Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Light and Life

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If there’s one motif in literature the world over, it’s the struggle between light and darkness. Good and evil. Heaven and Hell. It’s often as simple and straightforward as good guy / bad guy: here the guy who fights for righteousness and justice and really good things, and there the one trying to subdue him, or even better, subdue the world the good guy fights for.

And that’s fine, and good, and even compelling, from time to time. But light and darkness are bigger than good and evil.

Humans crave the light.

It sustains us, nourishes us, protects us.

Our entire planet only supports life at all because the universe creates light by smashing the elementary blocks of matter together again and again.

The light of a fire at night means warmth, means food, means survival.

The light of the sun in the day means growth, means sustenance.

The light of a cityscape at twilight means vibrance and strife.

We sleep in the night because that’s when the monsters come out; only in the light can we see them for what they really are. We seek out the light because the light means other people.

Light, in short, is life.

Darkness, on the other hand, is the great unknown — it’s the monster lurking just out of sight, it’s the cold bleakness of night, it’s the blasted wasteland of a sunless world. Darkness is death.

I’m in the midst of teaching Beowulf to a bunch of, at best, mildly interested near-adults, who aren’t particularly interested in working to understand that basic symbolic dichotomy: that light means life, and darkness means death. The world of men, in the piece, is always surrounded by a warm golden glow: the glow of a fire, the glow of a nourishing sun, the glow of human heat. The lairs of the monsters, by contrast, are dark, bleached out, shrouded in shadow. Grendel attacks the halls of men and steals from their safe places the light of life; only when Beowulf arrives from across the sea, bringing the light of God with him, does light and life return to men. Heck, one of Grendel’s weapons in the fight with a demon in the film is a glowing artifact that he uses to light up the darkness.

And it got me thinking about my own works. This symbolism of light vs darkness, of life vs death, is so obvious, so simple, so hardcoded into our very brains, it seems almost silly not to tap into it. So am I using it? Well… yes, and no.

The hero of my first novel is struggling to overcome an insecurity, a lost ability. Along the way, the power is cut off in his apartment, and he is forced to write by candlelight; a shallow pool of light keeping the demons and his fears at bay. He invents new sources of light, but they are all artificial — only when he overcomes his tribulations and embraces his potential does he win the windfall that lets him put the lights on. (Okay, so that didn’t happen at all, but now that I’ve thought of it, IT’S GOING TO.)

In the second novel, things are a little more complicated. Machines have taken over the safekeeping of men, and their world is bathed with light, but a harsh, sterile, impersonal one. The blank, faded light of fluorescents, a cold light. Interlopers from another time and place arrive and slowly begin turning out the harsh light of machination, and the world lurches into darkness for a time, but little by little the darkness and the artificial light are replaced once again by enlightened human light; a blinding, all-illuminating force that drives the shadow out of all the dark corners and exposes the truths that have been forgotten. (Again, at the moment, this isn’t happening at all, but CRAP IT NEEDS TO.)

And I could write on and on about the play of light in my books, the way it ebbs and flows with the spirits of my characters, but my heart’s not really in it right now.

Because I fear my grandfather’s light is going out.

He’s been battling with infirmities and sicknesses for a while now, and in the last month or so, seems to have lost his spirit and his will to fight. He’s old — no getting around that — and seems to be making the choice simply to allow his candle to gutter out, rather than to rekindle it through artificial, uncomfortable, even painful means. This isn’t a shock to us, but that makes it no easier to bear. Life — and light — are precious and fleeting. We have them for a short, little while, and then the darkness takes us again.

Life is about the struggle with that darkness, and my grandfather’s struggle is almost over.

So, as a tiny disclaimer, my thoughts are likely to be a little jumbled up in the coming days or weeks. If the material here turns dark or nonexistent for a while, that’s why. Programming will return to normal as soon as we are sure what is normal in the first place, to bastardize a quote by the late great Douglas Adams.

In the meantime, I’ll leave the lights on around here.

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.

Toddler Life, Chapter 211: The Daycare Demon

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Our kids have recently gone into daycare. And there are a host of parental tribulations that go along with that. What will the children learn outside of the house that we don’t want them to learn yet? What if they get sick? What if they hate us later? What if a helicopter crashes into the building? (Some of the fears are more rational than others.)

For better or worse, our kids have been fairly isolated in their development so far. Sprout the First was in daycare or in the care of his grandparents for a couple days a week  for a few months after he turned 1 — and he spent time with a few other kids, maybe three or four, during that time. And the kids have some cousins around their age, and some friends of ours (my wife’s and mine) have kids their age as well. But on the regular? It’s just been us.

Which is good and bad.

Good because, if they’re doing something, we can pretty easily isolate the cause. We know, for example, that when Sprout the First began telling his stuffed animals to “shut your piehole,” that we needed to start examining our, uh, turns of phrase around the boy. Good because, as a general rule, we can control the things that go into their tiny and developing brains.

Bad because, well, variety is the spice of life and all that. Maybe we shelter them too much. Maybe they need more interaction with kids their age. Maybe they need to hear the crazy beliefs of other adults in the world.

