stages (a study)

Materials
I have two poems in process right now.  They were seeded in two different forms.  One was on
20 July 2017 and is handwritten in my wide-ruled Composition Book; the second is in Notes on my iphone, auto-dated July 18, 2017,  to which I attached pictures that may never make it here.  The journey is almost too far, even though it's wireless.  The distance is time.

Procedure
I am going to transcribe each of these "seed writings" onto the blog, and, of course, revise as I go.  It can't be helped.  I am curious to discover how two juxtaposed starting positions might create a different experience for me as a writer as I struggle toward publishing.  How did I get from there to here?  Did handwriting or texting have better outcomes?

Hypothesis
Neither the texted Note nor the handwritten Composition will be better or worse than the other when typed up here on my blog. I have no way to prove this hypothesis. Maybe the proof will be, "What do my friends think?"

Background
A first draft (Stage 1) ever only really exists as its seed. You don't get to read those. Nobody does.
This, right here, is Stage 2.
Also, lately, my blog posts have been Stage 3 poems.  They have been labored over and crafted.  I'm very proud of them.  But they lack something.  Voice, maybe?  Context?  I don't know.  Like I haven't wanted to just write for the sake of writing anymore...  There's always too much thinking now.

I like thinking about poems as having Stages, though.  Like cancer.

Please remember that what you are about to read are Stage 2 poems, maybe 2B. They still have lots of growing up to do.  Any kindnesses or critiques you might like to bestow on them will be welcomed!
Also remember that you do not know which is which.  I think they call this a "blind" study, but I honestly really don't know.  Feel free to make guesses.

Procedure, con't

A:

Write each of your poems
as if it were your last—
As if all tattoos were temporary,
which they are, of course,
if you really think about it.
Send each of your words
to the darkest cave chamber, whose
walls have never known sunlight.
Make sure your poems have
napped in hammocks and
slept on Greyhound busses.
Let your phrases pierce our defenses
like terrorists, and be the Ones Who
Know. Read every poem three times—
you can't get it all on the first go.
Don't even try.
Write each of your poems
as if someone will read it
three times.


B:

We remember backwards best
I walked where once we kissed
My body remembers it as resurrection
My imperfect memory sees pathos

Here's the hole into which we almost fell
The lessons are all common sense
And we thought the trees and their shadows
could hide us from the moon.

How foolish, how almost tragic.

Conclusion
?

letting this one go.....

She was sleight of frame but strong in form. Her sparse long hair, the same drab color as mine when without highlights, hung down her back in a thoughtless ponytail. She asked me if I was "about ready to check out?" I supplied the openness she was looking for when I replied, "Why, yes, I am. Why do you ask?"

She produced a Kroeger gift card with 20.43 scribbled in black ink on the front of it. "I was wondering if you could use this card to pay for your groceries, so I could get cash to put gas in my car." Here I was, with a cart half full of cereal boxes and baby shower non-necessities.... how could I say no to a woman whose only need at the moment was gas in her car?

"Um... sure... how does it work?"

"Here, I'll take you through the line and show you."

"So wouldn't it just be easier if I traded you the card for the cash?" I uttered foolishly as I opened my wallet and searched out the lone twenty buried within a dozen smaller bills.

As I handed it to her and received the gift card in return, I offered her an extra dollar to cover the remaining 43 cents. She declined, and mumbled something about maybe getting a bottle of water with it.

She then led me like a lamb to the self-checkout slaughter, and proceeded to pretend to be interested in bagging my excesses. She must have been viewing me with that particular combination of envy and disgust that has forged and fed most every revolution in history.

I continued to occupy myself with a temperamental self-checkout station ("Please scan your Soopercard now." "Please remove the last item from the bag." "Please place the item on the scanner.") which I had made even more cumbersome by having the audacity to bring two of my own shopping bags, which required an intercessory prayer to the lone clerk (who, I'm sure, deals with the idiocies of inept humans all day, and yet still manages to smile patiently) who did something mysterious to the scales and added two 5-cent credits to the little screen in front of me.

