Straight No Chaser

More

trivial and stupid. let's see...

well, i had chinese for lunch today. chow mein and some burnt szechuan string beans. didn't get ice cream, a treat i'd promised myself, nor that ella fitzgerald cd i wanted, "sophisticated lady live featuring joe pass," because until i figure out whether i am helping to pay for a certain person's airline tickets, i am just behaving as though i'm broke.

the crazy woman from my office, the one who's pedaling to keep from being drowned by some metaphorical tidal wave, pulled me aside today to tell me i was "underclad." i wanted to point out that i don't take clothing tips from psychopaths, but i didn't say it, because that would have cut into the time i then spent being reamed out for something JIM did (or didn't do, being as he spent all of last week at "the lake").

the only thing i'm legitimately proud of in my port got a 3.5 today. i don't really care because i know that most people are idiots, and because i'm not so conceited as to think that i don't fall into that category, nor would i delude myself to think that a low rate means the difference between earning and not earning a pulitzer prize someday.

i miss my mom, who is in new york.

...trivial and stupid. i'd love to call marcus, but he's at work. every so often i get this uncontrollable urge to direct him here, to this journal, and then turn my head as he flipped through to see himself smeared across every entry. it would't make much difference--he knows, half the time, what i'm feeling, whether or not he chooses to do anything about it, and pretty much everything that shows up in my port is something he's read and okayed (with the exception of the big stupid white elephant, which i thought was too uncannily like us, even though i wrote it three years before i ever met him) and is, in fact, a general sampling of the stuff he's just kind of lukewarm about. stuff he hates gets scrapped immediately, under no uncertain terms, because he's brilliant and very seldom wrong about the quality of this item or that. stuff he likes a lot gets locked away, never to be seen by anyone else, lest a piece of him should fall out of it and clamor away. he never gives suggestions. he circles typos, makes expressive faces and crumples things up, but that's the extent of his feedback. when he gives me poems to read, i green-pen the shit out of them. i think it annoys him when they're things he's especially proud of and i do that, for obvious reasons.

he was the one who decided i was going to be a poet, because he said i was too "heartstrong" to go twenty more years without ever managing the kind of expression that he, a lesser literary being, had mastered ages ago. i tried, i really did. i did it without much guidance at first, wrote some pretty horrid free-verse things that were invariably about him and shared the same basic weaknesses. i was a slave to format. i'm a story-writer, and used to the freedom of a limitless canvas. given a confined space in which to express an idea, some upper-bounded number of lines, i panic and throw everything into insanely exaggerated order. if the first stanza has eleven lines, the second must, too. no fewer than two instances of alliteration per four lines, or whatever.

it all sucked. he let me think it was good, probably because he wanted me to keep trying, and he knew i'd get discouraged if he told me what horseshit it all was. he was very careful about interweaving criticism with praise, picking one flaw on which to focus at a time. he said i needed to learn about fulcrums. that should have been the first thing i figured out. i'm good at plot, at climax, and i can find orgasms anywhere--in literature, in music, in conversations, in the colors and textures at my gray gray office. a fulcrum is little more than a poetic orgasm. less, in fact, because every successful poem isn't orgasmic, every orgasm is different, et cetera. i know i've gotten an impressive variety from him. anyway, he was right, my poems plodded, and every single one stumbled across some underdeveloped unifying point that never worked out the way i wanted it to. they were all shit, but he read them all, patiently and with interest, and continued to receive my feedback on the stuff he'd written, even as i drained my own credibility.

in all this time i've only written one poem that i still liked five days later, and he criticized that one the way he never did the other ones. he said it reminded him of an episode of "rainbow brite." those of us born in the eighties know that is a pretty much unparalleled insult to what little poetic integrity i do have.

anyway, so i'm not a poet. whatever. i told him that at the beginning, and he never forgot, so we were fine on that point. he's not a storyteller. like i said before, he always goes into long digressions about natural harmony, a topic on which i'd read a thousand of his poems, even if they all sounded alike, but would rather not see get in the way of a promising plot twist. it's not heartbreaking. we can still make music together, and read each other's things. if i ever write a book i'm pretty sure he'll buy several copies, even if it stays buried at the bottom of sale bins all across the country. just like i'll always read his poems, even if he only ever scrawls them across bathroom walls using a sharpie marker.

he'd probably be able to tell me what to do about "melinda," if i had the werewithal to read him excerpts out loud, ask what i'm doing wrong (something, obviously, because even i can barely stand to read through it, and like grim, i usually have a lot of patience for my own junk. says fat bastard: "everybody likes their own brand"). it's the kind of thing he would tolerate but not love. he'd find the inconsistencies and tear them to shreds with his pretty fingers, tell me i'd been indoctrinated and label the whole thing menetian melodrama. and then i'd have plenty to go on when it came time to revise.

in the story, there are seven siblings, five of them women, and a mother who holds fast to her ideal of ultra-ordered parenting. the kids, meanwhile, i mean you'll see, or, more accurately, we all will. one of the sisters just might be (grim)aaron's dreamgirl; another, a shyer, more disillusioned katrina. one is some alternate-universe version of marcus with a crystal meth past. none of them are me, for once. that's marcus's most frequent complaint about my writing, that i personalize it too heavily, take all the guesswork away by always projecting every one of my four major insecurities onto the characters. not doing it this time.

i miss him with quite a fervor right now. just to be touching him, contact at one point, cheek on his stomach, maybe, reading aloud from "the phantom tollbooth." next time, he promised; he thinks i'll forget but i won't. i never forget anything, including the fact that he owes me two fulcrums.