The Other Day...

The other day… [STOP]

The post I was preparing to write needs to wait for a brief moment while I explain the phrase above – “The other day.”

I grew up in South Carolina. Along with sand fleas, mosquitoes and inbreeding, the south is known for several colloquial phrases. Where I come from, we know what “the other day” means, and it means something very specific.

“The other day” refers to a period of time that can be from yesterday to several decades past. The meaning, when used by a true Southerner, is to say “When it happened is something I am not prepared to commit to right now, and in fact when isn’t the damn point I’m trying to make and so don’t get hung up on when, or who even, just listen to what I’m getting ready to say next and know that it did in fact happen and it is important that you listen to the story and not get distracted by the facts -now.”

So when I say “the other day” I was listening to Oprah – it isn’t to tell you which episode or year so you can go back and watch it, I’m telling you that what I think about what I saw on Oprah “the other day” is something you need to know.

When I tell you “the other day” I was talking to Aunt Margie – it doesn’t matter that Aunt Margie has been dead for ten years; I’m telling you that she knew something that you need to know right now because it may save you a heap of trouble later.

And, most certainly, when your mother says to you “the other day” I was cleaning your room – be sure that what follows next will not be a discussion about which day ‘exactly’ it was but rather something much more critical to your living future…

I hope that helps. So, the other day…

Quoting

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

-Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961), in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech

Skin Crawling

Spend some time with someone who gets under your skin.

When I as in college, among the various subjects I studied was physics. I remember very little of that complicated subject, but one concept that sticks with me is that in order to have movement, friction is necessary. Just a quick jaunt down memory lane to the last time my truck as ‘stuck’ in the mud and I fully understand the need for friction in order to move.

The need for friction makes sense in physics. In order for an object, a car for example, to move from one point to the next, friction must exist for there to be sufficient traction for movement to happen. There are obviously many more factors - laws even - at work in the equation needed to get that car moving, but my point about the necessity of friction make sense easily enough.

What brings me to this – and what this is about, really – is pondering the need for friction on an interpersonal level as we attempt to move through life. Without stretching the analogy beyond recognition, I have thought quite a bit recently about how even though I often choose to be around like-minded people, very often it is when I am face-to-face with an individual or idea that just grates on my nerves that I become most passionate, and I know passion moves me. Isn’t it true that we often hone ourselves against the wet-stone of contrast?

So, I hang out this thought today – Should I intentionally seek out times to be around a person, place or thing that I know irritates me? Is a possible solution to ease, and perhaps apathy as simple as forcing myself to experience something I am against?

Should I spend time periodically with someone who gets under my skin?

A Musing Space

The water, hot and welcomed, pounds my shoulders and cascades around my neck, stripping away the dirt and sweat. Anchoring my hands on the shower wall, I let the water work its magic. I close my eyes, exhale strongly, and release my mind. The water envelops me, my senses, my mind...

Are there sounds that are only heard by the deaf? Are there things unseen to those with sight? Might the angst-ridden beauty of artistic accomplishment reveal itself more clearly to those burdened of twisted mind and unbridled emotion?

My life has been one of growing peace and routine more than artistic angst or spiritual distress. For awhile now, I had grown accustomed to percolating emotions, those feelings that lurk, coiled and ready to strike, manifesting malformed action and self-destructive choices. I have found solace regularly in the creative word. The twist of a poetic phrase or the presence of a story unfolding beneath the key stokes often releases much. Now, it seems that I am driven less and less to release my serpents of spiritual distress. This is different. Not good. Not bad. Just different.

I know the truth. I know that there lies deep within me an eternal presence, my creative magical essence that demands to be known - my familiar, my dragon, The lines of poetry, the tales woven in prose, the occasional burst of fire breathed from comments, are all glimpses of a piece of her being: scales of translucent blue, a sapphire eye blinking in the dusk, the sound of a gentle, rumbling breath, a brush of a powerful tail. She is my eternal muse. I miss her, these days. I sense she misses me.

Yet, here in this steam cloud, beneath the relentless waterfall, while all sound is blasted away, I hear her breath, steady and smooth. Through closed eyes, I see again, the cave where she dwells. It is in this moment I know that I could extend my arm and touch her. I can't help but smile, wondering what journeys await.

We live.

The Thinning of One

The Thinning of One

If I am not careful

With my thoughts

My ideas

Plans

Dreams

I will become thin

On artistic endeavors

Of creativity

Possibilities

Virility

Thin

Is transparent

Lifeless etching

On contemptuous bones

A Writer's Block of Stone - Public Journey #001-2

I'm a bit late with the second phase my public writing journey. Here is what I've 'carved' from the raw block of words - so far.

