I hated my best friend’s boyfriend. There was a constantly-rotating list of things – demands, ailments – that always seemed to bend our plans to his needs. He never asked if I liked the music he blasted in the car. But when I stood at the top of the pocked rock cliff over the ocean, looking down at his head and shoulders bobbing in the rolling water, he shouted instructions to me. Encouragements. Jump when the water is low because it’ll be high by the time you land. Here, right here, where it’s deepest. And, when I surfaced after the jump, feet tingling, heart pounding, the first thing I heard was a whoop from him and then, over and over, the word yes. 

It wasn’t that I had no idea why she would marry him. He was rude, yes, inconsiderate, also yes. He didn’t share many of her interests, and his seemed limited to whatever he felt like doing at any given moment. We didn’t have the words for it then, but I think the kids call it “main character syndrome” now. When my best friend told me she was getting divorced, I was relieved. But when she cried, and said she still loved him, I remembered him cheering me on when I jumped off that cliff in Hawaii and I didn’t have to lie when I told her I understood.

Apologies that this is a day late, y’all. Work got the best of me. Look forward to reading your work!

You dress yourself in sparkly strawberry lipgloss and a form-fitting, diamond-studded Bebe top (not the translucent one, which would be gauche). Maybelline waterproof mascara. Meet your girlfriends out front after mom drops you off in her Suburban, you’ll catch a ride home. Inside, the music has already begun. You snag a spot in the second row, stage right, where you will see others, but more importantly, be seen. Somewhere in pews there is a boy because there always is. You mouth the words projected onto the auditorium screen and glance across the room, searching. Some kid wails on an electric guitar. The keyboard swells, the youth pastor preaches, dirty blonde hair slick with gel. You fiddle with your King James Teen Study Bible. Every Thursday night, sitting pretty at the First Assembly of God.

—

Thursdays was Youth Group. I straightened my hair, glossed my lips, wore bright tops with an appropriate-enough neckline. Sat toward the front so that David, our youth pastor, would take notice, be proud. He’d bound across the stage, gesticulating like one of those inflatable balloons at car dealerships, we proclaim in the name of Jesus!, his dirty blonde hair unmoving, slick with gel. And me, armed with my leopard print Bible case, scrawling earnest notes I would never read into the margins of my King James’ Teen Study Bible. When it came time for alter call, when the keyboard swelled and David called us to repent and invite Jesus into our sinner hearts for the 25th time in Jesus’ name I knelt on the plush carpeting, sobbed shoulder to shoulder with the same girls who stood guard outside of the junior high restrooms so I could vomit Frito pies. Lifted my palms toward the sky and rocked just like the pastors’ kids. I wonder now if it was only me, or if we all were dying to be told that we were good.

The storm was hitting the next morning. A loudspeaker blasted a recorded message from a police car passing by our house: “Attention Long Beach Residents, there is a mandatory evacuation in place. As of 10 am tomorrow, October 29^th, you must leave the city.” It repeated down the street. There would be no one to help you if you get stuck. I starred at my room in disarray, I knew I had to bite the bullet and contact my mom to take us in. I resisted all day because I knew she didn’t want us there – she had begun the renovations on her home, and we would somehow inconvenience her. It was like her not to see what was staring her in the eyes in the hope that it would go away.

***

A Tropical cyclone was cutting a right turn in my head after days and days of news reports on tv. A big white swirl hovering over the east coast and on top of my house imprinted on my eyes when I closed them. On a loudspeaker startling me with a blasted recording: “Attention, Long Beach residents…” My heart sank into my stomach. Everything was suddenly real as if before it was just a hypothesis – a hypothesis I just expelled from my mind with a more favorable certainty: everything will be all right. My mom taught me that: to not see from my eyes. It was like her to not see what was staring her in the eyes. To not see me.

It’s For You

1. I always told people I quit drinking on my own. That wasn’t entirely true. “Yeah my parents are splitting up and I’m pretty depressed. I’ve actually decided to quit drinking. I think it’s making me more depressed.” A phone call from a friend. Not a best friend. Not an acquaintance. Just a friend I never see who needed to vent. Sometimes those are the best friends. Quit drinking. Quit. I offered my condolences to him about his parents (his dad had been my second grade teacher.) Suddenly this phone call from a not best friend and not a stranger made all the difference in the world to me. It was 2020 and something just clicked. To this day he doesn’t even know what he did for me. Will I ever tell him or will I just stay at a friendly, safe distance and wait for him to call.

