Scheherazade ran out on the bastard, retired someplace temperate, and started writing flash fiction on her shins and forearms with Bic rollerball pens. Every day, she squinted into the rising sun and narrated on herself while taking fortifying sips from a big plastic cup, until every limb was covered in jagged handwritten henna, which she’d then survey with brief pride, and forget.

She’d take a swill from a slurry of Kristoff and Crystal Light and ice.  And another, and another, until the ice went from thick rocks to small, crispy meteoroids, and the liquid became more water than not, and she’d drain it and chomp on the ice and the sun would burst into swells of purples and oranges and fizzle into navy and she’d find she couldn’t re-read the story on herself even if she wanted to. Then, by morning, a crest of water’d crash over her passed-out drunk-ass and wash it all away.

—————-

“Battered wife syndrome my ass. I’ll haul out whenever I want, and that’s now, or later today, I’m serious.”

“…”

“I”m telling you, I got my bag right here and I’m putting my shit in it, and that’s it, I don’t need you to pick me up, huh uh, I’m out.”

“…”

” ‘Financial domination’, they called it on the hotline. Like I’m a child. Like I’m a concubine. Like money justifies the thousands of, of like, women who stick around watching their kids get slugged for decades. Why? Because they need the fucker for a check? Like I need a job first?”

“…”

“Yeah, they’re the ones telling myass to hold my horses. Get some financial security, get a safe space set up with a friend, you need a parachute. Legit, they said that. But, no, that’s not true.”

“…”

“I don’t need to work on a thing. I’ll eat bananas and sleep on the beach. My hair and skin and sand all the same color, all taupe everything, all warm and dusty-dry. I can live there, fuck it. I won’t get skin cancer from it, I don’t burn, not hardly ever, except at water parks. That’s it. Just me and the sloshing sound of the water and a pen. I’ll live, like, forever in the now.”

“…”

“It’s that practicality crap that kept me hanging around here in the first place.”

“…”

“What, no, I’m not drinking.”

—————-

Once you’ve written a story, it doesn’t belong to you, even if you get credit for it. It reads in your head like something said by a sibling: it has your patter to it, but not your essence. So why try to own it? Why own your babies like an animal hoarder or a parent of helicoptered children?

There’s about three ways that can go. One, you can cling to what you’ve done in the past, while slowly losing your grasp of it nonetheless, failing to identify with your prior self more and more. Two, you can jump hoops and ride unicycles in parody of yourself, trying to get your own tone right. To keep sounding like the person you once were. That didn’t work out so hot for James Patterson or Cormac McCarthy. Three, you can keep shitting work out, stories as disparate, ephemeral, and unfocused as selfhood truly is, while paradoxically claiming all those mis-matched productions came from the same source.

Or you can do it up real, that storytelling thing, and throw out your loose ends with each coming night. You can murder your children and feed rocks to your forebears until their bellies burst and you’re the only one standing. You can come up with really hasty climaxes and put all your energy into composing catchy pitches and premises that beguile the listener until he passes out in a drunken stupor on the dog’s bed in the living room at four AM before he gets the chance to go all surly and whale on you. You can get really heretical with it, if you want, and tell stories not for their craft, but to save your crafty hide.

—————-

If someone writes your ass-saving stories down, and retells them, you might become mythological. But it’s little comfort. Trust me: people think Scheherazade’s story is a love story, for chrissake, because she marries her would-be murderer in the end. People know all about Aladdin and Sindbad the Sailor’s adventures, but they don’t think about how it’d be to pace around the palace every day with the scythe hanging over your head, being forced both to bang your be-header and tuck him in with swash-buckling, cliffhanging narratives every night.

Sounds like a hell of a writer’s retreat, though. It obviously did Scheherazade’s career wonders. See her there, hunched over herself on the beach, ostensibly free— but still married, somehow, to her old adaptations. She clutches to the drink and the tireless unwinding of narrative, those vestigial structures that kept her above the crest so long. You can’t swim very fast with your water-wings on.

Watch her sip, and write, and perhaps learn: Abuse is the art of turning gifts into weapons.

