We’re Still Here and a Contest

I had a dear friend tell me today, that she felt, not thought, but felt she was a “waste of space”.  Although we are about the same age, I never felt so much that I wished I was her mom.  To get to the point we’re at in our lives, and to feel that way, someone along the way did her a grave injustice.

So, to her and to any of you who feel that way, there’s something I need to tell you.

I believe everything you go through in life, creates you.  All the ugly, all of the ugly that has been done to you, and all of the ugly that you’ve done to others is a part of you.  The same goes for beauty, but it isn’t the beauty that builds you.  I think when you’re knocked down, and you struggle to breathe, that is when key parts of you are formed.  If I could, I’d make that go away for all of us.  But I can’t.

However, and yes this is a big however and a leap of faith, all of those things come into play into the person you are, and you are nowhere near a waste.  Maybe you just haven’t figured it out yet, but all of these things are teaching you where to draw strength.  There will come a time that someone who had it easier, who had the ideal family, the ideal situation may be unequipped for what life has in store.  I believe that it is that time, that those of us who have been through it, through the pain and the mud and the muck, that we may be called to stand up for something, or someone, and damn right, we’re going to do it.  Because we’re not unaccustomed to fear, and we haven’t yet been broken.  We’re still here.  There’s something to be said for still being here.

Do not underestimate your value, because damn it, you are valuable.  Do not underestimate your worth, because damn it, you are worthy.

Some of us don’t have the words, which is why others of us write.  Sometimes we might just be able to give you words that can bring you some peace.  Believe me, if I can do that for you, it is a gift I treasure more than I can adequately express.  It is not a task I take lightly.  When you pick up a book, when you watch a movie, when you think instead of default to what people say you should think, you are creating, you are using your mind.  You just haven’t found your outlet yet.  It’s not too late, and maybe it’s just too soon.  As I tell my son, the time for patience is when you have the least to spare.

Love.

Now, for some lighter fare, I am off to the land of the mouse next week and shall be back (barring my suspicions about it being a real-life Dr. Who episode, in which case, well, I may be in the future or the past, but I digress.  If the mouse starts to zip off his face, and the pig people start attacking, I’m so out of there).

Since there seems to be some dragging of feet about getting our work done, I think we need a contest.  The winner will receive a secret object guaranteed to bust up writer’s block/get you to finish your novel, memoir, nonfiction, whatever/make you look 10 pounds lighter/permanently get rid of grey hair!  Yes! Onward.

I saw this couple in front of Union Station.  Late sixties.  She had brown hair, dyed at home, faded toward the roots.  She wore makeup but was not overdone.  She wore a purple plaid tweed coat, and black sensible shoes and walked a couple of inches in front of him.  She carried a lime and brown, Vera Bradley bag.

He had a tweed coat, and a worn, off-white, button-down shirt.  He had the appearance of a retired professor.  I’m 5’9″, so I’d guess they were no more than 5″5″, identical in height.  He wore a bright red, knitted beret, that was a hair too small for his head.  What little hair he had was just over his collar.

They both had deep wrinkles, and were not happy and relaxed in each others company.  There was something about their expressions, that was not angry, but not happy either.

The contest!  Write anything you want, a sentence, a paragraph, all dialogue or none at all, take a photo, there are no rules.  What is their story?  Where are they going or where have they been?  Anything at all that you want to say about this little couple, and any way that you want to say it.  It’ll be open all week, so enter as many times as you want.

Love.

Discarded

The last time I saw my grandmother, I don’t believe she knew who I was.

She had been living on her own until she was 94, had fallen one day and was paralyzed from the waist down.  It should have happened sooner, the doctors said, her bones had closed up around the nerves.  They didn’t know my grandmother.

My parents couldn’t take care of her, so she was put in a nursing home.  Completely independent, to completely dependent.  This destroyed my father.  He is a stoic man, emotions are hidden so thoroughly that I don’t know he feels them.  He stuffs them back in with silence and food and sometimes misdirected anger.

I was almost nine months pregnant and 70 pounds heavier than she had ever seen me.  There were moments that I rambled on, that I’d like to think she knew me, but she was raised in a time that people were polite to each other.  We wheeled her into the dining center, past the people sitting out in the hall, lined up on display.  Some were sleeping, some were awake, all of them discarded and alone.

