CNF: Helter Skelter, Or: Things I Write Down So They Stop Perplexing Me
by Daniel Seifert
What my high school English teacher was thinking when she told me to Stop Being Such a Bloody Boy. What a sixteen year old Bloody Boy should make of this request, delivered with such fervent heat. How sometimes the best thing to be is the ice cracking, like a broken promise in my G&T. Where twenty years have slunk off to. Where the boy will be ten years from now, when the ice caps have boiled away. How Salinger got the idea for Holden to keep asking where the ducks go when the pond collects a skin of ice. Why ducks seem capable of a happiness entirely richer than mine. Whatever happened to the interrobang, the upside-down one in particular (⸘). How come helter takes its rest in shelter, and what it means to see chaos in everything. A word within a word.
And who coined the phrase a murder of crows and what they had, precisely, against crows. Why when I see a happy duck I want to scream into its face Stop being such a bird.
Daniel Seifert’s writing is published or forthcoming in The New York Times, Consequence, The Sun, and Gulf Coast. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and twice shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. He lives in Singapore, and is working on a novel. Wish him luck on Twitter @DanSeifwrites.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Helter Skelter, Or: Things I Write Down So They Stop Perplexing Me”? The best part of writing is collecting my little thoughts, oddities and fears like pebbles, stacking them up and seeing what kind of shape they make. In this case, the quote from a teacher (a lovely woman, which made her fierce non sequitur all the more baffling) has rattled around in my brain for years. But now it reached out and linked hands with my favorite, most haunting image from Catcher in the Rye. Why? Who knows, but if I’ve learned anything it’s that strangeness is where things start to cook on the page. The emergence of an ice motif then offered a way to introduce my gnawing fear of the climate crisis, the comfort of my daily sundowner, and a love of typography. I love that if I had written this piece another day, or another hour, the pebbles that swum to mind would have been entirely different. Hey presto and helter skelter, I had a strange, crooked tower of pebbles. One that perplexed me in the best possible way.
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