WRITING TIPS

1. Don’t read lengthy, voluminous, biased, life-hacking, procrastinatory personal, idiosyncratic, redundant, unsupported, pedantic, pretentious, contradictory writing tips.

PRODUCTIVITY TIPS:

1. Close those LifeHacker tabs right fucking now.

ok sorry everybody I’ve been waiting to use that gif for a while

Law school suddenly got a lot easier. 

I hadn’t even worried about it, going in— the amount of work, I mean. “Law school huh? Lots of reading!” is what people always said when I told them it was my goal. Every major, every post-grad education, every career path has some stock phrase that people dispense when you announce your commitment. Before that had been Political Science, in undergrad— “Are you gonna be a politician?”. My college roommate was an Early Childhood Education and Psych double-major, so for her they said “You must want to be a mom!” and “Are you analyzing me RIGHT NOW?” respectively. 

The other stock phrase that comes out when you announce your marriage to Law School is about money. “You wanna be rich huh?” Natürlich. Except not really. I wanted to work for the ACLU, or teach pretty, sweatered Stanford kids about the Supreme Court. I wanted walk across the quad in the damp fall twilight, a newspaper folded and crinkling under my arms, a pair of sincere half-rims imprinting themselves on my nose, half my paycheck ferried off to NPR each month. Extravagant lifestyle, right?

 But what no one acknowledges, ever, is that back-breaking, ‘noble’ professions are harder to come by than lucrative, amoral ones. Take the college roommate, for example: Beth teaches at a cush-ass charter school in some cloyingly big suburb out of Pittsburgh. She tutors in the dens of chilly McMansions in the country’s second-wealthiest neighborhood, helping Adderall-soaked preteens cheat on placement exams for $75/hr. This after three years of applying to public schools in the sweltering pits of educational poverty: inner-city Chicago, then Cleveland and Detroit, then the Delta, then Arizona, then Alaska.

She got a gig in a one-room school outside of Nome or wherever the fuck Balto happened— 22k a year. Then salaries got suspended to balance the budget. She said that was fine. Halfway on her drive up to Nome (she couldn’t afford a plane ticket), Beth’s tires exploded on a pile of tacks. After two days in a motel in North Platte, Nebraska, she got a call from the school in Pittsburgh and they quoted her a sinful, decadent 40k salary. She replaced all her tires and turned the car around.

Most of the people who survive my law program’ll probably end up as shit-licking consultants. I’m not blaming them for their fall. The bell curve slices you up like that; there are only so many government positions, only so many professorships outside of MBA programs. You can die by straining to get a moral spot, or you can make double the amount writing up briefs for Silicon Valley behemoths that sue small businesses and work-at-home programmers for having an itty-bitty line of code that resembles something the behemoths’ employees wrote in-house. You can sue little girls for downloading Nicki Minaj videos off BitTorrent. You can help Fortune 500 companies take out hopeful life insurance policies on their older employees, help them target the ones who’ve been suspiciously making liberal use of their health insurance lately. 

It’s easy to justify. Say you have loans (you do, after all). Say you gotta eat. All else equal, hitch your wagon to the gunner who sat next to you in Constitutional Law during your second semester, pop out a few above-average bright kids with social anxiety problems. Now you can take whatever nasty, pavement-fellating consultant job you want with inner impunity. Consequentialism. Gotta feed your kids. Gotta send ‘em to school.

————

I’ll probably end up the same way, job-wise at least— I’ve no cute L-1 peer to court and no functional womb to justify my selling out— but for now I’m still dying to set the curve. Just once I want to be the outlier on the right end of the grade distribution; In my dreams, everybody wants to slaughter me to set the spectrum right. 

But shit’s hard. When I applied to SUNY Stony Brook’s law program, I didn’t even worry about that cliché that I’d have to read “a lot”. Whatever. I can read speedily and voluminously, and I’d never had a problem before. I spent summer after summer perched on a log at my family’s old cabin in Buttfuck Egypt Tennessee, reading. I’d whip through four, five adult books a day. Big books. The Stand. It. Thomas Hariss’ Hannibal Series (spoiler alert: he ate his sister). John Jake’s The Bastard Series, full of incest, pre-modern menstruation accoutrements, and generations of bloodied American wars. Every single VC Andrews story, tales of pale, ethereal kids locked in basements and attics, brothers and sisters and mothers and daughters compelled by lonely desperation to breech the world’s earliest taboos…

But Law School was a bitch. Lot of reading, no kidding. In L-1, I barely scrapped by, dead center of the bell curve. The majority is the most anonymous place to be.