We wheeled her up to the table, where there were three other ladies, one complaining about all of it, happy to see my husband, my father and myself, for new ears to listen to her.  I saw the look on my grandmother’s face and leaned over to her and whispered, “Be nice.”  She smiled back at me and recognized me at that moment.  She had little need of complainers, and people who pitied their situation.  She was raised during the Great Depression.  She didn’t believe in whining.

She asked if we would stay and eat with her.  My dad immediately said, no, we had to get going, before I could respond.  He had been spending every moment there, and felt it would have put out the dining hall as all of their meals were planned.  I had been fighting the urge to cry, which believe it or not from these writings, I don’t do easily or freely.  I am my father’s daughter.  The hormones though gave me a disadvantage.  She looked down at her portioned-out, salt free meal, and nodded.  Then she raised her head high and picked up her fork.

I hugged her and we headed out, but before I got to the door, I turned, like a bad Lifetime movie.  She was staring after us, and raised her two fingers to her lips, kissed them and held her hand up in a motionless wave.  She had done this every time I had ever left her.  It was her signature, and to not see it in the doorway to her home, it still kills me.  I mouthed, I love you, and turned as I knew that moment, it was the last time I would see her.

As we were walking out to the car, we had to walk back out through the lined up people.  My dad first, then my husband, then me.  My husband reached for my hand, and I pushed it away.  I am my father’s daughter.

The second time, I took it.  I can always count on him for a second, third, fourth time.  He’ll take me however I am, and try for as long as it takes.  As we walked to the car, I was sobbing so violently the underside of my stomach was burning.  The weight of the baby, the weight of the situation was too great.  Then I began to rage.

The nursing home, the people, a society where the aged are discarded, how do we get her out of there, what do I need to do.  I was infuriated, and when I’m infuriated I’m very effective.  For the first time in my life, my father heard me, perhaps because I gave voice to something he couldn’t.  Perhaps because he got it that I felt his pain, and although he shot down every idea, as he had been spending every moment going over them with himself, he and I understood each other for that one moment in time.  There was nothing to be done.

Shortly thereafter I began to write a story which is now tens of thousands of words, probably more.  There are pages upon pages about our culture, our society, our dealings with people who no longer have “value” as we have established it.  Much of that section is stream of consciousness writing.  The woman started out as my grandmother, and now barring some quirks is not her at all.  All of that writing, will go.

I was writing on the train a couple of days ago, and the writing was working.  I had to get all of the other writing out, to clear the way for this story.  The other is something that means much to me personally, but it isn’t writing.  It’s my mind clutter that needed somewhere to go.  By the time I’m done, the incident that triggered it all, will be erased if I’ve done my job.  And this is a job.  The novel is a job unlike any other.  There is no pay, no time off, and at the end you may be the only reader.  For some reason though, some of us spend years picking words, filling plot holes, rearranging people’s lives, just to make it right.  We are a strange, stubborn group.

Did any of you have a catalyst, a moment that you just began the story even if that story is long gone?

Twenty Joys

1. When a perfect character name appears out of nowhere.

2. Having someone say, yes! I get it.

3. Laughing so hard that no sound comes out, tears run down my face, and how that makes my kids laugh even harder.

4. Breaking circles that were meant to be broken.

5. Seeing an old couple walking side by side.

6. When you don’t want to write, and you follow where the scene takes you to find out that was meant to happen all along.

7. Feeling my kids’ bodies relax when they’re upset and I hold them long enough.

8. Remembering that life is not static, and whatever is difficult now will be gotten through one way or another.

9. Stories may sink or swim, but no one can take away what you’ve learned from each writing.

10. The seriousness with which children take their play.

11.  The look my husband gives me when he knows I need to talk, but don’t have the words.  The fact that he rarely says, what’s wrong, but rather gives me a look that says he’s waiting to hear me.

12. Hope in all things, no matter how dark.

13. A book that you don’t want to end.

14.  A cup of coffee with just the right amount of milk and sugar.

15. Teachers who love our kids.

16. My love.

17, 18, 19.  My Minions.

20. All of you.

The Professor and the Madman

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

My husband loves words.  I mean the actual words, the nitty-gritty of where a word came from and where it is going.

