So Long and Thanks for All the Kind Words

I've been letting this one percolate for a bit to see how transient my feelings on the matter really were, and I think the mental lava has cooled enough to see the shape of the landscape now.

I posted on Facebook a link to my pompous meditation on marriage, and received a caustic comment that accelerated my thinking on how and why I use Facebook and this blog. That comment, part of which was "It's possible that every thought you have isn't meant to be thought aloud" didn't start me down this line of thinking, but it did bring it to the front burner of my mind. It did snap me awake to a perspective I hadn't had: that the focus of all my words, which I had thought of as firmly centered on myself, my perceptions, my emotions, my understanding of myself and my world, includes my perception of others, and expressing that perception can be selfish, hurtful, and pompous. Is that OK? Yes. I am not responsible for other people's emotions. And every person who reads the words written here is capable of doing exactly what billions of people around the world do, and even scores of my own Facebook friends do: don't read them. But still. My words do have an impact.

But what impact do my words have?

Why do I write this blog? Am I doing it now for the same reasons that I started it 9 years ago? Why do I link to my blog regularly on Facebook now when I didn't when I joined Facebook 7 years ago?

When I started the blog, I was reading a lot of blogs. I thought it would be fun to think out loud publicly. I hoped, but didn't believe, that mine might become one of the well-known, widely read ones. It didn't. But I still liked it. After the birth of my son, and my embarkation on the stay-at-home dad journey, it became a place to reach out when I felt isolated, to get positive feedback when I felt like a failure as a parent, a place to think out loud about what it was I was doing and how I felt about it. It was a place to write stories that I hoped would make my family and my son's know him and me better and to feel more involved in our lives. I wanted him to be connected to his extended family like I was when I was very young but was not as I got older. I wanted that for him, and I hoped that the blog would help keep him on the minds and in the hearts of his own extended family.

Now, I'm not writing about parenting. I'm not isolated. In my divorce, in my quitting drinking, in my dating adventures, I do feel like I'm doing something unusual that makes me think a great deal about what I'm doing and why, just as I did with my stay-at-home dad role. So I write about them here and link to them there.

I have received feedback that the impact of my words has been positive. That my openness about what I'm doing, why, and how I feel about it has inspired others to make changes in their own lives, and that they are grateful for that openness that many people do not exhibit. I made it easier for them, and I made it easier for them to talk about it.

Mostly the feedback that I get, though, is a balm to my ego. I don't kid myself that this space changes lives. This space feeds my ego. I know that. I post funny snapshots of my life on Facebook, and wait for the likes and comments to roll in. I write a blog post hoping that it's funny or clever enough to prompt someone to tell me how great I am. And some of you do. Thanks for that!

In thinking of my drinking, though, I know it was an addiction that I used to waste time that I could have and should have been using more productively. It was an excuse to not do something amazing out of fear that I could not do something amazing. I haven't had a drink in approaching a year and a half now, by the way. Please do feel free and encouraged to tell me how great that is. Because it is great! I'm very proud of it. And I'm still going strong. I quit drinking during one of the toughest, most emotional, most ego-crushing periods of my life, and I've not picked up a drink through plenty of difficult periods since then. It's awesome! I'm awesome! I'm kicking ass at not drinking!

But from that perspective, Facebook and this blog are exactly the same things. Addictions. I'm addicted to the positive feedback that I don't have to work very hard to receive. I don't have to really earn it. Friends and family are often very supportive and kind. That's part of being family and friends for many of us. We're nice to the people we know. And that addiction is an excuse not to commit the time I spend here or on Facebook to something more meaningful. And it's a time suck that distracts me from the fact that I'm not doing that more meaningful thing. If I write here, I don't have to work hard at crafting what I write. I don't have to try to convince someone to publish it. I put it out there, and people say, "Yay! Look at you! Good job!" And I don't write articles. Or short stories. Or poems. Or novels. And I certainly don't make any money at it. And I certainly don't have to face that fear-laden question of, "What if it's not good enough, and no one wants it?"

My dating adventures have put me face to face with my fears over and over again, and I've come out the other side of each episode still here, still alive, still kicking, still sometimes getting what I wanted and sometimes not, but always pretty much OK. Often more than OK. Often better than I was. So I think I'm ready to face that big fear that I've carried around ever since I first started writing, I think probably around the 5th grade or so. Maybe younger. I don't know. Carrying around fears from childhood, and shame about those fears, right through adulthood is how so many people end up closed off, defensive, stagnated, isolated. Afraid. I'm committed to never doing that again. It's not easy. But I can do it. So as someone I love often says, I'm going to say, "Nope!" And I'm going to say, "Fuck that shit!" And I'm going to write.

