it on a slice of bread
And that's what you eat when you are dead!

______________

I do apologize for being morbid. I finished reading Madame Bovary last night around 2 a.m., and all of my dreams revolved around dying a painful death after chowing down handfuls of arsenic powder. I swear, I woke up with the taste of ink in my mouth.

day 43: i joined in the great typo hunt

Depending on your position, arming hard-core grammar nerds (or "hawks" as some might call them) with sharpies, white-out and chalk and setting them loose to go typo hunting is either a blessing or a curse.

They will cross out that unnecessary apostrophe designating a restaurant's back room for "employee's only," add punctuation to the sidewalk sign reading "please come in seat yourself," and suffer an aneurysm upon encountering the phrase "your welcome." These are the people who proofread billboards, grit their teeth at misplaced modifiers, and mock you behind your back for using lazy abbreviations like "thx," "gr8" and "b4."

While visiting the Kansas City Public Library, professional typo hunters Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson talked about their cross-country road trip correcting typos everywhere from mall kiosks to the Grand Canyon to the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, at which they found both "Frances" (sic) and "Assissi" (sic) spelled incorrectly. 

this fucking sign is in the kitchen at my office.

The book that resulted from the exploits of these two mild-mannered nerds is aptly titled The Great Typo Hunt, and it's something of a call-to-arms for every armchair grammarian. 

One question I used to ask myself, and with which Deck similarly struggled while writing the book: What's the fucking point? Do sticklers really just have sticks up their asses, causing them to resist the natural forces of change?

And yes, maybe those people who get whiny about misspellings of "donut" or insist "ain't ain't a word because ain't ain't in the dictionary" (not gonna say I'm completely exempt from either category) do need to lighten up. Part of the beauty of language, after all, is that it's a living, ever-evolving beast that can accommodate advancements and changes in technology and culture. A staggering number of words exist today that were meaningless only a decade ago.

But there are certain rules that must remain static; I mean, no one argues that just because a bunch of people get it wrong, eight times eight is now going to equal 65, or that because it's tedious to learn the rules, the value of X in an equation is open to interpretation. No matter how you slice it, a complete sentence needs a subject and a verb, words have correct spellings, and the vast majority (like 99 percent) of plurals do not require apostrophes. 

These rules are important for clarity and consistency of communication, yes, but also because they're unambiguously correct. And there's something noble about fighting for what's right, even if it's as silly as preserving the integrity of the semicolon in bathroom wall graffiti (FYI, my resume could include: "Buzzard Beach bathroom graffiti editor, Oct. 2003 to July 2007").

day 26: i went to wal-mart without pants

Of course I didn't literally go to Wal-Mart pantsless, because then my next entry would read "I got arrested for indecent exposure." I actually posted some of my fiction Fictionaut, on a social networking site for both legit writers and wanna-bes like me, which makes me feel as exposed as a recurring dream I had in high school in which I was shopping for makeup at Wal-Mart and suddenly realized I was naked from the waist down.

I've never been convinced I'm any good at writing fiction, and yet I feel compelled to do it. My suspicions that I might actually really suck at it escalated when I applied to MFA programs last winter and was soundly rejected by all eight. 

I'm also not convinced, because I'm not a serious literary talent who really has something new to say, that spending my time writing about the lives and loves of people who exist only in my mind is something to which I should dedicate much time. And yet, I do it. I've always done it. 

post-storm rainbow, view from Roe Boulevard, 6-16-10

For about two years I've been writing and re-writing the story, waiting for it to be "good enough," whatever that means. Then yesterday I was driving down 69 Highway* on the tail end of a storm with the air humid and electric, and I realized fuck it, I'm free. So in the spirit of fucking it, I posted the damn story. I got nothing to lose either way.

*Apparently saying "69 Highway" instead of "Highway 69" is a Kansas City thing. I didn't know this until my boyfriend pointed out that it was severely annoying (or he might not have been so harsh; he might have just called it "weird"). In any case, he was right (see "local navigation tips").

day 20: i fell in love with junot diaz

The last time I immediately connected with a writer in a way that made me say “fuck yeah” I was 21 years old and visiting the south side of Chicago.

