A Shrine to Samuel Clemens

When I don't want to do something, I often read Mark Twain quotes instead.

"It was not that Adam ate the apple for the apple's sake, but because it was forbidden. It would have been better for us--oh infinitely better for us--if the serpent had been forbidden."
-Notebook

"After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her."
-Adam's Diary

"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart."
-Letter

"Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any."
- Advice to Young People speech, 15 April 1882

On the Afterlife: "I am silent on the subject because of necessity. I have friends in both places."
- quoted in Mark Twain, His Life and Work, Will Clemens

"You can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life but they would assassinate you."
- 70th birthday speech, 1905

"We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty."
- Foreign Critics speech, 1890

On Angels: "They are always on deck when there is a miracle to the fore -- so as to get up in the picture, perhaps."
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

On Antiques: "There are rest and healing in the contemplation of antiquities."
- Life on the Mississippi

"Whenever I take up "Pride and Prejudice" or "Sense and Sensibility," I feel like a barkeeper entering the Kingdom of Heaven. I mean, I feel as he would probably feel, would almost certainly feel. I am quite sure I know what his sensations would be -- and his private comments. He would be certain to curl his lip, as those ultra-good Presbyterians went filing self-complacently along. ...She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see."
- "Jane Austen," published in 2009 in Who Is Mark Twain?

Things I Don't Have Time To Work On Right Now

At the end of May, I will be free from the hole I dug with Dig. This home stretch is going to be tough, though -- I keep having to pull the brakes on my brain, because it keeps running off at inappropriate times, coming up with REALLY good ideas for things to write, do, and develop. But I have so much to do before I leave. A manual to write, a replacement to find, a few pet projects to publish, and of course, nine more weeks of deadlines.


I want to possibly approach thinking about corporate blog sponsorship for my harebrained ideas.

I want to write a book about my experience with the music industry today, geared toward the effects of social media on fanbases for new bands, and ultimately, to explore what this phenomenon is doing to the mindset of the musician -- how it might be changing the reasons a kid picks up a guitar, and how it's definitely changing what they do after that. This one will require tons more research.

I want enough down-time to digest the things that have happened to me in the past year and a half, so I can begin to wrestle them into the stories that they deserve to be -- to capture them like the fireflies I trapped in baby food jars when I was a kid.

I want to publish in niche publications and hobbyist rags, simultaneously hitting my goal of being printed in The New Yorker. It's less a cred thing and more a strange, situational desire of mine.

I can't wait to stop the deadline cycle of taking speed and writing under intense delirium due to sleep deprivation. While I've churned out some surprisingly good shit under those conditions, I want to get far enough away from it to look back on how that changed me as a writer. I want to see what I can do now that I know what I'm capable of, and I want to know if the past year has changed my voice as much as I think it has. I don't think it's changed it in a bad way at all, but I'm pretty sure it's permanent, and will not require Adderall to replicate (thank God). I simply haven't had the capacity to hear what I'm writing in so long, it's hard to tell what has changed.

I want to weasel my way into teaching a university-level writing course. Not "creative writing," per se, but maybe in the vein of business or journalism. I see so much potential in college students, and it's being held back because they can't put a compelling thought on paper. I've come to see the skill as a skeleton key to a million different doors, and I want the chance to help a group of people unlock them. That sounds so fucking satisfying. Also, I'd get the chance to crucify what might be the only phobia I still have laying around, which is public speaking.

Okay, back to work. It's hard to focus on work when I have so much to look forward to.

so afraid you were gone
then i found out i was wrong
i found out that i'm serious
and so is she,
so is she

recognize that you're always next to her in your head
alive, even when you're bored
and the small talk is desperate

Good Books

I decided it was all right to date a guy I'm in love with. That sentence really puts into perspective how batshit crazy my life has been for the past few months.

I survived, and the other side is just so lovely. Full of love. It's not the fairy tale I fabricated as a retreat years ago, and it's not, by any means, anything approaching how I pictured this part of my life.

In fact, it's better. He's better. I'm better, in ways that I absolutely can put into words, but I won't, because I don't feel the need to explain it. For once in my life, I don't feel the need to explain it.

