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 Thoughts destined to be washed away by the tides of life. |
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I've been studying my cover photo for a while now, and it seems to me that it is more than just a photo of what is there that can be seen, more than just three white rocks stacked on a beach. It contains an important question about the future, about what happens long after the photographer has gone. What will happen to our pile of stones when the tide comes in? Will it topple or has the architect built this structure at a safe distance? I don't know what will happen to these words that I stack here on the sand. They may prove safely distant, or they may be swallowed up by a rush of self-doubt. They may be here for a season. They may lose their balance and be scattered by the shoreline, or be hidden away under shifting sands. Perhaps someday, the tides of life will reclaim them. Or maybe that's just a bunch of poetic, romantic nonsense. After all, this is just a blog. |
| This is something I wrote may years ago when the children were young. Some people, well one or two people - okay, there was one person who wanted to read it. So here it is. Thoughts While Falling They say that pride goeth before a fall. I know this to be true, but hereby share what goeth during a fall. Now, walking is not really my gift. I don't do it very naturally. My left leg often requires much of my attention or it just forgets to come with me. With constant vigilance and a distaste for drawing attention to myself, I usually manage to appear somewhat normal. However, occasionally, when things are going well, I forget to pay attention. It is of vital importance that I look straight down at the surface my feet don't seem to acknowledge, as this is the best way to make my brain aware of the fact that I am, in fact, walking on this surface. I eschew sneakers and other such "comfy" footwear, as the cushioning of the shoe only serves to further obstruct any attempts by my brain to understand the strange language that the nerves in my feet use to communicate their mysterious interpretation of the part of the world they are in contact with. It is absolutely necessary to constantly keep an eye on where these feet are wandering to. Under no circumstances and for no event or noise, for no stimuli either visual or aural,may I turn my head. I forgot this. A general rule of life, of course, is never try to attend to more tasks at once than is reasonable. On a Saturday, dressing a small boy and making him wear shoes outdoors and ushering him to the car in the snow should be enough to do at any given time. However, I suffer from the same disorder most mothers do - I can't walk by something that is undone. So while trying to accomplish the aforementioned tasks, I noticed the full trash bag sitting on the kitchen floor and the broken cardboard box and the empty juice box carton and decided to take them out to the trash before we departed. A light snow began to fall this afternoon. It soon became a fluffy covering on everything. When temperatures are this far below freezing, snow seems to have no water content at all. It looks like Hollywood snow - light and shiny, made of soap flakes. It sticks to nothing, it is blown about by every small breeze, the brush of an arm clears it completely from the car windows. It conceals however, the very real danger that lurks beneath it - ice. I headed out the door with trash bag in one hand, the old and torn cardboard box in another and was nearly down the stairs when the boy decided to follow me out. I turned my head, only briefly, to tell him to go back inside but I had already set my foot down off the stair, and not being aware at that moment, experienced the sudden confusion and panic that my feet flying out from underneath me brought to my mind and my cardiovascular system. It is true that as adrenaline pumps in a crisis, your mind and body speed up and time slows down. I am always amazed at the number of thoughts and escape plans I am able to consider, the options I am able to weigh, the decisions about falling I am able to make. However, in a situation of hands full, feet going out from under you in a forward direction, there is no chance to alter the angle or course of your descent. You are going down, and going down like a ton of bricks. My first thought was to make sure my head was upright, so as to avoid hitting it on the cement step. Had I not done that, I would be currently in a persistent vegetative state, unable to type and cursing the fact that I have not, in fact, made that "living will" and am unable to stop hasty family members from pulling the plug. I have decided that should I ever become incapacitated in such a way, that I want any and all extraordinary measures taken to preserve whatever life may still flicker for as long as the state is willing to pay for it. I not only don't mind the thought of being a burden on society, I rather enjoy it. If I ever do enter a comatose state, it may be that I am just taking a break from consciousness and may return to it at some later time - if not cut short by court order. So, first I determined as I went down to finally codify my desires should I survive. A second thought was that the five year old boy was not going to be much help if I was unconscious in a moment. Now, my daughter at that age could have called any number of people. She knew the phone numbers of at least four relatives and could have called any of them or 911 or even WorldVision to sponsor a starving child in Africa. She often called me at work to give me the 800 number