Just Wrought

A Thousand Words on Grief

One… Two… Three…

When I proposed writing an essay about grief to The Stranger, my editor said I could have a thousand words.

“...Not one single word more. Grief is boring,” he said. “No one can understand except for the person going through it, and talking about it is like telling somebody about a dream you had. No one else understands, no one else really cares, and talking it out makes you look weak, needy, and a little bit nuts.”

I don’t disagree.

Still, a thousand words. Sounds like a lot, but, as we all know, it equals no more than just one picture. And so that’s what I’ll try to give you. A picture. Just one.

118, 119, 120.

At the end of her life my mom insisted on home hospice, which was the teensiest bit ironic because she was homeless at the time. So, here’s the picture I want to offer you: my studio apartment, hospice bed crowded into it, my mom lying upon it and suffering, horribly. Also pushed into this cramped room, a double futon in the corner, where my boyfriend and I sleep.

Now picture that for three months.

195, 196, 197.

When she finally died, I wasn’t there, but my boyfriend was. He’s never forgiven me. He suspects my mom did it on purpose: one last twisted trick; one last assertion of will. It would certainly be like her to try and avoid sharing with me this ultimate moment of weakness, and instead inflict it on this boyish man whom she never really came to respect. Or that’s how my boyfriend sees it anyway. I suspect he might be right. (I keep calling him my boyfriend. He’s not my boyfriend. Not anymore. We broke up a few months after my mom passed. It was like she was the glue sticking us together, and she had evaporated.)

Grief is a mind fuck.

318, 319, 320.

Grief is psychotropic, sometimes even hallucinogenic. In its deepest throes, ghosts and other terrifying apparitions appear, though in fairness, these ghosts and apparitions aren’t always terrifying. Sometimes they are comforting, which triggers the terrifying realization that you have come to depend on them. There’s a derangement that occurs. It still feels insane that she’s not here, not reading this over my shoulder, and then of course, I get chills, because often it does feel exactly like she’s here, reading over my shoulder, whispering the words along with me as I read back through this. It feels insane. And it makes me happy. It's sanity that feels sad. And I’m so goddammed sick of being so goddamned sad.

And now I hear my editor’s voice. “I told you this would be boring, Syd."

453, 454, 455.

Grief is a necromancer. You can wind up romancing the dead so much that you lose touch with the living, who become shades, and everything tastes like ashes.

We eke out our living moments just like I’m stinting on these words in this parsimonious essay, when sometimes it’s far better to squander. For instance, in this case, even though I only have a few words left, it might be better to unroll a long quote from Ulysses:

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.

Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!

No, mother! Let me be and let me live.

I no longer live in that studio. My “real job” here at The Stranger, allows me to “afford” a “real apartment”, with its own bedroom and bathtub. And I don’t share the place with anyone. And yet I think I would give just about anything to be crammed into that studio again, with my old boyfriend and dying mother, living with the terror of her someday being gone rather than living with… well, with whatever this is.

Why are the main characters in horror stories so often grieving? In that same vein, why do I feel frightened all the time? It’s like her death has torn some vital skin off me, which was protecting my sense of certainty and safety. My fear is not of death, but of living without her: of her both being here with me, and not with me, at the same time, if that makes sense.

It’s been nearly two years now since she left. I can still spend days lost staring at nothing. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to move forward? She took a hunk of me with her and I’m never getting it back.

I still write things thinking she will read them. (She was a journalist. They called her Girl Gonzo, and compared her to Hunter S. Thompson, though she hated the nickname, and believed Thompson was, ultimately, something of a coward.)

She still talks to me. She still edits my work. As I type this now, I hear her: “Maudlin”, “Personal without being intimate or evocative.”

So why is it that I know with a certainty that if someone gave me a pill and told me that it had the power to cure me somehow, maybe magically, of all my grief, I would take that pill and I would flush it down the toilet?

I’m broken by all this. Forever broken. And that’s a bummer. But everything’s broken. It’s the nature of all this. To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, that’s how the light gets in.

Is it getting better? I don’t know. It’s getting different. I think. Grief alters your mind.

999, 1,000…

 

 

One.

 

Leveraging Just Wrought’s Obscurity as a Feature, not a Bug

 

Okay. So yesterday’s experiment with blowing the dust off of Just Wrought’s mic went… well… not poorly—experiments can only be said to go poorly if they don’t yield data, and this one definitely did that. The data I took away from yesterday’s post “Testing… Testing… Is This Thing On?” is that not many people are going to hit my blog for information about what I’m up to during the Covid – 19 Corona Virus Crisis. Blogs are so 12 years ago. I get it.

But now that I know Just Wrought is (for now) a place where only people who really care what I’m doing go, I can shift its use from one-way information flow, to a two-way back-and-forth. For instance, I’m about to make a move in the space of virtual performance, but before I do, I’d love to sort of test drive the text of the crowd funding release to work out all the kinks, and answer all the questions that might come up.

The Pitch:

Help me pay actors to record my short stories.

