"Underneath It All" for #BehindTheBlogger

“Hey - How are ya?”

“How you doin today?”

“How’s it going?”

I don’t know about where you are, but where I live (and work), I am asked these questions all day every day by complete strangers who have little to no interest in an honest answer. Sorry to be a bit cynical, but hey – it’s true: the people who ask me these questions could really care less about the state I’m in on that particular day. The expected response is “Great!” or “Pretty good, how about you?” or something along those lines. What I tend to say is this:

“I’m alright, thanks.”

Am I really ‘alright’? Underneath it all? Underneath the blithe, chipper veneer I put on when I leave my apartment, I am actually usually experiencing something like what Henry David Thoreau meant when he wrote this line from Civil Disobedience and Other Essays:

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

Quiet desperation… because nothing is as effortless or pleasant as it would seem. Getting out of bed takes effort. Getting myself groomed and fed and off to work… Interacting with co-workers and customers… some days it all seems just about too much to handle. Yet handle it all one must. And when those inevitable sing-song questions come, enquiring in passing as to one’s well-being, one had best be prepared to sing-song right back. “I’m alright, thanks!”

Thank you for reading a story from #BehindTheBlogger Hop. Every 2 weeks a group of bloggers is given a writing prompt. These prompts are very open ended, so our bloggers can write about whatever they desire. The main rule is that their blog post directly relates to the topic of that week. The point of this hop is for our readers to get to know us on a personal level.  Please hop along and read all of the blog posts in this weeks hop. Just click the links below. If you want real and raw emotion, then you will find it here. After you read each post, please comment and share. We want to get to know you too!

Are you a blogger looking to join our future hops? Click here Sign Up Here

What Do You Want? (or) Willpower: Pump It, Aim It, Squeeze It!

What Do You Want?
(or)

Willpower: Pump It, Aim It, Squeeze It!



One of my great realizations in life has been that it is important to know what you want.

I spent a lot of my early years adrift, taking things as they came, clueless to my own desires.

Oh, occasionally I would give my life a nudge in a direction which seemed desirable…

But for the most part, I just took the cards I was dealt and let them fall as they may.

There are some good things about such… feckless… living; it is pretty carefree and low stress.

But as I have matured, it has become increasingly clear to me that it is important to take a more active role in shaping one’s affairs. I realize that this must be obvious to many, but for me it is something of a hard-won life-lesson. It is, essentially, a value. I have come to value more determined living.

When I say determined, I mean deliberate: deliberate use of resources and faculties toward a desired outcome. Now that’s a dry sentence. Albeit concise. Funny, how as terminology tightens up around an idea, the textbook effect kicks in and the writing begins to gloss over.

A splash of water is called for here, I feel.

Consider, if you will, water as a metaphor. Left to its own devices, water will find the lowest level, will eddy and settle and stagnate. But give it a push, or point it down a steep trough, or – even better – compress it, and water becomes a very powerful force indeed.

So it is with the exercise of the will in the course of one’s affairs. Will is what I want to talk about, ultimately. Willpower.

Untended, like water, one’s affairs will stray to the low places, slow, and tend toward dissipation, dissolution; motion and change will cease. But with the exercise of the will, this stagnation is counteracted. There is a reason we call it willpower. It is powerful!

Sometimes of course, will kicks in pretty much automatically. When we grow hungry, the will to eat kicks right in. Yet sometimes getting will working in us can be a chore. Especially when we become complacent. The value - the necessity, even – of overcoming complacency and general lack of willpower is my theme here. Got to get that water, that willpower, working. Pump it, aim it, squeeze it!

As I’ve said, this is likely mere affirmation of the obvious for most. But this type of thinking does not come naturally to me, personally. And there are good reasons for that.

I grew up with the understanding that I have always had many advantages, privileges and luxuries which others have to make do without. These advantages stem mainly from facts beyond my control, such as where I happened to be born, how I happen to look… having had a relatively intact, competent, supportive family in which resources were available for my education… this sort of thing.

Increasing awareness of these advantages worked on me in an interesting way as I developed. I felt, from the first, that the proper attitude for me was one of mindfulness of my good fortune and gratefulness for my lot in life. “What have I to complain about?” I always thought. Who am I to be desirous of better or more, when I have so much already, so much that has been simply handed to me? Who am I to want?

I’m sure you can see how the sentiment behind these questions works against the exercise of the will, against the application of willpower… how thoughts like these work instead towards complacency.

My complacency has long been augmented by the fact that things have come pretty easily for me. The hurdles I have encountered in school, in the workplaces where I have found myself, these hurdles have not been much of a stretch for me, so to speak.

