deez nuts roasting on an open fire
December 2021
This semester I’ve been collecting quotes. Rather than listing what I’ve been up to, I’m just going to drop a few of them and explain the context (the bottom 3/4 of this letter are writing pieces from this semester; if you are overwhelmed by all the words you don’t have to read that far). I have a few life updates too, some of them are even exciting! but I’ll mix them in with the inane stuff, because all of it is privileged equally in my brain.
“Certainly you all subscribe to Trains Magazine,” assumed Professor Giscombe.
I was in his poetry workshop this semester and we began every day by discussing our dreams. One of the dreams I shared was about how co-opers stormed my house and accused me of being a furry (I had recently put out my newsletter). Then I had to explain what a furry was and it started a whole conversation, but we’d already spent 30 minutes discussing Lana Del Ray so time was of little consequence at that point. “Ms. Shriber, you have magnificent dreams, you need to write a poem about them,” said Professor Giscombe. I didn’t write about that one in particular, but I did write about my hamster dreams, and on top of that I composed some pieces that I’ll share below. 10/10 class; I sincerely mean it when I say that every moment was so much fun and I loved our class and I feel like my writing improved so much. The most important final that I took this semester was attending our poetry reading.
“Stand goal achieved!”
my smartwatch congratulating me for throwing my hands up in despair
“If all looks good to you we are ready to go in January!”
This was in an extremely exciting email I got from my literary agent Jess. I got agented over the summer (the first step in getting published–an agent sends your manuscript to editors) so this fall I’ve been working on a manuscript. I’ve just finished the final sample illustrations, so it will go out for submission in a couple of weeks. If it gets picked up I’ll illustrate it fully, and if not I can just keep submitting new stories. My current manuscript is an illustrated children’s book about constellations, and the next one I’m working on is about a skateboarding raccoon in San Francisco. Although having an agent is no guarantee that your work will get published, I am so honored that someone believes in my writing enough to represent me. It’s probably the most amazing thing to come of this year, and this has been a year of a lot of amazing things.
“Dear Meg, I think that right now you're behind where you should be. Which is not surprising, one might say, given the shift of your topic relatively late in this semester. The point of this note is not to lament that fact, but rather to communicate that I think you really need to make the most of this winter break if you wish to write a solid honors thesis.”
This is from a less exciting email I just got from my advisor Professor Saul about my thesis, and he’s right, I’ve got a lot of work to do (I’m now writing about how the pandemic transformed the genre of personal essay). My family can attest to the fact that I spent four hours today doing research, and for that reason this break may be less interesting than usual. I’m excited to take this on, though, and I dropped ten units next spring so that I can prioritize thesis writing next semester. Actually, I’m currently enrolled in 35 units because I got into 20 units-worth of creative writing workshops and was automatically enrolled, but I intend to cut it down to 14.
“I pray for the ants, that they may be dead,”
said by Cathy one night as she blessed the food. We had big ants this semester. One day they all just moved in and our life was never the same. We had all the proper artillery–the spray, the traps, the caulking, a couple of vacuums–but they just kept coming. We sprayed their main hole with Raid, but rather than transmitting to their buddies that the hole was compromised, they just fell endlessly out of the wall and swam around in our dishwater for a few minutes before dying. Cathy kept finding them in her freshly-made tea and Katherine’s car was swarming with them, so it’s really a tossup as to who was more traumatized.
“Just because he’s nodding doesn’t mean he’s agreeing,” said Kate
of Dad over Thanksgiving Break. There isn’t much else to explain here–if you have a dad you probably understand.
“If it feels like we’ve been taxiing in circles for 30 minutes it’s because we have been.”
Said by my pilot. I had the worst luck with flights this semester. On this particular one (I was headed to DC)--I’m not sure how to put this delicately–-our plane weighed too much and since it wasn’t a cargo issue they had to ask several people to voluntarily get off the plane. On my return flight the pilot said, “Hello passengers, sorry for the delay. We just found out we’re going to San Francisco. Buckle up.” which is always a reassuring thing to hear.
“To ensure your furry friends are taken for a walk and looked after while you are at work, LinkedIn offers you an annual wellness allowance.”
Got a job! It’s at LinkedIn in their management training program in San Francisco! I love the company and I am FASCINATED by their benefits. I was earlier lamenting the fact that, after college, you don’t have your learning experiences divided into neat semesters, so I am particularly excited that this is a rotational program and I’ll spend 6 months in each of four different sales/marketing functions. I want my life to be like school always. I actually applied to this job twice this year–the first time I was immediately rejected and I just resubmitted my application without changing anything to see what would happen. Then I got an interview and made it all the way to an offer, which is a heartening lesson in how arbitrary recruiting can be.
“These whiteboard pens are dead,”
“Just like Latin.”
