Posts Tagged ‘daily words’

SHARE #8: Force

THE PROMPT

The lovely Margaret Malone and Kathleen Lane invited me to come as an artist to SHARE recently. Previously, I had attended their showcase and been quite overwhelmed by the amount of cool stuff in progress around the space. Mark Russell was nice enough to be my plus one, but when we got there, we discovered the happy accident that actually the regular SHARE is a participant-only space. For two hours, everyone in the room is creating. You get the prompt when you come in the door, which this time was FORCE, and you just go. Mark is a writer too after all, so we decided to collaborate.

Our process was that we started from the idea about force as a rule or change forcing you to do something. Mark began to write satirical airport rules so I started to think of a narrative that would play off of the airport setting, and then we juxtaposed the two pieces without looking at what each other were writing.

THE PIECE
Italics for Mark’s piece, regular font for mine.

The night before I went home to the US, Matt and I got to the Budapest airport completely out of cash. It was a boxy white space with high ceilings and concrete pillars and looked Communist. It looked like it would have rules. We had enough cash to stay in a hostel when we got to town but had decided it would be more fun to stay up all night drinking, so now we had to sleep in the airport. It’s the kind of thing you do when you’re not really getting along. Going out had been Matt’s idea but got no argument from me. If I held a plastic cup of red wine and coke in a dark cellar bar blasting the Pink Floyd, it was easier somehow to ignore the way his brown eyes never seemed to meet mine, the way he always seemed to be looking away from me.

On behalf of the Federal Aviation Administration, welcome to the United States. Please remove any metallic objects, belts, electronic devices, toiletries, shoes or prosthetic limbs and place them in the eight ounce cup provided to your left. Please note that as part of the new American Culture Preservation Initiative, a fine of forty-eight dollars will be assessed on anyone discussing the Broadway production of Spiderman, sporting a tribal armband tattoo or reading a Harry Potter book if you are over the age of thirteen. I mean, really people.

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I’ve Been Here All Along and I’m Getting Tired

I spent the 4th through 6th grades with Mrs Schmidt at the Sacramento Waldorf school, which probably saved me from a life of delinquency.  She was German, and maybe that had nothing to do with it, but she was both very kind and very strict.  I was kind of a mess in the fourth grade.  I couldn’t pay attention and read under the desk constantly.  I never turned in homework and my handwriting was almost illegible.  My parents had just got divorced and my dad was back in Eugene, Oregon.  I missed him and everything else.  Mrs. Schmidt was somehow able to keep me on a tight leash.  Dear Mrs. Schmidt, you probably didn’t guess that when you let me into your classroom with the rounded wooden door handles that you’d be breaking up a fight between two girls in organic sweaters and me with the copper rod from eurythmics class.  But I’m all good now, I promise.  If I am, it’s probably due to you.  Here’s one of those times I tried your patience.

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Contingencies_Serbia_1996, a poem

Between 1996 and 1997, I was living in Transylvania and would frequently go down to Northern Serbia to visit with my boyfriend because he had a friend there in a small town in Vojvodina, a once autonomous region that  was faced now with the growing tension between Serbs and other groups.  You could actually feel it between people as the year went on.  We once jumped off a train a station early because a bunch of guys with shaved heads and steel-toed boots were acting jumpy.  One kept walking up and down the corridor and opening the sliding door of our compartment and looking in.  He was tall and looked big like you get from training.   The older lady next to me in a flowered headscarf and peacoat just looked straight ahead, not looking, so we copied her example and got off at the next stop.  This was in between the two Bosnian wars.  Dragorad was Serb, and over the year grew more and more nationalistic, which began to put a strain on our friendship with him.

But early on, before spring break and the debacle with getting kicked out of his friend’s flat in Novisad for saying the wrong thing about Clinton, we used to have long chats in the evenings in the rundown stucco house he shared with mom and brother who he took care of despite being only seventeen.  His mom couldn’t get out of bed.  She was ill somehow, in some way I never fully understood.  We would sit around the rough wooden table and eat simple food he cooked and smoke and drink coffee and talk and argue late into the night.  This is one of those evenings.

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Even If You Think No One Else Will See

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