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Friday

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14
Nov 25

Bad words on poor words

First thing this morning I had a meeting. And then I spent the rest of the day writing. And also writing. And then there was rewriting. My process is to put a lot of words together in my head. Then drop them onto a page. And then stir them all up until they don’t make sense to me anymore.

I changed up the process somewhat because when I was working on this particular thing one night last week I turned it into a literary exercise. It felt good, even then — even as? — I knew that was all going to come out in the next draft. It was an exercise of getting it out of my system. Now, I am writing something so tediously specific no one will want to read it.

It’s a gift.

There are many styles in all of us, I am sure of it. We must only turn the right valves. And there’s an art in knowing which ones to use at a given time. Some people, I thought, today, never seem to heed those warnings. They just write the thing they wanted to write, the thing they needed to write, putting their magisterial collection of words and thoughts together in the way they must be written, this time. Or so we’d like to think. Even people that know the craft can get so caught up in the brilliant work of others that they are transported far, far away from the idea of drafts and editors. I don’t write like that, because it isn’t in keeping with what I do. Consequently I’m probably not good at writing like that. But it’s fun to dream about onomatopoeia and sizzling verbs and alliteration that affects us all.

I like to read it, though.

So I wrote the day away, which was fine. It was pleasant. It’s what I needed to do. I enjoyed it. I would print out a draft and sit in the window and read the thing I’d just written word-by-word. I am trying to develop a self-editing process for that. I think it would improve my output. It would make some of my writing better. At the very least, it would be a thing I could enjoy. With that objective in mind I’ll just keep doing it until I figure out the process. Then I’ll do it because it is a process.

Tonight we saw a comedian. We saw three comedians. Two of them were the opening and feature acts. It was a large arena show and I wondered if a comedian, on a big stage in a big venue like that, knows when he is bombing. The opener was not having a good night. He gamely plodded through. The feature act was better. And this is how it should be. We’re warming up the crowd for the headliner. The headliner who is doing an arena tour. And working on new material. But also offering to do a greatest hits set.

In a way, this is kind of sad for Bert Kreischer. He’s been closing with this bit for years and years now. It’s become Freebird. People yell it out to him. It’s paying the bills, and that’s great, but he hasn’t had to write a new finish in ages. So now he has to write an almost finish, but it can’t be bigger and better than his Freebird. What a fine line to have to thread.

He’s also doing these big arena shows and saying this is where he’s working on the stuff for his next special which will be recorded next year. I know even less about comic writing than I do about any other style of writing, see above, but I’d rather you work on that in small clubs. There’s a different intimacy there, and a tradition to honor. And it would fill. Tonight, he had about two-thirds of a basketball venue filled and were scattered and unpolished and it just wasn’t a good feeling. Also, a lot of empty seats.

I didn’t know, until recently, that there was such a thing as a showbiz review of stand-up comedians. By chance I ran across a review of this tour. The critic was dismissive of the effort. I thought, maybe the writer isn’t a fan of the genre. Maybe this person is new to stand up comedy. Maybe Kreischer had an off night. The critic said maybe Kreischer has run out of things to say. Maybe the critic was right.

The other possibility is that he’s too busy living the gimmick. I’m not sure when he can write while doing all of the things that his outsized personality and persona require. I’m sure there’s a process here. I’m sure he never sits down and thinks, “I wish I could write the most boringly dense thing possible that no one will read.” I’m sure his special next year will be good.

cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off
7
Nov 25

Photos I forgot to share

Rather than spend this time discussing today’s committee meeting — we looked at some material we’ll distribute on campus next year — or the rest of the day spent staring at words on a screen, I thought I would try to once again impress you with some photographs. These were things I shot earlier this week and, as the title says above, I forgot to share them here.

This was, I believe, from Sunday night. If you hold the phone just right you can tilt the lines whichever way you want them to go, of course, but this was the true representation relative to my position on the ground, no adjustments necessary.

And while that was in the nighttime this is fully in the afternoon, Monday specifically, when I had a little race with my sheep herding friend. He was pretty fast that day.

Here is my shadow selfie, as he is cruising through a little town. I set a PR on that segment, despite sitting up for a few photographs.

I like this one for all of the colors, one season’s palette is giving way to the next. And, also, it looks like some forgotten frozen plain. Except it isn’t forgotten — I’m here. And it isn’t frozen. Yet.

And then just up the road, this spot is only slightly evocative of an African savanna. But it’s only the colors on the ground and those couple of trees poking, and the bright appearance of the moon that bring that to mind.

In fact, the moon was watching over the neighborhood. These trees are much more familiar trees. I see them every time I come in and out.

