George "Knobby" Michael?

You can try to get to this blog directly by searching on just my first and last names, but Google won't send you here. Despite the fact that writing to survive is mine and I have the metadata to prove it, most people who are looking for Jennifer Lastname arrive by way of my guest post at La Belette Rouge or via PublicLiterature.Org. At least Bing puts writing to survive on the first page of results when you search for my name. But the blog itself doesn't have enough Internet power or back links or whatever it takes to convince most search engines that it's mine.

Some people who end up here via Google or Yahoo are looking for information on myelofibrosis. Although I did write a post about Kevin's death from the disease, I want you to know that his ending was dramatic. Atypical. He lived almost ten years after his diagnosis, which is also very unusual for someone who was diagnosed relatively young. Kevin was waiting for a stem cell transplant when things fell apart, which may have saved him, but might have hastened his death, too, if it hadn't been too late anyway. Every time someone lands here looking for information on the disease I feel guilty, since the ending of his story was so idiosyncratic and terrible. It's not like this for everyone. It isn't, really. There's hope.

But at least these searches make some sense, are tied to a particular name or a disease that I discuss in a bit of detail. And the searches for writing prompts or writing to survive have led people to the right place, though I think that the person searching for writing prompt using a toaster really needs to visit one of koe's blogs. Based on the keywords, however, a lot of you who end up here through an Internet search leave disappointed. Writing to survive is a friendly place. I want to answer your questions, want to give you what you seek, so once again, I will attempt to provide clarity, to transmit information.

Yes, this is not a squirrel blog.

Perhaps you were looking for birching stories, or variations on the theme (victorian birching stories, birch corporal punishment, bad boys birching stories). Or you were looking for information -- or something else -- about drunken teenage hookups. One person arrived by searching on the domain name submissivelouise.com. There are no birching stories here, though I did once mention a neighbor's birch tree, and while I took part in more than one drunken teenage hookup back when I was a drunken teenager, I don't tend to write about such things, at least not in the way you might hope. As for submissive Louise, I wrote a brief post about a dog with that name who was not the dominant type.

Some searches are from people looking for answers to matter-of-fact questions: Why is George Michael's nickname Knobby? (Beats me.) Can stork bites spread? (Not the birthmark variety.) How do puffins survive in the cold? (Sweaters and booties.) Can one survive on writing? (Not alone.)

Other queries get me wondering: How did Duran Duran's John Taylor cut his foot in 1984? Was he badly hurt? Was the search on an interesting story about me is i was 8 i was trapped inside of a burning building. it was about 2:00 a.m. when my father smelled smoke in the kitchen a misplaced copy and paste or was this person hoping that someone else in the Interlands had written about his or her private life story? Who "gestures and halts and falls"?

Footsie, neighbor?

I can tell you the good and bad about xylitol. Bad: it can kill your dog, though our dog survived her small exposure. Good: it is low in calories and oh so sweet. Will it make your gerbil listless and cold? Perhaps. But I don't know a thing about xylitol squirrels and this is definitely not a squirrel blog (Or a blog about autodidacticism).

Google leads you here, seekers of information. You are hungry for stories, for hard facts, for the light of knowledge. But once you get here, do you stay? Do you note the address and come back and visit from time to time? Not necessarily. I need better keywords, need to provide the right breadcrumb trail. I need better search engine optimization.

I need clarity.



Confidential to I'm in love with a childhood friend: Most of us have all been through it. Examine your feelings and figure out what's really going on. If it is really love, fess up and get it over with. Good things may happen. Maybe you can become footsie neighbors, or at the very least, you can move on with your life.

Squirrel image from here.

Foot image from here.

Tags: stork bites, puffins, Google, search engines, search strategies, SEO, search engine optimization, the half-life of linoleum, xylitol and dogs, Squirrels, 80s music, keywords, myelofibrosis, La Belette Rouge, Bing

To scrape your memory clean, you need only a handful of pills washed down with gin. You need a good wallop to the head, a fall on Mexican tile or sharp granite. You need to take the prescribed dose of anti-malarial medication before the trip to the tropics. The combination of drug and sun and strange circumstance will have the desired effect, the wake-up in a stranger’s room, the philosophical conversation in a bar strangely devoid of smoke, you speaking in tongues, memory gone.

