A Writer on my Run

I am "momentum sensitive." Anyone who has had trouble getting out the door on a lazy Sunday morning, which turns into a lazy Sunday afternoon, which then turns into a lazy Sunday evening, will know what I am talking about.

It had been some time since I had actually felt wholeheartedly happy. Brad texted me if I'd join him for a romantic walk to some park, but I put my foot down. No. No walking. I need to sweat. The wicked San Francisco fog had parted and it was time to break into a glorious sweat under the glow of the blue sky. I couldn't feel the tremors of pleasure of sweat, instead I just felt the swell of my belly under my biker shorts and the stiffness in my calves, but nevertheless I got up off the couch and jazzed up my knees.

As I focused on the pores in the pavement and strode up the hill, I thought about that line "I don't know how to live outside of fiction" [see previous Blog Entry for further details]. When I help with the Marketing department for my newspaper internship, I make 10 calls and then I am done. Success. But if I write 10 pages? Am I done? Success?

If I were to become a writer... If I were to become a famous writer... What is it that I would want it to be that is written that makes me famous?

I look up. I am almost at the top of the hill. I slow down to a walk. The signs points to the left: "0.1 mile Inspiration point." I can do that. I pick up from the inertia, heave back into a jog, and prance until I reach the side of the hill that is Inspiration Point. A man sits with a beer and a cigarette on a bench overlooking the view. A biker woman with a lot of accessories does lunges on the other side. I straddle my legs on a short wall and reach down in between them to the ground.

"That's a good stretch," a voice startles me. It is the biker woman. She sits on the wall next to me and asks me how to do it. I push her heels up on the wall, and instruct her to imagine her knees pointed back.

"Will you push me?" she requests. I reluctantly leave my stretch and come around behind her, place the palms of my hands on her lower back, and push.

"Ahhhhh," she sighs when I release her. "Now I'll push you."

I eagerly climb back on the wall. Then we start talking about other stretches, and she has me lay on my back and pushes my leg to my chest, the way her trainer does. I notice that she has no qualms about placing her arms on the soles of my sneakers. We talk about stretching and exercise. She points to two obese women who just waddled out of their car to check out the view.

"You see those women - I was like that," she says. "350 pounds after I had my kid. But I had surgery, and then got into biking everyday."

She asks me what I do. I say that I moved up from Stanford, I have a couple internships in writing.

"I'm a writer," she says. "A famous one, actually. Have you heard of 'Elephant'?"
I shake my head. "Now to the side," she says, as she pulls my right leg closer to the side of my chest and pushes down my left thigh with her knee. "Whew, this is a good workout for me too," she pauses to wipe her brow.

Then she goes on to tell me that she's been published under a pseudonym, JT Leroy. "It's performance art, they call it," she says. "I had my sister-in-law dressed in drag."

I switch legs and she helps me push my left leg into my chest now. So, she's a famous writer, I think, but I notice that I'm not flustered. Curious, but nonplussed.

"Actually, I was just thinking on my run about what it is to be a writer," I say. "I'm writing a story with my friend, and he started to recognize himself in my pieces and feel uncomfortable. He accused me of writing too directly about life, like it wasn't fiction, and I'm post-modern..."

She says that there was a whole scandal with the New York Times who accused her work of being fiction and incorrectly labeled. But she did grow up molested and went through an institution...

"There are no rules to fiction," she says, with the word "fuck" in there somewhere. Then she says, "It all funnels through you. Your soul flavors it."

It's her turn. She lays back down on the wall and I press my body into her, in the loving and violent act of pulling her leg to her face as she winces.

We exchange knowledge of stretches. I show her a partner stretch I know where one person sits with legs straight out while the other person lays back over them and grabs their heels. She really feels that one. She shows me how her trainer pulls her skull from the base of her neck and it feels simply amazing, and then she rubs my jaw and presses the pressure points of my hairline. I do the same to her, as she tells me more about books she's written and what she's working on and her son and her super German housemate named Uber.

When we're done and limber, she makes a call home. Most people, when they are about to get on their cell phone but they are still with someone in person, will say "Hold on" or "I'll see you later," or "Excuse me, one sec," but instead, this woman says, "Squat!"

I join her in bringing my feet together and crouching over my bent legs, while she calls home. "I'm at inspiration point getting inspired with a friend," she says over the phone, and then proceeds to make dinner plans. "Okay, in an hour, sounds great..." My breathing gets heavier and my legs start to feel like lead. My calves start to vibrate and my elbows feel stiff. Get me out of this squat, my legs squeal.

But I breathe and hang on. Then, still in the squat, she asks me for my phone number. She punches it in, and I eagerly await the last number so that we can get out of this squat. Finally, she has the last number punched. But, then she says she will call me and leave a missed call with her number. I wait, but then once it rings she lets it ring. Finally my voice mail picks up, and we wait through my voice message until the beep. Then, she starts singing, "Bum bum bum, bum bum bum bum. Hi! Bum, bum, bum... Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream... Ow. Okay. We're going to end this squat NOW."

