Traveling to Xanadu
02 December 2011 07:30 AM Categories: Writing prompts
On the days when you need something more (during the crisis, during the rise to a fall, the aftermath of the inevitable ill-advised move: thank you, ladies), you can hire one of them out to talk to you, to hold your hand over coffee or – even better – over a night of alcohol and tears. This is how it used to be, back when you knew more women, back when you were all free to talk and sleep in and worry yourselves about men and the future.
The women remember, too, though some of them are less prepared than others. The unprepared don’t know your back story, they come straight from another person’s narrative. They’re here for the break, for the thrill, for a night off with the teetering headcase from an off-kilter world. They want to blur the lines with you, to break out of the narrative arc. Others, the weathered women, the ones who started this thing with you back in the seventies and eighties, when you all had plump cheeks and bellbottoms and (later) shoulder pads (before the days of knits: this was the time of paisley and snaps and high-waisted pants, of hair that hung over foreheads in threatening swoops), they get it, they understand your story and sometimes you get to hear theirs, because they have authors, too, a whole separate life lived in a fictional landscape.
From the prompt "Where I want to go," dedicated to the psychiatrist who prescribes my antidepressants who advised me recently that I need more female friends. Umm, yeah? They are out there, but I don't talk to or see them often enough. I guess I should be grateful for Nora, the girl dog in my life.
More no-sleep, more kid-sickness. The poor boy had his traditional sickness puke in the middle of the night. I hate when he is sick and miserable, both for the way he feels (I can do so little about it and I always worry that it is something major, some terrible illness) and for the way life gets compressed.
Finally, from wikipedia on Xanadu, relevant to the time of high-waisted pants and shoulder pads, on the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song "Welcome to the Pleasuredome": In their debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome which rocketed to rank one in the UK charts in its very first week in 1984, Frankie Goes to Hollywood referred to the poem in the title track. While they changed the poem's starting line In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure-dome decree to In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A pleasure-dome erect, they delivered an atmospheric video that interwove contemporary mid-80ies youth culture with elements of a fictious Xanadu themepark. This is appropos of nothing but the associations of my tired mind, plus (as a survivor of mid-80s youth culture) I like the video description.
Image by Athena.
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