DING-ZING-THWACK, the sweetest song

A year ago I came across a typewriter on ebay. A whopping $10, plus $10 shipping. I thought, "How cute! I'll use it to write my great American novel!"

It came in the mail a week later. I immediately started pounding away on the old keys, the THWACK of each keystroke felt like I was using some brand new power that only I could possess. The power, unfortunately, didn't extend to making words appear on the paper - the dry ribbon was my Kryptonite.

I went to a local shop had ribbons cheap and typewriter advice even cheaper. I bought two ribbons, so great and sure was my dream to write my best-selling novel that I figured I'd need two ribbons, maybe one for the original and one for the editing. After all, the box wasn't that much smaller than the box most Inkjet cartridges come in, so it must be good for a few thousand pages, right?

I came home and, fool that I am, whipped the old cartridge off the machine and threaded the new one in. I didn't take a picture of how it was supposed to go, and had no idea, and in fact didn't even really glance at the set-up before I took the old reel off. It was two hours and six Google searches before I got it back the way it should be, or at least close to it. It still fights me on some letters, and double-taps others until at the end of a page it looks more like the crazed manifesto of a violent lunatic than a simple short story.

After a few days of sporadically typing away on the old machine the novelty wore off. I put it back in its case and stored away where it gathered dust and cobwebs for the better part of a year.

For a few weeks in the following year I was desperately trying to write something - anything - that would pay my bills and put food on the table and maybe afford me the opportunity to go out with my friends once in a while.

Typing on the computer held so many distractions - email buzzing, Facebook and Twitter and all kinds of other super-connected crap was going off all the time. I just wanted everyone to shut up a minute and let me finish my thoughts, but every time I tried to disconnect my computer, it resulted in endless "network error" pop-up messages. Hissing at the computer, "Yes, I know. I unplugged it! Shut up and go away!" as I jabbed at the little yellow error box was more than enough to make me lose my train of thought.

And even when the connectivity (or lack thereof) problems were at a minimum, there was the problem of the writing itself. I am a lazy typist. I leave my wrists on the desktop, inviting Carpel Tunnel syndrome to my wrists and endless fatfingered typos to my writing. If something is misspelled, I immediately fix it just to make the little squiggly line go away.

This instant editing issue doesn't just apply to typos but to poorly developed paragraphs, sentences that didn't carry the subtle nuance and sly wit that will get any editor anywhere desperate to publish anything you ever write, ever, right down to your grocery list.

And so you go back and fix it. And fixate on it. And delete and backspace and cut and paste and undo for an hour. And then you realize you've spent an hour writing one stupid sentence while the endless, heartless blank pages of your word processing program stretch on without any concept of "end."

Suddenly you realize that you could write a thousand pages - a million - and it would never be enough for this program. You will always be either one third or two-thirds of the way down the page. The beginning and end were melded seamlessly into the middle and it all runs together in one pristine, white window on your screen.

I was talking with a friend of mine about the problems of writing on the computer. She said something along the lines of getting a typewriter. I took a sip of my rum and coke and nodded. Typewriter. Sure. Spoken by someone who obviously didn't know what a hassle it was to type and edit on a machine, and how much White-Out costs. Whatever.

That night, full of rum and vigor and questionable tacos, the typewriter was the best idea in the world. And of course it was my idea - always had been, always would be. Sure enough, after pulling the plastic case out of hiding and setting up on the dining room table, the old giddiness came back as my fingers danced across the keys. Danced is probably the wrong word.

The keys had to move a few inches to meet the page so holding the classic home keys position was out of the question. My wrists no longer sat idly on the desk. I had to use force to put words to paper as my fingers bounced around the keyboard. I imagined myself a great piano player, knocking out one of Rachmaninoff's trickier Opuses. Things were really on a roll.

The force of my typing ignited the force of my progress. Going back to fix a typo or re-write a line was out of the question. White-out took too long to dry. Correction tape stuck to the letters and left the offending, unwanted type exposed and helpless on the page. So, I barreled on. Re-typing the word with the correct spelling got to be cumbersome and time-consuming, so typos littered each page like a swarm of locusts. (Or locsts, according to the typewriter.)

It wasn't just unedited typos. Sentences that hadn't ended up the way I expected went unchecked. And before I knew it, I was at the end of one page - two pages, three; my progress was finally tangible. The DING-ZING that separated each line of type was like a miniature cheer squad: "DING! You just finished a line! Try another! ZING! Way to go!" The cheers faded into the background as the manual line advancement became second nature and I found myself at the bottom of the page with little nor no memory of the thirty DING-ZINGs that had gotten me there.

