The Isolation Journals - Day 30

It's April 30th, but honestly what does that even mean?  Nothing as far as I can tell.

It's the last day of the first round of The Isolation Journals, which seems like it will continue.  Buckle back up for a continued thrill ride of my dark and cavernous mind-shaft.

Today's prompt is from Suleika Jaouad, the project founder herself.

Prompt:  Create a time capsule of the past month. What has this time meant for you? Write about the things you thought about and the things you ate. Write about how your world has stayed the same and also how it’s changed. Write about what you struggled with and maybe would honestly rather forget. Write about where you found delight; the things you fear will fade and want to immortalize for yourself now and for the future you.

---

My time capsule is wrapped up in a big handkerchief, hobo bindle style.  Without a sewing machine or fabric scraps, my makeshift mask has been this trusty handkerchief, folded just so and secured around the ears with hair ties.

I'm stuffing the bindle full of junk - some I'd like to carry with me on the rest of this journey, the rest I plan to toss off a bridge.  An empty toilet paper tube and hand sanitizer - good riddance.  A sourdough starter, a kombucha scoby, a scallion root regenerating in a shot class full of water.  Tiger King - sashay, you stay.  Zoom - girl, bye.  Fiona Apple's Fetch the Bolt Cutters.  Banana bread.  A dozen books and counting.  

The bindle is getting heavy but as I'm naming the items, I'm feeling lighter.  As my physical freedom decreased, my mental freedom relaxed and expanded, rose and aerated and took on a pleasing tang.  Or maybe that was the sourdough. 

Either way, there's time now in a way there wasn't before.  You know what's not in the bindle?  A watch, or a calendar.  Who needs 'em!  It's today, it's right now, what more do we need?

The Isolation Journals - Day 29

I've already made french toast and rice pudding this morning.  I had about two bites of each, and ate cereal instead.

Today's prompt comes from singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers.

Prompt:  In your deepest core, in your most vulnerable moments - what do you want?

---

This question made me mad because I don't have a good answer.  It's easier not to want things because then you can't be disappointed when you don't get them.

What I want is to be heard.  Not just heard - listened to.  Not interrupted.  Not 'nodding while urging you to finish so it can be my turn to speak again.'

It's why I write.  It's why I started doing stand-up.  It's why I went to therapy.  And why I stopped.  Because even someone getting paid to listen couldn't stop staring at her phone.

In my interpersonal life, I'm usually the listener.  It's rarely my turn to talk.  I rush to get my words out before I'm interrupted.  I assume I'm boring you.  So I write.  Because you don't get to interrupt me here.  You can stop reading, but the words, nevertheless, persist.

The Isolation Journals - Day 28

This Isolation Journals project was originally billed as a 30 day situation.  I've heard some chatter that it might continue, which would be great.  The thing is, now that the end is in sight, I feel a sense of anticipation that I think is misplaced.  In my head, I realize now I was subconsciously conflating the end of this project with the end of the pandemic, which is obviously not accurate or true.

Oh well.

Today's prompt comes from a tap dancer, choreographer, and actor, Ayodele Casel.

Prompt:  Write about a time when your bravery or curiosity was stronger than your fear.

---

Where is the line between bravery and stupidity?  Is it in the eye of the beholder, or do we trust the person having the experience to make the call?  Maybe curiosity is a more useful term than bravery.

I don't think any of the things I've done in life were particularly brave. Except becoming an elementary school librarian.  I've grown accustomed to -and even enjoy!- the kids who can hold a conversation and articulate their needs, but the 5-and-under crowd remains a terrifying cipher, but I digress.  

Sure, I've had to do some hard things, emotionally, physically, intellectually.  But those challenges don't make me feel brave.  What would have been the alternative to putting on big girl pants and dealing?  Maybe not dealing and carrying on would have been the brave thing - admitting vulnerability.

Back to curiosity.  I've done a lot of arguably stupid things out of curiosity.  "Don't touch the stove, it's hot," mom warned 4-year-old me.  Sounds like a challenge, I must have thought as I blindly slapped my hand down on the stove top to see for myself.  

It was hot.

"Bet you can't eat everyone else's wasabi lumps in one go," said four friends while we ate sushi in a run-down converted diner with a questionable health score.  Sounds like a challenge.

It was also hot.

"You gonna try the world's hottest hot sauce?" Andy asked as we perused the Pepper Palace in St. Augustine.  

Do you see where this is going?  The theme here seems to be scalding my outsides or insides to prove a point, and for what?  Stupidity or curiosity?  A story to tell?

I think I'm failing at this exercise, which I'm sure was meant to encourage a deep probing of the self.  It's not that my mind is a shallow kiddie pool, surrounded by 'no diving' warnings and always suspiciously warm.  It's just that the waters are so deep and so frigid I don't feel brave enough to take the plunge this morning.  And maybe admitting that...is brave?

The Isolation Journals - Day 27

Let's get right into it today.

This prompt is from writer/essayist Jordan Kisner, whose new book, Thin Places, sounds intriguing.