I cackle. I have an eerie flash in the future of me hearing this moment from my phone some later moment in time. She briefly shows me pictures on her phone. Her ten year old son. Uber with a super wide grin. Grayscale pictures from a photo shoot last week for Playboy. Playboy?

"How does it feel to be in Playboy?" I ask.
"It's Playboy France," she qualifies.

Then we say our goodbyes, and she says we'll be in touch, and have a good run. I am off, my momentum rolling back down the hill, unraveling now from Inspiration Point.

I barreled my body on the couch. I don't know how to live outside of fiction.

On Jul 23, 2008, at 11:22 AM, Brad Oliver wrote:

Mel,

Seriously, though, your stories have been increasingly trending towards discussing and embellishing your own specific life experiences (especially current dramas) vis-a-vis fictionalizing vague references to your past experiences; I'm curious to know why this trend has led you here, to a point where your contribution read more like a cryptic personal message than it did a work of fiction, though to anyone besides myself, it would have read like an amazing piece of fiction...

Disclaimer: If my ego deceives me, and the person in reference is not myself, than disregard everything I just said.

"A post-modern journal, replaces the truth in a diary with something
truer…something truer than objective facts; a post-modern journal replaces dull facts with rich, intoxicating near-lies, or near-truths…"

Best,

-B

----------------------------------------------------------
"He caught me," she thought, as she read between the words in his email. She dilated her eyes at the screen for a moment and didn't breathe. Caught. This caught-feeling seized her, like when she was a little girl who had slapped her father, or when she stole her sister's sweater and then lied. She knew she did wrong, even though she prided herself as a person that has something right going on inside. So, caught, she takes a moment to scramble and sift through the pages of her mind.

And that's when she wonders, am I caught lying, or am I caught telling the truth? Does my face shiver and my cheeks flash and my mouth utter "uh" "but" "I'm just trying..." to excuse myself from my near-lies, or to duck from my outspoken expose trues, where all is relevant, disheveled and unshoveled with abandon?
He caught me, I thought, I am a shit writer. I'm not even a writer, just a liar or a notary.
Let me try writing fiction. It can only garnered by 2 means: (1) name mystical characters with dramatic plights, such as: "The devil went soaring over the hills to find the woman he would curse for the evening with his purple potion." or (2) be so random that it can't be followed, personifying inanimate objects and using verbs that aren't physically possible, such as: "The golfball went laughing down the hill, licking the blade of grass as it leapt, and burped right in the side of her face."

But I've probably lost you already, reader. Why should you care about me trying to be imaginative?
No. But life - like the way he tilted his head and squinted his eyes and said, "Naw, it's good," an hour ago - I could see it and feel it even though it was just his voice lighting up a corner inside my brain and body that recognized the way he moves when he says that phrase, and the way he looks back and blinks in a staccato to step back and listen and think.
What am I losing by being such a blatant liar? Am I so post-modern that I will kill my own life? Toying on the brink of reality, like a baby recklessly teeters on the sidewalk, where a dip of his feet will make him roadkill?

The caught-feeling unseized me. I started to surrender, so I could join its ranks and find out what it meant.
Life IS fiction, to me, I realized. My thoughts are in poetry, and people talk to me in quotes.
I don't know how to live outside of fiction. And as this realization came to me, my face unswelled. I barreled my body on the couch. Proud. Terrified. I don't know how to live outside of fiction.

"Should I scoop you?"

“Should I scoop you?” he asks. I say I am tired and he says maybe we should make it for tomorrow since he wants a lot of time with me and I am tired, but I say no, scoop me now, because there is a relaxed attention in his voice and I want that. I want to be there with that slumped on a couch.

And an hour later, he’s scooped me in his broken down Mazda and driven passed Lake Merritt and I am there, slumped in the navy blue couch, next to his relaxed attention. He pinches the dough on the side of my waist when we laugh. An alarm goes off in me, the animal alarm, that he has harkened the mating call. This doesn’t tickle me and instead I stay stiff and ignore it while I keep talking and laughing.

He takes out his rhyme book, a book with a commercialized Asian-buddhist cover and parchment paper with his scrawled lines. He leafs through and performs a few of his latest raps for me, each one preluded by a “Check it, yo-“ They are vague raps with limited vocabulary, all rhymes ending with simple vowels, even though my sleepy brain does slip delightedly into some of the staccato. One starts about “stare into your soul, it’s scary I know..” and then gets vaguely political about how the streets are rough. I ask him if he’s ever lived that and he says, yeah, wow, definitely- he was once living out of his car for 2 weeks.

I look at the clock and it is 11:30pm. I want to catch the last BART. He says I am welcome to sleep there but I say I am not good at, um, sleeping, um, in new places.

He unscoops me back at the BART station. He mentions what about tomorrow night, and I say yeah but I can’t make plans when I’m sleepy. I get out and I don’t even bother to give him the friendly hug over the gears and armrest and steering wheel. I cross my arms over my chest just because it’s 11:40pm even though it’s not cold.