Was there anything in life more satisfying? Something more than maniacal pounding of the keys, my own DING-ZING cheer squad, and a pile of proof that I was moving forward and making progress? Well, sure, the world is a big place full of awesome things. But at two in the morning, very few things compare to that THWACK-tastic concert on my dining room table.

Summertime

Close your eyes. No, not tight, just...relax. Close your eyes. Do you feel it? The heat from the sun-soaked grass wrapping around you? The cool breeze of the dusk on a balmy July night tracing the curves of your face? No?

Listen. Take a deep breath. Listen. Can you hear it? The sound of a mosquito near by, ice clinking in a glass on the night stand, the sound of your lover's heart beating next to your ear. The sheets stick to you, the summer heat makes sleeping hard. The lights from passing cars race across the walls and ceilings and peek through the blinds while you study your lover's sleeping profile. Do you hear it? No?

Breathe. Can you smell the grass around you? The distinct summer smells of fresh air and hot concrete that waft in through the window? Maybe the warm breeze that traipses across the woods and cools down the front porch as you spend the afternoon swapping stories and gossip with the people who know you best, and love you anyway.

Listen.

Sappy love poem

The day ticks slowly by with no word from you,
and the minutes slither across my desk like so many ants marching uphill.
You are somewhere, dreaming of adventure and glory days gone by,
and I'm sure you're not dreaming of me but I can have dreams of my own.

The air outside is well below zero, and
the space you've left in my heart is even colder.
I gleefully await the day we meet, the day I can
trace my fingers over every lovely crevice, the day we're finally
together as we always were meant to be.
I'll hold that hope and dream this dream,
and until that day I'll keep your picture
right here,
my love,
so you'll know that you've found me and
know that you're home.



Hurry, dear - adventure awaits!

Blah blah blah

It was always just the two of us, Mr. Binky and I. A girl and her monkey against the whole wide world. We devised a delightful plan, and dreamed of the days that lay beyond the fences and walls of this hellish hovel. He left first, and when he made it out he was going to come back for me.

His plane flew far and true, over the horizon, his tattered scarf waving in the wind. I waited for years for his return. I finally escaped on my own one day, out of the blue and much to my own surprise. If I ever catch Mr. Binky in a dark alley, it'll be curtains for him for sure.

Damn dirty ape.

We interrupt this blog for a slightly embarassing poetry moment

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It's not what I want
But it's where I want
The edge of the ocean, the deep blue lip of the world
Away from you, away from them,
just old dilapidated me in this old dilapidated place.

3 hours a day makes me a professional's professional

Strolling down Jackson in the bowels of Oak Park, I can hear the roar of the airplane overhead and the roar of the blue line behind me. To the untrained ear it's the same noise, the same roar, the same swift, onward motion.

There are subtle differences. The airplane soars over, going somewhere - running away and leaving it all behind. Just like your daydreams, or the latest love of your life. Full of escape and possibility and perky attendants, the plane has had enough and is leaving for better climes.

The el clatters along, rattling, jarring you to the bone like roller skates on old sidewalks or the fathomless pit of your soul when you realize you've made the biggest mistake of your life. The el, cranky and ornery and mean, rumbles through the night. Staying its ground. Getting the last word in.

The little things

So every time someone needs to access the internet at my hotel, I walk them down to the computer room. On the short walk down the hall I explain to them the price for printing, that they can come to me with any questions, etc.

Just now this complete tool came by and I told him how much we charge for printing. He said, "You guys are RAPING me." I ignored him completely and just kept talking.

We got to the door and I was in the middle of saying, "The first computer on your left is ready to go online." I got as far as, "The first-" and he pulled the door. It's locked. I had the key card in my hand and refrained from explaining to him that I'm walking him down there specifically to unlock the door. He dropped his arm to his side. I continued, 'The first comp-" and he pulled the door again. I stopped talking and looked at him out of the corner of my eye like maybe he was some sort of imbecile who needed help putting his pants on the right way every morning. He looked back at me like I was giving him some sort of quiz full of trick questions. I reached across him and held the key card up to the reader to unlock the door, but it was pretty hard to keep from laughing right in his face.

Oh, yes, it's one of those days when the little things are everything. Real coffee from Dunkin Donuts, a $5 tip from some jackass customer two hours ago, being able to watch the WGN news in the break room this morning - these are the things that are making this extended weekend the finest kind that it can be.

