Write or Die: Coffee at Night

i am not a prairie chick. but here i was out in the middle of the goddamned badlands trying to get over a breakup which is just stupid. stupid. and there was a coffee pot engulfed in flames on the first night. i was thinking it would be hard to sleep. i imagined a coyote eating me alive. and i thought that would be preferable to the way i felt every day. i imagined myself becoming a wolf, maybe. but then i thought it would only be worth it if i was going to be an alpha mate. buck had been a beta male for sure. and i was an alpha girl. therein lay much of our trouble. shit. so, i was on this prairie missing my ipod and other affectations. i missed the starbucks cup that i would have been gently cradling in my hand if were home--fingering the edge of the cup guard, ruining its integrity. we weren't allowed to bring electronic devices on this outward bound for the lovelorn. what was i doing here? trying to remember or trying to forget? my lifecoach advised me against thinking through things too much with a specfiic outcome in mind. she said buck was buck and he was in my skin and my hair and my lungs and leftover like forensic evidence at a crime scene. he's just a goddamned fact of my life. take the good take the bad. whatever happened to that show? what was its narrative arc? how did it end? did tootie ever lose her virginity? there was some episode where it was implied, but then her jock boyfriend couldn't do it. were they trying to say he was gay? or was it some other secret? the 80s. situationally comic television scenarios were king. buck did not grow up watching television. it was another issue of ours. another one in a legion of thready, sticky problems. that all equaled i was still not going to be anyone's. i've always known that i'm not really suitable for anyone's long haul. he would probably couple up with that girl from his job. eventually. buck has this weird preoccupation with the appearance of propriety. he would wait the ceremonial month to six weeks before he even asked her for coffee. but i always felt her there like a smoky, disparate thought at the edge of who we were. he was too quick to leave her out of anecdotes and other places in his constructed narratives where she was relevant. negative space was the suggestion of her. karen. the coffee pot is in flames. i imagine it will taste like tar going down. my manuscript is stained at home on my desk. stained from the last venti americano i set down on it. the day before buck called and apologized for what he could not say. i had no reason to do anything except head out here to flatness, to a lack of man-made light. i am terribly afraid for myself. not of wolves or coyotes or even the big, big sky. i'm just going to fade right off the tip of his understanding. i'm going to be that unremarkable person he marked time with before karen agreed to have coffee with him.

dissertations in miniature

for the past several months now i have been caught in a youtube vortex. as is the case with most rabbit holes, it was some combination of accident and curiosity that made me peer in. and of course, what i started out looking for was not the ultimate point in terms of what i found.

contextually speaking, last summer, when i became tethered to the youtube experience, i badly needed an escape. after almost dying in car accident (with both of my sisters) and other uncomfortable situations related to my apartment, i was in a fairly constant state of anxiety and depression of the soul.

i'm usually too intellectual--far too rational a creature--for true down-in-the-dumpedness. what i cannot solve by puzzling out and analysis, i tackle with activity. there's something healthy in that. i'm also wonderfully capable of compartmentalization, which sometimes bleeds over into being denial's pusher/runner on the streets of my own perception.

anyway, i knew what youtube was before last summer, of course, but it wasn't a go-to venue for me. i'd watch clips people sent me, but i didn't hawk it for entertainment. it wasn't yet in the fabric of my paradigm to proactively search for things there. in any event, it became a delightful distraction.

i'll never forget the oppressively hot night (no central air in this apartment) this all started. a general perusal around the Internet like a turn 'round the parlor room in a Jane Austen novel, and i happened upon a thread of intrigue. oh, this thread i sought to worry might not tempt me today if i saw it. i don't remember exactly what it was, except that it was.

so, there i was looking for something very specific on youtube all of a sudden: "general hospital opening credits, 1963." suddenly, i was enamored of and overcome with the importance of my task. yt was not really forthcoming on this score. the search yielded all manner of "related videos" instances. the thing about that feature is that it is practically impossible not to click on something--even if you know it's not what trail you want to be on. yt is very meta in that way. and self-referential.

i have not watched general hospital since early summer 1991. and i have not thought to go checking on it in the interim. but there was a period of years prior to going off to college when i held court with a handful of characters--two in particular. this was roughly 1984-1991.

well, by way of that seemingly innocuous search i was portalized to the past. the lion's share of all the narrative pieces i cared about as a twelve-year old and eventually, a teenager, had been preserved and posted by a number of people who obviously still cared. i was soon to realize that i did, too, desperately. i thought i had rather nonchalantly let it all go 16 years before.

