Imagination

Inspirational song: Rescue Me (The Alarm)

There are times it has been great to be able to wake up easily in the middle of the night. There was that one time in high school when I woke out of a sound sleep to the smell of melting latex, and came downstairs to find that a rug had defeated its non-skid backing, and had been pushed over the top of a floor furnace, where it was starting to smolder. (The joys of living in an early 20th-century house... Floor furnaces were great in the winter when you were wearing nightgowns or robes to catch the warmth as you stood over them, but the downside was that they could pose a clear and present danger to an old wooden structure.) I've gotten up many times over the years to investigate sounds and smells that sometimes needed attention, and sometimes needed to be ignored if possible (like the farty smell that fills the house when you put a pork shoulder and apple cider vinegar in a crock pot over night). Last night sure seemed like there was something important worth waking for. I dreamed that there was something tearing apart my belly button, either an alien trying to escape or subconscious memories or surgery maybe. I felt like it was trying to wake me up, but I steadfastly refused to rise. Moments later, I swear there were flashing red lights that I could see through my closed eyes. It dug into my sleeping mind enough to make me think there was some really good reason to wake up. I looked around. There were no flashing lights anywhere. No police stop outside on the street, no fire in the bedroom, nothing. No smells to indicate a crock pot or oil warmer left on. No sounds of a cat puking or intruder at the window. Absolutely nothing inside the house was wrong. So I picked up my phone and checked for messages. Once my eyes adjusted to the light of a thousand suns from the screen, I looked on Facebook a minute. Again, nothing of importance at a local or international level that I had to deal with right then and there. False alarms all around, but then I was stuck being wide awake for nothing.

Maybe it's the product of having too active of an imagination. To be a writer this consistently prolific, I have to be able to get inside my head easily. I keep waiting for this discipline to turn toward writing the things I want to be producing, rather than just an endless series of etudes. I have that great story I outlined for myself that is set this week, starting today. I need to devote a few hours to fleshing out the actual story, not just the backstories of the characters which may or may not get used. The story ends on New Year's Day, and I'd like to have it complete and released into the wild before then.

My daughter has been putting her own running story down on paper, and she's showing me up. She has been filling a journal with small, precisely spaced but messy as crap handwriting, filling the entire page, margins and all, with a story she has been turning over in her mind for years. She bragged to me a few times about the progress she's making, and I'm not going to lie, I am jealous of it. Just this afternoon she sent a picture of how far into the notebook she is. I am proud of her, to be sure. I just wish I was setting a better example for her by pouring my own fiction out in such quantity. It's in there, if I could just force myself to extract it.

The Ghost of Christmas

Inspirational song: The Typewriter (Leroy Anderson)

I am made of sleepies. I've been dragging my tail all day, and doing what is necessary to address pain has only added weight to that tail. I had fallen asleep in my chair while Mr X was out running errands. When he came in and woke me, I mused out loud that I wished he could blog for me so I could just go to bed. He mimicked what he, an over-caffeinated squirrel, would look like composing random silliness for me, typing on an imaginary typewriter with just his index fingers and enthusiasm. I told him I could hear the music that accompanied him, and he just looked at me blankly. Does not everyone know and love Leroy Anderson music like I do? I played the proper video, which amused him, and now I'm wandering down a lovely lane of mid-century musical goodness. There are many pieces I didn't know before, like the Trumpeter's Lullaby, and I'm absolutely in heaven.

I want you to picture in your mind what I'm about to describe, mostly because I have not yet been given permission to share any photographic evidence. My brother has been sharing his friend's stories about an albino raccoon that she has currently living at her animal sanctuary. When he first sent a photo of this little creature, I thought maybe it was an opossum. I didn't recognize him without his mask. I have delighted in the stories and the pictures of a pure white, pointy-nosed, long-fingered juvenile learning about the world around him, safe in the arms of a woman who offers him nothing less than soft blankets and sufficient food. He was rescued young enough to feel secure and tame around her. I've seen photos of him relaxed and curious, obviously happy. Today she took him to be neutered, and she posted a video of him still quite stoned from his surgical and post-surgical meds, eating peanut butter. On the way home from the vet clinic, he found a candy cane in her car, and she took a picture of that too.

I have emotional scars related to raccoons that I wish I could erase forever. When we first moved to Charleston, we stayed at an apartment complex, where we met people who became our best friends in town. Several weeks in a row, we were swimming in the pool late at night, and saw a family of young raccoons rifling through the trash cans for dinner. Animal lovers that we are, we just watched from the water, quietly holding our breath so we didn't scare them off. It's possible that we brought out dog food one or two of those nights (I honestly don't remember, but I wouldn't put it past us). We and our friends loved the raccoons, but the trash collector had a different opinion. I will not give you the details (because it would scar you as badly as it did to me), but he dispatched the raccoons in a horrible, inhumane way. If I could have done the same to him, I would have without hesitation. I have never forgiven, and I will never forget.

