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My Slant on the Writing Life

…something

On Friday, August 8, 2008, after I had spent nine hours of my Life inside an office, running on a metaphorical treadmill, and then spent another hour of my Life inside a gym, running on a mechanical treadmill, I got home. I closed the door behind me. I heaved a big sigh. I said, “Gosh, but it’s great to be home!”

And I felt a sudden, transfixing, overwhelming, surge of… something.

I shot paint balls of words at that…something, hoping the multi-colored splatter would reveal its form. I felt restless, but at the same time, calm; in my bloodstream, the endorphins released by my workout at the gym were still dancing in a happy conga line. I felt bored, but at the same time, excited, as if a Happy Accident was very close. I also felt sad, elated, horny, distracted, and, to quote Huck Finn as he set off alone down the mighty Mississippi, powerful lonesome. I felt an irrational urge to open the door and run back outside, as if there was an earthquake happening and my one dumb thought was “Get outside!” Even if for no better reason than to give the falling palm trees, high-voltage cables, and roof tiles a shot at killing me.

Then.

I had a flashing flash of insight, in which I realized I was feeling the same feelings I used to feel every Friday when I got out of high school.

Then.

Another flashing flash of insight went off, in which I realized I could employ the same coping strategy I had developed in high school for these surges of… something.

I phoned a friend, Keri, and I said, “Let’s go drink beer!”

“I’d love to. But I promised to go an 8-8-8 thing.”

“You’re stuttering.”

“The eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year of the century.”

“Oh my god it’s the end of the world as we know it!”

Keri said, “Idiot.” But then added, “Although, in a way, you’re correct. A lot of people think it is the end of the world as we know it, and the start of a New World, a new era in the history of man’s spiritual evolution.”

“You’ve been reading those pamphlets the nice ladies in brown print dresses, fake pearls, and clunky black shoes leave on your doorstep, haven’t you?”

“Shut up.”

I did, and Keri explained, “The Chinese consider 8-8-8 to be an extremely lucky and auspicious day. Many people have been waiting for today to get married, or to start businesses, or to—”

“Do we use the same calendar as the Chinese?”

“That’s not the point. I’m not really into this 8-8-8 thing, but a lot of people are. And since you don’t read newspapers or watch television and are utterly ignorant of what is going on in the wider world around you, you probably don’t know that the Olympics started today.”

I lied. “I knew that.”

“It’s on Moonlight Beach.”

“The Olympics?”

“Idiot.”

“I went to school before the No Child Left Behind laws.”

“The Olympics are in China,” Keri said. “The 8-8-8 thing is on Moonlight Beach. It’s open to everyone. Even you. Want to come?”

At this point, I exited the conversation, and mentally took a taxi to my decision-making laboratory housed in a nondescript warehouse in a derelict industrial section of Brooklyn, where the rent is cheap and nobody asks what you’re up to, coming and going at all hours, and using all that electricity, and with muffled cries of exasperation or exaltation heard through the boarded up windows. I cleverly covered my exit by making a prolonged “ummmm” sound into the phone.

Once inside my decision-making laboratory, I flipped through reams of handwritten notes and boxes overflowing with grainy black and white or faded Kodachrome color photos, cryptic fortunes found inside cookies, tiny umbrellas in search of pina coladas to adorn, and ticket stubs to movies, baseball games and charity benefits. This was the detritus from the times in my long life in which people I did not know well who were going to an event that did not sound like fun, had asked me, “Want to come?”

Keri said, “What is that ummmm sound?”

Startled, I dropped a handful of photos taken at a high school keg party in the Connecticut woods.

I said, “It’s the dial tone of the Universe.”

“You’re meditating?”

I said, “Ummmmmm.”

Having to hurry, I left the photos where they had fallen and performed the final step in my decision-making procedure: Did I have an exit strategy? Since the 8-8-8 event was to take place on Moonlight Beach, which is virtually and factually my backyard, and just 144 footsteps from my presently closed door, my exit strategy was clear: I could sprint the 144 footsteps from Moonlight Beach back to the safety and fully stocked refrigerator of my small but comfy apartment.

Satisfied, I emerged from my decision-making laboratory, locking the door, putting the key in my pocket for future visits, and strolling away while whistling Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered, stopping briefly to pet a fat orange cat who happened to be sitting on a stoop watching the world go by.

When I got home, for the second time that day, I turned the “ummmmm” generator off, and said into the phone, “Okay. I’ll go.”

