Tag Archives: amwriting

Jaws, Cinematic and Beyond

07 Friday Jul 2017

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When we were young, sometimes mom and dad would let us watch TV in their bedroom. Perhaps there was a show on the TV in the living room that we were not allowed to see… or maybe it was some night the babysitter had the remote control so me and brother would invade mom and dad’s room and watch the tube.  One night I recall watching “Jaws” in their room and I was shocked by the things I saw. Sheltered, I’d never seen anything like that, and I’m sure Mom would never approve, but there it was in all its toothy, briny glory.  Funny, I never had shark nightmares then or now. Only Godzilla remains my subconscious nemesis.

I’ve watched Jaws so many times I can’t count over the years, either for the pleasure of dialogue or some background noise. Rarely do I watch the movie these days with eyes fully focused on the screen, surveying and drinking in the landscape.   Last night was a game changer.  The Virginia Aquarium and theater is 20 minutes away (as the GPS crow flies), and I left an hour before the movie. I mean, who needs an hour to get 20 miles? However, I forgot the daily congestion on the interstate. With some dodging and deep breaths I found a nice parking place, got my ticket and discovered the movie had only started 3 minutes ago instead of 15.  I was lucky.

The screen is enormous, the sound overpowering. I wished to have a seat center, rear, but I didn’t get there soon enough to have that choice. I wound up kind of center and a chair in the aisle.  It took me a while to get used to the enormity of sound and vision. I brought my knitted poncho because I knew I’d be so cold in there, and I used it to hide behind the flesh-rending scenes. (I’ve danced that dance before, and I don’t need to dance that scene anymore.)  Sometimes the sound was too loud, so I had to close off my ears.   The screen was bigger than our house. Chief Brody’s fingernail was the size of a soccer ball.

On this enormous screen I saw things I hadn’t before and felt grateful and blessed as a writer to see them. Why didn’t I notice the blood on Quint’s hands as he interrogated Hooper? I knew that Spielberg provided the voice of the Coast Guard at one point but never actually heard him, recognized him until last night.  Quint’s fisherman chair was beaten and worn in ways I never noticed.  Robert Shaw removed a tooth, put it in an envelope and never put it back.  The audience was quiet for this movie. No cellphones went off, no babies cried. I wonder if we were all here for the same, tense reason, wanting to fill the same need–nostalgia, bigger than life? I wonder how many came just to hear Mr. Shaw deliver his soliloquy, that soliloquy, equal only to Hamlet?

I heard some young people in the parking lot who said they’d never seen the movie before. I wanted to ask them all kinds of questions, but did not approach because I was afraid my enthusiasm and need for answers might make me look like a crazy person.  I wanted to know why they came, what did they think of it, do they believe great whites are vengeful, and so on. Instead, I drove home into a sky filled with a thrilling fight in my south, Thor smiting his foes in the clouds.  I headed “west” on the interstate towards home and the sky ahead was filled with high, building clouds and flashes of lightning that could make one believe the gods are at war, but there was no sound and no rain. As I drove with windows down, a fighter jet came low across the road as I fought to keep my hair out of my eyes with my left hand, maneuvering lane to lane with my right on a homeward trajectory.

As I drove, I secretly wrote the thing about this movie and a certain moment, wondering where it will lead and hoping it will go.  I won’t tell you here, because it’s still in progress.  I watched a movie, enormous in story and physicality. I drove home on dark roads watching a storm flash orange in blue clouds.  I am blessed, again.

Sugar Effs, Breakfast of Champions*

02 Sunday Jul 2017

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There is moment in the movie Sound of Music where Dame Commander Julie Andrews sings, arms outstretched, twirling around in a gorgeous field of flowers surrounded by cold, impressive mountains.  The internet latched onto the scene and uses it to create memes (amusing item[s]…captioned picture or video or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media — Merriam Webster.)  I do not know if Dame Andrews has seen any of these memes, but something tells me that a woman married to Blake Edwards would find them amusing at the very least.

