Category Archives: writing

And so it goes

When I was in High School my father clipped out a very short piece by Kurt Vonnegut published in the New York Times.  It was about how to write, and it was excellent.  He began with the advice to always give the thing you are working on a title.   This is the first step in framing what you want to say, and I have found it helpful.   I don’t recall much else from his excellent advice, but that was help enough.

(Spent the last half hour searching the web in vain for that piece.  If I ever turn it up, I’ll post it here.)

I have been reading a biography of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. called “And So It Goes”.  Engaging tome.   I am reading about how diligently Vonnegut worked at his craft, how tirelessly he pursued a paid writing career.  In passing I learn that he apparently played the piano well enough to execute Chopin’s Funeral March as the new owners walked up to the decrepit house he was selling.  This is the second mention of him at the piano as an adult, with no explanation of how he knew how to play.   During a time he should have been finishing a novel he’d long ago gotten an advance for, and when he was still completely unknown, he took a few days to build an 18 foot sculpture at a Boston International Airport restaurant.  Huh?  He took time to add many creative touches to his home in West Barnstable.   We have no inkling where these skills came from but we learn that he was handy, he could build things, he had many creative interests.  But mostly, he wrote.

I am reading about his struggles, including his bouts of depression, and trying not to think too hard about my own struggles.  I tell myself there are lessons to be learned from Vonnegut’s life, things I can use.

“One thing you could use is his discipline and drive,”  a voice announces, “the ability to soldier through terrible moods, fear, rejection, and keep producing something you can SELL,” a voice announces.  “He wrote every day from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., no matter what.  When he worked full time, he woke up early to write and wrote at night.  Another thing you should keep in mind:  you are no Kurt Vonnegut.” 

True enough.   Vonnegut was, from the beginning, a writer with his eye on making a living.  He wrote what he could sell, changed his ideas, often grudgingly, to sell short stories to glossy magazines at a time when selling three or four stories could provide a decent year’s income.   It was decades before he was able to write what he really wanted to write. Decades before he got any respect as a writer, something that troubled him immensely during those long years.  He was, from the beginning, a working writer, struggling to put food on his family, as a former president once observed was a challenge many Americans step up to.

Write with an eye for what the market will pay you for.

Write to one person — the one who loves what you have to say.  Come to the point, don’t waste a second of her time being clever.   Write what will touch her heart, make her laugh, and then, cause the tears to flow.

And so it goes.

 

Holiday

“So, are you saying his father literally machine gunned people into a mass grave?” she asked, brow bent.  

“Well, that was the weight of the old man’s painful confession the night before he died,” he said, already up on his toes, dancing in that half mad way of his.  

“So you’ve taken poetic license to his confession and transformed it to guilt over machine-gunning families into a mass grave?” she said.  

“Philosophical license,” he said, one finger in the air, head cocked like an old school pedant.

“You’ve taken license with the facts again,” she said.  “I thought you’d taken a vow not to write fiction.”  

“It’s not fiction.  What the man did to his own children, at the moment when they most needed a human response, was inhuman.   Instead of empathy he fought them, denied them, dismissed their feelings as stupid. He beat them down when they tried to express grief when they learned of the slaughter of their entire family when the family tree had all but one limb hacked off, was uprooted, the ground burned and sown with salt.   On this blackened dirt the bones of his aunts and uncles skittered on windy days.”  

“According to him these things may have happened, but they were the kind of trifles a mature person doesn’t waste time crying about. His children came to him grieving over a trauma to make a child vomit and he snarled adamantly that they were insane to grieve.”  

“So in your mind browbeating his children was the same as machine gunning the entire family into a ditch and feeling justified as he did it,” she said.  

“Yes, but it wasn’t just the browbeating.  The browbeating fit the pattern– take a trauma, deny it, tell anyone who may be traumatized they have no right to feel that way but that they are insane, and cowardly, in fact, to have any feelings at all about it.”  

