Prose poem in the works.

In an effort to be a little more productive with my personal writing, I've been writing with pencil and paper. I do this for two reasons: not everyone wants to read my every mood in a blog (nor do they since my blogging is so infrequent) and I can get a lot more of this "creative" writing (isn't all writing creative?) done and it's more satisfying than pounding keys. Also, I can do it while waiting for Facebook to refresh which brings me to the prose poem. A friend and colleague used the word "penetralia" in one of her posts. Being the word geek that I am, I was impressed and tucked it away in my memory for use later. It ended up in the stream of consciousness that I often put down on paper to warm up for a writing session and so I made a few changes and present it to you.

Draft 2 of Nonsense and Gibberish

I find my better work is here with the soft scratch of the pencil, the fluid motion, the so fine line on the paper trail. The curve of the ess and tail of the why; a tapered tail, smartly held in the off hand. A figure stops, gazes, resplendent in its grace, while a gabardine minstrel cruises by. It is late on the docks and the bouy peals, bells pealing just for you, sweetpea my darling. Stay for a moment, and in your stasis find the mineral gem, the hard glowing core, the penetralia in perpetuity.

Dumb fun.

So today's conversation of note revolved around the central premise that anyone on a gaming site who adopts the name "BigDick" is probably 12 years old, thinks he's pretty impressive, watches Star Trek, still plays Dragonball Z but gave up Pokemon because that's for kids, and are the type who either beg or outright demand that you give them gold in World of Warcraft.

You know the type. They hang around the guild just long enough to root through your vault and take choice armor and weapons then quit the guild without so much as a thank you.

We were discussing this in chat on the game Evony, a free browser-based game that is a lot like Sid Meier's "Civilization" series but with better chat capabilities and "alliances," which are like WoW guilds, where you can chat with your fellow lords and ladies. Without getting into the particulars of gameplay, another player and I started noticing strange system messages. The "System" always announces when one alliance declares war on another and the other day I laughed to see one announcement that said

[System]: Alliance MyFoot declares war against alliance YourAss. Diplomatic Relationship between each other alters to Hostile automatically.

I pointed this out to my alliance and everyone got a good laugh, then today we see BigDick.
First, it is reported that Alliance BigDick declares war against alliance Olympus.

Then,

[System]: Alliance SunTzu declares war against alliance BigDick. Diplomatic Relationship between each other alters to Hostile automatically.

Comments flew: that BigDick must think he's quite something, perhaps someone with "little man syndrome," and we listed the character traits that appear in the first paragraph of today's blog, and had ourselves a good giggle. Then the screen flashes:

[System]: Alliance VD declares war against alliance BigDick. Diplomatic Relationship between each other alters to Hostile automatically.

It was too much. Priceless! We hooted and stomped our feet but there were only two people - me and another player - who were online at the time to witness it. The rest of the alliance would never believe us when we recounted it. Then, the entertainment was quickly over because the system messages of wars being declared against BigDick became increasingly inane (Alliance Horny declares war against alliance BigDick, for example). Fun time over. Small things make my day.

Spring had better come soon. I've been at the computer much too long.

Spoiled Rotten

I was thinking about this horrible financial recession we're in and trying to put things into perspective when I was snapped out of my funk of self pity. I had been spoiled. For a year I made enough of a living to do things like replace most of a wardrobe, buy a camera for my writing business, go out to eat a few times a week and put enough gas in my van to take aimless drives for the simple pleasure of wasting time by enjoying myself. When all that came to an end, I was plunged into the aforementioned funk. I know that wallowing in self pity is not conducive to creativity and I had to keep working in order to work through the feeling of utter helplessness I was feeling after losing my cushy contract job wages. What helped me work through was my recall of my great grandparents and my grandparents, who lived through the Great Depression and who taught me everything I know about being thrifty. Drawing on the strength of their counsel and the core values with which they endowed my mother and her siblings, I have come to the realization that I am spoiled rotten.

I'm not talking spoiled rotten like the Paris Hiltons and Kari Ann Peniche kind of spoiled; I'm talking spoiled rotten like kids who can't live without their MP3 players, their smartphones, their high speed internets. I know, technology is where it's at but what happens when those very things are taken away from you one by one? Faced with a telephone shutoff or feeding your family, what do you do? You feed your family of course but the insidious part about living in modern times is that we tend to go through serious withdrawal without all of our talking, blinking gadgets.

For example, we lost power during a particularly nasty ice storm back in late autumn. For six hours we paced, we swore, we ranted. We went through denial, anger, bargaining and were mid way through depression and on to acceptance when the house suddenly hummed to life.

During the power outage I realized how noisy we are without even talking. We are silent in a house that speaks through whirrs and clicks and buzzes, creaks, ticks and that pervasive hum of electricity. We must be lulled by these noises because their absence caused much angst and gnashing of teeth.

So yes, we are spoiled. We have a small income still, which puts us better off than a lot of people we know. While I was considering whether or not to apply for food stamps, I kept thinking of my great grandmother and what she would think of living off the government dime. That's when the light came on. My great grandmother would have planted a garden, put aside vegetables and fruits in canning jars and freezer cartons, and baked her own bread. She would have taken clothing and removed the buttons, zippers, snaps, hooks, eyes, and rick-rack. Then, after adding these things to her boxes of like items, she would take the fabric and cut it into strips to either make blocks that would be sewn together to make a warm quilt or, in the case of woolen items, long strips that would find their way into grand braided carpets that were sometimes as big as a room and which kept the floors warm in the western New York weather.

