Author Archives: McPhedran

Scared of Writing

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I waited outside of Mr. Carver’s class, thinking of how I could get an extension. The assignment – a 2,000-word creative self-reflection – was due that afternoon, and I hadn’t even started. I didn’t understand why I had to do it, because I had graduated long ago and was in fact now teaching at the school.

I gave up and beetled off to my classroom, the Dean of Students behind me, a row of exiting buses ahead. As I sprinted up the hill, I opened my eyes to find it was late into morning, another cloudy day. I was scared of getting back into my writing. That’s all it was.

There is a sprawl of projects to address. I have to fine tune three scripts: Ave and Dorothy need to be established as live-bloggers from the outset of The Sacred Whore. Davis’ motivation for going on tour with The Grateful Dead needs more focus in Wave That Flag. And the background stories need to be more relevant to Davis’ isolation in Just Weird.

The Vanishing Pill is a mess. Two years in, and this book remains cluttered with notes all over. I haven’t figured out the starting point or the crisis nor where or how it ends. And then there’s my teacher’s guidebook, Fuck Pedagogy. No idea how I’m going to focus that into anything relevant at all.

To paraphrase Matthew Zapruder in Why Poetry, I’m afraid of being exposed, of being seen as banal, derivative, uninteresting and stupid. That’s all it is. And so, “To bed!” I will arise at dawn and begin this battle anew! Or now. I’ll do it now. And start with my first prompt: “My favorite childhood vacation…” That was in Anna Maria Key in Florida where everything was magic, especially the gift shops.

No One Cares How You Scroll

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No one cares who you like or who you follow.

No one cares what you post or what you share.

No one cares about your story or your memes.

No one cares what you comment or what you click.

No one cares because they don’t know how to care about you.

No one cares because you don’t know how to care about them.

Thanks for reading! Be sure to like and share.

The Thing of Expression

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You go down the pipeline thinking you know something you don’t and it isn’t a bad thing but it’s an obvious thing and that’s still okay but then you remember it really isn’t because that’s sliding to nowhere, not knowing who you are and thinking that’s okay when it isn’t.

Then you’re left asking who are all these people are and how did they get into your living room.

A Tale of Two Books: The Alchemist & The Little Prince

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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist are two of the most popular books in history, each selling over 150 million copies. Both are simple yet convoluted tales set in fantastical places. However only one of these books is worth the read, multiple reads in fact, while the other comes across like an inspirational poster on a middle school teacher’s wall.

The first half of Coelho’s book isn’t awful, following a boy in search of treasure, but the writing, attempting some kind of mythic, becomes tedious and facile. “Well, why did you say that I don’t know about love?” the sun asked the boy. More than anything though, it is the repetition of the two phrases Personal Legend and Soul of the World that tips the experience into something barely worth skimming.

Saint-Exupéry’s tale, on the other hand, straddles the wonder of a child’s imagination and philosophical reflection.

It offers a fairly simple rundown of the problems of mankind but with wonderful phrasings such as If you tame me, then we’ll need each other. Most of all, it is the structure of the work, the little prince an apparition to a man lost in the desert, and the painful finale where nothing is resolved. We just want the little prince to come back.

17 Slices of Cheese

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The deli counter was in the back corner of Gristedes, a New York supermarket I had mistakenly pronounced as Gris-TEA-dees to my sister — and not Gris-TAY-dees. She had mocked me for that. “Ham and cheese sandwich please.”

The woman didn’t look up from her phone.” American, Swiss, Provolone, Cheddar, Swiss, Colby, Pepper Jack?”

“Cheddar, Medium, thanks.”

“Roll or hero?” She continued to scroll.

“Rye please.”

“Rye.” She turned off her phone and placed a block of cheese on the slicer.

“Thank you.” I looked around the great empty space, lit in the horrible bald light and thought about my childhood fears and trauma, being abandoned, alone, all of that amorphous stuff, fanged blobs out from between the walls, bursting out, and then saw the woman wrap the thick sandwich in wax paper. “Oh, I forgot to ask for lettuce and tomato.”

“Anything else? Pickles? Pepper, salt? Mayo?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

She opened the sandwich to reveal a teetering stack of cheese, ten slices, more than that, atop the ham, and added watery slices of tomato and a tough ribbed section of lettuce.

“Maybe not the pickle.”

“No pickle?”

“No pickle,” I reiterated.

“What about the salt, pepper and mayo?”

“Yes.”

She wedged the sandwich back together and gave it to me.

“Thank you.” I opened the sandwich outside and counted the slices, 17 ion all along with three slices of ham. It had to be pulled apart to be eaten. I thought that was just how it was in the city, massive sandwiches that you couldn’t get in your mouth.

Even though I was wrong and came to learn that 2-4 slices of cheese was the standard, I still think of that woman as the gatekeeper of sandwiches. And that Gristedes as the gatekeeper of delis. Gris-TAY-des.

To Kiss Others

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“I’m going to kiss others.” And then her lips were on mine, and I was closing the blinds, people trying to peek in, her naked body there, all of it over too quickly.

I didn’t remember much, but she was pregnant and we were married. And then the accident, she paralyzed from the waist down. We didn’t make it.

I was back in her neighborhood years later, at a fundraiser. I stayed at the periphery, thinking I might glimpse her but only saw her friends, and went back down the hallway, and she was there, her hair lighter now, elegant as ever. I whispered her name. She began to cry. “You came.”

I wanted to hold her but knew that would make it worse and kept a respectful distance, leaving later, talking with her assistant about what arrangements might be made for later.

Time for the Witches

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Eight years ago, when Trump first was elected, there was the remarkable Women’s March in New York City, a joyous event attended by 400,000 people.

On Saturday, January 18, a mere 3,000 meandered through Lower Manhattan, now the People’s March, sad calls made to never surrender when they already had.

There is a lack of purpose in confronting Trump 2.0 , the vast majority preferring to doom scroll over engagement. “Is it even safe to protest? What about the counter-demonstrators?” Trump’s Culture of Fear is here, jokes about Canada and Greenland not jokes at all, freedom and individuality at stake, wildfires, hurricanes and flooding to come.

With the oligarchy setting up shop in DC, it isn’t time for identity politics nor inclusion, but for the furies and fates to rise, the sirens and witches to assemble and tear this thing apart.

The Kittle Fash of Stevenson’s “Kidnapped”

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Like Moby Dick, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped is one of those books I had never read and thought everybody else had. Like Moby Dick, I found the book exhausting and dense and eventually learned that few have actually read it.

The problem with the book is three-fold, the biggest challenge being the archaic language, with words like slockens (moisten), gliff (look), clour (hit), kittle (difficult) and argle-bargled (argue) permeating the text. On top of the language is the convoluted politics of the 1700’s where you were either a Whig, a Jacobite or a repressed Highlander, Stevenson assuming the reader understood the background to all of this. (Which I didn’t.)

View of the highlands from Ben Nevis

At the heart of the problem however is the narrative, which is a story of a young man who is knocked on the head and put on a ship for the slavery in the Carolinas only to escape and find his way tediously back through the highlands. It’s a never-ending journey that plugs on and on, like Ahab and his whale, until it doesn’t.

Beached Pilot Whales on Sanday Island, Orkney

I eventually made it to the end but with little satisfaction. And I would not recommend the journey to anyone else, unless you know bauchle and kittle and can thole fashious things.