i was heartless toward my pre-college self and her preoccupations, and moved effortlessly into the next phase of my life. i had other worries: my own legion of heartbreaks, remarkable tomfoolery, and well, other rabbit holes it took years to climb out of.

somehow, though, on that night in july of last year, hours went by before i knew it, and i was deeply enmeshed in a gh storyline from the fall of 1985. at that time, those two characters were at the height of their fraught love affair, and this would all be further informed on a meta-level by a foreshadowed offscreen marriage and two children.

so. double-helix narratives, hinting at themselves, all twisty and presciently delicious. as a narrative deconsructionist, this was even more impossible for me to resist now than it had been when i was a child. i didn't have the vocabulary then to describe all that i was sussing out, all that was teeming beneath the surface.

then, it was about the sheer mystery and impact of watching two people kiss differently than other people were kissing on tv, it seemed to me. always an analyst, even at 12, i leveraged the rewind button on the vcr to try and determine the moment an unscripted look passed across a face, to determine the precise moment when a kiss left the page, and became about a transference of energy between two people that couldn't possibly be scripted.

so, in the summer of 2010, for weeks, i watched favourite clips over and over again--enjoying them on a purely visceral level, to be sure--with the informed mind of an academian and narrative poet now more solidly in place. come fall, i was still at it.

youtube is a curious thing in that it is about the visual narrative, but has made a way for the written, metanarrative thoughts of viewers to companion that visual piece. the comments feature is democratic. you can write any banal thing there you want, and most people do. you can write effusive appreciation for what you see, or express extreme disgust. you can also discuss the implications of the video, the poster's intentions as you conjecture them, and if you are dealing with serialized subject matter, those comments become a string of dissertations in miniature.

later, i'll get into what happened between me and a handful of metanarrators on these boards when after months i was still viewing, favouriting, and new posters began to emerge to post to meet the requests of those who clamored for the gaps in the overarching narrative of those two characters to be filled...

wakeful nights

i am awakened, without fail, between the hours of 2 and 3:30 a.m. each morning. antagonized by the thought of something i forgot to do, something that could go wrong, and the general ick of acknowledging my shrinking possibilities, i bolt upright and take to the Internet. there are five or six pet sites that i worry like a stone, the page impressions like virtual grooves. my whole world is sleeping, it seems, but i am already up looking for signs of movement and progress from somewhere.

i am hurrying myself out of rest and into the arms of even more waiting.

i cannot lie. there is something enlivening about all this. to be enmeshed and invigorated by the enmeshment is a lovely, drama-filled time. i don't have many emotional outlets, so when i'm up in arms over something it's my own little walk on the wild side.

but really, even when my emotions are going at full tilt, the filter is analysis and categorization.

when i am engaged on this level, it's so hard for me to let go, to be let go of.

i'm up a night proverbially pacing because of my tunneled vision. there is no zen to be had anywhere right now, but i desperately need some balance and some perspective. what's going to happen is that my project is going to come to an end, and it's going to be fine, and i'll wonder why i saw the process of getting there to be my nemesis when it's the very thing i should have been savoring.

i don't know. i just wasn't made like that, y'all. so i'm mainlining caffeine, violently checking e-mail for updates, and making mental lists.

waiting on all the stray parts of me to fly back together

listening to 'america' (simon & garfunkel) on repeat since 9 a.m. and have yet to grow tired of it. drinking the blackest coffee. the black beyond black. yum! my first conference call is at 11 a.m. and i am only hoping it's brief. otherwise, it's just a sussing it out kind of day.

back to blogging. baby steps. the character restrictions of twitter (@salimahp) and fb have ruined me for lengthier discourse.

but i feel exposition coming back to me.

mercury retrograde

i guess it's time for me to blow the dust off this thing, huh?

here's a tidbit for now: on May 6th, 2011, i will be reading from the culminating work produced during my last three years as a mfa student at the university of baltimore.

mercury retrograde, by salimah j. perkins, limited print run! only 100 copies will exist in the world (unless a press picks me up!)

featuring:

open letter to a soap opera supercouple
the six-legged dog
ringer

and many, many more!

o blog world, so long abandoned

i have cottoned to the concept of micro blogging. this space, clearly hiatused, is not really indicative of all that i've been up to. more to come.