Thomas Sullivan

They aren’t making peanut butter jars like they used to. Twenty years ago that’s all I would’ve gotten out of last week’s fiasco. But at this stage of my life I got a story out of it. Writers have to learn to think this way, learn that life is footage waiting to be edited. I meet countless authors who were straight-A grammar students, who read a lot, and who majored in lit in college, but who don’t recognize life when it hits them squarely between the eyes day by day. Their resources are some grand vacation setting or a tour in the army or the dating years or going through a divorce or a long illness (if those last two aren’t the same thing), and many of them never see that countless comedies and dramas are happening to them all the time.

I’m going to set up a format here – call it the Cannibal Essays or How to Edit Life. It will be a hit-or-miss series that I’ll come back to now and then, trying to illustrate and inspire people, whether they write or not, to see the stories in their lives. To do so is to put frames around things and events, and especially around the people you meet. One way or another you cannibalize your relationships for material. As a writer, you learn to serve your fellow man…with gravy.

I met myself one day last week. Again. The writer in me is like one of those people I know but whose face I keep forgetting. If I don’t make an effort to remember that he’s there, he becomes a partial stranger – out of sight, out of mind. It was one of those periods of time when I was so busy being pissed and discomfited with little things that I failed to see the potential human interest. Here are the mundane facts told buck naked: it was down-time from surgery, the lawn needed mowing, and I wanted to be outside.

That’s it. Dull prospects and I couldn’t wait to be free of the cast on my arm so I could start living again. The cast was from a second carpal tunnel op on my left hand, more extensive this time, ‘cause the doc said the last one healed up so fast that the nerve didn’t have time to abate. Oh, I r from the planet Krypton, all right. You can’t slow me down. So there I was slicing up cardboard boxes in the garage with a sling-bladed right hand, using my feet to move the pile. Except that without his cape Superman fell on his ass. Ass and cast. Pile-driver straight down on the healing wrist. The five stitches out of fourteen that popped didn’t become known until the plaster was cut off today. All I knew was that the forearm felt like it had been disconnected from the elbow. Didn’t register as spectacle at the time, but there are dark forces in my life who would pay real wampum to see a film clip of my feet going out from under me galley west as I slashed around like Freddy Krueger in a scream flick.

And it got more humiliating. The week before the carp ‘n’ tuna surgery I had had a little deviated septum op, which was an experience in itself. I had even gotten past that miserable day far enough to see the humor and write about it in my broadcast newsletter, which goes out to friends and fans. (The newsletter often includes photos of content in these essays, so here’s an email link, if you want to send your name to be added to my mailing list: mn333mn@earthlink.net). But even that perspective was lost to me. Because the sawbones who carved up my nose told me I should snort KY Jelly through my right nostril for two months to help heal the surgery. Now I guess I’ve inhaled KY before (different circumstances), but this is proof that modern medicine was founded by Robin Williams. I am going to end up with a Q-tip embedded in a frontal lobe.

So you get the picture. Aching contusion of mummified jelly sets out to mow lawn. Push mower, but the cast was pushable. More bitching, of course. They are tearing up the street, and there are little utility flags all over the lawn. Up and down slopes, trying to keep an eye on huge broken branches hung up and threatening to fall from the crown of a basswood tree, I threw a chunk of same off the lawn and the move felt like I cast the cast with it. Stopped mowing, doubled over in extreme pain. But an epiphany was coming. Because when I finally got up and resumed mowing, now with one arm, what should I chance upon but a headless squirrel. An eagle or an owl had left it there in my path to run over with the mower (avian humor, like those crows in the ad for Windex where they close the glass patio door so that the homeowner walks into it). The decapitated squirrel seemed to be saying, “You think you’ve got it bad, at least you’ve got something to smile with,” and suddenly everything fell into place. This was funny. Hello, writer.

Really, it’s how you look at things. So now I’m registering the day’s little adventures in the third person like my craft demands, and I decide, hell, I can change the oil while the mower is still warm. This is because a couple weeks earlier I had totaled a Yardman on a landscape timber and the new Toro was on break-in oil.

Now the peanut butter jars. The one-armed man ties his belt around the mower to keep the motor running until the gas burns off. Then, pants falling down, he concocts a Rube Goldberg arrangement to tip the Toro so that the oil runs into a plastic peanut butter jar sitting on the drive. Plastic? Hot oil? Yes, Bunky, I did that. When the jar appeared to sink into the asphalt as it filled, I finally got it. Up curtain, next fiasco. Sully running around to stem the black sea flowing everywhere from the shriveling jar (“I’m melting, melting…what a world, what a world!”). Bottles, garbage cans, newspapers – black and white, mostly black. Fade to black. Black gold. Hey. It’s okay. I’m a writer; this is material. Ha, ha. The plaster cast looked like a Rottweiler addicted to licorice had chewed on it, but what the hell: fashion statement.