First year of law school you’re banned from having a job, so (natürlich) I took one, working nights at a sleep research firm out on Long Island, videotaping kids with bed-wetting and night terrors. I set up the equipment and left them alone, watching the video feed via monitor while perched on a stool in the next room. Every night, I brought my law books and Court decisions, reams of yellow paper, thick highlighters, and leaky pens.

But I couldn’t peel myself from watching the children fidget in their beds, at first clutching their bears and dolls and sighing to themselves, then softly simpering in loneliness, then singing themselves (oh premature self-soothing!) to sleep, or reciting to themselves their well-worn favorite bedtime stories. Then they’d drift off and the real show would start. I’d duck into my book, but I couldn’t help but watch ‘em scream in their infant sleep, watch them roll and throw pillows and furniture and shake, thrash like corpses lifted up by cyclones. They were feral, and scared the way only something brainless can be scared; they’d knock themselves against the walls until shallow bruises settled on their little sides. I couldn’t get any reading done.

The only book that could tear me away from the pitching, reeling horrors of the sleeping kids was the Cambridge University Press Manual of Sleep Disorders, which some researcher at the firm had left in the waiting room for anxious parents to peruse. The disorders’ names and symptoms enchanted me. Dyssomnia. Somnabulism. Somniloquy. Exploding Head Syndrome.  Each one read like a curse from a spell book. 

After L-1, I had a compendium-like knowledge of sleep disorders and a C-average. That summer, I quit the firm and took an internship at a city prosecutor’s office in Jersey that pursued maximum sentencing for underage former gang members. Unpaid internship.

————-

Fatal Familial Insomnia is characterized by complete, 100% sleeplessness, excessive energy, lack of appetite, brief hallucinations, profuse sweating, pinpoint pupils, premature menopause, rapid weight loss, premature dementia, and swift morbidity. The course of the disorder is remarkably rapid and predictable to a frighteningly airtight degree: there is a four month onset where insomnia slowly seeps in, followed by a plunging descent into madness.  

It is the rarest of known sleep disorders, caused by a mutation to the protein PrP^Sc  and is passed hereditarily. It’s most closely related to Mad Cow Disease, as well as Kuru, the putative ‘laughing disease’ found in cannibalistic tribes, both of which are also caused by deformed, curled proteins in the brain, called prions. Only 40 families in the world have been documented to exhibit the mutated Fatal Familial Insomnia prion, with only 100 known carriers currently alive.

The course of FFI is incredibly short. After ten months, the sufferer is usually dead.

————

I remember exploring the family cemetery, in a valley by the cabin in Tennessee where I used to read. It was basically a yellowed field with sunken earth and rain-washed chunks of limestone sitting at angles as jagged as my Tennessee forebears’ few teeth. The ground was sodden and the muddy outlines of grave holes and coffins were fully visible. When I was done with my second or third book each day, I’d set out for the cemetery with a notepad and crayon for etchings, and a pair of aqua shoes on. 

The grave that fascinated me most was one of a Great-grandpa, Malus “Dumpy” Whitehead. He’d met me, before he died, but I’d been a one-year-old so it scarcely counts. His voice, they say, was gruff and deep as sin, and made me cry and pull away from him. A recovered-ish alcoholic, he was a gentle man.

My family wasn’t really in contact with our living Tennessee ancestors; we never went down till “Dumpy” died and we inherited the cabin. My grandma Jean, his daughter, was always curt about him. She’d learned to drive at six years old, steering him home from the bar, and that was all about him she’d offer.

All I knew (and know) is that he died abruptly, like all the Whiteheads. They found him thin and famished and crazed, nigh-comatose on his porch, raving and mad yet drug-free and clean as a whistle. 

So now it’s L-2 and I’m pulling ahead. B’s and A’s, and I haven’t set the curve yet, but I know where I’m headed. The trajectory is indisputably up. My marriage to the law, once soured and sexless, got re-ignited somehow, and I’m crackling over the classrooms like a small fire swallowing twigs.