But I’ll tell you what’s definitely bad about sending them to daycare.

The Daycare Demon.

The Daycare Demon goes to your child’s daycare.

He’s the first child whose name your bright-and-beautiful offspring learns, because it’s the name he hears the most.

He’s the one you can pick out without anybody particularly pointing to him, because naturally he’s the one hanging from the curtains with fingerpaint all over his face, brandishing a paintbrush like a rapier.

He’s the one you begin to hate from afar because you just know that, through toddler osmosis, your precious darling is picking up on his bad habits.

Our Daycare Demon is definitely not named Fred, but I will call him Fred for the sake of not calling him by his real name, which causes my blood to boil and my face to distort as if I’ve chomped down on an enchilada full of ground-up bulls’ testicles and not ground beef, as I had previously supposed.

Every day, Sprout the First comes home with nothing but Fred to talk about. “Miss Smith told Fred to sit down or he wouldn’t get a sticker.” “Fred was getting in trouble because he wouldn’t come inside.” “Fred said I’m a baby.”

Fred is the one who, the first time I dropped the kids off at daycare for real, came and laid a square solid tackle on my knee and grinned up at me like the Joker. Fred is the one who, now that I have to comfort Sprout the First when I drop him off (because he’s upset about not staying at home all day), sticks his nose into our business and asks me WHAT ARE YOU DOING until a teacher can snatch him away. Fred is the one at whose name I brace for impact: what has he done today?

And I know. I get it. He’s just a kid. It’s not his fault. But that doesn’t change the fact that Fred has become something of a magnet for all my unquantifiable but vaguely negative feelings about putting my kids in daycare. It’s comforting to think that I can ascribe all the negative episodes, the questionable interactions, the dubious phrases brought home, to some anonymous ragamuffin.

It’s become a bit of a running joke at our house, to ask what the Daycare Demon has done today. Sprout the First always comes home with Fred’s name on his tongue. And that makes us laugh. But then, when we ask Sprout what he did that day, or who he played with, often the Demon’s name will come out. And that’s maybe a little troubling. Sprout might be fixating on him because he gets his name called so often (even for the wrong reasons). Sprout might be fixating on him because he’s loud and has his nose in everything like a coked-up bloodhound. Sprout might just think that the Demon is cool, whatever cool means to a three-year-old.

Still, there’s nothing to do about it. Fred is gonna stay crazy. So, for way too much time every day, my kid is flying in the same orbit as the Demon. And maybe that’s not the best thing. But it at least reassures me that my kid isn’t the Demon.

Not yet, anyway.

Writer Moments: The Tipping Point

Pavowski3 Comments

In any endeavor there are magical moments.

There’s the brilliant beginning: full of purpose and brimming with the righteous light of conviction, you take your first wobbly-kneed steps into the great unknown. Sure, your steps are uncertain and the path is dark, but you move forward anyway, driven by the cattle prod of motivation that drove you to pick up the torch in the first place. Every problem is just another step in the road. Every question, a mystery full of wonder and delight. Every setback serves only to motivate you further, and every accomplishment is a furious gale beneath your wings, buoying you toward the heavens. This is the honeymoon period, and no obstacle you face is too large, no challenge too stout, no door too locked. (Can a door be too locked? Don’t stop me now!)

There’s the elated ending: exhausted beyond the limits of what you once thought possible, you stumble across the finish line and collapse into a smelly, grumpy heap. The imperfections, the wouldas and the couldas, the endless desert of possibilities, all lie like the discarded husks of cicadas in your wake, as useless and irrelevant to you now as a screen door on a battleship. The journey is over, the battle won, and all that matters for the moment is the whistling glory of the wind in your ears, the sweet cocktail of accomplishment and fulfillment served with a job done. (Not necessarily well done.) The dragons are slain, the damsels are rescued, and all is right in the world. This is when you lay back, have a cigarette (no you don’t have a cigarette, smoking is banned everywhere in the world, what’s wrong with you??), and bathe in the vapors of completion.

But there’s another moment that doesn’t get nearly as much attention, and it’s maybe more important than the others. It’s a moment when you’re not finished yet, when the road stretches on and on in front of you and in back. When you’ve left home so far behind that you can’t even remember the last time you were there, but the end is still so far in front of you that it might as well be on the moon.

It’s a tipping point.

This is the moment when you aren’t yet at your goal, but you can look back on the path you’ve walked and see the arc of the gains you’ve made up until now. You aren’t running marathons yet, but you booked a 15-miler this past weekend. Your novel isn’t finished yet, but your characters and the action are all poised for the grand finale. Your kid still needs a diaper to get through the night, but you haven’t had to clean crusted-on poop out of the creases in his crotch for over a month.

This is a moment almost sublime in its transcendence. At this stage, perhaps more than any other, you feel the gravity of both extremes — the beginning, when the task seemed impossible, and the end, when it will all have been worth it — but you know, deep down, that short of an asteroid smashing into the planet and obliterating all life, you’ll finish the thing you’ve been working on for months if you can just keep at it for a little bit longer.

