The Mesothelioma Queen of Freeville
Mar. 8th, 2010 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraFinally – spring is here! I can feel it in the air. Ambient sunlight, temperatures lilting into the forties. The ground is still covered with half a foot of hard snow in most places, that hard pack that comes from successive melting and refreezing, but I imagine that will be gone entirely by the end of this week.
This has been a hard winter. A very hard winter.
###
“I got you your money,” I told him.
“How?” he asked.
“You don’t want to know,” I said.
That was three weeks ago.
###
In the version of the fantasy he threw together two weeks ago, the money would have had to come three days before I pulled it together. But that was rewriting personal history: with his back was to the wall, he was snarling. I distinctly remember him telling me: I need to leave on the 17th.
###
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me countless times over a sixteen year period, and it’s some kind of complicated folie a deux that bespeaks as much pathology on my side as it does on his. It’s not really a matter of saying: I don’t deserve this. It’s a matter of asking, Why am I doing this to myself?
###
And, of course, now he’s saying Chance has hired him back on for another season. Leaving on the 20th, he says. I guess that means he’s gonna get a chance to fool me again.
###
So. Things have been pretty ghastly on this end for the past four months. We’re broke, close to being indigent. Yes I have a job but it’s a stop gap job, variable hours, low hourly wage. Pays the rent, pays for gas to get to the job – not a lot left over. To pay the bills, I’ve been praying to Lousia May Alcott, E. Nesbit and all the other patron saints of genteel lady hack writers and doing the content brokerage thang.
For a long time I didn’t mind it. At times I almost enjoyed it. After all, I wrote an online sex column for many years, reviewed books for Amazon back in the day when they paid reviewers – never read a single one, wrote a Hollywood gossip column for AOL, have generally written more words on a wider variety of subjects than practically anyone I know. I take a certain pride in being a hack writer, as a matter of fact. Just call me the Philip Marlowe of the literary elite.
But then last weekend I hit a wall writing a group of articles on mesothelioma for some legal website.
Asbestos is the golden goose in tort circles right now. Lawyers love it. Why? Well, it’s been linked to so many nasty diseases that in 1989 the EPA banned the stuff. There is the Erin Brokavitch-esque saga of a mining town in Montana, half of whose population came down with abestosis, asbestos-related lung cancers and mesotheliomas. I wrote about that. I also wrote a 2,000 word description of mesothelioma itself, a disease that attacks the cells lining the serous cavities of the body and is invariably fatal because symptoms rarely show up until 30 or 40 years after the asbestos exposure. About 80% of all mesothelioma cases are linked to occupational asbestos exposure.
Thing is you have to breath a lot of asbestos fibers to come down with the disease. And generally you have to breath them in over a very long period of time. Not always – 300 tons of asbestos were used in the construction of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. At least one paramedic working at Ground Zero died from mesothelioma a mere five years after 9/11. I rather imagine the whole population of lower Manahattan is at risk for developing mesothelioma. But you don’t see a whole lot of sleazy lawyers pitching that on their websites.
No, instead they’re going after oil refinery workers. I wrote the pitch. I’m sorry but there’s absolutely no hard evidence linking oil refinery workers with mesothelioma. Wait! I take that back – there’s one U.K. study using sketchy statistical analysis, and I strongly suspect the author of the study was on British Petroleum’s payola list. True, asbestos was used extensively for insulating pipes, tanks, gaskets etc. But also true oil refinery workers mostly work outside where winds and air currents disperse the hazardous fibers. I suspect people who live around oil refineries are more at risk for developing the disease from asbestos dust that’s blown into their houses. But for some reason the lawyers don’t go after them.
Anyway, it took me forever to crank out the fish bait. And I felt like handing in my Hack Union membership card when I got up from my desk. It’s one thing to write frothy prose with entirely no content; it’s another thing entirely to disseminate misinformation at the behest of some sleazy lawyer looking to wrangle a profit out of other people’s misery.
I’ve had a hard time writing ever since. I mean – Subject. Verb. Object. The words just look wrong on the page.
This has been a hard winter. A very hard winter.
“I got you your money,” I told him.
“How?” he asked.
“You don’t want to know,” I said.
That was three weeks ago.
