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Our mandate for freedom was written by men who knew firsthand the peril of allowing a single man to accrete to himself unchecked and unlimited power. As Jefferson and his small committee drafted these legendary words, they did so with the full intent that no man would ever be allowed to exert his seigneur and that all men would be afforded an equal measure of justice and an equal measure of representation in the governance of their daily lives.
Many of these men would reconvene five years later to draft a second document that would put into practice these ideals and intentions by creating a framework for a system of governance that depended on a careful balance of authority in the institutions they stipulated, and, when that seemed to be insufficient to safeguard the liberty and equality of the populace from the excesses of government, they took the additional step of drafting amendments that specifically guaranteed those civil liberties to one and all.
At different times and under a variety of circumstances, it has sometimes been necessary to further amend this framework, it has been necessary to re-interpret ideas written by men who could not conceive of the future that would unfold before them, it has been necessary even to engage in civil war to reassert the primacy of our national structure over specialized interests.
But rarely has it been necessary to call the nation's leaders to account for their overreach of their justly-derived power. Rarer still has it been necessary to invoke the spirit and the intent of the Declaration itself to make it plain that this nation should not and will not be in the hands of tyrants who disrespect those basic ideas.
Now that time has come. The actions of the President and Vice President of the United States have crossed a threshold far beyond any reasonable expectation of "executive privilege". They have exceeded their authority by their direct disregard for the laws of the United States, by their deliberate deceptions which have led the nation into an illegal war, and by their systematic erosion of the fundamental liberties enshrined by the Continental Congress on this very day two hundred and thirty-one years ago.
The public cry for impeachment of these men falls on deaf ears in the Congress. Now the call has begun to sound for the resignation of the President and the Vice President, and that is equally likely to go unheeded. And thus I say to you that the only alert that can be sounded is to the people of this country themselves. Like Paul Revere riding his horse through the night to warn the people of Concord, we are charged with, indeed obliged to shout throughout the land and to prepare to battle for our freedom.
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."
-- Thomas Paine, "Common Sense", 1776
Permalink | Comments (2)The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say.
Here's what happened: I just didn't have any stories waiting to be told. Simple as that. It was one thing to take a random picture and jam on it for 500 words, and another to think through and write a story out of thin air. Honestly, I have never been a great story teller. I stopped trying to write fiction years ago because I couldn't come up with stories that were worth a tinker's damn, and now it seems I've run out of anything to write about altogether unless it's the pointless crap that fills up all these millions of terrible blogs.
So now i am not sure what to do. I was just going to go back to the same old same old, but maybe it really is time to give it up once and for all. Maybe getting away from blogging for a few months "cured" me of it, and this is the final proof that I have reached complete mindlessness. I have nothing left to say, nothing worth contributing, nothing original or creative or interesting. It's not what I expected to happen when I decided to spend some time writing again, but perhpas it's for the best anyway.
I need to think about all of this a little and I'll get back to you.
Permalink | Comments (2)Sorry, I guess I really don't have anything to write about.
Radio silence will continue to be observed until I do.
Permalink | Comments (1)No, really, I'm working on it.
Permalink |Yes, it's Valentine's Day, but it's also the mid-point of the month, so I thought I would take a moment to talk briefly about the "Month Of Writing" -- how it has gone so far and what's next.
For those of you just tuning in, instead of the usual collection of links and so on that I customarily post here, I decided to spend the entire month of February working on writing exercises and posting them here as a way to break out of the traps of the writing style I use for blogging. The idea was to progress from shorter exercises to longer ones, doing some fictional writing as well (and perhaps even some poetry before I'm done). So far I have done a week of 10-minute free-writing exercises and a week of 500-word exercises writing from found pictures. My goal this week is to write one or two "mini-short-stories".
The 10-minute exercises weren't terribly good pieces of writing -- they're not really supposed to be. What I got out of them was that I was still waaaaay too inside my own head to do any other writing. With that in mind, I made a sincere effort last week to get as far away from myself as possible and I focused on vignettes that were fictional characters. I actually liked some of the stuff I wrote last week and may expand on one or two of those characters this week.
I should also note that my "offline" life is a little busy this week, so I probably won't have anything to post this week until Thursday. Next week will also probably be a Tuesday-Thursday posting schedule.
I enjoyed last week's exercises a lot and am looking forward to doing more. I would be very pleased indeed if the net result of this month's efforts was to restore the writing habit that I allowed to wither away. Writing has been an important activity in my life since I was 9 years old and wrote plays to perform in front of my fourth-grade class. Blogging almost every day for five years has been an interesting reinterpretation of a writing habit, but it worked to the detriment of everything else, and it's nice to see that the old ways have not just but have just been dormant.
