Writing Prompt

April 27, 2016

 

A small outdoor table with four chairs sits on my brick patio. All these many red-purple bricks are being overrun with grasses and weeds.  A metal fire pit sits off to the side, quietly rusting. On my left at the far edge of my yard rests a vine covered canoe that has not be used in years.  Closer in is a hammock with two comfy looking green pillows.  Seeing the yard one would note it is a bit of a disaster.  Some purple border plant is making like Sherman across the center of the greening grass like Sherman heading for the sea.  A Rubbermaid shed needs reassembling a windstorm having laid it low.  Not tonight.

 

Last night when I was at a bookstore I saw for the price of a mere $9.99 a book of writing prompts.  For a second I was tempted.  I picked it up, per the cover the bound volume contained over a thousand first lines and/or suggestions like “It is you first night on the cruise. What is the most surprising thing you have seen?” Didn’t float my boat.  If there had been a sense of even the tiniest bit of imagination in these opening lines I might have picked it up.  Yes I hit road blocks when I write.  Sometimes a simple prompt will get the worlds flowing, sometimes not. There are simply days when I wonder if I haven’t used up all my good stories.  Still I find a way back to the keyboard.

 

Sitting at this pale blue table I think I have created my own writing prompt.  I will try to answer the question of who should fill one of the three empty chairs with me.  I will try to do it in my favorite style, ala one, two, fiver. In that style you start with one word, then two, then five, then ten, then well you get the idea. What follows next is my self-initiated writing prompt.

 

Who should take this seat next to me?

 

You. Of course.  Nobody else needs ask.  Too long has passed since you and I have talked, really talked. Tonight the evening is filled with cool air and above lays a clouded sky. This night would be the perfect time for the two of use to go one on one.  As I think about my role as your host I am sure I have a bottle or at least a few shots from a near empty bottle of your favorite scotch tucked away.  You know the one, an aged whiskey with a smoky peaty taste but mellowed because this liquor was aged a second time in rose soaked wine barrels. 

 

We can sit here for the next hour or so wearing just light jackets and sipping the scotch whiskey for warmth.  Things forgotten can come to light, for surely you will remind me of this and that like the day the old judge just started bellowing about the idiocy of the attorney up before him. And I will remind you of the talks and conversations we used to have about the Lemonheads and G. Love and whoever the band de jour was.  As we finish our first drams our talk may to turn to those now gone for good or just gone from our worlds.

 

As the scotch settles into our systems barriers should drop and the conversation will range far afield.  From the philosophy of what constitutes a real person or entity to those political views what seemed to have recently gotten some tractions.  Our era might be a time of xenophobia or imperialism.  Maybe we will eventually get around to things like the nastiest personal sex stories we have. I always win when I talk about that lass who horked up one very expensive steak dinner on my rod when her gag reflex kicked in. Or maybe we will talk about the one great love that was lost. 

 

I well excuse myself to see if I can scrounge up a little more of the good scotch.  I think there might be the remnant of another single malt and maybe two.  Time has long passed since I drank regularly.  Time has long past since company stopped over on a regular basis.   The fact that you are here has cheered me, it means I am not forgotten.  Oh I know my family still depends on me but my social circle is very small these days.  On a rare Friday night I will sneak out for a solitary beer with a friend or three.  Half the time those outings turn into situations where people are plumbing the depths of my knowledge for free advice.

 

We talk some more about the choices we made.  Did we really marry for love or did we marry out of expectation. Have we achieved what we ought to have achieved.  If I were twenty five years younger it would be at this point I would light up a small bowl of hashish.  But those days are so long ago.  Funny I asked my cardiologist about whether a toke off a joint would kill me.  He didn’t seem to think so.  However he said it was a bit of a mixed bag.  The learned man opined that t was an even odds chance that I would become the most relaxed person in the world or the most paranoid. Methinks he is right, the odds at 50/50 are not something I am willing to roll the dice on these days.

 

The scotch is now gone and the sky has gone full black.  There is some odd light from the city reflecting down from the cloud cover but mostly this pace has gone black.  We have talked and talked and talked and we have been open and honest and there is a connection that remains real and vibrant between us.  Let us not let so much time slip away before we meet again my old friend. Life is too short.  Our hearts last only the length of a song.  Understand I am not just talking about that muscle in our chests and pushes blood to every vein and artery it can reach.  I am talking about our spiritual hearts.  Eventually we run out of tears and laughter of lust and love of hatred and passion.  I want to see you again before the darkness really falls.

