That kind of a day...

I'm drunk...  Not by accident.  Not slowly.

No, I'm drunk very deliberately and very quickly with an almost scientific precision.  Because I drink fairly rarely, I worked hard at figuring out exactly where the tipping point is with various types of alcohol. How many glasses of wine does it take before I am buzzed?  One and a half.  How many before I'm sick and throwing up?  Two and beyond.  I don't get drunk on wine - I get depressed or I get sick, there's no middle ground.  I don't drink wine unless I want to become very maudlin and cry.

Today I just wanted to get f*cking drunk and very quickly.  I wanted to shut off my brain and to do it basically on demand so my choice of poison is potcheen.  What's better than Irish moonshine?  90 proof - two shots, swallowed quickly, and I can't hold my head up, I can't walk, I can't really do much but sit right where I am and wait for the waves of gentle wooziness to pass.

The room is tilting slightly as if I'm on a ferry and the cat appears to be floating on the arm of the couch.  I'm making spelling errors in every other word but I'm just sober enough to notice and correct them as I go.  I type "blindly" and being drunk, it's even more important not to look at the keyboard because otherwise my brain tries to tell my fingers what to do and the directions get all scrambled so my eyes are closed as I'm typing this. I only open them when I feel that I've made a typo.

So, why drink tonight?  Because it's just that kind of an evening and it's been that kind of a day.  Hell, it's been that kind of a week.  My week has been an hourglass of irritations, frustrations and upsets - all of them dripping down into an ever-growing mountain and today, the mountain just got to be too much.

And why drink at all?  Because if I don't, I can't shut off my brain.  It keeps spooling back over the day and the week and all the negative things it brought with it.  I try to distract it with reading or TV, but like an obstinate child focused on a toy he wants, my brain just doesn't listen.  All it wants is to endlessly replay all the bits of the world that I want to leave behind when I come home.

I wish my brain had an off switch...  and I guess, it does.  I'm done.

You may have already won

Writing Exercise 6

You have received a believable-looking, business-sized white envelope in the mail.  The return address is from a company called Peerless.  Printed on the envelope, in bright red letters, are the words "You May Have Already Won."  Tell the story of what it is you may have won - or what it is you didn't win.  Tell what you do with this envelope.

Start with:  Life takes some funny twists and turns...

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"Life takes some funny twists and turns and you just have to go with the flow."  Rebecca drew a thick red line through the sentence and grimaced.  If this is how the whole piece was written, she was wasting her time reading it.  She could already picture cliches tripping over cliches, propped up by bits of homespun wisdom.  What drivel.  Some days the effort it took to get through the articles the editor threw her way far eclipsed the measly amount on her biweekly paycheck.  She sighed and picked up her coffee mug, wincing at the disgusting taste of the lukewarm brown sludge.

She skimmed the rest of the page, smiling in grim satisfaction that her initial conclusion of the article's quality was correct and put it aside into the "write a rejection letter" pile.  She contemplated getting up and making more coffee but decided she couldn't be bothered and reached for the next envelope from the stack her editor sent over while Rebecca was working from home recuperating from recent ankle surgery.

The envelope was addressed to her by name which was unusual as most people wrote directly to the editor-in-chief if they put a name on at all.  Maybe one of her prior rejects who bothered to read the rejection letter to the end and remembered her name?  That would be a novel approach.  Intrigued in spite of herself, Rebecca picked up the letter opener and then noticed something else.  The envelope was missing a postmark and the return address looked like a company instead of a person.  Company's name was Peerless Entertainment Group and the address looked to be downtown, in fact, just a few blocks from where Rebecca worked.  Rebecca turned the envelope over and felt her heart sink in disappointment. On the back, splashed across the expanse of white, were the words "You May Have Already Won" in bright, lurid red typeface.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," she muttered.  Undoubtedly she won a cruise or a similarly exciting venture.  Her mood souring, she was about to rip the envelope in two when her attention was drawn to a tiny black line of text hugging the edge of the flap like a trail of ants heading to a picnic.  Rebecca tilted her head and read Open the envelope, Rebecca.  What have you got to lose?