I grew up in Myrtle Beach, SC one of the largest beach tourist destinations on the east coast. In many ways I was a beach rat, spending my summers working at my family’s ocean front hotels and making friends with our weekly guests, and their daughters. Mine was a life filled with those summer days of youthful zeal, sun-tanned skin, wind blown hair and new beginnings. Every week was a new start with clean rooms and new guests. The four month vacation season dominated all that we did. It seemed that school, and all things winter, were simply the time we spent remembering or preparing for summer. Summer was our time. Summer was the time when we thrived economically and personally. I always lived in summer. The heat of the sun blazed down from the sky and up from the sand. The sea tossed its mist into our air and we breathed in the damp essence of life. Living so close to the sea, we drew our life from it day in and day out. The sea held us and brought life to us. Its vast reservoir, pulsing with each tide, offered to and collected from everything it touched. It is this giving and collecting, that I have witness many times.

The sea gives. My grandfather and father were both sailors. Their comfort with the sea and its gifts of food and fellowship were passed to me. I can remember the day my brother and I spent a day catching hundreds of small ‘spots’ only to face the task of scaling and cleaning them into the night. My grandfather taught us that day about finishing the tasks we started and about the sequence of work to reward. It was fun to catch. It was work to clean. We had to do both to eat. It was the sea, as it lingered in the marsh and inlets that gave us this opportunity.

The sea gives. I have witnessed many occasions of children and adults finding the sea for the first time. They had been inlanders all of their life and never seen the sea. That seems strange to me, even now. What a change of perspective that must be – to see the sea, to see and feel for the first time the sea from which we are created…

A Writer’s Block of Stone, Public Journey #001

I attended a writer’s class recently for five weeks. Christopher Laney (writer, pilot and all around amazing human being) lead the group. I have struggled with writing. It isn't the need for stories to tell or a lack of love for words that holds me back, but one of my blocks is that I sit down to write and what comes out, for all of it’s potential, isn't that good. It has ‘good’ in it, but it just isn't the ‘perfect’ piece I would like to write – so, I write only rarely – when the inspiration bludgeons me to action.

Christopher shared an analogy with us. In the same way a sculptor must begin with a block of stone in order to carve a work of art, the writer must begin with a mass of words and begin the process of carving piece from them. I have been experimenting with this approach by writing free-form for 30-40 minutes and then slowly sculpting something from the mass of ideas and words generated in the free-form time.  I thought it might be fun to share one of these sculpting projects with you, so I have posted below the mass of words from which I will be seeking to carve something akin to an essay. I plan to post another phase of this next weekend, and I invite you to return and see what has been released from this writer’s block of word stone…

Rivers, oceans and streams collect things – rain, mud, branches, sand, and the dead. Dead birds, fish, people. He went to sleep with the fishes.

Time heals all wounds, well time allows for adequate decay, anyway. It softens, swells, expands until it pops- melts looses from its form (lets loose itself?) and changes into the collective. In water we are all borg – resistance is futile – really it isn't present at all.

Finally it becomes homogeneous – a mixture of all things , formless, laps with all tides and waves, a rocky cradle of the world’s mush – oatmeal of everything.

Some would say we came from the sea, an evolution of undaunted genetics that have to, must evolve – gather its one self and form to conform to demands of our own becoming. So with the waxing and waning, the tugging of the moon’s tidings upon us – a planetary massaging of our little planet – we have become this formed p[lace and these formed creatures, plants, people and things.

Some speak if coming from and returning to our creator, and if such is true then we are created by the hands of the sea. See then the sea in all of us? See all of us in the sea?

We do return to the sea – the splashing of childish play and delight (I witnessed many occasions of children and adults witnessing the sea for the first time – they have been in-landers all of their life and never seen the sea. That seems strange to me – what a change of perspective that must be – to see the sea, to see and feel for the first time the sea from which we are created?), the percussion of a dead body dropped form the pier, the trickle of mucus-like decay through soil, water tables and into the streams that feed the sea – we all return. We return and melt and blend in to the great sea – dissolved and transported.

Then some poor fool turns on a tap and drinks us.

A Cup of Character

Below are some excerpts from an essay I'm developing.

The coffee here is horrid. I forget this little fact between visits. It is weak in flavor and appearance. As I settle into my place among the identical sets of heavily varnished oak furniture, I notice this restaurant offers a similar transparency. Country curtains on every window and systematically placed cut-glass salt and pepper shakers proclaim homey character. Maps printed on faux aged parchment and brochures labeled by decade tell us this place is rooted in our own ancestry. Here our personal memories have been catalogued for us, our own character defined.

