So it’s early, early morning, and I’m writing. Once upon a time, in my head, I had ideas for many, many stories. Perhaps I still do, but they’re buried somewhere. For now, what I write about is just what’s going on in my life, which means that I spend a lot of time writing about work. I have an easy day today. There is a fifth grade field trip, which means that I don’t have a class first period. This is already my easy day, when I have two back-to-back preps second and third period, which means that I have a raft of free time this morning. Of course, there is always a chance that this raft of free time may go to subbing for other classes. Time will tell. If I don’t sub, I’ll spend more time with the Code.Org stuff, deciding which parts of it will work for the next eight weeks, and which parts of it won’t. I’m taking a professional development seminar on it this weekend, and I actually think that it’s going to be a whole lot of fun. There’s this slight, subtle difference between the writing that I do for myself--the writing that stays in my journal--and the writing that I do when I have an eye toward posting it in my blog. It’s a little less personal, and I don’t engage in the same relentless self-analysis that accompanies my journal entries. I just write differently at the moment. I almost feel, when I write this way, as if I’m writing a letter to about ten people, those friends who read my blog. I know that if they wrote stuff like this, I’d want to read it, so I guess I’m writing for them. Let’s see. My friend Laura now manages a yoga studio in Los Angeles. I’ve written about Laura before, and how she chucked a high-paying job teaching in New York, and pretty much moved to L.A. without a net; I admire that in a big way. That’s her on the right. “So I’m this fifty year-old yoga instructor working with a bunch of kids,” she said. “Who’d have thought it?” Then there’s my friend Beth, who retired to California and now spends a lot of time making incredibly cool art. One of her major projects involves making dioramas out of books in which she hollows them out. Every time she posts one on Facebook, I smile. My friend Yvonne is leaving behind a high-paying job in New York and moving to Florida to teach engineering at a branch of FSU in Panama City. She’s a Southern girl, and wants to move back home; she also wants to surf more. She said my moving to Massachusetts without a net inspired her; this made me happy. I study aikido with my friend Joe, who’s one of the wisest people I know. We keep talking about creating an audio version of Choose Your Own Adventure. Perhaps we’ll do that this summer. I realize as I’m writing this that I’m kind of skipping around, which is the way I write when I’m writing a letter to someone. Often, when I write a letter, I tend to ramble a bit, the way I’m rambling now in this paragraph. When I do that, I tell people that they can just skip over the paragraph, but of course, I usually tell them they can do this in the last sentence of the paragraph, which means that they have to read it to get to the point where I tell them that they can skip it if they want.
Perhaps it would be better if I began a paragraph by saying “you can skip this paragraph if you want.” Then I could just ramble for a while, creating a sentence that’s really long, one with a lot of commas, semi-colons, and ellipses; I wouldn’t feel too bad about it, because I’d have warned the reader that they could just skip over that sentence...and that they could move to the next paragraph. That would make more sense. Whatever. All I know is, I’ve written something that’s over 500 words (that’s my minimum for posting length), and I’ve posted it. That counts for something.
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A while back I downloaded the above video from You Tube for a health teacher. It’s stayed with me, because again and again, I think about the way things are now, and I feel as if entertainment--everything, actually--reminds me of the ideas in this brief film.
