A Feast For The Famished

No Comments
Posted 30 Dec 2010 — by Delores Dixon
Category MENtions, shmersonal, storyboard

Mixylodian – Make Me

Dinner is never just dinner, you remind yourself. And a dinner party is never a party when your married friends are hosting. Obligation gets the better of you, and you find yourself down a rabbit hole, an awkward guest at the maddest of tea parties. Better to be the drunken dormouse… Twinkle Twinkle …that’s your only escape.

Stare numbly at leaves drenched in vinegar and mutton cooked in bloody meatstuffs while the other guests ask you those questions that acquainted strangers ask one another. How’s the job? How’s the place? How’s the dog? How’s the commute? Eventually without doubt—because you RSVP’d ‘minus one’—they’ll inevitably ask about that.

They manage to pose the question in the most demeaning manner imaginable, like you’re wading alone in the baby pool and the big kids are asking you how the water feels. They’ll ask if you’ve been seeing anyone? Say you see lots of people. They’ll pry about details of dates. Say you couldn’t honestly describe anything you’ve been doing with any of the people you’ve been seeing as dating. When they ask what you mean by that, attempt monogamous linguistics. Nothing promising, you say, wondering what that means. You briefly entertain the thought of replying to questions for the remainder of the evening with things you’ve heard other people say.

They ask why it didn’t work out with that last guy, what was his name? Shrug and chew. You’re not sure whom they’re referring to. They ask why past relationships haven’t worked out, generally, and you take the question at face value but don’t have a suitable answer. Repeat something you read somewhere about someone else’s life, explaining that when you were younger you liked men who were neurotic but now you find them annoying. Stuck in their own illogical loop, unable to scale the walls or find their way out of the maze they’ve built for themselves.

Some guests are nodding, all are judging, and none of them have any idea what you are talking about. Well, and then there were the ones that cried during sex and liked to wear my lingerie, you joke. Those were obviously never going to work out, you continue. Still, no one laughs. Someone chokes quietly on their mutton.

“Let’s not forget that time you realized you weren’t a lesbian,” a friend’s disapproving husband digs. This also gets some chokes, likely no fault of the mutton. Touch your napkin to you lips with a barely discernible ladylike disdain. Yes, but she was neurotic too, you say plainly. Not a crier, but definitely into lingerie.

One of the betrothed ladies chimes in that she has a single male acquaintance that you may like to meet, a friend of her husband’s brother. Say you had thought only virgins were acceptable sacrifices, and wouldn’t want to anger the Gods. She laughs nervously and nudges her husband who nods at the offer to set you up. He has a couple tattoos, she thinks. You nod, too, wondering what about yourself makes others assume that tattoos would be an obvious selling point. Tell her that sounds great, and continue pushing your food around your plate.

Another of the husbands suggests to the jury that maybe you’re into black guys. Well aren’t you? arched eyebrows and stalled chews are dying to know. Not exclusively, you say without looking up. Silence is swallowing the comfortable, breathable air, and you lift your head to meet the glare of a small, confused army. Tell them that you like men of all colors, if they’re likeable of course. When that doesn’t seem to appease the beasts, add that you certainly prefer dark men generally to, say, neo-Nazi white supremacists.”

The air turns to breezy relief, which you can’t help but take advantage of. It helps if they have a full beard and narcissistic or alcoholic tendencies, you say, keeping a straight face. Your married girlfriend glares at you while the color drains from her face. And a steady welfare check, you add, brushing your hair from your face. Throats clearing and dinnerware dropping to sides of china are the only response.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Far from Shore

1 Comment
Posted 21 Sep 2010 — by Delores Dixon
Category shmersonal, storyboard

Local Natives – Camera Talk (Aurgasm Exclusive)

The pelicans at Doheny Beach are still asleep, perched upon rotted wooden pillars. She grabs a coffee from a deli about a mile down the shore. Thankful to find an establishment open for business at this hour, she buys a couple postcards and tips the old woman generously.

Ticketed passengers board the vessel. There must be seventy people on this boat. Ninety, maybe. She surveys the ship thoroughly making note of the mothers with infants and the small group of firemen presumably returning for duty. It’s a cold California morning at Dana Point, and it’s a chilly 30-mile trip to the island.

Tugging and squirming, she pulls leggings over her ankles and up under her sundress. She slides her arms into a hooded sweatshirt and layers with a long green corduroy jacket. I’m going to find a spot up top she says. She’s halfway up the stairs when she surrenders, resigning to the reality that her thin cotton leggings cannot grant her warmth enough for this birds-eye view.

