Month: December 2014

When I was pulling the pules and piles of garbage off my desk and out of my office this evening (in lieu of actual writing, mind you), I stumbled across a Writer’s Digest magazine raising the creative power of inspired work spaces. This resonated with me, partly due to an earlier conversation I’d had with friends about the role a good work space plays in my ability to create. There’s been less of that cosmic connecting in my universe lately. In truth, I’ve been feeling a bit isolated and uncreative. The space is a large part of that. Its a cluttered desk, cluttered mind sort of thing. Except its more like uninspired space, uninspired mind. I was recently reminded of how beige my home is. Beige and Brown. This isn’t ripe for the creative.

After my talk and finding (and then reading) the magazine, I went to my horoscope to see if forces were aligning to propel me in some positive direction. The first line: When you allow yourself to dream, and you totally immerse yourself in the dream, you begin to feel like anything is possible. To me the dream is the space and the idea of creative inspiration that empowers me to pull out all of the good that is inside me. I know a space can do that if I let it. Once I allow myself to transform the environment physically and figuratively, I think I’ll be back on a really good writing vibe.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The toughest thing about the creative process is that it requires serious alone time without any interruption. Every time I break to have a conversation or to deal with a screaming kid, I gotta reset and go through that long process of just sinking into the assignment again. You sink in too many times and eventually you can’t. You’re just used up–sitting around and waiting for the next interruption.

At what point is it okay to yell at someone else’s kid? Does that change if you’re his coach? If he’s kind of a problem? I’ve been running myself ragged trying to coach three flag football teams. Each boy has his own squad and each squad represents a fundamentally different challenge. The eldest is on a 10-12 year old team filled with what a nicer person than I would call, ‘personalities’.

The roster says I have 10 kids but I’ve only ever seen 6 of them at once. How can you practice without having a full squad? I mean we do the workouts and I have some things I can do with the team, but when it comes to building unity and community, there isn’t much there. In truth, they’re a ragged pack of arrogant 10 and 11 year olds who have some definite holes in their skillsets. I have a great deal to work on with them and very little time left to do so before they begin playing games. We have 1 practice and then a scrimmage and then two practices before our first game that counts. This could be a steep learning curve.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. When I was a wee lad my best bud at the time had a kitten. My son recently got a kitten and it occurs to me that his kitten looks exactly like the one from long ago. That makes me wonder if I’m really remembering it right or remembering the essence of the thing and plugging in the details that fit best for me.
2. My good friend is reading his poetry tomorrow and releasing his poetry book. I’ll be there for him, but I want to say ‘best of luck’ right now in order to get that positive energy out there in the universe.

I spent a good few hours at the office today trying to put a bow on the semester. I connected with my creative writing students and it was a good connection. There is something really uplifting about students who want to be in school and manage to get something out of the experience. On occasion (less recently) I’ve found myself able to reach out to students who didn’t want to be in school yet thrilled at and wanted to continue the experience. Truth be told, those are better than the ones who wanted to be there in the first place.

At the end of this surprisingly long semester I find myself happy, exhausted, and ready to focus on something different. My focus for the next few weeks is kids and fiction in that order. Xmas is upon us and I have three very energetic boys who are super excited about the week off and all the possibilities that creates. Personally, I’m excited about what they are excited about, but I am also excited to be able to delve deeper into my craft and create something truly engaging.

Stay tuned.