Prompt:  Describe a “thin place” or threshold you’ve encountered. It could be a location, an experience, a relationship, a period of time. Describe it in as much concrete detail as you can: what did you see, smell, feel with your hands? How did it make you feel? Who else was there? What led you there? What did you do? What happened afterward? Did anything change? It may feel hard to describe—that's ok! Ineffable experiences are the hardest to describe. Get weird!

---

I'm not religious or even spiritual.  I try to look for rational explanations and am quick to dismiss odd coincidences as just that.  But some things are just too damn weird.

I have a story I like to call my alien abduction story, partly because, 17 years later, I still don't understand what actually happened.  Also because insisting it was an alien abduction makes my hyper-rational husband irrationally irate.

And look, let me preface this by saying I don't think I was literally, physically visited by aliens after senior prom.  All I'm saying is, something weird and unexplained happened, and I promise no drugs or alcohol were involved.

This was now half my lifetime ago, and I can still remember the disorientation and confusion.  We had so many questions.  How did we get there?  How did that much time elapse?  The one thing we did know was exactly what everyone at the party was going to say when we showed up half an hour late.

What happened was, my high school boyfriend and I had a great time at our senior prom with all our friends.  Dancing, eating, stealing people's disposable cameras and taking close-up pictures of our bent elbows so it would look like butt cheeks when they got the film back weeks later.  You know, fun.

At the end of the night, we were all headed to a totally wholesome, parent-chaperoned party in a friend's basement.  The prom was held at a venue a few towns over, and we weren't totally familiar with the area in the dark, so we were following hand-written directions, probably from my mom.  This was 2003, so no smart phones yet, no GPS built into the 1985 Ford Escort with manual everything and only AM radio.  

I was navigating, he was driving, and we rode along in relative quiet, carefully looking out for each turn indicated in the directions.  We didn't miss a street, or make a wrong turn, but all of a sudden, we found ourselves at the end of a dead end street, coasting to a stop when it felt like moments before, we had been traveling at 45 or 50 mph.  We both felt groggy, as if we were just waking up.  Were we lost?  Where the hell were we?  We checked the time.  The whole drive from prom to after-party should have taken maybe 20 minutes.  But there we were in the middle of the woods, it seemed, and more than half an hour had passed since we left the prom venue.  

We had no choice but to turn around and drive back out the dead end street.  None of it looked familiar in the way it should have if we had just driven down the same street minutes earlier.  We eventually came back to a road we recognized from the directions, got our bearings, and found our way to the party, half an hour late.  

We tried to explain to everyone that we had just been, like, abducted by aliens, but of course no one believed us.  All we heard in response was, "off like a prom dress, right guys?" or, "don't come a knockin' when the Escort's a rockin'."  That was a little insulting, but I guess we still had the last laugh when they got their disposable camera pictures developed...

Syllabus #50

I just realized this is the 50th time I have pointlessly created one of these posts that I am certain will be read by 0-3 people.  If that's not a cause for celebration, then slap my ass and call me Sally.  What a milestone!

Cheers to 50 exercises in futility!

Let's see, what's good this week?  Is any of the below still relevant?  I start collecting links on Sunday or Monday, so some of this shit may have grown stale by now.  Take what you want and compost the rest.

This is heartbreaking and scary and makes me so angry for anyone who has to deal with this fear.  


Lois Lowry has a new book based on an insane coincidence in her own life.  In this article she muses on the renewed relevance of her Newbery-winning novel, The Giver - "Lowry is curious how they’ll teach a fictional dystopia during a real one."  Yep. 


What's in your bug-out bag?  I think I have a tampon that's been in there since 2017, a quarter for the cart at Aldi, and rusty bobby pin.  Wait, you're saying a purse doesn't count?  


This is a valid question that needs to be explored further, ideally by thoughtful people armed with robust data and not through knee-jerk reactions.


Have you Fiona Appled yet?  Of course you have by now.  This new album is so good.  It's rare for music to make we want to just lay down on the floor and let it wash over me, but this is that.

Andplusalso, I learned that the director of Fiona's video for Criminal drew inspiration from Larry Clark's Kids, which makes so much sense now in retrospect.


Speaking of music I either forgot or never knew I liked, I'm sad and mad and it's too bad that I never bothered to listen to John Prine and now he's dead.  I can't stop listening to this song, and even though I don't believe in an afterlife, I hope this is what he found:

Analog Reading:

Finished Isabel Allende's Long Petal of the Sea.  Highly recommend.

Almost finished Michelle Obama's Becoming.  I have tremendous admiration for her, but for reasons that have nothing to do with her story or her writing abilities, reading this book right now is an ordeal.  I miss the Obama administration, obviously, and it's just damn hard to read non-fiction about a world that now feels completely disconnected from our current one.  Not only that, but it's so easy to get carried away with wishing that we still had a president who would act like a fucking grown up and execute an organized, orderly, data-driven response to this crisis.