If you’re reading this and haven’t checked out the film, here’s a brief summary (and afterward, I’ll explain why I think about it a whole lot lately): The film discusses the effects of meth in the brain. Briefly stated, each brain cell has a supply of dopamine, the pleasure chemical. Normally, a neuron releases a set amount of dopamine, which hops to the next neuron. The next neuron then has a batch of receptors that grab the dopamine. Once the dopamine has delivered the “pleasure message,” it hops back to the receptors of the first neuron, which absorbs it so that it can recycle the dopamine. When someone does meth, the meth hijacks the first cell, causing it to release way more dopamine than usual. Then, after all this dopamine floods the next neuron, the meth blocks the dopamine from returning to the first cell...which means that the dopamine just keeps on hitting the receptors of that second cell, sending one pleasure message after another. After a while, though, that dopamine dissolves, and the first cell hasn’t been able to recycle it, which means that the first cell now has a lot less dopamine. To make matters worse, all this overstimulation of the second cell’s receptors cause the second cell’s receptors to withdraw. The result is a constant upward treadmill, in which the user takes more and more meth so as to get that first cell to release ever decreasing amounts of dopamine, which that second cell has an ever decreasing ability to absorb. Eventually, it gets to a point where the user is taking meth just to feel the “normal” feeling that was the way he or she felt before doing all this meth in the first place. I say all of this because when I think of all the sources of entertainment that are out there these days, I feel as if we’ve become a nation of burned-out meth addicts. I think of the first “Star Wars” movie, of which critic Pauline Kael rightly said “The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, the relentless pacing drive every idea from your head; for young audiences Star Wars is like getting a box of Cracker Jack which is all prizes.” I still remember that when I saw this movie, it was a rush unlike anything I’d ever experienced. There was one amazing thing after another, with no let up. At the same time, I remember having a conversation with a colleague a few years ago, in which he discussed watching the film the previous weekend. “It’s so incredibly slow,” he said. “I mean, jeez...there’s just so much talking, and the action doesn’t really kick in until the final hour or so. Before that, it just goes on, forever and ever.” And he’s right. Though I don’t find it boring, it’s amazing how slow the pace of “Star Wars” is compared to today’s films. It’s also amazing how primitive the special effects are. Yes, taken in the context of their time, they’re amazing, but if you watch it with a group of kids, they’re liable, with their visual sophistication, to complain that the effects are lame. And they are. Because after it came out, people soon tired of it. They needed more stimulation. And so the entertainment industry gave it to them. We’d depleted our dopamine receptors, so it was necessary to make the high stronger. One of the first things to go was plot development. Many years ago, when I attended a filmmaking class at The New York Film Academy, one of my instructors talked about a concept in films called “the setup.” This is the part of the film in which the writer puts all of the pieces in place, and then sets them on their way. It used to be that the setup of a film could take thirty minutes or more. That certainly is the case in Star Wars, even with its then hyperactive pacing. No long wait for a setup here...the film begins with that huge Imperial cruiser blasting away at that tiny Rebel craft. Yet even there, the film spends some time developing the main idea. It’s quite some time before Luke, with nothing left on Tattoine after the Imperial forces leave his home a burned out wreck, joins the Rebel forces. Compare this to the first five minutes of “Fight Club,” whice came out twenty years later. No wasted time here. The film begins with the explosive sound of The Dust Brothers, while the first shot--appropriately for this essay, considering its brain chemistry analogy--follows the brain’s cortisol stress signals and pulls outward, through the skill, through the skin, and down the length of a gun barrel jammed into Edward Norton’s mouth. From there, we get the setup in a hyperactive blur of quick cuts, and within two and a half minutes, we know it all. And that’s the way, it seems, that everything goes these days. And I find myself, when I read and watch films, deep in the throes of addiction to this kind of pacing. I see sign of it in my students. No more do most students want to sit and listen to a teacher lecturing or telling stories. No more do most of them sit down and play board games. Instead, they play first person shooters, where the violence is ratcheted up to almost pornographic levels. A little while ago, I watched a Charlie Brooker documentary on video games, and, not having played a first person shooter in some time (I always found them dull, and some of them gave me motion sickness), and I felt like a depressed old man, stunned at the violence (check out the nine-minute mark of the "Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe" video that I embedded above this essay, and tell me what you think). When I read, I find it difficult to stay with stories that take time to develop. And, more depressingly, I know that there was a time that these things genuinely gave me pleasure. It wasn’t the visceral, meth-like pleasure of a quick cut action movie; instead, it was this slow, graceful pleasure, one that I could count on again and again. I see it in old pinball machines as well. A while back, Megan and I went to The Pinball Machine Museum in New York, and I was stunned (and, yes depressed), at how slow and boring the pinball machines of my childhood were. I must have played “Captain Fantastic” hundreds of times; then, when I tried it out in the museum, I played it once, and quickly moved on to the more modern machines, with their ramps and digital sounds and bi-level construction, some of them even featuring a second, miniature pinball machine (“Family Guy” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” come to mind). I used to be so excited when a new comic book movie came out, and honestly, I know that the following sentiment is not just because I’m a lot older now: I’m burned out by them. I’ve lost track of the Marvel Comics films, and feel an overwhelming sense of “meh” at the whole thing. Yet still, there are these little things. Every so often, something comes around that reminds me of what it was to get that sort of natural high from a story, in which I felt this calm, lasting sense of seeing something truly great, something that made me simply smile and say “that was...boy, that was something.” One film that comes to mind is “Mr. Holmes,” a film in which Ian McKellen plays not Magneto but an elderly Sherlock Holmes. I still remember, midway through, turning to my father and saying “this is a truly great film; everything is great in this film, everything.” “Yeah,” my father said, “that’s about right.” Look, I’m not saying that I don’t like checking out a mindless summer movie every now and then. It’s just that now, mindless summer movies are the norm, and they come out all year round. And more and more, I find myself retreating from them, seeking to detox myself, and rediscover the calm, quiet pleasure of a story well told at a steady pace. Man, after all, cannot live on meth alone. One thing I’ve learned as I transition from being a school librarian to being a teacher: I buy a lot more stuff.