She climbs back to the galley to sit with the others. She feels resigned to the mediocrity of portal views. The maroon geometric carpet reminds her of musty motels and the oppressive scent of air fresheners. Recognizing a tinge of seasickness she stares to the horizon, giving everything she’s got to fight it off. She wonders why life is always so much more difficult than she would have guessed.

She finishes her coffee-to-go, warming her core and jolting her enough to regain confidence. She reaches for her camera, attaches the appropriate lens and steps out alone into the chilling air near the nose of the craft. Leaning her weight to steady herself against the rail, salt water splashing her legs and cheeks with every crescent of wave, she loses herself in the experimental focuses of her passing, choppy surroundings.

The portal door slides open behind her and the gust slams it shut. She turns to see a teenage boy standing behind her. He’s wearing stretchy black denim above wide, loose-laced skater shoes in typical youthful southern California style. His shaggy blonde mop blows recklessly in the sea breeze, and he ducks under the black hood of his sweatshirt.

She smiles at the boy, turns and resumes the capturing of images. A short time has passed, and the fog is clouding any possibility of a worthwhile shot. She replaces the lens cap and steps back from the rail to take it all in.

The boy steps forward until he’s standing close enough for her to smell the downy scent of his sweatshirt. She looks at him looking back at her. She smiles and turns back, allowing the ocean gust to assail her pink cheeks. A massive splash nearly soaks her camera, and she spins around, laughing. The boy watches her in her amusement as she regains balance. I guess we’re in the splash zone she says, assuming he’ll relate to the Sea World reference.

He continues his gaze, only looking down to his shoes intermittently, then back to meet her face, or the back of her head. She stands in the deafening silence of a heavy, cold wind, then resigns, turning toward the sliding door. When she’s almost past the boy, he grabs the sleeve of her corduroy jacket.

“I…..” he stares, wide eyes and innocent heart, searching for words. He must be sixteen, maybe seventeen, ten years her junior. “I wanted to stand by you,” he says. “I wanted to know who you are.”

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

birds on some stiff piece of wire

1 Comment
Posted 01 Sep 2010 — by Delores Dixon
Category MENtions, shmersonal

Neil Young – Birds [Live]

There was a history of roller derby on the local PBS (WETA) station today. It got me thinking about our willingness to bruise and beat each other for the win, for show, for fun, for competition, for the love of the game. For reasons we ourselves can’t fathom.

We did it to ourselves.

Looking back, it seems appropriate that birds had been a reoccurring symbol in our relationship. I’m starting to believe that the greatest thing we shared—which has inadvertently become a consuming theme in our years together—is the desire to be free. And true freedom means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to, and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

I don’t wholly understand what we last said to one another, or from where within us these sentiments are born, but if this existence has taught me anything, it’s that life will continue to go on all around us, and the understanding is hardly a necessary aspect.

The past seems illuminated now in broken, refracted light through clouds of an ominous sunset. But I can’t remember its warmth. The only future (or relative past) that I can perceive is one in which we’re attached to each other by some stiff piece of wire so that each time one moves the other moves in another direction. Another inconsequential example of freedom breeding brokenness.

In all of this, I’m reminded of a story I once read of a volatile relationship in which two lovers had a dynamic, passionate companionship. They overcame great obstacles together, fought like mad, rejected proposals, tattooed each other’s names onto their skin and loved each other in the most passionate and dangerous way that two people possibly could. They made each other stronger, but did so at the greatest costs of heartbreak and inevitable loss.

In the final angst-filled moments of their relationship, the woman billed her lover $100 for a coffee table he had broken. Reluctantly, he paid her the cash and insisted that the remains of the table then were his property. Unbeknown to him, she had already used the remains for firewood… burnt to ash.

I fear that theirs is a story somewhat similar to ours in breadth. It’s a story made out of shards, and neither of us are willing to pick up the pieces.

In the end, she was left cold and alone from the fleeting warmth of destruction, and all he paid for was his brokenness.

Tags: , , , , ,

Of Canaries and Boys

2 Comments
Posted 23 Aug 2010 — by Delores Dixon
Category MENtions, shmersonal, storyboard

The Love Language – Heart to Tell

Tell yourself you can care for him, even just casually. Invite him to stay with you and wonder why you feel so crowded when he agrees. Try to take up less of your own space to make room for someone else. Choose uncharacteristically to embrace the challenge. There’s plenty of me to go around, you decide. You imagine sharing your depression, your love-handles, your artistic temperament, your loneliness, your alcoholic tendencies, your insecurities.