I like raccoons. I'm not saying that I haven't been frustrated by them stealing "food" from my property (including all occupants from our one attempt at a fishpond in coastal California). But I like the little guys. I think they're cute, and they are part of the great circle of life. I told my brother today, when he sent the pictures of the albino raccoon eating the candy cane (before I Facebook friended the rescuer at his prompting) that after the atrocious year I have had, watching this little guy know nothing but love and safety might just save 2016 for me. At the very least, it is saving Christmas.

Party Games

Inspirational song; Du Hast (Rammstein)

Wow, is it really that late? We spent all night at a Saturnalia party, and now I have nothing left in the tank to make a whole lot of verbal sense. The party was excellent, though. Our thoughtful hostess made all of the food grain free so I didn't have to pick around dangerous items. They downloaded a new game to be played on XBox while we were there, and we spent close to three hours playing it. There were three categories we focused on, one where you tried to come up with the most believable lies to questions (or the most creative), one where you went head-to-head with awful answers to fill-in-the-blank statements, and one where you were given very strange things to draw and have people guess what they were. All of these were controlled by our own personal devices-- our smartphones, tablets, or laptops. It was with total shock that we looked up and realized that it was already midnight as we started the last round. The evening went way too quickly. For one head-to-head question, my daughter and I were give the prompt "The worst song to use for pairs figure skating." Without realizing we were against each other, and without any sort of coordination, we came up with the exact same answer (Du Hast). This really sums up our relationship.

While we were still eating dinner, they ran an older game where they created characters for the computer's AI to pit against each other in a wrestling ring. Some of the things they had made a year or two ago were too strange to describe. Some were instantly recognizable to me as my daughter's self portraits. At one point, her two characters were facing off against an old lady character. From the kitchen I heard her quote her job at an assisted living facility: "We're going to need help with a two-person lift." (See the photos that accompany this anecdote.)

The Big Guy

Inspirational song: Here Comes Santa Claus (Gene Autry)

I saw a certain white-haired celebrity for the first time this year while I was at lunch today. I know he has been busy making the rounds, but he managed to fit our luncheon into his schedule. Maybe we can convince Santa to become a Rotarian. He seems the type.

Our last meeting before the biggest holiday weekend of the month was well-attended, for a time when a lot of people are traveling or busy with out of town guests. Rotarians brought their spouses, children, and grandchildren, and we had a harpist, an instrumental trio of high school future Rotary members, and a youth choir to perform for us all. At the end of the program, Santa came out, gave a little speech, and took questions from the kids in attendance. They asked him how he delivered presents in one night, how he gets into houses when so many of them don't have fireplaces anymore, and pertinent questions along those lines. The thing he said that was most relevant to my family was to insist that when you have two or three bins overflowing full of Legos, it does not mean that you need fewer Legos. It means that you need more bins. (I told this to my kids, and my older daughter said "not all heroes wear capes.")

No, I did not have my picture taken with Santa. Sure, that might have been fun, but I let the opportunity slip by. Maybe he'll come by my house Saturday night, and we can take a selfie then.

Carried on the Current

Inspirational song: Perceptions of Johnny Punter (Fish)

I woke up resigned and full of dread, just before dawn. I knew this day would be a day I wouldn't like, and I resolved to distract myself from as much of it as possible. I needed fun activities, not the national news. The first thing I did after rising (well, after sticking a cup of yesterday's coffee into the microwave, that is), was to put on my hair-dying t-shirt, and dig out the bleach. I promised my daughter that I'd prep my hair to receive a color I'd never tried before. I mixed up a huge batch of lightener (which smelled horribly of ammonia), and sat for almost an hour with it coating my hair on the bottom six or seven inches. I washed it out in the shower and looked in the mirror to see what good it had done. Not much. There were a few new blonde streaks, but the underside of medium brown remained nearly untouched. My younger daughter showed up an hour later, with her favorite scissors and feathering razor, ready to have at me. I have never let this child cut my hair before, but I realized it was time. She has as much experience cutting hair (mostly her own) now as I had at that age in designing and sewing clothes, when I had a business doing it (we both started practicing at age 6). I decided to trust her. She took between two and three inches of hair off of the length and layered it expertly, and then set about evening up the front shape that had looked awful since I tried to trim it myself months ago. Then she took the pale lilac dye I bought (that came out of the tube a stunning purple), and gave me my first not-from-nature semi-permanent hair color ever. I've been wanting to put in this color for months, and the tube of dye was sitting in my linen closet since August or September, waiting for me to feel brave. Lessons learned so far are to use more of the lightener plus a stronger developer to lift more natural color out of my hair, and to leave the bold color in a whole lot longer. Right now I just have little peeks of lavender, just enough to make me want to make it darker purple right away. It's kind of like I was warned when I got my first small tattoo at age 19. It's just enough to get you hooked, and you'll want more and more. I still have some of the pastel lilac left in the tube, but today I purchased a tube of neon purple to go alongside it. The butterfly is coming out of her chrysalis.

