itch | Literature and Libation

Craft and Draft: Poison Ivy, No Calamine Lotion

May 29, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

The writing side of your life – once you’ve truly embraced it, absorbed it, made it part of you – is like a new skin. It surrounds and covers you, forms a protective barrier, keeping your emotions and squishy opinions safe from the daily onslaught negativity and rejection and slimy internet trolls.

When you start out and your writing is raw and innocent, this skin is delicate, easily marred and easily broken. But as you grow through and with life, every fall and bump and clumsy tumble toughens it. Callouses form and harden, scrapes dry and scab over, and the worst gashes fade into story-worthy scars.

As years and decades flit by, exposure to life will turn this skin into a flexible, protective suit of armor. Eventually, it will be your natural bulwark against critics and haters, who by definition, are gonna’ hate. And that’s real nice. A mighty fine thing. But it’s a pretty slow process.

If you want to speed it up, you have to main-line some kind of writing steroids. You have to introduce an external catalyst to creativity and motivation.

You have to give your writing-skin some poison ivy.

Poison ivy, that insidious vine, isn’t all bad. Sure it’s painful and unsightly, springing up at the worst possible times, in even worse places. But it also has the ability to bring your mind into a state of hyper-focus, where your brain is twisted and bent on one thing: itchy scratches and scratching itches.

Go finds some oily, nasty leaves (the kind made of focus and determination and motivation are the best) and rub them all over your writing. On your drafts. On your edits. In between your independent clauses. Rub them in the most annoying places you can think of, and make sure to get the oil in there really deep.

Rub them on yourself too. On your wavering confidence, on your self-doubt, on the weakest parts of your artistic bones.

A day or two will pass with no results. You’ll think, “thanks a lot, Oliver, I wasted like, 22 whole minutes finding and rubbing those leaves. I could have watched most of Wheel of Fortune instead!” And you’ll sit and be annoyed with me, typing like you usually type, thinking like you usually think.

Until a herald appears. The oil of motivation sinking into your brain, causing an allergic, innervating reaction. A red smear on a Word doc, an itchy piece of awkward grammar that you can’t help but scratch. You’ll think nothing of it at first, mindlessly clawing at the annoyances as they appear. You’ll rub and rub just so the frustrating feeling goes away, but that will only work temporarily.

Soon the red smear will spread to entire manuscripts of impartial edits, hundreds of damaged sentences you can’t help but repair, tens of thousands of word-itches that can only be scratched by typing them out, one-by-one. The oil has now been absorbed by your brain, and no amount of laziness or doubt can wash it off. You won’t be able to ignore the vexing throb and burn of all those words that just need to get out, all those edits that need to happen, all those ideas that need outlines.

All those itches that invariably need scratching.

And don’t even think about dumping half a bottle of calamine lotion or Benadryl gel onto the festering mess. Let it flare and shout its anger out into the world. Let the itches itch. Let the annoyance and frustration build, until the blisters and boils and the crimson patches of infected writing are the only thing you can conjure in your mind. Let them interrupt your sleep. Let it be the first thought on your mind before food or drink or other worldly wants.

The itch will become all you know, the scratch all you want. And you will write because you have to. You won’t have time or energy to think about “not being good enough” or mull over “will this be rejected” as you force the words down onto that poor keyboard, chasing after the never-ending tail of an insufferable itch worm.

And then, with as much creeping subtlety as when they arrived, the itches will fade. The redness and swelling will recede like a beach at low-tide, leaving freshly exposed writing-skin made tougher by the fury of the flaming reaction. Your skin, in a matter of a few weeks, will be more resilient and more experienced. Your writing will be stronger from having fought the itches and won.

And after you’ve had it once, sometimes in the shower or at your desk or on the toilet, a phantom itch with dash across your skin and you’ll remember how the poison ivy made you feel.

And then you’ll write, knowing that the itches might come back. Secretly hoping they will come back. Just so you can have the joy of scratching them all over again.

“Poison Ivy tastes like an itch when you have it on your tongue, and I’d say that love tastes the same, only itchier.  ” – Jarod Kintz

Review: Flying Dog Old Scratch Amber Lager

May 14, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

Old Scratch lives in your refrigerator.

His body is part tiny dog, part flea, part amber colored lager, all unfiltered childhood nightmare fuel.

His grotesque form creeps out of darkness, only visible when the door is closed and the light goes out.

He crawls and stalks and eyes your food, watching, waiting, for his chance to feed.

He is the curdler of milk. He is the molder of bread. He is the rotter of eggs.

His gaze is fixed on all that is good. His is the life of spoiling and defiling. When you want a sandwich, pray Old Scratch has not been at home.

He was not always bad. At one point he was of the purist malts and yeast. He was crisp and friendly and loyal to his masters. But he had a scratch he could not itch. The flea in him bit and dug and infested his soul.

Soon the itch took over. The good in him was replaced by a desire to scratch. Scratch and scratch and scratch and scratch. Soon he was no longer good. All he could think of was the itch.

The warmth in his life disappeared. He retreated from all he knew. No longer did he ride the neighborhood animals, no longer did he find joy the warm fur of dogs and raccoon and lazy house cats.

He found his way to your fridge. The cold of the icebox matched the cold of his soul. As his skin numbed, the itch faded, but never disappeared.

He takes his pain out on your food.

If you want to keep your food safe, keep this tasty amber ale in a fridge with nothing else. Or leave him out to warm up.

Maybe he’ll be a little nicer. Maybe he’ll get worse. The only thing to be sure of with Old Scratch is that he has an itch, one that can’t be scratched.

