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Morning confessions, afternoon daydreams, and evening wind-downs. |
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This is dedicated to my daughter, Azalea Paige Kraynak. You're half the cause of some of these entries, but that's why I love you. There's rarely a day that you don't surprise me with the things you do and say. I've changed since the start of this, of course I think that's to be expected - I'm not an overworked pessimist anymore. I'm and adequately worked, for the most part happy idealist who holds the occasional cynical view of someone whose done seen some @$*#. That said, these are the new and improved ramblings of a guy who lives a life that I find to be occasionally comical. |
| Today is the 2nd day of my 2 days off before I switch to the graveyard shift for a week. My preconditioning to the night shift schedule usually involves me staying up til about 7 or 8 in the morning, but sometimes, whiskey or just plain old tired get ahold of me and I don't make it. I made it to about 4:30 yesterday. In my eyes, that's close enough for me. I woke up at about 12:30 today and went about those routines I'd mentioned earlier. That said, it was about 1:30 or so that I got to sit down and say to myself 'let's write.' With laptop on lap, and fingers eagerly perched atop the home row, I stared at a white, blank screen. Nothing. Not one thing. Granted the story I'm working on has been kind of an uphill battle, but the idea is there, the plot is there, and the ending is there. But in this instance, the words just weren't. I couldn't place it. Most times I write, it's for a flash fiction or some contest, with a clearly defined prompt and guidelines that I am obliged to follow. Give me 3 words I need to use, and I'll give you 297 more words to put around them. a shoutout to "Daily Flash Fiction Challenge"  by Arakun the twisted raccoon  Which I'll say, if you haven't entered it before, give it a try, it's harder than you think to pull off a story in 300 words.This story I'm working on however, isn't for a contest, or a prompt. It's just me, an idea, the occasional sip of alcohol or coffee, and my ability to put the idea to paper. If this were a NaNoWriMo sprint, I'd be smashing out a couple thousand words a day. They'd be haphazard and chock full of grammatical fallacy, but they'd be there. I don't know what to call this, the lack of a metaphorical fire under the @$$, or what, but it just wasn't there. It's not block - the idea is still there and flowing - branching and evolving with other sub-plots and struggles in my head without any problems. Each time, invoking a new drive to research the subject matter further, dive into the unknowns and untapped creativity of this mind of mine, and yet I'm stared at with a blank white screen. A whole day wasted. Well, kind of. I came up with great dialogues (at least in my mind.) and those aforementioned sub-plots, but the loquacious rambling of the story getting drafted just didn't happen. There are times when I'd be bitter at myself for this, but I have taken a very long time off the habit of daily writing. It's possible that I'm just expecting too much from myself too soon, and I told myself as much. Then I sat down after making supper. One word drooled out, then another. Then a whole sentence. A few minutes in, I had a couple paragraphs. Then I sat back, read what I had wrote, and thought to myself: 'where'd that come from?' It wasn't how I intended that particular chapter to go, but then maybe that's what the problem was. I had kind of a linear direction for this story, stifling it's and the protagonist's ability to write themselves. I don't know if anyone else writes like this, but I've never sat down with the exact outline of a story and followed it to the letter. Sometimes the story just needs to do its own thing. It's a dangerous idea, I know, and can take you down a rabbit hole with no real ending and no real segway back to the original plot line. Still, it's kind of how I've always done things. I don't know, maybe I'm completely wrong in doing it the way I do. I was always told in literature class the methods of story development, and none of those lessons ever said, just sit down and start throwing words out there. What do you think? You're all far better writers than me, what's your take on it? |
| Well, I call it a morning ritual, it's more of a 'when I wake up' ritual. I work swing shift so I'm not always waking up in the morning, but the routine is always the same. Wake up, brush my teeth, make some coffee, put my lunch together, and then take care of the animals. I raise chickens and rabbits in our little corner of Pennsylvania. If you have ever considered doing it, do it! I mean it, it's a very enjoyable hobby. I don't know why I find it so pleasant, but I really like the sounds of chickens clucking. The eggs are an added bonus considering how absurdly expensive they are nowadays. We have 5 hens so we get about 2 to 3 eggs a day. My wife, kids, and I aren't daily consumers of eggs so that's more than enough to get us by. But I need to complain a minute about these eggs and well I guess the chickens. This isn't my first small flock of chickens. We started with Black Australorps and Production Reds. We had 6 of them then. Bruce, Kyle, Steve, Kevin, Kenny, and Craig. Yes, they had boy names. Those birds had the decency to use nesting boxes to lay eggs which is awfully nice considering I didn't have to pretend every morning was easter. This new batch of birds are a good bit dumber and so have dumber names: Breakfast, 2nd Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and Supper (an ode to lord of the rings). These ladies have nice, literally brand-new nesting boxes. Where do they lay their eggs? On my table saw of course. Perfect place to lay an egg. But we can't forget behind a stack of summer tires for my car, or on top of a compost pile. The morning routine used to be, go out, change water, feed, get the eggs in one spot. Now its, go out, change water, feed, find the first egg, go from there. Used to take maybe 10 minutes, now it takes a half hour. I literally went 2 weeks thinking they just weren't laying because it was so cold out. That's when I found the spot behind the tires. There were a dozen and a half eggs in there, all cracked because they had frozen - it's pretty cold here right now. I wasn't mad or anything but I was a little perplexed. I tossed them all into the compost pile (eggs make for great compost,) so of course the chickens saw that as the new spot to lay an egg. Why not? I can say, at least the compost pile is a few degrees warmer so they won't freeze there. Now anyone that has had chickens might say: try putting ceramic eggs in their nesting boxes. I have tried that. They're dumb but somehow, they know. They kind of just roll them around with their feet. Another might say: Put one of their eggs in the nesting boxes. Tried that, didn't work. Someone might say: Move the nesting boxes somewhere else, yeah I tried that. Trust me, I've tried it. I've tried all of it, at this point i kind of just look at as like F%#k it, lets just have a scavenger hunt every day. |