And that confuses me, so I'll just say it again: For once in my life, I don't feel the need to explain it.

Quite a Bit

There's been a lot racking my brain lately, as I can tell by how little I've gotten done this week. I've been sick all week, but I've been sick and worked through it without much of a fight. This week has been a lot of lazing around, knowing I have work to finish, but not even so much as starting on it, and Redditing instead.

Maybe this is what depression is like. Not sadness, not specifically anything, but more like...well, Russian has a word for it.

Toska.

"At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom." -Vladimir Nabokov

I particularly identify with "dull ache of the soul," "vague restlessness," and "ennui, boredom."

There haven't been that many times I've felt like this in the past two years. It's never been hard to summon some sort of motivation, and when I can't, it's usually a product of distraction. This is not that.

I could blame it on being sick, but I've been sicker. I feel like I'm in purgatory for a sin I haven't committed yet or something. I've used every trick I have for motivating myself -- taking home a handful of new notepads from the office, making lists of specific tasks so I can cross them off, editing photos I've taken, looking at BatonRougeRocks.com, reorganizing drop box folders for the magazine, and even my last resort (cooking). Nothing's making me give more than an ankle-deep fuck.

The only thing I can narrow down as the root of this apathy is the looming deadline for the Country Roads fiction contest, and the fact that I wrote a poem I like the other day. Maybe I'm no longer stimulated by chasing musicians, keeping suicide hours, and taking the pulse of Baton Rouge's nightlife every hour. Maybe it's gotten to the point where my brain agrees with my body that there are more important things I could be spending all this energy on. Maybe I'm ready to stop being the go-to girl; maybe I'm sick of being woman of the year.

I've been angry and ready to quit many times. Now, I'm not even angry. I simply don't care anymore, and I'm worried that nothing is going to make me care before they find someone to replace me.

I'm ready to get this situation with my heart all scrubbed clean -- it's carbonized from being on the backburner for so long. I'm ready to clean the whole kitchen, and get back to the peace I used to know. I still want to write, but I don't want a magazine hinging on me anymore. I'm 26 and I've got a life to live, and still so many souls to meet and document and grow from. I've got it all right in front of me, and I want to take it at my own pace.

The finish line is so close. Just a few more months. They all know already, by accident, so I just have to send the letter. I've got some proteges to pick from, and a manual to write.

Let's go.

This is Relativity

I believe I've come to a re-, re-, re-understanding of productive writing levels during high-stress times and emotionally-taxing life events. And while I've understood it like this before, I always thought it'd be different as my life got harder.

I've done some amazing things in a year, and I still don't believe how much I actually finished. Simultaneously, it was one of the strangest and most dangerous years my private life has ever experienced. Sometimes, I had to force myself to hit deadlines when my personal relationships were the absolute worst they've ever been -- like when a guy I was seeing came over at 9am as I was rounding hour 30 of straight writing, after I'd left his house earlier because he freebased in front of me. He was halfway through a solo mushroom trip and had tried to drive to Lafayette because he was having a mental breakdown. I had no choice but to talk him through it, delirious and angry and worried, knowing I had hours left before I finished my already-overdue articles. I still managed to finish everything that day.

On the other hand, I'm sitting here at my desk right now, blogging about how strong I am when shit hits the fan, and how focused I've become and how batshit last year was and all of the above horse shit, when I've got a list over there with one task checked off, on fucking Sunday. Why? Because this Sunday is an angel food cake compared to the one above, and the contrast was so stark, I had to write it down.

The only thing I can focus on right now is who's in my bed, curled up with a tiny kitten, living the dream. That is the only thing wrong with my life right now, and my productivity has been destroyed.

So basically, even though I've overcome what feels like a lifetime's worth of stress and missed hundreds of hours of sleep in the past year and it's made me feel like I could hit a deadline during the apocalypse, it hasn't changed the fact that I'm lazy and whimsical when I'm happy.

It is way harder to get shit done every time my heart turns into softened butter.