Fraggle lady

Riding the el to and from work is, if nothing else, the best cross-section of humanity available in any one place or time. This is what happened last night:

This lady gets on the el over by County Hospital. She has blond hair, curly, with hot pink stripes it in. She hasn't brushed it today, she looks like a Fraggle. She's on her cell phone. Apparently she'd been sitting at County all day in the hard, straight-back chairs and she was in pain. They had been giving her a hard time. She'd been waiting 13 hours. On the phone, she wails things like:

"They keep running these TESTS. They can't see the problem with TESTS. They have to see INSIDE MY BODY."

And I smirk because it's funny to see a Fraggle talking about people having to see inside her body. Next to where she's sitting, there's a jittery man standing in dirty jeans and a torn t-shirt. The shirt used to be white but now it's covered in the grime and grit of life on the street. He's either jacking off or peeing on himself, which is better than my first thought, which was he was cracked out. Having a grown man pee himself while a Fraggle says things like "I'm going to go home and self-medicate. I will medicate myself. Today is Wednesday, right? Thursday? What the FUCK happened to Wednesday?" is funnier than you'd think.

The man sits down, squeezes his knees together but the telltale smell of piss fills the train car. The lady is saying, "I can't...no...I can't use the phone during the day when I'm not in Texas." Does she realize she's in Chicago? And these are daytime minutes? The fact that she could mistake this blue line train for the Lone Star State makes me giggle quietly to myself, my face turned toward the window, hoping she can't see.

There's a mom and two little kids - one maybe 2 years old, and the other an infant - and the 2-year old is looking at the Fraggle with wide eyes. The Fraggle says, "They run tests but they won't get them back for a week and after a week I'll be gone - gone!"

The man with the wet crotch and jittery hands gets up and exits the train. It's been raining hard for about five stops now. The Fraggle is saying, "I'll just go home tonight and I think I should be blond again. I'll go get some hair dye on the way home, wherever. Whatever."

As if dying her hair will cure all of her medical woes. I have my face buried in my satchel, trying not to laugh out loud because you don't want to laugh at the crazies when you're on the train. There's nowhere to run when they come after you.

The mom and the two kids exit the train, holding up newspapers to protect themselves from the wind and the rain. The little girl shows no signs of fear as she and her mom and sibling march into the night. The storm swallows them up as our train abandons them to the lightening and thunder that are infesting the sky.

Fraggle ends her call, walks up and down the train once, twice. Halfway through the third lap she stops and her head whips around to the windows and the weather outside. "OH MY GOD!" she wails. "OH MY GOD! I DON'T EVEN HAVE AN UMBRELLA OR ANYTHING! OH GOD! OH GOD!"

She leaps off the train at the next stop, presumably to color her hair or trek back to Fraggle Rock, or maybe to melt as the rain touches her skin. After the doors close, my eyes are wet from giggling and the prospect of walking home in the rain and wind doesn't seem so bad; the giggling keeps the gloom at bay. It's a miniature euphoria that keeps me grinning all the way home.

Is there nothing those Fraggles can't do?

CTA Rally

One of my favorite blogs, The CTA Tattler, mentioned that there's a rally at the Thompson Center on the 28th. It's at 11:30. That's 11:30 a.m., on a Tuesday.

I don't understand. Do people not have jobs? Who the hell can just roll out to the Thompson center at 11:30? Maybe if you work near there, you can take your lunch really early and go down there, but you'll only be there about 15 minutes before you have to go back to work.

Hold a rally when the people who are affected the most by the service cuts can be there. People with no alternate transportation, people who rely on the CTA to put food on the table or pay a family member's medical bills. People who work 10, 12, 14 hours a day and can't afford a car because they're working 14 hours doing all the dirty jobs that you don't want to do, and they're doing them for minimum wage.

Damn. Use some sense when you're putting together a rally, for fuck's sake. Get together a 24-hour rally, where people can come before or after work, or on their way to school. Make a rally that everybody can participate in, not just the lucky few who have dwaddling time around 11:30 every day, or who have enough sick days that they can call in. It's our CTA, too. Our designated driver on those late nights, our carpool to and from work. Let us rally around her success, too.

Poor Doxology

Remember that scene in "Neverending Story" where Atrayu had to watch his trusty horse, Artax, sink to a miserable death in the Swamp of Sadness? That's basically what's going on with my car.

My poor car, Doxology. Named after Sam Hamilton's horse, which is a reference to Steinbeck's "East of Eden" for those of you not in the know.