The Isolation Journals - Day 26

This morning I picked up a canister of steel cut oats by the lid.  If you've ever made the same mistake, you know what happened next.  I spent about 15 minutes vacuuming up those little bastard oat shards out of every crevice in my pantry.  I'm pretty sure it was regenerating itself as I was cleaning it up.  I was like Oatmeal Jesus, except the true miracle was that I didn't murder anyone during this moment of hunger and irritation.

Today's prompt comes from conflict resolution expert Priya Parker.  I would have appreciated her help this morning, but something tells me her expertise would be wasted mediating a conflict between an irrational woman and a shelf-stable breakfast item.

Prompt:  What’s a memory of a collective ritual, inherited or invented, that was meaningful or formative to some part of your identity? Write about it. Who was there? What was the activity? What were the words that were used? What time of year was it? How did it make you feel? And years later, how might it have shaped you?

---

My high school had a stellar arts program that cranked out award-winning musicals year after year.  When I was a kid, still in elementary school, my grandmother worked at the high school.  Most years, she would snag tickets and we'd go see the Spring musical together.

I remember watching teenagers, just a few years older than myself, absolutely crush it on stage.  I thought only famous people could be that talented.  How could real people memorize all those lines?  How could they sing like that?  And dance at the same time?

Over the years, the amazement gave way to desire and misplaced confidence.  If those people up on stage were actually just normal human people, maybe I could be one of them.  

As it would turn out, I have a singing voice that might inspire a bystander to call an ambulance.  For me or for themself, anything to make it stop, as even the siren's wail would be more sonorous.  My high school musical dreams were crushed.  I wanted to be part of that magic so badly.

It was then that I discovered what seemed like an adequate consolation prize:  stage crew.  It was a lot of plywood, paint, and power drills, which turned out to be WAY more enjoyable than being in the cast.  They were subject to daily verbal abuse from the prima donna musical director, who sat stroking his Pomeranian and hurling insults at actors who missed a cue or failed to hit a high note.

Still, I couldn't help but feel undervalued or somehow second class compared to the actors.  They got all the accolades, the glamour, the applause.  The stage crew had to dress head to toe in black and make every effort to remain unseen.  

There was, however, a pre-performance ritual that brought us all together, cast and crew alike.  On opening night, we would hold hands in a circle behind the closed curtains.  Borrowing from Broadway tradition, we would carry out the ritual of the Gypsy Robe (which was, for obvious reasons, renamed the Legacy Robe in 2018).  

The previous year's robe recipient (sometimes a returning college freshman, which added to the exotic allure) would emerge from the wings in a silk robe elaborately and outlandishly embroidered with mementos from previous years' productions.  As they ran around the circle, three times in a counter-clockwise direction, we would reach out and touch the robe for good luck.  The Gypsy would come to a stop beside the new recipient, who would often be moved to tears by the honor (typical drama kid).

After experiencing that ritual, I felt like I was part of a grander tradition.  I wasn't just an ugly, untalented lackey lurking in the wings with the next set of props.  I was still that, but not just that.  Looking back, I appreciate the lesson I was forced to learn - that behind what you see on the glittering surface of anything great, there are many supporting characters and unseen helpers.  Those efforts have value, and it's not necessary to be the center of attention to contribute to something larger than yourself.  Also, what happens at a cast party stays at a cast party.  

The Isolation Journals - Day 25

Day 25, feelin alive.  Or something.  I'm just gonna get right to it and deposit today's prompt below.  It's a good one but it's long.

Today's prompt is from actress turned writer and professor of creative writing, Dinah Lenney.

Prompt:  Choose a photograph—maybe you took it, maybe you’re in it, maybe you cut it out of magazine just because it delighted your eye: the point is, the image doesn’t have to be beautiful or good, but you saved it for a reason, right? It means something to you. 

Your job is not to describe the picture. You can—but the point is to let it take you somewhere. How does the photograph make you feel? What does it make you remember? What’s your relationship to the people or place in the picture? And, whether or not you know them, does a story come to mind? If you don’t remember when the photo was taken, that’s fine: let yourself conjecture. What do you imagine happened the moment before or after the click? What might you know about the past or future that the photographer or subject does not? Who isn’t in the picture? What’s just outside the frame, in space or time? If you could, what would you ask the photographer (or subject) now, a day, a month, a decade since the moment held in the frame? Tell us what you believe or fantasize, beginning or ending with the moment that the photo was captured.

And—here’s a bonus: Now that you’ve written about a photo you possess, one you can look at any old time, write about the one you wish had been taken; if only that moment had been captured—but it wasn’t. In this case, with this photo that doesn’t exist—describe it in living color. (Unless, of course, it’s black and white.)

---

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

A headless, armless mannequin posing behind the remains of a skate shop, or maybe a bar.  I'm not even sure anymore.

It has been less than two months but also 300 years.

We all lost our heads that day, none of us able to make sense of what happened.  We all felt like we were helpless, defenseless, with our arms pinned behind our backs.

Except that's not true, or only half true.  Outside the frame, the neighborhood was swarming with worker bees, buzzing from pile to pile with gardening gloves, brooms, trash bags.  Working together, already trying to heal and clean up, eager to rebuild.

