In Between Days

Fall.

We always knew it could be like this.

A sun drenched indian summer that lingers until well into the second week of October, cold nights huddled behind faux spiderweb curtains drinking pumpkin beer and slinging dirty mad libs, sidewalks and graveyards crunchy with dead leaves and every now and then the wisp of woodsmoke alive and writhing on the breeze.

We eat books for breakfast and shit poetry without a second thought.

I am full of ideas.

I want to write a real horror story that makes good on all the things that are wrong with American horror as a genre, I have three stories whose endings are floating around like plump and rosy apples in a dark barrel of murk, and then there's that novel biting at my heels and gnawing on the bedposts.

I just wish this season would stop being so damn tantalizing with all its ferris wheels and pie, the horror movies and the tiny wrapped up lollies, the costumes and the screams and the tattered memory of summer blowing along with the trash in the wind.

Some Ten Years Later

When people share their where they were on september eleventh stories, I always think of my friend The Duck. While not a real member of the aviary tribe, she is a real member of the human race, and she was in New York City on the day everyone remembers in this country, in this century, so far.

I, like many others, watched it happen on a small screen, at first alone and then surrounded by others, our group growing, time slowing, and nothing mattering except those three words: What comes next?

The Duck lived in the city for close to ten years, and recently relocated, had returned to visit one of her friends. He had gone to work, and she was throwing together a backpack so she could galavant around the city in the beautiful weather. There was a sandwich shop she had to visit. She planned to get the sandwich wrapped up in paper so she could lug it to Central Park to this one special place where she liked to sit and regard things as though a monarch taking in the splendors of her regime.

But instead she felt things change that morning. A palpitation of the earth and air and all of their creatures. She saw the streets begin to slowly, inevitably consume themselves in a cloud of ash.

I am not one for glorifying tragedies. You, like I, can imagine the panic, the confusion she must have felt because we felt it too, just not quite as urgently, for, being human, there lies within us the terrible comfort of watching something happen on television. This can't possibly be real, we think. And deep deep down, where we only admit things with the lights off, we believe that it is all right because as long as we're watching it on tv, it is happening to someone else, and we are safe.

Only, New York is a huge place, and while millions of people were just sitting slack jawed next to radios and tv screens, millions of other people were actually fleeing, running, screaming and searching.

As a transplant, I have spent a large portion of my life fighting the label "American". There are so many international stereotypes that go along with the title, least of all a stunning, narcissistic blindness to the issues of the rest of the world, but I am serious when I say I have never felt more American than I did watching the events of September 11th 2001. I felt all of the bravado slip away and reveal what citizens of the states don't want anyone to see.

Like the most popular girl in high school, we are a country so determined to appear to be having the best time to all the other countries, we are letting our grades slip, and our term paper is always overdue.

That morning, America was a hurt, scared child of a country, realizing the rest of the world is actually watching and waiting for the moment where the rhinestone headband slips.

I felt the incredulity, the fear and the madness.

In New York, The Duck was inside those feelings, the nexus of disbelief, of chaos and pure human reaction.

People did unimaginably selfless things that day. People tore away everything they thought made them themselves and looked down into their bones and worked with what they had there.

My concept of what it means to be an American has forever changed in the aftermath. I may poke fun and dodge the comparisons, but I love The Duck, and I love everyone who was in it that day. I love every person, who let themselves realize they were never, and can never be impenetrable. I love every person who touched another person's hand afterward and gave them any form of comfort.

I hope that today, ten years later, the child country America is deciding what it wants to do with the rest of its life because it's seen some shit and it knows it can survive. I hope the people of this country are relishing every moment they have their freedom because they saw first hand how much it costs.

I hope every transplant, like myself, is taking a moment to stop poking fun at how you buggers play football and the ridiculous stuff you call pudding and saying thank you for not freaking out and deporting me after all of this went down.

Because I love you, and I think you have so much more left to do.

Literature In Stereo!

Weekly blogs.

Yes.

I do this now.

The planet is playing tag with an asteroid. Macintosh computers has more liquid assets than the entire united states. Jess Mann can't believe it's august.

These, are our headlines.

Had some really good ideas for a story this week. Also decided I want to make a playlist for the book. I think I want to release the playlist side by side with the upload in mid september.