Let’s see. First off, there’s the laminator. This is a godsend. I’ve used it to make copies of my roster that I can then write on it with a wet erase marker; then I can make notes as to how my students did in that particular class. I note these things, transfer them to my grade book, and then run them under the water where the things I wrote wash away. Then I dry them off. This makes me think about whether it’s better to use wet or dry erase markers. Things wipe off easier with dry erase markers, which always makes me concerned that I will put these things in my backpack, and that a lot of the things I wrote will be missing by the time I get home. At the same time, it’s a lot easier to clean things where I’ve used a dry erase marker. I bought plastic white cards, a hole puncher, and 3M hooks. I put the hooks on the wall, and one on the back of each computer. I numbered them 1-25 to correspond to my roster, and punched holes in them so that they hang on the hooks. The students come in, take their assigned number, and hang it on the back of the computer. That way, by just looking at my roster, I know their names. Considering that I see hundreds of students a week, it helps me in getting to know who’s who. I need permanent markers for writing these numbers on the cards. Also, in addition to writing things on my rosters that I wash off, I occasionally write permanent things on them, such as a grid for my seating chart, and the correct pronunciations of student names. I bought an amplifier and a microphone so that I could talk in class without having to raise my voice over the students who simply don’t stop talking when I’m teaching. Some of them clearly want to just disrupt my class, and if I raise my voice, it becomes a control issue. There’s just something different about an amplified quiet voice as opposed to borderline shouting. Of course, then when I walk around to check on student work, these same students get out of their chairs, walk to the front of the room, and grab the mike. Then I have to drop everything, go to them, and gently ease the mike from their hand. This takes tact and calm assertiveness. I buy gum and candy. Once a month, I hand out these things. There is far more enthusiasm for these things than there was back in my old school, where most parents dropped their children off in Denalis, Escalades, and Mercedes Benzes. In fact, I notice that pretty much everything I give to students here just gets more enthusiasm. When I do card tricks, students whoop it up. When I hand out Tic Tacs at the end of the day, they run up to me (which is why I may need to stop this; it’s not that great having students run up to me when they’re supposed to be walking to their respective bus areas). I’ve just purchased ten packages of green beads. I did this because one of my lessons, as I wrote about the day before yesterday, involves kindergarteners learning about algorithms by planting a seed in soil. Using soil with a kindergarten class is insane, so we’re going to plant Life Savers in a bed of green beads. Then there are the binders. I’m using the Code.Org curriculum for my coding instruction, and there are lesson plans for each grade, K-8. 6-8 is one set of classes, but I need six separate binders, because there are six separate units of instruction. Then there are two separate curriculum guides for the K-5 classes (and one binder each for the lower grades). That’s fourteen binders. Then there are the two oblong binders for the PDFS of the children’s books that come with the Code.Org lessons for the kindergarteners. Of course I laminated these pages. I also need to laminate a number of pieces of paper to make paper marble roller coasters so that the kindergarteners can understand how to debug a program. They do this by constructing a marble roller coaster, and fixing the things about it that don’t cause the marble coaster to to work. Then there are the gumdrops and toothpicks. One of the lessons involves younger grades learning about frustration, and how to persevere when things don’t work out the first time. They do this by constructing a support system out of toothpicks and gumdrops that can hold a book. To avoid buying perishable gumdrops, I bought a one-pound blob of Silly Putty. Alas, this didn’t work out...the Silly Putty is too mushy. So now I have a one-pound blob of Silly Putty. It is probably unwise to give out wads of Silly Putty to my students, who will no doubt learn, quickly, that you can turn a blob of Silly Putty into a bouncing ball. Then there are the plastic containers for all these things. One of the activities involves the students cutting out manipulatives to learn the basics of a graphical coding program modelled after Scratch, a program designed at MIT. It would take forever for students to cut out these manipulatives, so I’m going to laminate the sheets, create