Which means I'm done here.

Thank you all for reading. Thank you all for commenting. If I know you personally, you probably came here from a Facebook link. The status update that included that link also included personal contact information. If we know each other in cyberspace, let's stay connected in the real world. If we don't, that's OK, too. I know I don't have as many friends as my Facebook Friends list would have me believe. None of us really do, I suspect. But if you want to, you'll know how to reach me. If you want my email address and you're not a Facebook friend, drop me a line in the comments or otherwise reach out. I probably like you.

See ya in the funny papers!

The Body and the Blood

So I decided to do Finslippy's "The Practice of Writing." The eleventh prompt is about forgetting perfection, because it’s impossible. Forget safe and publishable and go for wild. Have fun. The prompt was our choice of the Higgs boson, the Marshall Plan, or transubstantiation. I had to look up the Higgs boson.

I wasn’t never one for going to church. Not ever. I went a couple of times when I was a kid, you know, just to see what all the fuss was about, and we ate sweet Hawaiian bread and drank tiny little cups of grape juice carried around in a fancy brass and velvet thing, but they didn’t believe it. There wasn’t no passion in it. Not in the songs, neither. They was just dancing a slow dance with each other, but Jesus wasn’t there in that room. I know. I’d have felt Him. I know that now.

But I found the thing. I found it now. It was a lot of long years in my life, long years full of falseness and pain, but I found it now. It took studying. I had to work to find it, to find Him, but now I did and things is different. That’s Jesus I’m talking about. I got Jesus in me now, and things won’t never be the same again. Not for me. I got Jesus in me.

Did you know He fed 5000 people with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish? Did you know that? It’s a documented fact. That’s the bread of Jesus. That’s what He’s capable of. He can feed the whole world. He can heal the whole world. And I got him in me.

I couldn’t get it at first, with the bread and the wine and all. I couldn’t get it. But I met a man one night when I was low, and I mean low. You don’t know how bad things got. That’s when I met him. I think Jesus put him there for me. Special, just for me.

We talked a lot. We talked. I told him how low I was, and I mean low. He talked about church, and I said, ‘No, I done all that already.’ And he said, ‘No, but you ain’t done this church!’ He said, ‘They do it right in this church. They got things in this church those other ones don’t have!’ And I said, ‘What kind of things?’ and he said, ‘Come see!’ and I did.

Now I know he didn’t mean things like things you can touch, though they had those too. They had fancy robes. They had smoke burning in these big bells on chains. They had a giant building with ceilings so high you could practically see the angels swirling around up there.

But those weren’t the things he was talking about. He was talking about other things. Procedures. That’s what they had special, secret ways of doing things passed straight down directly from those first men who saw Jesus and sat down with him and saw him feed those 5000 with 5 loaves of bread. Those other churches, they got it wrong. They didn’t know the special procedures. They thought it was a story like, like they didn’t even believe it was true. Parables, they called them, stories. Not history. Not gospel truth! That Hawaiian bread and grape juice wasn’t the Body and the Blood! Because they didn’t believe it! They didn’t know how to make it real!

But now I been to the right place. It took me a long time before they’d give it to me. I had to work real hard for a long time. I wasn’t low no more. Because I knew the real truth. And I wanted it in me. And now I got Him. He’s inside me. Him, that could walk on the top of the water. Him, that could feed the world and heal the world. I got Him inside me now. Don’t you see? Don’t you see there’s nothing I can’t do now? There’s nothing!

Getting Away

So I decided to do Finslippy's "The Practice of Writing." The tenth prompt is about just writing. I’ve not been good about keeping up a daily practice, but I’m trying. She suggests we just start anywhere and not worry about structure, or what the ultimate story or themes will be. Just write and work on putting it together later. For this prompt, she gave us a sentence from The Trick of It by Michael Frayn, and told us to "transcribe the sentence, then continue the story. Just write what you imagine comes next. Don't over-think this."

I was carrying a wire basket with the papers and a loaf of bread and a box of eggs and a large pack of toilet rolls, and I opened my mouth to say something to her, I can’t remember what – I think something slightly impatient about her slowness – and somehow the words changed in my mouth.

"Let’s go to Ottawa," I said, surprising even myself.

She snorted and raised an eyebrow. "Ottawa? What’s in Ottawa?"

