Gut feeling

Here's the weirdest thing to happen to me during the pandemic, thus far.

I still have a landline, the same number I've had now for probably 25 years. I don't check it as often as I should, but it comes in handy for emergencies and international calls (Holly, I'll call you in about 9 hours!). I checked my messages tonight, and...there was one from a weight-loss prepackaged food clinic emporium, the one that rhymes with Denny Plague in this case. A local storefront I'd never been to; the manager greeted me by name, hoped to get to know me better.

I have struggled with my body and my body image as long as I can remember, since long before I had anything to worry about on that front. The first time I remember seeing myself in a photo and thinking "ugh, fat," I was six years old. So when the weight-loss industrial complex really kicked off in the 80s and 90s, I was in. I tried pretty much any of them you can name. Canisters of shake powder three times a day and "a sensible dinner." Public weigh-ins and video classes that advised me to park further away from my destination. A Xeroxed diet that purported to be from "the Heart Association," given to me by a beloved middle-school teacher, where you exclusively ate certain foods on specific days of the week. Day 4, I remember, was skim milk and bananas, nothing else. The incredibly expensive but at least medically sound Fat Club program at my old Fancy Gym. Couch to 5K. Richard Simmons had his own show for a while, and I watched that with my mother. Oh, I did Denny Plague. At least twice. All of 'em worked, until they didn't. Until I just couldn't look at another beef-soy-blend burger puck, reconstituting itself in a little plastic tray (just add water!). Until I lost a job, got a job, quit a job, went back to school, graduated. Until my dad died and screw it, comfort me with apples, ideally in a crisp. Put some ice cream on it, because this is a short ride. I can't tell you how much money I spent on DiEt PrOgRaMs over 30 years. Ten grand? Twenty?

The last time I was a Denny Plague regular must have been about the year 2000, because I can remember starting my first contract role at Microsoft, and trying to socialize during a team lunch...while microwaving a branded can of about six tortellini in an abundance of too-sweet tomato sauce. So, it's been two decades. In that time, I've learned to cook, gotten more active than I ever imagined being, and made peace with my body, with the awareness that if I am stronger and lighter, things hurt a lot less. I didn't know Denny Plague still existed, frankly. I certainly haven't said its name three times in a mirror, or in front of my iPhone or Mark Zuckerberg. I believe the location I went to, two decades ago, has been torn down.

But my name, and my phone number, and Polaroids of my 30-year-old ass--which was definitely smaller than my current ass, as a matter of fact--are still in a file somewhere in their corporate headquarters. And someone, in 2020 pandemic-wrought, economically shattered Seattle, is trying to get me back on the books.

The even greater irony? I have...lost weight, during two months of isolating at home. About six pounds. I'm so thoroughly conditioned by the whole industry, by a lifetime of being told it should be HARD, and PUNISHING, and YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF, CHUBBS, that I'm embarrassed or ashamed or self-conscious to admit it, somehow. I see a lot of online fretting about gaining weight, in this unprecedented, stressful, miserable time, and I am right there with you, folks, baking reams of banana bread and mainlining cookies and cobbling together weird casseroles out of the pantry. I can only assume that it's the elimination of my daily mocha habit that's affecting the scale...that and my lack of access to the Snack Shelf at the office. The fact that grocery shopping is now a strategic, twice-monthly event for which I must mask up and schedule an appointment in an app if the place is too full. The way my total inability to adhere to a routine has me eating maybe two meals a day because what month even is it, man, and if I never wash another dish it will be too soon. (The dishwasher is running now, as I type. And the sink is full of "overload," so there will be more dish washing in my immediate future.)

I don't know where I was going with this. Just a strange, strange voicemail FROM THE PAST, to listen to late on a Saturday night. The old ways are gone. The old ways are right where you left 'em. The old ways would like you to come in for a consult, see if they can help you out with a 4-ounce can of tortellini. They can offer curbside pickup, so you don't die of the 'rona while you're starving in place.

