Daddy

Though I'm sure I must have, I don't remember ever calling the man who helped make me Brooke by the name "Daddy." In my mind and memory he's Dad and Father and Roy. Growing up we weren't yuppies either--in fact, Dad and I just spoke on the phone this evening, and he warned me not to turn into a yuppie as per my fear of mice, which I was scared to explain to him may just be his fault (see previous blog for explanation). So he's not the "just call me Roy" type of dad. In my memoir I refer to him in every way but Daddy. But tonight, when we got off the phone, I almost said I love you, Daddy, but instead said Bye, and we'll talk soon. And just like every time we get off the phone, I already miss him.

My father can recite lines from all eight of Shakespeare's history plays. Tonight he quoted Hal's line from 1 Henry IV, "I do. I will," as it's the prescient moment in which Hal promises to someday banish Falstaff. He then summarized 2 Henry IV for me, as I haven't read it, and said that the only actor out there capable of playing Falstaff is himself, but it's too bad he's so fit and good looking.

At another point in the conversation my dad started talking about the Germans and the Russians and some important historical interchange between the two, and this was leading up to a witty joke, only I couldn't hear what he said because, you see, my dad doesn't really know how to use a phone. Half the time he's covering up the receiver with his index finger. I've seen him murder many a cell, and sometimes even use it as an ashtray.

I'm no Plath, thank god, but I've romanticized my father in similar ways. Intellectually he's a genius, but when he was married to my mother she had to do things like change the light bulbs because he couldn't. If I ever had a question--historical, philosophical, religious or otherwise--I'd think, man, I should ask my dad about that...only he wouldn't have a phone number for me to call. He'd be living somewhere mistakenly auspicious-sounding like the Friendly Inn, smoking more than cigarettes and more than that other thing you might suspect one would smoke at the Friendly Inn. During high school and college, I only knew him as the man who was never a phone call away.

Where is this going? I've always begrudged girls their daddies, I guess. Daddy's girls grew up and found ways to own other men, thus own the world. Meanwhile I could barely own myself.

An ex-boyfriend once told me that girls who were abandoned by their fathers were the best kind: so willing to please, so loving, so...desperate. According to him Daddy's girls were the pits, and I was the shit. We weren't together very long, probably because he'd so savagely sized me up without even realizing how much it hurt me to be so plainly seen. I'm guessing he was a Momma's boy.

Don't fear for me though. I'm a big person now, have learned how to love and be loved with relative ease. I still hold one thing against my father, though: he didn't teach me any salable, interesting skill. Other people in the world, people I admire, can build things and cook things and climb things and sew things and grow things and film things. Not me. I interpret things.

Though I don't underestimate myself. I want you to know I believe in my importance. Therefore I will make a correction to a previous post. In "Musophobia," I said my dad wanted to teach me to read before I turned four; it was actually before I turned three. At sixteen months I could read the words "moon" and "boy," and perhaps these nouns were prescient for moments in my life that my father would never know about, only because he wasn't curious--I would have gladly admitted everything to him.

Still, don't think I have no skill. I can be a brilliant sixteen-month-old. I can long for a Daddy like the Dickens.

Musophobia

The first time I remember seeing a mouse was on the cover of the first book I learned how to read, Santa Mouse. That mouse looked nice, and I liked him because he wasn't really furry or angular and always wore a red suit and hat. I could dig a mouse that wore clothes. Oh, and he had a barely-visible tail and walked properly on two legs, which was very human of him. My dad bought this book for me and, I learned later, had the goal in mind that I'd read it before I was four. I reached his goal way ahead of schedule and learned early something about pride. My dad had A Baby Who Can Read.

The second time I saw a mouse my dad murdered it in his hands. His house was infested. Each night filled itself with pittering and pattering. The sheep I'd try to count would even run away from the mice. The murder was vivid and strange, like the nightmares you get when you're sick. I was in bed reading some bigger book to dad and one of the mice in his closet wouldn't stop squealing. When I wouldn't buy dad's poetic line--that perhaps that nice mouse was trying to read a book to her father--he sighed and ran to "take care of it." For a reason I can't remember, perhaps to make me understand the truth about mice, that they are small and inconsequential, that they cannot harm anyone, or maybe because he'd finished up the six pack, my dad dangled the mouse a few feet in front of my face. I screamed. The mouse screamed. My dad said "Goddammit!" and the mouse disappeared into his hands and there was silence. Strangulation? Smothering? I still don't know the exact cause of death, but my dad's hand was the penultimate coffin. Then, the toilet, his pink toothpick tail the last of him to go down.