This exchange took place in my Latin class. I decided to take Latin when I was in the Paris catacombs in 2019 and realized I couldn’t read any of the inscriptions. I’d taken five years of Latin at that point, and it was shameful to consider all of the sacrifices and kind people who enabled my learning (my mom drove me to Foothill for AP Latin every day my junior year). I took this class so that their efforts weren’t for naught, but also because Intermediate Latin this semester had a Persephone, a Caesar, and an Athena enrolled as students, and that seemed to bode well. So I stuck with it, and now I know Latin again, at least for the next few weeks.
Not a quote, but a frequent topic of discussion this semester was what food would be grossest to carbonate. I think the best answer is tuna, but someone suggested beans. You can’t carbonate beans though, they carbonate you.
I wanted to end with some of my writing from this semester. Here are a couple pieces, and I hope you’ll accept them as evidence that I have been writing, even if I haven’t shared it all.
Haibun about the trip that Professor Giscombe’s class took to Elkhorn Slough
I am disappointed that I am not the first to wonder: how is it that my mouth can see anything and know how it will feel? The prickle of a strawberry leaf on my lips; the warm shape of a smooth pebble, its harsh reaction with my teeth; the disappointing dust of aspen bark that does not dissolve on my tongue. Deep memory stored beneath my tastebuds. Pre-loaded knowledge from a time before I could see clearly. A dangerous way to explore the world.
This is what I think as I examine the duckweed on my pinky finger. When I scooped it up I could feel each miniscule leaf and tiny rough root resisting the surface tension so slightly, and now I feel the larvae around underneath and on top of the tiny fronds, intricate gelatinous nodules that would horrify me if I had not picked them up myself. It is an area no larger than my fingernail. Yet, my finger informs me, it writhes.
The light shining through the globule tells my tongue everything it needs to know, the way the roots would cling to my teeth, the way the larvae would pop and smear, the little green bits that would stick in my throat. The mild musk of it, how I would cough. The complications of each tiny piece. I consider it without contemplating it.
“I wonder, is that a leech?” says my professor, and I fling the colony across the trail.
When I woke: late morning light caught in the blinds, causing the morning glory entangled in the slats to glow brilliant green and violent heliotrope. Color. Bloomed. Bitter cold petals sticking to the humid window as they would my tongue. By evening folded back into itself.
[In the short essay below, “Fire Dreams,” I gave myself the assignment to reinterpret each section of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and transform some of the images to reflect my modern-day eco-anxiety. It’s an imperfect piece and I wouldn’t say that it is representative of the way I consciously feel most of the time, but I really enjoyed writing it. I hope you’ll appreciate it as a literary piece, even if it’s different from my usual writing.]
The Fire Sermon
A memory from a time when the tiniest of details would haunt me. Stories deeply affected me. Reality even more.
I remember once when I was four my dad taking me to Seattle to see a warehouse (or so it felt) full of hand-carved carousel horses saved from a fire. They were old in a way that I could not appreciate--all the past seemed equally primitive to me then--and their wild eyes and faded colors alarmed me. They looked as if they were still trying to outrun the fire. My dad thought it remarkable that so many had been saved and restored, but in their old wood I thought I smelled smoke and I almost cried for the ones that had been lost. I wished they'd never been crafted, left to grow in a forest away from fires instead of being bound to a circular course, able only to rush into the flames again and again. They’d been carved to amuse children like me.
Because I was so little and didn't have a map of the decades or any sort of historical markers, I assumed that this fire was momentous, the scale of the great San Francisco fire, the sort of thing that would later be taught to me in school. Fire, more than most things, more than growing up or leaving home someday, felt an inevitable terror. And because I could not write back then, I dreamed about it. I dreamed of planes and falling towers and burnt-out houses.
I have never been able to find whatever fire it was that almost destroyed that carousel. I understand it now as something even less than a historical footnote, a curiosity that stops once in your town and then is forgotten. But even now the horses haunt me in ways I don't understand. I smell the air on an acrid November morning and realize I am still living in that primitive past, subject to elements I could never control. Some part of me in my sleep still sees the terrified horses, scarred from the flames.
Aldebaran, stargazer, prancer, tu polaris qui fugis--
You whose eyes are stained by soot whose eyes rolled back are white no more--
Had you seen fire in the whirling electric lights? when it subsumed you
and your shellac crackled and while your celluloid guts melted and then burned
when your opalite tackle exploded into stars
You followed the stars on their courses around into the flames until--
I dreamed of burning things. I hated you
Death By Water
I dreamed of my friend Katrina, and I dreamed of Hurricane Katrina—I dreamed her house was gutted by the waters and she was left to play in the rafters. Her parents’ whereabouts were unknown. She didn’t seem bothered. I joined her, clutching a plastic wand with a plastic star at the end of it, afraid to jump through the rib cage of her home. I was afraid of skeletons and I couldn’t bear seeing charred things. She seemed as happy as I’d ever seen her.
I told my mom and she gave Katrina all of my toys. The toys immediately fell through the rafters into the waters below. At school the next day, in the real world, we had a fake fire drill. I thought of my dad’s power tools. Among the wood and exposed beams and broken things in the garage.
