Hey fruits! It's been a while since I posted a quickwrite but this is one that I did a few days ago. Part II is the following day. Pete, thanks for giving me "Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamott. I read the first chapter and vowed to write one hour a day for the rest of my life. I started doing this January 21, 2015 and so far so good! If I miss a day, I make up for that hour the next day or the next after that. I've had five dreams in a row since Janaury 21 which was uncanny but also good source material for invoking childhood memories.
Questions, comments, notes, post here, email, CALL ME.
A book from a friend, and I am suddenly reintroduced to the loves of writing, penning thoughts, putting images to words, connecting the dots. My friend Pete gave me the book, Bird by Bird through Didrik who I spent the day with this passed Saturday. Pete and I have been writing together on and off these past few months, a routine that I started with him a little under a year ago. We wrote in great strides and then there was a period of time in which we stopped writing together but separately of which is continuing. I hope he’s still writing.
Well what will I write down tonight?
I lit two candles in the center of the dining table and am seated at the west end in a fluffy faux-fur swivel chair my mother purchased from Pottery Barn kids. I’m wearing timberland winter boot socks, thicker concentration of material at the toes and heel with a red stripe around the ankle. These jeans are my customary 31 waist by 30 length; the shorter length somehow makes my legs look longer which really isn’t an issue but somehow, oh whatever. It looks smart in the British sense. My underwear is a pair (why is it called a pair?) from a six pack of Hanes, all darker shades, grey, navy, and black with a sturdy comfortable waist band that hugs. It’s snug. Why would anyone buy white underwear? Is it similar to the white wedding bed sheet to warn the wearer, alert alert you’ve shat yourself! Alert, alert there is yellow which means it’s dirty. It’s odd. The primary purpose of undergarments is to conceal and… seal. Having white underwear will just discolor over time from constant use. Is it the ability of the wearer to maintain it’s “whiteness” that is rewarding? That seems trivial and worth no ones time. So my underwear is grey. The belt holding up my jeans is made from thick and sturdy buffalo leather. It has a deep earth red color and curves when unused. I always thought it was peculiar that a belt would lose it’s straightness. Things that are designed with uniformity lose their uniformity when draped around, aligned with the human body. We are made of intricacies and dangers foreign to the inanimate. A long-sleeved black henly covers my torso. I bought this and it’s white cousin the second time I had gone to visit Didrik in Rochester, New York. I told him that I needed to go shopping that i needed to buy thermal underwear to shield my body from the blistering abuse of cold’s tight grasp. Whenever I use or hear the word tight all I can think of is pornography. Mixed with ice though, that’s weird, off-the-cuff. Not nice. What are you writing about?
Let’s write about a group of old white men talking about racism. That’s not fun. That’s boring. I was falling asleep after what seemed like 2 hours of senseless droning, going on and on about race and John Piper’s knack for getting under the White American psyche. I enjoyed the conversation for the most part but the comments coming from the older white men just made me cringe. I had such bipartisan thoughts in my head. What if I made a fuss and stomped out of here? We need a black person here. Oh wait, we do have one but he’s from Rio De Janeiro and he keeps going on and on about him being from that place. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, it was actually quite interesting and his perspective was most welcome. I was there too, along with Nancy, and Samuel. We should have said something. Peter was an asshole without trying to be one. Something felt so sinister about the way he spoke as if he was immune, impartial, uninvolved with race and America. You are race and you are America. I kind of hate you but we’re not suppose to do that. We’re supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves. There was a healthy mix of representation at the book discussion. The white men included Steve Romeo (ex-Italian gangster turned Grace embracing Harley biker), Josh (the pastor and leader of the discussion), Dan (soft spoken non-dad-Dad) and Peter (Central park should close earlier, nice watch, plaid socks, and suede wingtips, navy sweater, white checkered picnic blanket shirt uninvolved or impressed). The asian contingency consisted of Nancy (post-grad turtleneck), Sam (albino blue-eyed junior), and myself (blonde shocked hot-shot non-biker artist little boy). The hispanic world was represented by Mariana (soft and careful spoken grandma/mama type) and Nancy’s other half, which is ham, roasted pork, swiss, pickles, mustard and florida. If you didn’t get it, she’s half Cuban. I’m quite partial to sandwiches).
It was the way he spoke, Peter, that made me want to shank him. I wanted to cut him somewhere. I wanted to find him in an alleyway in China and show him how Chinese people live. I wanted to squat on the sidewalk, buttoned shirt open to reveal sun scorched torso, and sip cafe latte from a straw in a plastic ziplock with a cigarette in the other hand. I wanted to pick my ears with a long pinky finger nail and flick it into the street at his feet. I wanted to hold my infant son wearing special pants that were open at his tiny puckering ass hole and let him shit on the street as I held him. I want to take back all the things that I’ve just written. How terrible terrible am I to think such things, to wish discomfort on another. It’s not his fault that his voice is whiny, his skin stretched and flush with nervous misunderstanding. Hair, silvered from matinee shows. I’m totally at it again. I’m just spouting shit everywhere I am not offended. I am not taking offense. What was it about it that made me angry or so maddened to the point of disinterest that morphed into tiredness, desire for sleep? The walls were painted white. All the lights shone brightly in the hall that is the sanctuary. We sat in a circle. What am I doing there? It was at that point before we transitioned to talking about “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that I said to myself, I need to join a book club and meet a sexy soft-spoken vixen wolf-cat woman who wears glasses and loves Jesus and wants to suck my cock dry but also writes beautifully and wants to be the mother of my children, the ground in which my seeds are planted.
