“I’m a lightening rod for drama.”
Charlie’s Opinions is a column dictated by Charlie, who can be found engaged in a power struggle with his landlord when he’s not staggering under the weight of all his opinions.
Charlie’s Opinion #14: Wedding Planning 1.0
“In all seriousness, that could be a good place to put the mini orbs.”
Charlie’s Opinions is a column dictated by Charlie, who can be found requesting the “presence of the abyss” at his own wedding when he’s not staggering under the weight of all his opinions.
On Being the Stranger
You get a sick thrill when you stumble across a website that has been cobbled together to provide “solace” for people who are mourning a stranger. You can read through the comment section and see the way raw grief paralyzes grammar. You can look at the last names and piece a story together: there’s his cousin, there’s his sister.
You find yourself wanting to mourn them too because mourning feels good and soon enough the tears are stinging your eyes because you have somehow—inopportune and sacrilegious freak that you are—found the father’s obituary for the son. Nothing is sacred. Everything is accessible. Here, he is spewing aphorisms because they are the only way to bandage that geyser of grief, and he is signing off as “Heartbroken,” and you are reading the whole thing without apology. Past midnight, you search the Internet to find the boy’s real name and tuck it into your dark heart.
And the whole time you recite to yourself a litany of the people you have not lost. This is not the same as the litany of people you thought you might lose.
Recommended Readings for Unstable Times
There are usually two ways people respond when I shriek, “THE WORLD IS OBVIOUSLY ENDING, RIGHT?” Some people (my beloved, my close friends) are like “yeah” and then we shiver together over a glass of wine. Others chirp “things are great!” and we stare at each other without saying anything more. If I had any philosopher friends, I like to imagine that they would gaze deep into my soul with their limpid, color-shifting eyes and soothe me with ambiguous wisdom. But alas, I have no philosopher friends. This is a wind age, a wolf age, before the world goes headlong.
But friends, I take some cold comfort in the fact that things have literally never been stable (except maybe in ancient Greece and/or ancient Egypt and/or the ancient Abbasid Caliphate, before the libraries were destroyed??). If, like me, you are quivering on the edge of becoming a full-fledged conspiracy theorist, here’s what you should be reading and why.
The book of Habakkuk: For hallucinatory non-answers to why the world is so violent. Habakkuk was the most mysterious of all the prophets, and (I think) the only one to openly question God:
How long, Lord, must I call for help,
but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!”
but you do not save?
Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion: For the amazing way she captures a feeling of generational dread and grapples with the idea that “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold“:
At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.
“Explica Algunas Cosas” by Pablo Neruda: Depending on your career, this piece is either a) a heartbreaking explanation of how art sometimes falls silent in the face of violence or b) a guilt-trip for artists who aren’t explicitly political. The ending is like a punch to the face:
…from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.
A Google search of the term “folie à deux”: to understand the dark side of love and the fragility of a person’s identity as a Single Self:
Depending on whether the delusions are shared among two, three, four, five and even twelve people, it is called as folie à deux, folie à trios, folie à quatre, folie à cinq, and folie à douze.
Your own childhood journals: To remind yourself that “priorities” are malleable and relative, even the priorities that, today, you consider defining pillars of You Yourself.
“Little Gidding” by T.S. Eliot: Because of the dance that is love/pain/God/the world:
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
[Credit goes to Charlie for discovering this one]: The poem Völuspá: Because it is about the end of a mysterious world:
Do you still seek to know? And what?
Charlie’s Opinion #13: Logan Square
“Nobody knows about Stave Street, and even less people know about Point Street.”
Charlie’s Opinions is a column dictated by Charlie, who can be found playing TONIGHT at 7:30 (@ Comfort Station) and then again at 10 (@ Elastic Arts) when he’s not staggering under the weight of all his opinions.
Charlie’s Opinion #12: Illegal Subletting
“I’m fine being murdered, I just don’t want to be ripped off.”
Charlie’s Opinions is a column dictated by Charlie, who can be found unfollowing celebrities on Instagram when he’s not staggering under the weight of all his opinions.
Everything in Moderation Except Listicles
Photo: Joseph Lyons
- Hello, Reader.
- My friends and I used to read this incredibly pretentious blog where the blog-writer was always addressing the Reader: singular, and capital-R. It works for Jane Eyre but let me put all doubt to rest right now: it doesn’t work for you.
- The longer I let toridotgov.com go without updating it, the harder it felt to update it. It was like I had to break my silence with some magnum opus: Here is What I Think About Writing, Here is What I Think About Love, Here is What I Think About Life. I didn’t want to write any of those opi (?!) at the moment, so I kept not-updating…but now, to cure myself of this stagnancy, I’m breaking my silence with the easiest of all literary genres: a list.