The character they would have us find here is one of home as if presented in the tidiness of a Norman Rockwell painting. Yes, this place has character written all over the walls, menus, nick-knacks, and the wardrobes of the waitresses. It is a script carefully written by some deliberate designer and published by a majority vote in a boardroom. Yet, if it reads character it reads too loudly…

… This place fails. It isn’t the character that fails. This restaurant doesn’t lack for location, or presentation. What is missing here is something less easily conjured up on design tables or decided upon in board rooms.

The ‘Stinky Cat Coffee Shop’ wasn’t pre-planned. It just happened. Over time, it grew. In its own lore the place was a house, a home. People lived here. They dreamed away nights, ate breakfast together, thought of and planned for days at work and activities at school. They went about practical tasks and created meaningful moments. There are records of this planning and living preserved here. Faint lines on the back of doors catalog the slow ascent of children. Scars on the cabinet doors mark the memory of child safety latches. Claw marks on a door frame are deep assurance that a cat was part of the family.

Time passed and the family left. The house passed from family to tenant to vacancy with each chapter adding its own story to the place. For a while the building sat empty, housing only the occasional vagrant that slipped in to sleep or drink himself into unconsciousness. One sometimes stood in the corner and peed himself when he could do no better. Those stains don’t really come out, no matter how many times you clean and polish. The stains fade and become part of the character of the wood, but they do not disappear.

People disappeared and smaller occupants arrived. Squirrels hoarded acorns, rats nested, insects bored into the wood and things too small and transient to leave much of a legacy for us to see all made their contributions. In the scratches on the doors, the discolorations of the wood, the layers of paint, partially missing wallpaper and yellowed tile they all left their marks. People, insects and rodents alike have all left something of themselves…

…This place speaks its story softly but intently brushing against every occupant, purring an old and worthy message…

Plane Truth

The planes don’t bother me anymore. When I first started traveling to Raleigh, NC, the roar of the jets landing and taking off was disturbing. The first few nights, sleeping was impossible, rendered fretful by the random rumblings and vibrations. The deepest slumber couldn’t prevent their intrusions into my mind. Sporadically they bludgeoned me awake, torturing me in tension between denied sleep and imposed consciousness. Tonight I barely notice them, a transient drift of sound, a passing song. The planes don’t bother me anymore.

When does something bothersome get absorbed into our awareness and become normal? What shifts in our perceptions and understandings might allow us to accommodate such a change? Is it a slowly growing numbness like getting accustomed to cold ocean waters on a March morning? Does it happen more suddenly as if the nerves that carried crisp messages of pain suddenly misfired and went silent? Is it a choice? Do we choose to adapt one day and casually flip off the switch of caring? When does the new become old?

 What is that old saying? “The devil we know is better than the devil we fear?” No, that isn’t it, but I know there is one – something about new things becoming old things. “Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.” Yes. It is like getting married, in a way, when the new becomes familiar.

Getting married used to be, or at least we pretend it used to be, a rite of passage when many things formally taboo suddenly, in the blink of an eye, the moment of a kiss and the placement of a ring, are turned to sacred and expected to become normal. Permission from some higher authority gives us consent and instantly we change. Yet, it doesn’t happen so quickly. It takes time for us to travel from the something new to the something old, the familiar something.

We travel, though, finding ways to understand, cope, and even accept things that once surprised us. The towel left on the floor every morning, tucked away in the corner between the tub and the wall annoys us. At first we discuss and argue over the silliness of it.

“Why don’t you just hang it up?”

“I don’t know. I’ll pick it up next time.”

The next time it does get hung neatly on the rack, but soon the ‘next time’ gets lost and there’s the tossed towel, again; a damp, lifeless testimony to some inability to change. Then there comes a moment when we realize that this is a small thing, after all, and there are so many, must be so many, bigger than damp towel things. So we adjust. The cap gets left off the toothpaste and we manage to stop seeing it. The crumbs settle into the sheets and we grow accustomed to the little nuisances, simply brushing them aside to scatter somewhere else.

It isn’t a problem, really, accommodating the nuances of another, is it? Most would say, “No.” But, we have seen it matter. Sometimes it costs us too much.

Who knows when it happened to Sally? Somewhere between the something new and the something old she lost herself. Somewhere beyond the damp towel and a routine of rage she found herself staring at the barrel of a gun pointed at her like an accusing finger, like his finger. She trembled with fear. She stood there with a docile acceptance that kept her stationary when running should have been an option. It was her passive, undaunted acceptance that did her in. The bullet launched from the barrel and punctuated its own message through her skull and brain and into the plaster. She had accommodated too much. Some higher authority had been heard by her alone and commissioned her journey from startling to familiar, too far.

It is a precarious route we maneuver when we make those things new into things old, when we cease to be surprised and alarmed by the unkempt towels, loud noises in the dark and the violations of our peace. Sometimes we travel too far. Tonight I find myself wondering what else has found its passage to benign acceptance in my world along with the planes that don’t bother me anymore.