They did the Mash

I was undecided about going to the Greenwood trick-or-treat today. Yes, it's tradition; yes, it's my neighborhood...but the morning was gray and damp. Plus the ice rink was hosting a Halloween party of their own, so there were cupcakes and pizza and orange streamers at ten in the morning, and I had my lesson, deconstructing toe loops, to the strains of the theme from "Jaws." Kids spun until their cat-ear headbands flew off, tripped over their long Dia de los Muertos skirts.

The clouds blew off, leaving a blustery bright fall afternoon behind, and so I took myself to Herkimer. The gorilla seems to have moved upstate where he can run and play, but Frankenstein was on duty at the ale house as usual. And it was a slow start...but I sipped my coffee and had an excellent pain au chocolat, and settled into the goofy glee of bewigged, bewildered toddlers, just like every year.

Golden leaves tumbled down the street in the wind, and dry-ice smoke billowed from a cauldron of...something, outside Prost beer hall. Mary Poppins was practically perfect in every way, but had to hold onto her hat with both hands in a strong gust. A small UPS driver in uniform was followed by an even smaller Santa--package delivery is still a legit career goal, I reckon. Louise Belcher's bunny ears kept her head warm. A dad dressed as Lt. Dangle from Reno 911! may have regretted his choices, jogging in place in his tiny tight shorts against the chill. The medical profession was well-represented this year, as was the general "bloodied ghoul" contingent.

One little kid was a campfire: cardboard-tube logs and flames were attached around the hem of a sweatshirt, and he or she brandished a couple marshmallows on a stick. Long blonde hair stuck out under the Seahawks helmet of #26, Shaquill Griffin. Iron Man's drawn-on Tony Stark goatee was a bit smudged. Inflatable T-Rexes waved at each other across the street, while an inflatable poo emoji had figured out how to incorporate their bulbous costume into some funky dance stylings.

A mom carried her lobster-dressed infant in a huge stock pot. Cookie Monster tripped over a break in the sidewalk, but jumped back up undeterred. It was a lovely morning in the village, but would no one rid the villagers of that meddlesome goose? An unconscious parrot in a stroller went by. Simba towed a fire chief down the street by the hand. Olaf the Snowman's felt stick-fingers blew around in the breeze and kept adhering to his lollipop. A kid ran by with a rudimentary costume, but he was carrying a king-size extra-long pillowcase for candy and I admired his chutzpah. Dream big, little man. Another kid peered out the flap of a big blue cardboard US Mailbox. Two Elevens...es sported their best 1985 Gap finery, but the lone Scoops Ahoy! employee I saw was headed in the opposite direction.

My favorite thing, this year, was the number of combo/mash-up/hybrid costumes I saw. Wonder Woman also had on pink fairy wings. Spider-Man's dinosaur-head hoodie stuck out the neck of his spidey suit. A tiger chugged down the street in a cardboard-box locomotive, and sure, yes, why the hell not? Be whatever you want to be, kiddos, be everything at once, be the firefighting ballerinas and cowboy veterinarians and figure-skating novelists, ahem, that you aspire to be. The world is your oyster-zombie-construction worker.

She said

She was having a picnic with her high-school boyfriend. They got into an argument, and he put his hands around her throat and choked her, cutting off her air. Just for a moment. Just to show her that he could.

She was molested by her father, and told no one for 50 years.

She was raped by her high-school boyfriend, while his parents weren’t at home.

Somehow, he caught a live mouse in the kitchen and chased her with it, backed her into a corner. He held it by the tail, dangled the scrabbling creature over her hair, her face. “Take off your clothes!” he laughed.

Her father molested two neighborhood girls. Two that came forward, two that she knew of.

She was 17, but her boyfriend was older and had his own apartment. He invited her over and plied her with beer after beer in rapid succession. Lucky for her, she progressed through “suggestible” right into “puking,” and he took her home.

