As I sat at the computer, Ugly Fat Kid cryin' in the crib, I slipped the cursor underneath my Word document and opened up Firefox again. Even though I had only forced myself to close that window fifteen minutes before, I could not resist the lure of checking my Hotmail one more time. Maybe Cordelia wrote to me. A new man porn video I just had to see? Ida May (my battle axe of a neighbor) wrote her 25 things list — surely there would be new comments on her fist-closed, furious rant about me. Hehe, that bitch can suck it! There is always another editorial at The Weekly World News. Oh god, I haven’t looked at Ed Anger since this morning!
The Fry Cook walked into the room and saw me checking Facebook again. He stopped and looked at me, his hands dirty, fingernails caked with something dark and nasty.
“I’m just…. I have to see.”
He smiled and then looked toward Ugly Fat Kid's room then walked back to the kitchen, shaking his head.
If you write fancy, you are probably a good procrastinator.
I don’t mean the kind of procrastination where you call yourself a fancy writer but don’t actually write anything fancy ever. That was me last month, when the sum of my fancy writing was a shelf of spiral bound notebooks filled with ideas for funny fried foods, one after the other. I don’t regret writing down every cuss word — well, okay, maybe I get sick to my stomach at the dang hatefulness of the day I tried to write down every single cuss word that I hurled at The Fry Cook and Ugly Fat Kid in 2 hours; trust me, I was being a bitch. Every cuss word I wrote pushed me toward better combinations (like "son of a motherfuck"), some of them like a good kick in the ovaries. However, I look at them notebooks now and see some of that shit will never be in a cookbook, comedy type or not. (When we moved into trailer, I shoved all those notebooks in a big box and labeled them “tampons,” so The Fry Cook wouldn't steal any of my ideas. The Fry Cook picked up the box and started a'fussin', but I told him to "shut his face" and asked him would he rather I buy them retail.
No, I don’t mean the kind of I-can't-write-good-or-The-Fry-Cook-will-think-I'm-smart-and-find-a-dumber-girlfriend procrastination. I mean the plain ol', procrastination in writin'. Write a recipe for onion soup dip with an inappropriate reference to sour cream, go away. New funny shit gets thinked up while teasing sex to The Fry Cook, then I get down on the bed all rubbing my boobs on his pillow and all quick-like write an entire recipe for peanut butter cookies onto a napkin. I think a cheese dip recipe featuring an old-people joke to death, and then put 'er down. Come back to the less funny shit and immediately see, “I took too long. No wonder it’s so flaccid.” Hey, I wonder if Lorrie has a new post up yet? Ida May's foster step grandkid turned 18? Score. I can read this and laugh, thinking about Ugly Fat Kid turning 18 someday and not write for at least 15 minutes while I day dream about buying that Camaro when the kid moves out and the proceeds from selling food stamps start being for me again.
It sounds a little crazy if you don’t do this. Maybe it is.
One of the most interesting parts of the past three months, with the Fry Cook at home and the two of us working on the self-validating cookbook, has been the chance to learn each other’s minds real deep. We think deep different. For the past 20 years, he has been on the line, on his feet, on the run. When he worked at Bojangles, he sometimes went 10 hours without once sitting down. My job requires a lot of sitting, staring at a single fixed point on a chicken processing line. His work is greasy, dangerous, and a little vague for the direct results. If the Fry Cook sets off to chopping a block of velveeta, within a few moments he has a mound of evenly sized yellow cubes, ready to be melted over okra. One task leads naturally to the next. All he has to do is get his hands out of his pants and into the food, and he’s off.
But writin' fancy is rarely that interesting.
When I taught a the church school, it was easy to spot the student who had clamped down too hard a chaw of bacci'. Them little girls swallowed the juice and got to throwin' up and I had send 'em out into the chapel so it wouldn't cause a throwup domino effect. Most of the time, I’d walk close by her, and whisper toward her ear, “Think sideways.”
“What?” she’d startle, struck out of her anxious reverie by my odd sentence.
“Think about something else, and it won't all come flooding up. What did you have for breakfast?”
Being such a good Christian, she would do what I had told her. Face softened into the memory of biscuits with chocolate gravy, or a bowl of grits drizzled with Mrs Butterworth's, she sat for a moment, enjoying it. Inevitably, she’d be able to hit the spitoon like everyone else in Sunday School and I'd go back to talking about sodom and gomorrah.
That’s what writing is like. I just have to remind myself not to puke sometimes.
Sometimes I wish that I could simply bear down and chop at deep frier recipes with gay-guy jokes the way the Fry Cook attacks that velveeta, never sittin' down, always on to the next fat-bald-guy-turning-40 joke and not looking back. But writing bullshit recipes will never work that way. I’m always going to need the distractions, the chance to not puke, and smoke a cigarette, and not actually write, because basically I am lazy. Ask Ugly Fat Kid. After having completed two self-validating books, I’m at home in the process. This is just the way it is.
Besides, if I didn’t need the procrastination, I would never have found Twitter.
Most of you have probably discovered it already, this community of people eager to share their bullshit time-wasting stupid thoughts and pictures, in 140 characters or less. (It’s like those pregnancy tests in high school, all over again, but with less stress.) As Penny (best friend from the plant) phrased it to me in a message the other day, “It's lovely to have our jug of moonshine.” Those of us working at chicken processing plants without the hilarity of grat boys in cubicles nearby need that social interaction, somehow. You can follow gossip on pissed off people, watch how friends act all fancy to each other, and read about people’s dinners, seriously. And besides, being forced to limit myself to 140 characters made me even more careful with my cuss word choices. I think Twitter has made me a better writer of hate jokes.
Lord bless Twitter. Without it, and my twelve favorite man porn sites I check in a round-robin fashion while I am trying to describe the taste of soft pretzel casserole in a yellow mustard sauce, I would never have completed this self-validating book.
The Fry Cook thought, at first, that I was being a little lazy, commenting on friends’ status updates instead of completing the fancy words for the latest recipe, immediately. But I think he sees now (and perhaps even more after this blog) how I need to look sideways before I write forward, so I don't puke.
If you would like to follow me on Twitter, my name there is gluttonygal.
The Fry Cook don't got twitter cause his phone got cut off when his mamma stopped paying the bill on account of her sugar daddy died and his kids took over the gun shop.
That's all I'm writing tonight. Gotta have a smoke and do this home perm.
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