Cheered by my own attitude, I decide I can do my usual blading at nearby Elm Creek, one of the country’s largest municipal nature preserves (5,600 acres). So I do my 16-mile loop, and the cast, of course, gets soaked with sweat. I hate this. The exhilaration has blanked out the previous part of the day, and I’m back in my “ain’t th
is a bitch” mode about the wrist. Since the cast has loosened up quite a bit, I usually hit the highway and hold it out the window so that the wind can funnel in and dry my wrist up to where the plaster seals to the forearm. Tooling along at sixty, I suddenly feel something prickly inside the cast. At first I think it’s another chunk of the plaster broken off and stuck in the wrap, but plaster doesn’t buzz.

Are the visuals coming through? Sailing down the expressway with a trapped UFI (Unidentified Flying Insect) scoping out its new prison half plaster, half vulnerable flesh. Five alarms now. I’m beating the cast against the door to no avail and holding it into the wind as I press the accelerator, hoping to pin down the UFI with air flow. My remaining stitches are on fire from all the banging and twisting, but I can’t be sure it’s not saber teeth or a venomous stinger, so I’m trying to press the flesh against the cast wherever I feel a candidate lump, and that brings on a Charlie horse from the surgically weakened wrist. When I finally exit the expressway, copious fragments of something black and metallic blue shake out of the cast, along with a shred of red. I’m thinking the Red Baron flew his bi-plane in there and left a thread from his scarf.

Now maybe this all sounds kind of ready-made for the prime-time of the writer’s own journal, but it isn’t. Remember the drill down of vapid essentials: down-time, mowing, going outside. The rest of it is maxing out what I saw, felt and thought about it. It’s not that atypical a day for me. Or you. Whether you are a writer or just a person with a story to relate, these things happen to you all day long. The battle for a writer – or for any person trying to put life into focus – isn’t with the physical details. It’s with the interpretation and expression thereof. You have to see the drama and the humor, and you have to feel passion of some type. It comes down to who you are and what you are irrespective of what happens to you. And you can train that to a point. You can learn to put frames around things. Empathize. Apply unjudgmental insight. I stress that you can’t just wear these attitudes like discardable garments. On the contrary, you must be naked. You must be real. You must BECOME that observer and interpreter, wholly open-minded and ready for adventure.

Repeat after me: “I do not want to remain clueless.”

Okay. So you’re ready. But that’s just the internal half of it. Now you have to go out and live. Helps if you have a mentor, companion, relationship with someone who is like that. Kills you if you have someone just the opposite who dulls you down, smothers you, and inhibits your potential. Most of the time I have no one. But I’ve had my mentors. Perhaps two. And I attract unusual people like human flypaper. I’ve also been locked into a suffocating relationship that shut me down. But that was my choice. The worst thing is to miss a catalyst in your life. In my experience, those people are rare indeed.

You can do it with memories, of course, with passive interactions, but there still must be a bedrock of living behind that.

For a long time I thought I just had a very strange life. Incredible things happened to me, I met fabulous people, found myself in unbelievable situations, had fantastic experiences. I was grateful. As a writer, it gave me insights and a sense of the improbable I could never invent. But I’ve come to understand that most people are fabulous, that the unbelievable exists in your own backyard (especially if you have headless squirrels), and that you can dispose yourself to extraordinary experiences if you make yourself that kind of person. The downside depends on the demands of your emotional security. How independent are you? Escape the norms that stultify most of us, and you may lead the crowd but you will seldom be part of it. Accept only the borders or boundaries that you want, and you will sometimes alarm conformists. Or you can just lead multiple lives, which is what a lot of people do. My visa is stamped “Admit Anywhere.” I write. But that’s merely a symptom of who I am.

Oh, dear, this post-mortem of 10Wpeanut oil was supposed to segue into another Cannibal Essay vignette. I wanted to tell you about Agent Bingo and Snowman and a fabulous night last winter, which would have painted another tone to the kind of examples I’m trying to inspire you with, but as usual I’m running way over length, and I have to get over to Walmart’s where Kara, my tight-lipped pharmacist, will sell me KY Jelly under the counter. Next time. See you on October 16^th. My new novel, THE WATER WOLF, will have been out a couple weeks by then (shameless pitch). It’s a thriller that deals with adventure, love, horror, and people trying to find each other. Check it out here and read a sample first chapter: www.thomassullivanauthor.com

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome and your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan