OR
DIALOGUES WITH GOD, BOOKS AND OTHER SUPPOSEDLY NON-VERBAL ENTITIES
OR
UPPERCASE CAPTIONS FOR THE MOVIE OF MY LIFE
by Alena Deerwater
Reading Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? while drinking a purple smoothie. Yes, purple. Blueberries, romaine, pear and a splash of lemon.
Powerful writing.
I’ve been avoiding reading this memoir. The ARCs (advanced readers copies) are sent to us booksellers so we can read, read, read and hopefully love, love, love and then sell, sell, sell. Or perhaps ARC is a misspelled version of the yacht that saved Noah and all those glorious paired up animals from the flood. Only the unicorns didn’t make the boat, nor the dragons; the Loch Ness monster monstrously came without a mate and has been mourning away in the depths of the ocean ever since.
Back to the ARCs.
One stares at me from the glutinous bookshelves of readers copies lining the teensy bathroom at the bookshop where I work. We call this tiny toilette “the Chamber” (a la Harry Potter’s Chamber of Secrets) to keep the customers, who want to pee while they shop, off the scent that we have a non-public, non-sharing bathroom. Exceptions are always made for little tikes squeezing their legs together to hold it in, and oldsters who are card-carrying members of TWBS – Teeny Weeny Bladder Society. Amazon.com, the online-superpower-bookstore-gone-manic-that-sells-everything-under-the-sun-and-wages-commercial-warfare-on-every-store-that-ever-earned-its-first-dollar, is He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. Voldemort, we whisper when the internet pops up the unmentionable webstore.
Back to the ARC in the bathroom.
A memoir with the word Normal in the title stares at me every time I have to take a leak. It sticks out its tongue at me and squeals, “Na Na, NaNa Na! I’m a soon-to-be-published memoir with the word Normal in it and you didn’t write me.”
How dare it!
My memoir, which I haven’t finished for years (haven’t worked on in months), has the word Normal in it. I lived in Normal, Illinois before I was catapulted to California by the shit hitting the fan in my normal life in Normal.
I have a bad case of memoir-envy. Give me a pen, an unlined journal, a room of one’s own plus the bucks to have time in it, and I am set. Green-eyed monster be gone.
Back to the ARC I am reading today.
On the bottom of page 5, Jeanette Winterson says:
It’s why I am a writer – I don’t say ‘decided’ to be or ‘became’. It was not an act of will or even a conscious choice.
Am I a writer? Yes. I keep trying to make it an act of will or conscious choice by ‘deciding’ not to write, and it keeps coming back again. And again. And again.
To celebrate my 50th birthday I didn’t have a party, an affair, or even a day at the spa. I burned 126 journals. Mine. All of them. Actually I recycled them. My plan was to burn them. All day long in a huge bonfire in the Rabbi’s yard. With great and meaningful ritual, my soul-sisters and I would dance around the flames, releasing all my mistakes and flaws into the vast unknown to be blessed by God and Goddess then magically transformed. But, what can I say, people were busy.
“Very toxic, burning all that paper,” the Rabbi’s husband said.
Oy, was he right, I thought. Not good for me and my chemical sensitivities.
I let it go.
Recycling 126 journals is not that easy. I’m a conscientious recycler, and most of my journals are bound with those sharp, pointy, bended, endlessly spiraling wires. I removed every single one of them. It took weeks. My fingers started to bleed. The manual labor alone voraciously consumed time. Armed with only an old-fashioned wooden kitchen spoon, I eventually learned to plunge its handle deep into the coiling wire binding and twist and shove till the pages were unbound.
Every trash day for weeks, I added reams of white unlined paper with black scrawl into the giant, blue, lidded bin on wheels. My writing mixed with smelly tuna cans the cat had licked clean, flattened egg cartons, empty bottles of juice. Every Thursday night I wheeled the concoction down the dirt driveway to the gravel road we call Eighteen, a lucky, life-giving number according to Hebraic kabbalistic calculations. Early every Friday morning, the groaning of the Waste Management truck heaving, lifting, and dumping my writing into its maw, woke me up.
And what was the first thing I did? I rolled over, took the lid off my pen, and wrote.
Now a new round of bulging journals are scattered around my home. I’ve filled over a case of them again and I’m only 53.
God help me.
WRITE.
The word pops up in all-caps on the upper portion of the screen in my mind playing the foreign movie that is my life.
Is that the word of God answering my unconscious prayer for guidance?
More subtitles follow.
YES.
IT IS I.
THE LORD.
WHO ELSE DO YOU THINK IT IS?
WRITE.
YOU ALREADY DO – ABUNDANTLY.
SO OWN IT.
USE YOUR WORDS.
USE YOUR AFFIRMATIONS.
SAY:
I, ALENA DEERWATER, AM WRITING MY MEMOIR.
NA NA, NANA NA.
“I, Alena Deerwater, am writing my memoir.
Na Na, NaNa Na.”
VERY FUNNY.
NOT THAT LAST PART.
“I, Alena Deerwater, am writing my memoir.
Again.”
ALENA-LA.
ONCE MORE.
WITHOUT THE SARCASTIC ADDITIONS.
God is infinitely patient and firm and has a Yiddish accent.
“I, Alena Deerwater, am writing my memoir.
With the help of God? Please?”
DO I NEED TO SAY THE OBVIOUS?
“Yes. We mere mortals need that. All the time.
Have You learned nothing in the last six million years?”
OF COURSE I’LL HELP YOU.
I ALWAYS DO.
WITH EVERY BREATH.
EVERY SIGH.
EVERY TEAR.
AND ALENA-LA,
HUMANS HAVE NOT BEEN AROUND SIX MILLION YEARS.
IT’S BEEN 549,302,957,947, 300,102.64739164538923
ROTATIONS ROUND THE UNIVERSAL CENTER.
God laughs.
AND YOU ARE AVOIDING THE SUBJECT.
AGAIN.
Did I mention God has a odd sense of humor?
Noah had a whopping big threatening storm to help him from procrastinating God’s command to build the ark. Jonah had his time-out in the belly of the whale.
I have nothing.
I go back to reading the Normal memoir.
“Part fact part fiction is what life is,” the writer says from the page.
Ain’t that the truth.