Learning to sit still and write

I learned a long time ago that newspaper stories don't always flow like wordy liquid from the fingertips.

The process is usually ... how I do I put it?

Painful.

As a 16-year-old cub reporter (or as my first editor called me, "a stringer") I would drive home after covering three-hour town board meetings in a rural town where the council members' various concerns included accidental or deliberate manure seepage by farmers driving their tractors up village roads.

I had to summon an army of self-disciplined brain cells to write about this stuff. When I'd return from these meetings, I typically had two days to produce a story, which I understand is a virtual god-send for daily newspaper reporters.

(I've always written for weeklies. I still haven't decided if it's because I'm too slow or too intimidated by the pace. I think it's the latter. Daily newspaper reporters, if they're lucky enough to still have jobs, can't afford to lollygag. I have a good friend who works at a daily newspaper in Southwest Florida, who often returns to the newsroom after beastly city commission meetings, and busts ass on a story until midnight with his editor lurking over his shoulder, insisting he call a source who just a week ago announced at a planning board meeting that all reporters are lousy muckrakers hellbent on manipulating quotes.)

So, yes. I write for weeklies. To motivate myself I often set Reese's Cups beside the computer. For every 300 words written, I get one Reese's Cup. Depending on the length of the story it's possible that I've consumed an entire 8-pack of Reese's in just one afternoon.

It's a motivation/reward system.

Back when I still worked in a newsroom, before I started doing this job from home, I would reward myself with several vodka cranberry cocktails at a bar down the road, where a guy named Nick played Spanish love songs on a small guitar.

The motivation/reward system is precarious. Over the years, I've repeatedly failed to achieve many of my personal deadlines, which means I've plodded back to the kitchen with handfuls of uneaten Reese's, pissed off at my lack of ambition, or even worse, my propensity to procrastinate.

I knew I was a glutton for punishment when my high school newspaper internship turned into a reporter gig that lasted an excruciatingly gratifying three years.

Things I used to do the day after town board meetings to avoid pumping out 500 words on the board's decision to turn down the construction of a telecommunications tower:

1. Walk to the bathroom and put on my mother's red lipstick. Wipe it off with toilet paper. Reapply. Wipe it off again.
2. Perform handstands against my closet door.
3. Call my friend Ro and gossip about nonsense.
4. Eat dinner with my family extra slowly, impersonating a councilwoman whose voice sounded like Lily Tomlin sucking tennis balls through a vacuum cleaner.
5. Tear out useless notes, crumple them into balls and chuck them at my sister Heelya, whom I shared a room with.
6. Sign onto AOL and submit poetry to writers' Web sites.
7. Re-read dogeared pages from Alice in Wonderland and type sentences only the Mad Hatter would say.
8. Hold down the fast-forward button on my hand-held tape recorder, amused by how council members sound less irritating as chipmunks.
9. Do homework.
10. Daydream about becoming a marine biologist.

Ten years later very little has changed, except of course that I've fine-tuned my motivation/reward system.

Yesterday after finishing a story on deadline, I rewarded myself with an Adirondack chair.

When Joe and I first moved into our house, we pedaled our bikes on a cobblestone roundabout, where we passed a small house with one Adirondack chair in the front yard with a sign tacked to it that read: ADIRONDACK CHAIRS FOR SALE. CALL ###.

I made Joe memorize the phone number and when we got home I jotted it down on a piece of cardboard torn from an empty case of Pepsi. I decided when I was ready to jazz up the front yard, I'd call and purchase a proper chair from a craftsman in my neighborhood.

Yesterday, while blundering through a halfway interesting lede for a mostly boring story, I decided to fish through the kitchen junk drawer for the chairmaker's phone number. When I called it, an old guy named Ernie answered in a Long Island accent.

"Hey there," I said. "Do you sell Adirondack chairs?"

"Sure do," he said.

"You make 'em yourself?"

"Yes m'am. I got two right now. One made out of cypress. One made out of cedar."

(When he said cedar, he sounded like seeda. Oh, downstaters!)

"How much you selling them for?"

"Ninety-nine bucks."

"Listen," I said. "I'm on deadline trying to finish a story. As soon as I crank it out, I'll be over."

