WIT: EXPERIENCE EIGHTEEN : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

In French farces there is a moment that translates to "the WIT on the staircase."

It's when you are all the way home and half up the stairs and then you finally get the joke. Maybe just the opposite - a sad realization hits you.

When did you have such a delayed understanding or response to something?

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD : CHRISTINE TRZYNA FILM REVIEW

Friends who like old Hollywood films decided to pay Amazon Prime about $15. to buy this one and admit they did so because the film got such good reviews. An hour into it they were disgusted and said they're never going to bother watching the rest and are mourning their expenditure. When I asked why, he said the acting was forced. He hated the scenes with the little girl and the dog. In particular, he felt it was too jammed with cultural references and wished just once someone could drive without the radio blaring. She said without specifying, "We are not interested."

But hey, they spent $15. So I asked if I could watch the film at their place and did.

To me the thematic of this film is violence, violence - over kill- in Hollywood fantasies juxtapositioned against the real overkill of the Manson murders in the Hollywood Hills. Of course our tension builds as we see the hostile situation going on at the ranch where the cult lives, which was once a ranch where Westerns were filmed. We know the era of cowboys and gunslingers depicted in film is near over by 1968 and so will be work for actors known for them. 

(We haven't seen a modern cowboy film since Brokeback Mountain.) 

From our current hip viewpoint the obvious racism that was taken in stride in that cowboy film era is cringeworthy. I'm so glad the film maker was true to that era and didn't rewrite film or Hollywood history. It gives us a reward, a sense of how far we've come.

These characters drink and smoke and aren't in AA or concerned they'll get cancer. (Remember that freedom?) They are macho. Maybe there aren't too many men like that left.

At the same time, the film successfully has pulled off something few ever do. We know the cowboy acting scenes have a fictive, fake feel yet we forget the Manson scenes are. We get to know Sharon Tate and her friends on an ordinary day.

The violence in the cowboy scenes is gratuitous. The violence in stopping the Manson killers, necessary.

Wes used to tell me how the Manson murders ended the peace and love hippie era in Hollywood, something, like the cowboy actor and stunt man in this film, he was never part of. People who never owned guns bought them and people started locking up. Back in the day Americans were still big on cowboys and how the West was won. Television Westerns and movie Westerns - John Wayne - Dale Rogers and Roy Rogers, Gene Autry - these were the heroes of children and adult viewers alike. Many a boy wanted to be a cowboy when he grew up. These stories fueled pretend play in backyards.

There are still a few of those cowboy and cowgirl actors around. Trick riders on fast horses and the stuntmen too. They aren't all at Universal Studios. Many own apartment buildings.

As the Western genre has to be my least favorite, I admit my generally negative attitude early on in my viewing of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. The cowboy actor (acted by Leonardo Di Caption) isn't appealing even as recreations of dialogues and the sets - saloons - shoot outs seem classic. Then I realized yes, there was something different about television acting then and the recreation was accurate. 

The drastically different lifestyles of the cowboy actor whose got a house in the Hollywood Hills versus the stunt man living in a trailer near an oil pump that works (probably Van Nuys) : I have a reference for that. Many Hollywood stars stayed rich because they bought land in the San Fernando Valley - ranches - and sold off that land - real estate.

Of course in this reimagining, the Manson murderers are stopped before they can kill and when that happens, because you as an audience - or me - know what did happen and you hate those characters - so you - I - are laughing - yes entertained - when they get theirs. Meaning, once again violence is entertaining.  It's fun to see an enemy over killed. The same guns, blow torches and fists that are fake on sets kill in "real" life.

So there you are in 2021 cheering on the good guys, though they are violent, which isn't very nice of politically correct you, in that way taking part in the violence. Just as children once cheered on their cowboy film favorites on the TV set after school. Bonanza reruns.

Art is participatory.

Quentin Tarantino

made me participate.

Thumbs up.

C Christine Trzyna 2021

PRIVATE EDUCATION and INDOCTRINATION : OPINION BY CHRISTINE TRZYNA

News is that expensive private schools such as Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles, and Brearley School in New York have an agenda of indoctrination. The intention is to teach the lie that all White People are superbly advantaged due to the accident of their birth - their skin color - and that deep prejudices exist in all White people - as if this were inborn - so that we don't even know we are racists! Even when we have voted for affirmative action, even when we have intentionally and personally given people of a race or ethnicity or religion other than what we identify with, opportunities, we are supposed to be unconsciously racist. Maybe we should be paranoid that we have this trait, as real as blood, and unseen and unknown - like a virus.

Further we White appearing (after all, it is a presumption) people all must apologize and make up for American history, even if our people immigrated long after slavery was abolished and we were not raised to be prejudiced. That some people are not further along in their cultural situation has nothing to do with their values, it's all us doing them in.

What a steaming pile of manure!

Some parents are taking their children out of these schools, and you know what?  I'm all for it. A parent who is paying tuition of $30,000 - $50,000 a year tuition can afford to hire a teacher to work with their child full time, or several tutors who are experts at their subject. No more discussion about student - teacher ratio. There are teachers out there who would love the work to home school the children of rich people, children who never suffer for experientials, extracurriculars, travel, educational opportunities and sports outside of school, and usually have plenty of social life, learning young how to interact with adults as well as their peers. 