the manipulatives, and then put them in separate plastic containers. Then there were the binder rings I used when I made separate guides for students to do Scratch projects. I made hundreds of these. I had to laminate every page, punch holes in the corners, and then group them together. It also was necessary to get two mini pairs of pliers to open the binder rings, and close them again. This took time. And I need plastic cups. I need these to hold those beads, and for another lesson, in which students learn programming by “programming” a partner to stack up plastic cups in a specific pattern. There’s also aluminum foil. Another one of the lessons involves students learning about trial and error by making aluminum foil boats, and seeing how many pennies they can put in the boats before they sink. This also involves buying containers to hold the water, and the purchase of a large bucket that I will fill with water so that I can then fill the containers. I will also be purchasing many, many towels from the local thrift store. Perhaps I will scrap this lesson, as the idea of tubs of water in a tech lab makes me think that things stand a chance of getting seriously out of hand. Amazon has, of course, become my salvation. I often wonder what someone who is collecting my buying history makes of these purchases, which seem to have little rhyme or reason to them. Of course, there’s also the Chromebook I bought to keep a log of what’s going on during the day. Need to get ready for work. Then I will stop by the drive through Dunkin Donuts, and buy a decaf iced coffee with skim milk, unsweetened, and two glazed stick donuts. That is a purchase that I look forward to every morning. And that’s what I’ve bought so far. I’m sure there will be more. Often, when I am in a museum, I feel the same way I do when people discuss a fine meal.
I do not have a discriminating palate, and there are many things for which I simply have no taste. My interest in fish pretty much stops at fried clams and fish and chips. I will eat mushrooms and spinach, although, when ordering a meal, I have never understood any reason to include either of these things. To this day the notion of putting broccoli on pizza is unfathomable to me. So it is, often, with art. I love the idea of museums, and am glad to pay taxes to support the arts. I genuinely believe that art is vital to society. I love that notion of anyone producing art for any reason. I just wish I appreciated it more. Here I am, at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, outside the exhibit “Ansel Adams in Our Time.” It is an exhibit of work by one of the most celebrated photographers ever. The man’s images of national parks are legendary. And I know, absolutely know, that as I walk through this exhibit there are people who feel these images touching on their most primal senses of beauty. People linger on these photographs for a long time, no doubt breaking the images into separate areas of light and shade. These people look at these images, and feel a transcendence that takes them beyond the moment that they are standing in front of them. And there I am, looking at them, and thinking to myself “yes...very nice. Very, very nice.” These are masterpieces, mind you. They are iconic images. The photographs of Ansel Adams are legendary. “Yes,” I think to myself, “they are nice. Very nice. Really. They’re really very nice.” I sometimes wonder if, when we’re young, we sort of get this one shot to really take in finer things and appreciate them in a way that will stay with us for our life. When my father was studying for his Master’s in speech pathology, he told me about those cases of children who, for whatever horrible reason—imprisonment in a basement, being raised by wolves—didn’t learn to speak at a young age. And they never will; we all get one shot at language, and if we don’t take in a first language before the age of five or so, the opportunity is forever lost. I often think that there are a lot of things like this. Okay, maybe you get something of a second shot at taking things in during, say, the late teens or early twenties, but it just seems as if everything after that is just a sort of flat line in the whole “taking in new things” area. Yes, I’ve started numerous things late in life, but sometimes it feels as if my taste for certain things—food and art come to mind—is something where I kind of missed the chance to cultivate it when I was younger, and, as a result, I’ll never be able to truly appreciate them. Museums are lovely places. I love walking through them. I love going to them. And the art is nice. It’s very, very nice. I’ve now reached a second key milestone in my new life with Megan. The first was getting the trust (and, eventually, love) of her Basset hound Samson. Now, thankfully, I have also gotten approval from her tuxedo cat Juno.
