Category: Humor

Engineering Notes

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor

I’d inexplicably left a can of WD-40 on my nightstand for weeks next to the George Orwell book. This was not the first time I’d slept with flammables.  

***

I meet another engineer, who is also a blacksmith, and also a physicist. He sleeps with a knife under his pillow. He calls this knife his “bed knife,” insinuating there are others.

***

Saying where something is “staged” is an engineer’s unnecessarily codified way of designating where she left her shit. The second time I leave the blacksmith’s house, I begin a list of things I staged there. I employ a headlamp in search of staged items. 

***

I lost an earring in his bed once. Weeks later I awake to a cold piece of metal against my leg, and, thinking it might be my earring, I pluck it from the sheets. It’s a security drill bit. I couldn’t judge him. Security drill bits are very specifically handy. 

***

I have a complicated security system, just like everyone else. Somehow, he’s managed to disarm it. Tinkering around like that, he’s tripped a “trouble alarm,” which is logged in red ink under “Troubles and Supervisories.” 

The fire department will come. 

Cover Letter Template

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon

To Whomever Has the Power to Sign my Future Paycheck:

Cover letters are more awkward than first dates and worse, because no one’s even getting coffee out of it. I hope you like the font I chose, because I know you’re judging it right now with the same menopausal-and-overly-critical eye you use to bully investors into funding your tech product, which is obviously a lesser iteration of com.com, released over a year and a half ago. It is important to express product knowledge in the first paragraph. 

My friend from Important Skyscraper Company referred me to you, which is how I knew to make the menopause joke. Expressing humor is always important!

I’m inserting your name here to demonstrate I’m paying attention, and to show you I’m not afraid to use ethnic names. I won’t even try to give you a nickname. My friend from Important Skyscraper Company mentioned that some people in your office already have a nickname for you, but don’t worry, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have anything to do with ethnicity. 

I’ve attached my two-dimensional template resume which tells the story of someone who copy-pasted every SEO keyword from your job posting in hopes of demonstrating that I am a robot. 

I’m interested in this position with your overvalued, early-stage company, primarily so I can afford staying in my hometown which I don’t even recognize. All I want is to be able to afford stepping over homeless people on my way to artisan toast on Sundays with my friends who all dress the same.  

I’m desperate to immerse myself in the incredibly toxic culture I’ve been reading about, of which you are an original architect and incredible influencer! And of course I’ve heard about the amazing work that you do, personally. I’d be crazy to have any self-respect at all, if you would be willing to mentor me by treating me even worse, both verbally and energetically, than the men in this industry already have.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter which was painstakingly reformatted after having sent it out three times already this morning. 

It would be ridiculous if an email actually found anyone well.

 

Hey, I Got Your Letter

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor
Read Time: 04:31

Assholes around here sure do love the word “synchronicity.” Everyone just got back from Burning Man, so it’s to be expected, the uptick in the word’s usage. Maybe the whole thing will die down soon. And by die down, I mean them.

***

This morning, I started reading a book my friend sent me, called Elephant Engine High Dive Revival, a book included in a package he just sent for my birthday (which was three months ago). Like any book of poetry, some is really good (the guys’ stuff), and some is about periods and Mother Theresa (usually the girls’ stuff).

What does the title of the book mean? I don’t know, it’s probably more poetry. What does the collage on the cover refer to? I don’t know that either. Ordinarily, I’m curious about books. Books that are gifted to me, though, I’m skeptical about, the same way I’m skeptical about people who swear they love their children equally. 

I’ve often told people that choosing a book for someone is harder than choosing a piece of jewelry (though either is fine, if you’re asking which I prefer). In any case, this book happens to be a gem. 

For example, Brian Stephen Ellis’s “Letter from My Voice.” I want to eat this poem and digest it, and maybe then I can have inside me a lesson I really need to learn: “Stop being afraid of the world.” (ln. 2)

And they say poetry is dense.

***

Before I left Menlo Park, where I was very busy being a house pet of some sort, I used to be a stand-up comedian and podcast host and editor. I think I may have even had friends. I loved editing the podcast.

95% of everything I owned was in storage because I was leaving the country for work. That’s what we told everyone, anyway. It was easier to say that I was leaving because of the job–much easier than explaining why I might leave him for good after 15 years, why I might want to get as far away as humanly possible.

Everything was packed up and I had just days to go. Still, for some reason, I was recording things. I was still making content, putting music and ideas and people together, but I wasn’t actually producing a show of any sort.

Case in point: I had my friend Mike over. Mike is the Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County, or he was, anyway, when we sat down to record. He is also a veteran poetry-slam person, so he doesn’t read his poems off a piece of paper. His poems fall from his mouth the way jazz comes from a horn: smooth, intentional, with soul. We recorded that day and he did a poem called, “The End.”

That was in 2017.

***

My sound equipment had been in storage for two years, was in boxes the whole time I lived in LA. I lived in a megalopolis teeming with people who predicate their meaning in life based on being used for content, who are happy to whore themselves for attention, and I still couldn’t take advantage.

Something I really loved was in those boxes, and it wasn’t the equipment. It’s still hard to say which was worse: that I couldn’t name it, or that I couldn’t touch it.

This month, I opened the boxes. I poked around, and abandoned the equipment in the garage, but I did confront the external hard drives of old content. The first drive I opened happened to have Mike’s recording on it. 

Of all the orphaned projects, Mike’s was the only one I could listen to. The rest of the files were soundscapes of people who are no longer my friends, who never asked any questions about why I left, and who moved in very quickly to fill my place in that home, the way water leaks into places you don’t want it to go.

***

The Elephant Engine High Dive Revival is a different sort of poetry collection, insofar as each author has published not just one poem, but four, in succession, so you can get a true feel for each one’s voice. I appreciate the editors for putting the book together this way. It ensures we will not end up with an entire poetry collection about periods and Mother Theresa. 

In black, blocky font on page 89, there is the first and last name of my old friend Mike.

Wait. What?  Of course. He’s a poet. Of course he’s published. But are these his poems? How many Mike McGees are poets? I turn the page and am surprised to recognize this other, old acquaintance, his poem called, “The End.”

***

With so much poverty inside me lately, I didn’t think synchronicity was something I could afford–not to mention a trip to Burning Man, the place where people supposedly suffuse synchronicity at all times while possibly contracting Hepatitis C.

Synchronicity is typically reserved for VC companies finding the right 24 year old named Skyler to invest in. Synchronicity is Jung; it’s Freud without good cocaine. This is to say: synchronicity and I have never had much of a relationship.

But here it is. It just showed up in the mail, and it was addressed to me. I was beginning to think that if ever my voice had sent me a letter, like Brian Stephen Ellis’s had sent him, maybe mine just got lost in the mail. But it wasn’t lost. It just arrived. It was brief and to the point. It said, “The End.” It said, “Stop being afraid of the world.” 

Listen to Mike McGee perform his poem, “The End.”