“A very damaged individual,” she said, “but not necessarily a machine gunner of families into mass graves. You want to be careful before you go there.”  

“Nancy,” he said, “a person who is damaged this way, if he still has a soul, dies with terrible regrets.  He deeply regretted that he had lived his life in a black and white world.   The black and white world is a zero sum game where many atrocities are permitted.   After all, it cannot be black when it is white, nor white if it is black, right is right and wrong is wrong.  In fact, he told his son with sorrow, hours before he died, ‘I think of how much richer my life would have been if I’d seen life in all its gradations and colors…’  In a black and white world it sometimes becomes necessary to murder another person, even thousands of people at once.  In a nuanced and just world it is never OK to murder thousands of people at once.”

Nancy looked at him.  

“Ask God, if you believe in God, and you’ll get the same answer: there may come a time when a killer must be stopped from killing and deadly force becomes necessary to prevent an atrocity.  No God worth praying to would ever assure you– unless you see the world as black and white– that sometimes it’s perfectly fine to destroy an entire city in the name of some greater good.  There is no godly answer to the murdered souls of the dead children, old people, invalids, babies, workers in that city.  You want to say you are justified in war to slaughter an entire population?  God does not smile upon you, if you do.”  

“I thought you stopped drinking,” she said.  

“Nancy,” he said, “be serious.  I’m trying to get you to understand why I chose the metaphorical machine gun as the instrument of his towering, seething, white-hot rage, rather than a much harder to fully describe verbal whip he actually used. Brutally using words to cause pain is one way of being furious and self-righteous, but how much better is actually physically machine gunning a perceived enemy, on the lip of a mass grave he would later insist meant nothing.”  

“He insisted the mass grave meant nothing?”

“He waved his hand, Nancy,” and he waved his hand, “and he said ‘those people were mere abstractions, nobody ever knew them.  You have no right to claim to be effected by the loss of those people you never even met,’ and he smirked as he said it.  And it was true that I’d never met them, they were all killed more than a decade before I was born, almost exactly 13 years, actually.  The year of my birth would have been bar and bat mitzvah year for the infants who went into that ditch along with the dozen great aunts and great uncles wiped out by Ukrainains as Nazis gave instructions.   My grandmother Yetta knew them very well.  They were her six brothers and sisters, and their families, and her parents, if they were still around in 1943, and all the children and extended family, and also the same for my grandfather Sam’s six brothers and sisters.”  

“Wait a second,” she said, “so this guy you were referring to in the third person was actually you?”  

“No need to be so literal about it,” he said.  “Fact is, on his deathbed an old man expressed regrets, and whipped himself over having been such a cruel bastard during his life, stubborn, judgmental, enraged, unfair. This is the profile of the guy, who, finding himself behind the gun, turns and fires it, wiping out anyone who might stand against him.”  

“Which is only logical, after all,” she said.  

“It’s logical,” he said, “but not everybody sees the world as an implacable enemy worthy of death.  Not everybody is capable of actually swinging that big gun around, training it on the terrified faces, and, rejecting all of the many reasons not to, heeds only the imperative to pull the trigger.  And if they are capable of it, it will bother them on their deathbed when they have only their vanishing, irremediable lives to consider, and they’ll be filled, sometimes, with terrible, almost unbearable regret.”

“I see what you mean,” Nancy said.

 

 

 

The Error of My Ways

I’m going to try to reconstruct this post, wiped away as though it never existed when I decided to ponder and revisit it, thinking a draft was saved (he said, the passive voice used).   Only the title was saved, as if to mock me.   Another reminder, boys and girls:  when writing on a computer, save your work often!

I had three big ideas for books to write over the course of my life, all of them misguided.  I point out at the start that nobody ever needs to write a book, really, although many people often think:  somebody should write a book about this. Sometimes they do and the book moves, informs, enlightens or entertains readers.  Other times, eh.  Few books change lives, though many who write books probably start off believing their’s will.