Twenty five years later I've discovered my worst fears are true. It hasn't been cockroach poop on the kitchen counter all these weeks, something as easily dealt with as the crumpling of looseleaf. I turned on the light in the kitchen and prepared to take care of that sinkful of dishes and the mouse--no shit--stopped in his place on the counter, blinked once, and ran under the cutting board that I laid across the stovetop grates to dry (unbeknownst to me, creating the perfect tent for a mouse to settle under). Minutes later when I stopped screaming I realized I was in the dining room now, plates still in hand, and Brock was patting me on the head like the scared little girl I felt I was and saying all would be well soon. We just need some good traps. Meanwhile I was thinking we need a better fortified house.

I can anticipate an appropriate response to this: you live in the woods, you're surrounded by big and small creatures, many of which can actually hurt you, so grow up and get over it. Trust me, I'm trying. But so much of every day is tied to that moment with my father, one of a handful of memories that I don't need Proust's madeleine to recall. It's always there, that toothpick tail a swinging pendulum in my subconscious.

Which leads me to this question: can I murder a mouse? At the risk of sounding like a stereotypical liberal who brakes for every squirrel in the road, I have to balk at the idea. It's possible I'm scared of all the others I've come across in this life because of how that first one dies. I basically ratted it out (ew: bad pun). If I hadn't done that, then my dad wouldn't have searched and swung and destroyed, and I probably wouldn't have this irrational fear. In other words it's all my fault, and now I've got to kill this mouse to rid myself of the fear of the first (either that or I have to kill my father...clearly I've forgotten Freud).

Several weeks ago my friend Jessica found a baby mouse dying in the woods behind her house and has been feeding it some mouse-formula from a tiny mouse-bottle ever since. I am not Jessica. I can let a mouse starve. But can I set up a device to crush, torture, dash it out of its life? Not sure, but I do know it's got to be gone from my house or I won't be able to eat. As it is I'm not looking forward to my coffee and English muffin breakfast tomorrow morning. I may have to skip it. Brooke's breakfast-less birthday. Some creative thinking must be done to solve this problem, and I'm not disregarding hypnosis as a possibility. Though I'm dubious about the effect of a swinging pendulum watch just feet in front of my face.

10,000 Hours

On the eve of my 29th birthday all I can think is I don't want to work. I've been reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, a book which I'm teaching my freshmen this semester, and one of its principle theories is that in order to be a real master at whatever it is you want to do--guitar playing, football, law, writing--you've got to put in 10,000 hours. Do the calculations, or don't: either way you've gotta know this is a fuckload of time.

The first day of class I asked my students to calculate how long they've been students. We figured if they went to school for 8 hours a day, about 200 days per year, that after 7 years they'd just hit the 11,000-hour mark. But then I asked them how much of that time they'd spent truly being a student, being intellectually as well as physically present. Most said it was less than half that amount of time, a few said they spent little time at all being real students. After giving these students high-fives for their honesty I insisted they get their asses in gear, that they wouldn't live forever. Then they got scared and looked at me funny, in the same way I often look at my own reflection in the mirror.

All this made me think of myself, how much time I've spent being a real writer. I decided in earnest I liked to write when I was in high school, but because it came so easily I spent little time on it. My writing and journaling and private ideas English teachers force us to share for a grade were the only moments in school in which I received positive recognition. So maybe I spent a little more time on my journals than on math. I didn't treat writing like a genuine skill to be built and crafted until much later. Sadly, my seriousness about writing came even after graduate school, which I look back now as three years where I probably put in a full 10,000 hours toward my mastery of drinking and self-loathing.

In college I took workshops: nonfiction, poetry, fiction, playwriting. When I received an assignment I thought about it nonstop for days. Then, the night before it was due I wouldn't sleep. I'd crank. Write for hours, stop to look outside the window or clean the toilets or long for someone to love me, and then write again. Editing was something real writers did and I was only 19, after all. I figured I'd still produce something better than the rest of the class and to my detriment, that was usually true.

In graduate school I took workshops, all of the above. The only difference was such a misguided one I want to slay the seven-years-ago me: I truly believed all the hard work was over. I'd gotten here, after all, to the hallowed halls of Allen at LSU. Not everyone gets into an MFA program, and many many would-be writers are placed on hold. But I got in and got funded immediately. True, I probably had some strings pulled by my undergrad professors who loved me, but however I got in, I was in. This is the problem, I suppose, with allowing 21 year olds to pursue the MFA. Or at least me at 21. Then and now I've no discernable skill besides my desire to write. And as you know from reading the first sentence of this blog, though I'm approaching an advanced age, I sometimes still don't want to put in the work I know is necessary.