What We Wrote About When We Didn’t Write Well

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 04:04

The names alone are unforgivable: Sierra and Orion. I don’t think I named them ironically, or to incite hatred of the nature-loving 1%.

But who names their kids Sierra and Orion? Bloggers. That’s who.

This first story, a typical suburban bore, features two annoying children, Sierra and Orion. The opening line, “She slices the apple with haste,” makes me want to start a bonfire (with extra lighter fluid) and burn every first sentence I’ve ever written like that. That, or I should send a condolence card to anyone who read the story saying, “I’m sorry for your loss: I know that time and attention are things you can never get back.”

The “story” has a “plot” which consists of the children being so annoying that the mother hops a flight to Florence—a place that, in her youth, she shared with a lover. 

Was this my younger self projecting that I would want to breed, and then apply nature-based naming conventions to my offspring?

Or was this the inexperienced writer’s way of not being able to say the more interesting or more true thing? That my mother, and maybe many mothers, would have been much happier without children.

***

I’ve already admitted to some very lame naming conventions, but it gets worse, and linguistically, more complicated. 

I am author to a disappointing spate of stories whose central characters have names like Whoever (naming one who is a lover, unrequited), What (naming one who is an object of affection), and Yes (naming a female, and notably, also a word which does not neatly fit into the eight categories of conventional parts-of-speech).

Of course, I’m Yes.

Having created such characters, I know, is a thing worthy of a few therapy sessions. (I blame e.e. cummings.)

One particular story’s protagonist, the aforementioned Yes, is a character who works in the “Ministry of Words.” (I blame Monty Python.) The story is about a woman who feels isolated, disenfranchised, though her job is to keep tabulation of the word “with” for the Ministry. She meets a man named What.

And that’s the story. That’s it.

What does this mean? Realistically, we can only deduce that I was working a shitty corporate job at the time. But I can also testify—because I’ve travelled the ring of literary hell that is reading this story—I can also testify that if language is a currency, I am the ultimate profligate.

The names are one thing, but I also over-worked my license with diction. Bulky, awkward, unnatural and just gross: the diction is a fat person exercising. Phrases like “discomfortable reality emblazoned hot her cheeks red.” Or even, “Yes and What intoed the elevator together.”

My only defense in having written phrases like this is: Goddamn you all, proofreaders, poets and professors alike, for failing to get me to leave the poetry at the coffeeshop. (In the end, I blame you all.) 

There was a time when I could imagine worlds of words, structures of which no one  ever properly learned (for technically they are improper), but surely you got the feel. And this is beautiful when it fits, when it works.

But there are also times when you need someone to tell you that you sound like a complete asshole because you wasted readers’ attention in describing elevator doors which “nonchalantly close.”

The only salvageable piece from this story (aside from its ending) is the dialogue. Yes and What, when they meet for the first time, echo an obvious theme from a favorite, old-timey comedy routine:

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

And they had met.

Abstractions are powerful because they clarify complexity by ignoring specifics. And this is what the story is about. The names ignore specifics. The plot is unspecific (fucking snooze). And the author ignored her own specifics when writing the story, too.

The story was terrible, yes. The environment in which the story was written (the real-life relationship) was also terrible. And neither had been specifically acknowledged. Life imitating art imitating life imitating art…

When I wrote the drivel about Yes and What, we’d been together about a decade, but already acted very much apart. He accused me of having one foot out the door for years. I looked around, cited the home and the family and the business and made a performance-based argument against his accusation. Still, he sensed I wanted to be free of it, and he wasn’t wrong.

Did I not understand “with,” or was I just opposed to it with him? I couldn’t be sure, so I wrote a shitty abstract story about none of it, and all of it, without addressing any of it. 

Whichever story you’re following at this point, the abstraction or the “real” one, it almost doesn’t matter—neither are worth remembering. But still, there was some good dialogue in there, in both stories, on both sides.

And I stand by the last line. I do. I stand by its ringing truth. It almost doesn’t matter which story was told before it. It’s just a perfect last line.

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Bathroom Cabinet Anthropology

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 01:03

(1) Physical Anthropology: the study of biological and behavioral aspects of human beings and their ancestors, particularly from an evolutionary perspective.

“Blackface” is a form of theatrical makeup used by (typically white) performers to represent a black person.

Conclusion: My charcoal mask is inherently racist.

(2) Cultural Anthropology: the study and and comparison of human cultures.

My boyfriend (he/him) said it’s stupid how much I spend for my Lancôme eye cream, and my only defense was that it’s cheaper than botox and kind of gets the job done. He nodded, saying his PornHub Premium account is totally cheaper than a real date, so he gets it.

Conclusion: Humans are more alike than dissimilar.

(3) Archaeological Anthropology: the study of human cultures through material and environmental remains.

Because he never flushes the toilet, I can tell when he’s been to our favorite BBQ restaurant without me.

Conclusion: It may be difficult to discern the difference between men and children. (Also, corn!)

(4) Linguistic Anthropology: the study and comparison of language as a fundamental mechanism by which people create culture and social life.

I don’t talk to him through the bathroom door to annoy him. I do it because it’s the fastest way to get him to capitulate to any inquiry I have at that moment.

Conclusion: Urgency affects negotiations. Time kills deals.

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Things of Little Importance

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 02:06

Imagine, if you can, a time before apps that identify music instantly; go back and remember, if you can, a time before radio stations needed websites, before algorithms reiterated music you already definitely like. If you can’t imagine such far-away times, you can Google them.

During the wild, grungy and flannel-filled years known as the 90s, I came across one of these idiosyncratic pieces of music you love so suddenly and incredibly that you remember exactly where you were the first time you heard it. 

I was in college in San Francisco, reading philosophy in a computer lab. The song passed on through the radio without my knowing its name. And it didn’t have lyrics, because it was a classical song. I should have acted resourcefully and written down the timestamp and just called the radio station, but as I mentioned, I was in college, and I was studying philosophy.

Back then, we had Netscape, but that was only a browser; it wasn’t a Google. No YouTube. No Shazam. No Spotify. (Imagine!) I couldn’t figure out the song, its name, its composer. All I knew was that there was a clarinet and a piano. And I loved that clarinet.

During quiet or elapsed moments while drinking water or waiting in the car, wonder about the clarinet would sneak up on me, and then I would wonder about me still wondering about the clarinet. 

For years this went on. Friends would ask me about (what happened to) the nice guy I’d been seeing, and I’d wonder about the clarinet. I’d be in the grocery store figuring which garbage bags were cheapest, pondering the stupidity of people buying garbage bags to line garbage cans at all, and deciding that we should all just line our garbage cans with dollar bills instead. And then I’d wonder about the clarinet.

Like I said, this went on.

Six, maybe seven years later, when San Francisco still had a classical radio station (and people were still riding around in wicker carriages drawn by horses, obvs), the radio is on, and there are the opening notes of the Prelude. I’m uncertain for a few measures, but then yes. There is the piano! The clarinet! And this is when I come to know Gerald Finzi’s “5 Bagatelles for Clarinet & Piano.” 

