life rx 15 apr 24
how to get paid good money
the six of wands and an excerpt from Yelena Moskovich’s A Door Behind a Door:
“I TRIED MY BEST TO RAISE HIM TO BE A GOOD PERSON
No one was religious back then. Religion had stopped with my parents, rest their souls.
I never, never showed Dimochka a star with six points. All the stars we drew together had five points. Normal stars. Safe stars.”
the aleatory
Everybody should have, at some point, a job where you drive from one place to place trying to accomplish something. A job where you end up eating your sandwich in the driver’s seat, parked behind a strange church, watching a child throw a basketball violently at the sky. It is fun to be stuck somewhere, but for a reason. All the hells of America aren’t really hells if you’re on the clock and getting paid to drive around. Even the most stupid Subway in the most bleak Mon River Valley town with the most unsettling nuclear cooling towers—it’s a great place if you’re stopping for a cup of coffee. “Stopping for a cup of coffee.” Several pretend layers of memory and habit you can slip into at various depths. Do a Willy Loman. Do a Blues Brothers. It’s not quite an archetype, but in the same way children play, very seriously, as grocery clerks ringing up plastic salamis, you can play, very seriously, as the working stiff on the road. When I moved back to Pittsburgh, I got a job in environmental permitting at a large construction company in Robinson. “Environmental” not in the wholesome sense, more like in the sense that all day, I had to call people up and tell them, “Your environment is going to be disrupted by a major bridge reconstruction project, and you must permit it because you have no other choice.” In the brutalist building on Cliff Mine Road, I made phone calls for 8 hours a day telling people news that they didn’t like. But then, a problem: someone had to tell the Amish! Who would tell them? You couldn’t just call their transportation supervisor. So I went out in my little silver Elantra with a stack of photocopies and a list of counties to notify. In each one, I would drive around until I saw a bunch of rocking chairs for sale, or a roadside stand selling butter. And then I would ask whatever Amish people I could find which other Amish people I should find next, and write down their directions, and drive to the next place. I forget how long it lasted—maybe just a few weeks. But a few weeks is long enough for a facet of the persona to float to the surface and name itself. It was a terrible job, but for those weeks, they were paying me good money.
the assignment
At your job, pretend you are a child pretending to do whatever it is they pay you to do.
writing prompt
Pretend you are a child pretending to be an adult writing something.
a chune
“Kingdom Come” by Cindy Lee
If the CIA made a rock record specifically for me (why they would do this is anyone’s guess, although “anyone’s guess” seems like their style), it would be this one. If you triangulated girl group songwriting, the way Ray Davies tore up an amp with a knitting needle to get that sweet hissy Kinks sound, and the high-plains transmission of a roller rink and snack bar in the upper Midwest where the radio plays songs you’ve never heard before, Diamond Jubilee would be right in the middle, plus or minus a little Axelrod. Never you even mind that Cindy Lee is a drag persona. Rock*A*Teens fans, this is a goddamn red alert. You can only listen to it as a .WAV file downloaded directly from a Geocities site, or on YouTube, which makes it feel like a special secret the way hardly anything does anymore. Goddamn. Records like this make me want to be a better writer (meaning, make more stuff, be less scared). Pretty much the highest praise I have.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
A Door Behind a Door by Yelena Moskovich
Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee
Dear diary, why do you think some people move around the furniture in an Airbnb? There’s nothing wrong with it, I guess, and I always feel like it shouldn’t annoy me, but it does. Like … you had to move the bed two inches to the left? Had to do it, huh? Had to put that stool upstairs? Had to put the Brita pitcher away in a dark cabinet, as if it had said something sexy to you? Had to turn all the couch pillows upside down? Gosh, I don’t know. It makes no sense to me. Cleaning Airbnbs is really good for realizing that you don’t know anything about what’s going on in a stranger’s mind. But then sometimes they take the little thank-you note I leave out for all our guests, and that’s kind of nice. X S