 

Yes you should be in the chair next to me right now. How is that for a fucking writing prompt?

April 26th

April 26, 2016

 

It is good to seek inner peace and a simply undisturbed life.  

 

For a day to go well the first thing I must do after I get to my office is to pull out the mat.  I unroll it and at roughly the same time I put on soft ancient music.  Sitting for five minutes I try to push all conscious thought from my mind. During that short span it isn’t easy not to fixate on laundry lists of things to do.  It isn’t easy not to dwell on regrets and unfulfilled dreams.  But for five minutes I really try and detach from myself. Call it meditation, call it prayer, it is a special time.

 

Most times when I stand up I am refreshed.  Most time I feel more balanced after such a session.  The trick is that it is so easy to walk away from this practice.  It is five minutes that I am not typing an Order.  It is five minutes I am not paying a bill.  It is five minutes that I am not being useful. We are driven to be doing something all of our waking moments.  Being still isn’t considered productive in our culture.

 

The Orders can wait.  I am paying a bill to myself, to my soul.  I am being useful because a “me” with a clearer mind is more productive over the course of a day. Surely I get more out of a calm focused set of thoughts that from a jangled cognitive center. In seeking quietude I am seeking clarity.  In pushing things out of my conscious mind I can see sometimes quite clearly what is junk. Knowing what spiritual junk is lets me begin the process of growth and awareness. Reflection helps me pick a path that leads me out of the spiritual debris. 

 

The key is that after reflection we must be willing to set aside the inertia in our lives.  We have to push ourselves after contemplation to move beyond the foolishness encumbering our mental and spiritual lives.  We need to look for clarity. We need to seek out the source of clarity. Then, we must act with awareness.

 

Warm but Sickly

Today I am a little under the weather.   My oldest son had some crud Tuesday and Wednesday that involved a body ache and general malaise.  On Saturday he had a very nasty GI thing.  Me, today I got the aches and malaise.  Instead of 10,000 steps this fine day I am shooting for maybe 3,000.  

 

Prone on the floor I have watched a little television.  It is a free movie channel weekend.  Really not much on but I watched a bit of family drama.  Father trying to come to terms with not being the father he felt he was supposed to have been.  It was not really good but it was the kind of thing that pulls just a little at a 60 year old man’s heartstrings. Boy do I wish Robert DeNiro had somebody that would slap him and say, “Bobbie, don’t do this suck ass script.  Think of your legacy man.”

 

I did grab a cup of decaffeinated coffee earlier.  What I saw when I ventured out of the house was the promise of real spring.  On one of our lot lines there is a daffodil popping up in bright glorious late April yellow.  Simple and maybe pedestrian but the daffodil was just so alive.  So wonderful. Oh well back to the Tylenol and the big comfy pillow.

The View from + 1

Today I am 60 years of age….plus one day.  My friends and family celebrated me yesterday and it was a joy.  Funny thing I really do feel different.  To me it seems I should be more sober in my comments.  It feels as if there is an obligation that I think before I speak.  To be a Buddha seems to be my goal.  Want nothing and exclude no possibility.  Act with kindness and listen with full attention.  

 

Yeah I don’t know if this feeling will last.  I hope so.

Boomlee and a Sunny March Day

My approaching birthday has me flummoxed.  Yes I know it is only a number.  Yes I know that my life is defined by how I live it and not how old I am.  But I also know that the time remaining is shorter that the time past.  I want to stay vibrant.  My goal is to be living to the fullest in the face of the winds of life that erode us to nothing.  

As I write this I am at my office working.  It is Sunday morning and I am way behind on my work.  I have committed to come in today for about three hours so that I get much closer to where I need to be on my backlog of cases.  Hopefully after I finish up this note I will get some real solid writing done.  We shall see now shall we not?

Yesterday I discovered my Fitbit™ had died.  Turned out the charger was not assembled correctly.  I had gotten none of my activity from Friday recorded.  Well I fixed the charger and I then spent time walking all over my neighborhood. We need to get our 10,000 steps in don’t we? As the walk progressed it was clear there are some lovely early blooms coming out.  For a few moments I slowed my pace and took photographs with my phone.  Of course I had to color correct them with my phone’s software for better pictures.  Reality is never quite captured by a phone camera no matter how good that camera is.