"I don’t know. It just sounds exotic. I’ve never been there. We should leave the country more often. I hear it changes your perspective."

"Does your perspective need changing?" She was still behind me. Now she stopped altogether.

"I don’t know," I said. My fingertips were turning numb. I tried to shift the basket to my other hand, but it was awkward. "Maybe." Why couldn’t she carry the toilet paper?

She started walking again, still maddeningly slow. "I just think 'Ottawa' was a strange thing to say. I don’t even know where that is. North? South? East? West? My grasp of Canadian geography is pretty fuzzy." She was quiet for a moment, then: "Is that one of the ones where weed is legal?"

"I don’t know. No. I think that’s Montreal. Look it doesn’t have to be Ottawa, it just popped into my mind. It could be anywhere. What about Vegas?"

"That’s not leaving the country," she said, and skipped lightly ahead three steps to catch up. She took the basket from my hand and stretched up to kiss my neck. "Ottawa’s fine," she said. "Ottawa’s perfect."

Transcrinspiration

So I decided to do Finslippy's "The Practice of Writing." The ninth prompt is about reading, reading a lot, to see how other writers solve problems. She suggests we transcribe writing we like whenever we’re feeling stuck. At the very least, it will get the hands moving.  Then "use the passage you've chosen to transcribe as inspiration…"

I’m transcribing part of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" from the collection of short stories by Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From.

“What about the old couple?” Laura said. “You didn’t finish that story you started.”

                Laura was having a hard time lighting her cigarette. Her matches kept going out.

                The sunshine inside the room was different now, changing, getting thinner. But the leaves outside the window were still shimmering, and I stared at the pattern they made on the panes and on the Formica counter. They weren’t the same patterns, of course.

                “What about the old couple?” I said.

                “Older but wiser,” Terri said.

                Mel stared at her.

                Terri said, “Go on with your story, hon. I was only kidding. Then what happened?”

                “Terri, sometimes,” Mel said.

                “Please, Mel,” Terri said. “Don’t always be so serious, sweetie. Can’t you take a joke?”

                “Where’s the joke?” Mel said.

                He held his glass and gazed steadily at his wife.

                “What happened?” Laura said.

                Mel fastened his eyes on Laura. He said, “Laura, if I didn’t have Terri and if I didn’t love her so much, and if Nick wasn’t my best friend, I’d fall in love with you. I’d carry you off, honey,” he said.

                “Tell your story,” Terri said. “Then we’ll go to that new place, okay?”

                “Okay,” Mel said. “Where was I?” he said. He stared at the table and then he began again.

                “I dropped in to see each of them every day, sometimes twice a day if I was up doing other calls anyway. Casts and bandages, head to foot, the both of them. You know, you’ve seen it in the movies. That’s just the way they looked, just like in the movies. Little eye-holes and nose-holes and mouth-holes. And she had to have her legs slung up on top of it. Well, the husband was very depressed for the longest while. Even after he found out that his wife was going to pull through, he was still very depressed. Not about the accident, though. I mean, the accident was one thing, but it wasn’t everything. I’d get up to his mouth-hole, you know, and he’d say no, it wasn’t the accident exactly but it was because he couldn’t see her through his eye-holes. He said that was what was making him feel so bad. Can you imagine? I’m telling you, the man’s heart was breaking because he couldn’t turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife.”

                Mel looked around the table and shook his head at what he was going to say.

                “I mean, it was killing the old fart just because he couldn’t look at the fucking woman.”

                We all looked at Mel.

                “Do you see what I’m saying?” he said.

Maybe we were a little drunk by then. I know it was hard keeping things in focus. The light was draining out of the room, going back through the window where it had come from. Yet nobody made a move to get up from the table to turn on the overhead light.

                “Listen,” Mel said. “Let’s finish this fucking gin. There’s about enough left here for one shooter all around. Then let’s go eat. Let’s go to the new place.”

Source:

”What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver

I love that Carver doesn’t worry about his dialog attributions. Everybody “said”. Period. He’s so bold about it, he even repeats it in places where it’s not necessary, as in “He said, ‘Laura, if I didn’t have Terri and if I didn’t love her so much, and if Nick wasn’t my best friend, I’d fall in love with you. I’d carry you off, honey,’ he said.” I love his tiny, unimportant details that add so much to characterization, the little objects that people fidget with, how Laura’s having trouble with her matches. His characters, their dialog, the movements of their eyes and what they notice, are so real without much embellishment at all. He’s brilliant. So here’s my attempt at a Carverish scene:

                “I’m not saying he was right,” Joel said. He winced and shifted in his chair. “But with a woman like that…”

                “Woman like that, hell,” Doreen said.

