Five-Minute Friday: Waiting

Photo by Wikimedia user AEMoreira042281.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a traffic jam on the interstate, waiting for it to clear up and for the cars to start flowing again. Once that happens, I’ll wait for the bus to get to my stop so I can get off and walk to work. I’ll work for eight hours, which involves very little waiting; but then I’ll wait for the afternoon bus to pick me up, and once it does, I’ll wait for it to take me home.

In my writing, I’m waiting for my writing partner to finish his revision on our screenplay, but I’m also waiting for my next big idea to come to me for the next big project I’ll work on. Little tendrils and filaments have started to creep into view, but the thing itself remains hidden. Perhaps it, too, is waiting. Life seems to be a repeating alternation of waiting and activity. Today let’s focus on the downtime, the in-between time, the interstices when all we’re doing is waiting.

How to hurry up and wait:

1. Write for five minutes, using the topic as an initial prompt. Feel free to deviate from the topic, and feel free to write for longer than five minutes, too.

2. Don’t stop to edit. Don’t worry about typos or grammar or even the quality of the writing. Dig deep or skim the surface, but keep those hands moving for five solid minutes.

3. Feel free to send me your piece to be posted. You can post as a comment on this post, or you can send it to me via the Contact Me link on the main page. I’m happy to post your piece anonymously or pseudonymously, if you wish. This thread will be moderated to ensure a criticism-free zone.

Ready? Five minutes. Go!

i decided i wanted to be a writer so many years ago, decades ago, and i’ve written since then, a fair amount, not like stephen king or joyce carol oates but still way more than most people and even more than some writers, and in all that time i’ve been waiting. waiting. waiting for the writing to catch fire, take off, succeed. oh yes there have been successes in the interim, some large, most small, and plenty of defeats too, and other outcomes not victory or defeat, not success or failure, just a whimpering out into nothingness, like the journals that go defunct, the editors you just never hear back from. the black hole that waits to swallow all your endeavors, all your efforts. as i write this i think of friends and acquaintances who seem to have succeeded at everything they put their hand to. and how those people don’t seem to know what it is to fail. but they probably do know what it is to wait. but i wonder if they know what it is to wait to succeed; if they know what it feels like for success to constantly keep you waiting, waiting, waiting. i feel ungrateful as i write this; i am aware of the many blessings in my life and i know that i don’t necessarily deserve them and i am genuinely grateful for every single good thing in my life. but i want more! yes i do. i still want more, not because it’s “more,” not because the amount i have is insufficient, but because i want something else. i want my writing to do what i have always wanted it to do, for decades now; i want it to catch fire, take off, and light up the universe. maybe one day it will do that. until then, i’ll wait. and wait. and wait. and work, of course; and wait for the work to bear fruit.

Bestiary: The Owl

She jogs down the asphalt path in the morning; not the early morning; she’s not one of those early-morning runners; no, this is more of a late-morning event, because she’s working second shift at the store, so she has time to wait until the late morning to haul her ass out of bed, put on the shoes, lace up the laces, and get out the door.

At this point in her run, all she can feel is the weakness in her legs, so she tries to distract herself by paying close attention to the slant of light through the trees that line the path on either side. She tells herself how beautiful the light is, how precious the golden mist at this time of day; but beneath those uplifting thoughts is a dogged weariness and the niggling discomfort that comes with the awareness that she had intended to do more with this morning: call her mother, swing by the bank, throw at least one load of laundry in the washer, even go to the store if she could manage it.

She jogs down the path—not much of a jog, more of a speeded-up trudge, really, or a slowed-down trot—and regrets that she hasn’t done more with her morning, her day, her whole life, while she’s at it. Her whole life, which, now that she thinks about it, is nothing more than a span of time. Nothing more than a bucket full of seconds; or it used to be full, but the bucket is emptying through a hole that was drilled in the bottom on the day she was born; she knows the truth of that emptying; she feels it deep in her heaving lungs; ever since she turned thirty she’s been wondering how much life is left to her; and as she thinks about the seconds carelessly scattered along the ground, her feet scuffle along even more slowly, her gait stutters, she almost trips, she decides to stop.

