Tag: writing

Posted on

Decay Doldroms for the Season: Ten for Today


September 19, 2016

I haven’t written in a while, not here on the blog anyhow. Not for ten minutes or any minutes. My time has been taken up with ghost blogging and raising some cash. Writing under deadline drains me. That and mid-night walks with the puppy. Not sure how I’m still standing and working this late hour.

Jump starting the ten minute write is just what I need to get my groove back. I fear the return of the malaise, the block—the doldrums. Don’t want to go back there where I could not write a word as my mind swore there were no more to write. The mind trap viciously snaps shut. Sometimes it feels as if there is nothing to be done about it.

Another September, approaching fall, which has always been my favorite season, full of the color of dying, a ravaging display of decay and splendorous leaf parades (not that we get that much here in Southern California) and summer heat relief. There will be an Indian summer here in a bit—if the weather isn’t totally deranged as it has been (no such thing as global warming). But then the crisp Halloween night will remind me that it’s fall, time to bring the crockpot down from its box atop the refrigerator.

I like cold weather foods—roasted root vegetables and butternut squash soups and pumpkin everything (not latte, please)—and I like cold weather wear: big bulky sweaters, leather boots and wool beanies. No, there’s no snow here, but we can look like we are expecting it at any moment. Pullover sweaters are the reason for the season.

The year winds down. The count down to my most unfavorite time of the year, holidays and forced cheer, overspending and time pressures. This year I may find myself alone for the holidays with my family going overseas, but I think I might welcome that more than dread it. Perhaps not on Christmas Eve, but that’s never been my tradition, except for my kids’ sake, and so I’m always slightly estranged from the spirit and light of it.

I might actually get time off without the hassles of shopping—my least favorite thing to do—and agonizing over selecting, wrapping and presenting gifts. I’m not a Scrooge. Just over it after too many seasons. Ah, who am I kidding? I am Scroogie.

Posted on

Puppies, Language and Gender: Ten for Today


September 14, 2016
 
Between classes in the adjunct faculty lounge, I researched a little for those 600-word blog posts due in a couple days and then decided to lie a bit on the couch before my class in an hour. Teaching a two-hour afternoon class and a four-hour night class, Wednesdays are double espresso shots over ice with soy milk days. It’s just too long. And with the sleepless night discovering that 5-week old Husky puppies howl like wolves when they’re small, scared and lonely at night, I almost went for a third shot. That might have made me jump up and down in class, scaring students.
 
The lounge/work station/office is usually empty when I enter with maybe one or two other adjuncts tapping keys or eating lunch. Today there were two, then just me for a stretch, until five minutes ago when the mom-toned, 50-ish, Spanish teacher came in with the young Vietnamese student. She encourages the young man with the thick Vietnamese accent in her thick Spanish accent. She is gentle. He is intent, trying to understand nuance, detail and idiosyncrasy of the language. He frets over Spanish gender words.
 
For good reason. Gender confuses me too these days. I agree with Judith Butler and many who followed after her: gender stretches out over the arced spectrum of identity, biology and psyche. Binaries are a relic from a bygone era. But the English language hasn’t caught up to reality, how people live. It lags. Pronouns shift; grammar is slow to follow. The plural “they” is now more apt a singular designation for the individual, neuter, than a plural. 
But aren’t we all a plurality of identities? Ethnicity, nationality, biology, anatomy, culture, class, IQ, ideology, lifestyle, and a myriad of other particulars–including gender? Tracking gender in language, on government forms and in questionnaires is obsolete.  

Posted on

It never rains in Southern California: Ten for Today

September 12, 2016

The deserted parking lot on a Monday night at 7:50 p.m., one lone woman standing in an empty store, peering out the window into the low-lit night, it looks like the opening scene of a horror movie. Time freezes as the camera zeroes in on the woman’s catatonic face, drugged with the silent motionless night. The light peering from the cracked-open door leading to the store back room casts menace into the scene.

Will the spell be broken?