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As a kid, I loved those science fiction films where the space patrol guys had those whacked out control panels with dials and toggles and gauges and stuff. Even when we were kids we used to make fun of "the future" in those movies because it was totally ridiculous compared to the space-age technology of 1975. So it surprised the hell out of me when the professor led me into the monitoring room. I expected to find a row of computers and video monitors, some high-end imaging stuff, anything, you know? I mean, it's not like the university couldn't afford state-of-the-art. They had just built that big-ass biology lab at the other end of campus, right? Yeah, so, I'm literally speechless when he sits me down in this wooden desk chair and puts me face to face with the control gear and two rows of analog meters. He tells me my shift will be every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, just before his class, shuts the door, and leaves me there to stare at eight meters and three dials, with just some scribbled notes from the guy who had the previous shift about not adjusting the gain more than 1 dB without recording a minute's worth of data so they could see the adjustment on the paper output.
In retrospect, I really appreciate that experience, because it taught me that science wasn't about the gadgets, it was about the ideas. We've gotten spoiled in the years since then. The laptops my undergrads bring to class now are more powerful than what passed for our entire processing core in that lab. And sure, there's no denying that we can analyze everything so much faster and crunch so much more data, but the tools don't make the research better if we don't understand what the tools are for. By the end of that semester I felt like I was Albert Fucking Einstein because I could tell what was going on just from the hum some of those old devices made. My write-ups were full of the little ideas that I thought of all afternoon as I sat in that closet. The professor never laughed at any of them, at least not in front of me, and one time he almost choked on his tea as he read my notes and realized I'd seen a solution to a problem they'd been struggling with for a year. His recommendation letter got me into my doctoral program later on. I read in the Chronicle of High Ed that he retired a year or so ago and I sent him an e-mail thanking him for starting me off in my career. He wrote me back a letter with a fountain pen and ink. I laughed.
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I remember that coat so well. You can't tell from the picture, of course, but it was red. My mother bought it for me just before she got sick. I was seventeen that winter. Don't bother trying to do the math in your head, dear, that makes me 87 now. Those gloves were warm but I never cared for them half as much as the coat. I always wanted a pair of calfskin gloves, but it was the Depression then, you know, and we made the most of the things we had. Years later, when Bill opened the store in town, I bought a pair of calfskin gloves. They were so soft on the outside, and they looked lovely, but they weren't at all warm enough.
Bill and I met that winter. He was two years older than I was, and he was working for his Uncle Roland in the mill. I had stopped at the Woolworth's over on Mason Street to pick up some things to take to my mother in the hospital, and he was with that red-headed boy he used to pal around with. I think his name was Allen. He was one of those boys who looked at every girl as though he was trying to see through your dress. I never liked him at all, and once BIll and I started seeing each other, I was pretty glad he stopped hanging around. He was killed in the war, you know, and after that his family moved out of state. So there was Bill and the Allen boy, and they were looking at something on the shelves, or at least pretending they were, but they kept sneaking looks at me. I just ignored them and went about my business in the store, but they got right behind me at the checkout counter. "That's a nice coat you're wearing," Bill said. The Allen boy snorted, but I didn't see anything particularly funny about my coat. "Thank you," I said while the cashier rang up my things. I paid and walked right on out of the store, hoping they wouldn't see which way I went. Of course, the Woolworth's had all those big plate glass windows there in the front, and so naturally they saw exactly where I went. I didn't even get as far as the corner before they were out the door and following me.
So I stopped at the corner and turned around and faced them. "I know who you are, William Mills, and if you and your friend don't have anything better to do with yourselves, I'll walk straight to the police station and let them know," I snapped. I don't have the slightest idea where that came from, because usually I was as quiet as a mouse in those days. I suppose I was quite upset because Mother was doing so poorly and Father was so worried. I think I knew long before she did that she wasn't going to get better. Well, anyway, you should have seen the look on Bill's face when I called him by name. You'dve thought he'd been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He got red, red, red in the face and he started stammering trying to think of something to say back to me. You know, I think that's the moment I fell in love with him, right there.
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Bailing out of a flaming aircraft into the North Atlantic offered very little chance of survival, so it seemed almost laughable that they were given not only a floatation vest but an actual liferaft. More than one pilot simply threw the thing away, preferring to drown in the freezing water as quickly as possible rather than drown trying to fuck around with the canvas raft or get shot by low-flying fighters should he really get the thing inflated. Later, after the war, when Luftwaffe POWs were returned to Germany and former comrades could compare stories, there were a few who claimed that the rafts saved their lives. One or two had been lucky enough to even paddle the little boat in the right direction, back towards France or Belgium or to be picked up by a u-boat. The others told tales of going ashore along the English coast, trying their best to avoid the Home Guard patrols, but all were eventually caught. Of course, the combined effects of old age and ample beer sometimes enhanced the perils of the adventures recounted, not to mention the number of English girls who succumbed to them along the way, but all knew a tall tale when they heard it, and no one cared to dispute such a claim. There was little else to polish with glory for the losing side.