The first book I attempted to write was called Me Ne Frego [1], the story of an idealistic narrator’s inevitably losing battle against a soul-crushing bureaucracy, embodied in the unreasonable person of Minnie Frego.  The reader knows how the story ends long before the naive, somewhat sympathetic narrator does.  It’s part of what makes the manuscript so hard for me to read now, more than twenty years after posing as the tough guy narrator.   The manuscript served as my thesis for an MA in Creative Writing, so there’s that.   The letter I got from the one publisher I sent a sample to informed me that, although nicely written, it was not suitable for their house because the main character had not undergone the kind of dramatic personal transformation that apparently drives every great tale.

About twenty years later I had another big idea:  Bird Wins [2].   The idea was given to me by a literary agent, actually, although the title and the subject matter were mine.   In Bird Wins the occasionally droll narrator observes countless one-sided battles between powerless people and a soul-crushing bureaucracy, embodied in the people for whom our hero carries a bucket into which, after  lifting their long robes, they relieve themselves.  These thousand mini-tragedies are set against the backdrop of the narrator’s mother’s slow death from cancer.  I was told by the literary agent I’d regaled with some of the interlocking stories that it was a natural.  “If you write the pitch just the way you told it to me now, I can sell it,” she said confidently, flashing a winning smile.   I believed her, though my attempt to recreate it was nowhere near as engaging as what I’d improvised for her and her son.  Nothing came of it in the end but a few disjointed chapters.

In the decades in between I periodically worked on a manuscript I unfortunately called Get Outta Here, Melz, taking the surname of my fictional alter-ego from an old friend who not long ago died of a rare and vicious disease.   At that time he was alive and well, as far as I knew.  In that story there is no relentless, soul-crushing bureaucracy for the narrator to fight a losing battle against, but, in a refreshing change of pace, Benedict Melzer is eventually chased by a torch-wielding mob of his former closest friends who form a posse in the mistaken belief that he has seduced and run off with one of their teenaged daughters.  They find a seemingly incriminating correspondence between the self-righteously noble Benedict and the, at one time, slightly infatuated girl, but their suspicions could not have been further from the truth.  The last letter the girl writes to BM, coldly denouncing him as a hopeless, pathetic, self-important idiot, which the readers see, is not found by his former friends among the papers.  At the time they take off after him, the girl is in another state with a young man and Melz is far away, alone, on the run from himself and his life.  It was intended as a comedy of errors, although, ideally, a comedy is funny.  I never made much progress with the book, though thinking about it now, and the unfortunately named BM’s all-consuming, impractical, slightly mad belief in the supreme importance of spontaneity and creativity, I find it tricky to escape the psychic ripples of it as a certain alienated desperation dogs me like a hellhound in the uncomfortable silence of just about everybody I know.

As I jotted uncharitably in my former gratefulness journal the other day:

My first two attempts to write a book, Me Ne Frego and Bird Wins, were ass-backwards, spectacularly unmarketable efforts.  Each featured a brave, unquestionably earnest narrator describing a detailed crucifixion, gesticulating stoically from his crude cross as the life dripped from his body.

Another equally compelling book could be written from the POV of a precocious child dying of dysentery in a toxic slum in Lahore.  The world has billions of such books, unwritten by the losers of a billion small, infinitely brutal, rigged games.

The books the world wants, and it’s hard to blame them, are stories of a remarkable individual’s miraculous triumph over the relentless machine that grinds us all down at varying speeds.  The paying world goes, by and large, for moving triumphs or dramatic, fully justifiable revenge stories, a Hollywood ending.  The world, where the scales are so often false and weighted, loves the rousing story of an honest count, against all the odds, or failing that, a good ass-whupping.  Stories by those on the wrong end of the ass-whupping do not sell as well as the other kind, as any marketing expert will tell you.

 

NOTES:

[1] “I don’t give a rat’s ass!” an Italian expression of contempt and bravado famously used by Benito Mussolini.