But without my memory I am nothing. There is no story, no me. You could tell me about my life and I would smile and nod, sometimes gasp. Maybe I wouldn’t believe parts of it, just like I don’t believe the stories you tell about yourself, about first grade and that teacher with the wheedling fingers. He cornered you in the empty classroom and you knew something was wrong and then you let it happen again and again. OK. I can believe it. Maybe it happened; you wouldn't be the first. But the one about your mother, her fingertips coated in lotion, rubbing your bare chest as she tried to erase your budding breasts? The chair was cold, her hands were warm. You were obedient, pulled between pleasure and confusion.

Are you sure that you're not confused now?

I don’t need my memory to tell me that I am a skeptic. It's built-in, a defense mechanism, maybe, or just hardwired into me. So you could tell me about my life, the room done up in pale pink, my chenille bedspread soft against my cheek. You say he came in through the window after I went to sleep and the image is so surreal it could be fantasy, the fluttering curtains, the dark shadow of stubble on his familiar cheeks. And then, seven months later, in the same room, the push and shove of labor and my mother screaming. The silent bloody bundle that neither of us knew what to do with.

Or you could lean across the table and tell me my secret, say that I let him in, did nothing to prevent it. The curtains didn't billow: the windows were closed. I unlocked the door and held out my hand for his. You could cup your hands and whisper, "Some girls get the ending they deserve."

No.

You could tell me and I would be polite about it, would raise my eyebrows in mock surprise, but inside I would fold your stories on top of themselves, like the handkerchiefs I wash and fold for my husband. I would make them smaller and smaller. I would compress them and leave them on the table for someone else to put away.



Prompt: In the blink of an eye (heavily edited from the original and then avoided for a few weeks).

Image: Chair outside the Little House, Fall 1986.

Tags: memory block, guilt, child abuse, self-blame, child neglect, suppressed memories

Tanning butter. Warm sun, a plunge into comfortable water, like being in the womb, no difference between you and what surrounds you. Afternoon nap in a hammock with your hair giving off a touch of chlorine. Dinner by candlelight, light ocean breezes flickering the flame. The fish on your plate stares back at you with a dulled eye. Fish never tasted so sweet.

Creamy potatoes with a layer of crunch. Haricots verts steamed and tossed with sesame oil and ginger. You tap the skin on the crème brulee into shards, take a deep drink of Sauternes.

In the dark he comes to you, smooth muscles, breath underwritten by cigarettes and mints. It isn’t a surprise. It isn’t expected. It just is. You accept the gift, a kind of reawakening, the necklace of kisses, his rough voice, the burn of an unshaven cheek. You interlace fingers and he speaks of your beauty, your irresistibility, how you taste like papaya. He has been watching you all week.

Morning brings an empty bed, a freshly-plumped pillow, a trio of hairs tangled on the sheet. In the shower you sigh. Remember. Anticipation only lives once.



(Soundtrack: La vie en rose, sung by Yves Montand.)
Image by besia.
From a prompt: Just imagine.

Tags: escape, haricots verts, creme brulee, writing prompt, why do I keep mentioning cigarettes when I haven't smoked since I was fifteen?, Round Robin

Stained

I want a cylindrical room made of factory glass, the door a piece of carved mahogany salvaged from the She-Wolf, Lord's old boat, the one that is sitting on a trailer in the backyard, the hitch supported by a stack of cinderblocks. Against the cool glass, set into block, the mahogany will seem rustic, warm to the touch. I will rub my hand against it before I enter the room, think of the times we went waterskiing or just bobbed around in the muddy waters of the Elk, my wet ass spreading a dark stain on the boat seat.

Even then that boat was a piece of shit. Lord wasn’t paying attention to it. He let it sit in the water all winter long. The varnish wore off, the gleam melted away. Every year he bought cans of teak oil, stacked them in the shed, and let them sit. Barnacles coated the She-Wolf's hull. They were rough against my hand, cut into my feet as I pushed against the boat into the heavy water.