Ease of accomplishment in school and on the job, awareness of advantages like being able easily to pick up and hold a job… these factors naturally fostered what I believe to be an innate temperament and sensibility, my being a generally mellow, easily-satisfied kind of guy, not very competitive or materialistic, content with a fairly basic, low-frill lifestyle and set of circumstances.

I do not deceive myself that this effect is unique to me or unusual. To the contrary, what I’m describing is essentially being in the majority. In the thick of the twenty-first century American herd.

What may set me apart to some extent from the mainstream is a certain oversensitivity or hyperawareness. Of advantage. A dear and very intelligent and perceptive friend of mine has accused me of being crippled by this. “You are crippled by white guilt!” she has yelled at me in dismay. “You are ashamed of who you are! Even though you did not choose it!” My friend yells at me a great deal.

Yes, lurking between these lines are some loaded, volatile terms like ‘first-world’ and ‘class privilege’, ‘white privilege’ and ‘white guilt’ – quite popular terms, really, which wake you right up, but I don’t feel we need these sensationalist terms. I feel that, like curses, they tend to function against… specificity.

Suffice it to say that I do not consider myself to be crippled by guilt. I am not ashamed of who I am. If I am somewhat hyper-attuned, a bit over-aware of the advantages I have always enjoyed, well… poor me! Right? I tend to think of it more as mere awareness… consciousness… of myself relative to others, and of my place in the grander scheme of things. I think of it as knowing myself better, painful though self-knowledge can sometimes be. There are plentiful and various worse forms of pain.

The painful truth is that what emerges from the admixture of nature and nurture I have been describing here is your classic underachiever – an individual with very little drive or motivation to apply the will.

A slacker. A coaster. You know the type. Maybe you are the type, to whatever extent. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Plenty of us in the herd, and I believe that cuts right through all those dotted lines on the map, those contended borders of nation, class and race, gender, etc. There are complacent underachievers everywhere. Are you pretty much content with what you’ve got? Whatever that is? Do you suspect that it is a bit ridiculous to want… more? Or a bit futile, perhaps?

I’m back where I began. Back at the essential values, the essential received truths, which I am still learning: It’s important to want. And to know what you want.

Divining what you want in life is of course an early step on the way to getting it, and it could go without saying that getting what you want is usually pretty great. I say an early step rather than the first step because I suspect that the first step for a lot of us is giving ourselves permission to want.

Yeah, getting what you want. Pretty great. But I’m not here to deliver a how-to on getting what you want. My point is more just that wanting in and of itself is important. And figuring out what you want. And taking deliberate steps towards it. Whether you’ll ever get there or not. This is how we combat stagnation. This is motion. This is change. And change, well… change is as good as a rest. Change is good.

I’m gratified to report that I’ve come a long way with wanting. I know that it’s okay to want, for starters. I’ve found a few things to want, as well. Take writing, for example. (Because everybody likes writing about writing, right?) Writing is a bit like hunger, I think. At least sometimes. It comes on like a compulsion, like a biological imperative, and it has built-in desires: the desire to express effectively what one is trying to say, the desire to say something (anything!) in the first place, and of course the desire to be read – to complete the transmission – to know that what one has said has been heard and (in a perfect world) understood, the desire to have an impact on someone (anyone!) and on the world.

I have been writing lately, and I have been taking steps toward fulfilling some writerly desires.

I hope you have, too.

It Will All Make Sense Someday (with #BehindTheBlogger)

Off and on all this long, long day

I have been thinking of this past friend

Who has the same first name as I do

I suppose he still has it

Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him in years

He could be dead

But then

He would still have his name

As one does

He’s a for-real athlete, this guy, why

One year he even played pro soccer

(or football, as they call it, where he played)

It’s one of the many ways we’re different, he and I

For I am nobody’s idea of an athlete

Whatever the sport may be called

But we were friends

And sometimes when you’re with a friend

You can see something with that friend’s eyes

The only soccer match I ever bothered watching

Was with him

One day, suddenly, he filled his apartment with books

I said man, if you read all these books…

You will be a legitimate intellectual!

Whereupon he took down a book

And proceeded to prove to me, to his own satisfaction

That intellectual did not mean what I thought it meant

I remained unconvinced

He’s a concrete thinker, he is, so to him you see

A word has correct meanings and you know them or you don’t

Whereas I am more of the school that words can mean…

Whatever we agree that they mean. That’s what they convey anyway

Like if I say

That round, checker-patterned do-hickey

And we both know I mean the soccer ball there

Then ‘do-hickey’ means ‘soccer ball’ for us

Though that’s not what the books say ‘do-hickey’ means

If ‘do-hickey’ is to be found in the books at all

We saw art differently too

I clearly recall, one fall afternoon, what now – nine years ago?

