Everyday Life – Page 115

Real-Life Dialogue

March 23, 2009 by John 5 Comments

[The scene: a small quasi-hallway between garage and kitchen in a suburban house somewhere in North Florida.]

She: [pointing to weird, waist-high structure made of woven twigs and/or sticks, with four legs, a torso, and a head from which antlers sprout] Why is that still here?

He: [studiously ignoring the obvious] Why is what still here?

She: That. The reindeer.

He: Well, it’s a Christmas orn–

She: But Christmas was three months ago. Why is that reindeer still here?

He: Maybe it would help if you don’t think of it as a reindeer. Think of it as a stag.

She: It’s not a stag! Put it with the other Christmas stuff!

Dogs, Lions, and Fish (Oh My!)

March 20, 2009 by John 5 Comments

From whiskey river:

When you run after your thoughts, you are like a dog chasing a stick: every time a stick is thrown, you run after it. Instead, be like a lion who, rather than chasing after the stick, turns to face the thrower. One only throws a stick at a lion once.

(Milarepa)

Not from whiskey river:

The End Of March
For John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read: Duxbury

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist.

The sky was darker than the water
—it was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed
a track of big dog-prints (so big
they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on
lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string,
looping up to the tide-line, down to the water,
over and over. Finally, they did end:
a thick white snarl, man-size, awash,
rising on every wave, a sodden ghost,
falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost…
A kite string?–But no kite.

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
of–are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious.)
I’d like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, a grog a l’américaine.
I’d blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window.
There must be a stove; there is a chimney,
askew, but braced with wires,
and electricity, possibly
–at least, at the back another wire
limply leashes the whole affair
to something off behind the dunes.
A light to read by–perfect! But–impossible.
And that day the wind was much too cold
even to get that far,
and of course the house was boarded up.

On the way back our faces froze on the other side.
The sun came out for just a minute.
For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored,
and all those high enough threw out long shadows,
individual shadows, then pulled them in again.
They could have been teasing the lion sun,
except that now he was behind them
–a sun who’d walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints,
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

(Elizabeth Bishop [source (pages 15-16)])

…and:

[Read more…]

The Dog Owner Pinpoints the Onset of Dementia

March 16, 2009 by John 8 Comments

Out for morning walkies, the dog owner says, aloud:

No.

(Very good. The dog needs to understand No, and has even at times hinted that she does so.)

And then comes:

Uh-uh. No way.

(Hmm. Well, all right: it’s said in the same tone as No, and immediately follows it. So yes, within the limits of plausibility, the dog may read into one’s tone the continued sense of disapproval, the establishment of and the insistence upon boundaries.)

But then things deteriorate, and the dog owner finds himself having said, a split-second too late:

Sophie, stop. There is not a single circumstance under which you may go down this neighbor’s driveway. You know better than that. Have I ever let you go down this driveway?

The dog stops pulling at the leash. The dog turns, looks back at the man at the other end of the leash. The dog tilts her head, quizzically.

“Nerd Humor”

March 13, 2009 by John 4 Comments

That, according to Wikipedia, is how comedian Demetri Martin’s humor is “often referred to.” Hmph. That’s as may be.

Whatever you call the genre, I’m hugely enjoying his new show, Important Things, in which he takes a single topic and just riffs on it for a half-hour. His “important thing” this week was safety. In the excerpt below, appearing as a commercial pitchman for a nursing home, he assures us there will be no more lying about Tony Bennett (among other things). As soon as ~~possible~~ convenient.

Being Here (Today)

March 13, 2009 by John 16 Comments

From whiskey river (first 3+ lines not included there):

from The Ninth Duino Elegy

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then
have to be human–and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?. . .

Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too. . . . .

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some
strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, c. 1922 [source])

…and:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one of them looks over at the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

(David Foster Wallace, 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College [source])

[Read more…]

A Hrooom of One’s Own

March 10, 2009 by John 15 Comments

I know a fellow I’ll call Guy, although that’s not his real name. (He’s no longer a Boy, but not yet — not consistently– a Man, either, except in the most literal and least important sense.)

