Category: Blog Post

I have two options when, as now, the Muse deserts me (and this has so often been the case of late, and over, say, the last dozen years).

Well, actually, I suppose I do have more than two options. I could recognize, for instance, that anyone who uses the phrase “the Muse deserts me,” or even just “the Muse,” deserves his desolation.

I could simply stop.

But I do not like to stop.

Or I could keep going, Muse-less and muddling, which is, of course, the usual routine around here. If there’s one thing I’ve pretty much figured out how to do, it’s how to keep going. I can keep going with the best of them, just so long as we can agree that by ‘keep going’ we really mean ‘keep saying.’

I could also repeat myself, which I’m more than happy to do in a pinch. Sometimes, I swear, I don’t even know I’m doing it. There are words all around me, stuffed in books and in the pockets of jackets and pants, scrawled on index cards, scraps of paper, napkins, ATM receipts, and Post-It notes. There are shelves of black, lined journals that are also full of words, words that stretch back now over a decade. Those books are a loose –very loose– chronicle of my long nights, an inventory of the conscripted words that march across my skull in the wee hours.

Sometimes, out of desperation, and out of that frankly terrifying and inexplicable impulse to keep going, I just grab whatever words are at hand and force them to flee through my fingers a second time. In the process they are occasionally transformed, often (well, not often) in surprising ways. Most commonly, in fact, they are entirely unchanged from the day they were born –homely, in other words, and entirely lacking in sense.

When I’m truly strapped for inspiration, though, I turn to Jean Kent’s The Professional Writer’s Phrase Book, an essential tool for any struggling writer. Don’t be daunted by that title; you don’t have to be a pro to use Kent’s book. Even a fledgling scribe will find “thousands of descriptive tags that put pizzazz in any copy.”

It says so right on the book’s cover, and the professional writer who wrote those words wasn’t kidding. I have no idea anymore where the book is (things tend to get lost and buried around here, or it’s entirely possible I loaned it out to a professional writer colleague and never got it back), but I did, once upon a time, jot down some handy examples in a notebook. I’m sure you’ll agree that just about anybody could write a professional-quality story using almost nothing but these phrases and a few simple words of their own.

Take a crack at it and see if I’m not right.

ANGER

time to bring out the heavy artillery

the words were sudden and raw and very angry

feisty as hell

she gave him a most unladylike dustup

the rage in him was a living thing

their eyes traded strings of malevolence

like an awakening giant

if I hold it in any longer, I’ll blow out my teeth

LIMBS

hooked her thumb in her panties and cocked her hip

he swatted her behind

raising the tea cup to his heavily mustached lips

kissed his bunched up fingers…MNYEH!

