This week, I started a new class for my MFA program. It lasts three weeks, so in addition to formal classtime, we have daily field work. We visit places of liminality—loosely defined—and observe. This week we spent time in the Minneapolis skyway and in St. Paul’s Union depot.
I’ve tried to avoid using too many free writes and other class activities for my Project 25:365 contributions, but there are only so many hours in a day, and it’s creative work, so there we are. Here’s some of the little snippets I’ve scribbled in my mole-skin notebook:
Tuesday:
Immediately after seeing Beth going the wrong way, I looked at numbers backward through glass to figure out where the fuck I was.
***
A man in a trendy suit walks by. His companion is equally posh or posh-adjacent. One elite says to the other “She’s the last psycho!” I’m not sure who she is or why she’s psycho. I wonder about this mystery woman’s psychosis as I keep walking toward wherever the fancy suit men came from.
As I wonder, I enter a new atrium where I hear Chappell Roan mid-”Pink Pony Club.” He didn’t mean her, did he? Nah, my money’s on a bad date that the date probably felt worse about than he did. Is she on the skyway, too, talking about the last psycho she’ll ever date?
Wednesday:
I am sitting on a couch in the Union Depot, late to class by 2/3rds. Lateness is caused by my teeth, horrendously damaged from years of bulimia for which I received none of the benefits but gain a string of terrible dentists who bamboozled me in ways that weren’t even consistent. One tells me we just need to do a bit of gum work and adjust diet. Another fears utter calamity if I don’t spend thousands of dollar and hundreds of hours of peace. My current dentist is a moderate, the solution to teeth, I think. Failing moderation was my problem in the first place.
I should be writing about trains or transitions right now.