The very definition of bagatelle is ‘a thing of little importance.’ It’s a trifle, a trinket, something purely decorative, like a bauble or knickknack. Like the way we treat wonder and remembering and old things in a world apparently very busy with its progress, its purpose, its diet.

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Obit 10 (for the Giraffe part)

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor

Obit 10 (for the Giraffe part)

My job was to synthesize random and unique news blips from all over the world. One particular day, I had just finished a descriptive paragraph about a body dumped in the giraffe enclosure in the Ukranian Zoo, and the lead-in was really good. Really some of my finer work.

Then suddenly the passage was gone. Where did the giraffe part go? Ctrl Z. And again. Maybe a different document? Untitled 5. No? No. No dead guy in with the giraffes.

There’s absolutely no telling how these things happen. Everything autosaves all the time. There’s external hard drives filling every available hole like my computer is some sort of hardcore porn star. Things don’t make sense for a moment.

***

This same afternoon, I throw away books for the first time in my life. Most were philosophy books from college, marked up with in-the-margin-scribbles, ostensibly the short-hand answers to everything.

There was water damage and black mold that could be blamed on no one and most certainly not my ex (nor his passive-aggressive roommate), and really my ex had been so generous (he reminded me) in having stored my books for so long (he reminded me) anyway.

While cleaning, I find a letter to my ex from someone with a sad housewife’s desperate penmanship. The date on the letter coincides with our time. The letter says nothing I want to know and of course read it anyway. Twice. Just to be sure I have this right.

This unexpected afternoon storm occluded an otherwise blue sky, our year together. There had been joy, certainly. There had been love. Art. But the new information about the other woman seemed insistent on pushing out the story I knew. Irony creates incredible illusions, certainly, but it doesn’t change truths.

***

‘Loss’ should be absence, should be not-there. But it’s the opposite. It’s incredibly heavy. I want to tell it that it’s no good being a dichotomy, that it’s super uninteresting, really, so 90s-angsty to be that way. I want to tell Loss to get whole with itself, go to a self-awareness retreat or do a cleanse–whatever it takes for Loss to go a little easier on us all.

***

I make a list of the books I throw away so I can replace them, knowing that I will likely not replace them. I preoccupy myself with trying to reconstruct the phrasing that made the lead-in about the dead guy in the giraffe enclosure so good. I am aware I have lost several important things this day, but fail to prioritize them, cannot exactly name one of them.

I want to know the mechanics of how to bear the weight of having lost a thing you cannot reproduce or replace. And I bet the answer was in one of those philosophy books I threw away; I bet the dead guy in with the giraffes knew the answer, too.

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How is Your Time?

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor

INQUIRY FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF THE FUTURE

RE: How is Your Time?

Does your time feel short, or maybe it feels long? Were there those left behind that should have been brought along?

Did they leave? Did they die? Or was it a suicide? Was it a truly good intention gone terribly awry? Or is it just as simple as loving and living? And how do we know when we have enough to just keep on giving?

I suppose what we are asking is:  How should a person be? The Department of the Future awaits your answer, expectantly. 

Shelly Strebel, Unintentional Officer Department of the Future

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We All Know What We’re Doing Wrong

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 02:54

(Excerpt From: “The Privilege of Cowardice,” Essays by White Girls)

I grabbed my Balenciaga slipper and smashed that fucker, just as it was eating a still-very-much-alive caterpillar, I smashed it straight. It was one of those “killer bees” everyone had been posting about in the neighborhood. Does one dead killer bee matter? A queen can lay about 1,500 eggs per day. Still, one dead, left out lifeless on the pavement like that, staves off the others. 

I have never been quick to act in defense of myself or other humans when they are being eaten alive (also right in front of me) by other pre-programmed killers like culture-sellers, bosses, or abusive spouses. I know this about myself, have been living with this disappointment about myself for a long time, that I still wear my Balenciaga slippers out into the yard.

***

(Excerpt from: “Eulogy for Another -Ism,” Coping with Suffixes)

There was a man who was a friend of everyone in everytown, across the anywhere nation. The man was friends with everyone in everytown because he was the boozy loveliest of joy who travelled far and wide, spreading his smiles and joy and booze. If he had been a cartoon, he’d have travelled with a little bird that was his best friend and minder.

One day the man who was a friend of everyone up and died, he was quite young with a family, and everyone across the anywhere nation was sad. They posted drunken pictures of the friend of everyone, and they recalled half-remembered events and those who wanted most to forget them then had to remember them.

And now his friends pay homage to his life by chugging the beers and downing the shots and showing the pics, but it’s never just a pour out, never that, because man, I mean what a waste.

***

(Excerpt From: Pablo)

Pablo worked along the coast one summer selling ice cream outside the place with the red and white awning where the rich people and the ex-pats went. Many of them he knew, and the first month they saw Pablo selling ice cream, they thought it was la plaisanterie. The second month they thought it was la nostalgie, and the third month brought hushed discussion about his state of depression.

Pablo would sell his ice cream only to children. And he’d take a pencil or crayon (whatever was in his apron, really) and after three or four passes of the pen on a napkin, he’d hand the child an ice cream cone, wrapped in a delightful and artful napkin-doodle.

Pablo was depressed. But the patterns in the sloped cobblestone street, the sun’s and shadows summertime shifts, and all the beautiful, self-important people seeing themselves as important–these things were fine.

One night, Pablo left drunk from the place with the red and white awning, and when he punched the door open into the summer night, the heat punched back. His face clammed sticky with heat as soon as he reached the curb, and he pulled a cigarette from his pants pocket.

Looking down, he saw one of his soiled napkins in the gutter, on it a crumpled, dirty doodle, lifeless and useless, worse, just litter. He thought of his friend that committed suicide. He thought of his art. He thought of squares. He thought of a prostitute. He thought of prisms. He thought of all these things as one thing. He squinted at the doodle in the gutter and said, “Well that’s where that belongs.”

And then he lit his cigarette, and pitched his sweaty face upward toward the blue night sky.

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Not a Food Snob

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 02:02

An anomaly to regular statistical incidence, this town has had three contestants on the show “Worst Cooks in America,” though its population is a modest 34,000.

When I Google “restaurants,” what comes up is a picture of a UPS Store, noted for having a casual atmosphere that’s good for kids.

DP Dining

The whole coastal town is dated. You can tell some of the homes still have shag carpets, wallpaper, and a can of spam tucked back in the pantry. You can tell.
I’m just looking for a decent restaurant, but in this town, dropping the name James Beard makes people respond with the sound a pirate might make. And that’s confusing for everyone.

The list of eating establishments seems to have interchanged and reiterated all possible nautical terms, the way Mexican Food restaurants can take four food items and make an entire menu.

Chart House, Harbor House, Harpoon House. Good God.
“Beach Fare,” I say to my companion, wondering if that means there’s just sand on your food when it comes to the table.

“This other place has ‘area sourced’ Mahe.”

“‘Area sourced’ probably means it’s from the Costco up the street.”

“Is there actually a Costco up the street? Should we just do that?”

“Is Mexican food too pedestrian?” We look at the reviews on a tiny screen. The reviews are good. We scroll through pictures of the restaurant and see a picture with the owner standing next to Vice President Mike Pence, and my companion says, “The Mexican looks so confused.”

“He does look confused. Like he’s asking his staff, ‘You guys served this asshole?’ ”

We continue our search:

The Waterman’s Harpoon. The Longboard Chart Harbor House View. Mike and Ted’s Charter House View at the Harbor Lighthouse. The Harbor Grill Restaurant. Harpoon Henry’s. Waterman’s Harbor.

I would trade every harpoon, harbor and chart in a 10 mile radius for and anything involving kale, but do not say this aloud.

“These places all look like they serve fried calamari with a side of ranch.”

We capitulate and decide on Mike and Ted’s Charter House View at the Harbor Lighthouse. As we slide into the wicker seats and take in the view of overweight and oddly-shaped people lumbering about outside on the harbor, a young and overly-eyemakeuped woman brings us water in plastic cups and asks, “How y’all doin?”

My companion wastes no time in ordering the fried calamari as an appetizer, and asks, “Does that happen to come with a side of ranch?”

“Everything here with comes with a side of ranch, sir.”

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Baby Names

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 01:27

It had been two years since I talked to one of my best friends from college and that’s how I found out she had had the baby. So of course I ask what’s the baby’s name and she says, “Tiegen.”

And I think OK, so that’s how that’s going.

***

I’m at the wedding of a good friend, Lisa, whose brother, Tom, is officiating. When I meet Tom, I understand that he is gay. A plot twist is introduced, however, when I later meet his wife (a lifestyle blogger) and their child.

Afterwards, I ask my friend Lisa, “What’s your brother’s kid’s name again?” And she says, “Isla Skye.”

I muster incredulousness to remain polite. “Ah. That’s a family name?”

“No. It’s a fucking blogger name.”

***

I was probably ten years old before I realized that Margaret and Aunt Peggy were the same person.

***

Six calendar days before her wedding, an announcement made on slices of printer paper in Arial font arrived through the mail: the event was off. Even the bridesmaids received the news this way.

Uncomfortably soon after, the bride-to-be married a different man who happened to be a billionaire, but no bridesmaids were involved. Their charming story was printed up on glossy magazine paper and distributed, and they talked about how they named their first-born son after their favorite Underground stop in London.

What a hoot it must have been to ride the Underground!

***

On the last girls’ trip, a wife had her sons’ names tattooed in very fine script under her arm, where even a bathing suit or a bra would cover them.

The husband knew some things about the girls’ trips, but he didn’t know her friends inspected the garbage can in his wife’s bathroom after her trainer would leave.

That which is named cannot really hide, and although hiding is usually very obvious, no one acted as though this were true.

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A Look at Public Transportation

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 01:30

Riding the subway in New York City is a moveable feast if you enjoy people watching. The only thing is to not stare at someone too long. They might stab you.

***

In Italy, riding the Metro is different–especially in the summer, when the absolutely murderous heat and the second-world air quality affects your disposition. In Italy, it’s so hot and pressed and populated that when you come eye to eye with someone riding the Metro, there are mere inches between your sweaty faces, but you don’t look away. Everyone’s just there in agreement that it’s goddamned hot and hey ho this is humanity.

***

In NYC, the homeless people have a gig in the subway cars. They pitch. They pitch their needs (whether asking for money, food or feminine hygiene products), and they do it better than I’ve seen some CEOs pitch their own businesses. NYC should hire homeless people to teach big business about how to sound sincere, how to sound urgent in their pitches. During these pitches, most riders avert their eyes to the floor, to their phone, or to the most recent issue of The New Yorker.

***

My first trip to Italy, I was about 30 and I went to visit my mom. She’d had an apartment there (an entire life, actually) for a few years, and I wanted to know about it. So I visit. One summer day we take a bus to Porta Portesi. It is Dante’s seventh-ring-of-hell hot, and there’s an old man standing behind me on the bus. It’s so hot and populated and pressed, and I can feel his erection poking through his pants on the side of my thigh so I turn my head and all I see is his wide, unapologetic and beautifully crooked  grin.

And I’m just there, in agreement, that it’s goddamn hot and hey ho this is humanity.

 

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The Art of Prayer

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 03:29

For a long time when I was little, I didn’t know all the words to the “Our Father,” let alone what the prayer meant. Memorization was new, and because I could only remember as much as I could get through in the first breath,  I would repeat what I knew, over and over and over, exactly as long as it took everyone else to finish.

“On Earth as it is in Heaven.” 

Years later at an immersion school, we would have to memorize the same prayer in Spanish. I was at the age where hearing something enough times lead to the belief that you could fill gaps in understanding with random but approximate words, the way we did with song lyrics and philosophy.

“Y perdona nuestras dudas como nosotros perdonamos nuestros dudas.”

More time has passed and now Churches are just wonderful architecture. Prayers are an empty vase we send to sick people so they have a place to display their modest bouquets of hope. Memorization in the age of The Google is not a skill, but a cocktail-party affectation.

The only place I am invited to some semblance of prayer anymore is during yoga classes which are filled with excruciatingly good looking and much younger people.

I don’t care for young people the way I care for older people. I think everyone younger than me should be relegated to jobs at Trader Joe’s, and when I meet in person, for example, the successful artist whose bio said he was born in 1993, I feel form on my face a million microexpressions of judgment, the likes of which even $800 worth of Botox can’t suppress.

One afternoon in yoga class, the instructor announces that my “breathing is incorrect,” and a red, humiliated feeling one should not feel during a meditative practice wells up in me. I assume she is trying to help by making such an assessment, but all I understand is that this woman, this woman whose only fatty aspect has been syringed into her lips? She just informed the entire class that I can’t manage a basic autonomic function.

And she’s not wrong–that’s the worst part. I actually do spend a bad amount of time in yoga class thinking about smoking cigarettes.

To end the class, the instructor gives us a mantra. Her cartoon lips drip monotonous, meaningless-to-me syllables: Ra Ma Da Sa Sa Say So Hung. 

We repeat the incantation. And we repeat the incantation. And we repeat the…and I’m saying, “Ma Ma Ma Say Say Say Hung,” and I don’t care that it’s wrong, so I keep saying it because our voices, voluminous, fill the space up to the roof beams, and no one can tell I’m so wrong anyway and the whole, low tone starts to soothe, rumbling slow through my chest.

Ra Ma Da Sa Sa Say So Hung.

The instructor who we cannot see because our eyes are closed now, is, in my mind’s eye, a plumped and glossy, pouty mouth, bulbously but with perfect teeth articulating: Ra Ma Da Sa Sa Say So Hung. 

It sounds like a Lady Gaga lyric. It sounds Vietnamese. Ra Ma Da Sa Sa Say So Hung. It sounds like a jazz singer working out phrasing with no words.