to do just that. But she is a girl, girls are naturally drawn to the phone. The boy is not that interested in the phone. He may occasionally get on the phone when I call and tell me, "hahaha, I am Batman" and then hang up, raucously laughing at his own joke. Conversation on the phone does not appeal to him the way it did, and still does, to her. Suddenly, it struck me why women get so invested in a man's promise to phone, why they get so angry and hurt when he doesn't, and why he is baffled by this reaction. A brilliantly illuminated revelation that would be completely useless if I came out of this with the IQ of a gourd. I also had time to curse my cheap nature as I thought of ice melt at $1.99 a bag, considered and passed over during my last trip to the store. I compared the possible $250 copay for an inpatient stay at the hospital and decided it was not a wise choice. I also realized I have not willed my children to anyone and this may be because no one has expressed an interest in taking them, and I can't really blame them. One of them can't even call 911, of what possible use are they? Finally I landed. Pretty hard landing too. I sat there for a moment, assessing my status and determining that: a.) I was still alive, b.) I was going to be able to move, c.) I was going to be in a lot of pain and d.) I still had to take the trash to the shed. That is all that that was necessary to motivate me to move again, so I got up off the ground, minus a fraction of the skin that used to adorn my forearm, with reddened palms and a slight sense of the headache the whiplash was going to cause to bloom. And I also had a few things to add to my "To Do" list. |
| When you buy anything requiring assembly, whether flat pack furniture or electronic devices, you will find an instruction manual. Well, you will eventually find it. It's usually hidden at the bottom of the box so that you have to remove all the pieces before you have established which order they should be stacked in. That's on purpose. Reading the manual can be trying, too. They tend not to explain fully so that while you know that piece A should screw to piece B, you don't know that it will fit on backwards so much more easily than the right way that you will be quite confident in tightening the screws and so have a more difficult time un-attaching it so that you can do it all over again. YouTube has changed all this because for just about anything you can buy, there will be a video of someone who has already read the manual and put everything together twice so you don't have to. They say life doesn't come with instructions, but it's not true. Ask anybody and he will tell you everything he knows about the subject. Then ignore half of that and watch the video. |
| When I was young, I used to experience déjà-vu quite often. It was slightly disturbing to feel that I had lived through an exact moment before but not know where or when. Nowadays, they guess that déjà-vu is the result of a kind of hiccup in the hippocampus, confusing a present moment with a memory and causing a brief glitch in the memory matrix. They also say déjà-vu happens most frequently between the ages of 15 and 25. I realized the other day that I haven't had "déjà-vu" in years. I don't have "avant vu", either. That would be more useful, but whatever. I think mon déjà-vu a disparu. Je suis perdu. |
The older I get, the stranger and more convoluted are the paths my brain takes from subject A to subject B. The years add more and more trivia, more and more experiences, and every cultural reference can send my mind down a twisting path from which my original thought never returns. That’s my way of explaining how I got to this video. The Man was singing Winchester Cathedral which made me sing along because it’s quite catchy, you know? And of course, it was incumbent upon me to pretend I had a megaphone by forming one with my hands and altering the sound of my voice. I thought how funny it was that the style was once to sing into a megaphone. Why that must have been the 1920s. They were certainly the bees knees back then. Rudy Vallee made the whole megaphone thing popular. Odd to think of someone named “Rudolph” being a pop culture megastar. So, I had to find out when he died because the only movie I remembered Rudy Vallee being in was “The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer” (great movie btw) which was well before I was born. Google told me that he wasn’t named Rudolph at all, but Hubert. Hubert Prior Vallee. Suddenly, Rudy seemed a more reasonable alternative as a stage name. So, YouTube. YouTube for everything. YouTube for how to assemble that furniture from Walmart. YouTube for finding obscure performances from long-dead entertainers. So, YouTube for Rudy Vallee and of course, we get the great Ed Sullivan, showman extraordinaire! I know you don’t care but here’s Rudy Vallee. |
| When I say this song reminds me of my sister, it has nothing to do with her mental state. Growing up in the sixties, my musical tastes were highly influenced by older siblings. I remember the differences in the styles of music they preferred. Things were changing rapidly. For my eldest sister, there was Elvis and Tom Jones. The next sister was all about Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary. My brother was into Dylan, too, but the later Dylan with the electric guitar who wrote the mysterious songs and was no longer just a folk singer. I appreciate all of their contributions to my musical memory archives. This song added nothing to the richness of my musical experience. My sister had it on a 45. The reverse side was the song in reverse. If you know what a 45 is or had one, you are older than dirt like me. And you don't care that this record was no great musical achievement. You're just glad you can sing all the words. For me, it reminds me of my sister (who could say all the words - she couldn't sing a note). |
