Appallingly Stupid Writing

Wed. 9-11 8:05 AM

[A pencil drawing of a window with the blinds raised and the trees, cars, fences and houses outside]  I hate this school.  My materials suck.  I've got a fucked-up, mismatched hodgepodge of books in two different languages and twenty kids returded enough to cause the problems of forty.  I want to quit.  I want to collect unemployment and write all day and pursue an acting career.  Urg.  What if I only teach night school?  What if I go up to the ESPN offices in Hollywood?
I'll go home for lunch and eat my shrimp salad.  I'll buy a sixty-dollar bag of lung cancer and brain-cell defecit after school tomorrow.  Should I go to Lancaster Saturday?  I have to pick up Bayless at the airport on Sunday.  There's a writer's open house at Ucla on Saturday.  I want to go fishing soon.  Still have to get enrolled at U of Phoenix.  Have to call Sharp colleagues.  This school bites.  Like a vampire, like Cujo, like Marv Albert, like Bruce the great white shark from "Jaws"; Sucks like a vacuum cleaner, a ten-dollar whore, a black hole, an Erie lamprey, a Congo leech, a Pisces in your wallet.  Fuck this school with a broomstick, a corn cob,  a big black dildo. 
Eek--What have I become?  Can't ever let this fall into the wrong hands.  I have to set up a conference with Marlin and his mom.  Damnesia Harkins is a horrible child who will grow into a horrible woman.  If I can find some paintbrushes we might paint after lunch.  What the goddam  flying mutherfock could there possibly be?  Marlin broke his pencil in half.  Fock.  I could write Fock for a whole page.  It's hard to believe I haven't done so already.  Fock Marlin.  Fock anybody with any connection to Wilshire Hill.  Fock working tonight, too.  Fock Damnesia always wanting to go to the bathroom, go to the sink, never wanting to get anything done, never wanting to do anything to make herself less appallingly stupid.  Fock this class and these focking idiot kids.  Fock this school.  What other job can I get?  I hate focking teaching.  I hate it. How can I get out of it?  Maybe if I could get some kind of seratonin boost.  Maybe if I beat the shit out of stupid fucking idiots  and take whatever valuables they have.  Maybe create some kind of tax windfall. 

9-9 11:57 AM Tu
I still have some more posters to put up in this classroom.  I had to make Marlin Crenshaw stay in at lunch because he was goofing around during our math lesson.  I got up at six this morning, but I read a lot of old fifteen-minute files and didn't write before class.  I ate an apple and some low-fat Trader Joe cat cookies for lunch.  I felt like I was onto something for a little while last night.  Today I feel like a dullard again.        I dreamed about Laurie Sunnyfield again the other night.  She had an enormous butt.  Her sister was in the dream.  We were like shopping in a souvenir shop in some national park.           I got a new student, an angelic little girl, partially deaf.  What else?  There's a fucking faculty meeting after school today.  Had I remembered earlier, I would have eaten a more filling lunch.  "You hit me first."  "No because you slapped the book on my leg."   "No-oh."  "Can I get something to drink?  Can I?  Can I get some water, Mr. Zurn?  Is it okay?  Cuz I'm burnin' up.  It's hot, hot, HOT in here."  What else?  This school--I don't know.  What else?  I'm going to make pasta and do my typing and read the newspaper before and after school tonight.  The Braves are on Fox Sports West 2 tonight.  Three days until payday.  What else?  I have some social studies books in English and some 

[a line drawing in red ink of a a guitar and stylized lettering of Madrigal's Magic Key to SPANISH] in Spanish.  What a hassle.  I'm sick of teaching.  I want to go into sports broadcasting.  I want to write full time.  I want to travel.  I just taught the little bass turds "America the Beautiful" right now.  Their social studies book is called Sea to Shining Sea or in Spanish De Radiante Mar a Mar.  I'm out of weed.  I smoked the last of it last night.  What else?  I've got to sit down with Steffanie to proofread her essay on the computer. 

