Category: essay

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Message in a Beer Bubble: Ten for Today


Happy hour. A hearty hoppy beer might make things go right for a short while anyhow. Maybe even release the vise grip on my brain. This tension headache brought to you by your local, fucked up telecommunications service. No tv, then no internet, and no rhyme or reason. “We’ll overnight that modem to you, but it will take 3 to 5 business days.” What do you answer to that kind of math?

But at least it forced me to work at my favorite watering hole for some atmosphere, compared to my usual, dull writing environment: dusk-lit room, dilapidated desk over-cluttered, bed beckoning from behind my back, and puppy chewing on my bare feet as I try to focus on a screen that sometimes allows me to reach the world outside–when the internet hasn’t drifted in then out. Today, like yesterday, it’s all out.

And then there’s the election. It’s worse than anything I can remember in my public awareness age. Yes, even Watergate. This trumps all, pun intended. The banana republic antics. It’s hard to stomach any more. It’s like stupid times infinity, as we used to say. We’re sliding speedily down the ice hill in reverse. I can’t watch–but like that carnage on the side of the road, I must. No entertainment. All sadness and nausea. There’s an ache in the pit of my stomach that threatens to swallow my entire body, engulf it in burning bile. 

Or is it just me? I can’t tell any more. As I look into the foamy, golden crystal ball of my immediate future, cold and wet to my clasped hands around its glassy trunk, I ask, “Is it just me?”

She answers from inside a beer bubble, “It’s always been just you.”

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Cant: Ten for Today


October 25, 2016

Not too many days left here. Other work picking up enough now. Enough for me to starve elsewhere same as here. But somewhere else is looking better now.

I told you that the other day, over lunch, staring over our spring salads cozily tossed over delicate sky blue rimmed plates dotted with balsamic splashes. Your eyes–barely hiding blood-shod heart hiding in muddy boots–stoned menace into radicchio and leeks. 

My own intrepid gaze, blazed red into radish rounds and scallions. We could hardly speak, abjuring conversation for the death of leaves, lies, us…

“Can I bring you anything else? Dessert?”

Each of us nodded to her, looking to her while acknowledging the thud of silence on the table that dared us not peek into each other’s musing. 

“I’m okay, thank you.”

You just smiled in assent. She curtly nodded and turned her heels to walk away. 

“I’m quitting.” 

Your head rose suddenly, alarm flooding your pupils, readying…

“I can’t work there any more. It’s too…just too… I’ve outgrown the place, nothing left there for me. I’m past the insecurity and fear of not finding another job. I need to strike out.”

Noticeably relieved, despite your impassive gaze, you waited for me to say more.

But I didn’t. 

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I need freelancing like a buzz saw to the brain: Ten for Today

They’ve sucked me dry, the health pro start-ups and the holistic healthy lifestyle entrepreneur and the real estate investor coach and the legal multi-media start-up and the beta reader. They’ve all got a piece of me. My brain throbs in its swollen state.

I think I’m averaging about $1.00 an hour at this new avenue to freelancing–an agency. And while I’m stroking myself with the story of paying my dues and getting better at my craft and investing in future pay-offs, today it’s not so convincing.

I’ve never been a quick learner. A die-hard learner, yes, but not fast. I will plod on til the death, determined to get to the bones of some task, job or career. But it’s never a smooth-sailing entrance into something new. I learn by burn. There’s no other way for me. But once it’s inscribed in my flesh, I’m fluent. I know it.

Until then, it’s turn and burn and yearn. I want to get past this mistake after mistake stage. I hate mistakes. And maybe that’s why I struggle. Resistance. It’s like trying to mellow out in a yoga practice–incense burning and Dr. Dre on Pandora–while some ear-splitting air show decides to come to town just as the tree trimmer revs up the buzz saw. 

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Day is Done: Ten for Today

Death is a symbol. People stand in for other people, incarnation after incarnation.
 
My father comes in my room late one night earlier this week. “Al died.” His face is pale; he collapses to sitting on my bed, head bowed as he cries into his hands. Only he raises harrowed eyes to warn me, popping out through fear’s door where the pain gripped his voice,
 
“Be prepared. I’m next. And mom. I haven’t been feeling too good. I didn’t tell you but…”
 
And he sinks back into despair.
I try to hug him but his body and mine are too long-limbed, his back too rounded, mine too straight, and we clash. I never fasten my arms firmly to his shoulders. Maybe he resisted. The torment had him.
 
At the funeral, he told jokes, said inappropriate things that suggested the man he knew nearly all his life–his only sister’s husband–was not the best friend he appeared to be. There were hurt feelings, slights in the last ten years. And he learned early to protect his sister.
 
“I’m here for my sister.”
 