[2] named for the unbeatable tic-tac-toe playing chicken in the Chinatown Arcade on Mott Street, (the bird always went first, so you figure it out…) may she rest in peace.

 

 

 

 

 

Magical

“It’s hard to know what to say to you, how to start a conversation with someone in your perilous situation,” she said.

“That’s understandable,” he said, trying to distance himself from me. “What do people talk about? Not their terror, too scary. Not their inner feelings, way too uncomfortable. I have no idea what people actually talk about, I don’t talk much these days.”

A long moment of silence, and swallowing, seemed like it might never end.

“Death, there’s something else we don’t really like to talk about, except maybe for which really bad people deserve painful forms of it,” he said, after a while.

In her struggle to get him off depressing, dead-end subjects, she suggested that there was hope. An introduction had been made by email to a possibly congenial collaborator. “I heard she wrote that you were ‘magical’,” she said hopefully.

“Yes, she did, that was the word she used. Said I was ‘magical’ with groups and individuals,” he said brightly. It would only be a second or two, she knew, before he’d manage to turn even this glowing compliment to the dark side.

“Who was it who wrote ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’? If I had a smart phone I could tell you in a few taps, hang on, let’s pretend I do: Joan Didion. You remember that phrase? Magical thinking is a kind of irrational, superstitious belief that if you do things a certain way a bad outcome will be averted. Like Didion thought at one point that she couldn’t get rid of her dying husband’s shoes because if she did he wouldn’t have shoes when he came back from the hospice. By holding on to the shoes she believed she was magically preventing his death, somehow. Grief, derangement, insanity, all very terrible, desperate things, and part of the realm of the magical, you know.”

“What?” she said. “How do you get from a compliment about your ability to turn a group of strangers into a creative, collaborative team into Joan Didion’s meditation on the insane thinking caused by grief and impending loss?”

“It’s really a simple step,” he said, “nobody knows what to say about my program, which nobody, also, really grasps the potential and present reality of. I have seen it at work many times now, how organically my idea works over and over, and I have a few participants who can vouch for how well it works, but to the rest, and everyone I know, absent a compellingly creative and engaging commercial pitch, you have to take my word for it. My word, in a word, magical thinking. You know, if I meet a rich person who generously supports the idea, get the idea to a philanthropic foundation who can picture the vision I present and pay to help make it real in the world, if I can work in the shittiest schools in the city and produce work far better than anything I’ve had them do so far, if… you dig? My word for the odds of success here was ‘miracle’. That’s what it would take for one person to succeed at what I am trying to do alone. Another word is ‘magical.’ The guy is a miracle worker, magical.”

After a moment she said “do you realize how hard it is to have a conversation with somebody like you?”

“Absolutely, I do,” he said, and smiled, after a fashion. He thought suddenly of a man he once met at a friend’s parents’ party. The man was slim, and shy, and had a beaming smile on his face almost the entire night. Every time he looked over the man was grinning like the happiest man in the world. The woman the smiling man was standing next to for most of the evening, also happy looking, was his sister, it turned out. He learned later that they lived together and that the beaming man had died of complications of alcoholism.

“What should I have done at that party?” the ghost of the smiling man asks, “sobbed and wailed about how fucking unbearable my life was? I had one card to play, and I played it, went home and got shit-faced and then, soon after, I was dead. Finally.”

“Whoa,” she said, “that transition was kind of magical, but in a very dark way.”

“Believe in magic and you have to believe in dark magic too,” he said darkly.

“You’ve been painting the floor of this room we’re standing in and we’ve been backing up step by step and now the only door is far across that field of wet paint,” she said, pointing at the tiny door a long way off.

“You’re only now noticing this?” he asked.

“I’m trying to go along with you here,” she said. “You are not the easiest person in the world to talk to, you know?”

