No matter what is happening, or how busy you are, you manage to carve out a few minutes each day to spend quality time with me. I spend too much time missing your touch, but those moments, however brief, make up for it. It doesn’t matter how you feel, how tired you are — you never fail to pick me up.
I’m most alive when I am in your hands. How I tremble as your thumb trails its caress up and down my spine; how I quiver as you crack me open. The spark of wanton lust in your eyes as you take in all of me, laid bare and spread open before you. I am a banquet, unguarded and vulnerable, and you are famished.
How you take me — sometimes white-knuckled and feverish, devouring me with an intensity that threatens to tear me apart; othertimes soft and slow, your finger tracing my lines with steady focus and gentle intent. I know I am not perfect; I know I’ve made you laugh as often as I’ve made you hurt or made you cross. But I am yours; you, mine.
I know of no greater pleasure than knowing I am yours, that you care for me and protect me, that you shelter me from damaging elements. Despite that you know me inside and out, from beginning to end, still you come back to me with a greed at once passionate and insatiable. It humbles me.
Though you could have any one you want — you could experience one you’ve enjoyed before, or you could sample one of the thousands you’ve not yet known — still you come back to me. You say I am your favorite; you say that you must always have me near. My heart resides in the palm of your hand and at the flick of your thumb.
There is no metaphor for longing, and so I tell you true: if I could edit my own pages, I’d dedicate myself to you.
These are things tossed out of the windows of my mind. Catch them. At worst, I am brilliant at breakfast.
At best ....
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I went to my favorite used bookstore today. People do this on tumblr, right? Like, this is a thing? This is my haul. I got all these for around $7.
The Mark Twain collection was published in 1961, and, per the Editor’s Note, includes pieces Twain himself elected not to include in “collections” in his lifetime. The Editor wanted “complete,” not “selected,” even if “complete” meant including works of which the writer himself was no longer fond. I dig that.
That copy of “The Arabian Nights” has 28 color plate illustrations by Maxfield Parrish. That’s why I picked it up. I already have like 5 copies of this book, but I’m a Parrish fan.
The dried/pressed leaves were left by the previous owner between the pages of “Once Again to Zelda,” which I picked up because I’ve seen it recommended multiple times here on tumblr. I’m keeping them because I think they’re pretty, though I don’t know what I’ll do with them. This kitten’s paws aren’t well with delicate things.
Occasionally a book comes along that manages to weave its way so thoroughly into the fabric of your own being that it actually changes who you are in some small way. These books never leave you, even if you forget details or plot turns or names of characters, because you will never look at anything quite the same way again after having read it.
It is my terrible misfortune to have just finished one such book. Having finished it, I was overtaken by a profound emptiness; my own thoughts echoing in the space the book’s words had once occupied in my mind. Having finished it, my first thought was to write. This is not typically my first thought after reading such a book — my more typical first thought is to sulk for days, convinced I should give up writing entirely because I’ll never create something with half the impact or merit or beauty of what I just read. This book, however, managed to have all of those things, and still be inspiring. Garth Stein wrote The Art of Racing in the Rain. I’d hate it if I didn’t love it so much.
“That which you manifest is before you.”
It was the first sentence I read that really did a spin cycle on my perception. I’ve trained at several performance driving schools but never really thought to apply the lessons I learned there to life itself and the living thereof. No matter what happens to you, on the track or in life, is a result of your own actions. Even things for which you bear no active blame, nevertheless occurred because your own choices, your own mistakes, put you in the position for them to happen. This doesn’t mean you should blame yourself for every trouble that befalls you. It means that you should accept that it happened and move on. You can’t change it, and dwelling on it gives it more power in your mind than it ought to have.
No matter what happens in life, you always have a choice. You have a choice of action or inaction, but both are choices. When things happen to you, you have a choice to react or not to react. There are consequences of every action and every inaction, of every reaction and every failure to react. We should take ownership of these consequences — not to beat ourselves up over them, but to learn from them. There is no destiny you have not created from your own thoughts and actions.
