Most boring title ever

At this point, the blog is a journal. I haven't journaled for years. Feels kinda good. When I was a kid, I would buy a diary every year, or get gifted one at Xmas, and I would commit to writing a little every day. I found some of those old diaries once, and noticed only a few days of writing in each. Plans, plans, so many plans. I prefer using Blogger. It waits for me patiently, doesn't take up space, I always know where it is, and doesn't kill any trees for paper.
Most adverbs are garbage.
Language notes: I corrected my own conversational speech yesterday morning, editing an adverb. That self-editing action got a giggle from my fellow chatter. Is there a label for the two parties involved in a conversation? English is limited in many ways. How can that be, with one million words and counting?
And it wouldn't be a blog post without a scribbled line or two of poetry ...
Too many feels
A poem
I feel sad for you
All the time
Do you want me to?
Later, I scrub the guilt off,
Like washing crusty dishes
left by lazy roommates.
One atom of shame remains;
my expectations feed the disgrace fungus, and it multiplies, until it's ripe and spores of more guilt fly.
The end.
Phew, that was a weird one.
P.S. Today is the one-year anniversary of my father's passing. Heavy heart.

Toad on the deck

After dog-walk this morning, I was startled to find a large toad on the back deck. He eyed me with distrust and disdain, but remained on the deck while I hunted for my phone to take a photo of his glorious amphibianness. He declined the photo op by hopping under the deck the moment I trained my camera on him. I realized that I could have spent some quality time with him instead of trying to get a photo. Moment lost. I'll recall that option next time.
Urban nature.

Toad
A poem
Toad, whom I met this morning on my deck,
Please don't meet the same pancake fate as your fellow amphibian did last week on our roadway.
Thank you, your human admirer.

Art as therapy

Writing poetry acts as therapy for many people, I'm certain. Processing emotions, bringing your own stories to the page, what a powerful tool for mental health that type of writing can be. Would that writing poetry appealed to more people in need of an outlet. I see poetry getting more popular lately, but I fear the rush to the extreme that consumes our culture already infects that arm of publishing with celebrity culture. I wish writing and publishing one's own poetry and stories were as normal and accessible for everyone as buying groceries or riding a city bus. We are all always about the stories: humans need stories to survive and thrive. Almost every moment of every day includes a story of some sort: the snippets we tell ourselves to build our world as we negotiate society, the details we share with friends to construct our social identity, the sweet pap of commercial storytellers that fill our spare moments with tv, movies, novels, and so many other stories that we receive and give daily in order to survive.
Meander
A poem
A wander in the city offers stories for the supping
The people share their tales
Whether I want them to or not
Quaff the joy, the fear, the delight, the angst
I take it all in and form their story in my own way, write the urban, write the people, write the life.

Sunday

Definitely one of those slow days. The doggo sat on my feet all afternoon: didn't feel like doing much anyway. I turned on the dishwasher: that seemed like an accomplishment.
Another poem
Lethargy
That ache at the base of my skull
When I want to feel ambition
Today is not that day
Lay your head down and rest
Tomorrow is soon enough.

Today

How little sleep can I get on a regular basis and still function? Will have to spend my weekend catching up, repaying my sleep debt.
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My brain
A poem

Sorrow darkens the edges of my brain.
Like a sponge, my grey matter absorbs whatever moist slime lurks nearby. It thirsts for more of the carcinogenic emotions,
self-destructive
self-vindictive
self-malignant.
You don't know my brain.
The me inside my brain wants
love
light
joy
peace.
My brain seeks disaster.
This is a story.
Poems are fiction.
Don't worry about me.

