Exercise Post. Week Two:

PEANUT BY PEANUT

As meager as it sounds, maybe 250 words a day is a little unrealistic. In reality, two hundred and fifty words is less than half a page. When I open a blank word document the words should come tumbling out like kernels from a dropped box of theater popcorn. Instead, it's like shaking free sticky globs of Cracker Jack; sometimes I have to jam my finger into the little cardboard hole and rub it raw as I try to hook a sweet peanut. Sometimes pulling metaphors is worse than that terribly overused simile pulling teeth.

I am detail oriented. Blame it on a mother whose towel folds were as crisply specific as origami. Furthermore, I loath revision. By the time I get there, I am already sick of the piece. I have already picked piece by piece through my lexicon, written and rewritten each sentence; dug peanut by peanut and kernel by kernel through my Cracker Jack. Friends tell me to just write, don’t worry about the details at first, but I cannot do that any more than I would toss the silverware in the drawer and come back and sort it into its rightful compartments later.

I am currently working on novella. I am attempting to set my stakes higher than a short story, but a novel seems a little too optimistic --especially since after five months I can chalk my page count up to ten. I guess this is why so many writers keep blogs in which they lament their masochistic undertaking. Sometimes, I wish I could pull myself out of the creative pool, these waters surely produce some festering mutation of the psyche. And regardless of how stagnant it has become, I can’t seem to evolve the necessary apparatus to push myself from its murky hold and become onE of those fabled creatures don’t gasp and thrash without it.

And so I guess I will keep rattling the box. Hopefully, realistically, the edges should soften, my finger callus, and those sweet cognitive clusters pour a little freer. That is, until I can pull myself out of this mess.

Exercise Post. Week One.

Rooting For Dogs
Sunday, May 16, 2010

I root for dogs padding through dewy yards at dawn. The lowed head dogs, nose thrust toward the night’s footfalls, trotting with an urgency as though tugged by the brush of weeping rope at their neck, pulled by bent-link drag of chain. I commend dogs sniffing and spraying cached streams of urine over light poles, tires, hearty clumps of grass, a child’s dump truck, things that for that morning seem as though they could be theirs.

I applaud the dogs whose rose petal belly has scraped the morning damp earth, whose chest is a hackle of matted mud teeth; dogs who have pawed all night at the catch of gate or the clay beneath the fence. The dogs carrying the guilt of all dogs in their hunch. Dogs that glower with eyes like moon on a midnight pond as they hasten with joyous lolling tongues; tongues like flapping red flags of dissent.

The lone mutts snuffling up sidewalks towards bilious white piñatas, they know that they are bad dogs. Bad dog! Bad dog! Bad dog! An still they shamble to those decadently effluvial sacks that will burst like melons, that will spill butter-moist crusts, bones still clinched with flesh, heavy putrid diapers. They will flutter that little red flag over whiskered chops, in and around cellophane wrappers, sticky paper towels, coagulated lumps on tinfoil. There will be no discrimination among dogs.

They will grin and pant and run with the slam of the door, like teenagers after festooning the school in toilet paper, flee as incandescent as caught lovers. With glee and guilt they will return to chain-link fences, to kennels, to tethered stakes. And for a few moments they will have owned the morning as dogs can.




Job Description
Tuesday, May 18, 2010

I nestle the rubber and canvas shoes in an old drawer, poised like sand dollars or a bed of oysters and tied in pairs with twine, they will go places I never will. Every few minutes I straighten the other vessels of leather, rubber, canvas, wood and cork. I straighten the laces like a mother smoothing a child’s curled collar before sending them out the door.

The shoes perch like patient birds on the wood and wrought iron shoe trees. Some alight upon tall, delicate, leather-wrapped heels, the sole an elegant inclination, they are the summertime beauties. Their soft taupe, swan, and dove-hued leather wings will enfold the feet of brides.

Fanned upon another shelf, pumps and flats display their bold contours, anomalous designs, and rant of color like the specimens of a tropical aviary. Some squat on bubbly, squashed heels others crawl into a gentle webbing across the ankle. These shoes’ flights will be on dance floors, over chic urban blocks, lunch dates.

