Polaroids

Week 2

POLAROID 1:

Every Color You May Ever Know

A chameleon

Bursts into every

Color

It has ever

Known

In the final

Moments

Of its life

What a beautiful

Ode

To all that

Has been

Given so freely

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POLAROID 2:

Below is a blurb I wrote for a novel I started writing when I thought I wasn’t abstracting the Deer novel enough.

The Deepest, Darkest forest.

As humanity settles into the reality of “Life after the biblical apocalypse,” We follow Percival and his loyal companions: Galahad (aka Gary the gay anteater from the San Francisco Zoo), and a lost child, Violet, searching for home, as we gallivant along with them and their quest for the holy grail.

In this modern Arthurian tale, we find humanity at its most beautiful and darkest moments, as seen through the lens of a fool who hopes to save humanity’s souls but ultimately must save himself.

An epic tale of woe, destruction, and the consequences of addiction, and maybe if we look deep enough into the holy grail itself, we may even find the possible absolution of humanity.

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POLAROID 3:

Gods and Dogs

Dogs come and go

Like my feelings on God

Often

The two are intertwined

How can something

That lives for

9 to 16 years

Be full of

So much love?

Maybe

That’s the perfect

Amount of life

But yet

How does something

So beautiful

Not live forever?

+++

For Gomez, Meiko, the Beegs, Mr. Lunch, Magic, and every dog or cat that showed us how to love and left too soon.

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POLAROID 4:

One Shit Storm After Another

Frank pulled the tabs on his son’s diaper, then reeled back as he witnessed—smelled the horror that lay ahead of him. A gut punch of shit, a mortar of it. It smelled like the jungles of the Mekong Delta, six weeks in, hunkered down. You lift a shoulder or bit of your head above a grass line or a pot of shit soup posing as a dugout, and you’re going to lose that shoulder or head or whatever.

Fighting in Nam, Frank had seen some shit, and he told himself this was no different—just a job. Get ‘er done! Hoora!

When Frank got back from Vietnam people could much see how his job killing Charlie’s, the skill he had acquired out there in Nam, doing such, well they, these guys in suits who didn’t go sit in the shit and the piss and the muck, didn’t watch their buddies get shot in the gut or the inner knee where your femoral lays, they didn’t watch their bodies bleed out in the mud, they didn’t hide under a bug infested log watching their dying buddies laying in the mud and blood get their heads and hearts speared by VC’s, so these guy, they couldn’t much see what that unique knowledge was good for in their sales departments or whatever. Frank even got turned down for a job as a high school janitor. The superintendent citing that Frank’s milky white left eye, and the pink scar that trenched across the left side of his face, that pulled up his upper lip on that side, they cited how his face, Frank’s face that went over there to Nam, that tried to do the right thing, that tried to fight for what it thought was good and would provide the American people the opportunity to live honest and free, well that face, Frank’s face just wouldn’t be good for the children’s emotional states. If they saw him walking around the school in a blue jump suit or whatever.

So, after nearly a year of this, nearly a year of “Sorry we just don’t have the need for a guy with your particular know-how,” after there was a mix up with his military benefits, and Frank and Patricia and their new little baby, Frank jr had to go on food stamps to make sure Frank jr had milk and something to eat everyday. They had to ask Patricia’s parents for a loan so they could pay their mortgage. They had to have some tough talks, while Frank jr lay in a crib in the other room. Talks that Frank wasn’t comfortable, talks that confronted what his dad and the Maries had told him it was to be a man. Well, yeah, after a year of that, Patrica decided to go back to being a dental assistant, and, well, Frank—Frank the gunner McKenzie had to bury his pride and become a stay-at-home dad.

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POLAROID 5:

Old Writing Notes To Self.

Try not to use “I” or “me”. Bury the I whenever possible. Starting a sentence with someone’s name still feels like using " I. " Bury that shit.

Try not to qualify a verb with IS.

Say the action without “IS” as much as possible.

Readers respond better to active verbs like step, kick, grabbed. A guy doesn’t just walk down a hall, he stumbles, ravages—he army-crawles. Use words that show the character, point to their nature, words that feel true to them not just in the scene but in whole.

