Month: January 2020

Practice, Practice, Practice

That old joke, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?…”

It’s showtime, folks.

Here I am, back home again. Not that I can’t blog from the hospital, I just didn’t want to. Husband has yet another brand new part, Art Child has a brand new diagnosis of walking pneumonia, and me? Well, I’ve got the same old pile of dirty laundry staring at me. Much like the file that holds the current manuscript I’m sort of kind of querying, I’m ignoring it. Every morning I get up, make my coffee, exchange emails with my writing buddy, squint at the newspaper while I try to pretend I’m not living through the death of American democracy, do my stretches, open the file intending to make notes for a synopsis (some agents require these when you’re querying), read a couple of paragraphs, weep, and close the file again.

Life has been pretty damned weird these days, and I feel like I’m…on the cusp of a new stage, or grieving, maybe both. I think those two things go together. Grief, not just for ~~dinner~~ dying anymore.

No, no, don’t get nervous, I’m not going to go on about health, hospitals, or death. We grieve a lot of things at different stages: loss of friendship, loss of marriage, job loss, major financial difficulties, leaving school, starting school, menopause (so I’ve heard–personally, I celebrated), children growing up, viagra prescriptions, a healthy planet, elected officials who understood the term public service, and dreams. Oh, those traitorous, treacherous fucking dreams. Mine, as anyone who’s been with Mrs Fringe for any length of time knows, is tied to my writing. A contract. Someone in the industry who believes in my words, my fiction, enough to think they and I could earn a dollar from them.

That clip above? From All That Jazz, my favorite movie, I honestly don’t think I can tell you how many times I’ve seen it. Gah! I was an adolescent during one of the golden ages of movie musicals. All That Jazz, Saturday Night Fever (I know, technically not a musical, but it was the soundtrack of my youth), Hair, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Grease, Fame, Yentl, Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, The Rose, Shock Treatment, Fame (yes, I wrote it twice), The Blues Brothers–there were a lot of them. They were all great fun and great tears with a message. If you had talent, determination, someone who believed in you, willingness to put the work in and put up with various setbacks and humiliations, booze and/or mind altering substances but didn’t OD by the time you were 30, well. You would make it. That or you’d be beaten by life and give up those stupid dreams for a house in the suburbs. Or financial security. Or you’d just be too busy with financial insecurity to care anymore. See above, “I acceeeeeept!” Whichever way the chips fell, there was definitely no soundtrack telling me I’d take a twenty year break from trying, wake up one day to hear the alarm ringing from Pink Floyd’s Time in my head and start writing again, and write and revise and write and revise and connect with other writers and learn about the publishing industry and get derailed again and then write and revise and submit, and write and revise and submit, over and over again until I was 50,000 years old, still care, and what’s playing in my head is no longer the alarm clock, but Clare Torry’s brilliant, wordless vocals. Yeah, I’d like to see that movie. It’s possible this manuscript is a version of it.

I want to accept. I say I accept. I think I’ve accepted. And then I don’t. Because even as I grieve the loss of my writing dream, the writing is how I get through, how I live, how I grieve.

The closing scene of All That Jazz is below. Kind of long but you should watch it, about the death of a dream realized, and also Ben Vereen is a god.

Where Have Those Damned Words Gone?

Sunrise over the East River

I’ll say one thing for all of our recent time in the hospital, they have the best damned views in the city. Most of my photos have weird shadows and reflections because of the double paned windows combined with my terrible photo taking skills when using the phone, but hey, I’ve woken up to worse.

Scary hospital stays are scary. How’s that for profound blathering? And when faced with these stays, we are a family that talks around things, jokes about them, because we do. I don’t want to cry any more than when I absolutely can’t hold it in, leaves me with one of those vicious migraines that have teeth and nausea every time, and hospital security gets really testy when you stand in the halls and scream profanities. In the past, I’d tell Husband I appreciated the vacation, but next time let’s pick a better hotel. These last few times, well. This is a fancy shmancy hospital, with tvs larger than the wall our living room tv hangs on. I told him it was the nicest hotel he’d ever taken me to. That was the joke, over and over with each new nurse, each new visitor. Not all that funny the first time, less so every time I said it, but again, wtf else am I going to say?

Words may be my thing, reading and writing them, but I lose them when I most need them just like a cab driver trying to explain in his third language that the crumpled fender of the car in front of his isn’t his fault.

