(CW for vomit and other gross nonsense.)
Often, when I'm lying in the bath waiting for the pain to recede, or in bed waiting to fall asleep, I sift through my brain in an attempt to discover new short fiction ideas, even though my document listing unfinished and unstarted short fiction ideas is already huge. Well, I was in the bath one night, and a subject crossed my mind that instantly filled me with overwhelming sentiment, nostalgia and amusement. I wondered if I could make a story out of it somehow, especially one with a speculative fiction bent. No, it's too weird and plotless, even for my most experimental fantasies.
I did think it would make for a good blog post, so fuck it. If I do ever figure out how to slot this into a story, I'll surely have to delete this, but until then, enjoy.
During my senior year of college at St. John's, and most of the time I spent living in Annapolis after graduation, I worked at a chain of souvenir stores. There were three of them scattered across Main Street, masquerading as different stores while all selling almost exactly the same t-shirts and hoodies adorned with Navy logos and crabs.
Annapolis is a lovely town. I miss it. The houses are old and ornate, many of them with plaques from Historic Annapolis denoting their historical importance and the date of their construction. The sidewalks and roads are mostly brick. The tourist section perches by the harbor. Though the water is murky, it's populated by ducks. Boutique-y storefronts and restaurants crowd every available space, and in the warm months a lot of businesses would grow flowers and trailing plants in big pots, put out flags and displays. In the warm months, the air would breathe up pleasant and humid from the water. In winter and fall, the wind would cut right through you.
The souvenir stores I worked at weren't long walk from the college, but when we moved to Eastport after graduation, it was a painful thirty-minute journey, during which I clung to distraction to keep me going. I also often had to travel between the stores -- just a few minutes' walk -- to fill in my time card or fetch someone a t-shirt in the size they requested.
Frequenting these streets more than I used to, I noticed that if you take a Swiftian view, looking closely at the bricks and stonework, Annapolis is not so lovely. Strange smells rise from murky puddles and cloudy drains. Mysterious stains and old gum cake the bricks. An unwrapped but unused condom sits on the street by the Capitol Building. Dozens of green bagels litter Church Circle after a St. Patrick's Day parade. A large, flattened fish head sits on the sidewalk in front of one of the fancy houses on King George Street. Nearby, random chunks of birdflesh, with red feathers still clinging to blackened skin, lie scattered across the sidewalk.
Wreathing the weeds straggling out from between the bricks, ringing the parking meters and lampposts, lining the walls, are mats of what a friend and I termed "sidewalk hair." This discovery mystified me, though I realized eventually that the thick streams of tourists, Johnnies, Middies, townies, and dogs, must shed a lot, and all that hair has to go somewhere.
I mailed a Ziploc bag of sidewalk hair to the friend who helped me name it. I didn't want to be noticed, so I made a brief stop on the way to work one morning, crouching by a parking meter and grabbing a handful while watching for passersby. I hadn't expected so much resistance. I had to tear the bundle away, snapping many of the strands that wouldn't come loose. I still remember the feeling of it, and the way it came up with tiny, uprooted weeds. I stuffed the grayish mess in the bag and mailed it off to my friend, who still has it. They even brought it with them when they moved to a new house.
I love the sidewalk hair, but the thought that incited this blog post was the sidewalk vomit, which was what conjured all those rose-tinted memories of fun times in Annapolis.
The joke runs that Annapolis is a drinking town with a boating problem, and St. John's is a drinking school with a reading problem. Between the masculine bravado of the Middies from the Naval Academy, the mountains of baggage of the students at the Navel-Gazing Academy, the trapped loopings of townies, and whatever troubles the tourists brought to town, there was a lot of vomit in downtown Annapolis. Your average drunk human will choose a corner to vomit in, so a lot of it went unnoticed, never to be cleaned.
I'm an emetophobe -- any interaction with vomit used to give me panic attacks. However, this disembodied mystery vomit triggered more of my morbid curiosity than my phobia, and I came to enjoy checking in on my favorite vomit spots as I trotted about town on my business. I gravitated towards anything that might look like vomit, feeling a mirthful excitement when I found a good new puke that I could keep tabs on.