Maybe it’s because I quit the job in the sleep center, my little cheating dalliance with another field. Maybe it’s the summer internship, where I sweltered in a tiny Newark office copying briefs and criminal records for forty free hours a week, sweating my way to wisdom. 

Or maybe, probably, it’s this reservoir of energy and time I have now; Bountiful time. I read every page and footnote and all the recommended and optional readings, sometimes weeks ahead. I gulp down two, three, four law books a day. Legal history. Political philosophy. Biographies of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Rehnquist. All the Supreme Court and New York Appellate Court Google Alerts. I read it all. Everyday. I seldom break for anything. 

They say law school is “a lot of reading”. They say it’s not just about smarts. They say you have to die by your reading eyes. They say you have to want it. This means making sacrifices. If something falls through the cracks, my grandma used to say, then it mustn’t have been very big.

I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep. 

Every story is either a roman à clef or a retelling of myth.  Unless you’re a god, your story shouldn’t be both. 

A feverish Dodola suffers from literal, clinical Logorrhea. From Craig Thompson’s Habibi. 

I used to work for a psychologist who did research on romantic relationship functioning. She recruited 19-ish-year-old college freshmen and sophomores who were in relationships and brought them into her lab, where she battered them with questions.  Or rather, I was obliged to do so at her behest.

One of my jobs was finding research subjects. I had to stand outside emptying Intro Psych classrooms, proffering flyers advertising the studies, whimpering “Females in relationships?” or “Males in relationships?” as the case might be. Since participation was voluntary and involved carting one’s significant other into the Psych Department’s dingy Stalinistic basement on a Saturday morning, the studies were paid.

Usually an hour of participation netted each half of the couple one $5 Chipotle gift card apiece. Sometimes, though, girls dragged their boyfriends to the lab in return for extra credit instead. Offering extra credit is the cheapest way to get an experimental sample, and de rigueur in psychological research. It’s why our results often can’t be generalized to a real-world sample of actual grownups. “Kids’ll do anything for a free point,” a colleague once told me.

————

In studies conducted during the fall, the average relationship length was something 22.4 months (actually that’s exactly what it was; I just checked the data). For studies conducted in the spring, it was more like 14.1 months.  This despite the fact that the spring sample was a few crucial months older. This was because many freshmen in the fall sample were still riding out the last waves of romances begun in high school. By spring of their first year, many freshmen had cheated, dumped, or broken up, then hitched their masts rapidly to someone new. This brought the average relationship length down.

————

The psychologist would videotape the couples’ interactions and later have sad undergraduate research assistants code the footage, first for verbal interaction, then for body language. The body language coding was conducted in silence, with conscientious senior psych majors hunched over keyboards typing listlessly as peer couples bickered and tittered wordlessly on the screen.

They bickered and tittered because it was important to have footage of the couples sharing a conflict. Often it was easy to provoke one— all you had to do was ask for a point of contention. There’s always one partner who’s quick to offer a real, imagined, or trivial issue.

 In some studies, however, the protocol involved creating conflict where none existed. It was actually a masterful manipulation, one of social psychology’s rare spurts of subtly brilliant mindfuckery. Both partners are brought into a small office and sat in opposite-facing cubicles a few feet apart. Each is given a survey packet and a dull, squeaky pencil. Most of the survey features demographic items and questions assessing the respondent’s narcissism and attachment issues.  Short, anonymous,  humdrum items that the average oversharing young adult doesn’t balk at answering.

But then, the last page of the survey: Both partners get a near-empty sheet of paper with a brief writing prompt at the top.

For one partner, the task is: “Please list what aspects of your partner you would change, if any.  Just write whatever comes to mind off the top of your head, and stop whenever you run out of ideas. When you are done, flip the booklet over and wait for your partner to finish.”

For the other partner, it reads: “Please spend the next few minutes listing every item in your home. Every piece of furniture, every clothing item, every utensil. Please try to be as complete as possible. The experimenter will inform you when time is up.”