I love the thought behind the words.  I like words that get me from point A to point B in any way that they can.  On occasion I can even come up with the word I’m looking to use.

Back when we first got together he mentioned this book to me, along the lines of if you haven’t read it you must.  Here’s a quote from the back cover.

“Finally, in 1896, after Minor had sent nearly ten thousand definitions to the dictionary but had still never traveled from his home, a puzzled Murray set out to visit him.  It was then that Murray finally learned the truth about Minor–that, in addition to being a masterful wordsmith, Minor was also a murderer, clinically insane–and locked up in Broadmoor, England’s harshest asylum for criminal lunatics.”

I loved this book.  Some things to understand about me.  I don’t like nonfiction except when I do.  I believe there is no better way to get to know people than to read what gets their groove on.  I can tell you day after day bits about me, but if I were to get into a conversation with you about books, two things would be immediately apparent.  1) I may possibly never shut up when around another book person.  See water in the desert theory.  2) I will never have to tell you an additional thing about me.  You’ll know more than I care for you to know.  See show don’t tell theory.

The best part of this book was how much my husband loved this book.  He wrote his masters thesis on something related to this if I can remember correctly (I used to have an amazing memory, then I had children.  So forgive the faulty detail memory, along with any questionable word/grammar/punctuation usage.  It’s long gone, and I’m hoping by stretching this muscle it returns.  I’d also like to be a size 8, if anyone is taking requests).

He was the first person I had ever met that said that he would have loved to have been a lexicographer.  And I had to look it up.  And I fell in love.  His second choice was a librarian.  Except he really didn’t want to spend all that much time with the public.  Ah, yes, the details do bite us in the ass sometimes.

He waxed poetic about the OED.  He had always dreamed of owning a full set, not the abridged but the full 20 volume set, with three additional volumes.  He also knew there was no way we could afford it, and really, what a waste because that money could be so much better used on something else.  One book person told another book person this.

Now, there was a time when I was out of work, and we were broke, and we still gave each other books for special occasions.  We’ve never questioned spending money on books.  It happens that it is the one thing that we both agree on that goes beyond, well, books.  We think (and forgive me, dear, for putting words in your mouth but it certainly wouldn’t be the first time) and feel that to create and write and read is one of a key few purposes for being here.  That if you want great art, you must support great art, or even good art, hell, just art.  So we buy when we can, and sometimes when we can’t, because if people who love books as much as we do stop buying, the people who are cutting all the music and arts classes in schools win.  The people who say it isn’t important like science and math, win.  Okay, that last bit is more me than him, but I believe in small things making big differences.

Anyway, the idea that a man who loved words more than anyone I’d ever met, the man who keeps this family together, fed and clothed and even puts up with the cat, that this man couldn’t have his own set of the OED, was ridiculous.

For Christmas that year, he got 20 large volumes (and three small) of a very large navy blue hardcover OED.  He beamed.  The second best part?  When people in my family, or co-workers asked, “So what did you get him for Christmas?”  “A dictionary.”  “Huh?”  “Oh, it’s just this one that he really wanted.”

If there are any other wordsmiths out there, you may really enjoy The Professor and the Madman.  And if anyone needs a 6 page definition of a word, I’m your girl.

The Story of Songs

I can’t listen to music when I write.  Cannot do it.

The odd thing about this is that I’m not sitting in a quiet room with my thoughts.  I am on the Metra bouncing along for an hour, my notebook precariously balanced on my knees, my coffee at my feet.  A couple of times during the inbound commute, I grab my coffee cup because if I don’t it will be airborne.  My hand reaches for it by instinct during two bumps in the track.  My mind is unattached to what my hand is doing.  I lift the cup, we hit the bump, I place it back.  I go back to writing.  People around me in the morning talk a bit and then two go to reading, and three go to sleep.  The man that sits next to me does the crossword, and frequently asks me questions.  I give him the word he’s looking for hoping he’ll get it that I’m doing something that takes a bit of thought.  A moment later he gives me another clue, sometimes passing it under my nose.  Whether I’m reading or writing, he doesn’t seem to think what I’m doing is a pressing as his crossword puzzle.  I try not to start the day rude.  I’ll get there eventually without his help.  I can’t begin there.

