November 1st, 2021 - The Depletion Prompts
Dear TNY,
“The Depletion Prompts”. What a puzzling thing.
My first response to this was: I wrote this story. Years ago. 2012 to be exact. I was at an unofficial writing residency the morning after making mistakes with my hands that would ultimately ruin my marriage, because, TNY, I am a huge piece of shit (oh and just days later I made mistakes with more than just my hands, the shame of it, I’ll tell you, still makes me wish I had just died), anyway, I was in a group of people who claimed to write and be writers and they were trying to write, but it has become clear that these people were more likely just trying to live, to be alive (you feel me, fam?), myself included, surely, as I was not better and am not better in any way, and we sat at a table, our writing prompt being to write a story in the time it took for the pizza we ordered to be delivered. And I wrote the below:
To Write a Story
I want to write a story. About pirates. There will be two, a captain and a bosun. Yeah. I will use the time that I found that swing in the woods behind my house when I was a kid. I will use the feeling of when I leapt off the oak stump and swung through the kudzu and saplings, spinning on the rope. I will iron that into a pirate fight scene, with their cutlasses and blunderbusses, and the captain will lash onto the mainmast of a Dutch freighter and swing across the open water, already littered with splintered wood, and he will swing free and clear, like the metronome in the woods. That’s the story I want to write.
Then, after the armada comes, the Queen’s ships sailing hard, the captain and the bosun, ship destroyed in the night, will make landfall on an unknown island in the South Pacific. They make a life of it. There will be goats. I will write about the time that I first witnessed a goat giving birth, the steam of hot placenta and slow surge of the goat pushing. The smell of blood-matted hay. The captain will husband the goats, the bosun scouring the island for food. They will love those goats like children.
Maybe the captain gets sick. The bosun will do what he can, bring breadfruit and flowers from the other side of the island, smash them to a paste with a rock. He will apply the paste, wipe the sweat, soothe. He will be at the bedside when –
No.
I want to write a story. I want to write a story about a herdsman. No, not a herdsman. A father and son. Yeah. A father and son who get in a fight about wiffle ball. I can write about that time, where the grass was already yellow. The wiffle ball had a chunk missing from where the dog chewed it. I wore an orange sweater with white stripes on it. The orange had bled into the white over the years and the white had become the color of egg yolk. I will write about that, how the colors bled.
The father and son will disagree. The son is young, maybe six, and he will want to hit the ball as far and as high as he can. But the father will only be interested in the rules of the game, drilling lessons into his son. And the son will only see the yellowed grass. He will see the orange and egg yolk of the sweater. And the father will –
No. I will not write about that.
I will write about a man that sells candy. No, a man who sells toys. No, a clown. I want to write a story about a clown. Maybe a happy story. Maybe not. There will be a boy. Chester. His family is poor, his father laid off from a steel mill. Chester has never had a real birthday party. He is young, but old enough to have written off the fact that there would be, could be, should be a party. His mother will have stashed away money for a clown, Harold the clown, an old man whose problems tower over the problems of Chester’s father, but she will contact him anyway, because he is all there is for clowns in this dying steel town.
While Harold the clown is at the party, entertaining no one, Chester will play in his room, setting up different plastic cowboys in a line. He will take potshots at them with a wooden gun before knocking them over with his fingers. I can write about the gun I made from an old cupboard door. I made that gun, whittled it down and filed it smooth, modeling it off of some movie, I can’t remember now, but I can use that. I can write about the reaction of when I gave it to –
No.
I want to write a story about chemotherapy. But I can’t.
I want to write a story about a hula dancer whose father loved her so much, but sold her to the cannibal tribe on the next island to ensure the safety of his citizens.
I want to write about the hurt.
I want to write about the way I felt when the tubes and the machines pumped and wheezed and beeped. I know all about that.
No.
I want to write a story that has a happy ending. I want to write a story about a man who loses his dog and years later his dog comes back, old and grey, and the dog still remembers the tricks the man taught him. And then the dog will die. Because there are no happy endings.
That dog will die while the man is sleeping. It will die with tubes that wheeze and with nurses busying around it. That dog will die and they will call the man after they have tried, twice, with paddles. The man will be drinking coffee and getting ready to go to the hospital. The dog will die and the hospital will say, we regret to inform, because that’s their lingo, words like inform, we regret to inform you that Ethan has passed. That your son has passed. Your. Son.
My son.
I want to write about anything but that.
Please.
Anything but that.