One parent said that he wants his child to LEARN TO THINK rather than be TOLD WHAT TO THINK.

He's right. That used to be the reason one went to a liberal arts college. That used to be the purpose of writing papers, to not only prove you knew the material taught, but to take a position. That used to be why DEBATE was honored because we wanted to know the two (or more) sides to a question, and perhaps become enlightened or persuaded.

What about creativity, originality, individualism, and invention?

I'm wondering just when certain Americans lost the FEAR of THOUGHT INDOCRINATION. Of 1984. Of 1999. Isn't this one of the reasons we as a nation feared and opposed Communism because of the CONFORMITY necessary in Communist Countries?  (We certainly spent enough on military occupations and  lost enough lives to prove that.) Have we invalidated previous "American values" ? 

I think there is DISCUSSION and that's the best way to teach things.

This issue falls into two categories I'm concerned with.  One is parental rights.  The other is parental responsibilities. A parent has the right to pass on their belief system and we can all come up with some worst case scenario with this, but we all have a heritage. How much influence our parents, our childhood religion, and so on has on us as adults is questionable.  In fact, too harsh an indoctrination often becomes a reason for rebellion.  For instance, I meet a lot of people explaining themselves claiming they had "Catholic Damage." (For them, this exists.  For the rest of us, they're just want to do immoral or unethical things and not be responsible or feel guilty.)

And there is this. I personally do not feel responsible for anything any of my ancestors did in their lives, good or bad.  How many people even know much about their ancestors? History has a funny way of both repeating itself and being rewritten. I can only try to imagine what it was for women who had no contraception, for instance. How can I really understand what it was to live in 1848 or 1942? Time travel? I'm aware that I'm different than many of my relations and I don't know how much is nature and how much is nurture. I cannot typecast my family.

Besides what happens in a classroom, there is what we personally experience and how we make sense of it.  As a result of experience, things we are told are true we often decide are not.  In life we change.

Students whose parents cannot afford private schools or home schooling really have to assert themselves to teach their children what they want them to know, what they are not getting in public school, where they are dictated to. That tends to fall into the category of religion and too many parents are letting the school do all the work, even treat teachers as babysitters, rather than spend quality time with their children and teach them these basics at home.

****

I had the experience of Anti-White Racism in one class in college where I was downgraded as one of the few White students in a class full of Mexican-Americans and a Mexican-American teacher who basically preached Anti-White in his lectures. For instance, he passed out anti-White poetry by an Angeleno poet of Mexican descent. According to this professor Mexican-Americans were taking over neighborhoods in Los Angeles and would soon dominate - in a sense he was right- eventually, but he was part of the belief system that this was never the United States, that there was no illegal immigration because this really was Mexico. Never mind that the college was a short drive from the historical site where the Treaty was signed, making this part of California, American Territory. And never mind that the early Mexicans had land grants from Spain and chose not to be Spanish or Mexican but called themselves Californios. The Anti-White and Anti-United States belief system expressed in that classroom certainly took rewriting history. I could go on about this so called professor and what he was getting away with in the classroom, but let's just say that the only White students in the class who got an A agreed to volunteer for his political candidate - a Mexican American.  I had no time, thought this was wrong, and wasn't for that candidate.  I got a political B - this with an open book final.  Did the Dean give a rats ass?  Hell no.

I think this college educator was so Anti-White he imagined I had never experienced discrimination or prejudice myself - for being a woman or being of Polish heritage for instance - and thought he'd punish me with a "lesson" in what it feels like - such as when I saw that bullshit grade.

This wasn't the first time I was treated with distain, treated as White Woman - the Heiress of Advantage, by Hispanic people and by Black people, but hey, I know when I'm dealing with an Anti-White bigot and when I'm not. I've also been treated with basic respect by people of these ancestries and have sometime formed friendships that would be impossible if either party were racist.  

***

We cannot be afraid to see differences. Different doesn't always mean bad or wrong. So at a time when there are a dozen ways to label our sexuality there is only one way to label White.

We do have to look at how it is a person got to where they are - or are not.

An excellent EDUCATION at a SCHOOL should not the same experience as a RE-EDUCATION CAMP.

We need to see individuals as just that and get to know someone more deeply and decide if we like them or not based on their innards - their character, personality, their values - not their skin color. When schools try to impress upon White students that they should be apologizing for their assumed advantage, embarrassed by a heritage they took no part in, then the school administration, teachers, and educational philosophy is basically Anti-White racist. They are practicing exactly what they claim to be against.

C 2021  Christine Trzyna

FOOT IN MOUTH : EXPERIENCE SEVENTEEN : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

Think back to a time when you said something wrong, insensitive, or stupid - a time you "put your FOOT IN YOUR MOUTH."

What happened? Was it funny then or do you think so now? How did you feel? Did you leave the remark to sting or influence or float in the air and walk away? Was it a remark you aimed or said unthinking?

Did you let it go?

Set the scene. Write it as dialogue.

Go from there.

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

MENTAL ILLNESS : EXPERIENCE SIXTEEN : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

When did you realize someone you liked or loved was MENTALLY ILL ? 

Did you encourage them to seek treatment? 

What happened in your relationship?

Alternatively, write about your own experience with mental illness. 

What's it like to be labeled? 

Is it a secret?

