Hey you,
Lately I’ve had to think a lot about myself, which is always a drag. I’ve been seeing a therapist for the past few months, the kind that treats obsessive compulsive (personality) disorder but doesn’t necessarily make you lick a toilet to overcome some germ fear. Instead, my therapist works with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, which I’ve been told really works for people with OCD and OCPD. I won’t go into the differences between the two disorders, because yawn, but in short: yes, I lock and unlock doors a lot; no, I don’t wash my hands eighty times a day; yes, I spent a decade thinking every hookup would give me some megadisease, some CancerLupusAIDS; no, I don’t spend my days ironing; yes, all of this makes me a great editor and a slow reader; yes, I’ll clean your home for a price.
But in order to get to the fun part where I move my eyes around a bunch and rewire my brain, I have to work through all of these thoughts about my past and present. It’s been hard thinking about myself to this degree—not out of false modesty, but because most of the time I find myself quite a bore to talk about. When I used to go to bars and parties, I was always the person asking questions, being witty, or making some insight about what someone else said as a way to avoid ever bringing up any mention of my past or myself. I think to this day, maybe five people know what my actual day job is, and at least one of them looked it up on LinkedIn. Whenever I do something candid—including sharing poems and art—my first impulse is to move on as quickly as possible. I think it’s only ever easy in persona: twitter kayfabe, the high drags of university teaching, cocktail party panto.
I’m curious to know exactly how you are.
Years ago, when I was a lonely academic, I heard a hip younger professor lament, “Cover letters are such a difficult genre of writing.” At the time, I thought it was such an absurd, almost embarrassing thing to say—as if someone admitted that they couldn’t tie their own shoes. How could a job query be a genre? After several dozen tailored letters to Upper Nutsack University and similar institutions, however, I began to see her point. An academic cover letter is a sonnet written on dirty toilet paper, a blind date where the person is already in the cab—and with that comes a certain conditional nausea that comes with talking about yourself, or your skills, or your interests, or your dreams. To think about finding a publisher still fills my throat with reflux singe. And yet, this is where my obsessive compulsive nature could thrive:
If you don’t send in four job letters today you will be destitute. Dear members of the search committee: Please consider this letter part of my application for the open position in Teaching Some Young Cunts Shit About the Past at Eastern Turd Tech. You know if you don’t send them in before the end of business today they’re going to realize you may actually be a fraud. To whom it concerns, my current research focuses on the political culture of standardized testing—or put another way, why you will pass me up for someone who went to more prestigious universities despite having identical CVs. You know actually have you considered if you accidentally plagiarized a hundred pages of your work I think you need to stop what you’re doing and check every footnote you wrote again, but you also need to get these letters in by today. Ma’ams and sirs, I have honed my teaching skills through teaching well over a dozen sections as an underpaid adjunct at various institutions, including a school where I walked two miles after parking at the Dunking Donuts because I could not afford the on-campus permit. Look what you need to do is just rewrite every third sentence in your longest chapter and also do seven or eight more searches for materials that you already read and gathered last year but maybe you forgot how to read or maybe you copied every word in a moment of hysterical blindness also it is now 2 am, why have you not turned in those letters you idiot fuck. Folks: I have a half dozen references and public-facing work, so if you give me a stock rejection could you do so within a six-month timeframe?
Hey hi hello, how are you gorge.
In the five years, since I’ve left academia, I’ve been in constant motion. To this end, I’m not sure whether what’s remained steadfast is the ship or its speed. I had spent my twenties becoming an expert in a field, being a teacher and union organizer, while also moonlighting as a spreadsheet jockey and audio editor and queer workshop practitioner. (Who cares!) And then it was all just kind of done: there were no jobs for historians, at least the type of historian I was, and I wasn’t getting anywhere with what few positions existed. (How boring!) Nobody was moved by my cover letters, at the very least. Moving made sense, as did reinventing my professional life from scratch. (Snoooooze.) But what about you? How are you doing? What’s new with you? Anything, anything at all.
Perhaps the actual constant has been the years-long argument with myself, one in which I scold myself, “Do more, do more, do more, you lazy cow,” and then immediately say after any achievement, “Just who the fuck do you think you are?” Nothing I’ve done is ever quite good enough, but looking back at what I’ve done is also unacceptable. It’s exhausting in both senses of the word. Even now, what I really want to do is say: “Meh, who cares: people live through war and famine.” My therapist has told me we really need to drag all of that up—and has reminded me that we can work through OCD and OCPD because quite literally our brains can bring us through war and famine.
