A View: a Mini-Trenches Manifesto

I was going to go for a walk, no destination in mind, those kind of childhood walks we took before someone taught us that everything should only be done for a particular purpose. One of the spiritual gurus I fan-girl out on sometimes, Teal Swan, is a big proponent of these walks, and she looks fabulous all time. In New Bern, one doesn’t have to walk far to encounter something pleasing to the eye, or haunting to the eye, or otherwise notable to the eye. This place was founded in 1710. It’s got some old bones to rattle.

 I pulled on shoes and sunglasses and set out for a walk with the following rule in mind: I will not predetermine my destination. But somewhere in the recesses of my noggin, I knew I’d probably walk down Pollack St. and poke through the English and French gardens at Tryon Palace (North Carolina’s colonial capital), maybe snake through quaint downtown storefronts and restaurants, peek in at galleries (of which there are an unusually large number for a town of 29,000 people), poke around graves in the 18^th century cemetery, end up down at the waterfront and read clever names of boats passing by, or look for turtles sunning themselves on the rocks, or try to get close enough to the mallards to see the colors of the feathers on their heads up close, because its iridescence reminds me of gasoline floating in puddles and it weirds me out that something found in nature could remind me of something so unnatural. Or I could watch seagulls eat something disgusting washed up in the pools on the banks of the place where the Trent and Neuse Rivers meet and make way to the Atlantic Ocean some miles east. It’s not a bad place, aesthetically speaking.

While I had no good reason for my walk, no appointment to make, no errand for which I was responsible, I know that when I take off on these spontaneous wanderings, I’m going to think about writing. More likely, I’m going to think about things that I want to write about. Most likely, I’m going to think about my life as if I weren’t the one living it, but the biographer of the person living it . . . the one making a distant observation of this character that is living this life. This is a characteristic I’ve finally realized about myself. I feel like my life has been lived and simultaneously constantly observed by two different people. I’ve probably said this before, and it’s something I’ve certainly examined in my writing for years, but something human I’ve learned this go around is that I should be trying to reconcile the person who gets up in the morning and does the things she does and the voice in my head that is constantly remarking on those doings. On my walks, I ultimately start thinking about my daily living while concurrently constructing some story around it to discern some grander meaning of life. If at this point in my explanation, you find yourself wondering: “What the hell is Jacks going on about now?”, rest assured, you’re not alone. These thinkin’ walks sometimes turn my head into an MC Escher drawing. My brain, examining my brain, and from a distance also designing some story that makes my brain connect to the brains of everyone in the universe. There’s some brain-on-brain criticism that goes on, a lot of René Descartes I think, therefore I am happening.

Thinkin’ walks tend to start with an itch in my soul, something I need to let percolate without the distractions of housework or cat poop or mail-to-be-opened nonsense that I typically allow to interfere with my creative life. And today marks the 4^th day characterized by my sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, waiting on news from a job interview last week. I feel like a homely, hope-filled gal waiting for a prom date to call. If I could get out of the house, I could stop feeling that way. I could also shift my focus from how deeply silent my apartment is, void of the children chattering, the background blue buzz of the television, the sound of Clay’s guitar from the porch. I’ve been here for almost a year, and still haven’t grown accustomed to the quiet. I miss my kids, who are starting another year of school in Columbia tomorrow, and I’m shattered inside that Mommy isn’t there to be a part of that. I miss my husband, who is surely sleeping in a Marine Corps barracks in Iwakuni, Japan right now, our time difference being exactly 13 hours. He’ll call when I’m nearly asleep, when he’s just beginning his day. 

His deployment came as quite a surprise, although it certainly shouldn’t have, and it somewhat derailed a lot of our plans—moving to a larger place, kids relocating out here before the school year began. At the same time, a lot of these plans have been delayed by my inability to find a full-time job in Eastern North Carolina. The closest large city, Wilmington, is still an hour and a half away. This region of the country is speckled with small, old coastal settlements, most of which haven’t grown much past the 50,000 mark in terms of population. New Bern is probably called “the city” by residents of the numerous tiny towns that surround it, most of which have populations under 1000. There aren’t a gaggle of opportunities for employment for a gal like me. I’ve been working in higher education in one way or another since 2002. I’ve been teaching since 2007. I know books. I know literature. I know writing and love and music and people and world events and pop culture and joie de vivre, but that’s about where my skill sets end. It’s been a struggle. The thinkin’ walks help me avoid an overly-critical shame spiral that ultimately results in my needing a glass of wine and a soft bed to just sleep through a real sad patch of time, call a mulligan on that day and start over again the next.

