(This is the one with no sex in it. I'll be neither hurt nor judgmental, if you skip it.)
I keep an Oscar Wilde quote pinned to the wall above my
writing desk. It says “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the
morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” This is
the section of my unemployed life that was, to me, the highest pinnacle of
luxury. Yes, there was still laundry to wash and fold, there were still errands
to run, but I had woven my sex life through all of it, so that it was decadent
instead of irksome. I was getting thoroughly laid all the time, so I was in a
happy mood more than ever, and in the rest of my hours, I was revising poetry.
My husband had been on me for some time to back up my documents, so it was a
joy I didn’t even have to feel guilty about – it felt like I was getting
something done, by getting everything rewritten and categorized in subject
files where they could be saved properly. It was blissful and serene. I wrote
until 11:00am, did some chores, went to the gym, ran errands, and came home,
with various delicious little bits of debauchery sprinkled throughout. It
became a routine. A weird one, though. It turned into a sort of existential
crisis – though crisis is the wrong word, because it has such negative
connotations, and this wasn’t really all that alarming. That’s sort of what made
it an existential crisis, though: Nothing was alarming. I came to realize that
there was no outside stimulus influencing my life, at all. It was a strange
sensation. Nothing happened to me. Everything I experienced, I created for
myself. If I stopped doing things, nothing happened. I don’t mean that nothing
happened as a consequence of my having stopped doing things, I mean nothing happened. There was no external
impetus. There was only me, and whatever I did was whatever occurred. If I
thought too much about it, I began to wonder whether or not I actually existed,
or if the world had simply sealed the gap I’d slipped out of, behind me. It was
like being the main character in a Dostoyevsky novel, which is more than a
little unsettling. So I didn’t think too much about it. Plus, I had ten full
years of poetry to make just-so, and the deep throating blow job hobby was
happily out of control… I was truly a woman of leisure.
And then my computer crashed.
Remember that I was revising everything in preparation for backing it up. This is an unwise course of action that I do not recommend. Because it was gone. All of it was gone. It wasn’t just the poetry, either. It was all the work documents I’d written over the dozen years of my career, that I’d need again if I ever came back to my senses. It was the novel I’d started and never gotten around to writing. It was every short story and memoir I’d written since grad school. I’d been living in a bubble into which the world was actively not intervening, and then the world intervened. With a bolt of lightning. Literally. There were days and weeks of attempted recovery. There was dismantling of computers and there were hard drive rescuing devices, there were experts and non-experts, advice givers of all sorts, and every last ditch effort possible, but even though I remember all of that, it still feels to me like it was instantaneous. Like I was sitting at my desk while it rained outside and the lights blinked off and on again and it was just done, leaving me there in that hands-poised-over-the-keyboard stance we all take when something goes suddenly awry. You know the position; it’s called “Woah, what just happened…?”
I didn’t actually freak out. Because I had been living with that creepy consciousness of existing without outside stimulus, the abrupt reversal of that condition was the most significant thing to me. I kept thinking Huh, well THIS is interesting. I think I knew immediately that it was hopeless, so I set about my acceptance of it right away. My noble husband took much longer to give up, and I remember sitting terribly still next to him, when he finally did, and announced to me that it was officially done for. The first thing I did - because I am belligerent - was pick up the paper next to me and write a new poem. It wasn’t good, but it was new.
And then my computer crashed.
Remember that I was revising everything in preparation for backing it up. This is an unwise course of action that I do not recommend. Because it was gone. All of it was gone. It wasn’t just the poetry, either. It was all the work documents I’d written over the dozen years of my career, that I’d need again if I ever came back to my senses. It was the novel I’d started and never gotten around to writing. It was every short story and memoir I’d written since grad school. I’d been living in a bubble into which the world was actively not intervening, and then the world intervened. With a bolt of lightning. Literally. There were days and weeks of attempted recovery. There was dismantling of computers and there were hard drive rescuing devices, there were experts and non-experts, advice givers of all sorts, and every last ditch effort possible, but even though I remember all of that, it still feels to me like it was instantaneous. Like I was sitting at my desk while it rained outside and the lights blinked off and on again and it was just done, leaving me there in that hands-poised-over-the-keyboard stance we all take when something goes suddenly awry. You know the position; it’s called “Woah, what just happened…?”