In the Ear

Mon. 9-8 10:43 AM
Three girls he loves, but only one he fucks is a whore.  Mary, Sam, Tink.  Tink gets into crack trouble in Vegas.  Wants $ from Jim.  I'll do a list of Spanish and English words.  One word for each student in the class.  We'll discuss word origins and roots and how to identify them.  Put out a bunch of different dictionaries.  Lead on a few and leave the rest for individual groups to research and report back to the larger group.  I read the essay "Slouching Toward Bethlehem".  Didion makes it all sound pretty lame.  It probably was.  Should "lame" be a featured word in Jim?  Is Sam/Tiff really a writer?  She's not Tink.  Jim's mom left him and his father for a rich man and had Tink?  His half-sister?  Don't get too excited, cuz they'll never have sex with each other, ya perv.  She may go down darker paths than Jim can see by.  Jim is dim enough as it is, he might realize.  I ate a microwave Swedish meatball family pack for four.  "Smoking is disgusting," she might say.    It's time to go to bed.  I drank cold latte from a can at class.  I took a picture of the shadow of my hand, Kong-size on the window shade.  I tried to focus on a flip-off middle finger shadow, but it didn't look right.  A pubic hair curls out of the nail on my right ring finger as I write this.  I pulled it out and let it fall to the floor.  A little moth landed on the flab of my nipple.  I flicked it off.  Shirelle came over to sleep.  She's working in Santa Clarita at six tomorrow morning.  What else?  Cereal for breakfast tomorrow.  Skip lunch.  Pasta dinner.  Dodgers lost.  I'm getting tired.  I've been working on these three pages for over an hour now.  I fucked with the camera a while in there.  Tracy and Sharon and I were talking in the parking lot after school tonight.  Demona's frank discussion of sex:  "After six years together, I don't know, you'd let him fuck you in your ear if it was big enough."  She hung out her tongue and let her face go stupid and bobbed her head left and right imitating what it would be like to get fucked in the ear.  Marv Albert might have been discussed.  She said I should write a book about them.  They should just videotape each other.  I couldn't say much yesterday.  Crap.  It's midnight now. 

Sa 9-6 10:?? PM
This is a strange place to write from, sitting on the curb under a streetlight on the corner of Keniston and Dockweiler.  I probably look like I'm waiting for a ride.  I hear someone coming out of the house behind me.  I hear the key slide in and lock the door.  There's a part down the street.  I hear whooping and laughter.  My shadow scatters a few dead leaves.  A crack staggers down the sidewalk and disappears.  A wild, teenage, donut skidmark swings around in the intersection.  The woman who came out of her house a few minutes ago is still sitting in her idling vehicle.  What's she waiting for?  Maybe she's afraid I've been casing her house and will break in when she leaves.  More people arrive to the party down the street.  I watched their silhouettes go in the front door and a "Yoww" erupted from the party.  Three girls, apparently not affiliated with the party, since they walked past it, are coming this way down the middle of the street.  You can hear from their intonations they are black.  Always the crickets.

[neighborhood watch warning sign]  Cool air for a change.  I knocked the screen off the window and stepped desperately onto the peaked porch roof, clinging to a rickety false shutter, which made cracking noises from the strain of my weight, threatening to drop to the walkway a story below because I had to escape Shirelle.  I waited out there fifteen or twenty minutes.  She wanted to know if we were going to my step-niece's first birthday party.  I didn't know.  She kept asking.  I don't know why I didn't know.  Jupiter stares at me. 

[drawing of a two-story house on Dockweiler with awnings and barred windows and drainpipe and stop sign]  People in their cars stare at me.  I wonder if the giant brown tree roaches will crawl across my sandaled feet in the gutter.  I wonder if they'll crawl into my shorts.  No moon.  I count fewer than a dozen stars.  There's a puddle of water on the sidewalk.  Someone must have had their sprinklers on.  A phone rings.  Distant jet engines roar a sound of supernatural calamity.  Tripper at the Bounty last night.  Some discomfort with the seating arrangement.  A lunatic bull-dyke at the bar.  Farris read my journal snickering at times. 