Ugh. That was gross. I’m aroused. I’m alone in my apartment with two candles lit as if this were some kind of sacred religious experience, as if someone had just died, as if the power went out and I’m in the basement of the Michigan Tulberry circle home with it’s leaf green door, playing legos in the basement while my mother eats baked salmon. I can’t remember the look on her face if she’s said anything, if she’s sad, or if she’s angry. Mother’s in the middle of raising three kids totter between all three I presume. I don’t know if my parents were ever happy. All I know is that they were stressed and sad, taking a lot of naps. They were both involved with so many church activities. Bible study this, college student that, young couples this, marriage counseling, children’s ministry. Over and over again with the Children’s ministry as if my mother had some kind of super power in creating culture out of thin air. Dad was either at work, or on his bike, or in the driver seat. That’s Dad. Dad was either talking on the phone for a conference, or asking us kids if mom was in a “bad mood” and she was constantly. I remember sitting on the toilet, really luxuriating in the labor of coercing a shit out of my colon like a newborn being cooed to rest. Doing this in my parents bathroom, I noticed a stack of art books with pages upon pages of advertising and graphic design. This is one of the many ways in which I discovered the wonders of a women’s breast, the sacred fruit in which the fullness of my boy’s curiosity could not fathom. Once it was revealed to me, the subtle incline, soft slopes of cream, the sound of sighing and ocean salt, the dark sharpness of a nipple or it’s inverted crater form, I obsessed over it. I would find reasons to shit and then I’d spend what felt like hours gazing at the beauty of the naked female form. I remember the picture; a women, top naked, the photo center on a semi-profile of her chest area. Her face was masked by what looks like a masquerade ball mask. Her arm closest to the viewer is raised, the other by her side. But that single breast at the forefront of the frame, so nonchalantly there. My eyes traced it’s outline many times. It made me think of what my mother’s breasts looked like and I would scream at myself in my mind at how wrong that would be. I then remember seeing my aunt’s breasts as she bent over in a loose shirt to clean up a mess my chubby-golden boy cousin made. This was when I learned not all breasts look the same. Do I want to continue writing about this? This is kind of strange, weird, I feel gross but simultaneously not- it’s the truth, it’s my experience, the truth cannot be wrong. These are things I saw, have seen, am seeing and will see for the rest of my life. That art book taught me to frame the female form, to observe and desire it, and that it’s different from my own form. I used to think of a vagina as a hole the same size a hole puncher would make. I remember watching a sexual education video in elementary school that made me very uncomfortable but it made me whisper to myself, someone understands my hard penis. I never spoke of sex to anyone. Not even my friends. The only thing I’ve ever said to my friends is something along the lines of, “Sex is great. Girls are dumb. Girls are hot. Girls are soft. Girls are not liking me right now.” That pretty much sums up my outright conversing on the subject. But if I can’t air these images to human beings, where else can I place these thought worlds? Where else can they live? They live on these pages, in these documents that no one will read. Or maybe, they will be read.
I always wonder, in the middle of writing in the way that I do what would happen if the people I write about were to read everything I had written about them. If my parents read what I write about them, what they would say, how they would react, would they ostracize me? Would they hate me to the point that I could no longer show my face to them? How does this whole writing thing work? What about all the sexual things I’ve written about, the descriptions of women I’ve come across, the things I want to do to them or the things i imagine them doing to me… What a long list of fantastical shit. But this is the stuff of my mind, these are my creations, these are my children and in any other form, they are undocumented and therefore not given the attention all children deserve. Do I feel better for having things written down? Yes, I do. I feel that it validates the “me” inside of my head. That my thought life is worth something more than just a jumble of useless b-roll in a movie that will never screen except maybe in some arthouse in a Brooklyn warehouse. Maybe not even that, that’s giving it too much elevation. Maybe it’s being projected on the screen of some shitty rage bar with piss, vomit, and bodily fluids stains all over the floor. I need to write that story down of Christine’s birthday.
It was her birthday, as was told to me by a Facebook notification on my phone. I was playing Destiny or maybe Dragon Age trying to seduce Josephine when I texted Christine a picture of my family dog and a “Happy Birthday.” She responded saying she’d be getting Midnight drinks at a bar near her place and I wanted to come out and say hello but she insisted after an involved back and forth that I shouldn’t make the effort. I cocked my head to the right and my right eyebrow upwards and said, “Huh. Okay.” I said it out loud. When you’re alone and then you say something out loud, like a full word or a sentence, you need to see a real human being face to face soon. She then followed that up to explain she’d only be out for a mere twenty minutes or so and that I should instead go to dinner with her the following evening. Excited! I’m bored of the story now. I’m going to finish it later I want to do other things I want to play Destiny or look at pictures of naked attractive people. C.S. Lewis in me says, “Don’t, you’re poisoning yourself!” and to that I say, “Yes. I know. I’m not going to.” I’m not going to. I’m going to drink Tonic water. I like it because of the quinine.