As a kid, I remember reading books and listening to albums simultaneously until the story and the music formed an almost symbiotic relationship, and even now when I hear a song sometimes I see an argument, or an inspiring speech, enemies slain or lovers won.

This is probably responsible for the way I unconsciously create a visual representation for almost every song to which I listen.

In fact, the stories just show up of their own accord and demand recognition. The entire first draft of the book was written listening to one particular album on repeat because I felt the music not only inspired the idea for the story, but encompassed the atmosphere and general tension of the scene.

Here is my question:

Would you be interested in reading/downloading a story if it came with a musical recommendation or even a simultaneous itunes download or something?

You would obviously have the option to only download one...and I guess in the beginning of this, I'm not going to have the copyrights to just freely give away whomever's music I choose, but would you be inspired to listen to such a thing if it was created to compliment the reading experience?

It still fits!

Ugh.

PMS is such a bummer.

My boobs are enormous right now. E-NORM-OUS.

So is my tummy, which I am finally becoming affectionate with after seven+ years of pure bloody minded hatred. It's a happy little ball. It droops when its hot out, it sits up when I eat something new and exciting. It's like a puppy really. It waggles when I dance, flops when I nap. Sits and behaves itself when company's over, and sometimes, I tuck it away and tell it to be good, and by the end of the night after one too many glasses of wine, I don't care anymore and i just want it to be proud of itself, so I let it out and you know what? Every time, it is so enthusiastic and lovable and received so well, I don't remember why I hid it away to begin with.

But seriously, I would love for my bra to fit right now.

Anyway.

Bidness things this morning. This involves trying to get my student loans put into forbearance (AGAIN WOOT) for a year, although, in examining the digits this morning, I am forced to realize, I have officially paid them off about halfway. Which is sort of amazing.

I am going into Salem to open a bank account to attach to my amazon account, which means very very soon, there will be real Jess Mann stories for sale on the internets.

This is simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating.

August first also kicks off the SUPER EDIT PROJECT. Or SEP as I will be referring to it. Not only for acrnymical purposes, but because On September 12th (B's and my second wedding anniversary awwwww), I plan on having "the book" edited.

It will be a slog. It will be hard. It will mean I will not be available for nearly as much social awesomeness. It does, HOWEVER, mean I will finally have finished what I started two years ago, and then...well...then I will be asking something very important of you indeed.

But all things in their right place, and let's not get ahead of ourselves!

Why don't I blog more? I really like it.

I used to do it all the time...should probably get back into that, what with this steam machine that is SEP rolling ahead. Because it isn't just about the book. It's about me. It's about doing what I've always wanted to do, but this time enabling it to pay for itself.

Who's with me?!

Once upon a time, I got really depressed (wow Jess, tell us something we don't know), and I spent something like four years just drowning in the mire and stagnation and frustration of it all. Which is really really easy.

You know what's hard?

Being happy.

There's a trailer for an aussie movie coming out soon called The Tree (I think) and it's gorgeous and heartbreaking looking and I'm totally going to netflix it some sunday afternoon and sob hysterically into a bottle of shiraz and then call everyone I know and tell them I love them before passing out on the dog, but that's not the point.

The point is that in the trailer, a man dies suddenly, leaving his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg I KNOW RIGHT?!) and three wee childers to mourn and move on and do all that horrifying grieving. There's this one part where the little daughter is talking to her friend, and her friend asks, "aren't you sad?" and the little girl, with this brilliant smile on her face says, "I figure I have a choice. I can be happy or I can be sad, and I choose to be happy, and I am."

And she says it in that gorgeously glib childlike way that is so ineffable you are forced to believe her.

I do.

I believe that is the choice we all have, and it is not admitting the choice, or deciding which side to go with, it is the final statement: "and I am" that makes it so.

It's something I neglected spiritually for a very long time, but I am returning to my soul parts as well as my body in these last few months. It is time to inhabit one's entire self, all of it, body and soul.

So here I go then...

Yes. I go.

The Love of the Words

I am not writing what I thought I should be tonight.

I thought I would be full of original fiction, or at least slick refining editing skills like a fine coat of primer applied to a chalky layer of paint.

Instead I find myself looting through my old documents and hidden files like pulling musty garments from an attic trunk.

