How on earth do you wash a Fedora? [and other random thoughts]…

I have been intensely busy, lately. Not just by hand, either.

It's a cabal all right. Against me.

My mind…it often goes into Mach 7 when I attempt to procrastinate (by the way, the word “procrastinate,” itself, is ironic – I mean, by the time you write the word out, you could have done something already – it’s not a word for the lazy), and the only thing I can physically do to make it stop is to sleep (even though my dreams are usually full of anger when I do that – last night, for instance…ouch!), but if I don’t stop it, from time to time, it just runs all days with thought after thought after thought, and so what I’m about to do is a little experiment I engage in, every now and again: I’m going to pause, take a deep breath, and type out every single thought I have in my head right at this moment in an attempt to empty my brain.

Because I really want to take a nap…without feeling guilty about it.

Ok? So, here I go:

How on earth do you wash a Fedora…pancakes…the way Max sleeps with one open, staring…the other day when the tornado siren went off some student in the hall asked if North Korea was attacking and I was impressed because he didn’t seem the type to be that aware of the world around him, his clothes made that suggestion…why a city has the name of Scooba…Old Man Frank came by the house yesterday to tell me I’d left the water hose on and flooded his driveway, he’s an old man with scoliosis but my god he can knock loudly…that time I brushed my teeth with Cortizone-10…my glasses are broken – well the leg fell off but still it’s going to cost money to fix it better than I did with hot glue…apple juice gives me heartburn and so do onions and so do Tums which is ironic since they’re supposed to fix heartburn…I really like sweet potato pie…why can’t I start back working on my new script, I think it has potential, and I sometimes feel guilty doing other types of writing but Gary tells me just write everyday so I do, this blog if nothing else…why won’t I finish this other script I have because I know the deadline is looming…I’ve only once seen an actual loom and the word loom makes me think of a loon…Smoking Loon is a type of red wine…I’m allergic to red wine…how is too much water bad for you…I’ve switched mayonnaise brands, U.L. is shocked…I wish I’d planted those irises deeper in the dirt…where would I put a bicycle if I had one…I hate my cell phone…at some point I’m going to need new tennis shoes…my ankle still hurts…I am still angry because this morning I was almost finished with a new blog and then I hit some button and the whole damn thing was erased…what it would be like if I could magically freeze people and take off their clothes and then move them somewhere else and then unfreeze them and laugh at how embarrassed they’d be…how people can eat warm mayonnaise is beyond me…why I don’t have any pet fish, they’d be so much easier to handle until the cats found them…why some doctors don’t use anesthesia…I’m very glad my dentist did even if now I have a new health concern called synethesia and it feels like ice-cold water is running down my chin and neck several times a day…if people could float indefinitely…what would constitute a magic umbrella…would having sex with a centaur be bestial and illegal…why John Mark Karr would lie about JonBenet Ramsey…how to love through pain, and mean it…how do I manage to memorize all my lines each play I’m in…what would happen if I could disappear…how many people would come to my funeral…why I drink so much…if we’re all hiding something, what then are we all compensating for…why trust is so hard to get and so easy to lose, and doesn’t that imply a serious flaw in the nature of trust…what does God do when he rests…do I have cancer, or West Nile, or Swine Flu, or diabetes, or RLS…why can’t I focus on losing weight…how upset I get when the media overlooks the devastation of Katrina in Mississippi, even now four years later..should I give Olive Garden another chance…why does gorgonzola taste so bad when you melt it…I cannot abide any more of the heat…I cannot stand it when I sweat without purpose…should we build a bigger fence for Max…why can’t I find a handwriting that I approve of…when did I develop this paranoia…will I ever write a good play…how much of your identity is in your name…how many people did I upset this week…what would happen if I always told the truth…why are there so many bad spellers…why don’t people read anymore…what happened to conjugating verbs…how did Latin die…why do I have to have a favorite color, or food, or anything at all really…what will my next car be…why am attached to the name Cutter…I’m still mourning Bea Arthur’s death, but I’m glad we still have Angela Landsbury for now…how can one face death…what is a timing belt and how do I find it…who was the first person to stain glass…why do I have a desire to be famous…I’m not sure there’s such a thing as compromise, one will always retain the power…does anyone ever really forgive…is my first cat, Aristophanes, mad at me for leaving her at U.L.’s…I hate doing laundry…I can’t believe I’m almost 33…I’m afraid I’m losing words…what happens if I go crazy…I don’t like orange Powerade…why don’t I speak better French…why do I always pretend everything…I take back what I thought a minute ago, I think I may be partial to blue and deep reds…I hate the word “cubicles”…a young boy yelled at me one day from across Main Street and said, “It’s raining gayness today!” and I yelled back, “Well, we needed the rain, didn’t we?”…I need to buy more nose strips, for my apnea…what is it about men in uniform…why don’t I approve of steel top roofs, especially green ones…some days are so beautiful I think to myself, if I have to die, let it be on a day like this…I do not want to be put in the ground, though; I want to be in a crypt above it…I’m glad that even in my darkest days, I still believe in God…why can’t I bathe all day…I’d like to thank everyone that I’ve ever met…I can’t stand it when I go to the hair salon and they spritz my hair instead of shampooing it, that is a pet peeve of mine…sometimes I use room spray as cologne…was Jean Harlowe a more tragic case than Jayne Mansfield…