The painted prancing orange Corgi silhouette on the dog training parlor next door leaps to no one, nowhere. Odd. No clear launching or landing points for the dog–seems implausible. I’m not sure I’d take my dog there with that emblematic greeting: teach your dog to leap from nowhere to nowhere. Eerie and unsafe.

Seems pointless.

Like paying someone to write lame stories—pumping her creativity, not the store coffers. What should I do? Take to the boulevard with one of those huge arrows to twirl, dancing customers into the store or causing accidents by the distraction?

Who would mind the store?

Perhaps the old man picking through the trash in front of the store could keep an eye on the place while I wrestle up business. Ah, but he’s destroyed the horror movie ambiance with his fruitless search. But no, not picking through the trash (that’s reserved for the 50-something bedraggled woman in the wheelchair right around 9 p.m.), he’s throwing out trash and heading in!

“Did you see it?!!”

“What? See what?! (Yes! Some action heading my way).

“The rain. It’s raining. I even had to use my wipers to swipe it away once.”

 
Pixabay/rain

Posted on

Fear and Loathing: Ten for Today


September 11, 2016

“I’m sorry, so, so sorry!”

She apologized like this several times over the two-hour class that had begun at 7:20 a.m. that Tuesday in 2001. Her words flew automatically, frantically from her mouth—apologizing. But she might as well have wrung her hands or put her face in her hands, saying she didn’t understand—like the rest of us.

We were stunned. I made them write about it. Some could just lay their heads atop their papers on those small college desk/table units. I was teaching a comp class in the then Home Ec building on campus. It has since changed to Writer’s Row.

The kid from Texas was the first to read. I still imagine him with a cowboy hat on his head, but that could not be true, just too stereotypical. His writing was full of anger and blame. He didn’t say he hated Muslims, but he knew someone had to pay. Something had to be done about who got into the country and how. Fear.

Someone else read. And then she said it again. The young twenty-ish Syrian woman with the hijab, pretty face, stand-out from the first day of class a couple weeks before because of her dark coverings, often full body black and flowing.

She was in tears. She faced the class with pleading in her eyes, distorting her cringed face, tight and angled with panic. Pain. Fear. No, they won’t understand. Saudi Arabians the news plastered over the burning tower images.

Before I left for school that morning, so early that I sleep-walked into the spare room where from 5 to 8 my husband watched the market, I first saw but did not register. Seeing me enter his lair, he pointed to the burning towers on the t.v. and said, “Look at this.” I looked. I then turned to the shower while thinking that it was too early for disaster movies and wasn’t he supposed to be working, anyhow?

When I came back into the room, showered and dressed, he said, “No, look at this. The second tower just blew.” And I looked. My mouth fell open involuntarily though my brain barely comprehended. How could it have happened? Why? How? I had to go teach.

By the third time she said it, I spoke firmly but with a slight chuckle, “Unless you had something to do with it, you don’t have to apologize. Though I understand why you want to.” She quieted.

It wasn’t long afterward, maybe three days after the united great good will of the U.S. turned to the business of blame and retribution. The airstrikes were already in the making. And there at the college, a political science teacher was disciplined, maybe even resigned, after pointing in the direction of a Middle Eastern looking group of students in the 200-seat forum during his lecture about something other than the events of the previous days and boomed, “You, you did it.”

Posted on

Fat Knees: Ten For Thursday


September 8, 2016
 
I’ve always had a rocky relationship with my knees. Maybe it was my mother who first brought notice to the knee knocking. She once remarked that she had fleshy knees. I have the same knees. The surrounding knee flesh on the inner leg side puffs noticeably, like a mutant swollen skin tag.
 
Luckily, my era saw the maxi and midi skirts, either ankle length or below the knee length skirts and dresses. I recently emptied a closet full of midi skirts I wore professionally with a smart suit jacket, the uniform I wore to my law office. Like the law practice itself, those styles belong to a bygone era.
 
Now the mini and maxi remain, the latter my preference of course. The knees.
 