On the Beach

By the time I had showered, dressed, and began the 144 footsteps down to Moonlight Beach, the orange ball of the sun had set the blue sky and the green ocean on fire, and the white luminescent crescent of the quarter moon was rising above the flames. The world was awash with shimmering color, as if everything were made of stardust. Which, in fact, it is. At the end of the beach farthest from the water, I passed people gathered in big groups around a half dozen fire rings, cooking, drinking, talking, eating, arguing, scolding, belching, shrieking, and laughing. Closer to the water, just to the side of the weather-battered gray wood lifeguard station, there was a group of forty or so people standing near lighted candles inside of white paper bags that they had placed on the sand to form of a giant peace symbol. As I passed them, three very loud, wind-beating Marine Cobra helicopters flew past, working their way home to Camp Pendleton. I wondered what the men and women in the helicopters, who had to fight the two wars the elected leaders of our nation were waging, thought of the candle-powered peace symbol on the beach.

I found Keri to the right of the burning peace symbol. She introduced me to the only other person standing with her, “This is Jim. Jim’s a Reiki Master.”

Jim and I shook hands. I said, “Sorry, but I don’t read much poetry.”

Jim laughed, but stopped himself; clearly concerned his laughter might have offended me.

I scowled at him, and crossed my arms on my chest, pretending it had.

“Rey-kee isn’t actually poetry,” Jim said, choosing words carefully, as if he were shopping for perfectly ripe tomatoes. “It’s a spiritual practice and teaches how to move healing energy from one person into another.”

“He knows what Reiki is, Jim,” Keri said, and kicked sand on my feet. “He’s just being a dope.”

I scowled at her, re-crossing my arms on my chest, pretending she had offended me.

“Jim is like my big brother,” she said. “How many guys do you know who are Reiki masters and drive bulldozers for a living, huh?”

“One,” I said.

“Who?” She demanded.

“Jim,” I said.

Jim said, “Maybe he’s an idiot savant.”

I decided I liked Jim. “So. You drive bulldozers?”

Jim smirked, correcting me as if I were a slow student and he were a smug professor. “Ac-tu-a-ly. I operate heavy ma-chin-ery. While one drives a car, one operates heavy machinery, or, bull-doz-ers, if you must.”

In the blink of an eye, 20 other people surrounded the three of us. In the blink of the other eye, there were 30 people, and one of them, a guy with dreadlocked hair the texture and color of dry straw, began walking backward through the crowd, dragging his heel in the sand.

Keri said, “What’s that guy doing walking backward dragging his heel in the sand?”

“I think he’s making a figure 8,” Jim said.

“Or the symbol for infinity,” I said.

Jim said, “You’re going to fit right in.”

Keri said, “Zelig.”

In the blink of the third eye, all of the 30-plus people in our group had arrayed themselves in a circle around the figure 8. Although it was now too dark to see the shape in the sand, someone had set an upturned cardboard box at the nexus of the 8, like some kind of altar. On the cardboard altar was a big bunch of wild looking wildflowers, a clump of smoky incense sticks standing in a drinking glass, and what looked like an 18-inch tall purple-colored Washington Monument.

I asked Keri, “What’s that 18-inch tall purple-colored Washington Monument on the box?”

“That’s a rock crystal. It has healing powers.”

“Who’s sick?”

“Lower your voice.”

Speaking just as loudly, but lowering my voice two octaves, I said, “We used to burn incense sticks in my parent’s basement when we were getting stoned.” 

Keri whispered, “Now I know how you got to be so smart.”

If circles have middles, a woman in the middle of ours with a chirrupy voice, said, “Let’s all join hands and be silent. Right hand on top and left hand on bottom. So the energy can flow. You can close your eyes if you want to.”

Not comfortable with someone who was not a lover, or a doctor, giving me permission to close my eyes, I kept my eyes open. Everyone else had his or her eyes closed. What fools these mortals be. Keeping alert in this pickpocket’s paradise, I noted there were representatives in the circle from every decade of Life, from 20 to 70. No one spoke, but several show offs were breathing and exhaling very loudly and dramatically, as if breathing were the most amazing yet underappreciated thing about being alive. Our neighbors at the flaming peace symbol were softly singing or chanting and for some reason I don’t claim to know, I decided to close my eyes. Then, not having anything better to do, I began paying close and relaxed attention to my own breathing. I soon became entranced by the minute and graceful operations of taking air into my lungs, following its flowing through my body, and exhaling it back from whence it came, as if breathing were the most amazing yet underappreciated thing about being alive.

Time passed. Possibly the entire Universe shifted. More likely, as would happen in the smoky world of my parent’s basement long ago, I had simply “spaced out.”