“Was” always feels as if it steals the energy from a sentence; try to use it as little as possible.

Start with motion, action. ACTION! ACTION! ACTION!

Say it as simply as possible. Then cut, cut, cut!

Illiteration and repetition feel musical. make the reader dance through your pages.

A good character name can lead you down interesting roads.

Normal people in extraordinary situations.

Extraordinary people in ordinary situations.

Write what you’re most afraid to write. Write it first, or cut everything before that moment.

Read more poetry. Start your day with it.

Heart at the center of everything!

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POLAROID 6:

Maybe I’m the Fucking Asshole!

In sobriety circles, there’s a lot of introspection. You don’t want to beat yourself up too bad because, frankly, you, the addict, are pretty fucking good at it, but it’s necessary to progress beyond the life you have come to live. The life you have—if you have come to a 12-step program, decided that life, your life, is not worth living anymore, at least not in the fashion that you had been, then the only options are death or change.

If you choose to go down the route of change, of working a 12-step program, you’ll eventually reach a writing step, and then a step that involves reading that writing aloud. In the writing step, you write every resentment you’ve ever accumulated in your whole life. You write down every person, place, or institution that you believe wronged you. If you don’t start to see it by the time you’ve finished that list, it’s probably not honest or long enough! Mine was 7–count them 7-subject, college-ruled notebooks FILLED to the brim with resentments. T-shirts alone showed up 7 times. Fucking T-shirts! So, if by the time you’ve finished that list, if you don’t see it, the thing I’m trying to get to, that YOU might be the ASSHOLE, then well thank god you get to examine that list in detail, listing where your part was in the resentment (if there was any. This requires a lot of honesty again.) and then if you still don’t see that you might, just fucking maybe kinda sorta, YOU MIGHT BE THE ASSHOLE, then you read that list aloud to your sponsor or a close friend you trust, and hopefully it happens then. Otherwise, most people I’ve known who have done this thing, if they don’t see it, then, well, they just never seem to quite ever see it and die miserable, thinking that everyone and everything outside of them is the problem.

One time, when I was sitting with my first sponsor, about a year after I read aloud all my resentments to him, some of which he was part of, we sat in a park with another guy. This guy was a real rich “somebody.” Or so he thought. He drove a bright red Lamborghini, and he drove it that day into the parking lot of the park where he was going to read us, my first sponsor, and me all his resentments.

So, to fast forward a bit, it’s a beautiful fucking day, I mean the type of day that makes tourists say, “Why doesn’t everyone live in Seattle?!” And the Lamborghini guy is about halfway through his resentment list when it clicks. You can see it in his eyes. Like coming up for air after almost drowning or a broken pane of stained glass, once you see beyond that veil, it’s hard to go back. Well, right then, as Lamborghini guy’s eyes pop, and me and my first sponsor see it, our eyes light up and we look at each other, and then back to him, big dumb smiles on our faces and say almost in unison, “Do ya get it?” Did it happen?” And o’ l Lamborghini guy looks at us, and his popped eyes have now turned absolutely fear-stricken, and he says, “So wait, it’s all just me? None of this, the cars, the women, the job, or money will fix me. I just have to be a better person?” And my first sponsor and me, our knees cool in the grass, say enthusiastically, “Yes! Isn’t that great!”

Right then and there, I kid you not, Lamborghini guy gets up, walks right between us, through the beautiful Pacific Northwest day, gets into his Lamborghini, and screeches off.

My first sponsor told me, when I asked him a few weeks after that day, when I said to him after a meeting, “Hey, have you heard from the Lamborghini guy at all yet?” He said, “Nope, I can only imagine he found himself a hooker, all the blow he could buy, and that Lamborghini, the hooker, blow, and him are either off on some wild adventure, or dead in a ditch somewhere in Utah—

—Some guys just don’t want to see the truth. The truth that THEY MIGHT BE THE FUCKING ASSHOLE.”

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POLAROID 7:

I got new glasses.

The eye doctor said I had to bite the bullet this year and get progressives, said after 45 its just needed. I feel like I look like a delightfully bitchy Gen X mom in these. Maybe Erykah Badu.

On that note—

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POLAROID 8:

My youngest daughter refers to me with the pronoun she, I never correct her.