You awake restless and decide to walk to the market. It’s hot, you warn. He walks with you and the dog. You talk casually about your crush on the neighborhood butcher and you laugh when the dog defecates in front of the Virginia Bank of Commerce. I’d like to deposit this into my account, you say bending over to bag the dog’s warm shit.

He challenges your ideas and opinions. You make a literary reference and he corrects your statement on some historical basis.  It’s too early, you think to yourself, excusing your frustration. You stay outside the market with the dog.

Do you need anything? He asks, kindly.
An iced coffee is all, you say. Thank you.

He returns with peaches, fig preserves, fresh-squeezed orange juice, a beautiful thistle-like wildflower, and an iced coffee white with cream. You look up at him as sweetly as possible. Ice and coffee, you say. He looks at you, puzzled. I never said cream.

The two of you apologize at the same time, both with closed-mouth smiles. You pull on the leash and throw the creamed coffee in a trash bin. You wish you had your bike.

You make love tenderly and you both step out in the mid-afternoon sun for a cigarette. Young people moving from a U-Haul into the flat above you remind you it’s only Saturday. You climb back into bed, curling under the covers and listening to the hum of the wall unit clacking on.

You ask him to read to you. Won’t you, please? You plead in a young girl’s voice. He suggests an article from yesterday’s USA Today’s business section. You hand him a copy of a memoir you’ve been reading by Mary Karr. He starts to read from a section about a young girl being raped by a neighborhood boy. You apologize and ask him to turn 20-pages or so and begin again. He has awkward, unsettling timing with word delivery. He mispronounces Greta Garbo.

You recall hearing a story you’d admired of a couple, someone else’s parents, intelligent and bohemian old lovers reading Anna Karenina to each other beautifully each night in bed. You tell him that’ll be enough reading for now, and thank you. Ask him to join you in the shower.

Your mother calls and asks impatiently for a report on the romantic prospects. You tell her that you didn’t enjoy it when he read to you, that you found nothing about it peaceful, and you explain how precisely that you felt discomfort and displeasure from the whole event should be regarded as something significant. That if you couldn’t be in love with someone while they were reading to you in bed, you simply couldn’t see being in love with them ever. There is a long pause from your mother. She asks you why he was reading to you in bed. I asked him to, you say sharply. She sighs with an overwhelming inability to understand what she refers to as your idiosyncratic nature. She would just like to remind you that most men his age would laugh at the idea of reading to someone in bed. She suggests that you are being a bit ridiculous about the whole thing, wouldn’t you say?

He likes to watch you read on the metro and he thinks your tan is beautiful on your olive skin. He compliments you on your cooking and your lovemaking. You walk past a busy intersection and notice a freshly road-killed pigeon near the crosswalk. You are noticeably upset. These assholes you say.

It’s just a pigeon, he says. Do you know how many diseases those birds carry? They are rats, the scourge of society.
You gasp and let go of his hand. YOU carry diseases!
He shrugs. How many blocks to this Mexican food place? he asks.

Over tacos al carbon, you ask him if he has ever killed anything. He tells you he had a pet canary back when he lived in Brooklyn, as a young boy. You say you always wondered what it would be like to live with a caged bird. I took it out of its cage one day and held it so tight that I strangled it, he says, coldly. It was an accident, of course.

Walking to the train, you hear only your footsteps on the pavement. You wonder what it must feel like to kill a bird, to strangle a creature so peaceful. He reaches into his pockets and offers you a cigarette. You refuse and try not to let yourself become upset.
That all sounds very Steinbeck-esque, you say. There’s a long pause.
Of Canaries and Boys, he says. You’re right.

Tags: , , , ,

Send our Regards: A Note on Hallmark Greetings

No Comments
Posted 24 Jul 2010 — by Delores Dixon
Category MENtions, shmersonal, storyboard

sculpture garden, south austin

Red House Painters – I’m Sorry (John Denver cover)

Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom.
It is pain.
-Randall Jarrell “90 North”

Cal Summers was charming and magnetic. He had a contagious laugh and flung his arms in eloquent gestures when he spoke. He read historic Black Literature and watched the Game Show Network. He climbed trees in the summertime and drank beer before noon. He led an East Coast swing on a crowded dance floor as if he were born to do only such things. He had an indescribable ability to attract wildlife and children wherever he went. He loved the river, content to watch it for hours, casually flicking his cigarettes as it rippled past him in all of its valor and serenity.

The two of us weren’t apart from one another for the better sun-soaked days of several formidable, passion-filled years. It seemed as if we were the only two people on the planet who understood that you didn’t have to choose between utopia and rationality. This was our secret that separated us from everyone else.