She was backpacking through Europe with a female friend when the men cornered them both in a narrow stairwell. “Lesbiana! Sono lesbiana!” both women tried, in what they hoped was the local tongue. The men laughed, crowding closer.

She was groped by a shopping-mall Santa while someone snapped their picture.

He was sloppy drunk, belligerent drunk, boxer-shorts-in-public drunk. When she called him on it, he pulled back his fist for a big haymaker swing. Lucky for her, he was so drunk he fell over instead. He didn’t remember this the next day, and she never mentioned it.

If he sabotaged the condom, if he could trick her into pregnancy, she couldn’t very well leave him, could she?

He blocked the door. She could leave when he was done screaming at her and not a moment sooner.

Only one of these women is me.

There go I

The man and two beautiful little girls were sitting on a bit of concrete curbing outside the Starbucks that adjoins the grocery store. "Excuse me...can I ask you a question?" he said.

The little girls had matching coats on, hot-pink fleecy trim on their hoods. The older girl was sucking her thumb--surreptitiously, exactly the way my cousin used to: casually propped up behind her free arm, fooling no one. That was the detail that broke me.

Their father explained that they were homeless, had spent the last two nights sleeping in a bus-stop shelter. Could I spare any money? He specified the dollar amount they needed to get...somewhere, something, I've already forgotten. "I don't have any cash on me," I said. "But can I--can I get you some food? Can I buy you lunch?"

They all looked surprised, at that. There's a Panda Express counter inside the market, and after a moment they decided on orange chicken bowls, with fried rice. "A soda?" the dad asked. "A Sprite?" The girls, gap-toothed and warming to the idea, requested apple juice.

And so I ran into the store and bought three crummy bowls of steam-table Chinese takeout, little bottles of juice and lemon-lime soda. I got cash back at the checkout. When I emerged, the thumbsucker jumped up with excitement and ran to me. They were so polite, thanking me as I handed over the bag of hot meals and cellophaned fortune cookies. I slipped the dad $20. "Get them somewhere safe tonight, okay?" I said.

And then I went into the Starbucks, where I had come because I was bored with the obscene quantity of leftovers in my warm, dry, clean house. I sat with my coffee and a magazine and could not focus on a single paragraph. The family were visible through the window. They ate their lunch. A few more people stopped to chat, though I don't know if or what they shared. I watched one man solemnly fist-bump the girls. Eventually, it started to rain, and they got up and crossed the parking lot and the street--the girls skipping and jumping around a little, then running to catch up. I watched them ride away on the bus.

I don't know what I'm supposed to feel. I don't feel better. I'm not writing this down to say oh, look how righteous and good I am. Look at my tiny, meaningless gesture, a stupid greasy rice bowl in the face of this city's homeless emergency. Maybe I got scammed, but I am above worrying about it!

I'm writing it down because I saw those kids. I knew those girls, in their matchy-matchy jackets like Sis and I used to have. I knew the not-at-all-secret thumbsucker. We never went hungry, but sometimes our mother did. I knew kids who did. We were never without a bed to sleep in, but I knew kids who were. A hundred thousand accidents and choices across a dozen generations, and I can go shop in the QFC while someone else sleeps behind it. There but for the grace of God go I, I'd say, but I am not a believer. There but for the total, utter randomness of fate go I. There go I.

It's Herk-o-we'en!

It is gorgeous out today, a dazzling fall afternoon pushing 65 degrees. Blue sky and lurid leaves and I counted at least three convertibles with their tops down, cruising the annual Phinneywood trick-or-treat--a far cry from last year's torrential downpour. As ever, I took up a window seat at Herkimer Coffee and sat for a couple hours, cracking up and scribbling notes on the paper bag my breakfast pastry had come in.  This is almost my favorite day of the year, definitely preferable to actual Halloween night itself. My neighborhood COMMITS. When I arrived, a grown woman in a rubber Catwoman mask and street clothes was enjoying her coffee at one of the tables.

