blog queen said...
Hello Pot Boy,
I am the Blog Queen of the Grove Palace. I met the Queen of the palace at 2:00 am at a workshop. I was one of her lowly students. Wonderful lady she. Which of her estemed offspring are you? The eldest perchance? So Pot Boy, I have three questions for you. How does one manage to quit one’s job and become a full time writer? And, can one make a living writing?
...
So the Blog Queen …wants to ditch it all and do something else. Anything else. Actually if you need a scullery maid, let me know. The last question. What is the hierarchy of your palace?
9:11 AM, March 25, 2006
Dear Blog Queen,
The Pot Boy advises you to tread carefully; many unfortunate souls have lost their positions in the workaday world outside the Palace by indiscrete blogging—luckily you have committed misdirection by not saying that you live in South Dakota or Idaho or wherever it is. Right?
Just now, for example, I am running some small degree of danger. When the Beggar Queen finishes whistling with fury and blowing tax steam out her ears, she may come rampaging back to the palace and take a dislike to my friendly bloggibles. I saw her rush by yesterday, eyes spinning and hair on fire! Wonderful lady she may be, but who can maintain the eternally sweet temper when faced with the Miscellaneous Wildly Numbered Forms of the Federal Government?
I hate to tell you that the three offspring—you honor the Pot Boy!—of the Beggar Queen are profoundly unfamiliar with the sponges, the scrubbing brush, the implements of the Pot Boy trade. You have heard of untouchables? I have tried, but they are the unteachables! They might as well be planting their bottoms on velvet tuffets at Windsor Castle and waiting for someone to bring an egg cream on a silver tray. As for your impertinent but amusing questions about my identity, I am merely one of the Beggar Queen’s myriads—perhaps one of the more notable ones. In the Palace, a good-looking and intelligent (and somewhat vain) Pot Boy may be more powerful than a vizier or a king.
There is a very simple answer to how one quits the job and becomes a full-time writer: marry rich. You say that you like your current husband and are no 'Wife of Bath'? Well, you may console yourself with the sentiment that if you did live off your writing—as do an
incredibly tiny number of writers—you would lose your freedom to write exactly what you want to write.
That’s called sour grapes.
But they’re true grapes, all the same. And they are the sort of grapes that are trampled and served up in wine glasses at the Palace at 2:00 a.m. In an effort to be trendy and ‘with’ the political times, some choose to call them “freedom grapes.”
Alas, thank you for your interest, but I’m afraid that all our scullery maid positions are occupied by attractive young women who do not appear at all likely to retire. I am sorry for your disappointment.
Hierarchy.
That’s a tough one. Since one or more palace doors open onto the internet, the place appears to be infinite. I’m always stumbling through an unexpected passageway, or discovering some entirely new person—a cross-eyed scribe, a thief, an Irish opera singer, a governess, a string of little brats pulling another child in a wagon, a chemist or alchemist, an Akhwesasne boy smuggling cigarettes between the billiards room and the third-best parlor, a boy painted with purple stripes, an old speechless man, etc. You’d think that the Beggar Queen had some sort of power over them all, and perhaps she does. But hierarchy? She’ll come down, hoick up her skirts, and warm her feet by the fire—laughing and telling stories to the scullery maids…
In the course of writing you, Blog Queen, I have discovered the wonders of spell check, a thing that I have little use for in the kitchen and environs. It wants, very badly, for me to change the line, “They might as well be planting their bottoms on velvet tuffets at Windsor Castle and waiting for someone to bring an egg cream on a silver tray.” Clearly this computer was not brought up on Little Miss Muffet. It would like the line to read, “They might as well be planting their bottoms on velvet buffets at Windsor Castle and waiting for someone to bring an egg cream on a silver tray.” Alternatively, it desires the royal bottoms to be applied to “velvet toughest” or “velvet taffetas” or “velvet toffees.”
Velvet toffees! What weirdnesses do I miss, lounging in the scullery with the maids?
Sincerely yours,
the Leviathan of Pot Boys
megan said...
Oh, most wise Pot Boy, I have a problem. My mind has gone completely and not even left a forwarding address. I watched part of a Star Wars movie with my brother, and now, think, I can't. I mean I can't think. What can I do to get out of this non-creative state?
Dear Megan,
Answer 1: Find a nice sturdy cloth, and a bit of steel wool, and a scrubbing brush with a long wand of a handle.
Go find some dirty, mucky, nasty pots and pans, some copper and some aluminum and some cast iron. Begin making mystic symbols on the pots with the appropriate instrument.
Let your mind drift on the floating bubbles in the sink.
Soon your parents will be extremely fond of you, if they are not already—no doubt they are, but clean dishes never hurt the maternal and paternal affections—and strange thoughts will come swirling into the empty spaces of your brain.
It works for me. I get very creative in the kitchen. But perhaps it’s the presence of all those quick, lithe scullery maids.
Answer 2: Just don’t get too fussy about being muse-struck. Remember Faulkner’s famous advice, “I write only when I'm inspired. Fortunately I'm inspired at 9 o'clock every morning." This, too, applies to Pot Boys and to the shining of pots.
But Megan, you are a clever girl. I like your deliberate stumble into “now, think, I can’t.” So your assertion of the non-creative is really just a flourish of the creative…
Respectfully yours,
the Pot Boy
Photo credit: royalty free image, "dragon castle" by kizkiz (Kieran Harvey of Australia) from www.sxc.hu/. Taken at Manly Beach. Castle by a sandman from Byron Bay! ***