Well, that was an unusual marketing gimmick.  Of course, they knew each recipient's name so it wouldn't be that difficult to automate the "personalized" touch, but still...  Rebecca paused, then steeling herself against the inevitable disappointment, she ripped the envelope open.

At first the envelope appeared empty but then her fingers brushed against the thick edge of a stiff card.  The card felt to be about the size of a formal invitation and as Rebecca pulled it out, she could feel the delicate embossing on its face.  The words Peerless Entertainment Group were embossed in matte black type on the cream card.  She flipped the card over and read the bold, flowing script:

Congratulations, Rebecca,

You just won a new life.

And then the doorbell rang.

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Those were the days

Writing Exercise 5

Finish this story.  Start with: "Back in 1938, before..."

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Back in 1938, before my little world was turned on its head all I cared about was avoiding marriage to Shmuel Wasserstein.

"A son of a rabbi!" my mother nagged me, always in the tone that implied the exclamation mark at the end.  The crowning achievement for a moderately attractive, "You're no beauty queen, bubbala!", seventeen year old girl.  So what if the smell of him made me want to gag and he had the laugh of a hyena?  He was interested and to my mother that was the end of the discussion.

"What to discuss?" she would say, throwing up her flour covered hands as if genuinely bewildered by my stupidity, "You need a husband, his family is interested, he is interested and you with your...!"  She'd tail off as if even her impressively extensive vocabulary of both English and Yiddish expressions was powerless in the face of my stubborn refusal.

Father stayed out of it, only intervening should our raised voices interfere with his studies.   

"Torah is not be to disrespected by this caterwauling," he would say mildly, coming out of the study into the kitchen where most of these exchanges took place.  His appearance usually meant a reprieve for me as my mother would immediately turn the full brunt of her well-acted 'disappointed parent' routine onto him in a rapid-fire torrent of Yiddish and English, allowing me to escape to my room.

What did I want?  Truth?  I had no idea, but I knew I didn't want Shmuel or any husband for that matter, not then anyway.  I had just finished the level of schooling my parents considered appropriate for a girl and it was time to get married.  And Shmuel was "interested!".  I overheard my mother say once that Shmuel's interest in me was practically a mitzve on his part, but then Father shushed her and I pretended that I hadn't heard.  Was I really so without charms for it to be considered a good deed on Shmuel's part to be willing to marry me?

These arguments would all end the same way, with my mother accusing me of bringing shame on myself and the family.  How much longer could I hold out in the face of her incessant badgering?  And worse, what could I offer in return?  What else was there for me but to give in and marry?  Always, at the thought of going along with the marriage, my throat would close up with choking panic, followed by the feeling of drowning that dogged my nightmares as the arguments escalated and became more frequent.

And then suddenly the answer was right in front of me and it was so blindingly obvious.

I could go to Palestine and serve my time in the Holy Land in a kibbutz.  There was no way my parents could say 'no' to that.  Even Shmuel's parents couldn't object to their future daughter-in-law spending a year in the Holy Land before wedding their son.

I could see Rachelle again...  And just like that, my vision suddenly cleared.  I thought about Shmuel and other boys from the yeshiva and shuddered with distaste.  I thought about saying good bye to Rachelle six months ago when she was heading off for a year in a kibbutz.  I remembered the warmth of her hug, the barely suppressed tears, the softness of her hands as she held mine in hers, the unspoken question in her eyes, the trembling of her lips as she kissed me on the cheek and made me swear to write to her.

I couldn't stop a wide smile as everything fell into place.

I knew exactly what I wanted now.

In need of perking up

Writing Exercise 4

When in need of perking up, some folks go boating, some play air hockey, others listen to loud music.  List four things you do.

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I have trouble thinking of myself as "perky".  I'm not perky.  I can be happy or sad, down or excited about something, lethargic or intensely passionate, but whatever else I am, I am not perky.

Now that that's cleared up, what are the four things that I would do if I were down and needed to snap out of it?