I recently wore a mini-ish dress, a sleeveless, painted, loosely-body-conforming sunset dress I bought in Hawaii a dozen or so years ago. I took a long look at my knees peering out from just under the hem of the midnight blue portion of the dress (sunset waters), and still did not like my fleshy knees, especially now that they’re accompanied by crepe-y skin sliding down to meet them. Aging ain’t pretty.
 
But it could be. While I know I’m perpetuating the cultural lore of youth beauty worship by disliking my knees, hiding them most of my life, I still wore the dress–with only a little trepidation. The beauty of aging lies in Helen Mirren style fuck-its. The gorgeous feeling of not giving a shit. But maybe that trite image–the rebel 50-something–is culturally produced too.
 
I’d like to take my fat knee to the crotch of cultural dictates, the media and marketing agencies. This fifty-something raises her age-spotted middle finger and says, “Fuck you!”

Posted on

Published on Life in 10 Minutes


A Room of my Own, a ten minute write I published here was published today on the site that inspired me to begin the daily habit of ten minutes to drain-write. I’m finding the creative sprints have opened possibilities, even whistle beckoning to begin or finish those bigger projects. 
Read the piece here. Hope you enjoy… Again. 

Peace. 

Posted on

Breaking Down the Wall: Ten for Yesterday


September 6, 2016

The music never stops outside and inside my head. Sometimes the melody pounds in time with a pumping, thumping drum beat of a heart. Sometimes the violins screech and thrust me deep in a Psycho movie scene, stabbed over and over again with high pitched wails and screams, decibels higher than eardrum capacity.

But it’s just the neighbor toddlers yowling and the dog yapping. And that spinal column creep of approaching slippered steps of an interruption about to happen. My neck tenses awaiting the final knuckle knock knock, a rapid five or six in a row.

And all the while, the pings and bings of phones, IPads and computers tick away at flesh, flying skin chips scattered everywhere. My attention shattered in shard millenia. That’s what it’s like to write at home. Life music blasting me and my mind all day.

But my mind has steeled itself impenetrable against so much more than noise before this. My constitution has weathered barn storms and hurricanes far greater, like three, grueling, sleepless days of exams preceded by years and years of mind-numbing tedious study. And then untold hours, thousands upon thousands, invested in a slow-bleeding, fast burning career life-suckingly anchored, financially and personally, that eventually landed me inside the court house walls.

Dismantling a person brick by brick, thorn by thorn, thought by thought, nerve by nerve, takes a long time. I got away with a quick turn, only 56 years building and breaking. Some take a life time. And it’s not over for me—or anyone. We turn like the worms we are.

No lives matter, not in the sense that we think they do. They merely breathe and do and be—just like everything else. The rock and me, we stream steady, hold our ground and pass unnoticed by most. Human fate, being just another assembly of matter and particles. I don’t understand why it feels so different to be human than to be a rock.

Posted on

Dear John…Poem 20

Dear John:

You’ve told me a man must have everything.

He must have her love and affection, trust

and cares, woes and fantasies, body and belief.

He must contain and compel her dreams, speak

her mind with her, beside her and be her too.

He must have her body, entirely his own, as she

equally partakes of his, fully accessible any time.

He must give her solace and she his support.

They must build things and break things down,

together, working as a team, united as one.

There must be abundant love everlasting, you say,

and undying even beyond death and delivery.

John, you’ve claimed possession of her opinions,

her bodily secretions, and her style of clothing.

You’ve demanded her attention and hands, her

movements during the day and night, her arms

ever clasping yours, enveloping you enveloping her…

Dear John, my dearest of all, love can’t be swapped

and traded, quantified and qualified, bought and sold.

Love is no cure, can’t fill the gaps, cracks or ailments,

not those inherent or fostered in the care of those who

thought love was power and hurt and discipline and

control, John, mere control that fear spills through you.

Love is not for keeps, never on sale, bundled or peddled.

Especially, love is not had but kindled, like wood fires

warmth and sustenance, dazzling and mysterious, in

properties known and magical too. Love has no rules.

John, let me, if you will, teach you all I know about love.

Love–

Blog at WordPress.com.