Why didn’t I just have sex with him? I could have done it so easily. Just reached over and smashed my face into his, smashed his large hawkish nose and pressed the skin of my cheeks into his slightly porous, post-Acne marked cheekbones. I could have rubbed my hands along his waist and yanked up his baggy wanna-be gangsta jeans. I could have lightly brushed my fingers along his scrawny arms and poked off his wanna-be gangsta ring on his pinky. I could have looked for a moment into his sweet slitted brown eyes and wiped his forehead under his newly mowered bangs, and called him “baby.”

I could have filled up so hard and so fast with attention for him that I could have forgotten all thoughts of my emptiness and it would only be me, and Mark, and his inflated dreams of making music and selling his $1200 beat-up, smog-check-failing Mazda that he can only drive with the brights on. Me and Mark and his large angular nose. Me and Mark and his witty gangsta phrases and his sweet tinkled laugh at my jokes. We’re always squealing and laughing together, the energy spiraling up into a cavorkean havocing crescendo. But I’m afraid we’d get to a point where I’d be on my knees on top of him like a hyena. He’d be cowered and drooling under me. It’d be serious, him tender and yearning, me stabbing. And I’d laugh at him. I’d look straight at him without saying a joke, just drunk and slippery with sleepiness, and I’d cackle in his face, just to keep myself awake.

I think I hurt him last night, like a little bite, because I did not touch him, and because I looked at the clock at 11:30 and said time to go home. I hurt him with the bite of disappointment. But this hurt was also instead of the hurt of having sex with him just for the hell of it, just to fill the time of my cavernous and quaking, listless soul.

And then I come home to wake up and wonder how asexual I’ve become, and how all I could use is a good romp. How sterile and unbent my body is. I need to go to a circus class and throw my head under my pelvis and reach my crotch to the sky, let it catch some wind so maybe it can fly. Maybe I should have spent just one night in his bed, nibbled his ear, and pretended that he was the universe put together in one bicep.

Sneeze in the stairwell

I want to be efficient, I tell Mary Shelton.

She pats the space in between my shoulder blades and says, “No. Successful. You want to be successful. Janette’s on her 5th revision and she’s still sending me revisions. Efficiency is not an option.”

I go out for a lunch break. I do interviews for my article. When I get back, Dustin, the computer hacking genius with a flamboyant voice and a pretty mop of brown hair, guides me over to the side of the building and buzzes up so that I can load my bike into the stairwell, like a VIP, rather than keep it chained to the parking meter on the sidewalk like a deserted puppy dog.

Back in the office, I lurch around the computers. Before lunch I'd already finished my intern-ish task of retrieving data for a marketing report, so I am just here to finish up a perfunctory meeting with Dan. I have been avoiding him all week. He is going to teach me how to do a task that I do not want to do and have no intention of doing.

The other intern, Cheryl, asks me how I am feeling from behind her desk. I mozy over to her. I lean on her desk and sigh. But then she rustles in her seat and says something about "being productive" - a cue to not stay. I cannot dock ship in this harbor, must go back out to sea like the SS St. Louis.

But then, Dan says he is ready to teach me. The way he approaches me is like I am the Queen of Sheeba. I nearly collapse under his hairy potbelly.

Instead, I nod professionally. I say, “Thank you for your patience,” and he talks me through how to input data.

As he stands back and explains each item, that's when it starts to crack.

Something inside of me: yawns. Scrawls. Screeches. Screeching like a baby dinosaur just hatched out of its nest.

“You need to check that box, otherwise it will not go online, and it is also really important to note that the contact information is updated, and there are two columns for that,” Dan explains. The baby dinosaur is screeching.

I try to keep a straight face at him. I feel like I have to sneeze, but it isn’t a sneeze. It is a cry. Behind the façade of my straight eyeballs my eyes are watering.

Finally, Dan finishes. I heave a sigh and collect my belongings. In a daze, I go to the front exit.

“Did you finish this? I was just wondering if you-” Laurie, the front receptionist, holds up some papers.
I keep moving toward the door, as if pulled by a cane off the stage, my head turned back over my shoulder, as I wait for her to finish her unending sentence.

“Okay, sure.” I interject. Then I remember that my bike is not parked in the front so I have to exit through the back stairwell. This means passing Laurie again.

“Don’t have to walk away while someone is talking to you,” she snaps, “Show a little respect.”

“I got it,” I call back. I'm getting out of here! I open the back grey door, and I run down the stairwell in haste to get out of the building. I'm getting out of here! I'm going!

I get to the second to last step, where I completely deflate. My arms flail as I shatter on the step. It is hot and my backpack, yoga mat, and recording equipment swamp my torso. My face cringes into a grimace, and I collapse into a cry.

Nothing is the matter. I’m just sitting at the bottom of the stairwell, the crying erupting like uncontrollable sneezes.

I have no beacon of truth, no paramount moment of clarity, and I am severely sad for all paths that I cannot do at once.