For appearances sake, I hope they’ll hold on to their leaves just a bit longer. Until the first week of March, let’s say.

Anyway, this is the weekend when I will catch up on some things. I have been behind on some work for a few days too many, and concerted efforts will be made to get back up to level. And then Monday will come and we’ll start this again. And then I will catch up on next week and I will start in on some other projects where I am woefully behind.

But, first, I must go deal with some leaves myself.

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31
Oct 25

Happy Halloween

There is a metal bowl of candy on the bookcase nearest the door. The kids are coming up at irregular intervals. I can hear the entire transaction, which seems a lot faster than I recall as a kid. They are up the stairs and off the porch briskly, though each comes with a “trick-or-treat” and also a “thank you.”

One pair of kids came up to the porch, one stumbling up the stairs in their costume. And the the other stumbled down the stairs in their costume.

Maybe those miniature pumpkins we put out are really crash buoys, and I didn’t realize it.

I think we missed at least one kid in the sugar distribution process. Maybe she came back around later. Surely she did not do without.

This ritual gets out of control in some places. Once we lived in a neighborhood where people literally bussed in their kids from afar. They’d deplete your candy stores right away, and that was before the chainsmoking teens showed up. Here, we had one set of young teens, the neighbors we may never otherwise meet, but the rest were fairly young from the sound and looks of things. That’s nice, some of the older folks in the neighborhood have noticed, with a sigh, that the place is aging around them. The sigh comes because they realize it is aging with them. But lately there’s been a youth movement, witness the Halloween traditions! And maybe people are coming from afar.

There may be leftover candy.

We played our part in tomorrow’s sugar coma until about 8:30, and then the door was closed, the lights were off, and the ninjas were deployed from their barracks out back to return to their evening surveillance.

There is leftover candy. No, the ninjas can’t have any. We need them hungry and light on their feet, just in case there are any tricks over night.

Before all of that, I took the recycling to the inconvenience center. When we first moved here I had to take the garbage there, to the place across town, hence my clever little nickname. After a year we got curbside garbage delivery, finally. And now I just take the recycling. Today I loaded the car up with a repurposed outdoor garbage can, an oversized storage bin, a kitchen-sized garbage can and two big armfuls of cardboard.

I tried, and failed, to remember the last time I went there. Maybe it’s been a month. That’d be great. And it would also make sense. The recyclables were threatening to push us outdoors.

Anyway, it’s easy there. You drive up, back in. There’s a great big bin for cardboard. (Break down your boxes! Sometimes I do.) There are two bins for garbage. Another for scrap metal and one for mixed use stuff. This is where the plastic and glass go and I assume it’s all just melted in a weekend bonfire down past the tree line. But it makes me feel better. I have saved the earth. I have dispensed and disposed of all of that, so that some of it may be reused again.

I think we now send out almost as much recyclable waste as garbage, which is … good? We’re pretty streamlined on both. And the cats help with repurposed cardboard.

On the way back home, I was stopped at one of the two red lights right by this temporary installation.

This was set up right in front of the bank. Across the way is the little local performing arts center, and the store front of a nice guy who makes high end fountain pens. He’s currently selling 10 pieces with wood and copper that came from Old Ironsides. You can purchase one for $1,250. As much as I appreciate the novelty and historical heft that you can apply to that, I don’t understand that income bracket. I don’t understand how anyone could lay that out and then put a pen on their desk, or in their coat pocket. Or use it. Or put it in a display case some way. Or even a safe.

One day I hope he’ll let me come in and bring non-historical wood and turn a pen of my own. He invites students to see the process, because junior high kids are always ready throw down big bills for fountain pens, why not the rest of us? Surely he has slow days. Surely this could be an easy way to make a few extra bucks. Surely that chunk of wood I picked up that one time, from that special place, can make a nice, personal piece in no way approaching the price of a mortgage payment.

Maybe I could compensate him with leftover candy.

Happy Halloween!

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24
Oct 25

It stings

Well, that hurt. I went back to the dermatology center today — I think that’s also the name of the place. It’s about a half hour away and it is clearly a front for some jobs program. I have been there three times in less than three months and I have seen five different people in their exam rooms. First was the woman who did the summary inspection, a nice young woman already washed out before her term, staring at people’s skin all day. She had an assistant who excelled in not being at all visible or memorable. Two weeks ago, another person did the operation. Firm handshake. No real sense of humor. Michigan man. The woman who assisted him was delightful and kind, the sort that seems to have an irrepressible sense of good cheer about her. She’s probably been reprimanded about that before. I liked her immensely.