When I opened my eyes, I saw that most of the other people had their eyes open now. That same woman in the middle of the circle chirruped, “That was incredible! I could really feel the good energy! What should we do next? Do we need a leader? Someone want to volunteer?”

I, like everyone around me, had been through kindergarten. So, I, like everyone around me, recognized this woman’s plea to be acclaimed our leader. No one volunteered, so she followed protocol and nudged us once, saying, “Oh, come on!” She then waited. With bated breath. I could hear a wave crash on the beach and a small child crying and a deep male voice making a sound like “oaf,” over and over. (Or, if you prefer, oafer and oafer.)

The woman released her held breath and gushed, “All right okay then if no one else wants to do it I’m not good at it but I’ll try my best promise!”

The terrible excitement of her new role as Cheerful Leader caused her already high voice to raise half an octave. “Okay I think we should all just sit down and get comfortable and of course sit in any chairs or on any blankets you brought and then well how about if we go around the circle and all just say whatever we want to like just a few words whatever you’re feeling or want to share or if you don’t want to share you don’t have to and can just say “Pass!” and that’s okay too.”

Fortunately, Keri had brought a blanket. She let me sit on it next to her, but only after she had used her finger to draw an imaginary line down the length of it and said, “Cross that, the lasers will incinerate you.”

The guy who had dreadlocked hair the texture and color of dry straw and who had walked backward while dragging his heel in the sand to etch a figure 8, said, “We should use a talking stick.”

Cheerful Leader handled the momentary usurpation of the powers of her office with great aplomb. She took a long, patient breath, and exhaled it while saying, “Well I think that’s a great idea but what would we use and I think I should explain for anyone here who maybe hasn’t heard that term that a talking stick is just something that we hold and pass along and whoever is holding the stick can speak to the group and everyone else listens and waits their turn to talk until they’re holding the stick but it doesn’t even have to be a stick really it can be anything we agree on and want it to be.”

Voices from around the moonlighted circle politely square danced. “Anyone have a stick? What could we use? I have my son’s light saber in the car? A light saber? That’s maybe I don’t know it is a weapon after all…”

“Wait!” My new friend Jim the Reiki Master Bulldozer Operator got up and skipped across the sand to the cardboard altar. He lifted the three-inch thick 18-inch long purple Washington Monument. Jim used body English to say, “I am a sensitive guy, a spiritual guy, but I am also a confirmed heterosexual who operates heavy machinery and I am not at all comfortable handling this large, decidedly phallus-shaped rock crystal.” Jim used spoken English to say, “Here’s our talking stick!”

He held aloft the stone phallus and turned in a circle, like a hockey player showing the Stanley Cup to a sold-out arena. He then skated across the sand and handed the new Talking Phallus to Cheerful Leader. Everyone was relieved, Jim having saved us from using a light saber weapon to moderate our civilized discourse.

As an hour of my once-in-a-lifetime Life flowed past, I sat on a blanket on the beach and listened to people I had never before met hold a miniature Washington Monument in their hands as if it were the Holy Grail. After each person told the group their name, they pretty much all made the same short speech. “I don’t know what to say. I’m just so grateful to be here. In this beautiful world. And with all of you. And even though I only really know two or three of you I just felt so much good energy when we were all holding hands and meditating or whatever you chose to do in that quiet time. I mean, like, I’m just so deeply thankful to be here.”

When the Talking Phallus came to the hands of the thin man in his early twenties with dreadlocked hair the color and texture of dry straw, the same guy who had walked backward while dragging his heel in the sand to etch a figure 8, and who had suggested we use a Talking Stick, he accepted the Talking Phallus as if it were a scepter and he had just been proclaimed King in a land where war, famine, plagues of locust and stock market crashes were all raining down and it was now his supreme mission and terrible burden to carry everyone forward toward peace and prosperity.

He said, “My name is Moon Song.”

I leaned over to Keri and said, “That guy’s name is Moon Song!”

She whispered, “Shut! Up!”

Moon Song had paused, staring down at the Talking Phallus cradled in his hands, like a king lost in deep monarchical thought. Then he said, “I don’t know what to say. I’m just so grateful to be here. In this beautiful world. And with all of you. And even though I only really know two or three of you I just felt so much good energy when we were all holding hands and meditating or whatever you chose to do in that quiet time. I mean, like, I’m just deeply thankful to be here.”

