Category: writing

Monday’s Theme Music

Time for a little Neil Young. Call out to him for being naturalized as a U.S. We used to live in the same neighborhood, broadly speaking, on the California coast. A friend was his primary supplier, so the story goes. A little club wasn’t far where he liked to play for small crowds with no announcement, so the story goes.

1989 saw him bring out “Rockin’ in the Free World”. The song provides so many mocking lines drawing attention to our cultural hypocrisy:

We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
We got department stores
and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes
for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people,
says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn,
got roads to drive.

h/t to AZLyrics.com

Yeah, that’s rocking in the free world. That Trump used the song during his POTUS campaign without irony nauseates, but then the Trumplicans bastardize the meaning and intention of everything that they touch, subverting without sparing, heavy of hand and cruel of ideas.

I’m part of the hypocrisy in my comfy white land, something the feeds my perpetual self-damnation. Too weak to walk away from the cushiness, I’ll just do some marchin’, protesting, donating, and votin’, hoping to change things, even though that’s not been working for lo’, these many years since Bush I.

Guess I’ll just keep rockin’. Pour a little CBD into my coffee, please. My joints are hurtin’. “I try to forget it, any way I can.”

 

 

 

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St. Seata

Today, I applaud St. Seata. 

Like St. Asphalta, St. Seata was originally a human who became a saint who attained a godlike presence by fulfilling others’ needs as expressed through prayer. St. Asphalta was all about cars, transportation, and traffic; you appeal to St. Seata for sitting issues. Sometimes, in mass transportation, such as trains and commercial airlines, St. Seata and St. Asphalta work together to address people’s prayers.

St. Seata’s origins stretch back into the caves of antiquity and are known through ancient cave paintings discovered in Europe. One of the first human cave dwellers, others often came to St. Seata’s cave and asked, “Hey, can you fit one more in there?” St. Seata always found a way to oblige.

As with many of the ancients, St. Seata fell out of favor for a period as organized religions and wealth dominated the seating scene. He eventually made a comeback via as major disasters like the great fires of London and Chicago, or wildfires, typhoons, hurricanes, and earthquakes that took down populated areas. As space and safety became scarce, people found themselves appealing to find a place to sit.

Entertainment has fortified St. Seata’s presence. People looking for tickets to events such as soccer and football games, the Olympics, music concerts like the Beatles, etc., draw him forward to help them with their pleas for seats, too. St. Seata tries to help them all.

My prayer to St. Seata was for a much less dire situation. Sunday morning, and I was late to the coffee shop. Spotting the full parking, I worried about getting a seat where I could sit with my coffee, plug in the ‘puter, and do my writing thang.

St. Seata obliged with my second favorite space. Thank you, St. Seata.

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Didn’t Finish

I didn’t finish writing the first draft of It Begins. (BTW, I’ve come to despise that title, even for a working doc. It was always meant to be short-termed. I keep waiting for the real thing to pop up.)

Disgust, anger, irritation, and frustration all stopped me from finishing the first draft. This wasn’t working, it wasn’t what I’d envisioned (or anywhere near it) and more, it wasn’t satisfying, winning a prolonged grrrrr from deep in my throat.

WTH and WTF? I kept trying to write around the issue. What was it disturbing me? Didn’t like that beginning, so I added shit. Didn’t like that, so I took it away again. Rearranged chapters. Deleted story lines.

None hit the magic g-spot. Exasperation hounded me like a hungry cat. Finally, and at last, as I was in the bathroom, a huge freakin’ epiphany struck.

First, I want to note that a much of my best epiphanies arrive in the morning while I’m doing my washing, shaving, and dressing. I think that’s because the tedium of routine permits my brain to enter a prolonged idle. The stream of thought calms and new items percolate in.

The second strike of intrigue came as I walked, thought, and then started writing. The epiphany showed me that I was pursuing the wrong tack. But as I reviewed what I’d written in the first takes compared to what I thought that I was writing about, it seemed that my subconscious (through the vessels called muses) was pursuing the correct direction while my conscious mind slaved in the wrong direction.

I’d been thinking that I needed clarity. That’s what I’d been hunting, not a problem with the writing, but clarity about the story that I was trying to tell. Now it feels like clarity has been found.

Hope so, but you know, like many things, a victory is achieved on one day, but the same work is required on another. Which was what I think all my writing efforts demonstrated: I knew something was off, and tried writing through it to a solution. In a roundabout way, that’s what happened as the effort helped my thought process. Guess that’s what fiction writing is about, in the end.

Once my clarify was delivered, I felt like I was suddenly shifting into a new, unknown writing gear. Not surprising, right? That’s what happens when you overcome an obstacle.

Done writing like crazy for the day. Off to other adventures. Cheers

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