None of us realized how soon another storm would come, or how drastically different the next one would be.  We all know what happened next.  Ten days later, bit by bit, the city began to shut down.  The cleanup had only just begun, and now so much of it is frozen in time, a brutal reminder of just how much in life is out of our control.

The picture I don't have, that none of us have, is the picture of that mannequin planted in the same spot on March 3, 2021.  Will he be toppled over, choked with weeds, still surrounded by rubble?  Was progress arrested by disease and economic collapse?  

Or can we flip the negative over and see things in a different direction?  Maybe he'll be resting peacefully in a landfill somewhere far away, the debris cleaned up, homes and businesses rebuilt and thriving.  Maybe there will be people sitting shoulder to shoulder in bars and carelessly brushing past each other on the sidewalk.  

I want that photo, but I'm afraid to see what develops.

The Isolation Journals - Day 24

Today is the first day of the last week of this project.  At this point, talking about the absurd inscrutability of time is not even beating a dead horse, it's like, dropping it from a helicopter into the mouth of an active volcano full of sharks that are impervious to lava.  It's gratuitous.  We get it.  Oh my god, we get it.

But guys, time is weird!  And this project is keeping me vaguely in touch with the old socially constructed boundaries of time.  I might start sleeping in 'til noon and doing my dishes in the bathtub when this project ends.  Who knows.

Today's prompt comes from a doctor at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, Dr. Colleen Farrell.

Prompt:  Because breathing is essential for life, it touches every part of our existence. What does it mean to you to breathe? When was the last time you really noticed your breath? What were you doing? Was there ever a time when you realized you had taken your breath for granted? 

---

Breath is everything.  We can hold it, we can whistle with it, we can blow bubbles, or make a wish.  It can be stale or bad, deep or shallow.  

I remember being conscious of breath, or lack of it, as a kid trapped in the cab of a pickup with my chain-smoking dad every weekend.  In winter I'd bury my face in my coat sleeve to block out the smoke.  In the warmer weather I'd hang my head out the window like a dog.

Years ago, we moved from sea-level New Jersey to the high desert of Northern Utah.  On our second day in town we hiked the Crimson Trail, which topped out around 6,000 feet.  The trail followed the ledge of a sheer cliff and to this day I can still feel my legs shaking and my head feeling like it was attached by a fraying ribbon, light enough to float away on the next breeze.

It took days for our blood to acclimate to life at elevation.  For weeks, every run felt like wearing leaden ankle weights.  The first time we returned home to New Jersey for the holidays, we passed a gift shop in the Salt Lake airport with t-shirts that said Utah:  Dude, we're all high here.  That first run back in Jersey felt like flying.

The Isolation Journals - Day 23

Yesterday I promised to provide an update on my maiden sourdough voyage.  If The Yukon Trail is a metaphor for this whole journey, then I struck gold, y'all.

    

I'm so pleased.  Who needs commercial yeast when you can conjure it straight out of the air like a sexy bread witch?

I'm not a witch - they dressed me up like this.

Anyway, today's prompt comes from writer Stephanie Danler, and it's a trip down memory lane.

Prompt:  Meditate on places. If you’re working on fiction, perhaps choose places from that fictional world. The easiest might be your childhood home, but it could be: a restaurant, a street, a parking lot, a ferry station, a borrowed home in the Catskills where it rained for three days or a stranger’s glass penthouse where you once did too many drugs. Write down any images, details, or words that come to mind. Don’t worry about complete sentences. Don’t worry about describing the place as much as describing what it felt like.

This isn’t research, or even a place to collect lines of dialogue or turns of story. It is simply to remember, to feel out for a tender spot, search your own memories for the surprising detail, the “punctum,” which Barthes defined as, “the accident which pricks me.”

---

Haddonfield, NJ, 2008

Last night I was trying to picture the linoleum pattern in the kitchen of our first apartment together.  I feel certain it was identical to the one in the house where I was born.  Three or four shades of brown squares and rectangles assembled in an irregular repeating pattern.

That was the galley kitchen where I melted the Brita pitcher and the whole apartment reeked of burnt plastic for weeks.  The kitchen where our upstairs neighbor got stoned and took a nap in the middle of doing his dishes.  His sink overflowed and flooded our drop ceiling so a few soggy tiles collapsed and left a gaping hole.

That was the kitchen where a squirrel scaled the side of the brick building, found a gap, and got into the space between the 2nd and 3rd floors.   It found its way into the kitchen through the hole in the ceiling.  Andy was up at Rutgers for the day, so I hid in the back room with Ajax, the cat who was scared of everything back then.  We sheltered together while the squirrel tore from one end of the railroad apartment to the other, back to front to back, screaming and clawing at the walls.

The landlord was busy at his day job when I called about the squirrel.  In his stead, he sent his elderly Greek parents who had about 15 words of English between them.  The father beat the ceiling with a broom handle as he yelled at "the rabbit."  He stuffed a raccoon trap full of peanut butter and lodged it in the drop ceiling directly above our bed.  The bastard squirrel danced around the edges of the cage all night, sending showers of tile dust onto our faces as we slept, or didn't.

