Accelerate! Accelerate!

Lessons in creativity from Coach Monroe

I am officially in the home stretch of Corporate Rock Sucks. Did I say that last week? Well, it’s even more true now than it was then. I’m turning in the manuscript later this month along with all the photos, credits, and captions, so I’ve been eating, breathing, and sleeping SST these last few weeks, which has its up and downs. 

On some days I feel like a kid cramming for a test and I just want it to be over. It’s not unusual to start my morning dreaming of sitting in a coffee shop and writing in my notebook. Sometimes it’s a short story. Sometimes it’s a screenplay. (Right now the thought of jumping into a new novel terrifies me but whatever.) This isn’t a reflection on how I feel about the book, but a strange impulse to self-sabotage that lurks below the surface of every creative project I undertake. 

It’s the strangest thing. Back in my drinking days, this was achieved very easily. I’d celebrate every minor milestone—finishing a scene, completing a streak, or just writing a good sentence—by getting up from my desk and pouring a drink. In other words, I’d celebrate writing by not writing. Then the next thing I knew the weekend was gone, and then the work week would creep in, and I’d be sitting down a week out from my last writing session, looking for a way into whatever I was writing and often struggling to find it. 

I thought I’d left this impulse behind when I quit drinking but it wasn’t the alcohol that was causing my to derail my writing. No, that was the tool. It was my brain that was trying to throw a wrench in my plans. The closer I got to the end of a project the stronger this impulse became.

In the last week I’ve thought about movie marathons, going on long hikes, blanking out on video games. What is it about being 95% done with a creative project that makes me want to go chase butterflies? Fear of failure? Mourning the loss of something that lends structure to my days?

Thankfully, it doesn’t take long to snap out of it. These are feelings and feelings are ephemeral. What matters are the choices we make. Everything else is out of our control. I have the good fortune to be able to focus almost exclusively on the book right now. Still, the impulse to chuck my laptop off a bridge is there.  

In “Ode to Oldcorn” by Sam Lipsyte, one of my favorite short stories, there’s a bit where the high school track and field teacher, Coach Monroe, urges his charges to accelerate. Coach Monroe’s core belief is that the secret to the shotput, and thus to life, is that in the middle of the spin, at the moment when momentum begins to lag and gravity starts to do its thing, you’ve got to accelerate. Everything dies in the middle. You’ve got to accelerate! 

Good advice, but accelerating in the middle of the spin can be perilous. Here’s Coach Monroe: 

“Do not fall out of the circle. Your mark means nothing if you fall out of the circle. It’s a foul. Do it enough times, you foul out. Like you were never even here.” 

This golden nugget appears on page one of the story. If I stumbled onto a paragraph that good I would probably put it on the last page, which is why Sam Lipsyte is Sam Lipsyte and I am not. 

(“Ode to Oldcorn” doesn’t appear to be online but it’s in Lipsyte’s short story collection The Fun Parts. I originally found the story in a literary magazine called J&L Illustrated that I bought at Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard sometime in the winter of 2005. I know this because I used a receipt from a bar as a bookmark. Tucked inside the journal I also found a flyer I made for a reading at Skylight Books a few months later with Roy Kesey when our first books came out. 

Like you were never even here.

(BTW, you can purchase a signed copy of Big Lonesome directly from me.)

Meanwhile Corporate Rock Sucks is coming together nicely. I’ve been sifting through the transcripts of my interviews, searching for pearls I might have overlooked and finding them. I’ve been listening to SST tracks and having my mind blown all over again by some of my favorite songs in the catalog. I talked to my editor earlier this week about the first 100 pages I’d sent him and he loved it and was excited to read the rest. 

So it’s not all doom and gloom here at Casa Rulando. In fact, my editor told me he’d be on vacation on the day the book is due and gave me a brief extension. (I don’t need the extension. I don’t want the extension. I’ll take the extension.) There’s a lot of good energy swirling around the project and for the most part I’ve been able to tap into it, but now I’ve got to accelerate.

The Blood Oracle of Chula Vista

Do you remember when I donated blood at an old Foot Locker at the Dystopia Mall? A woman who worked for the Red Cross claimed she could tell a person’s blood type by the color of the blood. Well, I met her again when I donated blood a few weeks ago in the parking lot of a local casino. 

