Deleted & Redacted: No. 0224
Unhinged thoughts and independent reading time find a home here.
There’s a book I started at the top of the year, I haven’t finished it yet, and I also know it’s a book I’ll be reading for the rest of my life. It’s Black Women Writers At Work, a series of interviews with prominent Black authors in the 80’s, including Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Maya Angelou. It’s so expansive but not on page count. The interviews ask the women about the craft and their process, their place in the movements, and open questions about the state of the Black American. I think it has already changed my life.
There’s something Gwendolyn Brooks said when asked about advice for writers and forming the craft. So simply she said, “go naked, go afraid”. It’s been sticky in my head ever since. The goo of it all sticks to my fingers, urging me to come to terms with the shaky and deeply clothed way I present many things, like anything remotely vulnerable in any of the two substacks you received so far. So I’m committing myself to practicing being naked and being afraid.
I have a friendship centered around secrets in a jovial way, so I’m always making sure I have one ready. I’ve begun keeping a list in my notes app, and I’ll share one with you, relevant as always: “I’m really afraid all the time, like a shaking chihuahua who barks,” so I’ve got that one down pat. As for naked, I am a lover of the nude. One of my fondest memories from the past year was the two days I spent at a nude beach in Lake Tahoe (on the Nevada side). I went afraid, and the nudity came later, incrementally. I went topless the first day, then fully nude the second. But that’s not what Gwen Brooks meant. She meant.. be vulnerable, something I have voiced a deep struggle with on account of probably.. being so afraid. To balance the two will take time, and maybe at the end of it, me and my writing won’t be something someone interested in pursuing has to wait out.
c’mon share with your friends maybe they would like this?
Notes App Highlight Reel
random excerpts from somewhere in my notes app for easy reading. These are quick ideas to read and see, and maybe even recognize the full range of human emotion.
February 19, 2023: Notes App Facade
(I edit my eventual obituary for Jimmy Carter frequently; hopefully, I will never have to use it).
Deleted Twitter Thoughts
What I think is fun about sharing my tweets in a shared notes app is that if I think only three are good, I won’t edit out what’s around them. You think they just fell out of a coconut tree; they exist within the context.
Bad Behavior
I was on a solo trip for eight days; I behaved very normally and was very chill for the most part. I did things I would normally do at home. I canceled a date at the last minute in Mexico City; I spent too much money on food; I fixated on an article of clothing that was too expensive, and I went to the store multiple times trying to convince myself to buy it - normal Kirby Page behavior. However, my last night in Cancun, which overall feels like a fever dream, cruise ship on land, I got a little reckless. This is a formal apology to everyone I chatted with; I had passively cruel intentions.
Was too busy manipulating trauma out of drunk Americans last night to realize I had one too many Sauvignon Blancs
But here’s the highlight reel:
I met a bartender from Brooklyn (originally North Carolina and she put the accent on thick, which comforted me), but she was with a mean gay who wouldn’t talk to me. Also, an old man tripped on her chair and fell in such a way that made my heart race, and I think that fall ended a period of his life. I think he may never be the same.
I met some kids from Iowa, and they had the elite wristbands and were telling me how much the tequilas cost. I thought the girls they were with were their sisters, but it turns out they were their fiancée (soon to be for one). That’s not the best part. They are gone and appear a very drunk white woman whose name is Robin, and she’s like, I’m hiding from my kids and my husband, so I clock her immediately, and I’m like, oh, you’re from Iowa, huh?
Then she tells me that her son is getting engaged tomorrow via dolphin and that the girl has no clue (she’s screaming this across the bar, so I think she has an idea). Then the fam comes back over, including her soon-to-be-engaged son, who has a problem with touching me, but now the sister is known to me as his fiancée, so I’m like, please stop. I don’t want any smoke (& I am not interested sexually, but from an anthropological perspective, I’m so locked in. Come back to my room; I will put you in the bathtub and ask you questions about the world).
At one point, Robin invited me to move in, and I am considering it. The bartender from NYC, after it became clear that I loved these people and wasn’t going to so much as mock them with my eyes, leaves. I go pee and leave my drink with Robin; never in my life have I left a drink unattended, but again, for science’s sake, I had to deal with the consequences if I wanted a truly independent variable. It was all-inclusive; I really could have just gotten another one. I will not be risking my life for science again.
Anyway, Robin has 8 kids, 3 from her husband's previous whatever, one of which children trashed the house she let them live in, and that’s causing a rift between her and her husband because every time she hears that motherfucker giggle on the phone, she wants to cuss him out. She bought the engagement ring for her son and also booked the proposal vacation, which broke something in my brain, but just so you know, the dolphin proposal was only $100. Lastly, she’s a nurse who smokes weed on the job and may be the love of my life. She had a huge knot on her forehead from falling down drunk the night before. I sat there and encouraged her to be the worst version of herself.