Some are very much worth a turn in the laundry and another wear.

Some are so moth eaten and humbled by time that they probably wouldn't even be worth polishing your car.

I save this and that. Tweak a word here and there. Mostly I just read and reread and think to myself.

This is what I am meant to be doing.

I know I write a lot about the tortured existence that is being a writer, and more explicitly, one whose day job is not their passion, and ergo is even more tortured, but there is a reason I do this at three in the morning after a nine hour shift at the bakery.

I love words.

I love words the way Van Gogh loved paint; to the extent that if I had to choose between food and words, I would choose words, and then you would find me sucking on a pen, teeth blackened with ink, malnourished and witty as fuck.

If you've ever met me, then you know I also love stories. I love telling stories, the bigger, louder and more gesticulation required the better, but I also love hearing them.

I have a secret mental list of truly excellent story eliciting questions, although often they are not necessary, for we storytellers find each other through smell.

When I was six years old I had chronic ear infections and eventually underwent that operation where they insert little plastic tubes into your ears to drain all the pus out of your head. For two weeks afterward, every night I had to lie on the sofa with my head level so my mum could drip these prescription ear drops into my ear canals. Then I had to stay very still for ten minutes so the drops could work their way deep into my cochleas and do their thang.

It felt like mercury was being dribbled directly into my brain and I could taste the thin metallic sting of the medicine as it coated my ear drum and soaked ever deeper freezing my jaw and making tears run quietly out of the corners of my eyes.

To pass the twenty minute administration of these drops, my mum made up and told me stories about a little family of mice and a little family of cats who were at war with one another.

After the medicine ran out, I began asking for a story each night before bed, and my lovely mother continued to oblige me elaborating on the characters in the stories until I remember, very clearly being about ten years old, and hearing the end of the last chapter. The mice were long gone, and we had moved to the grand children of the original cats, and I'll never forget my mother winding up the series with the kittens building a hot air balloon and getting in it and leaving their parents and grandparents behind as they sailed off into the sunset. The last thing my mother added to the story was that like the kittens going off into the world to make their own adventures, it was now my turn to tell myself stories.

Pretty smart of my Mum, huh?

Her eloquent shuffle out of the spotlight as storyteller launched me into the rough hands of my father's tutelage, where I was called solemnly into the office or the living room and handed a book my dad deemed essential in the development of my tastes as a reader and charged with the challenge of completing the tome.

In this way I read Little Women, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and A Christmas Carol, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Anne of Green Gables all before entering middle school.

My dad gave me the thirst for a literary challenge. Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it won't improve your thinking processes seemed to be his lesson, and he pushed me all the way to high school shoving The Odyssey at me, A Town Like Alice and many others. On my own I sought out the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Douglas Adams, Roald Dahl and Shakespeare.

Begrudgingly good of my Dad too.

In my adult life, I find all too often I make excuses for not reading or writing. I'm too tired, or I can't come up with anything. I read easy books because I know I'll finish them faster and I am less inclined to pick up challenging literature due to the commitment it requires.

But deep within me I know this change is temporary. For I am still telling stories. Even when I sit in front of the computer for hours on end and can't string two damn sentences across the page. Even when I take six weeks to read a book I could have chewed through in six days five years ago. Even when I am so defeated and furious with myself I throw my pens and journal across the room and pull the covers over my head, I love words.

They always come. They paint the picture. They erase the pain. They give and they give and they allow me to give them along to you as well.

I think it was Neil Gaiman who said that 'a writer is someone for whom writing is the most difficult task in the world, and yet is compelled to do it.'

It is, and I am, and what he didn't say is that the reason you keep going back is because the words give you a king's welcome every time you return.

The Snowghost

The snow ghost take the laughter
and they take the screaming too.
They take the tears
the unlocked fears
they take what makes you true.

I walked alone
it was after midnight
the snow fell thick
under a streetlight
the golden orb
was shook
with flakes
as big as torn apart peonies.
I miss the snowghosts.
I miss myself.

The path was made of footprints
the path was made of sand
the path was two by two by two
the path was hand by hand.
The winding through the woods
was made of needles, pine and soot,
the memories that we left there
we will never reach on foot.

