And realize that I

easily write 700 words in 20 minutes when I am working with writing group, yet here I am choking through 1500 in 4 days. Time to rethink my strategy.

As of now, I am going to set up a writing prompt based on my last past, where I went through the basics as currently conceived. Write for 20 minutes at a time. Move on. No idea if it works, but it is a quick way to kick myself back in the pond.

 

Bottom feeder

This is what it’s like to be a bottom feeder. First of all, we love ink. Ink is invisibility. Ink is darkness. Ink is what we write our history with. Look out there, out there into the vast whiteness. It has nothing to say until the ink drops into its wide open. No turning back once the ink has been spilled.

You want to tell your history, that’s fine, nobody’s stopping you. You want to tell someone else’s history, that’s different. There’s danger there, smells like sulfur, smells like burning cactus, smells like the brushfire or the war that can rush in and wipe out an entire clan.

Once I was playing cards in the back room of a little trailer house in Four Corners and I heard the wind pick up suddenly, and it was like I could see them even from inside, tumbleweeds rushing across the black night and suddenly igniting, igniting like monks in red robes, self immolating and taking down the fragile open country and everything that lives there with it.

I understand the meditative life of the tumbleweed, I understand the need to move, to feel the wind catch and carry us somewhere new. I knew about that even before I left Navajo country after the fire. I found my home on water, water green and blue and dark, almost black, where I fell in and never went back to dry land again, not for more than two, three days at a time. Long enough to find myself lurching when I came back to dry land, feeling the hitch and pull of gravity and rotation more strongly than I felt them on the water.

My family’s been landlocked for hundreds of years, most of them. My sea ways made me foreign, weird and unrecognizable as a giant squid, coming up from the deep only rarely, with gifts for my sister’s children, and then her grandchildren, until I am the only old salt on the Navajo nation, bringing seaweed ristras and monkey balls and painted tentacles. I stay a couple days, give them the salty sweet taste of my bottom feeder’s life, and then I leave again, leaving behind nothing but a trail of ink, and a history they can fabricate from the secrets hidden in the bright open sky and the black mesa reaching in the four directions around them.

For me, I add two more directions: straight up into the heavens, and straight down, into the cold, dark waters, where the wild shy ones live, where I feel most at home.

The singing beggar

There once was a beggar who loved to hear himself sing. He started out as a child.

Most singers start out as children. I remember, myself, singing to my small dolls, which were made of popsicle sticks dressed in fabric scraps. At that time, gingham was easily come by, but my small dolls did not sing back to me until after the war, when the fabric samples suddenly bloomed. The gingham was still there, but also sequined fabrics, gold lame, bright silks, rayon, some thin gauzy fabrics that were neither silk nor satin. My popsicle dolls dressed more and more for evening wear, their little painted faces had rosebud mouths and eyelashes drawn on for many nights on the town. They put on little plays, some geisha action, but with Debbie Reynold’s moral sensibilities, and these popsicle girls were terribly conflicted. I didn’t know what to do with them, exactly, and put them away for some time. Took singing lessons, etiquette, even found a small Korean book on how to entertain American service men. This was in English, marginally, with many grammatical errors but the basic message intact: listen carefully, your face must mirror your companion, no extra movement of body, hands or face.

I taught my dolls to keep their faces still and their stick bodies well dressed. We learned to sing simple Korean songs, little jingles that had two or three American English words. I learned to tilt my head at the exact right angle to convey interest, kindness, and willingness.  My dolls had red rosy cheeks.

Then one day my uncle, who was an American serviceman, came by to say hello and to bring us presents. When he saw my dolls, he took them and crushed them and screamed at my many Korean moms, who were raising me to be right for them, right like they were being, and I felt sad, confused, and angry, too, to tell you the truth. Then I went away to school at the American school where Ken, my American sponsor, sent me, until I was 17, when I went away to the U.S. to go to college, where I studied music. And that is another story.

The Complete Idiot

I had this system for getting exactly what I wanted out of people.

It was so perfect, this system, like a surgical knife, or maybe more like a perfectly blown piece of glass.

This system worked for everyone, and I was the author of it. Sweet!

It is pretty exciting to be the author of a system for getting exactly what you want out of people.

I wrote a book: Getting What You Want Out Of People For Dummies.

And another: The Complete Idiot’s Guide For Getting What You Want Out Of People.