The rafts were just big enough for a man to lie down in. The rough water of the English Channel frequently sank the rafts or filled them with enough cold water that the downed airmen, sometimes wounded and always in shock, would simply die of hypothermia. They were mostly defenseless targets, too, and fighter planes from both sides strafed and shot at almost anything they could see on the water indiscriminately. There was also the real danger of being hit by shrapnel from planes exploding in mid-air, or from the wreckage raining down in flames. In all, it was no surprise that some simply went on missions without them.
As the Germans were eventually pushed back from the edge of the continent and as supplies dwindled for the German military, the survival kits were eventually given up as standard issue. Advancing Allied forced found them now and again at Luftwaffe air strips, and some were held on to as the inevitable war souvenir by men on both sides. They worked their way into war museums, personal collections, even the occasional survivalist's cache of war surplus.
None of which explains how there came to be one in the attic of the little house in Dover that Tim and Richard bought from an elderly couple named Binsley. Or why people who lived in the neighborhood kept coming 'round for tea long after the novelty of having a gay couple in the area had worn off.
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The roller coaster towered in front of them. It seemed as though it had been designed by a toddler with a crayon or one of those painting chimpanzees. From below it was difficult to tell where or even if the loops and curves went in separate directions. Only the motion of the train of cars gave any clue as to the sequence of the ride, and even then they moved away so fast that they could be quickly lost to the eye that blinked or looked briefly in another spot. There was a nearly constant thunder from the car wheels on the rails, and an undulating scream from the passengers, rising and falling like the sound of a siren, warning the people in line of the terrors they would soon face.
The day was stiflingly hot. There was no breeze except when the cars whooshed by somewhere near the line, and the popularity of the coaster kept the waiting riders backed up all the way around the maze of restraining bars all day long. The moment they'd entered the park, Will had insisted on going to the coaster, but from a hundred feet away his father could see that the line was packed and insisted that they wait until later. They spent an hour half-heartedly riding other things before he would let them walk back in the direction of the roller coaster, only to find that the line was just as long as before.
"C'mon, Dad, we've been on every ride on this side of the park, I want to go on the coaster!" He added that whining tone than all fourteen-year-olds have mastered. It was a gamble. Will knew his father hated it when he whined, hated it enough that he might even make them leave, but if Will couldn't go on this roller coaster, he'd just as soon leave anyway.
Chris stopped dead in his tracks, closed his eyes and grunted. The sound of his kids whining was enough to make him want to scream. Will knew damn well that they would get to go on the stupid ride, so why did he have to behave like he was five years old? They had been coming to this amusement park for ten summers, and from the time Will was eight they had been riding this damned roller coaster. Chris took his baseball cap off to reposition it, feeling the sweat trapped underneath come trickling down into the corner of one eye. "I said we could come back to it when the line lightened up a little bit, Will."
But they both knew that the line was not going to diminish, and they both knew that each wanted to ride the coaster as much as the other. Will fidgeted a little, and Chris deliberately let him hang, using the moment of tension to mop some sweat from his brow with his arm. Just then the cars pulled back in to the loading area and a couple of dozen people stumbled off the ride, laughing and making mock shrieking noises. One or two immediately returned to the end of the waiting line, but the whole line lurched forward a little.
"See, Dad? It's moving!"
Chris let out one more overheated sigh and handed his video camera to Annie. "Let's do it," he said, trying to let his exhaustion cover his own excitement.
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For five days, every day that week leading up to the start of the festival, it had rained, and no one thought Saturday would be any different. So nobody was quite prepared for a picnic when they got up Saturday morning to clear blue skies and dazzling sunshine. There would have to be compromises – Mrs. Dawson hadn't made her strawberry-rhubarb pies the night before, thinking the day would be a washout, nor had the Kiwanis men marinated any of the chicken. People swarmed the market looking for boxes of crackers, frosted cupcakes, and packages of sliced salami and cheese that they hadn't bothered to pick up during the week because the forecast had been so grim.
