mercuryfern

Memes as a cure for writer's block.

The last, what, week or so, my brain has been swimming with the sorts of Big Questions I thought I’d figured out before I was an official adult.  (Not a youth, not even a young adult anymore, no, just look at the insurance charts.  The line is quite clear.)   When I feel this way, there is nothing for it but to sit with the fountain pen and the journal, no, that was ten years ago, the keyboard and the modem, whatever, I need to write my thoughts clear.  For mostly logistical reasons I’ve been away from the computer, wishing throughout the days I were typing instead of occupied with whatever meaningless drivel has been wasting my time.  (seeking gainful employment?  pffft.)  Tonight I sit down and, predictably, the profundities are playing coy with me.  Fine.  I’ll do this meme instead.  Courtesy of Kimberly.

Seven things I plan to do before I die:
*get knocked up
*own a house
*ascend to the highest ranks of the Dance Dance Revolutionary Guard
*be an excellent mom
*learn HTML
*tend a garden over the course of more than two seasons
*have health insurance

Seven things I can do:
*make sushi
*read music (in three clefs, no less)
*get found when lost
*beat the bus from North Austin to Sixth Street on my bike
*endear myself to a room full of strangers
*get the cute girl discount in most retail and automotive establishments
*operate a bulldozer

Seven things I cannot do:
*ski
*type quickly
*spell legibly without the aid of a checker
*back down from a fight
*cry in front of another human being
*finish more than one alcoholic beverage in a night
*be concise

Seven things I find attractive in others:
*defying gender stereotypes (women who are handy with power tools, guys who knit)
*sharp wit
*being so vivacious as to reveal conventionally defined defined standards of beauty for the hollow lies they are
*spontaneity
*passion for a craft
*being shy/ nervous around me because I am, after all, worth impressing
*the good taste to find me attractive

Seven things I say most often:
*fuck
*mother of god
*(assorted other obscenities)
*Pebbles are not for putting in your nose.
*(activity I would like a three year old to avoid) is not a choice.
*Use your words.
*Thank you.

Seven celebrity (If the meme regulatory bodies will allow an occasionally unconventional definition of fame) crushes:
*Angelina Jollie
*Op Ivy era Tim Armstrong
*Emma Goldman
*Edna St. Vincent de Millay
*Cezar Chavez
*Virginia Woolfe
*A certain viola teacher

Nonconsensual Guest Blogging

Awwwww, you guys, check out this email my husband just wrote me. The boy's got a BFA and he's not afraid to use it. Somebody get him a blog. No, don't bother, he wouldn't post anyway. *crestfallen sigh* Ah well, I'm just as bad. About a week ago I showed him a piece of which I was particularly proud, and he said, "Honey, I'll never understand why you are fucking around with this blogging business. You've obviously got a novel to write." Um, thanks??

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Sitting in a dirty strip club on the outskirts of Columbus at 3 am, a gyrating cunt 12 inches from my face, Jason turns to me and reiterates how especially odd and drowning in intricate moments existence is. The subject turns to how beautiful a subway explosion may look in infrared, how an atom bomb is a blooming flower when viewed from outer space. The next day we trespass to swim in a private quarry. It takes hours to cross over and back, I kick at the lapping water that cradles my head and fills my ears with another world's sounds. I drive home exhausted, watching a sunset I wish I could broadcast in Times Square for you to see. I want everyone to see it. The strippers, the swimmers, the fighters, the welders, the miners, the cheaters, the devoted, the missing, the ancient, the confused, the rotting, I want them all to see it. I want the universe to crucify me, tear me into molecules and spread me across the surface of this crumbling rock that careens precariously around a giant ball of nuclear explosions.

I want to save everyone.

Straw into- well, something shiny anyway

Blogging now because the idea with this thing is that I'm supposed to be getting in the habit of writing regularly, whether or not I have anything to say; the latter being the case now. 

It isn't that I'm uninspired or that I'm not noticing and thinking.  Oh, contrare, I'm full up with little thoughts that might eventually become things to say.  Right now though, they are just lonely observations waiting around for other observations to join them and beget insight.  I suppose that's where craftsmanship comes in, the ability to tease those little glimmers of "oh hey that's kind of neat" into cohesive pieces with neatly tied up and logically arrived at conclusions.

I have a weakness for neat tying up, for structure.   I am thus wary to spill out the unfinished pieces of my messy mind anywhere, even my private public journal.   

In both my classes we are talking about gender, funny how knowledge intersects where you would least expect it to, eh?  I've never had a semester of classes where I didn't find myself making unanticipated cross disciplinary connections.   On the English test today was a Darwin quote.  (I missed it, oh the pain.)  Oooh,  I know, maybe I could prattle on about why I think Antioch's academic reformation is misguided.  The problem being, I'm stealing this time from a paper I should be writing re Harper's Bazaar 1880.  (Why yes, it *is* very interesting.  I bet you just wish you knew the differences between the English and American wood engraving trade during that time. If you ask me very nicely I will tell you all about it.)

Of course there is the conversation about what is real.  I do photojournalism, memoir, etc.  Truth telling is complicated stuff, you could make a life's work of trying to be accurate.  Yes I know, emotional truths sometimes deviate from factual ones.  For me, though, the obsession is with what is true, it eludes me.  I should explore that, dontcha think?

Did you know that arched feet are one of the physiological definitions of hominids?  My arches collapsed a few years ago.  (This hurts significantly more than missing a quote from an author who's works you've read and heard referenced repeatedly.)  The structure of the knee, the curve in the spine, these too, define our species.  Is it entirely adolescent to worry about by own subtly knocked knees, my slight scoliosis, when I learn this? 

With more time and energy, I'm not even asking for a room of my own, though it would be nice, think of all the the insights I could glean.   They are in there, wanting me to chase them, the coy bastards.

Free write over, back to things I'm acquiring debt to be instructed to compose...