Mantras need doing 108 times, and who knows if we’re even at 40 yet. There’s still time to get it right, I think, though I’m lucky if I make it to the end Ra Ma Da Sa Sa Say So Hung because usually I give up in earnest before then. It’s hard, man, Ra Ma Da Sa Sa Say So Hung How are these even words?

Sure-definitely I do not know what it all means Ra Ma Da Sa Sa Say So Hung big picture, or if this’ll fix my chakra? Plus we been doing this a minute now, man Ra Ma Da Sa Sa Say So Hung if I could just get it right just a couple times, seriously, a couple times in a row Ra Ma Da Sa Sa Say So Hung I should have it memorized by now what are we at like 80 now Ra Ma Da Sa Sa Say So Hung seriously how can you not remember something when you’re listening so hard, Jesus Ra Ma Da Sa Sa Say So Hung it’s the same every time and you heard it so so many times already.

Every incantation I get at least one syllable wrong; and every incantation I’m one syllable closer to getting it right.

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Authors’ Note

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 01:03

Writers who know they are writers from a young age often spend half their lives denying that they should become writers at all. This may be common of many artists who do not inherit the industry.

Really good writers sometimes (instead of writing) will read everything decent under the sun and further convince themselves that they could never be a writer and everyone else already did it better anyway.

–It’s either that, or they convince themselves that they are already a better writer than everyone they’ve recently read, despite not having written anything new for months except lists of household tasks that also remain incomplete.

When reading as a writing-avoidance-technique, the writer often runs up against writing they are sure they could have created. Of course they didn’t create that writing, having been far too busy cleaning the cats’ litter boxes (or busy with some other anti-social pet or activity), creating hackneyed water color pictures (business a writer has no business doing), or drunk-dialing friends to leave voicemails about the next piece of writing which should be written (but probably won’t be), and which is based on another thing just read while avoiding writing.

Every writer looks forward to the day that the publisher sends that thin note saying, “Thank you. Your first book can’t look like this.”

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Every Good Boy Does Fine

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 01:12

Before I’d even met him, my idea was to end up in Malibu like it was still the 60s, where music and art and writing and complicated relationships were the things.

Still, he didn’t mention that he was married when I met him.

He couldn’t read tablature, but he was a good enough guitar player that his Laurel Canyon friends would ask him to play at art openings or dinner parties hosted by Vogue people. He played stylized covers. It was fine enough.

He invited me to one of these numbers up on Wilshire, an art opening where he was playing, and there was an open bar. I left with a beautiful art book and a new Moleskine gilded with the gallery’s emblem, though they weren’t necessarily giving them away.

About the fact that I had just stolen beautiful books from an art gallery where he performed, he said, “Bonnie & Clyde.”

Later, he’s telling me about his cheating wife, and each pour of the 2015 Rombauer Merlot is warming a perilously close confidence. Everything he says feels like an admission, but to me, admissions feel like secrets. Admissions talk like they’re related to honesty and truth, but they’re second cousins at best.

He said, “I could love you.”

I said nothing.

He said, “So then, hire me as your assistant when you make it.”

I said, “You can’t even read music. You have to learn to read music.”

And he said, “That’s fine.”

 

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Obit 1

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Obits

She was an occasional regular.

The men she loved have the gardens to prove it, and the women she loved no longer live in the country. Or they became men.

She was a woman who always wished that her mother would just say.

She had written only one truly great metaphor. It was:

“Innocence is a dandelion, lost to the breath of time.”

Too bad she wrote this metaphor at 14.

She never divorced because she never married, but when she left she knew she had to leave the cats behind in order to get out.

There will be some furniture left over. Don’t panic.

Join us any day in celebrating life, as it is, motivated by deadlines and seasons.

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Shark Life

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor

Shark
Original Illustration © 2018 Shelly Strebel

Read Time: 0:27

A lot of people don’t know that when a shark bites a human, it’s actually making a mistake.

Scientifically speaking, sharks prefer to eat marine life; they bite humans mainly when they are confused or curious.

I’ve always been taught that sharks are very smart animals. So I wondered, “How could such a smart animal make a mistake like that?”

And then I thought: I suppose I am a pretty smart animal.

But haven’t I also, at one time or another, put something into my mouth only to realize that it, too, was a huge mistake?

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Find Your Tribe, Fail Further

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 3:02

I may be an example of a liberal arts degree gone useless, but my skin starts to itch whenever I hear people talk about “finding your tribe.” The saying has metastasized through American culture, having crept its way onto statement t-shirts, bumperstickers and throw pillows on the sofas of yoga moms everywhere. 

find_your_tribe_throw_pillow-e1540764404949.jpgI’d love to get an anthropologist’s take on a lot of modern things, but especially the fascination with “finding one’s tribe,” the purpose of which seems to be: to reinforce one’s sense of self in terms of ‘belonging,’ to codify success, and to surround oneself with like-minded people who help manifest emotional buoyancy and resilience.

I think about the way anthropologists used to talk about finding tribes when anthropology was a burgeoning field. As a study of human societies and cultures and their development, finding tribes literally meant that you had a new subject to study both in terms of physical evolution and cultural understanding.

Comparatively, “finding one’s tribe” nowadays doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the understanding of another, at all, and can appear solipsistic at worst and self-absorbed at best. 

What’s more, the the complication of the older, more warring connotation of the word ‘tribe’ lodges itself in my head. Tribes are historically understood as groups of people bound together by politics, language and/or geography. I think of the likes of the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Our more modern understanding of tribes, say, at Burning Man or with self-proclaimed nationalists, are also understood as people bound together by politics, language and/or geography, though I would also include income or tax bracket as another basis of belonging.

Screen Shot 2018-10-25 at 12.09.39 PM
Photo Blair Guild Washington Post 

And I’m here to tell you: the conflation of the colloquial use of “finding one’s tribe” with the ancient understanding of an exclusive political or cultural group isn’t helpful. And people who believe that they they are forward-thinking or woke AF in “finding their tribe” seem to overlook that in doing so, they create inclusion for themselves by creating exclusion for others. If it’s not wholly antithetical to seek belonging by creating exclusion, it’s at least hypocritical.

***

I check the dictionary to make sure I’m understanding the now-version of “tribalism” correctly.

Yep. Seems so.

I think we’ve got to get back to a time of editing what we say and how we say it—not for political correctness—but for accuracy. There’s no need for further advertisement or amplification of modes of thinking that divide us as a nation or human family. Our government is doing enough of that. 

***

It just so happens that this week’s wonderful Humans of New York is covering stories from survivors of the Rwandan genocide (1994). In this country, tribes are more than just the Red Lightning Camp who has the water.

The Rwandan genocide is a recent international disaster of tribalism become paramount; familial, friendship and faith bonds meant nothing. There was no respect for the bonds of one’s chosen tribe (a husband or wife) against the social order of the ethnic (genetic or geographic) tribe.

In characterizing the genocide of more than a million people between two warring tribes, the Hutu and the Tutsi, the BBC recounts, “Neighbours killed neighbours and some husbands even killed their Tutsi wives, saying they would be killed if they refused.”

