It was in Carolyn Forché‘s poetry class that I heard the story of the Lebanese woman dressed to the nines in Chanel. I do not remember the woman’s name. She was a friend of the poet. The friend was leaving her home in Beirut during the war. Being killed by bullets or bombs was a high possibility that day – and every day. Forché grew luminous in her storytelling cadence, embodying her friend when she said, “She said, ‘If I must die today, I may as well look beautiful.’”
This was also the year that I cut C.K. Williams‘ poetry class, feeling blue. Anomie had overwhelmed me, and instead of doing what I was supposed to do, I simply wanted to wear sequins, and wander. Who knew if this would be my last day on earth? Morbid to a fault, I have always feared death, and sometimes worry that I should do what I always wanted to do, just in case this is my last chance to do it on earth.
C.K. Williams saw me in the hallway halfway to playing hooky before poetry workshop. He asked me why I was going the wrong way. I said: “I feel blue, and so I put on a red dress and will not make it to class.” He scolded me me with a barely concealed smirk: “If only I could cut class every time I felt blue.” I was determined to cut class anyway, so I wobbled defiantly the wrong away from the professor, in sequined heels and ankle length red dress to get on with the urgent desire to do nothing, and with fabulousness, in a red dress.
I must have been about 23 years old. At the time, I knew that looking fabulous never prevents death. But now that I am older, I realize that nothing prevents death. Prevention is not the purpose. Death must be approached not with questions of “if” but with questions of “how.”
9/11 showed me something else about the charge of death: not if but how.
A photographer caught images of people falling from the towers. Some flew downward in arabesques, some with arms folded in gestures of insouciance. The photographer, asked why she took the photos said that the images looked defiantly beautiful to her. She said that they were photos of courage. All falling human bodies seem to demand: “If I must die, I will die deciding my last gestures.”
Poet Cornelius Eady writes in his poem, “The Dance” that “when the world ends, I will be in a red dress.”
The plan may indeed be a red dress. The best form of resistance. The best form of redress.
Many worlds end, at many times. One need only turn on the news to see another person bleeding from the head to remember that life is a fragile proposition.
It was in the small library at the YWCA’s “Survivors of Domestic Abuse” support group that I learned again the value of a red dress, bubble bath, and fabulousness.
The first step, the counselor said, to resisting erasure is sometimes simply lipstick and a hairdo. Do what you can. Be here. Tell the world that you are here. Be fabulous. Make sure you cannot be erased.
It was at this time that I understood what some call the urgency of superficiality, the persistence of beauty.
Cornelius Eady wrote in his poem, “The Supremes:”
“And it wouldn’t be a bad life, they promised,
In a tone of voice that would force some of us
To reach in self-defense for wigs,
Lipstick,
Sequins.”
The world may indeed be ending. Terrible things are happening. Reach for your lipstick. And a red dress. Sometimes it’s the only form of defense. The best form of redress.
If there were a cookbook for breakups and makeups, it would be a mixtape.
A series of sweet and sour sounds to fill the hungry ears, starved of the sweet nothings you really felt were something. And they were something.
This is like the Happy Meal girl toy version.
This tour through the drive thru, I’m out of boy toys so you get the prize with the pink plastic skirt. We’ve got Dora, Strawberry Shortcake, or Barbie. If you needed Spongebob or a green tank, please come back next time. Sorry about that. I’m a very gendered expert.
Or gentlemen, you can suck it up and think feminine for a spell.
Photo: Epicurienne
Disclaimer #1
I don’t know you or your heartbreak. I don’t know where you came from, nor that horse that you rode here on, nor how or when your carriage broke down. Blog posts are cheap. But what I can hand you is cheap, hot and fresh. That’s not bad.
Disclaimer #2:
It’s been a bone or stone’s age since I had to stitch my bloody self back up from wounds of the crags of Scylla and so on. It’s been steady sailing for some time and I can see the horizon. Trust me.
Photo: PanAmerican
But then, at a distance all things look clear, hypothetical, and etched in pencil. Mapped.
I know the maps of heartbreak. My mapmaking for heartbreak makes the world look flat. Maybe because I’m afraid of falling off. Trust the narrator. We’ll talk about the round whirling world on paper.
I like to call myself Air Traffic Control. That’s my sexy stage name.
Roger Wilco
Control Tower to Broken Hearted: You’re halfway over the ocean. If necessary, you can make an emergency landing in Iceland.