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

WHY CHURCH III

If I don't Believe but I'm still Walking the Walk, does that mean I'm still Christian? Arian Christians were wiped out. They believed in God (the father) but not Jesus as the same as God. There were several takes on what Christianity ought to be. Still are.

//

Someone I barely knew and last saw in early adulthood but who came back into my life, someone who is surrounded by people who Pray and Believe and who must be at least somewhat aware of my discomfort with churches, asked me to pray for Him - a risky surgery.

I said I would. 

I said to whom ever was listening just outside a church I'd gone to (it was locked up), to say this prayer, "Jesus, your devotee and servant, X... Guide the hands of the surgeon and send in doctors who can accept him as a Christian. (This is not a favor to me.)

//

Meanwhile, there are those who believe we humans are trapped in a virtual reality, a video game. 

Who made the rules?

//

A hundred miles, a hundred miles.

C 2021

THE EXAGGERATOR

One of my most beloved friends, who long ago died, had a way of exaggerating that didn't qualify her as a bold faced liar but still had the effect lies did at times. I'm sure she couldn't see it.

She was a highly intelligent and sensitive woman who I met in a fiction writing class, basically a good person. She was the person who critiqued with care and caring. You knew that about her.

One day I gave her a copy of a short fiction piece I'd read in a magazine that I loved. The short story took place in England. She called me an Anglophile.

I'm not.

But it wasn't something worth mentioning.

Then, I met up with one of the writers in our class who'd written a fun story and was also quite popular in the class.

His character and personality outside of class quickly proved to be no fun. As a friend, he came to share a meal. I suspected he was on drugs because he was so shaky he managed to almost overturn the table. Later I suspected that he'd stolen from me while in my apartment.

We were never a couple. It wasn't an affair. We never kissed - not even a friendly hug. It was just a few meets - a go see - with a classmate.

I was incredibly busy in those days and I just let him go. No biggy. Until he climbed over an eight foot security wall, knocked on my door, which I opened thinking it was the neighbor across the hall, and threw flowers. They flew past me and landed inside my living room. 

He said, "I suspected you were with another man!" Then he stomped back down the stairs and out the gate.

I knew he was crazy. There was no "other man" but also absolutely no reason to think we were in a committed relationship that he should express jealousy or anger. And this kind of behavior wouldn't be acceptable to me if we had been.

I told my friend about this. I was irked when it got back to me that she said that because of this brief go-see I was someone who had "trouble in relationships."

Nothing, I thought, to the trouble in hers. She was living with a paranoid. He was suspicious of everyone, especially a new female friend, to the point where he'd accuse her falsely of lesbianism. She'd had to let me into her life slowly. He found it suspicious that I'd invited her to an exercise class held at a community center so he sat outside in their car sulking while she went in and joined us. He checked doors and windows every night in fear of an intruder and I guess that's always possible but they were living in a decent suburban area, without gang warfare. Maybe he had an enemy. Who knows?

He'd let her support him for years. She'd wanted that overturned. 

That is a relationship. That is trouble.

It took a while for me to realize that the grip on reality was slipping over at that house. 

These were the days when hugging was becoming popular and there was even a hug guru who said everyone needed a minimum of one a day. I was never much of a hugger. I had never touched her. I'd read in an Oprah magazine that you should tell your friends you love them. I never did. 

I hadn't seen her for several weeks. She'd called to tell me she'd been re-diagnosed with cancer. It had come back and I knew the treatment this time would extinguish her hopes of having a baby. I was heartbroken for her because having a child had become her obsession. 

When she'd told her mother, the woman had blurted, "Why are you telling me this, cancer doesn't run in the family!"

As if it had nothing to do with her.

Her mother had depended on her to financially provide all the extras. My friend had even bought her mom a franchise. 

Her husband had gotten a job after all. It was a good job but he traveled and worked long hours. 

Who was going to be there for her?

I wrote a little note that Oprah would be proud of and attached it to a few flowers I bought for her on my way home from work.

She had said she wanted a year to be alone, suggesting for spiritual reasons, saying there were three spirits there with her. I accepted this, including the spirits.

I didn't want her to feel abandoned by me, by people.

My flowers included a pink rose for friendship and an iris for hope. It was a simple gesture. When I got to her house, cars in the driveway, I rang the bell and could hear whispers inside, but no one came to the door. It was early in the evening but I assumed it was a bad time. I left the flowers and note on her doorstep.

Her response was exaggerated. She took it all wrong. She sent me a thank you note. She defended her marriage.

The year came and went. I made no further contact with her though I felt sad when I thought of her. Sometimes I would try to imagine what she was going through. Had her mother finally realized her daughter was dying and helped her around the house? As I had offered to. Who took her to appointments for radiation and chemo?

I wondered. 

I told myself I probably couldn't imagine what she must be going through. 

I told myself she didn't want me to know. 

I told myself she didn't care if I was worried.

I got a call from an old member of our extinguished writing group. Would I be interested in a screen writing roundtable? I said no. No interest. He said he'd called her and she hadn't had much to say.

It was uncanny I know, because I rarely bought the paper or read obits, my eyes caught a notice. She'd died a few months before.

I decided I'd been guided to buy that paper, to see that notice.  Maybe even by her. The notice guided me to more realizations such as that I'd had an exaggerated notion of what good friends we were.