That was the apartment where it was 1000 degrees in the winter because the radiators for all three floors were controlled by the 300 year old woman who ran the antique shop on the street level.  It was 1000 degrees in the summer because we could afford to buy and run only one window AC unit.

That was the apartment where timid Ajax used to hide in the 100 years of accumulated filth behind the ancient cast iron tub whenever we had company.  The tiny bedroom where Ajax liked to paw open my closet door that never closed all the way.  He'd pull down every sweater that I couldn't wear indoors anyway and make a nest in the pile.

That was the apartment where Ajax entered the room with a red ribbon from a Maker's Mark bottle around his neck, a diamond ring dangling at his throat, and like that, Andy and I were going to get married.

Every place we have lived since has been a little nicer, but none of them have been as good.

The Isolation Journals - Day 22

Today's the day I throw Nellie's baby in the oven.

Before you call CPS, lemme back up.  Nellie Cashman is my sourdough starter, and her baby is made of flour and water.  I expect to report back with the results tomorrow, for better or for worse.

Bun in the oven

Today's prompt comes not a moment too soon from therapist and writer Lori Gottlieb, author of a book I immensely enjoyed, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.  (Maybe I should talk to someone, no?)

Prompt:  Think of a story that’s keeping you stuck—it might be a story about a friend or family member, a co-worker, or even yourself (some version of “I’m not loveable” or “I can’t trust people” or ‘Nothing ever works out for me,” etc.). Now imagine the story from the point of view of every other “character” in the story. How would they tell it? How would their version of the same event differ from yours? What can you see now that you weren’t willing or able to before? How does including their points of view add complexity and nuance to the storytelling? How does taking responsibility for your role in the story make the story far more interesting and compelling to the reader? 

---

Six-year-old Katie knew exactly what she wanted.  Her dream was to grow up and be an author.  Thirty-four-year-old Katie has let life get in the way.  Burned out on college essays after earning an English degree, and unable (or unwilling) to take a risk on an uncertain form of income, she turned to the next best thing.  Libraries.  If she wasn't creating books, at least she could be surrounded by beautiful ones all day.  

As it would turn out, Katie would spend much of her career surrounded by books that were once beautiful, but rapidly became sticky and threadbare by the many children who loved them.  One of these children confessed to Katie that she wanted to be a Barbie or a princess when she grows up.  Katie wondered if her childhood dream had sounded as impossible to the adults in her orbit.

Did it?  Certainly not to her mother, who is prepared to buy as many extra refrigerators as it will take to display every page of Katie's first book.  Certainly not to her husband, who has asked Katie several times during quarantine why she isn't writing.

"But this, the very thing I'm doing at this moment, is writing!" she'd retort.

"That's not what I mean.  Write a book.  When will you ever have this much time again?"

And he's not wrong.  Katie can't argue with that part.  So what is it?  Is she afraid to sink a ton of time and energy into something that might not be good?  Well, she did just halve a recipe for sourdough bread so she wouldn't waste flour...in case it wasn't good.  

But!  She's still making the bread.  Maybe someone just needs to remind her it's okay to start small.  She's not going to bang out Middlemarch on the first draft.  The Old Man and the Sea is a perfectly respectable scale (at which to potentially fail).

The Isolation Journals - Day 21

Hi there.  How are you today?  I don't mean that superficially.  I hate small talk.  Take a minute for a self-inventory and get back to me.

I made crackers yesterday with my sourdough starter discard.  I felt like an actual wizard. 

Today's prompt comes from writer Ruthie Lindsey.

Prompt:  Take a few deep breaths. Ground yourself in your body. Bring your attention to your sternum and your hands. Your legs and feet. Do you feel electricity? If so, where? Do you feel warmth or coolness? How is your heart? If you’re experiencing an emotion, where does it show up in the body? What color, what shape does it take? 

Enter into your body as much as you can and then write about the experience—what you noticed, what you encountered, what you learned.

---

Inhabiting a body is a curious thing.  A sack of flesh and blood and bones that we are forced to drag around when we want to move our brains and eyes.  That's one view.  Another is the wonder of noticing every distinct and sometimes contradictory sensation the body can hold at once.  

The rumble in my stomach and the tension in my neck don't detract from the singular delight of a warm kitty purring on my feet as I sit upright in bed to write this morning.  My thirst doesn't absorb the pleasure of my favorite mechanical pencil gliding across a blank page.

I have a daily yoga practice (which is an insufferable-sounding thing to say).  It is non-negotiable.  No matter how sick or exhausted or busy, I have taken at least five minutes to move and breathe and be in my body.  It's so easy for us, women especially, to resent our bodies for what they don't look like or can't do, or to forget them altogether in the crush of getting things done and taking care of others.  

Give yourself at least five minutes (much more if you can manage!) to remember that you are a whole person inhabiting a body.  It is never time wasted, it is a gift for your whole self.