The other morning a man sat up in the upper deck with us.  You’d never guess by the motley group that we are, that we even know each other.  But we have a rhythm established over years.  This man takes a seat next to me, he’s on a wide seat perpendicular to mine, a laptop perched on his lap.  I settle into the routine, our morning catch-up done, the sleepers sleep, the readers read, and I start writing.  It’s going well.  I intersperse my thoughts with crossword answers, but haven’t lost the thread of my story.  That’s the heavy lifting for me.  This book has taken me so long, and has traveled so far that when I’m thinking about where everyone is, and where they need to be, it gets complicated.

The music begins.  Classical music is piping out of his laptop.  He’s also wearing earbuds, so it’s either that loud, or he forgot to turn something off.  I used to bartend in a nightclub so I have trouble thinking it’s because I have supersonic hearing.  I try to ignore it, and I cannot.  It is invasive.  I can tune out chatter, and interruptions, and by no means do I think that public transportation should cater to me.  However, I cannot write.  It’s tinny, and energetic, and I have to move seats.  I move to the other side of Crossword Man, who is annoyed by the music, although he’s always annoyed about something. He’s a conservative.

I can still hear it, so I get out a book which I always must have with me, and happily read until we get to Union Station, albeit I’m a little bummed because that is my only fiction writing time, gone until tomorrow.

Since then, I’ve been reading much about people and their writing/listening habits, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why I have never written while listening to music.  I love music.  Love, love, love.  I tend toward rumination, and this has been driving me to drink.  Okay, so that’s a short drive but whatever.

Today, I was doing my second Litebrite page, after my enthusiastic sons thought it was too hard, yet they both needed to do one.  While they had moved on to Megablocks, I put in some music.  I love the soundtrack to Away We Go, love the movie as well, but the soundtrack was my introduction to Alexi Murdoch.  I love this man.

As I’m sticking those tiny colored pegs, into those itty-bitty letters on the black paper, I am transported.  Every song is a story, haunting and beautiful, and that’s when I see it.

I cannot listen to music when I write because songs are stories to me.  I am actively listening to the lyrics, the guitar, the piano.  I see a movie in my head, and I’m watching the man who’s singing the words, and hear his haunting melody as I watch him write a letter, and my mind is zooming in to see the words on the page. I’m no longer in my home, I’m a fly on the wall of the song.

On occasion,  I can’t remember the singer or the title, but I can give a detailed description of the story.  The only problem is that the story is in my mind and unless you are me, it’d be very difficult to guess.  My husband has actually guessed right based on my stories of songs.  Everything turns into a story with me.  Sometimes I get disappointed by people I don’t know well.  The reason?  I have taken what I do know, and filled in the rest.  I’ve taken creative license.  This is problematic because I don’t want to be like that, but it’s the only way I know to be.  If there is a blank, I fill it.  Instantly, automatically.  Does anybody else do this?  It’s just so, freakish.

So mystery solved.  I can’t listen because it’s using up the same muscles that writing uses.  To focus, I can tune out conversations and many other things, but not music.  Music has always been important to me, but it wasn’t until today that I saw why.

I’d like to be the person who gets inspired by music, the person who has music for a muse. Maybe it is in a different way.  Listening can lead to writing, it just can’t be simultaneous.

 

My Tribe and a Thank You

In an e-mail exchange a bit back with Averil, she had mentioned that she had looked for my blog but couldn’t find it. I told her that I didn’t think that I could keep one up, between the job, the mommying, the writing, or that I had that much to say (yes, I really did say that, stop laughing). She mentioned that she does it partly to hone her craft, that she’s a work in progress. Bells started ringing the moment I read that. I had been following so many blogs for so long, getting attached to ones that brought me something.

I have been working on my book, pretty much in isolation with the exception of my husband, and the blogs I read and kept reading were ones that made me laugh, made me think, made me worship (some of you write so well), made me think. Altogether they gave me a sense of community that I had been lacking. After the exchange with Averil, I came across a comment on over at Betsy’s. I believe it was Sarah W who said, “I’ll make my own damn community’. And voila, that’s all it took. Without realizing it, I was looking for this tribe, all of you, who work so hard to find the right word, the right plot, the right character name.