Even as people began to gather in the park for the kickoff parade, there were trenchcoats and umbrellas to be seen tucked into baby strollers and draped over arms. The smart ones remembered to bring plastic tarps to put under the picnic blankets, and the rest soon found the seats of their pants uncomfortably damp. Before long, the orange and red balloons began to appear, tied to the wrists of toddlers in raincoats, or attached to a circle of lawnchairs in a “saved” spot on the grass not too far from the port-a-potties. All the rain had made everything lushly green, and the grass was ankle-high. Despite the occasional look skyward, though, the weather seemed to be in full cooperation.
DeeAnn tried to look like she was enjoying herself, walking around the park in her red “Event Coordinator” sweatshirt, a whistle around her neck and a large black walkie-talkie bouncing off her butt and chattering away. The last-minute reversal of fortune had sent the organization committee scrambling as soon as daylight broke. Twelve hours of setup somehow needed to happen in four if there was going to be a parade. She smiled and waved to people she recognized as she walked through the park, halfway paying attention to the conversation on the radio in case someone should call her name. “Next year, I am only doing the donut tent,” she said softly to herself.
“DeeAnn, are you there?” the radio finally obliged her. “DeeAnn, please check in.”
She stopped and unclipped the big black handset from her back pocket. “I'm here, Art, what do you need?” Her mind flashed through any number of likely disasters, and for a moment she thought she heard the distant rumble of thunder.
“If you could make your way back to the A/V tent, could you please have a brief conversation with the sound guy for the rock band. Apparently he was unaware that their opening act was a parade, and he's a little displeased about not being able to do his sound check while the middle school band is warming up in the parking lot.”
As if on cue, there came the whine of an electric guitar on top of the muffled twittering of piccolos. DeeAnn laughed, waved at her neighbor who was trying to catch her eye from the other side of the field, and marched in the direction of the stage.
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Mid-morning light streamed in through the window over the tub, mixing with the steam floating out of the shower so that every drop of water sparkled as it condensed back to liquid in the air. On cold days John loved to keep the bathroom door closed tightly so that the room would fill completely with the steam as he bathed, then he would stand naked at the pedestal sink and wipe a clear spot in the center of the mirror so he could shave. The steam made the transition from the hot shower to the cold room less jarring; he needed a slow shift from sleep to being alert.
He grabbed a hand towel and started to rub a circle on the surface of the mirror. The condensing water streaked and dripped down the glass. He looked at his face, cupping his hand over his chin and feeling the whiskers. His beard was still soft, the way it had been when he first started to shave as a teenager. It pleased him that his face did not feel like sandpaper halfway through the day. He remembered his grandfather's face and the dark hairs that never seemed to quite go away, even though he shaved twice a day. His grandfather's face was so scratchy that as a little boy John refused to let his grandfather pick him up for a hug. Instead, he thrust out his tiny hand and told the old man "Shake!" Finally, when John was nearly grown, he embraced his grandfather at his aunt's funeral, both of them resisting the urge to cry. As their cheeks rubbed for a brief instant, the old man laughed, pushed John away and thrust out his own unsteady hand. "Shake," Grandpa said, and they both shared a laugh to hide a tear.
John pulled at the mirror to open the medicine cabinet and retrieved his razor and shaving cream, a sad little half-smile tugging one corner of his mouth. He hadn't expected that moment, and he was surprised at how lost in that reverie he was. He stared blankly for a moment, not really looking at his face in the mirror or anything else, just thinking about his grandfather and the hours spent with him -- watching him freshen up in the bathroom after getting home from work, sitting with him at the counter in the coffee shop reading the newspaper on a Saturday morning, curled up in Grandma's lap listening to him play his harmonica in the dark.
A knock on the bathroom door finally got him out of his head and he quickly busied himself lathering up his face. "I'll be out in a minute, I just need to shave. Don't open that door, whatever you do! You'll kill my steam!"
“Hurry up, Daddy, we're late already! I can't afford to miss the flight back to L.A., my boss will have my head on a platter!”
John sighed, his breath obscuring the little window he had made on the wet mirror. He swiped it clean with his hand and began to shave.
Permalink | Comments (1)This week I am doing little 500-word exercises. I have found some random pictures on Google and used them to write around. I'm starting today with "Places". I'll also do "People" and "Things".
These exercises can be useful if you think of them as idea generators. I didn't have any specific story in mind as I wrote today's pieces, I just went with whatever I got from the picture. The pieces aren't complete stories, they're more like fragments. Maybe the fragments are worth writing more about, maybe not.
This week I will leave comments turned on, and you're welcome to offer feedback about the pieces. I will be trying to do complete stories later on, so don't feel bad that these just start and stop arbitrarily. If I like any of them, I might use them for the longer stuff later.
I'll be including the pictures so you can see what I was looking at. You're welcome to play along, too.