Samson was easier. By the third or fourth time I came up to visit before I was living with her, Samson would bark rousingly when he heard me walk up to the door. Then he would flop on the ground for a session of belly rubs. Juno, being a cat, took more time. Yes, she would occasionally acknowledge my presence, but there was that decidedly feline aloofness, as if she were taking notes and feeding them into a computer to decide if I was worth trusting. A few days ago, it would seem, the computer’s algorithm produced a result that deemed me trustworthy. I was in bed, lying on my back, and suddenly, Juno crept up, and with an obligatory kneed of her paws, settled on my chest. I scratched her neck, and, with the knowledge that comes from 45 years of cat ownership, knew exactly where to scratch behind her ears. Before long she was purring, and brushing her face against my hand. Within five minutes, she bestowed on me the ultimate benediction: she started licking my fingers. Granted, this could very well be a case of my being a pawn in a complex political power game between Juno and Samson. Occasionally, he will snarl at her, and Juno will run off. It is clear, from Juno’s dispeptic look, that she is not fond of this. I often picture Juno and Samson playing long, bitter games of Risk, with Juno’s sister, Piper, rolling the dice and moving the pieces while Juno consults a complex log of strategic and tactical battle plans. “We could fall back to Central Asia to consolidate our forces,” Piper would say. “No,” Juno would snap, “Kamchatka must never be given up. Never.” Perhaps I am simply one more bit of territory in this ongoing battle for house supremacy. I do imagine Juno looking at Samson as he walks into the bedroom, saying something like “he’s mine now. He belongs to me. He’s not yours anymore.” Fortunately, Samson, having a short attention span, forgets these nightly liaisons, and by the morning, he is once again swatting my shin with his paw, demanding love and affection. Whereas Samson would write letters to me in crayon or with a large pencil meant for kindergarteners (his paws, after all, are quite large), Juno would write letters in fountain pen, her copperplate penmanship in stark contrast to Samson’s block letters. I do, however, like to think that some of this, and Juno would never admit to it, may just have something to do with Juno having developed a genuine bond with me. Perhaps the political gains are a secondary benefit, though Juno would never admit to this. “I gave you affection for purely territorial reasons,” I hear her saying. “Nonetheless, I feel a certain lightness when I am with you. Antacids have done nothing to allay this.” Whatever the case, I will take the affection as a positive sign. When the girlfriend’s four foots decide that you are worthy, life is good. And now, each night, when I get into bed, Juno is there to tell me, I hope, that in addition to the importance of Kamchatka in affairs of world domination, she does indeed like having her head scratched. I’ve been spending a few days at my friend Bob’s. It’s easily one of the most enjoyable and life affirming places to hang out, because it’s full of life. Bob spent decades managing a group of comic book shops in and around Connecticut, and his house is full of pop culture ephemera: comics, of course; boatloads of DVDs, many of them obscure; countless posters and figurines of assorted touchstones from my childhood, such as Underdog and Davey and Goliath.