I miss my girlfriends and having people to go to lunch with, I miss my writer friends, who remind me why I call myself a writer, and why I hold onto that identifier.  I miss having a garden, I miss my backyard and my bathtub. And if I had to stay in this apartment one more second, I was going to veritably lose my shit. I had to scratch this nagging at my ear, the pulling of my shirt tail to the world outside to get out of my inside headspace and into my outside headspace.

 I made it to the stairs leading to the ground floor of the building and remembered that tomorrow was trash day, so I retreated to the kitchen again to swing the bag over my shoulder as I headed downstairs. I figured as long as I was taking my trash down, I should roll the city garbage cans to the curb. And while rolling them to the curb, sweat already beading on my forehead in the Carolina August heat, I thought that while I was taking the garbage out, I should take the recycling out, too, just to get it out of the way. Certainly after a long, sweaty walk, the last thing I would want to do is take the recycling out. So I consolidated the recycling materials in the three different bins our building is allocated. And while I was dumping my neighbor’s bin, one of his chew-spit cans tumbled out of the bin and spilled down my leg, gooey brown slime sinking into my shoe and between my toes. I gagged and ran back upstairs, hiking my leg up into the kitchen sink, shoe and all, to scrub his chewing tobacco refuse off my toes.

Those who know me intimately know that sometimes I get the gags from things that gross me out. Bear Grylls eating giant grubs and drinking liquid squeezed from elephant poop have sent me to the toilet for a vomitus review of my lunch. A story a girl told me once about a Japanese porn involving eels and a funnel and her words made me ralph, sight unseen. . . I threw up just imagining the image. I could watch someone having brain surgery or a hip replacement, I can stomach blood and guts and gore, but there are things in this world that are just Jackee-Bugaboos, and it turns out that having the contents of a spit can splashed on me is one of them. While I upturned the whole bottle of dish soap, indiscriminately squeezing it on my foot and lower leg, the underlying aroma of sun-baked tobacco spit hit my nose and pressed my bugaboo button, and I leaned forward and puked into the sink.

I was hot and sweaty and dirty and I’d already puked, and I hadn’t even left the house yet. This is when that veritable shit-loosing happened. 

In a cranky temper-tantrum fit, I dried off my leg and ripped off the dress I was wearing. It wasn’t likely sullied with the spitty mix, but I didn’t even want to chance smelling that smell again. I pitched it into the laundry and flopped face-down on my bed in my underpants. The brain I had planned on having a hearty think with started in on me . . . everything sucks, I miss everyone, I hate this town, I’m sad, I’m lonely, I miss my family, I can’t get a job, my education is useless, I’m impoverished, I’m a terrible mother,  I’ve made so many mistakes, I’m a shitty person, I regret being a shitty person, I can’t do anything right, I’ve failed at everything, I’m an idiot, I can’t even go on a thinkin’ walk without it getting all screwed up. . . you get the idea.

I folded my hands on my pillow, rested my chin on top of them, and stared out the window. This vista from my little apartment gives the onlooker a view of the Mexican Bakery across the street, and the AT&T cell phone tower just beyond it. I noticed that if I squinted my eyes, the tower’s design could look like that of any other tower. If my eyes crop a little square of that otherwise ugly thing (and sometimes reminder that everyone everywhere is spending way too much time on their phones), my brain could pretend it was a much cooler tower. And then I remembered something: A few years ago I spent a couple of hours on a Parisian real estate site, gazing through the monitor at quirky studio apartments in neighborhoods like Montmartre, imagining how amazing it would be to have just six months of peace and quiet in one of those little domiciles, a place of peace and quiet where I could get some real writing done for just a little while.

