do i have big stories inside?

Here’s how I feel today:

(is this a danger of public journaling? Feeling out loud in public? Especially when a sentence is modified with the word, “today?”)

I feel like a reasonably disciplined and moderately talented writer who doesn’t have any stories to tell.

I mean that’s not true. I feel like I have plenty of stories to tell.

But no GRAND IMPORTANT PERFECT stories.

So what does that mean? Should I not write toward big audiences? Should I stick to my blog? Should I write short stories for obscure literary journals?

I guess its just that I’ve worked hard enough on enough stories to know what it feels like when you get to the end of a YEAR of writing a story and realize whats wrong with it. Or you get to the end of several years of writing and revising a story and you realize: well that’s a cool story, and I could fix it – but ultimately it doesn’t SAY anything that I’m that devoted to saying.

But everybody knows that you can’t write stories to make points. If you want to go into that business – you should be a preacher like your father and all your brothers. Or an academic like you’re trained to be…

Anyway, that’s how I feel today…

not bad, just not sure.

peace~

post it notes

have you seen the thing where people cover an office door or a cubicle in post it notes -- that say something? or make a design with color?

is there a verb form for that kind of minor office terrorism?

like t.p.ing with toilet paper?

when lynn was a high school english teacher, one night one of her favorite classes celebrated the end of a unit on Romeo and Juliet by plastic forking the pages of the play across our entire lawn in the middle of the night. You literally couldn't see any grass at all.

Ritual House Assault, my pop culture mentor, Jack Santino at BGSU called it.

Just like the time that our neighbors subtly expressed their dissatisfaction by filling our mailbox with grass when our lawn had gotten much longer than it should have (during the writing of our dissertation).

Santino said it was the equivalent of burning in effigy back in the day when people used to publicly sanction extra-marital affairs or unfair social policy.

there's something glorious about office pranks, though, when they instruments of oppression to subvert the grind...

anyone? postiting? (feels awkwardly like prostating to me -- and yes, i mean prostating not prostrating...)

curious ~

shocking hypothesis

haven't been blogging because:

1. front burner just firing up (beginning of a new semester) *and*
2. i really like my front burners right now -- job particularly...

and it makes me think that blogging last semester was a low cost, quickie form of escapism from the feeling that i wasn't quite so fond of my front burner.

I say that, but i know that its also true that i found it really rewarding to be in the presence of several people who i feel quite confident read regularly...

and it is to you whom i direct this quick posting. sorry i've not been writing....

so, yeah, i guess the shocking discovery wasn't so shocking: i'm a bit of an escapist.

or is it escaper?

I was thinking that even the act of watching the real world -- particularly inasmuch as i watch it to "escape" (which everybody does a little bit when we engage fiction, don't we?) actually matches that mythos that i was describing a few days ago. That whole longing to escape our own particular pasts and particular dreams and start anew with a new pallette or canvas or something....

hope you're good!

peace~

baaaaah

Jaelyn is at a growth stage where she’s eating voraciously. I mean – girl is EATING.

She could give the big bad wolf a run for his money (or for the nearest little pigs house – depending on how close you want to stay to the story).

So I’ve been trying to teach her this technique for assessing how full she is – before she mindlessly consumes the entire table spread before her.

She was teaching the same technique to Lynn the other day when Lynn said “I can’t stop eating these….”

“Mommy,” she said, “First you’ve got to close your eyes. Then you’ve got to take a deep breath [so far this is word-for-word my technique]. Then you’ve got to count TEN SHEEP. [?!?] Then you’ll know if your belly is full.”

Ten sheep? Well apparently Jaelyn has recognized (and conflated) the commonalities of the various meta-scripts I’ve been giving her to talk herself into / out of things – counting sheep is the classic help-you-get-to-sleep routine.

But it cracks me up that now each time my daughter wants to engage in a reflective decision, a meditative examination of her self and practices, she closes her eyes, and…

…in wander the sheep.

I can just see it now in ten years when its my turn to say the infamous line: “if all your friends were jumping off of a bridge, would you jump too?” – and then later as her friends hold a smoldering cigarette in her direction, and she’s considering whether to light up with them -- an uninvited herd of sheep come galloping out over the edge of a bridge in her imagination –

peace~