Practice

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

I hate this

Shit

Shit

Shit

That feels better

Fuck

Fuck

My hand is fucked

My right hand

Right for writing

*

Better today. Not so much pain.

Erin sent pot. Medical marijuana. Harder to get here than it is for her. Works a bit. Cuts the hurt. Lets me write this.

Erin is on Instagram. She moved to Boulder five years ago. Works in a dispensary. I keep liking her posts. We stopped messaging a while back. Didn’t know she was still looking out for me. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe someone from The Cellar Door told her.

I make good gossip. They probably say Maria fucked up. Lost two fingers. Then that asshole Vee didn’t put them in ice. No. Put them in milk. Couldn’t reattach. Insurance paid out $20,000.

$20,000 = taking a break. Getting over the pain. Learning to use my left hand. Practicing handwriting now. I always wanted to take time out and write. Didn’t think it’d be like this.

I’m using the notebook I bought special. I got it right after college when I first moved to Austin. Thought it was real cool. Creative but without the shitty weather you get in New York or Portland. I bought the notebook where I’d write my novel. Understated, black, Moleskin - the sort Ernest Hemingway used. I’d write the novel and then I’d go on book tours and show it to my worshipful audience like a holy relic. They’d watch in awe.

Seven years gone and it was untouched, pure. Writing in it now is blasphemy.

*

I’ve had more of the stuff from Erin. I don’t feel okay but I don’t feel like total shit. This notebook was supposed to be holy so I’ll treat it like a confessional. Forgive me, Ernest, for I have sinned...

I got the bar job at The Cellar Door when I moved to Austin - nothing that’d take up my brain so I could give my whole self over to my writing. A job that didn’t take anything from me - except now my fingers. But it took more than them.

If you work at a bar and a guy wants to sleep with you, he buys you a drink. At first you say no, but being surrounded by people who are drunk as fuck sucks when you’re sober, so I used to get buzzed during work. Then I’d hook up with someone, or go out with someone, or end up at someone’s house and I’d get more than buzzed. Embalmed. I’d wake up late, feel like a cockroach, struggle up and force myself closer to human, but still feel a bit insecty - like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly when he gets weird hairs but before bits start falling off him - and then back to The Cellar Door to do it all again.

Drinking isn’t a sin for a writer. At least, it’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be the necessary crutch of the genius, the thing that divides them from the grey mush of normal people and makes them into a saint or pariah - a voice in the wilderness. It’s what allows the writer to see the bullshit of the world and reflect it back in all of its deformities, justified in their brutality because they are disgusted at themselves more than anything else. Drinking as a writer is a journey into the unexplored caverns of the psyche. It’s essential to creating anything that speaks of melancholy truths or visceral humanity. It also makes your words flow out. Sit by a typewriter with a bottle of whiskey and watch as your fingers - oh, how wonderful fingers are! - hop up and down playing the tune of your thoughts until the page is coated in the words of your brilliance.

Drinking isn’t a sin for a writer, not writing is. And I don’t write. So I’m not a writer. So maybe that means drinking is a sin for me.

*

I read back my confession this morning. My therapist says I ruminate, having the same thought cycle again and again, like some mental Mobius strip, until I’m sick of them but can’t break away. I’m not going to do that in this notebook. This is writing practice or a diary or a monument to my hubris, or whatever amorphous thing it turns out to be, but dammit it’s going to be linear. After my confession comes my penance and then, I hope, my absolution.

So, penance.

I need to stop drinking. Maybe not forever, but for as long as I use drinking as part of a delusion that it can transform me into a literary genius. I’m not going to AA. It feels too religious. Leaving religion behind is the only change I’ve ever made that felt positive. It stopped me worrying about hell every time I do, or say, or think something that falls short of the diktats of semi-literate desert patriarchs or medieval celibates. That said, here I am with my penance and confessions so it’s still within me. I just don’t want it to get hold again. I don’t want to go from emulating dead, misogynistic, alcoholic authors to emulating dead, misogynistic, fanatical martyrs.

That said, I do need the kind of community, pat-on-the-back support AA brings. Thing is, my community is The Cellar Door. Except Vee. I know forgiveness would be good for me, but the ice machine was right there. It can’t be Paul, Kiko, or AJ because they’re drinking buddies. So the only community I have is not worth shit if I’m not drinking. I don’t speak to my parents much (they think I’m going to hell, they tell me every chance they get). My sisters agree with my parents. My brother makes Vee look like Stephen fucking Hawking. I’m not going to call Josh, because if I do I’ll sleep with him and, once he finds out about the insurance payment, I won’t be able to ditch him till he’s spent it. Everyone I knew in college has gone corporate. If they hear from me it’s just going to validate all the warnings they gave me before I moved down here and all their blandness.

The only person who has helped me since the shit hit the fan is Erin. Erin who lives in Instagram-land, filtered in Valencia, hashtagging everything she eats. It’s so phony I can’t stand it, but - still - she helped. Boulder isn’t hot like here, but damn if it isn’t pretty. The people there look healthy, their skin glows and they’re always on hikes. The bars and Mexican food are better here, but that doesn’t seem like a good reason to stay, especially because - getting back to my penance - I need to stop drinking.

*

I know what I need to stop but I don’t know what I need to start. I’m trying to list what I want:

To get rid of the cockroach/insect feeling - to be well, mostly sober, maybe hike or do yoga.

A job that doesn’t cost me my whole being - one that could help people, make them feel better in some way, one I know helps.

To write something that I like - no great American novel, just something I can read back without wincing, something I could show people and say ‘this is mine’ and feel proud while I do it.

I don’t think I can stay here to do that. My mistakes are here. My vices are here.

Here is where I sat as a part-insect, staring at the white pages of a black notebook and never being worthy of marking it.

I have my money. I have my mind. My left hand’s for writing now. I need to move.

The weed is almost all gone.

*

Now a prayer, a supplication to the blessed Erin. Whoever I ought to pray to, grant me the grace to send it.

Dear Erin,

How are you? I know you know how I am (down two fingers). Thanks for the pot you sent. It helped, both with pain and getting me thinking.

The thinking led me back to you and how you are now. I’d like to see you, if that’s okay, because (as pathetic as this sounds when we haven’t spoken for years) you are the only one who’s helped. It made me realize I want to try a new life.

I want to help people the way you helped me, so I’m hoping you can do me another favor and let me know if there’s any work going at any dispensaries near you. I don’t need paying much, in fact I don’t need paying at all for a while because of the compensation, so it’d be like an internship of weed.

Maybe I’m going too far, asking you all this on the back of a free sample, I’m just hoping it might be the seed of change.

Thank you again, sincerely,

Maria