Then a large whitish blur passes before her eyes and she thinks in a frenzied moment that this is it, she’s having a stroke or a heart attack while jogging, how ironic, and she hopes that everyone at her funeral will have a sense of humor about it—and the barred owl swoops upward in front of her and alights on a branch next to the path, where it turns to regard her with black jewels of eyes as she stumbles by.

She stumbles onward, trying to put more distance between her and the owl, her heart pounding all the faster. So close to her, and she didn’t even hear it until it was already gone! That sharp, thin little beak, so perfect for getting at the tender inward parts. It could have sliced her open like a sausage if it had wanted to. That swiftness. That lightness. Silence.

She runs onward, a little faster now, no longer seeing the cracked pavement, the precious golden mist; only seeing the owl; wondering what it would be like to be an owl. To launch from your branch at a time of your choosing. To glide easily—so easily—to within a hair’s breadth of your prey. To be there in the flick of an iris contracting against the late-morning light.

And then to lift it up in your talons and carry it to your branch and rip out the entrails in a neverending instant. Feathers spattered with the bright blood of eternity.

Five-Minute Friday: Time

Walter Mosley, author of the acclaimed Easy Rawlins mysteries, has said that you need at least an hour and half at a time to get any writing done—writing for publication, that is, writing intended to edify anybody besides yourself. John Gardner, author of Grendel and many other fine books, including two very authoritative tomes on writing, has said that when you really get in the flow you’ll need twelve to sixteen hours at a stretch to just plunge in and stay there, even if you have a family; and if you do have a family, “you should feel bad about this.” The unwritten coda is, But you should do it anyway.

But what about all the stay-at-home parents out there who have written poems and stories and even novels a few furtively snatched minutes at a time? I believe that they, and many other writers who can work in bursts, in fits and starts, prove Gardner and Mosley wrong. Maybe it’s easier to work in longer segments; but that of course depends on your having the longer segments available. What if you don’t? Are you doomed not to write?

Well, not this writer. I’m going to learn how to write in whatever time is available to me. The time’s length is not the issue. The time’s quality is not the issue. The time’s availability is the issue. As any writer will attest, time itself is a fundamental issue for writers. Which is why it makes a good topic for Five-Minute Friday.

To unfold the secrets of the space-time continuum:

1. Write for five minutes, using the topic as an initial prompt. Feel free to deviate from the topic, and feel free to write for longer than five minutes, too.

2. Don’t stop to edit. Don’t worry about typos or grammar or even the quality of the writing. Dig deep or skim the surface, but keep those hands moving for five solid minutes.

3. Feel free to send me your piece to be posted. You can post as a comment on this post, or you can send it to me via the Contact Me link on the main page. I’m happy to post your piece anonymously or pseudonymously, if you wish. This thread will be moderated to ensure a criticism-free zone.

Ready? Five minutes. Go!

i once heard someone refer to “the little men who slow down time,” an educated person, a non-religious, non-credulous person, but someone who believed that somehow when you get your head in the right place you can enlist the aid of supernatural beings who will help you get to work on time even when you leave the house later than you should–a big issue in the Atlanta commute. she didn’t have a specific mythology worked out. she had not heard of these little men from somewhere else or someone else. but she believed in them nonetheless. it makes sense that time can slow down or speed up, in theory, just as it makes sense that space can stretch, contract, or curve, as the theory of relativity tells us; because space and time really are part of the same continuum, and under the right conditions it’s a plastic continuum, not a static one. but the question is, how do you stretch space? how do you slow down time? how do you enlist the aid of the little men? for me it seems to have something to do with penetrating more deeply within the time that you experience. some sense of enfoldment, of a fundamental pervasion within each second of time, udnerstanding that the seconds themselves are artificial divisions that we impose upon our experience of time, just as nations are artificial divisions that we impose upon the continents. but if you try to understand the actual time within the seconds, if you can plunge within time and try to swim within it and perhaps even grow gills so that you don’t have to come up–that’s how you can find the spaciousness within time.

Dream: Kurt Cobain and the Icy Water

Photo courtesy of ralphunden.

I dreamed that I was outside at dusk in a vast, open, snow-covered expanse of land. There were a few other people with me and nearby. We were about to participate in some kind of artistic event—a live performance or happening of some sort.