My then-boyfriend and I had taken a road trip to see the Cubs play, and at a bookstore down the street from Wrigley I discovered Dangling in the Tournefortia by Charles Bukowski.*

Being so young, I had not yet seen anyone write the way he did and get away with it:

From "I didn't want to"

it is difficult for me to get interested or angry.
when a cop stops me for some infraction I simply sink
into some great sea of disgust.
“do you want to know what you did, sir?” he asks me.
“no,” I say.

“message”

I’ve been sitting in this
room for hours typing, and drinking
red wine.
I thought I was
alone here. the door is closed
and the window.
now a big fat fly
ugly and black sits on the edge
of my wine glass.
where did it come
from? so silent, motionless
like that.
that’s the way
it might be with death.

Despite being a skinny girl from a middle-class Kansas City suburb, I somehow related to this middle-aged drunk living with whores in Los Angeles motels. In our own way we each tested the limits of what felt safe and crossed lines that left us vulnerable and exposed but ultimately still bored with our own extremism.

Then this spring I visited a St. Louis bookstore with my boyfriend Jason, and while bending over to pet the resident cat I spotted Drown by Junot Diaz.

From the first story about two young boys in the Dominican Republic plotting to steal the mask of another boy whose face was eaten by pigs, I was owned. The story played on my natural sense of voyeurism with the unsympathetic and sometimes cruel curiosity of children.

And the rest of the book doesn't lighten up. The characters of Drown inhabit a world of perpetually leaky faucets, stolen jewelry, and thin walls through which you can hear the daily dramas of the people above and below you. 

But Diaz’s matter-of-fact, occasionally cynical voice belies the stories’ quiet tragedies – a boy’s father abandons his family; a teenager carries on a dead-end relationship with a crack-addicted hooker; a pool table delivery boy helps a young maid escape an abusive relationship with her boss – and makes them at times even funny.

In fact, most of the characters’ experiences are accompanied by little introspection or analysis. Yunior, an adolescent boy who appears in several of the stories, has not yet begun to string together the moments of his life to make whole, meaningful events. And this, I believe, is the part of Drown I love most, as in terms of growing the fuck up already I’m a late bloomer.

*Yes, I know he’s not considered a “literary” writer and it’s a stretch to even call him a poet, but he’s gritty, dammit, and that’s how I like ‘em sometimes.

day 6: i listened to a podcast

Having spent most of my adult life stumbling in and out of rum-flooded trenches, I am fascinated by the stories of other women who drink. And I mean it in the most grotesque sense – women who get sloppy fall-down drunk, rationalize it (it was a tough day; I didn’t eat enough; if he/she/they would just do/not do X like I want/don’t want, this wouldn't happen; etc.), and then, several days, weeks or months later, do it again.

After reading Drinking: A Love Story, Caroline Knapp’s honest and sometimes startling memoir about her decades-long (and mostly secret) struggles with alcoholism, I felt I had met a kindred spirit.

I don’t feel I have a drinking problem so much as I tend to drink problematically; I won’t touch booze for two weeks, and then one afternoon I’ll go out and buy a bottle of wine, and the next thing I know I’m sobbing on the kitchen floor and the cops are pounding on my door.

Knapp drank more regularly – she had the obligatory “secret stash” of bottles hidden throughout her home – but many parts of her memoir felt like scenes out of my own life: she would wake in the morning unsure of how she got home or where she left her car; she would be stricken with nail-biting anxiety at gatherings when they ran out of booze; she would grow irritated with the well-meaning concern of her boyfriends, who had watched her drink too much and act a fool at one too many parties.

One such well-meaning boyfriend used to tease her about her near-obsessive tendency to finish entire bottles of wine on her own. She would plunk the bottle down on the table with authority, as if to say, "I am drinking this wine tonight, so don’t even try to stop me." He called those her days as a "wine terrorist."