So, the room. It is lit from within, white light/white heat. Even the ceiling is made of factory glass. The floor, too. It is empty. I will go inside, lock the door, and remove my clothes. I will press myself up against the glass. See if you can tell me what you are looking at, my blurry image refracted in each square. I will light a cigarette, will snuff it out on the rounded wall, again and again. You will see flesh, the death of ember, the end of the spark.

Lord is dead now, too, washed away, though not in the way you would expect. It had nothing to do with water. It was emotion. The dike broke, his water wings deflated, a big hole opened in his roof and the house filled with rain. You want me to tell you about it, to be more direct, but I won’t. I have his boat and my plan. Every weekend I sand down the mahogany, try to remove the stains, think about my cylindrical factory glass room. I picture Lord on the other side, horn-rims slipping off his nose, one hand marking his place in the book. I mystify him and he likes that.

Image by Vinje.

Tags: Round Robin, boats, writing prompt, sick kid, writing, existential angst

The pavement was slick and there were potholes and too many trees by the side of the winding road. The first to go were two juniors who were cutting school, doing what teenage boys do, driving too fast, maybe drinking or passing a bowl while the tires screeched and the car fishtailed. They ended up upside down in the creek that snaked by the road. They died. There were others in high school who died in car accidents, too, though at this point I mainly remember the names of the survivors (thanks, Facebook, with your updated images of people from the past).

Since my grandmother died, I’ve developed a strong sense of mortality, of my own, of other peoples’, of the various cats and dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes it hits me more than others, generally when I’m feeling low and isolated, when the sun hasn’t been out in weeks. It doesn't help that I've been spending an hour or two a day writing out the details of illness and death for my novel manuscript. And I’ll have dreams about these people, the dead from high school, usually as represented by David Anderson, the last one to die, the one who made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the time the book was printed.

There are other “deads” as my son calls them, like Carolin, a friend from college who had some sort of birth defect that we never discussed. She’s been gone for seventeen years, sometimes still visits me in my dream version of our college dorm. My grandfather shows up less and less now as I deal with the past, though I am sometimes reminded of how much there is to deal with (another nod to Facebook, where people who knew me peripherally during one of the darkest times in my life show up, and I remember just how bad it was and I want to die with the memory).

As I was wrestling again with that long-ago past, something that I keep thinking should be a “dead” itself at this point, as I was having a good cry after washing the dishes Thursday night, Nora, our Russian squirrel hound, came clicking into the kitchen. She likes to comfort the sad and inexplicably lonely, especially if it involves a pat or two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest and was struck again with memory. There I was, ten years old, in what used to be my grandmother’s room, petting Greta the miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur was warm and soft. She groaned as I scratched behind her ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't stop." At the time, I was struck with the exquisite transience of it all, the way a heart stops and the lungs give out, the vulnerability of our soft bodies and delicate skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams into a tree and then into you. You ignore the deep cough until it is too late. No matter the trajectory of the story, we all know how it ends.

Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when I was in seventh grade, about six months after we left my grandfather's house for Wilmington. He let her out when he was getting the mail. As he limped to the mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard. She was halfway across the street when a car came tearing past and knocked her into a ditch. Either the driver didn't see her or didn't care to stop and my grandfather caught only a glimpse of the car's tail lights. It was the violent conclusion of Greta's brief story.

I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora, and added up the dead. I felt their hands in mine, the touch of a gentle paw, the sound of a meow. Greta and I sat together in the dusty sunlight, her eyes brown and serious, her heartbeat strong. Sidney played a game of capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under the door. Louise curled up on the dining room table, a dog pretending to be a cat. I brushed against a boy in a hallway as he ran by, late for class. And my grandmother croaked out "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" while I giggled from the swing that hung from the maple tree. Even the tree is gone now, but like the rest it exists in my memory, in the stories I tell.

I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the moment, knowing I would think about it when she was gone. And the sweetness of it almost killed me.

Top photo by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon mistress and photographer extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week with us in 2003.

