Today's featured article on Wikipedia, as pointed out to me by friend Marshall, spotlights Stede Bonnet, 18th century marauder of the seas, and possessor of one of the baddassiest names ever given to man. The article also features one of the greatest sentences ever constructed by man: "Because of marital problems, Bonnet turned to piracy in the summer of 1717."


(The version in the full-length article is perhaps even more edifying, if lacking the precise graceful punch of the above: "Because of marital problems, and despite his lack of sailing experience, Bonnet decided to turn to piracy in the summer of 1717." (Emphasis added.)

Things didn't go so well for Stede after that, either. Maybe he just shoulda done what Joe did...

rocking chair sheep

“I love clothes. I love hats. I love dresses. I love jewelry.”
The woman in, I think, a purple hat, exclaims these words into the camera, her image grainy, her voice breathless with a singularly vapid enthusiasm. She sounds like a reality-show contestant-to-be, only it’s 1985 and so that’s not true. And this is Pittsburgh, land of a thousand local business catchphrases, (“It feels so good, it’s got to be a dream (Dream Waterbehhhds) It’s got to be a dreeeeam,”) but no one’s idea of a fantasy-setting in which to make ridiculously beautiful people do ridiculously terrible things. Few ridiculously beautiful people live in my hometown.

Ask anyone from there, though, who watched reruns of Laverne and Shirley on even the most irregular basis between 1983 and 1987; the purple-hatted woman and her pitching on the ad for the Pittsburgh Fashion Institute, are legend.

And lately, I feel like I’m channeling her. My drive to create, create, create, has amped itself up in the last few days to this extreme that feels like it has nothing to do with me. It’s just this visual-aesthetic thing, this enhanced appreciation of pretty things, specifically, pretty manmade things. This happens every now and then and it takes the form, symptomatically, of: Finding excuses to go to the thrift store and pore through racks of musty old dresses from decades when women had tiny waistlines. (What to attribute that to: restrictive underwear or restrictive eating or some combination thereof?) I try to zip them; I can’t, but I still feel as though something’s feeding me in that moment. Just to appreciate the gorgeous cut, the material; the way the peter-pan collar lies just so across the gingham, the way the pearlescent buttons are spaced out at perfect intervals along the red wool, is weirdly satisfying.

The other night, I couldn’t sleep, Henshaw. I had that head-is-a-balloon feeling you get when you’ve taken cough syrup, only I hadn’t. I couldn’t sleep and my head was disconnected from my body. I was envisioning, suddenly, a wallpaper mural I’d had beside my bed as a child. All in colored-pencil-like hues: a giant tree surrounded by a group of anthropomorphized animals, all equal parts comfort and menace. There were four or five animals in that mural, but all I recall is the old sheep sitting in a rocking chair, knitting her own wool and looking bemusedly out over her spectacles at the goings-on of the other beasts. Also I recall the Cheshire-like blue cat with the big, yellow eyes sitting up in the highest branch, four feet over where I lay in my bed. Definitely scary.

I heard on this great science show on NPR called Radio Lab that we don’t actually file our memories away. As it turns out, memories don’t exist as discrete objects in our minds, even hidden away as such. Rather, each time we recall something, we are, in essence, re-creating that moment in our minds. We are painting those scenes even as we’re remembering them. Along the same lines, the less often we recall something, turns out, the more likely we are to recall its details in an accurate way.

It had been so long since I’d thought of that mural. And now, as suddenly and surely as it was coming back in my mind, I wanted to re-create it, or see it again, and suddenly I had all these other ideas of associated images, too, and knew that I had to put together a diorama. So I got up and sketched out ideas and the next day, spent forty bucks at AC Moore and various secondhand stores around town. Then, that night, I sat down to try to sketch the sheep lady, and, although that mural exists nowhere on earth and I will never see it again, the final drawing gave me the shivers. I swear I can't draw, but something in my past reared up and put to paper, exactly, that rocking chair sheep. An experience eerie as hell, just like all those nights I spent lying in bed as a child and tracing the whorls in her wool with my finger by the yellow hall light. Creepy, but so satisfying.

I have no idea why I ever want to do this craft-thing. Why, sometimes, I must turn to the glue gun and the vellum, the decoupage and the sewing machine. It’s not like any final product I craft is earthshatteringly amazing. The desire is connected to the end-product only in the most distant way. It’s the doing, the way the painting and the cutting and the application of plastic blue gems to a thick sheet of foam board, constrict time, make it drift off completely, in the most satisfying way ever. What can I say. I love paints. I love buttons. I love Mod Podge. I love scissors.

Ways to Procrastinate in the Morning

After making your To Do list for the day and checking boring, university and work-related emails, you need more tea. Tea to Write By. Go into the kitchen. Pick up fabric tape measure on the way to play with your cat.

Spend five minutes playing with the cat by dragging the tape measure on the floor while he stalks and pounces. This is creative play. This is acceptable. Cat loses interest before you do, however, and soon you’re just a person dragging a tape measure around her house all alone; you realize you are 1. not sleeping in 2. nor reading anything inspiring 3. nor writing, but rather entertaining, not your cat any longer, but yourself with a fabric tape measure at 9:00 a.m. on a Tuesday.

Heed the call of the boiling water. As you stand there, putting teabag, then hot water to mug, tape measure strung around your neck, you realize anew that you are alone in the house. Recall all those episodes of Six Feet Under, which would begin in just this sort of way, all disquietingly-innocent-enough: A humdrum person doing her quotidian activities, only to land herself in some freak accident: getting choked on a fabric tape-measure, for example.

Get back to your desk. Look up “quotidian” to see if it has quite the ring of the mundane that you intend.

Tell yourself you’re not going to check your frivolous, personal email. Check your email.
But your connection’s too slow. Hit Stop. This is a sign. You should be writing.

Look at the cat as he creeps through the room, around the rug that’s too new to yet be trusted. What were his New Year’s resolutions? When you went back to the UU church for the first time in nine months or so the other day, the minister was talking about Tomorrow’s-Gonna-Come-No-Matter-What; How-will-you-arrive-there? And you were enjoying it, the metaphor about being out to sea in your little Schooner (the Schooner of Life), no land in sight, but that land, ho, ho, it would come, yes indeedy. Then on the drive home, the metaphor started to annoy you. Or the fact of it. Because, like many UU sermons you’ve attended, this sermon was: Pick a metaphor and find different ways to riff on it for twenty minutes.

Not to say it wasn’t useful. And the meditation was nice. And the moments of silence and the singing. (Except when they tried to go all gospel for one number. There is nothing worse in this world than a roomful of white liberal people trying to sing gospel music. It makes the heart fold in on itself.)
The people are always nice there, though they’re all your parents’ age; oh god when will you meet someone your age in this town not somehow connected to your freaking MFA program?? Or just some new, real friend, would be nice. But oh well.

So worn is this thought, it’s your autopilot, it’s your I Like Chocolate statement of fact for these three years; sometimes the shoulder-shrug comes first, it’s so emptied of meaning. Like shampoo when you say it twenty times: shampoo, shampoo, shampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampoo shampoo shampoo shampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampooshampoo.

Shampoo, Henshaw. Okay, I’m gonna get to work for real.