Then it was full dark, and we were watching Kurt Cobain (the deceased lead singer of the band Nirvana) use a laser to cut through the permafrost on the ground. The laser issued from the end of a contraption that looked much like a fire hose. Kurt held the fire hose over his shoulder, squatted down, and fired a bright pink laser at the ground. The laser sliced through the ice and churned it into a glowing, chunky slush. It was fascinating to watch.

Dave Grohl, the former drummer for Nirvana and the current leader of the Foo Fighters, came to stand beside me to watch Kurt do his art piece. Kurt used the laser to draw a longer line through the ground, and suddenly a large slab of ice gave way beneath him, causing him to fall through into a body of water that had been below the ice this whole time.

Dave and I laughed: Poor Kurt! That couldn’t have been fun. I looked at Kurt, and because there was (inexplicably) a light source beneath the water—like an underwater light in a swimming pool at night—I could see that he wasn’t moving. Then I remembered that the water must be unbelievably frigid. Hypothermia could set in quickly, and Kurt might drown. He hung still beneath the surface of the water, and he flapped his hands toward us in a come-hither motion, urging us to come rescue him. I also noted that he seemed to be naked now, as far as I could tell while looking at him through the water.

I jumped into the water. It was indeed frigid. With my right hand, I grabbed Kurt, and I stretched my left hand back up to Dave at the edge of the ice. Dave pulled us toward shore, and together we were able to get Kurt out of the water.

But when we got Kurt back up on land, I saw that he wasn’t just naked; he had changed into a woman. He was now a young, petite, naked woman who was still in danger of freezing to death as she stood soaking wet on the icy ground. Dave and I each took an arm and guided her toward shelter, where I knew her life would be saved by the hot shower that awaited her. Then I woke up.

The Blank Page Gets Blanker

When last we saw our hero, the intrepid blogger had just taken a job that required him to travel to another city every day. Others might have quailed at the thought of the dreaded “I-40 commute,” spoken of with such loathing throughout the land. But not he! No, because he obtained the smallest, lightest writing machine that would accomodate his economy-sized hands, and he rejoiced at the thought that his “commute” would instead be a serene hour and a half (round trip) spent crafting tales and narratives and pure language, unencumbered by the demands of operating a motor vehicle, secure in the skill and caution of what surely must be the very finest bus drivers in the history of bus driving.

And so he would write instead of driving; think about stories instead of cursing people who drive slowly in the left-hand lane; hit the return key instead of the turn signal. He would write, he would write, he would write.

But what? What, exactly, would he write? He was working on a story for a moving-picture show, it was true; but he was working on that with another writer, and at that time it was the other writer’s turn to work on the moving-picture story. When it came to the moving-picture story, the intrepid blogger had to hurry up and wait.

And there was his blog, of course, which he loved and which he felt committed to, like a favorite course of study that never ends; but that didn’t take up seven and a half hours a week. Nor was it his deepest heart’s work. No, his deepest heart’s work was . . .

Ah. And now he comes to it. What does he work on when he has no partner waiting to be tagged, no subscribers waiting to be fed, no editor, no deadline, no obligations to anyone other than himself and whatever gods set him on this path? What does he write when his strongest obligation is to the writing itself?

Chapter 44: In Which the Wild Mustang Returns to the Corral

Sorry for no blog posts lately! Jeez, you must be feeling all neglected, all low self-esteemy, all questioning your inherent worth and all. And do I ever know how that feels.  Hence all my dysfunctional compensatory behaviors. Speaking of which, where’s that bartender?

Well, until she gets back, let me explain what’s been going on and why I’ve been a bit of an absent blogger. You know how, when you’ve been running your own freelance business for eleven years, you get to a point when you realize that you’re doing okay as a businessperson—but only okay? I mean financially. As in, you’re keeping your mortgage paid, but your retirement plan consists of hoping that Steven Spielberg will option your screenplay for a fat six figures. And you do the math, and you figure out that while you could improve your receivables somewhat, there’s an upper limit to that—and you’re not very far from it.

So you start thinking about going into a new line of business. Like, maybe you could give seminars on how to write the perfect Facebook status update, or you could give a workshop titled “Writing Tweets That Matter.” Or maybe you could set up a lucrative business ghostwriting the memoirs of people’s pets! There’s got to be a lot of money in that niche. But that would require marketing yourself, developing a new set of contacts, trying to get your first client—basically starting all over again.

