Writing From the Rage Vortex

by Marianne Leone

Every day my husband wakes up to the sound of steady, inexorable cursing. It’s coming from me, pacing in front of cable news. Like a Westworld escapee, I have been programmed by the events around me to turn on the television immediately after staggering out of bed, before even brewing the dark roast jet fuel coffee I need to open my eyes and accept the reality of today. I’m just checking to see if the nuclear codes have been launched or the white haired wannabe in waiting has somehow succeeded to his dream job and during the night the Handmaid’s Tale has become nonfiction, and now it’s time to pack up the rescue dogs and flee to the Canadian border. Just positing this scenario, I can already feel the rope tightening around my sagging throat. 

Mornings used to be for revision of whatever I was writing at the time. I have a vivid memory of the days when I was just past the middle of a book and the momentum was such that you could feel the wind whipping your hair. That’s when I would look eagerly at the word jumble from the night before that had magically become pages and I was grateful to be over the part where it was an hourly uphill slog. Those were the days, my friend. The momentum now is like the Rotor, the carnival ride where you whirl around in a circle and the floor drops out but you remain stuck to the endlessly spinning walls of the ride and even lifting your hand becomes impossible. You are pinned, part of the vortex, stuck there until the ride slows, the floor ascends and you can free yourself.

Things I do to attempt to climb out of the Rotor of Rage:

Take t’ai chi twice a week (I am told t’ai chi is good for balance. I want to be fair and balanced. This hasn’t happened yet, but I can stand on one leg for a long time.)

Walk the elderly rescue dogs for two miles every day in the cathedral of pines at the cranberry bogs. (Avoid using the audio notes app on my cell phone during the walk to record yet another rant too incoherent to become an actual op ed and pay attention to the cathedral of pines and the mindless joy the elderly rescues take from sniffing random butts.)

Listen to Yo Yo Ma play Bach cello suites (if the floor is dropping too quickly on the Rage Rotor, substitute Dance Wildly playlist and dance wildly.)

Swim, even though it’s freezing (Pretend I’m Katharine Hepburn, who swam in Long Island Sound in November even in old age)

Garden, and by gardening I really mean coddle my baby marijuana plant, the one I am hoping is a girl. She’s already named Jeff Sessions II. (Last summer’s Jeff I was a healthy girl and gave forth two bountiful harvests. Jeff II is turning yellow from anxious overwatering.) 

Try to get another acting job like the one in Clear History where I got to sit in a ditch and hurl nonstop improvised invective in my native Massachusetts accent at Larry David’s character and get paid for it, a dream come true that I revisit from time to time. Acting jobs are a true palate cleanser for the writer brain. Someone else has written something on a page that someone else prints out and hands to you and you just have to interpret it. 

But here’s what finally worked:

Revising my unsold coming of age novel and turning it into stand-alone, but connected short stories, then sending them off into the electronic universe. That began a brief surge of hope and a lessening of the centrifugal effect of the daily rotor ride. 

Who could have known that losing oneself in the histrionic torments of a Catholic schoolgirl in 1965 would bring such utter relief and a way to stop the carnival ride? I’m working, I’m working. And I’m following Flaubert’s advice, scrawled on a post-it on my messy workspace: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”