11/29/2006

Inner Voices, early morning strain

Sorry, I can’t make it out of bed today. You go on without me.

Uh, that would be difficult, seeing as we share the same mind.

Whatever. I can’t face life this morning.

Still moping about the latest rejection, huh?

No. No, it’s just been such a week. Then, you know, I got sick over the weekend. I haven’t quite bounced back. But, why, why didn’t that journal accept my story?

You won’t find out. You’ve got to let it go. Send it somewhere else. You worked hard on it, right?

Yes. It felt so good, to revise, to get feedback. I thought I made progress.

Maybe you did. You’ll never know if you bury it in a file now and quit.

I’ll be a stupider dork if I keep sending my stuff to the world when nobody wants it.

Maybe. Didn’t someone recently tell you they thought that very story was well done?

Yeah, but what if no one else agrees?

You mean, what if it will take more work to write acceptably for more readers?

Work, work, ugh. Pardon me while I hide under the covers. How about we smother ourselves with the pillow?

Chicken.

It’s not the labor I mind so much. The trouble is not knowing how I’m supposed to do it. Isn’t it obvious? I’m uneducated. A dufus. There’s no figuring out how to write well. For me, the problem’s unsolvable.

Okay. You win. Let’s get going and do something different. From now on, you’re not a writer.

What?! How can you suggest I give up my dream?

You just said you can’t solve the main problem.

True. It’s true. I keep trying things, and often it seems I’ve fixed trouble spots. The writing gets smoother. Better in small ways. Overall, though, I’m waiting. Wishing for a breakthrough. A technique; a paradigm shift; a rescue ...

I see. Well, maybe--

That’s it!!

What? You’ve got it? You figured out something?

No; I realized I’m just like Tom Hanks in CastAway.

Right. You watched that on Saturday for--what--the eighty-thousandth time? Tom Hanks’ character, Chuck Noland, gets stranded on a deserted island, then finally gets home, then has another awful setback ...

Yes! And what did he learn from his ordeal, his terrible loneliness and the trials of life?

Don’t talk to volleyballs?

No, silly. Keep breathing. (Or taking steps. Or writing and submitting.) You never know what the next tide will bring.

It’ll likely bring lots more rejections.

Yup. Still, I think I can get up now.

Good. Our stomach’s growling.

11/23/2006

Brindy's Thanksgiving Post

Because my family is busy in other rooms, I have snuck in here to the computer for a moment. I’m a guest blogger, if you will. My people don’t know I can do this, especially when they haven’t trimmed my toenails in a couple months. All I hear is, “Brindy, you’re making a racket walking around,” but it’s not like I can alleviate the problem.

There’s one issue with which I can deal. Deanna has never mentioned me by name in the months she’s been posting to Stories Happen. I’ve decided forgiveness is the doggy way, however, as I’m a patient soul. You would not believe how many times I’ve waited, for example, until everyone finally left the house before eating the cat food.

Today something’s up around here. I can smell tastiness and excitement, and I only hope Deanna, now in the kitchen peeling roundish, starchy things Tim dug from the garden, will forget to shut me in the utility room when other people arrive. But if she does banish me, maybe she’ll forget to bring in those dishes from the garage that came from the oven late last night making my mouth water as dreams of pumpkins and sugar danced in my head. And maybe I can at last squeeze through the garage cat door, gather my legs beneath me like Kaavik, the Wolf Dog and leap to glorious heights atop the workbench where gorged-tummy pie dreams will all come true.

I’ll scoot soon, because Tim’s got the fire going in the woodstove. My old teeth are chattering here at the computer, and Deanna might have something different cooking now. When she spills, I take full advantage. These days, though, I don’t hear her exclamations right away, and I miss some of the pre-mopped up goodness.

Okay, eating’s not really what life’s all about. I’m a wise old pup now, not so sharp anymore in the hearing department, a bit fuzzier to see you with, but I still guard my family with my life (no squirrel enters this yard without danger of a good chase--well, these days maybe a deafening bark from behind the sliding door’s glass, because it’s wearing on my hips to hop out there every time). I’ve made this home secure, and when anyone new was allowed in I’ve made them think twice about braving slobber-coverage in the future.

Edna, Deanna’s grandma, took me in as a wee puppy, no bigger than your hand, and named me Brindy for my brindle sort of coloring. I miss her... quite a gal.