When I found out Knapp had died of lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 42, I mourned the loss of this woman I had never known but with whom I shared a common bond.

It seems women are less likely than men to discuss alcoholism, so when my boyfriend gave me an Aloud podcast from the Los Angeles Public Library featuring memoirist and poet Mary Karr, I was intrigued to hear her describe drinking patterns that sounded eerily similar to my own.

A successful teacher and writer whose drinking life was mostly characterized by periodic binges, Karr quit the booze for good after she nearly crashed her car into a concrete wall. In her struggles to stay sober, she test-drove various religions before settling on Catholicism after feeling inspired by the sense of community she experienced while attending mass. She details her experiences in her 2009 memoir Lit.

While I relate to the absolute lack of control and single-minded focus on getting as wasted as possible as quickly as possible after having a few drinks, Karr and I veer in different directions when considering Catholicism as a solution to this problem.

Of course I respect anyone who has overcome addiction and recognize that sometimes our last resorts can save us (Karr was a lifelong atheist), but I cannot abide a religion that says birth control and homosexuality are sinful, expects its followers to somehow reconcile a god whose love is unconditional with the possibility of eternal torture and damnation, and gives women a secondary role to men. Also, some of the pope’s stances – such as telling AIDS-ridden African communities that condoms are actually responsible for the spread of the disease – are downright dangerous.

Perhaps having been raised in an environment opposite Karr’s – everyone in my family is a devout Catholic – I simply cannot conceive of any reason why anyone would become Catholic by choice. To me it seems the same as choosing to believe in Santa Claus. At various points in the interview, Karr says “I know you think I’m crazy” regarding her choice to become Catholic. And my response is, “Well, yeah.”

On the other hand, she has managed to stay sober, while I have continued to struggle. And honestly, if I were the kind of person who could believe, maybe I would. But the older I get, the more I begin to suspect I'm just not that kind of person.

day 1: i met a pulitzer prize-winning author

Having spent nearly a decade trying (and largely failing) to write character-driven fiction, I was struck by Marilynne Robinson’s live interview at the Kansas City Public Library when she said that after finishing Housekeeping in 1980, she mourned the loss of the characters she had spent so much time getting to know.

Similarly, the characters in Gilead, her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, stuck with her long after the book’s completion, so she had to continue telling their stories in her most recent novel, Home.

“If these characters want their lives,” she said, “I should give it to them.”

My signed copy of Gilead is awesome.

While I am looking forward to reading all of Robinson’s novels, last month I read Housekeeping as part of the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read series. In this poetic, observant novel, the characters are fully realized in an organic way that seems effortless and inspires a great degree of admiration and envy in my cold, cold heart.

After losing their mother to suicide when she drives her car into the same lake that swallowed their grandfather’s derailed train years earlier, young sisters Ruth and Lucille fall under the reluctant care of their eccentric, train-hopping aunt Sylvie.

The haphazard family lives in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho, which is a character in itself – located in a valley alongside a temperamental lake that is always flooding or freezing, the town’s difficult climate threatens its mix of residents and transients and rattles its already shaky foundation.

Like Fingerbone, Sylvie is unstable. She sits alone for hours in the dark, fills rooms from floor to ceiling with newspapers and tin cans, “borrows” unattended canoes, and doesn’t know the whereabouts of her husband, whose very existence seems to occasionally slip her mind.

While Lucille rebels against Sylvie’s strangeness, Ruth seems almost intrinsically a part of it. The inherent similarities between Ruth and Sylvie and their inability to conform even when faced with loneliness and isolation raise questions about how much people are capable of change and how much certain tendencies such as transience and privacy (or in Lucille’s case, conformity and propriety) are simply hardwired.

On an unrelated note, Robinson teaches fiction writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she is a self-assured, competent product of a lifetime spent in quality educational institutions. Though she claims not to think of herself as such, she is a capital "W" Writer, part of a group very few people successfully infiltrate.