just put up a poem
she said
when I complained
of having no ideas
as if it was
the easiest thing
to do
and so
I did
Posted in Creativity, Poetry | Tagged creative writing, modern poetry, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
When I was in my early twenties, I moved house a lot—different roommates, different apartments, different towns, different states, different countries—and it quickly became obvious that there is a peculiar arithmetic attached to the process of changing residence.
No matter how much you have when you begin the move, you always arrive at your destination with less. It’s not so much that things get lost in transit (though that is a factor); it’s that when packing up, you tend to evaluate every object. Do I need this? Do I want it? Do I even like it anymore? Items that fail to make the grade are sold, donated, given away, tossed, or just plain abandoned.
For my first move out of my parents’ home, I took several pieces of furniture, four instruments, a rack of clothes, and a dozen boxes filled with household goods, papers, books, LPs, letters, and memorabilia. By the last of my youthful relocations, though, I had pared it all down to a mattress, two instruments, a suitcase of clothes, a backpack of toiletries, and three ratty cardboard boxes (one each for kitchen, books, and memorabilia). If pressed, I could pack up and be out the door within three quarters of an hour (faster, if I decided to leave the mattress behind).
Since then—after I married and found steady work—the pace of the moves slowed until, back in 1997, we moved into our first non-rental home and vowed never to move again. This new-found contentment did not, however, stop us from repeatedly culling the herd. The thing about owning a home is that you always accrue sufficient belongings to fill it (and then some), so periodically we still reevaluate and downsize our possessions.
I’ve written before on these pages about household purges, and we’re in the midst of one now, a big one, as we simultaneously prepare for retirement, redecorate and renovate the house, cast off clothing that’s way too big, and clear the shelves, cupboards, and cabinets of anything we no longer use or no longer want. In almost every way, we’re simplifying, and there’s a liberating feel to it. It’s rejuvenating, filled with all the excitement of a move but with none of the anxiety. And because it’s such a big effort, I’ve been digging deeper into the closets and storage spots than ever before, which led me to discover something interesting. Through all of these—moves and purges both—there is one area that never gets downsized: memorabilia.
To be fair, my habits regarding the accretion of memorabilia have always been austere, allowing only the most pithy of tokens to be added. As a result, I have only a small cigar box of ticket stubs, a tiny box with remembrances of cats now deceased, a shoebox of old love letters, and a wooden case designed for three bottles of wine that now holds a collection of disparate objects: shells from the Mediterranean, marbles won on my grammar school playground, my old wind-up metronome, a collection of keys from every place I’ve lived, a coaster from a London pub. Very little accrues to this potpourri now—ticket stubs are things of the past, my wife and I generally text “I love you’s” rather than send them via snail mail, and my marble-playing days are long behind me—so when I went through them last week, it was a jolt to the senses. The smoothness of a river-washed stone, the faded delicacy of a love note written on fabric, the scents of pipe tobacco and patchouli, the dull notes of brass keys.
In truth, there’s nothing in there but junk. There is absolutely nothing of any value in these boxes, nothing that could be sold or donated or that carries any meaning to anyone but me.
But they are sacrosanct, unpurgeable, pieces from the museum of my life’s story.
To paraphrase Spencer’s character in Pat and Mike, while there ain’t much there, what’s there is cherce.
k
PS. Items in photo, examples of said junk/treasure, anticlockwise from lower right:
- Buttons from my first visit to the National Gallery, London; my first Ren Faire; and my first job
- A pair of hand-made spectacles (for a medieval feast)
- An acorn from Devil’s Den, Gettysburg, PA
- Two first place ribbons from a jazz competition
- A pair of dragons from my model building and RPG gaming days
- A long-stem hobbit pipe
- Wooden interlocking Escher lizards
- A wooden car pilfered from the Toy Museum, Camden, London
- A miniature brass Cupid, a gift from an old friend
- A pocket copy of The Merchant of Venice, ex libris Vera Roads, West Australia, 01Jan1906
- Stage fairy dust, given to me by the man who “flew” Mary Martin in the Broadway production of Peter Pan
- Hand-painted pewter figurines, from our wedding cake
Posted in Culture | Tagged history, memorabilia, Memories, personal history, quiet living | Leave a Comment »
Yesterday was not a great day.
To start with, I was grumpy. Very grumpy.
