From the drafts folder

From cell phone reviews I read tonight:

"First off, we should all thank Alexander Graham Bell for inventing the telephone in 1876."

"I have the red version and my soul mate has the blue one."

"Please help, I washed my phone in the dishwasher when I was very drunk and now it won't turn on!"

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At the park today a man had three little Toto dogs named Leia, Ewok and Chewbacca.  They sprinted, crossing each other's paths like birds do, like they have a radar sense that prevents collision.  Their owner kept saying their names and they kept ignoring him, and I found it comforting that the dogs have never seen those movies, that they will never understand their names, that they're immune to culture.  Like maybe there are significances, meanings, that I will never understand but that nonetheless exist.  Only instead of Star Wars movies I hope they're spiritual, and I hope when those dogs die they'll go to a heaven where they watch the series of films and understand them as spiritual allegories for what happened to them during their lives.

From the drafts folder

Tonight I sat in the Taxi in the rain with the engine running and the hood up, my battery connected with jumper cables to the battery of a van with no door handles at the end of a dirt road.  I read Harper's while one guy clicked the handle-less van's ignition and another guy kicked it, rocked it, talked to it. 

I looked up from my magazine and watched them for awhile, and thought about this girl I met at community college ten years ago named Ashley.  We sat near each other in an English class, and I found out one day that she went to a private Christian junior high school named Brethren, which is where one of my friends from high school went.  "Did you know Kelly Pepperidge?" I asked.

Her eyes got big.  Ashley was one of the prettiest people I had ever met in real life, and she was friendly, and she had good fashion sense.  If I was a jealous god I would have disliked her.  "Yes," she said, slowly.  "I was really mean to her.  I kind of started a club against her."

"Oh my gosh," I said, remembering.  "You were the one who came up with PAK?"

She cringed, visibly, and said, "Yeah.  You heard about that?"

PAK stood for People Against Kelly.  Kelly was, and is, really, really nice.  When I met her freshman year of high school she was bubbly, studious, and as confident in herself as any of us were freshman year, which is to say not really at all.  She told me one time that people were really mean to her in junior high, that in fact there was a club of people who hated her. 

I was teased in school at various points, but the bullies never organized.  They never formed a union.  I'm not sure of the details of PAK - did they have meetings, a clubhouse, collect dues?  I don't know.  Ashley put her head in her hands and said, "I feel horrible about that.  Ugh.  I hated that school - a lot of the other kids weren't allowed to play with me, because one day on a beach field trip we were next to some people playing a Violent Femmes song on a boom box, and I started dancing, and the moms were like, [whisper] 'That girl is evil.'"

A couple weeks after I found out about PAK I walked into English class visibly upset - it was raining and I'd left the headlights of my 88 Honda on all day.  The battery was dead.  Ashley asked me what was wrong and I told her, and after class she asked me where I was parked, and met me there in her car, and she had jumper cables in her trunk, and she knew how to connect them, and she jumped my car battery in the pouring rain.

Secret Room Sects

There's a secret room in the hotel.  If you push on a wooden panel in the wall in one of the lobbies, it opens into a small room, maybe more of a closet, that's for some reason very hot.  Actually the reason it's very hot in there is that it's a portal to hell.

Who loves secret rooms?  I love secret rooms.  My best friend in elementary school lived in a house with a secret room for awhile.  You'd open the hall closet and push past all the jackets to an alcove beneath the stairs.  When her brothers ran up and down them it sounded like thunder.

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Someone left a book titled The (New, Illustrated) Great Controversy in the lobby.  It's written by Ellen G. White and is the basis of the 7th Day Adventist sect of Christianity.  It's kind of interesting that this book and the book that is the basis of Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, were both written by women.  Should I write fanfiction of Ellen G. White and Mary Baker Eddy as friends? lovers? enemies?  Spies who frequent secret rooms in hotel lobbies and coat closets?

Let's see: Mary Baker Eddy was born in New Hampshire in 1821.  Ellen G. White was born in 1827, in Maine.  That would totally work.  Stay tuned!*

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*I will never actually write this.

El Pollo Lorca

This is pretty amazing if you have the patience for it.

California, Alaska

It was the best of both worlds, it was the worst of both worlds.

First sentence

Last night, as I donned my ceremonial Night Audit robes, I thought to myself...

Fran Lebowitz cont, cont

INTERVIEWER

This all sounds so difficult. Why do you do it? What does it give back?

LEBOWITZ

The rewards of any warrior. The word that best describes my feeling of having written is triumphant—triumphant on the level of Alexander the Great. Having overcome your worst fear, the thing you are most vulnerable to, that is the definition of heroic.

Also, it’s such a worthwhile human activity. The most.

Finally, no soldier ever came to me and said, You have to be a writer, but it was decided long ago that it was a given. So when I’m writing it’s the only time I feel all right. It’s the only time I feel justified. Whenever I am doing anything else, which is most of the time, even if it is not something like robbing a bank, I feel felonious. Writing is what I’m supposed to be doing.

Fran Lebowitz cont.

INTERVIEWER

What did you do during those five years before you started writing the book?

LEBOWITZ

I sulked. Sulking is a big effort. So is not writing. I only realized that when I did start writing. When I started getting real work done, I realized how much easier it is to write than not to write. Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I’ve ever encountered. It takes it out of you. It’s very psychically wearing not to write—I mean if you’re supposed to be writing.

INTERVIEWER

Is that because the ideas come steaming along and you feel like you should put them down and you don’t?

LEBOWITZ

Not writing is more of a psychological problem than a writing problem. All the time I’m not writing I feel like a criminal. Actually, I suppose that’s probably an outmoded phrase, because I don’t think criminals feel like criminals anymore. I feel like criminals used to feel when they felt guilty about being criminals, when they regretted their crimes. It’s horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. Especially when it goes on for years. It’s much more relaxing actually to work. Although I might not strike you as languid, I’m much more relaxed than when I wasn’t writing. I’m much cheerier, I’m definitely much happier.

Fran Lebowitz

"It turns out it’s not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert. I have no energy. I never have. I just have no desire to be productive. Now that I realize I don’t hate to write, that I just hate to work, it makes writing easier."

Anecdote vs Writing

"You get no points for the living, I tell my students. It isn’t enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn’t anecdote. It’s the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means."

--from here