Bookstore... I would go to the nearest Barnes & Noble and lose myself in the books.  Fiction, cooking, writing, magazines...  The reasons for why I'm down might guide my selection, but in general, just being in the bookstore itself is often enough.  It's the endless possibilities, the sense that there's an almost infinite amount of knowledge right in front of me and available for the taking.  New books, new worlds, new hobbies, new interests.  A bookstore for me stands for all of that and that's where I would go as one of my places.

Office supplies...  If I don't have time for a bookstore, I would go to an office supply store.  Office Depot, Staples, one of those.  Office supplies are my therapy.  I don't even need to buy anything, just wandering around the store and looking at all the shiny notebooks, pens, folders, sticky notes is enough to settle my mind and bring a sense of peace.  I don't go near the electronics, just the tactile supplies, the things that I never had growing up or at least not in this dizzying variety of colors and styles.  I can spend twenty minutes slowly wandering through an office supply store and leave it feeling ready to face the world again.

My kitchen...  If I can, I'll cook to clear my mind and get away from whatever is bothering me.  I love cooking.  Not baking.  I don't bake.  Baking requires too many rules and my life has enough rules and regulations in it already.  I love cooking because once you have some sense of how ingredients will behave, you can experiment in just about any direction you want.  Cooking consumes me leaving no room for anything else.  I can have the TV or radio on in the background but it's just noise.  When I am cooking, my entire world is reduced to the ingredients in front of me.  The results of what I make are almost irrelevant.  What matters is that for the minutes or hours that I spend in the kitchen I feel like I'm in full control of my life. 

Meditation...  I don't meditate in the more conventional sense of the word; it's more like self-hypnosis.  This is my last resort and I will employ it before I go to sleep.  If I've had a horrible day and I cannot shut my brain off in the usual ways, I'll go through the steps of my self-hypnosis.  I imagine a long hallway with many open doors on both sides and a single closed door straight ahead.  I walk down the hallway and imagine each door closing as I pass it, secreting behind it part of my bad day - work, personal issues, anything - so that by the time I reach the end of the hallway and am standing in front of the final door, everything that I've been carrying around with me all day is gone; safely away behind all the doors that are now behind me.  The final door leads to a sanctuary and each time I do this I get to decide what I want the sanctuary to look like.  Some days it's a small private library, other days it's a luxurious bathroom with a tub, still others it might be a bedroom.  Whatever works for a given evening, I will draw it in my mind to the smallest detail and once I enter it, I can feel myself physically unclench and usually I am already drifting off to sleep as my mind finishes putting the final touches on the sanctuary of my dreams.

The ideal place to write

Writing Exercise 3

Describe the ideal place to write.  Be very specific and detailed.

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The ideal place to write...  There are two places, actually - one is what I imagine would be the perfect place to write and the other that fits the reality of my personality better. 

First the imaginary place...  In my imagination, the perfect place to write would be at home, in my kitchen.  I can imagine myself sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, one leg folded under me.  My cat curled up on a cushion on another chair.  Sun slanting through the window, birds chirping outside.  Peacefully quiet with maybe a bit of music burbling in the background.  Nothing moving, no distractions, just me and my laptop. 

Now for the reality...  In reality, my ideal place to write is in a busy and buzzing cafe.  Crowds of people around, constant movement, low grade noise that I cancel out by plugging in my headphones and turning the music on loud enough to drown out everything around me.  The distractions are numerous.  Inside, people are laughing and talking, sliding in and out of chairs, brushing by tables in the overcrowded space.  Outside, cars are passing by the giant plate glass windows, flashing their lights, occasionally idling to wait for someone.  And right by me the coffee grinder buzzes on and off, the frappuccino machine grinds away, music on the storewide stereo keeps changing in volume and tempo from time to time.  There is a constant stream of distractions and it is only through fighting and pushing past all of them that I am actually able to concentrate and write.  Some of my best writing took place in circumstances just like this; in places where the sensory overload is so high that I have no choice but to escape inside myself, put up a glass wall around me and let the writing pour out. 

My ideal place to write is a place I want to escape from.