What's in a name?

Daily Write: Falling

I'm falling asleep as I write this. So tired today, I nodded off in the middle of working, around 4:30, and was snapped awake, full of adrenaline, by the ringing of the telephone. By 9, things had gotten dire; I was trying to read, and memorize, the NH Boater Safety course... so unimaginably dull it's no wonder I had trouble retaining consciousness. Somehow forced myself off of the sofa at 10, rousted Bentley and got him out for his nighttime bathroom break... I wonder if he thinks his name is "chicken," since that's what I croon to him when he's out like a light and making no move toward the door. The odor of these roasted chicken strip treats I bribe him with is like smelling salts for a Basset Hound. Got Ben back in, and got him settled into bed, and took a little while to make myself ready: tooth-brushing, medicine-taking, the usual. And now I'm in bed, and literally one eye is slanting closed, and my fingers aren't working very well, and I'm fighting like hell to keep my vision from going double and cross-eyed on me, and ... oops both eyes closed there, and I don't even know what I was talking about a second ago. An interesting little thought experiment here... typing with my eyes closed while I'm literally falling asleep at the keyboard. I wonder if the same sorts of crazy half-truths half-fantasies that I relish, and that sometimes visit me while I'm falling, falling, deeper into unconsciousness... I wonder if they'd appear while I'm typing, and if I could type them out here if they did. Methinks I have another idea for yet another writing project, which isn't so smart given that I can't even keep up with this one... doing my daily write while I'm about 75% asleep at the laptop.

The New Ride

Apologies for the Navel-Gazing...

Fair warning that I was doing some serious navel-gazing today, and ended up writing up some blather that probably isn't worth posting, and yet I can't seem to delete the draft so... here goes...

How do people who don't have creative pursuits define themselves, especially for others? For me, my photographs are a visual representation of something unique about me: they're products of my viewpoint, and examples of how I see the World around me. My writing is a physical (insofar as it can be printed out) representation of me: a sheaf of paper with printed type summarizing the thoughts in my head, demonstrating my ability to compose those thoughts into phrases and sentences, to influence others' thoughts.

For artists, writers, musicians, and other creative types, the physical, visual, and audible output of their creativity allows them to share pieces of themselves with others, in a way that helps to define them for others, and themselves. These creative products are unique, and so provide an intricacy of definition that might otherwise be unattainable.

If one is lacking a creative outlet in life, how does one then define oneself? One can say, "I do this," or "I think this," or "I am this," of course. I enjoy the outdoors. I am a dog-lover. I earn my living as a software engineer. These are definitions of me, but each on a level that is extremely superficial compared to those that can be accessed through creativity and its products, which serve as a window into the inner workings of a person's mind and heart.

Creativity, then, seems to have this as one of its purposes: to break down barriers between oneself and others, by attempting to communicate the incommunicable core of one's introspective mind; to cure the incurable solitude of existence, and the inability to be truly and completely known to another human being.

Are people without creative outlets simply less needy of this sort of deeper connection with others? Put another way, do creative outlets arise, and remain driven by, a person's insistent need to find connection?

Daily Write: Hazy Hot & Humid

Even in this oppressive heat wave, she started her days the same way as always: two cups of hot coffee, black with plenty of sugar, while perched on the swiveling chrome stool in the old-timey diner downtown. The Red Robin, it'd been run by her uncle Jimmy these last 20 years or more, a streamlined 1950's aluminum trailer-cum-railcar sort of a thing, dimly lighting up the dying mill town with its flickering neon "Open" sign. This morning, with the outside temperature already well into the upper 80s, the humidity was practically drinkable. The big old steel fan blowing loudly from the corner of the dining area wasn't doing much to improve things inside; it was more sound than fury. The heat of the griddle and the smoke coming from the frying bacon and sausage served to stick the vinyl seat cover to the backs of her legs, and conspired to make her not want to move, ever again. Even raising the cup to her lips was a titanic effort, as a rivulet of sweat ran down the small of her back, down past the waistband of her jeans.

Daily Write: Lighter Than Air

The ethereal bits of ash wafted upwards, dancing playfully on their way to oblivion. Mesmerizing, this process, both of destruction and renewal. She was rapt, watching the flames licking, the sparks shooting skyward suddenly with a hiss and pop, and the silently floating rising ash. Her cheeks glowed rosy, and the light flickered, reflected, in her dark eyes.