Permalink |I feel tired. I feel old. I feel broken. I feel cold. I feel weak. I feel sad. I feel lost. I feel isolated. I feel a draft from the window in front of me. I feel my shoes pinch. I feel the pressure of my arms against the edge of the desk as I type. I feel my swollen knuckle and the pain it sends into the palm of my hand. I feel less than human. I feel foolish. I feel. You're not supposed to stop. You're supposed to write anything. Nonsense. Babble. Whatever comes into your head so that you don't stop writing until the ten minutes are up. Ten minutes is a long time when you are trying to think of soemthing to say, and so you're not supposed to think. Not thinking is a challenge for me. Here I am sitting still and not typing or writing or whatever you want to call it. I feel the vibrations from the fan inside the computer. The hum is noisy, and it's possible to sense the actual movement inside. Most of the time I don't notice it; I sit here so much that the ambient noise has stopped being consciously processed. Except when I am sitting here silently and trying to not think so that I can write. A minute and a half left and I've got nothing. That's the way it goes with this little practice. Nothing is cheap. You have to do and do and do, and all you have when you're done is the feeling that you've been blathering like an idiot. And you have.
Permalink |Exercise #8: I Wish
I wish I could roll back time and start again. I would pay any price to have it be 1985. Any price. When I think about my life these days, sometimes I am reminded of the last act of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" where the girl is dead and asks the Stage Manager to go back and visit one day of her life. It's not her life anymore, it's only memory, and she tries to tell herself all the things she came to know in her short time on Earth, but she cannot. She can't talk to her mother, who sits beside her in the graveyard, except together as ghosts. She longs to be with her husband, the boy she loved so much when they were young, and cannot ease his pain as he stands by her graveside, his life shattered.
I am only a ghost in my own life. I am so far outside this world and everything that's in it that I feel I might as well be deep in the ground. What I was, what I thought, what I felt, these things are untouchable to me now and I have not found a way to reconnect. Oh, to wind that clock back. How cruel that we cannot, for surely we would all undo things, amend the errors, soothe the ephemeral fears, heal the broken hearts with the knowledge of what will be, save ourselves.
I remember a lot less than I used to. That isn't where we're supposed to go with this, is it? But it's true. My short-term memory has gone to shit in the last couple of years. I'll tell you what I remember. I remember being so excited to go with my father in the car. It was 1967, and I was just shy of my fourth birthday. We were going out to pick up something for lunch, if I recall the details, but that's not something I remember, it's something I was told. I just remember being excited about the prospect of being allowed to go along for the ride. I had this toy, a little yellow metal toy that I cannot remember clearly enough to tell you what it was, just that it was yellow and operated somewhat like a slot machine. You pulled a handle and five little windows each displayed a picture. This was before toys were electronic, of course. I brought it with me.
I remember standing on the front seat of the car, next to my father. The next thing I remember is being held by a woman, who was holding a towel on my forehead, and all the blood everywhere. I thought she was my grandmother at first, but she told me that she wasn't. I struggled when she told me that, but I could scarcely see for all the blood in my eyes. I don't remember the firemen or the ambulance ride, but I do remember being in the emergency room, sitting upright on a guerney, talking to the firemen and then, a few minutes later, to some policemen. At that time, my father's uncle was the mayor of Lynn, and I kept telling the policemen over and over that my uncle was the mayor. They weren't asking me about that, they were asking me if I remembered the car that had hit us head-on or anything else that happened, but I was just a very little boy and it seemed like that was the thing the police would want to know.
I remember being in a bed in the pediatric ward sometime after, with my forehead sewn back up and my knee as well. The beds were crib-style, and I was very unhappy to be sleeping in a crib. Time's up.
Last go-round for this. If anyone's still reading, this'll cure them of it.
Today it's the "I xxx" set. "I remember..." is one place to start, and you can figure out a bunch of others. "I don't remember" is equally valid, if you'd rather start there. They're like open-ended questions. What do you remember? What do you think? Ten minutes is a long time to ramble on with some of these. For "I remember" you can usually settle in on a story and work your way through the details. It's probably one of the most productive vairations on this exercise.
Next week, as I mentioned, the exercises won't be quite so spontaneous. Not that I am one for heavy re-writing and editing, but the idea isn't just to barf all over the paper with whatever thoughts come out. 500 words isn't much longer than these 10-minute exercises, so I might do a couple of them at a whack on an every-other-day basis.
Permalink |Stinky surrounds us. We think our world is clean and fresh and smell-free, but everythink stinks. We are drenched in odors to the point that we simply cannot smell them any more. So when a new one comes our way, our first reaction is disgust, and our second one is fear. What could that smell be? What danger am I in from that horrible, horrible smell? Our forebrains are fast enough to get ahead of our lizardy hindbrains and sort the smells out quickly. No Proustian reverie for us until the analyzer runs its review. But it is classified and categorized too fast for us to even be aware of most of the time. Most of the time. And then there are the times when the smells remain unimaginable, overwhelming, indistinguishable and we react to the stink with conscious intent. Sometimes the stink outdoes our cloaking device for the world of smell and we become acutely aware of all the smells around us. We are given access to the stink and have to hope for our brains to re-engage, lest we be carried away.
How many smells do you think you can distinguish? A hundred? A thousand? Which ones do you know well enough that no other sense is required to correctly identify its origin. At this very moment, my cat is walking back and forth in front of me, and each time his tail runs across my upper lip, I am reminded of his exact smell. In the middle of the night I can tell my cats apart by their unique smell signatures. I can only imagine how much more challenging the world is for them, since their sense of smell is so much more developed.
Permalink |Gravy in a bowl does not glisten, it sits there thick and brown and steamy, wishing it was a leather sofa or a buffalo. Pour the sauce over the meat and you have a glistening coating that transforms the meat from something dead and burned into something transcendent, something that sets your mouth drooling in raw primal hunger, something more than just food. The glistening comes from the fat, the rendered tissue of generation upon generation of animal that builds in the muscles and sinews of each and every creature that walks. It is the stuff that holds the meat together, that cushions it from the shocks and assaults of life. It is kindness and care incarnate, and we boil it and bake it and roast it out of the formerly living things until it is greasy and unctuous and brown in the bottom of a metal pan. How horribly we treat this thing that loves us all so well, and still, even after we have abused it, teased it from the muscles, scraped it from the pan, and forced it into some emulsified brew with flour and water, still it loves us with its shine and its feel as it fills our mouths. We partake of this tangible tenderness and make it a part of our own bodies, but we cannot incorporate that love -- it hardens and clogs and chokes off our bloodstreams, wishing it could share the joy of life with each and every one of us, but killing us because it cannot.
The thermostat in here says 72 degrees. It doesn't feel like 72 degrees. 72 degrees is a soft and gentle day, a breeze barely able to brush the hairs on your arm, and sunlight that seems to float. 72 degrees is May and an afternoon lying in the grass. 72 degrees is new sneakers and running as fast as you can, jumping into the air and landing feet first on the cellar bulkhead door. 72 degrees is no limits, no sorrows, no worries, no history, no future. My hands get so cold now and nothing I can do makes them warmer for any length of time. Sometimes I run the faucet on the bathroom sink until the water gives off steam, and hold my hands in the spray, but all it does is make them burn, and as soon as I turn them off they are cold again. My hands tell me it can't possibly be 72 degrees, and I know they are right. They feel the world, and when I touch myself they tell me what a cold, cold place it has become, and how I have grown cold along with it.
You can tell that yesterday was a warm-up. It was hard to get out of my own head. Today I have chosen words that are not quite so object-oriented. You can do these exercises in a lot of different ways, depending on what you hope to accomplish. I think I did a better job getting uot of my head and into my imagination today.
Permalink |Okay, I picked this word because I saw it on the back of a cooking magazine sitting right here on my desk. "Heavenly Cheeses", it's a piece about a bunch of nuns who make artisanal cheese. Could have been worse. They could have gone for the "What A Friend We Have In Cheeses" joke. I would have. The thing with these exercises is that you never know quite where you're going to go with the thought, you simply just have to keep writing. I never used to be able to do these exercises on the computer, I always did them by hand. There's a different feel to writing with a keyboard and it took me a very long time to get used to it. In fact, I almost never write things out by hand anymore unless it's to jot something down in a notebook. It's actually physically painful for me to write for any length of time. The pinched nerve that runs down my left arm gets easily irritated, and I find that after just a few minutes of writing with a pen, my hand is half-numb. So my very expensive pen collection sits unused on a corner of my dresser. I've considered selling off the pens. Some of them are fairly expensive, and even as second-hand items they'd be worth a couple of hundred bucks a piece. I imagine there's enough value in the set to make them worth selling.
So far this has almost nothing to do with cheese, but I can see from my timer that I have five minutes left to go. I *suppose* I can come up with something cheese-related in the space of five minutes. I've got a fridge full of cheese right now. I tend to buy cheese on speculation. Which is to say that I will buy some cheese that strikes my fancy when I see it in the groccery store, whether I need it or not. When there are enough different ones sitting around, I'll declare a "Cheese Night" and we'll have cheeses and crackers and other little nibbles for dinner instead of some cooked dish. Sometimes, though, I don't get around to it in time and find myself throwing away a bunch of cheese that never got eaten. It's not quite the same as wasting money on pens -- I'm far more likely to eat the cheese than I am to use the pens. Still, it's a waste and it's one of those things that irritates me a notch more than it probably should. Mostly I feel stupid for having not noticed all these bits of cheese waiting to be eaten. But I'll turn around and do it all over again.