And I lost you there,
my child, my eye, my ribbon in the wind
I lost you and you left the acrid
stench of curry and tamarind
in your wake
i wept a pear tree
and the pear tree
wept the snow
and the snow ghosts
brought you to me
after all i had i had let go

and you nursed of me
the last i had
and i nursed of you
the first
and you awakened in me
any bloody thing
but thirst.
I miss
the nights
i was trapped in amber...
i miss
the morning of the morning after
when your sickness
was upon me
when your marks were on my throat
when I had nothing left to get
except i still could get your goat

and you were always right behind me
when you were not in my face
and then one day i ran so hard
i wound up wounded
wounding in
the wounding space.

I am nothing like I used to be.
I wonder how you ever loved
a halibut like me

who walked on land and breathed the air
and told you riddles about dirt and
dirty riddles about fish.
I wish to god I'd never made
my first and only wish.

In the leaving
I am whole.
I go back to the water
and I go back to the sun
neither is my home
for my home is in the run

and in the running

and i may be caught here
in the sap
but it too will break
or melt and then I'm never coming back,
so wear me
wear me out
wear me close to your weakest point.
know if I struck you there
i'd take your breath and snap your joints.

For I am but a snow ghost
and I bear no mark of you
and I melt
before the morning
and I slip away like dew.

What the Blackbird told the Crow.

It's funny how little you realize about yourself and your quirks until confronted by someone who has the exact same impulses and reactions as you.
Working ourselves into the ground we are.
This pair of us. My sisters and my not-blood twin from another planet person who show me precisely how hard I am throwing myself against the concrete wall by hurling themselves at it with their own perfect intensity.
What are we doing?
We are young, healthy, strong, sexy as hell women, and we are bludgeoning ourselves to shit over things that we really shouldn't let have so much sway over our happiness.
I want to tell you all of the reasons why she is marvelous and capable and brilliant and a gemstone of a person in a world full of gravel, but I would have to say the same things to my own reflection to do so, and I am so very allergic to that.
But it must be.
For I am worried. I am worried because I see in us the volatile, illuminated terror of real creative progress. I see in us the abilities to move and shake and french kiss the world out of blindness.
You are stunning.
I am stunning.
We are taking this year by the ears and throttling it into submission. It may kill us on its way down, if we aren't careful.
Tomorrow could be the last day. Stop putting off all of those words you tell yourself you'll say someday. Do that thing you're so scared of. Get on the plane. Write the goddamn novel. Kiss the girl. Kiss the boy. Wear the dress. Eat the cake. Run the marathon.
Do it, and do it because you want to, and afterward, celebrate how glorious your existence is. Because I think it's bloody amazing.
And quit banging your head against the wall to prove to me I should stop too. I'm stopping. I'm stopping. I'm stopping.

The Unbearable Weight of Lightness

So... this thing happened the other day. Which happened to be my birthday. A bunch of people (spearheaded by the dearest of those) in an impossibly grand gesture of birthdayness (yeah, that happened too), got me a laptop. A real one, with a mousepad and a keyboard and a big pretty screen and programs and software and *gasp* microsoft word and *gasp gasp* access to the interwebs. Needless to say, I wept like a baby bitch baby drunk on cheap champagne and nineteenth century bitters. Which I wasn't. Why do I see you don't believe me? Nevertheless. I doodle around with my new toy, which is inappropriately elephantine in nature and I want to name Clay, after the LTZ character and through some happy accident of the Bretiverse is also a substance artists use to shape the brilliance between thri synapses, which, coincidentally is what this disgustingly light, sexy paperweight is for. It reminds me of the nega-guide, from the Hitchhiker's Trilogy, the super scary one with only one button on it that says PANIC. I think it turns into a dark bird and flies out of a filing cabinet out a highrise office building window at some point in Douglas Adams' opus. I feel like if I don't grip the smooth, ergonomic sides of Clay, he will perform a similiar disappearing act, and I will once again be toddling around the apartment with a two hundred page manuscript in my armpit and a deathwish in my heart. Yet, he remains. And he dares me, with his lopsided, invisible supermodel smile, not to give up. Not to make another excuse about the hoards of spies from the evil Uterati on their bloody warpath to my door and pants. He tells me I am not nearly tired enough, and not reading enough, or doing any bloody thing else for that matter, and his sculpted little mousepad wavers scintillatingly like waves of heat from the hood of a car. He is taunting me...my supermodel, serial killer, pachyderm. I have opened the door I was certain was rusted shut, and I have tested the key to make sure it is mine and mine alone, and shockingly, yes Mary, the garden is still here along with Dicken and Colin is doing backflips through the daffodils screeching wildcats cheers. My laptop...a dark uncle with a sorrowful secret lurking in the foreground. My laptop...a wad of pewter on a workbench next to a clean pail of water. My laptop...an elephant balanced on a beach ball, or flying down a sky scraper on a pair of brand new running shoes, dancing in a janet jackson video with a powdered vogue wig and a cleaver covered in sweet cherry brandy. My laptop is mine...and only the beginning.

