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.