I had fallen into a mania, hadn’t slept for days, was utterly absorbed

In art-making

I was taking

Huge sheets of clear contact paper

Laying them out on the floor

And sticking to their sticky sides scraps and clippings

From magazines, papers, brochures, mail circulars…

Images and words, chunks of color… a lot of blood-red

I was collaging

The art of pastiche

So deep into that afternoon, he came to my door unannounced

Worried, not having heard from me in a week or two

And when he witnessed my mad, manic mess of collages

All over the floor and walls

He cried out, “Goddamn!” (and he is a religious man)

“What is this?! What the Hell do you think you’re doing?!”

To which I replied, “It is art! I am making art!”

“This isn’t art!”

“Why not?” I asked

“Because it isn’t beautiful!”

Him saying that, that it wasn’t art if it wasn’t beautiful

Is why I have been thinking of him today

For I have just recently fallen in with some poets

As I have been moved to make poetry again

I have sought them out, these poets

And they have shared some of their work with me

And it is beautiful, almost all

Beyond doubt: beyond what I think, beyond what you think

Beyond the eye of the beholder, these are beautiful words

‘The nacre of morning’… ‘The nadir of their love affair’…

Beautiful images, sentiments, beautifully put, beauty beauty beauty

Until I do not know what beauty means

Anymore

Except that this, this is not that

There is no nacre, no nadir here

Meter nor rhyme

Nor nothing

Will they need to be kind, presented with my pages?

Will they shake their heads and sigh and shy away?

Will they say of this as my long-ago same-name friend said

Of the ugly collages crowding my little apartment

“This isn’t art!”

No.

But they will see

My words and ideas jerking along like so many ill-made robots

Against the fluid motions of their own elegant creations

Perhaps they will say, some of these poets whom I admire

“This piece simply isn’t for me.”

Sure they will, sure they will… and that’s okay

People can have different tastes

And still be friends

It will all make sense someday

My friend I didn’t see many times after that

At a bar one night some months later, where we happened both to be

He took me to task for being stupid drunk

And I had wit enough left, just, slurringly to explain

That getting stupid was my very reason for getting drunk

After that, I heard that he was mastering swing dance

And had become a full-fledged major heart-throb hunk

Then I heard he was engaged to be married, but that she broke his heart

And after that, nothing more

Thank you for reading a story from #BehindTheBlogger Hop. Every 2 weeks a group of bloggers is given a writing prompt. These prompts are very open ended, so our bloggers can write about whatever they desire. The main rule is that their blog post directly relates to the topic of that week. The point of this hop is for our readers to get to know us on a personal level.  Please hop along and read all of the blog posts in this weeks hop. Just click the links below. If you want real and raw emotion, then you will find it here. After you read each post, please comment and share. We want to get to know you too!

Are you a blogger looking to join our future hops? Click here Sign Up Here

And here are links to the other participating bloggers:

Our Gang & The Karate Kid

As a kid, I had plenty of friends. I was a kingpin kid. I always had a gang, and I was usually the one calling the shots.

How did I pull off getting to be the ringleader? Easy. I provided the clubhouse.

I grew up in a small town on the Ohio River. My childhood home was a nice old Victorian in a neighborhood that had gone somewhat to seed. In the backyard was an old wooden stand-alone garage – the kind with long beams running across the top. And at one point, my cool-as-hell older brother had nailed onto these beams a bunch of huge pieces of plywood, creating, effectively, an attic to the garage.

As a side-note, all that plywood had started out as signage supporting my father’s campaign for County Coroner. He’d won…

My gang was always on the lookout for fresh blood. We’d spot a potential new member, and take a vote on whether to invite him in or not.

I remember when we tried to recruit Brian Askren. Brian was older than us, but we thought he might join anyway. He didn’t seem to have any friends.

It was a close vote on whether to approach Brian or not. He had many an idiosyncrasy. Through casual questioning across the chain-link fence which surrounded his trailer, we had learned that he didn’t like music, wasn’t interested in sports at all, and studied martial arts.

The fact that he knew karate actually worked in his favor in the vote. We were always preparing for war with another gang. Of course, there were no other gangs to speak of, but that was beside the point.

“Well, what do you guys do?” asked Brian when we went over to crew him up.