This is a moment to be relished, to be savored, like the last drop of a Dr. Pepper. This is a moment to pat yourself on the back just a little bit while girding your loins for the home stretch. The air is still up here; still but full of static, the twenty minutes of quiet before the hurricane hits.

Because, make no mistake, you’re not done. The finishing is not for the faint of heart. You will be chewed up. You will be spit out. You will suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

But if you’ve come this far, you can make it through.

This post brought to you by me reaching the 75% mark of my novel today.

(Tiny) King of the Beach

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I didn’t post this at the time, because with two kids running around, you become a lot less concerned with taking adorable pictures and posting them to your various social media right away for the adulation of friends, neighbors and acquaintances and more concerned with making sure that one child does not kill the other or itself while you try to close the door to use the bathroom in peace for a moment.

Still, though, despite your dubious parenting and hopeless second-child-syndroming of the second child, you do catch a good picture from time to time.

King of the Beach.
King of the Beach.

The boy has mastered at age 3 a pose that I can only hope to emulate. Maybe after I sell a few books and buy a beach house that I can just lounge around in at day’s end, I can come close to his casual indifference to the world, his satisfaction at a day’s work well done, a beach’s worth of sand castles properly kicked over, a pink bouncy ball thoroughly bopped around.

His shirt even says “Life is Good,” for the love of all that’s shameless.

So, yeah. Usually I have more to say, but sometimes it’s better to just let the picture speak for itself.

We’re Never Ready. Do It Anyway.

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When you’re starting something new, there’s a lot of hullabaloo about picking the “right time” to do it.

“I’d love to write a novel, but I just want to have the perfect idea first.”

“I’d love to start exercising and dieting, but I’ve got a vacation coming up (or the holidays, or whatever). I’ll start afterward.”

“I’d like to have a kid someday, but things are just too busy for me at work.”

The excuses all sound decent and reasonable, and they’re never specifically wrong. If you’re going to start writing a book, you should have the best idea you can muster in mind before putting pen to paper. If you’re going to start getting fit, you should eliminate as many barriers to success as you can. If you’re going to have a kid, you want to do so at a time when you can give the child as much of your attention as possible. And so on, and so on. The problem is, you can use that excuse (and here I mean whatever excuse you may have concocted to justify the thing you’re not doing) ad nauseam, and there is always another “perfect” excuse. Sure, I have a good idea for a novel, but what if I have a better one in a month or so? Okay, I cleaned the junk food out of my kitchen, but who wants to take up running in the middle of the summer? Yeah, my job is secure, but money’s tight right now, so maybe we can think about having a kid next year.

You can always find a reason why you’re not “ready”.

President Kennedy said of going to the moon that “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing regardless of the time frame in which you do it. There is never a “perfect” time. You’re never really “ready”. And chasing after perfection is the surest way to never get anything done. If you’re waiting for the perfect opportunity, you can prepare to spend your whole life waiting.

If you have the inkling that you want to write, pick up your pen (okay, crack open your laptop), open a word document (or notepad if you must) and write something. Now. Today. Brainstorm ideas for the novel. Do a little outline or a character sketch. Write an opening scene. It won’t be perfect — hell, it may not even be good — but at least you’ll have started, and taking that first step is the only way you’re going to change your momentum.

If you want to start exercising or watching your diet, do something. Now. Today. Go for a twenty minute walk around the neighborhood. Bang out a few push-ups during the commercial break. Have an extra helping of veggies before you hork down a bunch of bread, or stay in and cook your own dinner instead of driving to McFatty’s.Your exercise may not be graceful or impressive, and your dietary choices may not be the best, but at least you’re doing something. At least you’re making the effort instead of hiding from the opportunity.

If you want to have kids, well, the clock never stops on life, right? I had my kids at the age of 31 and 34, which means I’ll be about 50 when they graduate high school and head off to college. When my wife first started talking about having kids a year or two earlier, I told myself “I wasn’t ready” to be a father. But I did the math and realized I didn’t want to be a geriatric school parent. I have a colleague who just had his first baby at the age of 46. He’s going to be over 60 by the time his kid graduates high school. He told me he and his wife were just waiting for the right time, until they suddenly realized in their 40’s that there was no right time and they were on the verge of missing their chance completely.

The point of all this is, change is hard. Momentum matters. It’s easy to sit on the couch and get fat, easy to watch movies and TV endlessly instead of chasing after a dream, easy to stay a kid forever. The human animal seeks the path of least resistance by its very nature. We have to fight against evolution, against society, against ourselves to achieve the things we want to achieve.

We’re never really “ready.”

Which is why, whatever the change is that you’re chasing, there’s only really one thing you have to be ready for. And that’s being ready to say goodbye to the old you, the old way you did things. If you’re ready to move on, you’re ready for the next thing, whether you think the time is right or not.

Just start. Do something. It won’t be perfect, it may not even be good. But you’ll never get good if you don’t start sometime. And as somebody famous once said, there is no time like the present.

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.