Shameless Prostitution

Maureen suggested that I start a Blog to create a web presence. She suggested I do that rather than mope on the couch and eat brownies for breakfast and be depressed about being graduated and mostly unpublished with nothing to look forward to except for $40,000 in student loans. This is where I insert a commercial for bringtheink.com. That is where you will find my dystopic short story “People Factory.”

Someone asked me if I felt differently now that I had my MFA. It’s not any different than turning 33. But that was silly of me to expect that I would feel something else. That’s like an alcoholic trying to find happiness at the bottom of the Popov—when there’s nothing but a cheap head ache.

This is my shameless attempt to get myself out there. My family is waiting for me to create the next Harry Potter so that I can put them in a luxurious retirement community rather than a stinky nursing home. I keep telling them that I write short stories and that nobody pays. It’s like playing the lottery. I submit a short story with a $10 to $25 fee for contests with higher odds of being rejected than accepted. So in actuality I have a gambling problem. I’ll be lucky if I can give my stories away.

I’ll be prostituting myself on Division Street. Instead of wearing short skirts and fishnet stockings, I’ll be standing there in Birkenstocks and a bathrobe with an extension cord running to my laptop from the independent coffee shop (because they feel sorry for vagrant writers). I’ll scream of cheapness. I’ll give you my story for free. Just pick me up and we can drive around the block. I’ll tell you that it costs more to print it out than it does just to lick the screen. After a while, I’ll start to worry that I have some sort of disease for pedaling my stories to strangers. I’ll wonder if I have brain cancer from sitting in front of the computer screen too long or maybe the electromagnetic waves have effected my girl parts from too many late night lap dances.

Every writer is a narcissist. Even when we’re not writing about ourselves, we’re still writing about ourselves. We project ourselves onto real characters and into the fictional ones—they’re all versions of ourselves. But this blog isn’t going to be all about writing. Writers writing about writing—Jesus, isn’t that what they always do?

So it’s a good thing I have a real job, so I can bitch about nursing. In my real life, I’m a Registered Nurse. RN also stands for Registered Narcotics Pusher and Registered Nag. Or maybe Registed Narcissist? Due to the unfortunate circumstances with the Michigan economy, my place of employment has felt it necessary to restructure. My hours were cut. Instead of working 60 hours every 2 weeks, I’ll be working 40 hours every 2 weeks. This brings me back to prostitution and homelessness. All that bullshit about a nursing shortage—not true.

So I hope to blog about injustice, politics, health care, LGBTQ issues, various current events, food, death, tattoos, mental illness and myself. Not in any particular order. Names may or may not be changed to protect guilty or innocent parties. And some seemingly non-fiction parts may or may not be fictionalized