ers.617's Open Salon Blog

Because 2 poems walked through my head

Mon, 5 Apr 2010 15:04:19 -0400

... down various neural pathways, and left by way of fingers and pen.

---

Ape-legged, addlepated,

he lurches foot by bare hairy-toed foot along the dirt road.

He reminds me of Eliot's Sweeney.

Clad in rags unwashed, trying to use a mind unhinged and cluttered:

he is the definition of an unproductive member of society.

------

Sharp spikey blades of petals force themselves upward because they must

offer themselves to sun and wind.

A verdant (my mother loved the word verdant) sacrifice, if it turns cold.

They are the burden of Hope made visible.

We are all heliotropes.

Hey, kid

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:02:38 -0500

Hey, kid,

Take it easy. It's just me... 30 years later. A little unsought advice (and worth every cent you paid for it):

Mom and dad love you much more than you think they do. Try to see that, ok? I wish I could tell you to talk to them more (over tea, late at night), but I know you're too angry and mistrustful to be able to do that. Can you believe that someday you'll want to do that? Ah well, didn't think so.

Don't be afraid to ask for help. Don't be afraid to tell the truth.

I wish I could tell you not to be afraid of getting close to people, but I'm still afraid of it. Maybe you could give *me* a break and think about it earlier, huh?

You will find it in yourself to be a beginner at any age, with enough patience to work through the steepest part of the learning curve. This is a good thing. It also means you can sing on stage, land a role in a play, teach folkdancing... The only "never" is never knowing what you can succeed at (other than ending sentences with prepositions).

You are a good friend to your friends. Someday, you'll be surprised to realize that you learned that from your mother.

You don't need to be afraid of college. It will be much easier, and WAY much more fun, than you thought it would be.

Pay attention to your strengths and weaknesses. Just because you think you should be able to do something doesn't mean that it's worth the effort. You can step down from a challenge without shame.

I don't need to tell you to keep reading, writing, and thinking. Good thing, that.

You're very emotional, but not fragile. Even when you feel fragile. Trust me, I wouldn't be writing this to you if you were really fragile.

You have found some of your people. You will find more of them.

Again: don't be afraid to ask for help. When you can't figure out how to climb out of a hole, it's time to ask someone to throw you (carefully!) a rope or a ladder. Standing at the bottom of the hole feeling helpless is somehow safer, but it doesn't get you out of the hole.

Good luck, kiddo. Keep on trying.

love,

well... me, I guess

Mice I have known, albeit briefly

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 18:02:42 -0500

Unintended consequences

Sirenita wrote a lovely post recently, a series of vignettes of the vermin in her life. Like the scent of Proust's madeline, it evoked memories...

Don't get attached to him -- especially don't give him a name

When I was in high school, one of our cats, Fresser, was a Mighty Hunter. Fresser is Yiddish for the kind of glutton who sucks down a refrigerator without batting a lip. He earned the name; in his heyday, he supplemented his already-quite-adequate commercial cat food diet with the local wildlife. Well, as wild as it gets in New Haven.

Yes, I commited a cliché: I (with my brother's help) rescued a mouse from the growling cat. I don't remember how my brother and I managed to winkle the mouse away from The Mighty Hunter, but I do remember that we brought it to school and gave it to our biology teacher.

Our teacher cautioned us against getting too attached (as above) and naming the critter. Our reply? "Who, Oscar?" She put the little fellow in a cage with one of those running wheels. I remember my classmates placing bets on how many times the mouse could coast after running up some momentum.

At least she didn't feed Oscar to either of her snakes (Victor Constrictor and Julius Squeezer). If he ever became snake food, it happened after I graduated.

Booger

My brother (ETL from this time forward) was living in a 3-person household during the early nineties.They got mice. ETL twigged to it when they started snacking on his Pop Tarts. You do not want to come between my brother and his Pop Tarts. He named his little uninvited housemate Booger.

I was sitting in his kitchen drinking tea when we heard the telltale scrabbling noise. ETL handed me a colander, armed himself with a broom, and headed into the pantry to Confront the Beast. As mousers, well, um.... we drink a mean cup of tea.

One of his housemates was violently allergic to cats, so he fell back on mechanical means. ETL's a merciful kinda guy, so he got a mouse-sized hav-a-heart trap (live trap). He tried some traditional bait like peanut butter, leftover Chinese food, etc., but this mouse had a serious sweet tooth. Frosting mix did the trick and Booger, on a serious sugar high, went for a long ride on a short commute, to be released in a woodsy little area in the city.

Either Booger knew his way home, or he had invited his friends and relations... the Pop Tarts remained under siege.

When the allergic housemate moved out, ETL decided to use nature's own weapon: he hired a hit cat. Said cat had a good reputation for mousing. She also lived with 2 other cats, a few gerbils, 2 rambunctious kids, and perhaps a ferret or two. When she got to ETL's house, she looked around, noticed the peace and quiet, and promptly curled up at the foot of ETL's bed to catch up on her catnapping. No mouse corpses ever appeared, but her presence seemed to have been deterrent enough. Exit mice.

Mouse hockey

I've pretty much always had cats, so I assumed I'd never see mice in my home. It was an unexpected pleasure when GreyCat came up to me, meowing around a mouthful of mouse. She was pretty smug. I was pretty horrified.

I had thought my indoor-dwelling cats were complete cream puffs. Clever, yes; bloodthirsty, no. H'mm.

GreyCat isn't a selfish beast, so she shared her fun with CalicoCat. They moved the mouse into my bedroom and started playing Mouse Hockey with it.