These books were wildly successful. I had some LLCs. Bunches of them. And two accountants to manage my numbers.

Lost seven jobs in 6 years. Fired for being hard to get along with.

Next I’ll write a book about Getting Fired for Dummies.

Pays the bills.

Deep breath

George Hamilton takes a deep breath. Aaah. Cuban. Hand wrapped. Smooth. He is smoking in his tanning booth, smoke swirling around his head, gliding smoothly down his torso like a familiar snake. He exhales and wiggles his toes. His eye guards have been customized for him with his own warm brown eyes printed on them, eyebrows elevated, whimsical, amused. He inhales again, lungs filling with green trees and rich forests. He visualizes himself full of vibrant health. I am full of vibrant health, he says, from my head to my toes. He exhales, and the smoke wraps around the hairs on his arms, his legs, his long bony toes. He lies quietly for another minute or two, until the alarm goes off. He opens the lid of the tanning box and steps out in a cloud of smoke. He picks up a towel and walks to the two-headed shower with the large glass doors and the oversized rain showerhead. He sets his cigar in an ashtray just outside the shower and steps inside. The steam and the smoke blend and rise through the warm, humid air. George takes a deep breath and lets it out again. A deep, cleansing breath.

First I will tell you a true story

First I will tell you a true story. Then I will throw a big bag of words at you, because I can.

True story: About a year ago I was working with a kid who did not talk, almost three years old, no language at all. I spent a few months getting past his fear and hysteria, helping to lead his mother to the A word. Autism. One day, teaming with my therapy partner, she was talking with mom about his learning style. While they talked , I had Lou leaning against me, looking at cards as I turned them over and named them.  It was rare for him to touch me, or to sit quietly, or to interact in any social way. I showed him another card and said the name: Violin. And the next one: Rainbow. He took them from me and said: Violin. And showed me the card. Then the other: Rainbow. And showed me the card. Then he danced around the room with the two cards, saying Violin (holding it out). Rainbow (holding it out).  First words. Violin. Rainbow. Three years old. For the next few weeks, he kept those cards close, repeating the names. And new words came, all of a sudden, a suddenly opening door.

 

Suddenly words

You might consider your libido as a kind of ornament, hanging on a tree like a ripe tomato, or secret and deep as a trench, ripe and sweet as fresh-squeezed juice. But that’s not how we do it round here. We keep our spirits up, we’re green and crisp as spring salad. We like to showcase our young; reservations are required. At the Odium Theatre every year there is an extravaganza that features filigreed kimonos (most of them in mauve) challenging the deep water acrobats, diving into moats, down gorges, smiling and waving all the way down. The journalists draw pictures of them, smirking like Cheshire cats, jumping down that gorge, making aerial hairpin turns, alive alive alive until there’s a bad moment, could have been just a bruise but instead the truth is a bastard, a dastardly freak who gloats at the bloated corpse that floats downstream until it is washed up in a swamp, a quagmire, a murky, queer and unlikely terrain. The distinguished gentleman stands and with characteristic discernment and an unseemly relish demonstrates his encyclopedic knowledge, his Hail Britannica superiority. After hours he goes home, shoots up, and plays the violin, watches as the sun goes down, where the rainbow smudges the lengthening sky. But never mind all that, indeed, certainly not, it’s not surely, but you jest, and you find this questionable, this questionable judgment that zooms past us while we stand and pontificate. Zip it up, friend, make it work, it’s not me, it’s the esoteric tickle of uncertainty, the chronic temperamental temptations of someone who loves Pandora, the Explora who is no esoteric Cassandra, no hunch maker, inkling spreader, odds wagerer. She is more like coals carried aloft on balloons, leaving their baggage suspended on earth day, the flying Brenda on the wall, bounteous, dubious, glorious, smack down gorgeous, suspended indefinitely by curious safeguards draped in a koolaid smile.

Rainbow Ocean by Thelma 1 at deviantart.com

Storm

Then all hell breaks loose. My front tooth is chipped as I am thrown forward and against the ceiling. The windows break. Something is wrong with gravity, and with the street itself, buckling and kicking, a wild horse, an avalanche, a flood, an earthquake.

