about buying a customized poem

A young man, his long, damp-brown hair pulled behind his ears, sat curled over a spiral notebook at a little TV table set up along a high-foot-traffic area. I passed him on my walk to the drug store. He had posted a handmade sign: "custom poems."

 

But he is gathering his things when I pass him again on my way back. "Is it too late to get a poem?"

 

"No, it's not too late," he says, pausing, resetting the table. "What do you want the poem to be about?"

I look down. "How about—when you're about to see old friends after not having seen them in a long time."

 

"Ah. How long has it been?"

 

"At least 10 years."

 

"That's a long time. Okay." He sits down and goes to work. He should take his time, alone.

 

I step away and watch a family take pictures by the city's 20-foot Christmas tree, in front of its white lights' bright confidence in a January evening willing to forget that New Years happen and ever come.

 

Some 5 minutes later he stands, holding a page ripped from his notebook.

 

"Read it and let me know if it makes sense." I read. It's a poem written by a young man. "Does it make sense? Do you like it?"

 

"Yeah. It's good."

"Good. I'm glad you like it."

 

I hand him $10 and thank him. He appreciates it, he says.

 

I should have told him how I really feel about seeing old friends, how conflicted I am. But it's a poem by a young man.

 

a note about Ms. Kitty

 

One day in second grade, I learned we had a cat. Dad found her or got her for free somewhere, I guess. We called her Ms. Kitty because that was the name a vet put on the paperwork when she was vaccinated. She was mean as hell except to my dad and me. We could pet her and hold her, but nobody else could. She would nap on my bed or sleep on dad's newspapers. When she had kittens, she got even meaner. One day my older sister brought over a boyfriend and his big, dumb German Shepherd. Ms. Kitty ran right out the door to confront the dog on the back patio, springing, claws out. I still remember bright red blood dripping off the stunned dog's rubbery black nose.

 

a creative writing exercise on here

The sun blinks. The cells in this body never should have asked permission. The foreign bot-god could make another you to love the corpse you leave actually dead.

Things, special dead special things. God raising families of corpses night and day, rain or shine, until they negotiate mentally through oxygen and make a deal with the black angel.

Offer Satan my white horse and ask him, What is real? What made me and why? Buildings now ruins, people now dust.

Sign here and explode, angel. Leave the heir sterile living or dying. Promise to the black angel.

something about a David Sedaris best-of

The Best of Me is a David Sedaris best-of collection that was released in 2020—more than 25 years into his professional writing career. Sedaris supposedly picked out the essays himself. The publisher's copy claims Sedaris's "words bring more warmth than mockery, more fellow-feeling than derision." I think that is debatable. I probably should not have read this because doing so will lead me to skip ahead when I come across these essays in the other books.

Note: I've read and thoroughly enjoyed more Sedaris since drafting this.

something about the lunch table

One day, this kid at our high school lunch table, Patrick, started talking about a Geto Boys album, “Grip It! On That Other Level,” and about Bushwick Bill, one of the rap group’s members. Patrick had us laughing as he mimicked Bushwick—“Fawk ‘em up like a gawd-dāmm caw crash!” I went out and bought the album, which was already several years old, on cassette. Bushwick sounded just like Patrick said—“You gawd-dāmm parrents awe trippin’, gimme sum madat shet ya’ been sniffin’!” But the album was no joke, especially the Scarface-driven songs “Scarface” and “Life in the Fast Lane.”

 

(posts) two Eliot Smith lyrics that have bounced around my mind the last couple weeks

 

a poem from back on Flamingo

Knew they did
The sharp broken sun
by yawning shadow of the valley would hide
their very soul

Rested there and waited
Fawning
O'er one another
Lusted and seeming to grow
Multiply, and all the while unseen

'Til rushing came the score
A thrust from the belly
When felt was the rumble
he cried "Let loose your bowels!"

And loosed the unloosened promise
burned through the ranks
living, in the Sodom of the land's silhouette.

about Richard Yates’ “Disturbing the Peace”

Richard Yates debuted in 1961 with Revolutionary Road. Critics would say that was his peak, although his short stories in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) and his fourth novel, The Easter Parade (1976), both drew high praise—much of it posthumously.

I first read The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (2004), then The Easter Parade, and then Revolutionary Road. I loved it all and thought some of his short stories equaled Revolutionary Road. But I had been wanting more, so I started with Disturbing the Peace, published in 1975.

Disturbing the Peace dramatizes a suburban middle-class man’s breakdown.

John Wilder works in advertising sales for a magazine. He drinks a lot—too much—and early in the novel finds himself locked in a psychiatric ward over the long Labor Day weekend—a traumatizing experience. He tries to resume life after his release while also regularly visiting a psychiatrist and attending AA meetings. But alcohol abuse soon resumes its place in his life, and AA meetings become cover for frequent rendezvous with his mistress and escapes from his wife and son. He continues drinking even while on powerful prescription medication.

Critics did not care for the novel, and I had my doubts in the first quarter of it or so, but I read on and was rewarded. (I read the rest of Yates's works after this.)

My favorite excerpt from Disturbing the Peace comes after Wilder has reestablished his life but starts spending most evenings drinking and sleeping with his mistress across town. After some months, Wilder’s neglected wife forces him to spend an evening with her in a coffee shop, where she breaks the news that the school guidance counselor has singled out their son.

“He said—oh, John, he said Tommy’s emotionally disturbed and he thinks we ought to have him see a psychiatrist. Right away.”

Wilder had learned once, in some elementary science course either at Grace Church or at Yale, that the reason for a retractable scrotum in all male mammals is to protect the reproductory organs in hazardous or distressful situations: sharp blades of jungle grass, say, will brush against a running animal’s thighs, and the testicles will automatically withdraw to the base of the trunk. He wasn’t sure if he had it right—did he have anything right that he’d ever learned in school?—but the basic idea seemed sound, and in any case it was happening to him now: his balls were rising, right there in the coffee shop.

Note: I read a Delta trade paperback reissue I bought on Amazon. It had a couple of minor typos and flaws but was fine.

about a connecting flight

A beautiful woman sat in the aisle seat, row 6, and I took the window. More passengers filed in, and then a man took the middle seat. He wanted to sit by her. The plane was full of conversation minutes after takeoff. The man and woman talked. They talked the whole flight. I caught bits and pieces of what he said, but nothing she said. He told some stories. One was about a time he cashed a check at a bank drive-through but at home discovered the teller gave him too much money, which he reported. What a guy: honest and so secure that he doesn't even count money when it is given to him.

 

His smothered, gentle laughs, his quiet applause at her jokes, and the sun streaming through the window onto the pages of my book—it all felt so good.