“I know, it’s true,” he said softly. What did they tell him at school about writing with adverbs and qualifiers? Fuck if he could recall.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “There are no rules in this world, and nothing is for certain. We stand on legs that will be swept from under us one day, under a light that will go dark and never come back on. We are controlled largely by our fears, and most people do what they feel is the safest thing to do. It is much easier to go to work and come home with money than to stay in a room with your thoughts and wavering beliefs as your existence becomes more and more marginal. On the other hand, you have a dream, even a noble one, and it is very hard work, and you’re not young and energetic any more, but you should either be grateful for your passion and your slow but forward progress or give in and find a way to make a living, however meaningless. If your Plan A is too hard, do Plan B. And I have no idea what Plan B would be in your case.”

“I like that!” he said. “And you said it was hard to talk to me!” He patted her arm, the paintbrush hanging down by his side in his other hand as the two stood in a tiny circle of dirty, unpainted floor. She smiled, and shook her head.

“Now, if you will excuse me,” he said, “I have to paint this last bit of floor.”

Elmore Leonard’s Game

My father, who had the taste to love Sam Cooke, recommended Elmore Leonard to me at one point, many years back.  He thought I would like Elmore and I did.   Between us we probably read every book Elmore Leonard wrote, often passing them on to each other.  I think my father even read the westerns, the early novels.   I may have only read one of those.  But I was always happy to find a new crime novel by Elmore Leonard on the bookshelf at the library, snatched it up immediately, read it in a day or two, passed it on to my father if he hadn’t read it already.

Master of dialogue, and ingenious plot twist, and creator of page turning interest, Leonard often underscored the cool of his bold, sometimes stupid characters by showing that they weren’t in a hurry.   “He lit a cigarette and looked at her, taking his time.”   I noticed early on that every single book by Leonard contained the line “taking his time”, usually several times. Thus began the game Elmore and I, the reader, used to play.

I would chuckle, as I read some of them, to see that Elmore had taken his time using “taking his time” in a book.  I’d note on the bookmark, p. 117, and smile, nod, “good one, man,” I’d say to Elmore Leonard.  Then he’d pepper the next chapter with it, 124, 127, 131.  Damn, he’s good, I used to think.

Of course, I love dialogue too.  And space on the page.  I literally begin choking when I see a block of text margin to margin in every direction, an immense, dense paragraph filling the entire battlefield of the page.   It’s like music, when somebody’s playing on every single beat, and somebody else is too, and there’s a wall of strings behind them, and the singer comes in, bleating directly on every beat.

“Let me breathe, damn you!” I mutter, closing a book with its black pages of type, and not taking my time about it.  I literally won’t read those books, no matter how wonderful the writing might be.  Open any place in Mein Kampf and you’ll see that kind of merciless shit, page-long paragraph followed by two page paragraph.

Terry Gross ran a nice tribute to Elmore Leonard recently, an edited version of her 1995 and 1999 interviews.  At one point Elmore says, once again warming my heart:

I like dialogue. I like to see that white space on the page and the exchanges of dialogue, rather than those big heavy, heavy paragraphs full of words. Because I remember feeling intimidated back in the, say, in the ’40s, when I first started to read popular novels, Book of the Month Club books, I would think, god, there are too many words in this book. And I still think there are too many words in most books. But dialogue appeals to me.

It appeals to me too.  Sometimes, sadly, the best dialogue I can find is here, tapping like a mechanical monkey on a keyboard, aware that it’s not a true dialogue.

“Don’t be so judgmental, man,” says Zeppo.

“Shut up, man, let the guy think,” says Ratso, a retired judge sensitive about such things.

You can hear Terry and Elmore Leonard talking here:

http://www.npr.org/2013/08/23/214831379/fresh-air-remembers-crime-novelist-elmore-leonard

there is also a transcript of their conversation you can cut and paste, if you’re in college writing a term paper on Elmore Leonard, say.