Today, which I have been looking forward to for the better part of the last two weeks, is when the sutures came out. I’ve been looking forward to it so, naturally, I was eight minutes late. Also, I had to go alone, because my lovely wife was out of town.

I was very brave.

Once, several years ago I was in a hospital waiting room and a mom and her young child came through. It was some sort of visit for the kid, and the staff at the admissions desk made an appropriately big deal about him. I was still there when they were through, and the woman at the desk remembered him and she asked, in her adult voice, not the patronizing kid voice, “Were you very brave?” And, of course, the little boy was, and I think of that from time to time. Today I was very brave.

This is what it was. I stuck my head in the at the desk. The woman there said they’d be right with me. I sat down just in time to be called to the back. A woman walked my around a byzantine set of hallways to an exam room. I asked her if she would be the one dealing with me today (because see above). She was the one that was dealing with me today. I asked her my series of carefully memorized and rehearsed questions. I got satisfactory answers to all of them. And then she proceeded to rip this industrial strength cable through my tender, delicate skin.

This was, again, just inside my shoulder, so I couldn’t see it but there were several sharp burning pulling moments. I wanted a local for this. When I got back in the car, in a few minutes later, I realized this was the worst the thing has felt since it was a thing. But Tylenol took care of that later in the afternoon.

So I had five stitches. Now I have none. And I went from a gauze pad to a Band-Aid. And, in a few days, it’s back to normal.

I have to have another checkup in a few months though. Standard procedure. I have been assured that the tests came back from the lab in fine order. The humorless man from Michigan land must know what he’s doing.

These have been sitting in my phone for a few days, and I don’t know why I keep forgetting to share them. So let’s share them. The last color of the hydrangeas, in the warm bath of a flood light.

They get bent over in the late summer rains, and never really recover their posture. But, aside from that, I enjoy the changing colors of these petals a great deal. There’s just a lot of character and nuance there. Like the bush is trying to tell me of the season, or the longer, cooler nights. I don’t know.

For another week or so, I’ll have that to ponder, and then soon it’ll just be sticks and twigs and waiting until it bursts back to life in March and April.

I could make that a metaphor, but my entourage of dermatology experts have told me I still must avoid heavy lifting for a few more days.

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10
Oct 25

Cutting pieces off

I went in for a little medical procedure today. This was planned. I am fine. We scheduled this several months ago. There was a mysterious spot no one liked on my back. (I, however, was fine with it. Couldn’t see it. Wasn’t bothering me.) So they did a biopsy. The lab work determined it was the sort of thing that’s not a danger today, but you don’t want it around tomorrow. And so today was that day.

There was bleeding and stitches. I’m calling it a surgery. There was not enough anesthetic. There is never enough anesthetic. For the record, should you be with me when I need medical attention, it is general anesthetic or bust.

The guy asked me what I would like, as I had had time to peruse their generous offerings on the menu, accessible by QR code. I said I’d take the local, and then two regionals, please and thank you. Oh, I played it tough. I said I don’t want to feel the sensation of you tugging on my skin, even in the areas around the professional butchery. In truth, I want to be down the hall, around the corner, and across town at the mall. I don’t want to remember any of this.

Especially when the local begins to wear down. Which did happen. And I don’t want to hear you and your assistant discussing the finer points of the size of the suture material. Get the good stuff. Get it fast. Let’s stop the bleeding and have a blast.

I tried to enter into a discussion with the guy — hey, he let me stay conscious and that was his choice — about all of the things I can and can’t do in the next several weeks of recovery. I think he came to think I was arguing with him, but I saw it as a negotiation. What if I do this, but not hard or well? Finally his colleague laughingly said I can’t do the dishes for two weeks. And yard work, that’s right out. I guess the new phalanx of ninjas will see their training delayed, as well.

I am told the incision was the size of a couple of quarters. And I’m sure it will not feel pleasant tomorrow. I am to treat with alternating dosages of Ibuprofen and Tylenol.

What in the wide world of medicine is going on with these orders?

The dressing has to get changed twice a day for the next two weeks. Stitches come out in 14 days. And, supposedly, I am to take it easy for three to four weeks, though even the derma-guy said, “But you have to live your life.”

So I’ll milk it as long as I can, I guess? Or until I go stir crazy or feel guilty about not pulling my share around here.

Hey, at least the local stayed with me for much of the day. Operating under the idea that I’ll be equally uncomfortable wherever I am, we went to watch an Army-Navy doubleheader. Women’s soccer, and then men’s soccer. I even saw the Goodyear blimp.

The Middies won the women’s game. And before the men played The Leap Frogs jumped onto the field.