I know it sounds weird, but let's not forget I was the child who was obsessed with the Grim Reaper and the bubonic plague in 5th grade and who was allowed unfettered access to the internet in middle and high school, graduating from GaiaOnline's General Chat to the problematic horrors of Enyclopedia Dramatica to rotten.com. I wrote my senior essay on all the bodily functions in Gulliver's Travels because, of all the things The Program had to offer me, that's what fascinated me the most.
Here are some of the most memorable pukes and similar sidewalk messes, arranged in a hopefully intuitive list for your perusal:
-The alley by Chick & Ruth's Delly was always a good place to check. Chick & Ruth's is a restaurant that famously offers a milkshake challenge, which often results in predictable consequences. Once, a cheery white guy came into the souvenir store shirtless after the milkshake challenge, for obvious reasons, and bought a t-shirt. I hope he still has the shirt and that it indicates a cherished memory. But as for this alley -- it let in the rain, so whatever pukes could be found there were often washed away, only to be replaced before long. I checked whenever I passed by.
-There was in this awkwardly shaped little area of no purpose right before the bridge towards Eastport. I passed it to and from work. Whoever was responsible had obviously eaten shortly beforehand, perhaps to quell their stomach, because this watery ejecta was scattered with large, not easily bite-sized chunks of chicken meat. These dried into jerky-like scraps gathered in the boundaries of a vague stain. After a while, it wasn't immediately obvious that someone had vomited here.
-Speaking of things not clearly or obviously vomit -- far away from downtown, in front of my beloved Paca House and Gardens, I once found a dense pile of food-like material, potentially some sort of cheesy rice or chicken salad or something in that vein. It looked like it had been overturned out of a Tupperware, perhaps someone's spilled lunch. It wouldn't be remarkable or in the same list as sidewalk vomit if it weren't for the stink, which was especially sour. The birds loved it, however, flocking around to peck at this unfathomable substance, twittering joyfully. I wrote a little poem about it somewhere, though I don't know where, which ended with the line "I abhor what nature does not."
-Treading further down the path of diversion: I remember walking down from one souvenir store to the other. It was summer, and tourists thronged the sidewalk, but in between them I noticed these patches of white material, as if someone had spilled curdled milk on the sidewalk every ten feet or so. Arriving at my destination, I mentioned it to my co-worker, who told me that this was actually dog diarrhea. He'd witnessed the event himself when going to get snacks from the CVS: a woman had her dog on the leash and the dog had uncontrollable diarrhea. My co-worker approached her in his sassy way, saying something like, "Miss? Miss? You need to take your dog to the vet. Get it together." I felt so sad for the dog, and I hope it felt better, but I couldn't stop laughing, wondering what on earth causes dog shit to turn white.
-It reminded of some vomit from my sophomore year of college: multiple spots forming a trail either to or away from the dorm building I was living in at the time. It involved shreds of a white, potentially bready material. It had rained that night, so the substance was dispersed in puddles of water, and didn't last through the next day.
-I had to work on July 4th, in the morning. It's supposed to be a big day for business, because there's a parade, so I was delighted when I entered town on foot and found a fresh vomit in front of the hat store. It contained chunks that looked like fruit, and the birds flocked around, eating the chunks happily. I have no doubt that these chunks were infused with alcohol and the birds were getting drunk off their meal -- they were twittering quite loudly. Unfortunately for the birds, someone hosed the sidewalk off before the parade, and then it rained anyways.
-Finally, the king of all vomits: the CVS vomit. It appeared one day and never quite left because it was under the awning of the CVS. Someone had vomited, largely and impressively, on the stonework right in front of the window, to the left of the door, and no one had done anything about it. I don't remember its original color, but I do remember that it slowly developed into a black, drippy stain, that never quite blended in with the rest of the filth there. When I visited Annapolis years later, in 2018, it was still there! What an legendary puke! It did blend in to the passive observer, apparently, because I remember some tourists perching there, on it or right next to it, completely oblivious to this amazing piece of history.
I'll finish this with a little anecdote.
How the giant growler with the spongy bacterial mat floating in it came to be in the kitchen is a complicated story. The most important thing is that it lingered for at least a month, a passive science experiment lurking next to the stove.