I felt you long after

There will be no regrets when the worms come,
and they will surely come.

I don't think about that event much, as it's nothing nice to think about, but it might be the singular event that affected me the most. The deepest cut I ever had.

This evening, I watched a look come over Tommy's face that made everything make sense -- I remembered the first time I understood something profound enough to cause a look like that.

Eight years ago, Nick pulled a razor on me as I tried to close the door to my car, to drive away from him forever. He held the blade closer to me than himself while he said he was going to kill himself that night. His eyes were red with everything that composes desperation -- rage, sadness, pain, abandon -- and though he was breathing heavy like a wild animal, I knew that his heart didn't want to hurt me.
I'd sat in the background of his life for two years before that, watching his family rip holes in his being; holes that no stitch is strong enough to fix. Holes I would never have, because by random happenstance, I wasn't born into such a hell.
I heard his mother tell his young sister that she'd never be smart enough to be a doctor, over a frozen, microwave-fried dinner and listened to his father yell at the Wheel of Fortune contestants on the tiny TV at the end of the table. I stayed quiet with Nick and averted my eyes when he did, with the constant awareness that my presence was the sole thread tying the peace together. I kissed his face after his dad gave it a mean upper cut, and his eyes were the brightest blue I've ever seen, even when they were swollen shut.
I had front-row seats to his creation story. I saw him begin to associate pain with relief, and even then, I knew no one else would ever understand that part of him as well as I would. I cried with him every night when he begged me not to leave, because I knew why he wanted me to stay.
And I cried again in my parents' kitchen every night, peeling back the aluminum foil on the home-cooked meal my mom left out for me.
Every day for two years, I left my lot in life to feel his with him. I can't say I was ever in love with him, and I knew that I wasn't at the time. Looking back on it, I'm sure he knew it too. Love is a luxury not afforded to those who grow up in such an environment -- his quality of life had never, ever been anything approaching what mine had been. He had never known security, had never felt safe, had never been taken care of. He had never been shown love.
And though I was too young to know how to write these things down, I understood them. I understood what staying with him meant, and I knew why I was doing it. I knew why he didn't want me to hang out with my friends, why he insisted that I come over every day, why he desperately suggested I take a year off before college.
And at the end, I understood why he held the razor closer to my skin than his, just as well as I knew he did not want to hurt me.
When I left him that day in the parking lot, my heart was broken, but not in the way hearts tend to break. It was the kind of break that happens when you've witnessed the creation of this monster in front of you, and you know that in a different life, you may just as well have ended up with a family like his. When I put myself in his shoes, as I'd done every day for what seemed like an eternity, I couldn't say I wouldn't have ended up a monster myself.
My heart was broken because he had shown me how big of a heart I had. How much I was capable of caring for him, and to what lengths I could stretch my own well-being to compensate for his lack of it, even when it was humanly impossible for me to end his circumstances.
And when I summoned every last crumb of selfish strength that day, as he pulled at his hair and screamed and threatened to kill himself, I commanded myself not to care what he did after I left. Even if it meant the end of his life. And I did it, flawlessly.

The face Tommy made tonight was the face I made after I shut the car door in Nick's face that day. The face I made when I realized how big my heart was, right after I'd taken a hammer to it; when I found out I was capable of turning my back on the things I'd seen, solely because I had my own lucky life to live; when I showed the world that, if it came down to my well-being or his, I would choose mine, knowing I would have to live with that decision.

I was 18 when that happened. Tommy is 28. It put a lot of things in perspective -- specifically, what that event did to me, and how I'm still feeling the effects of it. I blocked it out of my mind for years, without realizing it. As a result, for a long time after that, I would wake up in tears, screaming, with no clues as to why, except for a vague awareness of his absence in my memory. I'd cry uncontrollably, because I didn't know what I was feeling, or how to deal with it.
It was guilt, and I still feel it.

I know there's nothing I could have done to help him, but that's no longer the issue. Though being with him gave me a deep (and sometimes insatiable) need to understand how people become who they are, it came with the burden of seeing things that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
And for better or for worse, that's a big part of how I became who I am.