Averil Dean's Blog, page 5

Snapshot

An idea has settled over me and I can’t shake it off. If you’re a writer, you’ll be familiar with the signs: the queasy excitement, drifting focus, the sense of impending doom. The curse is come upon me, cried the Lady of Shalott. A story looms.

I keep asking whether I have to write it. Will it fuck off and leave me alone, or will it be there every morning at 4 a.m., watching me sleep, waiting to pounce as soon as I open my eyes. Can I pare it down to nothing, write it and be done? Or will i...

Neckties

My god, these men. These foolish, grasping, needy men. Can we not have a moment of peace? Why must we always divide ourselves into teams: on the chamber floor, on the street, in business and religion and cultural constructs of every kind. Red team, blue team, world without end. Competition is their constant excuse for violence, for conflict, dragging everybody in, as if we all must stand behind our leaders at the urinal while they compare their dicks with the dicks on either side. Yours is bigge...

Pink

I’ve been thinking about one of our patients. A young guy, rope thin, with pink tips and dark roots, who went to the wrong clinic on his first visit and arrived so late we had to work through lunch to see him. He was sweet about it, though, and doggedly pushed through our paperwork, describing his health history, his symptoms, carefully laying out the mundane demographic details I’m expected to collect. He’s had a lot of injuries in his short life. A car accident in the recent past has left his ...

Trombone

Back to those new year’s intentions. What to do, where to place my focus. I found a local writing class starting up in January, an adult-ed sort of thing through the community college, with classes every Thursday evening from 6:30-8:00. If this were a Saturday morning meet-up, I’d be all in, but I’m on the fence with an evening gig. I get up early—very, very early—so usually I’m in bed by 8, taxiing down the runway toward sleep. It’s almost a job in itself, this pursuit of sleep, and I get crank...

Pots

I got a wonderful Christmas present from the therapist I work with. A plant stand with several tiers, mounted on white metal posts in the shape of a crescent moon. There’s a perfect spot for it at the clinic, just beside a west-facing window on a blank stretch of wall. This is real estate any plant will love.

The trouble now is how to decide which of my collection can be pried from their existing spots and come with mama to work. I have a lot of plants—for the sake of this post, I counted: 1...

Iceberg

I’ve been trying to decide what to do with the new year. Though resolutions are cliche and sometimes problematic, they can also provide a needed course correction, a multimedia cue that it’s time to regroup and gather your wits, make sure you’re headed where you mean to go. This optimistic momentum fades over time, and resolutions rarely succeed, but imperfect efforts can still be valuable. We don’t have to improve our lives like the hero in a rom-com, via soulmate and epiphany. We can meander i...

Oak

It’s Christmas Eve. Dinner’s at our place. A giant veggie lasagna, mainly, with some other bits and pieces on the side. Stuffed bread shaped like a wreath, a big green salad. Bananas foster for dessert, with that daring rum-fueled flame at the end. A couple of game hens as well, with roasted squash, because carbs are not for everyone. I did most of the work yesterday, so what I plan to do now is bedeck the rooms in twinkle lights and votive candles, set out bowls of crunchy things and chewy thin...

Vapor

Baby, it’s cold. The dogs’ water bowl is frozen over and the steps are outlined with frost. The trees are brittle, shivering in the wind, and the roads have dulled to gray under dangerous sheets of ice. It’s going to take some time to let my car warm up, and I intend to drive like a granny on my way to work this morning. Slowly, slowly around the turns. No long strides when walking.

I wonder how the homeless are coping out there. It’s common to see them on the sidewalks and under bus shelter...

Three

I’m supposed to complete a self-evaluation at work. You’ve seen one of these, I’m sure. A long series of questions covering various aspects of the job and how good you think you are at it. It’s divided into categories and subcategories: How organized you think you are, how careful, how accurate, how skilled. One to five, line by line. The bosses fill out the same assessment, and afterward you get together and compare the answers.

What kind of sadistic shit is this? Imagine the horror of rati...

Sweet Alyssum

Work is okay. Better than okay, when compared to the shit-show of 2021. That was an awful year. I’d lost my long-term job to COVID and had to find another. At first, it seemed I’d landed on my feet at a pediatric therapy clinic, where I worked the front desk and managed the schedule for ten providers and a passel of wild-eyed children. I loved those kids, by the way. One of my defining features as a human is how much I love children; it’s something everybody knows about me, including the kids, w...