I had that meme, captioned in bold white letters that said, “Look at all the Effs I do not give” in mind when I wrote my previous post. It was appropriate at the moment, and I’m sure it will be again every now and then.  I didn’t include the meme hoping the words would get the message across.  Isn’t everyone tired of blunt internet tools banging on our weary brains? Well some of us are anyway.

I think about Dame Andrews and the life she’s had so far: her tough childhood, iconic roles, the loss of her soulmate Blake Edwards, and the needless, criminal loss of her singing voice. There’s a woman who could spend a lot of time cursing the darkness.  There was a pause in her creative life, but she never completely succumbed to all the effs she could not have given, a la the memes.  She continues to sing, act, and she’s written piles of books (32) on her own and with her daughter. She continues to be a woman, mother, grandmother, actress, writer, and everyone who meets her says the same: she is as positive and wonderful in person as she is onscreen.  Authentic through and through.

There is irony (and some humor) in using a happy woman singing a happy song in a meme that expresses displeasure at best, misanthrope worst. Neither of us knows what it feels like to be hanging on by a fingernail to life or sanity, but we’ve had our share of life things that we work through in equal and unequal measures, no matter where we are on the globe. She reminds me that the trick is knowing how to hold onto happiness, blessings, caring, giving — life — no matter how effed up things feel.  So I take a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, the stuff that reminds me it’s time to go back to giving a Royal Eff, to get focused and stay focused and not let the paltry shit get me down, to keep the pen moving and the love flowing no matter what the volcano is spewing. Isn’t that what winners, those persons who find happy moments and contentment in their lives no matter how small, wind up doing after all?

 

*Perspective, yo.

Tales From The Mattress

26 Friday May 2017

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And there it was, through the struggle of the night, another long Goldilocks night where I’m too hot, I’m too cold, but oh, please, bring me just right….  I awoke in the middle of the night and remembered that story I used to tell myself when I was little.  Actually, I was telling my stuffed animals, for they were good listeners, but I am getting ahead of myself.

My brother and I went from cribs to bunk beds, nothing in between.  Brother got the bottom bunk which means I got the top.  It was so high up, though, and Mom was worried about me falling out of bed.  Dad had every Craftsman tool known to man (or at least it seemed that way to a little girl who liked following him around, wanting to help spackle or anything else he thought I was capable of doing.)  Dad brought home a ginormous piece of wood, longer than the bunk bed and thicker than a pizza box.  He drew lines and sawed the ends into curves, sanded, then he varnished the shit out of that thing which stunk to high heaven and set off my asthma, naturally.  When it was done, he fitted the smooth, dark wood piece over the edges of my bunk so that it would keep me from falling out during the night.

I accumulated stuffed animals over the years and I lined them up, just so, at the head of my bed.  They were my cabinet, my aides du camp, the only thing helping me through Godzilla / tornado dreams — or worse.  Mom used to read us bedtime stories like an orator on a stage, me high in the balcony.  I used to make up stories as I lay in the laps of my dear stuffed animals, and they listened.  And I remembered one of those stories last night.  You know.  It’s the one about the dragons.

My goal is to write the story today.  I don’t know what I will do with it when it’s done.  There are so many places I could hobble up to and beg they take my paltry thing and publish it.  But it all starts here. In my bed.  The place where I still sleep with dragons.

Vague Confessions

12 Wednesday Apr 2017

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I won’t advertise what I won’t deliver. There’s just too much of that. One of my pissed off pet peeves.

The prompt asked for Confessions, and I see some people lining up to willingly to release, divulge what they’ve been carrying. I am suspicious of their words because I don’t know if they’re writing for relief, in truth, or notoriety.   I’ll join in eventually and confess some vanilla thing that I can share willingly and truthfully. Always truthful. But the real stuff…

The real stuff is is what you haven’t seen yet.  It’s in my journals, in my dreams, on the sand. I’m withholding all my truths because I can’t trust you face to face.  I’ll put it down in a poem instead, eventually.  I’m still working on shedding the vague for the bold, hard truths.  I am told that the best writing is the hardest, when it’s the most real, the hardest crash and burns.

