84
My name is Autumn Christian, and I am a writer. This is possibly the most truthful thing I’ve written about myself in the entire book so far. Every day I put on a suit of scratchy orangutan hair and climb up a Nepal mountain to my office full of vintage typewriters and casks of wine from the 1800s. I perform my ablutions in front of a statue of Hemingway and the unmarked graves of one hundred, possibly two hundred, Kerouac wannabes. Then I half-heartedly type a sentence on my Macbook Pro and wait for breakfast from my garden, which is tended by a man named Roquefort, who claims he is an empath who can speak to crystals and can read aura. You know, the kind that doesn’t exist.
He can be whoever he wants as long as he tends the garden and makes me breakfast.
Yesterday it was fennel, baby tomatoes, and mammoth flesh. Roquefort stood by the window, sipping black tea. He refuses to make me coffee, because he says it taints the aura. Cocaine is fine though.
“Madam, your royalty check is here,” says Roquefort, and slides the envelope across the table.
I open the envelope. Inside is a letter.
“YOUR BOOK HAS ATTRACTED THE ATTENTION OF THE ILLUMINATI. GET OUT NOW.”
“Damn it, Roquefort, they’ve found us!” I said. “Get to the chopper!”
Roquefort and I don the bullet proof vests that I’ve stowed behind the casks of wine from the 1800s. Roquefort says “A snort of cocaine for the road?” right before the windows blow out and the machines begin their assault.
“No time for coke, we’ve gotta get the hell out of here!’
We run through the garden, trampling those beautiful little baby tomatoes, and head to the chopper. We get into the chopper, right as Roquefort is hitt. Good thing I used my last royalty check to buy those bulletproof vests. But now I’ve got to steer us out of here. Roquefort spits up blood from internal bleeding. Looks like he’s broken a rib, writhing on the floor.
“Get it together, man!” I scream, pulling the chopper into the air right before the launchpad explodes. “We’ve got to survive for art! Think of Hemingway!”
“Orange,” he muttered, “Orange and black.”
“What?”
“The colors of your aura,” he said, right before fainting. “Just like Halloween.”
85
My name is Autumn Christian and I am a writer. When I was twelve years old, my mother banned me from writing a novel because she knew it was one of the few things that made me happy. She also took away my Dungeons & Dragons books, anything remotely resembling horror, and most of my will to live.
I oftentimes wonder why I didn’t become a painter, or a pianist, or any other hundreds of ways that I could’ve expressed myself. I could say that it was because the first time I opened a book as a child and was able to read a sentence after sentence, stringing words together in my brain, it seemed to ignite previously dormant parts of my consciousness. It stirred a renewed interest in experience. The world outside of words was a crushed, dull color, shadows painted upon shadows, circles of gray and dark blue. Inside the books, there was a pearlescence to each moment - rainbows of colors, bursting on the insides of my eyelids.
I could say it was because I was a shy child, forced to give up my voice, and it was the only way for me to communicate in any way resembling the landscape inside my brain. Now I could speak in more than the monosyllabic, eyes cast to the ground. Here, in the realm of words, my eyes cast in all directions.
Sometimes I wonder if the real reason I became a writer was that it was not ostentatious. It was a quiet art. It was a secret art. It was not something that could be immediately taken, put up against a wall, and scrutinized. And my mother - well - criticism was her favorite game. Fortunately, she wasn’t much of a reader, and she didn’t understand my obsession. So I turned my computer to the wall, closed the door, and enjoyed just a few moments of being myself, without the discerning, angry banshee wailing and beating her fists against a girl who couldn’t be what she wanted.
If that space becomes violated, poisoned, bent to expectations, I don’t know where I’ll go to escape.
86
I am a writer. I said to him, as we walked up the driveway of his drug dealer’s house.
“I really should be home writing.”
He dismissed this.
“You’re a writer, right? You need this experience.”
I realized this was fast becoming a way to convince me to socialize in general.
And as my friend chatted with a hungover girl with thick black hair, her smile stretching her jaw until I thought it’d snap, I wandered into the backroom. Two men were hunched over a pile of cocaine.