In November I began reading a novel I had long been waiting for, and it’s truly rare for me to buy a book at full price. I wish I could more often to support authors, but my budget is limited and I read a lot. This one, though, I had to. Erin Morgenstern. There are many authors I admire for different strengths, and her strength is incredibly lush sentences I just get lost in. Nevertheless, I stopped reading once Husband was admitted because I just couldn’t relax into those opulent, fantastical dreams on the page. Nothing I can imagine myself writing.

Because my words are wrong, too raw. Too many shadows and distorted reflections that gauge their way out of my mouth with teeth and claws.

This morning I finished the novel. It didn’t inspire me to write anything beautiful, say anything beautiful, but I did bake an apple pie with all the cinnamon my heart desires, on top of a puff pastry crust with a layer of cheesecake in between, as close as I get to lush. Five minutes ago–as I was writing this–Husband’s doctor called, we’re looking at another inpatient stay next week.

Uncomfortably Numb

Well. Pretty much skipped 2019, didn’t I? Wish I could say that was true outside of the blogosphere, but life is what it is. Yesterday I saw this Tweet and this response and I thought, yes. Immediately followed by, maybe. I began this blog not expecting anyone to find it, and that was ok. I did it for me, and along the way gathered some followers, made some friends, connected with more than I had any right to expect. Mrs Fringe was a space for me to be not just mom/wife/dogwalker/reefer/writer/bitch/feminist/New Yorker, but the sum of those parts; a person (albeit a somewhat anonymous and edited one). It turned out great and perfect in all the ways for a long time, until it wasn’t, so I hit pause. I think I’m hitting the play button again, but life happens, so who knows.

How was your 2019? Mine was overall shit, with some wonderful bright spots. Art Child graduated from high school. Whee, I’m done, done, done with the public school system! That New Thing I was working on? I kept working, wrote to The End, and I’m pretty fucking proud of it. All the old qualifiers apply, no clue if anyone in the industry will like it/want it, but there you have it. I even went to a writers’ conference last summer and pitched it to a few agents, have done some limited querying, getting some interest. We’ll see. Hope for the best, expect the worst, blah blah blah.

The past couple of weeks on Twitter, reading my timeline I’ve just felt old. All these youthful, positive posts cataloguing the past decade in accomplishments, earnestly seeing the beginning of a new decade as something. There have been many New Years where my overriding thought has been wow, this past year kicked my ass. This year is not only not an exception, but I don’t even feel human anymore. When I tried to think about the decade gone, my mind started ticking off medical emergencies. The last 14? 15? years have been a twisted game of lurching from emergency to emergency, and 2019 will take its place up there in the top three. In the hospital with Husband, and then Mother-in-Law, and then Husband, and then Husband, and then Husband, and oh fuck the kids, MIL and I pretty much spent six months alternately holding our breaths and checking his, and then I spent most of the past two months inpatient with him.

All this time immersed in the world of medical interventions and I’ve learned four things really, really well. One: human beings aren’t designed for this level of sustained stress. Two: for every major medical intervention, there is a price to be paid–both physical and psychological–the more complex the intervention the higher the price, and you better believe this isn’t one of those no money down deals, they want that arm, leg, or kidney upfucking front. Three: I know who does or does not have real experience in the world of complex, chronic medical needs within ten seconds; by their understanding–or lack thereof–of what the actual, literal, monetary cost of our fucked American healthcare system is (if you’re reading this and you’re one of those mythical Americans who love your health insurance, all I can say is how nice for you, you’ve lived a charmed life with the luck of good genes), and what actually is/is not realistic to expect in terms of healing and recovery. In this skewed little corner of the world, out of the hospital doesn’t mean all better, it means the immediate risk/benefit of being inpatient tipped to the risk side, because nowhere harbors more antibiotic resistant bacteria than hospitals, so hey, congrats! Now you get to go home and do all this without a kitchen sending the patient three hot, fresh, reasonably nutritious meals a day, no nurses, no wonderful cart down the hall stocked with warm blankets and clean linens, and oh yeah, no teams of doctors coming to round, so multiple doctor appointments across the city weekly. What’s the fourth thing? I have the best kids in the universe, no shit.

I don’t know if any of my old faithful readers still check Mrs Fringe. If so, thank you (and hey, I’m not dead!). If not, that’s ok too. Maybe some new readers will find me. Mostly I’m hoping to blog my way back to the status of human, if that’s still possible.

PS: My camera has permanently decided it no longer wants to partner with my laptop, so for the foreseeable future all photos will be blurry cell pics.