I know it's stupid, it's just a car, it's not a horse or a family member or even alive at all, but damn - it's Doxology. That car has been there for more with more consistency and grace than anyone else I've known in the six years I've had him. He's moved me more times than I can count - sometimes across town and once it was to Maryland. On the drive back from Maryland, with 90% of everything I owned crammed into every available inch of the car, a blizzard chased us through five states for two days. Doxology held on, though - we got through just fine.

When we got t-boned in that hit and run, he still ran. You couldn't use the passenger door at all, and ever since then the wind might catch that door just the wrong way and give the car an unexpected tug, but he could stil get from point A to point B. He wasn't pretty, but I'm not a proud person, so it didn't matter.

I have this family that isn't my family. I call them my adopted family, which is close enough and not really the point of the story. The youngest daughter in the family, she and I are pretty close, like sisters. At least, we were when she lived here. On warm summer nights she and I would ride around in Doxology - through lower Wacker Drive, up Lake Shore Drive, around that park across the street from Lincoln Park Zoo, then back home. Just me and my sister, blaring music and joyriding. I miss having her here, miss her fucking with the radio and throwing trash out the window, no matter how much I yelled at her for it.

Sometimes when I drive along now, I remember when I was in Maryland and my sister's kids were in the car. The youngest would crawl up to her car seat and say, "Aunt Maggie, you have to clean this car!" And I'd laugh and tell her to make a car payment and I'd think about it.

I remember driving with all three of my sister's kids one day after there had been a lot of snow. My back window was caked in snow. I warmed up the car but couldn't find the snow brush, so the snow stayed on the back window. As we rounded a corner, the kids were all turned around (as best they could, being buckled in) trying to watch the patch slide off the back. It slid a little one way, sort of teasing the audience. It slid up when we hit a bump, then back down; its audience was captive and brimming with excitement. When it finally slid off into a ditch, the kids cheered like it was some great accomplishment. Their cheers still ring in my ears sometimes, when I need a reason to smile.

Doxology has been there for me when I'm scared, or excited, or crying so hard I can barely drive. It's helped deliver me and countless friends home safely. Most of those friends are now scattered and gone, but Doxology and I still muddle through.

Long gone are the days when I'd drive down to Kankakee just for the sake of going for a drive in the middle of the night. Hell, for the past three weeks I considered myself lucky if I could make it over the bridge at the end of my street. Gone are the days I'd spend waiting to get back to my car, where I had the day's only guaranteed air conditioning or heat, depending on the season.

Poor Dox. I changed his plug wires last night, it made everything worse. I tried to drive around the block, he froze up on me. The steering wheel locked when I was in an intersection with moving traffic. I had to re-start him four times just to get back around the rest of the block. He's twelve years old, with 122,000 miles. That's pretty good for an Escort that's been through what he's been through. A friend of mine back east says it's time to do the respectful thing and just let him go out with some dignity. She's not the one facing a 90-minute commute (each way) now that Dox has two tires in the grave. She's also not the one who has only been able to count on Dox and Dox alone all these years. Friends, lovers, family - they came and went. Dox held on. Dox got me where I needed to go. Dox was my 2-door sanctuary with a hatch back and a busted dome light. Dox was my Artax, and my empty wallet is his Swamp of Sadness.

Voyeurism

It didn't look like much, but it was my green castle in the vast and spectral sky. Night after night I'd watch you from my perch as you scuttled by on your way from point A to point B and all stops in between. Your loves, your mundane petty arguments, your grief - I saw it all. And you saw naught of me, hidden as I was in my green castle, above your heads and beyond your secrets.

And then the day came, it was time to make myself known. The day none of you will ever forget: when I stormed out of my castle, wielding a shotgun and a purpose.

Sunflower field

The smell of dew settling on grass in the wee hours of the night - the darkest part of night before the dawn sheds some light on the subject - that's the smell that always takes me back to this field.

Sweet sunflower field, it held my childhood dreams and adventures. It was where I hid and sought, where I brought my private thoughts and public tantrums. A few years later, it was where I brought the boys who claimed to love me, and we'd make love under these white stars and yellow petals and for a few hours, at least, I could believe them.

Grateful or greedy?

I got a digital camera for my holiday bonus. A nice one, shiny, lots of features. Spring sprung, I started taking my camera out just to take interesting shots. It became a little more than a hobby, a little less than an obsession. An excuse to get out of the house, a conversation piece, a way to express myself.

I took pictures of interesting outings, and pictures of mundane outings. I recorded people's lives to satisfy my own curiosity. It became a part of me, my right arm. When I could find no one to go to things with, I went alone and took my camera for company. The camera justified my presence. I was a photographer, a semi-professional flaneur, I wasn't just some weirdo who stood out of place.