Maybe that's because when I went over to help her stencil the room that has been intended as a nursery she said, "You are my best friend. None of our other friends would ever come over and do this."

C 2021

THE SCRATCH THAT WASN'T AN ITCH

From the first that I knew him, I knew he had a skin condition. 

I brought him special soaps to try. 

I called him when I heard a man on a Saturday radio program promoting his miracle water that healed skin.

I said a week long novena, with his permission, though he was confused about God, to be guided to the answer - the cure. 

I was guided. 

On the last day of the novena I suddenly had the urge to turn on my television. On the channel that was previously set, was a special about allergies and skin conditions and it seemed apt. I suggested he send away for the show transcript.

I didn't tell him that I also had a tarot reading asking for the underlying cause, for my friend was always itching, tearing his skin up so that it never fully healed, even at night, even as he slept. He was tortured. 

The tarot reading brought forth a card depicting a youth looking at his reflection in a pond which substitutes as a mirror.

This was more telling than I understood at the time. It suggests an obsession with one's appearance. I didn't know until years later that he was spending increasingly long periods of time in a mirror in skin clearing rituals. The depiction also suggested a person who is trying to figure out who he is, as we all do in moving towards maturity. 

Another interpretation is a fellow in love with himself. I recently heard that Narcissistic people actually hate themselves.

Over time, because of small comments that some of his long time friends from his high school said to me, such as that he was "stuck" in high school, that he "always had to have his way," or that he was showing up for work so late that employees sat around waiting for him because of his skin rituals, I began to think.

I understood that he had not left his high school girlfriend behind, though she was long partnered and the mother of two in a distant city. She was an obsession and an excuse for why he just wasn't attracted enough or interested enough in other women.

As an employer he was quite liberal about letting employees take time off - even weeks. They got the work done. I had a boss who spent his afternoons partying when he was supposed to be out visiting good customers so I wasn't sure an absent boss was a problem. We were glad when this moody man wasn't in the office. I thought that for his employees his not being there could be a good thing.

My friend had a good sense of humor too. I wasn't prepared to call it a "compensation."

Some of his friends accepted he had a condition.

Absolutely no one called it a disability.

They were all entitled to their opinion, their own experience, but years later I didn't know if they had been honorable in saying so little and not telling me more sooner. Why hadn't they? My guess is a mix of pity, respect for privacy, ignorance, and a competitive attitude towards me - for some time the new best friend.

I thought of him as good and true. It takes time to know someone you thought so well of isn't.

Slowly, by incident, his illness began to hurt our friendship. I wanted him to get well, if that was possible, and the real medical issues that were present made it difficult to know how much was psychological.

He went to a medical doctor who basically was in business to give out prescriptions including psychotropics. He got a common antidepressant from him which he said did not help. Not a referral to a therapist. No.

Actually, my scratchy friend said, the meds made things worse because now he had no libido. I noticed that while he was on them he turned into a snotty person, arrogant and pompous. I was glad when he talked back to the meds, quite popular at the time, and threw the pills away.

Then, one day on the phone he said he was in pain from a physical issue not related to the skin condition. It sounded like a pulled muscle. He was at his wit's end. There was a hint of suicidal thoughts. I called one of his other women friends who I liked. I said I was really worried. Did she know of a good medical doctor because I didn't.

She seemed to think it was all in his head. 

Years went by during which we saw much less of each other. 

One day in a college computer lab, in walked a man who needed to use the computer I was on. He explained he was earning a doctorate in psychology and urgently needed to use a computer. Though working on my thesis for graduation, I readily agreed to get off the computer so he could get on. I had been thinking of my friend with the skin condition, who never called me long distance to see how I was doing or showed support, but who I visited on breaks. I said to the man, "Briefly, if you don't mind me asking," and I quickly told him the story.

"We find with such people that they build themselves a House of Cards and about the time they hit 40, it all falls down," said the proto-psychologist.

So the next time I was on break I went to visit my friend at his office. He was running frantic. This was what he did these days. Hours in the mirror, late to the office, running frantic. 

I went to visit his mother, a woman I always liked. I hadn't planned to bring it up but she did. She began crying. "I hope it's not psychological," she said, tears smarting her eyes. 

Somberly I said, "I think it is."

If anyone had been aware of all the desperation, the antics, the seeking, and the trying this and that - perhaps not one thing long enough, it had to be his parents.

Denial that their son was mentally ill. 

Codependency. 

I knew now that he had prevailed to get his way with them time and time again. If his business went poof, they were there with the mortgage payment till it picked up. No one seemed to think he couldn't possibly keep a job working for someone else. 

Ultimately, what ended our friendship was my refusal to make excuses for behaviors of his caused by his mentally ill lifestyle.

He broke a promise to me at a very bad time, I caught him running away rather than face me about it, and I looked him square in the face and directly in the eyes.

I said not a word but I projected a message. "This is shit."

He ran to his car and pulled away.

