Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: creative writing, fiction, flash fiction, rain, short story, writing
I do not venture out in light, and dark has terrors far more fearsome than myself. Light is a cruel tale-teller. Better to go out in the rain when her sweet whispers can cover and conceal my faces. In rain the people on the street look down and look away, eyes blinded by the tears of angels, so they cannot see me. The rain is my cloak of invisibility. It hides their eyes so I can pace the sidewalk in the open without a glance or word of scorn in my direction.
The rain is my cloak of many colors. When I awake to hear a downpour on my windowpanes I dress and take my black umbrella with me to the store where I immediately make a purchase of another black umbrella. I make the the old one dry as best I can and hang it from my wrist as off I go under my new one looking for a worthy soul to pass the old one on to. Somewhere trying to avoid a puddle while holding a shirt or newspaper ineffectually above her head I find her and I tell her I’ve just bought a new umbrella so look here, it seems I have a spare. It’s not nearly so nice as this new one I’ve got but it might do some good for you, young lady.
I stay just long enough to see her grateful smile but not so long until it turns to hatred when she sees who she’s been thanking so profusely.
The rain is of course also my enemy, and I curse its wetness and the impossibility of keeping trouser legs completely out of puddles. I am one with a thousand choruses of curses echoing throughout the city and our common enemy, the rain, brings us a sort of closeness. The rain is my shield, for you would not seek to embrace a dripping mass of flesh and cloth and anyway our umbrellas project force fields to the ground preventing us from brushing up against each other accidentally. When I am safe from you I can be one of you after the rain has made us brothers.
Another rejection today, with comments that clearly showed the editor had read the story. It was the same guy or the same publication who did the same last time.
It’s hard to feel good about rejection. I know, I KNOW that persistence is 90% of success in this game. I know I’m happier as an unpublished writer than a failed social worker or even back before the dawn of time when I was still an on-track social worker. I know that trying and failing puts me in with all the writers who I count as heroes, who had to try and fail and try again a hundred times before they started making progress.
It’s just hard not to see rejection as… rejection. Not good enough. Nothing special. Wasting my time, wasting the time of the poor editors forced to read my story alongside a hundred or a thousand other hopeful selfish grasping writers wanting their name, their story, their idea to be the one that finally attracts attention.
Intriguing setting, but the story never caught fire for me. So goes my hanging city, and on to the next editor who likely will not be so kind as to give me even that much of a comment.
I want my ideas to echo through the collective consciousness. I want money, damnit, and respect and pity. Not self pity, I’ve got plenty of that already, thank you.
I want to be Vonnegut. I want to be Douglas Adams or Isaac Asimov or Charles Dickens. I want to be Homer but all I am is just one more Odysseus.
Filed under: Uncategorized
There’s nothing I hate quite so much as a utopia. The very idea to me is like the screeching and grinding of machinery as it tears itself apart. It’s like the emptiness of somebody remarking on the beauty of the snow just at the moment I’ve begun to think of shoveling out my car, and of the inevitable difficulty I’ll have in finding a parking space once I attempt to drive somewhere.
Utopias aren’t just impossible. They aren’t just silly fantasies or harmless games for children. They are actively bad and I will tell you why. Utopias are bad because they are an extension of one’s will projected out to encompass everything. We imagine things ordered perfectly to suit ourselves and then we say that everyone will find this order just as pleasing. We will all be happy if the game is played exactly as I wish. We will all be much happier if I am made more happy. If only I were god, I’d set things right for everyone.
This is not the way that things should be. The spice of life is in its variety, its many flavors. Conflict, argument, disorder, carelessness, and selfishness! These are our pleasures and I reject a world that tries to do without them. I would no more enjoy a world where no one argued than I would an endless march through a glorious snow covered landscape. It would be cold. It would be lonely. It would be boring and I would eventually die from cold, and from fatigue, and from exposure.
When someone looks out a window who loves the winter and says how pretty it is the winter will eventually change and lead to summer. Then my friend will become irritable and languid and I will come alive and say how lovely it is, how I don’t mind the heat at all, how I wish it would go on forever. Wouldn’t it be lovely if it was always summer? For me, perhaps. This is the problem with utopias. They imagine that we are all so much alike that we can find the one single way to order things such that we all will be happy. Well, I won’t be happy if everybody else is happy. I’ll be bored and look to start arguments so I can show off my wit and my sarcasm and my intelligence. I’ll go rooting about to find hypocrisy and shallowness and when I find them I’ll hold them up in triumph as your utopia breaks and falls away, back into nothingness.
I like the world we have. I’d like to make it better, a world where more people were more free to pursue their messy, shallow, selfish careless lives. I want a real world with real people in it and I don’t think real people would ever populate Utopia.
They are the ones I want to know,
and never will.
Dream People
If I become aware,
If I awake although my body sleeps,
I try to find the persons in my dreams
and ask them who they are and how they think.
I’ll stick my hand in deep,
Pull out their brains and lay them on a tray
Look through the screws and buttons and spare change
to see if they are me or I am they.
It’s true too. I used to be intrigued by the idea of people in dreams who weren’t dream versions of people I knew but total strangers… Whenever I was able to come aware in a dream and realize I was dreaming I’d try to find these people and interrogate them and find out who they were and where they came from. They never had a satisfying answer. I think my demands that they explain themselves confused them terribly.
Take a piece of paper and draw a large rectangle. Somewhere at the top of the rectangle draw a T, to remind you that the upwards/forwards/north direction is Time. Time is forwards. Remember that.
Now, take a pencil and slowly and steadily draw a line from the bottom of the paper to the top. Steadily is the key word here. Allow your pencil to progress from bottom to top at a constant rate, no speeding up or slowing down, just gradually making progress from bottom to top.
The line you’ve made is equivalent to standing still. It is what happens when you just stay at rest and time moves you steadily forward.
Now take your pencil and start at the bottom, perhaps in the same place as the first point, and try to move your pencil at the same speed as before. Imagine that something is pulling your pencil towards the top, but at the same time you’re going to try and reach the left or right side of the paper. What you’ll get is some sort of a diagonal line, and if you’re trying to move at the same speed as before you’ll find that of course the diagonal is longer than the straight line and it takes a longer time to reach the top if you’re also trying to diagonally reach the right or the left side.
If up/north/forward is time, and left and right is all the movement you do in your normal life in all the ordinary dimensions, then you are like the diagonal line. Whenever you move in space you’re moving less in time. You haven’t stopped moving in time or changed direction, but you are moving more slowly through time- you’re up/north/forward progress has been diverted to the left or right.
That’s what it means to think of Time as a dimension. It is how our universe is put together, strange as that seems. Every time you move, if you go for a walk or take an airplane or drive a car, you’re moving more slowly in time than you would be if you were in free fall, at rest, motionless.
This is probably not why very active people who move about all the time seem younger. The effect is too small for us to notice, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. If you want to try and get more of an intuitive understanding of what Einstein did to change our understanding of the universe then all you have to do, next time you’re going for a drive or taking an airplane, is imagine that your movement is diverting some of your path through time and making time move slower.
This is probably not why air travel seems to take forever.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: fiction, humor, religion, short story, spirituality, story
Illusion vs Shoebox
In dealing with religiosity amongst your sentient creations you will soon notice a simple division amongst religions and religiously minded individuals alike. This will take some time to develop, and if you so choose you may retard its development for quite some time but as any race matures it will find the followers of religion dividing into two camps, which we label for simplicity’s sake the Shoeboxers and the Illusionists.These terms are meant to be descriptive of the underlying theories, often never explicitly stated, of these two segments.
Shoeboxers are in many ways the simpler and more predictable of the two. They look upon the universe as if it dwells within a giant shoebox, looked down at by an Almighty creator who arranges things with tweezers. Shoeboxers thus seek to plead their case to god and look about constantly for evidence of god’s interaction with reality. The majority of prayers come from the shoeboxers and if you guide too many of your religions in that direction you may eventually find yourself a bit put out by all the constant hectoring and questioning. “Why did you do this?” and “Can you do that?” can come to grate on the nerves of all but the most patient Deities.