9-2 8:22 AM Tues
The auditorium buzzes at my new school as the teachers meet for the first day.  They sound happy and excited.  I have many things to do. I've started a list.  I've probably not thought of half the things.  The principal's wearing some kind of leopard-spotted skirt suit. 
9-3 3:10 PM Wed
From my messy desk in my sweaty new room.  Wasn't real impressed with me kids so far.  Not feeling very professional.  Went to Taco Bell for lunch.  Dying of thirst.  Much to do still.  Have to teach night school.  When I get to the bottom of this page, I'm out of here.  I'll move the flag to over by the other door and put up the class schedule under the clock.  Does this school suck?
9-4 6:05 PM Th
You can see how swamped I've been by how little I've written.  It is as hot and humid as it has ever been in LA in my lifetime.  Everything is listless.  Even the breeze blows the leaves half-heartedly.  The thunderheads remain in the north, too hot and heavy to billow or move on.
9-5 2:50 PM
When I finish this, I'll do some planning for Monday and then go to the market for beverages and pasta.  I'm way fat today.  When I went to pick up the class after lunch, Ashley said, "Seems like every day you get chubbier."  From the mouths of babes.  Marlin's mom, the bus driver, came in to meet me.  Marlin said he didn't know who his dad was.  Later he said his dad was an astronaut who took him to the moon. 

8-31 m 7 PM
Dublin Whiskey Pub again.  Bears and Packers on Monday Night Football.  It's oppressive.  I don't know if it's more oppressive than home, though.  I feel chained because I go back to work tomorrow.  I've got to set up my room and get my books and plan lessons for the rest of the week.  Intimidating women down the bar.  No NTN cuz of the football game.  Angels and Rockies on one tv.  I lost two pool games and won one.  My mind has been devoid of all thought going on weeks now.  Thing and Gip are here.  We've decided Dublin's has the hottest waitresses in the universe.  When we went to pick up Gip, they were grilling carne asada in the backyard.  We were invited to stay and eat.  Gip's mom made a great ensalada de nopal and beans and tortillas and papas and margaritas and beer.  Eddie's girlfriend went to Hawaii and found a job and lived there for two months.  She looked so young.  I got a haricut at Fantastic Sam's on 3rd and Crescent Heights.  The woman who cut my hair was Iranian with a thick Persian accent.  She had lived all over the world.  I went to Ralph's and got sunscreen and anti-bacterial lotion and Tide with Bleach laundry detergent.  I spilled red wine down the front of my new white shirt at Miceli's the other night.  The bartender asked if I was doing all right.  I said, "Yeah, for now."
The bartender asked what I was writing.  I gave him my standard "Whatever I can think of" line.  He told us he's a writer from Toronto with a journalism degree from the University of Missouri.
I should tread tonight, try to sweat off some of this chin showing now that I've shaved my beard.  What else?  The Bears and Packers are tied eleven-eleven. How the heck does that happen?

[blue ink logos for Heinekken, Camel, and O'Doul's.  The O'Douls shows a golf green and pin] 

What the hell am I going to do for this page?  The announcers infrom us there has never been an eleven-eleven halftime score in NFL history.  

[Portland Brewing Company Oregon Honey Beer] What a fucking bore this night is.  Eliot Rosewater is a bizarre kind of uncapitalist.  Vonnegut had some intersting things to say about pornography, but I don't remember it now.  Carlin just showed up.  I bought her a Shirley Timple.  I told her not to go crazy and run around the bar naked this time.  Thing said he guessed he would get another beer.  He said, "We're gonna be here a while, right?"  I said, "I don't know.  Who's in charge?"  He said, "I thought you were the head muckety-muck.  I resigned."  He ordered a Miller Lite.  Drats. Rats.  Nuts.  Poop.  Pee pee. Caca. Doo doo.

8-31 Su 10:10 PM
From Derek's house.  I don't know what his last name is.  I feel like a geek writing.  We're playing pool in the backyard garage.  "Good try, Babe,"  the husband, Ben, said to his wife, Debbie.  They're trying to help her play.  "Do what you were doing," Yuri said.  "Nice shot."  Oohs and aahs.  I feel conspicuous.  I'm just writing what everyone says.  Jazz music on the dusty, paint-spattered workbench.  Yuri sits under the dart board.  Dimona says we need a recorder.  She's talking about me.  "Where are my cigarettes.  In my purse."  "Oh, I love to drink."  "Can I just hit everything over there?"  "Just break up all my shit for me, please."

