The persistent pursuit of The Stuff

"A place for everything, and everything in its place."

Have you had this feeling? You want to accomplish something, but your mind and even your physical work space is such a jumble that you can't even figure out what it is you want to accomplish. Many mornings I'm there.

Tumbled piles of books and phonograph records and toys and even a rock or two - where is their place? Surely not in this mess.

On the other hand, there is that little plaque in the corner: "Creative Clutter is better than tidy idleness." Yes, but why does my work area look so much like idle clutter?

Still, I keep at it, spilling words onto a page at the appointed hour every morning, and at some point I find that among the nuggets in my careless pile of stuff is the stuff of dreams, the stuff of magic, the stuff of capital letters:

The Stuff, not just the stuff. The Stuff.

When you find The Stuff within you, or resting on a branch, or soaring with the pelicans overhead - ah, The Stuff and its magic spell will lift you - there, where The Stuff is waiting to be discovered, there is when it becomes Creative Clutter.

Keep creating - just digging and building from the stuff that's inside you. It may take a while to happen, but if you keep at it, eventually The Stuff will begin to happen. Don't quit now; keep creating.

A closet full of universes

Technology is freedom. The toaster changed the universe. The boat opened worlds. Clumping-style kitty litter saved continents. Tissue-paper handkerchiefs saved lives.


Every picture tells a story - but words expand the picture - and every person who sees the picture sees a different story - and every person who encounters the words hears a different story.

How many novels did she write? One - and several million.

I built bookshelves into what would be the clothes closet if we were using this room as a bedroom. It is a closet full of universes. A shelf packed with lifetimes. Each book a unique miracle, a collection of rare gifts waiting to be unwrapped.

We each pass this way just once, and forever. What miracle will we unwrap today? The joy of discovery is endless when we open ourselves to joy. The pain is endless when we focus on the pain.

Choose the joy, overcome the pain - open the closet and discover another universe.

How to overcome the restrictions of time and space?

He was helpless to be anywhere that this mobile vessel of a soul carrier, this container of flesh and blood, was not.

If his soul needed to be 20 miles away in a half-hour, he had to transport this soul carrier to that location. If it was better to be 1,500 miles away, well, then, he was helpless to do anything - although he could transmit his image and his voice to that far-away location, and that worked almost as well. And there, in that fact, was the reason for the technology. If the tech failed, how would he get the message across the miles? 

Even with the tech, how would he sense the how would he sense the feelings in the room when only the image and voice could be experienced? And how would he understand the community he was talking to, without walking its streets and among its people?

No, to be real, he needed to move the body into those other places. Or ...

Or else ...

He pulled a book off the shelf and was on a riverboat chugging down the Mississippi River a century and a half ago.

He was a young girl hiding from insidious forces that wished her harm because of the accident of her birth.

He was a scientist traveling to the moon in the faraway future of 1962. He was the captain of a submarine plying 19th century ocean watsers.

Each book a time machine, a moment captured in amber to be preserved for the ages.

Another scene from Sunset Electronica

He thrust a small sheaf of paper into the other's hand. The papers were bound together at the top, and the last sheet was of heavier stock - cardboard, in fact.

"This is what we used to call a tablet," he said, next handing over a box of small, thin sticks. "And these are pencils. Bring the wood and the graphite inside to a point, and you have a writing instrument."

"Writing?" said the other. "Where's the keyboard? How do you attach a screen? What about the batteries?"

"There are no more batteries and may not be ever again. We must relearn how to write with these utensils. We must relearn how to make paper. We must relearn how to make pencils and pen and ink."

"But why?"

"You weren't listening, were you? Because there are no more batteries and may not be ever again. Your tablet is now a useless slab of glass. Well, not useless. You might be able to use it as a hard surface for your paper as you write."

Snowflakes

In time she came to understand that she was different from others. It took longer to understand that everyone was different, and that that was the the only thing everyone had in common.

Some would look almost like someone else, some would act almost like someone else, some would think almost like someone else, but like snowflakes no two were exactly the same, and therefore the loss of one was like the ending of a universe.

The arbitrary groupings were so absurd - attempts to find commonalities based on hair color, skin tone, religious beliefs, even birthdays, proved futile and absurd. After all, what do William Shatner, Bob Costas, Reese Witherspoon, Werner Klemperer and w.p. bluhm have in common anyway beyond a shared birth date, the rich diversity of human experience and variety?

"I've never met a woman named Jennifer who wasn't attractive," one man said. It never occurred to him that all women are attractive in some way or another, because all life is beautiful.

Drawing conclusions based on any grouping of people is laziness to avoid the hard work of discovering the individual.

Random scene from an unfinished romance

He whistled a melody, a random series of notes that reminded him of nothing. He was just feeling the need to whistle something.

"What is that song?" she said.

"Nothing," he said.

"No, I've heard it somewhere."

"It's just random notes, really."

"It was a sad song, but I can't remember the words."

"I'm in a good mood," he insisted.

