My idea of recklessness has gone downhill – recklessly
Today I am switching tenses in a story and I feel brave, daring, and reckless as I drag my characters, screaming, out of the past and into the present. So you can see what has become of me, motherfuckers, me who used to say YES! to everything, cross my fingers as a preventative measure, fall in love and never fall out
There’s something stabby and urgent and harshly beautiful about present tense. But my story buckles in places so I have to go in and sort of drag it screaming from then to now and in doing so I have to leave some parts behind because there will always be casualties, which is why I keep first drafts of everything forever.
Being we were is so yesterday these days
I bought an EQ3 chair maybe ten years ago and it’s shaped like a dentist chair. It’s red like a pomegranate and heavy and soft and sexy and although I like to look at it, I’ve never sat in it for more than a few seconds, until yesterday, and Now it’s Mine and I have put it in Charlie’s old bedroom, also pomegranate, which I have sort of emptied or at least stacked and it’s my new workspace, and also for yoga. It’s a very colourful and warm and happy room, the carpet is forest green, my yoga mat is purple, and the assorted junk is just fine. Sometimes when I feel like being in the thicker of things, I take my laptop, swipe a clean spot, and sit at the dining room table again, like I’ve been doing since March, but there’s nothing like a room of one’s own, Virginia.
It rained all day yesterday which it hasn’t done in a long time, since March at least, because not a day of working from home has gone by when I didn’t take Daisy for at least two nice long dry hikes
Part of dragging my story into the now involved a trip to the neighbourhood of my childhood and that’s what I did yesterday morning. Without really thinking about it. The idea came to me and I just sort of grabbed my keys and went. I parked on my old street. This part’s weird, but one of the houses seemed to have flopped and it was an important house. I wrote a quick email to my friend when I got back home, the girl who lived in that house, and it’s probably best if I just repeat it here because it was urgent and I can’t recreate the urgent because it’s not anymore because I’ve already fictionalized it but here’s what I said:
I just got back from a walk in the old neighbourhood, in the rain, like a crazy person. I parked in front of the Creighton's, but on the other side, walked up the black path to "the bench" which is no longer there, and along the path to the school. It was all so small. Then I took that other little path to Somerale, to the white path and back to Regency, up to our houses and around the block that way. Aside from everything being so small and close together, I noticed a big lack of colour. Nothing cheerful anymore. I missed your red garage door and the bright blue of the Creighton's. Walked past the Dee's, which never seemed lived-in to me, wondered if they somehow still lived there because it's got the same weird stillness, but then I saw some plastic slides in the back yard so I guess they have "moved on" whatever that means…
And then I present tensed it and put in in the story like so:
I don’t park in front of my house or Elouise’s, and I walk in the opposite direction of our houses, down the black path leading to the school and someone, it seems, has tampered with this because the path is shorter, the fields smaller. It is raining again and I walk like a lunatic, saying the family names out loud as I pass the old houses, through the old ghosts. Finally, I come to Elouise’s house which feels weirdly backward, as if part of its evolution was to flop, and the big garage, formerly red, appears for a beat to be on the wrong side…
I didn’t tell my friend, whose name is not Elouise, about her house flipping because too weird. I like to let the too weird shit fester a while before I put it down.
It’s 9 am now. Almost time to sign in work and take Daisy on our first hike, which I do simultaneously, unless I work with you.
So if you see somebody motoring along a muddy path with a motoring white dog it’s either me or not me.
Here’s a post walk bit for people who aren’t writers and must be bored to death, but if you made it this far, motherfuckers, your schedule must be pretty fucking thin
So I am watching Breaking Bad again and I wish that I was Jessie’s girl so hard that I think like him, as evidenced by my response to the nice dog-walker lady I see on repeat, and once again just social distanced from like a fucking blow leg, nice one spellcheck, a fucking bow leg.
nice lady baby-talking to Daisy who skulks right the fuck past her: I’ll win you over some day
me, also skulking: Not until you win ME over… bitch
I don’t actually say it but I think it
And you should see what else we saw. Holyfuckingshit I said to Daisy and she said it right back in a sort of awestruck whisper. A cloud tree. The sky was blueblue except for a single tuft of Einstein-hair and it was positioned just so, behind the branches of an empty tree.
