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Leave the dirt

Thursday 10/10/24

October 21 is the tenth anniversary of my sister Kerrin's death and I have been trying to think of something nice I might do for my mom. I will call her, of course, but I don't really want to send a card. Instead I'll send her "The Bird." I think if she reads it on that day then she will have a part of it where something makes her happy because I don't think you can read that story and not feel happy at least for a little bit no matter how you feel otherwise.


For me, a work of writing should be something you can reread again and again. Read daily. With no diminished returns. Ideally, it's a work that gives you the same amount of joy--and we've talked about joy and all it can mean before--each time. Or not less.


Don't wash the dirt or dried mud off of your pumpkin. That's a great pumpkin. Be glad it has brought some of the dirt or mud from the patch with it.


M.R. James's "The Mezzotint" is a ghost story about child murder on the one hand, but it's also cozy horror on the other--these friends in a comfortable, safe, homey place are watching this changing engraving of a manor house to see how a crime once played out. We encounter that coziness in the ghost stories of E.F. Benson, but it's more diffuse than with James. M.R. James can move forwards in his stories even when moving circularly.


Do you know how much easier and better everything gets when people try a bit harder and think a little more?


People say, "I said what I said" after they've said something like whatever that was was provocative because it was so intelligent. It's never intelligent. It's either bland and obvious or wrong. As for provocative, this is just sad. The emptiness inside never gets filled in this manner. Try as one may.


People are often very simple and yet they manage to overcomplicate things such that I wonder how they manage to do anything. For instance, I saw this post where a women said she'd eaten poorly for a week and wanted to know what she should do about it in order to feel better. People take to social media for the likes of this now. You can't just get the answers--or put the answers you know into practice--on your own? And then everyone gives labored, bad advice that involves many things and yet misses the mark with every one of those things.


If I feel like I have not eaten well--and there's only so wrong I can go with the dietary rules to which I hew--I will simply not eat for a day. I'll drink my black coffee, my teas, my lemon water. It takes no time for me to feel once more like the spry hunter of life and light on my feet again as I bound up the stairs.


Another example: Someone said that their dentist recommended a night guard because they were grinding their teeth while they slept and wearing them down. Again, we have a person taking to social media, automatically complicating a simple problem. I had the same issue. My dentist recommended a night guard. I intend to make it past 100. I need good teeth and to take care of my teeth. I got the night guard. I wear it each night. Problem addressed. In reading some of the responses to this person, again I couldn't help but wonder how anyone ever gets anything done.


But failing to move A to B--something I've talked about again and again in this journal--is a symptom of being simple, not trying very hard, and not thinking very much. This is also how most people fill up their days--by thinking ineffectively. That creates what is tantamount to "busy work" for them.


Remember busy work from school? Your teacher gave it to you just to keep you busy. Not to learn or progress. But this adult version of busy work becomes the stuff of adult lives, almost exclusively--save when dealing with emergencies. It's also like having meetings when there are no need for the meetings. Everyone sits around the table so that they can say a meeting was held. Very little is accomplished in meetings. People live in abeyance rather than in moving forward.


One way I try to keep myself on task is to have days where I actively ask myself, "Is this contributing to moving forward?" There are bigger ideas there for me pertaining to the war I'm in, getting to the world, impacting the world, getting to the life I wish to have. Returning to Rockport. There are both big and small things to which I can answer, "Yes." They are equally valid. Running the stairs can be one of those things. Making some notes. Writing the story, of course. Working on the book. Getting to bed at the right time so I can get up all the earlier. Eating that apple. Thinking about that title. Watching that film. Writing an entry in this record. On Sunday, I spent some time re-centering my mind. I sat in a park and thought. I did nothing else. Drank my steamed apple juice, watched the rabbits and the birds. Breathed. I reached out inside of myself to regather my strength. To put it where I could reach it. If you looked out your window, you would have seen a man who'd been sitting on a bench for twenty minutes. But I was moving forward.


My thumb seems to be mending from the injury I did to it the other day with the scissors. It's not a pretty sight--this angry red crescent-shaped wound. Each day after I run the stairs and shower, I remove the old bandage. I apply some Neosporin, then a wound strip that is supposed to help bind the skin. I wrap a Band-Aid around the thumb, and then another above that helps keep the strip below in place. I'm not confident that this couldn't open up again, so I will continue to keep it covered thusly. As bad as this was, I think I got lucky.


I've been informed that Amelia won't be a unicorn for Halloween after all, but rather this person I have never heard of, though that is still subject to change. She will be getting a Halloween card from the Little Ghost Girl, though. That has not changed.


Did the Chiefs win the other night? I don't even know. But I bet they did. And I suspect they got a fortuitous call. I'm not saying it wouldn't have been the right call. But there was probably a fortuitous call in there.


Here is one way I would look at the difference between baseball and football fans. Sherlock Holmes would be a baseball fan. That person whom Sherlock Holmes attempts to get information from at the tavern by putting on a similar outfit and adopting a Cockney accent would be a football fan.


I had mentioned my favorite recording of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" a while back, which is one of my favorites of all spoken word recordings, but not knowing who the reader was. It was Martin Jarvis, as I've since learned and was originally broadcast in three parts for BBC7 in 2005. I listen to it a lot.


People who give tours say the exact same words, with the exact same inflections, every time. That seems like a shame to me.


I really don't like win probability graphics and stats during baseball broadcasts. Must we try and take the possibility out of everything? The potential and hope for magic? There is a reason why Han Solo never wanted to know the odds. One who thinks in terms of odds is a person who can only go so far.





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