In his Prison Notebooks, written while imprisoned by the fascist regime, Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
When my father was dying of cancer, I helped my mother care for him at home. We had a hospital bed set up in the spare bedroom. My mother thumb-tacked a teddy-bear themed calendar to the wall so my father could count the days.
“Something to take his mind off things,” my mother said about her choice of calendar–teddy bears in tutus, teddy bears in tuxes, teddy bears in bikinis emblazoned with rubber ducks.
But the bears were more for my mother than my father, whose mind wanted nothing to do with things like months and dates or cute stuffed animals in drag.
This was around the time my mother got a pattern for teddy-bear-making from Joanne Fabrics. My mother, working through grief and worry, stocked up on fake fur and cotton fluff and began churning out bears.
Soon my parents’ house was overrun.
I began to worry when one night I found my mother in the living room, surrounded by bears in matching caps and vests. She’d been talking to them in a kind of little girl voice. I couldn’t hear what she said and when I asked, she denied it.
“You’re not the boss of me,” she said. “Mind your own goddamn business.”
Still, I heard what I heard.
***
It never occurred to me until now to wonder why teddy bears, why such a childish obsession in the face of my father’s–my mother’s husband of over 50 years–impending death.
Teddy bears in the mix of that immense, incomprehensible loss.
It wasn’t until my daughter Phelan, years after both my parents died, went into the hospital to have her tonsils out, that I thought more about my mother’s weird bear fixation.
Phelan was, of course, terrified.
I was, of course, terrified.
And so, the day before her appointment, I took my daughter to Build-A-Bear Workshop at Ross Park Mall, a fancy rich-person’s mall outside of Pittsburgh.
Build-A-Bear Workshop is the scourge of not-so-rich parents everywhere. At Build-A-Bear Workshop, everything is ala carte–the bear, the outfits, the shoes, and, especially, the vanilla-scented heart that the adoptive bear-parent/kid has to kiss before the heart is inserted into the bear carcass that is then inflated–resusitated!–with cotton fluff then stitched whole.
You can pay extra for a heart that beats or a heart that sings the Disney theme song.
You can pay extra for a heart that records the adoptive bear-parent/kid’s voice saying, “I love you,” or “You love me,” or some other message three words or less.
The average price for a Build-A-Bear bear with all the fixings is just under $100, give or take.
At Build-A-Bear, the bears come with their own birth certificates, which list their official bear names.
Phelan, who had a stuffed dolphin she named Puffysqueakymart and a stuffed monkey she named Squinko, named her bear Teddy.
When we arrived at the hospital for her appointment, Phelan clung to her Build-A-Bear bear. The nurse in charge, a woman with the bedside manner of steel wool in Oscar the Grouch scrubs, asked Phelan her bear’s name.
“Teddy,” Phelan said, and squeezed the bear to her chest.
“Wow,” the nurse said. “That’s original,” and prepped my daughter’s tiny arm for an I.V. while Phelan tried not to cry.
***
Stuffed bears.
Of course.
The universal symbol of comfort, even in the presence of a nurse who made Nurse Ratchet from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” look kind.
Teddy bears line memorial sites for children murdered in school shootings in the United States. Too many to count.
Teddy bears fill sites where immigrant children have been separated from their parents, gone missing, etc. Too many to count.
Teddy bears line the gates of prisons, detention centers, walls.
Too many to count.
***
Back when my father was dying, my mother suffered the way anyone losing someone they love suffers. My father suffered the way people with cancer suffer.
I was there to see all of it. I slept on a loveseat in the spare bedroom so my father didn’t have to be alone nights. I’d lie awake and listen to his raspy breathing, counting the next inhale to the next inhale, wanting him to hold on even though I knew he was in pain.
Sometimes I’d go into my mother’s room and count her breathing, to make sure I wasn’t losing her, too.
Some days I made jokes, like how caring for my father was aging me. I’d goof and show my father my elevens, those between-the-eyes lines that mark every worry, the ones most likely to be shot up with Botox, a neurotoxin that in larger doses could paralyze or even kill but mostly made people look timeless, death-defying.
Eleven, that angel number.
Eleven, signifying high intuition, insight, and a connection to the spiritual realm.
Eleven, lovely and luminous, when wrinkles aren’t concerned.
I showed my father my elevens, my wisps of grey hair. My father’s face was so deeply lined it looked like a relief map. My father lost all his lovely hair to chemo and radiation. Even in his hospital bed, he wore a knit cap to hide it that summer.
“Everything’s a joke to you,” he said, “you jackass.”
But there was no joke.
Nothing was funny.
Still I leaned in and held onto funny, the way a near-drowning person holds onto a life raft.
Something, anything, to ward off the inevitable.
***
Did you know that life rafts on airplanes, the ones that self inflate when they hit the water after a crash, are stocked with Jolly Rancher candies and an orange dye labeled Shark Repellent?
The Jolly Ranchers are to keep people calm, a sweet and jolly distraction. The dye creates an visible orange perimeter around a downed raft. The dye is to make people feel safe, sharks being terrifying and all.