I was afraid of falling into the water and of the vast unpredictability of disaster, and I was most afraid of becoming like her, Katrina, who didn’t seem to mind at all. And when I slept I was sucked into the water as the Titanic went under and then I was swimming and although the water was thousands of feet deep my feet still scraped the water-rusted iron of the great sunken ship and it kept pulling me down with it. I saw the pearls of eyes in the depths before I woke up sweating.
The Burial of the Dead
When I got older I fantasized about the heat death of the universe. It was an easier fantasy than my fear of fire. In the heat death of the universe, the fires send their last sparks into the night sky and this experiment runs too long and things grow too far apart—even now, our galaxy is accelerating away from almost every celestial thing we’ve ever identified at a pace faster than the speed of light. Everything that has ever been radiated by every fire every star every oven every body eventually escapes and is never again absorbed to keep atoms from freezing. Entropy ceases. All cools asymptotically to zero degrees Kelvin. Nothing is ever again created.
In the heat death of eternity I imagine myself in the cold ruins of a universe. I am solitary on an asteroid, just me some shadow and all the deconstructed information. Information is the word that they use. Because although not everything had DNA, each particle somehow still had a purpose, all tiny words constructing some bigger thing, and now here in the heat death those fragments cohere only into a heap of broken images. Beckett said in Endgame: “It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still, and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.”
Of course, none of this will happen before the sun grows old and swells up and subsumes our planet and the rest of them and explodes and creates a new star and does this life thing all over again, and none of that will happen before all the vegetation and plants on my windowsill burn up and our atmosphere thickens and we become Venus, radiant and warm and then unbearably hot and poisonous, and maybe none of that will happen before my own fiery crash in some human engine.
I imagine that too sometimes. And then I wonder why I bother imagining it at all, when the sun is killing us all already anyway, mixing our cells breeding tumors and oxygen is slowly burning us up from the inside.
I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also good and will suffice
What the Thunder Said
In 2020 when it rained for the first time it rained so ferociously that it wiped the blossoms from the trees. They floated into the gutter and briefly everything was all slick boughs and pink rivulets. The perfume was overpowering, stirring things, grassy oils and earth that hadn’t released its scent since a solitary rainstorm the November before. I let my anxiety drip from my fingertips into the iridescent runoff down into the storm drains.
Summer surprised us it rained one more time: it stormed and thrashed and knocked down power lines, threatening to flood the courtyard, punishing the parched poppies and soaking dusty sidewalk chalk into overflowing gutters. When it came I was afraid because I’d wanted it for so long but not this soon—this summer rain asked a price of lightning and thunder and when it struck not even the maelstrom could keep the fires from spreading. It was only September 6. In two days the sun wouldn’t rise and everything glowed orange in the cold.
We watched a carmine disk set into lilac dust and the half-erased eucalyptuses on the horizon. Tired, by then, to consider our slow-burn nuclear winter. I’d once determined to reverse all this. Serene apocalypse.
A Game of Chess
I have sent away 300 of my paintings. I used to keep them on my walls. I only have a fraction of what I’ve ever created now because I can't keep it with me. In case it all burns down here. Eggs in a basket. I’d rather have them scattered around the world, where they can’t burn until we all do. As for my journal--it is stored in Google Drive and so I don’t risk losing it in a fire, but the thought of its loss terrorizes me nevertheless. I am what I have written. What would it mean for me, what would it mean for who I was if it were all wiped out in a power surge or some solar flare, if my printed records burned and my computer was destroyed and the Cloud disintegrated in the inferno. These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
Which is why I’m not safe here. The Bay Area is irrigated by fog. The soil is serpentine and things exist here that cannot anywhere else, I exist here, the land asks so little and yet is an internationally-recognized biodiversity hotspot. This year the fog irrigation didn’t work—the manzanitas, the redwoods even, they’re all burning slowly around the edges, evergreens browning and drying and the fog is not enough to quench the thirst of the land. It all gets mixed with smoke and burns away before it reaches Tilden.
I cannot have a future here. I’ll take all my paintings and journals and all that information somewhere else. I can’t bear to see the slow destruction of it all, the oxidation of all things and trees. If I lived here I’d think too much of the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up, unreal city where the rain fell thick. I can’t go back there either. The streams used to boil kinetic with salmon, chum, chinook, pink, sockeye, I left when the coho ceased swimming upstream. Sweet Thames, run softly, ‘til I end my song. Many of the places I remember only exist now in my journal. I’m not sure where to go.
This summer I thought I’d escaped—we were 3000 miles from California in Boston, it even rained, it rains there in the summer—when one morning the sun was red. I smelled the sky and it was all so familiar, filled with alkaloids and pesticides and benzene. A coincidence, I thought, until I looked it up and learned the smoke had followed me here to my birthplace from the West Coast. I thought that someday I'd live, but now I'm not sure where I'll go. Maybe to the mountains.
I’d include more, but this has already gotten pretty long. Lots more updates to come this year, I think!