I’m sleepy, and if I’m being honest, I’m not fully invested in the wire at the moment. I lost in the playoffs of both leagues and now am only playing for weekly high scores (that I don’t get)…

 

JAX over TEN

PHI over WAS

SD over SF

CLE over CAR

DET over CHI

HOU over BAL

NO over ATL

NE over NYJ

KC over PIT

GB over TB

NYG over STL

IND over DAL

BUF over OAK

AZ over SEA

DEN over CIN

I wound up in a Tempe coffee shop called Cartel. I was holding a notebook in one hand and a Pale Ale in the other–an old order Mennonite in a sea of glowing Apple Macbooks. Everyone arond me seemed like derivatives of one stereotype or another. There were the classic 99-percenter’s the bowtie professors, the hip kids, and so on. Even the music shifted with whichever caricature was on a particular duty station. In the moments it took me to move from the back door to order my beer and to a table, we’d shifted from a playlist best described as Britney Spears vs. The Spice Girls to an early century R&B retrospective featuring songs like Tweet’s 2002 hit, Oops (oh my). Nothing about this shop was normal. Nothing was Starbucks or anything corporate here, which made it an ideal location to explore 10 minutes of writing.

I used to live in coffee shops and on street corners and bus stations and city parks where the kids played basketball behind mesh fences and the squeak of sneakers mingled with the harsh grunts of play and the good natured insults of boys. I collected these human moments and carefully filed them away for future use. They were my fossil fuels of creativity that existed more commonly in the madness of New York City than anywhere else I’ve lived. I’ve long held that Arizona hurt my writing. This has proven to be true only in the fact that the limited number of human interactions of the style that I thrive upon are rarely available to me here. I ceased to have access to my fossil fuels. Without those interactions I dove deeper into the virtual. I swapped human contact for the static pleasure of TV shows and virtual reality. I ceased living in the social world and carved out a meager existence online. I still marvel at the day I came to realize that I was playing a game online (Eve) in which I was working a boring menial job and somehow acting like that job was exciting and meant more to me than the boring menial job I was at that actually made me real money.

Then I realized something else. Finding moments of inspiration is no dependent on place so much as it is on attitude about place, time, and situation. While I was online doing the work of space miner, I would imagine all the wonderful things happening in the virtual world around me. My state of mind made the mundane magical. I made my own fuel. This is something anyone can replicate if we let ourselves. Even Britney Spears blaring from overhead speakers can be someones voice of creativity.

Few things in life give me the pleasure a good book can. When its going well it feels like a conversation with a great storyteller–like I, as a reader, am taking part in the story in some small way and riding along anxious to see how things turn out for the characters. There is a certain freedom in reading this way. I choose the book and can separate from the experience the moment it no longer remains worthwhile. That is why libraries are littered with books I’ve never finished. Beautiful You, the latest offering from Chuck Palahniuk, is a book I did finish and I’m all the better for doing so.

Beautiful You is strange mesh of science fiction and dark comedy in the tradition of Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein. The protagonist is a fairly plain Jane-styled character who gets caught up with a billionaire on the verge of launching a new series of sex toys. The billing for the toys (and thus the novel): A million husbands are about to be replaced. The lead becomes this central figure in an escapade that quickly becomes more than just a tale about a corporate genius making sex toys and arrives at a real message about the power of marketing and the way that we are controlled by trends.

Lately I’ve been seeing a terrible slew of women wearing leggings and boots. That’s practically all that’s out there. The book speaks to that craze indirectly. It seeks to explain or at least comment on why so many people become slaves to a singular trend. The shock of the book is the cavalier way that it addresses sex, but that wears off and it quickly becomes something you can laugh with and enjoy.

Bunch of stray thoughts running rampant tonight. I’ll share.

1. I’m having an increasingly difficult time getting awards for my youth teams. I don’t want to spend a fortune and I do want to get something meaningful. Those two things together create a very small window of opportunity.
2. I hate that I like some Taylor Swift songs. Seriously. It is hard to separate the person from the music, no matter how hard I try. It is hard to separate the image from the person, which makes it tough to like her. There is a real and interesting and epically lonely person beneath all that glitz and that’s the chick I find interesting. The real chick is intelligent and deep. As for the other person, the whole thing is a hot mess.
3. George R.R. Martin blogs. He blogs about all sorts of things–like the Jets and Giants. I dig that. I also like that both teams won tonight, despite a total reliance on one WR for the Giants and another terrible performance by the QB for the Jets. Mariota, anyone? He looks good in green. Unfortunately, there isn’t much chance of the Jets getting him. If they do, I hope they let him sit and watch Vick for a year. That or trade for RGIII-seasons-and-out.
4. I think Stana Katic is pregnant.

