Suck It Up
One of the frustrations I find with my work is that it’s hard to pinpoint beginnings and endings. The middles, on the other hand, are vast, murky, and infinite. With Playing Dead, for example, I began thinking about the concept in 2010 over a conversation with a friend, considering what it would mean to end one life and begin another. But beginning the book, when the hell did that start? In stalking Frank Ahearn? In being told time and again that this obsession of mine wasn’t, in fact, a book, but a cute subject? And the forever middle, the Dantean spiral of research, writing, reporting, writing, going back to sources, writing, fact checking, writing, editing, writing, line editing, writing, copy editing, and all the attendant psychological turmoil. And the end? What end? It didn’t end on August 9, 2016, when I could finally hold that thing in my hand. That was the beginning. The thing that had been so intimate and personal for years was made public. I was just getting started.
Again I find myself in the throes the muddy middle as I’m working on moi’s second book of narrative nonfiction, Love Lockdown (potential subtitle: “Dating, Sex, and Marriage in America’s Prison System”…What say you?) I’ve been gathering intel and interviews for two years and I still feel like I’m at the beginning, that there’s still so much more to know. And yet occasionally when I step back I feel like, dang, girl you know quite a bit now about relationships and struggle and how love prevails in the harshest of environs, not to mention the creative ways people find to convey their ardent affections across huge divides…from these interviews at the very least. I’d say I’m squarely in the middle at this point, the end feeling as far away as summer in this dreadful so-called spring in New York City. (It’s April 2nd and it’s snowing, for those of you sensible enough to be someplace ((anyplace)) else.)
But there is a task that offers a visible end and surefire delight, that doubles as a kind of therapy, that has the power to quell even the sturdiest unimpressedness. It is an exercise that blends the physical, the emotional, and the practical, dare I say the spiritual. For me, it is a prayer/Xanax speedball. This week, I recommend to you:
Vacuuming.
I love vacuuming. I vacuum every other day, mostly because I have a tiny dog that sheds half her body weight in a downy white fur that sticks to every single surface in my home. I really don’t understand shedding, and would love it if someone can explain to me offline how the process works. Like, does she grow back that amount of hair every day? From what I’m sucking up it seems like she should be bald, yet her coat remains robust and resplendent. And why is it that short-haired dogs shed and long-haired dogs do not? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? I hope to answer these questions and more when I retire back to my native Worcester and enroll in the Becker College Certificate for Animal Husbandry as an active senior.
While some might look on at vacuuming with a deep sigh and a furrowed brow—yet another thoughtless and thankless chore to do, another nail in the Sisyphean coffin—I urge you to reconsider. When else in life can you make such a concrete difference in the appearance of your upholstery and in your quality of life in under seven minutes? Vacuuming provides real results, not to mention a not-insignificant upper body workout. Should you want to take a more spiritual approach, I sometimes imagine the dog hair and chip shards and cake crumbs I’m sucking up to be emblematic of bigger problems. Bye, NRA! Farewell, people who don’t return my emails! Au revoir, feelings of inadequacy and existential unrest! I also have weird theories bordering of anti-vaxxer conspiracies about dust and invisible adversaries in the air, and extinguishing them through the vacuum hose, while throwing open the windows to keep one robust and healthy. Hard to determine causation/correlation, but it is a fact that I am rarely ill. At least physically. Now if there were a way to vacuum up those little particles of madness…
All those Happiness Project books urge readers to make their beds in the morning to accelerate into the day with a miniature sense of accomplishment, to which I say: duh. Amateur hour. If you really want to up your game and walk proudly with your chin thrust skyward then pull out your vacuum.
The brilliant Simon Doonan noted an inclination for vacuuming among grande dames of cinema. In his delightful book Gay Men Don’t Get Fat, he celebrates Joan Crawford for her precious solution to life’s barrage of problems: “The Late Miss Crawford was, in many ways, the patron saint of gay prissiness,” he writes. “Her when-things-get-tough-just-start-vacuuming philosophy has helped many a gay though a dark hour.” Some turn to drink, some turn to drugs, Miss Crawford and I say suck it up!
(me&Joan to dirt/dust/dog hair)
The moment I fell irretrievably in love with Scott was when Bonnie and I were spending lots of time at his apartment, and I’d futz around with his bachelor Handi-Vac, to no avail. He replaced it with a Miele, the Mercedes-Benz of vacuums, an item long on my vision board for all the domestic perfection and prospect of great suctioning peace it represented. Scott claimed to be allergic to dogs prior to meeting Bonnie, and it’s true, I’ve seen him go into sneezing fits and great bouts of malaise around other people’s dogs. But for whatever cosmic reason, Bonnie never sent him to the allergy ER. Had these two been incompatible it would’ve been a real Sophie’s choice. But who am I kidding, I know who I would’ve chosen she is currently snoring in a cloud of her own shed. Thank you, Miele, for never forcing us to confront the question! And thank you, things that end.
NOOZ (I hope) YOU CAN YOOZ:
Two books you should devour immediately: Anya Yurchyshyn’s My Dead Parents and Sally Franson’s A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out!
My first installment of “Our Prison Love Affair” dropped on Medium, commencing with “A History of the Prison Bae.”
Still a few spots left in my Catapult class, kicking off April 18.
What is getting you through this liar of a spring?