When Leonard died the other day, at 87, I got an email from Sekhnet, who broke the news to me by writing that Elmore Leonard won’t be taking his time anymore.  Of course, she pointed out, ever ready to console, his characters still will.

I had to chuckle when, at around 15:30, toward the end of the interview with Terry Gross, Leonard describes the way Quentin Tarantino went about turning the novel Rum Punch into the movie Jackie Brown.  The interview is almost over when Leonard casually mentions that Tarantino took his time with it.

I loved it.

In the empty stadium

The pitcher winds up, back to the batter, corkscrews around whipping a 96 mph heater toward the plate with tremendous movement on it.  He sprints in a flash to home plate, grabbing a bat in one motion swinging and sending it to the deepest part of the park, on a high arc into the seats.  But racing to the 410 sign, slipping on a glove as he does, he is able to time his leap perfectly and, reaching 18 inches over the wall, pluck the ball out of the air before it can descend into the stands.   Falling to the ground after slamming into the wall he manages to stay on his feet, takes a stride and throws a strike back to the first baseman, on a fly, and doubles up the runner who had taken off at the crack of the bat.  Double play!  He makes it half way down the first base line where he kicks the dirt, the bat again in his hand, and curses the fucking centerfielder, who a second ago was him.

All this drama is watched impassively by 50,000 empty seats.  The seats, truly, could not give less of a shit about heroics on the baseball field.

Invitation to Writers

I invite anyone reading these words to take this quick challenge:  

choose something that makes your heart beat stronger.  Write it down, explain in a sentence why you love it, then run with it.  Let it take you where it wants.

Say music is the passion, the beat, bap! with the right note laid thickly against it, there’s nothing to compare.   We call things “like music” in order to convey ineffable levels of grace and delight.   Without music, just noise.  Music sweet music, soothing savage breast and beast alike.  On the wings of a song, every desire anyone ever had.   Without music, no dance, and gone, most grace.

Or take, say, logic.  My passion is logic, so needed in a world of competitive noise, senseless violence and a troubled dance for human connection — to clear a path through the chaos for a moment’s relief.  Once I’ve grasped the logic of something at least I’m no longer perplexed about the cause.  Take Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting a different result.  We’ll use that for a thought experiment:

Assume I tell you the same story one hundred times, the same beginning, great excitement over unlimited potential, same middle, everything going fine but something nagging, inevitable as death, same treacherous cataclysmic ending.  Identical in each story are my actions, virtually interchangeable the other person’s actions.   That I take pains to weave this seamless chronicle of betrayal would tell you the larger story of my life.  

You can predict that these repeated experiences with disappointment, the tremendously built-up hopes always dashed in a close variation on the same cruel theme, will leave a person more susceptible to bitterness than the average person.  Here’s a hypothetical to flex between your back teeth:  a possible cause of compulsively repeated painful behavior. 

Imagine the case of character A_________.   A_________, the youngest child, is routinely ignored at the dinner table.  His older siblings hold forth, sometimes pick on him when the parents aren’t around, punish him when he squeals on them, his parents dote on the others, and often tell him to be quiet, wait his turn.  A kid in this situation may easily begin to feel starved for affectionate attention.  There are millions of people in A_________’s  basic situation, in every culture, on every continent.  

The random people they interact with will make all the difference in how their lives turn out.  A mother or father who is generous, calm, one who listens well, or that kind of grandparent, or best friend, or teacher, alleviates a lot of the child’s pain as the child grows up.  A parent who’s overwhelmed, angry, preoccupied will not do as good a job in this regard.  All parents are some fluctuating combination of these and other types.  

Unless A_________ gets some encouraging outside help, he will grow up convinced that basically people don’t care about him, perhaps nobody cares about anybody.  He can give you a million examples from his own life of why this is so, with ten irrefutable illustrations of each example.  A____   is like my father, perhaps, whipped in the face as an infant, somebody who may realize, after a lifetime angrily defending himself, that he never stood a chance in this world, that it wasn’t his fault.   Or a thousand gradations, from atrocity to inconvenience to tolerance and calm.

