Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate

If you’re under forty, you probably don’t know where the title of this post comes from, or even what spindling is.

If you’re under thirty, you may think OMG is a real word.

If you’re under twenty… Well, honestly? I’ve no idea what people under twenty think. I thought I did, then, a  while ago, I was approached by two young men on the street and asked if I could spare a cigarette. As  it happened, I was down to my last cigarette, so I gave them the pack.

“You’re giving away your pack?” one of the men said incredulously. “Sick!”

Insulted, I tried to take the pack back. The young man assured me “sick” was a good thing.  I believed he was being facetious, but didn’t want to get into an argument on the street. I scowled at him and stomped away. Still, it bugged me, so when I got home I checked it out online.

Turns out, nowadays “sick” swings both ways. It can be derogatory, as in:  “You eat toe jam? That’s sick!” And it can also be complimentary, as in: “You won the Pulitzer? That’s sick!”

So how am I supposed to know which one he was using? Is there an accompanying hand gesture? Is the meaning contextual? Do I get to pick the usage that best matches my own opinion?

English is a constantly growing language. And that’s okay, even though we already have more words than we can possibly use. But words must have definable meanings. They can’t  mean just anything and they certainly can’t be their own antonyms. If they were, English would shrink.  Debates would be ludicrous; arguments impossible.

She: It’s sick.

He: No it’s not. It’s sick.

She: I’m sick of having this fight with you all the time.

He: Sick off.

Okay, I made up the last one, but you see where we’re headed here.  Our language is being mutilated, folded in on itself, spindled beyond legibility. On the other hand, it makes my job as a writer easier.

Sick, isn't it?  

Career Advice for Aspiring Writers

She sat on a bucket in front of the liquor store, a slab of a woman holding a wriggling, white puppy under one arm and a stained coffee cup in her other hand. It was a warm day for February, but windy, and she’d pulled the hood of her grey sweatshirt so far forward her face was in shadow.  As I approached, she called out to me with the monotonic delivery of a six-year old in a school play.

“Got any spare change? I’ve got two kids at home. Can you help me out?”

I don’t give money to beggars; my time in India taught me it’s not a useful form of charity. I told her sorry and commented on the cuteness of the puppy.

“It’s not mine,” she said with the same flat delivery. “Just a couple of quarters would really help.”

I shook my head and said sorry again. She shifted her apathetic attention to the next person approaching the liquor store and repeated her rote pitch.  

A few years ago, I stepped over a man on a crowded sidewalk in San Francisco. He was sleeping with his body positioned in such a way passersby had to step over him or step off the curb to get around him. At the small of his back nestled a grubby paper coffee cup, one of those blue ones with a white crenellated pattern circling the rim, half full of coins. On the cup, he’d taped a piece of paper that read: NEED MONEY FOR DRUGS AND BOOZE.

She had that same carelessness about her, that same disdainful disregard of the people she begged from. We were a job to her, and a boring one at that. I looked into her cup and saw, with no surprise, a meager scatter of coins that didn’t even cover the bottom. With an attitude like that, she was easy for me to walk away from, especially since she was better dressed than I was in my raggy-hem jeans and the ski-jacket I bought for five dollars at the Salvation Army thrift store seven years ago. Her sweatshirt had that almost crispy, never-washed look. Her jeans, and this did surprise me, had pressed creases like dress slacks.

As I entered the liquor store, I saw a familiar face coming through the exit door, a whiney woman who begs in the doorway of an empty storefront on main street. She staggered under the weight of a clanking bag, at least eight bottles of something, which made me wonder how much she’d made that day.

I bought my  bottle of scotch and left the store. The hooded beggar still squatted on her bucket. Forgetting she’d tapped me before, she gave me her deadpan spiel again.  As I passed her, I glanced into the cup and was shocked to see at least four toonies. (For my non-Canadian friends, a toonie is a two dollar coin. They’re quite distinctive, large with a brass centre and a silvery edge, impossible to mistake for anything else.) In the ten minutes I’d been in the store, this woman had made a minimum of eight dollars, probably much more.  

I am a writer. I spent at least five hours a day (usually more), at least five days a week (usually more), writing my first novel.  From the first word of the first draft to the last word of the last draft, it took eighteen months. Because I am one of the statistically-anomalous writers whose book got picked up by a big six publisher, I got an advance, and quite a generous one. (Some of this went to my awesome agent, April, who deserves every penny.) Adding in the time I will spend promoting the book (things like developing my website, writing this blog, social networking , and if I’m lucky, doing signings and interviews when the novel comes out next June), when the dust settles, unless the book earns out its advance (most don’t), I’ll have done all this work for just under five dollars an hour.