And you don’t want to start over again. Because you’ve been an editor for seventeen years now, and for better or worse, this is how you earn money in the world. For better or worse, this is the best field for you to plow, even though your little independent farming operation is on the verge of showing diminishing returns. Which means it’s time for a change. A big change.

So then you start looking for jobs. Not desperately, but in a very picky way, because the whole point is to improve your situation, not to make some lateral move that you’ll regret in a year, which you’ve done before and which you’ve seen others do.

And then you finally find a job to apply to, and it’s a big deal because you haven’t applied for a job in years. And you send off your spiffed-up resume and you fill out the online application, and you wait . . . and cobwebs cover the phone, and the crickets are snickering at you behind their wings, and nothing happens.

So you apply for two more jobs. And after you apply for one of them, the cobwebs once again multiply, and now the crickets are openly giggling, and you wonder if it’s just too late­—if you’ve been a freelancer so long that no company would hire you, unless you want to pursue a rewarding career in telemarketing.

But the third job. That one calls you back. That one wants to interview you. And after the interview, the hiring supervisor tells you that you did a great job, and you think he really means it. And then they want your references. And then they make you an offer.

And you accept it.

So you’re thrilled to once again have a regular paycheck, dental insurance, and a retirement plan that does not involve a Hollywood mogul. But part of you is scared, because what about your writing? Have you traded in your creative aspirations for a higher income-tax bracket? Have you sacrificed your art on an altar of business-casual attire and direct-deposit stubs?

No. Because if there’s one thing you’ve learned by this point, it’s that your writing is the golden goose. If you do have some sort of purpose for being here, writing is a fundamental part of it. Not “your” writing, necessarily; just writing, the activity, the artifact, the body of art and culture and work that is writing. You create it, you consume it, you sculpt and polish and improve it. Your clients and employers think you edit for them, to make them happy, and of course that’s part of it; but there’s another part of it that isn’t for anybody—not even for you. It’s for the writing itself, to make it better. It’s as if there’s a secret pact between you and every piece of writing you’ve ever edited, a secret agreement that you and the writing will work together to make the writing excel, just for the sake of excelling. Because excellent writing is a beautiful thing that deserves to exist.

So you’re going to take this job, but when you do, you’re going to take the bus to work, rather than drive; and you’re going to take a small, light laptop computer with you; and you’re going to write every morning and every evening: an hour and a half of dedicated writing time five days a week, which is more than you’ve written on a daily basis in a long time.

And one more thing: before your job starts, you’re going to let your blog readers know why you’ve been absent lately. You’re going to ask them to understand, and you’ll hope they do. You’ll reassure them that once your new routine gets established, you’ll get back to regular blogging. You’ll thank them for reading, and you’ll wish them well.

You know how all that is, right?

Five-Minute Friday: Change

Guidelines for participating in Five-Minute Friday:

1. Write for five minutes, using the topic as an initial prompt. Feel free to deviate from the topic, and feel free to write for longer than five minutes, too.

2. Don’t stop to edit. Don’t worry about typos or grammar or even the quality of the writing. Dig deep or skim the surface, but keep those hands moving for five solid minutes.

3. Feel free to send me your piece to be posted. You can post as a comment on this post, or you can send it to me via the Contact Me link on the main page. I’m happy to post your piece anonymously or pseudonymously, if you wish. This thread will be moderated to ensure a criticism-free zone.

Ready? Five minutes. Go!

i couldn’t believe it when i learned in philosophy class that parmenides said there was no such thing as change, that change was an illusion, that nothing ever changes. are you shitting me? mark me down as a disciple of heraclitus, who said that everything was constantly changing, that you can never step into the same river twice. every cell in your body is constantly dying and being replaced, albeit at different rates; you get a whole new stomach every 24 hours, while replacing bone takes seven years. but regardless the very particles of your body are constantly changing. you are constantly changing. the weather is constantly changing. i once asked a man who worked at the esalen institute and lived just a mile away from it whether he ever got tired of seeing all that natural beauty day in and day out. i wasn’t trying to be absurd, but i just wondered if some sort of acclimation would take place such that you would get tired of anything, even esalen and big sur. and he replied, “oh no, i never get tired of things around here, because it’s constantly changing all the time.” and he was right: heat one day, cool the next, mist in the morning, fog in the afternoon, starry skies at night. wildfires, rains, whales, condors, flowers, herbs, succulents. constant change. so it is with life. but we resist change, we fear it, we seek to minimize or avoid it. and change can be harmful. but even scary changes can be beneficial. but that’s hard to remember when the chasm yawns beneath your feet and it’s time to jump but you don’t want to. you don’t want to jump. jump.

