I laughed when I read that a member of the current regime used the phrase “freaks, weirdos, losers, and crazies” recently to refer to members of the political party he would like to see deported. I’ve been a card-carrying member of at least one of those groups for most of my life. As evidence, I give you my elementary school fears, my high school social awkwardness, my college indecisions and geographicals (more than one), my so-called career as an impostor teacher, my current job as a faculty-wannabe, and my on-again-off-again lovefest with creativity. Oh, I forgot to mention my many failed relationships and my recent stint of homelessness.
I think I’m qualified to be considered a freak-weirdo-loser-crazy, possibly all at the same time. I’m not ashamed. I’m proud, especially because a member of the regime I find particularly abhorrent thinks people like me don’t deserve to exist. Maybe someday he will wake up (when he’s in prison) and realize he’s a member too. Joke’s on him.
Speaking of jokes, or maybe not, I trotted over to the library on Friday to sit with the leader of the writers group to get some work done on my current writing project. Every other week, the agenda is what she calls “Write, write, write.” These days are designated as writing days. Almost always, we are the only ones there. I assume the other members opt out because they like the social interaction and attention they get at the “Write, read, critique” sessions. I’d rather sit alone and write, but that’s just me.
Anyhoo, at the end of the two hours, she always asks me, “Did you get a lot done?” I always say, “I sure did, how about you?”
On Friday, she said, “The words just flowed out of me.”
I said, “That’s amazing,” but hearing her words transported me back in time to a moment when I was sixteen or seventeen, with my boyfriend (one of my brother’s friends, age 19), in the backyard of the house I grew up in, talking about getting high on weed (I was never an expert, but I seem to recall we called it dope or grass back then). I asked him something about getting high, and he said he was “naturally stoned.”
For some reason, that stuck in my craw and it’s been there ever since. I remember feeling righteously resentful, first that somehow he was high in some kind of natural way (like, what is that?) and second, that he sounded so arrogant and braggy about it. His attitude pissed me off, and it still pisses me off when I think about it.
In our defense, we were kids (statutory rape was not in our consciousness at that time). Our brains weren’t fully developed, which means there was a lot of look-good going on, plus some sweaty social anxiety.
But why do I feel so annoyed when someone claims “the words just flowed out of me?” Haven’t I had words flow out of me. They’re flowing right now.
I think I’m cranky because I am judging this writer on the quality of the words that are flowing. I base my judgment on a few months of listening to her read her work in the group. I question my opinion constantly. Am I qualified to judge? (hm.) Does my opinion matter? (no.) Am I simply imagining that her work lacks character development, plot arcs, tension, conflict, or danger? Who am I, a self-labeled cozy fantasy hack, to judge someone who obviously loves what she is writing?
All I can tell you is my brain wants to run screaming from the room when she starts reading her endless tome about boring humans excavating an asteroid somewhere in the vicinity of Mars. (I like hard science fiction, don’t get me wrong, and I really like the premise of people co-existing in space.)
Now that I’m ranting, let me really get into it. In the group, when we write from the five-word prompts, she always places her response in outer space, with the characters and settings she already knows so well. The self-righteous subtext to that sentence is “while I always write something new, on the spot, pulled completely out of my own ass in the moment, hemorrhoids and all.” Oh, sorry. Well, what can I say? The words just flowed out of me.
“Naturally stoned” and “The words just flowed out of me” are cut from the same cloth. The kind of cloth you get in the bargain bin at a going-out-of-business fabric store. It looks great when you get it home, but then you wash it and you see all the holes.
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P.S. I know I have a lot of typos and misspellings in these blogposts. I don’t spend much time writing, editing, or proofreading, and it shows. Sometimes I feel chagrined about my many errors, but honestly, my eyes and brain don’t work as well together as they used to. Rather than beating myself up for getting old, I’m considering these posts as less like snappy witty pithy snarky prose and more like therapeutic poetry. WYSIWYG. Thanks for being here.