070717 July 17 and 18, 2007 "Psion (Erica) Journal"
Meaningful Lives and me
Occasionally, I read a novel that is more like life than the majority is. I read one a while ago, but unfortunately; I've forgotten it name. The protagonist was a klutz and everything always went wrong. If I wrote a truthful story of my own life, that's what it would be like. A comedy (or tragedy) of errors.
I did not want to write about this. I wanted to write about something meaningful. I had a whole list of topics to explore. I wanted to write about some of the people I admire why I admire them.
For example, Tim Burke. I don't know him; I just met him. This is why I admire him:
• He's an artist. He's a real artist (whatever that means.)* He makes and sells art. He is serious about his work), but playful as well. Best of all, he lives like an artist. He lives in an art community, surrounded by his art. He makes a statement with everything he does.
• He's a poet. He's a performance poet, and he does it well. He recites political poetry, poetry that might make a difference.
• He combines his poetry and his art in performance and seeks to engage the public.
What do I like about him? I think what he's doing is important. I think art is important, I think poetry is important, ad I thin speaking out for what you believe is important. I'd like to be more like that. I'd like to live my art and poetry and speak out on important issues. Instead, I wallow. I wallow in a black hole of stupid wasteful activities.
I tried to order tickets for the Harry Potter movie online because it's newly out, but Fandango kept saying, please enter a valid email address, e0venen though I had. I Xed it out and tried again, numerous times. I called star theaters, emailed Fandango, but to no avail. This mean that in order to assure we had seats, we had to go in really early. More wasted time.
I emailed back and forth about the sale of my mother's house. This is a daily or nearly daily activity that is a singularity of wasted time.
I could go on, but I won't, I won't list all the stupid things I did today instead of something useful and productive, except this. I wanted to have biker buddy's dinner ready the minute he got home from work so we could go right away to Harry potter. I am making grilled yellow fin tuna in a lemon=wine sauce with a fresh veggie mix in a curried win sauce and a side of beans and rive and a fancy complex salad. In the midst of the elaborate preparation, I am reaching for the wine evacuator in the side of the silverware drawer and knock over the bottle of wine. It turns upside down in the silverware and special tools drawer and empties entirely into the drawer before I can rescue it.
Then, it begins draining out the bottom of the opened drawer onto my feet and the floor. Did I mention that what I had wanted to do today was work on my story and take a walk? Spinning through the darkness of Murphy, the day was almost gone, but I thought that once the tuna was marinating and the veggies cut and the sauce made, there's still be a little time to accomplish something.
But instead, I was cleaning a big mess on the counter, in the drawer, on the floor. I had to take all the silver and tools out and wash them, dry them and replace them after cleaning the drawer.
When biker buddy rolled in, I was just finishing cleaning up, and it was time to start the fish and veggies.
Now, I am sitting in the theater, a half hour still to go before they even start the previews. I didn't work on my story and I didn't walk. I did no art. I didn't confront George Bush for ruining the environment or bombing babies. I did nothing useful or meaningful. I wasted a day trying to get Harry Potter tickets, cleaning lost wine
The people who do meaningful, good and useful things, do they have their own private Murphy diverter?* Where can I get one?
Wednesday, July 18, 2007, 10 AM
It's supposed to rain today, but it hasn't started yet. I am out walking around the block because the day ahead will be busy. The air is perfumed and heavy, first with the scent of roses and flowers, then with the cloying and disgusting smell of dryer sheets.
On the corner, I meet the "old" man out watering his lawn by hand. I don't know his name (I probably should ask it0, but he is often out. He's in his eighties and tells me he is ready "to go now," though he seems healthy. He says everyone wants to take care of him. If he can't find a way to contribute and feel useful, he tells me, life is not worth living, but his family doesn't understand that. They want to feed him, because, he says, "they think I can't feed myself." He is sad as he says this. "They're asleep," he tells me, "so I sneak out." He's Polish, and tells me some things in polish.
He tells me I am healthy because I have so much to do. (Sometimes I think my anxiety about all I have to do makes me less healthy.) We talk about the process adopting Piano Boy. As usual, it is difficult to get away and I don't want to be rude, but I tear myself away and continue on around the corner and down under the green tunnel.
Here there are a string of honey locusts where the elms have died and been replaced. They are pretty and lacey and lovely, but not as impressive and "stately" as the elms.
Last night, we saw Harry Potter. Of course, I love the movie, and so did Keith and Graham. I was a little surprised that there were more adults without kids that there were families. I expected some, but not quite so many.
The movie was excellent. It was much darker than the previous Harry Potter movies; not only in theme, but also in the way it was filmed. It was physically darker, which may have contributed to the feeling of darkness; which supported and amplified the dark thoughts and actions. It was filmed with more jaggedness and cuts which gave it a sense of ragged. Doris Umbridge was wonderfully awful. Beyond that, I won't say anything, in case you haven't seen it yet.