(For what it’s worth, I didn’t figure out how to tie shoes until I was seven. Nothing of the bullshit about the rabbit running around dog made any sense. I have no idea how I faked it until then. If there are hyper niche genres of writing—cover letters, lunchbox love notes, index card to-dos—then there must be hyper niche genres of ignorance: tying shoes, understanding tides, mastering left turns or interest payments.)
But tell me something I don’t know.
I suppose there will be a point at which repetition doesn’t come with some ongoing monologue, a negative mantra about failure or disease or pestilence. I feel most comfortable when I braid myself up, every image and word twisted into some knot, my chewy challah feelings I serve you with jam and tea. Maybe I can straighten out, or at least not listen to “Kind of a Drag” again and again and again as I hammer words out. Maybe I won’t be a failure if I don’t lock the door five-by-eight times nor become a professor. Maybe I won’t sneak things into things into things, a letter holding an essay holding a wave hello. But while you’re here, I have a couple small things, some deviations if you don’t mind.
Thanks,
KJ
crickets
1.
i went to the neighborhood park
to do my medicine ball routine—
the typical horsehair shirt hour,
a conniption with jumping jacks.
i watched the sky grow amethyst
as my underwear crept up my ass—
the string caressing its hinterlands
as the afternoon glow left the horizon.
i thought i could exercise my way
through the longest December night,
or perhaps start some new ritual,
invoking the winter in breath and/or musk.
but, of course, i already knew
underneath this ripened haze
nobody really ushers in
the transition from our darkest hours;
imagine being the ant,
a dutiful creature of habit,
willing away all this pestilence
with persistence and/or compulsion.
i suspect we’re actually crickets,
endlessly chirping creatures unsure
when, exactly, dusk turns purple,
or when indigo relents for dawn,
but nonetheless singing
in midnight unison.
all we really have together
are these vibrating throbbing legs,
recoiling before every spring
and rubbing out sharp harmonies.
*
2. as soon as i finished this paper cricket, i looked down, bleary eyed from folding well after midnight, hoping to be enamored with the veins on my feet. instead i found a very real cockroach on the edge of my pants. i jolted upright, which wasn’t very smart at nearly one a.m., but the choice was clear: the neighbors or my ankle. what is a cockroach but some paper scrap with an electric spark? what is an origami cricket but a veinless dream, some spit and finger grease and wishful thinking? what is a poem but a long-legged bug, looking up with dim bead eyes, saying please please please?
*
3. orion beckons me in midwinter repose, belt still tight, like a lover getting off on his reveal. i hear you across the room, wine-heavy eyes and stained teeth, cricket thighs bare under lamplight, calling, “c’mere, it’s getting cold out.”
*
embellishing the story.
three by shorelight endeavors But I don’t always want to be this force of nature— your bay of Fundy high tide, night and day night and day night and day Let me become something small instead, some thing by the shore— this broken shell, this ragged sea glass, the jellyfish strand approaching your left foot. The whole full moon You woke me from a drool-deep nap, six pm creased on my cheeks, and told me news that was truly news—there’s news like “hamburger is on sale” or “Colin Powell, known war criminal, has died,” and then there is actual news, where you forget to wash the sleep lines off your face. I went on a walk until the moon came up, big and fat like a middle-aged smile. The lights from oncoming traffic smoothed out my crow’s feet. I pointed toward the sky with my own news: “Look at this bitch! Look at this big fat bitch tonight!” dinnertime we sat at the dining room table with a bucket of fresh names, scooped straight from the shore, still briny and wriggling. “how will i know which one is right,” you ask, plucking out all of the mythological swimmers. the pot rumbled behind us. “i think you just know,” i shrugged, “but if i had my way i’d be a victoria.” you sighed, squinting as a hundred half-chewed variations of kayleigh, eyes where their legs ought to be. “hold on: what about these,” i said, holding a few olden sturdy ones. “hold on”—i chucked them in the boiling water until their shells turned vamp red. the decades and silent letters sloughed away. “sometimes it’s just there,” i said before squeezing a lemon wedge and sucking on the largest one’s head. i handed you the supple body, every letter where it ought to be, sudden pink flesh. “and sometimes you’re born again.”
That’s it. Thanks for reading. If you like it, tell a friend. If you didn’t, I don’t know what to tell you. See you again sometime soon. —KJ