To  summarize:

BEGGAR - at least eighty dollars an hour for sitting on a bucket holding a used Styrofoam coffee cup and someone else's dog.

BREN - almost five dollars an hour for beating the shit out of a thirteen-hundred-dollar laptop with a busted backspace key.

Choose wisely my aspiring friends.

The Powder of Imagination

Imagine you are walking through the Sahara desert. Not the Laurence-of-Arabia Sahara desert of dramatic, chiaroscuro dunes and hunky sheiks on camels. A Valley-of-the-Kings desert,  bleak stony ground punctuated with tumbled boulders beneath which scorpions have taken refuge from the merciless, midday inferno of blinding sunlight. (This is actually what most of the Sahara looks like. I know because I’ve seen it from a plane that couldn’t fly higher than a few hundred feet due to a crack in the pilot’s windshield that had been patched with duct tape.)

Now imagine you come across a cave-like opening between two boulders. You take out your trusty flashlight and creep cautiously into the cool darkness, where you find ancient, hand-hewn stairs leading downward. As you descend, the walls become smooth and decorated with flaking murals depicting stylized images of brown-skinned people wearing elaborate wigs. You realize  you have stumbled across an undiscovered Egyptian rock tomb from the late New Kingdom period and could be on the verge of becoming the David Beckham of archeology. (You’ll have to imagine you’re an archeologist to do this.)

The only sounds as you descend are the thundering of your heart and the occasional slithering of snakes disturbed by  the vibrations of your footfalls. You clamber over a rubble of stone blocks, remnants of the wall that once sealed the passage, left here by the grave robbers who were the last people to set foot in this tomb three thousand years before. On the other side, the burial chamber is all but empty. Only a few fragments of smashed pottery and the shattered lid of the sarcophagus give evidence of the room’s original grandeur. The defiled mummy of the grave’s original occupant lies at your feet. In the feeble beam of your flashlight, its desiccated features leer at you in an eerie parody of greeting. Inside the skull, a tiny heap of dust is all that remains of what was once a living human mind. (You’ll have to imagine you have Superman’s X-ray vision to see it.)

That little mound of brain powder? That’s what the inside of my head looks like today. My imagination has temporarily dried up.  So instead of subjecting you to anymore random rambling through the crumbling remains of what was once a thriving community of neurons, I’m going to share with you my go-to blog at times like these:

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/

Enjoy.  

Margaret's Will

As an internet volunteer at the library, I get occasional glimpses into people’s lives. Most of them amuse me, a few sadden me, and every once in a while, something chilling comes along.   

I’m sitting at the volunteer’s desk, checking out the latest issue of Creative Knitting, when I hear Laura, one of the library technicians, say my name.  “Talk to Brenda. She’s the internet volunteer. She’ll help you.”

The elderly man and young woman standing in front of Laura’s station both look over at me. He is well presented, clean-shaven with a full head of neatly-trimmed hair, but his demeanor does not match his grooming. He peers vaguely at me, as though he’s just found himself standing in the library and doesn’t know how he got here. His companion’s demeanor is equally odd. She is young and pretty, with Bambi-lashes surrounding velvety-brown eyes that express the intense relief suitable for a drowning person spotting a lifeboat. I ask how I can help them. The old man tells me he wants something printed.

“Do you have a library card?” I ask him.

“No, but she,” he points to Laura, “says you can do it anyway.”

“How about you?” I turn to the young woman, who is drifting away from us toward the reference stacks.

“I have a card, but I don’t need to use it.”

“You’ll need it to log on to an internet station.”

She glides closer to the stacks. “I don’t need to.”

“She’s helping me,” the man says.

Behind him, the woman shakes her head hard enough to dislodge the hair tucked behind her ears.

“You’re not with him?” I ask.

“No, I’m here to do research.” She takes two more steps backward and disappears between the shelves.

I ask for the man’s ID to sign him on as a guest. He produces a driver’s license. In the picture, his features are the same, but somehow more inhabited than his real face, and I wonder if my client is senile.  This suspicion seems confirmed when he asks twice if printing is possible. He signs his name, very slowly, in clear round handwriting that doesn’t appear to have changed since he went to grade school approximately seventy years ago.