Things I would rather be doing instead of my job
Manager of a Buffalo Wild Wings in the Midwest and the proud owner of a Nissan Altima with a moon roof.
Being in charge of putting more niggas in the NHL.
Long Haul Driver but in a Honda CRV (also with a moon roof), and my delivery is just a box with a rock in it. I have a loose deadline for getting it to the destination, and I get paid $225,000 a year with benefits and unlimited PTO.
Being the wife of an out gay man.
Unfinished Piece of the Moment
This one is short and doesn’t have an ending because it needs editing, and I don’t know if it really says what I want it to. Maybe you can tell me!
Shame Loop
5 Minute Read
In a cold vinyl seat, in the warm orange-tinted light of a Chinese Buffet in a strip mall on the East side, he sat across from his parents. His father; oblivious and yet somehow still belittled by his mother’s incessant assaults. The remains of the dinner splayed across the table, a canvas of bright red rib missing just one bite, brown loose noodles of lo-mein swimming across the terrain with buoys of bright pink shrimp tails and chicken bones dotting its surface. His mother’s face stuck in a perpetual scowl that he doesn’t know how to save her from.
They are there for him to indulge his love of buffets. Often, when back home with his friends from college, he would rant on and on about how buffets are the backbone of American society. The rant serves as a defense mechanism to both support his true appreciation of the thing and to hopefully skirt the shame that this lot associated with it. It was clear, in look, attitude, and even direct response, that they viewed a buffet as something shameful and excessive. They didn’t see the allure of being able to imagine you were a king for a day, the world at the edge of germ-lined silver tongs, because they had no use for imagination when reality could sustain them for longer than a day.
The server came over to drop the bill. The price of this meal for three, with no sodas, just water as always, would barely cover his portion of dinner and one or two crisply chilled martinis with his friends in the city. Floating his eyes back at his parents, reaching to pay the bill, he felt the shame in the excess of his life.
The fortune cookies slide across the table as each person reaches to uncover their destiny.
Dad goes first, only finishing half of his cookie before tossing it into the growing sea of scraps. Dad’s fortune finds a home on the table, unread. He goes next, devouring the cookie first, stale like a communion wafer, but it’s the right thing to do if he wants the fortune to come true. He read it next, and it was promising. He would soon receive a fortune. He had a wave of doubt for a second, hoping it wasn’t the start of a time loop keeping him attached to that vinyl booth forever, but it passed. He had something he could share to bring air into the thick silence at the table.
“Looks like you should play the numbers,” his mother offered, slightly lifting the scowl.
He reached to grab his father’s fortune to measure his luck against his own. His fathers read something about steering a boat steady and avoiding rocking it for his own sake. Looking at his father, sitting next to his mother, he felt the comparison strengthened his case. Dad didn’t read his fortune because it was just a mirror of reality. He reasoned that his fortune could be a door to cross into a new reality rather than the one he was constantly straddling.
On the way home, his mother pulled into a Texaco, to the surprise of the other passengers.
“The numbers,” she reminded.
She demanded the two go in together so the father could show the son how to fill out the numbers manually. Of course, he would have no knowledge of that; it wasn’t quite his world, and his father, who plays the lottery weekly, would be a great help. Walking in, after blinking away the momentary shock of the fluorescent lighting, he saw group of people near his own age, buying beer for the night, he recognized a girl near his age. He and his father shuffle over to the lottery booth. Dad is unclear and mumbling about his purpose while shuffling for his reading glasses. He lays the slip in front of his dad and pulls out the fortune for reference.
The group of his so-called peers begins to liven up an argument over what seltzers they want for driving around to look at Christmas lights. He glances up briefly at the familiar face to see if she also caught the recognition but does not give a strong enough position in gaze or time to alert her of any desire to interact and give attention to the process unfolding in the lottery booth before him. He failed at that and was met with a questioning glance and immediately felt silly and naive. How could he explain away the shame and excess of playing into the idea of a purposefully unattainable jackpot? It was just a way to play at the idea of being a king forever, crossing the threshold into that next reality, two feet firmly planted instead of awkwardly straddled in and out. It was too much to explain away, probably; he quit his gaze and answered a question his dad posed about the sheet, a worthwhile distraction point.
Dad had filled the numbers in wrong, the tiny slots too much strain on old eyes this late. He gently filled them in again in silence, careful to provide soft eyes to convey to Dad that the ocean was steady and he could steer easy. He finished the numbers and went to the counter to pay as the girl and his friends exited. He glanced their way as he opened his wallet, to be met with a chorus of falling coins he had to scramble to pick up as they bounced against the tile. The commotion elicited a turn of heads as the door closed. After scavenging and sacrificing a few coins to be lost forever, he paid the three dollars needed to finish the transaction, took the promise of a fortune, and stuffed it in his jeans pocket.
<and this is where an ending would begin to exist>