I asked her about this super power of hers and this time I got the impression that she was kind of joking but also kind of not. Like she was trying to keep her super power a secret. I felt like she was *this* close to leaning in and whispering, “Don’t say another word. Our lives are in danger.” 

I’m going to get to the bottom of this.

In any case, the American Red Cross tests all donations for infectious diseases, including COVID-19. When you donate blood you can get the results of these tests via the American Red Cross app, which is really helpful. Yesterday I finally got the COVID-19 antibody test results and it came back reactive. What does that mean?

It means the vaccine is working. It’s one thing to get the vaccine, but quite another to actually know I’ve got the antibodies in my system ready to do their jobs if it comes into contact with the coronavirus.

Fermin

Last week I received my contributor copy of The New Guard with my story “Fermin.” In fact, I received it on Roberto Bolaño’s birthday, which was cool because the story was inspired by a Bolaño short story but grew out of an experience Nuvia and I had in Mexico City. 

(If Bolaño-inspired stories are your jam, here’s an essay by Chris Power about how a Bolaño short story inspired his new novel, which I ordered faster than you can say, “The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.”)

Fermin was one of those stories that fell out of me. It was the first in a series of four or five stories that I wrote by hand. I entered the story in The New Guard’s fiction contest because Elizabeth Hand was the judge and a few weeks after submitting I learned it was a finalist and would be published in the next issue. I’d submitted the story to a few other publications and as I withdrew the story I realized it was the first time I’d had a short story accepted before it was rejected elsewhere. 

Magic, I tell you. 

The publication was delayed due to COVID-19, but it looks beautiful. 

Choose your fighter

The New Guard is available for purchase but caveat emptor it’s a bit pricey. I’ll leave you today with an excerpt from the story. This bit comes a few pages in and contains directions to a place where I guarantee you will find happiness. In my mind, I am going there now…

That evening I was roused by a piercing shriek from the street below. 

I put on my clothes and slipped out onto Avenida Alvaro Obregón. The flat was located between a bookstore and a churrería. The feeble sun had given up trying to penetrate the murk and the upper reaches of the sky had taken on an orange hue. Disaster weather. 

I heard it again: a noise like the whistle of a ghost train, only this time it was farther off. I hunted the sound, hoping it was not being broadcast from the back of a truck, but it came back to me immediately, and I thought of how sailors are taught to sound the ship’s horn at intervals in case the sailor on the vessel bearing down on them was blowing its horn at the exact same time and at the exact same interval. I remember reading about this in an almanac of the sea, a book that thrilled me as a child, and let’s face it, probably would again, wondering at the calamity that had made such a precaution necessary. Two ships passing in the night is a cliché; two ships colliding in the dark is an epic. 

It didn’t take long to locate the source of the sound: a sweet potato vendor who used a portable steam-powered stove to cook his potatoes. Marvelous. 

Pleased that my quest had come to a successful conclusion, I decided to document the moment with a photograph from my phone. As I lined up the shot I realized a video would be even better and with a flick of my thumb I was making a movie, a documentary to be precise, on the life of a street vendor at this particular intersection of space and time, but really I was just waiting for the man to blow his whistle. 

A businessman approached and explained that the man was a camotero, a maker of sweet potatoes, and would I like some? 

Before I could decline his generous offer he’d bought me an order, such was his desire for me to try it. I was mildly put out because this gentleman was interfering with my video, but then the vendor let fly with a blast of his whistle and a long, loud mournful sound drowned out the traffic noise and rose up and over the rooftops. A magnificent sound and the potatoes weren’t bad either, sweet but not too sweet, like so many things in this city.

I went back to the apartment and uploaded the video to share with my friends when I received a message from a man I didn’t know very well. In fact, I couldn’t really say how we’d become acquainted. When I saw his name—Boris—I assumed he was going to ask me for a favor, and I was right. 

“I know this is a lot to ask,” he wrote, “but I see that you are in Mexico City and I was wondering if you could look in on my grandfather. He’s been under the weather.”

“Under the weather, how?” I replied. We are all under the weather, are we not?     

“He’s old,” was all I could get out of Boris. “It would mean a great deal to my family.”

His family. I took down the address. “I’ll see what I can do.” 

“Thank you,” he wrote, over and over again, which added to my aggravation, so that with each repetition he pushed me further away from the likelihood that I would ever do such a thing.

“What is your grandfather’s name?” I asked.

“Fermin,” he said. “My grandfather’s name is Fermin.”