CHILD DRESSED AS STRIP OF BACON, I texted Sis. She asked for a photo, but the kid had already run down the block in a sugared fever. Anyway, I don't feel right about taking pictures of strangers' children...but I will adore them from afar and describe them endlessly.

A whole Wizard-of-Oz family went past, Mom in what might have been a repurposed Slutty Dorothy costume; she had thick leggings on underneath, but that dress was short for the 1930s. One kid was a magnificent Tin Man, babe in stroller a lion. Dad, pushing the stroller, was wearing a padded plastic mailer like a vest, a house hastily drawn on the front with a Sharpie. I thought that was kind of weak sauce until I saw the wicked-witch legs, stripey stockings and all, sticking out under the...hem, of his bubble envelope. Okay, points.

The Herkimer gorilla was absent this year, giving my heart a little pang. Instead, a mime distributed Dots and Tootsie Rolls in twee silence, which seemed to still freak out a good number of the little urchins. I was relieved and somewhat mollified when Frankenstein emerged across the street to do his thing. Over at the Prost beer hall, I glimpsed their treat person in a Rockford Peaches uniform from A League of Their Own.

A wee spider, with multiple googly eyes attached to its black hoodie. A gorgeous, feathery, sequined pink flamingo. A little girl as the solar system: all the planets as ornaments pinned to her swirly star-patterned dress. She also had on planet socks, Saturn and Mars visible around her ankles. Left Shark hurried past, too intent on candy to bother with choreography of any sort. A lady went by dressed as beer pong, with red Solo cups pinned to her shirt; she was walking a yellow lab in a fuzzy beer keg outfit.

What is the collective noun, for an array of Wonder Women? (Besides "Congress 2018," amirite, nasty ladies?) I lost count of them, though the one that nearly impaled someone else's dad on her sword was memorable, as was the one that happened to be a Chihuahua mix. Another mom went by in a Handmaid's robe and hood, a Nolite te bastardes carborundorum placard around her neck. I gave her a grim thumbs-up through the glass. There was a Joker-Trump, and a Latino Trump, the only two I saw. The latter kid might have been of Puerto Rican or Dominican extraction, his candyfloss combover wig riding up on his own natural curls, and if that concept gives our bigot blowhard President nightmares, good.

A young couple took seats beside me, agog. "We just moved to this neighborhood. Do they do this every year?" they asked, awestruck and thrilled.

Little Orphan Annie needed to go potty, I think, judging by how she was clutching her DownThere. A lion tamer foisted her flaming (hula) hoop, festooned with fluttering yellow and red crepe paper, on her mother. (This is another part I love, the parents toting and/or wearing the various disintegrating heads and weapons and tiaras and accessories as the day grinds on.)  In a weird hiccup of the zeitgeist, two Bob Marleys (Bobs Marley?)  and then two Wednesday Addams...es went by within minutes of each other, none of them together. A tall gangly boy, I think? was dressed in a tweedy pink suit as Dolores Umbridge. Hey, Aquaman! You do you, buddy. Several kids wore their own backup snack distribution systems: one was a vending machine, lumbering along in a cardboard box with a plastic-wrap window displaying real bags of chips. Another was a gumball machine in a red onesie, with a clear plastic cake dome from the grocery-store taped to his or her belly, full of jawbreakers.

A tiny toddler lumberjack in plaid flannel, suspenders, toque and pegged jeans let his mother carry his wee plastic chainsaw. An even tinier infant Viking, with horned helmet and thick red beard, had to be carried. A girl was a carefully painted giant cardboard BOK CHOY--kiddo, you win for Most Unique. My other favorite? Two dads and two little kids, a quartet of Steves Zissou.