(End)
I suppose, as a writer (maybe I am one now, I do not know), we all write this story. We all write all the stories, I suppose. As is the bane of creation, in that you are never really creating anything new. Yet, like young love and sex, no one has ever done anything like this before, no way, no how. I’m not fooling myself, though. I know there is no originality left, per se. No new ways to make love. I don’t think my story is good, by the way. I’m including it…fuck, I don’t know why. Reading “The Depletion Prompts” made me think of this story, which made me think of the circumstances surrounding writing it, which makes me think of blowing up a fucking family, which is what is on my mind anyway as I’m trying to plan another epic summer trip but my ex is saying no to vaccinations for the kids so the giant boat trip from Port Townsend to Ketchikan and beyond is impossible based on Canadian restrictions for the unvaccinated, which, I could keep talking about, but it’s not about Canada so much, or my ex’s politically charged narrative which is being passed off as concern for my children’s health (see: their diet and daily activities as strong evidence to the contrary), no, it’s the fact that I am not allowed to make decisions, that I am in the car but do not have the steering wheel, the keys, the pedals. I’m in the back seat, at best, but mostly the trunk, riding along, not even pounding on the hood anymore because when I do, the car pulls over, the driver comes around to the back of the car, the gravel crunching with each step, and the trunk opens where I am met with the brilliance of a flashlight with fresh batteries and boot that was made for stomping, which I fruitlessly try to shield myself from with outstretched hands and weak pleas, before the trunk is slammed shut and the journey continues. So, yeah. I’m on a jag, I gather, inside my own memories, replaying horrifying events, like saying to a 3 and a 6 year old, “I’m not going to live with you anymore,” and seeing that they do not understand because it’s an impossibility to them, the same as gravity vanishing, or air drifting off somewhere and leaving only death behind.
Fuck me, guys. I’m a fucking monster. Just kill me.
So I don’t know how this story, the structure of it, makes me feel. Because on one hand, I like the descriptions. I like the scenes. I like that we only get bits and bobs of this story and we have to put it together on our own, what little of it that we can, and that’s just going to have to be good enough. And I like the structure, kind of.
But, it also feels like Brian Doyle’s essay “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever” at times. By that I mean both genuine and disingenuous simultaneously. See, my history with Doyle’s essay, it includes monsters too. Once, while on an actual writing retreat, a group of us (around 30) were at a farm in Palmer, AK, and the farm workers were so nice, so gracious, so innocent and kindhearted, and we were “writers” in a Master’s program and, as a group, very full of ourselves, so much so that when we entered this yurt where a young woman on the farm staff, wearing bright green pants, having exceptionally white teeth that were all rounded and lined up perfectly, and wearing her pitch-black hair in big, looping curls, and she wanted to read us an essay that moved her, her trying to connect to us on our plane, that being the literary arts, which was moving in and of itself because I think most of us didn’t know fuckall about farm life and weren’t trying to connect with her, and so she began to read Doyle’s essay, and was so moved by it during the reading that she began to cry real earnest tears, and the monsters in our group, myself resoundingly NOT among them, as you will see, decided to, after she had finished, inform her that we had just attended a class on irony and that Doyle’s essay, was, in fact, eviscerating the nature of nature essays and was not meant to elicit the response that she had, oh no, which is the response of a plebe (in their eyes), but instead was supposed to make us clever writers smile wryly at its cleverness and the lack of cleverness in people like her. I would say no less than 15 people jumped on this bandwagon of writer-splaining how she was wrong, that her emotional experience was wrong. Chuckling while they did it. These monsters then filed out of the yurt, pleased with themselves. And I stayed behind to apologize to her for our horror, which she shrugged off with what I perceived to be real pain behind her eyes, but I cannot know for sure. Fast forward to the bus ride back, all of us “writers” returning from whence we came, having left the farm girl in her own, vastly better world, and the samesaid group was laughing loudly at how badly she misinterpreted that essay, oh how her ignorance was both humorous and precious, and I fucking simmered, TNY, I fucking smoldered and fumed.
At times, “The Depletion Prompts” feels a little ironic to me in the same way that Doyle’s essay does (likely a side effect of writing about writing (which, fuckers, stop with the fucking writing about writing bullshit)). But if you go to his essay at this very moment (link above), you’ll see in the comments below the story, they all praise him for having changed the reader (themselves). How can we discount that both things are happening? Can it be both ironic and moving at the same time? Maybe. And this story was too. I was moved by the last line. Was this my favorite story? No. But, it’s an object I looked at, wondered about, moved around before me, a strange thing to behold. Do I know what it’s supposed to be? No. But it was not a chore to partake in and it didn’t enrage me. Parts of it I enjoyed.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Because I know that I can’t apologize to the curly haired woman for the monsters and yet I’m the monster to you most weeks. And I can’t love my kids with my whole being but also have blown up my family. It’s the dichotomy. I know that both things have to be true. But I cannot resolve them that way. Only one can stand. So, I’ll be the monster, I guess. The villain. That feels more fitting than the hero. And as it is the easier path, that also suits the negative way in which I see myself (but not how I see myself either, TNY, as I also see myself positively; dichotomy strikes again!).
I don’t know what to do with this life.
I do know that I wanted so badly for the sister to present her beautiful face to me. I wanted her to be beautiful still, illness be damned. In the same way I wanted that woman with the curls to be as beautiful as she ever was, her sullying at the hands of lesser mortals undone. In the same way that I want my boys to be as pristine as they were before I fucked everything up. In the same way that I want Ethan to be alive and beautiful as well. In the same way that, really, what we all want, if we are really trying, and surrounded by the failure of our tries, is to be beautiful ourselves, in the way others see us as beautiful, without our twisted-up bias, to love ourselves fully, for both the mess and the perfection, to love ourselves because of our struggle, because struggling signifies trying, and without trying there is no beauty.
Maybe I’m saying all this because I’m trying to be okay with me. Maybe I can be beautiful too.
Not likely.
Fuck. I’m insane.
See you next week.
Nick