Permalink |My arms are short, and so I always roll up my sleeves. Well, maybe my arms aren't really that short, but my shirt size doesn't come with sleeve lengths that fit, so maybe the problem is my belly's too big. Far more likely. The rolled-up sleeve thing has worked for me, anyway. You look like you're doing something when you've got your sleeves rolled up. It says "I'm ready to get down to work". It says "I'm up to my armpits in busy, whaddaya want?" It's one of the few ways I've ever been able to make chicken salad out of my chicken shit appearance.
I look ridiculous in a suit. Suit jackets are not tailored for short people. I look like a little boy who has been given Daddy's jacket to wear and it's too long. You can't roll up the sleeves on a suit jacket. Not unless you're Don Johnson and it's 1986, anyway. I have always wished I looked good in a suit. Some guys are just made for them, and others always look out of place. It doesn't matter how good the suit is, if you're not built for that look, you're always going to look like a reject. "You can dress him up but you can't take him out." If there's nothing else about the last ten years to be glad about, it has been that I didn't have to wear a jacket or a tie on a daily basis, and if I chose to wear a dress shirt, it was sleeves-up as usual. I don't know if it's such a good idea to go to work in shorts and sandals, but I did that, too. After a while, I stopped caring if anyone thought that was okay or not, but everyone else did the same thing, so I guess it was fine. Funny that. There was always such a big deal about how you dressed for work, and in the end it didn't matter at all. We got suspicious of people who showed up in shirts and ties, as they were obviously out of place. Ironically enough, I was probably more out of place there than the places with people in shirts and ties and jackets. I just didn't look that way.
The first thought that occurs to me when I see a nickel is almost always Arlo Guthrie singing "I don't want a pickle, I just want to ride on my motor-sickle." When my youngest brother Danny was a little boy, maybe six or seven years old, he and his friend Jody were big into that particular song and they used to sing it, but I never heard it for myself until years later. It's not one of Arlo's best songs. It's funnny and all, but I've always thought that Arlo is more than a little bit uneven in his work. We saw Arlo perform at Club Passim a year or so ago, and all those years of being stoned have added up.
A nickel isn't much anymore. They could do away with every coin smaller than the quarter, and I don't think it would make much difference anymore. Small change is a holdover from a different time. Here we are at the dawn of the 21st century and still haven't fully shaken off the 19th. I think that really speaks to how slowly change actually happens, and I don't mean nickels. We have become accustomed to rapid change in so many areas of our lives, and we have lost a sense of perspective about the sweep of human history. Fifty years is nothing in the course of history, and yet we perceive things that are five, ten, twenty years past as long-dead. But we can't hide the reality that we change in our worldview much more slowly. How else can you explain the "return" of these imbeciles who call themselves "Conservatives" and "Christians" who seek to sweep away the 20th century? It's not really a return; they never really left. They got ignored, overwhelmed by the flood of other changes that washed through the last 100 years, but they did not perish any more than the nickel or the penny, even though they are becoming just as obsolete and just as worthless.
So this writing exercise I'm doing is one that I found in Natalie Goldberg's "Writing Down The Bones" years and years ago, and I've been doing it for a long time. In keeping with her sense of wild mind, the idea is to just write without censoring or stopping for ten minutes. Total stream of consciousness. There's usually a word or an idea that is the object for the exercise, but because you're supposed to just let the words flow, you very often drift quite far afield of the original subject.
These are exercise material, not polished writing. The exercises aren't meant to be important in and of themselves, they're meat to get you acclimated to writing, to let your voice work its way out without the control of your inner censor editing as you go along. Still, it's difficult not to stop and think or to go back and cross out words, especially on a computer. You're expected to make the effort but not be too terribly attached to the results.
I can say from years of experience that this is an excellent way to develop writing as a practice. You won't write a novel this way, but you will get used to the idea of 99% shit and 1% useful work, which is how writing goes. It really helps to do a few in a row. I took a class years ago where we did this for a couple of hours -- write ten minutes, then everybody read their piece, then do it again and again until time ran out. Seeing/reading/hearing other people do it is useful, too. That's why I've tried to do this exercise with my forum friends now and again, but in the end the distance of the Internet works against the intimacy of the exercise. Still, I am happy to work on them by myself.