I know it's time to leave when the sugar crashes start to unfold in real time. That Ewok was out like the proverbial light in her stroller. Jack Skellington nodded out on his dad's shoulder with a nearly audible THUD. Behind me, a NASCAR driver was taking a little break, sorting candy. "Are you having fun?" asked one of his or her pit crew.

"I'm HAPPY!" declared the kid, holding up a peanut-butter cup. Me too, li'l leadfoot. Me too.

Dark side

I remember the 1979 North American solar eclipse only vaguely. I was nine. My Grammy, an internationally ranked worrywart, had absorbed the warnings and convinced me that if I so much as glanced skyward, I would be struck blind in an instant: two smoking holes in my skull where eyeballs should be. As an anxious kid (can't think why), I was terrified. Helen Keller was A Big Deal in my popular iconography at the time, but I didn't want to go BLIND.

In Seattle, the eclipse took place during the morning commute. It was February, and so the sky was grey and overcast and the sun completely obscured...but I took no chances. I remember staring grimly at the sidewalk at my school bus stop, wondering how much of the day I could get through with my eyes closed, maybe my stocking cap pulled over my face? On the bus, I put my back to the windows. As far as I can recall, nobody handed out eclipse glasses with hamburgers or Slurpees; we didn't punch pinholes in cereal boxes in my third-grade class or anything. The sky darkened, but it was already pretty dark. The streetlights came back on, briefly. Then it was over. For all intents and purposes, we missed it.

* * * * *

I didn't get around to buying eclipse glasses (or crafting a pinhole viewer) this time either. (Or even running outside with a colander, which a woman suggested on NPR this morning, too late.) I had dinner with Sis this past weekend, and we talked about our shared indifference to this event. "What's the big deal?" she asked. She would have been almost 6, in 1979; she has no memory of that eclipse at all.

But I've been thinking about it, even though I didn't look. I took a couple photos after the high point, crescents of light in the leaf-shadow dappling the ground. (Grammy would be relieved; I'm still focused on the pavement.) And I watched ABC's 1979 coverage, the Frank Reynolds clip that's been making the rounds.

"So that's it--the last solar eclipse to be seen on this continent in this century," Reynolds said before signing off. "And as I said not until August 21, 2017, will another eclipse be visible from North America. That's 38 years from now. May the shadow of the moon fall on a world in peace."

I had to check: Reynolds died in 1983. Sorry, man; I suspect you'd be disappointed.

It's what I keep coming back to: the recognition of my own mortality, in the context of everyone else's. That I'm unlikely to see such a thing with my own eyes, now, in my lifetime. Not without chasing it across continents, or oceans. I wish my fretful Grammy had had the opportunity. I chuckle over the point in the hazy, lo-fi ABC broadcast when Reynolds gets OH WOW! excited. I think about the gruesome, ugly, hateful world of the last week--just the last WEEK!--and I have a hard time reconciling that with two minutes of awe from the heavens, with Reynold's sweet and hopelessly naive wish for the future. The widening gyre. I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you.

Who'll be my role model, now that my role model is gone, gone?

Princess Leia was the first Halloween costume I chose myself, and the first that was a character rather than a simple noun: tiger, witch, clown, pumpkin-headed ghost thing my mother slapped together at the last minute after I balked at railroad engineer (striped overalls). My grandma whipped me up a gown out of an old bedsheet, and I set to wrapping strips of tinfoil around a discarded belt.

Like thousands of other 70s kids, though, I had the standard Dorothy Hamill bowl cut, my head round as that of a Fisher-Price peg person. What to do? I have no idea how much effort my mother put into coiling and gluing whorls of yarn onto two discs of cereal-box cardboard, which I guess she planned to bobby-pin to the sides of my head. If memory serves, they probably looked pretty good. I can remember her presenting them to me in our tiny, avocado-green kitchen.