| I am always on the lookout for new and interesting television shows, however, most of the current fare are awful, badly written, badly acted and very disappointing shows. Even the writers don't seem to know where the plot is going. I generally end up just going back to the old shows from bygone days and re-watching favorites from my youth. But, as the "Cheers" TV show's theme song plays in the background, I realize that I have never wanted to go where "everybody knows my name". I wouldn't mind going someplace where no one knows my name... I guess that's the internet. |
| I am growing tired of these social media posts and internet articles about cat behavior. They all claim to decipher the actions of cats and tell owners what they "really mean". I've been watching my cat for a long time now and I can say for sure that I have no idea what half these behaviors "really mean". Heck, the poor cat probably has no clue why she does some of the things she does. Cats are imperfectly domesticated. They have adapted to a life of comfort indoors, but in their DNA runs a wild streak they neither understand nor can control. Even if you can momentarily convince a cat that you don't enjoy having your arm kicked and bitten and scratched, the cat won't remember not to do that. It's instinct. It's a technique for disemboweling prey. It's in the cat's nature to want to kill you, but it becomes a kind of aggressive play because you're far too big to conquer. No, it's not because you feed the cat or stroke it and let it sleep on your bed. The cat is incapable of weighing those benefits against the delicious idea of tearing you to shreds and throwing you around like a soft toy. If you were the size of a mouse, you'd be a saliva-coated rag doll. I don't say to the cat "oh you're such a good kitty". There's no such thing. Maybe an old, fat cat is quiet and passive, but this young and lithe creature of mine is no better than she ought to be. She behaves quite badly at times, but she can't help that. She's a cat. I try not expect too much from my cat. A more docile creature wouldn't be useful. She might occasionally bite me out of uncontainable excitement, but she keeps the mouse population under control and so we have agreed to make allowances for each other's strange behavior. |
The prompt over at "EXPRESS IT IN EIGHT "  today is Stardust. Honestly, I feel like I have written a lot of poems about stardust and nothing new has crossed my mind. But, if something stirs in your imagination, you should run over there and contribute. It's a fun activity. I did write this poem for Express it in Eight about a year ago: It is said we are made of star dust we are not just part of the universe but it is part of us the remains of ancient days intricately woven into our DNA and yet we look to the skies seeking meaning for our lives when we are the reason for it all And that is about all I have to say about star dust. But Hoagy Carmichael said many more elegant things in his song "Stardust" and so I offer this: The melody haunts my reverie... |
| 6:18 am Second cup of coffee Finally caught up on Promptly Poetry. Various other contributions made on other forums. Now blogging my morning. I feel very accomplished and there's still coffee in the pot. Have some happy music: |
| I’ve had some reviews recently. First, I will apologize for not responding. Soon, soon. Unless it’s been more than six months. Then it would be embarrassing to remind people that they've written a review on a piece that they don't remember having read. No need to point out how forgettable my writing is. So I just want to say that I will eventually get around to thanking all of you regardless of how enthusiastic you were (or were not ) when you read the piece that you reviewed. Many members belong to one or more of the encouraging reviewing groups here at WDC and some groups require suggestions as part of a review in order for it to qualify. Luckily, for the people who review my writing, I leave a lot to be suggested. The bulk of suggestions though, tend to refer to my lack of a line count or word count and definitely highlight my resistance to using drop down menus. I honestly do see the benefits of including word counts and line counts and even organizing notes about the prompt and the piece itself under a drop-down menu, but that still doesn't mean it's going to happen. Here's my process: I sit down. I drink some coffee. I write something, probably something I was supposed to write several days ago.. I drink more coffee. I post what I wrote and if there's no more coffee, then I run away and I don't come back for a very long time. Usually. I have a lot of other things I have to do. It's not as if I don't appreciate these suggestions, I do. They're actually very good suggestions. I'm just not sure I'm organized enough to be capable of following any of them - and I'm sure that I'm far too lazy. However, there is an upside to not taking these valuable suggestions: it gives the next reviewer something to remark on in his or her review since it's not going to get any better. I suppose it might also be a bit self-serving because it lessens the need to critique my actual writing. And if there's anything I dislike more than counting words in the lines of my drop-down menus, it's criticism. |
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