In the middle of all this chaos, my middle-aged con-woman excused herself to the restroom, saying she'd "be right back", but that she "really had to go", and that she would help me check out when she returned.

It was then, of course, that the doubts tiptoed into my dreadfully unmindful mind, as I struggled to look up cucumber codes, keep an eye on my purse, play bagging Tetris with my scanned items, and try to stop thinking about all the time I was wasting when people would be arriving at my house for Elise's baby blessing in less than an hour!

Lo and behold, she showed up again magically at my side to help organize the last of my goods into the two bags I had brought, and begin the check-out process.

Let's just skip the details and asides for now, shall we, as we arrive at the inevitable: the gift card had a balance of zero. She didn't appear to be too mystified, and actually said, "Well, I just kinda found it and figgered it had the money on it that it said." Then she asked the clerk if there was a way to check the balance. He asked for the card, and said he could make a phone call. While he was dialing, and before giving me time to process this new revelation, she asked our clerk where the water was, as she was quite thirsty, and disappeared, 20 dollars richer, down a brightly lit aisle that could have just as easily been a dark alley.

I would wait for another four or five minutes, as the kind clerk made his phone call that confirmed the zero balance. After he returned the card to me, I related my story, embarrassed though I was, to him. He reviewed aloud with me her appearance, so that he would be able to recognize her in the future.

In my mind, of course, I believe she had it all planned out, every single detail of the operation, beginning with the spotting of the ideal victim and ending with $20 in her pocket. And so I have to applaud, really, her resourcefulness. She made in ten minutes what most panhandlers make in several days. Was it dishonest as hell? Yes. Did she intentionally want to hurt me or make me angry? I don't think so. I told the clerk before leaving, "Well, I think I'll just chalk that one up to my naivete, and let it go."

Once again, what Odysseus pronounces in The Odyssey proves to be true: "All-seeing Zeus takes half the good out of a man on the day when he becomes a slave."

i could listen to her all day

keebler elves = stoners

war games

So, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates resurrects a favorite phrase and now declares that the war in Afghanistan will be "a long slog".

Well, DUH!! Witness:



I just can't get enough of these VBS Videos! Go ahead, try the link. I dare you
You'll be lost for hours.......... I promise.

the tale of despereaux

Arghhh!!!! I feel such anger at Kate diCamillo for letting Hollywood destroy her perfect little gem of a novel! Sadness for the children who may now never bother to read the modern-day fairy tale! Disappointment that something so seemingly dark but unbelievably charming was turned into something so mediocre and watered-down!

I read The Tale of Despereaux aloud to my boys about a year ago, in the February darkness, when they were seven and eight. It was one of the most profound experiences we have ever had reading together. I knew it would be a challenge to turn the exquisite language and themes of the novel into a film, but I thought the same about Charlotte's Web as well, and was pleasantly surprised by the screen version. I suppose my hopes were too high.

Do yourself and your children a favor, please: for the price of only one movie ticket, you can buy the book. Read it aloud together. Caress the uneven pages along the edges, marvel at the illustrations, talk about what it means to be yourself, about what happens to people when they are mistreated, about what it means to find light in "Once upon a time....."

The themes are heavy and dark, and for this reason alone, I know parents who have dismissed it. They are idiots. They forget that for true redemption, there must be real sadness, real suffering. Children need not be sheltered from these kinds of stories. They are powerful beyond measure.

For those that don't like Despereaux's themes of abuse, servitude and death (the themes that were completely left out of the movie!), I would refer you to this lengthy, but appropriate comment from C.S. Lewis:

"A serious attack on the fairy tale as children's literature comes from those who do not wish children to be frightened....Those who say that children must not be frightened may mean two things. They may mean (1) that we must not do anything likely to give the child those haunting, disabling, pathological fears against which ordinary courage is helpless: in fact, phobias....Or they may mean (2) that we must try to keep out of his mind the knowledge that he is born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil. If they mean the first I agree with them: but not if they mean the second. The second would indeed be to give children a false impression and feed them on escapism in the bad sense. There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to.…the atomic bomb. Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage...