// 

Over Covid-19 time, I found a YouTube video put up by a woman who reminded me of this man. She admitted her skin condition was psychological. I think her diagnosis fits him. Self Harming. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Then I found another: Doctor Lee, otherwise known as Doctor Pimple Popper, who was a scarred woman's last hope. Applying medical tests, Doctor Lee pointed out that the scars and open lesions this woman had were the result of this woman's failure to stop picking at herself because they only appeared where she could reach and other tests revealed she didn't have cancer or a fungal infection. The doctor avoided suggesting she see a psychiatrist and sent this patient away with medicine patches to stop her fingers from touching sores as much as to apply medicine. The woman said she didn't agree with Doctor Lee that this was not a skin disease. Actually, this woman was in better condition than my old friend. 

One time I saw him go into a zone where his eyes became transfixed on something far away or maybe something deep inside. Then he rhythmically began to scratch his legs.

We are not able to force an adult into psychiatric care or to take their meds. 

I realize this is a complicated and confusing issue. I know there are health issues associated with any long term daily medication. Yet, combined with other forms of therapy, some people are able to achieve a better life.

There's help worth trying if you're a picker. Or maybe you pull your hair or eyebrows out. 

It's OCD.

Being firm and not accepting him back into my life until he was being seen by a psychiatrist was not an easy thing for me. I hope his House of Cards didn't bury him.

Over the years he had tried everything but a psychiatrist.

C 2021

OCD is known for repetitive and ritualistic behaviors as well as obsessive thoughts. Hand washing, door checking - these are well known. OCD can also be hang up calling or repetitive message leaving.

PARANOIA and TRUE TERROR : TALKING TO STRANGERS

A woman who came to the U.S. from a country that experienced Communism said, "No way am I going to take the vaccine. The government chips people."

She pantomimed a vaccination being performed that inserted a chip.

"Just like they know where you are all the time because you take your cell phone with you wherever you go," she said.

"If you're a criminal,  a drug dealer, a sex trafficker, I could believe that the government might find a way to chip you and track you. Believe me, they don't care about people like us," I said.

"I'm not changing my mind.'

"I understand."

I couldn't help but think this woman is still effected by living under Communism.

I'm still exhausted and in withdrawal from four years of Trump administration chaos. 

Though the reportage is that Californians are getting vaccinated enthusiastically, other people are telling me that they've had no luck getting local appointments, and those who do not drive and cannot drive to the big vaccination sites are trying to get in on websites to make appointments in the middle of the night. Some are going by to see if there are vaccinations left at the end if the day due to no shows. Locally is Ralphs, Walgreens, Vons, CVS, and Rite Aid.

In a few days it will be more competitive. 

June 15 is the target date for everything open but frankly I don't think a feeling of normalcy will be immediate or soon after that. The stress of a year of fear has damaged our collective psyche. Not socializing in person has turned us into a nation of loners reevaluating our friendships. So much has been put on hold. As the schools open there may be rather empty classrooms - at least until mothers find new jobs and go back to work. I think there will be some sense of relief but mask wearing, social distancing, and hand sanitizing will go on and remind us we are not safe.

Smiles unseen.

Hugs withheld.

Inner conflict about hating to go back to work and having to.

The traffic being one of the worst experiences you didn't have to deal with.

More craziness.

There are people to be afraid of. People infected with evil. 

I was surprised when a person I know who is highly involved at her Christian Church told me there is no Satan, no Devil, that evil exists in people.

Another person also involved in his Christian Church told me there was no reward or punishment. 

I asked him why someone worships a God who just doesn't care (enough to reward or punish.)

All of this was a bit concerning but not upsetting. Maybe they're right. 

What kept me up was hearing a report on YouTube by a well known Christian who talks End Times.

He talked about China and the way Christians were being persecuted.

He said the backed up container ships (i.e heading to American ports such as Port of Los Angeles) included Christian stowaways escaping Communism. "They've gone insane and are screaming."

I imagined the total darkness. Maybe you and a couple other people with flashlights, food, water, and a poop bucket, think you can deal with the dark for three weeks. Questionable air. Movement of the heavy ship. Metallic sounds or dense quiet. Knowing that on all sides, top and bottom, you're surrounded by containers. You don't know if it's day or night. You might have kept a calendar or a watch but you're not going to have a cell phone or radio that can get signals. Then, for whatever reason, the ship doesn't dock. No-one can tell you why. You wait, more trapped.

I think human cargo is a reality. As are people in the know. Paid to load the people. Unload people. There has to be. This isn't hobos finding an empty boxcar. It's not Jews shoved into trains headed for camps. It's weeks on the ocean.

It's illegal immigration.

It's refugees but also spies.

Try finding what you need and can afford Made in the U.S.A.

My friend decides not to buy China, searching a box of tinned cat food and finding no "made in" notification at all!

C 2021 Christine Trzyna

INANIMATE OBJECTS MOVE AND MATE

She was the new girl in high school, burdened with going to the school where a parent had been hired in administration. An introverted genius who was always so serious. She was most likely depressed, depressed in that slunking slithering teenage way. 

That didn't stop Patricia and me from befriending her. We were open minded!

One day she said, "Jesus and Satan were friends. God made them both!"

Ok.

To show you just how open minded we were, when she, one day, furthered the theory that inanimate objects move and mate, even reproduce, we entertained this theory.

Delivered without a smile, without the slightest indication of a sense of humor, but looking into my eyes deeply, she said, "Wire hangers mate in closets. If you look in your closet you'll see more of them in there. Every time you look!"

"Ooohh. Wow! You're right!"

