Month: March 2017

Today’s Theme Music

Today’s music is dedicated to Tucker and Pepper.

Tucker is ‘my’ cat. Sick, hungry and lost, he came to us through the smoky summer haze a few years ago. We were in a drought. Wildfires surrounded our valley. Temperatures were running one hundred degrees Fahrenheit plus. Going outside without a mask wasn’t recommended. Two of my cats were dying with cancer, as was one of my best friends. It was a challenging period.

Tucker

Tucker is sweet but he fights other cats. They know this and fear it. We’re vigilant to keep him away from all of them except Quinn.

Enter Pepper, the long-haired black and nutmeg calico with a black face and green eyes. Pepper lives next door but enjoys our porch. She’s always hanging around the front door. Although she’s well-fed and healthy, she begs for meals. I feed her because, as my my wife claims, I’ve never met a cat who doesn’t need a meal.

Pepper terrifies dogs, raccoons and other cats. She has the battle cry down, loud and furious, like she’s going all ninja cat on them. She rarely fights, issuing the cries and making a lunge or two. It’s enough to intimidate other cats.

Except Tucker. He and Pepper sit side-by-side on the front mat, peaceful and relaxed. Open the door and they lift their heads and look up and back over their shoulders with synchronized perfection.

It seems like a strange little love affair. So for them, from 1972, is Billy Paul performing Me and Mrs. Jones’  on Soul Train.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2v98PGBZH4

 

 

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Pawhold

Pawhold (noun) 1. The grip cats execute by wrapping their legs around something and refusing to relinquish it. 2. The emotional attachment cats hold over people.

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I Want to Ask

I know it’s silly. I shouldn’t care about these things. But –

I can’t stop myself. I must ask.

I’m driving home. A car is in front of me. We pass the speed limit sign: 40 MPH. The driver ahead of me, now going about thirty-five, slows down to around twenty-seven. We then follow the road around a curve and up a hill where we encounter a new speed limit sign: 25 MPH.

The driver speeds up to thirty-five.

So I want to ask the driver, what’s in your head? Do you know you’re doing this? Are your actions of doing the reverse directed part of a secret organization Or do you have something mis-wired?

I almost followed the driver, a white male who looked about fifty, when he turned into the store parking lot to ask him, but I was already running late.

Have others encountered this in their areas? Does anyone know why this happens?

Help me. Please.

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Fooled Again

Ah, the writer did it to me again.

Riding the thrill of yesterday’s progress, I jumped into it today with a razor of doubt hanging over me. What if yesterday was a mirage? What if what I’d written makes no sense, or that I can’t connect and continue? 

My head ached with fear about what might go wrong. Asking myself, where was I, I resumed typing. Within a few lines, the writer sprang another twist on me. Damn, I should have seen it coming.

Exuberant understanding burst upon me. Holy hell, this was the deeper truth behind the concept. Wide-eyed, I laughed at the astonishing epiphany. I’d conceptualized the novel and had started writing but had not taken the concept to its summit. Now, in writing, that’s what the writer within me finished doing.

Implications and realizations bubbled through me. A new light flashed on everything written in that novel to that point. Surreal, abstract and stunning, I considered my running joke, that a writer resided in me who actually came out and wrote, and wondered if that was the truth. At this point, it really seems to me like there is someone else in me who is the writer. He understands the novel. He has organized, outlined and plotted it, but only shares with me what I need to know when it’s being written. I’m just the poor, earthen vessel struggling to hang onto the moment.

Even now, done with my daily writing session, I struggle to fully comprehend and cope with what’s been proposed. It stuns and amazes me.

Seriously, maybe I am insane.

Maybe it’s just a side-effect of writing like crazy.

Is there a difference?

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Last Night

I checked last night before going to bed: still a man. The three AM rise to pee told a different story.

I felt odder when I walked, a warning that I’d suffered the change again. I was supposedly awake and walking, going to pee, but was stumbling through a dream’s fading chaff. I wasn’t really thinking, moving in auto-mode. It wasn’t until I raised the toilet seat and lid and flicked on my Fitbit to give me light to piss that I discovered my missing pecker.

It always happens during the night, and people are always asleep. I’m black again, too, although not as black as one of the other times. I’ve been through this change enough to be angry, irritated, resigned and frustrated simultaneously. While sitting and peeing, I reflected on how long it had been since the last time (three weeks) so I had clean female clothing available. I don’t know why it makes a difference. Male and female clothing fit me differently and I feel ‘better’ wearing clothes appropriate for my sex.

Except shoes. I won’t wear heels. No way.

I have no cosmetic experience, so that’s always an interesting aspect. I go without make-up. Mom is a natural beauty and my sisters are gorgeous. I thought that gave me a chance, but no; I look like a female version of my father. My mustache and goatee automatically sheds during the change and my physical structure changes. I have a rack of floppy boobs and I’m busty as Mom. You’d think all these changes would wake you when it happens but it never wakes me.

By the way, Mom and my sisters look great as men, too. Some people have all the luck.