Whew…and just think, I didn’t even get to the part where I’ve invented a new form of poetry that I call a “tri-ku.” It’s a re-constituted, inverted version of a haiku, in three stanzas, each one goes 7-5-7.  I’ll leave you an example of one.  We’ll talk about it later, don’t worry. Each one is based on my belief that there are nine universal truths.

The Ancient Art of the Written Word.

Universal Truth #1: Berth

Other people would have left.
They might have laughed.
No, no they would have, I’m sure.

And not because of your face,
or indifference,
they didn’t care how you were,

All they would care about was
that your smile had flaws
and that your bite had no teeth.

Speaking of teeth…I can’t wait to tell you about Rasputin. The Kitten Who Lived and Had Teeth.

That’ll have to be after my nap, though.

You can go home again…it’s just frustrating.

Thomas Wolfe wrote, “You can’t go home again.”  (At least, I think he did).

But you know what: you can.

I do it every Sunday. Mainly because I don’t want to miss Nana’s cooking; it’s in a class of its own…and I love going home, I do, but you want to know a secret:  It’s also quite often very aggravating.

Why is that?  Why is going home such a frustrating experience?

I've lost my keys...and the doorknob.

Sometimes, I think, it’s because as soon as I open that front door and step inside, I’ll see that nothing has changed, and I’ll feel like I haven’t changed either. And I hate that feeling.

Despite the unusuality (I’m creating this new word right this second; I think I am, anyway) of my family circumstances, I had a fairly conventional upbringing: a solid home life, food each evening, love, and church. But, I was reared by a great uncle, in Mississippi, and so…like many families in the Deep South, change was avoided, and at our most hospitable, conveniently forgotten when wedding invitations went out, or when pressed, allowed to sit at the table but thoroughly ingnored and not given a linen napkin or salad fork.

The couch had been the family couch since before I was born; the curtains had cost a fortune when purchased, pre-Depression, and so they were tolerated with their heaviness and coatings of dust and memory. The chairs at the dining room table had been in the family since before there was a family, they weren’t going anywhere…so much had been sacrificed for the minutiae and detritus, if you will, that we lived in, and splendidly, and all those little things that went into making the home a home…well, it’s understandable that it became a necessary security to make the home remain that way – unchanged.

It wasn’t a coffee table; it was a story. It wasn’t a piano; it was religion. And it wasn’t china, it was our history. We were curators as much as members of a family, and you don’t become a curator in a day. And a curator has great responsibility.  (They’re not exactly a docent, for godsake).

To ignore that is a wide sin.

I’ve thought on this for quite awhile, as a means to calm myself from frustration.  It’s not so much the expected conversations: you need insurance, check your tires, stop putting things on the credit card; any child, I think, would feel unloved without these petty nitpickings.

No, what it is, at least for me, is the lack of understanding about major things…at least the reciprocation of it.

But, I think I realize now why. 

I look around the house and see things that I didn’t have to work for; things I expected to always be there: plates, sweet tea, arm chairs. My uncle looks around and sees things he’s given a life up to get, to take care of me when no one else would. He lives in a house of prior burden, and in it, he’s carried everything over and worked hard to deserve it, to keep deserving it. For me to turn a nose up at that is an insult, of course. He’s living in his major things. So, the reciprocation is difficult to measure. And, truth be told, all I really want, is a house like his…of my own.

But, here’s what the makes Deep South, deep:  guilt.

We don’t grow up to move away, we’re not supposed to…even within the state, it seems, sometimes. We are “grown up” to be representatives of our people, our church community, our neighbors; it’s one reason we make great politicians, those of who do get away.

