Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Neat Little Boxes

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The blarg has been populated overmuch lately with thoughts of death and of passing, and this is the last post on the subject, I promise. Happier topics are on the horizon.

But in the meantime, I have to reflect on the subject of burials. As much as I understand and appreciate the power and the lure of tradition and ceremony, I just don’t understand it. I never have, and I don’t know that I ever will.

There is something strange — I’ll even say, for me, unnatural — about making all this fuss over a dearly departed loved one’s body, draining it of its fluids and preserving it, saying these lovely things over it, reflecting on the life lived, and then carrying said loved one up the side of a hill to leave them in the ground.

Shakespeare once said, “We are such stuff as dreams are made of.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “…We are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.”

Moby said, “We are all made of stars.”

The things that make us up — the energy, the atoms, the dark unknowable forces of creation, whatever — move out of phase with our bodies as we die and return to the chaos that spawned us. Burial maybe slows that process down a little bit, but in the end, we all turn to dust. I don’t understand the point in putting it off by putting a body in a neat little box.

We are humans. We are more than the skin we inhabit. We deserve more than a six foot by three foot plot in the ground when we meet our end.

When I go, I want to be scattered over the ocean or over a mountaintop or maybe in the coffee of a bunch of pretentious coffee snobs.

…This doesn’t particularly jive with my theme of writing motivationals. Or maybe it does. But I think maybe mostly it doesn’t.

Ho hum. Regular programming will return next week.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Accidentally Interrupted

Pavowski1 Comment

My grandfather has passed. Programming will return shortly.

In the meantime, here’s a sign we saw yesterday. I refuse to believe this is anything other than a baby on a grill.

Go ahead. Tell me I'm wrong.
Go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong.

What’s Your Weird? (Or: Coffee Snobs, I Hate You)

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We all want our stuff a certain way.

Well, let me back up.

We all want certain things a certain way.

For example, somehow, some way, I’ve come up against this thing several times in the past few months:

This is a Chemex, and if you haven’t heard about it, BOY OH BOY it’s time to buckle up. A Chemex is a coffee pot. But it’s not your ordinary coffee pot. Well, yeah, it’s an ordinary coffee pot, but it also has MAGICAL POWERS. The power to transform an otherwise ordinary human being into an absolutely insufferable coffee snob. The power to infuse said human’s vocabulary with nonsensical coffee jargon like “brewology.” The ability to cause friends and acquaintances of that person to, in tiny, almost unnoticeable ways, hate that person.

There are videos dedicated to the Chemex and how to best use it. There are detailed, multi-step guides with entire nested webpages devoted to it. In particular, one of my favorite authors of late and one of my favorite youtube channels have both written and explained in great and grating detail how much they love their Chemex.

The secret behind it (apparently, if you buy into all that neo-hippie coffee-infatuada nonsense) is: you like coffee, sure, but you’re not getting the most out of your coffee.

With that, you fall down the rabbit hole. You buy the thing. You have to get the right filters to go with the thing, filters made from recycled thousand-year-old rainforest wood. You have to get the right coffee beans for your particular demographic and unique taste. You have to hand grind the beans using stones purified in the bowels of goats. You have to boil your water in a kettle, preferably one consecrated by an aged, castrated bishop. The boiling must be done using a hand-torch crafted by the elders of unnamed tribes in the heart of Africa. The steam must not be allowed to escape; you must inhale every molecule to open up your nose for the taste explosion that’s about to happen.

And I hear about this, and I ponder on my life and the choices I’ve made, and I find myself starting to think, well, hot holy hell, maybe I should get one — I AM missing out on this vital part of the coffee experience. Except I don’t drink coffee. And I really find all this gobbledygook about filters and glass and grinding and inhaling to be utter nonsense. Not only nonsense, but wasteful and snobbish nonsense, the worst kind. If you want a cup of coffee, just make a cup of coffee and get on with your life — why do you need to devote twenty minutes of your morning to it?

So I prepare to make a scathing diatribe about exactly how foolish it is. An all-out attack, not just on users of this product, but on anybody who gets at all uptight about their coffee. IT’S JUST BEANS.

But when I pull back to let this stone fly, I pause, because I catch my own reflection in the walls of this glass house I live in.

Sure, I couldn’t give two randy Sharknados about coffee, but you’d better believe I’ve got my own series of oddities.