Scattered wandering finally led me to the EL Public Library.  My thought had been to get a book on philosophy to read; maybe I would get something about the Age of Reason.  When I got just inside the front door I ran into a librarian who is a casual friend.  She and I travel in some of the same circles because we both have autistic sons.  Talking for a few minutes we gabbed and gabbed.  She had a victory with one of her children.  It was good to find someone who has similar battles to fight.  Warm conversations always make me feel better.

The conversation cut down on the time I had to look for philosophy books and so I ended up just getting some movies.  One of the films I picked up was a Thai movie with subtitles. 

The film was called Boomlee Who Can Remember His Past Lives.   It was a slow paced film.  It was about a man dying from kidney failure who is confronted with the ghosts of his wife and son. Some magical realism is found in the film for the ghosts interact with other living people in the film besides the dying man and nobody seems weirded out by the presence of these long dead spirits.

Confrontation is not really the word either for the interaction between the dying man and the spirits.  His wife’s ghost has come as sort of a spiritual guide across the threshold to the next plain of existence.  His son who is a large spirit ape with glowing eyes has come to protect him from malicious spirits who might interfere with his journey.

The man who is dying says it is karma that things are playing out this way because he is dying relatively young.  He is very clearly Buddhist.  He talks about killing communists and about spraying bugs with pesticides and the karma from that burdening him.  His spirit wife inquires of him as to what was in his heart.  Was he acting with good intentions?  When he asks whether his actions in this world will prevent him from reaching heaven his ghost wife says, “Heaven is over rated.” I smiled at this.

My family commenced watching a rerun of one of the Bourne movies after this finished.  I love the Bourne films but I was just not in the mood.  At that point I went upstairs and continued reading Dreamland, the book about America and opiates. What I read about was the rise in pain medications for palliative care in the early 1980s and about the “Farm”. The Farm was the federal government’s drug treatment prison cum opiate teaching hospital, up until about 1990.  The Farm conducted most of the research into the mechanics of addiction was conducted pre-1990. MS-Contin was researched there for those will long term pain.

The Farm was shut down because as governments are often wont to do, they used its facilities off book. The Farm is where people conducted the so ill advised experiments on hallucinogenic drugs that later came to light.  You know they gave LSD to people for the CIA to see if there was any counterintelligence value to the drug. People went bat shit crazy because of the quantities administered.

And then I fell asleep.  Some days are just full and action packed now aren’t they?

Temporary Art and Temporary Life

In the years of early awareness we are aware only of the external world.  Our senses fill with scent of the flowers of spring and the chill that touching snow with the naked hand provides.  We are keenly aware of the hours of light and the hours of dark.  If it is light every bit of our internal energy wants us to be doing something.  We live on a clock that says so long as it is light we should be exploring and doing.

 

When you are 6 or 8 colors make such a large impression.  The brighter the color the better it is.  Sidewalk chalk and tempera paints give us a chance to take the color we have seen and processed in the rudimentary structure of a mind we have at that age and put it back out there for comparison to and appreciation by the world.  We are all innate artists with a desire to make something to do something.

 

I think what I like most about this photo is the hand prints up in the corner.  These palms and digits expressed in chalk on concrete are shouting, “This is me. I am part of this great glorious world.  Notice me you passerby”. I saw this handprints and I notices.  It gave me joy to know one or two young people had joy on a sunny day. 

Writing Later Chapters

Thomas Merton struggled with the limits of his intellect.  He struggled with the limits of his faith.  He struggled with the limits of mortal life.

In a piece I read this morning (he wrote it in 1956) he mused on living his life as being the equivalent of writing a book he. Merton stated he did not want to write a book about everything.  Instead the devout man’s book was to be a book into which everything could go in.  His life was to contain everything that would fit.  The contents of his would come from everything around him.

Merton’s worlds are simple, but in their simplicity stand the most profound of commentary.  Sometimes I am regretful of things I have not done and achievements I had not attained. When I reflect in regret I am forgetting what my life actually contains. 

Each day as I set out to do my daily chores from cleaning up a stream of dried cat hork (this morning’s pile was a pretty accurate depiction of the Hawaiian Islands chain) to poking apart the lies that someone has constructed to tell a better story of their life to me, I am writing my book. Every person I call to say hello to is a paragraph on a page of my life.  Everything I learn about the heroin explosion in America from the book I am reading each night becomes part of my everything. Every time I clink a glass and say “slainte” another line writes itself.

My guess is here that I should be choosing my text carefully and doing it with clear vision.  My eyes should be open to all the wonders of daily life. My hope is that the remaining pages are rich and absorbing.