***

Until we recognize the effects we create (exclusion, persecution) by “finding our tribe,”  and until we have felt the gravity of our collective world history as one giant seething and sick organism borne of guns, germs and steel; until we are able to remain as curious and as excited to preserve cultures like olde anthropologists, and until we have mourned those histories which are lost, which we destroyed or murdered, or which we prohibited from ever coming to light—we will only fail further as humankind.

In an effort (I deleted “best effort”) to end on a more positive note, let’s all self-reflect on the implications of the language we use, and have a little more respect for the lessons history has taught us and here are some cute dogs to help distract you from everything I just said. 

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Other People’s Brunch

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 2:28

The guy right on the other side of the window is reading something boring: Steinbeck, the Eden one. His coffee is done, he’s already checked the bottom of the coffee mug to see who made it, and then he checked the bottom of the the lovely, naive and long-haired fairchild over there with a fine ass. He crosses his legs. I wonder if she is good enough to give him an erection.

I wonder if I am.

He’s way too young for me, but I can already see he’ll look exactly the same, likely better, in about ten years.

He reminds me of the time my friend declared, “I’ve never had a bad Jewish dick.”

***

I parked next to a Tesla whose license plate said CR8PEAC, which I imagine is actually really easy to do if you are able to afford a Tesla.

***

You propose an “official” girls brunch. Perfect. So good. You are the director of West Coast sales now, which you announce to the cooing women at your table, feeling a vague existential twinge (though you’ve never actually used those two words together, like ever).

Congratulations on those new business cards, bitch! Your life is a consumerist nightmare! Your long, elegant sweaters and diamond earrings! Fuck your elegant sweaters. I hope a thread from your sweater hangs down all the way down to the ground, and when you go to leave this place, I hope that thread gets caught in the escalator and unravels and causes a scene. I know there is no actual escalator in this place, and I still want it to happen.

***

The adolescent with the oily, pimply forehead: I think she will likely become a harmless citizen some day soon. I wonder if I was that kind of child, who was able to look at adults with confidence. I don’t think so.

I think I knew I was smart, but I also knew I was ugly. Forcing the ugly but smart to become self-aware is what ensured I would grow into anything but a harmless citizen.

***

At table C outside, there is a giant and old golden retriever who stands, is reminded that he buckles under his own weight and bad joints, resigns, and sits back down again. He scratches his chin relentlessly.

I hope never to be old, with owners who ignore my fleas.

***

Some lady working on the computer. Who are the people who come to a cafe, order some breakfast and then reside there like it’s their own living room? This question comes from the asshole writer who judges everyone around her because she got into a terrible argument with her lover of 14 years who she won’t marry.

She doesn’t hate you because you are happy; she hates you because your job is not as important as you think, because you are replaceable down to the last atom, because you act like you don’t understand the human condition. She hates you because she’s made so many mistakes, and she hates you for being the audience to her failure.

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It’s Lampoon, People

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 1:03

lam·poon (verb)  publicly criticize (someone or something) by using ridicule, irony, or sarcasm.

In writing, you have to be honest enough with readers to share the hard thoughts–those thoughts we don’t want to say because we’ll look like assholes; those moments we don’t want to relive because they were hard enough the first time; those conversations we’ve had where we’ve definitely said the wrong thing.

Pretty serious stuff, right?

Pretty boring, too, if that’s all you’ve got. (Also it’s just sad-making and shitty to harp like that.) Besides: Camus/Sartre, Neil Simon/Woody Allen and Shakespeare/Dylan already did most of that as well as it could be done. And if not them, then Updike.

And this is why I lampoon. It’s just a form of humor. Sometimes irreverent, sometimes inappropriate, sometimes “too soon”–and sometimes just the right amount of levity mixed with reality to make the medicine go down.

**Most everything I say here is opinion, so you’re free to disagree, even though there’s no place for you to comment. This is a bullshit blog where my only editor is my better (or worse) judgment, and I don’t need you hating on some silly opinion when there’s other things to do like house the homeless, adopt pets, or write your own stupid blog about how much you hate my stupid blog.**

How to Get Your Dream Job

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in Humor, Sports Takes
Read Time: 1:25

(On meeting Jim Rome and Kyle Brandt on Media Row, February 2016)

5:15 am

Wake up a little drunk. Realize that the hair should not have been washed last night without a blow-dry. Smoke a joint and drink 3/4 cup of coffee.

6:20 am

Get into car and onto gridlocked freeway. Notice that gas gauge says 10 miles until empty. Drive 15.7 miles.

6:55 am

People looking at each other in traffic. They think I am a responsible adult driving an expensive, responsible adult car. Little do they know I am about to run out of gas, which would block lane 2. Also, I might still be a little drunk. And I am definitely high.

6:57 am

Get fuel. And coffee. Same thing.

7:39 am

Decide to listen to the “Jam” station. All songs run 8-12 minutes: an enchanting duration due to ambling tablature, but not helpful in ignoring how much of life is being wasted in the expensive adult car in order to pay for the expensive adult car.

Everything feels like it will never end.

Driving Aggression level: character Ari in “Entourage.”

8:49 am

Survey downtown SF: 4th and Mission: No shortage of assholes eating imported artisan toast.

8:50 am-12:03 pm

Inside waiting. Make best attempts at seeming busy/important/like I am paying attention, without actually having to engage with anyone.

12:03 pm

Wipe hands vigorously on pants to remove hours of air-conditioned sweat and skin cells from palms. Leave curiously shaped oil stain on inside thigh of slacks.

12:04 pm

Meet the host and producer of the radio show that you would like to emulate in brand, style and longevity. Shake hands. Fail to mention the one thing you actually went there to say, because both are actually more handsome in real life.

6:56pm

Suffer excitement about another successful day, tomorrow.  Have a drink.

Whose Ideas Are Whose and Whose Ideas Are Those? (Why I Write)

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 16:00

Why I Write

1. Because if I don’t write it, other people will 

I’ve seen them in print before: ideas that were mine, storylines mine, compositions mine. This morning wasn’t the first time it happened, but it’s fucked every time it does. The idea, the storyline, the composition, yes, they were all mine–he just wrote them down first, got them published first. Bastard.

So this guy gets printed, not to mention everybody else who seems to be able to shit out books regularly like they’re on some juice-cleanse. Over here, I’m pretty busy avoiding writing, so much so that I have stress-gas bubbling cramps in my stomach. It makes me wonder Why can’t I even shit out a piece of shit, even to just get started? Try harder. Fail harder (1). Shit it out, I tell myself. Rock back and forth and get your shit out, even if it’s one of those hard, unsatisfying pebble shits. 

***

I’m upset. Today what was plagiarized was my very original, page-centered and stand-alone, blocky prose that I originally created in the 11th grade.