But. The yarn she’d used was black. Black! And I was a fairly mellow kid, master of the passive tantrum, where I’d just lie on the floor or the ground or under the bed when I’d had enough, getting my Gandhi on. But over those yarn bun blobs, I had a complete and utter meltdown. No! NO, WRONG! Princess Leia’s hair was BROWN! Brown like MY hair! Brown like YOUR hair, Mama, WHAT THE HELL? No, no, forget it, HALLOWEEN WAS RUINED, THROW EVERYTHING AWAY.

I posted the resulting photo on Instagram this Halloween: me as The Sullenest Clown, wearing another hand-sewn-by-Grammy costume for the second year in a row, inconsolable. Or only moderately consolable, by a pillowcase full of candy. I kept the dress, though, stuffed into the back of my closet unworn.

Jerry Lewis in The Day the Clown Whined and Sulked

Sis and I had a smattering of action figures, too. Characters our parents had grabbed at random, not the whole main cast, so maybe that was why we didn’t play with them much. I had a Greedo with his lumpy green head (Han shot first) and a Darth Vader; one of us had a hammer-headed alien from the cantina bar. But someone was smart enough to get us each a Leia, obviating several years of fights-to-the-death.

I coveted the TIE fighters and other accoutrements, too, especially the Death Star playset with its working trash compactor filled with chunks of foam garbage, but it was not to be. My figures lived instead in a floral-patterned box that had once held an Avon bath set. I didn’t play with them narratively, but I liked to take them out and look at them, line them up, especially Leia with her little vinyl cape. A tiny teenage princess, the only girl in space, bossing the boys around. A brunette heroine you could fit in your pocket.

* * * * *

I first got contact lenses in the sixth grade. "Rigid gas-permeable" lenses, newly introduced as the intermediary between hard and soft lenses; it was thought that an eleven-year-old would be less likely to rip one of these in half. I still wear this type. They're smaller than a soft lens, sitting only over the iris.

The originals came very lightly tinted--not the lurid, exotic shades you can buy for beauty purposes or Halloween, these days: just blue, green, a hazel-y gold, and brown, natural eye colors. The idea was that the tint would also help you find one if you dropped it on the floor. My eyes are green...but when I got those first contacts, I chose brown. It was 1981: our carpets and virtually every other surface in our home was brown, so brown contacts were no help there, but I insisted. I don't remember ever explaining myself about this, but my reason was simple: Princess Leia was why. Carrie Fisher was why. I wanted big, deep, dark brown eyes, anime eyes, eyes like my primary icon at the time. Maybe, with brown eyes, I could approach and approximate the brave, fierce, snarky princess movie star I idolized. Maybe I could captivate a charming, roguish scoundrel of my very own, in the halls of Washington Middle School. Maybe brown eyes would make me that kind of pretty.

Photos from those days show me looking a little wide-eyed and blinky, still flinching at sticking little plastic disks into my eyeballs every morning. You can't discern the color. I suspect it was muddy and indistinct at best. But I saw what I wanted to in the mirror, and that was enough.

This absurd pile of hair was also an affectation of the period. Deprived of yarn buns, I grew my own.

(Let’s backtrack for a minute: this article made the rounds during Pussygate, a couple months ago [note: not the David Wong I know and grew up with]. And I am woke, indeed, to rape culture, and recognize how I’ve been steeped in it for nearly half a century. “Consent” is a mountain we’ll all be climbing for generations. But the first example Wong cites, the kiss in The Empire Strikes Back? DEVASTATED me, in this context. I hit puberty precisely when that movie came out. I may have hit puberty the exact moment I watched a clip of that scene, in an interview with Carrie Fisher on Good Morning America. It was romantic. It was a premonition of “sexy,” before I understood that word as anything but giggle-inducing. To look at it through the lens—haha—of consent, nearly 40 years later…and to know that Harrison Ford [and I still would, whew—remember, pubertal imprinting) was in fact screwing a barely-20s Fisher, who’d dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College to shoot the second film, ahem—was I wrong, to base my first understanding of LOOOooooOOOOOVE on that moment? How am I supposed to feel, now? 2016, ladies and gentlemen, ruining every little fucking thing, even backwards through time.)