| Today ends another week in my department at work, at least on my shift. Next week we go to the graveyard shift, but for the next two days, I can relax, enjoy a beer or whiskey or both, and maybe put pen to paper at some point. Before I do all that, I need to get something off my chest here. I'm not the guy that stresses about things at work, especially when I'm not there, but by God do I work on a crew full of those guys. I'm the 2nd oldest on my crew, granted I'm not old - only 39, but the others are a good bit younger than me and the other fella. That said, you couldn't tell. Stress beats you up. I don't share the opinions of some of the guys I work with about our company, but if you ask them, this place has beaten them into the dirt. That's the killer there. I try to say there's way more important things to worry about than how good your weld looks. You welders out there, I know I just triggered you - believe me, we don't weld for beauty contests in my department, and I've seen some damn fine looking welds fail, and absolute ugly beads hold like a champ. With that out there, the youngest guy on my crew is 21. I swear in another year this man is going to have gray hair, if he has any left. This kid is a straight worry stone like I've never seen; welds, electrical cords, cranes, fork-lifts, paperwork... this kid just stresses about all of it. On top of it all, he's a single guy who desperately wants to not be single. I'm rooting for him. Really, he needs it. Two days ago, he called off after a lot of urging from me and the other older fella on the crew, to meet a girl from his days in weld school. It took us an entire shift to convince him that he's got nothing to worry about here at work, and to go enjoy his self. Today he apologized to me like I was mad at him. Buddy, I'm not mad at you. Gotta enjoy life a little bit. 21 years old is way too young to be worrying all the time. He's a happy-ish guy, but by God I want to see that potential really get tapped when he gets himself a lady friend. It sounds cave-man I know, but you'd have to meet him. I can attest that a good partner really can bring a lot of harmony to your life even if it was nothing but stress before. That's what my awesome wife did for me. I was that kid once when I traveled for a living. If i'd have stayed with that company, I'd have given myself maybe 20 years and stress would have killed me. She brought me back down to earth. Really, she did, I don't even know if she realizes it. I'd love to see the same happen to this guy. It bugs me seeing someone put on a happy face when they're not happy. It's a tough-guy thing to do, and in our line of work, that's just kind of the prescribed method, but why be happy-ish when you can actually be happy? |
| Let me start this by saying, I've been gone a while - a long while. I haven't written in this blog in something like 8 years or so. A lot has changed since then. This blog was originally called 'Ramblings of an Overworked Pessimist,' yeah i'm not that guy anymore. I mean, I guess I'm still a bit of a pessimist kind of but not nearly the diva that I was. Work had a lot to do with that. Let me just say for anyone whose ever wondered about traveling the world, do it - if you can afford it that is. It ain't cheap. Nothing gives you perspective like seeing a different country with a different culture. Granted - I didn't do this for leisure, work told me to go so I went. After 11 years of living out of a suitcase, I don't want to look back nor do I want to really leave my little corner of the Appalachian Mountains. With that said, I'm not in that line of work anymore. I don't miss it, and I don't like wasting thoughts on it, and here I am talking about it like an idiot. I get to go home every night now. The home dynamic has changed of course. 8 years ago, I had a fiance and 2 kids. Well that didn't work out, she's now an ex-fiance. While traveling in Australia, fate decided to gift me an encounter with a beauty that is either blind to my strange ugliness, or oblivious to my eccentricities or both. One thing led to another and so-on and so forth, that beauty is now my wife. I still think she's a psycho for marrying me though. A few years passed, now we're parents - me again, her for a first time. It's weird being the one who knows what they're doing this time. I'm loath to admit it, but I sucked at babies the first and second times. So here we are in the present. We've got a baby that wants to walk but can't, so she gets mad that her balance sucks. She crawls at warp speed and has the courtesy to close the baby gate behind her which is kind of odd in 2 senses: the first being that I could have sworn I closed it, and second - it's just weird that she turns around and purposefully closes the baby gate. It's like that guy who always pushes his chair in even though he's going to sit back down in it in a minute or two. Those nuances just kind of strike me in a way that make me laugh. I legit have a daughter whose favorite hot dog topping is sour cream - SOUR CREAM. I'm not an expert but that's got to be on like an 'Am I a Serial Killer' checklist. It's funny, but it's just weird. I've got another that eats almost nothing but likes watching food getting prepared. Her diet consists of chicken nuggets and boiled eggs, but she likes watching my wife and I make something we know damn well she's not going to eat like she's studying to be a michelin chef. Now with all this in mind, they're all girls. All 3 of them. I live in a mire of "Frozen" and "Animal Crossing" theme songs, and the occasional minefield of Legos. Mixed in with all that, I'm a working class guy with a working class vocabulary that married someone who speaks metric and eats veggiemite. If you haven't tried it, don't. It's disgusting. Seriously I don't know how Australians can eat it with a straight face. It's like if salt was condensed into a black paste and then dropped outside on the ground and put into a jar. I was told once that I was eating it wrong. Yeah, like it was my fault that it tasted like crap. I was told that you have to put butter and jam on it. So the logic in the end is: Take something that tastes like pureed anchovies turned into a pudding, and cover with stuff that actually tastes good. No. That's just a lot of extra steps. This viewpoint annoys my wife, and really she's a saint for putting up with me and my idiocy, but seriously Australia, what the hell were you thinking with Veggiemite? |
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Thanks! Life is good, frustrating, but funny. I try to find humor in my day to day world and I'm glad you enjoyed it.