Sometimes things may happen to you over which you legitimately have no control. What matters is not what happened — it’s how you deal with it that matters. It may not be easy. To mix metaphors, amateur poker players will say (and are taught to believe) that not every hand is playable. Smart poker players know that depending on the totality of the circumstances, every hand is not only a playable hand, but potentially a winning hand. Whether you’re playing poker or racing cars or simply living, the art lies in knowing when a risk is or is not necessary; and in knowing to take the necessary ones and ignore the rest. The only destiny you have is the one you write yourself.
To move forward, you must look forward.
“The visible becomes the inevitable. The car goes where the eyes go.”
One of the first things I learned about performance driving, or driving at all, really, is that your hands on a steering wheel are hard-wired to follow your eyes. You intuitively know this if you’ve ever inadvertently swerved your car while reaching down to the passenger-side floorboard to retrieve something. The faster you’re driving, the further ahead you have to look, and this isn’t just to monitor stopping distance. Your brain can’t process a track moving that fast. The further ahead you look without losing focus, the longer you have to process changing conditions, turns, markers, etc. If you start sliding and you’re looking at the median, you’re probably gonna end up in it. If you keep focused on where you want to be, you’ll find a way to make it there.
Many of us (myself included) are often guilty of not looking far enough ahead in life. If I can just make it through the next 4 hours of work I can have a beer. If I can just make it through the week I have the weekend. If I can just get this paper done before it’s due tomorrow I can deal with everything else. Ad infinitum. The problem is that we become so hyper-focused on the next few hours that everything else slips through the cracks. You are white-knuckle driving through life and time slows to a crawl while you grind unhappily through it.
And then, some of us (myself included) are also guilty of looking too far ahead. Let’s face it: 10-year plans are fucking stupid. You don’t know where you’re gonna be in 10 years! Nobody does. If you do, then with all due respect your life is boring and you should get out more. When you look far into the future with idealistic plans of what that mythical future might bring, you lose focus of the actual road ahead of you, and when you lose focus of the road, you run the risk of missing something important. You fail to interact and react; you fail to recognize changing conditions until it’s too late to properly adjust for them.
The key is finding the balance: to look far enough ahead that you can smoothly navigate life’s many turns, but not so far that you lose focus and fail to make a necessary adjustment to changing conditions.
“Yes: the race is long — to finish first, first you must finish.”
In Which Jen Commits an Act of Temporary Vandalism
It’s been roughly a year now since the Borders store I worked at was permanently closed. Liquidation was HELL. I wrote a snarky piece about it that got published by McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. You can read it here. (I never get tired of pimping that out, for the record). But what I haven’t shared is the story of the Rabbit. See … before we found out we were liquidating, we got roughly a shit-ton of stuffed rabbits to sell for Easter. I don’t know. It was a tradition to have a rabbit. Anyway, we had massive amounts of them, and, once we went into liquidation, we didn’t have the promotional sales on the rabbits that the other “going forward” stores did. (Side note: they didn’t go very far forward, sadly, but that’s what corporate called them). So customers were five million kinds of irritated that they couldn’t get a rabbit at our store for one dollar if they purchased $25 worth of books or whatever promotion was going on, right? Because those promotions no longer applied to us, as we weren’t technically a Borders. We were owned by the liquidation company.
So I drew this little cartoon rabbit for whatever reason and it was cute and all my co-workers loved it, and then I had this grand idea. I went home that night and searched quotes on the internet. I found quotes applicable to every section in our store (and some generic extras besides), wrote them on card stock I’d liberated from the store before the liquidators arrived, in Sharpie® (every good Nashvillian has a handful of Sharpies® lying around), and affixed Remo-tape to the back of them. The Rabbit was my “signature”.
The next morning, before the store opened, I went around to all the sections and stuck them on appropriate shelves and such. I called it a “Quote Bomb”. It was seriously one of the greatest experiences of my life. I was giddy. I was jumping up and down and shaking all day, I was so proud of this (semi-stupid) shit. I felt so rebelliously bad-ass (in a completely literary way, of course).