The house we lived in at the time had been a party house before we graduated, and in the time that Tim and the other hippies held the lease, at least ten people had lived there for varying lengths of time, each one leaving something behind. The growler was just another oddity, in amongst the art pinned to the walls at skewed angles, the plastic bag full of craft feathers and dust, the inexplicable locked safe that sat on a table in the second living room.
As the bacterial mat -- the color of a deathly pallor -- appeared and thickened, we observed with detached interested and wondered how to dispose of this organism.
A friend and I came up with the most absurd possible solution: someone should take it to Main St. on a hot, busy summer day, carrying a sledgehammer or something comparable. Put it on the ground, and, as tourists pass by, smash that thing open and run. Running being necessary both because of the wave of mystery substance, the smell, and the possibility of being accosted or arrested for disturbing the peace.
Thing is, as I review all my memories of mystery puddles and smells around Annapolis, I'm sure that, after the initial shock, that mess would blend right in.
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I wrote most of this a week ago, then didn't know how to continue it. I tried to pull it together into some theme, relate it back to the ever present subject of writing, but to no avail.
Why did I write it? It excited me. These memories are vivid and strangely sentimental. It was easy to write; the words flowed out of me. The same night, I wrote some flash fiction about a dead squirrel I found in Annapolis. I stayed up too late, tried to go to bed, but my brain was too agitated for sleep.
My brain does this excited dance when I'm faced with upsetting and disgusting things. Not that there isn't a limit -- I still can't stand to watch people vomit in real life, even if Funhouse is my favorite episode of The Sopranos. The end of Akira, the turtle shell with the eggs in it, the desperate anxiety that fills me whenever I watch Climax -- these things fill me with a feverish fascination, enough to interfere with sleep, to send me into a spiral of fixated horror. I like this, for whatever fucked up reason, because it's inspiring or challenging or life-affirming.
I imagine it's not that unusual -- horror films exist for a reason.
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Well, Lyra, how's it going in the writing world?
In therapy I'm doing something called ACT -- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. I forgot about it for a while, then remembered I should be doing that and returned to it. I'm at the point where it's probably time to start trying to use that to claw through the dense tangle of self-hatred that surrounds most writing activities. There will always be pressure and doubt in trying to have a writing career; I can't hide from it forever.
So that's how it's going. Been feeling highly averse to editing and writing new short story content, moderately averse to working on my NaNo manuscript (which is at around 107k words right now, ugh). I did set myself a daily word count to achieve (basically -- it's complicated). At first it was 1,667 words like it was NaNo times, but I'm supposed to be doing this online gardening course. I gotta leave time for that too, so I reduced it to 800 words.
I have easy things that I can work on whenever I'm not feeling up to the hard writing, but I feel like that more days than not at this point...so obviously I'm just being avoidant.
I've had some turnover in books -- I finished The Roots of Strategy and Havasupai Habitat. I decided I should probably not just add in more non-fiction because I was getting tired, so I started N.K. Jemisen's Fifth Season, which is intriguing so far, though I'm not sure what to make of it. Read a ton of it while waiting for a long time in a doctor's office today. I have the other books in the series -- just bought them as a bundle. I'm sure I'll wind up liking the first book, but even if I don't, I fully intend to read the others -- N.K. Jemisen is too important to pass up.
I also started another non-fiction book -- Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men, and Ancestral Wives: Female same-sex practices in Africa. I expected it to deal more with the history of same-sex practices in Africa, but it's mostly a survey of attitudes towards and experiences of lesbians, tommy boys, etc. in various African countries in the early 2000s. It's nonetheless a fascinating read -- lots about the experience of being closeted in repressive societies and this continuing trend of oppressive governments insisting that homosexuality is a Western import -- when it's not, of course, but the homophobia is. There are some problems with the book -- but I don't want to judge so much when I'm only on Chapter 4 (Namibia), so I shan't talk about them now.
Well, dang, I meant to finish this AND edit a short story tonight...and I might not have time before bed. OH WELL. There's always tomorrow.
Edit 5/1/21: Since I was late in posting this on any social media, here's another update. As of today, I am fully vaccinated! It's been about 9 hours and I have yet to have any serious side effects from the second shot. I'm in a little pain, but I'm just so used to that it's insubstantial.
Anyways, have a dang drawing. It's not the best proportions-wise, but it's also just a doodle in my notebook. I've been playing with crayons lately.