Enter Marina Abramovic. Man, I wish I had the chance to sit across from her and challenge myself in her eyes.  I use her to guide my writing. What is raw and naked instead of what is shy, camouflaged, and afraid.

I will write Confessions today that are meaningless, that adjoin the masses who just had to get some stuff off their chests, their hearts, their beings.  Meanwhile, I will scribble truths in notebooks I can barely decipher, hoping to find the right time and place to let the real all go.

Sleepless In Virginia

05 Monday Dec 2016

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“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” — popularized by Benjamin Franklin

Sometimes I go to bed early because I just can’t stand another minute of being awake in this world. I set aside little projects, put my pretty glass of water on the shelf near the bed so as not to bother my neighbor with thirsty midnight wanderings that might creak on her ceiling, and hope to read until oblivion.  Sometimes it comes quickly, but most times not so much.

After looking back on the day, the days, the weeks, months, a lifetime, my mind cannot rest because it feels like all the things it wants to say, to shout, to megaphone, telegraph, all the change bonfires it wants to set or incite mean nothing.  Smug minds are sleeping cozy in their righteousness while I lie awake thinking about injustice, or tiny personal wounds or the greater ones that deforest this thing called humanity keep after me. I can’t sleep when everything feels so wrong, even while counting my blessings, acknowledging with deep, deeper gratefulness for all these things.  I am safe, warm, and fed in my bed grinding my teeth, feeling afraid for the future of your great grandchildren, and yes, still sorrowing for the vacancies, lapses, and longings in my own life.  I cannot sleep even though I count a rosary of gratefulness, though I delve down into breathing and the art of silence, hoping to form a memory palace, but the mental noise is still too great. I cannot sleep because I despair, wanting with a need so great it grinds sinews for I cannot go back and undo my mistakes.  That the world would be a better place if it would just listen to me and do as I say, because I am right, and the shock when I realize I’m no better than you are with that kind of controlling attitude.  I can’t sleep because I realize how wrong I have been, so all there is left to do is get up and write.

It’s hard to let go of despair when I realize that writing about peace, love, decency, honor, sacrifice, family, gratitude, amounts to what feels like a hilla beans. Hell, if it were a hilla beans at least it would offer a chance for somebody to plant and grow and share sustenance.   I feel like all I got now is Times New Roman type on a white page seen by few, something that provides no sustenance, in a world where women and children sift through garbage because it’s their normal, knowing if I introduced them to clean water in plastic bottles, grocery store food, amazon delivers  you things you didn’t know you wanted, media that tells you that you are unwashed and need to better yourself, that you need a constition and a militia to save you from poverty, perhaps I am the crazy one, and you were better left in your simple, scavenging life.    I can’t sleep because the things I want to say to people who do not matter conflict with the things that do. I can’t fix the whole world though I want to, like it’s my job or something, and I’m trying to figure out the best way to make my shade satisfied in the end. Perhaps no shade goes to rest satisfied?  Or perhaps they all do because they know that this earthly, mortal mess in between mighty fields of beautiful ain’t nothing but a thang.

I need to sleep in the dirt and drink from a stream and walk farther than I meant to because I am not a resident of this land.  I need to sleep beneath great black blankets of night and peeping stars, flashing skies that observe me peeing behind a stand of trees because life is just so much better when it comes by the cupful. No one of us can right the tilt of the world, its temperature, its depth.  How can I convince the rest of the world that we can coexist, if only we respect?

Healing The Hero

17 Sunday Jul 2016

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“Does this pen write,” she begins in her journal with purple ink, finepoint faint and scratchy.

She lifts her eyes from the page to watch a young man walking back to his apartment, face upturned to the skies. He looked like a man in the middle of a heartbreak needing to hear the answer, and hear it now. She watches him retreat into his apartment, slamming the door.

“Does this pen write,” she asks of her journal once more.

She posits on the page that it’s not a compelling tale unless Bambi’s mother dies.  Nobody wants to read that once upon a time there was a good queen and a good king who raised a perfect prince, that nobody lied and nobody died. Where’s the grit in the reader’s teeth for characters they love to hate, turning pages in hopes it will all work out in the end?  Is our need for grit what drives some literary imperative that the tale must be tragic—or worse–have an ambiguous end where the reader gets to decide?  “Well is it,” she demands her journal answer. It remains silent; a rock instead of crystal ball.

“Does this pen write,” she asks her journal one morning, but the answer was unclear.  There’s a movie reel playing in her head that hisses and skips, showing her flashback scenes from the bad old days that reopens old wounds, and sometimes it plays so loudly it drowns out the world.  It’s what bleeds through the books she’s trying to read, her thoughts as she walks alone. It leaves wet fingerprints on her eyes. Now she wants to know if her Daddy ever read to her because she does not remember.  “Did he ever read to me from a little pink book, soft words that rhythmed and rhymed, trickle tumbling like rain on the pane? Did he ever want his Daddy to read to him,” she asks her journal in black. Silence.

She’ll never know the answers now, but she’s got plenty of time to wonder. She considered making up answers to stop the bloody flow of questions, but what difference would it make in the end if he did—or did not?  She reminds her journal in blue that it does not matter today if Daddy thought she was good enough, and that he’s not here to read the best poem she’s ever written, polished to a nub, and marked with postage. She sorrows to know that no one is coming to wash the sins from her bones, untwist her heart, or bring home some kind of happy ending. Only she and her pen get to decide the hero’s end, and she smiles because she knows it would make her Daddy proud that she just finished the damned thing at all.

“This pen is microscope, it is centrifuge.  It threads the needle to write the story and heal the wound,” she notifies her journal before closing it.  Her journal approves.

Harder

29 Wednesday Jun 2016

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We set our boundaries and we write our narratives.  If we are awake and aware, foster the desire to do so, that is.  Writing your own narrative means you know what the end of the story looks like so you sit down to write it, then everything happens, or nothing happens, and your story looks different from the one you set out to create when you arose, but when you slide your tired body beneath one thin sheet between concrete walls that keep out the heat, you are satisfied.  There’s another story coming in a dream and another that wakes up with you, that you take with you everywhere.

The narrative begins when you know there is no more energy left to give to fear, worry, anxiety, uncertainty. All your energy now belongs to the unknown, beyond your boundary walls, your fear markers. There’s no time left for fear because it’s never been kind to you.

And there’s no time left for an even keel, so if you thought you’ve gone fast, go faster.  Throttle up, feel the bow lift out of the water, there’s no seat belt to strap you in, so you fly along and you notice your knuckles aren’t white, they are folded in your lap like a prayer, and you ask for everything to happen and the awareness to take it all in and remember every second–remember every tattoo needle cherry breaking baby’s head crowning lug nut knuckle smashing first day of school sore throat screaming that was the world cup or a fight about the kids the last dollar is gone waking up alone boot camp mug shot sand in your shorts blood on your sheets first paycheck spent your name on the byline compound fracture falling out of a treehouse first deer kill first date first sext burning your fingers on a candle flame–what will you do to remember it all and treasure it all and everything yet to come?

If you ever thought you worked hard and worked up a good sore sweat or had a bad sunburn, if you think you wrote a great lyric, took too many shots of frostbite tequila, if you ever thought you slept hard, wept hard, gave at the office, if you believe you’ve moved the home run walls back, move them back farther because I’m betting everything is right where you left it, right there in the middle, somewhere in the center of our human experience.   Sometimes you gotta feel wrung out, your soul muscles aching so bad that you flop down on the bed too tired to breathe. Whatever you’re doing, do it harder because a nice even keel isn’t living, it isn’t writing.  It’s just waiting patiently for your name to be called.  The doctor will see you now and prescribe something for your pain.