Guy recently took a weekend trip with his wife. It was a long six-hour drive in a rented car, of a US make and model which Guy knew of but had never even ridden in, let alone driven. They finally arrived, with relief, at the hotel — a chain which he had never before patronized — and unpacked their stuff in the fourth-floor room before heading out for a bite to eat.

The restaurant to which they’d been directed was farther from the hotel than they’d been led to believe, and the traffic heavier, so he was behind the wheel another half-hour before he and his wife could sit at a table, have a couple of drinks, and relax over dinner with the fellow they were meeting.

Then it was back to the rental car, back to the hotel, back to their room, and time indeed to get ready for bed. Guy’s wife wasn’t tired, and she’d be involved in a conference over the next 24 hours so wanted to prepare some materials and wind down before going to bed. But Guy himself looked forward to it after all the driving. He thought he might read for no more than a half-hour before drifting off.

He was standing in the living area in the room as his wife flipped through the channels on the big flat-panel TV. He was unbuttoning the cuffs of his shirt sleeves before getting undressed, when he felt the floor vibrate, subtly, beneath his feet:

…hroooom…
…hroooom…
…hroooom…
…hroooom…

[Read more…]

Saving the Criminal Justice System from Itself

March 9, 2009 by John 6 Comments

The name of the fellow over there at the left is William (Bill) Dillon. At the time this picture was taken, in November, 2008, Dillon was 49 years old.

An unremarkable photo, really. A man in middle age, playing a guitar in what appears to be a kitchen of a suburban house or apartment somewhere.

But the circumstances surrounding that photo: remarkable indeed.

Until earlier on the day when that picture was taken, Bill Dillon had been imprisoned by the State of Florida for 27 years. His sentence, for the crime of murder in the first degree, had been life imprisonment.

Tsk, tsk, you may think. Once again, the bleeding-heart criminal justice system sets a murderer free to kill again. Perhaps you wonder how the people around Dillon could possibly seem so relaxed. They must be accomplices, you imagine.

Er, no.

For it turns out that Dillon did not commit — could not have committed — the crime for which he was convicted and imprisoned.

[Read more…]

Call Me Unreliable

March 9, 2009 by John 8 Comments

My fairly regular posting schedule here at RAMH — averaging a post a day — is about to run off the rails.

This is a good thing, as it happens. See, I’m just about ready to start spending my morning writing sessions in writing, all over again, the book I refer to as my Work In Progress. Since August or so, I’ve been plowing through the three earlier drafts (written over the course of almost 15 years) — getting my head wrapped around the characters, and the twisty plot, and the background (real) history and how the WIP’s story line weaves in and out of it, and… and… and…

Now the time has come to put aside the tools of critical reader, of careful researcher (if you will) into the mysteries of a story much of which I’d forgotten. It’s time to face again a blank screen, tremble just a bit, and start hammering at the keyboard.

I’ll still be posting here, from time to time. In the first place, I’ve still got something like a couple dozen draft posts in the pipeline (including one to appear later today), and plenty of ideas for others. And, for sure, I’ll continue to post the Friday whiskey river-driven meditations. For those of you with blogs of your own, I’ll still be stopping by to lob comments over your transoms. And for those of you on Facebook (and, to a lesser extent, on Twitter), I’ll still be around there as well.

Finally, I’ve done this kind of thing often enough that I know I will need distraction every now and then.

But, well, duty beckons. :)

A Half-Dozen Words Which Say “Your Work”

March 4, 2009 by John 5 Comments

Continuing in yesterday’s six-words-about-you vein…

A good number of years ago, now, I started a journal — handwritten, in a plain old spiral-bound notebook. I no longer have it, as far as I know, not even in any of the old, yet-unopened boxes in the garage or our offices which often whisper to me tantalizing hints of their contents.

But I still remember the first entry, which was an attempt to calculate my “lucky number.” The attempt was based on some certainly bogus description I’d read someplace — it even sounded bogus. All you had to do, according to this faux-numerological “plan,” was take all the explicit numbers you knew from your life, and add them up until you rendered them down to a single digit. So you’d take your Social Security Number, your date of birth, your phone number, any street addresses and postal codes you’d ever lived at, your shoe size, and so on, turn each multi-digit number into a string of single digits, and keep adding up the digits. E.g.:

SSN: 123-45-56789
becomes:
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 = 45
and then:
4 + 5 = 9

In which case 9 (so went the theory) would be the lucky number based on SSN alone. Of course you had all those other numbers to add in, but the general process was the same.

