Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

That Ubiquitous Muse

That Ubiquitous Muse

My blog has 16 unique members who pop in and out throughout the month and read it. I think they catch up on back blogs when they show up and don’t necessarily visit that often. Still the number has grown steadily, albeit slowly.

I average about 16 visit’s a day but this includes non-members and I really have no grip on who those are. Sometimes the ratio between members and not members at any given time is high…i.e. 501 members, 2304 non members. In the last thirty days total hits exceeded the 500 mark. Somebody is reading this stuff even if the numbers are not exactly earth shaking. Still they keep going up, with a slow sure consistency. I wish my stocks performed with such predictability.

Speaking of the market, I understand all about “Buyer Beware.” However, its one thing to get wrung out by the vicissitudes of the market place and another to get taken by downright fraud. This exgovernor of New Jersey, Corzine, who took over MS Global and suddenly they can’t find 900 Million, and are alleged to have “Commingled” funds… This guy and his chief financial officer deserve a cell next to Bernie Maddoff. The reason for all this Wall Street protesting is that these financial weenies are as bad as the politicians. They’re a bunch of frackin thieves… I need to take a course on how commingling of funds is done by a Global Mutual Fund giant. Maybe they will explain it on Fox news. Maybe I can get a mini-tutorial. I thought I understood how mutual funds worked… that they are compartmentalized to keep “Commingling” from taking place, but I guess I don’t really know diddily-doo. However, I am resolved to not let my blood pressure rise any higher than it already is…. But SHEEHH! The nerve of these guys. People who manage billions, risking jail time, to make a few million more….Talk about dropping your hamburgers reaching for a French fry.

I mentioned that I am very proud of my One Act Play students. The way I “teach” the course is to take each one as an individual case. I don’t compare them with one another and try and make the class some sort of completion. Clearly some of the products I get are superior to others and some, no doubt, have a greater potential for being serious contenders for the stage, but I don’t even think about that. What I do think about is a continuum that begins when I read their material on their port and use that as a base line of comparison for the play they are writing. Since the whole purpose of the course is to make the students better writers how much progress they make from where they start to where they end up is the measure I use to evaluate the success of the workshop. I know this is a bit of an unconventional approach but Karen, my boss, isn’t calling me to task.

So each play is uniquely different by a host of different measures but they are similar because I insist they follow the same model and contain the same ingredients. When I look at the final products, when I do the final assessment, sitting in my bed, with my two dogs… and sometimes my wife, (when she isn’t mad at me) I get this warm and fuzzy feeling. And it isn’t just from my more talented and experienced students….It is from reading each and every play…

Sure they are still full of things that need improvement and some are riddled with all manner of mediocrity and errors, from start to finish…but it never fails that somewhere I encounter a resonance of the spirit, vibrating unexpectedly and I mutter to myself in awe…“there it is….the real deal…that thread of creativity worming its way into the context of their writing from the cosmic dynamo’s of creation…”

I know this isn’t a scientific explanation and there are those who will think I’m smoking…but I swear to you I don’t use drugs, maybe some prescription for my blood pressure and sinuses….but not weed, amphetamines or barbiturates or alcohol…cocaine or hallucinogens. Sometimes I read an entire book, written by the most gifted of the published elite and don’t get the “hummm,” or feel the subtle tremor that I get from reading these plays.

“Oh my gosh, I mutter… The muse floated briefly through their fingers and onto the page leaving indisputable evidence that there is more to the life experience that can be measured in a laboratory.” It is like my watercolor teacher taking my brush and with the swish of her hand creating half a dozen leaves in a heart beat that I could struggle a lifetime to duplicate and never even come close.

Don’t mean to get weird. My wife says a little bit of Percy Goodfellow goes a long way.