                Joel said, “I’m just saying. With a woman like that, you have to wonder.”

                Doreen said, “You think she doesn’t have the same rights as anybody else?” She was sitting straight as a board. “You wouldn’t have done anything any different than him.” Her ash was getting long. The huge, plastic ashtray sat right in the middle of the table. It was the same color orange as her hair. She stared at him.

                “I’m not saying I know what I’d do in a situation like that,” Joel said. “I’m just saying I sure as hell wouldn’t have done that.” The ash from her cigarette finally fell into the laces of his shoe. Neither one of them looked at it.

                I looked out the window. I didn’t say anything. One of those charter buses went by, one of those  huge double-deckers. It could be going anywhere. It could be from anywhere. I couldn’t see inside.

                Doreen said, “Without the love of a good woman, you don’t know what you’d  do.” Too late, she tapped her cigarette. “You’d probably be in jail by now,” she said.

                Joel winced and shifted again, his leg straight out like a rifle barrel. He didn’t say anything. Doreen took another drag and blew it out noisily. She crushed out the butt.

                “Mexico,” I said. “I bet it was going to Mexico.”

Chosen

So I decided to do Finslippy's "The Practice of Writing." The eighth prompt is again about the primitive fight-or-flight part of the brain, how its function is to protect us from risk, and how it can be a useful tool because it points us to exactly the kinds of risks we need to take. "Write about another time you've tapped into your courage." And yes, I’m trying to do two a day to catch up from slacking last week.

Empty in his head and his heart, he could think of nothing to do. He felt scraped clean, like a pumpkin. She was gone.

He walked to the store 2 miles away because he had nowhere else to go. His feet moved. He had no idea how long he’d been walking. Every white car was her coming home. He bought milk. He didn’t need milk. He trudged home again.

It was his fault. It was her fault. He couldn’t think of how it might have been different. He sat in the dark in an empty house, staring.

He dozed. The night warped and elongated into impossible shapes. The sun came up, and the light came on: he could choose. This was his choice. All he lacked was knowledge of what he wanted. Did he want for this to be the end, or did he not? He picked up the phone.

Nothing was fixed right away, but they agreed to one thing: just be nice. Be nice to each other. Everything else followed.

The Evolution of a Dream

So I decided to do Finslippy's "The Practice of Writing." The seventh prompt was about the ways that fear manifests itself when one sits down to write. "What childhood nightmare do you remember?"

In 1977, or possibly 1978, when I was 5 or 6 years old, I saw King Kong. Looking back on it now, it was a silly movie with unconvincing special effects, but then, I watched in wide-eyed wonder and dread. The foreboding of the empty native village; the anticipation of the trembling trees as the yet-unseen monster approached; the shuddering revulsion as the snake’s jaws are torn apart; the horror of being crushed by that massive foot; the terror of falling from great heights; each of these things affected me deeply. I had to keep watching, but I didn’t want to see.

From then on, I had a recurring nightmare that I, my brother, and my childhood neighbor Tommy were chased relentlessly through a city landscape by that giant ape. Everywhere we hid, he found us. Wherever we fled, he pursued. In the end, there was nowhere left for us to go but into the sea, swimming farther and farther from shore, hoping only to get to deep enough waters that he would no longer be able to stand. I swam on hopelessly, knowing that I would drown.

The last time I remember dreaming of King Kong was in my early 20’s. That means for something like 16 or 17 years, that movie haunted me, with ever-decreasing frequency. At first, I’d dream it regularly, and I’d wake each time sweating, heart pounding. Later, it would come to me only once or twice a year, and I’d wake bemused, thinking, "Oh, there’s that silly dream again. Strange. "

As a teen, I finally saw the movie again, and its magic mutated into something else entirely. The ape was clearly a guy in a suit. Charles Grodin was cartoonish. The snake was completely ridiculous. The relationship between the ape and Jessica Lange was laughable, and even disturbing. Instead of terror and wonder, I watched in a kind of hormonal haze, hoping at each moment that the wet, white dress would slip just a little farther down, until finally it all but disintegrates as she runs into the arms of Jeff Bridges and we’re treated to a side view of her bare breast pressed into his chest. Now, we both leered, Kong and I. And thus the terrors of childhood transformed into the fantasies of adolescence.