My memories of Cal construct my sentiment for a momentary existence and for our participation in it, the duration or culmination of which was never a consideration

It is in these instances that we feel the most powerful—that bewitching point of youth when falling and flying are equally thrilling. Fearlessness replaces trepidation and nothing seems threatening. When we’re ultimately too busy living life to acknowledge the opportunity for distraction or disappointment. When life’s story is written in active verbiage, not passive. That glorious period when what you feel is what is real, and caution isn’t invited to the party.

Cal was everything I never knew I wanted in myself, in my life, in my lovers and in my friends. He introduced me to the possibility of a life lived outside the confines of conventional morality and societal expectation. He was his own definition of individuality and my introduction to the freedom that only this distinction could grant.

Of all the beauty Cal exemplified, I never could have anticipated that the greatest lesson he would teach me was of the inescapable authority of pain against which we are all powerless. It was in the irony of reality’s contradiction that he came to teach those pivotal lessons of nightmarish defeat—the realization that life could be lived as a the victim, regardless of intent.

“Prison is an odd form of punishment, wouldn’t you say?” he asked me once in a crowded bar.

I shrugged, taking another slurp of my cocktail.

He looked around the room. “I mean, even this solitude among strangers can’t make me lonelier than I have always been.”

My eyes moved from my drink to his face, and I wondered if it were possible that I had never truly seen him before. Of all that Cal had taught me about the world and myself, this felt like a misplaced sentiment, a typographical error. It was at this moment that I learned the most about my dearest friend … that I hadn’t known him or his sadness at all.

His comment struck me as unusual, not because of any unconventionality. As all free spirits, free thinkers and children of the counterculture, anguish and melancholy were not lost on us.

Cal and I represented the same forsaken paradigm. We were the irreverent, unapologetic, question-asking, answer-seeking secular products of early Christian education. Don’t get me wrong. Cal and I weren’t ignorant rebellious destructive fucks. We were good hardworking, beer drinking, vinyl listening, river swimming, Ginsberg reading kids. The problem wasn’t that we were philosophically or intentionally defaming the Southern Baptist Convention in purposeful protest. We simply desired another perspective and took another route in search of our own peacefulness. We chose to experience life and seek happiness our own way. We were comfortable living as outsiders, even if the two of us were alone in the world.

Being alone, of course, is not the same as being free. The problem was that we existed in an environment where no one was accepting or open-minded, and everyone was watching.

This proved to be a much greater problem for Cal.

Cal had no desire to sexually experience women—likely one of his holiest virtues. He was tidy, polite, well read, fashion-forward and sensitive. He used hair products and skin-softening lotion and burned lavender candles. Cal was gay. Cal is gay. But Cal isn’t allowed to be gay. Where he comes from, ‘gay’ doesn’t exist, and any choosing of such a lifestyle is without toleration.

But I watched as he grew into himself and gained understanding and confidence in his ability to be Cal. We could talk about Les Miserables and West Side Story while our peers discussed March Madness predictions and fraternal weekend conquests. While I cherished these moments, it seemed that his conflicts were deeper and more internal than the Sharks and the Jets.

As he acknowledged his homosexuality the burdens and realities increasingly became heavy, clouding and eventually suffocated my friend’s beautiful livelihood.

This forced suppression, part in fear and part desperation, instigated a sloppy, disheartening revenge of destruction. His weapon of choice was a severe, disabling drug addiction followed by months of depressed desolation and drug-induced comas. A series of sleepless nights and seclusion. He lost friends and jobs. Eventually he lost himself and everything he loved and once lived for.

Cal—along with his drugs and uncontrollable hopelessness—leapt further into escapism, and after a period of hospitalization, he landed in the wholesomely hypocritical custody of his frightfully closed-minded guardians and the Holiest of Spirits they so believed in.

Cal had survived in a purgatory of promise for some time between the freedom of realization and constraints of ignorance, just to be thrown back into the stale sour prison cell of the self that he had already begun to escape from. No visits were accepted, no calls were extended or returned, no living allowed.

This is the loneliness he spoke of. This was his inescapable punishment.

Several years passed since Cal evaded my life and the journey of his own. I hadn’t stopped asking about him.

Unsettlingly discontent, I pried into any sign of my estranged friend’s life, to no avail. Until not long ago when I ran into an old mutual friend and thought it was worth a shot.

“Any news of Cal?”

“Oh yeah. Yeah, actually. Guess he’s doin’ good. Doin’ real good. Ricky ran into his little brother when Petty was playing a show in Nashville. Word is he’s living at home, he’s off the drugs and he’s even working again.”