So anyway, I ran all the numbers I could think of through the wringer. I never stopped to consider the thoroughly arbitrary bogosity of the exercise: Why add them all up — why not (say) multiply them? What about the street addresses you couldn’t remember? If you lived on Third Street, should you add in a “3”? If you were (as I am) the first of four siblings, should you add in 1, and then 3 (for the others), or 1, and then 4 (for all of you as a group), or just 1, or just 4? But I was also the third-born in a family of six — so then…? How about the number of stairs on the way up from the first floor to my childhood bedroom?

It’s easy to get lost in this sort of thinking, obviously, unless one is simple-minded in direct proportion to the Bogosity Index of whatever it is one is trying to achieve. Which, back then, I pretty much was.

The bottom line: my lucky number is/was 6.

To this day, even knowing as I know that the result would’ve been different if I’d just remembered (or forgotten), say, just one more phone number — even knowing that, I’m never surprised to see the number 6 cropping up in my life. Which is why the premise of yesterday’s post (that a life could be summarized in a half-dozen words) didn’t completely catch me by surprise. (I mean, come on, really — why not 7 words? or 5?) (Or, looked at another way: why 6, considering all the other people with different lucky numbers?)

So I’ve continued thinking in this six-words vein. Which leads me to a second, related (but not identical) challenge:

How would you summarize your life’s work in just six words? A few examples:

“Not as good as I wanted.”
“Show time, folks. Day after day.”
Or go the enigmatic route: “Objects in mirror not so big.”

What would you say?

Now, coming at this from a writer’s point of view, my inclination is to think of my “life’s work” in terms of my written works, published or not. But there’s no reason why you need to use the same yardstick. Maybe you’ve got a grander vision, and prefer to consider the question in terms of something like, “Why am I here?” Maybe you’re thinking of work in the everyday sense — what you “do for a living.” Or maybe it’s got nothing at all to do with an objective, material product per se; maybe you think of your life’s work as how your kids or your family in general grow up and thrive.

Whatever criteria you want to use, go for it. (Also whatever timeframe: consider it as of now, if you will; when your life’s work is “done,” if you’d prefer; or just considering what you have left to do — perhaps have always wanted to do, but just couldn’t bring yourself to try. Yet.)

I think mine, by pretty much any standard, could be:

He never stopped chasing his hat.

As with yesterday’s post, give it a try yourself in the comments or just in your head. We don’t stand on ceremony here and we certainly don’t stand on candor, either. :)

[Tomorrow: one more post involving six words. That one is almost guaranteed to drive writers crazy, although the rest of you may enjoy watching the spectacle.]

A Half-Dozen Words Which Say “You”

March 3, 2009 by John 16 Comments

In the spirit of many mothers, my own wishes that I were more of a committed churchgoer, less a dilettante of formless spirituality. She doesn’t bother me about this at all, let alone nag me, but every now and then there’s a little tap on the shoulder just to let me know it’s on her mind.

Over the last week, she gave or sent to my sisters, brother, and me one of those little daily-devotional booklets, spanning the part of the Christian calendar called Lent.

I (and my sibs) thought that today’s item was especially interesting, and I (and maybe my sibs) think so especially for writerly and word-nerd reasons. Shorn of its theological trappings, it says:

How would you summarize your life in just six words? The online magazine Smith asked readers to do just that. [JES: link] It was based on Ernest Hemingway’s response to the same question: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” The result is a book called Not Quite What I Had Planned, a collection of six-word memoirs from folks famous and unknown. A few examples:

“Well, I thought it was funny.”
“I still make coffee for two.”
“Seventy years, few tears, hairy ears.”
[…]
So if you were to try to summarize your life in six words, what would you say?

Any takers? (I’m thinking on mine.)

4:50 pm/edit to add: No one noticed (so he thought).*

________________________

* The man does like ambiguity.