So here’s how it goes…
I know you thought for some time it was you, Honey. You thought that buying a new Swiffer or repapering the hallway would pull you two back to the middle of the spectrum. It’s a fulll spectrum of catastrophes, this love business. And you held on to the steering wheel like a demolition driver on ice during brake failures and engine fires. Track #1: It wasn’t you.
Track #2:
That man or woman was not your home. You could make a home in a cardboard box. Think turtle, think crab, think Bedouin. Boots. Walking, Nancy Sinatra. Are you with me so far?
Track #3:
This thing that hurts like hell is the best thing that ever happened to you.
It’s a fearful flight or fever this business of making and breaking love.
Track #4:
Wake up before dawn. It gives the satisfying illusion that you are pulling the sun’s ass out of bed. Very empowering. Wake up earlier than God. Wake up at zero o’clock if you can.
Track 4a:
The secret ingredient is water.
There’s a cure for everything. It’s usually water. And time. For anything. At any time.
Track 4b:
There’s no magical ingredient.
There’s no special sauce.
There’s catsup. So catch up.
Are you still with me?
There’s a recipe, Honey. But it’s not to eat.
Liquor makes your liver die quicker.
Chocolate makes you chunkier and grumpier.
Cigarettes make you stinkier.
Drugs make you creakier.
Track #5:
You may as well turn on the radio. Track #5a:
You may as well get up out of your rocking chair and dance.
Track #6:
Whenever you feel lonely, just feel lonely. That’s all you have to do. And when you miss him or her, just miss him or her. That’s all you have to do. As easy as rowing a boat. Just row.
Track #7:
You might not be ready for something heavy for a long time. That’s okay. Just keep your womankind nearby. And don’t let them go. Don’t trade them for any lover, ever.
Track #8:
You’ll wonder what love’s got to do with it for a while.
That’s okay. Just keep your center and your cool. Get Zenny with it.
Track #9:
When you come out on the other side of this tunnel, you’ll believe in some new things. Believe me, it will feel good to believe in some new things.
Track #10:
Eventually, you’re going to have to believe in life after love again.
Track #11:
And then one day you will feel and look fine.
And one day you will wake up and feel fine.
Track #12:
Just when you think you are finest on your own, someone will come along so fine you’ll want to know about her or him.
What is going on with that? You had better figure out how to get to know that person.
That’s how it begins and ends and begins again. That’s the Breakup Makeup MixTape.
But this is old school advice. There’s no auto-repeat or shuffle. You’ll just have to flip the cassette, rewind, and play again.
My reason for leaving Barcelona, I suppose, was that I have never been the class of people to remain in Barcelona. Barcelona has diamonds in its sidewalks. I have turquoise in my strong box.
And so for four dollars there is a commuter train South out of Barcelona (the most too-beautiful-for-me city in the world) along the Costa Daurada (the Gold Coast) to the most reasonable village of all, Calafell.
The monument to El Pescador Calafell greeted me as I walked toward the Mediterranean Sea as if to tell me that this, Calafell, is a fishing village, and that this overpowering history stretching back to the Roman times and the Visigoths will overshadow anything that ever comes after.
I stayed on the beach by the Mediterranean sea by the black crosses of ships many days, long days until the one rare gray day darkened the masts of boats and brought the poem, Aqui Te Amo, to mind.
O la cruz negra de un barco.
Solo.
A veces amanezco, y hasta mi alma está húmeda.
Suena, resuena el mar lejano.
Este es un puerto.
Aquí te amo.
I knew why I left Barcelona. But I did not yet know why I had come to Calafell.
For some reason, another line from a Pablo Neruda poem, this time misremembered, came into my head: “And it was at that time poetry arrived in search of me.”
I turned around and looked at the botigas behind me and found myself not in front of the house of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, but in front of the house and botiga of the Catalan poet, Carlos Barral.
I entered the house of the poet and knew why I had come.
Poets make sense to poets. This, despite the fact that we are all unique constellations of crazy. Poets are much to be trusted in snapshot moments, never to be trusted to do the same thing, in the same spot, several times over. Unless that spot is a typewriter.
I would not have stopped at the Catalan poet’s house had I not seen the plaque engraved with the words: “Cave Canem.” I took the sign, literally, as a sign.
Cave Canem is Latin for “Beware of the Dog.” Cave Canem is also the name of a singular place for Black Poetry co-founded by my first poetry professor, Cornelius Eady.