a moth-wind flutter of her hand

rotates a finger near his temple

HEAD

he twisted a benzedrine inhaler up a hairy nostril

and took a somewhat beery breath of fresh air

she pushed her hair back, the better to glare at him

BODY IN MOTION

all his gestures were outside and violent

grabbing up her gown for the run to the kitchen

she slapped her sleeves to get rid of the crumbs

grasped his tightly rolled umbrella like a sword

she ditted around past all the channels

he sat on the porch and waved away the flies

a body so supple it twanged

he moved like a slug

the slow-spitting and squatting men watched her covetously

standing at the lip of a hole

she walks like a construction worker

he moved with the sure grace of a forest creature

a nudge here, a hip there, and an occasional light shove

left the room like a scolded hound

still beavering away

taking on that ‘Let’s be reasonable’ slouch

BODY MOTIONLESS

a thin old man, frozen on the edge of the fallow fields forever

huddled in the water

standing there with an indolent, tomcat grace

TRADE TAGS

bronzed and beautiful

the massive chest of a body builder

a tropical tan even where it doesn’t show

foundation training in the iron game

highly visible in an alluring bikini

with great stability in the shoulder girdle

BUILDINGS–EXTERIOR

a small, nasty shed with a furtive look

a security system that had everything but a moat filled with alligators

it wasn’t an ordinary building but a home

a suspect motel named El Ranko

the sort of railroad flat you find in the ghettos

INTERIOR

sat at a table about as big as a diaper

a husky oak table

the walls started to sweat

the room smelled of dust, mildew, and old love

rancid grease hung in the air like a wet sheet

CRIME AND FIGHTING

a man doesn’t become an investigator without a capacity for cruelty

a man who didn’t think but let his sinews rumble him to oblivion

his first foray into thrilldom

and then came a moment of atavistic horror

he was covered with blood and vomit

the pain in the testicles streaked up to his stomach

the velvet trap of easy living and hard drugs

the code of the vendetta was absolute

an animal instinct told him all was not well

no gun racks in the pickup truck

he ran like unleashed hell

my goal is to stay out of the morgue drawer

DEPRESSION

in the twilight world of the half alive

restless, seeking

hoping the wind and rain would take away the brooding hurt

he stood in the burning lake of himself, unable to escape

slumped into morose musings

pain and loneliness walked with him in the dark

a life which daily negated all her dreams

FACES–DESCRIPTIONS

the upper-echelon mafioso type

his nose looked like a wedge of cheddar

perspiration on her forehead, like water beads on good butter

a nose that could slice cheese

he looked something like a hawk with mumps

he had a face like a benediction

HAPPINESS

a few crocuses of hope poked through the surface

the feeling of happiness rising wonderfully inside you

beer commercial joviality

when I feel this delicious, I laugh at practically anything, sometimes nothing at all

Enjoy!

INNER THOUGHTS

he took the world by the nose

I still believe happiness can be worked out. I am a fool.

there’s nothing worse than a hero out of work

you could catch it and kill it and pin it down, but then it wasn’t a butterfly anymore

The world was a jungle. Only the strong survived.

Bastard! she whispered behind his back.

yet deep, deep inside he still burned with his love for her

preoccupied with matters of nomenclature

you can’t fall off the floor

love was a weed that flourished in the dark

as bad as being told God dislikes you

PHILOSOPHY

I live in a silent movie

a satisfying influx of Mexicans

not everything was cotton candy

two nice people made for each other

when you walk among women, do not forget your whip

Who knows where terrific things begin?

SMELLS

I smell sneakers

I could smell her light, warm femininity

the lusty odors of earth and cattle

See what I mean? Wow! What you have here are the raw materials to make a writer out of the drabbest, most tongue-tied closet dreamer. And I haven’t even made it to the phrases related to lovemaking (he took a look down her decollete). I’ll buy lunch for the person who can send me a reasonably coherent story –or, what the hell, an entirely incoherent story– that makes judicious use of the largest number of these helpful phrases, and I’ll also post the story for at least twenty-five other people to see! So start beavering away! And send those entries to zellar at rakemag dot com.

There are surfaces you can’t get a look under. You see just a flat line, for instance, or a face, or the horizon, but that doesn’t mean there’s not something beneath or beyond them.

It never means that. There’s something behind or under everything, depths and layers and distance, and it’s a rare thing that’s simple enough, small enough, or that will hold still long enough for you to properly dig around and pin down what’s really under the surface.

Face value truly is the currency of our understanding, and of our trust and our faith. Human depths we infer from art or action or speech or behavior; we take people at their word, choose to believe in their sincerity or in the truth of how they present themselves or the stories they tell about who they are.

We learn all the time to our great disappointment (and disenchantment) how flimsy and unjustified this faith is; we are lied to and betrayed and deceived hundreds of times every day, and yet still we continue to believe and to embrace the idea of depth, and to wrong-headedly confuse this notion, somehow, with virtue, as if depths were not just as often roiling with darkness and ugliness and contradictions and mystery and even evil; as if one of the primary functions of surface and depth were not to conceal.

A wall is a surface, as is a facade, a trap door, a mirror, a mask, a voice.

Most of the time –an overwhelming majority of the time– we are left to wholly imagine what is beneath a surface, and this gives the imagination its incredible freedom, even as it serves as an open invitation to our basest insecurities and fears.

This is what gives our heart its hope, and allows it to dream and to love and to tell stories. And this is also how our heart gets trampled and broken and then put back together, again and again and again.

Do you think it’s easy,

not biting

the one you love?

Try loving someone so much

your mouth is only at home

in the place where your teeth

meet the flesh

of your beloved. Try

not tasting the flesh,

not taking in your mouth

the beloved, not

going all the way.

—Jim Moore, “Teaching the Dog Not to Nip”

1) This, Vesithia LaRue said, is not living. Decidedly. Not. Living.

Ms. LaRue was in the bar of a Chinese restaurant, where she was sitting straight as a pin at a corner table and bathed in an almost infernal red light. Though she was a non-smoker, she had the mannerisms and dramatic demeanor of someone who was smoking cigarette after cigarette.

With her long fingers dangling from impossibly thin wrists she was drawing slow, continuous circles with a pink plastic straw in a drink that was the color of an exotic and idealized lagoon.

Vesithia’s table companions had been reduced to silence by her churlish mood (which was increasingly her prevailing mood). To venture even the most innocuous comment was to invite a withering lash from her acid tongue.