At 5:30 I headed over with $125. I wanted a table too and Ernie had suggested he had other bits and pieces of furniture for sale.

When I got to his house, eight blocks away from mine, I knocked on his front door and heard a woman say, "Ernie! We have company."

Ernie opened the door, shook my hand, and took me to his back porch, where he told me how he makes his chairs using plans designed by some Bob Vila-type guy on PBS, and how he purchases his wood from a guy who lives in the sticks an hour outside of St. Pete, and how cypress is insect-repellent and how he and his wife are going on a cruise next week through the Panama Canal.

"You know much about the Panama Canal?" Ernie asked.

"Not really," I said.

"Ya know 27,000 men died building the Panama Canal."

"Really?"

"Yellow fever and malaria. They didn't know about mosquitas then."

"27,000 men. Jesus."

"I know," said Ernie, wringing his head. "The French tried to build it in the 1800s, but after so many men died they gave up on it and Teddy Roosevelt stepped in and finished the job."

"Wow, and now we motor up and down it in luxury cruise liners."

Ernie smiled and hoisted a cypress Adirondack chair into my trunk.

"Do you have a little table I can set beside it?" I asked.

"Sure do," he said, pointing to a crude plywood table by his garage with a dusty flower pot on top. "I'll sell it to you for 25 bucks."

"How about $15?"

He paused for a second, reached for the flower pot and said, "Ahh, alright," tying the table to the Adirondack chair with a piece of twine and fastening my trunk shut with a bungee cord.

"Where do you live?" He asked.

"30th and 2nd Street," I said.

"Ah. The center of the universe."

"Yeah!" I said, reaching into my wallet for cash.

"'$114," he said.

I handed him $115 and told him to keep the buck.

He thanked me, tugged on the twine and the bungee cords and declared the rigging safe for at least 10 blocks.

"I tell ya what I do in my Adirondack chair," he said. "I get me a cold drink and I set it on the arm rests, then I lay back with my feet out in front of me and I think to myself, life is great and I've got no complaints."

--
PS. I tried to write this post from the Adirondack chair, but it's too bright in my front yard. Must build porch!

On seeing butterfly nets.

There's this fantastic theory, this conceptual theory first suggested by psychologist Carl Jung, called synchronicity that surrounds my every move. 

It is the idea that a collective unconscious pulls random things - ideas, names, events, places - from whoknowswhere and plants them in your head only to have you happen upon them later. Whether later means 15 minutes or 15 years, is as Einstein would say, completely relative. 

All you need to know to understand synchronicity is that coincidences are meaningful.

A few years ago when I was out shopping for a religion I came upon Jung's theory. I naturally gravitated toward synchronicity as I was raised to believe in similar faiths such as Shit Happens and It All Comes Out in the Wash, the likes of which my father preached daily.

Synchronicity is the natural evolution of these two theories, less crude and with the right amount of Faith and Magic, which we all know is the same witchcraft anyway. I fell for synchronicity on the spot. I figured if Carl Jung was a fan of Lewis Carroll than I was a fan of Carl Jung. 

It is also important to note that around this time I also learned I could control my dreams. Not in the sense of willing myself to dream certain things, but in the sense of taking control of my dreams while having them. For example, once while sleeping over at my Oma's house, I dreamt that a man walked through Oma's sliding glass door and held a gun to my head. 

I was scared at first. Guns to your head will do that, even in dreams. And so I screamed. I was sleeping next to my Japanese exchange student Yuuki, and according to her I screamed pretty loud and then zonked back to sleep. What happened next I can only explain in the way out-of-body-experienced folks talk about death on the operating table, except of course instead of watching myself die I was watching myself dream. 

Floating out of my dream, I hovered close to my sleeping head and peered down at my nightmaring self. I was asleep on Oma's pullout couch, asleep in an old folks community on the Gulf Coast of Florida. The only thing pointed at my head was a snoring pug. Fat, content and puffing like a diesel engine. 

Well I'll be damned, I snorted and then I slipped back into dreaming armed with newfound power.

The gunman was still there, still standing with a gun at my head as if the dream had been on pause.

"Pull the trigger," I taunted him. "Won't make a lick of a difference."

I have no idea if he actually did. All I can remember is feeling like I was let in on something, like the first time I was told the sky wasn't blue, that my brain just makes it that way by processing scattered light.  