The Gist:

I retired from theatre, particularly play-writing, seven years ago to pursue other sorts of writing and story-telling. In that time I have written a wild, weird quasi-memoir called The Starting Gate (published in 2016), a novel (yet-to-be-published) inspired by my time working as the only male executive assistant in the senior executive suite of Washington Mutual Bank during the run up to the Great Recession, and countless essays, poems and short stories. I. And am sad to admit that I have given those short stories (if you’ll forgive the lame proto-pun) short shrift. That I,s, I do sometimes post them on line and I do read them at my monthly literary reading Loud Mouth Lit (which I founded 3 ½ years ago), but other than that limited exposure, they sit on a virtual shelf gathering virtual dust, perhaps never to be read again.

I’d like to change that by paying professional actors, first with my own money and then with yours, to record these stories and ultimately offer them back to the public as audio book quality recordings.

Here’s how I see it working.

I open an Indiegogo campaign, with a goal of raising $7,000 dollars. This is how I raised the money to publish my book The Starting Gate, so I can vouch for it as a tried and true method. The pitch will contain an explanation of my plan essentially paraphrasing what I’ve written above. I will set contribution levels as follows:

Story Patron

Give me $10 and I’ll give you a story, recorded by professional actor local to the Pacific Northwest.

Collection Patron

Give me $25 and I’ll give you all seven of the stories I hope to record with local professional actors.

Book Patron

Give me $50 and I’ll give you all seven stories, PLUS a free copy of the paperback edition of my book THE STARTING GATE (a 15$ value.)

First Edition Patron

Give me $100 and I’ll give you all seven stories, PLUS a free copy of the limited first edition hardback version of my book THE STARTING GATE (a 25$ value and there are only 20 of them left), PLUS I will record a sonnet of your choosing by William Shakespeare, written back during a similar epidemic which closed all of the theaters in England.

Casting Patron

Give me $500, and you’ll get everything you get for $100 but also I will give you the option of nominating a professional Pacific Northwest actor whom you wish to record one of my stories.

Commissioning Patron

Give me $1,000 and you’ll get everything you get for $100 but you also get to commission a brand new, original story from me based on beginning parameters that you help provide. And I’ll let you cast the actor, too, if you want.

 

For every $1,000 I raise, I will record a story, paying a local professional actor (whom I worked with back in my theatre daze) at least $500 to do so.

Why not the whole thousand? Well, there are several expenses associated with this endeavor in addition to the actor’s fee, such as:

• The director’s fee. (This would be for the services of the incomparable book artist, Lyssa Browne, and whose studio, Cedar House Audio, the stories will be recorded.)
• Post-production costs. These range from paying a sound designer to do the final mix, to any other costs associated with bringing you a professional audio book quality offering.
• Administrative costs. Indiegogo, just like every other crowdfunding platform, charges a fee for its services. In this case, it would be ~5%, which is ~$50 off the top of every $1,000 raised. Other hidden fees around distribution will also apply.
• Promotion costs. I would only be spending money to promote this if I had a little extra left over after everything else got paid.
• Paying forward. In the unlikely event that there is money leftover out of the $1,000 per story I’ve budgeted, l will plow the surplus forward into the next story. I honestly don’t anticipate this being a problem, but I am ready and eager to deal with it if it arises.

 

So that’s my initial sketch of my plan. What do you think? I welcome any and all of your feedback in the comments.

 

Also, what should I call this project?

Exit/Entrance/Exit/Entrance... Imagination

 

This week I started my new job working for the City of Seattle, Department of Transportation (aka SDOT). This coming Sunday evening, I’ll be reading a story I wrote called “Exit Interview” about getting laid off from my old job. At the time I conceived it, the plot was mere imagination, but I knew the ax would eventually fall. Additionally, the story morphs into being about the end of my life, and then, more eventually still, about the end of the world. And again, I used my imagination but I have a pretty good general idea of how these things will go.

So why am I reading this story on Sunday evening (with the help of the truly excellent Brandon Simmons)? And why, in support of Bernie Sanders campaign to become the next president of the United States of America?

So many think he doesn’t have a chance. Others think he’s inured to the injustice of American racism, puffed up on a cloud of clueless White progressivism.

What do you think?

Do you think he has a chance to become our next president?

Here’s my suggestion: use your imagination; because like me— like all of us— you have a pretty good idea of what will happen otherwise.

 

 

Meantime

 

 

You’re asleep. Dead unconscious. So in a way you aren’t anything.

There is a blast, or a flash. In any case a vast shock of everything. Now you are cold. Freezing. Parts of you are burning. The wind rips through you. You see darkness. Mostly. Falling fire punctuates it. And you are falling.

Ah right: you were in an airplane. But now you are being torn by the torrent of your downward spiraling. Dead soon.

What do you do in the meantime?

There’s always time left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Exit Interview

I ate lunch early out of sheer boredom again, so now, two hours later, only caffeine and the Clash are gonna get me through the afternoon doldrums. The jangling siren howl of “Police on my Back” blocks out any other sound, but I see him out of the corner of my eye at the entrance of my cubicle. I pull off my headphones.

“Hi Paul, can I talk to you for a second?

He is smallish, with glasses and sandy hair, a button down shirt and smart casual slacks. I have never seen him before in my life.

This is it. Is this it?