I can’t put what I want to say into words. It’s not formed enough in my noggin yet, I reckon. It’s aggravating. I know what I want to say. Really. It just doesn’t come out in anything other than a ramble. Must be something big. Blarg.
I hate it when I have big ideas but can’t enunciate them.
Now that I’m forty years old… I believe I may be hitting my stride again. Things have been clicking back into place. It’s not been by design, I assure you. I’ve just been doing my regular, daily stuff, living the usual day-by-day routine and being myself. I resolved a while back I wasn’t going to “try” to “get it together”. Thing work out best, for me at least, when I don’t force them. That’s contrary to much of what I see, hear, and read in the popular culture, but them’s the breaks. I live by my own anecdote.
I may go to the library today to find a biography of Thomas Jefferson. I’ve learned a fair amount about him over the years, just not the details. He puzzles many people, apparently. At least that how it appears to me. So… I’m going to start reading a bit about him and seeing what there is on him. He was definitely an interesting, complex man, and so I’m expecting a good read.
Last night, I emailed some sociology professors, one at the University of Wisconsin and one at the University of California, and asked them about ethnicity and race. I was under the impression since high school and college that the two may overlap but were not the same thing. Over the past few years I’ve seen the two often used interchangeably. Looking for information online, I found varying definitions and interpretations. So I decided to field those who are most likely to be able to illuminate me on the issue.
I re-watched this year’s season of Doctor Who over the past three weeks. Most of it just doesn’t click for me. I’ve read and listened to many people explaining why I should and/or how I’m mistaken, but it comes down do this: De gustibus non est disputandem. And so it goes.
What has been seen cannot be unseen. As glib and funny as that saying has become online, that’s how experience works. You never know until the experience, and once it happens… it can’t unhappen. It is always with, inside you, regardless of how much you try consciously or unconsciously to bury it. It has an effect on who you are in that you are never the same after. The event doesn’t have to be an external physical event, like a car accident or walking in on you mom and dad having sex. “Eureka!” moments do the trick as well, when some realization hits you after your subconscious has figured something out.
It’s not usually as cut and dried or either/or, but for the purposes of illustration I put it like that. Usually you put things together little by little over time, noting happenings and occurrences, reacting minutely as you go until over a period of time. And one day you finally sense the world is no longer to you as it was before. You’ve undergone a sea change. Maybe you consciously knew something was going on. Maybe you didn’t. But there it is, a change you can neither ignore nor bury. You have evolved, for better or worse or neither.
I had a birthday recently. For it I got a realization. I finally came to the conscious conclusion of something that had been brewing for quite some time. I’m still having something of a time enunciating it, though. It’s quite different from what I thought I knew, from how I saw the world and its dwellers. Some of the people with whom I’ve shared my newly found thinking have been at the same time in general agreement and, to smaller extents, a bit sad or shocked. My grandmother, who turned 92 on the 1st of this month, was some pleased and unsurprised. It usually takes people a lifetime to get here… if they ever do, she said. A friend of mine, who is 88, a retired professor emeritus of philosophy in a nearby metro, said that now I had a chance to be genuinely effective, provided I don’t get stuck in my own head. I just have to get past the disappointment and relative disgust of it all, which both of them say will soon pass.
It about human nature, you see.
I may write more on this later, though I plan to get back to Garden Variety fairly soon.
What’s been going on since I’ve been away from the online world? Well…
I finished reading Hitchens’ No One Left To Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family. He nailed not only the Clintons. He called out the various disparate component groups of the American Left, the Republicans, the so-called mainstream media, and intellectuals/talking heads. It wasn’t just breathtaking. It was everything I’d ever thought about the Clintons and American politics in general… and why… and then some. I didn’t trust, respect, or admire the Clintons from day one, and it had nothing to do with the jersey they wore. As people I instinctively knew they were rotten, more rotten and malignant than almost anyone else of power or influence in western politics. I may be in the nonpartisan minority, to be sure, but it’s some small comfort that I’m in good company.
