Hero Worship

     Right.
     I really need to stop writing blogs when I'm sleep deprived.
     It's doing absolutely nothing for my reputation as a sober, serious individual. And there's some guys wearing white lab coats lurking around lately, eyeing me with an unhealthy interest. It's kind of freaking me out. So let's talk books, and maybe they'll get bored and go away. They don't seem to be the reading type.
     Besides my own books, of which I am a rabid fan of (unless they're giving me back-sass, that is), I have an ever increasing stable of "never throw out" books that I will read over and over again when the desire to visit their world strikes me. They take me away to places new and bold, familiar and old, and bring me back to my world a happier, more thoughtful, insightful, peaceful, energetic person. They reveal layers of myself and the world I live in, enabling me to live my life with a wider and more comprehensive understanding of everything. The authors that create these stories? I quite frankly worship. The brains that came up with the worlds that captivate my imagination intrigue me, and I would love to have a telepathic mind-meld with them. There's really no way I could sit down and have a conversation with them--the stuttering, the drooling, and oh, the horror of the socially awkward mis-spoken statement would prompt a mad stampede to city hall for a 1000 yard restraining order. Mind meld, oh yes, that would be much safer for us all.
     But every once in a while, one of the subjects of my hero-worship tumbles off their gilded pillar, and I can never see them, or their books, the same way again. The glass has shattered, distorting the reflected glory into a hideous caricature of their former god-like status. I, meanwhile, am crushed and hurt. Betrayal of my most closely held emotions propels me to jettison every trace of their influence. Books are shoved under the bed or given away, bookmarks are burned, websites are deleted, Twitter feeds are un-followed, screen savers are uninstalled, t-shirts are heaved into the scrap pile. You see, there is no more fervent detractor than a former advocate.
     I'm not naming names, because my own personal feelings are irrelevant to the author in question. Their super-star status negates my input, for they have far too many shiny new fans, who are much louder and screechier than I ever was. My quiet devotion to their worlds, my constant support in the form of buying hardback versions of their newest book for the last 10 years--like I said, are irrelevant. The fan club that I actually shelled out $35 to become a member of--largely ignored. And that is a crying shame. Their books were good, until they rushed them and went for cheap thrills. The super-star status went right to their head, an intoxicating champagne that fizzed and bubbled until it became more important than the people that got them there. It's a shame, really. Those splinters they're going to pick up on the way down that ladder are going to sting like a bitch.
     Meanwhile, I'm in the market for a new hero. Any volunteers?
   
   

Productive Avoidance

     There seems to be a strange feedback loop going on in my head lately. "All is naught, all is imperative,"--a thought that floats through every moment of my day, a senile shaman who's had too much peyote, dancing and cackling merrily in my poor sore noggin. The significance of every thought, every action weighs heavily on me, while the utter insignificance of it floats my feet inches from the floor. It's driving me crazy, this 'forcing me to address the day moment by moment' doublethink (thank you, Mr. Orwell, for that exquisitely appropriate concept).
     So to deal with my new affliction, I've learned the sacred and mystical art of productive avoidance. A moving target is harder to hit, or so the reasoning goes. Clean the bathroom? Heck yeah! Change the water in the fish tank? You betcha! Suddenly decide to fix that length of fence line that had been peacefully falling down for five years? Sweet Georgia peaches yes! Be so tired that you want to pass out at the end of the day? That's the plan!
     And it's there that the cracks in the dam are found; the blank concrete face that I had presented to the day found riddled with fissures and rotten to the point of failure. There is nothing so tempting to circular logic than a worn down, weakly defended mind. What that evil, spinning logic keeps forgetting, though, is my secret weapon. Or cache of weapons, if there is sufficient fodder for them all to come out to play.
     My books.
     Oh yes, that was a plural stuck in there. And no, it wasn't a typo (I have plenty of those pre-edit, thankyou vry muach). There are now two and a half books bubbling in the works, one mostly to completion, the other more of a series of post-it notes and scribbled notations on various scraps of flat, note-friendly mediums. They keep me busy with their worlds, and mostly out of harm's way.
     I play with my plot, scheme with my themes, fraternize and satirize with my main characters, and generally get lost within the worlds that I have created in my own head. This sets up a wave propagation of delightful harmonics, cancelling out the squallings of introspective shamans, and luring me into the hopefully peaceful slumber that I crave.
     Or sends me scrambling for note-friendly mediums to jot down a breakthrough concept that just won't wait for the morning. Either way, I consider the day productive if I can avoid spinning in circles, questioning the very reason for my existence on this wobbly globe we call home. 

