Tag: thinking

Post #153

Path back up the mountain at Giant's Causeway, Northern Ireland.

I haven’t written a process post for a long time. Not since I had that spat of poor posts a few months back.

Today I’m writing about writing because I’m simply not feeling it. The writing, that is. I flipped through my notepad to see what I could work up today. There are twenty-four starts in that file. No finishes.

There are a few openings that are just a sentence or two. Just the beginning of an idea. In other cases, there’s a solid idea with no heft. Discounting those, there are still fifteen or sixteen with minimally a paragraph. Most of those are a paragraph with some change or a pair of paragraphs with some change. Then there’s four or five that have been worked to a couple hundred words.

Those are the sad ones. The entries that began to take shape, started to flow and then were writus interruptus.

Some starts were overtaken by a better, or a more timely, or a more immediately engaging (for me) finish. Others just lost juice. Some were jotted down in a fit of inspiration. They seemed to be a substantial concept, but dissolved like wisps of neurotransmitted-cotton candy on your tongue. With less of the stickiness of the sugary form. And less sweetness.

I don’t know that I’ll ever get back to these semi-baked items.

Or any of them for that matter.

These snippets of thoughts are captured but won’t be stretched and pulled along the path to semi-coherence. I won’t work on moving their sentences around like puzzle pieces, searching and finding the correct nub on a part of the piece that fits to the left, and then matches a piece on the right and finally snaps into pithy congruence from both above and below.

I won’t flip clauses from the end of a sentence to the beginning or from the beginning of the sentence to the end in an attempt to get it closer to clarity. There will be no speed backspacing to obliterate fraught word combos that briefly seemed poetic. There will be no annulment  of ridiculous over-adverbification.

These fragments won’t ever be pushed to the end of the literary line. Where I realize that it’s actually done as it sits. Another paragraph unnecessary. The writing at it’s natural end. This always surprises me. And it pleases me.

They’ll be no selection of an image to accompany these incomplete thoughts. Where sometimes an image comes early, but usually it is selected after the thoughts are decently formed. The thoughts won’t get far enough for a picture. The words only exist on the notepad, without form.

The sprouts of copy will never be copied and pasted into this forum. This forum that you, Loyal Reader, are consuming now.

Actually, that’s not accurate.  On a rare occasion, an embryonic post is moved here and festers. Not decomposing because it has no carbon, but not fully composed because it has no life. It doesn’t get the electrical jolt of the blue publish button. It’s not alive.

The prenatal posts in my notepad are accumulating. There weren’t always a generation of them. The group started with a few false starts. But as I read through them today, for inspiration, I only culled two. I was inspired by none.

None were used today. They were neither easy enough to finish nor inspiring enough to develop. I wrote this instead. I’m at peace with this. Not everything is good enough. At the same time, everything is good enough for practice.

So, the sad attempts remain sad. And I am moving on.

Posted on by docthink 1

Handle with Care

Holding hands. It's very nice.

She looked at her hands. They were holding each other, restless in her lap. Her long fingers on her right hand tried to comfort the fingers on her left. Her signature well-groomed nails were now some long and some short. Her cuticles were encroaching. She needed a cotton ball and some remover to clean up the chipped polish. She hadn’t for a while, so there was fairly little left to remove.

Her right hand and her left hand rolled around themselves in her lap. She was unsettled–to look at the ring or to look away? She turned her left hand so she could see the stone. The diamond was much bigger than she should have. It was long and tapered at the ends–a fancy marquise cut diamond. It was slightly yellow but with so many surfaces it could always catch and reflect light. She wanted light to reflect on her. The reflections in her head were not light.

She was tired, she thought, but that wasn’t it. Yes, she was tired, but it was like she was a little stupider than she was before. Maybe not stupider, but certainly very much less sharp. She couldn’t hold onto thoughts that could become a plan. She needed a way forward. The only thoughts she could hold were the thoughts that she wanted to lose. She held the thoughts about the press of debt from medical bills and the services–and the income void. But she didn’t think of the void as nothing. She thought about her youngest. How to make prom happen? She needed a plan. She needed her partner.

Yes, her crazy enterprising partner of decades. The one for whom everything was possible. The one who led their roller coaster adventure. The one who would figure out how to take care of things–sometimes three or four things at a time–while she used her smarts and her heart to home school the babies. The one who had infinite energy and who made the most outrageous asks and would not hear “No.” The one who shared her strong faith. The one without life insurance.

* * * *

She looked at her hands. She held them under the faucet. The warm water rinsed off the soil and the soap. She looked at her cuticles and saw that there was still some dirt. There was dirt under the nails on the last three fingers of her left hand. She picked up the vegetable brush to dislodge the lurking loam.

He wouldn’t like her washing off the gardening in the kitchen sink. Even though strawberries and rhubarb and bibb lettuce and even carrots pulled from that ground would be washed in that same sink. He had a lot of rules for her to follow. He stopped her from painting the dining room because he didn’t have time to select the right shade of blue-gray. He didn’t like the one with too much green undertone and the other seemed too purple. He didn’t make time. He just stopped her.

She scrubbed the fingers on her left hand and stopped at her empty ring finger. She left the ring in a box in her dresser upstairs. Looking at the ring made her sad. Looking at where the ring was made her sad.

She was worried about her baby-girl’s choices for school. He was supposed to pay, but based on his rules. He wouldn’t say what his rules were. They seemed to shift, at least to her and the baby-girl. He said he was being clear. He didn’t have time to explain. He knew he was supposed to pay. It was part of the agreement. He wouldn’t actually agree to the agreement, though. It was all like the paint.

* * * *

She looked at her hands. There was a burn on the back of her hand where she brushed the top rack in the oven when she was shaking the roasted cauliflower. If she was smarter, she would have removed the top rack before she started. If she was smarter, she would have pulled the bottom rack out before tending the cruciferous veg. Maybe it wasn’t smart she needed. Maybe she should be less lazy.

Her hands were full of scars from sloppy cooking and scars from lazy cooking. The nail on her left index finger had a nick from a misplaced knife blade. Two knuckles on that hand had burns on the way to being healed.

She sat down at the table. She adjusted her ring that was always sliding around her finger. She righted the stone and put her hand on the table.  He put his hand on hers. They said grace.

Posted on by docthink 0

Blocking

colourful plastic blocks for a baby

The baby was fully concentrating. Her brow was furrowed as she rotated the red box. She was very impressed with herself. She picked up the box, and she also manipulated it. FTW!

She lifted it a bit more quickly than she calculated and knocked herself in the head. She was quite surprised by the velocity she created. She actually forgot that she was responsible for the collision. She didn’t cry. She just looked at the box in a confused way.

Not to be defeated, the baby shook it. More activity that caused something. She was reminded that there were contents in the box. She dropped the box the three inches to the carpet.

She dipped her hand in the box. It emerged attached to a green block. This was unexpected, but delightful. She raised the block to her mouth so she could steady it as well as taste it.  She pushed the block more solidly into her hand with her chin.

She pulled the block away from her face and looked at it anew. Because everything for her was new.

Posted on by docthink 0