Meme Verification Exercises

Inspirational song: Picture That (Roger Waters)

After months of planning and researching, I progressed to composing actual text on the story I've been shaping. It's sort of like throwing pottery on a wheel... For the first several minutes you are conditioning the clay. You slap a giant lump as close to the middle of the wheel as you can, as hard as it takes to make it stick to the plate. You let it go in circles a bit, pushing hard with the heel of your hand, centering the lump into a balanced mound. Then you have to cone it -- meaning you shape it into a cone and then you crush it, and start over again, three times. Only then do you begin forming your initial shape. Once you have a little height on it, you shove both thumbs into the center, and open up a hole to pull up a bowl or cup or vase, whatever your idea is. For my story, I'm just starting to pierce it with my thumbs. I've done a lot of prep work. I have names, histories, personalities, birthdays, professions, and alignments. Until today, I didn't let them actually get going. As of this afternoon, I have a currant red 1972 Toyota Corona station wagon full of a physically and emotionally broken family, pulling up in front of their ancestral home. We are off and running. Or perhaps spinning, to follow the metaphor I set up. It's just a couple handwritten pages so far, but it feels totally different than the research and summary phase.

It took a lot out of me to give myself permission to move to the next step. I've spent countless hours picturing the whole story complete and released to the public. For some reason, getting the first sentence down to start the journey was hard. It will take discipline to work on it every day until it's a habit, as much as this nightly essay is.

To give myself a little air, I tried to soak in the hot tub, but the day was oppressively hot, so the whole experience was a let down. I gave up on that early, changed into a spa robe, and wasted a little time around the house. Elsa came in to hang out with me, in front of the only fan that was going in the living room. She kept trying to tell me something that I just wasn't getting. It wasn't until she returned to the backyard that I realized I had a bowl with a watermelon rind sitting next to me on the side table. It's entirely possible she was letting me know that she had never in her whole life tried watermelon, and she really wanted to. (That could have been untrue -- our dogs and cats have been known to lie when food is involved.) I remembered that there was a meme going around not all that long ago (within the last year or so) of dogs daintily eating watermelon, and I had to know, would Elsa devour it like she does everything else, human fingers be damned, or would she be cute like those internet dogs?

I only gave Elsa and Murray thin slices, to determine how they felt about the whole thing. Elsa started out a little enthusiastic, and sure enough, she slowed down as she got a feel for the stuff. Murray wasn't quite so sure what to do with it until he pulled it out of my hands and onto the ground. At first I thought he didn't like it, as he is only lukewarm on apples, carrots, and other treats that Elsa thinks are divine. Then right before I turned off the video, I heard him tell Elsa to back off. We both went back to the patio and let him discover watermelon all by himself.