Deanna used to take me jogging with her. We ran like a bronzed athlete and her Iditarod champion. Well, we circled the sewage treatment plant with something like grace in our strides. We both spend more time indoors now, Deanna only running on her loud, electric thing that Tim surprised her with on her birthday. She loves it, because her hips are less reliable now, too.

Oops, I’m really outta here. Westley the cat is sidling up to this chair--it’s precarious already, and he wants to write about his gruesome exploits. Some animals get to go outside the fence, never get plopped in the tub for a bath--well, I’ll tell you more later! I think Deanna just spilled some gravy.

11/18/2006

Circa 1972

  • I've always had a big nose.
  • My mom could have modeled, don't you think?
  • Delish, my Siamese cat, was my best friend during junior high. (Prolific, too.)

11/14/2006

For the Weary

You step outside, imagining. The square of ground before you will look different. Beauty, like scents on the dew-sprinkled wind, will show up after you’ve done your work and your waiting. So you begin.

Where did all those roots beneath the grasses come from, you wonder, gouging clods of soil. Their tearing sound as they release their grip goes on for hours. Your strength is tested and holds.

A shovel blade beneath your mud-caked boot invades dirt clumps a thousand times. Worms on your periphery squiggle. You tug them, sometimes parts of them you’ve dismembered, and plunk them out of your way. A beetle family scuttles for shade, the giant grandfather slow beneath black, armored wings.

As sections of dark earth appear, muscles between your shoulders burn. You wipe your forehead, spotting specks of green in the still too-chunky bed. Your gloved hands grasp at missed weeds; you know more of their quick, bright shoots will grow up almost tomorrow.

Yet as you straighten, spine crackling, and adjust the bright scarf on your head, your sigh is contentment. The work wanted here is a good work.

If you were expected to build an enormous shelter for every lost soul, and if you tried to do the job, you know you’d fail. If your ordained task was to glorify a single city block with flower beds and park-like lawns, you’d stumble.

In the space before you wait more grassy clumps, more brutish clods. And days to go until planting. To cover the seeds you’ve been given. To watch slender tendrils poke forth, to wrest out weeds. To let what happen will. Though difficult, it is far from a burdensome task.

11/10/2006

A Piece in the Puzzle

There’s a big part of me ever wanting to give people what they want. My nature strains toward the way to please.

Seeking to do so helped a lot in school. I had only to discover what a teacher wanted from me and deliver. Voila, good grades. At home existed a similar situation. I could find out what my parents wished. My behavior conformed, and they praised me. Friends, nearly always oddballs, or flashy, or somehow needy, generally knew what they were after. I did my best to provide off-beat humor, or a listening ear, or whole afternoons letting them help deduce what I desired, so they could give me advice on how to get it.

When I began dating, things got confused. Young men wanted. Would I give in? The pull to please, and to embrace physical excitement, grew strong. Then I became involved with the son of a preacher man.

Timothy wanted me and wanted to be good. His strong-willed restraint kept us somewhat proper, at least by today’s standards. After the Navy reassigned him to Charleston, SC, two thousand miles from my home, I struggled to give him what I guessed he wanted: freedom. Tim decided, not long after he’d moved away, he WANTED to take me for his WIFE, yesterday.

His desire (not to mention my own) blessed my immature sensibilities with a reasonable path to travel. So far I’d very narrowly skirted adolescent sexuality’s pitfalls. Some friends from church were getting abortions, but I wasn’t hip to go there. My parents, the ones who discovered my friends were getting abortions (the friends themselves weren’t talking so much as withdrawing), expected their offspring to make mature choices. For me, a girl who’d once sworn she’d never marry, wedded bliss became attractive. My mom would blow up over my trashing dreams of university degrees, but I would form a plan for attending a Christian college one year to soothe her, while engaged to Tim, to soothe him.

It worked. Yeah, well … You who’ve set foot into marriage without a clue (is that most of us?) can guess the problems were massive. I found myself bound to someone and not able to give him all he wanted. If only I could do that, see, I’d be sure to relax. Tim, for some odd reason, wanted and needed me to understand what I wanted, so he could be a partner to me. He wasn’t much interested in heaping on praises for each thing I did, to reassure me we were okay, so I could calm down, and so on. I got pretty darn angry. And withdrew. And screwed up, literally. But that’s another story, for another long post (where was I going with this one?).

Oh, yeah. Tonight my thoughts are of writing. Frustration abounds trying to conjure what the bookish masses want. But as I’ve learned married to Tim, growing to accept my own wants makes for clearer, truer expression. It’s risky. I still desire a good report card, though I’m learning I no longer need it. Maybe the main thing someone who might read me wants is refreshment, a dip in a well-worked story.