Down here, everyone has a vested interest, I guess, which is a great support but not the most Platonic of ideals. It takes a village, Hillary Clinton has remarked, and yes it does, but this village has a drawbridge.

They are scared because they can’t imagine another village, or why in the world, after all they’ve done for you, you’d want to go there, and stay, and trust me: no suitcase in the world is big enough to pack that kind of guilt.

There’s also no way to explain this need, which many of my generation have, on a routine, clockwork Sunday afternoon…and so what happens is you begin to talk about anything else under the ecclesiastical sun to steer the bulk of conversation away from “where you’re going” and you just talk about “where you’ve been, and what that was like.” You avoid the future, because it must involve the unknown and the unknown is built on change, and that avoidance takes so much energy that you leave home each weekend exhausted…and a weekend spent in exhaustion is aggravating. And you know, next Sunday is not that far away. 

You keep squirreling away your privacy and plans and realize that the only way this will work is to jump ahead, make the move, then a U-Turn, then an announcement on your way out of town, and then you put your seatbelt on and drive and drive and drive until you realize you hadn’t packed anything, and that’s ok, because nothing is still better than guilt. Shock is the only salvation we still possess.

 Yet, we keep going home, don’t we? Either to prove Wolfe wrong, or dig a deeper hole in the front yard. Ironically, you can’t dig a deep hole anywhere hear a magnolia.  The roots are too hungry.

I guess the biggest frustration, really, in going home again, is that of expectation.  Because buried beneath the heart in all of us is a fear of meeting that expectation: I’m sure parents, even great uncles, know this – the dreaded what ifs – what if my child is that rare breed who can’t wait to be kicked from the nest?  I was that child. What if my child is the one who thinks he can make a difference? I was that child, too…still am. What if my child is a dreamer, a writer, an actor, a singer, a lover, a mover? What if, what if, what if.  I am, I’m all of them, and everyday I try to decide just which child I am, was, or want to be, still.

I love my uncle more than anything else in the world. But, I’m also not through with the world, yet. The other side of the problem is that I’m too ready to move. The timing’s not right, then. But, the need, the desire, the drive is.

Still, I stall on the idea of expectation.

I’m supposed to be working on one of my new plays, right now, for instance, and even though I argue with editors and friends and workshoppers on my slow progress(es) with anything I write, strung out over a strange array of “valid excuses,” the truth is I’m scared to death I won’t meet their expectations. Just like I keep straddling the fence on my next move, literal and meta, because I’m scared not of what I can’t see ahead of me, but of what I’ll see when I look back.

And for the record, I rarely use salt in my cooking; the last thing I need is a pillar of it.

So, for the time being, I keep going home.  Out of respect, which some in my life never understood, and to learn a little more before heading out again. There’s something, I suppose, that seems regressive about keeping a finger on old roots; but, for me, there’s something so necessarily alluring about the roughness of those old roots that I’m not sure I could remember if I let go of them just yet.

It’s what writers do. And that’s what I am.

At least, today.

I can’t believe I’m blogging.

But, then, is that really true?

Aren’t we all, deep down, deliciously wanting to be voyeurs, without a court trial attached; those always take up so much time. What we want is to break a law and get away with it.  That’s all blogging is, really, an acceptably broken law; windows made of words for the rest of us Peeping Toms to look at. Nobody minds it; no, instead, it’s encouraged.

Besides, isn’t there something just too alluring about showing a little “skin” to the Peeping Toms, to the entire web-viewing  world about how you feel, on any particular subject: racism, nudity, Republicans, orange juice, how to keep pests off squash, pornography, banned books? 

Your answer to this is of course. And, so that means that this, right here, this small blog against the millions, is really what America is about, or better yet: what America is becoming.

Now, I know a lot about a very little, admittedly, but that is all I need to grab a blank webpage and start typing; it’s what I’m doing right now with my blatant overuse of semicolons, ellipses, and don’t think that’s where it’s gonna stop – I fully intend to abuse dashes, capital letters, colloquialisms. What are you gonna do about?  Comment?  Go ahead. That’s the point.

Maybe someone will read my blog and tell me how wrong I am, how belittling my opinion appears to be; that it drives them batty how I don’t even have to use grammar correctly. I hope they do. Having taught Compositon in college for several years, it’s a great relief to ignore the rules of grammer.  There’s too much structure in education anyway, don’t you agree? (Personally, I think I’m still a traditionalist, if slightly leaning towards liberalism, in language – but I mean, hell, look at your last text message: DNT 4GET 2 B @ MTG @ 3. DRX L8).  I don’t want to admit it, but I know what that means. DNT U? LOL. Or, as I’m beginning to see more often, HE HE.