The camera got lost. The camera and a gigabyte worth of pictures from the zoo, on a sweltering Saturday afternoon. Heartbreak, honestly, as silly as it seems. I'd finally found an outlet that suited me better than writing. Writing was a chore, I always use too many words and, in my own eyes, all of those words were contrived, inadequate and poorly placed.

But a picture - a picture is worth a thousand words. Maybe more, maybe less, but a contrived picture is more appealing than a contrived essay about a bridge from my childhood. And so, visually mute, I prepared myself for a mundane return to writing as my only creative outlet.

And then there was hope. A woman living in Rhode Island with whom I'd talked online for over a year (but never personally met) offered to get me a replacement. I'm not a fan of gifts out of the blue, I'm not a fan of taking things I haven't earned. I turned her down, she persisted. I chose a decent camera, sent her the information. She came back with the shinier model, the one I was saving to get myself for a graduation present.

And I'm grateful. The kindness she showed me and the swiftness with which she bestowed it was shocking. I can't know how to thank her, I can't know how to earn this. I feel like a swindler, a cheat. All of the problems in the world, and here I am acting like the gift of a digital camera is the greatest thing to have happened in decades. But it means something, to my ego and my heart, to know that people out there give a shit.

I'm grateful. I have my voice back, I have things to look forward to again. This weekend is the Chinatown Festival. I'm looking forward to taking colorful pictures of dragons and traditional costumes, exotic food and crowded streets to post to a billion strangers on the internet. Maybe it's pathetic, to find so much faith in humanity in such an act. "Oooh, I got something shiny, there must be good people in the world after all." And it's probably pathetic to get excited about taking pictures for strangers. But we each have our own joys in life, though it may take years or decades or an entire lifetime to find them. This is mine. She gave me back my joy.

And this Sunday at the Chinatown festival, I'm going to start earning it.

Blah blah blah

It didn't look like much, just two ramshackle buildings set out in the middle of nowhere.

We didn't look like much, a bunch of dirty twenty-somethings planting organic food, selling turnips on the side of the road. Trying to make the world a more peaceful place. The townsfolk stayed away from us, called us "hippies" and "tree huggers." They didn't like our kind.

They didn't know about the guns. They never looked in the bottom of our well to see who was living down there. Well, "living" is kind of using the term loosely.

This was the perfect cover, this stupid hippie compound. And the turnips weren't half bad, either.

Untitled

The sun drooled down over the horizon, over that field of dandelions and lightening bugs. The cool night air kissed our skin and eavesdropped on our great plans. We were full of plans that day, my love and I. We were full of plans, of vim and vigor and all the passion that youth can consume. It seems a lifetime ago, in another world, in another heart that beat with more ferocity and reckless grace than the heart I now have.

Our youth was nothing but frolic and adventure, our future became nothing but heartache and bloodshed.

Ukulele festival

There is a ukulele festival this weekend. There is a ukulele festival and people giggle when I tell them I'm going, and that I'm looking forward to it.

There are clothes strewn all over the apartment because I cannot afford to do laundry. All this week I am having cereal for dinner, reusing the milk from one bowl to the next because I can't afford $2.03 for a half gallon of 1% at the store.

The idea of a ukulele festival calms me, it is a goal. I can't fix my mother's problems, I can't be the friend my friends need me to be. I can't make my fucking cell phone work.

I can get lost a ukulele festival. I can mingle in the crowd, be a flaneur among ukulele enthusiasts, forget for a moment about having to wash my underwear in the sink and dry it on the shower curtain rod (because using a washing machine costs $1.50). I can just stop and listen to and learn about ukuleles.

I can forget how my mother has been shipped from one couch to another all these years, the same way I was shipped around all those years ago. Back then, I had my youth around me to protect me and keep me from falling down. Her youth is behind her. I cannot fix her problems.

I can go to a ukulele festival. I can attain one goal this week, I can say for the rest of my days "Oh, that sounds like a ukulele. I was at a ukulele festival once. It was fun." It will be fun. It must be fun. It is my Friday night salvation and I will not be swayed from my meager, fetid goals.

Red

It's that dangerous red, the heartbreaking kind, the shade that you know is trouble. The color of our fire trucks, the lipstick on our whores, the blood that pumps through our veins.

Red.

There's nothing so eye catching as the bright red of dawn, the early morning red that spreads like new found hope over the muted grays that the pre-dawn spews all over.

Red.

Luscious and lethal, the siren shade that reminds of what we'd all like to be, if we could get half a chance at clawing our way out of our rutted, fetid lives.

Red.