Perforation Problems

I'm not going to acknowledge the fact that it's been 11 days since I've written. Let's just let that go. 9-13-2012: Clyde Has Mats in His Tail We had to cut Clyde's tail because he had giant mats in it. He looks like a doofus.  9-14-2012: Haircut Friday and Trip to the Lake Packing the car full of wedding-related items before going up to the lake for Johnny Appleseed. 9-15-2012: Sunset at the Lake I ran from the car to the pier to catch this before the sun went away.  9-16-2012: Planning Platforms Grandpa trying to figure out the platform for the wedding.  9-17-2012: Home Again and Sleepy Back home late - reading in bed and thinking about writing.  9-18-2012: Flowers From the Yard I cheated on this one - I forgot to take a picture till the 19th. But these are flowers I picked from the yard on the 18th, so it counts, right?  9-19-2012: Clyde's Couch Clyde is always sleepy. 

I've had a couple friends do Project 365 , in which you take a picture every day for a year. I decided to jump on the bandwagon because it seemed like a good way to do something creative and improve my nonexistent photo skills...plus it'll be cool to look back over a year of photos. All my photos are getting uploaded here (at least for now while I'm keeping up with it), but I thought I'd do weekly summaries (again, copying some of my friends) on the blog. All part of keeping active, folks.  9-6-2012: MEATBALLS! Michael made me make meatballs for dinner. I didn't really want to but I must admit they were delicious.  9-7-2012: Clyde There are going to be a lot of Clyde pictures over the course of this project.  9-8-2012: Flood!  Mud Creek decided to take over our backyard after three inches of rain Friday night. Luckily the water had receded by Sunday, but when we walked out there Saturday, the water was almost up to my knees. And I...

I read a couple good essays by Craig Clevenger this weekend on LitReactor: one about descriptions and one about " disembodied action ." Some things to remember: 1) It's the "conflict" in a description that's interesting. You don't need to have a laundry list, or as Clevenger describes it, as "fashion catalogue copy," when it comes to describing a character - pick the contrasting details. Contrast or conflict is what makes a person interesting and what turns him/her from a flat, two-dimensional stereotype to a real, complex human being. A few striking examples from his essay: “I wear a black suit and tie and a dirty white shirt. The clothes hang loose, as if borrowed.” –Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas (the contradiction lies in the formal, put-together nature of the black suit, the tie, and the white shirt, and the not-put-together nature of the dirt and the loose fit.) “I was stirring my brandy with a nail boys, stirring my...

I am sitting in the dark in our library The room we were (and still are) most excited about. I don't sit in it very often - my life right now doesn't allow much time for piles of books or old typewriters from garage sales. My life is more about Excel spreadsheets and revenue numbers - and I'm okay with that, most of the time. But in here the smell of paper and print of wood and waiting starts the letters dancing in my head I read in a Frank McCourt book once that Shakespeare was like jewels in the mouth For me it's dancers in my brain moving across the glossy floor of my thoughts in a dip and sway too fleeting to capture on paper or a computer not that I'm in the practice of trying, anymore. I most often let them swirl away. But tonight the dark, and the rain, and the lightning, and the dog beside me and the sound of you outside helps the words live just a little longer so they make it onto this page where they stumble on the rougher pavement ...

(AKA Why are the things that are good for you so hard?) The other day, Michael and I were taking a walk around his neighborhood, and somehow we started talking about writing. From the very beginning he's always been really supportive of my wanting to be a writer, even though he has no particular idea if I'd be any good at it. I don't really have any idea if I'd be good at it - and that is the issue. I move in and out of writing moods - three or four years ago, I was writing several times a week. A thought would come into my head, and I'd want to get it out on paper. Now that rarely happens, or if it does, I never follow through. It's like eating right, or exercising, or making the really cool whatever that I saw on Pinterest - things that take effort and time never seem to get done, even when I know I'd be happy I did it after the fact. I would love to be a writer. I'd love to be able to play the guitar. But instead I spend a lot of my time outside of...

Someone posted this on soulpancake.com in response to the question, "Is Poetry Dead?" Feeling Fucked Up by Etheridge Knight Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and split and I with no way to make her come back and everywhere the world is bare bright bone white crystal sand glistens dope death dead dying and jiving drove her away made her take her laughter and her smiles and her softness and her midnight sighs— Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and democracy and communism fuck smack and pot and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck the whole muthafucking thing all i want now is my woman back so my soul can sing “Feeling Fucked Up” from The Essential Etheridge K...

Tonight in class one of my fellow grad students said this: "Writers feel a lot of shame in the egomania that's involved in writing...it makes them focus on their failures." I found that interesting, and it spoke to a lot of what I feel when I'm writing, and probably part of the reason every blog I've ever started gets abandoned. It also reminded me of something I tweeted three days before: "Artists of all kinds find themselves in a dilemma characterized by the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found." (From "When We're Alone in Public: The Metabolic Work of Eileen Miles," Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions by Maggie Nelson.) Agreed. I constantly feel a need to hide - even making my Twitter public has been an agonizing dilemma for me. It's much safer to keep one's thoughts within - there's no criticism, no opportunity to be misunderstood or disliked - or perhaps...