We’ve been renovating and redecorating for a few months, and yesterday I began to feel a tad overwhelmed not only by what is still left to do, but by the toll it’s taken on my sixty-plus-year-old body. In short, while I’m used to aches and pains, I’m not used to being so tired at the end of the day that I’m thinking about going to bed at 8PM.
So that was my baseline going into things.
Then came work, where I’ve been in a holding pattern for a few days, waiting for analysts to provide answers to specific questions regarding the solutions I’m supposed to be crafting for them. Well, I got some answers, all right. The first answer was to a question I hadn’t asked, but it’s an answer I’ve long suspected. The answer was, “No, we really don’t read your emails.” The second answer was also to a question I hadn’t asked, because (as mentioned), they really don’t read my emails. Ditto, the third answer.
Waiting three days for an answer to a specific question is frustrating enough. Waiting three days and getting answers that are totally irrelevant to the questions posed, well, that pushes my frustration coefficient to 11.
To keep myself from lashing out, I needed a distraction, so I turned to something totally unrelated, something as far from programs and coding and specifications and analysis as possible.
I decided to reorganize my collection of British coins.
I could have chosen any number of other activities—weeding the garden, working a crossword puzzle, rearranging my office (again)—just as long as it engaged my hands and my brain sufficiently to keep me preoccupied and kept me from delivering mayhem to a few certain someones. Reorganizing my coins was the perfect choice.
My collection of British coins is modest and limited. Nothing too old. Nothing made of gold. Just coins that regular folk used in their daily lives, coins I’ve collected over the decades, either on a whim or because my interest was reignited. They range from Victoria (1836) to Elizabeth II (pre-decimal, 1971)—okay, there is one sixpence from the reign of Elizabeth I (1573), but that’s an outlier—in denominations from farthings to crowns (1/4 d to 5s, for you LSD afficionados; you know who you are).
I won’t pretend otherwise: it is an extremely nerdy activity. On the nerdiness scale, it’s right there next to stamp collecting (though whether it’s on the nerdier or less-nerdy side, I couldn’t possibly say). It’s the kind of thing where you’d expect me to be wearing tweed, smoking a pipe, sitting in a room lit by a single lamp, surrounded by dark wood bookshelves, and holding a massive magnifier. And you wouldn’t be far off.
But it does consume a great deal of brain activity, and yesterday, that’s precisely what I needed: to be distracted.
So, I fiddled and examined, sorted and re-sorted. Should I organize by denomination or by monarch? Ascending or descending? Is this coin really in XF condition, or is it merely VF?
Pressing, important issues.
Issues so much more important than screaming “Read the damned email, why don’t you!?” or reiterating for the third time the question I’ve been asking for days.
And it worked. My blood pressure went down. No one was injured.
Sure, I was still grumpy (and sore, and tired), but at least I wasn’t making plans to nuke my co-workers anymore.
I’ll take a small victory over none at all.
k
PS. In the end, I went with: by denomination, ascending, and merely VF.
Posted in Culture | Tagged difficult people, hobbies, self-care, social grace | Leave a Comment »
———
our eyes spill
waves of notion
across the eternal void
into the depths of time
seeking
intention precedes our questions
of who we are and why and how
but the answers received
are not answers
any more than
we are we
the aeons stare back
drop clues
of intricate detail
tantalizing the ape-minds
that think themselves gods
———
Posted in Hi Tech, Poetry | Tagged creative writing, exploration, modern poetry, Poetry, space | Leave a Comment »
Some things I object to on principle. Things that are just . . . wrong. Things that shouldn’t be. Things that cheapen or degrade ourselves or others.
This week’s example hit me—appropriately—as I was scrolling my social media feed, a place where devaluation and degradation are becoming the norm rather than the exception.
Normally, I can shrug off such assaults. Performative outrage, shameless puffery, sycophantic fawning, lickspittle tirades, blatant misinformation, misguided memes: these take up a growing fraction of the non-advert portion of my feed, but it was the advert portion that got my dander up.
To the extent of which I am capable, I have turned off ad-tracking. This doesn’t stop me from seeing adverts, but at least it eliminates (okay, reduces) the creepy, Big Brother-esque, “we’re watching you” feeling I get when I ask my wife where the hammer is and then see an advert for ball-peens on Facebook. Sometimes, though, just sometimes, I’m presented with an advert that is somewhat relevant.