Chasing Dreams

     Sleep and I have never been cozy bedfellows, for reasons both physical and psychological. For one, you're so defenseless--sprawled there on your bed with most every sense diminished beyond usefulness, a half-corpse waiting for the predators of the night to shred you with claws of sharp, swift death. For another, sickness manifests itself in the darkest bowels of the night more so than in the healing light of day--when the body is repairing itself in REM sleep, things can and do go hideously wrong. Dying in your sleep may be a peaceful way to go, but personally, I want to have that last burst of adrenaline before I'm dragged out of here.
   
And then there are the dreams.

     The moonscape in the deeper part of my psyche holds creatures that sincerely do not appreciate any kind of illumination, be it in the form of visible light or from intrusive inquiry. They rise up over the rim of their craters when I dream; dark tentacles grasping for purchase on powdery rock, seeking the intruder into their world of shadows. Escaping their grip is painful, and leaves me gasping on the edge of tears when I do rise to wakefulness.

     But every once in a while, the spirit realm lays a gentling hand upon my brow, soothing away the helpless, strangled feeling, and grants me a brief respite. Then dreams, and sleeping, lose some of their ragged edges, smoothing out into something intriguing and memorable. Oh, they may be filled with guns, corpses (not mobile ones--zombies hold not a iota of sway in my subconscious), and random glee-filled violence, but it's all in good fun. And every once in a blue moon I have cameos--people who walk onstage with their knapsacks full of sweet memories and honorable (or wickedly not-so-honorable) intentions. Then I linger, chasing them through the friendlier realms of my dream worlds, pursuing the joy that the dream brings as much as the visiting doppelganger itself.

     The challenge I face in my waking life if eerily similar. Learning to chase the beautiful things in life instead of being pursued by monstrous figments of my imagination is a hard chore for me. I have always been haunted by the specter of "hard work is its own reward"--that soul and body crushing folk wisdom that has been cold comfort to the huddled masses over the decades. As I pass through this many, varied, and opportunity-riddled world, I am coming to find the lack of truth in that time honored phrase. For if hard work is its own reward, why do people pull in paychecks? That's an additional reward, above and beyond the hard work they've done. It's unraveling right before my eyes, and I'm not going to say I don't find a certain amount of relief in its demise.

     Dreams, the kind you imagine when awake, have always been a beautiful thing to me. In other people. I've had a hard time convincing myself that my dreams of authorship are worth pursuing, seeing as how they are not about hard work, in the "coal mine" kind of way, with back breaking physical labor that lets you know at the end of the day that you're "Another day older and deeper in debt". But now that the heavy weight of unacknowledged drudgery is sloughing away from my shoulders, I'm finding it easier to believe in my own waking dreams.

          

Sweat Is Just Weakness Leaving The Body

     I have a t-shirt emblazoned with that pithy quote, worn often to the CQB facility to play airsoft. The mindset of those that play either airsoft or paintball is that if you didn't leave bleeding, you didn't play hard enough. I still have the scars on my hands and forearms to testify just how very hard I played. But now, I wear it infrequently, and usually to do a bit of gardening. I have to qualify 'gardening', though, for in the words of my sixteen year old son, I don't 'garden', I landscape. I thought I was gardening, until I spoke with a few gardeners in my neighborhood, and realized that sod stripping, tree felling, rock excavating, brush clearing with a tractor and a saws-all was a far cry from the dainty weed picking they defined as 'gardening'.