When I first read reports of it happening to Trump, I thought it was hilarious. That was the first I’d heard of it. It wasn’t so funny when it happened to others. There was nothing funny about it when it happened to me four days after it had happened to Trump. At least I wasn’t moved to kill myself. Many men do when they awake as a woman. The percentage of women killing themselves is much smaller than men after they suffer the change. Women seem to adjust better. The percentages of suicide drop as you experience more iterations. This is my eighth or ninth time, I think. I think. I don’t know.

No one is forthcoming about what started it. It might surprise you to know that the Internet has some theories. Some of it involves secret government activities. Some claim it’s the Russians, but female Putin vehemently denied that. Others blame Muslims, GMO food, witches, sorcerers and aliens. Some put the onus on an angry god.

I hate this erratic cycle of changes. I wish I’d stay either a man or a woman and one race or the other. It doesn’t comfort me at all that everyone in the world is going through this, no matter what age, race, culture or religion. I’m not a violent person but I swear, if I ever find those responsible, they will pay. How?

It’ll depend on whether I’m a man or a woman.

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Inspirational Quote # 580

This post reminds me of all the places where writers write. I set up offices at home to write. The spaces never worked well for me. I like the process of walking and thinking as preparation to writing. But the end result, as PKD notes, is the same: a lonely way of life. Lonely, yes, but also intoxicating and rewarding.

Today, You Will Write's avatarToday, You Will Write

quote-writing-is-a-lonely-way-of-life-you-shut-yourself-up-in-your-study-and-work-and-work-philip-k-dick-224183.jpg Google Search Image

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Catwhacked

To be ambushed (bushwhacked) by a cat.

Example: “I swear, I was just walking by when Meep leaped out from behind the chair and catwhacked my foot. That cat. I swear, I never saw him coming.”

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Celebration

Taut, breathing fast and shallowly, I type, trying to keep up with the words.

The words shoot out of my mind into scenes. They fire as fast as a railgun.

The scenes explode and splash, forming for me to momentarily glimpse before racing into the next scene. I hear voices, feel the characters’ emotions, and experience their shifts.

Hunched in concentration, I type and type. My back knots. Tension stresses my neck.

I don’t want to stop. This isn’t what I planned to type. Again, imagination and the writer have conspired to create something I didn’t expect. I type as fast as I can to capture the essence, making errors in my haste, correcting them as I can because I can’t help myself. This is my nature.

When, finally, like a fading tornado, the storm of words end and I can probably breath, I stretch and look around. The day’s sunshine ambushes me. I don’t know what music is playing or how long it’s been on. I know it’s been on but it was so far away from where I was, I noticed it like a distant sound.

My eyes itch, my neck hurts, my butt is asleep, my stomach is rumbling in hunger, and I think I need to pee. The coffee is long gone. It was an intense day of writing like crazy. The story spun itself. It was just up to me to keep up. I missed some of it. Those pools of moments and details will come to me tomorrow when I review and edit what I’ve written.

I didn’t expect that direction, not at all, but I didn’t stop to question it. I just raced to keep up.

Now I’m supposed to walk but I feel so spent and happy. Walking seems so pedestrian – sorry – that it doesn’t seem worthy. I want to celebrate the words and experience.

And this is where it’s painful to be a writer. Because when you’ve teared up with the emotion of your writing and your pulse speeds with action and your body aches with tension and you sit up, pleased with what’s come of out you, there’s no one to celebrate with you.

It was a damn fine day of writing like crazy.

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Dog & Cemetery

In a way, I think this post’s title, Dog & Cemetery, could be a pub’s name in a cosy.

Passing one today, I saw again the rusted and bent blue and white ‘Dogs Are Not Permitted in Cemetery’ sign. And again wondered, why? Do pooches offend the cemetery owners? Were there fears that a dog might dig up bones or soil a grave?

In an area of deer, squirrels, opossums, rabbits, rats, raccoons, cats, bears, coyotes and the occasional wolf and mountain lion, it seems odd to single out ‘man’s best friend’ as being unwanted at man’s final resting place.

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Today’s Theme Music

I put the mental stream on shuffle and then sorted through the tunes. Two ended up as potential for today’s theme music.

One was The Blues Brothers singing ‘Rawhide’ in their movie. I’m not certain how the stream came to that.

The other was ‘Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)’, released in 1991 by C+C Music  Factory. I’d just returned from a tour in Germany and was settling into the SF Bay Area when I first heard it. This song was ubiquitous. I found its sound intriguing but more, enjoyed going to a club and seeing everyone’s reaction when the song was played. The floor could be empty, with people milling around, chatting and sipping. Then, “Everybody dance now,” blared out. People reacted like they’d be ordered, moving and rushing the floor. Amazing.

Of course, I also adapted this song to my cats, ‘singing’ “Everybody eat now,” when I fed them. They reacted just like the dancers at the clubs, eating like they’d been given an order that must be obeyed.

It’s a good, energetic Friday song. You heard Martha. Everybody dance now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siBJXjVLnVs

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