“Care for a line?” they asked.
Experience. Right.
Coke doesn’t burn when it goes up your nose, if it’s good coke. There’s only this sort of tingling rush in the head, the dripping afterwards. Wipe the back of your nose, pretend like you do this all the time. Nod, you’re a charismatic god. You can only be defined by what happens after this. The drug is beyond experience, it is essential human existence. The only reason to enter a state is so that you can exit it into another, inexperienced state.
I begin to wonder what the ratio of experience and production should be?
I often thought that experience didn’t matter so much as the habit of writing. After all, one can hardly attempt to write without life wrapping its grimy, unwashed paws around your throat. Or so I thought. There are only so many basements to hide in, so many calls to dodge, before life takes you out for a ride with a gun pressed to your temple, screams, “LOOK AT THIS.” There aren’t enough escape hatches in the world. One day you’re going to be caught someplace you don’t want to be without a ride home, and there will be no tunneling out of it. EXPERIENCE is equated to uncomfortablenes.
Or maybe it’s perhaps the nature of how I experience life - my compulsion to wander into back rooms and talk to people uninvited. Maybe there’s something in the way that I don’t speak loud enough, turn away when people are looking at me, that make people spill their secrets as if I am a confessional booth or a black mirror, They feel safe telling me, “she’s the love of my life, but she can’t know it,” five minutes after meeting me. Offer me cocaine after I wander into their rooms. Show me the burn scars and the knife collection.
Because I thought - one must make room for production and not experience, right?
But if that’s the case why do so many people write like they’ve never been in love before, never stepped outside of the basement, the garage? Why do so many people write like other people are pieces of cardboard, to be manipulated and strung out?
Is that the writing, or the experience?
And as I lay on a couch in the middle of the lawn, unable to sleep, I think -
“You’re a writer, right? You need this experience.”
But is that really true?
And is this more of an excuse or a qualifier? Should I have 1 parts experience for 3 parts production, make it a 50/50 split, a 30/70? And how does one quantify that? How does one quantify experience?
Going out to the bars?
Doing coke?
Breaking someone’s heart?
Wandering the hallways of a residential home?
Growing up with an abusive family?
Paragliding?
Do I need to do more PARAGLIDING so that I can write like a HUMAN BEING?
Do I need to see a woman weeping in a foreign language so that I know suffering has no boundaries?
But I’ve also seen people so uncomfortable with emotion that their bodies writhe like they’re being assaulted by thousands of cockroaches whenever someone cries around them. I’ve seen people so uncomfortable with foreign geometry, the idea that people lead lives that are perhaps dirtier or more violated or with more disease, that they shut the walls of their homes up and close their eyes.
Then these people go on to write like, the DAVINCI CODE
86
I am a writer. This is the consequence of loneliness
87
I am a writer. Here are my relevant stats.
5 feet two inches, anywhere from 90-135 lbs
Current hair color is BLONDE, but I’m getting sick of the attention
My feet are always cold from poor circulation
When I’m depressed I take way too many showers
When I write I often pull my hair, sigh, and bury my face into the keyboard
I write like I’m having a mental breakdown
When I write, I’m usually having a mental breakdown
I have drank an inordinate amount of bud light mang-oritas
I go crazy in solitude and crazy in company
I knew I wanted to be a writer at the age of five
Because it was the only thing that opened my mind and split it apart
So that I could see colors for the first time
In a world pasted with gray
Covered in wood splinters from smashed furniture
and bruises from smashed faces.
There is no sensation comparable to the sensation of plunging my head and my hands down into the warm water of the quiet consciousness, pulling up words like seeds covered in silt at the bottom of a pond
There is nothing better than the moment when the voices are coming in rapid fire, click, click, click, but they are not a congealed ball mass of voices competing for attention, they are smooth and orderly in line, they are forming thoughts and then sentences and paragraphs that transform the tangled wires of my anxiety into stories.
So that I know there are stories inside of me.
That these heavy, painful, trudging, horrific metal creatures inside of me could one day fill me up with calm
with warm blood like gold
Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.
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