I also discovered my ex-wife has been having me on about “vacation” days. As per our divorce agreement, we share custody, and the kids split time between us on a schedule. Up to fourteen days a year we can take time off (from childcare) to go on vacation or whatever. Apparently, she’s been dishonest with me about stuff, and I’m going to have to confront her soon and tell her she is minus two days (that I know of) because she willfully disobeyed the judge-approved and enforceable terms of our agreement. I wouldn’t mind really but for that when it comes to me taking time off she is absolutely strict and unyielding. I really don’t like this kind of thing, but it’s something I have to deal with.
I’ve also been out enjoying the weather a bit. The past few days have been really beautiful, cool. When the hurricanes stroll across the Atlantic and up the eastern seaboard or into the Gulf it really does improve inland weather dramatically. People’ve told me that’s insensitive and mean that I say that. My response is that if those who live in those parts of the country don’t realize by now that there are going to be hurricanes and floods every fall and that it’s going to rough their lives up and maybe cost lives and billions of dollars to repair, then they have something wrong with them. That’s like living in Kansas or Iowa and complaining about all the tornadoes. I am reminded of the old George Carlin quote: “If you don’t like the weather, move.”
I wrote a segment of dialogue for Garden Variety. It’s a bit where the retired serial killer speaks to the town’s Catholic priest in the confessional booth and he comes out and says what he is and the problem he’s having. The dialogue wanders and hobbles about, but it’s a start. It’s cementing a few notions, ruling others out finally, and giving me a few new ideas for nuance.
That’s the big stuff that’s been going on. I’s not much really. I just needed the time away. It’s good to log out for a while every so often.
I am so often easily diverted. It’d be laughable if it weren’t so entertaining. The writing’s taken a back seat to reading some nonfiction. I can’t explain it, not rationally anyway. I’m sure there are plenty of possibilities for it, but I don’t really care what they are. It’s just happening. C’est la vie. I’ll get back to Garden Variety when it needs me to. For now, my curiosity on certain topics must be satisfied. Why? For no other reason than I liked the titles of the books when I was browsing Amazon.com recently. I’m a sucker for a good title.
The book I started on the other day is The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. The next book in line is The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Next up is Quirkology: How We Discover The Big Truths In Small Things. Then bringing up the rear is No One Left To Lie To: The Values Of The Worst Family. In order, the authors are Mlodinow, Schwartz, Wise, and Hitchens. (That sounds like a New York law firm, doesn’t it?) As my tastes and preferences are with so many things, my tastes in reading material are eclectic.
Regarding Garden Variety, by the way… I decided not to use the cosmic horror/supernatural element suggested by my son. It’s an interesting idea, one I’ll probably try to use in a later story. It’s just I am going to stick with my original inclination and make the story about a personal, if bizarre, struggle concerning a very human, if bizarre, problem. I want the relative evil to be definitely human-sourced for this one.
I’ll be editing my keyword searches here on WordPress soon. “Creativity” won’t be on my list any more. More often than not what I read is either about some aspect of commercial business or some sort of video or meme repetition. Maybe 20% of what I wind up reading concerns creative peoples’ creative processes and enterprises, and I don’t like spending that much time separating the wheat from the chaff. I’ll mine for blog posts some other way. I’ll be creative.
I was never the black sheep. My personality was never sheep-like. It was more like a goat’s. I would butt heads (figuratively speaking) sometimes, just for fun. I easily digested (figuratively speaking again) things that others found inedible, unpalatable. I adjusted to new (social) terrain very quickly and rarely lost my footing. I was smarter than I looked or acted. I was at home hanging around with the herd, and sometimes I just liked perching atop a mountain by myself. I could be stubborn or easy-going, spastic or graceful, noisy or quiet, and sometimes if I was startled I would faint. I was the black goat of the family… and everywhere else.
College and marriage tried desperately to drive that out of me. Both institutions really wanted to to conform, toe the line, jump through hoops, and do others’ bidding without question. No self-respecting goat would ever do that. This goat came horrifically close, though. Even the strongest of us can be beaten down. Everything hinges on at what we hit bottom and decide: Is it time to call it quits, or have I really had enough of all their shit? In April of 2003, after trying to “fix all [my] problems” because of an ultimatum from my passive-aggressively abusive then-wife, I finally told her I had really had enough of her (and everybody else’s) shit. (I didn’t put it that way, though. I wasn’t rude.) She said nothing for about thirty seconds, though she looked at me like my hair was on fire. I remember what I said.
