inefficiency

my writing process is stunningly inefficient. I had to go through several (more than two) hours of being stunned by the amount of work i was just assigned and the deadline on it, then several hours (again, more than three) being pissed at my editors and trying to figure out how this could happen, what caused them to sit on my original draft for a week and then require a completely new draft the night before the print deadline, then another hour or two making peace with the thing and accepting that whatever happens, i've really done all that anyone could reasonable expect of me, before i started actually putting pencil to paper.

that's an insane way to work. i wish it didn't have a history of working out really well so i'd stop relying on it.

also, one of the editors made this note on my original draft before they told me scrap it and start over:

in the rest of the draft, this editor used orange to indicate things (s)he wanted cut or clarified. I can only assume (s)he wanted this apostrophe cut. this pissed me off four or five hours ago. now i can only shrug. 

frankly, its bullshit.

slaying the dragon

i've heard that there are writers who like to write, who enjoy the act of creating a story and committing it to the page, who can write with regularity and discipline.
i have never been one of those writers.

my writing has always felt like an exorcism. like a demon swirling around in me for months and i like it there and i keep it there and i put off writing it down for as long as i possibly can and when i finally do it's a violent, messy, painful thing. it's blood all over the page. it's the battle of st george and the dragon and in the end the dragon lies headless on the page and i stand over it, white-knuckled grip on my sword, but i don't stand tall like st george in the paintings, i stand heaving and panting and bleeding and torn open because this was no minion of some other satan sent to fight me; this dragon tore it's way into the world from inside my guts, and then forced me, still leaking my own entrails, to slay it.

writing is pulling monsters out of your bloodiest deepest insides, cutting them out with scalpels and knives and rusty blades and then fighting them while you lose blood, vomiting your darkest monsters into their corporeal forms and killing them and smearing their blood and yours all over a pure white page, and writing your dying words in the gore.

i've heard murakami sits for the same number of hours every morning and writes with a cup of tea next to him, then goes running, then comes home and re-reads his work and edits it. every day.

my writing is the swirling pit of demons that occasionally becomes so violent it forces me to do battle until i've killed them all.

writing is masochism. writing is an exorcism.

brain stem hemorrhage

at almost exactly 6pm yesterday, 36 hours ago, my dad got home from work. i was sitting on the front porch with the dogs. he answered his phone as he walked over to me and i heard him say "who's with her?" and "get her to the ER."

he left for the hospital with my mom and i stayed home to take care of the dogs and because i'm a selfish cunt.

my father's middle sister has had an atrial fibrillation which apparently let a blood clot slip through her system where it lodged in the stem of her brain and caused a massive hemorrhage. i'm a bit foggy on what happened after that, but i know that any fluid flooding the skull will cause irreparable damage to the brain. the brain simply cannot be impacted in such a massive way - or in any way, i'd imagine. i'm not an expert in neurology, but if you think about such a sensitive piece of machinery being held in a solid case, and then something else suddenly filling that case by squeezing that machine against the wall and squishing all its operating parts, you realize that that piece of machinery is not going to recover.

but she'd been married since she graduated from high school. Married married. as in every single night making dinner for this man and watching tv with him and raising their kids together and watching the grandkids and being married to this man since she was nearly a decade younger than i am.

and she came home from work yesterday and talked to her husband, probably about their grandkids' soccer games or what he wanted for dinner or some stupid bullshit she'd had to deal with that day, and suddenly her side of the conversation turned into strings of unrelated words while he listened, and then he watched her collapse and seize up and it was just any other friday except that he was holding his wife, the girl he wooed in a red convertible when he was a teenager and married straight out of high school, he was holding her and dialing 911, holding her until the EMTs strapped her down and drove her away.

the ER CT scan told us what happened, and the DNR order was signed, and the life support will be pulled in a few hours, and it was just a friday night. it was every friday for the last forty years. and now there aren't any more friday nights.

just like that.

my family has seen a lot of important people go in the past couple years, but never like this. never without months of waiting, of preparing, of setting everything in order. never like this.

i didn't process it until an hour ago on my drive home from work. it didn't hit me at all. i just got the medical updates from my mom and nodded like i know shit about medicine. "oh ok, what are the CTs like? what's her condition? is she responsive?" like i have any idea what that means.

what it means is that the last time i saw her she watched me in a music video and said she liked it, and that's the last of my work she'll ever see. it means there's no more growth, i don't get to know anything about her beyond what my dad and - holy fuck - surviving aunt tell me about her. that's it.

her entire life, her whole story, ended on a friday afternoon like every other friday afternoon. there were so many things left unresolved, but that's how they'll stay, because on a friday afternoon like every other friday afternoon a blood clot lodged in her brain stem and hemorrhaged there, and now she's gone.