11/08/2006

Reckoning, I reckon

Subdued morning after mid-term elections. I spell out numbers on a check, taking up the entire space, which I will mail to the Lane County Tax Collector. I feel poor.

Tim, in the other room, goes about morning chores, somber. Yet, for me, there’s a strange lightheartedness brimming. I’m mainly agreeing the people and issues which were victorious last night are opposites from what we’d have chosen. Big education, especially, got a shot in the arm here in Oregon. Big casino gambling, too. Taxes and more taxes will burden us further, probably.

I’m thankful, though. As I partook of our habitual Tuesday evening class at MSC, I remembered the point of a prayer I love: “Your kingdom come.”

It’s interesting. The Bible mentions few political victories the Jews enjoyed. It leaves out the one still celebrated at Hanukkah. As if beating those we see as oppressors is not so much the point God meant to get across.

He gives everybody victory sometimes. This morning I’m happy for friends of mine who descended into despair both years President Bush was elected. Today they get their turn to dance for joy. Maybe God is saying through their triumph the right way to go is with these views. Heaven knows when my perspective has “won” things haven’t turned out all goodness and roses.

In the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, if our teacher Ron interprets it correctly (I think he does), the opening entreaty looks toward a distant future with joyful longing. It’s saying, “I want that kingdom in which God’s purposes will be done here, on earth, as they are in heaven.” No matter who’s in charge, we don’t see this happening yet, or any time soon. But I can keep praying for it, as country-bumpkin poor as I become, believing it will take place. Jesus, the mustard-seed king, will one day rule over all.

11/07/2006

Brief History, rated R

The following is so rated for language that seemed appropriate to the author and that may be repeated later, in private, on this Election Day. Please disregard (skip it; go ahead) if offended by foulnesses.

Update: I've been told this should be rated R, so have complied.

As I do on Tuesdays while my son audits a Special Relativity class at--where else?--Gutenberg College, I sat inside my comfy van and wrote. I bring along only pen and paper. No distractions. I always get something done, the value of which can be judged later.

Today at one point I started jotting notes regarding history as I know it. Since I was born in 1960, my experience in our world spans four-and-a-half decades so far. Impressions from what I’ve learned about the 50s are included, even though I don’t own their turf.

I’m curious whether or not you think these statements reflect merely clichés, especially if you’re my age or older. What say you younger folk? Do the threads from my aging brain fit with what you know?

1950s: Read the instructions. Appliances. Tricycles. Coffee houses. Birth control pills. More women enter the workforce.

1960s: Rock music. Assassinations. College protests. Bra burnings. Anti-establishment. Anti-status quo. Question authority. War again. Question the war. Do things differently. Why not? God could be dead. We can have sex. Don’t have to become parents. Why don’t we do it in the road? Everyone could die tomorrow; Russia has the Bomb. Annihilation. Groovy. Mind-altering drugs. Escape to peace. Save the environment from technology. Live in the woods. Fuck the government. Fuck each other. What the fuck.

1970s: Most kids still in two-parent families. Parents breaking up, though, every day. Population going to explode soon. Pollution irreversible. We won’t make it to the next century. Government must change things. Ration gasoline. Produce smaller cars. Everybody work and buy houses. Become political. Abortion is legal. DINK--double income, no kids, better than single income, kids. No-fault divorce. Find yourself on Easy Street.

1980s: How many sex partners you had? Watch out for AIDs. Bash gays or love them. Check your biological clock. Must have babies, now! Become religiously right. Fight abortion. Protect abortion rights. Develop a queer eye. Get a computer game system. Get a computer. Rent a video.

1990s: Get used to right-wing politics. Watch “Touched By An Angel.” Teach your kids to love Bill Clinton: he’s anti-war. Don’t talk about conservatism: it’s a conspiracy led by Rush Limbaugh. Start shopping online. Turn in guns for money. Start checking kids for guns at school. Start homeschooling. Watch “Buffy” and “Angel.” Prepare for Y2K; don’t let your Internet porn go away.

2000s: Rage against polarization. Become diverse. Buy a cell phone. Question the voting system. Rage against terrorists. Don’t attack Iraq. Find, kill Al Qaeda, Bin Laden. Protect birth control and abortion rights for our children. Sing praise songs to Jesus. Feed the hungry--feed and clothe them all! Computerize everything. Fuck everything. Tax everything. Leave God out of everything. Be spiritual.