Anyway. I was in college when I first heard "She Moves On," its reference to "her cold coffee eyes," and who else could it possibly be about? The quote "maybe these emotions are as near to love as love will ever be" was a gift from Fisher to Paul Simon, I am certain, one genius poet to another.

 * * * * *

As an adult, I love Fisher’s books, her wordplay and punning and obvious love of language. I found her public persona intimidating: she was such a brash and brassy broad, which I intend as an honorific. A broad’s broad, so smart and so funny. I’ve known a few friends—and writers—like that: the kind of funny you hope to stay on the good side of, knowing that they could slash you to ribbons with that wit if they chose. Though, from everything I’ve heard this week, Carrie Fisher didn’t have a mean bone in her body, would cheerfully shred herself rather than turn on anyone else.

She was brave, battling addiction and mental health crises, and didn’t give two shits about saying so. She spoke her truth, blared it; she stood in her truth, and sometimes waded through it neck-deep. Not so unlike that trash compactor. Feeling trapped? Blow a hole in the wall, jump through. You might have to flounder through a fetid swamp of garbage, for 15 minutes or a year (or a Presidential administration), but you can grapple and claw your way to the top of it eventually. Friends you’ve just met will love you despite your- and themselves, will help push and shove and drag you out.

As a child, I thought Leia was my role model. Now, it needs to be Carrie Fisher: kinda fat, kinda furious, hopefully hilarious, brutally honest. To live up to her is my new year’s resolution. So I’ve got one more truth to lay on you, if you’re still reading.  To explain it, though, I have to duck back into adolescence again for a moment.

My middle and high schools were served by the same school bus route, so I rode with many of the same kids from ages 11-18. There was one girl, older, who’d get on a few stops after mine and often sat next to me, perhaps because I was shy and silent in a way that passed for “friendly.” I remember her name, but I won’t out her here; suffice to say that she was a geek, an awkward, nerdy kid, much more visibly than I was. It came off her like an aura—something about her haircuts, her thick greenish glasses, the paperbacks she carried around emblazoned with dragons and lasers: geek.

I was, absolutely, also a nerd. I was also also consumed with self-consciousness, with fitting in and staying beneath the radar. Mostly, I prayed not to be noticed, or to have any obvious flaw that could be made fun of. Hence the contact lenses, for example. I dressed plainly; I read a little sci-fi and fantasy, but wouldn’t have been caught dead toting a dorky novel where someone might see it. On the other hand, when the Star Wars movies cropped up on HBO (in one of the flush periods where we could afford cable), I had mastered the art of faking sick. I had thus committed the trilogy to memory, privately—plus had all three novelizations worn flimsy and spine-cracked in my bookshelf.

One gray, pre-dawn winter morning, Geek Girl got on the bus clutching a typed and stapled manuscript. She shuffled down the aisle still reading and sat beside me with a half-shrug “hi,” eyes never leaving the page, avid.

It looked like a term paper. Nosy, wondering what so completely captured her attention, I craned my eyeballs left hard enough to hurt, trying to get a glimpse of the page in the grimy light. What I finally read, a snatch of a paragraph, astonished me: it was a story about Star Wars. It was, in fact, a description of Han and Leia’s wedding. Flowers, candles. Probably some Ewok ringbearers.

I gaped at it, seizing on sentences here and there. Where the hell had she gotten such a thing? I wondered, followed in an instant by Oh my god, people actually wrote this shit down? Because I had thought it, at least, before. I’d made up backstories and missing scenes and denouements for these characters, just in my head. Dreamily, falling asleep. I’d imagined this very wedding, and—sshhhh—The Sex that I knew should occur afterwards, within the sacred bonds of galactic matrimony blah blah. I’d never heard of fanfic, and had no word for this bizarre and amazing document in Geek Girl’s hands. (Ironically, I had always hated the language-arts exercises in this same vein: what do YOU think should have happened to Susan? Now write the story from Tommy’s perspective instead! Who gave a crap what happened to dumb Susan and Tommy in the bland, dull textbook? But STAR WARS! Holy shit!)