Like any temporary graffiti, especially temporary graffiti placed in a liquidating store, their relevancy lost its potency after a day or so … but what shocked me was that as co-workers went about consolidating sections as our stock was sold, if they saw a Rabbit card they’d remove it and replace it with the corresponding books.
I don’t know what happened to the Rabbit quotes, in the end. I moved on to a new job before that Borders locked its doors for the last time. But I’d like to think a few former co-workers have them affixed to their refrigerators, if not on their own bookshelves.
I have a bone to pick with you. Of course, when I say I “have a bone to pick with you”, I don’t mean that I had chicken for dinner and am looking for you to share the last measly morsels of tasty meat with me, but rather, that you have caused me a problem or issue that I’d like for us to discuss. I realize open letters are typically considered a poor means of starting, let alone conducting, any real sort of discussion, but as this is the only means at my disposal I suppose it will have to do.
Over the past few months, off and on, I’ve been reading your Series of Unfortunate Events, and I’m greatly enjoying them — at least, as much as one could possibly enjoy stories revolving around orphans who lose their parents in a tragic fire and then undergo a multitude of difficulties perpetrated by an evil man determined to abscond with their inheritance. “Abscond” is a word which here means “figure out some way to get rid of the Baudelaire children and take all the money their parents left for them”.
As I have read your books, I have noticed they have a rather startling effect on me. I only ever evaluate books based on their effect on me, because when I am reading a book, I only really think about me. It’s a bit like the time when I was cave-diving in Iceland. Although I was exploring with others, we were unable to communicate with each other, being under water. As such, I was the only one that mattered, even though others were all about. And if I felt endangered I’d not think twice of leaving the others in an icy Icelandic cave at the bottom of the sea. When I read your books, I feel as though I’m the only person reading them, even though I know millions of people all over the world have read them — and I’d like to think that the books think I’m the only person reading them, too, despite the fact my books are used and have been read by others and will doubtless be read by others still.
Your books, or more accurately, your words, and the way you weave them together — the word “weave” meaning, here, “place them one after the other to form an image”, rather than that you’re somehow taking the words and weaving them together into a blanket, which would be absurd — have somehow found the way to take over my own writing style, and mold it in a way which fits your writing more than it fits mine. I have tried to fight them off but it seems my defenses are weak and unable to resist them anymore, so I have no other option than to ask for your help.
You seem to have connections, a word which here means “the ability to make something happen for me that I cannot make happen on my own”. This is why I’m writing you, although I’m not writing you, really, any more than someone who puts a letter in a bottle and throws it into the sea can expect it to reach its intended destination. But you have introduced me, it seems, to both a problem and a solution to that problem, and in doing so have made yourself the only person capable of solving the problem. Don’t ask me how that works out, it just does.
Your words have unfairly overtaken my own. As I am a writer also, I’d greatly appreciate having my own words back. The only way to make this happen is to somehow transport me back in time, to the place and time where I was approximately 7 years old, and have me read your books then, rather than now. When I was seven, you see, I wasn’t seriously writing — so although your words would have had some effect on how I processed language in the future, they would not have seriously infiltrated my own writing style. “Infiltrated” is a word which here means “completely taken over, as if by hypnosis, as Klaus was in Book, the Fourth, and unable to construct sentences on my own in any meaningful way that doesn’t sound like you wrote them, which given that I love your sentences, is not an entirely bad thing, but still”.
I believe that Klaus can research theoretical physics, and that Violet can invent a time machine to transport me back to the year in which I was seven years old, and that Sunny can bite a hole through the time-space continuum, which is a phrase that here means “make it possible for me to read your books when I’m seven, rather than now”. That is something I would appreciate very much, and since I am a reader, and you are a writer, I’d like to think you’re willing to grant me this small favor.
In the meantime, as I’ve not yet finished reading the series, I’ll continue reading, and I’ll endeavor to make them last as long as possible until I hear from you in relation to the possibilities I’ve described above.
At least until then,
Yours truly,
Jen.