Maybe it’s a passion for interpersonal relationships.  Most readers and writers do what they do out of a desire to connect with others.  Words from my heart, through the light filter of my mind, into your eyes, back to me.  It’s magic – sending messages of power and complexity through symbols we’ve evolved to make units of meaning we call words.  Language is a miracle, created by that deepest human need, to love and be loved in return. To be understood, and cherished, by another, a yearning that goes all the way back to earliest animal consciousness.

That’s why babies are always so much cuter than their adults.  They are created to be lovable to their parents, so the parents will take care of the baby while it is helpless.  Babies of every species who are not as cute have tended not to survive and reproduce.  Intelligent design, wot.

So the invitation is open, and I hope you all will take it, and drop a line, or better still, leave a comment below this one. a comment others could feel free to add on to.  I am flooded by Zora’s oldest of human longings, to make myself known to another.  In cyberia, that takes on strange and mutated forms.  But hey, might as well dream. 

 

10,000 Kicks

I saw a quote from Bruce Lee recently, my man Bruce Lee.   “I do not fear the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks.  I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”  Dig it.

My father could have been woken from a sound sleep, been urged to put on a suit and rush over to the funeral home.  On the trip, even if the place was close by, he could compose a eulogy in his head to make the mourners cry, then laugh, then cry again.   It was a talent he had, something he must have given a lot of thought to at some point.   I saw his notes for a eulogy, five or six words on the back of an envelope.

He was not a professional eulogist, if there is such a job, but he was a very, very good one.   

His example may not be the best one for our purposes here, because it was somewhat innate in his case.    I am thinking of the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.   If I sometimes spent ten hours straight playing the guitar, it was not to improve my playing, it was because I couldn’t stop.  And because I couldn’t stop my fingers got more and more warmed up, I stumbled on new possibilities, parts, voicings for chords, ways to strike the strings.  So love of the thing made me improve, because the playing was  so much fun for me.  The discoveries were an organic part of how much I love to play.  Same with drawing.

This blahg is a kicking board set up in front of my cottage in dreamland.  I come out each day into the fog and kick the board once, softly but with great focus.  I stand and breathe in the cool, wet air.  I kick the board again, harder.  Then I kick it again.  After a while I am kicking the living shit out of the board, smiling as I recall Bruce Lee’s smirked rejoinder to O’Hara, the evil bully, breaking a board in front of Bruce’s face before their fight at Evil Han’s tournament.   “Boards don’t hit back,” says Bruce Lee curtly before bashing O’Hara directly in the scar on his cheek inflicted by Bruce’s father the day his sister committed suicide after fighting off O’Hara and his lecherous bully friends.

Boards don’t hit back.   But if you hit a board correctly a few thousand times you get the hang of it in a way that people who kick things randomly have no hope of ever kicking.

Peak Experience

We experience countless things each day.  A person with a great memory, which I am often reputed to have, might remember a few grains of these experiences.  Certain experiences are unforgettable, when they involve our senses directly.   This cuts both ways, great memories and terrible ones, both enduring.  But when things are exciting, fun and spontaneous they inspire us, they stick in our memory.  That is because these are the moments when we are most fully alive.

Your soul is on fire, poet, but there is nothing we can do for you but throw spears.

Peak experience is when you operate intuitively against the beat, chose notes and flavors that have not been tried before.   Seasoning a new dish with fresh herbs from the garden, a different combination, delicious.   Hitting the cowbell perfectly against the side of the beat.  The colors spread thickly in a perfect brushstroke gradient, that succulent array of sunset blues going dark.   The spatula of a hand, bending supplely against beats from the Indian Ocean.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please send me an email.   I will in turn send you a rhythm track to improvise to.   You can then send me the youTube link and I’ll add an animation to it.   These times are in many ways hellish times, but the technology is getting fucking amazing.