 

Anchors Aweigh

16 Thursday Jun 2016

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Something happened when I walked the beach with sunrise coming up behind me. I discovered I was walking along untethered. No cup to carry, no dog to walk. I left all guilt and judgement somewhere, I’m not even sure where, or the precise moment when, I just knew that I was walking in my own footsteps. I carried no memory or their burdens, and that’s a healing that’s been coming for a long time. I felt I might rise up and float into a gull, but not a pelican for they are too shy.

Untethered means my thoughts flow freely and I don’t care if all those envelopes I sent out are destined for the slush pile, it’s all just right.  They’re going where they need to go, and I am breathing who I need to be. Untethered means I get to choose what books to read, to set aside the ones that don’t hold me or devour the ones that take me away; I get to choose a long hot day inside the apartment herding words or go outside and chase breezes. It means I sit no longer on the sand than I want to, even if friends ask me to stay, because when it’s time, it’s time.

Someday I will learn to trust. I will untether myself from that final fear, and I will let you see the rest of me, the one the black dolphin takes down with him in retreating light.

I’m exploring cooled embers and slumbering coals that are getting ready to ignite. How far one can go, untethered. Look how far she’s come already.

Taking Notes

29 Monday Feb 2016

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The plan was to write.  The plan was to heal and grow. The plan was to accept the hurt I was about to deal, and the hurts I might feel by the needle and thread in my own hand. Plans change when the noise stops and all you can do is listen.

The silence here has been … well. You don’t know what noise is until you seek out the silence and that is all you ever hear.  I sometimes wonder if I speak to Zephyr, my wax plant, just to break the silence now and then.  Sometimes in the middle of the night the silence is broken by what seems like a giant person slamming a giant door that shakes the entire building. Those times are rare and my eyes open not in fear, but I emerge from mild sleep and look at the pale orange rectangles on the wall that show me nodding tree branch shadows.  Silence returns. The loudest sound I hear is the tinnitus earned from too many concerts without hearing protection. Guess I never believed it could happen to me, this thing where I hear your voice but not your words.  Now the constant sound of raining bells in these two silent rooms are my loudest company.  Sometimes the loudest sounds are my fingers touching keys or hot water pouring from the faucet for my bath. I rarely break the silence with my own voice, and I rarely want the silence broken.  I never knew how much it meant to be able to slide the bedroom window open and hear branches chiming on branches in their midnight wind dance…and nothing else.

The plan was to listen to my body. To hear what it needs to tell me so I can either honor it with good things or pollute it with chemicals, bad habits, negative thoughts, or stasis.  Sometimes I take the entire day stopping to ask my body and senses, “What does this feel like? What does this sound like? How does this taste?  How am I feeling just now? Why?” I write those things down because if I can’t tell you that the clean, bright taste of lemon in cold water makes my mouth pop, how can I ever describe it to anyone else?

All very nice things for a writer to experience in between bouts of laundry or wiping up the stove top after dinner. All very serene, privileged tools in my shed. Until we pick up a book and it challenges everything we thought we understood or wanted to understand.  I wanted to read it so I could know what all the “noise” was about, why was it so important to everyone, it seemed?  I spent the entire day yesterday reading it, and at its conclusion asked myself if I have been asking the right questions all this time. A friend sent me an article that reminds us that a wave breaks at precisely the right moment, that only it knows when it is time.  I doubt I could have read this book with open eyes until now.