I hate this shift in linguistics, for a starter point, but I defend it, and if I defend, I must condone it, to some degree, which could mean, maybe I don’t hate it, after all. There are so few places left in the American worldview where freedom of speech is so rarely challenged, at least in legalese. (I’m sure I’ll get a challenge to that).  But blogging, texting, it’s the future. And it’s already put its roots down in places like Mississippi, where I live, so that’s pretty much a guarantee of longevity.  We should realize this: even though now that misspelling words doesn’t alter meaning as much as we’d tried to scare past generations into believing, there are still dangers: people tend to put a lot more stock in what they read as accurate or true than what they hear. And, for those of us who call ourselves bloggers, we, perhaps, assume some of that responsibility.

But, for my blog, please, take note: there may be ounces, grams, teardrops of truth in what I write, or state, or opine, etc., but most of the time I’m more concerned about the humor beneath the truth. That’s the real connective tissue. Truths as they happen in this world are mostly relative, but humor, humor is universal; it transcends truth…and often comes at the expense of relatives, or relativity.

And, that’s really where my focus lies. Or, at least, will attempt to lie. (Dig a little deeper in that sentence until your shovel hits the pun. There’s one there).

A truth of mine: I’ve always, gut-deep, wanted to be a writer, and I try, still…a poem or two here, a play thrown over there, and so on, but blogging…if I can really stick with it – because I’m not, I repeat, I’m not what you’d call a very disciplined writer, I’m an inspired writer (read: procrastinates until some unique idea burrows into my conscience and won’t let go). And so, saying, you should sit down and write for awhile, everyday, has become more like a really good philosophy and excellent theory to share/proselytize with/to other writers over martinis or in between cocktail weinies (and no, I didn’t mean for that to rhyme) to appear more wizened than they are and thus, more productive which means a “better writer,” but, in reality, it’s less likely to become an actuality for me.  Which makes me far less than those earnest writers who listen to me blather on about the craft itself.

Hopefully, this will change.  But here’s why it’s been such an issue for me:  1) writers need to, much like an actor, play hide and seek with gratification; the “hiding” comes in waiting for someone to acknowledge our worth and say Yes, this should be published and read by the world – the “seeking” comes, rarely for most of us, but comes when publication actually happens. Sure, sure, we write because it’s an obsession, it’s an obligation, but the other half of that obsessive obligation is in the sharing, in the recognition.  Please, please, we beg, read what I’ve written and talk to me about it, tell me I’m worthy of the written word. That’s validating, and that’s a, no the, sad commentary for those of us in the arts; and 2) editorial intrusion is as much a part of the writing process as the fact that words put in a logical order with corresponding subjects, verbs, and modifiers create a sentence, which leads to understanding, which is a cornerstone of a civilized people. It is impossible for me to “permit” myself to write uninhibited by my own internal editor. I monitor every syllable to the point that I, well, often miss the point of writing.

So, blogging, for me, I hope will allow me the opportunity to write without internal criticism, to purge my mind of extraneous thoughts and share those, in their pure, raw, unchiseled form.  Seems ridiculous, doesn’t it, since many will judge me by what I leave here, on this blog, but at the same time, those many will also see reflections of themselves; perhaps not in what I say, but in that I say it all…as is.

We all secretly wish we kept journals. We all silently like to believe that whatever we have to say is immediately important, without revision, a la Ginsberg, and you know what?  Maybe it is…no, no, of course it is. Because in that off-handed comment, in that over-the-shoulder greeting, in that “of this moment” conversation, in that shared joke, in the cruelty of social grazing, is not just truth, even by the ounceful, but is the actual process of how we think and what we think. Aside from judgment, which no one escapes, there’s also a healthy amount of courage…in saying the right thing, the witty thing, the wrong thing, the stupid thing, the thing we all think but can’t say, whether it be a synaptic misfire, a faux pas, a foot-in-mouth incident, or, just the God’s honest “truth.”

We’ve all been there.  We just wish we hadn’t been, or that we had a second chance to explicate, or had been the one to say it in the first place, to elaborate, to erase, to re-write history, or to be “born again” in that moment, even after the moment…and, well, we can do that now, thanks to blogging.

At least, that’s what I’m going to think, to believe….that’s how I’m going to approach this exercise in dialogue, even if I can only use my fingers to do the talking.

There’s ten of them, and that’s like nine more than my mouth.