Every disaster movie ever made is dancing like sugar plums in my head. I’m waiting for ancient indian burial grounds to vomit their dead, I’m waiting for giant dancing spiders to descend, grinning, to snap me in half with monstrous jaws. I’m waiting for tsunamis, one after the other, to smack against this inland city like concrete, a wall of water harder than diamonds. This is about the right time to reconsider religion, or whiskey, or all the incredible sex I might have missed, or the books I might have written. Instead, I had been sitting up in my bed in my flannel nightgown, with a cup of chamomile tea and a Lilian Braun mystery. The disappointment I feel in myself at this apocalyptic moment is hard to describe. I wish I’d been doing something else. Something mysterious, deep, sensual, creative. I’m tossing around like a rag doll still, looking out the window as the city collapses and debris begins to fly. I am waiting for a white rabbit, waiting for a waistcoat, waiting for the fall to come to an end. When it does, I am returned to gravity with a thud and there is, suddenly, an absolute silence.

The accountant

I like specialty bubblegum flavors. Peppermint, of course, and sage, the rain flavors, mud, ocean, tomato worm, potato chip, and my current best ever favorite is dead roadkill flavor. I save all of the wrappers and when I have enough I fold them together in a custom built bubblegum chain that should reach from my bedroom here in Seattle to the outer city limits of Little Rock, Arkansas, if my calculations are correct.

My calculations are usually correct, and I do all of my parent’s accounting for their firm because they are not very good at calculations, which they say is not a nice thing to say but is true anyway. They point out to me that they have many skills that allow them to get me the things I need to achieve my goals, and that is true right now because of the child labor laws. The child labor laws were first instituted in this country in 1916 because many children, even children with very good accounting skills, were working in places that were too hot or too cold or dangerous and they worked so hard that many of them died before they could grow up to be accountants, which is what I am going to do. The job of parents is to support their children and give them the things they will need to be productive adults some day, and my parents are clearly doing this job, since I don’t have to work in a sweatshop and live in a sub-standard situation that would be hard to imagine these days anyway.

The accountant is the person in the company who makes sure that all the information about the money in the company is reconciled, with no missing information or information that is not true. This is an important job because missing or wrong information causes people and companies to make mistakes and then companies can fail, which can sometimes lead to children losing their homes, their computers, and their parents, whose job it is to raise the children until they are mature enough to take care of themselves. The other job of the accountant is to tell people when they’ve made a mistake and to hold them accountable for their mistakes. This would be a very good thing to do, although I’m not allowed to do this with my mom and dad, just make notes of the mistakes they’ve made so they can look later to see that I was right.

The accountant looks for predictable numbers in columns and rows and becomes highly sensitized to variations in the predictable columns and rows that suggest that an error, either accidental or intentional, has been made. This is important information to share with people who have an interest in the company, and this information should be made known as soon as possible so that mistakes can be corrected. This is the basic job of the accountant, and that is what I will be doing professionally by the time I am 16, which is when I should be done with my accelerated math program and ready to go to college. My parents say they don’t want me to go any earlier than 16 because of my social skills, which I don’t think matters, but I am still under age and so that is the end of that debate.

Summer vacation

I lived for a time in a solid wooden box. Not cardboard, you can’t live in cardboard for long; first rain takes you out, puts you back in shelter.

I believe in shelter. I believe in shelter like I never believed in some other things. Once, when I was little, I lived in a doll house behind a big old palace, or mansion I guess it might have been. In Texas. The folks who lived in that mansion were almost never there; they lived in Connecticut most of the time is what I heard from Elba, who washed their clothes and put food out for the stray cats in the neighborhood (pretty good food, it was, and with cloth napkins, sometimes). I slept in that doll house, belonged to these folks little girls, only like I said they were never there anyway and I guess the people who kept the place up while they were gone didn’t much mind me for a certain length of time. I stayed there one entire summer. It was small for a real house, but real big for a doll house. There was a kitchen that actually worked, only it was short, like for kids about 7 years old or so, with a sink and a little fridge. No stove, but I did find cigarettes and matches in the little bitty roll-top desk in the living room. There was a velvet sofa in there, too, almost big enough for me at the beginning of the summer but I had a growing spell and had to switch to the little bedroom with the two twin beds. I had one big summer of pretend. I pretended I was Goldilocks. I pretended I lived in the Magic Kingdom. I pretended I was a fireman. I pretended I was flying through space in a rocket ship. I found a telescope one evening in the gardens near the house and looked through it on a clear night and I saw shooting stars and I imagined myself up there in the constellations riding a horse with magnificent wings. This was maybe my best summer ever in my entire growing up years. There was a little bitty library in that small house, too, and since I like to read I found myself curled up on that velvet sofa or stretched out on those twin beds with the chenille bedspreads reading all night.