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I better turn off auto-suggest if I want to write more poems on my phone.
That was fun.
Thirty days, thirty poems?😀

Blogging, a restart

I started this blog eight years ago, but haven't made an entry since 2016. Do people still blog? Or is everyone an essayist or a podcaster? Instagram is much easier. I feel like I need to strain my brain a bit this year, so writing it is.
And my old doggo gets me up too early, so I might as well write. I deleted Netflix from my phone so I would choose reading or writing on these early mornings instead of that "sweet, sweet pap" of TV.
Trying to turn off my editor brain while I write is a struggle for me. I think blogging on my phone like this will help because it's too much effort to go back and edit anything.
Daily I wander through my self-constructed microsphere, working, reading, watching tv, dog-walking, eating, cooking, grocery shopping. I'm at a point where I like my tiny life. Over the years, I've carefully constructed this milieu to avoid stress and have a comfortable life. I recognize the privilege that enables me to do so.
No matter how hard I try to control the stress level, to mollify my anxiety brain, the real world intrudes: my father passed last year, my dog struggles with her old age, the mammogram has to be done twice (I'm okay), the car needs repairs, the condo fees go up, so does my weight. And the entire world flames in chaos. Right, there's that. I try to make my personal life as stressless as possible because of the swirling morass of the general Earth polity. If I don't mean to try to do anything about that, then why ever think about it? I'm just trying to make my own little life work in some way.
My father's favorite saying was the serenity prayer by Niebuhr, which is now identified with AA:
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference."
My father had a copy of that prayer pinned to his cubicle at work; he read it every day, and often advocated its message to my brother and me when we were anxious or troubled. I saw that courage to change things in action many times in his life. Yet he also worked very hard and arranged the elements of his life to create a haven for himself and my mother.
Every line I type generates a new digression in my mind, so the point of restarting this blog was achieved at least for today: the brain awakes a bit.
This format of stream of consciousness writing is how I've always journaled. Today it felt a little productive.

Enough with the adverbs

Another one of my narrative problems is working out how to express what a character thinks and feels without relying too much on the omniscient narrator and adverbs. A pox on adverbs! I want to write expressive text that sparkles with compelling verbs; not, I want to write expressively and compellingly. In my work as an editor, too much reliance on adverbs strikes me as lazy sometimes: a writer who cannot be bothered to seek the correct, evocative verb, or a writer who gives up when the sentence structure frustrates their attempts to express an idea and throws in a few adverbs to dress it up instead of rewriting. A pox on adverbs, I say! When I get a few more pages of my novel written, I'll do a find/replace and destroy all the -ly words. I don't want to sound like I use a thesaurus when I'm writing, either; where simple verbs will do, that's what I'll use: such as "he said" "she said" almost all the time, never "opined" or "asserted" or "pronounced." The way some writers use adverbs and those specific speech-verbs bothers me because the writers fail to take the time to describe the character's face and voice. I don't need a plethora of details, but a crinkled lip and a turned head combined with the right dialogue conveys disgust in a profound way to the reader, much more so than writing "Tom was disgusted." When people interact in real life, those microexpressions on others' faces, body language, and word choices reveal all we need to know, unless the person actually says, "I am disgusted." And no floating bubble (aka omniscient narrator) resides behind people's heads that reads in a large black font [definitely NOT Comic Sans], "Ooh, Tom was disgusted." My interest in facial expressions expands with every episode that I watch of the Fox show "Lie to Me." I will definitely incorporate some aspects of this study of microexpressions into my novel in order to describe the moods and reactions of my characters -- much better than adverbs.
And this omniscient narrator business, or even the first-person narrator, are getting a bit tired. We never get to see what a person thinks and feels inside their brain, inside their soul, except for our own; how can we identify with this person's innermost thoughts when they are so completely foreign from our own. The only stories using first-person narrators that I enjoy are the ones written like diaries or letters; clusters of glimpses inside a person's thoughts and feelings presents a much more convincing narrative strategy to me. I know, I know "suspension of disbelief"; but that only works for me with movies and similar media. I want a book to convince me of its believability, to work at converting me to its version of the world, to draw me in while I struggle to maintain a foot outside, yet I fail because the word-world compels me to change my beliefs for those moments I indulge in its wonders. Visual media requires suspension of disbelief, while print media forces a change of beliefs, at least for that time my brain engages with the particular wordscape.
Oh third-person omniscient narrator, who invented you? What wunderkind novelist blessed the world with your first appearance? Jane Austen does work wonders with her narrators, but many modern novelists rely on this point of view to the extent that their descriptive work gets lazy. Why do I have to figure out how to inform the reader about the mood of a character, when I can just tell the reader that "Tom sits in a chair by the window, bored, as he watches rain trickle down the pane"; there, wasn't that easy? What if Tom taps his finger, leans his head on the back of the chair, or shifts in his seat: don't those movements convey his boredom without simply writing "bored." I think I'm annoyed lately with the writers telling me how to perceive a situation with such exactness. "Tom is bored," writes the novelist; but what if I want to interpret the situation presented in this novel of Tom's sitting by the window and swinging his leg as a deep-seated melancholy for that character which will influence his life's path and cause him great distress every time he tries to talk to his hyperactive, cheerful sister? Stop telling me as the reader how to read these characters and their dialogues and their actions and participactions; isn't that part of the fun of reading? To take those settings and characters and dialogue into your brain and imagine what is going on; as with paintings, part of the great art of novel-writing should reside in the mental pictures and moods that the reader sees, not only what he or she is told to see and feel by the author. Without that aspect of great fiction, most of literary criticism could not exist. This incompetence exists in so much current fiction, at least what I've been reading lately; I find this informing instead of storytelling even in books that others proclaim to be great works of art of our contemporary era. I want my words to paint a picture, but I don't want to try to control how people see and experience that picture. In my book, Tom will not be "bored" and boring, he will sigh and shift in his chair until the reader thinks, "ah, he's bored; now why is he bored, and what is he going to do about it?" and then turns the page in anticipation. 

