Tag Archives: Writing steps

You Need a Ticket

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I booked a ticket for an historic guided bicycle ride from Gdansk to Stuthoff for Saturday. The World War II museum emailed a confirmation date, but there was no time. I decided to drop by the museum to confirm.

“Excuse me.” I leaned down and spoke through the gap between the glass and the counter at the information booth. “Do you speak English?”

The young man narrowed his eyes. “Yes.”

“I want to confirm the time for the bicycle tour to Stuthoff.” I angled my phone screen towards him. “I have the date but I don’t know the time.”

“You need a ticket.”

“I have a ticket.” I pointed the screen more specifically in his direction. “It gives me the date but not the time.”

He peered briefly at the screen. “You need a ticket.”

Orson Welles’ adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial flashed through my mind.

I nodded at the phone. “I have a ticket. See?”

He pushed back his official museum cap. “You need a QR code.”

I showed him an enlarged screen. “I have a bar code.”

“You need a QR code.”

“Where do I get that?”

“You need to get a ticket.” He had a wispy mustache.

“But…” I peered at the screen again. “I have a ticket.”

“You need a QR code.”

“Okay.” I glanced around the empty space. “Is there someone else I could talk to?”

He pointed at the sign above the counter and back at himself. “Information.”

“I just need to know what time the bike tour is going.”

He stared back blankly. “You need a ticket.”

“You understand what I’m asking, right?”

“Yes.”

I decided to try one more time. “I have a ticket.”

“They must email you the ticket.”

“See? I have the bar code.”

“You need a QR code.”

“Okay, well…” I decided to try the ticket office downstairs where a thickly bearded man was putting away audio guides. “Excuse me?”

“Yes?” He was not interested in dealing with me.

“I want to confirm the time for the bicycle tour to Stuthoff.” I angled my phone screen towards him. “I have the date but I don’t know the time.”

He didn’t look up. “9:30.”

“9:30?”

“Yes, 9:30.” He continued to sort the guides.

“Thanks.” Unsure, I went outside and replied to the email, asking for a confirmation.

The answer came the next day. The bicycle tour leaves at 9:00. Arrive 15 minutes before that. Not 9:30. No QR code needed. 9:00. However I received an email a day later that the trip was cancelled. Heavy rain in the forcast. I would have to rebook at a later date.

Back to The Vanishing Pill

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As I’ve previously blogged, my move to Poland has distracted me from writing. I have more excuses too! I was in a work situation that was particularly draining. I’ve had to deal with being cancelled by family members. Not only that, I’ve had to settle the cats.

While I have been regularly submitting to literary agents – The Sacred Whore, Em & Baller – I’ve just as regularly been receiving the same auto-replies.

It’s time to get back to The Vanishing Pill, a book I’ve been working on for three years now. Or is it four? I’m some 3 3/8’s drafts in and still don’t know what’s to happen to Davis as he faces his private little wasteland. Is there a way to salvage his promise? Or is it just going to be all sad and pathetic?

Compelling and real, funny too, darkly so, all of that. But I have to get it it done! Words on the page. There’s nowhere to start but the opening: Davis twisted off the cap from his Paddy’s Old Irish Whiskey shooter and considered the prompt on the whiteboard. “What does it mean to be human?“

I Need to Figure Out the Recycling First

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I’ve been trying to get back into my writing. I just needed to acclimatize and stop scrolling so much. I’m in Poland now, which means there’s lots to figure out, including the recycling. They have different rules, different colors of bins and of course the language. I’ve been ignoring the accumulation of bottles and plastic even though I’ve seen the recycling machine at the supermarket. It looked easy enough, but I was intimidated and stayed in my funk.

Not quite this bad. But getting there.

It wasn’t just the recycling. I wasn’t going out to see anything either. I’d planned to visit the Tannenberg Memorial ruins where the Nazis had buried Hindenburg and made their speeches about getting East Prussia back. I’d reviewed it in the guidebooks, checked the train schedules and weather and planned to get there on Friday and then Monday. But I didn’t.

The Germans blew it up at the end of the war, but there’s apparently a few bricks left.

I can handle the food and laundry and distracted myself with the World Cup, even if was a dreadful bore. You’d think the Argentinians would try to be a tad more likable, given their Nazi-aligned past, but they’re so fully in with their racist taunts and hateful faces, it’s like Eichmann and Mengele are in the stands. Watching their questionable play doesn’t seem much different from the bombings in Kyiv and Iran, the Russian Invasion now longer than WWI, and Trump beetling on to WWIII. But I digress.

The Argentinains wouldn’t want try this nonsense against the Canadians.

I did work up the nerve to take in the cans – I’d run out of beer – and it was mostly a success, even if some were spat back and the cashier got irritated with me when I couldn’t explain to her why I had given her the receipt. I thought it was clear. And so now I have my beer, perogi too, and Spain has won. It’s true that I’m still scrolling, but Rage Against the Machine’s live Bulls on Parade might be my take-off point. I just need to watch it a few more times.

Tragic Tiny Things

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I had been alone for much of the day, not knowing where everyone had gone. The tide was coming up, the clouds descending.

I climbed the sand bank and went along a row of luxurious homes, peeking beneath the cement pilings to what looked like a little sandy basement piled with boxes and toys. There was no sign, no barricade or lock, just a plastic toy train, which I moved out of the way.

A large group of children followed me. I knew I shouldn’t have let them in and confessed my trespass to the family upstairs who I somehow knew. They expressed their anger with tight faces and phrases uttered under their breath. They forgave me and explained that this was a place of silence, of memorials and things locked away.