Also in Bob’s house are many, many musical instruments. Bob plays guitar, and plays it quite well. Besides that, he’s always had a soft spot for electronics and machines of all variety, so there are also countless guitar gadgets and amplifiers within reach. A couple of months ago, I bought a Roland Street amp from him, and have loved it ever since. It’s a portable amplifier that takes AA batteries and packs a surprising punch for such a small, lightweight speaker. It also has a couple of effects knobs, so that I can change the general amplifier from a simple clean sound to stacked distortion, and add such things as chorus, flanger, and delay. When I’m not reading or writing, I tend to sit down with my guitar for a while, and just see what I can discover. At the present I’m messing around with the keys of G Major and D major, which seem to fit best when I’m trying to find a way to play a song so that it’s in my limited vocal range. Yesterday, after playing the assorted chords that sound best in those keys, I tried my hand at finding the fingerings for the major scales. Without getting too technical, the guitar offers a set pattern of places to put fingers so that moving up and down the fretboard allows the guitarist to play in a variety of keys. On a four string guitar, starting on the first fret of the second string down results in playing the G# major scale, and starting another fingering combination with the pinky on the fourth fret of the lowest string results in the F# major scale. By moving all the fingers up one fret, the guitarist plays the same thing in G Major, and so on. So I started messing around with these discoveries, poking around to hear the various fumbling melodies that I played if I just randomly played the strings while pressing down in whatever places resulted in my playing a note in one of these scales. While I had my fingers positioned to play the D Major scale further up the fretboard, Bob just started playing D Major scale chords. I continued to randomly play notes, and as I listened to him, I focused on certain patterns of notes I playing, listening to the patterns change as Bob played various chords underneath them. I’m sure a true musician could explain it better, but the patterns would sound, at times, as if they were on their way to somewhere, and then, as Bob continued to play those chords, they sounded as if they arrived at their destination. I continued to do this, and to my surprise, it sounded awfully good. And as I just settled into experimenting with various patterns, something kind of magical occurred to me: I was playing lead guitar. Yes, of course, the leads I was playing were fumbling, stumbling things, where my fingers would hit upon the wrong note and create wince inducing sound. Yet there were other times where my fingers were going to the right place, and a particular pattern sounded, if it’s not too egotistical to say so, quite beautiful. We watched the film “Vertigo” a little while later, and as we watched, I sat with my guitar, quietly pecking out notes. I tried my first tentative steps toward melodies that I knew, and stumbled through a measure or two, repeating certain three and four note pieces of the melody that sounded good. It was exciting. It was fun. It’s a start. When Megan talks about her beloved Bassett Hound Samson, she always calls him her “furry boy.” It’s just the perfect expression for him. Whenever you’re down, Samson is there, flopping on the ground and offering his stomach for belly rubs that are as therapeutic to the giver as they are to him.
Then of course, there was Hugo, and from the beginning, he was, and always will be, The Guy. “It’s pure and simple,” I would say to Hugo, after he offered me yet another round of support as he purred away on my pillow, millimeters from my head, “you’re the guy. You just are. I don’t know what I would do without you, buddy. You’re the guy.” This has been a rough patch of years for me. I don’t need to get into the gory details, because my friends know about them, and plenty of them are mighty personal. Suffice to say: these have been times that tries a man’s soul. Three years ago, at the recommendation of Megan, I sought out a tuxedo cat from The North Shore Animal League. I always adopt cats; everyone takes the kittens, and the cats have difficulty finding a home. Hugo, in particular, was a tough sell. He had FIV, which unfortunately sends alarm bells ringing in the head of any prospective adoptee. In truth, FIV is far less serious than most make it out to be; it simply means that the cat is more susceptible to infections. Yet unlike the other cats, he nuzzled my fingers when I stuck them in his cage; I took this as a good sign, and it was. I took him home with the promise that I didn’t have any other cats in my apartment, and for a few days, he hid under the couch, getting used to the new digs. He was nervous; he’d had a hard life on the streets, and in fact had a nick in his ear from his earlier days as a street fighter. After a few days of this, my father came over, and all at once he came out of his shell, winding around my father’s legs. That was the start of it. For the next three years, he was my companion, my friend, and my familiar. I would wake up, feed him, and write my morning journal entry, during which he would jump up on my desk and usually lie down on my forearms, as if he were suggesting edits. I wrote many blog entries from his point of view, and when I did, I would hear his distinguished voice in my head. I often imagined his voice having the cultured inflection of someone who grew up in rough circumstances and took elocution lessons, and went to finishing school. It felt right, for Hugo was, in every way, a gentleman. He never shied away when people came over. He always walked up to them and introduced himself, eager to receive a petting or a chin scratch from a stranger, who, in a matter of seconds, became one of his friends. He was, easily, the most affectionate animal I’ve ever had, cat or dog. There were so many times, these past three years, that I felt down, so down. And there he always was, by my side, telling me that things would be better. He turned out to be right, and I will always be grateful to him for getting me through those tough times. Whether his compromised immune system had anything to do with his untimely passing will remain unknown to me. All I know is that he seemed listless for a couple of days, and on Thursday evening, laid down for the last time. Perhaps he was in pain those last few days, but it really didn’t seem that way; it simply was his time. It was almost as if he knew that he had a limited amount of days on this earth, and wanted to devote it to someone. He chose me, and my life was much the better as a result. I will miss him more than I can say, but will carry with me a lifetime of memories. So long, pal. I’ve been having trouble writing and posting things, and as I think about it, most of it has little, if anything, to do with not having a desire to write.
