Homework Assignment in which I Proposition the Instructor

There is an Ancient Babylonian Priestess (or, more exactly, the de-fleshed spirit of an Ancient Babylonian Priestess) in my head. I don’t know how she got in there, but she wont stop chanting or sloshing my brain-jelly against the rim of my skull. She must have slipped in along with Steven King, DFW, public radio, loud rap music, Anne Sexton, John Dunne, and shouting family members. Words and syntax orbiting my head like branch-bowing fruit. So sweet. So wormy.

But it’s only ABP that makes me put out like this. Poetry, prose, shouting on the street: “Heavy bearded like I’m Jesus, circumcised like I’m Jesus, unhappy like I’m Jesus!” Why do you do it to me? Why do I feel anxious if I haven’t written in a few days? Tapping out a note or two on my phone helps but not a whole lot – steam from a kettle’s whistle. I write in a furry, alternately grinning and scowling, running my coffee-yellow tongue over my smoke-yellow teeth. What do you do to me, ABP? What do I do to you?

I use her so the reader sees exactly what I see. We layer images and characters like geological strata, burying dinosaur bones way down deep as irrefutable evidence of my existence, both holy and secular. Crushing coal into diamond and diamond into dust.

ABP: This sentence doesn’t quite work.

ME: Well, I’ll put some pressure on it.

That’s all I ever say to her, while she offers me fatty grains until my liver swells and I am diced all to bits for foie gras. She feeds me the courtroom sketches of Puerto Rican bomb makers, Icelandic demi-gods caught in a world that doesn’t want them, and Freudian epistles to dead friends – and I digest them any way I can, with an eye towards clarity, dynamic verbs, endings where circumstances make the hero eat shit, and uncompromising control. If you do not see what I see, I will run up on you in a balaclava and hooded sweatshirt, armed with similes and neologisms, and slug it out until you surrender all aesthetic prejudices.

We want you to feel what we feel, which is often “caustic glee.” A little boy from Massachusetts, who liked to torture black ants, grew up into a young man who likes to make his audiences uncomfortable. I hope my sentences make you cough and my chapters give you emphysema. My goal is to put a phrase or an image in your head like that pimple you are acutely aware of right now. Make it last for months, red and infected, until the blemish becomes just another aspect of your beautiful face. You’ll miss it when it heals.

Maybe I’m painting ABP too forcefully as a Dismal Diana, a lone trick phony. We can be upbeat. Some days, manic. ABP snuggles up sometimes, whispers to me, and licks the ridges of my ear. Those days I write about friends, dogs panting on the beach, and simultaneous orgasms. We find that all our writing is equal parts joy and sadness.

I write because ABP doesn’t have another outlet and my ego needs constant attention. I write because business majors make me want to vomit into their Blackhawk snapbacks. I write because writers have better drugs that make me vomit into their black stocking caps. I write because I read the sentence below on a plane from Barcelona to Ireland and giggled to myself for the whole trip, wiggling my body side to side like a toddler gumming cotton candy:

“He clawed at his shirt and ripped it open. It was fastened with snaps and it opened easily and with no sound. As if perhaps the snaps were worn and loose from just such demonstrations in the past. He sat holding his shirt wide open as if to invite again the trinity of rifleballs whose imprint lay upon his smooth and hairless chest just over his heart in so perfect an isoscelian stigmata” (The Crossing: Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy).

I mean, come on; fuck me, right? It’s passages like that that make me want to trek to the homes of my favorite writers and conduct a couple blood sacrifices, which all conclude with yours truly eating the raw heart of a fresh-slaughtered goat as a symbolic stand-in for the elder writers’ talents. Writers love symbolism. ABP loves raw flesh.

I was uncomfortable with the idea of being lost before ABP gave my cloud of words an animal shape. Solitary kid lying on a grassy green hillside. She teaches me about me, exposing values and ideas I didn’t even know I had. She tells me stories that I steal from her. Then I steal intimate personal life-details from drunk and chatty college kids and offer those to ABP. I am very easy to talk to. The trick is eye contact and to actually listen rather than waiting for an opportunity to speak; people are uncomfortable with silence, it’s amazing what they’ll tell you to avoid it. My eyes say, “I want to know, please tell me;” the spirit behind my eyes says, “I want to know, please tell me.”

Hooray for the ABP because I don’t care about much else; hooray because now I feel comfortable in places I’ve never been before, surrounded by people I’ve never seen; hooray for exposing myself and her thoughts to random people (e.g. fiction seminars); hooray for that flock of moths tickling in my guts before readings or workshops; hooray for people who unabashedly point out my weaknesses.

This is a serious thing we do. I don’t make jokes – I don’t have enough white space for jokes. People tell me they think my work is occasionally funny, and in our #postmodern world that’s fine, but every word they’re laughing at I laid like a judge at sentencing. I don’t make jokes. This is a serious thing. We (you, I, me, and ABP) might be laughing sometimes but laughter is one weighty pigeon in the shooting gallery of narrative.

“Write in joy; edit in sorrow.” I wrote that down half a year ago. I don’t know if it’s useful. I tend to go overboard in terms of language on first drafts and indulge myself. If being brought up in the social-media-soaked world has given me one pearl of insight – besides, I fucking despise social media – it is to always write it down. That’s my bulbous marble (if I’m flattering myself) in its natural amorphousness. Then I chip away, shave, and superglue as needed during the editing process. Final product: Micky Angelo’s “Davidian Cyclops.”

But, that’s why I write: possession.

This homework assignment took a left field-type tone. I’m not sure how to end this. Goodbye? Until next Thursday? Do you, ABP, want to blow smoky O’s and pop X pills until one of us gets tic tac toe? Do you love me? Do you think you could ever love me?