Huh.

     I figured that unless I'm filthy, crusted with mud, leaves, or grass clippings, with bloody scratches decorating any exposed skin, and having made a major visual impact to my frequently unruly acre and a half, I was slacking off. It's nice to know that once again, I've blown way past actual expectations and have arrived at precisely where I'm most comfortable--working both smarter and harder. Why is that my comfort zone? Because it keeps me centered, focused, and most importantly, in control. I don't relish the idea of turning any part of my environment over to strange hands, and it gives me the willies when I have to. But I know that I can't drill my own teeth, do my own surgery, and most importantly....sell my own book.
     That's the providence of my agent, the brilliant-minded Natalie Fischer, who has walked me through some of the darkest and scariest terrain I have ever trod--Revision Land. I never thought a person could actually, physically sweat while writing in February. The changes she tactfully suggested pushed me deeper into my characters, forced me to embrace them on a level I had unknowingly avoided. I realized as I was revising that it was hard for me to know them on a truly personal level--they were my creations, and I was being a bit high-handed and distant. Keeping them at arm's length, thinking that if I didn't "get involved" too deeply, it wouldn't hurt as bad when they were rejected by the outside world. And believe me, they got rejected. But Natalie saw something within both myself and my world that she liked, and wanted to bring out the best within all of us.
     So I pushed myself, pinched myself (to make sure I wasn't dreaming, and really did have an amazing agent), sweated, bled, and ground my teeth; and landscaped where I had just been gardening before.
     But like any good garden, it's never really done until you can harvest enough to survive the winter with. I suspect there's still a bit of sweating to do, but I know that without a doubt, I'm up for the challenge.
     The weakness is leaving my manuscript, forcing it drop by drop to a strength that rivals my own.

Gone Fishin'

     I'm not quite sure how this happened. It all started so innocently, but has spiraled out of control so badly that it's now become a major obsession. I won't even try to say I can stop anytime I want to, because frankly, I don't want to stop. And at this point, I can't.

     The house is over-run with it; upstairs, downstairs---and there's even talk of doing it outside now. Let the neighbors talk. I don't care.

     No, there's no need for an intervention, or to get the authorities involved. I've just been swept away by the raging fever of aquarium keeping:

     That last one was an accidental tank--the hubby caught the fever too, and got some mollies, who promptly gave birth that first night to 15 fry, two of which survived. If you look reeeeeal close, you might be able to pick out the tiny guys.

     But what fun it has been! I never knew how involved the whole fish thing could be. I thought just plopping them in a tank of filtered water and throwing some flake food in on top of them a couple of times a day would suffice. Oh what a fool I was. There's water testing, temperature levels, bio-filtration, compatibility with other fish, (which I found out the hard way. Bettas and tetras do NOT get along well, especially if your male betta is hyper-aggressive. Floaters greeted me the next day)

     So now I'm obsessed. Just ask my kids. They are starting to roll their eyes when I call them over to look at the new trick the female betta learned in her new big tank, or when I talk baby-talk to my sweet little neon tetras. Yes I know they can't hear me, but at least they have an excuse. The three teenagers occupying space in my house don't live underwater, and make a bigger messes than my fish!!

     And no, I'm not using them as an excuse to be glacier-slow on my current rewrite. I'm just, well, being difficult with myself. I was requested to take two of my most entertaining characters out of the book and replace them with ones that don't steal the spotlight from the main characters so very effectively, and it's been trying to kick my ass. I'm not real good at slowing down and re-thinking things, so it's been a real learning curve, but I think I'm in the home stretch now. There are a few more notes to take, and a couple of knots to untangle, but nothing too traumatic.

     Right after I feed my fish.