In a story that she often related, Vesithia explained that her name was that of an imaginary flower that had come to her mother, Estelle LaRue, in a dream.

Do not think, Vesithia was now saying, do not dare think for even one moment, that I have been wounded. (Everyone at the table –and, in fact, everyone of Ms. LaRue’s acquaintance– was decidedly of the opinion that Vesithia had, in fact, been badly wounded.)

Although, Vesithia added after a moment, I suppose that boredom, if it becomes terminal, would have to be classified as a type of wound.

Eventually, in timid response to one of the conversation’s earlier tangents (or, more properly, one of the fragments of Ms. LaRue’s halting and ongoing monologue), one of Vesithia’s companions ventured, “I feel certain that the body retains some memory of every encounter it has ever had with human hands.”

Hogwash, Vesithia said. Utter fucking hogwash.

If there was one phrase that defined Vesithia LaRue (and in truth there were a great many), it was, “I strongly disagree.”

As strident and forceful as Ms. LaRue could be –and she could be very strident and forceful indeed– she never, ever resorted to outright exclamation, although the temptation to insert exclamation points after her utterances was nonetheless irresistible.

2) Vesithia LaRue had a dog. It was smallish and ordinary-looking, the type of dog of apparent mixed breed that one was likely to encounter at any dog park or animal shelter. So ordinary looking was Ms. LaRue’s dog, in fact, that her mother, Estelle, had once referred to the animal as a “generic sort of dog,” a description that Vesithia pronounced “unpardonable,” and which led to a protracted estrangement between mother and daughter.

Estelle LaRue was now (fairly recently, in fact) dead, but while she had been among the living there had been many such protracted estrangements with her daughter, all of them caused, the older Ms. LaRue would contend, by small misunderstandings.

Vesithia LaRue had a long history of misunderstandings large and small –of misunderstanding others and being herself misunderstood. Many, if not most, of these misunderstandings were the result of her insistence that others abide by her own version of the truth, a version of the truth which might charitably be described as peculiar.

Vesithia would claim, for instance, that her smallish, ordinary-looking dog –which, owing to her characteristic inability to make up her mind, was called either Pronto or Presto– was an African Dancing Dog. This, she asserted, was an extremely rare breed, and had once been on the endangered species list. Vesithia had acquired the dog, she said, on a trip to Nigeria.

Despite the animal’s purported breed, no one could recall ever having seen Pronto (or Presto) dance. Many people, however, had heard the dog bark. What it was apparently lacking in dance skills, Vesithia LaRue’s little dog more than made up for in the noise-making department.

The creature’s incessant barking had, in fact, prompted Ms. LaRue’s eviction from a half dozen different apartments.

3) Vesithia LaRue had been born Vesithia LaRoach, a name that had been for her a torment of longstanding. It was, she would tell her mother from a very early age, insufferable. It was unpardonable, egregious, and an affront to someone of Vesithia’s refined sensitivity.

These words Vesithia had learned from a book called Thirty Days To A Larger Vocabulary, which she had stolen from the library at Blanche Patch Middle School, along with another book called The Golden Keys To Self-Improvement. There was a chapter in this latter book –“If You Don’t Like Yourself, Be Someone Better!”– that Vesithia had revised in her mind to “If You Don’t Like Yourself, Be Someone Different!”

Toward this end –her goal was to be someone entirely different– Vesithia was determined to change her name. Her nickname at Blanche Patch Middle School was “The Roach,” and hearing these words hurled at her every day by cruel schoolmates, Vesithia would tell her mother, had left her permanently, irrevocably scarred.

“But, dear, it is your name,” Estelle LaRoach had told her daughter. “There is not a thing in the world you can do about it.”

Vesithia knew that in this, as in so much else, her mother was mistaken, and the day she turned eighteen years old, with money she had made working at the perfume counter at the Younker’s Department Store, she had applied for a legal name change for both her mother and herself.

The elder Ms. LaRue knew that it was pointless to resist her daughter in any matter on which she had set her mind, and so reluctantly went along with the change. In time, she would eventually admit, she had come to appreciate her new name.

4) In my private moments, Vesithia LaRue would say, I cannot deny that I feel my soul to be an unspeakably forlorn place.

Vesithia was not in the least bit reluctant about making public the many feelings that were incubated in her private moments.

Despite her frequent insistence that she had not been wounded, it was generally assumed by all who knew her that Vesithia LaRue had, in fact, had her heart broken by Roland Thames Trempeleau, a postal carrier and classical music composer whom she had met once upon a time at a Mensa meeting.