We spent the rest of the day shopping. I refused to look at the internet or television the whole day. I couldn't bear it. It was so nauseating to me that I actually preferred to be in a giant mall, surrounded by strangers, carrying heavy bags through crowded stores with loud piped-in music. I was doing all right until I had to stand around Hot Topic, waiting for my daughter to look at every single tiny thing in there, searching for the one thing she wanted to give away. Ever since my kids were pre-teens, Hot Topic has made me feel claustrophobic, something that is unusual for me generally. As I used to do before, I told my girl that I'd wait outside, and I held her bags while I stood in front of the store. I must have stood there way more than 30 minutes. I'd been holding up okay while we were walking around the mall, but that period of standing and shifting back and forth on my feet set off every old, inflamed, autoimmune-eaten ounce of connective tissue in my body. I could have sat down about 50 feet away from the store, down a spur hallway, but there was a gigantic television in front of the leather sofas there. I turned my back to it and instead just stood there in agony, waiting. All of those years, shopping or just standing about has done this to me, but not until now did I have a vocabulary for what is going on with me, and an understanding of how serious it is and what my options are. I was 25 miles away from my bottle of Tramadol, but I knew that getting back into motion as soon as possible and then sitting on a heated seat would tide me over until I could get home to it. I just had to voice my plan, and it was understood and accepted. It's so far removed from a lifetime of hurting and getting angry and acting out because I couldn't believe that these simple activities were as devastating to my health as they are, and because it was assumed that I was exaggerating my discomfort. Now we all know what it is and why it must be addressed. That makes it easier on all of us, and attitudes stay much more positive and convivial.

I peeked at Twitter just a little, to confirm that history has taken a dark turn. I truly believe that mistakes have been made, and compounded, and it's going to take hard evidence to the contrary to lessen my bad attitude about the situation. The purpose of my writing has never been to push a specific political agenda, and I will do everything I can to keep it that way. My writing does, however, float on the current of my emotions, and they are turbulent indeed right now. I'm planning on refocusing those emotions into the piece of fiction that threw itself at me yesterday, and grew as rapidly as the Grinch's heart this afternoon. It will be more productive than peals of gloom and doom or vitriol at people who think differently than I do. This will continue to be a mostly apolitical, escapist, self-affirming retreat for as long as I can keep it that way.

(Before -- before bleach and before coffee)

(When it's just a few highlights on top of your head, you don't notice as much how badly it smells of ammonia)

(If only it stayed that vivid purple)

(It's a start. Next step: adding in dark neon purple beside the lilac!)

Just Getting Started

Inspirational song: In the Evening (Led Zeppelin)

So here it is, one week before Christmas. I have finally started shopping, just a little bit. Is that late? I used to think I was at least competent at this gift giving business, when I was much, much younger. I don't even pretend anymore. I'm terrible at it, and I don't know how to change that. I don't know how to quantify how I feel about people by how much money I spend on them on stuff I can wrap. It never seems like the right metric. I try to find things that make me think of other people and smile, but even that fails me. I either get something so mundane as to be insulting, or so weird that they don't see the affection in my attempt at humor. I wish I knew how to get it right. If it's mundane, doesn't that mean that I see reminders of this person everywhere in everyday life, and I think of them all the time? If it's weird, doesn't that imply that I think they are unique and unexpected and worth the extra steps it takes to connect the dots? Maybe I really do just over think it, which leads me to an impasse. I was just explaining this to one of my friends in regards to why I never get cards out on time, or usually even at all. I get so caught up in how much it takes to write a personal letter, more than a paragraph for each card, that I never start on the first one. Presents have become that difficult for me now. I'd love to just fill up a shopping cart with scarves and soaps and toys, and hand out a simple present to everyone. But I have to stop and think whether the things I give are useful enough or wanted enough. Do they live in a small apartment and have no room for new kitchen gadgets or decorative items? Are they downsizing? Are they allergic to perfumed personal care items? Will I be repeating something someone else is giving them this year? Will I even make it to the post office in time? I just can't get out of my own way on this. Never think that if you don't get a present or card from me that I don't think highly of you. I just suck at showing it.

I had a helper in shopping today. It made it possible for me to buy a few things, having someone to steer me into stores, and assess the things I passed by without much comprehension. I mostly just looked at colors without knowing exactly what anything was good for. I'm pretty sure I stared at cannabis-leaf-shaped silicone ice cube trays for a full minute in one store before I realized what I was doing. Maybe tomorrow's shopping will go a little better. I miss the days of letters to Santa. I knew exactly what to get the kids when they were little. And back then, it was "the more the merrier." Now they both have more than they can put away in their little apartments, but I still feel like gift cards are too impersonal for my girls, even when they tell me that's all they want.

