life rx 1 apr 24
a thousand eyes turning blue
the eight of cups, and a passage from Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries: “I want sandals and some new clothes. I want simply to write my next book. I want the book to be amazing. I want to be able to afford to get haircuts, and to wear make-up and nice clothes. I want to be healthy, but then right away after thinking that, I had a cigarette and some wine. I want to be words in a book, and not even that so much.”
the aleatory
When people say you should “get a grip,” they don’t always specify what they think you should get a grip on. Technically, you could get a grip on anything.
So much of the world is actually neutral, impersonal, and good-natured, mysterious if only because it’s unable to explain itself.
I’m thinking, for some reason, of the fryer grease smell particular to those fast food establishments with the felt board menus and the generic yellow-white Pepsi signs and red pebbled glasses. There should be a picnic bench out back and a coffee tin filled with concrete holding a sun umbrella and there should be the smell of permanent fish fry and it should be summer. The crick water should be green and deep and stitched by mosquitoes. I’ve got a grip on that. It’s got a grip on me. I love how it is ugly and meaningless and I love how it is eternal. Any story I’ve ever written starts in that place, and consists of the things which happen to occur while I’m seeing it in my mind. Vincent’s Pizza Park. The Log Cabin. The Grill and Chill.
I’m thinking about it because it will not leave me alone.
the assignment
Be neutral, impersonal, good-natured, and mysterious. Be unable to explain yourself. Don’t even try.
writing prompt
Write a poem with a spine. Ask 20 people you know to finish the sentence: “I want xxxxyyyzz.” Put them all together. Good poem! (PS, this works really great on day one if you’re teaching how to write poems to a group of people who are intimidated by the idea.)
a chune
“Gone Daddy Gone” by the Violent Femmes
For reasons I still don’t understand, the Violent Femmes were the thing in my high school. It was a little bit after their time, though, and I’m not sure what social contagion made it so that everybody had to have a copy of the Add It Up compilation. Reality Bites had happened years before, but I guess we didn’t let it go. One of my friends taped the audio from Reality Bites off the TV and listened to it on a walkman, just the sound and no movie. Maybe it was that Milwaukee Death Trip vibe. I felt like they understood the nature of our rural abandon.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
“Gone Daddy Gone” by the Violent Femmes
Dear diary, I shoveled so much snow today. The hardest thing about shoveling snow, to me, is seeing how much of it is still there even after I’ve been heaving it off the shovel. I spend most of my time looking around at it all and just being like, WTF, I am in hell. So I came up with a new method: I count one two three four five shovels of snow, then I stand up and take a break for 15 seconds. Then I do five more shovels. God, the human brain is really just a series of pinwheels and trap doors. All I have to do to make things easy is count to five.