Giants Fans, Ha!

Saturday 11:59 PM 8-29
The Laurel Inn, Salinas, CA.  Listening to "The Unforgettable Fire".  We had to get a room because I felt like I was going to fall asleep behind the wheel.  I was already dreaming up killer ground fogs and massive I-5 pileups between Fresno and Bakersfield.  I awoke a dozen times last night.  We brought five blankets, used four of them as a mattress and still it was like sleeping on concrete, and we had only the one blanket to share.  Shirelle slept soundly on her side and never moved.  In the morning we did a little bone in the tent.  Then we packed up and spun up the cliffs of Highway 1.  We drove through Monterey, along what was once Cannery Row.  All it is now is hotels.  We went to Denny's, but Shirelle started freakin' so we left.  Later we stopped at another place nort of Santa Cruz that said "Home Cooked Food", but it was over-priced, new-age shit, so I just had a coffee and Shirelle said she wasn't gonna eat if I wasn't gonna.  It was cloudy and cold between Santa Cruz and Frisco.  Saw some cool lighthouses.  Shirelle had never been to San Fran.  I asked her where she wanted to go first.  We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge.  Then we drove down Lombard Street, ate chowder and sandwiches at Fisherman's Wharf.  A lady at Holiday Inn told about a shuttle that runs from downtown to Candlestick, but we drove there.  We thought there would be hotels near there where we could stay.  Bad idea.  We'd've had more fun if we would have listened to the lady.  Still the game was fun, even though the Giants won.  It was funny, they were playing the Rangers, but the Giants fans, looking at the out-of-town scoreboard, I guess, were chanting "Beat LA!" most of the game.  Giants fans...ha!

8-28 8:40 Pm Th
From the Harbor Hut, we went to the Great American Fish Company.  They guy who had been our bartender at Harbor Hut before his shift had ended and had left, was sitting at the bar.  He said his dad owned both restaurants.  He told us about a cook there who had been shot at by a guy who dropped the gun and ran away.  The cook picked up the gun and shot back at the guy as he was running away.  I had a Turkey rocks.  Shirelle had a vodka tonic and a strawberry margarita.  Then we went to the Rose Restaurant, or something like that, and watched a catamaran race across the harbor.  I told Maine stories about how hard it was to steer home when the wind was blowing crossways,  and how tense Al would get in the fog.  Then we had the best sushi ever at some place.  We had sake and Sapporo and tempura, too.  We argued about when we would marry.  We stumbled back to the room.  We sat in the jacuzzi a while.  We went to bed.  Shirelle was all drunk and stoned and confused.  We woke up early and went to Bob's Wharf, but the captain who was going to take us out said it would be too windy.  We went to Virge's, and they were going out, but wouldn't be back until two, so we decided to skip so that we could get to Big Sur as early as possible to get a canceled reservation.  That was exactly what happened.  We snaked up the edge of the continent and when we got here all the signs said CAMPGROUND FULL.  We pulled up to the ranger's kiosk and asked anyway.  He told us we were in luck. Someone had only just pulled out early.  We got a great site right on Big Sur Creek.  They call it a river, but it's a creek.  Creek sites are supposed to be $23, but we only had to pay $20.  After we set up camp, we drove back down the highway and had an overpriced lunch at a place called Nepenthe on the high cliff overlooking the ocean.  We came back here and hiked to Pfieffer Falls, which trickled an unspectacular fifty feet.  Then we went to Pfeiffer State Beach.  There was crazy wind.  The sand stung.  I took pictures of the ocean crashing through the window of the rock formation on the beach.  I brought my fishing pole, but the wind was too mad.  We retreated to a tree-sheltered place with a soft bed of grass by the creek and kicked back and drank beer. 
Now I'm writing by lantern light and eating day-old chicken teriyaki and sushi that hasn't been refrigerated and hoping it won't kill me.  I found the Dodger broadcast against the A's on the radio.  Smoke makes ghosts in the lantern light.  Our wood is not exaclty burning brightly.  Shirelle's disconsolate we don't have a big flaming fire.  Tomorrow we might try to see the Giants game at Candlestick Park.  I warmed up the sake we brought.