It was at a party full of Cave Canem poets, in fact, when I found myself apologizing for being, well, a poet. I was in the midst of explaining that sometimes I do not arrive on time, sometimes I do not arrive, sometimes I do not know where I am going, sometimes I feel the need to go nowhere at all — when the writer Jacqueline Jones LeMon interrupted me with a sort of whispered arabesque of a hush:
“It’s okay, Honey. I get you. We get you. We’re all poets. We see you. I see you. I will find you.”
And so when I found myself by accident in the home of the dead poet Carlos Barral, I lingered a while.
I have always felt at home in the homes of poets. I always manage to find poets. They always manage to find me.
And so we linger, feeling, for a time, not lost, but found.
Photo of doorway of old Victorian house, Summit Avenue, St. Paul Minnesota: Doorways Around the World
My grandfather had another house. It was just something that always was. And the strangers who lived in this other house were like family to my grandfather, although they were not family.
If the images from cartoons are to be believed, they were criminals, all of them. Perhaps that is not fair of me to say. But in the mind of a seven year old, they looked like criminals, all of them. Or what I thought criminals might look like: shaggy, scraggly and darting their eyes to the side all of the time.
Photo from O Brother Where Art Thou: Lost Highway Records
Grandpa bought an immense old Victorian mansion for this other family in the heart of St. Paul, Minnesota.
Francis Frith, Halfway House
Grandpa would go to this mansion to make sure there was coffee in the kitchen, everyone was well and accounted for, and then to give sermons in the grand living room.
Photo of Orson Wells: Hypostulate
When your grandfather is a famous preacher, sermons in the living room are just part of the deal. Over six feet tall with limbs like timber, his voice was deep and booming. He held every room spellbound. He could make anyone believe in life-after-death.
The mansion he bought for this other family had a name: “The Door of Hope.” I first saw The Door of Hope at 7 years old. But it was 20 years later and 2 days after my grandfather’s death that I understood it.
Homeless Mother" Dorothea Lange
Twenty years later, my grandfather was dead. I was twenty seven, slumped low in a metal folding chair wearing a 3x black down parka from WalMart. It was the only black coat I could find. Last minute airfare and last minute funeral wear. It was five sizes too big. I looked like a gigantic burned marshmallow.
Funeral Home Coffee: Hillard Rospert Funeral Home
In the funeral home, Norwegian-Americans offered each other coffee. No-one drank the coffee. Everyone seemed to be finding seventy seven reasons to say, “I am fine. Don’t worry about me.” Then they spoke of the weather, then paused in protracted silences. Said my grandfather looked good in his suit. Said the funeral home sure was nice. Mourning here looked like a challenge. A game of chicken. The silence was cold and heavy as granite. I wanted to scream.
Photo of Paul Newman in film Empire Falls: The Cinema Guy
As if in answer to my prayer, I spotted a man across the room with a wooden leg. He was handsome in a Paul Newman sort of way. He was tall, with a shock of white hair, and a red, red face. He had big ice blue eyes that looked like he never dreamed or closed his eyes to sleep. His eyes looked stuck open, as if watching something horrifying like Napalm. I sat down next to him. He was crying. I liked him already.
His name was Jerry. Short, I think, for Jeremiah O’Malley. He didn’t ask who I was. He just launched into his story. I am not sure if I ever said anything.
“Your grandfather saved my life. I’m only alive because of him.”
Jerry stopped. Pulled himself out of a choke or a sob. I wondered if this was going to be one of those “Amazing Grace” evangelical stories. But it didn’t seem like it. This guy Jerry was too shocked-looking for brainless evangelical blather. He had been through something.
“I was in a bad way. A very bad way. I did a lot of bad things.” Jerry continued. I tried to imagine all of the bad things a person could do. As if to answer me, he said, “We’d do whatever we could. The Rev. never gave up on me. I told The Rev. I couldn’t do it. He said don’t leave. I was too ashamed to let him see me leave. So I snuck out one night, did what I did. It was freezing out. I went down under this one bridge by the Mississippi.
“The Rev. woke up. The Rev. said later he knew something was not right. He just knew. So he woke up. He went out on foot. Said he had to find me. Said he would look until he found me.”
“I went down there drinking and God knows what else. I had passed out, see? I fell asleep on the banks under the bridge. He found me with my leg on fire. Cigarette fell and caught my pantleg on fire. I never felt a thing. Found me with my leg on fire, burned off. I never felt a thing. The Rev. threw his overcoat on my burning leg, stamped out the fire. Put the fire out. Then he picked me up and hauled me over his shoulder like it was nothing. Like I was a sack of grain. Like I was a baby. He carried me home.”