I could go on and on and on about the “right” running shoes and the “right” way to run. How your shoe needs to provide protection from the ground but not insulate your foot from feeling the bumps in the road. How you need to adjust your footstrike (and there I go using nonsensical jargon) to properly engage the musculature of the leg and the back. How the average runner should aim to run on trails from time to time rather than pounding pavement all the time because of the instability the body has to deal with.

I could ramble for ages about my writing process. The right music to help empty and focus my mind, the right programs to capture the draft and insulate myself from distractions. When writing longhand, I much, much, much prefer pencil to pen; the faint skritch of graphite on paper is soothing beyond words. Preferably, it’s a .7 gauge mechanical pencil: smaller and the lead breaks too easily, larger and I feel like I’m writing with a freaking crayon. But if it must be pen, then it’s got to be a Pilot g2. The ink slides out like a seal slathered in syrup, and there’s a crease in the grip that settles right into the grooves in my index finger, and let’s just leave it there before it starts getting uncomfortable in here.

Or shaving. I’ve become one of these guys about shaving recently (though not as bad as some); I use soap or cream from a tub, lather with a brush, shave with an old-school double-edged blade (1000 blades for $10, how could this not be for me?!?!).

For that matter, here’s a not-at-all-exhaustive, by-no-means-in-order-of-importance list of things I feel unnecessarily strongly about, that I have to have just so:

  • The angle at which papers should be stapled (Diagonal, about thirty degrees from horizontal)
  • The consistency of scrambled eggs (still moist but not runny)
  • The position of my hands on a steering wheel (either one resting on top while the other holds at about eight o’clock, or at 10:30 and 1:30)
  • The delay between when a traffic light changes and when I have a right to honk at you for not noticing the light has changed (three seconds; less is draconian, more and … well, we have places to be, don’t we?)
  • Shoes in general (the flatter the better, and I could very well give up on dress shoes altogether tomorrow and feel not a bit upset about it; in fact, I could almost give up on shoes as a whole altogether)

The amount of thought and mental distress I’ve experienced over these things is probably much more than I feel comfortable discussing, but suffice it to say, I have realized that humans, as a rule, are a weird bunch.

We gravitate toward others who are weird like us.

We are repelled, or at least puzzled, by others whose weird we don’t understand.

Point is, you can take your gross weird coffee snobbery and your gross weird birdwatching and your gross weird homemade macaroni replicas of famous renaissance monarchs and stay the hell away from me. Go over there. In the corner. Where it’s dark. And weird.

Of course, you can have all you like of my awesome, cool, somewhat-nerdy-but-ultimately-enviable weird.

But I’ll ask, just because I’m curious.

What’s your weird?

Day Care Damage Report

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For the third time now, we’ve had to sign a form acknowledging that one of our kids was damaged in day care.

First, it was a tumble on the playground. Okay, that happens. It’s a rare day that your kid doesn’t come out of a visit to the playground with a shiner or a scrape.

Then, it was a bite to the cheek. Look, kids bite. Literally and figuratively. Especially little ones. I’ve had more than a few chomps taken out of my own shoulder in my time. My wife’s nipples have been chewed on like a Rottweiler’s rope knot. Little kids are gonna bite each other.

Now, the kids in Sprout the first’s class were doing some activity (and bear in mind, of course, that something as simple as washing your hands or singing “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” qualifies as an activity) and, while getting up from the mat, they got tangled up and my kid got kicked. IN THE FACE. Sure, it was an accident. Sure, he’s only got a tiny little red mark on the thumb of his jaw.

But dude. DUDE. He got kicked in the face.

It’s a different world, putting the kids in day care. Time was when I was the only one getting face-kicked or stomach-bit or junk-stomped by lunatic rugrats hopped up on applesauce and 2% milk from a carton. Now, they’re getting a taste of their own medicine, and rather than them freaking out about it, it’s me.

Because kids are made of rubber. Anything short of a compound fracture or blood-spilling mouth or head wound, and they bounce back within minutes if not seconds. Sprout couldn’t even tell me how he got hurt; his teacher had to tell me. A few hours later, he didn’t even know what I was talking about when I asked him if his face hurt. The hits keep on coming, and they bounce off like golf balls in tile bathrooms.