The Isolation Journals - Day 20

Please, whatever your faith persuasion, accept my wishes of a blessed Four Twenty, and receive this picture of Rick Steves holding a goblet of nugs with joy in your heart.

Also, here's a highku, because April is also National Poetry Month.

hotboxing my dog

think he might just be a narc

he's on Prozac now

And one more:

who smoked all the weed

why is the dog throwing up

guess he's not a narc 

Today's prompt comes from multi-hyphenate writer, editor, podcaster, visual artist, and actress Fariha Róisin.

Prompt:  Look back on the past few weeks and consider what has felt momentous for you. What have you let go of, surrendered, only to learn from? Has anything felt fated, or fallen into place? Write from the depths of that knowing. Of trusting the signs. Explain what you’ve witnessed in yourself. What tiny revolution have you faced?

---

Nashville was hit by a tornado around 1 AM on March 3rd.  Before the interior of the country was thinking seriously about coronavirus, my little corner of the world was picked up, shaken down, slapped around, and slammed to the ground.  In a matter of minutes, the danger had passed, and the people came together to heal and repair.  

A week later, the shutdowns began.  Now we sit in our separate spaces, licking our wounds in solitude as we wait out a much more protracted peril.

Some of us say that sheltering in place feels like life in a war zone.  There's the meme about sucking it up because Anne Frank hid in silence in a 450 square foot attic with 7 other people for two years, without Amazon Prime or beer delivery.  As if our experiences, however unfamiliar or harrowing they may be, could ever compare.  

However, I think about the war comparison each time I leave my apartment.  We're all inside fighting, or hiding from, an unseen and figurative war.  Where I live, a few blocks from my home, piles of bricks and broken glass and half-collapsed buildings strip away the metaphor.  

I have made discoveries about myself during this time.  It's either resilience or delusion, but at the moment, I'm okayish.  I thrive on routine, so I've been making a daily schedule/docket of shit to do.  Ticking off little things, like 'eat breakfast,' holds me accountable for behaving like a civilized adult human.  

I've been focusing on what has to be done and what makes me happy, and damn the rest.  Aside from work, it's mostly reading, writing, cooking, and exercising.  I've fully neglected makeup, not that I wore a ton to begin with.  I haven't touched my blowdryer in over a month, nor have I plucked my eyebrow, which is now a singular entity.

The most profound truth I've had to confront is that Andy and I will someday have to be caretakers and advocates for our parents.  Somewhere in the week between the tornado and the shutdowns, each of us got into screaming matches on the phone with both sets of parents.  We begged and threatened them to cancel upcoming travel plans.  

I doubt screaming, "Are you OUT OF YOUR MIND?  You CANNOT [get on an airplane/bungee jump/invest your life savings with a Nigerian prince who emailed you]," will always work on our parents.  This time, however, the cognitive dissonance of being parented by their own children was enough.  They listened.  They stayed home.  They are behaving, treading water in the uncertainty like all of us.

Syllabus #49

Have we reached the acceptance stage in your grieving for this situation yet?  I kind of feel like this is just what life is for a while.  What am I gonna do about it?

This really hit me where I live.  I don't have kids so I can't pretend to know the depth of that aspect of the struggle for mothers right now.  The gender disparity is a little too real, though.  And it's not a new thing, but it's thrown into stark relief at a time like this.  If either one of us lost our jobs, it would be a lot more financially disastrous for us to lose Andy's paycheck.  It follows, then, that he is the one working from home, full time, while I'm doing things here and there and taking on all of the other chores to apologize for the free time I shouldn't be allowed to enjoy.

Apparently the Spanish Flu was a real tough time to be in a traveling theatre troupe.  Now out of work actors just make regrettable web content.

What's the most ethical way to eat right now?  The short answer is, it depends. 

Bleak and beautiful.

Did you watch The Tiger King...and I?  Thoughts?  I really just wanted to hear from cipher and scapegoat Carol Baskin, but it is not at all surprising that she didn't hop on the Zoom.

Speaking of watching things, this Saved by the Bell reboot is everything I've ever wanted in life. 

Are you keeping a corona diary?   Remember Pop Up Video on VH1?  I want to see Pop Up CoVIDeo, where we just have snippets from people's corona diaries, and stats from the news, popping up in little speech bubbles overlaying the music video for R.E.M.'s It's the End of the World as We Know It.

Watching:
I'm not proud of it, but I conned Andy into watching the Goop Lab episode about vulvas.  I mostly just wanted to see how much of it he could tolerate, but we made it to the end.  What a champ.

Analog Reading:

Finished Long Bright River in record time, much like one might lightly crumble the remaining third of a bag of chips and then tilt the bag straight into one's gaping maw.  No time to use your hands, or chew.  Just get all those salty bits into your gullet, fast as possible.  Not to say this book was junk.  I mean, there was a lot of the other kind of junk, but, you know.  The book was delicious and I needed to gargle a great mouthful of the sharp salty pieces.  It was good.  The city of Philadelphia was just as much a character as the human actors.  Wawa, the Franklin Institute, Mummers' Parades...all of it.  During the long stretches of dialog between characters, I could just hear  that glorious Philly accent tumbling out of their mouths, past the dangling cigarettes.  God, it was a thing of beauty.  I was just waiting for someone to ask the question, "Jeet yet?" but it never came.  That's my only critique.  I hope this book is made into a movie, and I hope they cast local actors.