Last week, we saw Ratatouille, which I also really liked. It was a different sort of movie, since it was a cartoon, but it covered some difficult and heady themes and I really enjoyed it. I do not always like children's movies; some of them are unbearably obnoxious or simperingly simple and stupid. But Ratatouille was excellent. I never had time to write about.
The scenes where many rats were running gave me a quiver or excitement and dread because I have had in my life several opportunities to see hoards of rats running in the flesh==close enough to me to be a danger. And, a rat has attacked me. It may have been rabid.
I was probably 13 or 14 years old and was raising mice in my garage for a science project. The smell must have attracted rats, and the spilled food. One day, I stood in the center of the garage in shorts, bare feet and a tank top, doing what I no longer remember, when an enormous rat came at me. I was not a girly screamer as a child, but I screamed, and my brother, Scar Boy, grabbed a tool and attacked and killed the rat, "saving m." from an uncertain but unpleasant fate.
It's not the only time someone saved me. My second husband, Nature Man, saved me from certain death. I may have already told this story, but here goes again: we were driving in Wyoming in the mountains, along twisting narrow mountain roads. There was a rock face cliff above us and a sheer cliff below and no guardrail. We could see the outer loops of the road fading off into the distance, the inner loops lost in the indentations between the mountains and ridges. And we could see a lone pink truck approaching at a distance, driving on the wrong side of the road.
We were on the outer edge of the outer loop when the truck came into view on our loop. It sped inexorably toward us, never budging out of our lane. Nature man, driving his Ford Mustang, bore straight toward him, in our own lane. The faded, blotchy old pink truck never wavered. We never wavered. At the very last possible second, Nature man turned the wheels and the car teetered on the brink of the cliff. Teetered and finally came down again on very edge of the road. I turned and looked back. The pink truck had never budged.
Nature Man had saved my life, and for that, I am grateful.
He also saved Violin Girl from a rooster attack. But I know I've told that story. I just want to remind anyone who finds that laughable: rooster's spurs, long sharp, dangerous spurs. They can inflict a lot more damage than the uninitiated might expect.
It has begun raining. Luckily, I am almost home. I walked 23 minutes. Half my required walking, or 1/3 of it, depending on how I count it.
*I am an artist, because I create art.** But I don't often consider myself a real artist because I rarely sell anything and don't live like an artist.
**What is art? What is poetry? Who defines what art is, what poetry is, what a novel is? Can I say for certain that I create art?
Death, Pain and the Sliver 1:05 PM
It stopped raining. I'm out walking again, the second walk of the day. I need to walk 45 minutes a day. If divided, each segment must be at least 15 minutes. There are three ways I can readily divide the time, 3 15=minutes walks, 2 22 and a half minute walks, a 30 and a 15 or 1 45 minute=walk. I sometimes walk more than 15 but less than 22.5 and end up walking more than 45 minutes, but I feel that a little penalty for dividing the walk is justified, because there isn't as much aerobic affect when the walk is divided, but sometimes, my fibromyalgia pain or the elements of my day don't allow 45 minute stretches of time.
The fibromyalgia pain isn't too bad today thank goodness. Instead, I have a little lower back pain that comes from writing as I walk.
Sunday, at Grandbaby boy's birthday party, I was walking barefooted on x's (Henrietta's)* deck and got two large slivers in my foot, one fairly shallow and one deep. Biker Buddy dug them out with his jackknife. He was very gentle, but it still hurt, and I cried out, much to his distress, several times. China Grandma and China Aunt laughed and laughed, not meanly, but sympathetically. My foot hurt all night and the next day, too. Biker Buddy refrained from saying I told you so. He had warned me against going barefooted on that deck, but I persisted.
I continued to go barefoot afterwards, too, but walked more gingerly.
Last night, lying in bed beside Biker Buddy, I asked, "Do you know what I was thinking about when you were digging the splinters from feet Sunday at X's?" He said, No," of course, not poi8nting out, as he might have, how he could not possibly have known what I was thinking.
So I told him. "I was thinking about my death," I said. "I was thinking about pain." I told him that my parents were stoics, and that I grew up in a culture where bravery in the face of pain was highly valued. I had my teeth drilled without Novocain, even when the dentist struck a vein. My parents were stoics until their deaths, with a few notable exceptions.
But I am no longer a stoic and I am no longer brave. Something happened that turned me into a wimp. Now, I am very afraid of pain, and because of that, I am afraid of dying. I am also a bit afraid of death, but that is another matter.
I wondered aloud to Biker buddy and we lay in bed together, if the thing that switched me from stoic to wimp was my fibromyalgia pain. I am in pain constantly, a pain I have to live with, day in and day out. I try not to complain about too much. Other people get tired of hearing about it.
And they say horribly mean thoughtless things, like it's OK to have pain if you have it every day, because you get used to it.
NO, you don't get used to it--I don't anyway. It hurts. It still hurts. It hurts day in and day out. It hurts just as much today as it did yesterday (although it ebbs and flows, rises and falls, it is always with me.) When the pain is at a certain level, it is just as painful as it was 20 years ago. Maybe more so.
