Make Sure Your Home Is In Order

Currently Reading:

Brandon Sanderson, Way of Kings

Currently Listening To:

Little Dragon - New Me, Same Us

Blogging’s tough.

I wonder if I chalk it up to being a writer. When it comes time to write I first have to get my sillies out, so to speak: surf the web, listen to music, basically waste time until I feel guilty for being distracted. But once I start writing, I am hyperfocused on intention. If I want someone to read the words I’m writing, I want to make sure that I’m not wasting their time. Of course when it comes to stories, we have our editing processes that can make sure the work is tidied and tightened up enough. It seems to flow over into blog writing as well. I want to create a blog post heading that screams HOW TO BE A WRITER or HOW I LEARNED BY FAILING. But sometimes I just want to… ramble. I cannot tell you just how good I am at rambling. Enough so that some people will look at me and say, “Can you hurry up and get to the good part?” Or “Is there going to be a point to all this?” 

The answer to both of these questions is “Probably not”.

All that being said, this is going to be an example of the rambling. Why? Because sometimes we just have things to say and don’t want to worry about the long tail of those things. Sometimes I just want to write some paragraphs without a through-line or what some people call a “point”. I just want to take a moment to put a bookmark in my life and see what page it has landed on.

Currently there are fires on the other side of the mountain. I can see the plumes of smoke from it. I feel guilty that they seem beautiful to me. If I saw the flames would I still say the same? It reminds me of a few years ago when I drove home from work one night. The mountains behind my apartment were aflame, rising tendrils of orange against a black night. Even though it looked apocalyptic I was taken aback by the power of it. How something that feeds on air could be so 1) beautiful and 2) vicious. There is something scary about the things that are beautiful and dangerous. 

No transitions here.

Quarantine can be a state of mind. When I shut my blinds and rely on the recessed lighting, I see things I’ve never noticed before. It feels like an accomplishment when I take a leveler to that picture frame. Sweep an unsweepable spot. This is the time for—finally—a rug at the front door. A pantry shelving unit! Candles, oil dispensers, circular cuts of wood to put under things! When we cannot live outside we live within. The small blessings we receive when the world becomes a literal hellfire. We hibernate and create a home that was less warm before. Now it is full of love. Do we curse or thank a virus? I don’t know.

The point to a pointless blog post is that sometimes we lose our structure and we forget how a house is built. We expect that they all stand up of their own volition, as if the house gods went here you go and from the heavens we get a pre-fabricated home.Then we remain in them long enough to notice the foundation. Every morning now we wake up and knock on the floor as a reminder. We lay our cheeks against the wall and feel the stucco there. We pull a dusty ladder from the patio and reach to the popcorn ceiling, bits of it falling into our mouths. Our days go on like a river with no end but we look around for any semblance of structure. Sometimes I have to put a hand on my own chest to feel the heartbeat there. I remember that it goes on no matter what happens beyond the closed blinds. 

Any sickness rattles us. Be it of the mind or the body, we are left thinking of how fragile these bone bags are. When the fires rage and engulf another’s home we think of our own. Do we have a to-go bag ready? We look to those around us and make sure that those we love are within arm’s length. It’s time to make sure our home is in order.

Time

Currently Reading:

Suzanne Collins, Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Frank Bill, Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories

Currently Listening To:

Boy & Bear - Harlequin Dream

Thirty-two-years-old used to sound so old when I was younger.

I am a teenager looking up at my parents. How excited they are about things I deem the most mundane. My mother gets a bread maker, constantly wondering if her children wants bread. My father obsesses with his tools, whirring and grinding coming from the garage. My neighbors constantly are cutting the grass. It makes me wonder if the grass needs to be trimmed daily. I don’t want a part of that world, a Groundhog-Day-effect. Murder mystery parties and spaghetti dinners and cookbooks and talking about how only, if only, there were more time in the day.

All this while I swim in the shallow end, realizing that I never understood why people loved to just sit in water so much. Taking my cheap shin-splitting scooter down to the Catholic church, wondering if I could finally do the tricks I never once learned to do. All I had was time. The oyster of the world was mine.

But then you grow old. You become that dreaded 32. You see how beautiful and awesome mundanity truly is. You see things at the grocery store and wonder if you could make them yourself, grow them yourself. What is going on! Are you talking about gardening? You’d see your own mother spending half a day in the flower beds with a small shovel and printed flowers on her gloves. You’d hide just so she didn’t see you, pull you into the dirt with her. But now you are a golden 32 and you want dirt on your hands so badly. Want to eat the fruits of your labor. Hell, now you understand your mother’s obsession with making bread, don’t you? Except now you can’t find active yeast anywhere to save your life.

You’ve always loved reading but now it is an imperative. A day without reading is a day wasted. Going so far as to adding book-buying into your monthly budget. There are other things that make you realize the past just folds over on itself. You’re a child and you couldn’t care less how you are seen. But then your self-esteem becomes a double-headed dragon and you are all hair gels and mirrors. If only that period of your life rushed by quicker. Because now you are here, knowing that you’ve done as much growing as you are going to do, emotionally and physically. Have finally fit into your personality like a tailored suit. And if someone has a problem with it? Tough shit, world. You’ve spent thirty-two years to get to this point and have the scars to prove it.

So. Our life at thirty-two.