I'm nearly finished Isabel Allende's A Long Petal of the Sea.  It's a decade-spanning novel about the lives of two people who flee Spain at the end of the Civil War and emigrate to Chile.  It's beautifully written, and I don't know if this is a function of Allende's writing style or the way it was translated from the original Spanish, but I find myself needing to reread sentences and passages a time or two to fully absorb them.  It's been a pleasure to read this one more slowly usual.  Also, there's so much that resonates with our current situation:

TP is más precioso que oro

The Isolation Journals - Day 19

Lazy Sunday.  I gotta admit, I've never been able to fully embrace the idea of a Lazy Sunday.  Even now, when Monday is essentially meaningless, I just can't get down with the idea of doing zero productive things. 

Is it guilt?  Is it a need to justify my existence?  Is it just that I have to leave the apartment to walk Charlie, so once I put on outside pants, I might as well just keep the ball rolling and actually do things?  I don't know.  But a Lazy Sunday sounds great in theory:

Today's prompt comes from novelist and essayist Esmé Weijun Wang. 

Prompt:  Write about a time when you (or your character) experienced something that may be a common human event (for example: scratching an itch, sneezing, petting an animal, etc.), with concrete language that brings the experience to life. Try using all of the senses in order to avoid cliché.

[Proust's madeleine moment is provided as an example]

...[my mother] sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called "petites madeleines," which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?

---

Road Soda

I lead a cautious life.  I am risk averse and generally rule-abiding.  But on occasion, for no discernible reason, I grow (to my mind) careless and bold.  Yesterday was such a day.

In mid-afternoon, we set out for an urban hike.  On impulse, I yanked open the fridge on our way out.  I grabbed a Sierra Nevada beer and jammed it in a koozie.  "You want one?"

"No," Andy replied, regarding me with bemusement.  "Is it legal to drink on the street here?"

"Only on Lower Broadway, so no," I answered with a shrug.

Down on the street, I gripped my contraband in my left hand, waiting for the perfect moment.  When I pulled the tab, the sound echoed in my ears as a thunderclap, announcing the arrival of my storm of deviance.  

The yeasty aroma wafted out of the can as I raised it to my lips.  The first tentative sip emboldened me further.  The bitter, foamy rebellion surged down my gullet.  In that instant, with the sun on my face, and the birds chirping unseen behind glorious neon leaves, I was transported.  I wasn't standing on a desolate street still pocked with last month's tornado debris, but rather beside a turgid spring roaring with snow melt in the High Sierras.

The mountains are calling, and I must go.

The Isolation Journals - Day 18

Hi, hello!  I'm in a good mood this morning for absolutely no reason.  I made blueberry pancakes with sourdough starter discard.  Andy ate them and liked them.  It might actually be the end of the world, because I never thought the day would come when I would trick Andy into eating what is essentially leftover garbage and he would wholeheartedly enjoy it. 

Today's prompt comes from memoirist and essayist Melissa Febos.

Prompt:  Make a short list of texts from your past, even better if you can select particular passages or moments that meant something to you. Without necessarily revisiting the book (you can do that later), start writing about your relationship to it, in narrative terms. When did you read it? What was your life at the time? Write a scene of your reading it, replete with all the ways it made you feel. Then, consider why you needed it at that particular time. Follow it from there—feeling free to depart from the text.

---

I sometimes wish I had a list of every book I've ever read, perhaps printed on one long scroll or even register tape, just to unfurl it and see how far it stretches.  

Our house was always full of books, some new, many old.  Piles of library books.  I wasn't a picky or particularly discerning reader in my early years.  My choices were based on availability, proximity.  I read compulsively, voraciously.  I'd read the back of the shampoo bottle if there was nothing more compelling in the bathroom.  

At first, my tastes skewed towards the pedestrian and the binge-able.  A series completist, I devoured The Baby-Sitters Club, Sweet Valley High, and Goosebumps, but classics such as Little Women or the Little House series, or heavier books like Number the Stars, were just as important.  

My mom was very sheltering and overprotective.  There were plenty of things I wasn't allowed to do, shows I wasn't supposed to watch.  The one place she gave me absolute freedom was reading.  When I turned up reading her copy of V.C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic the summer I was eleven, she didn't bat an eye.  Good on her.  

Despite all its literary deficiencies, that book was a turning point in my reading life.  In my whole life, really.  It blew my mind wide open.   Up to that point, I had been reading books that were more or less intended for children or young people.  Even when they were scary or sad, things turned out ok in the end, or there was a valuable lesson to be learned, at least.

But Flowers in the Attic was just one steaming hot, licentious mess from beginning to end.  It's the first book I remember making me feel things other than say, mild suspense, amusement, or affinity for a character.  I felt disgust, rage, shame, fear, disgust, sympathy, revulsion, more disgust.  I couldn't get enough.  It was my train wreck.  I could not look away, and thank god my mom also had several of the books that followed.  That was one hell of a summer.