My wife and I are another story. We’re trying hard not to be the over-protective mama grizzly and papa… what’s the male equivalent? Anyway… we’re trying, but when you have to sign paperwork three times in the space of a week and a half acknowledging the dings and dents your brood have picked up in the care of (conceivably) qualified adults, you really start to wonder just what the hell is going on in these places.

Look, I know. Every three-year-old is a Tasmanian devil on a Starbucks triple espresso coffee bucket, and every newly-learned-to-walk one-year-old is a terrified jackrabbit bouncing full-bolt off the walls and furniture. It’s next to impossible to watch them every minute, even between my wife and me when it’s just our own two kids in our own house. So what can I expect from a couple of people charged with watching a dozen of the rugrats for eight or nine hours every day? Of course they’re going to come away with some scratches, with a bit of paint on the fenders.

We’re trying to focus on the positives. Certainly, there are positives. The kids are learning to get along with (and follow directions from) adults who are not my wife and myself — a necessary life skill. They’re learning to play with other kids, to share, to take turns. These are things it’s hard to learn in your own house when it’s just you and your sibling. They’re learning that mommy and daddy go to work during the day and that this is how life works. And it’s hard to put a price tag on that stuff.

As with all things, there is good and bad in this.

There is suffering, and there is growth.

I just wasn’t expecting quite so much paperwork.

More Riffing on Light and Dark

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A couple of days ago, I penned a post about light and darkness, and the enduring, almost super-conscious symbolism contained within the dichotomy.

In short: Light = life, dark = death.

And we see it play out a thousand different ways in a thousand different tales:

The universe explodes forth out of darkness, and here, in our infinitesimal corner of a speck of a galaxy, a slow-burning star provides the heat and light necessary for life to take over our planet.

Cavemen huddle around a dwindling fire, both for the heat it provides and the fact that it keeps the predators away.

The lights go out in the house when you’re all alone, and that’s when the monsters (demons, ghosts, psycho killers) strike.

Macbeth: “Out, out, brief candle!”

And I riffed for a little while on just how ubiquitous the dichotomy is, and how universally recognizable it is, and I even fielded some ways in which I’m going to consciously work the idea into the books I’m working on.

And that got me thinking.

Can you reverse it?

I’ve been pondering over the last day or two on this idea: can you invent a storyworld in which darkness represents life, and light represents death? Okay, maybe you can do it, but you can technically do anything in a story: reverse gravity just for kicks, invent an alien race who, for fun, remove their genitalia and fling them at each other, cozy up to all sorts of talking flora and fauna. But those are concepts totally alien to us. They don’t have to compete with a preconceived notion already extant in our head; they simply have to carve out their own little weird space in our thinkparts.

The fact is, symbols mean only what we agree they mean. But light and dark are symbols that have been around and understood since before there was literature. Huddle up around the fire at night, walk during the day, and your odds of survival go up. Go wandering in the darkness, and sabre-tooth tigers will make kibble out of you.

Can you reverse such a powerful, subconscious symbol, even for the space of a single story, in the mind of your audience?

I can’t be the only person who’s had this idea. I’m sure it’s been done in films or books before, but all of a sudden my mind is racing like a jackrabbit on Jolt cola.

Maybe aliens come down and suck all the juice out of the Earth’s power grid, causing their ships and their bio-suits to glow. As long as we stay huddled in the dark, they leave us alone, but if you turn the lights on…

Or maybe there’s some long-forgotten beast slumbering beneath the earth, dug up by glory-seeking archaeologists. At first, it just sits there, inert and unmoving, since they dug it up at night. But the moment daylight strikes its ancient hide…

Or maybe I’m thinking too close to home. Maybe it’s the far-flung future, and we’ve found a perfect planet to colonize (you know, since we’ve either a: trashed the earth or b: a wandering asteroid has wiped it out or c: the sun burnt out and left the earth frozen… pick your apocalypse, we have a neo-earth situation here), except that it emits a particularly nasty brand of radiation, so that you can’t go out in the day lest you be burnt to a crisp…

Man, I dunno. Each one sounds dumber than the next, and I immediately start poking holes in those ideas. (Do the aliens only live on electric power? Is it just one monster, and is it only sunlight? What about indoor lights on the neo-earth, surely we still need light to see indoors…) Which brings me back to the question: can it really work?

Can a story teller create a world where darkness brings the life and the safety, and the light brings with it death and fear?

If you know of a story like this, I’d love to hear about it.