Fun fact: Jolly Ranchers have a long shelf life, even when they get sticky, and have no real nutritional value beyond the kind of carb-loading people stuck on a raft might need for paddling.
Fun fact: There is no such thing as shark repellent.
The things we think will help us are mostly illusions, temporary fixes.
***
I paid extra for my daughter’s teddy bear to have a beating heart. I giggled when my father, hallucinating from morphine, mistook my mother in her violet velour sweatsuit for a gigantic purple pill.
“I don’t want any more of that purple pill!” my father, a week before his death, said, and I couldn’t help it. As soon as he heard me laugh, my father was alert as ever.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” my father wanted to know, and I wanted to say everything.
Everything is the matter.
Funny, right?
Funny.
Right?
***
A few years back, I found out some of my writing students were compiling a notebook of what they called Jakiela-isms. The notebook, apparently, has been passed around and handed down and, while I have never been allowed to hold it because I’m pretty sure there are some funny drawings of me in there, students have recited from it in class.
It’s awkward and sometimes a little flattering but mostly just creepy to have your own words tossed back at you from a notebook covered with cartoon cat stickers.
I am unnerved by how often what I pass off as writerly wisdom comes off as something lifted from a refrigerator magnet, or, more likely, from other writers who lifted it from other writers and so on. (See: “There is no such thing as original thought.”)
Sample Jakiela-isms:
“Use an exclamation point once every seven years and then only when you mean it.”
“Put your fucks where you need them most.”
“Steal time to write. No one’s going to give it to you. Like someone’s going to give you a Rolex. Please.”
“Make a mess. Clean it up later.”
“Go somewhere new and scary and see what happens.”
“Let a little light in.”
“No heroes. No villains.”
I love my students, 99.8% of them anyway. I’ve been teaching writing for three decades now. Three decades is a long time to do anything.
In Hollywood, for example, three decades could mean four to five marriages, a dozen stints in rehab, or three rounds of intensive plastic surgery and countless rounds of Botox. Thirty years is the lifespan of termite queens, tarantulas, and naked mole rats, boa constrictors, ball pythons, and alligators, but not politicians in Washington, who seem to have other-worldly lifespans, dear god.
As for Jakiela-isms, I mostly believe, as all ism-makers do, in my 30-plus years of isms. But those last two–no heroes no villains, let a little light in– have been giving me trouble lately.
It’s difficult to teach anything with certainty now, especially, maybe, writing–something that relies so heavily on truth, which has become as elusive as Bigfoot or Moth Man or justice.
“What the hell is the matter?” my father, a veteran of World War II who fought fascists, who saw the worst in most people but held onto hope even so, might want to know.
Everything.
Everything.
The list goes on and on, the answers lodged like cancer in my throat.
***
“Let a little light in.”
That one is about the importance of humor in the presence of pathos or worse, as in “When humor goes, there goes civilization.”
That’s the brilliant, big-hearted columnist Erma Bombeck who prophesied it decades ago.
My mother used to clip Erma’s columns out of The Pittsburgh Press and post them on our refrigerator.
Remember newspapers?
Remember clipping bits of wisdom, pre-refrigerator magnets, to save? You’d have to be a certain age to remember this, but trust me, it mattered.
Sometimes, when my mother landed on an especially brilliant Erma column, she’d press the clipping between two pieces of waxed paper and iron them, preserving them the way romantics saved flowers.
My mother hated ironing. She wouldn’t iron clothes, but an Erma column was worth the effort.
I like to think one of the columns my mother kept was the one about humor and civilization, though it was probably one about a bowl of cherries and life being the pits.
***
“No heroes. No villains.”
That one’s about empathy, of course.
Everyone, every writing teacher who has ever taught writing says, is complicated, a crazy quilt of light and dark.
Sure, Grandma makes the best Snickerdoodles, but she also cheats on her taxes.
Grandpa roasts the best marshmallows but is also a violent drunk.
Someone can be a thief and an honest person.
And even the Joker in Batman, an absolute comic psychopath, has a backstory where the government withheld his meds and he was bullied by other clowns and his mother probably didn’t love him much.
Learning passionate compassion, understanding motivation, understanding the essential flaw in human nature–all of our natures–is vital for writers and artists and anyone who doesn’t want to be, in the beautiful language of my Pittsburgh homeland, a jagoff.
“I do not ask how the wounded feel,” Walt Whitman said about his time at the bedside of wounded soldiers in the Civil War, “I must become the wounded.”
But here we are, writer-humans in America in 2025, at a time of division arguably greater than the ones that sparked the Civil War or even the first American Revolution.
Here we are, perched on what feels like the end of civilization, at a time filled with what seems like very one-dimensional villains and when very little that’s happening around us seems funny.
“The true terror is waking up one morning and realizing your high school class is running the country,” Kurt Vonnegut, that master of humor and pathos, said, though he was talking about Bush, Dick, and Colon–George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell–who now seem playground-level villainous compared to our current monsters.
How can any of us write anything when most days it feels like all we can do is scream into the abyss while every good thing around us burns?
When I say us, I mean me, but I hope you might understand.