But it is so much more than that. I am in touch with all of you more than most people in my life. I look forward to recommended fiction, nonfiction, writing books. When something tragic happens, I want to write, but I also want to share. I want to read. I want to read about your struggles, and your triumphs. We are so strong together.

I want all of us to not feel so alone and in all of those silly, fantastic links at the side of my blog, where you on a daily, weekly, monthly basis pour out your hearts, or your knowledge, or your support, and I cannot forget the photos, oh the photos (MSB), here is where I find me. Some people may do it to find an agent, and hat’s off to them. With what I’ve been writing though it’s possible that my writings may not work in my favor. But frankly, it doesn’t matter. That’s just not what this is about for me. It’s about people, in a disconnected world, people who give a damn, and take a moment to hold each other up, while keeping their families together and their mortgages/rents paid. People who try to find the truth, who speak the truth as far as they’re able.

Raw. Beautiful. True. Complicated.

So, to my tribe, and any of you who may be reading but don’t enjoy to comment, thank you. Thank you for giving me a community that I don’t have way out here in the boondocks. Thank you for your thoughts, and your wisdom, and your humor, especially the humor.

I have to say, I think I have gained more than I have given. Averil was spot on. It is a way to work on my writing in a completely different way, but it is so much more. And Sarah, this is our own damn community. And maybe someday if we’re very lucky, and work really hard, and open the damn door (Downith, I’m looking at you), something will come of all of this writing.

But if not, I’ve already won.

My tribe.

(I’m still trying to figure the link feature out. I did try to link to all of the beautiful people, but alas. If anyone wants to read more from any of them, please see the side of my blog. Over and out.)

Leprechauns and Poetry

Distraction anyone?

There are challenges to being a step-parent.  One of them is holidays.  As a parent, you get to make the rules, decide what you celebrate and how you celebrate.  If you’re a co-parent, you find yourself occasionally following someone else, recreating their holidays.

This would be the case with St. Patrick’s Day.

St. Patrick’s Day Eve when my daughter was four, she told us sometime around eight at night how excited she was for the Leprechaun to come.  He always brings gold candy!  My husband and I exchanged glances.  Her mother is a teacher and all over this sort of thing.  She’s my first child and I came into her life when she was three, so to say that I was out of my element was an understatement.

St.Patrick’s Day for me had always been one too many Irish fests and inevitably drinking too much green beer.  Not exactly Sesame Street.

Late that night, my husband rushed around to different stores searching for those mesh bags of foil-covered chocolate coins.  I stayed home trying to come up with rhymes suitable to a Leprechaun that had just popped up uninvited into my overextended life.  Rhymes done, coins hidden.  Happy girl on St. Patrick’s Day morning.

She’s now just shy of eleven, and the boys are 2 and a half and almost six.  I found the gold coins yesterday, phew, and now I have to start in on rhymes that incorporate things that the nasty little leprechaun would think.  He’s big on underpants jokes, and he’s quite the rude little man.  If we have to celebrate these silly things, we like to give them a twist.

Caught you picking your nose, Make sure you wash those same toes.

It’s going to be a long night.  What are the chances that I can get my very funny husband who is sick and reading on the couch to write these?  He can do kid-funny so, so well.  If he doesn’t, the kids may fear for the leprechaun’s mental well-being.

May you all have a happy St. Patrick’s Day, chocolate coins for breakfast, and a morning of poetry that involves nose picking and underpants.

Just save the green beer for lunch.

 

 

 

The Business of Japan and A Prayer

Nine hours sitting next to CNBC.  Nine hours of Japanese destruction, smoking nuclear plants.  Another aftershock, 6.9.  Larger than most earthquakes and they’re qualifying it with the term “aftershock”.  Talk of cooling pools, radiation leaks.  People in a 13 mile radius evacuated, from 13 to 19 they are told to stay indoors.  Stay.  Indoors.  Imagine that.

And now back to your business news, is this a buying opportunity?  No, says the man with the tie, I’ve been saying Japan is overvalued.  Yes, yes, I agree, says the woman in the black suit, with her perfectly-coiffed, messy hair, and comfortably numb, neutral lips,  from the comfort of her New York studio.