"And yarn. When you're not looking it moves to touch the other yarns and gets itself all tangled up."

"Oooooh!"

As the new girl walked the halls to change classes, she clutched her notebooks and purse to her chest and refused to look at anyone. She hated being there. She was going to bear it without grinning. High school was such shit. When would it all be over?

Patricia and I, still silly and innocent enough to think that the first girl to claim a crush on a boy could expect all other girls to give up, did dump the new girl when she dared express her crush on Smiling Sam. This we were not open minded about. Sam had the most brilliant perfect toothy smile that went on forever. God knows why he was so happy all the time but he was lit from within. Maybe his parents were uncharacteristically unconditionally loving. Maybe he had a bright future in accounting or management. His overall attitude and composure was open and friendly, just the opposite of the new girl who wanted him. Patricia had claimed Sam first and we two were horrified that the new girl wanted him and we had bonded over her dibs on the boy. So we stopped speaking to the new girl and didn't look at her to see her ignoring us when we passed her in the hall.

Sam married a girl from his church not long after high school, a girl no one had ever heard about. He must have been aware that Patricia had an obsessive crush on him. They had talked. She reported to me that he had said to her, "If I hadn't married my wife, it would've been you!" How diplomatic!  How impossible!

What made me recall this story?

I have yarn. This morning I wondered how it could've gotten entwined with the electrical wires of my clock radio and cell phone. To detangle, I had to unplug.

Fortunately, all is well in my closet.

C 2021

Seriously, April Fools.

WET

"Stop this and we can still be friends," I told Micky. 

That was me knowing life's a bitch and then you die, said in a spirit of generosity. I meant it, there was art in our friendship, but she didn't stop. She was having an affair with a man not her husband, irresponsibly, and she'd recently told me the two of them were including me into their fantasy.

To explain to others what appeared to be my sudden departure from her life, but had been a long sad realization on my part that Micky was using me and didn't care about my reputation, she lied some more. 

She called it "making something up" and I suspect she had been doing so since childhood. She felt no guilt. She shrugged. She was going to do whatever she wanted and get away with it even if it was a horrible way to treat a person who'd believed in you - your work - your writing - and had participated in a genuine friendship.

I felt relieved to be freeing myself from an entanglement not at all to my making or liking. I didn't want these two screwing with thoughts of me in their heads. To me that was Black Magic. It was absolutely not OK with me.

After a while, after she had not stopped, the phone rang a hundred times that I know about. 

Hang up calls.

Withdrawal.

I got a message from her boy brother telling me I had been insensitive.  What did he know? I'm sure not the truth. Vague rumors of bisexuality or repressed homosexually were also in his aura. What had she said to him about me to enlist his pity? 

I decided not to use the word "girlfriend" any more as it could be misunderstood in Los Angeles.

I didn't call him back.

//

I met Micky at a poetry reading before I burned out on that scene.

Reading her wet lines to an audience that included a smiling cat of a husband who was always using nip, you would have assumed she was enjoying the best sex with him and he knew it. Her poems encouraged everyone to be more daring, self revealing, and sexy as writers but were based on the fantasies of a sex starved woman who was interested openly in males and secretly in females.

What an imagination.

Micky was one of the most creative woman I've ever known. 

I don't know if she knew her survival required constant invention but after a year, I did. 

Seems the black and white Lucy Show reruns were on her television set whenever I visited and she watched as if she were taking a master class in getting around a husband. 

How had so much intelligence and artistic talent and beauty come to this?

She'd laugh, knowing what was coming next on that show.

Her lips glistened her words as they left her mouth. 

//

Micky was the neglected wife of a husband whose life philosophy was to stay in the denial of a constant high on pot. He loathed reality and mixed it up with the threat of an overdose of got-lemons-make-lemonade. He was always smiling. Nothing was going to get him down. Retreating into his role of provider, he preferred dumb. 

He was not interested in sex, not with her, not in years. He couldn't imagine she had needs besides money.

He was a good provider and she could count on that. 

There were always rumors with no reference, such as that they had an "arrangement." They did. Unsaid.

She was told by her parents that she was lucky she didn't need to bring in income. Lucky to have him. Her parents put all their money on their boy. Their boy expected the marriage to last. Their boy went to college while she had a boss who tossed her to clients. It was a sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle that ended in a celibate marriage.

//

I'll tell you how to prevent your daughter from ever being Micky. Love your girl. See her potential. Raise her knowing her own value. Give her the strength of an education and foundation - some basis for ethics and morals. The Golden Rule. 

//

Her sins of surviving a marriage were like a twelve car pile up on the 405 - hard to figure who did what but full of permanent injury. You know you shouldn't look but also you can't help yourself - you look. 

//

For the hell of it, I courageously sent a poem into a tiny time chap book publisher who was soliciting entries (first publication rights only) and was surprised when it was accepted. I'd written the poem on a high tide afternoon in Malibu that I'd spent watching surfers from a perch on a cliff. 

Micky called me and was faking a conversation on her end to be overheard by her husband, suggesting we two drive to the publication reading and spend the weekend away but what she was trying for was a weekend away with her lover. Her script confused me. What the hell?!

I went alone.

Some time after that I went over to her place to work on an art project and found it curious that her husband was actually not smiling but sitting at their table holding a check book, his thumb repeatedly ruffling the pages while he glared at me to make a point. I pretended not to notice.