It was a moment of revelation for all, letting these things breathe and talk to one another again and express the sadness for our torn lives.

Teen Speak

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I recently received the following voicemail from a student: Actually last week. The calculator. Oh, Jesus, no, no! (Audio unclear)That was so loud. Mr. Ellen might come over here. Here we go, move on. What else you got? We’re running out of time. How’s your day? Because you can’t. This kid keeps asking me questions and they don’t have a question anymore. How was your day? Bob, I’m out. What’s the information? Yeah. It would not be shocking. It would not shock me tomorrow.

Anger > Fear

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I’m spooked listening to my breath, thinking that it might be somebody else ready to tear me apart. I turn my phone around, and there’s nothing there. I’m stupid enough to think that this might be real. A child, still a child.

I’m driving the winding road at the bottom of the city, thinking it’s the next left and never getting there, searching for whatever and it always being ahead. I’m lost. Maybe worse.

I’m on the phone. No one’s answering. I limp across the street. The door won’t open. There’s a siren and then another. I vanish into the dark and walk and walk. The anger comes first and then the fear. I work myself up and get back to the anger. I want that sense of control as the bear chews off my face.

The Man in the Mirror

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I thought it was funny at first, this guy mimicking my every move. He was one of those fake plant people that popped out of nowhere and he got the nervous laugh.

I smiled as I walked away, but he wouldn’t stop, imitating my every step and gesture, every facial expression, always staring back. I wanted him to stop. I told him that. And he said it right back.

“No, I mean it.”

“No, I mean it.”

“I’m not fucking Pee Wee Herman.”

That drew a gasp, especially when he repeated that.

I pushed him, which he did back, and came after me. And so I punched him good and made him hurt. I was the villain and accepted that happily.

Pitching “The Sacred Whore”

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The Sacred Whore is a dark comic thriller that digs into the chronic ills of our spastically contradictory world. We care. But we don’t. What better way to address that malaise than through shootouts, car chases and furiously sexy women?

Sean Baker’s magnificent Tangerine, his first film to focus on sex workers

It begins with a tractor-trailer trip across the country during which one of the sex workers, Corinne, assaults a would-be rapist, altering the direction of their journey. Some of the women – led by Ave and Dorothy – decide upon an outrageous plan to kidnap a college basketball team at the Final Four Tournament and demand primetime coverage to air their views on the moral destitution in America.

Others, led by Corinne, Chantal and Savannah, leave for Las Vegas where they confront JP, the queen-pin in charge of the sex trafficking network. The original group, now named The New World Brigade, dress up as cheerleaders and successfully hijack the college team bus. In Las Vegas, after maiming JP and executing her security team, Corinne is badly wounded by a police counter attack.

Chantal and Savannah find themselves in a hostage-taking situation and reach out to The New World Brigade, hoping to obtain leverage. After tense negotiations with the authorities, The New World Brigade returns with the team to the arena where each of the women post video statements on the travails of sex work. Chantal kidnaps a FBI agent, leading to a car chase in which she and Savannah are both killed. Stunned by this tragic turn of events, Ave delivers an emotional speech on live television, the final scene revealing Corinne opening her eyes to watch the broadcast from her hospital bed.

The Sacred Whore empowers and celebrates sex workers as complex individuals, rather than the tropes and cartoonish figures we have become accustomed to seeing. Outrageous truth drives the spectacle.

Pink PickUp Truck

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The pink pickup truck was just ahead, a car and then the truck. I saw it when we turned, better to the left. It got further ahead, and I tried to keep up. What was that voice yelling in my head? Was it a workman on the street? A bad childhood memory?

The pickup glowed in the evening light, like an artificial starfish, the driver waving her arms back and forth in a steady beat. No, that was a dog’s tail. The dog jumped into the front seat. I picked out our family dog when I was a kid. “Not afraid of that one!” That’s what I said.

I needed to see the driver. I knew it was someone I should know. I changed lanes and then back again. I met a beautiful girl in my Feminist Film Theory class. She had heard stories about me and she still liked me. She said that laughing. I really thought it would work out.

The truck caught the light, and I couldn’t keep up. I remembered missing the bus. Shadows glided past as I navigated the curbs. I couldn’t find my phone and then couldn’t get it to work. I thought about that familiar frustration as I watched her go.

Who Will Play Me?

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Listening to Jafar Panahi speak about his film It Was Just An Accident made me think about my life, the things that I do, the things that I say I’ll do, my half-baked words and actions, the things that make me the regrettable quagmire of contradictions that I am.

I know one thing and one thing only: time passes. No matter the tastes and pains, the magic and nothingness-eses, that’s what it does. It passes.

I’m on the side of a narrow, cold channel. The lighthouse is in the distance. I take off my boots and socks and make my way across the kelp and rocks, expecting to fall, my body to wash out with the tide, found in the years to come, a human interest story on the northeast tip of Sanday Island in the Orkneys.

It is not as difficult as I imagine and brush the sand off my feet as I examine the small bird skull. The path winds beside a fallow field. The nettles are thick. I look back, wondering if the tide is already rising and I will be stuck here for the night. The lighthouse is fenced in and fully automated.

I return along the coast and am dive-bombed by oystercatchers. They screech and shit, and I scream back and throw rocks. They terrify me.

The tide rises, and I walk in the knee-deep water. There is an ancient tomb at the side of the road, but it has been covered over. Sheep stare back, their bodies oddly sheered and painted blue. I want to write, but I don’t know what about. Something true and real. Something fantastic and simple. Something about what I was doing here. Can oystercatchers be trained? And who will play me?