“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”
My brain still performs a melodramatic little swoon (replete with arm draped over brow and Victorian-era couch in readiness underneath) when faced with the idea that someone, somewhere, chose something I wrote out of a collection of others. It gives me hope that I’ll get more words between the covers of a book, like in Bianca’s hoodie pocket above.
(Do those books have my words in them? Oh, no, no. That’s a couple of Hemingways and a Ginsberg, freshly purchased from a stall at our local farmer’s market.)
I’ve updated the Published Works page, as if to prove it to myself.
I am scheduled to have two wisdom teeth evicted tomorrow, by force, and am feeling apprehensive about it.
More than apprehensive. Such a procedure typically uses general anesthesia, which is a fairly common thing to be phobic about, but which I have never in my adult life experienced.
A secret truth about this shell I inhabit: I have a poor memory, and an abject fear of memory loss. This is probably why I never developed the habit of drinking myself into a stupor, and have to date never in my life really been drunk. The worst of all possible results of aging would be to lose myself to dementia or Alzheimer’s.
Perhaps related to this, I possess a strong desire not to “miss out” on something: nights out, laughter, life experiences, food, play, sex.
Anesthesia, in all its cold professionalism, taps into all this. For a time, it is an utter removal from the world, unlike sleep, unlike sickness, with no memories and no dreams. I have unreasoning fears of risk and loss, of returning with something missing from myself, or something switched off, or something awakened.
All this shouldn’t happen, of course. Standard procedure, very common, well-trained staff, sign here, count down from one hundred, medication for when I am returned to the world groggy and sickened.
I just do not like being at the total mercy of substance.
I have too much yet to do.
“Kakorrhaphiophobia: The fear of failure or defeat.”
Life is in layers. Death, too.
This is why ghosts appear behind you, or before you, in the mirror, against the far wall where handprints glow.
(Filmmakers understand this.)
Ghosts do not manifest by your side, do not walk next to you. They cannot.
Worlds can be slid into sideways, in fact must be; life and death must be entered, or exited. A threshold is not a threshold if you can pass it by.
(You remember how dimensions work: we see and measure space in three, we understand two as a plane, we know that one dimension is a line.)
The fact that life and death work this way, at least for us, is what drives humans mad, for we can move along life (which we view as time) only in one dimension… and not even one, for we cannot move in two directions along that one, pale line.
Forward, only.
Not even one dimension.
The trick is to make the distance ahead very long, indeed.
So upon wrestling with the local laundromat that plays KOST-FM’s seasonal barrage, and then having my errand-filled day completely aborted by the trafficked and chaotic presence of the Hollywood Christmas Parade, which raised street barriers all the way down to Santa Monica, I was feeling particularly sour. The holidays have come banging on our collective doors with unhealthy fervor this year.
I wrote a post on some blog back in 2007, and upon looking through it, I realize with some hand-wringing, cackling and grinchly satisfaction that I feel the exact same way I used to.
So I ask you… which Christmas song is your least favorite?
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I look up from reading while colors tumble.
Hundreds of birds wheel in dozens of directions, in front of the daytime waxing moon.
It has an eerie chaos, such that Frazetta might have painted it.
With extra serpentine coils to menace womanly flesh in the foreground.
I haven’t been creative much lately. Poke my head in, shake it to clear my day, grimace, and exit without commentary.
I haven’t written, I haven’t sat and thought. I have been tired, and sickly, and in pain.
Partly this is due to my working schedule, which can be busy and long and spasmic and unpredictable, and I have a good/bad habit of keeping my email open long after I should have gone to bed, just in case there’s something I can address.
Mostly, though, it’s been a slow realization of my condition. It’s been years since I’ve had chiropractic adjustment done; when I stand you can see how offset my head is, how one shoulder is higher than the other. It’s dawned on me that I’ve been living with pain, every day of my life. I get tension headaches. I can’t think well. I don’t mention it much. I have things to do.
I had the opportunity to meet with my friend H., who is a Doctor of Chiropractic. With his portable table he made necessary adjustments, cracking and popping areas that had not moved in years, locked into place like rusted chain. He could feel the parts that had tried to weld together.
I stood up straighter, and could lift my head, put my shoulders back. I had range of motion again.
Chiropractic has had its share of skepticism directed at it, but I have no trouble believing that its effects go beyond cracking liquid back into the joints. The body uses the spine as a highway, and it seems fair to think that the offramps can get congested.
It’s startling what one lives with.
Thanks, Dr. Hans.