“Oh man. I’ve been waiting for news like this. So what is he doing these days for work?”

“He’s uh… He’s writing. Cards. You know those greetings in like Hallmark cards? He’s writing those.”

…

These days I find myself loitering in pharmacies, grocery stores and hotel gift shops, slowly shuffling up and down aisles of ‘choose-a-generic-message’ brochure buffets.

Old men numbly finger through the sympathy tabs. Even I can relate to the inability to find the words. Sometimes it feels easier to let someone else come up with what you wish you could think clearly enough to relay.

I pick up cards at random and am unimpressed by the 99-cent obligatory Shoebox greetings. Whoopee, You’re Three! (giraffes). You’re Old! (smoke alarms). You’re Married! (six-packs and newborns). You’re Divorced! (scantily clad resorters).

What’s the trump in this card game? I suspect that it often goes something like: “This one’s good. This one has cats. She likes cats.”

Anxiously I wait the day that I’m searching for the right thing to say when I select a card and find the small inscription.

Even this solitude among strangers cannot make me lonelier than I have always been.

Cal will have taught me yet another lesson, confirming my hope that life will grant us all the opportunity to express ourselves. I will smile with my cheeks and my heart and replace the card in its only appropriate classification: Thinking of You.

Tags: , , , , ,

Haunting the Forgotten

1 Comment
Posted 17 Jul 2010 — by Delores Dixon
Category MENtions, storyboard

The Cloud Room – Hey Now Now

The trim of a second-storey window was beckoning, illuminated by the moon. The long-limbed girl stood in the dark field behind the house, the evening’s bar rot pushing her back and forth. Her legs were wide in her sundress, unsteady, knees bent, trying desperately to control the swaying.

She dug in her purse for anything she could wrap her fingers around. Wallet. Cell. Cigarettes. Peppermint. She grabbed the mint and fished it out of her over-sized shoulder bag, clutching it tightly in her hand. It was sticky from El Paso summertime and covered in tobacco from the sea of broken cigarettes that exists in all her satchels.

Everything was black and damp in the night except the pale window trim. She swayed, squinted, and focused as hard as she could on her target. She raised her clutched hand high above her head, and gave her best overhand release toward the window. The sticky pitch hit the brick outside the window frame, just off target. Nevertheless, it made an audible clack.

She waited for a moment, listened for anything but silence and resumed digging. She clawed around deep in the broken cigarette sea and wrapped her fingers around something square, just the throwing size. She pulled it out of her purse. Ah, matchbook. Perfect.

She wound up, raising her long arm awkwardly above her, gave her most intent effort and flung the book of matches right in the center bottom pane. Tick! … Not the intensity she had expected, but the target had been hit. She heard Gus, the weimaraner, bark. Once. Then three times. Then nothing.

She might have given up by now if it weren’t for all those hours at the pub, but she felt no fear. She felt no shame. She reached her hand down into her purse one more time to find another mint, stuck half-unwrapped to the side of the bag. She grabbed it, peeled it away from the fabric and positioned herself for one last attempt. The peppermint catapulted out of her hand and stuck to the window with one intensely satisfying SMACK!

The bedroom light flicked on. She grinned excessively and ran around the house to the front door. The door opened with a creak, and he stood half-dressed, silhouetted in moonlight. Gus peed all over the entry floor in excitement.

“Hi.” He said flatly, groggily. “Would you like to come in?”

Conejita en Costa Rica

3 Comments
Posted 11 Jul 2010 — by Delores Dixon
Category shmersonal

Group Bombino – Tenere

[I wrote this in 2005 at the close of a summer in Costa Rica, and after coming across it again recently, I found it worth sharing. If you are familiar with even limited Espanol it should be comical, to say the least. It was a beautiful time in life, and the refection is painful in the way that everything we've loved and abandoned is. Enjoy.]

Mi estancia en Costa Rica me ha cambiado la vida de una forma irreversible. Primero, mi vuelo llego a la Ciudad de Guatemala. Debido a mi falta de experiencia en español, estaba perdida y no pude comunicarme. Después de muchos esfuerzos, pague un impuesto de seguridad y cambie de vuelo. Después de una escala en Nicaragua, mi vuelo llego a San José. En San José, yo conocí a todas las personas con quienes pasaría el resto de mi visita. Algunos amigos míos de Baylor estuvieron conmigo en la visita. Cuando llegue al aeropuerto de San José, tome un taxi en el hotel que se llama Balmoral. En la primera noche, mi hermana y yo fuimos a la discoteca. El próximo día, fuimos al río Pacuare a los rápidos. Costa Rica estuvo muy húmeda. Me costo un poco simplemente fumar un cigarrillo de Marlboro Lights.