So I'm writing this now with the recognition I've got to put in the work, but I'm still trying to figure my own writerly calculations. How close am I to 10,000 hours? This depends on how one views a skill such as writing. If you want to be Jimi Hendrix, yeah, you've got to practice on the guitar for hours on end. In that situation I don't think just listening to good music counts.

But I wonder if it's different with writing. Are the recordable moments only the ones in which hand grips pen, or finger bounces on keyboard? Moments in which words, sentences, paragraphs are created? Though I'm clearly trying to compensate for my skinny hours, I do think other times should be incorporated if one wants to write: time thinking about your work, time reading the dictionary, learning new words, time studying what others' work is like and what should be avoided and embraced, time editing your work and reading it and loving and hating it. Maybe even time recognizing how much time you've put in so far in your life?

Some of this time has to count. If not, I'm alright, I'm okay, but here's what my calculations look like: I've written about one hour per day, seven days a week, for the last eleven years. That brings my total hours to just over 4,000. With this blog and some other journaling I did this morning I suppose I'm at 4,001. If I put my ass in gear the same way I've asked my students to and double that amount of time to 14 hours per week, 52 weeks a year, I'll reach my 10,000 hours right around my 36th birthday. And I can live with that. Prodigious writers who reach brilliance early often burn out early as well. Or they die: Keats, Shelley, Plath, Sexton, David Foster Wallace, etc. And I certainly don't want to die. Thus, the hours come slowly. (See how that works?)

But still I'm back where I began, not wanting to work. I so don't want to that my desk plant, the one with the ironing-board-shaped leaves, is reaching toward the window because in lieu of the water it needs, it will take the sun. Knowing this I'm still too lazy to give it water. Doing so might make me forget that I've sat here to write. Outside my window the pine needles want less cold, more sun, and turn brown despite themselves. Listlessly they hang. Listlessly so do I. But if I note at least a little of what I think and see as I sit here, so not wanting to work, then I've done something. I've spent five minutes more.

Some Reading

If I said I was shy you might not believe me, but if you're reading me you must know me well enough to guess I'm insecure. This is why readings of any kind are hell for me. For this reason I think the best thing to read at a reading is something super meta-, that pokes fun at what you're doing or yourself or someone in the room--preferably all three. The audience usually likes this, because it makes them feel as if they are reading themselves.

That's another weird thing about readings: if it's a round-robin with a lot of readers, it feels as if all of them are just waiting to read their work. They aren't listening. We might as well be a roomful of cokeheads pretending to listen but really just waiting for our turns to speak. Whatev. I read on Wednesday and even though I was full of the whooping cough I got a few laughs and that's all a writer who wants to inspire bugginess can ask for.

Things you should know if you read this and don't know Vince: he's absurd, speaks in absurd poems, drinks a lot, has a beard, has bad taste in rap, has written an exceptionalist manifesto which I do not understand, and is my friend.

This is for Vince, and it's called Some Reading.

It’s ten-thirty and I’m on the phone with Vince trying to convince him I shouldn’t read poetry at Teddy’s. “Look, Vince, I’m not a poet anymore.” “Fuck nonfiction,” says Vince. “Exceptionalism. Whiskey. Hamburger with pickles. Talk radio. Kidney disease. America.” I say, “I’ll say! But look, Vince—I still don’t write poetry anymore. I don’t get line breaks. I write about my life, prosaically. In prose, I mean. You know.” “Fuck it,” says Vince. “Borrow my bicycle.” So two weeks later as Brock and I are driving to Baton Rouge and I’ve got my memoir in my backpack I’m thinking, that fucking Vince is really gonna make me read poems. I mean, as soon as I get up on that stage and start reading something about my grandma and how she breastfed me, he’ll really lose his shit. I know the guy—he will not be amused. I’m scared, and that’s saying something, if you can imagine how it was for me growing up with someone like my grandmother! I ask Brock, “What should I write for the reading? Quick! We’ve got eight hours!” And he says, “Thinking about Poetry is so unsatisfying,” and he switches out the Jerky Boys CD for The Blueprint III, which incidentally, Vince thinks he’s too cool for. No shit. Jay-Z does not compare to Lil’ Geezy or whoever the hell. I mean, we’re friends with this guy. We like him, and we have to listen to this kind of stuff. But we go visit him anyway because he’s given us a place to stay, plus he’s lovable (for an exceptionalist) and we’re laughing now and there is whiskey and that does improve my situation and also Brock just winked my way and that’s poetry enough for me, but still I would’ve rather read to you about my grandmother, her dry breasts, or maybe about the time I punched my pregnant sister because she was asking for it, just ask Brock, and instead I just read a poem I’m hardly even capable of writing because of that goddamned bearded exceptionalist Vince.