And it is touching to me, now, a little, to imagine how Geek Girl had worked to get hold of this thing, so carefully typed and Xeroxed, probably at great cost to someone, five or ten cents a page at the Copy Mart. Maybe she went to a convention, or ordered it out of the back of a fan club ‘zine. Paying for the SASE and the privilege. That somebody had done this, that somebody could do this, just start making shit up about someone else’s imagined world, and write it down, was a revelation to me.

But I was too embarrassed to expose my own geekery. I stared holes in the pages from the window seat, and never never asked Geek Girl about it, afraid that she’d rub off on me, dork-by-association. I said nothing, and she clomped off the bus at the high school, and that was the end of that.

Fifteen years passed. Al Gore invented the Internet. I was a grown-ass woman (though still comically young to my now-self), working a real job, with a laptop I got to take home. I had my MFA in creative writing, but because I also enjoyed both food and shelter, the authorial life I’d envisioned had been subsumed by the need to work for The Man. I’d also been recently dumped. I soothed myself by developing an obsession with the X-Files reruns playing, in order, nightly on cable. And at some point, I installed AOL dial-up on that company laptop, so I could Internet from home, and went poking around online for reviews and analysis and plain old gossip about my favorite show. A rabbit-hole montage of links later, I hit the motherlode, and learned the vocabulary to go with it: Fanfic. Shipper. OTP. A no-infringement-intended universe being born.

I…dabbled, let’s say. I roughed out Mulder and Scully moments that never saw the light of day, even with an avatar to hide behind. I read a metric ton of other people's stories. And yes, there are hordes of semi-literate, erotically…uh, naïve…twelve-year-old auteurs to sift through, to find the good stuff…but it’s there. I found authors I admired, strangers toiling away in anonymity, writers so good I envied them. “I hope you write in Real Life,” I told more than one. “Please, please do.” I watched certain writers evolve, getting better in real time, fascinating and humbling to witness.

It still took me another decade to realize that I could try it, too—that this was a way to keep a hand in, when my original fiction stuttered and stalled and went nowhere. I could hang a story on someone else’s scaffolding, as practice. I knew, incidentally, that between her novels and memoirs Carrie Fisher worked as a script doctor, but only this week did I realize what a lot of gold she spun out of somebody else's shit-caked straw indeed. How do YOU think the story should have ended?  

That’s the confession I’m inspired to today, that I’ve found some joy in writing, again, by pushing other people’s chess pieces around the board. It’s embarrassing, but at this age what isn’t, and who cares? I’ve published a handful of stories to fanfic sites on the web, for Fringe and The Killing fandoms. (Apparently, petite, feisty, powerful women bicker-bantering with their hot male partners are forever my JAM…that and whatever they’re pumping into the atmosphere in Vancouver, B.C.) I’m still not quite ready to own up to my pseudonym, though folks who know me well could suss it out, I bet.

* * * * *

When I started this piece, Debbie Reynolds was still alive to grieve. I can’t begin to think what hell Billie Lourd is going through tonight, and I have no tidy way to wrap this up. How DO you think the story should have ended? Well, Christ, not like this.

But here are a couple lessons, morals, pithy reminders to take forward, should you want to, that I’ll try to: I am, at heart, the girl I’ve always been. We all are whoever we are. Keep being you, and do what you love—on weekends, on buses, in line at the bank, wherever whenever you can. Quit wasting time, don’t fuck around. Even the longest hours and days and lifetimes are just so goddamn short.

And 2016, get the fuck out of here, seriously. I will burn you to the ground.