- The ENORMOUS IRONY is that I have been thinking about all those big ideas. That’s the thing about freelancing—it really forces you to examine things under a microscope. I mean, you could coast along forever writing listicles for $25/piece, but if you’ve got any sort of intelligence at all you’re gonna want to be constantly growing, expanding your writerly resumé, and usually working toward some vague end goal like Be a Great Writer or Sell That Screenplay or Get Published in The Atlantic. I have goals, some vague, some not…maybe I’ll write them down here someday, so the great choking hand of the internet can hold me to them. Anyway, I’ve been thinking a ton about writing—especially the way writing relates to money—and love and life and religion and the plight of the earth, but either my thoughts are still too vague to blog about or too precious to blog about or too convoluted to bl—HOLD UP, this isn’t a blog, I forgot. This is my “online portfolio,” and don’t you ever forget it.
- I have come up with a GENIUS money-making scheme that is already threatening to ruin my life. I sold a book (“Congrats!” “Oh, thanks!” Moving right along…), and in order to fund my extravagant lifestyle while I write said book, I have decided to first write a romance novel, sell THAT book, and live off the profits. It’s a sort of Russian nesting doll of book-selling, if you will.
- I’ve lived in Los Angeles for one year now! Whoa. I own only one succulent and a dead air plant, which in this, the city of succulents and air plants, is an absolutely disgraceful lifestyle choice.
- In this, my twenty-seventh year, I sold a book and got engaged (to the author of Charlie’s Opinions, no less). I wonder what twenty-six-year-old Tori would have thought of that. Multiple people have told me that massive changes happen when you’re twenty-seven. I love change—in fact I might be addicted to change.
- BUT!!!!!! In the six years since graduating college I’ve lived in six different apartments in three cities. I’m tiiiired, guys! Part of me wants to keep moving forever and part of me wants to buy a tiny white house in Marfa, Texas. Guessing I’ll fall somewhere in the middle: a flat in Paris and an apartment in every American city that inspires me (so, all of them).
- Note to all potential editors: do you want a piece written about the changing economic climate in Reno, Nevada??? I will gladly fly myself there and pay for my own housing. This is not a joke; I need to write a piece about Reno. No I am not copying Tom Wolfe!! No Vegas is not next on my list!!!!!!!
- I’m seeking a partner in crime for something very specific: I want to go to a diner, drink a ton of cheap coffee, stay up all night, and emerge the next morning having both written a film noir script. It has to be diner coffee and it has to be a film noir. Any takers? LET’S PUSH EXPERIENCE TO ITS AWFUL LIMIT!
Charlie’s Opinion #11: Branding
‘Creative’ is a capitalist buzzword.
Charlie’s Opinions is a column dictated by Charlie, who can be found writing songs based on the Book of Revelation when he’s not staggering under the weight of all his opinions.
Spine
Tonight, I was sitting on the curb drinking a glass of wine—AS WE DO HERE IN CYPRESS PARK, LOS ANGELES—and thinking about the city vs. the country. I’ve read a couple of things lately that have emphasized the difference. Don’t be impressed by my nocturnal musings, please. I was thinking about my immune system. And I was thinking about my skin.
Apparently kids who grow up in the country have stronger immune systems. They’re exposed to dirt, bugs, and swampy muck, and the result is an immune system that can withstand a lot of outside nastiness, unlike those milquetoast city kids who are running our financial centers of industry!!! But cities have their demons, too, and all the pollution of cities is really hard on your skin. Wrinkles. Cancer of the eyeballs. The usual suspects. Anyway, I was just sort of emptily musing about these different places and the various degrees of trouble/salvation they hold.
And then I just thought: whatever. The fact that we even have this dichotomy—city vs. country and all the nuances in between—is amazing. I don’t really care if I’m breathing in a little pollution right now. It’s so incredible that I’m sitting here with my feet—OKAY, MY BIRKENSTOCKS—planted on concrete that covers dirt that covers pipes and water and the army Beyoncé is slowly building underground. It’s pretty incredible that I can see the moon and a few sad stars and that there’s also an electric light over my head. I love that it’s dark out but I can see two teenage girls sitting on the stairs of the school across the street and gossiping. I love that I can see a few ants milling around. And I love that there is such a thing as the country, and it’s heartbreakingly beautiful, and I can see it whenever I want, because there are also things like Rental Cars and Airplanes and Jobs that Pay and Credit Cards For When You’re Really Desperate to Get Out.