En Tamarindo, tomamos unas copas. El camarero estuvo simpático y nos regalo bebidas. Hice muchos amigos en mis vacaciónes y conocí a muchas personas, también. Mi parte favorita del viaje entero fue la puesta del sol. Mis amigos y yo la mirábamos de nuestros balcones todas las noches. Mis amigos de Baylor y yo miramos muchos deportes estando en Tamarindo. Aunque el equipo de béisbol de Baylor perdió a la Universidad de Tejas, fue muy eufórico cuando los San Antonio Spurs derrotaron a los Detroit Pistons en los finales de básquetbol.

Lleve español intermedio y Brent fue mi profesor. Me gusta mucho mi profesor. Mi apodo es Conejita porque me gusta decir, “¿Quieres arrimarte?” Mis amigos Josh y Charlie estuvieron en mi clase, también. Fuimos a clase de lunes a viernes de las ocho de la mañana a la una de la tarde. Hubo diez personas en la clase.

En Tamarindo hice muchos amigos. Pase un tiempo con algunos locales en un apartamento. Fui a una comida de pescado frito. Comí plátanos y yuca también. Cocinaron sin usar grasa o mantiquilla. Yo lavaba los platos mientras Daniel cocinaba con mucha cerveza. Oí unos cuantos monos en el bosque lluvioso. Un día, alquile un scooter con mi hermana. Mi hermana y yo fuimos a Playa Langosta. Entonces, fuimos al hotel Capitán y alimente una iguana. Sacamos muchas fotos. Mi hermana y yo nos relajamos en la playa todos los días. Mi playa favorita fue Playa Conchal.

Un fin de semana, tome un viaje a Playa Negra con mi amigo Keith. Al taxi se le desinflo la llanta. Supimos que el repuesto estaba desinflado. Nos quedemos en una cabina bonita cerca de la playa que se llama Pablo Picasso. Las cervezas estuvieron caras, pero los sandwiches estuvieron grandes y baratos. Me sente en la playa y mire a muchos surfeadores buenos. Nos divertimos mucho. Keith y yo hemos llegado a ser amigos muy cercanos y planeamos seguir en contacto el resto de nuestras vidas.

Un par de veces me puse nostalgia. En Costa Rica, he pasado lo mejor de mi vida aquí. En Hotel La Colina, conoci a un militar pensionado estadounidense llamado Jeff. Me dio unos buenos consejos sobre Costa Rica. En sus propias palabras: “La vida es incierta. Come el postre primero.”

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

The Mermaid Parade

3 Comments
Posted 02 Jul 2010 — by Delores Dixon
Category shmersonal, storyboard

Dawn Landes – Straight Lines

You are a young girl, not quite eleven years old. You have started to define things for yourself, on your own terms. Make-believe takes on an entirely new definition and you no longer accept what others proclaim as factual to be so.

When trying to explain this progressed state of informational acceptance, your friends are bewildered. All the people and things that you love on TV are costumed and fake, you explain. Your mom is playing house and your dad is playing doctor and everyone is playing Monopoly, you tell them.

Your friends confide in your teacher about what you said. They tell her that you are a fibber. She looks at you across the room with sadness, and she tells your friends not to worry. She tells them not to think about everyone else.

Your family has taken a day trip to the aquarium, and your impatience is outweighing your amusement. The jellyfish dance slowly like rhythmically handicapped ballerinas. Watching all the small fish in all their unhurried display of intricate, multicolor detail seems arduous and painfully anticlimactic. Don’t wander off darling, your mother calls. You walk through a musty hallway to the next set of aquatic life-on-display.

You stand at the shark and stingray aquarena for countless minutes, maybe hours. You think about sharks with no fins. You think about drowning mermaids. The carpeted stampede of a group tour fills the area in front of the next tank over. The neoprene-clad guide girl projects to the gaggle of wide-eyed children with slow, overtly animated inflection as if they were preemies or puppies. You wonder why everyone is entertained while you are ultimately annoyed. This is animation, you think. She’s wearing a costume, for chrissake.

You wonder how many times this guide gal repeats the same spiel each shift. You debate whether she’s an aspiring actress or an extremely peppy Jesus-loving aqua geek. You wonder if she believes in mermaids.

You trudge unconsciously to the next tank, which is larger in size and cooler in temperature. The penguins waddle to the synthetic iceberg edge and dive in repetitively without exhibition. You wonder why the sign on the tank calls them birds. You think about costumes and TV.