After the funeral was done, we all got into black cars. The cars drove slow. My heart dull thudded slow as the wheels below me. I thought of the W.H. Auden poem: “…with muffled drum/ Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come…”
They perched my grandfather over a hole in the ground. They lowered him into the hole. They closed the hole with dirt. My heart closed. After a while, we all turned away.
The Reverend A.D. Hartmark founded the first halfway house for drug addicts and alcoholics in St. Paul Minnesota with money from his second wife. He called it The Door of Hope. His book The Psychodynamics of Alcoholism is considered a forerunner in drug and alcohol dependency treatment. It is still quoted to this day. He died in 1997 on Christmas day.
It is something I do to hear the voice of my grandfather. I find this video and wait for the german narrator to begin at minute 2:08 and end at 2:58. It is not my grandfather. My grandfather spoke in Norwegian. In fact, he hated everything german because of the war. But the timbre of the german man’s voice is like that of my grandfather. Since my grandfather had no answering machine, I make do.
And then I begin scavenging. I begin scavenging for people who looked like my grandfather. Marlon Brando is the closest I can find to a young Reverend A.D. Hartmark.
Then I look for hands that look like his hands: great, square hands that helped build bridges in Brooklyn before making it west to Minnesota to attend divinity school.
I find no hands like his hands. His bones seemed to be made of boulders, just as the Viking creation myths said all Norsemen were made. He had bones of stone, hair of wild red moss, and blood cold enough to swim icy fjords in winter.
I begin looking for the icy fjord named Hartmark. The mouth of Hartmark fjord has riptides that pull a swimmer out to sea. I find it. Here, my grandfather swam through ice floes toward riptides just to hear his family scream in fear. When he reached the sea, he went underwater and hid under waves before heading back. It was a good joke.
I look for a bedehus (prayer house) like the one he circled when he bumped into my grandmother turning the corner. He said that when he met her he had no idea who she was, but he felt instantly like a millionaire.
And I think, then, he began thinking of how he could become one.
Then I begin looking for ocean liners in service in 1929, the year The Reverend sunk his savings into passage to America, in hopes of striking it rich.
He told me he stood at the helm, saying he would watch out the whole way. An old woman laughed at him and said, “You have a long way until America, young man.”
I look for pictures of Norwegian girls who look like my grandmother but who are not my grandmother. I find this one:
I know very little about my grandmother who died long before I was born. The old Norwegians said only the same thing, again and again: “She was so very kind.” And then they grew silent.
I think about the period of time after she died, when the sanitariums and the prayers and the faith healing failed. The Reverend stayed in bed for days. When the ladies from the church threatened to take my 8 year old father away from the Widower Reverend Hartmark. When there was nothing in the cupboards for breakfast but one can of Chef Boyardee Spaghetti-Os. When The Reverend married the church secretary after one date to find a step-mother for his son. To keep his son. The Reverend’s new wife brought dutiful efficiency to heartbreak the way an iron lung brings air to the heart. The way clean laundry whips in wind. The way hospital corners pull sheets tight across mattresses. I do not know if the Reverend’s new wife loved her stepson, my father. I know she kept a spotless house with plastic over all of the carpets and furniture. She kept my father on-time and always in clean sweaters. I think she left him no money when she died.
I can find no picture of something like this.
Then I begin looking for pictures of Lazarus. My grandfather wrote of the miracle of Lazarus in his diaries, pondering what could make it possible, for years.
And then I listen to this song, and think again of the moment they met, when he met her around the corner, and he felt like a sweepstakes winner.
Then I think of the Reverend snickering at my impishness. How I somehow always got a free pass from a stoic and stern patriarch who never really stopped mourning. I ripped up the plastic on the carpets running and screaming through his house.
“Laura is a writer,” he would laugh. “Someday she will write about Norway.”
Engagement Photo: The Reverend and Mrs. A.D. Hartmark
Sitting in Spain in the Plaza Catalunya and staring up at an Armani billboard, I thought about the strange anomie of being a single mother. How does a mother act single?
If single, must a mother go out at night to near-empty bars just to wait for nothing fantastic to happen in her tiny city where single people are 25 years old, mothers are married, and parents are already asleep? Perhaps something fantastic happens after midnight. But since my child wakes up every morning at 7 a.m., Cinderella and I will never know.