Roland Trempeleau, Vesithia was fond of recounting, had wooed and courted her with “elegant zeal and uncommon ardor.” Roland had been a perfect gentleman, and he had been –or so Vesithia would claim– unabashedly smitten with her.

I have been swept off my feet, she would often report in the early days of her tempestuous yet wholly covert courtship with Roland Trempeleau.

Whether people were inclined or disinclined to believe these reports varied a great deal, but it was nonetheless undeniable that no one who had ever been subjected to Vesithia’s breathless accounts of her affair had ever so much as laid eyes on the man, let alone made his acquaintance. They were, however, told that Roland Trempeleau had a habit that drove Vesithia absolutely wild; whenever he checked his wristwatch, it was said, Roland would jerk his whole body upwards, roll back on his heels, hunch his shoulders dramatically, and then raise his right arm, cocked at an extreme and exaggerated angle, in front of his face.

Vesithia would often provide public demonstrations of this ritual, and it was, she claimed, the sexiest thing she had ever seen.

Alas, Roland Thames Trempeleau, once such a perfect gentleman, had in the end been revealed as just another cad, this after he purportedly abandoned Vesithia for an “internationally renowned cellist with a major American orchestra.”

To reveal any more information than this, Vesithia would insist, would be indiscreet.

There will come a day, mark my words, when every conceivable disappointment will meet in a giant hangar somewhere in Kansas. Every dashed dream and broken heart from all over America will converge there on the edge of some dusty little town to awkwardly mingle and avoid eye contact. Just as in Vegas, in the hangar there will be no natural light and no clocks, and the only way to mark the passage of time will be by the exhaustion in people’s eyes.

Among those who will make the discouraging trek: The man who once upon a time dreamed of becoming an astronaut and grew up instead to become an unhappy insurance adjustor. The woman whose naked body was never seen –let alone touched– by anyone outside a doctor’s office. The failed writer of science fiction novels who lived with his mother until her death and, oafish and sweating, stalked about his old neighborhood in camouflage and, well into middle age, raced remote control cars up and down the sidewalk in front of his house. The jilted lovers, brides left at the alter, and infertile couples. The boy who asked Santa Claus for a Dukes of Hazzard pinball machine and received instead a Slinky, a seemingly small and isolated letdown that nevertheless in time planted the seeds for a lifelong pathology of disenchantment.

Also present: Beauty pageant rejects, disgraced public servants, neglected children, actors that never got a break, persistent writers of ignored doggerel, bitter misanthropes and alcoholics, those for whom an adolescent crisis of faith became crushing and permanent, brooders and pipe smokers, and all manner of neglected or talent-less musicians, artists, and philosophers.

You can be sure the sleepless will be there, standing in zombie pockets at some remove from packs of the pathologically shy, the socially awkward, and the chronically fatigued.

Should you make the pilgrimage you will be joined as well by stalled middle-managers, the perpetually startled, orphans, gimpy quarterbacks, cheerleaders who grew old gracelessly, bankrupts, and scores of broken refugees from Nashville, Hollywood, and New York.

There’ll be quite a crowd, to be sure, and you’re virtually guaranteed to recognize all sorts of old friends, neighbors, and former co-workers, and they’re certain to bitch ceaselessly, provided they haven’t been made entirely mute by their disappointment.

God knows there’ll be plenty to bitch about: It will rain every day, the food will be lousy, and the accommodations will be sadly lacking. Entertainment –for lack of a better word– will be provided by an assortment of some of the worst garage bands, barbershop quartets, choirs, magicians, mimes, ventriloquists, and baton twirlers you’ve ever seen.

As the evening wears on a bullhorn will be passed among the congregation of the disappointed, and each person will be allowed to shout out one sentence or declaration.

It’s interesting, if fruitless, to speculate what those present might make of this brief opportunity to express themselves. How many do you suppose will use their moment in the spotlight to merely blurt terse, general condemnations laced with profanity? How many, however disappointed, will declare some enduring love or eternal regret? You can certainly imagine that there will be a great deal of stammering, and many will simply attempt to articulate some already broken promise, ineffectual apology, or impossible wish. Others, of course, will have nothing to say.

Should you or I find ourselves there in that awkward crowd of the bruised and broken what words would we find to speak to the assembled? What might we say to the better, happier people we –all of us– should have been? And do you suppose there will be even one among us who will have enough small courage or faith remaining to utter some message of hope?

Finally, at some point in the endless night, black and white balloons will be distributed, and on command they will be released to rise slowly up into the distant rafters of the hangar. This gesture will mean different things to different people, and to some it will mean absolutely nothing at all.