Once I understand that, the sky could be neon green if I wanted. 

...

Anyway, back to why I brought up synchronicity ...

This vacation has been one big bowl of collective unconscious, a series of synchronic flashes that all began with a butterfly net about a month ago, around the same time my sister PK moved to Florida.

Joe and I were walking the pug down 3rd Street in St. Pete when we both remarked that the 10-year-old boy across the street from our apartment catching butterflies in a long handled net was so ... Leave it to Beaver that why of course we'd have to purchase a home in Old Northeast, the quaintest hood in town.

From that point on butterfly nets kept popping up. About a week ago I watched someone on I-275 near the exit for Tropicana Stadium pass me going 85 mph with a giant butterfly net half hanging out of their passenger door. A butterfly net dragging along the interstate at 85 mph! The dragging sounded like a chain saw running out of gas. It was impossible to miss even if you weren't in the business of looking for butterfly nets. 

There were other net incidents too of course, but I won't bore you. Suffice it to say that when I got to St. George Island last week I walked into the island's lone convenient store, noticed a big box of butterfly nets for sale at the counter and figured perhaps it was butterfly hunting season in Florida. 

While on vacay I finished reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, an amazing memoir that everyone should read, and then upon thinking of my next read I thought: Ugh, I hope I don't pick up one of those poor, pitiful divorced thirty-something works of fiction that usually start with the female protagonist sulking around her house in her ex-husband's white button-down shirt. 

And then two days ago Joe and I drove up to Tallahassee, walked into Borders to find new books and on the first page of the first book I selected was a sentence describing some trifling thirty-something woman pondering love in her ex-husband's button-down shirt. 

Around this time I remembered a book I bought years ago from a used bookstore in Port Colborne, Canada, a tiny Lake Erie fishing village my family ended up stranded in when the transmission failed in our antique Chris Craft boat. I wandered this port town for hours looking for bookstores. I eventually found one and ended up with several books, all of which I read during our shipwrecked time in Port Colborne save for one collection of short stories - Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter. 

So I wonder, on the car ride to Tallahassee, how come I never read Burning Your Boats? Was it because I was only 17 and fancied Salman Rushdie's introduction to the book arrogant? 

Back in the bookstore I shelve the story of the divorcee in the white button-down and begin randomly scanning the store again. I shuffle to another part of the store, pull a title at random and kazaam ... it's Angela Carter's Burning Your Boats. I lose my shit and move on to a book by Pam Houston, whom I had the pleasure of meeting last month at a writer's conference in Boulder, Colo.

OK, so I'm on to something with books and butterfly nets. No big deal, eh?

The next morning Joe and I turn on the Today Show, because we're on vacation and all about morning TV and intravenous coffee. 

He comments on Al Roker, whether or not Roker is a freak of nature or something along those lines and I say, "I used to work with a woman at the newspaper who's good friends with Al Roker. She flew to New York for Roker's wedding. Her husband sings all that Trop Rock Jimmy Buffett crap and Roker is a parrothead. They met him in the Cayman Islands back when he was fat." 

That night, Joe and I drive down to the convenient store - the same joint selling butterfly nets - and on my way out the door I grab the local newspaper, The Oyster. I turn the front page over and there he is, on the second page, my old coworker's husband the Trop Rock singer, headlining some sort of Oyster Spat Festival on St. George Island.

"Get out of town with this freaking synchronicity!" I cry.

So this morning I sat down to write this post and as I did Joe walked past me at the computer and said, "Hey I updated your computer. All those system updates started piling up."

I said, "When my sister did that her hard drive crashed. That's why I ignore them."

And he said, "System updates won't cause your hard drive to crash. If that happened it was a coincidence."

A coincidence! Are you kidding me? I re-read the beginning of this post, paused and narrowed my eyes into distrustful slants. The word I had just typed was coincidence. 

Egads! What does it all mean?!

..

 

PS. The Alice illustration at the top of this post is by Stephanie Fizer. I love her work. I love that she like to eat pickles and lives in West Virginia with her boyfriend. I love that she compulsively makes lists. I love that she's a vegetarian who hates meat more because of the texture and less because of animal cruelty.