We drove five hours there in morning traffic after dropping our younger off at the airport to begin her college visit. Her flight left at 6 a.m. for Boston, Newark first. We had to get her there by 4:30, and then took to the road, sailing in to the Veterans Cemetery by 9:30 and thirty minutes to spare. This honored last rite in exchange for a leg he left in Korea.
 
And I cried. For the man, for his children and wife, for my father and mother, for my daughters, all the endings and beginnings swirling inside the belled mouth of a trumpet, steady-sweet, singing taps to signal day is done. As if we didn’t know it with our guts sunk into the intoning rabbi’s throaty prayers.
 

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Being writerly me: Ten for Today

October 10, 2016
 
This week I am the writer. Most weeks I’m more the teacher than the writer, and a bit of a dabbler in word pretties on the side. And every day I’m the mom.
 
But this week, I am working like a writer: writing, procrastinating, struggling, and mostly feeling insecure. I’ve been badgered by contract bosses breathing down my neck. “Is there a draft yet?” “Take your time (I gave you a week and it’s about 3 days in), but let me know when you have a draft.” And then, “How about now? Now? What about now?” Fuck, I’m trying to work!
 
So yesterday I sent my draft–twice. Once by message on the writing platform and once by invitation to Google docs. Nothing. Hurry up and wait.
 
But it didn’t take long before I got not one but five requests to view the doc. How big is this organization? I guess I never ask the important questions when I interview. They ask me if I can write, and I say I can. End of story.
 
What you want me to write, I can write it. For two days, I have been writing about robots and other godsends in upcoming AI applications. Health care will continue to automate for decades, delegating jobs to bots–therapy chat bots, vitals chat bots, and take two aspirins and call me in the morning chat bots. Amazing.
 
And then there’s IBM’s super duper Watson, kicking ass on Jeopardy when he’s not diagnosing disease and prescribing medicine. Watson will find the cure for cancer. Makes the post human age moniker I go by more real each passing year.
 
Today was rah rah cheerleading day for how wonderful corporations want their worker bees to beam good health and cheer–and not just for monetary reasons. That one was a hard sell–especially adding a little soft wit and snarkiness to make it less dull.
 
Tomorrow I’m the editor.

 
pixabay: dog writer

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Why work when there’s soccer on? Ten for Yesterday 

October 7th
 
It’s supposed to be feel-good Friday. How do I feel? Not as good as a Friday. Perhaps there’s too much pressure to respond to the collective psyche of the week day or weekend start day. That kind of pressure–conformity–always bums me more than just a little.
 
Measuring the days is a waste of time, though I’m programmed (self) to do just that. Yesterday was a productive day. We’ll call it productive Thursday, or throwback Thursday to a time when I was productive every day. Yesterday, I paid bills, cooked a meal, landed a couple of contracts, wrote a couple of blog posts, wrote a short essay for the blog, posted my social media blurbs for dollars, and enjoyed an entertaining evening and night.
 
I had more completed tasks than today. This morning, I completed a writing assignment due by noon with time to spare, so rewarded myself. I played with the puppy, started research on my next project, took a break to lie a bit, thought about writing some more, ate lunch, tried to walk the puppy (not successfully), and wrote a little more. Then I napped, and awoke to the cat staring at me. So I started writing this.
 
When the kids came after school, I watched Cameroon and Germany play for the Women’s Final something or other in soccer. My 8 year old great nephew watches soccer with me while his little sister downloads apps to my phone, ones with many animated pink girls, animals and purses. They are supposed to be my daughter’s charges, but somehow the powers of procrastination and the loose hand of the babysitter drive me to play.
 
So soccer on a Friday isn’t bad. It’s just that I didn’t get very far into researching that article I’m supposed to write. But I did make inroads into breaking my procrastination habit–one of the top items on my to do list for today. I thought about procrastination most of the day.

 

pixabay/soccer-competition-game-women

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Coffee College: Ten for Yesterday

October 5, 2016

For a change, I am spending my gap time between the two classes I teach on Wednesdays, in a cafe. Usually I flop on the adjunct faculty room couch to grade essays or research for some writing project I’m working on.
 
But today the weather hints fall, a pinch of bite in the temperate weather that makes an overly air conditioned room inside an old brick building edgy-cool. It’s a cold-settling-in-the-bones sort of day, and not just from the weather.
 
I awoke too many times last night, went to bed too late with a question on my mind after a day that went awry. I like my days to hang straight, not all crooked and dangling. Yesterday wobbled and pitched. I thought today was about recovery.
 
And to a degree, it is. The job I thought I lost yesterday is won today. I suspect I undersold myself again. I have no perspective. I simply press ahead, demanding fees and contracts, due compensation. I just keep writing. Somehow I believe I will write myself into something good.
 