I could name drop and say, “Oh it was this book by this author.” It might add a hit or two to my stat counter, make me look all intellectual-like.  That would bother me on so many levels and the bottom line is that it’s less than truthful or helpful–to anyone–to do so.  So why bother bringing it up, anyway, if I’m not going to be candid about it, I mean, it meant enough that I spent a whole day with it, then took the time to blog a few notes here, what was the point? The point is that it gave me perspective. It gave me powerful reading that I hope will lead to powerful writing. I haven’t the sophistication, the intellect, the background, NOTHING in my arsenal, at this moment, that allows me to make a meaningful comment about the book I just read.  However. It allows me to question my perspective and ask if I am asking the right questions.  What might happen when we all start seeking new perspectives, asking better questions, carrying the light so we can see enough to take the log from our own eyes that we might understand how a speck came to be in our neighbors?  Yes, I misquoted just there, but that’s how it feels right now, a log in my own eye, my heart, my understanding.

 

Perfect Writing Room

22 Monday Feb 2016

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It’s all so complicated, but we make it so.   Perhaps writers and artists, creatives of any kind, will recognize the idea that they can’t (won’t) get started until everything is just right. Just the right tools at hand, the right weather, the right amount of background noise (or none at all.)  We somehow get it in our minds that we can’t create until everything is juuuust right. Thanks a lot, Goldilocks. I blame it squarely on her, Ms. Folktale, taking away our ability to sit in a chair too hard, sleep in a bed too soft, or eat foods that are too cold. Everything has to be just right, we heard in childhood. Seemed to make sense. Life is all about comfort, innit?

So, not writing is so much easier when I have Goldilocks to blame for my problems. Or the fact that my office is too cold, or there’s too many people in the house, or I haven’t had enough beer yet to be in that comfort zone, that sweet spot that opens and words pour through.

So, to quote a friend, “Bullshit.”  The sweet spot don’t exist, it’s a myth. Successful people, not just writers, but creatives, executives, cubicle creatures, scientists, students, it all applies to them:  They succeed because they worked for it instead of standing around waiting for their coffee to be the perfect temperature, their mood just right, the stars aligned, who the hell knows what the sign is that tells them it’s time to begin.  Successful people just keep at it. They want to, have to, and the truly lucky ones are doing it because they are in love with it. Perhaps a degree is helpful, but how much does it mean if you never use your gift (after polishing the hell out of it since forever.)

I read an article online recently that darkened a shadow that’s lurked behind me for some time.  I allowed the idea to take roost in my head that the best way for my work to be taken seriously when submitting to a poetry contest is to have MFA nestled somewhere in the bio. I looked back at previous winners and felt my sweet spot go right sour. Oh god, there’s no hope for me–or any fledgling writer–how can there be, when the “literary elites” are the ones who dictate what’s great–and publishable.  I shared my ongoing fear with authors and editors whom I respect, trust, and look up to.  The responses were passionate, as expected. One was particularly thrilling for the beautiful language he chose to assuage my concern.  Their responses shared the same message:  Don’t worry about “literary elites.” Just keep working.  Great writing will always find its way to the top, no degree required.  I do believe they blew my MFA shadow away into grains of sand in the wind.

But. There’s always a but. All this writing talk leads me to yet another article found on Literary Hub, shared here for your perusal.  The perfect room. Another myth. What kind of moment it was when I discovered the perfect room to write in is the one I am in right now. Last week it was the library. Two days ago it was in a spiral notebook with my feet in the cold sand, sun warm on my arms, waves wandering in, not especially concerned with fledgling words. The perfect manuscript does not exist. There will always be room for one more nip, one more tuck. Sure, a really great cup ‘o joe and the worlds most comfortable pen (or laptop with silent keys) can make the writing experience easier, more pleasurable. But none of it matters if there’s no thinking, dreaming, or writing going on.  I’m not known for being disciplined. I don’t think Goldilocks was, either, but one of us is going to sit in chair too hard, burn her mouth on something spicy, and put some words together that someday, somebody will really want to read.  I am the perfect room.

Oorah!