Does not play well with others

Last night, following a lovely dinner party, I roped three people into playing crokinole with me. It's a board game where you flick little wooden discs around; I couldn't remember all the rules, not having played it for many years, so we decided we were playing the "Hamilton Rules" version of the game. 
Playing with those three was immensely fun; people even came in from the party-on-deck outside to see what we were laughing about. But, at some point early on in the game, my evil, overly competitive snarky inner bi-atch surfaced, and I found myself saying the craziest things. And I noticed I was saying them, but I couldn't or wouldn't stop. I won't detail them here, because that would be like saying them out loud all over again, and I don't think any of them were very nice and should not have been put out into the universe. I like snarky humour as much as the next person, but from a comedian, on stage, who does it for a living. I really don't like getting that way when I play crazy board games, or when I'm drinking a bit and playing board games, which was probably part of the problem, you know, that losing-your-inhibitions thing that happens when alcohol soaks into your brain. I really didn't know any of those people well enough to be that snarky. I now have post-snarky regret clouding my brain and making me feel sorry for myself ... all day ... ruining my Sunday. I'm doing this to myself, snap out of it, SELF!
Now that I'm rethinking the whole episode, maybe snarky-Alice wasn't as extremely horrible as I recall, because the other three people kept playing and playing and playing for more than a hour, and we laughed altogether quite a lot; and I was actually the one who broke up the crokinole session ... when my flicking-finger started to get too sore. Ah, self-doubt, what would a post-party, blue-day, Sunday, last day of weekend, deep low-pressure system sort of day be without you? Blergh.

On days like today, I need to find my own "Ego Kevin" to achieve homeostasis ("look it up: wikipedia it" LOL).

In progress

Couldn't sleep, so blogging.
My teenage heart writes poems.


"Too much"


Twice that day I looked at you with scorn.
Once, secretly,
at the back of your head
across a crowded room
when I heard the squeak and crackle of your polite laugh.


The second, with forethought,
to your face
across the dinner table
when you winced about the day you'd had.


My full-frontal assault had no effect.
"Honey, do you have indigestion?" you asked.
My scorn-face melted into bemusement -- 
Feeling the muscles in my face relax,
I reclaimed my usual mask
of calm, demure contentment.


--Alice

For a Middle English word from the twelfth century, "scorn" gets a lot of play on the internet: with 1 million hits on Google Images, it's the name of metal bands, super-villains, and a wrestler; and it's mentioned in innumerable blog titles. It's a great word to use in a poem, and it's fun to say out loud ... "scorn." This pic shows what could very well be my next karaoke shirt.