I didn’t actually freak out. Because I had been living with that creepy consciousness of existing without outside stimulus, the abrupt reversal of that condition was the most significant thing to me. I kept thinking Huh, well THIS is interesting. I think I knew immediately that it was hopeless, so I set about my acceptance of it right away. My noble husband took much longer to give up, and I remember sitting terribly still next to him, when he finally did, and announced to me that it was officially done for. The first thing I did - because I am belligerent - was pick up the paper next to me and write a new poem. It wasn’t good, but it was new.
will in the off
position
spine straight
shoulders back
legs crossed at the
knee
arms at the wrist
my stillness is
absolute
there is no tension
in me
not in my jaw
nor in my mind
I am engaged
in the holy act
of letting go
And I let go.
A couple of years before, I’d bought a small, extra cool whiteboard, so that I could try out what it would be like to write poems (that I actually liked), and then erase them. I had wanted to experiment with the emotion of that, and the fleeting nature of poetry… I never succeeded at it even once. Until now. I couldn’t do it with one, single poem, so I did it with all of them. Funny old world. I’m exaggerating, of course. Some things trickled back in when I reached out and re-engaged some of the more human external forces in my life – my sister had a chunk of my poetry, one of my former coworkers had a chunk of my work documents, somewhere on my green bookshelf I knew there were hard copies of a couple of short stories from years before. But the bulk of the poems simply no longer existed, except in a different form. I am a scrap writer. A margin filler. And on that green bookshelf, and at the back of my desk, and in my nightstand, and on all the tables and counters, and in every bag I owned, there were notebooks. Notebooks and folders and torn out pages and index cards and the backs of old lists and documents that printed improperly and napkins from the local bar and staff meeting agendas and Power Point presentations, where were scrawled the zygotes of many, many, many a vanished poem. They were not the poems they had become; not at all. They were the first inklings of the proofs I’d been revising for years, Oscar Wilde style. But they were there. If I could really, honestly let go of them as they were when the lights went out, I could get back something else. New plants from the old seeds.
A couple of years before, I’d bought a small, extra cool whiteboard, so that I could try out what it would be like to write poems (that I actually liked), and then erase them. I had wanted to experiment with the emotion of that, and the fleeting nature of poetry… I never succeeded at it even once. Until now. I couldn’t do it with one, single poem, so I did it with all of them. Funny old world. I’m exaggerating, of course. Some things trickled back in when I reached out and re-engaged some of the more human external forces in my life – my sister had a chunk of my poetry, one of my former coworkers had a chunk of my work documents, somewhere on my green bookshelf I knew there were hard copies of a couple of short stories from years before. But the bulk of the poems simply no longer existed, except in a different form. I am a scrap writer. A margin filler. And on that green bookshelf, and at the back of my desk, and in my nightstand, and on all the tables and counters, and in every bag I owned, there were notebooks. Notebooks and folders and torn out pages and index cards and the backs of old lists and documents that printed improperly and napkins from the local bar and staff meeting agendas and Power Point presentations, where were scrawled the zygotes of many, many, many a vanished poem. They were not the poems they had become; not at all. They were the first inklings of the proofs I’d been revising for years, Oscar Wilde style. But they were there. If I could really, honestly let go of them as they were when the lights went out, I could get back something else. New plants from the old seeds.
So I bought a new cube of sticky
notes, made stacks of every notebook and folder and page I could find, and I
began to seek and pursue poems. It took days and days, and when I was finished,
there was an Aztec temple of a tower on my desk, bristling with sticky notes
like the leaves on a summer tree. It sat there for weeks. Every once in awhile
I’d pick up the little notebook on the top and turn to the first marker,
shudder, and put it back. Mostly knowing it was there was okay. I could look
forward to getting back into the leisurely process of rewriting, without
actually doing so, but after awhile it began to glare at me, and I was at risk
of beginning to put other things on top of it – burying it so I wouldn’t have
to face the starting over. Then one day in the quiet of late morning calm, I
sat at my writing desk, opened up a word document on this dusty, hand-me-down
lap top (along with my brand new, cloud-based storage platform), and I picked
up the top notebook again.
Then I put it back again and typed
Then I put it back again and typed
Laundry and Blow Jobs
at the top of the page.
(Yeah, it's cliche, but hopefully you skipped this post due to the lack of sex, anyway.)
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