8 out of 10.

Amber + Lager = Amblager – or – Lamber!

Next up: Sam Adams East-West Kolsch!

Itchy, Itchy, Scratchy, Scratchy

October 13, 2010 · by Oliver Gray

It’s not all bad.

An injury can be quite sobering, especially if it impacts your well developed routine. It’s very easy to take things, even those that are very important to you, for granted when you’re able-bodied. Stupid things that normally take no cognitive thought become herculean feats of strength. Do you have any idea how hard it is to put on socks with one hand?

It forces your brain out of its comfort zone and tests the very limits of your creative thinking. Healthy limbs and surfaces of your body take on new roles and your manual strength and dexterity is tested at every turn. I’ve found ways to open bottles one-handed, sort the mail one-handed, even apply deodorant, to both armpits, one-handed. Some people may resign themselves to not doing certain things while injured, but I am far too stubborn to be so fatalistic when I still have some capacities.

I may not go to the extreme of driving or playing guitar with my feet, but I have been using them for unorthodox purposes. I can use my left foot in conjunction with my right hand to create a grip with a much wider span, or put my feet together to grasp something while my good hand opens/adjusts it. Years of soccer have given my toes freakish strength, which comes in very handy for picking up assorted items that are out of reach due to the injury.

But beyond forcing a new kind of adaptation, an injury ruins some of your favorite activities. Like the realization that all of your entertainment is electronic during a power outage, I was faced with the realization that all of my favorite hobbies rely heavily on having two free hands. Playing a stringed instrument: two hands. Using a computer efficiently: two hands. Reading a book: two hands. Dressing oneself: two hands. Showering: two hands.

All of your innate learning wants your body to use both hands, but a screaming stop sign of pain quickly reminds you of reality. Your arm becomes a cumbersome dangly part; good for getting in the way or making you look mentally handicapped at best. The easy route would be to lie in bed until cast removal day, but some of us don’t get that kind of time off work.

Instead I began to appreciate what I was missing. I took my left hand for granted, using the most literal definition of the phrase. My mini jam sessions will be all the more sweet from here on out, as I’ve tasted life without my music. I will cherish any feeling in my hands, cold or hot, good or bad, just because I know realize how terrible prolonged numbness feels. I’ve reawakened my appreciation for the little things in my life and all it took was one catastrophic injury!

There are many things I have found joy in, in an otherwise miserable period. I learned that the harmonica is one of the only instruments you can play one handed, and is fun as hell to boot. I rediscovered the joy of classic, turn-based video games that don’t require the frenetic response time of their contemporary brothers. I taught myself to take pride and garner a sense of accomplishment from the perfunctory, because I opened that can of cat food all by myself, dammit. Life becomes simple and your brain goes a little Pennsylvania dutch; it doesn’t matter that you’re not building an HD TV satellite, it just matters that your overalls are clean and that you can wear a sweet beard in public.

I have to mention the one bastion of sanity that an injured person can cling to even in the darkest of times, that I have embraced like a mother: scratching itches. A cast, while protective and stylish, is a hellish prison full of itch-monsters, hell-bent on driving you insane with impossibly placed, difficult to scratch itches. They will wake you up in the night, tickling or poking the hardest to reach areas of your wound, until you maniacally laugh or depressingly cry out of sheer frustration.

I had a theory in high school, that the total pleasure experienced from scratching itches outweighed the total pleasure experienced from sexual gratification over a lifetime, but unfortunately I cannot back it up with anything empirical. Scratches itched inside a cast are the mangum opus of a career featuring thousands of bug bites and the worst poison-plant induced rashes.

When you finally manage to satisfactorily scratch the itch, a euphoria, that I can only assume is like doing a buttload of Ecstasy while watching The Incredibles, washes over you. Your knees quiver and a chorus of angels sing praise hymms in your name. Small, furry animals flock to you and hippie folk musicians sing of your triumph. You may even black out. It it quite possibly one of the most rewarding physical experiences in the scope of human feeling.

Getting to these itches is an art in itself. Some suggest vibrating the cast from the outside with a personal massage tool (nudge nudge wink wink, say no more), but I found this only marginally effective. Others suggest using a can of compressed air to “shoot” air down into your cast. The thought of liquid nitrogen leaking out into my cast and incisions negates the idea. One of my coworkers even suggested dumping talcum powder down my arm, an idea I found difficult to pull off without creating a giant mess.

See below for my weapon of choice, a size 3 (3.25 MM) knitting needle.

(Scissors included for scale)

This is a thin, green, metal stick. A knitting needle is ideal because of its rounded edge and superb length. That curve came naturally from use and is exactly why I didn’t buy the plastic versions; I don’t want to explain to my orthopedist why there is a half of a broken plastic stick stuck in my cast.

Here is an action shot!

(Scissors included because I forgot to move them)

Technically speaking, you’re not really supposed to stick things down your cast. The doctors claim you can cut yourself and get a horrible infection, but I’m pretty sure that is an empty warning. Anyone who has ever experienced the mind-bending bliss of scratching that long sought after itch would completely agree with me.

This has been my life for the past 5 weeks, scratching my way to freedom one day at a time. I’m over the hump now but hopefully I can retain the appreciation for the little things that this elbow has given me the chance to finally notice. Do yourself a favor and try to use just your dominant hand for one day; duct tape the other one to your leg or something. You’ll be surprised how awkward, but ultimately humbled, you feel by the time you go to sleep.