It all happened rather faster than she imagined it would have. Everything did. It took a shockingly short time to figure out that this was the necessary course of action. Only slightly longer to decide what materials she'd need. (It seemed completely cliche to douse things in gasoline and toss a match onto a volatile puddle. And yet, that was the most readily-available way to get things done, and what did she care about cliches at this point? Or consequences. She didn't give a shit, and so she went down to the Mobil on the corner, bought a little portable gas tank, and filled it.) It took her no time at all to get here, and mere minutes to decide what had to go first... where this needed to start.

Time did slow, markedly, as she dragged the match head across the friction strip on the matchbook. She heard the grinding of each grain of the strip against each granule of flammable match material, one at a time, played out like an improvisational melody, culminating in the rush of the ignition. Two deep, rhythmic breaths, lungs filling with astringent fumes, while she held the lit match aloft, staring into it. Then, quick as a wave breaking suddenly, folding over and crashing down upon itself, she dropped the match onto the wet floorboards, turned, and walked out, the heat already strong at her back.

Daily Write: Constrained

It was just about Summer, and things were starting to take off. The garden, weeks ago a patch of dirt with just the first sign of daffodils striking through the earth, now a proliferation of leafy green of all shades, with the occasional colorful flower. The wisteria climbing up onto the front porch had looked dormant until only two weeks before, and then quite suddenly greened. A day later, the new shoots began to push and pull their way out from the old vine, and now, she carefully coaxed them, each morning, to curl around the white wooden railings in spirals. There seemed to be no stopping these tendrils, which grew by inches every day; all she could do was attempt to train them, and hope they obeyed her will.

Daily Write: I Feel Trapped

The snow kept falling; a little more, every day. Just a couple of hours of light flakes drifting quietly to the ground from the steel grey skies, it seemed innocuous enough. For the first month, it was novel, even fun. I was living in The Great White North! It was remote, and a little forbidding. It felt adventurous!

By January, when the days were short, twilight arriving around 3:30 PM and complete darkness enveloping the outside world by a quarter after four, it was getting tiresome at its best, and deeply oppressive at its worst. The accumulation just kept piling up, as the days above freezing were few and far between. Soon, the only paths one could take, walking around campus, were those that had been cleared by the snowblowers.

A strange sensation, to stand in an open quadrangle, wide and expansive, and lined with beautiful old elms, and feel intensely claustrophobic... a guinea pig running through a maze... dorm to class to lab to home to dorm to library to dorm again... each day more night than anything, and full of bone-chilling cold, and always, the snow.

Daily Write: Femme Fatale

Oh joy, the return to the daily write after a week-long hiatus, and it's with a prompt that's pretty much the absolute antithesis of me. Yeah yeah, I could take this as a challenge, to really break outside of the bonds of my own head, and my own experience, and just go for it: total and complete fiction. But, I'm way too hung up on things being believable, and have absolutely no confidence that I could write anything remotely credible about any kind of femme fatale.

I'm the chick who, trying to look cool for my crush of the moment, trips over her own feet or walks headlong into a door jamb. Shit, I still have crushes; crushes are not the stuff of femme fatales.

I'm the chick whose baggy jeans fall down and need to be hitched up all the time, and I can probably count the times I've worn a dress, in all my 33 years, on the fingers of two hands.

I'm the chick with perpetually skinned knees, and cuts and callouses on my hands and fingers, and I've never had a pedicure.

I'm the chick who wears sequined Converse sneakers, and has never, ever worn true high heels. Black velvet Doc Martins are probably my best attempt at femme fatale footwear.

I'm the chick who once tried to smoke cigarettes while going through a dark intellectual period in college, and who ended up smoking a few back to back, and inhaling too deeply, quite literally turning green. I spent the night intensely dizzy, and vomiting.

I'm the chick who drives a practical Subaru Forester, with my goofball Basset Hound's head hanging out the passenger window, ears flapping in the breeze.

Yeah, I'm pretty much the polar opposite of femme fatale. I'm a tomboy joker most days, and on my very coolest, ultimate hipster days, I might almost attain the label geek chic. And yeah, since I believe in the old "write what you know" adage, I guess this is what I've come up with. Better luck with tomorrow's prompt, I suppose.

Do Not Eat/Sell!

Love this sign at the ice cream window at Town Docks, Meredith, NH. I was thinking of eating/selling these cones, but was helpfully informed as to why that would be a bad idea: