Archive for the ‘humor’ Category
Roundabout
A funeral procession circled the roundabout, bound for the cemetery. An impatient driver nosed in, cut between the mourners’ cars, and darted out the other side. The only one not in a hurry was the passenger in the hearse.
We pretend life gives us two choices: hurry, or not. Yet most of us choose hurry and excuse it with refrigerator wisdom: Stop and smell the roses. We don’t. We grumble at those who slow us down, and bristle at those who outpace us.
They say we live in constant change. I wonder if nothing changes—because we never pause to notice. Children leap from infancy to adulthood, and we miss the quiet growth—or quiet loss—of the spirit. We hurry to work, hurry home, hurry on.
And then, in the end, we arrive at the one appointment that never runs late.
The God who receives us is never in a hurry.
Chores Not Done
The air, thickened and over-warm, cautions against exertion. A brief and once beguiling call to fix up, repair, restore is but a whimper. In a sparse corner of my imagination I hear that whimper and recoil. It’s too damp and the soon-to-fall rain dissuades me from sawing wood or clearing debris. I retreat to the table where a seat awaits. The air inside, comparatively cooler, is seductive. I shall not work says my first yawn. Indeed not, says the second. I’m done, says my nodding head.
Boredom Is Not a Birth Defect… It Could Be Congenital, Though…
Not too long ago I listened to an interview with James Taylor and he attributed his creativity to boredom. I guess I haven’t been bored enough for a while now? Today to add a new post to my blog I am leaning on the extraordinary creativity of a friend whose effort to invite a date to the school prom suggests that he is must suffer from congenital boredom (if Mr. Taylor is correct). PLEASE watch this:
For shame….
Thanks to The Christian Gift for a great shot.
The maple I see from my window is clearly embarrassed by the pending nudity of limbs and branches. She is blushing. It must seem odd to her, having nurtured the tree since spring, to now abandon her perch and leave the tree free from her calming presence. If only she could know nor’ easters to come are the sum of the great northern forests’ wiggly flaunting their bare selves. Oh to sing the coming stirring air and let our pale yellow blush burn with brightest passionate red!
To Die (to Write), to Sleep, to Sleep Perchance to Dream…
There is some aspect of death in the act of writing that rises in the instant of losing oneself in narrative. We writers are permitted to dream. But what dreams indeed may come? I am told that for some, writing is like a narcotic. The dictum, “You are a writer if you are compelled to write,” has been hammered into me for decades. Real writers are addicted to their narratives?!
Not me. I have always wanted to write and write well. But, in a perverse self destructive effort to prove I am not addicted, ergo not a writer I seek refuge in the mundane. How I love the distraction of a clogged toilet and cherish the joy of a late night return to the house and finding doggy hors d’oeuvres scattered from den door to garbage can.
I used to write a weekly newsletter column. One that I pompously titled “In the First Place”. Every day would start with random scribbles with the idea that I would build momentum as the deadline approached. Starting with some superfluous worlds and adding more of the same I would finally have whole paragraphs of noise. These I gleefully discarded knowing that NO ONE wanted to read my blathering nonsense. Far better that I tighten screws on a door handle, dust a window sill, and repeatedly check whether the wadded paper in the bin had enough relatives to constitute a zoning violation so I could toss out the whole lot.
But who am I kidding? What else pulls me to a keyboard late at night or forces a pen and church bulletin into my hands during prayers? What other form of insanity compels me claw through an in-flight magazine searching for a clear margin on which to scribble random thoughts and waking dreams.
It is a sad thing to believe a writer is always a Jack Kerouac, drawn by the call of a great idea to sit for hours or days birthing an idea in a single gushing stream of consciousness. There are times when I wish I could not sleep. Times when I wish my own compulsion to write was easier for me.
In my Walter Mitty life as a writer, I see myself awakened from a dream filled sleep. Flailing, groping for a lighted pen and note paper (real writers have cool tools) I record passages of sublime prose. The real me is awakened by the familiar urge of a full bladder. I stumble down the hall and I reach the toilet to find it is clogged… again. In my groggy state the only narrative is a rich and unrecorded internal discourse regarding how gross is the state of the toilet.
When it comes to writing there’s no easy way out for me. I am compelled to tell the stories in which I find, rather than lose, myself. To find myself in a narrative flow I have to plunge into a reality filled with loose door knobs, clogged toilets, and raucous hounds that feel ever so free to help themselves to the dainty treats in the garbage can. To be and to write in the world filled with be-ing, or not to be is the question indeed.
On a whim... 