11/04/2006

Witnesses

Today people walked our street in pairs, men in suits and women with dresses covered by rain coats. They skirted leaf piles, toting clipboards and pamphlets and mounting steps to ring doorbells. I answered ours while Tim stacked wood out back.

Later our son asked why Jehovah’s Witnesses go door to door.

“It’s what they think they’re supposed to do for God,” I said. “They have some wacky ideas. Their flawed theology comes from a Bible translation I don’t agree with.”

Still later I decided my answer sounded smug. While I do see flaws in the J.W.s’ understanding, I can’t deny the times I’ve discovered gaping holes in my own theology. Undoubtedly, more will show up.

My conflict lies less in thinking they’re wrong about reality and more in knowing how closed-minded the group generally is. People who become part of Watchtower religious culture are encouraged to “take in knowledge” about God, which means they’re expected to enquire about and learn this particular brand of theology, with no deviation. Questions venturing beyond their leaders’ views can lead to disfellowshipping. That means being severed from family, friends and support. I’ve heard stories of people who’ve gone ahead and asked, having decided their irresistible need to dig for the Bible’s true message, wherever their search might lead, was ultimately worthwhile.

When you think about it, the Watchtower organization’s ways aren’t far removed from those of traditional Christendom. Of course, some churches don’t care what you believe, just so you show up Sundays and honor their pledge drives. But in many congregations asking questions bestirs a range of reactions, from semi-smug dismissals to earnest appeals for silence to a firmly planted shoe between shoulder blades in the direction of the front door.

Sure, it can go the other way, when a church member barrages weary leaders with irrational diatribes from a belligerent, unteachable mindset. I wish those folks would take life easy and stay home, out of hard-working ministerial people’s faces.

And, yes, questions can lead to heresy. Yucky, frightening heresy. We don’t want to be wrong.

Yet there was this person who came along once, who got it right. Every bit of it. A voice boomed one time from heaven, “Listen to him.” And there were these guys, a rag-tag bunch who followed that person around and were told by him, “I’ll send you the spirit of truth, and you will remember everything I’ve said.” Miraculous, huh. Certainly not the way I’ve been instructed. But part of my belief, my joy, is knowing those apostle guys gave their wisdom to the ages. Flawed men, they received the Christ’s teachings flawlessly, in a burst of flame atop their heads, in a rushing wind. It got recorded. It’s hard to understand, because time and language obscured it, but it’s still around. When I begin to get it, as they meant the words when they wrote or dictated them, I start seeing real life. It clicks with what I’ve experienced, making all kinds of sense.

Part of getting there, though, involves somebody asking questions. Honest, skeptic-less queries into the nature of the language, the history, the culture. I see it happening around me daily in this amazing, Gutenbergian culture I’ve hitched up with. Here are cubby-holes where people ask questions, whatever comes to mind, and it’s truly okay. And people hold strong, theological opinions with open hands. For me, an irresistible draw.

No door to door ministry on the horizon, though, sorry.

11/01/2006

While listening to John Denver

It’s something to sit in my little home, at my unsophisticated computer, as “Annie’s Song” makes me teary, and receive an email from a friend who’s waiting at SeaTac airport for a flight to Norway. Then I read a blog entry by a woman from my city who’s in Florida, preparing to do the Ironman events on Saturday (though in her case it’s Ironmom). She’s been swimming this week in clear blue ocean, watching dolphins frolic. I check another blog, this one originating in Alberta, Canada, where I think things are fairly snow-covered.

Here, November has arrived in autumnal fashion. It’s raining. As my music plays (now I’m onto a track from Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?), the weather doesn’t cause a problem. It’s life.

You readers put up with a lot of melancholy from me, I think. Thank you. For peering in, when it strikes you to do so. You and this blog, along with more good things than I can count most days, are gifts. I sure like this arrangement, with the music, flowing into this room from all over.

What to Do

I started reading Anna Quindlen’s Blessings, called by one reviewer “a polished gem of a novel.” Already I can picture myself learning from it and despairing.

In a Writers Digest (October ‘06) interview, Anna spoke about the good and bad of reading great writers’ works. There’s the help amazing stories give you, the absorption of technique you can experience. But there’s also the descent into depression after tasting the craft of a Dickens, a Faulkner, a Yeats. What to do?

As Ms. Quindlen put it, “You just have to push your own inadequacies to the back of your mind and get on with it.”

That’s pretty much where I live these days.

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