Like all kings, he seemed deeply reluctant to surrender his power to a successor. Yet, King Moon Song did finally relinquish his scepter and the Talking Phallus continued its journey around the circle of adult humans sitting in the sand of a moonlighted beach called Moonlight Beach. When it reached a woman who was clearly, even though sitting down, statuesque, she said, in German-accented English, “My name is Heike.”

Keri elbowed me. “That’s James’s partner.”

I said, “Bitte.”

After saying her name, Heike broke form, and made her own speech. “I saw Moonlight Beach the first time when I was a teenage girl. I was in this country the first time. I wanted so much to not have to go away from here. I wanted to live here. And now I do. I don’t really have words to tell you how I feel. So I am going to make tones.”

I turned to Keri but she had already put a finger to her lips to mime, “Shut up!”

Heike began making sounds. Long deep throbbing pulsating sounds came rumbling up from her diaphragm and resonated in her chest, in her throat, the vibrations finally flowing out of her shape-shifting mouth and into the air. I imagined I could see the sound waves, as if the moonlighted darkness was an oscilloscope, and the tones Heike made were a flowing wave pattern moving outward in all directions.

As suddenly as Heike had begun making the sounds, she stopped.

People seemed to be shaking themselves awake from a wordless, placeless dream they had passed through.

Heike passed the Talking Phallus to Jim, the Reiki Master Bulldozer Operator. He shook his head and said, “That’s my girl!”

Brave New World

The next thing I knew, Keri was passing the Talking Phallus to me.

It was heavier than I had imagined. I tossed it a few inches into the air, caught it softly, tossed it higher, caught it. For some reason I don’t claim to know, I heard myself saying, “You know, if my East Coast friends could see me now, they wouldn’t believe it. They’d probably disown me. Unless I could convince them that 8-8-8 is some West Coast version of playing the numbers. But they’d want to know why Californians sit in the sand at the beach to gamble when they have all those Indian casinos.”

Cheerful Leader said, “You’re funny!”

I said, “People have been laughing at me all my life.”

Jim was the only one who laughed at that. I scowled at him, crossed my arms on my chest with the Talking Phallus under them, and pretended I was deeply offended.

I couldn’t believe it, but I actually had more to say. “I live right up there,” I pointed to Moonlight Overlook, a flat promontory of the bluffs, past the lifeguard station. “I consider that, and all of this beach, as my backyard. But you’re all welcome to use it. Just please don’t litter. I love to watch sunsets from the Overlook, while drinking beer. And sometimes when I’m there at night and I just look out over all of this, I would see all these people having bonfires and laughing and sitting around in circles talking—like we’re doing here—and I’d wonder why we don’t spend more hours of our lives doing stuff like that.”

I stopped, surprised that people were attentively listening to me. It threw me off. No one had catcalled, heckled, or interrupted. In a moment of inspiration, I closed my rambling monologue with, “I’m just grateful to be here. In this beautiful world. And with all of you.”

When the Talking Phallus reached Cheerful Leader, she took a deep breath, and said, “Oh, gosh I don’t know where to begin. I should tell everyone that three years ago I was just a regular old housewife. A happy housewife! Definitely happy. Because I have great kids and a great husband that’s him right here beside me he doesn’t say much at these things but he’s really supportive and I’m so grateful for him because I mean one day I came home from one of my long walks on the beach and just up and told him the truth that I could hear what dolphins are saying. He just took it all in stride. Other men would have freaked out!”

She rocked back and forth in the sand and waved her hands, palms out and fingers spread, in the universal distress dance of the freaking out. She was an attractive, energetic woman, despite the chirruping voice. She could have passed for 28 instead of 38. Maybe that had something to do with her husband sticking around.

Then for some reason I would bet Cheerful Leader would not claim to know, she turned to me and said, “I have to ask you, since you’re so new to all of this, do you know about the orbs?”

“Orbs?” I flashed back to an old Woody Allen movie in which people living in a futuristic society hold a shiny sphere they call “the Orb” and it gives them endless orgasms. I chose to keep that to myself, and said, “You mean, orbs, like, the planets?”

A woman from the far end of the circle called out, “O-R-B-S! Other Real Beings! ORBs” She then chanted, “ORBs! ORBs! ORBs!”

A dozen people were talking at once. I shot a glance to Keri. She shrugged; apparently, the ORBs were news to her and I was on my own.

Cheerful Leader called out, “Let’s show him the ORBs! Whose got a camera?”