Dream: Anna Paquin and the Field of Stars

I dreamed that I was riding in a car at night with several other people. We were going to a really big party. I was sitting in the back next to Anna Paquin, the actress who plays Sookie on the True Blood TV show. I was excited to be sitting so close to her, but I was trying to play it cool and not be an obnoxious fan. She was talking to someone else about her experience of being on the show.

“When I first came on the show,” she said, “I tried to make the character of Jason smaller. [In the show, Jason is Sookie’s brother.] I went to the VP in charge and said, ‘What do you think?’ She said, ‘Nuh-uh.’” Anna laughed. “She wasn’t too happy with me.”

A woman sitting in the front said, “I can’t believe you did that. How old were you at the time?”

“Twenty-three,” Anna said. The implication was that Anna, at twenty-three, was too young to be telling a VP of HBO how to apportion screen time among a show’s characters.

I said, “I can understand why you did it.”

Anna turned to me. “Really?”

“Yeah. There have been times when I’ve thought that Jason’s character is too big.”

“Well, what I did is, I tried to chop a fair amount off of him and add a little bit to all the other characters.”

I said, “I know why they want him to be big. It’s so they can appeal to male viewers.”

“Well,” Anna said, “now every time I get around one of that VP’s ex-boyfriends, I’m just like, ‘oh, baby, mmwah, mmwah.” She put her face close to mine and did an elaborate mime of kissing somebody, and as she did, her lips lightly touched my cheek and mouth. I thought, Anna Paquin’s flirting with me! I felt myself blush, and my body broke out in chills, but still, I just smiled and played it cool.

Then we arrived at the party. We got out of the car and approached a very large old house, almost like a castle. A woman in our group (not Anna) reached over to me and plucked at the button of my coat. “Why don’t you take this off before we go inside,” she said. I understood that she thought my coat was ugly or unfashionable. I took umbrage at the implication, and I resented her bossiness; but I took the coat off anyway as we entered.

Inside there were lots of people sitting at round tables, and others were dancing in a big open area, like at a wedding reception. The room was huge, with smooth wooden floors; chandeliers cast a golden light over everything.

I left that room and walked around a corner into a hallway of marble and granite. There was a coat-check window, with an older, craggy guy wearing glasses serving as the clerk. I handed him my coat, and I stuck out my hand to shake his. “How you doing, man?” I said. At first I thought I recognized him, but when I met his eye I realized I was wrong.

He didn’t take my hand; he just smiled, shook his head, and said, “Maybe later. Why don’t you go enjoy the party.” Chagrined, I walked away. I noticed other people hanging out in twos and threes. I wished I had someone to hang out with, but I didn’t. I was very conscious of being alone.

Then I was outside the house. I looked around and realized that we were high up on a mountain, with other mountains nearby, and valleys dropping away in front of us. I walked out onto a projection of rock, sat down, and looked up at the night sky, which was full of stars. I focused on one group of stars in particular, which were clustered unusally close together. They were moving across the sky in a way that I’d never seen before. Then I realized that all the stars were moving relatively swiftly across the night sky because they were contained in—or perhaps reflected in or projected on—the clouds. It was as if every cloud in the sky (and there were lots of them) was pierced with a million tiny pinpricks of light, and those pinpricks of light were the stars. I watched in dumbfounded awe as the starry clouds slid smoothly in front of and behind each other.

There was a guy near me on the rocky outcrop. I thought I recognized him; he looked like a guy I know in waking life, but in the dream I thought he had a different name from his real name; in the dream, I thought his name was Jason. But I still wasn’t sure if that was him, so I didn’t say anything.

He looked upward and said, “Pretty sky, huh?”

I said, “Yeah, man. All I know is, the sky didn’t look like that when I was growing up.”

I noticed that near me was an interesting group of friends. They looked like scruffy bohemians. One of them resembled actor Liev Schrieber, but scruffier. Somehow I knew that he was an ex-con who had been paroled.