I am sharing this with you only as part of my desire to push myself to do this. I've committed publicly to playing these games, and nothing makes me do the work like knowing there's someone to read it. I don't think these are aything special. Sometimes you get very lucky and hit a vein of creativity that keeps you going and you wind up with something worth keeping. Other times you are lucky to get a turn of phrase or an idea that you can save up to use another time. Mostly you just get your inner dialogue played out loud, and you realize how hopeless you are.
Comments are off for these posts, but you're welcome to try the exercises yourself, and if you really want to talk to me about them, you can e-mail me.
P.S. I thought about that "posting in real-time" thing but didn't do that today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe not.
Permalink |I wanted to take a moment to outline a little of what I intend to do here starting tomorrow.
For the remainder of this week (Wednesday, Thursday and Friday), I am going to prime the pump a bit with the 10-minute free-writing exercises I am fond of. I'll do three each day and I will probably post them in real time (e.g., I will write one, post it, write the next, post it, and so on) so that the writing time for me is about half an hour.
Next week I would like to do a slightly longer exercise. I'm thinking I'll do three 500-word exercises and post them Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The general themes will be a person, a place, and a thing.
The following week I will try some fictonal short-short-stories, and the week after that will be non-fictional short-short-stories.
I'll finish up the last partial week of the month with some poetry exercises.
Please note that comments will be closed for most of these posts, but I would welcome feedback via e-mail. If, as I go along, you are interested in doing some of these exercises with me, send me a note and we'll talk.
Permalink | Comments (1)When I emerged from my self-imposed exile several weeks ago, I made some noises about writing more. By which I meant "real" writing. Blogging for five years has been a blessing and a curse for me as a writer. On one hand it really gave me the chance to write something five days a week, and as a result sometimes I actually did write something more than the snarky little blurbs that we've all come to recognize as the archetypal blog post. On the other hand, I got really good at snarky little blurbs; much better that I was at writing substantively. I also developed a lot of writing "tics" that absolutely do not fly if you want to consider yourself a "real" writer.
I have not been entirely able to get away from snarks and tics. Even though I have not been writing in this space five times a week for the last four or five months, I have still been writing in my cooking blog, and a lot of those bad habits have carried over. That's the problem with "style", if I dare use such a term to refer to the way bloggers write; it overwhelms the actual writing. Ultimately, this is why so many blogs are indistinguishable from one another. Everyone is writing to the same style, and it's not an especially flattering one. Some people truly excel at the snarky, the arch, the inwardly referential, and the rest of us, all umpteen million of us, suck.
But, however over-mannered my blogging style has become, I do not believe that I suck as a writer. I simply allowed myself to develop poor practices because they worked for the given format. Don't kid yourself -- professional writers do this, too. They become expert at the baroque stylings of their own particular bread-winning format and lose touch with anything else. The difference is that someone pays them to be a hack and you and I are just in it for fun.
So I'm going to try something different for the entire month of February. Instead of the usual tripe, I am going to engage in writing some different tripe. No linky posts, no newsy posts, no gizmo posts. Just me working on writing again. I presume you'll all go find something else to do for the month as a result. I understand the Winter Olympics will be on TV morning, noon, and night so you'll have that to keep you occupied, but if you get bored with the unending stream of "Up Close And Personal" featurettes about struggling young Americans overcoming adversity to kick international butt in the dogsled event, you can always stop by here. Luckily for all, February is a short month.
Between now and next Wednesday, I'll do my level best to load up on the standard formula posts.
Permalink |I have a couple of small proposals to start off the New Year and the New Blog. [MI]
Over the several years that I've been running my community site (these days called The Big Red House), I have tried without much luck to motivate the gang to engage with me in a couple of activities: reading and writing.
Well, not in the most literal sense. What I mean is that we've tried a few times to organize a reading group project, and I've tried again and again to get people to do writing exercises with me. Neither has ever gotten much traction.
I've sort of come to believe that all reading groups are basically doomed to fail, whether they're online or not. People have excellent intentions and join up for them, then they don't read the book, or aren't very good at discussing them, or whatever and they sort of slink away, leaving one or two people to fend for themselves. But I also know that the online world does not lack for people who probably are good at reading groups. So I wanted to throw out a general invitation to anyone who is interested in doing one with me to drop me an e-mail.
As far as a writing group goes, I am not looking for people who are banging out the Great American Novel. I am looking for people who like to write and need a place to practice without having to engage in the ego-jostling competitions that most writing groups turn into. If you're trying to polish your novel/screenplay/book of poetry, this is not the sort of thing for you. Again, my forum friends are generally not writerly types, and so they've occasionally joined in to make me happy, but it has never panned out for long.
These are standing invitations, by the way. If anyone responds, I'll get in touch with you privately and we'll figure out how such things might actually work.
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