In the version of the fantasy he threw together two weeks ago, the money would have had to come three days before I pulled it together. But that was rewriting personal history: with his back was to the wall, he was snarling. I distinctly remember him telling me: I need to leave on the 17th.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me countless times over a sixteen year period, and it’s some kind of complicated folie a deux that bespeaks as much pathology on my side as it does on his. It’s not really a matter of saying: I don’t deserve this. It’s a matter of asking, Why am I doing this to myself?
And, of course, now he’s saying Chance has hired him back on for another season. Leaving on the 20th, he says. I guess that means he’s gonna get a chance to fool me again.
So. Things have been pretty ghastly on this end for the past four months. We’re broke, close to being indigent. Yes I have a job but it’s a stop gap job, variable hours, low hourly wage. Pays the rent, pays for gas to get to the job – not a lot left over. To pay the bills, I’ve been praying to Lousia May Alcott, E. Nesbit and all the other patron saints of genteel lady hack writers and doing the content brokerage thang.
For a long time I didn’t mind it. At times I almost enjoyed it. After all, I wrote an online sex column for many years, reviewed books for Amazon back in the day when they paid reviewers – never read a single one, wrote a Hollywood gossip column for AOL, have generally written more words on a wider variety of subjects than practically anyone I know. I take a certain pride in being a hack writer, as a matter of fact. Just call me the Philip Marlowe of the literary elite.
But then last weekend I hit a wall writing a group of articles on mesothelioma for some legal website.
Asbestos is the golden goose in tort circles right now. Lawyers love it. Why? Well, it’s been linked to so many nasty diseases that in 1989 the EPA banned the stuff. There is the Erin Brokavitch-esque saga of a mining town in Montana, half of whose population came down with abestosis, asbestos-related lung cancers and mesotheliomas. I wrote about that. I also wrote a 2,000 word description of mesothelioma itself, a disease that attacks the cells lining the serous cavities of the body and is invariably fatal because symptoms rarely show up until 30 or 40 years after the asbestos exposure. About 80% of all mesothelioma cases are linked to occupational asbestos exposure.
Thing is you have to breath a lot of asbestos fibers to come down with the disease. And generally you have to breath them in over a very long period of time. Not always – 300 tons of asbestos were used in the construction of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. At least one paramedic working at Ground Zero died from mesothelioma a mere five years after 9/11. I rather imagine the whole population of lower Manahattan is at risk for developing mesothelioma. But you don’t see a whole lot of sleazy lawyers pitching that on their websites.
No, instead they’re going after oil refinery workers. I wrote the pitch. I’m sorry but there’s absolutely no hard evidence linking oil refinery workers with mesothelioma. Wait! I take that back – there’s one U.K. study using sketchy statistical analysis, and I strongly suspect the author of the study was on British Petroleum’s payola list. True, asbestos was used extensively for insulating pipes, tanks, gaskets etc. But also true oil refinery workers mostly work outside where winds and air currents disperse the hazardous fibers. I suspect people who live around oil refineries are more at risk for developing the disease from asbestos dust that’s blown into their houses. But for some reason the lawyers don’t go after them.
Anyway, it took me forever to crank out the fish bait. And I felt like handing in my Hack Union membership card when I got up from my desk. It’s one thing to write frothy prose with entirely no content; it’s another thing entirely to disseminate misinformation at the behest of some sleazy lawyer looking to wrangle a profit out of other people’s misery.
I’ve had a hard time writing ever since. I mean – Subject. Verb. Object. The words just look wrong on the page.
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no subject
Date: 2010-03-09 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-10 01:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-09 06:46 pm (UTC)What's he been doing this winter while waiting for Chance to hire him again? Are you and Robin staying put in Ithaca or is Robin going on the road again?
no subject
Date: 2010-03-10 01:52 pm (UTC)Thanks. I'm less emotionally involved with what I write these days, and my method has changed -- I frequently begin in the middle of something, and then tack on a beginning and an end. I hardly ever write sequentially anymore.
Robin needs to stay in one place. He's 15, very much needs to be rooted in the friendships he's developing. B is just hopeless -- I'm not at all sure he has a job with Chance. Hasn't worked, doesn't appear to be looking for work Truly bad situation -- Robin loves his dad so I can't really kick him out. Robin wouldn't forgive me.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-10 07:53 pm (UTC)Glad to hear Robin is staying home for a bit. Wish you could find the key that turns B.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-10 09:30 pm (UTC)And I can't tell you if that means I'm a writer or I'm not as much of a writer as I could be.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-11 11:47 am (UTC)