The Mostly Weekly Dribble

I always thought that if suffered some major injury from derby that I would write a book with my new found free time.  I also always thought that my brain would be a bit clearer than it has been but things are coming around.  It's 27 more days until I'm supposed to start walking again.  I have to admit that I've been trying steps but when I said as much to my physical therapist I got 'the look.'  They're pretty good at 'the look' actually.  Must be all those rollergirls they treat.  At any rate, I need a distraction and this is it.  50,000 words which is about 1,800 a day until I walk again and you're going to find them here (unless my inspiration runs dry in which case you're going to find whatever you find and you're going to like it). 

The first time I tried to write a book the summer before I was a Freshman in high school.  I had just read the series "So You Want to Be a Wizard" and my friends Dakota and Caleb had both just written epic fantasy novels which I did not read but was very impressed with nonetheless.  This confluence led me to the conclusion that if they could do it, I certainly could do it and so my very own wizardry epic began (this was before Harry Potter.  I swear.)  I used to hide in the spare bedroom back in the corner of the basement with my clean and perfect black composition notebook and draw out character profiles in my very best handwriting.  This took forever because my handwriting is now and has always been absolutely atrocious but I wanted it to be good.  This was my new, secret and exciting calling. 

However like all of my new, secret and exciting callings it didn't stay a secret for long.  I proudly wrote out 40 single spaced typewritten pages and proceeded to show them to everyone who would look.  My Freshman English teacher promptly had me go to some sort of writing clinic where I sat on the tired chars of the Eagles Lodge in Kalispell, Montana with other high school students.  All of them were probably older than me and many of them certainly seemed to know what exactly you ought to be doing at writing clinics.  We went through the beginnings of my novel which was nestled inside a cheap but much loved purple plastic binder and agreed that it had great ambition and lots of potential.  Or maybe that I had great ambition and lots of potential.  One of those

It may have had potential but I had run up against a wall.  My main character was an orphan who did not know that she was a wizard (I swear!  Before Harry Potter!).  She was tall, blonde, athletic and smart.  Persistent too, but did not trust people.  She had a little sister and together they went from foster home to foster home.  Kit (the nickname for my girl) was very troubled and possibly into drugs.  She needed to hit bottom to discover her true identity.  The problem with that was that I was not troubled, just a tad neurotic.  I had never used drugs or taken a sip of alcohol and I lived a fairly Rockwellesque childhood with ballet classes, piano lessons and the occasional foray into childhood sports.  So while I was trying to write about Kit's spiral into some sort of suicide attempt it was clear that I in no way possessed the emotional depth to pull it off.  I was 14 after all.

So Kit went to go live on the bottom shelf of my bookcase in her shiny purple binder.  She's still there, actually.  Sitting in my parents house, waiting for someone to come along and let her find her true self.  I like to think that if that damn Rowling woman hadn't come along I might have come back and found a way to write myself out of my literary trap but no one wants to be a copycat, least of all me. 

I think it must have been the next year that I got my own email for the first time.  My family had gotten a home computer when I was 9 or 10 but the internet didn't come until later and even then there was some degree of uncertainty as to what one was supposed to be doing online anyway.   I remember spending my allocated time entering in URLs I found on cereal boxes which provided a temporary reprieve from creating folders within folders within folders strung out in long nests of codes meant to prevent my brother from reading my very secret private computer files which for some reason I did not elect to keep on a floppy disc that could be removed and hidden.  This was all until it was discovered that I could collect the email addresses from my various summer camp friends and keep up with them much more frequently than traditional letter writing had allowed.

And thus Peatty23@hotmail.com was born.  At the time, my brother desperately wanted a PT Cruiser because he had just gotten his license and the PT was clearly the height of coolness and fashion.  Instead, we rode around in a tiny grey '93 Mazda pickup just big enough to transport a few tubas or maybe a jazz band's worth of music stands for my dad's work.  I called this pickup Peatty in an effort to goad my brother with daily reminders about that which he could not have.  23 vaguely rhymes with Peatty and so I took this address and sent out a mass message to everyone I knew talking about my adventures in learning how to drive a stick shift.  I sent mass emails with these sort of self absorbed fun anecdotes on a more or less weekly basis and called it The Mostly Weekly Dribble.  So while I'm not saying that I invented the blog at sixteen, I am saying I got an early start.

