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Feels like I should put something here, cus I hate to think my site has died all the way dead.

No, no; it sleeps like a dormant volcano.

I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month- getting off to the usual anti-productive start of indecision, babble and procrastination. Wheee! … Feels like old home week.

Interesting to me how people who are peripheral to all that deep, dark writing intent seem to be inspired to write. While I vacillate around a pile of disparate words, I’ve received the pleasure of absolutely beautiful writing from others through e-mail & blog entries. None of these people are doing nanowrimo, but want somehow to also make writing a priority for November.

I am much more impressed by their output than my own.

It’s been fun to connect with a few on twitter who are also giving it a try. You can tell the veterans because they gamely dig in, in a low profile way, knowing today’s ideas will mutate & knowing they might lose steam in the middle or drop off & fail of their goal.

It’s the process, not the hype. Someday I’ll learn that. (But the hype is kind of fun.)

Hope you’re all well out there in blog-land. I won’t mention the elections right now. I don’t want to jinx my darling Kitzhaber whose still in a neck & neck race for Oregon Governor.

Hoping. Hoping quietly.

Tell me, if you feel inspired, what projects you’ve taken on for November, the beginning of the gloom we dub wintertime.

Hoping the hearth-fires stay warm for you,
A.

** addendum: John Kitzhaber won! Yay, and welcome back, governor.

Poeming

I have a weird relationship with poetry. Sometimes I really need to write what I would call a poem, but unlike regular prose, I don’t feel I have any craft at the medium.

It’s a strange feeling, because I can *recognize* a good poem immediately. There’s a resonance right there, the language does all sorts of things in a good poem that you wouldn’t think language can do.

I can see it, I just can’t make it very well, and this is where I know the frustration of the passionate art aficionado who cannot paint, or the deeply sensitive lover of beauty whose own facade is ugly- I love the twist and ache of crystallized language, but I fall short at creating it.

So I’ve sort of made my own style of nugget sized prose- call them scapes, or oubliettes or itty weirdnesses. They aren’t exactly, really poems.

And they don’t necessarily mean something. (They don’t necessarily not.) A poem, to my mind, is something like a snapshot- the imagery of emotions taken in a moment. It doesn’t hafta fit into a framework or have immediately recognizable context. It can be inspired directly, or by several degrees of separation.

The result always fill me with ambivalence. Ah well. At heart this place has always been my space, to write or not to write, to poem or not to poem. -And so the nuggets will continue.

For now.

Lukewarmly, yours

Don’t like to go too long w/out putting something down here, but the topics aren’t exactly raining down like manna. Worse, I started twice and bullshitted for three paragraphs on topics I was totally apathetic about. Not necessarily attractive to recognize you can yammer on endlessly without point or inspiration. Who was that dude in Hamlet? The boorish uncle…

Nyi. Deleted musings: Shall I cut  my hair? It’s long. I like it. Sorta. Sometimes.

Deleted musings 2: Umbuto. Kevin Garnett. The four horsemen of Notre Dame (as coined by Grantland Rice) I half-heartedly started to explore how dating an enthusiast of any ilk indoctrinates you with their lingo and fun-facts, whether you welcome that or not.

Mostly what’s in my head right now is nightmares. Bad ones; I keep having these horror-drawn creepy scenarios in my sleep. I wake from them almost hungover. Feels guilty talking about them, too, because you can almost give people nightmares simply by talking about them. I gave my boyfriend and my daughter a nightmare that way. The passing reference is almost more potent to the subconscious mind then a heart-felt discussion.

I’ve looked for outside answers, but it’s dicey when you’re playing doctor with your brain-stem. Where do these images come from? Why? Is there a why? There’s no definitive reason to believe that our dreams ‘mean’ anything, except the mind’s unfathomable process of organizing and storing. 

Do you ever think about how much of life centers around things that have no weight or substance in ‘the real world’? We live in realms seen and unseen, sure, but the unseens- the conceptual stuff is really dominant: Love, death, our idea of what others think of us, ambitions, dreams, memories.

The mind is almost a speck  in a web of perception; we are creatures of flesh pinned between concepts, grasping for meaning in a world comprised of baffling idiosyncrasies: A pebble in your hand is also an idea. It’s a marker of a moment that’s fleeting and finite, a beginning and an end wrapped around something concrete. Let it drop to the ground: Did it happen? Did you see it, or the retina’s reproduction of a shape and color- not even the color of the stone, but the color reflected by the stone, which means the stone is every other color except the bend of light you saw refracted.

The world’s not that different from a dream. We are composed primarily of spaces,- spaces to be filled with light, or nightmares.