After writing this prompt and struggling with various versions of it for the blog, I got out my senior high school yearbook (theme: "A Unique Blend." I had forgotten that high school yearbooks had themes), just to check on some of the facts. There was David Anderson, still in with the living seniors, but at the front of the book was a dedication to three other people from our class who had died, two of them in car accidents: Pat O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and Joe Lombardino. There were others who died while I was at school, specifically those upperclassmen in the first paragraph of this post, though I could have some of my facts wrong about the accident. They died in the mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally monitored, before you could have a Facebook page even after death. The fact that there was no trace of these young men made me sad. It was almost as if they had never existed.

Tags: Facebook, Death, Pets, NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, school, car accidents, dying, grandfather, isolation, Round Robin, writing prompt

Here are the things I don't write about here:

My son's colds and coughs

Chores, like vacuuming up the fur, dust, and sand that accumulate pretty quickly in a house with three cats, a dog, and three humans

The laborious process of rewriting my novel (well, I may mention this in passing, but not in great detail, since that would send all of you to snoreland, but it is indeed laborious, like work-on-the same-three-paragraphs-for-six-or-seven-hours laborious)

The difficulty of writing something that is long-term, of continuing through it without the instant feedback of blogging

Cooking dinner whether I want to or not

How we're figuring out where the kid will go to school for kindergarten in the fall

Tips and tricks for keeping one's sanity after weeks of rain and afternoons inside with an energetic four-year-old

Coping mechanisms I use to see us through one of Mr. T's business trips

My political views

Natural disasters

The pros and cons of having another child

The perhaps impossibility of having another child

My anxieties about the quality of my writing and the wisdom of my current career choice

RIght now I'm stuck smack dab in the slog and drag of the humdrum. The novel is taking precedence over the blog and I don't feel like I have enough time to really shine up any of my short pieces of fiction for this space. I'm not sure that many people want to read the fiction anyway. It seems that most readers are interested in my personal pieces, either angst from the past or my depressive musings on current life. Not that my current stuff is all darkness, exactly, but I think my views are cloudier than the average person's, cloudy with a little patch of blue sky that expands as I examine it, which can make the whole process hopeful, I suppose, in a Jennifer Trinkle sort of way.

It feels as if my mind is preoccupied, that it is working on something. I just need a few hours with a keyboard to find out what it is. But who has the time? I'd rather work on the novel or maybe that just feels like the right thing to do right now, a necessity, a way to lose myself in words and justify my existence.

So I'm not sure what to put in this space at the moment, but I know my mind will crack open again and offer itself up for material. In the meantime, I may be posting more short writing prompts, or perhaps reposting some of the oldies but goodies. We'll see.

Image: Everyday me, as recorded by my computer.

Tags: blogging, writing, preoccupation, NaNoWriMo, preschooler, sick kid, school, National Novel Writing Month

I miss the tall ginkgos with their rotting fruits, the way the berries felt beneath my feet with just enough crunch, a pleasure to step on. The sidewalk was covered with ginkgo leaves, too, bright yellow fans dampened with the rain. A storm had come through the night before, had knocked the leaves off along with the fruit. The air was full of the smell of them, acrid, rotting, sweet.

We were lost and I was defensive about it, but if you were going to be lost, this was the neighborhood to be lost in. The street was tunneled in by wide brick rowhouses, voluptuous Victorians with turrets and whimsical windows accented with stone. Each house had a set of black iron steps, shiny and slick, one-two-three-four, up to the entry. The steps made little caves over doors to English basements, a term which conjures up mold and damp and a view of other peoples’ ankles, the angling of a dog’s leg as it releases a spray of urine against low iron window bars.

He got angry with me after I got angry with him and we had an embarrassing fight in front Martha, a hissy fit that revealed more than we intended. A tense moment with the map revealed my mistake and our luck: we were three blocks from Adams Morgan, a short walk to a few cold beers and a platter of Ethiopian food. The three of us marched from Swann Street to 18th Street, walked uphill against a thin wind. It was getting dark, people were bundled up against the cold. We walked without talking, single-file past the homeless, the crazies, the young people with their know-everything attitude. And then we shared a meal with all the awkwardness of something being over, knowing we had years to go before it would really end.

This is from a Round Robin prompt this week, my (slightly edited) response to a very different photograph.

Photo by Antediluvial.

Tags: gingko trees, autumn, exhusbands, writing prompt, Round Robin