Karl Bloggerfeld

Writerly Advice

I need some.

The assignment: “write about two separate events or people and in a final paragraph find a common thread or point that brings the two together.”

The work:

I like my coffee with a bit of fat in it, she thought, but not too much. If I fill the cup’s vacant crawlspace with whole milk, it’s never as good as if I use skim and then, when no one’s looking, that little splash of half and half, or cream. Which is worse for you, she wondered, moderate steady fat, or the affect of health with a last-minute shot of excess when there barely seems to be any room left at all? Seriously though, empirically, which one has more fat? I wonder what kind of scientist you’d have to ask to find out; a bored one, probably.

And what about washing dishes? If I’m trying to save the planet, she wondered, what’s better: buying a reusable dish but having to wash it or using a paper plate and throwing it away? Paper biodegrades, so that’s good, but it’s rainforest trees they’re cutting down or something, and there’s always that waxy coating that could be leaching god knows what into the atmosphere. So throwing out a paper plate is waste, but washing dishes by hand wastes water, and the dishwasher wastes more, or maybe less, I guess depending on how many dishes you have to wash and how much water you use on each. I use a lot, too, because I always have to make sure all the soap is off or I get paranoid it’s getting in my food.

That kid who goes to the forestry school told me the soap is harmful too; that’s why he never washes his hair, he said. It’s getting into the water like all the drugs they’re feeding kids and old people for fun. A sip of tap water has Lipitor in it, she’d read, and maybe Prozac and Viagra. Does it accumulate in your body, she wondered, gaining potency? It can’t, right? Because then the people taking it proper would eventually work up to boners forever. A perpetual boner, she thought. Enough water and ten years down the line they’re going to have to start marketing completely new kinds of pants.

* * *

Parents who lost their children young were lucky, in a way, because they never had to watch them turn into assholes. It’s worse though, he reasoned, because there’s nothing to help rationalize the loss and only the good to remember. He thought awful things sometimes, he thought. He thought of driving over the Kosciusko bridge, past the place where the guardrail breaks open, bare bones, just for a moment and then it’s whole again. Beyond it you can see the skyline, Chrysler and Empire State and sulfuric mist or heartbreak sunset, but just for that one moment, the massive graveyard yawns beneath it all. New York, he thought. City of the living, city of Dead.

I don’t know anyone buried there, he realized, but whenever I drive by it, I think of the old joke that goes, “You know that big cemetery you drive by on the way into the city? Yeah? No one living within a mile radius of it can be buried there. Why? Because they’re alive.”

No one ever knows the name of it, he marveled, but everyone knows. There’s that octopus dumpling store too that I never know the name of, the one on 9^th, just on the diagonal from the sole differentiable Starbucks in the whole of Manhattan. It’s on the corner of First or Second or A, but if I remembered which it was, then it wouldn’t matter. Whenever I see that Starbucks, though, I know that only a little farther down there’s that deep, narrow storefront with the wooden grating and inside there are those round metal pans like edgeless honeycombs and inside them the hacked off legs of crimson plum suspended colloidal in nearly-cooked batter and contained in perfect crust.

I took a picture of a drunk man sitting on the bench outside once, he remembered, as he wrapped his head turbanlike in the flag, probably of some Asian country. I showed him the picture and he asked me to send it to him and gave me his business card. It said he was a photographer. What are the chances? chances…what…what…what…

He rolled off her and onto the waiting cool side of the bed. He let her push him almost off the edge in her scramble from the moist depression (sopping really) that coursed through sluggish cotton capillaries and must have feathered at its edges in escape. He let arm arch over chest, leg loop over leg and under. She pictured the alveoli, pathetic little air sacs, expanding and contracting as they may or may not do. Areolae, she laughed to herself. I can be downright nasty sometimes, she thought. Latin, too. He rolled forward, planted a  foot and picked a path to the bathroom, where he scrubbed his hands vigorously with soap.

She pulled a crinkled sheet onto her side with her, over the shoulder, tucked under the chin, all matted hair and disentangled limbs. Nothing’s ever permanent, she thought. You can always kill yourself if things get bad enough.

The question: Do I need that last little paragraph or not?