“So what do you want to print?” I ask.

He pulls a grimy envelope out of his pocket and extracts two typewritten pages. “This. It’s my wife’s will. Can you print it?”

I’m confused as to why he wants to print something that is already on paper, until I take the pages from him and really look at them.

The larger page is headed LAST WILL AND TESTEMENT OF MARGARET JONES BROWN.  The word BROWN is hand-lettered. Below the heading and following the sound-of-mind legalese, are five numbered bequests dealing with things like disposal of remains and clearance of outstanding debts. The paper is uneven at the bottom, as though carelessly cut with small scissors.

The smaller page is similarly uneven at the top and contains bequests number 13 and 14, which appear to dispose of the remainder of Mary’s estate equally among her  heirs , followed by some signed-and-dated verbiage over empty signature lines where the name JONES is again scratched out and replaced with a hand-lettered BROWN.

I hand the pages back. “Where’s the rest of it?”

Clearly, he doesn’t like the question. He responds with one of his own. “Where’s that girl who’s going to help me?” Most people would look around the room when they ask a question like this. He keeps his attention on my face.

This puts me off. I feel like the target of that neuro-linguistic programming trick, the one where the programmee is lulled into an agreeable mind-frame by being primed with affirmatively slanted questions, as though he’s getting me to buy into the idea of helping him look for the girl as a setup for more elaborate assistance.  I force myself not to look around and say “I don’t know.”

He asks me the same thing twice more, gets the same answer, then gives up on that angle and asks again if I can print the will. I explain to him that before he can print anything, it has to be put into the computer. He gets frustrated, says he doesn’t want the computer, he wants a typewriter. Then he asks where the girl is.

I offer to tape the two pieces of paper together and photo copy them, even though I’m sure the missing bequests would invalidate the will in probate. Again, he asks where the girl is, which seems to be his standard response to anything I say that he doesn’t like.

We go around this bush a few more times, during which I learn Margaret has “terrible arthritis” and can’t leave the house, which is why she is not here with him. I finally realize he’s waiting for me to offer to type in the text and print out the will on a single, contiguous sheet of paper because “that damn lawyer put things in I don’t want.”

By this time, my mental landscape is littered with red flags. How stupid does he think I am? And how much longer would poor, housebound Margaret be around if she signed a revised will? Determined not to help this man in any way, I tell him a holographic will is every bit as valid as a typed one, and suggest he copy the document out himself, under the assumption that Margaret is able to recognize the difference between a handwritten document and a typed one. He asks where the girl is. I repeat I don’t know. He tells me his son’s girlfriend knows how to type and leaves the library.

Ten minutes later, he’s back with his son’s girlfriend, Phyllis, a middle-aged woman with the barrel-like physique of her pure Inuit heritage. She claims she knows how to use a computer, but when I tell her to click on an icon to open the word processor, she doesn’t know enough to release the mouse button and drags the icon all over the screen. Clearly, Phyllis interprets the concept of honesty with extreme flexibility.

I open the document myself and show her as little as I can get away with about things like using up and down arrows and shift keys. She nods when I ask if she understands.  

Phyllis follows her almost-father-in-law’s instructions obediently as she types the revised will (in a bizarre mixture of upper and lower case  because she keeps accidentally hitting the capslock key) using the hunt and peck method she learned at the two-finger school of typing. As their hour on the computer approaches its end, they are just over halfway through the document, which will disappear as soon as their time is up. I think about just ignoring this, but find myself incapable of such active malice.

What happens next is entirely unintentional and downright embarrassing. I get the library USB drive and save the document to it. As I do this, I note neither of them thought to renumber provision 13, which I find reassuring. I check to make sure the document is on the drive before taking it out of the port.  I log them back on for another hour, but when I open the USB drive, the document is not there. Flustered by my careless destruction of Phyllis’ hard work, I offer to re-type the first part of the document before I can stop myself.   

The old man asks how long it will take, peppering his question with enough crude language to alleviate any guilt on my part as I respond with my standard, “I don’t know,”  and leave it at that.

This is when Phyllis develops a sudden, intense need to leave the library. She takes the old man by the elbow and steers him, not very gently, toward the door. I watch them leave with the same relief Bambi-girl felt when she saw me.  

I strongly doubt Margaret is in any danger from these inept plotters, if they are in fact plotters, and not just a senile old man and his son’s dim-witted girlfriend.  I am curious though. What do you suppose was in those removed bequests?