I straighten the stout clogs, the sexy kitten heels, the organic sandals the color of reeds, fowl, and soil. For a season they are my kittens in a box, my graduating pupils. Soon the will walk out into worlds I will never know. For now, I must straighten and primp. Tie laces. Buckle and button. Straighten. Straighten…

Steel Wool for the Soul

As the point of creating a blog was to give myself an incentive to write, to be beholden to something other than my own slack ideals, I have to decided to set a goal of writing 250 words a day. The 250 words can be about anything, they can be short stories, descriptions, essays, or continuations of larger bodies of work. Once a week I will post at least one of these exercises on the blog. As I have given myself a week's time to write and post they will be pieces that are relatively unedited. I am taking the steel wool to my syntax, tuning up my cadence, polishing my voice. In other words, a little spring cleaning for my creativity.

Why publish it in on a blog? Believe me, I keep asking myself this. I guess it is a way to keep myself in check. Hopefully, eventually it will loosen the cogs and something greater will be produced. For now, it's about quantity with the hope that quality will follow.

I hope to eventually fill this space with something other than my rusty ramblings, but for now I'll give what I have.

Grimace

A few weeks ago while bumbling through the detritus of my bedroom in an imitation of cleaning I found a couple of rolls of undeveloped 35mm film. I had probably tucked them into the pocket of my camera case in a time of unemployment with the intent of developing them when I gained a paycheck. Jobs and student loans have come and gone and the film has lain curled in its fetal torpor for the last five years. With curiosity, I paid the nine dollars and twenty four cents and had it processed. After the magic, a white envelope delivered to me the apparitions of a former life; an ex-boyfriend, a half-waned interest in botany, and behind the lens a phantasm of a young girl forever captive.

It is hard to speak of photos without speaking of the past. The second the light etches itself upon the celluloid the moment ceases to be. It only exists in the plasticine substance of memory and that very narrow scope captured through the lens. And, although the image in the absolute physical sense never changes it is always viewed with that ever-growing tumor of retrospect and experience. What are these things but a plaque build up of the past? I mean not to give these images the tint of regret or disease, but merely to express that in no way do we ever regard these people, places and events with open indifference. These brief testaments to our time in space will never be regarded by us with anything but subjectivity.

Yet, we hold onto them regardless of what emotions they may bring. Personally, the act of destroying or tossing a physical photo, a glossy 3x5, feels like sacrilege. I wouldn't throw out a photo anymore than I would grind the crepe blossom of a wildflower into the dirt with my boot. And yet, with digital photography it is so easy to erase the humanity behind things. I don't know how many photos I have deleted when an intended smile became a grimace, a single chin magically doubled, or the image didn't seem worth taking up space.

More and more we attempt to control our image in the eyes of our peers through technology; erasing unflattering photos, creating social-networking profiles that more precisely reflect who we would like to be than who we are, turning to internet dating sites which can only depict so much our personality and quirks --both endearing and irritating, and the world of second life, which I don't even pretend to understand. We are refusing our imperfections and entering a sort of Neverland where we never have to document how fat we've become (just turn to the side, stretch out your neck, and crop accordingly), how boring our lives have become (just add "Status Shuffle"), or admit that we lack social graces.

And yet, here I am writing a blog. And worse yet, a blog with no greater purpose than to document my thoughts. So, I suppose this is a sort of textual snapshot. Although it can't boast all the candid humanity of a 35 mm or Polaroid, what it does do is force me to present something to the world that is much more raw and unpolished than I would ideally like it to be. And yes, I'm aware of the irony.

I have chosen to call it, "A Narcissist's Folklore," as this is nothing but an exploration of the self. It is the stories I tell myself to try to understand my place in the world. It is my own selfish obsession with my own happiness, my own purpose, my own aspirations. Perhaps you will find part of yourself here, but really that is none of my concern. I don't want my writing to become one of Lenny's mice; coddled to death, loved lifeless. I don't want to stare like Narcissus into a pool at my own perfection; to be pulled under and drowned due to my own obsession. Thus, this blog is the photo of me with the double chin and the spinach between my teeth. It is the captive girl on the other side of the lens. It is an eyes-clenched grimace of a blog.