“I’m done trying to change myself any more. You knew exactly who I was when you married me. We dated for almost three years and lived together for two. I never lied about who I was. I never acted differently around you. You’ve made me miserable for years. You’ve known, but you’ve not cared, just demanded I change more to suit you.”
She said she’d leave if I didn’t reconsider.
I told her: “Do you you gotta do.”
That was it. She moved out later, in August. It was such a relief. Yeah, I was depressed, directionless for a good while. I’d not been single in ten years, and I still had the kids with me most of the time. I had next to no money and no prospects. I was off the chain, though. I was a free goat. Now, seven years later, I’m much more confident, stable, and happy. It’s taken a while to get here. Along the way I’ve dropped several other toxic or unhealthy relationships and come to terms with them and things done (and not done) during them. There’s still more work, shaping up to be done. I’m still getting my sea legs back. (I know that’s not a good goat-ish analogy, but it’s the best one for the point I’m trying to make.) I’m in a good place, though. The outlook is good.
Of course, I had to do this one.
For the past couple of days I’ve slowed my pace. After a fairly hectic and expensive summer, I am allowing myself time to decompress and enjoy the weather. I’ve thought, but I’ve not writ. I’ve watched films. I’ve read. I’ve cleaned the house and bombed for bugs, and then I cleaned again. (The cleaning and spraying/bombing process will continue indefinitely until the damnable yet useful creatures are annihilated within the confines of the domicile.) The kids are back in school, and my life is once again sedate.
I had lunch today with an old friend, a playwrighting/theatre colleague I’ve known since 1989. We talked about how busy he is and the inherent jumble, bustle, exhaustion, effort, and sometimes confusion of taking on multiple enterprises. He’s a professional commercial photographer, a traveled and sought after artistic photographer, a semi-professional playwright, a small-venue theatre and short film producer, and a novelist. He’s been doing all of them for going on twenty years, and he’s very, very tired. He’s quite happy with his achievements, but he’s just plain worn out, to the point that for the past two or three years it’s really not quite been worth it for him personally. He’s asked me off and on for the past umpteen years why I don’t do more theatre and films and write more. I often make excuses, but today I had an answer. It’s something I’ve thought about for a while now, since we last had a really deep conversation. I said (now paraphrasing, of course):
I learned about contentment and how to find it. I know what I like, what I enjoy, what makes me smile and be satisfied, and I know their opposites. I cut out the junk as much as I can, and I work on the good stuff as much as I can. The kicker is I don’t push myself. I don’t run, dart, dash, sprint, zip, or otherwise speed through things the way I always used to. I enjoy the stroll. I don’t attach myself to projects just to have something to do or because the people are cool and the like. I really take stock and make sure I have the time, the inclination, and the energy for anything, everything I do. If I’m missing any one of the three, I respectfully decline. When I’m in, I’m all the way in, when I’m working with others. So I don’t join in all that much. I’m concentrating on a balance of original work of my own on one side and collaborations on the other, and I’ve not found it yet. (And that I haven’t doesn’t bother me. It’ll get here.) The key is: I’m genuinely content. I did manage to find that, and that’s really the hinge for everything else. As an old Jamaican coworker years ago used to say, “It’s all good, man.”
I know that was a ramble there, but I expounded a bit here for the post.
I’ve also cut down on internet usage, soft drinks, white bread, tv news, and other things. I’m listening to more tunes and playing with my cat and my neighbors’ dogs and horses. The hectic pace of summer has subsided, and things are back to what passes for normal. It’s all good.
Garden Variety keeps roiling in my noggin. It’s taken something of a different direction. I mean… it may be taking a new direction. I’m not sure of it yet. There’s a new angle under consideration, influenced I’m sure by recent readings in a different genre. More on that as it develops.
Other than that I’m pretty boring.
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meandering back from oblivion 