spy vs. spy
stop! and think it over
LIFE RX 18 NOV 24
the seven of wands, and a paragraph from Magda Szabó’s The Door:
They died, both of them, before they had time to make friends. That night, I laid them out in front of the house. No-one has ever worked out how they came to be lying there, side by side, so peacefully. I also hid Mr. Brodarics in the same place. Rákosi was after him. As if I'd just hand him over! He went off to the drilling site with his helmet on each day, and when I found him the oil wouldn't come off his hands. A spy—the hell he was a spy! Whoever said that about him was the real spy.
the aleatory
When it’s time to make a life decision, I imagine myself being spied on from above. More specifically, I guess, I’m spying on myself. There I am, knocking about in the rectangle that is the living room, the rectangle that is the bedroom, the strange polyhedral kitchen. I watch her—because I am no longer myself at this point—and I see the small paths that go through her life. Same lunch, same walk, a lot of sitting on a computer. I find it so sad and horrifying that I almost immediately force myself to do something contrary to what I usually do. I put a stone in my own path. I cup my left hand to rinse my mouth after I brush my teeth. I take out the guitar that I hardly play but want more than (almost) anything to play well, and I buy a guitar stand so it will be out all the time. I will have to walk by it every time I go to bed.
This omniscient perspective is not a new one to me. I remember doing the same thing when I was in third grade, watching the line of my classmates walk behind Mrs. Lyons. Like ducks, I thought. Or narrated. Is this a normal thing for children to do? It didn’t feel normal at the time. It felt like I knew a secret, but it was a secret that not everyone wanted to know.
My house is a machine. A factory with a conveyor belt. The thing that falls off the conveyer belt at the end is me. If you don’t know this, you’ll never be able to wash the oil off your hands. But if you do, you can change the machine. Someone new will fall off the conveyor belt.
the assignment
make a helpful little change. Nothing showy. Nothing crazy.
writing prompt
Spy on yourself in the past, at a time when you did something extremely physically difficult or dangerous, and watch from above. Write down only the things you can observe—not the things you thought or felt.
a chune
“Stop and Think It Over,” Compulsive Gamblers
One form of brain damage I’ve retained since working as a proofreader at the music-coverage-heavy Austin Chronicle is a resual to insert a “the” in a band name when the record cover doesn’t include it. (It’s not the Pixies, babe.) Sad! Anyway, this is an amazing song to learn if you’re picking up a guitar again and you’re me, and you’re such a sucker for a Cm chord that you would let it steal your wallet.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
The Door by Magda Szabó
Crystal Gazing Luck Amazing by Compulsive Gamblers
dear diary, on the first day of class I asked my students to introduce themselves by sharing 1) their name 2) when did they come closest to death? This was the first time anybody let me teach college creative writing, and I had not planned to ask that question—the series of handouts which passed as “pedagogical instruction” at Iowa suggested that ice breakers were nice, but I hadn't yet thought of one. I was at my lowest and messiest. I wore a wine-stained pink sweatshirt almost every day and I could just barely get myself out of bed fifteen minutes before my class started, and I had started blacking out after only one drink, which seemed like the troubling moment in a fairytale where the magic begins working backwards. Anyway. What an insane question to ask on the first day. It would probably get me in trouble for not being “trauma-informed” these days. But it was actually pretty great, because for the rest of the semester, I think we were all glad everybody else was alive.