And look, I know the book is trash, but it opened my mind to the possibility that a book can make you feel things deeply.  A book can take you to dark places, characters can be complex, and endings aren't always neatly wrapped in a happy little bow.  Not all problems can be solved with an emergency meeting of the Baby-Sitters Club.  

And look, I'm an elementary school librarian and I would never, ever, EVER give Flowers in the Attic to an 11-year-old on purpose.  But I hold my experience with that book in the back of my mind when I see kids checking out books that I (snobbishly) think are trashy, or when I see a kid choosing a book that I fear could be too mature.  You never know what a kid is ready for, or what they might get out of a book.  Let them explore and figure it out for themselves.  And if that exploration puts them front and center for a multi-generational incestuous Gothic horror show, well, I turned out fine, didn't I?

The Isolation Journals - Day 17

Good morning!  You woke up today.  Mission accomplished.  Thanks to technology, I can inform you with some accuracy that today is, in fact, Friday.  Remember when that meant something?

Remember when this song came out?  This was 9 years ago.  Now we're all just like, gotta get down whenever the hell because time is a flat circle and the rules do not apply.

Anyway.

Today's prompt came from someone who needs no introduction, unless you're Andy, to whom I keep having to explain who Ann Patchett is.  It comes up more often than you would think.  Duh, dude, she's Ann Patchett.

Prompt:  Pick out a poetic form and give it a try.

---

Poetry?  Funny you should ask.  It's not usually my jam, but I do love the challenge of contorting myself into the smallest of spaces, physically and creatively.  Coincidentally, I wrote a bunch of quarantine haikus earlier this week, just for funsies.  This morning, I wrote a limerick.

This virus has all of us stuck
And some of us down on our luck
Let us stock up on booze
And turn off the news
Raise our glasses and not give a fuck


Here are a few of the haikus:


COVID-19 sounds
like generic birth control
or an STI


woke up yesterday
thinking it was tomorrow
what even is time


Zooming with my friends
They have growing kids, but I
scallion in shot glass


sourdough starter
feels like playing Yukon Trail
now let's pan for gold

The Isolation Journals - Day 16

Old habits die hard.  It's Thursday and I'm looking forward to the weekend like some kind of schmuck, like the weekend means anything anymore.  If it wasn't for this journal project, I would have no idea what day it was, which would be a problem when I got bills I gotta pay:

Today's prompt comes from journalist Lizzie Presser.

Prompt:  Call someone you haven’t spoken to in some time. Ask what their days and weeks of isolation, or essential work have been like. What is a moment that has been significant for them in recent weeks? Try to understand why that moment in particular. What did it show them about themselves or their families or their coworkers? How did an emotion—a first gut response, like anger—evolve and reveal itself to be something else altogether, like fear?
 
Then, write a journal entry inspired by that conversation. Explore what stepping out of your own experience and into someone else’s brought up, maybe even clarified, for you. What was unexpected? Did it evoke a significant moment from your own life over these past weeks? How has your understanding of that moment changed? 

---

Iowa screens her calls.  It's a point of pride that she always picks up for me.  Iowa is my grandmother.  She's 86.

She answers on the third ring.  "Good morning.  How are you?"

"I'm alright, just walking Charlie.  How are you?"

"I just came upstairs to get dressed.  Ready for another miserable day."

And so it goes.  Iowa doesn't sugarcoat things.  She's not a butterscotch candies in her purse kind of grandmother.

We talk about her food supply.  It's adequate.  She hasn't gone out in weeks, but she keeps threatening to go to ShopRite during the high-risk hour to look for alternatives to all the items the Instacart buyer couldn't find.  She has a list of grievances.  It is long and detailed.

We talk about her sources of entertainment now that the library is closed.  She's re-reading books she read decades ago.  She regrets giving away most of her puzzles to the water conditioner repair man.  Why did she do that?  His wife likes puzzles.  I don't ask how she knows that.

I ask her if her parents, born just before the turn of the 20th century, ever talked about the Spanish Flu.  They were living in or near Philadelphia in 1918, where the disease was especially devastating.  

"We didn't really talk with my parents when we were kids."

"So they never mentioned it?  It never came up in conversation, say at the dinner table?"

"No.  There was one time my brother Phil, who was quite a bit older than me, threw up on his plate and my father made him eat it."

"Well I guess if there was ever a time to talk about the Spanish Flu at the dinner table, that would have been it..."

It's hard to think about her alone and vulnerable in her big old drafty house, drifting from room to room like a ghost in her cloud of Marlboro smoke.  Her world was already small and isolated, and now, this.  Aside from doctors, she had three spaces she could look forward to complaining about visiting:  ShopRite, the library, and Heritage's to buy cigarettes by the carton.

"I don't think anything will ever be the same," she says.  "Even after the vaccine."

"Will you get the vaccine?"

"No."

 

"No?"

"I probably won't even be alive by then."