2. You did not expect this phone call would make you sober. Sometimes advice from a nagging therapist, your family, and loved ones is just too familiar. Familiar is fine but you need to welcome the unexpected, the uninvited, the party crasher who makes your night memorable and shakes shit up. A passing ship that throws a life preserver. Sometimes you need to reach out to an old friend you never see who won’t judge you or react because they only know the idea of you. Who are you? It did not concern him entirely and that’s okay. You knew then who you did not want to be anymore. Will you tell him this? No. Maybe. You did not expect this phone call to change you.

Julia Kirsteva can be hard to read. If you understand her primary terms, you’ll understand the basics of her theory, at least this one.  See basic definitions below.

As you read Kristeva, think about how her theory  speaks to Woolf’s and Hustvedt’s in various ways–but also to Questlove, Hayles, Freud, and Gay. How might we learn something about our own writing, about how we generate ideas and language, by thinking through connections among the ideas of these writers. If they are far-flung from each other in terms of style, where can we find contiguities in their thinking? How do their ideas help us understand the dynamic between intuition and intention? Or fact and play? What might Woolf’s ‘shocks’ or Kristeva’s ‘thetic’ add to the conversation?

Come to class having made two connections–between any of them–that you think it would be interesting to discuss as a class. Also, bring any and all questions.

Note: We’ll have about forty minutes to work through these ideas, so it will be sort of like speed dating. But we can always come back to them (if a second date seems worthwhile).

Chora — A pre-linguistic state, or “non-expressive totality”outside “the symbolic order” (in an infant, “oriented toward the mother”)

Semiotic — Nonverbal signifying systems–“a distinctive mark, trace, index, precursory sign, proof, engraved or written sign, imprint, trace, figuration”; also gestures.

Symbolic — A system of language that catches the subject in a (patriarchal) order, often referred to as “the symbolic order”; note: the subject always both participating in the semiotic and the symbolic

Thetic — A rupture or break in the symbolic order; these ruptures are inherent in participation in the symbolic order

There is an eerie similarity between the opening of a kink scene and the Sunday morning alter calls of my youth.

Feet folded under me, shag carpet stamped into my knees and the fluorescent ceiling lights; above all, the awareness of being watched hot on my skin.

It was a giving over but one where I kept in control, and even as the prophet pressed his palm to my forehead I felt myself weep or almost weep, a silent but public cry of relief.

***

Inspiration sentence: “It was a kind of disobedience but a kind he would like, and even as he tightened his grip on the chain I heard him laugh or almost laugh, a slow satisfied chuckle.” From Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness.

All you can eat, bottomless brunch, mile-long buffets: they make money because we all reach a point when we are truly full, that there is enough food, more than enough. Money isn’t like that. 

Greed is as much a part of the city as the bedrock that keeps it from falling into the sea. 

You don’t need talent or the right last name or a great idea to make it in this city. You only need money.

***

Inspiration: “Because here, money is the one thing that no one can ever have enough of.” Jessica Pressler, New York Magazine, How Anna Delvey Tricked New York

In creative nonfiction news, The Huntington Library has acquired the Eve Babitz Archive. I’m  glad to know she remains in Southern California. Imagine what’s in that archive! 22 boxes!

1. Know this! For it is because you lack the sense to fear God, that your life and leisure have become forfeit. Thieves! All of you! I know thine crime’s upon the gentle bosom’s residing in my home. To rob me of my dignity and pride. Scavengers! Wolves of the grave! Twas a foolish belief the walls of Troy might keep my vengeful torrent at bay. Nay! I say unto thee. For I shall rend the time thou hast stolen from me straight from the marrow of your bones!

2. All have betrayed me. My friends, my neighbors. My wife, and the servant women of my home. So, there will be a reckoning. And I won’t return to Troy until… I am satisfied.

3. “DId you really think I wouldn’t find out? You’ve stolen my wife’s honesty, raped the women tending to my home, and above all, forced me to leave my honorable post in Troy. You will pay! With. Your. Life.”

Inspiration – “Dogs, did you think that I should not come from Troy? You have wasted my substance, have forced my women-servants to lie with you, and have wooed my wife while I was still living. You have feared neither God nor man, and now you shall die.”

– Homer, The Iliad and the Odyssey; Fall River Press

Left. Right. Left. Right. Step after step. One leg in front of the other. Every day until I die.

My friends think I’m crazy for still running every day, but it’s what I like to do. I’ll use these legs until they give out on me.

I’d hate to miss my daily run, but it’s inevitable to make room for obligations.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami: “It’s two and a half months now since I resumed my old lifestyle in which, unless it’s totally unavoidable, I run every single day.”