Suddenly it was daytime, and the Liev Schrieber guy was fatter, shirtless, and messing around with a homemade bow and arrow. There was dried mud on his hands and his big, pale stomach. I made a teasing remark about his archery skills, and he glared at me silently. I decided maybe it wasn’t a good idea to tease an ex-con with a bow and arrow in his hands.

Then we were all swimming in this small body of water outside the castle, a canal or creek. The current in the canal started flowing toward the edge of the flat area at the top of the mountain, as if a lock had been opened. I understood that from there it would continue downhill, flowing down the mountain. I didn’t know how fast this little stream would get before it got to the bottom of the mountain, so I got scared and got out of the water.

I noticed a woman who was in the water with her boyfriend, who was floating on a raft next to her. She was singing to him as they moved toward the place where the water poured over the edge and started flowing downhill. Then the alarm went off and woke me up.

Bestiary: The Forgetful Friars

The friars had forgotten who founded the monastery. In fact, they had forgotten who founded their entire order. They were called the Dionysians, a name that was either reputable (the namesake of Dionysius the Areopagite, the first bishop of Athens, converted by St. Paul himself) or disreputable (the namesake of the pagan god of wine), depending on how you wanted to think of it.

They had forgotten their founding rule—that list of precepts that governs every religious order. They seemed to get along fine without it, as long as they escaped the notice of the archbishop, which they strove to do.

They had forgotten which side of various schisms they were supposed to be on. Were they against a given heresy, or secretly in support of it? They couldn’t keep track of such things.

Individuals among them tended to forget where they had left an oil lamp, or a quill pen, or a flagon of water. They forgot lots of things, all the time.

But they had not forgotten how to make the famous wine of the Dionysians. They had not forgotten how to grow the grapes; how to crush them into pulp; how to ferment the grape must. How to filter the wine, bottle it, patiently age it. How to pour it out for guests and travelers, wealthy tourists and poor mendicants. How to drink it. How to enjoy it. They had not forgotten that.

Five-Minute Friday: Signs

I was hanging out with my wife last night, and she said, “Whatcha thinking about?”

“Trying to come up with a topic for Five-Minute Friday,” I said.

“Can I help?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Signs,” she said.

“Signs,” I replied. “Signs. I like it! Thanks.”

“No problem,” she said.

I love writing my Five-Minute Friday entries, but my least favorite part is coming up with the topics. I have honestly considered opening a dictionary at random, closing my eyes, putting my finger on the page, and using that entry as the topic. In fact, let’s try that now. I’ll be right back.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The entry is “maximum card,” a philately term that means “a postcard with an enlarged picture of a commemorative postage stamp, with the stamp itself postmarked on the picture, usually the first day of issueeeeeeeeeihjoigtaeilkweoihgaoicmlaiesjlkd— Wha? I’m sorry, I fell asleep as I was typing that because it’s SO BORING. Thank goodness for my wife and her suggestion that we write about signs for Five-Minute Friday.

How to stay awake until the end of the sentence:

1. Write for five minutes, using the topic as an initial prompt. Feel free to deviate from the topic, and feel free to write for longer than five minutes, too.

2. Don’t stop to edit. Don’t worry about typos or grammar or even the quality of the writing. Dig deep or skim the surface, but keep those hands moving for five solid minutes.

3. Feel free to send me your piece to be posted. You can post as a comment on this post, or you can send it to me via the Contact Me link on the main page. I’m happy to post your piece anonymously or pseudonymously, if you wish. This thread will be moderated to ensure a criticism-free zone.

Ready? Five minutes. Go!

the first thing i thought of when she said signs was the ancient roman philosophers and their theory of signs, which had to do with the relationship between smoke and fire. apparently it was important to them to be able to definitively assign an effect to its cause, working backwards so that you could know what was causing the smoke; using causality as a detective would. the sign was bound to the signified in some inextricable way—not just inextricable but explicable, i.e., you could follow the causal chain, you could use that causal relationship to figure something out about the world. the signified created the sign. language has a similar relationship between signified and sign, there is a relationship between a tree and the word “tree,” but the tree doesn’t create the word “tree”; we create that. with language we try to create a relationship like that between smoke and fire. we try to step into that god place and make things relate the way that cause and effect do.