The penguins soar, dipping and emerging effortlessly through the water in some sort of consecutively similar trajectory. You think of protractors and math class. You think of trapeze artists and tether-ball. You imagine how you feel on a swing set, with the weightless airy lulls and heavy accelerated dips. You wonder if this is how the penguin feels, even though it’s through water. Are they all mimicking each other? you wonder. Is this the penguin game?

A young boy about your age appears beside you, also staring at the penguin performance. See that way they walk?, he shrieks. They have no knees! You do not reciprocate the comment, assuming it is rhetorical and plagued with stupidity. You silently denounce the boy for his ignorance.

Why does everyone automatically compare everything to themselves? you wonder. What if he didn’t know what knees were, or what to call them?

You think about swing sets. You think about birds. What if penguins could fly and mermaids couldn’t swim? You are surprised to hear yourself ask this aloud to your own reflection … even more surprised when someone answers: That’s what TV’s for.

You spin around to find a young man struggling into his neoprene suit. Ten minutes till showtime he  says, sardonically. The badge on his backpack reads TOUR GUIDE and the next group is already gathering.

Silly people … you think to yourself … Paying for performances.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Pixy Stix & Sailing Trips

4 Comments
Posted 22 Jun 2010 — by Delores Dixon
Category joberectomy, shmersonal

Portugal The Man – Work All Day

Every job applied for asks how you’ve managed to apply yourself. Ah, the repetition of self marketing, the packaging up of previous work experience into pretty little bullet points. I’m not sure what the writing samples, media internships and few years as managing editor sell in regards to qualified, relative work experience. But when it comes to work—to the real, unflattering, under-respected, lunch-lady-esque, punching a clockwork work— I’ve run the gamut. I’ve joined the wash-ups, the would-have-beens, the wishers and the worthless in all sorts of wage-earning endeavors. And what I want so desperately to write in my bullshit cover letter, or to include in my self-marketable résumé, is that what qualifies me to be a writer, to be a journalist, is not what I did in my ‘relative’ work experience, but what I have done in my life’s work.

If any place exists to tell these stories, it is this place… this nameless, faceless place. So in the next several posts, I will add some good-ole home-style ingredients to this stale, sorry excuse for a soup. Welcome to the chronicles of one workingwoman. Marketable or not … this is my experience in the working world. Dolly, eat your heart out.

….

My first job—or the first effort for which I received a cash reward—was, like most preteen girls … babysitting. Except I wasn’t watching babies, rather three young girls.

Meet the Edmonsteins: Meghan was 12, Serena was 7 and Katlynn was 3. Ms. Edmonstein was a wealthy divorcee, and I assume from limited knowledge that her divorce was almost as messy as the unkempt mansion she was left in the settlement. She would call me at the last minute to watch the girls for a few hours… always turning into an entire evening. I knew when she said she would be home by 9 to expect her no earlier than midnight, more likely 3 am.

She was a drunk. She would leave me cash to order pizzas and movies, but there was no food in the house, and no sense of organized living. Other than ballet lessons—which is how I acquired this gig—there were no activities taking place in the house. I brought my old dance clothes and Halloween costumes over for the girls to dress up in, I brought board games, books and a small trampoline. I even began taking the girls to the local YMCA, introducing them to their first taste of competitive or team-centered athletics. While the two older girls learned to play basketball, I would entertain young Katlynn with Pixy stix and flashcards (mainly Pixy stix).

One weekend, late on a Thursday evening when I was almost through with my freshman year, Ms. Edmonstein called. She needed a last minute favor. She was going on a sailing trip with her boyfriend, and could I please watch Katlynn until Friday afternoon. The other girls had weekend plans. Sure, I said. And I came to the messy mansion to spend the night with Katlynn. I cleaned the kitchen while Katlynn ate pizza with extra cheese. We watched movies in the master bedroom. We laid together watching Lady and the Tramp in the gigantic elaborate bed in which Katlynn said she saw her mom and her mom’s sailing boyfriend doing bad things.

Friday afternoon rolled around, then Friday evening, and there was no sign of Ms. Edmonstein. When it got to be 9 pm, I brought Katlynn to my house and my mom cooked us both dinner (no pizza). Katlynn slept with me in my bed, and Saturday came with no sign of her mother. Calls to the cell were not answered, which I should have expected, as she was “sailing.” I began to think she was lost at sea.

When Sunday afternoon came, Katlynn had begun to think that my home was her campground, her temporary home. At near 10 pm Sunday night (more than two days late), Ms. Edmonstein came to my door. She was sun-kissed and tipsy. Pushing my mother aside and attempting to subdue her rage, I brought Katlynn by the hand and gave her to her mother.