Like the previously written about woman friend who was using me as an excuse for where she was and to account for gifts she bought for a lover, Micky was also. That's why when it became glaring obvious that I was no longer around she spun more web.

This situation, I eventually learned, was worse than the last. Micky wasn't buying a men's wallet for her lover at Macy's. She was spending hundreds of dollars. She was buying cocaine and abortion.

//

There are so many things I've never experienced. 

I'm so glad.

And, Oh! It is not true that you have to have experiences so you can write about them.

C 2021

Notes: A few years ago I learned that Micky, having secured a max of social security and half the assets, did divorce. I so hope she's found peace and real love and is making art.

NEW YEAR ACCOUNTING

For years, the first week in January, I did my taxes. I would do an accounting of all my bills, what I had spent. That January I realized I could no longer be friends with Daphne. I had spent a half weeks pay, money I very much needed, calling her across town, long distance, because I was the kind of person who returned calls when someone, even a flaky someone, called me and left a message. I said I would on my message. So honorable!

Daphne and I had an intact friendship when we lived a canyon apart. She lived not far from work so we got together after. 

Then her parents bought her a condo at a real estate auction and she moved to the South Bay. 

We made one plan after another and time and time again she cancelled at the last minute. She never said she was sorry or acknowledged that we had a plan or said the world cancel. Instead she'd say that her parents were waiting for her or that the mysterious "Bud" was on his way over. "Gotta Go!" she'd exclaim.

Or - most ludicrous - she'd coo with warmth - "We'll get together soon, I promise!'

I didn't like being put aside for Bud.

She didn't like Bud. 

They were all involved in trying to sell real estate. If you want to be cancelled on, involve yourself with someone selling real estate.

Bud was always promising to cut her in. It was clear she couldn't afford to assert herself with the man. She'd call and say he came over but poo he didn't give her any money. Give, not pay. 

She told hilarious stories though some were mortifying. Bud had a fart problem and when he let one out everyone could smell, he'd make a face and look around for the real culprit, usually her.

He was crude and embarrassing but he was going to cut her in.

Bud wasn't it.

One call, she never had anyone to date. Next call she'd just been on a Date From Hell. She was taking an emotional beating. Some really were, really bad men you'd put a curse on, if only you knew how. Others, simply Wrong.

Date From Hell. 

Date From Hell!

Date From Hell?

If you think I grew to hate Daphne, you're wrong. I admired her for hanging in there. She had terrible struggles and I suspect had developed her sense of humor to get through a life that brought tragedy. I still laugh about stories she told as a naturally gifted storyteller who knew how to build suspense and then let you in to the ending. Stories about real estate agents getting drunk and having sex in bathrooms at parties; so European!

I went over to see her at her condo and see the infamous bathroom. 

"They walked out like noone could hear them. Like noone had to pee the whole time they were in there. I don't know what they did. The shower curtain was in the tub. Eeewwe."

We laughed till tears sprang and our tummys hurt then laughed some more.

Daphne was sexy without ever dressing provocatively or moving to attract attention. She got asked out at art galleries. She got asked out at the market in the frozen food section.

Her social skills were terrific. She'd dated celebrities - more stories - who had cut a decade off his age - who needed glue for his wig. 

She was artistic and educated. Smart and wise in her way. But Daphne was held hostage by money, her parents money, her step father's money, if she'd get an inheritance or her mother would give it all to her new gay dance partner that let her grind on him, or maybe it would all go to her cousin with all her improbable babies, or maybe her parents would finally help her network her way into marriage with a politician or some rich man would "take her" off their hands."

Meanwhile, I was a overworked worker. I couldn't afford Daphne in my life. I got to that point where I was not willing to make another plan with her. 

I finally got it about Bud. Yes, he got leads from her. Maybe he did cut her in and pay her some of the time, but she was involved with him way more than she'd admit to herself or candidly to me, until someone better came along. He gave her money to go buy herself something pretty, while her parents paid her mortgage. She could not afford to support herself in the manner to which she was accustom.

C 2021

TROUBLE WAS EXCITING

The phone rang.

"Christine, could you put my wife on," he demanded, not wasting words.

"She's not here," I said, not wasting any either.

"She said she was."

"She's not here. I don't know where she is."

We hung up. He had misunderstood. So I thought.

They were boy and girl next door and married young. 

I wasn't the last to know. He was. She wanted out. She was having an affair.

Immature. Badly Raised. Gossip. Trouble Maker. Missing Something. User. 

These were terms used to explain Doreen to me by others.

I don't know what I would've said if she'd asked me to cover for her. She hadn't.

She was drinking after work and with the other man. Coming home to her clean living LDS husband late and with boozey breath, claiming she was out with me while I was at home alone, eating my chili and grilled cheese and reading a book. 

Shit.

She bought her new man gifts on their charge cards. She said they were for me. Was she kidding? Macy's men's wallets?

She took the flowers he brought her home from work and said they were part of a display struck on Friday. 

She wanted to get caught. Trouble was exciting.

Her never married lover asked her to marry him. She had her out. If only he could get a better job, she said. So he got one, risking the loss of tried but true. He was heartbroken when she broke with him and kept the little diamond - his life savings. He went back to another state from where he'd been raised, nothing left for him in California.