Several people dug into hemp bags or backpacks, but they were no match for the woman sitting in a low chair and chanting, “ORBs!” She won the race, plucking a digital camera out of a huge canvas bag beside her chair, holding the camera above her head, but very close up to her eyes, and taking a photo. I was thirty feet away and the bright flash ruined my night vision. I wondered what it did to her eyes. She managed to stand up, wobbling, and said, “Whoa!” The people near her raised their arms, ready to catch her if she fell. She stumbled around the circle, to my dismay, evidently heading for me, while Cheerful Leader led the circle in a chant, “Show him the ORBs! Show him the ORBs!”

The woman with the digital camera reached me and thrust the camera at my face. “Look!”

I looked. The chanting stopped. All I saw in the black rectangle of the display screen, were a few small, rainbow-colored circles.

“You see them?”

I said, “Um.”

She pointed at the small, rainbow-colored circles. “There’s one! And there! You see them, don’t you?”

To cover my frantic effort to hail a taxi and flee to my decision-making laboratory in Brooklyn, I said, “Ummmmm.”

But Cheerful Leader came to my rescue. Sounding like the Queen of Hearts, she sang out, “Bring the ORBs to me! I want to see the ORBs!”

I gratefully handed the camera back to the photographer. She trotted over to Cheerful Leader. They both stared into the display screen. “There they are!” They made satisfied “oooing” and “aaahing” sounds. Others were politely asking for time with the camera.

I have a fourth-grader’s understanding of physics, but what would have been the point to ask if camera flashes inches from eye-retinas might not cause small, rainbow-colored circular shapes on an otherwise empty black screen. And, while I had no evidence to support my skepticism, Cheerful Leader and the others had incontrovertible photographic evidence of Other Real Beings.

The next thing I knew, the circle had broken into pieces, with people hugging their neighbors and departing. Cheerful Leader had gathered the big bunch of wild looking wildflowers from the cardboard altar and as people were leaving, she went up to them and said, “Please pick a flower petal or even several and take them to the beach and drop them in the surf and make an intention statement but if you don’t have time you can just hold the petals in your hand as you walk to your car and make your intention clear and it will come to you if you do that too.”

Keri and I tried to slip away, but Cheerful Leader appeared before us with the wildflowers. “I envy you,” she said to me. “You have so many new things to explore!”

I plucked a few flower petals and said, “Thank you, Zuzu.”

She tilted her head, confused. “My name’s Cindy,” she said. “But thank you for being here and for being open to everything I’m sure it must make your head spin to take in all this from ORBs to 8-8-8 and everything.”

Keri and I walked along the surf, watching the moonlight glint off the waves and make the swirling foam at our feet seem luminescent. We stopped, and released our flower petals in the surf.

“What did you wish for?” Keri asked.

“World peace.”

“Liar.”

“Anyhow, it’s not a wish.” I said. “It’s an intention statement.”

“What did you intend?”

“To go drink beer. As soon as possible.”

In the restaurant, we ate pizza and drank Moretti beers that had been brewed and bottled in Italy and shipped across the planet to be sold to us for less than what it would have cost to buy a beer brewed in the town next to ours. We talked about global interconnectedness, war, the childlike conviction that Other Real Beings are all around us but only some people can see them even when they are captured by a digital camera. We talked of global poverty, and the arbitrary measurement and alignment of Time in man-made calendars, and the television shows we watched when we were kids.

I said, “You know what the oddest thing about tonight was?”

Keri, chewing pizza, said, “Hmfwha?”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever spent over an hour and a half in the company of 30 or more people and not one of them—not one of them—complained. Not once. About anything.”

“Are you trying to be deep?”

I said, “What I’m trying to get at is that these were all grown ups. All of them with jobs and bills to pay and most with delinquent kids and untrained dogs and ballooning mortgages and assholes at the office and scary results from medical tests. And not one person complained. Not once. About anything.”

I paused, intrigued by my observation. Keri, her beer empty, got up and went in search of the waitress.

I thought how Keri had told me earlier in the day that many people believed that this one day, this 8-8-8 day, would mark the beginning of a New World, a new era in man’s evolution toward a kinder, gentler way of Being. I thought how, when the time came for each person in the circle to hold the Talking Phallus, they had pretty much made the same small speech. “I don’t know what to say. I’m just so grateful to be here. In this beautiful world. And with all of you.”

Was that how a New World would begin?

I smiled inwardly.

Keri returned and said, “The waitress is bringing more beer.”

I smiled outwardly.

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Other ICBWB Slants on Writing by David Boyne

Failing to Write

WRITING SUCKS!
DON'T TRY IT!

Write. Exercise. Shower.

WRITING CONTESTS SUCK! DON'T TRY THEM!

Write Naked. Now.

NaNoWriMo and Water Into Wine

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

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