Home Remedy for Writer’s Block

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1. Combine frozen bananas, fresh mangoes, strawberries, honey, milk, yogurt, half an avocado, a pinch of delusion, The Collected Short Stories of Raymond Carver (Library of America, 2009), the last remaining threads of your childhood blanket, a classically romantic belief in fate, a few dry sardonic comments, a Xerox copy of the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. Inc. vs. FCC (or equivalent legal precedent), a portrait of Francis Bacon (the painter is preferred, but the inducer will do), a few marital dramas by Lydia Davis, a small handful of scruples, and one Fiona Apple into your Blendtec Designer-625 Limited Edition Breast Cancer Awareness Blender. On the Advanced Capacitative Pink LED touchpad, press PUREE. (This is the button that looks like a margarita).
2. Will it blend? Sure it will, but how long to puree the mixture, and thus, whether to leave it heterogeneous or render it homogenous is a matter of taste. For you, historically, the borderline has always been the most interesting. In other words, 45 seconds.
3. Behold as the power of two whole horses pulls a hidden couplet around a radial axis. It turns the stainless steel blade in a blur of laceration that carves the Carver into concise strips. It is good.
4. Centripetal forces throw the berries, mangoes, apples, and scruples into the Blendtec’s faux-glass wall. This allows your classically romantic belief in fate to drop in on the superior drop-in motor.
5. Honeyed bananas open like shotgun shells, splaying their insides across the Warren Court’s unanimous decision.
6. A tornado forms. It swallows a rainbow of fruit and regurgitates something darker and more subtle. Your sardonic comments float above the mush, weightless as observations. You see them—for a brief, fluttering moment—for what they really are. Then they fall.
7. Francis Bacon wraps himself in your childhood blanket and leers.
8. Fiona Apple eats your scruples, as a snack.
9. Justice White, writing for the US Supreme Court, asserts the immateriality of your remaining belief in fate.
10. The avocado is gone.
11. Bacon opens his mouth to scream. Lydia Davis stares him down.
12. Two blueberries, like eyes, close.
13. Postmodern dust, don’t breathe this…
14. Season with sincerity, to taste.
15. At last, you’re ready to write.
16. Except, no. You’re hiding something. Running. You’re sick of following recipes. They’re not real. They avoid the heart of the matter. You have to make choices, reach out and grab your ingredients. You have to decide why you blend.
    You blend because of your mom. It’s in the lymph nodes now. Her health insurance doesn’t cover enough of the costs, and she’s asking you for money you don’t have, reiterating her sweet I love you's. If she weren’t exhausted from the chemo, you would call her and reminisce about the women who hung around the house you grew up in, making her laugh that shoulder-shaking chest laugh. Instead, you load up the blender.
    This time you improvise. Decades of birthday cards, handwritten notes with phrases she told you as a kid, dresses she can no longer fill, the photo of her on her wedding day, face lit up with possibility and promise like a sign at a roadside fireworks stand.
    In the ads they call it a Blendtec Designer-625 Limited Edition Breast Cancer Awareness Blender, but you call it your mood processor. There’s something soothing about watching the chunks of her past collapse in on themselves. A soft, singular pureé. It is, after all, how you wish your emotions moved. It would be easier. Toss them all into a clear-walled container and press on the pink advanced capacitative LED touchpad to purify them until they’re PUREE-button smooth.
    Watching your Blendtec Breast Cancer Awareness Blender, your stubborn feelings are held, dropped, torn, and diluted. Knotted fears of death unfurl on the blade, financial worries scatter out of sight. The core of the trauma grinds against the clever steel with a desperate screech. You wince as it gives in, tossing its tawny hue to the congregation. It is everywhere and gone.
    Your phone rings. It’s your mom. You steel yourself. Prepare. Whatever it is, sure, yes, of course. It will blend.
17. No, you think. Too syrupy. You pour the mixture out and start again.
    

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