This time it was an advert for Jasper. “Artificial intelligence makes it fast & easy to create content!” I was informed. This software has “read 10% of the internet” and would help me create blog posts, social media interaction, and marketing copy up to “10x faster.” It would even help me write a novel that is “original and plagiarism free [sic].”
—[shudder]—
Usually I do not engage with adverts (except by mistake, via clumsily executed clicks) as this only provides fodder for the tracking I try to avoid. In this case, though, I was overcome by a looky-loo train-wreck revulsion/attraction impulse to investigate some of the literally thousands of comments appended to the post.
Let me pause for a moment, as my state of mind, whilst preparing for a dive down this rabbit hole, is pertinent.
I appreciate a well-crafted phrase or sentence, revel in a paragraph that takes me on a little journey, and marvel at novels filled with allusions, metaphors, contextual layers, and well-orchestrated plotlines. Conversely, whenever I read poorly written prose—be it long form or in a short news article—prose that cries out for an editor (“An editor! An editor! My kingdom for an editor!”), I die a little inside.
Yet there I was, faced not only with the prospect novels published without the benefit of an editor, but without the benefit of a writer.
With the burgeoning of algorithms and “artificial intelligence” (quoted here, because it’s not a true intelligence, artificial or otherwise), there are dozens of products and services like Jasper, all of which tout the same credibility-stretching boasts. Write a novel! In the style of your favorite author! In a language you do not know! In mere hours!
To be honest, this kind of algorithmic assist can only help some of the novels I’ve read, but in general, it’s the end-state of our own dumbing-down. Quality no longer carries currency, if this becomes the norm. All we need now is another service that will read this dreck for us (because I sure don’t want to suffer that way).
Eventually, I perused a few hundred of the comments that people (I’m assuming they were actual people) made on the Jasper advert, and I was shocked. All of the comments I read—and I mean all of them—were derisive, often with replies to comments that piled the ridicule higher and higher.
So, there is hope for us. We may not have the collective gumption to oust autocrats, defend democracy, treat women as fully actualized humans, or deal with a planet that’s on fucking fire, but at least I know that a large portion of us think that reading a book written by an algorithm is a stupid, laughable idea.
k
Posted in Creativity | 2 Comments »
H*(Rα/Υ)=ς
Or, in other words,
A Home, when multiplied by a Renovation raised to the power of the Affected Area and divided by the Unity factor, equals the perceived level of Serenity.
As I sit down here in my basement, above my head Thor is wielding Mjölnir in a fierce battle against giant angry wasps.
Or so it seems.
And yet, I am at peace.
We are having new windows installed, replacing our old 1960 single-pane aluminum frame rattletraps (emphasis on “rattle”) with updated double-glazed, gas-filled, smooth-sliding jobs. Three windows, two sliding glass doors, and the pièce de résistance, a bay window in the bedroom, overlooking the gardens. It is a huge job, by our standards, and the saws—reciprocating, circular, oscillating/elliptical—plus hammers from small to monstrous and compressors and sundry other tools of destruction/construction are creating an acoustical landscape that makes one think of banshees, murder hornets, and alien warfare.
It’s the kind of chaos that would stress me out, worry my wife, and send Portia (the cat) running for her panic room (my closet).
And yet, my wife is happily alternating between watching her reality TV and napping, Portia is comfortably settled up beside her, and I am taking a break from my workday to compose this blog post.
It’s our being together, an island of mutual strength, that allows us to weather the storm that rages above-stairs. Though planets are being torn asunder, down here the clock ticks, the walls remain firm, and though the lights flicker each time the massive chop saw kicks in, we are surrounded by warm and comforting light.
Unity, reaffirming familial bonds, is a powerful tool. When we separate, we are weak, but when we join together, that makes us mighty. In a crisis, unity is crucial, but our ability to join forces against the world is made even stronger when we practice it, be it in running errands, making decisions, sharing a meal, or planning an event. Sharing the little agonies improves our technique and readies us for when the big agonies come along.
To be sure, this isn’t a big one, but it isn’t a small one, either. Seeing us here, though, calm and unruffled, gives me confidence that when a big one does land on our doorstep, we’ll be better prepared.
k
Posted in Culture | Tagged family, home renovation, quiet living, Serenity | 2 Comments »
lazy bumblebees
ride from bloom to fragrant bloom
in yellow jodhpurs
Posted in Poetry, Writing | Tagged creative writing, haiku, modern poetry, Poetry, Writing | Leave a Comment »