I’ll admit now that the invention of the layout happened by way of my irrevocably fucking up the page justification on the electric typewriter. I took what was a newly-learned term, “poetic license,” and used it to explain the block-shaped paragraphs I could not undo. When asked about the structure In English class, I manufactured an explanation about the verbal blocks: my writing was like a word sculpture, a cubist word sculpture.

I imagined a later time, in a future fancy city, where arty people would see my writing and immediately know it despite a bare glance at the words. I imagined them all recognizing my writing for the blocky turd that it is, and some would roll their eyes while others would mew, “I sort of like it,” but either way they would know who I am and that the turd was produced by me and my typewriter with its unchanging justification.

Every passing moment and every small shift of the sun is wasted on me if I am not getting my ideas out. Each day I wait (and drink coffee and feed the cats and masturbate instead of writing), there’s going to be someone else shitting out some runny, yellow, malnourished version of my ideas. And I just can’t let this go on.

2. Because we would all be better if we acted with a little more urgency 

George Orwell wrote an essay called, “Why I Write,” which is what I would have called this piece of mine. 

Orwell’s writing benefited from a far more compelling urgency than my gastric metaphors: actual War. In the 1930s, Orwell goes to Spain to fight the war (by way of Paris, you know, so as to dine with friend and American writer, Henry Miller, first), ends up getting shot in the throat (after being warned that at 6’4”, perhaps he should not be standing against the trench parapet), and is dispatched after loudly being labeled a fascist. Years later, he is become the canon. Orwellian artillery–thoughts, ideas and books–won the most real war of all simply by lasting.

People nowadays have no real concept of war, except maybe that they know someone in the small minority who has given up their freedom to protect ours. But kids today aren’t charging at their brothers with bayonets and frostbitten feet, anymore.

You know what I mean: war is so impersonal now, the troops aren’t even told whether they’re fighting for ideology or limited natural resources, or what’s the difference between the two. And I’m just not fortunate enough to have the bombs overhead reminding me of the fragility and urgency of it all. 

I hope someday to be in combat with my laziness. Until then, I can only imagine the urgency Orwell felt with the thunder of new technology, jet aircrafts blasting overhead, not knowing if the plane is us or them, not knowing if the bundle about to be dropped means survival or death, not knowing if he had time to get himself and his manuscripts and get out of there at the sound of the “Red Warning.”

We don’t really have a war going on right now (not one that our government will tell us about, anyway), but it seems like everybody else does. Sometimes I think my writing would be helped by an actual war, the same way I think my writing would benefit by my mother’s death.

3. Because I am in love with certain writers and maybe you will fall in love, too 

The first time I read the “Preface to a Life,” in James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times,  it became my favorite literary garment of everything hanging in the wardrobe of my mind (1). Season after season, I return to the comfort of that perfectly-fitted, perfectly warm-when-it’s-cool, perfectly cool-when-it’s-warm prose that is unmistakably Thurber.

It doesn’t matter that such an outfit can’t be worn everyday; I try it on again and again in the company of No One simply because it flatters me. The curves of his words cut to fit the naturally ill-shaped, better than a foreign-tailored suit. He explains the temperament of a writer who “…moves about restlessly wherever he goes, ready to get the hell out at the drop of a pie-pan or the lift of a skirt. His gestures are the ludicrous reflexes of the maladjusted; his repose is the momentary inertia of the non-plussed. He pulls the blinds against the morning and creeps into smokey corners at night. He talks largely about small matters and smally about great affairs.” (2)

Oh, go on. 

The simply knitted blanket of Thurber’s words warms me with delightful stitches and loops. (He is talking about me, to me, after all.) And it is warm for a while, like whiskey. And then like whiskey, it gets confusing. Because here Thurber has perfectly put together the words to make big the small, to day the night, and he beautifully buffs a writer’s ridiculous sensitivity to a patent shine.

Can an expression of the beautiful mitigate an ugly actuality? At the very least, we can agree that a perfect description of the most lowly or affected is more holy and high (and undoubtedly more powerful) than the idea unexpressed. 

***

James Thurber, on a via from Benvenito Cellini, warns that “a man should be at least 40 years old before he undertakes so fine an enterprise as setting down the story of his life.” I’ve considered the amount of time I spend doing things like eating and sleeping, clipping the dry skin from my cuticles and avoiding phone calls; the amount of time I spend looking for things and being lost; the amount of time I spend feeding cats and masturbating (separate items, there); and then I consider how much time I actually spend writing.

Based on these calculations, starting to set down any story at all at 35 (as I am now) leaves (maybe barely) maybe just enough time to squeeze out time for you “…time for me, /And time yet for a hundred indecisions /And for a hundred visions and revisions/ Before the taking of a toast and tea.” (3)

What every story is–all any story can hope to be at this point, really—is a hundredth revision about a hundred indecisions. And what every life well-lived wants, I think, is love, repeated in any form, any iteration. –That, and some time for toast and tea. 

4. Because I think I know something about the state of mankind, and I want you to admit it, too, so that we both feel better 

Nobody tells you it’s okay to be an artist, except maybe other artists, and this they do (I suspected for a long time) to justify their own means and to feel less like a fraud. Certainly no one tells you to hurry up and be an artist, though I think there is art in all of us.

Feeling fraudulent may have something to do with why writers can’t help but indulge in creating grossly self-important prose (Reason #1 ‘Why I Write’ is a prime example). Regarding the things we bring to life, we are desperate for justification. We must make ourselves rightly understood; we must make ourselves right.

The need to alleviate feeling fraudulent might also explain why we can’t help but coddle the soft step-sibling of Self-Important Prose, Purple Prose. Creating Purple Prose, though, is even more shameful. It is an imperious child from an affair who will publicly complain that it never asked for life, but who privately believes is it special for having been born of love, however illicit.

Writers and artists wear humanity’s foibles like formals. Our scars show. We are less embarrassed about what we have or have not made of ourselves. Still, we can’t help dressing up what we mean in purple prose, and its flowery, overblown way becomes a fiction we tell ourselves, and each other, that everything is okay when everything is not necessarily okay.

If our self-important musings or purple prose ages well or at all, it grows into the the woman at the cocktail party whose plastic surgery scars, still visible in the sunlight, haven’t quite yet healed. (Still you might call her beautiful.)

I believe it is not just artists who struggle to find justification, and I believe we are all desperate not to appear or feel fraudulent. I believe we all want to be right, and we have all created fictions to prove our rightness. Artists are just the first ones to admit it.

***

Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? has a great section about the ugly art piece inside each one of us (4). She challenges her artist friends to an “Ugliest Painting Contest,” and, in the end, one artist cannot create anything truly ugly, one artist paints something so ugly that it creates an emotional burden, and one artist does not complete the task at all.

The ugly painting contest forces them to see what their ugly says. When you look at yourself closely, sometimes you will be like the one artist who created something so ugly that it is worrisome. You’re a fucking goddamn mess inside; and you look at this fact and it upsets you, and everything that comes out of you is a fucking goddamned mess, too, and it upends everything and everyone around you.

On the other hand, sometimes you’re the artist who cannot create anything ugly at all. You have a golden touch and perfect timing and all is right with the world and even your ugly is sort of beautiful.