I never asked Ms. Edmonstein where she had been. I never scolded her for her abandonment and delinquency. She wrote me a check for $325.00. I never cashed it.

This was my first job, my introduction to the working world.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Sean Penn taught me to fly

4 Comments
Posted 25 May 2010 — by Delores Dixon
Category literology, shmersonal

“The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying. “
– Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways to Look at a Blackbird

Robert Ellis – Bamboo (Daytrotter session)

A writer is in constant fear of stagnation. We will chase countless ideas into rabbit holes and belabor every drop of inspiration into incomprehensible dust. We do all of this in fear of the soul-devouring plague called stagnation.

I know this first-hand. Take for example my countless abandoned novel attempts or screenplay suicides. In exercises of writing, I’ve found a common thread of incompletion. Most often it exists, among other deficiencies, in a tendency to short-change characters in the stories so much so that they come off as synthetic or insufficiently alive.

One of my favorite writers has said that for a character to be believable to a reader, the writer must get to know that character throughout their writing. That, as a writer, you have to befriend your characters, to know what your characters would live and die for. What they would kill and steal for. What matters most to them in this world. And in my struggle to craft characters that I care about, believe or believe in, I realized that I will be forever incapable of creating such individuals if I cannot answer these questions of myself. What drives me? My deepest most inherent tic and toc? What do I live and die for?

Thankfully, I suppose, I am not alone in this struggle. The great novelist and essayist Thomas Pynchon encountered similar problems of disconnect with his characters early on. He blamed his junkshop or randomly assembled quality of work on himself, on his own mental and emotional inadequacies and the cluttered way that items accumulate in the rooms of his memory.

So I took to mending these shortcomings in the form most familiar to me, one I often utilize in healing processes. I wrote a love letter to a faulty, yet human memory:

You are the most personal of narrators. The most astute, observant and masterful of biographers. You have bravely defended and withstood persecution and are sensitive and kind in both. If you were a courtroom stenographer, you would tell tenderly of heartbreak and triumph rather than trial proceedings and legal formalities. You are my forgiving past and the inspiration for my future. You are my compass, the tool with which I find direction and guidance from mere analysis. I must be cautious of carelessness, as held with shaky palms or hasty interpretation, you and I are misled. I may tuck you in a bed stand drawer and independently plow ahead in moments of gusto, but eventually the misled again meets the memory … and direction is mine once again.

But as my letter sat, without response of even a spiritual kind, stagnation returned. I thought about what Cezanne said about memory. That our sight is weary, burdened by the memory of a thousand images. That we no longer see nature; we see pictures over and over again. Then I thought about how, in that simple statement, Cezanne wasn’t speaking on memory at all. He was talking about vision.

So I focused on vision, searching for signs of it and inspiration for it. I prayed to Saint Rita, the patroness of lost causes. I read endlessly, everything I could get my sticky fingers on. I channeled all of my literary heroes, Hemingway and Thompson. I drank like a fish. I smoked like a chimney. I downloaded a compass app on my phone, for Christ’s sake. Then I came across an article in an old Rolling Stone featuring Sean Penn, in which he said, “People are more afraid of being laughed at than boycotted. It’s a really cowardly position to take.”

I thought about this quote endlessly. It haunted me. I thought about fear, about what it means to be honest with myself about my own fears, about how fucking frightening it is to honestly confront fear. And though I’ve fancied myself to be fearless at times, I discovered early on that being a woman, being a human out on your own means being afraid. And I reminded myself that fear is a worthy place. A place of new beginnings. A healthy place to find direction. This is the path promising change.

Take film production, for example. In creating a film, it could be assumed that if a scene weren’t to a director’s liking, he or she would offer notes of explicit direction. This seems industrious for an overall production. Tell someone exactly how to do something, what you hated and loved about how it had been done. Tell someone precisely how to move, gesticulate, enunciate, and at what volume to do so.

But spoon-feeding commands—though proven effective in many cases—isn’t the end-all be-all of direction. It has been said that if Woody Allen weren’t pleased with a scene or the acting in said scene, he’d take a rather unique path in directing.

Woody would say, “You know what’s wrong with that take?”

“Everything.”

Now that’s a kind of clarity that makes things easy. You don’t go about trying to adjust the things you’ve been doing … you just CHANGE them. Completely.

So I took Woody Allen’s direction. I took my memories and my fear. I packed my things into my little Volkswagen last week, and I took to the highway. I drove from Houston, Texas up to Washington, DC.  And here I am. On a porch in Virginia. Changing the direction of my destiny. Completely.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
← Previous Entries