Excuse me (or did my frail human body get in the way of your *&%ing Hummer)?

I'm certainly no Miss Manners. I say fuck when I cut my finger cutting onions. I sniff when I can't find a tissue. I have been known to let my underwear dry on the towel rack and even let an absolutely raunchy belch through the gates given the proper circumstances (which usually include pajamas and beer).

In the last few months, however, it has been brought to my attention that there are some issues of chivalry, kindness, and plain common decency about which I am very serious, and appallingly the general populous seems not only lax but utterly at odds with.

Earlier this week, after a brief flurry of snow, which left barely a schmaltz on the roads, which the city chose to salt rather than plow, I had the daily privilege of my three mile walk to work. I set out with my winter coat, knee high boots, gloves, hat and umbrella. Not a third of a mile into this commute, I was passed by a car traveling at a fairly high speed. The speed limit for cabot street can't be more than thirty mph, and this vehicle must have been going at least forty, giving its wheels the perfect opportunity to cover me from head to foot in filthy, thick slush.

Now, I am not a newcomer to this walk. I have trodden this same three miles since last spring, and I like to think I am not only a considerate and proper pedestrian, but that I ask very little in return, first and foremost DON'T KILL ME and secondly please don't treat me like another car.

This second one may be a smidge less specific, but think about it for a second. While you, driver, are safe and secure inside your four walls of reinforced plastic, metal, rubber and airbags, with glorious things such as climate control, windshields, moon roofs, seatbelts and antilock brakes, I am a sorry little sack of flesh and bones with all the protection of sunblock, fabric, sunglasses and an ipod. If I'm super flash, I have on a pair of shoes that are waterproof.

All I meekly demand is that you think before you honk at me for being not as speedy as a vehicle when I do things like cross the street, or when I startle because you clearly didn't look one way while shooting out of a side street and I was almost a smear on your passenger door.

I realize that this is america and I have the ability and right to a vehicle of my own choosing, but for the moment that vehicle is me, and all I ask is the same amount of caution you would hope a driver would give you, if suddenly your ton of glass and steel and cushion was stripped from you, and you stood staring down a three mile plod along a poorly cleared road on a thirty degree january morning.

By the time I reached my job, on this particular day, I had been frosted like a cake. One or two or even three splashes are to be expected, but during this commute I had been drenched by EVERY OTHER CAR. I would like you to take a moment and think about that.

Every second car that passed me, either thought I was pathetic enough to deserve being soaked in salt and grit and ice cold water, or it never even crossed the driver's mind to consider what would happen if they traveled through a huge pile of precipitation at the same speed they travel on a highway.

I don't want anyone's pity. I got to work. I changed my clothes. I washed my face. i did my job. But I'd be lying if it didn't make me pay closer attention to how people are treating each other in general right now.

Sadly, the results are conclusive. Nobody gives a shit about anyone but themselves.

People don't hold doors anymore, not even for a person entering directly after them. People don't stop for crosswalks. Maybe one out of every ten people say please and thank you.

In my three years of grocery shopping in the state of massachusetts, I say excuse me, whenever I am in the way of anyone, and clear out as soon as possible. If I am obviously right in front of the product another person is reaching for, I excuse myself and move.

Not once, at all, have I ever seen this behavior in anyone else. I have never had someone say excuse me in a grocery store. Period.

In fact, I can't think of the last time someone said excuse me to me that wasn't a dear friend of mine because yes, my friends are polite, considerate human beings. I don't associate with cretins.

And yes, everybody else, I am talking about you.