      

Demons, Dragons, and Sharp Toys

Everyone has demons. Big, small, fanged or riddled with tentacles, we all have those inner twitchings that make us more, and less, than who we are. They define us, push us, hold us back, bully us forward. Mine have the surprising and frustrating ability to do all of the above simultaneously.  It makes for the most silent and bitter struggles, self against created self, to keep control over my life and not let them have their way with me. I don't alway win. And it's entirely my own damn fault. The balance of power tips over to my inner demons when I allow others to let their demons play in my backyard, breaking my toys and leaving giant piles of dung in their wake.

I need to quit watching the news.

It's not healthy.

Why do we insist on knowing so much of other people's demons? Does it make it easier to ignore our own, pretend ours don't have claws just as sharp? Or does it quiet them, knowing that there are other, larger things that would eat them whole for a snack?

No, I'm not talking of tsunamis, or earthquakes, or any other disaster--natural or man made.

I speak of those who should be silent, yet squawk loudest of all. Those that have nothing but doom, gloom, and dire predictions. Or who broadcast vices and problems like it's something to be proud of and quickly forgiven and forgotten. The politicians. The 'celebrities'. The psudo-news agencies.

You know who you are.

I have a small collection of really interesting knives that I've collected over the years. But none of them have a specific purpose. They are blades, and blades in my mind can be used for ever so many things. But I think I need a new, exquisitely honed blade that I can dedicate to just one single, specific usage. One so sharp that it can slice deeply before the pain registers, and so dexterously thin that it can carve its way around even the most delicate vein.

I'm cutting out the rotten and damaged bruises that other people's demons have left me with. And keeping them at bay with a glitter in my eye, and protective fierceness in my heart. My demons are dragon enough for me to handle. I don't need to welcome them into my heart, house, or home. No more newscasts for me. No more self-indulgent Facebook friends. I'm not reading another Tweet that has links to yet another late breaking story of doom and gloom. Keep your demons.

And get off my lawn.

Bloody-minded Celt

     For many years, I have felt an affinity for Celtic anything—knot work, pagan Goddess worship, bagpipe music, you name it, I loved it. I still do, but now there is a faint, uncomfortable tinge to my admiration. Thanks to my wonderful mother and her genealogy research, I now know that while it is true that I am closely related to the Emerald Isle and her inhabitants, the story is much longer and bloodier than it appears on the surface. Tracing our lineage back, we have discovered that our ancestors had the same fascination with the Celts, but in a more direct and active way. Our beloved ancestors were so fascinated, they came over not once, but twice to check them out for themselves, in the form of:

1.) Viking “exploratory committees” and

2.) Bill the Conqueror’s BFF’s.

Oh.
 

     Now I wonder if it’s more than simply a fondness of the culture, or some echo of the need to make it my own that my forebears were so adamantly pursuing. Or maybe-- and this is coming from modern psychology-- I feel guilty on some ethnic level about taking what was never mine in the first place and want to make it up to them in some way. I think it might be both. There is another level of me that does feel very specifically guilt-ridden and unsure about ever voicing it publicly, in a most modern sense though. In most stories, no matter the medium used to deliver them (movies, books, oral traditions), there is a sympathy for the innocent victims of invading forces, the brave fighters standing shoulder to shoulder against overwhelming odds, giving their lives willingly to defend their families and way of life. Or of the righteous fighters of freedom that conquer evil both on their home ground and abroad. But my own bias in this case is towards my ancestors, and how very bad-ass they were. Strength, surety of purpose, and getting the job done right has always been a turn-on for me, a deciding factor in so many choices of my life. Which puts me at odds with the general outlook of morality and storytelling—I root for not the underdog in this case, but for the violent and victorious forces that crushed a smaller and weaker culture so completely that very little of it has translated to modern day.

And let me tell you, pride and mortification mix into a sour and undrinkable brew.

History has always been important to me, for I have a deep seated need to know exactly where I have been in order to move forward, both personally and professionally, and to examine exactly why I do what I do. This is taking the knowledge to an unexpectedly deep level, and revealing to my astonished psyche why I have the tendencies that I do. I am absolutely convinced that genetics play heavily into who you are, along with the cultural affinities that echo down through every generation. The nature vs. nurture conflict, in my mind, is trying to make human behavior fit into a single, easily definable box. Nice and tidy, I would agree on that.