Illusionists are very different, in that they see deity and creation as inseparable, and the divisions between creatures and creation and creator as illusory. They seek not to control the world or call in godly reinforcements but to become attuned to their own essential oneness with creation and thus penetrate the veils of the illusion. Some of this is perfectly lovely of course but too much of it can lead a world down some very strange avenues indeed. The positive side is of course that meditaters are a whole lot quieter than prayors.
Obviously for any deity the distinction between the two is meaningless and both are right, however this knowledge or the lack of it seems to be a large piece of what allows independent self-willed beings to form up in the first place. If any lower order being comes to a deep understanding of the ways in which both sides are right, well… You know what happens.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Well, here I am after much longer than I ever expected spent either at my parents’ home or in Maine, home again. It’s funny how my apartment feels strange and new after only a couple months gone. Home is such a flexible concept in a way. You think of it as a single place, but in a few days or weeks a completely new place can become the One Place and feel like it, too, will stay that way forever.
I think I’m doing well with living, compared to my previous standards. One of the nice things about having set such a low bar for myself is that it takes very little to allow me to look around and see how swimmingly things are going. I haven’t been puking into toilets multiple times a day, or even multiple times a week (imagine!).
I’m not sure what the standard is for success for unpublished writers but I’ve written 6 short stories, 5 of which I’ve judged good enough to submit for publications. I’ve gotten several rejections and not been deterred. I’m working on a new story, with another one on a back burner, still writing daily. All of this, it seems to me, is pretty good if my intention is to keep writing, keep submitting, and hope persistence is the better part of valor in the battle to remove the “unpublished” from my appellation.
5 The Slight of change
16 It doesn’t bend
3 to webelos
13 Until the day
2 you’re not in love
1 Please explain why
10 and hope to die.
4 Or He above
6 may come to blows.
11 Stickpins and needles
7 when summers end
9 So burn a bridge
12 into your guy.
15 His smile breaks,
8 and Heaven knows
14 that summers end.
(here’s a hint – it rhymes the other way round)
I wrote something today that may eventually become another number poem, but is just prose for now. I thought I’d share it with you.
Good Girls vs Bad Girls
Good girls toast their marshmallows to golden brown perfection. The stick is not so thin that it will break but not so thick to do it damage. Bad girls stick the whole thing in the fire and then blow it out and eat it whole, never mind the bits stuck to the twiggy parts, just pierce another marshmallow on top of them.
Good girls roll their pants above their knees and shriek in terror as they play a game called sandpiper. Bad girls let the waves wash in and out over their jeans and dig their feet into the sand and then go numb in place and dare the water to say anything about it.
(Today I had the last of my writing workshops but – good news! – I’ve decided to continue on and signed up for another round beginning in August.)
Here’s an unfortunate side effect of wasting so much of my life being miserable: the tendency to say or think, when feeling down or when something just isn’t going right “I wish I was dead” or “I want to die”.
This has been going on for years. I can’t remember when it started, this strange verbal tic of wishing for death when I’m running late for something or nervous or bored or about to go home for Christmas with the family. I don’t mean it, of course. I never say “I want to die” because I’m seriously considering ending my life and I think the empty room might have some helpful tips on suicide. It’s just a habit, leftover from a time when I really wished that I was dead, or thought I did.
It’s unsettling though. It makes me think things are worse than they are. It’s melodramatic to the nth degree. It’s embarassing and one day someone might hear me and call the paramedics.
So, I’ve decided to attack the problem directly, by forcing myself to say “I want to live forever” whenever I’m about to say I want to die, or say it twice as a correction if I accidentally slip up and say it. If this works as I intend it will both cure my melodramatic outbursts and cheer me up as I reflect on the ridiculous nature of saying aloud either that I want to die or that I want to live forever. Because whichever way I say it, it aint happening.
So, to be clear: I want to live forever. I never want to die, ever. I want to live forever and not die, forever and ever, amen.