AND THEN!!!!! (Never talk to a fiction writer if you want a short story, unless you’re talking to a flash fiction writer, in which case you may have to lean over to hear what they have to say because they will be laying on the ground because most flash fiction has no spine. YEAH, I WENT THERE.)
Then I reached down and touched the concrete.
About a year ago, maybe more, I wrote a flash fiction piece (I AM NOT IMMUNE TO SPINELESSNESS) about the end of the world. Fine, fine, I’ll link to it, go ahead, twist my arm. It was about a mother, in a space station, who watches the world split in half. I felt very emotional when I wrote it. I felt, deeply, how sad it would be if that actually happened. I know that sounds like an obvious thing to say, but just think about it. Ehhhhhh? Are you imagining it? The little grave you dug for your parakeet when you were 7? The name you scratched into that tree and then, embarrassed, tried to scratch out again? The last batch of recycling you threw away, thinking somewhat guiltily that recycling old birthday cards feels wrong but hey, are you supposed to save them all forever?? ALL OF THAT GONE.
And then a couple of weeks ago, I read a submission for Cicada (a hip cool teen mag I freelance for) about…a girl in space watching the world end. In both pieces, the world ends in flame. In both of them, humans watch it happen with a particular gaping nostalgia-tinged grief. And when I say “the world ending,” I mean the world LITERALLY BEING DESTROYED. No zombie apocalypse or global warming happening here. I mean the planet physically blowing up/burning up/cracking apart.
When I stroked the concrete I thought for a second that maybe I was stroking the spine of the planet. Like it was some big animal that we’ve all forgotten about. I actually whispered something to it. I wanted it to know that I remembered it. I just couldn’t bear the thought of Earth not existing anymore. I mean, it’s so amazing! And yes, it has been the unwilling—unwitting?—stage to so many horrors. And all we talk about are those horrors. And we should talk about them. But all this time, under us, has been this great sleeping animal. And I feel like me and this other writer were probably feeling the same way when we wrote those little pieces. Like, we really haven’t appreciated the Planet-ness, the Globe-ness of this earth enough. And the whole thing will probably split open someday. And won’t that be awful. Won’t that be the ultimate sadness.
Human Raising Her Head to the Universe
Oh, my little site, how I’ve neglected you! And if you think I’ve neglected tori dot gov dot com, you should see my actual journal—poor empty baby.
Like everyone else in the world, I have been very busy. I have been traveling so much, it’s like I think it’s tax-deductible or something! HA! HA! HA! IRS, YOU’RE NOT LISTENING, RIGHT? I’ve been struggling to stay on top of work while simultaneously moving forward with “work”—excuse me, MY LEGACY—which would be the most difficult and highly-ranked gymnastics move in the Olympics if I had anything to say about it. I’ve been editing a dissertation about Ecclesiastes (not mine). I’ve been reading a little book called The Grapes of Wrath which is a really great book to read in California, because you will end up watering the drought-ridden soil with your own unstoppable tears! Steinbeck, WHO KNEW YOU HAD IT IN YOU?! And I recently made a spreadsheet only to discover I have nine different sources of income. You say freelancer, I say TRUST FUND.
I’m only here tonight to make a brief point and also to ease my soul of the burden of having an un-updated website (NOT BLOG). Ahem. Tonight, a favorite album reminded me that it’s so easy to go through life with your head down: focused on your work, your friends, your love, your goals. But one of the things I like best about the world is, well, it’s a WORLD. In a UNIVERSE. And there are certain—shall we say—pieces of art that, I find, have the effect of gently opening me up to the world around me. And it feels insane. It’s the best type of vertigo. These particular books/albums/government secrets thrill me in a very specific way, reminding me that there are so many places to go and so much gorgeous unknown stuff in the world. And it’s not just about geography, but about time, too—people in the past! Can’t forget about them! And speaking of time, what about tesseracts? Which reminds me, I really need to re-read all of Madeline L’Engle— who was one of my favorite authors as a child—because I suspect that going back to her novels would feel like a little personal time-traveling of my own.
I can’t tell you what exactly I’m listening to right now that’s opening up my world/memories/perceptions like this. Because it’s cliché, and because you have to find your own stuff. But only a handful of art gives me this feeling. It’s worth seeking it out. And in my experience, that sort of perception-opening-up, human-raising-her-head-to-the-universe experience mostly only happens after midnight—or if you find yourself so lucky as to be sitting outside somewhere in Europe. Or when you’re counting your millions, but that’s a story for another night.