How shocked she must have been when her quick acting husband sold their house sans profit, paid off her charges, gave her the car and a couple thousand cash, removed her name from his life and medical insurance, dropped her possessions off at her mother's, signed the divorce, moved to Orange, started his own business, and married someone he just met - in mere months. Wasn't he supposed to beg her back, buy her presents, prove he loved her?

She was terrified of living alone in an apartment she could afford.

Of course she remarried. Was he the man who won the fist fight over her that she managed to produce at a party in the Hollywood Hills?

ASAP.

C 2021

SKINNY RIPPED PANTS OR FAT MOM JEANS? A FAIL AT BUYING AMERICAN

I've had a "buy local and in person" attitude for years. It's more difficult than ever to start or keep a shop and I want to support local and privately owned business. I head for the coffee house, restaurant, or boutique owned by an individual or a couple locals over a chain store or corporation.

I got my Economic Stimulus money and decided I'd spend a small part of it on clothes.

I'd avoided going anywhere unnecessary to the point of near insanity (Ok, I'm exaggerating but it felt that way at times) due to the plague and had put a year's wear on all my clothes. And yes, despite daily walks, trying lots of new recipes had created a little difficulty in zipping up.

I ventured out to buy underwear and cotton tops and a pair of pants.

The boutique I first thought of had gone out of business. Other stores closed, no signs of life.

I went into Ross Dress For Less and it looked bare. They also had a Security staff, wearing signage that said Security, all over the store. Has the store been badly thieved?

One of them, a young woman, was watching me so intently and obviously, if I'd been there to shoplift, I'd been nervous. "It looks wiped out," I said to her.

"We're in the process of restocking," she said.

I looked in a mirror and could see me. I looked rumpled and uncoordinated. I hadn't bothered to dress fashionably to shop for clothes.

She called me mam. "Come back on Friday, when we get a shipment, mam."

Had I degraded?

I'd cut my own hair after being quoted $25 for a one inch trim. I'd stopped wearing any cosmetics, not even tinted sun screen. I had no jewelry on, nothing to suggest status. I use a backpack, more of a schoolgirl backpack than a wilderness kit. 

I took to using a backpack a few years ago. I suppose that's suspicious.

I found that a backpack kept weight even and I no longer had to keep switching a big satchel from one shoulder to the other, that using one left my hands free to hold onto my dog's leash and walk her with ease. My backpack was especially good for packing groceries without having to buy a bag.***

There was absolutely nothing at Ross that appealed to me. I noticed the tops I saw were made in China. That was repeated absolutely everywhere I went. Not good.

"Oh, yea, there are cargo ships waiting to come in, backed up all the way down the coast from San Diego to the Port of Los Angeles," a friend said. "Incoming from China."

"So much for American jobs," I said.

After several trips out I bought a pack of underwear. An "American" brand, Made in China. And a couple of tops, because they fit and the color was right, from Big Five, also Made in China.

Pants?

Whatever happened to pants? Everywhere I went there were only two types, skinny leggin-like jeans with ugly, improbable rips, a trend that has gone on far too long because it only looked good on a few men who earned their rips, not via hammer, and they were muscled men, that trend is at best a teenage girl look. 

Or I could try overly fat "mom" jeans. I guess when a person becomes a mom they earned the right to be more modest and comfortable.

I went home and got on line. I didn't want leggings, skinny, denim, stretch denim, dropped waist (fat belly exposing), fat legs, or beachy cropped, pants. I know the fashion industry changes pants enough each year that the savvy can look at my pants and call out the year they were made. I wanted black, straight legs, made of cotton mostly, something that can substitute for dressy or business in a pinch, not athletic wear, not tight in the rear.

I surveyed my closet, unable to determine just how long I'd had things in it. I'm not much of a thrift store shopper because you normally can't try anything on. Now none of the stores were allowing try ons. Not being able to try on clothes is to me one of the negatives of online ordering.

"You risk things not looking at all like the pictures," my friend warned.

So I thought, maybe I'm so far out of it that I'll never get back in. I hadn't been in a library in a year - all closed - to even page through a Vogue. I know that fashion in Vogue trickles into stores like Target or Walmart in some way. Usually in color trends. 

I failed at buying local or American.

The trend to destroy American jobs began before the pandemic. It's all tied into the notion of "jobs Americans won't do." You will find that notion is used as a way of union busting or preventing unions from forming, exporting jobs and manufacturing, and for illegal immigration to being tolerated.  (I know this opinion takes into account both Republican and Democratic notions.)

So, I made myself promise me that for every new item I purchased, I would throw out or donate one item. 

What will our economy look like and when? 

C 2021

*** In order to, supposedly, prevent plastic bags from polluting, we now have to BUY paper bags at stores, it buy heavier "reusable" plastic or bring our own. It's bullshit. Cashiers are no longer tasked with having to produce a store bag and fill it. Stores are not giving you a bag for your purchase for free.

VISCERAL : EXPERIENCE FIFTEEN: CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

VISCERAL

When have you had a visceral reaction such as skin crawling, throwing up, or a sudden massive headache to a person or in a situation? Who. What. Where. When.

(Maybe this writing exercise will clear you or bring back the sensation.)

Christine Trzyna 

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna

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