No, instead, it’s that so much of my head is taken up with…other stuff. There’s just a lot going on right now, and it’s that worst kind of limbo, where everything is undecided. It’s that feeling when someone is, say, going through a lawsuit, when things drag on, and resolution seems a long way off. I’m not involved in a lawsuit (thank goodness), but there are a lot of things going on in which the general status of them is decidedly unresolved. The specifics of them are unimportant. The fact remains that there are a lot of things that I’m in the middle of, and the end, during certain moments, seems nowhere in sight. When I’m going through things such as this, they take up valuable space inside my head that I could instead devote to, well, writing, for one, but just about everything else as well. During times like this, it’s even difficult to do everyday chores, because those unresolved things consume so much of my thoughts. So I turn my mind to them, thinking that if I dwell on them, it’ll make them resolve themselves that much faster. How free my mind will be, I tell myself, when I have all those things tied up with a bow. Yes, I tell myself, I’ll tear right back into writing after I’ve settled them all. Yet lately, and I do wish I’d had this epiphany decades ago, something has finally occurred to me: life is always going to be like this. My friend Jeff’s emails used to have a postscript that included a great Mark Twain quote: “Life is one damn thing after another.” How true that is. The moment I resolve one thing, some other thing comes along, and once again, it takes residence in my mind. So the key, I’m seeing, is not about getting those things resolved so that I can write (or do anything else, for that matter). Instead, it’s about latching on to that space in my head that’s still capable of writing words (or doing anything else), and cultivating it. It’s not just that cultivating that space allows me to actually get things done. It’s also that when I attend to all those unresolved things from that sacred place, I tend to do a much better job of it. The worst place, I’ve come to see, to attend to an unresolved matter is when my mind is in that anxious, unresolved place, when I desperately want the situation to just end. This is when I say those things where I so dearly wish I could unsay them, and when I send those emails where I so dearly wish I could unsend them. And so I write this, here in that little sliver of my mind that is not thinking about those things, but is instead thinking of what I’m doing, right now. This place will, with time, become more sacred, and when, at last, some of those things finally reach resolution, there will be even more of my mind that can just focus on the here and now. At the same time, though, I know that other things will come along, and will drag on for days and weeks, sometimes months. Yet having worked on cultivating this small sacred space, I will be ready for them. No matter how much those things fill my mind, there will always be a place in which I will see that the most important thing to do, when eating breakfast, is not to dwell on those issues and how to solve them. It is, instead, a time to think about pouring myself a glass of orange juice, and adding milk to my coffee. Because if I inhabit that furtive, anxious place of unresolved issues, it’s a sure bet that I will, instead, pour myself a glass of milk, and add orange juice to my coffee. Dear Sir:
Your father is a fine and honorable man. Nonetheless, I must take issue with a comment he made some days back. While the two of you were engaged in conversation, your father looked about my empire, and his gaze fell upon my throne on which I lay myself down for occasional constitutionals after my creative endeavors, and upon your pillow. At this point, he made the statement that, however unintentional, wounded me deeply: “Boy, Hugo sure sheds a lot.” It is understandable that your father would make a statement that conveys such a grievous error in judgement. I admit that there are those of my kind who carelessly leave parts of themselves about their particular residences, heedless of the way in which such leavings clash with the surface on which they choose to leave these parts of themselves behind. In my case, however, these instances of what your father so coarsely referred to as “shedding” are nothing of the sort. The tradition of an artist using unusual materials is not a new one. Richard Serra (bottom left) created vast sculptures out of huge sheets of cast iron, Donald Judd (bottom center) used milled steel, and Julian Schnabel (bottom right) used broken dishes. In my case, I use the most intimate material that I have, my coat. I call your attention to my first work, “Rescue (top left).” Here, I used my throne as my canvas, creating a careful composition that is, in many ways, a representation of myself. My careful use of white to contrast against the black background creates, if you will, visual representation of the power that we draw from places of respite. In this same way, the work demands that the viewer compare the so called “comforts of