The Big Board is red, not a trace of green, stocks are selling off, the market is under pressure.  More people talk quickly, the market, where is the trade, where is the money to be made?  What about buying gold?  Insurance companies, Aflac insuring over 75% of the insured in Japan, only one in four households though being insured.  Tricky math there, my friends.  Is Aflac the buy, the sell?

What about wind, gas, whose energy are we in favor of now?

And still the images, one after the other, farm fields washed away, and the airport, entire cities reduced to rubble, detritus and radiation.  Oh that’s right there is the radiation.

So how about this?  We see the people who are hiding under their tables with no power in thirty degree weather, huddling with their children trying to tell them it’ll be alright.  We picture the thousands mourning their dead, our dead, because it is a fucking wide world and instead of worrying about where a buck is to be made we worry about how the fuck to just get every last person off of that island.  Now.  Every country’s planes flying in, every helicoptor, every nation’s military, we all go,  and try to save these people.

How about we get all of the best scientists and find a way to stop it.  A fucking nuclear reactor is on fire and it affects the fucking world.  What about running out of food and clean water and it is cold and there is nowhere to fucking go, and the children, my God, the children.  How about we just all make it stop before we become numb to words like Tsunami, and Richter Scale, and Casualties, and the numbers keep climbing and it is desperate.

Top two headlines on Yahoo news:

“Japan to spray water, acid on stricken nuke plant”

“Japan plant poses little threat to US – for now”

Really?  Explain to me how at this time, during this disaster of unknown, incalculable proportions, the second headline is about the United States and how it affects us?  Somebody explain it before my head explodes.  My piddly donation seems so ridiculous in the face of what needs to be done, and I have no idea how to make this all better.  Right now we are a nation of the helpless.

My heart breaks for Japan, for their dead, for their mothers, their fathers, their daughters, their sons, their children, their empty convenience store shelves, their freezing temperatures.  I hope they know that there are so many of us who would help in any way possible, if we could only figure it out.  Please someone, tell us what to do.

Amen.

 

Ready or Not

Not too long ago when my parents drove out from New York, they brought my high school yearbooks.  In almost all of the signatures, the ones saying how we’d keep in touch, the ones saying call me over the summer, more exclamations then you could shake a stick at, something very strange became apparent.

They all said to remember them when my book got published.  At seventeen, from all indications, I knew what I wanted.  I got out of writing a report on Light and August, by promising the teacher I’d write her a play.  She headed up the school magazine, and needed it.  I had no interest in the report, and voila, a partnership was born.

My play was awful.  Awful.  Then they edited, and it became not only awful, but additionally it made no sense.  That didn’t stop my confidence that I would in fact be an author.

In seventh grade, a kid prone to depression, I wrote all the time.  Journals, poetry, any form I could use to express myself.  Then one day, my mother found my diary where I had written about her, and there was hell to pay.  She wouldn’t admit to it but openly commented on things I had written, anger with which I had nowhere to go because my father would have stomped it down in a heartbeat.  She humiliated me.  I brought everything I had written up until then, and quietly tore up the pages during loud parts of classes at school, disposing of them in different garbage cans for fear anyone would read anything.

Now, should anyone think time heals and I look back and laugh, I don’t.  I’m not built that way.  I  kept ruminating how she could hate me so, and not wonder why I wouldn’t hate her back.  I was in seventh grade.  Who doesn’t feel that way at times?

That is now many years, relationships, lives later.  It has taken me this long to write something without fear that it will be read.  But it has left a horrible scar, not to the rest of the world, trust me, people have far greater concerns.  The scar is that part that I can’t shut off.  I’ll start to write a scene, and if it gets too messy, too ugly, I start to think about my parents, and how this would embarrass them, and on and on.  I think about how I should write about something neat, clean, something sweet and nice and something that would be nice for them to show off.

And I can’t tell you how much that pisses me off.  Almost thirty years have passed since something was read that I didn’t think would ever be read.  I fight that feeling often, that feeling of hurting someone.  I talk a good game, but I do care what people think.  I hope, that when I’m done, the story is just so compelling that the ugly isn’t held against me.  Then again, what would we be trying to desperately work out on paper if our lives were so, so neat?

