Bluetoothing the Novel
Maple bacon cheddar pizza, I say, repeating what she just said to me.
I need a snack soon, she says.
A swoony-jazzy song plays like it’s 1967—remember the smarmy song playing in The Graduate when Bancroft is making the hard play for Hoffman—well some white bread m.o.r. tripe like that is playing in our background. But we’re both the same age, she’s only 3 months older than I am. We’re just living through a pandemic.
She stands up, unable to take it anymore and announces, snack! What snack do you want?
Before I can answer she’s walked out of the room and turning on the kitchen light.
She says, snack! What snack do I want? In a husky manner like she’s a hibernant bear just awoken.
Then comes the crackling of the plastic bag and the tinkling pretzels. I imagine the blue bag of organic pretzel twists—the pretzels falling and caroming around a small glass bowl until the scale reads 1 oz or 28 grms, depending on the setting she used—she’s a 1 oz type.
The crackling of the bag again. The clasping of the white chip clip on the bag—it might have been the black clip—and she walks into the room again. A deep guttural sort of crunching amplified in her mouth as she walks past me to the desk.
These are extra crunchy, she says, facing the laptop. The crunching continues, a gravelly molar-assisted deep crunch.
Today is the 20-month anniversary of the day Gov. Baker sent people home to work out the pandemic. That’s Massachusetts.
Everything But the Girl’s debut album, is bluetoothing through the blue Sony SRS-X33 speaker. It’s not really smarmy music, I just felt that particular conceit at the moment.
She asks why I want to know the make of the speaker.
I was researching how porn would sound through the speaker, I say. (Obviously not, folks, I was writing this!)
Huh, she says. Did you say corn or porn?
Corn porn! I say. It’s supposed to sound amazing through the speaker.
She ignores me. She knows me.
I should be working on my 50,000 word novel manuscript right now, but I’m procrastinating. I’m at 43,047 words as of 11:39 am yesterday, but I haven’t written a word on that project since then — but I have written many other words nonetheless.
(Take these for instance)
Anyway, there are only 9 days left until the artificially imposed November 30th NaNoWriMo deadline.
Like I said, I’m procrastinating.
The pretzels are consumed.
It’s time to get to work…
But I keep on writing this…
“… the girl asked me, as softly as she could: Are you a spic? And I, with a hive of words in my head, could only think to say: Yes, I am. She never spoke to me again, and as I thought of her in the outfield, the moon fell from the sky …”
— Martín Espada / “Asking Questions of the Moon”
thee istsfor manity reader 