I get tired of the pain, it wears me out, is stresses me; it makes me grouchy and irritable. I don't sleep well, and that makes my tolerance to pain and irritation worse.
Sometimes I feel almost OK. When I am doing art, writing a story, working on a poem, having sex, exploring and discovering, I can forget the pain for a while. But when I stop, when I lay down at night, there it is, still with me.
"I don't think dying's going to be much fun," I say to Biker Buddy. Understatement of the day.
"No," he agrees, "I don't expect so."
"Or getting old, either," I add.
"No," he agrees sadly.
"But we have right now, and we have each other," I say. I wrap me arms around him, and he around me.
"I love you, Biker Buddy," I say. He says he loves me and gives me a squeeze and we drift off.
The rain has held off, allowing me to complete my second walk.
As I walk up the driveway, a series of explosions dog my steps. Bomb bags. Yesterday, Piano Boy came downstairs from cleaning his room, all excited. "Look, Mom, look what I found!"
He waved them by me so fast, I couldn't see what they were and dashed outside.
A few minutes later, he returned. "They aren't as much fun," has said, sadly, "as they used to be."
"One of the trade-offs of growing up," I replied. One of the many small deaths on the way to extinction. Now every time I go outside, the little bombs blow up under my feet. Bang, bang. BANG. Guess I'm still alive.
I walked 23 more minutes. I could quite now, or do another round, but it's started to rain again. It's hot, humid, and wet.
Not only that, but before I do any more walking, I need to clean the kitchen. Biker Buddy comes home at 5, Piano Boy has his piano lesson at 5:30 (we have to leave right away to drive there), and Biker Buddy will be making dinner tonight, when we return. He will not appreciate, when he is tired and hungry, a messy kitchen.
When I get inside, Enahs-sha, one of Piano boy's friends, asks what will happen if we take rocky from his cage. I close the kitchen doors, and offer Rocky my finger. I lift him out and he sits on Enahs-sha's finger. Then he flies to my head and when Enahs-sha attempts to retrieve him, he flies up out of reach on Susan's "I'm in the garden sign." After a while, we manage to retrieve him.
This reminds me of Sissy and I want to put the rat incident into one of the stories.
*Blogger Names
I need to think of a blogger name for X. Finding names for the characters in my life for the blogs is one of the most difficult things about blogging. No one wants their real names used when I write about them, but the wrong alias can offend them even more. I recently learned that it is not PC to call someone with ancestors from the Far East "Oriental," now you need to refer to them as Asian. I don't mean to be insensitive; I just didn't know that. So if I refer to certain people as China Grandma (because she's Chinese and a Grandmother), is that wrong? I can't call her by name and I don't know her well enough to know some personal traits that might otherwise distinguish her? How can I? She speaks SPANISH and I don't. I speak American English and she does not. She is ethnic Chinese, but lived in South America. That is interesting, but it's her story, and I don't know that much about it. I don't even know her first name.
And all that has little to do with the alias for X, except to elucidate my confusion on the issue. X takes lots of pictures, should I call her photowoman? She's an excellent seamstress, should I call her sewing woman? No name can express the whole of what someone is, and any name based on a characteristic immediately devalues (or at last de-emphasizes) everything else someone is.
One blogger calls me poet-woman. I like that name, a lot. But I am also a novelist, short story writer, artist, photographer, mother, daughter, wife, mountain climber, hiker, snow-shoer, gardener, blogger. Still, Poet=woman pleases me. I think that blogger means it lovingly. What can I say lovingly about X? None of the "handles" I've tried to apply as aliases so far feel right.
Biker Buddy, Piano Boy, Violin Girl, none of those seem quite right, either. But at least they are something; I have nothing for X. And I figure, like members of some tribes rename themselves from time to time, I can rename the people in my life and myself if I need to.
I think maybe I will temporarily call X Henrietta. X = L = Ingles Wilder = In Wildness is the Preservation of the World = Thoreau = Henry David = Henrietta. It has nothing much to do with her character, but rather with her real name, but not in such a way that most people would prolly guess the connection or the real name unless they happen to read this post and hardly anyone reads my blog posts.
I'm a failure as a blogger, because I'm not that interesting and because I do not post daily or regularly. So why do I do it? Dunno. Because I like to write and I prefer to do it on my own time table, not someone else's.
I walked around the block--twice--and now I realize that biker Buddy has no beer and I could have gotten him some at The Village market and carried it back in my backpack. Oh well. Issues, issues!
I've been cleaning the kitchen. I made three or four trips to the garage with Biker Buddy's empties and one to empty Rocky's seeds and the whole time, a Red Admiral Butterfly was hovering by the out-vent for the dryer. Why? We don't use dryer sheets.
Speaking of names, I've named this computer, the new Psion that's not a Psion, that's an Ericsson. I'm calling it—her—Erica. Lyra's companion may be male, but my muses are all female at the moment, or most of them.
