Okay. Just so you know, the few of you that come around and poke your awareness into my world, I have to begin just putting words down again. No structure. No editing. Just words. I’ve come to a bit of a frozen place, and I have to break out of it, so here come the words.
It’s a writing exercise. Sort of like the prompt to just write what comes to mind, no editing or thinking. For you practical people out there, call it move #1 when you’re stuck.
Churning. That’s what’s going on with me these days…churning. There are facts, and there are stories about facts. We are all different. We are all the same. Lots of Jungian analysis reading lately, trying to grasp certain possibilities about character. I’m an INFP, and yesterday wished I wasn’t. Political conversation is everywhere, and by that, I mean conversations that mostly have to do with power brokering rather than discovering. Who really knows what it will take to create jobs, lessen the number of folks on the public dole, and generally do the best thing for human beings around the world? Lots of folks with answers, hunkering down, planting their feet, reading themselves to voice their best shots, whatever they’ve got, at the encroaching challenges. A sort of panic sets in when what you believe comes under assault in what seems to be reasonable form, and you scramble to get your defenses into place. But turns out, because of intelligence, or emotional unintelligence, or something else that’s unknown, all your defenses don’t amount to much, and you find yourself actually considering alternative ways of seeing things. Unless of course, you’re entrenched, which, as Ulysses S. Grant says, leads to stalemate and heavy casualities.
I bought an Ipad not too long ago, and have been a bit transfixed by the wonder of the world as it flits across this screen, delivered by Flipboard in a magazine format that goes on forever. News about a friend’s dog sits alongside pictures of famine and Libya and the church auditorium. Art and design, classic songs by the greatest of artists, news both broad and deep depending on what you want to follow. Brilliant photography that makes you feel like everyone on the planet has a camera and is on a hunt for amazing “captures.” The imagining of films and poems and economics…oh, yes, economics too is imagination, the stock market swinging up and down depending on the guesses happening that day. Panic and bubble-born hope sends swaths of cash careening back and forth between the few wealthy folks who can afford to play that particular game, while the poor folk sit in the stands with old popcorn, disinterested, disheartened, and not quiet sure of the rules of the game they’re watching.
Yesterday, after a worship time of children’s songs (My God is a great big God..wider than the Universe…I kept leaning over to my physicist friend saying, “The universe is REALLY WIDE”), I fought with God through the afternoon in a full-throated, foul mouthed kind of way, and by the end of the evening, He and I were, as is often the case after a big fight, sitting and talking quietly, Him trying to not roll His eyes at my litany of complaint, me wishing I could hide the eye-rolling I’d been doing at His complete disinterest in making anything clear. Certainly He has way bigger fish to fry than my petty need to have Him explain (yet again) the human condition to me. As the night rolled on, I munched and sipped, went to the store, came back home and tried to read, but instead watched a bit of YouTube. I watched Judi Dench do a speech from Twelfth Night, then compared her “Send in the Clowns” to Streisand’s (sorry, Barbara–Judi’s got you on this one), and watched Dame Dench receive a lifetime achievement award. I listened to Streisand sing (again), then watched Patrick Stewart doing Shakespeare back in the 80′s, and saw a better version of that amazing entrance from Le Theatre du Soleil’s Richard II. I thought about the whole chase after beauty for awhile, as well as the stalled nature of the play I’m working on, and pondered embracing futility as a way of being. Having almost immediately rejected that, I spoke to my wife on the phone (she’s in Nashville) and apologized for my less-than-stellar-attitude of recent days, to which she winningly replied she hadn’t noticed. I wished her goodnight, drank coffee until 1:00 a.m and then promptly went to sleep, only to wake up at 4:45 a.m. feeling amazingly refreshed. I headed for the gym, changed up my routine, and came back home to fresh breezes blowing through the house. I ate my little breakfast, read updates about my brilliant friend Julie who moved to Waco, and then came to the computer to find some words to write down.
I guess I found them.
Now headed south in my imagination, heading for that little house I call “Arlington” where Lee and Grant are still slugging it out after all these years. Today, I’m working character, eating foods that supposedly keep my brain sharp, and will have carpet in the basement before the end of the day.
I like texture, density, and saying stuff…
There you go…