Maybe that’s why I craved a cafe today. Writers write in cafes, don’t they? Or is that just hackneyed ones? I write in bars. Same thing. Today’s cafe writing is meant merely to bear the weather, watch the caffeinated crowd rather than the distilled, lilting and tipsy crowd (which I prefer).
 
Coffee intellect collects in the corners of cafes–in game board challenges and earphone mufflers, round table-ettes with stiff aluminum chairs and their hard comforts. I am cool. I sip espresso and write stupid observant shit about the gathered students in Star Wars shirts and floral, short dresses absorbing smoke from the lone cigarette dangling between two fingers of the Vietnamese girl in lipstick and roses.
 
No one else smokes. No one else of the 10 or so, have dressed for a party. They–all but the girl in short dress, leggings and hijab–have dressed like college students, the jeans and tees uniform.
 
And me, the teacher behind the window watch the outside patio group, denim-clad, capped, gum-chewing students of varying interest and attention spans. And as they shoot a glance at me behind my glass shelter, silently speaking aloud, do they wonder a whit about me?

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Mulligan Stew: Ten for Today


Someone kicked me in the head. No, it just feels that way. Like a rubber soled tennis shoe attached to a leg cocked back in ready mode, ready to slam into my head on the ‘go’ of Ready, Set, Go! The phantom bump on the base of my skull aches. 

It’s just pressure. The day’s failure oppresses me and manifests itself in an overblown-balloon-ready-to-pop tension. That’s me. Ready to pop. And it’s not popping time. Not for 4 more hours on this miserable shift.

To boot, the lady who pulled down the lever on a broken machine marked “out of service” complained about the dripped water on her food and wants to start her frozen yogurt creation over. Whatever. Sign of the times. Stupid.

I’m stupid. I spent all day writing for two new clients, two good blog pieces, solid stuff, just to blow the deadline on one by a minute and the instructions on the other. I actually wrote the wrong thing, on the wrong topic. How could I have misread the directions, completely ignoring the point of the whole blog site?! I could not even argue the post was remotely related, though I did offer to fix it. 

But first impressions are lasting, and I made a shitty one. Twice. Two jobs lost in one afternoon. Impressive–Not. Hours of work for no pay. My fault. And the drum in my head keeps beating it: Twice. Work. Zero. Pay. Zero. Work. Twice. No. Pay.

Sometimes the climb out of hell hits loose, slippery, rocky mountainside. I slipped and fell, though I probably won’t make the same mistake again. I hope. Back to the grind.

“No, see the sign? It says it’s out of service, so you hit stale water, not yogurt. Yeah, I guess you should have read the sign. No, it’s all right. Start over.” I smile weakly. She takes her do-over in sheepish confusion. I’ll take mine tomorrow.

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Taco Love: Ten for Today

Another night. Of course, I had to. He tries so hard. And it is taco Tuesday all over the world, right? Okay, all that matters is he wants to feed me to say thanks. He believes I saved his life. But I simply nursed him back to health. He saved his own life. No one can save another’s life, not if he doesn’t want it saved.
 
His meds have changed him. Some would say for the better. He’s loving, kind and sentimental. Before he was mean, sad, angry and mournful, broken up with biting moments of crass humor or cutting sarcasm. We actually were more amused when he was an awful curmudgeon. I mean awful. The kids laughed at his foulness, how he’d get pissed off and tell his grandchildren to fuck off, or I hate that fucking kid referring to one of the small neighborhood children.
 
Not that he meant any of it–or not for long. He had no patience. He still doesn’t; he just doesn’t care. He’s Celexa free-bodied now. Numbed to the pain. Some would wonder why all the pain. But I know. I see him suffer in rage and frustration. That life he thought was promised, the kind with growing old with your wife of 63 years, bickering, holding hands and reminiscing.
 
He was always himself with her, no matter how much that meant the ogre unleashed his ugly all over us, all over the place. But he could apologize and laugh and lie peacefully in spooned sleep, snoring away the reality of another 12 hour day on his feet in the noise, no one treating him right, yet his duty, loyalty and ethics marching on, always.
 
On time. He had to be on time, always. Not miss any days in the factory go round. Proud of his stamina and responsibility. If anything, he’s been responsible and enduring. Sisyphus and the invisible rock.
 
And after all those years, those endless hours watching, walking, minding the machines, his retirement a promise of hundreds if not thousands of dealt hands and studied numbers (he’s a card counter and that’s why he’s so good), he finds her gone, only her bodily remains shadowing him like the cool shady relief of memory. But she’s a wound too.
 
So he feeds me. He thinks it’s love. I take it. My belly begs me not to. Because it’s not enough to love me two tacos large. It’s always four taco love, despite my refusal. Today, I ate. Burp.   

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