Soybeans

This poem is Brock-approved, which is the only reason I'm posting it. Because I don't consider myself a poet anymore, I don't feel like an asshole as posting poems as blogs. I didn't read this at Teddy's because I felt like I was dying and just read a funny poem about Vince (perhaps only funny if you know him), which I will post once I get it onto my computer.

This is for Brock, and it's called Soybeans.


Inside the pages of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row
I find one of Brock’s discarded lines:
“In the grocery aisle, the soybeans are notoriously absent.”
So loving this line that’s never found another home,
I place it in a new white box:
Facebook status.
Suddenly, friends believe I’m a poet again.
They say, only you could make grocery shopping
poetic, Brooke. Only you
could make soybeans sexy. Maybe I just needed
to see the word again next to my name: poet.
Blue name tag: Hello, My Name Is Poet.
Now, as long as I can avoid my own face in the mirror, I’m on a roll.
Now, I compose my own line: “tomato soup and grilled cheese for my sick buggy and for me.”
One more: “avocados sit glibly in their rows.”
Only…my poetic lines aren’t as poetic as his.
See how that works?
I hate the thief in my heart and the poet in my husband’s.
I take a pen to bed, hide it under the pillow: a way to weaponize love.
That last phrase I just wrote: a way to weaponize love—I stole that
from some guy on Keith Olbermann.
I don’t even know what it means.
Now Brock’s snoring—the soft kind that never wakes me up
but while awake, I can be appreciative about.
Holding fast to pen I remain vigilant:
of the air wending in and out of his mouth
when suddenly the air stops, his eyes are open,
and he ends this poem.

My Name is Brooke, and I'm a Poet

I'm reading at Teddy's in Baton Rouge tomorrow night. This is the first time I'll read poetry in front of a large audience in years (maybe three? yikes!). On top of this I've got to read for about ten minutes and that equals about four poems all of which I'll post here for the two of you to read.

Here's the poem I know I'll read because it's safe. I wrote it high as a kite last Thanksgiving, and titled it this way because it took about 30 seconds to write and another 30 seconds to read, and at the time I thought that was pretty funny. Here it is:

30-second Thanksgiving Poem

The room smells like cigarettes
and we’ve moved with impressive swiftness
from Sarah Palin to Beowulf’s gods
then to the capital G God of Milton and America
but I’ve got to piss
so I go to do so
and bend my head between my legs
to make it come out faster
so I can return the conversation quickly
and proffer my piece:
I think intellectuals can believe in God
even though I don’t
even though in my non-judgment, I’m judging
and I hate that
but Broc’s there
and Jen’s there
and Brock’s there
and they’ve got their pieces on the subject
which don’t necessarily cohere with mine
but they’re all smart
so who is correct
I’m not sure but I love them all
I even love myself right now
and I don’t know of the veracity
or perfection in any of us
but God does

On Being Sick

A leaden lung, two timber legs. My back made from the earth, half-dollars for eyelids. Allow me this tiny attempt at poetry: I have been sick.

Woolf and Didion and others have written beautifully about illness, about the prison of the sick-bed and the horror of the congested head, but I can’t quote them now, because my fingers marching across the keyboard are marathon enough. To pick up a book, to bear the weight of all that ink on sheaves, might be deadly.

I’ll just try to relate what happened last night on top of our brand new sheet set from Wal-mart—army-white colored—which I’ve christened with my sickness. I lay there, sunken down, becoming part of the pillow top. For a moment I had the secret wish that someone would break into the house and brutally murder me, preferably with a sharpened kitchen knife, because to be stabbed would be something visceral, a pain to know, and though it would mean my end, to be finished on that note must certainly be more dignified than passing banally atop pressed army white. Mainframe brand. 200 thread-count. Orange tag clearance sale.

I don’t want to be murdered, not really. But there was a feeling last night, and it was that a force was pushing me into the earth. How low could I go? It felt a giant iron made for unwrinkling humans moved back and forth across my torso: up towards the head to help expel the breath, back down to the feet to secure another inhalation. Something mechanical and invisible in the ether was responsible for my every action and breath. I was alive because something I couldn’t even see said so.

Since I’ve been a grown-up I haven’t taken a sick day, soldiering forth through classes with tissues and Halls Vapor candy. This will likely happen again tomorrow. Something mechanical inside me will find words to say about Henry IV and the need for every person alive to know Shakespeare. But for now I’m of iron, I’m about iron, I’m even among and amongst iron. I am the heaviest human alive, and can see with surprising clarity each thread to count on these new sheets. Being sick often gives me fresh eyes. Still, though, I have a wrinkled stomach and lung and heart.