I’m trying very hard to decide if the voice of the responses to articles represents the social and moral undercurrent of our society, or if it’s more so a digital snapshot of a small collection of people who don’t have anything better to do. This is an established part of the internet culture. When someone posts an article there is a space below for comments. Depending on the popularity, or even the controversial nature, of the article there are a number of comments.

Here’s one example: I recently read a post on cnn.com about a company that recalled a wrapping paper because it appeared to have swastikas on it. Now I won’t say they are deliberate, but it is clear these symbols can be seen. On the other hand, this may be as obvious as the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast, but someone saw it and complained. Afterwards, some people read the article about it and flamed. There is quite a bit of racist banter that happens on the net. This isn’t limited to articles. I’ve seen some horrors posted below videos or on twitter and Facebook feeds. Does that mean we are this kind of society?

The internet provides a certain level of anonymity. It is, in a sense, a white hood that anyone can put on and say terrible things. This anonymity grows when you consider how many people watch porn, comment on porn, and explore thoughts and feelings they could not in their daily lives. So, maybe the net isn’t who we are but who we allow ourselves to be when we think nobody is watching.

1. America tortures and says it is wrong… Or is it? The hub bub over ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ reflects that legalistic shift between the spirit of a thing and the letter of a thing. The Atlantic has a stirring article on the topic that pokes at some of the recent statements by President Obama, Senator King and others. Somehow this 600 page behemoth of a report (that no senator or congressman has likely actually finished) allowed us to distance ourselves from…well, ourselves. During the earliest stages of the War on Terror (TM) we were an angry nation who dove headlong into the mess that is Afghanistan because we believed the source of the attacks were there and we were going to get the bad guys by any means necessary. Thirteen years later, out comes the white paint and the whole mess is cleaned away with a handful of symbolic ‘we went too far’ guys trotted out in front of the cameras to make sure we can have plausible deniability of a systemic problem. Nope. Not buying it. This is a systemic problem. We have a lot of those here, and the sooner we are willing to acknowledge and address instead of acknowledge and move on, we’ll be a lot better off.
2. As the semester winds down I am surprised at how little some students actually care about learning. They want to have fun and get good grades but the whole learning stuff is beneath them. They know what they need to be successful and satisfied (there’s that word again) with their lives. Of course they do, because the TV tells them they do and their limited realities don’t require a whole lot more than what is already provided in 140 character or picture form. Sadly, this is a losing battle at times and a battle that can be won at others. Also sadly, I take every loss to heart.

1. Finished watching the Cardinals win and apparently lose at the same time–a pyrrhic victory if you will. They beat the Rams to move to a 10 win season, but lost yet another QB. He hopped off the field under his own one-footed power and was carted back to the x-ray area. Who knows what happens next. This is why the Cards always keep three QBs on the roster. While I would love to see them get to the Super Bowl, I would love even more to see it happen with a 4th string QB. That’d prove a lot about the Jets–follow me here. The Jets are where they are because they don’t have a top CB tandem. One of the two they could’ve had is a Cardinal because the Jets wouldn’t pay. The other is a Patriot because the Jets wouldn’t pay. Both are likely to be in the Superbowl (unless the Broncos and Packers have anything to say about it). In other words, Fire John Idzik.
2. Been listening to a lot of people complain about Obama’s speech about racial tensions in America. He didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. He didn’t say anything we didn’t already know. He did say all the things we didn’t want to admit. Fact: a lot of people feel treated unfairly. I think it is silly to deny that, or worse discredit the feelings of those people by showing isolated examples of racial unity in the face of overwhelming evidence of constant and pervasive racial discrimination. On the other hand, that’s the American way. We are a country that disavows its flaws. We are the country of ‘let’s move on’.