I was just as spaced out driving home at the end of the evening as I was when I was overloaded with stacks of gift ideas. I have been feeling the need to write another short story, and I was struggling to find the starting point for it. Then, over dinner, my daughter and her father said a couple triggering statements, and suddenly, it all opened up for me. On the drive home, along the dark county roads, I had a cast of characters come up and introduce themselves, one after another. Seven people came out of nowhere, and now they are as real to me as if I spent the last decade getting to know them. I was so involved in naming them and understanding their relationships to each other, that when I got to the first stop sign past the reservoir, I really had no idea where I was. There aren't a lot of street lamps way out there, and I couldn't see the houses in the dark to know which way to turn. Even the name of the road was minimally helpful. I made it home, and wrote down all the names and what I knew of each person. I still don't know where the action will go, but at least I know who will perform it, and for now, that's a good start.

Not What I Expected

Inspirational song: Take Me to the Pilot (Elton John)

I was reminded this morning that today would have been my great-grandmother's 132nd birthday. She is the only person of her generation in my family of whom I have active memories. Mostly I remember that she was incredibly sweet and indulgent to us great-grandchildren. Stories I've heard from before my time only confirm that picture of her. (My father loves to tell about having dinner with her when my brother was still a toddler, when he turned his nose up at most of his food. He'd eaten about four peas and not much else, when Granny said in an old-lady-Okie-voice, "He done pretty good. Let him have chocolate cake.") As I have admitted two weeks ago, on what would have been my grandmother's 100th birthday, I like to mark those days by doing something that makes me think of my ancestors. I expected that I would make a (flourless) chocolate cake, and maybe crochet or play Chinese checkers or drive around the cemetery "just for fun." I did none of those things. In fact, I am not sure Granny would have appreciated anything about this day. As my mother often says when she ends up working in the yard or laboring in some other way, "My grandmother would never have done this."

We found out this week that Oskar Blues brewery was having a special release event for a barrel-aged beer, and something called "Death by Coconut." I didn't fully understand the significance of this sort of knowledge. This morning, when I was leisurely making an omelette and fresh pot of coffee to warm up the man who had just shoveled snow off of my walk in the single-digit (F) temperatures, I said out loud that at some point we should stop by the tasting room to try the new beer. In my head, it would be on tap, and there would be a steady crowd of about fifteen or twenty beer drinkers in the bar at any given time. I was just sure that this would be around for a few days, no problem. The man laughed at me and said if we weren't there right at noon when they started, we were not going to get anything. Turns out even that was cutting it close. We drove up to the Tasty Weasel at 12:10, and the parking lot was slammed. We followed the arrows around to the warehouse entrance, and were greeted with wristbands and shunted over to the large crowd. They could only have about eighty people at a time in the bar, and our bands were numbers 380 and 381. It was a long wait. The warehouse was warm enough when there were 300 people in it, but once they got close to our numbers, it cooled off. We met a whole lot of fun people, many of whom brought in adorable dogs. At one point a man walked in with a hand truck stacked to the top with cases of their regular beer, and within seconds it was picked clean to the ground. It kept the crowds calm while we waited hours to go buy beers that cost $12.50 per can. Obviously, I did not drink beer, nor buy any for myself. But I did a good deed. By 3 pm, there were no wristbands left, but thanks to a careful rationing system, they still had beer left for those of us with bands. A man I walked back to the bar area with heard me say that I was gluten-intolerant, and thus not buying anything. He begged me to take him back to the purchase area, to use my number to buy a twelve pack. I helped a stranger pay $150.00 for half of a case of beer. Am I not helpful?

I begged the fates for this cold weather to come around. I got out and enjoyed the hell out of it once it did. I had to help with the rescue when the man tried to drive his project Jeep around the block and it died in the alley just up from our house. (And once it got running again, it almost didn't shut down. Turns out you can open up the cover over the air filter and choke it off at the carburetor in a pinch. Good to know, I guess.) We went to the movies (Rogue One for the first time--there will be more viewings), and it was dark and extra chilly by the time we got out. The car said it was -8. The weather app said -10. The air froze in my nostrils as I walked to the car. It was like being up in North Dakota again. And I spent the rest of the evening helping clean up the components as the man tore apart the old 4Runner he bought for our daughter back in North Dakota. He pulled out the dash to replace the heater core, and asked me to scrub all the pieces free of decades of dust and car residue. These are absolutely things my great-grandmother would never, ever do. I guess I'm setting my own traditions, that perhaps my own grandchildren can imitate to think of me instead.