In the end, I wonder if I’m a better writer for it.  I wonder if because I’ve been writing for so long in my head, and reading because it was far safer, far easier to keep your distance, if because of all that, maybe, just maybe, now is the time.

I do know that when I read the yearbook comments, a little bit of my heart broke.  What happened to that girl who thought she could do it?  Maybe though, I just wasn’t ready to do it before.

I’m ready now.

 

Ugly Every Day of the Week

I don’t trust singers who are pretty.  I don’t trust that what they’re singing about, that they know what they’re singing about.  There is something overproduced, from the outfits to their makeup, to their hair, to their songs.  They may have perfect pitch, but it’s too done.  Opera singers have a glissando.  Overproduced pop stars, manufacture glissando which sounds more like they started flat and are sliding up until they’re somewhere in the range of the right note.  These are two entirely different things.

Think right now about two singers, any style of music, and think about how they look when they sing.  Pretty or ugly?  I’m not talking about how they look in real life, I mean while they are singing.  For my list, I love Melissa Etheridge, especially her old stuff.  I’ve seen her in concert numerous times and she looks downright crazy when she sings.  Dave Matthews, certifiable.  Lyle Lovett, not pretty.  There are so many, and what it comes down to, I think, is that they didn’t spend hours watching themselves in the mirror.  They spent hours listening to their voices, training their body to come up with new sounds.  Sometimes there is contortion involved.  It’s all about the music and the body is a vessel.  They serve the music.

Now, not to hit a group that really has been hit enough, but compare that to Brittney Spears, Christina Aguilara, and Miley Cyrus.  They have varying degrees of talent, and they all have something that hit the right tone when they came to the business of singing.  But in their cases it would appear, it is first and foremost a business.  I get the impression that although I am years older, I was not the only one standing in front of the mirror, listening to Joan Jett while holding my Tickle deoderant after stripping it of its clear outer cylinder.  I have dated myself certainly, but do any of you remember how Tickle was the perfect shape of a microphone.  I practiced every song, but it was about how I looked (Who didn’t look good with purple eyeshadow from their lashes to their eyebrows?  What about the pink lipstick, Raspberry Glace?), not about could I squeeze a different sound out if I contorted my face.

This leads me to writing.  I applaud all who put pen to paper, agented and published, or sitting in your bedroom terrified that anyone would ever read anything of yours.  I get it.  I am not someone who thinks one type is better than another, but rather there are certain types that are better for certain people than another.  Certain books make certain people electric, and if I could bottle that, we’d all be flying high.  I know when I’ve read a great book, and a bit of me changes every time.  I don’t know that’s a huge accomplishment though because I consider myself constantly in flux anyway, but nevertheless I change.

The fact is though, I like ugly writers.  Bring me your discomfort, your twisted, your what’s happening in those happy houses when there is no “company”.  Bring it.  The writer who untwists her pen (I know, I know, tap, tap, tap of the keys, but let me live my dream, capisce?), and gives you as much as she can, not worrying about how she’ll look on The Daily Show (But let me tell you about a pair of shoes, I digress.), but rather has captured the ugly in such a way that there you are so swept up in the dream, you haven’t even wondered what the author looks like.  The writer who contorts her face, her body, her mind, her ideas to get that one scene just right, honest, true.

I have no plans on writing about books I don’t like.  I think there are enough academic ideas in print, and really haven’t we destroyed each other enough?  What I will say, is that the stuff I don’t read, it’s because the writer is too pretty.  It’s too easy, it’s too surface, it’s too made-up.  It’s a pretty book, with a pretty cover, and it’s all going to work out in the end.  Sometimes there is hope in things not working out, and sometimes it’s just damn ugly.  Bring me the ugly every day of the week and twice on Tuesday.

To get it right, we have to be brutal, and ugly, and show what happens when the cameras are off in what is becoming an overproduced world, with overproduced children and overproduced writers.  We can see what we’re supposed to be every time we turn on the television.  I think our job is to show things as they are, and then turn up the heat.

Make it burn.

Singers pretty or ugly?  Writing?

(Once again, I am always very concerned that something can be misconstrued and I do not mean this to be singers or writers looks in that sense.  I hope that came across, because it’s very important to me that it did.)