She would have done many other things too, and I remember as a child, watching her pluck and dress a chicken for dinner. She showed me the eggs still in the egg sac and the liver and heart. I distinctly remember her hands, bony and gnarled, her deft fingers bent with a "little touch of arthritis," but which could turn out tatted lace edges for pillowcases and warm wool mittens for my own childish hands. I knew that she would use the chicken feathers later to stuff pillows and featherbeds.

I watched her work incredibly hard until the end of her life. Compared to her, I have nothing about which to complain. When I look at my cell phone which is due to be shut off any day now, and my cable bill, which I will try to pay because I really can't survive without the interwebs in these days of online publishing; when I look in my cupboards and realize that I have a store of recipes in my head for good food for cheap and I realize that I am capable of walking around and moving my arms and willing my fingers to do work, I set out once again with renewed determination and the thought that I really need to not be so damn spoiled.

How the Grateful Dead Ruined (and saved) My Life

The Grateful Dead, God bless 'em, enjoyed a career that spanned 30 plus years. I enjoyed them for perhaps 25 of those, although not as devotedly as others who built a lifestyle around the band and their pantheon of counterculture icons. I was too young to be part of that San Francisco scene, and too far east, but I caught the bus when it went by and I stayed on the bus in various ways for a long time.

I can safely say that I got to enjoy an extended young adulthood. Long after I saw age 35 and even after Jerry Garcia's death in 1995, when I turned 40, I made my place in this world with other Deadheads, enjoying a sort of idyllic life and yet trying not to fall into the "hipper than thou" trap. It made for interesting times, sometimes incredible fun, and a social safety net that could catch me, with all my eccentricities, when I fell. In retrospect, and I say this because I now find myself on the margins of this hippie caste, it was indeed a long, strange, trip that has culminated in a clearer understanding of what went wrong with the counter culture.

My own story is nothing special. I grew up in a nice suburb in a nice "medium sized manufacturing city" as an old friend used to call it. I knew that I heard that different drummer early in my life when I got wind of rock and roll and The Beatles. When the Summer of Love happened I was barely out of grade school. When Woodstock happened I was fourteen years old. I wanted to be a part of rock and roll and the music scene and was rabid about reading everything I could get my hands on. I had the first issue of Rolling Stone. In later years, when Cameron Crowe wrote his screenplay for "Almost Famous," he was writing what I dreamed of. What would eventually be diagnosed as a crippling case of clinical depression and imposter syndrome as well as social anxiety would keep me from realizing those dreams. For the most part I dropped out. I was never in danger of addiction, however, since I had a low tolerance for alcohol and most drugs. I wasn't a drinker. I did inhale.

The difference between then, or life up until May, 2000 and now, is that I have been away. The past decade has been a crash course in focus and determination. More to the point, coming home made things stand out in much sharper focus. There is the old song from the world wars that goes, "how you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paris?" (pronounced in true American hick: pair - EE). Well, I have been to the academic Paris. I did what most every red-blooded American single mother does when faced with a child starting Kindergarten: I went back to college. It was the best of both worlds decision in that it kept my child from being a latchkey kid.

Going back to college was my first clue. My friends were incredulous, my family dubious. I had a checkered employment past (I feel that I was doing "research" for "life skills"). I had started college once, but wandered off, never really quitting, just "putting it off for a year or twenty."



... continued

Oh and by the way ...

I did end up taking that job after all. I actually like my job and the people with whom I work. I still refuse to dangle prepositions.

Bad Blogger

I'm a bad blogger. Not only have I not posted in here in a year, but I have multiple blogs, none of which get any attention. For me to consider myself a writer, this does not bode well. I was just playing a fascinating game of Bejeweled Blitz which is mildly meditative and thinking about how I blow off my writing all the time, as if it were a red-headed stepchild and then I admonished myself for having more than one blogging spot. It is foolhardy to try to keep them all fed with blistering social insight and so it is easier to simply do nothing.

I also keep two blogs for one main reason and that is because I have a few readers who are on the same site. I consider one of those readers to be a dear friend, a kindred-spirited, menopausal reinvention of her former self, who braved the tempestuous ride through graduate school along with me but we will manage to keep communication.

I have been toying with the idea of going completely Google-based on my home computer. I already use most of their plugins, my opening brower page is my iGoogle page, my resume is online courtesy of Google, and I have all my photos uploaded with Picasa and hosted online by Google. It's really one-click fun despite all the people who bitch about Google. I have been assimilated by Googleness. That and Facebook. And Twitter. But those are other stories.

So I'm paring down to two blogs now, both on Blogger. My Motime account, Yankee in a Red State, will languish but really, that was my Florida blog. I'm still a Yankee but I no longer live in a red state and not because Florida went blue this past presidential election. I've changed latitudes and attitudes (apologies to Jimmy Buffett). You can catch me here most days, and sometimes on Where's Chindo?

Things are looking up?

This is the way the world works. I filed the last blog entry. The phone rang. My sister said her company was interested in hiring me for a contract job. We'll see how that works out.