It is common knowledge that a much more terrifying atrocity is committed by the person who thinks and feels nothing for his fellow man than the person who is filled to the brim with hatred for him.

I don't ask much. I just ask that everyone look around! We are all hurting right now. This economy is absolutely hammering us. Many of us are stuck clinging to jobs we can't stand or lost jobs we didn't like due to downsizing. Some of us are on the dole, or moving back in with our parents. Some of us have kids to feed or unemployed significant others. Some of us have all of the above!

What we do have is our commonality as humans, our decency and our ability to look around at those who suffer alongside us. Who cares if you drop your last ten dollar bill in the snow if you don't pick up the money the person beside you dropped and give it back to them? Who cares if you get cut in line at the store, or if someone breaks the drier at the laundromat right before you load your clothes into it if you don't do the same.

The more narrowly we carve our vision, the more people will turn blind eyes to our own hardships.

It took a couple of hours for me to dry out after that walk last week, but the apathy of so many people has been impossible to wash off.

Look around. Somebody always has it worse than you. Somebody always has it better. And at the exact moment that you are fucking someone over through pure bloody minded ignorance, someone higher up the ladder is unknowingly about to do it to you.

I'm not going to get preachy about karma or the threefold rule or anything, but I am going to say that I am not ready mourn humanity yet, but you are hanging on by a string.

Words Words Words

At the end of 2010, I crammed a book into five days. It felt really really good. In the last two days, I read another.

This means in the last week, I have read 12.5% of the number of books I read in the entirety of one year.

Things that make my brain squirm.

My two new years resolutions are to read more, and to be visible.

I want to be seen. I want to be noticed. Hold my head up and put myself out there and display my work and stop being so very very self conscious.

I remember when I was fourteen. It was my first year living in the U.S. after Canada. The school was very different from what i was used to and the cafeteria terrified me. In Canada everybody ate their lunch at their desk in the portables we had class in, or outside, when the weather was nice.

In this new school, there was this really terrifying set up called a Cafeteria. I had never seen one before, and I thought it was set up like a giant theatre, where everybody sitting down was watching all the people in line to buy their food. My Dad told me that when you're a teenager you think everybody's looking at you, but they're actually so worried about being looked at themselves, they couldn't be watching me.

Still, I was relieved I always brought a bag lunch, and I would never have to be up there in line being looked at.

It was the scariest part of my day, any time I had to walk up in front of the class and write on a board, or give a report, or even just find a table in the cafeteria to sit at and not get bothered.

I was a weirdo. I found a table of girls like me, who hid in the back and didn't want to be seen. They were the only people who asked me questions about where I'd lived and why my accent was different, who were interested in the answers and not just how strange and alien I seemed.

In high school, we were the girls at the table that got food thrown at it. I stopped eating in the cafeteria after a while and stayed by the lockers just outside the big room. I sat on the floor and ate my lunch with one or two close friends.

One day in a humanities class run by a teacher who thought his methods were the very fanciest, we were each given a sheet of paper with the names of everyone else in the class on it. The teacher told us to write down exactly what we thought, truly thought, about each person, and then hand the papers back. We did, and the next day he handed us all back a sheet of paper with what everyone else had written about ourselves. It was entirely anonymous, so we could be as mean or revealing as we wanted.

I recall that out of twenty or so responses, maybe thirteen of the lines written about me said, "she seems nice, but I don't know her."

Mission accomplished.

I set out to right some wrongs when I went to college.

I vowed to do very scary things.

I picked the scariest thing I could think of: improv.

Standing in front of a huge room of people with nothing to save you but your mind and a lack of stage fright.

Shockingly. I wasn't bad at it.

I had so much fun, I buried myself in it, and I used it as an excuse to hide my writing. Why expose myself in other ways, when I was doing it so thoroughly already?

After I graduated, I fled. I dropped off the map. I didn't send anyone forwarding addresses. I never reached out. I lost good friends. I squandered opportunities and connections in an effort to vanish again, to fall off the radar and disappear from everyone's sight again.

A few of you refused to let that happen. Thank you.

Now it is 2011.

I am going to turn twenty nine this year, and it will be ten years since I stepped on an improv stage for the first time, and fifteen since I shivered in that cafeteria.

I have written. I have written. I have written.

And I have been terrified to ever let anyone see.

It is time to be visible.