We will wake up and wonder what that new ache is all about. We aren’t going to do anything about it. What is an ache without a friend? A lonely ache. We will wonder if it is standard to brush your teeth before or after coffee, and spend a week doing either. Reading with our coffee is something we never realized would be the brightest point in our day. As long as we have that, our template is set. We’ll keep peeking at the oven. Not that we think it will explode or cook us a loaf of bread (if only). We just want to see the time, even though we have a watch on our wrist and our phone within arm’s reach. We don’t want to go to work, just like we didn’t want to go to school once. But now it’s because we feel like we don’t have enough time. We want to put a bookmark in our day as soon as possible or the bastards will take everything from us.

But we go to work. We may put on a face today that says “everything is fine” and hit it home with a wink. But more than likely we won’t even pretend. We will say our weekend was fine, didn’t do much. When in truth we did exactly what we wanted to, and it is only when “didn’t do much” hits our lips that we feel deflated by it. We read. We drank coffee. We saw a bird and it took all of our attention for two full hours. We don’t want to bookmark our days with events but it is all we can do to attempt to make time stop. If we tell others that our days were spent with useless tasks then we haven’t used our bookmarks. But what do we have to prove?

They say as you get older all you have to give is your time. Not your talent. Not your money. Your time. Because every minute spent with a task is a minute that you are giving away. This is something that we only realize as we hit twenty-five. Thirty. Thirty-two. Even more so as the decades pass. So we go outside and we find the dirt. We shovel some up and dig around, hoping for worms. We taste a smidge of it and don’t even look around to see if anyone is watching.

Best Case Scenario

May, 2020.

Like waking up in a brightly-lit apartment and seeing, feeling, nothing but darkness. You check each bulb to make sure they haven’t been replaced with something far more magical while you were “sleeping”. 60 watts have been transformed into an amount of lumens that makes everything feel topsy turvy enough that you hold back the want to choke on invisible fumes. The fact that everything, every single little thing, is just slightly off means that your new reality is through a set of goggles with a vertigo setting.

This morning I was not sure what was wrong. As most mornings go I watch as 6 a.m. becomes 7, 7 topples into 8, and only at half past 9 can I do something that resembles removing myself from my bed like a fly stuck to glue-lined tape. If I thought that I was alone in this waking dance then I would be sorely mistaken. I am living one life among many who reach out for the railing and find it missing. Stolen in the middle of the night, the object that tied us to our sanity has gone the way of the dodo.

Emotions are like a bouquet of multi-colored flowers. Each day we pick off a thorny singular rose and we don’t know which it will be today. A blue-dipped stem and we prick ourselves to the beat of anger, not knowing in which direction to aim it. Red the color of deep passion means something else entirely as we lie on our couch and even the way our cats sleep makes us want to cry. There is a bout of happiness as we brush our fingers on petals the color of a newborn chick, but it is short-lived. Every minute a reminder that the self-created smokescreen of our lives is still see-through and we can see the fabrication as well as the reality.

We creatives are in mourning. Days filled with minutes that feel stolen, hours that stretch on begging to be filled. With flung paint, pages of finely-crafted words, in front of a microphone with an emotionless weapon at hand. We told ourselves, “If I only had the time I could finally make my masterpiece.” But they never trained you how to paint in the middle of a war zone. How to write when you look at your hand around your pen and wonder if you need to wash your hands again. We go to sleep under heavy blankets of guilt, hoping we will feel better in the morning.

What does all of this even mean? Months and months of trekking through thick mud that tries to take us under instead of forward. Uncertainty like seeing a target but they’ve changed the ways to throw the darts without telling us. The only thing we can do, it seems, is to tell ourselves that getting out of bed, weighed down by our heavy thoughts, is a battle won. The war on the other hand isn’t something we can fight. We can only do our best to stay just outside the battle lines even when those lines are constantly in flux. A calmer mind once told me that we were now experiencing something that no one alive has experienced. Did this make me feel better? Worse? More unsure? I still don’t know. But I do know I have since put my fingers on this keyboard and put one word after the other. Reading this back I may even be able to comprehend it.

I wonder sometimes if it is true that they’ve given us a blessing in disguise. That fate has played its hand when it saw us overworking ourselves and losing sight on the things that matter. If that is true, then are these the side effects? The guilt that we carry in our pockets that jingle like rocks as we make our way from shallow to deeper water. 

Maybe we should make a list with two columns. We can write an effigy for the things that we miss in one column, ruminate on even the most petty things—though we know nothing now can be considered petty, not anymore. In the other we can think of the first things we will do once these restrictions are lifted. What are you most excited about? Running your hands down the bookstore shelves, sitting in tattered seats with the remnants of a prior patron’s popcorn pile. 

As lonely as we feel, we are oddly united by our longing and loss. We are holding on to things as if they have been doused in grease and are threatening to escape. It seems that all we have is an untapped amount of forgiveness we can use on ourselves daily. Hourly, if it necessitates it. There is no right way to spend your now open calendar, no matter what others try to tell you. Like a teacher who has been given a subject that has just been created a few weeks before. It’s a good time to hold on to those few things that don’t make their death dive out of our hands, grow legs, and crawl in between the cracks. Tell a friend you believe in them. Tell yourself that you believe in yourself. 

Read that book that has been burning a hole on your to-be-read shelf

Or don’t.

Begin writing the novel that has been haunting you for thirteen years.

Or don’t.

There is no right way, and maybe that is the best case scenario.