But if neither of these things are true for you, then you might be the artist who opts not to create anything at all. If this is the case, you may have avoided the Seriousness of self-expression that making art requires, and you might be the most sane of all.

Whoever we are, there is a definite importance in finding out out sooner rather than later: Aren’t we all the same, in our confusion about how to be?

***

Sherwood Anderson, in Winesburg, Ohio, paints portraits of the town’s people as grotesque masks making up an unfortunate parade of humanity. But nowadays, what is grotesque, more than just a baroque idea?

Why, it’s you. It’s you. It’s you and it’s me.

You look in the mirror in that bad light—that fluorescent light or maybe broad daylight–and you catch a glimpse of deepening creases between your eyes on your forehead there, and that momentary inertia of being nonplussed allows you to stop and see how ugly you have become. The lines on your face make you look older than you are and a little angry, but you know your face has not always been this way. You reassure yourself you have not always been this way. 

But then the asymmetry of your bottom lip (which has bothered you since childhood) is still there, and knowing that it can only be seen from the left side, you shift your head again to the right and decide that it’s just the light.

Usually you think you are a relatively decent looking human being. But there is a certain light that paints us all unflatteringly, and this you know. So you try not to look at your friends under those fluorescent lights. Sometimes you even try to avoid them in the daylight. And you walk around wondering exactly how much people can see. 

5. Because I am in love with words as much as self-important people at cocktail parties are in love with themselves

I love words so much that when I was younger and used to go to a lot of cocktail parties, I would either embarrass or confuse most people for the fact that I would use as many five-dollar words as possible. I would not realize until years later that this did not give any appearance of intellectualism, but only fostered a definite conclusion that I was a great big blowhard. 

I love words so much that even after I was able to control my word snobbery at cocktail parties, I would keep a silent, secret count against other people who used any particular five-dollar word more than once in an evening.

If by chance I heard someone use the same word multiple times, I would grant several imaginary (but real to me) “You’re-a-Fucking-Idiot” points, depending on how heinous the word was. (For example, saying the word saccharine more than once would earn more “You’re-a-Fucking-Idiot” points than a more banal adjective like excessive.) I would dock points for inappropriate usage of pretty much any word, and I would dock points if someone got infected by someone else’s five-dollar word (that is, if they reused it). I couldn’t stand five-dollar words being passed around a party like shitty hors d’ouevres on a plastic plate. 

***

I love words so much that I once had a teacher tell me that I was a pretty good writer except that I “ought not to be so in love with my own words.” I was about 22 years old.  Later, he asked me to dinner under the pretext of editing my writing, and that’s when I found out about his cheating wife and clinically depressed, transgendered son.

By dessert he had touched me inappropriately and enough times that I knew I wasn’t going back to his class. Years later, his name was on a list of judges for a local writing contest, and I was compelled to enter for the sole purpose of vindication.

I was desperate to show that I had finally synthesized my love for words into decent writing, and I was unrelenting about the fact that I would edit down to the bare minimum word count, a demonstration of a beautiful economy of words. I won an honorable mention and had my name and piece printed in a local paper, which, when I saw it, made me neither happy nor sad nor gratified. I thought only of the teacher as I saw him last: a sad, tall man with a pathetic little poke showing through his trousers.

***

If the words are the thing I love the most, how is it that every story I love to the stars I can’t even remember the name of?  Why can’t I remember the last words my dad said to me?

The words are so goddamned elusive sometimes; sometimes objects don’t want to be named the things you want to call them. Sometimes people get angry because you use truthful words. And sometimes, no meaningful words get put on paper at all, even though my only constant desire is to have words like lovers: available, ready, mine.

6. Because writers have got to write otherwise we’ll forget things and have no literature

These difficult fucking words: they’re the only way we’re going to remember anything at all, which is why we’ve got to deal with them. We’ve got to create them and ingest them, regurgitate them, share them, sharpen them to precision. If we don’t, everything we have, everything we are, and everything we know will rip away violently, like what would happen if gravity gave up on earth.

Though writing is always a testament of some sort, there’s a wonderful irony in having forgetting as a central theme in much great literature. The very fact of setting down words about forgetting is sublime, contradictory.

***

Another interesting problem: some of the most perfect ideas are so simple that if you are not careful, you will forget them. Important things have got to be recorded and writers need to be left alone to write the important things. In his “Self-Interview,” Kurt Vonnegut warns that we are “…soon going to find ourselves without a contemporary literature. There is only one genuinely ghastly thing hack jobs to do writers, and that is waste their precious time.” 

I think about the writers with ‘hack jobs,’ stuck in the circuit of magazines, advertising copy, newspapers, blogs–the never-ending race of content-creation. Some of them want to be doing what they are doing, but if they are true storytellers and soothsayers, such jobs might mean death.

One of Murakami’s characters from Dance, Dance Dance illustrates the caliber of bullshit-commercial-writing he does by calling it “shoveling cultural snow.”  When I think about shoveling cultural snow, I recall this news article, a wonderful blip of exasperated humanity on the news radar about a man who was tired of having his time wasted with snow shoveling:

Fargo, ND – Local resident Todd Fox has been detained for “reckless endangerment” and “illegal use of high-powered fire-breathing weaponry” for attacking snow with his flamethrower…

… Neighbors to his immediate right and left noticed a bright orange cloud and could hear what they thought was, “Puff the Magic Dragon spewing mayhem all over hell,” which prompted one of them to notify police.

Fox stated that he was simply “…fed up with battling the elements,” and that he did not possess the willpower necessary to move “…four billion tons of white bullshit.”

Four billion tons (of bullshit) is actually a very close estimate of the amount of content published here in the US every month, which is probably how all of this got connected in my head in the first place. 

7. Because I want you to find good things

You wanted a particular book so badly that you to spent extra money on the hardback version with the lousy sleeve that gets in the way but must nonetheless be kept. You buy the book and you keep it close a short while, a new and welcome companion.

When you are done reading it, you place it back on the bedside table and close your eyes to go to sleep in the simple satisfaction of having read something really good. The next morning you reach for the book again. You touch it again, inspecting it all over to see how you have bent or mistreated the pages and cover. You notice small details on the cover you never saw before. You have finished the book, but you go back and reread the last page or so just to satisfy the desire of arriving at the end again. You leave the book on the bedside table, there to glance at every once in a while, the way you glance back in time and consider the particular feel of a past lover.  

***

Hemingway said Gertrude Stein gave the following advice: “One should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.” I am confident that the result of my effort here is one of those two. 

–S.A. Strebel, South San Francisco, 2014

 

(1) Beckett, Samuel I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On teaches us a healthy sense of resignation
(2) Wolfe,Virginia. “How should One Read a Book?” The Love of Reading
(3) Thurber, James. “Preface to a Life,” My Life and Hard Times
(4) Eliot, T.S., “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”
(5) Heti also commits perfect exposition on the power dynamics of giving desirable blowjobs.

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