"Then why are you whistling a sad song?"

"Didn't feel sad to me."

"What's wrong, honey? Whatever it is, we can work it out."

"How did we get here?"

W.B. at the Movies: Avengers: Age of Ultron

There is something that Joss Whedon said during an interview about Avengers: Age of Ultron that rings true to the way his work progresses: "I have a contract with my audience - that I will do better, that I will give them a reason to come in again that is more than the reason we gave them last time."

We finally got to the theater this weekend to see Whedon's latest effort, a sequel to arguably the best comic book superhero movie ever, Marvel's The Avengers. He was hard-pressed to come up with something "that is more than the reason we gave them last time," but there were indeed moments in the second film that exceeded the first.

Most significant - and I write this carefully to avoid "spoilers" for those yet to have experienced the film - there was the moment when "the cradle" was opened. Long after the film came out, I saw an interview with Paul Bettany, so I knew what was in the cradle. The anticipation of seeing this character emerge was almost as good as, I imagine, was the surprise of movie-goers when Bettany's character was revealed - a gleeful moment of recognition and awe and the certain knowledge that the villain Ultron was going to get his now.

Then, too, was the "OMG Wash" moment of this film (a little Serenity reference there), a sacrifice sudden and poignant and unexpected that also made the villain's demise inevitable. Those two moments fulfilled Whedon's contract to provide more, even if the overall film could not match the original simply because the original was so, well, original.

The folks behind the Marvel Studios films have envisioned a sprawling adventure story that is taking hours and hours of screen time - and close to a decade of real life - to tell. It's an ambitious project and a keen lesson for storytellers regarding how to spin a tale. Can the payoff (Avengers: Infinity War Parts I and II in 2018 and 2019, respectively) possibly be worth the buildup? It's an ambitious goal, but if they pull it off as well as they have so far, they'll be the two best adventure films ever created.

My wild things

They make my heart sing.

They make everything groovy.

What am I doing

On the morning of April 15, I tried something different. I read a couple of short stories, grabbed a pen and a semi-neglected journal, and wrote my brains out instead of immediately turning on the computer and wandering around the Internet and finally writing with the keyboard if I had any time left after surfing.

It worked out so well that I came back the next morning and did it again.

Now it’s a habit: From 5 to 6 a.m. each morning, my pen and I have a date with the journal. (This blog entry began life as scratchings on paper.) Sometimes I reflect on life, sometimes I map out a project, sometimes a scene from a short story or novel bursts out, sometimes I just write nonsense until my brain gets traction, but every day I sit next to the window in my room and write, eschewing the desktop computer.

On Monday, May 11, I typed out one of these random musings to post on this blog, an observation about the promise of a new week, a new beginning. I attached a photo of Willow romping through our field on the first day we had her. Completely unexpectedly, I had forged a template, and now here we are every day, you and I.

I didn’t plan to do any of this. As I wrote a couple of weeks later, sometimes a new idea is discovered in hindsight – you just start doing something and see where you go. It doesn’t matter what you do, just get started. Just do something because it’s better than doing nothing. “Ready, fire, aim.”

So what I’m doing here is sharing some of the fragments I’ve been writing during these early morning hours, and photos of my adorable companions. Sometimes they come and sit and/or sleep while I scribble; often they slumber with Cj, who gets up an hour after I do.

Where is it going? I think we’ll discover that together. In the meantime I hope you find some entertainment, some encouragement, some insight, some whimsy.

One day (May 26) out of curiosity I counted to see how many pages I had filled during these mornings and I found I had 50 blank pages to go before I filled the book. Now (June 12) there are only 11 pages left. As I wrote at the end of May:

The first 50 pages (of this journal) took us from Oct. 26, 2011, to Jan. 17, 2013. This is the 90th page my pen has touched since April 15, 2015. The difference is in the decision. The difference is in the habit. The difference is in the discipline.

Of course, quantity is not quality. But in the quantity is something more than emptiness. I have scattered carrot seeds, and some are turning into carrots and some are turning into nothing. But the soil is being turned and the pages are being filled.

If Sturgeon is right and “90 percent of everything is crud,” then in six weeks I have created nine good pages (10% of 90) – in those first 14 months I created merely five. More or less.

Eighty percent of the job is just showing up, someone said. Will I keep showing up for 50 more pages, so by midyear I can finish this journal and start writing in the new one I got for Christmas 2014? We shall see. How many journals like this have I filled in a lifetime? None so far? How many do I have left to fill? Let’s see.

Each day belongs to itself

Look at the calendar. Remember? Today is the day when – but no, it isn't. It's 365 days later, or 730, or 3,652 more or less.

This day has nothing in common with that day, except for the name we give it, and even that name is different by a year or two or 10.

Today is a day all its own, and while it's wise to remember and learn from the past, this is NOT that day.

What beauty can you create today? What wrongs can you right today? How can you make today one where a year or two or 10 from now, you remember, "THIS is the day when . . ."?