As my favorite drug, self-pity, wore off, the beauty of Barcelona began to sink in.
Barcelona would be a better honeymoon city than Paris. I have never gone on a honeymoon.
I decided then and there that I would get on with it and get married again, just to have a grown man to talk to in Barcelona about the beauty of Barcelona.
Not just any man. It would have to be the right man. It would have to be someone with whom conversation flowed like water running downhill. It would have to be someone whose expansive mind made me feel like some sort of Maria Von Trapp twirling about.
It would have to be a man who always looked like someone I knew, or would know, or should know. He would have to smell like wood and frankincense and leather. He would have to be someone in particular. In fact, I had someone in mind.
We would live in a world of our own making: strange and beautiful like Casa Battlo and filled with animals of our imaginations like Parc Guell.
In my mind, our love would be a conversation that continued beyond life with the persistence of the ever-building infinite architecture of La Sagrada Familia. Spires with an insouciance of raspberries and grapes taunting clouds and even death.
Photo: John Giuffo for Forbes
I came home from Spain a woman with a mission.
But as life is strange and love is cruel, I came home from Spain to realize that I was not on his mind at all. I was as absurd as a failed evangelist missionary in a zen dojo.
And I needed to buy an umbrella. The sun, and all of my Gaudi delusions were lost on the waves somewhere over the Atlantic. What I learned in Spain remained in Spain. Everything, including I, was lost in translation.
Like the starfish I saw in the Mare Magnum who had lost its head and was washed upside down such that it resembled a star by Miro, I had lost my head, my balance, and my perspective – too swayed by the siren call of life imitating, or chasing art.
The man I had in mind had his mind on another woman.
So I began to think about other things. Like buying an umbrella. Like getting through the winter and over colds. Like herbal medicine. Like Milky Oat Tops, Nettle Leaf Tea, and Blue Vervain.
The first time I came back to a dead car battery after my divorce it was raining big messy sploshes of rain-snow or snow-rain. The sky had nothing to offer that day but heavy over-committed snowflakes losing their cool. Splosh, splash and sploosh tried one after another to hold it together but broke apart into water when they hit the windshield.
Carolyn Monastra: The Ice House
As soon as I realized my dead car battery was stranding me, I buckled my seat belt and hit my forehead against the steering wheel. My ribs began to shake like the condemned frame of a ball-and-wrecker-wrecked and dynamite-imploded building. A hurricane ripped through my lungs and spat saltwater moans out of my mouth. I stayed there for a while, as if praying, as if studying, as if standing by. I wailed a wailing cry until my forehead was imprinted with the vinyl steering wheel pattern stamped into my skin.
Eventually, my friend Rosa showed up, working the jumper cables like a tow-truck junkie. She laughed and lectured me. The gist of her lecture went like this: “Problem? Solution! Problem? Solution! It’s a really easy formula, Laura. Next time you need to call me first instead of crying in your car for an hour.”
But sometimes a woman just needs to freak out a little.
Sometimes, the nerves, when frayed to death, just have to break down.
Sometimes the interior electricity of the heart is off-kilter. A surge of water and a jolt or two can reset the fuses, somehow.
Martha Graham gets this.
Alvin Ailey gets this.
There is a wail and a lament to music, to dance, to poetry, and to the blues. But I wonder how many times we really lean into a freak-out, a meltdown, a nervous breakdown and just do the damn thing with style?
This is a bit of a cultural trespass for me. Of 100% Norwegian Northern Minnesota stock, I come from a long line of stoics – from the Viking women who held down farms alone, to a church-full of fidgetless children listening to long sermons in cold Lutheran prayer houses. My grandfather was a preacher, and cracking a line in my face during the sermon or even so much as letting my saddleshoes circle-chase each other as they dangled from the pew would get me a stern and appropriately stoic: “no fidgeting!” warning.
Among the old Norwegians, crying was a luxury we simply did not have time for. When people died, a mourning Norwegian might spit in a Norwegian brogue: “I never liked death. I don’t agree with it.” Or a Norwegian might slip out the back door on skis and be found the next Spring, frozen under snow.
Mourning rarely included busting open and crying, or “freaking out.” Stoicism was seen as a sort of self-effacing politeness, as if to say: “Don’t bother about me. I’ll be okay.” And in the Northern Minnesotan skyline of white snow against big white sky, a crack in the face was as hard to find as the horizon line in a blizzard.