By confining your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing at all alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable.For in the fairy tales, side by side with the terrible figures, we find the immemorial comforters and protectors, the radiant ones; and the terrible figures are not merely terrible, but sublime. It would be nice if no little boy in bed, hearing or thinking he hears, a sound, were ever at all frightened. But if he is going to be frightened, I think it better that he should think of giants and dragons than merely of burglars. And I think St George, or any bright champion in armour, is a better comfort than the idea of police."

you won't find this one at the carnival

This was bound to happen.....

I like it for the sound effects.  There's a small thrill of satisfaction when you launch the shoe and hear it smack.  

A diversion, yes, but what would this world be without them?

Try it yourself.  

Here's to the first laugh of 2009!

oh brother.....

Here's why:

Sexy - 6x
Breast - 3x
Death - 2x
Porn - 1x

It helps, I suppose, that "sexy" is one of my labels, not just a word used randomly in various posts. And then there's the fact that my mother died of breast cancer. Yes, Ron Jeremy did pass through Colorado Springs last year, but he was touring with a holy man (click on "porn" above for the details). It should be obvious to everyone that these things combined hardly warrant an NC-17 rating.

I'm also wondering why it picked up the word "breast", but not the word penis. And what about whore? Who created this rating program anyhow?

Anyway, I suppose my new rating (which I am rather proud of even if it is suspect) gives me license to recommend this movie. I watched it last night. As it ended, I had a silly happy grin on my face while the tears were gently falling. I was acutely aware that these were genuine emotions, not ones that had been manipulated in the usual Hollywood fashion. It's a beautiful film. And funny. Really. Just watch the trailer:



Or perhaps you would rather take a look at this website. Oh, wait, it's for teens. Damn! Stupid rating. (If you have teens, or if you will soon, please check out the link and watch at least one of the episodes. It's brilliant) I just think it strange how we condone and allow violence in absurd amounts - the average child has seen X* number of murders before he/she is 17, and yet the words breast, death, sexy, and porn are enough to send me into NC-17!? Why is crime and punishment more acceptable to us than sex and relationships? WTF is wrong with our society people!?

More sexy stories about death and breasts and porn to come! (I'll let you decide if that pun was intended or not)

*I'm too lazy to go looking for the stats right now, but I know they're out there.

but will he resurrect in three days?

The boys wanted a reasonable answer as to why the Easter Bunny didn't find us in Leadville.














No, I didn't give them this one.

Today, I ran into an old friend at Mt. Princeton Hot Springs. We picked up where we had left off.
While looking up from my riverside pool of bliss, I saw a man that looked just like the quintessential Jesus... long brown wavy hair, beard, white robe (oh, wait, maybe that was a terrorist?.....)

I pointed Jesus out to my friend and she quipped, without missing a beat, "Well, it figures, it IS Easter."

tpp as the sun rises on the hagia sophia

I'm drowning in the middle of my own TPP at the moment. That's "Total Pity Party" for the uninitiated.

I just found out today, after several emails and phone calls, that our much-anticipated summer travel adventure to Turkey is NOT going to happen because some incompetent secretarial schmo didn't send us an application form for the teacher-diplomat program for which John was supposedly a shoe-in!

That's all.

Here's a lovely photo of what I will NOT be seeing this summer:



unless I can get it together and plan the trip myself.

at year's end

There's so much that could be said on the eve of a new beginning. But this is all I have to offer:

Dickheads

thank you grammar lady!

god will not bless an educator driving a BMW who doesn't even seem to recognize the fact that she is driving around with an extra apostrophe. This car parks every day in my SCHOOL parking lot!