I hope I’m not alone in my screaming.
***
In his great work, Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut writes about his own time of monsters. Within the novel–a bit of science fiction burrowed in realism–Vonnegut recounts his experience as a 22-year-old prisoner of war in Schlachthof Funf, a slaughterhouse where pigs were butchered before the war.
Vonnegut was held in the slaughterhouse during the firebombing of Dresden, one of the most brutal bombings in World War II. The attack in February 1945 left the city of Dresden destroyed and killed nearly everyone, an estimated 25,000 people.
Kurt Vonnegut survived by hiding in a meat locker three levels below the street. Then he wrote about it. He wrote, by his own account, over 5000 useless pages until he finally channeled his experience into his sixth novel, Slaughterhouse Five.
Anyone who has read Slaughterhouse Five can recognize all the hallmarks of Vonnegut’s style. The entire book is deeply funny and boisterously serious. From the Trafalmadorians, the aliens who look like toilet plungers, to sweet but hapless Billy Pilgrim who gets unstuck in time and finds that free will is as much of an illusion as shark repellent, Vonnegut’s quirky humor belies the tragedy underneath everything.
What the hell is the matter with you, Kurt Vonnegut?
***
Critics have sometimes been hard on Vonnegut, landing especially on the book’s recurring phrase, “and so it goes.” The phrase shows up again and again, but only when a death occurs or is mentioned.
Well-meaning critics, an oxymoron maybe, have said that the phrase comes off as a shrug, a resignation, an easy acceptance of the violence and fallout of war.
The late great songwriter John Prine, lost during the pandemic, called critics “those syphilitic parasitics.” Critics, like authoritarian regimes, seldom recognize irony and have a putrefied sense of humor. Some see the phrase “and so it goes” as a stand-in for the cliche, “It is what it is.”
Another Jakiela-ism–don’t use cliches. It’s something I stole, of course, from George Orwell, who knew a lot about fascism and whose rules for good writing, gleaned from his excellent essay “Politics and the English Language,” are–and I’m translating–as follows:
- Never use a long word when a short one will do.
- Never use a long sentence when a short one will do.
- Never use a foreign phrase or jargon when there is an everyday English equivalent.
- Never use a phrase you’re accustomed to hearing or seeing in print (the anti-cliche rule).
- Never use the passive voice when you can use the active voice.
- Break any of these rules before you do something barbarous.
Orwell was, of course, concerned about how language can be used to obscure meaning and manipulate people. See his prescient novel, 1984, which is of and for our times, and which is often on America’s brave new banned-books lists.
The irony of that.
Orwell’s bias against cliches?
They allow people to check out, to not feel, to not think and instead nod along to all that static, their brains whirring in authoritarian blenders.
If George Orwell were alive now, I think he’d particularly hate the cliche, “It is what it is,” which is the worst of them, with “My bad” in close second. Both mean, sorry not sorry. Both mean, whatever. Both mean, fuck off. And both are used primarily by dickheads.
Trust me on this.
On the other hand, “And so it goes” is a phrase Vonnegut uses with great intention, not as filler or cliche, but when there are no other suitable words for the horror he’s witnessed. It’s his expression of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s advice to avoid similes or metaphors when writing about tragedy.
“The blood of the children/ran in the streets/like the blood of the children,” Neruda wrote.
And so it goes.
As for Vonnegut’s lean into comedy, author Salman Rushdie explained it this way. “Vonnegut sees war as a tragedy so great that perhaps only the mask of comedy allows one to look it in the eye.”
***
As I write this, I am about to begin my 31st year–sweet everything–of teaching writing.
The students I teach are wide-ranging–traditional undergraduates, doctoral students, community workshop writers.
But all of us are living together in these times, with horrors too many to list, with hopes that refuse to go gently, but still.
There are no simple answers. Every Jakiela-ism I utter now rings hollow, but it would be weird for me to stand in front of a classroom and say nothing.
The job of the writer is to bear witness.
That’s another Jakiela-ism, but what a weight to put on the shoulders of anyone. Students especially.
Maybe we can start with our own small losses.
Maybe we can start with our own small hopes.
Maybe writing about one human moment, then another, can matter some.
Maybe we can avoid doing anything barbarous.
Anne Lamott, another of my writer touchstones, says writers should start with a one-inch picture frame. Imagine filling that tiny space with words. Imagine capturing a moment there. Imagine holding the shared flawed experience of human nature in a sentence, in two sentences, more.
Imagine building a calendar. An army of teddy bears. A beating, vanilla-scented heart. Loss. Grief.
Imagine it all matters some.
Imagine, as Anne Lamott says, that laughter is carbonated holiness.
Imagine the power of joy, even up against the horrors of the world, even up against tragedy that has no language.
The blood of the children/ran in the street/like the blood of the children.
And so it goes.
Most of the people –and of course aliens–in Kurt Vonnegut’s work are neither good nor bad, but I think they’re mostly good. Anne Frank said that, too, and it ended in horror.
And still.
And still.
“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” That’s Samuel Beckett.
I stole that one, too.