So partner A, no doubt a loving, accepting person (or someone who wants to be so) lists one or two tiny things about their partner that they’d change. Or none, if they’re a saint or a fake. They flip their packet over, and wait… And their stomach plummets and their head goes soggy as they hear partner B scratching away at their paper, writing dozens upon dozens of things, hurriedly, furiously, for minutes on end.

Sitting in the cubicle, hearing their honey-bunny-beany-baby scrawling dozens and dozens of their flaws (they think), Partner A becomes the definition of crestfallen. Think of that word— like a family crest. A banner. A symbol of identity and belonging has crashed to the floor and shattered in that moment. Relationship psychology tells us that half of attraction is merely knowing the other person is attracted to you. Partner A gets fucking pissed.

Then I come in and ask the couple to fight.

———-

I quit working for that psychologist a few years ago.

———-

One of the items in the aforementioned survey is a measure of relationship closeness. Each partner is shown a series of Venn diagrams, each overlapping by various degrees, some barely cresting over each other, some almost mutually occluding. Select which represents you and your partner [click below to expand image]:

There is, by the way, no consensus on which Venn diagram is healthy and ‘normal’, and which are codependent or cold. The psychologist, when I worked for her, shivered at the heavily-overlapping circles. She was single. Every relationship psychologist I’ve ever known has been female, single, and very successful. Wait that’s wrong. I know a male one who works for Eharmony. He designs the algorithms.

I think the closeness circles are missing an option. This occurred to me when reading about Virginia Woolf’s book “To the Lighthouse.”  She diagrammed the plot of her book thusly:

No overlap. Just a thin corridor, which connects the first half of the book with the latter, set ten years apart. The middle decade of war, marriage, death, birth, and strife are spanned in a handful of slim pages.

How much overlap is healthy, and how little perilously thin? How thin can a canal be and still relay necessary supplies?

————

I have a friend with whom I exchange hyper-detailed, hyper-intimate letters that verge into emotional TMI territory, then swerve and crash right into my own over-educated pedantry. She wants to join a sex and love addicts anonymous group. Sometimes I’ll discourage her ardently, arguing against the whole psychologically untenable premise of love addiction, and then pivot on myself and instruct her to go to a meeting right away, all in the same conversation, with equal co-dependent investment in her doing what I say both times.

I even called relationship advice guru Dan Savage to ask him to tell me what to tell her to do. He didn’t call back, but I know what he’d say. I had pancakes with him once when I was in High School and have felt abidingly connected and loyal ever since. 

You’ve done it. Thousands of words of bleary academic jargonese. You’ve mastered the form. I.e., lots of hyphens. Lots of “effect” used as a verb, and “affect” as a noun. Lots of “he or she” and “him or her”. Very careful, very politically correct; damnably grammatically wrong. Only in the academy is “integratively” a word. Is “impacted” a modifier of anything besides teeth. No fragments allowed. I still don’t know what the fuck ‘self-complexity’ is.

Surnames and dates abound, with no modifiers. Papers are scrubbed of signs of gender, age, race, religion, and lack/ambiguity thereof;  The writing is free of ideology, safe from self-referential idiosyncrasy, neutral in tone, and missing signs of the authors’ immature, “individuating” body modifications and personal style/lack of style (see, e.g., Ottati, Renstrom, & Price, 2012).

Seriously, see it. Google Scholar that shit. Every word like water squeezed from a rock.

Four people will read your paper. Perhaps twenty will cite it. There is no shared variance between those two populations.

Under review. In press. Cited in (Eds). Passive voice is the law. Colorful adjectives are proscribed. Redundancy’s ok. It is unclear whether it’s correct to say “myriad influences” or “a myriad of influences”. Even now.

The temptation toward Lexilalia is not, shall we say, socially adaptive. Counterfactual thinking: In an equivalent time span, you can write (could have written) hundreds of thousands of puffed-up words of pretty (?) bullshit about “fake” things. I.e. Fiction.

Punctuation [sic]. Self-sickness purely an affectation. Both types of writing are fun, actually, for me the present author.

Cognitive dissonance can be a real cunt. Time is fungible. Are words?

Do you write to put air back in people’s lungs, or to knock it out?

From Habibi, by Craig Thompson.