It’s representative of how my life seems sometimes like a giant practical joke I’m always playing on myself. Back when my life seemed ‘normal’—house, kids, husband, groceries, garden, school activities, and work and work and work—I longed for just some time to get my shit legit, to richly wallow in my writey-hole, to have no other responsibilities to tend to so I could just dive into the world that surfaces when I sit down with a pen (or keyboard, whatever) and let things unfold for me. Here I was, suffering myself the slings and arrows of my own relentless criticism, and it’s like the universe was telling me, “But remember that little Parisian apartment you wanted with a view of the Eiffel Tower? Remember that time you wished you could just write for a while without distraction?”

I got an email from the kindly hiring committee. They said I nailed the interview. They said it was a delight to have met me. However they have chosen a candidate with more experience with non-profit accounting. The thing is, I knew this already. I just knew that though I’d pretty much smoked that interview like I was getting paid for it, I knew that it wasn’t right for me. Besides, I’d read my tarot cards three times, each time getting the same answer that this particular job is not for me, and that I knew that I should be doing something else. 

Prior to the interview, I’d written a Facebook post saying something like: “Dream Job Interview. Wish me luck.” But to tell the truth, no job is my dream job. I dream about not struggling financially, I dream about finally having all of my family in one place, I dream about being fulfilled by the way that I spend my days . . . but that job, that’s not my dream. I don’t dream about a one-hour commute to-and-fro every day, I don’t dream making sure my tattoos are covered lest someone think I’m some sort of trollop, I don’t dream about spending 40+ hours a week working to just have some leisure time, none of which would be spent on writing. These are not my dreams. I dream about getting paid to be myself, I dream about saying things, writing things that people find meaningful. I dream about wearing whatever I feel like wearing that day. I dream about work and pleasure not having such a definitive border between them.

The impetus of starting a blog was to just write the things about the human experience that I notice, to tell the same stories that I would tell to my friends or whoever is willing to listen. It was writing I could do between bigger writing projects. I feel like at this point I owe you an explanation about the title of this blog: Hot in the Trenches. I've been asked, but never really publicly addressed it. 

 “In the trenches”, draws upon the connotation of battle, because it seemed everyone I knew was fighting some kind of battle, enduring some long war with themselves and with the lives that they are living or the choices they make, and I thought that my own battles, my own ongoing war, might resonate with someone. When someone says: “It’s hot in the trenches” they’re indicating that the battle is raging, that heavy fire breathes down the necks of the grunts on the forefront. We are the grunts on the forefront, trying to figure it out as we go along. But I hope to evoke the double-meaning of the word ‘hot’. Hot like sizzling, hot like sexy, hot like “I know it’s shitty in here, but we all still look fabulous.” 

I want the entries of this blog to remind everyone that though we are all in battle of some kind or another, we can still be fabulous. We can still be who we are. We can still feel joy, and wonder, and marvel at the sheer humanity of everything around us. We can find delight in things just outside our window, even if they weren’t the things we expected. That’s what I want to do with these little things I share with you. Despite the heat and humidity, despite the tobacco spit running down my leg, despite the fact that my long thinkin’ walk didn’t get me past the end of my driveway and that my once fantasized-about apartment doesn’t overlook the Eiffel Tower, but an AT&T cell phone tower, despite the fact that I’m still unemployed, I somehow manage to delight in the absolute weirdness being a human allows.

When I’m feeling bad about myself, particularly if I’m feeling bad about myself as an artist, I watch “The Mindscape of Alan Moore.” If you haven’t seen it, even if you aren’t a typical fan of the graphic novel genre, I still highly recommend watching it, especially if you are a writer or artist of some kind. It serves as a much needed pep talk in those dark nights of the soul we all traverse.

With regard to traditional employment, Moore says this: “I found myself working at a skinning yard and tannery . . . I got expelled from that job after a couple of weeks for smoking dope in the men’s room, which wasn’t improving my career curve any. The next job I was able to get was that of a toilet cleaner at a hotel, and it more or less went downhill from there until I finally ended up as a comics writer.”

This took the sting of the job-rejection away, a little. Moreover, it’s an encouraging reminder that entering into an endeavor like being a writer might look like a battle. But I have a room of my own, with a hilariously gross misrepresentation of the Eiffel Tower just beyond, a constant reminder that I can create my own reality and play practical jokes on myself from somewhere in the ether. I have nothing but time to write until something else happens. So keep reading, I’ll keep writing. And remember that despite your battles (and you have them because we all have them), stay fabulous. Stay hot. Let it roll over us in so many waves, reminding us we’re alive.