Tag: pontificating

Writing at home kinda sucks

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A really rough day of writing today.  Lots of things demanding my attention at work (silly work, intruding on my happy writey time) and more roadblocks falling in my path.

But, as we learned in the previous post, when we hit roadblocks – WE DRIVE THE FARGO AROUND THEM.  (We, here, would presumably be me and my slavering pure-id writing alter ego.  Do NOT feed him caffeine.)

From the current vantage point, from the lofty peaks of oh, a week and a half in, seems to be this: the action of writing a play within a play, while I think it works brilliantly onstage, does not translate particularly well in a book.  Or, if it does, let me amend by saying: I do not know yet how to do it right.  I wrote the first sort of split scene today, and oi, was it an exercise in frustration.  I kept finding myself leaning back in the chair, saying to myself, “god, I really don’t like that,” or, “there’s got to be a better way to do it,” or, “WHY IS MY DOORBELL RINGING AT 7:30 AT NIGHT, WHAT ARE WE, SAVAGES?  No, I don’t want to change my cable provider, you can have a nice tall glass of go to haberdashery, now where was I, oh yes, this passage I just wrote is godawful, maybe I would like to talk to you about my options for upgrading my high speed internet for just a little while, please come back?”

Sidenote: writing at home is HARD.  First of all, there’s the sprout, whose demand for attention is akin to a black hole’s demand for swallowing all matter in the universe.  Basically inescapable.  (And yes, I know that black holes no longer exist, or maybe they do, SCIENCE CAN’T BE TRUSTED.)  Then there’s my dear pregnant wife, who needs as much of my attention as I can give her, and bless her, she deserves it, which is why this post will be extra short so that I can get some quality Walking Dead time on with her.  Then there are door-to-door salesmen at 7:00 at night, apparently.  It’s so much easier to take some time on my lunch at work or get to work a bit early, to close the door and bang out some piping hot words and then go about my day safe in the knowledge that I have achieved a personal goal today.  Twenty minutes writing in isolation is worth an hour of writing in the den, and I will take it whenever I can get it.

Of course, as you may have gathered, that did not happen today.  I got about 600 words in during the day – a good showing, but short of the mark – so I came home to hammer out a few more.  And I got them. Oh, boy, how I got them.  Subvert the roadblocks, leave them for Future Me to deal with, move on to something a lot more fun to write and hi-ho Silver, I ended up with 1200 words today.

So I’m still on track.  The Project.  Day 7.  It’s gonna be a thing.

Here’s my favorite passage from today’s session.  Might just have to make this a regular feature.

  • Bernardo was a local man who was very well paid to keep Harold’s drink topped off, to have Harold’s breakfast ready when he came down in the morning, to screen Harold’s phone calls for him, and to otherwise stay the Fargo out of Harold’s way and pretend not to speak English, thank you very much.  For these modest services, he was ridiculously well compensated, and was happy to suffer a week’s worth of abuse once or twice a year.

See you tomorrow, bandidos.  Pew-pew!  (That’s a laser gun six-shooter.)

 

Daylight Savings Time is Government-Sanctioned Time Travel

PavowskiLeave a comment

So here we are, at that time of year wherein we have to “give back” the hour that we “gained” back when we fell back in fall.

It’s not for me to say that for the vast majority of the country, the practice is arcane and distracting.  But it did spawn an interesting idea, perhaps and probably influenced by my short story from yesterday.

Time.  Never enough of it, always slipping away.  Sometimes it creeps by and stretches out for miles, other times it’s gone before you can say “Sharknado, I’m late.”  So here, we have this bizarre practice.  A bit of give and take.

In the fall, you get this extra hour.  In the spring, you give it back.

Put aside the fact that the extra hour comes in the middle of the night.  They just say that to throw you off. Time is time, and just like energy, nobody but nobody can destroy it nor create it.  No gain without sacrifice.  No yin without yang.

So we have this extra hour in November because society decides that we do, and then we skip an hour in March to bring balance to the force.  But all we did was move the hands on the clock; we might as well have switched out the labels on our day-of-the-week underwear.  What, you don’t have those?

But what if we actually – really – honest-to-goodness – gained and lost time once every year?  Even if it were just an hour, imagine the possibilities.  You cut a bargain with the gods (or devils) of time.  Sign it in blood, because, you know, that makes it for realsies.  You get to live one hour over again, and then you have to lose out on an hour as payment.  What could be better?  Didn’t kiss that girl at the end of the date?  Go back and try it again, for the low, low price of missing out on an hour in the office.  Got to the bank five minutes after it closed and thus missed your mortgage payment and they’re gonna repossess your house?  No, they’re not, because you just went back in time and cashed that check.  And you just have to give up one hour of sleepytime.  Wanna relive the time you found that $5 bill on the sidewalk and declared it the best day ever?  Knock yourself out.  You only have to skip over the hour when the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Photo Shoot bus broke down in front of your house and all the models had to pile in and borrow your phone and your shower.  Well, you can’t win EVERY time.

But why stop at an hour?  Would you give up a day to try one over again?  How about a week?  A year?  Would you give up a year wearing adult diapers and puttering around the house remembering the good old days to try another year in your twenties and fix everything you screwed up?  Pass on your fifties entirely for the chance to be a teenager again?  Or maybe you could skip over the boring kid years and gain some extra time on the back end.

I think there’s something there.  If time is so insubstantial that we can simply shuffle the board around and say we’re on the same page, then what does it even mean?  Never mind, forget I asked that, let me just go back to watching this video of a dog saying “I love you.”