Unfortunately, human behavior is the farthest thing from neat and tidy as you can possibly get. It is both nature and nurture, combined with a sticky, undefined cloud-like ephemeral quality that is as difficult to define as quantum mechanics. It is the link that all of us have to our ancestors, regardless if we know one iota about them. The way you talk, walk, think, and the tone that underlies everything you do is subtly affected by your lineage. If you don’t believe me, try engaging a dog breeder into a discussion over bloodlines and point of origin. Now that is passion on a level that would make any Viking proud.
 

     I once saw a t-shirt during my brief membership in the Society for Creative Anachronism that said “1066—Not Enough Saxon Violence”. On one hand, I was appalled (I was young and idealistic, what can I say), but on a deeper, more instinctual level I agreed. And that appalled me again. But as I grow older, I realize that humans are violent. More so than the ‘natural’ world. And I understood the need to invade, to conquer, to expand and to take what is not mine. And no, fortunately for my neighbors, I put none of those impulses to trial on the surrounding countryside. But I understand it. And I can quietly say, with a very non-PC flair, that my ancestors were really good with follow through, and I’m proud that they had the balls to do what they did. Go team!

                 

Does This Taste Funny To You?

Every day is open mike night at my house. Humor has a seat at our table, all day, every day. I think it should be a part of daily life to tell at least one joke a day, the worse the punchline the better. I say the worse, because although a great joke told with impeccable timing is a wonder to behold, did you ever notice that there is an awkward silence after all the guffawing is over, and everyone just stands there and wonders what to say next? How can you top the great joke? Naw, the best jokes are the ones that have you groaning at the ridiculousness of the punchline, because they give you something to talk about after it has been delivered. Usually, it is a great segue to deliver another horrible, crass, or just plain stupid joke of your own, kind of a one-upmanship contest of sorts.
I had ample opportunity to do field research on this phenomenon recently when my septic tank mainline decided to go all medieval on us. And by medieval, I'm talking about the 'lack of sanitation facilities' kind of medieval. It sucked. Big time. There was hand-digging in frozen ground for me and hubby, paying rotor-rooter services insane amounts of money to not fix the problem, unspeakable flooding, the works. What saved the whole thing from making it the most miserable time of our lives was straight up potty humor. I started it, and kept at it so ferociously, that even the joke-impaired husband got into the act, and instead of moaning over the hard labor and money flowing out the door (and not down the drains) we laughed about it instead. There developed a certain 'brown' theme that colored every aspect of our lives, both funny and not-so-funny. The overall balance, I tried to keep on the funny side, because anger and tears clean not a speck, replace not a pipe! I had everyone on guard against my 'ninja' humor-- mostly puns that snuck up on the unsuspecting recipient and delivered a punchline either so tasteless or undeniably witty that all they could do was roll their eyes and groan, admitting my mad, punny skills.
But it's all about taste. Most of the jokes told in my house are not fit for public use, they are that freaking bad. And it is a kind of shared secret language in the family that would make no sense anyway to anyone who over heard most of them. It's our flavor, our color, our taste in humor. You might not find a single thing that crosses my lips funny in the least, and I may look at you blankly if you tell me a joke that is over my head or out of my league. But I'll try to get it, to understand your flavor of humor, because I think it's an important way to bond with a person, and to take their measure all at the same time. If I can see what makes you laugh, and inversely, what makes you cry, I can know more about you than if I had a cheat-sheet with your life's bullet points on it. Humor is what makes us, sorrow is what breaks us. So if I knew what makes you whole, and what breaks you down, then all the stuff in between just falls into place.
Oh, and by the way, can you guess what was going through my head as I was staring into my septic tank for the umpteenth time trying to figure out what was wrong with it?

"I don't need this sh*t."


Yep. Mad ninja skills.