home” available to the more fortunate with the bleak options available to the homeless. I, of course, roamed the streets in my childhood, and before we became acquainted I knew what it was to be a man without an address, let alone a man without an empire. Given this, the work is actually a tribute to you, sir, for you rescued me from my sorry state, and properly installed me as ruler of the empire that I now oversee with an even and just hand. It is this same tribute to you that suffuses my work “By Your Side (top right)." Here, the very pillow on which you sleep provides an intimate canvas in which I create a portrait of intimacy. When you sleep, I am by your side, and I therefore chose this very place of connection between us as the surface on which I created this work. The gentle feathering of white on black is symbolic of my constant desire to provide you with comfort and solace during your darkest moments. In the same way that you provided me with comfort and love, so do I wish to convey, in this work, the comfort and love that I seek to provide you. In many ways, this is my most heartfelt work; it conveys my deep gratitude for your kindness and years of service as my personal valet, and how this relationship between ruler and subject has evolved into a deep and lasting friendship. Having said all this, I ask: please urge your father to take another look. The apartment in which I dwell and over which I rule is not simply a place in which I have scattered myself. It is instead a gallery, a statement of the vital importance of art for each and every soul. Having written these words—and, of course, having created these works—I find myself quite fagged out. I shall require a dish of haddock posthaste, and shall then retire to my throne, or should you choose to take a brief respite yourself, the pillow that we share. We are, after all, bound by our joint yearning to create, and must celebrate the symbiotic relationship that exists between those who have an artist’s heart. Fondly, Hugo Emperor Apartment 29D1 I’m just in this mode where it doesn’t feel as if I have things worth writing about. The basic core of energy just isn’t there, and I want it to be. For now, it’s just a slog.
I’ve tried to come up with various ways to describe this stage in my life as someone who writes, and posts things. Specifically, I’ve tried to come up with ways to post the way things are now. I’m still working on finding a specific way to articulate it. It’s not depressing, really. And it’s not really the miserable feeling of being trapped complete stasis. It’s more of a lull, where the ideas are certainly there, but out of reach, buried under layers of detritus in the basement of my mind. For many, this would be a time of complete silence. It is a time where some just stop writing entirely, needing to turn their minds to other things. Like those people, I’m certainly turning my mind to other things…but the drive to write something, anything, is still there. So I write, but even though I have in the past vowed not to post anything like the thing I’m writing at this moment (and posting), it becomes clear that if I’m to convey what it is to write, I need to post this kind of writing as well. I want this to be a chronicle of what it is to be creative, and part of what it is to be creative is to have not just days, but weeks, sometimes months, where creativity is definitely at low tide. It becomes easier when I just accept it instead of fighting it. If I’m a runner whose muscles have become sore, this is a time where I know that continuing to drive myself to a sprint will injure something, and cause me to hobble along for a long while, recovering from injuries. So it’s a time that I move along at a trot, even stopping every so often to walk. I pick up my guitar. I play the chords that are part of the basic major scales that form the basis of most popular songs. In the key of D, it’s D Major, E Minor, F# Minor, G Major, A Major, and B Minor. I could also play an augmented C chord, but I rarely mess with that. I play progressions, which is the term for playing certain chords sequentially. I think about which popular songs have those progressions. Then I put down the guitar, and check out something on Netflix. I watch a few minutes of Ken Burns’s documentary on The Vietnam War. I go back to my Scrivener app, type out a few words, and then practice the basic major scale chords in the key of G. G Major, A Minor, B Minor, C Major, D Major, E Minor. I notice that on a four string guitar, I can switch between C Major and E Minor by just lifting my index finger. When I play C Major, the four notes I’m playing are E, G, C, and an E that’s an active higher than the low E. When I play the E Minor chord, the notes are E, G, B, and E, an octave higher than the low E. Megan gives me the morning breakfast order from Dunkin Donuts. A sausage egg and cheese croissant for her mother, a Bacon egg and cheese wake up wrap for her. I will have cereal. And this is what it is like now. There will be days like this. Maybe weeks, maybe months. |
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