I considered the Dribble to be the side show to my main event.  I still wanted to write fiction and Kit was still my character although her circumstances had changed.  I no longer read as much fantasy in high school as I had in junior high and so Kit needed a real life scenario to go along with her fabulous good looks, street smarts and witty charm but it seemed like every story line I came up with was too pedestrian for her impeccable strengths.  I wanted her to live in a city, but didn't know how to write city life and I wasn't sure what she was doing there anyway.  So instead I just wrote descriptive scene after beautiful descriptive scene where nothing ever happened but it was all set up just so and she was alone.  Always alone.

In the meantime the Dribble was wildly successful by my own measure although in re-reading some of them its hard not to come to the conclusion that they were written by a hyperactive squirrel.  At any rate, people seemed to respond to it and I got a chance to be funny and insightful which I love.  Here's an excerpt from June 7th 2002:

"So ya know what I was thinking?...........

Wouldn't it be terribly lonely to be a superhero?  I mean yeah, you get all the sexy babes, you get to save the world and everyone loves you.  But in the end I think it would be lonely.  Everyone would respect you, but I think because of that, no one would ever really know you.  I'd be lonely anyway.  In the same respect it's like some of those people at school.  Ya know who I'm talking about.  The kid everyone knows and likes.  The one who's always surrounded by a thousand people.  I think it's people like that who are the most lonely.  What's the use of having lots of friends if all of them are too in awe of you to really ever be close to you?  It's something to think about anyway.  Why did this come up?  Well we have this assignment in history to make up superheros.  It's our semester.  Yeah, don't ask....."

^this is the saddest thing I have ever written.  Why it didn't occur to me that I was that kid is beyond me.

Then college happened and for some time Kit disappeared entirely and the Mostly Weekly Dribble became a Mostly Perfunctory Series of Updates.  I was too busy being overwhelmed to be clever.  In my Freshman year I took a small honors course discussion course whose topic I think was intentionally vague and made more so by the fact that our professor wanted us to self direct the class into some area of the humanities for a journey of discovery and knowledge.  What we actually did was talk a lot about numerology.  There were only 14 people in the class and one of them only came once.  Her name was Alexis Kent.  We talked a lot about Alexis while she wasn't there.  We speculated on her proclivities and wondered aloud what sort of life she might be living while we were in the classroom.  Her number (based on her name in n numerology) was a 3 which meant that she had a propensity for fame.  I liked the idea of her.

Later that year I went to see the vagina monologues with some friends. After the play we were standing around chatting about what we might name our own vaginas (like you do).  Before I knew what I was saying I blurted out the first name that came to mind.  "Alexis Kent."
"You mean Alexis Cunt?"  Asked my best friend.  Raucous laughter ensued.  I decided right then and there that Alexis Kent was not the name of my vagina.  But she did stick with me.  She was Kit all grown up and so after college I began again to try to write her into my first great work of fiction.  I lived in New York City for six months after school and finally could write an urban story.  I had experienced some heartache, some adversity and some really bad choices and I knew that Kit, Alexis - whoever - could weather it better than I had.  She was my perfection, and that was a big part of the reason why she never came to be.

It was at about this time that I was reading a news article about a young writer talking about her memoirs.  She had started her writing life in fiction but never had much success.  Finally, after showing a story about a little old man to a friend of hers the friend looked up and told her that the story wasn't about some old man, it was about her.  That all her writing was about her.  That in spite of all her efforts to imagine something new she was really just writing memoirs and maybe she should stick to it.  I read this, looked up from my writers block and realized that Alexis wasn't real at all.  She was just the all the things about myself that I liked best without all the things that made me interesting.  No matter what story I found to fit her it would only ever be a shiny patina over my own.  The decade I had spent writing Dribbles instead of fiction wasn't a way to bide my time until I came up with the great american novel - it was my novel.  Will be my novel.

And so we find that I am 29 and writing memoirs in spite of my youth.  Not because of a sense of vanity (although I do plead the 5th in that regard) but because its what I do well.  I don't think in novels but rather essays.  27 days until I walk means 27 days of essays about my life.  I hope you enjoy it.