Then they lost the fucking mouse. In my bedroom. My very very cluttered bedroom with piles of papers and books and clothes everywhere. They patted a few piles of papers, looked under a few t-shirts, shrugged at me, and went about their cat business.

I couldn't assess the damage to the mouse. Was it OK? Was it Dead Mouse Walking? Would I find a decomposing body in a few weeks? Even if I found the mouse, what in hell would I do with it? I couldn't let it suffer.

So I called ETL (remember? my brother with the hav-a-heart traps?). His response? "Don't expect me not to laugh long and loud." Not a surprise, that. His traps were on loan to a mouse-plagued friend. No joy.

I completely balked at the idea of finding and killing a living creature manually. More sarcastic laughter from ETL. He suggested that, when I finally found it, I put it out on the back porch in the 20°F cold. Too inhumane. Well, next option: drop a book on it. I whined that I couldn't drop a book like Harry Potter VII on a mouse. He recommended Wikipedia.

I settled on a tried-and-true option: denial. I gave the cats a dirty look and said "This never happened." I went to bed, hoping that the Laws of Nature would be suspended Just This Once, and the mouse would vanish, as if it had never been.

The next morning I heard skittering and meowing again. I looked at the cats, said firmly "Do your duty. I'm giving you an hour," and shut them in the bedroom. An hour later, I opened the door to a neatly-laid-out mouse corpse (not even mangled!). I shoved it into a plastic container, slammed the lid on, and took out the trash immediately.

The Scottish Play

I've always been vaguely superstitious about naming The Scottish Play backstage, but the following incident made a True Believer out of me.

As I was applying makeup in the dressing room, I carelessly mentioned an Orson Welles production of an all-black version of TSP -- without using the appropriate euphemism.

Within 15 minutes, it started pouring rain. Two dead rats (see? there's the connection) blocked the drain behind the theatre, and the stage got flooded. We had to hold the curtain for 15 minutes while the wet/dry vacuums were summoned.

Two dead rats: irrefutable evidence that Something Out There heard me.

Never again.

Here's to the folks who flounced

Mon, 8 Feb 2010 14:02:40 -0500

(with no apologies to Stephen Sondheim for the homage to the Ladies Who Lunch from Company)

I've lost track of the good writers on OS who have departed because OS had become too much of a distraction from Real Writing. And I don't really want to comment or PM to each writer individually. Suffice it to say, I'll miss your work very much, and I do hope you keep reading -- or eventually, return to writing here.

I do get it. Time is finite. And it's certainly possible to spend Way Too Much Time in this corner of the virtual world. OS is a one-of-a-kind blogging site -- not like Live Journal or Wordpress at all.

It's tempting to call down curses on these flouncing folk, but it's not fair to deny them the respect they deserve. (Floyd, if you're reading this, may the Pandas of Perdition lick your nose for all eternity. For you, I'll make an exception. )

I've been part of writing communities before: the aforementioned Live Journal and the old-fashioned paper kind, an APA (Amateur Press Association). For various reasons, I burned out on them, so I'm wary of committing myself to any blog. I don't think I'll ever flounce, but don't be surprised if there's a long interval between posts.

My way of dealing with the temptation to obsess is to avoid OS for days or even weeks at a time. One frustrating result is that I don't know who has left since last I read their blogs. (Maybe I should configure a search for the appropriate tags.) I feel a little guilty (okay, Jewish, female, breathing: of course I feel guilty) about not keeping up with my "favorites" and offering them support and criticism (of the writing, not the ideas/person). And I don't like the idea that I'm almost definitely missing some stellar posts. Everything's a trade-off.

One last thought: This is Real Writing, too, irrespective of ambition-to-be-published-by-someone-other-than-self. I do think some of the work here is eminently publishable. Some of you should check out The Sun magazine (www.thesunmagazine.org) as a venue for personal essays, poetry, and fiction.

You don't have to be published to be a serious writer. Remember, one of the differences between a published writer and an unpublished writer is the tall stack of rejection slips.

Hell is what you make of it

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:01:06 -0500

I don't officially believe in Hell.

Last time I checked, it wasn't a Jewish thing. We do our suffering here and now, believe me. (Note to Self: Maintain intellectual cred and do research, starting with all Judaica bookmarks on delicious page. Note from Self: Yeah, right. Did you see that pig fly by? Or did you get distracted by the bunny rabbit?)

I do know what Hell is like.

Sartre was right. Hell is other people. Especially in long meetings. Meetings in which group decisions must be made by consensus. In a conference room with no windows (not the OS, the kind in the wall).

In Hell, you are stuck wearing uncomfortable shoes. If this is Serious Hell, the shoes aren't even pretty. And of course you have to walk to some form of public transportation, which you miss because your feet hurt too much to run.

In Hell, you have to move. Every other week. As soon as you unpack and set things up, oop! Gotta pack again. You will never see your cell phone charger again. Or the box of Things To Be Dry Cleaned. And you won't remember the fruit that fell into a box of books until it's Much Too Late.

In Hell, your best friends are singing at your ex's wedding. Which is on one of your milestone birthdays. And they're singing a four-part piece that YOU taught them.

In Hell, you have to take calculus. Over and over and over. It never makes sense.

In Hell, all the software is written by Microsoft.

In Hell, you step on slugs. Barefoot. Way worse than cat puke. Cat puke doesn't wiggle.

In Hell, it's always hot and humid. With no air-conditioning. Not even a fan. Did I mention the mosquitos? And that buzzing noise?

In Hell, you run out of things to read.

In Hell, you run out of ideas to write about -- even when you give in and end a sentence with a preposition.

Actually, in Hell, you keep editing the same post over and over -- because each time you read it, you find a typo, a grammatical mistake, or a speling [sic] mistake.