In the daytime, when there were people around, I headed on into town and went to the full size library, where they didn’t have snacks lying around or anything like a little privacy, but they did have air conditioning, which was new in Texas at that time and most welcome by just about everyone. Back then all the older ladies still carried their fans with them everyway, and every one of them smelled like lavendar sachet and talcum. Old ladies always made me sneeze, and I can barely think of them even now without the end of my nose twitching reflexively. In those days, librarians were strict about silence, and about not folding the pages of the book back. I knew how to follow the rules, even back then, and how to break them without getting too lost from my own sense of what was right and what was wrong.

At the end of the summer, I came home to the doll house one evening and found that it had been visited. There were piles of toys stacked against the wall in the little living room, most of them with their price tags still on. There was this one toy donkey, about 3 foot high, almost big enough to ride on, and if you pulled his tail and let go, he made a big hee-haw sound and his ears wiggled. That was one expensive donkey. I looked around – didn’t seem like anyone had noticed my stuff, it wasn’t touched at all. So I gathered it up and put it back in the pillow case I’d been carrying it in before I stopped here, and I left. I found a bag out by the back porch where the cats eat, with peanut butter sandwiches, some fritos, and a few apples, and I took those with me. Cats don’t really like peanut butter, anyway, I said to myself.

Eulogy

He’s taken my money and killed himself. This is what I have to ask myself. I mean, I can imagine the earth opening up, gaping mouth and hungry for vengance and taking him down to the steaming pits of hell. I can definitely imagine that, and I can definitely more or less agree with that plan, what with all that greed and all that theft and all of those people, people like you and me, just left out in the cold, holding the bag, while he’s been sucked down into those bowels. But what I can’t understand is where the money went. Do they use money in hell? What currency? What exchange rate? Do they extend credit? Because what I don’t understand is why the man would kill himself after he got all the money. I can readily understand suicide for someone who’s too poor, too sick, too miserable, too pained to tolerate the hand they’ve been dealt, but when billionaires kill themselves, you’ve just got to ask a few questions. I mean, they wouldn’t be billionaires in the first place if they’d had any scruples, am I right? So how does it happen that scruples develop after they’ve taken everything but the very shirt off of my back and where the hell is my mother’s money? That’s all I want to know. Maybe he’s not really dead. Maybe he and Bill and Bernie and whoever else lives on their privately-owned island paradise somewhere, paying for their exile with her retirement funds. 

Then again, maybe he really is dead. He could be dead. So I ask again, where is the money? And then again, maybe he didn’t really kill himself. Maybe the machine killed him, the machine that makes the money happen, makes millionaires into billionaires (billion is the new million, had you heard?), then eats their heads.

Maybe he didn’t kill himself. Maybe his head exploded from trying to do the accounts, from trying to account for, be accountable for, the transfer of wealth from the gullible middle class into his own stainless steel glass and white leather penthouse apartment that he’s had replicated in several major cities worldwide so he never feels like he’s away from home. Because he’s pretty fearful of being away from home. Remember when he was little and he used to wet his bed until the psychiatrist recommended the electric matress pad that gave him a shock every time he did it? But not until he asked for them, because he was going away to summer camp and the summer he was seven, every kid in Potlatch Village knew he was a bed wetter and a thumb sucker too and they made his life a living hell. So much so that he told Dr. Stangard that he’d either have to use the electroshock system or give up on ever getting into a decent college. Dr. Stangard wrote a prescription for nerves and ordered the electric pad, which was delivered three weeks before camp started. It only took 4 days.

Then again, maybe he did kill himself. Maybe that early bedwetting was an indicator of deep sensitivity that he’d learned to suppress using electroshock and assorted prescription drugs and he was so out of touch with his feelings that he could screw anyone, even his own parents and sister, without feeling much of anything. And maybe when he went to rehab, like he did last December, they cleaned out his system and all those feelings came rushing back and overwhelmed him and he had feelings again for the first time since he was seven years old. Poor little guy. And maybe if he hadn’t turned on himself, he might’ve turn on us, like some of them did, mowing down an entire tribe of CEOs and investment bankers. And maybe we should be grateful that he didn’t. Bless his heart, we will miss him, won’t we?