Northern farmers can’t afford for people or vehicles to break down. My great uncle, at my grandmother’s funeral, strode into the funeral on legs like windmill blades. He took off his hat, looked at the body, turned on his heel and said: “I’ve got to get to Grand Forks by noon. There’s a farm shipment coming in.” And then he was gone. He had paid his respects and not bothered anybody, so his mourning time was done.
Sometimes breaking down and crying is the goal, or should be. As David Bowie sings, “isn’t there just one damn song that can make me break down and cry?” Or as Blind Faith put it, I just “had to cry today.”
Luckily, my mother understood this. She’d swing her long black Crystal Gale hair to one side and begin plunking out “It’s okay to cry” on the old brown upright piano for me whenever I cried as a child.
It was a cultural transgression made possible by the 1970s hippie song book, “Free to Be You and Me.”
Musical Introduction brought to you by Swedes Singing Backward:
(which reminds me of my favorite home movie filmstrip as a child – “Susan eating cereal in fast backwards.” It was brilliant, and although I think the joke was about vomiting, it taught me to believe that time and space are flexible concepts.)
Well, enough ado about nothing frontways. Let’s get on with it, shall we?
This missive comes to you from Laura Hartmark, a.k.a Laura Fartmark, a.k.a The Laura Haura Horror Show a.k.a…
It goes without saying but I will say it: I was picked last for dodgeball all of my life. Of all the movie stars and porn stars on earth, I most closely resemble Deb from Napoleon Dynamite. Pippi Longstocking does my hair. I have more money than Scooby Doo.
I grew up wearing mauve corduroy culottes sewn by my mother with white knee socks and bandaids on my knees. I sported glasses, braces, violin case, and a backpack full of the entire contents of my locker. I was afraid my locker would get robbed during the night.
It’s not that I don’t have game. It’s that I have another game. Another game going on inside my head. My kindergarten teacher said I was a lovely child but needed to stop staring out the window and daydreaming.
My second grade chorus teacher stopped chorus rehearsal to tell me to keep my tongue in my mouth while staring at the ceiling instead of singing. She recommended me for special services. I don’t mean like an FBI early training program, I mean like for the classes that get you on the short bus.
Tonight going to my longtime friend’s longtime house in the mountains (which I have visited several times before), I remembered 10% of the way — the first 5% percent when I started out on my journey, and the last 5% when I finally got to her house. That’s called dysgeographica, a.k.a. “This girl can’t find her way out of a paper bag.”
If there’s a straight line anywhere, I can make it into a curlicue.
I saw so many little villages in Upstate New York and Massachussetts along the way, though. Each village magical, as if it had appeared out of nowhere. In fact, they appeared out of nowhere that I could remember. Oh, to think what I saw on Mulberry Street! A whole new world! All along the circular circuitous way! Way out! Far out!
My method of flirting, I am sorry to say consists of: “Would you like to partake in a discussion of radical feminist theory and also of the science fiction?” I stole that quote from a blogger in Australia because I actually couldn’t think of anything to say. I first thought that the Bridget Jones quote, “I love you, I have always loved you, I will always love you” was the best line. But then, I have been told, it isn’t. Not so much.
Realizing that I have no game, I attempt quick recovery by turning it backwards: “I hate you, I have always hated you, I will always hate you.” But by then my credibility is ruined.
So then I go silent.
I will mention here that often in gym class I got hit in the head by the ball.
Onwards! I digress.
When I speak to people good with sequencing things, they simply take whatever I have out of my hands and do it for me. The reason I am a writer is that the talking thing has not always worked out for me. I am always off-topic, frequently off-color, and forever off-kilter.
So as a sort of coping mechanism, I write. In writing I have time to consider what I am saying and edit appropriately.
My nose is cold. It always gets cold when I get tired. (yawn)
I recently had another writer stay at my house and she made forty seven calls, sent thirty eight emails and texted one hundred people in the time it took me to think about liquid smoke and google Hennessey Youngman. I made up those numbers. I do better with made-up numbers than with real numbers.
I make sense. I make sense tremble in my wake. I make sense backwards like a palindrome. Like anyone, you just have to take the time to get to know me.
Don’t judge a person or a book by its cover. Hey, look! A cliché!
You should especially not judge a person covered with double-sided tape by accident, which sometimes happens.
Let’s just unfurl the song and get out of here before I get hit by the ball.