“Play poker. Swap comics. Read comics. Ride bikes. Ramp bikes. Fix bikes. Among other projects…” I told him, intentionally leaving out listening to the radio and trading baseball cards.

“What kinds of projects?”

“Well, right now, our main project is filling plastic juice jugs with pokeberries.”

“Why?”

“To throw at an enemy gang and stain their clothes.”

“Okay… I’m gonna have to pass.”

I wasn’t surprised when Brian declined our offer of membership. He was an odd duck. I mean, who doesn’t like music?

As I recall, Brian did join us in the clubhouse for poker a few times.

Years later, long after my kingpin days were over, and also after my family had moved to the town’s fancier subdivision, I ran into Brian in the grocery store. We chatted, and he was enthusiastic about having moved out of the trailer and into a nice little house. He even invited me over to see.

In the process of giving me the nickel tour, Brian showed me his stash of comics. They were all Wolverine. The next day, I stopped by and gave him a handful of Wolverine books I had doubles of.

A few years after that, Brian became a policeman. I hear he’s doing well.

I wonder whether he has found any music he likes.

Worst. Babysitter. Everrrr...

Back in the 90's, I worked a couple of years at an alternative K-12 school in my college town. Most of the older kids who attended this school had had a hard time in public schools for one reason or another, so they were a demanding bunch, but the 3-6 year-olds in the Early Childhood Program where I spent most of my time were different. They were there because their parents were cool. Most of these parents led so-called 'alternative lifestyles' like living off the grid, having a religion that wasn't mainstream in Indiana, and/or being gay. 

It wasn't uncommon for me to be asked to babysit, so I spent many an evening hanging out with little ones in their homes. I've always had a way with kids... which is to say that I pretty much still am a kid myself in a lot of ways, so it's generally just good fun to play. Unless the kid is a twerp. But these kids were not twerps, so I genuinely enjoyed spending time with them. And things always went well... well, almost always. Which brings me to my spooky tale:

Worst. Babysitter. Everrrr...

Once we'd sent the parents off to their off-the-grid, earth-worshiping queer Halloween party (to which I secretly wished I was cool enough to have been invited), and Little Ben and his older brother Asher (who was six) and I had the house to ourselves, we convened with great gravity at the dining room table to map out our gameplan. 

We had only about an hour before their ungodly early bedtime, so the question at hand was not "what do we feel like doing" but "how can we wring the absolute most fun out of precious little time."

"Well, we have to play the tripping game," Asher said.

"Tipping Gay!" agreed Little Ben.

The tripping game was a brilliant piece of pedagogical methodology which I had developed on the playground at school in order to deal with the fact that the children would often attach themselves to my legs, sometimes two or three at once, which was well and good for those so attached, but made guard-dogging the rest of the herd rather difficult for me. Eventually I learned to recognize the determined look on the face of a child who was about to attach, and simply to reach out with my foot and quickly kick their little legs out from under them before they could get hold of me. They are so close to the ground already, you know, that no harm was done. In fact, they loved it. Everybody wanted to play. The entire class of twelve or so would run at me at once sometimes, screaming "Tripping Game!", and like the lithe ninja that I was in my early twenties, I would trip each and every one of them to the ground.

"Okay, tripping game," I told Asher and Little Ben. "Then what?"

"Hackey sack," said Asher.

"Right," I said, "Excellent. Tripping game, hackey sack, then..."     

"Storytime!" cried Little Ben.

"Right," I said.

On to business. I spent the next twenty minutes kicking the crap out of my two buddies in the basement. Then, when I judged them to be sufficiently bashed and bruised, I broke out my handy dandy little woven bag of beans and we spent another twenty minutes throwing and kicking that at each other. We were just tiring of bending over and picking up the hackey sack when Little Ben got confused and decided it was time for more tripping game. He came in low and hard for my leg just as I punted the hackey sack, and so he got punted too - in the face - with my shoe. 

"Tipping Gay," Little Ben explained through his fingers, which were clasped over his nose, from which blood was gushing.

I didn't know a three-year-old had so much blood in him. By the time we got the gory geyser to stop, we were up to our knees in a drift of red Kleenex in the bathroom. 

"Okay, storytime," said Asher.

As always, I spent the first half of storytime interviewing the audience regarding exactly what sort of a story they were after. I have always found that just a little persistence in pre-story questioning goes a long, long way in the making-it-up-as-you-go phase. In fact, a perfectly successful storytime can consist of nothing but a nice long set of questions about who's doing what when, where, why, and how. On this night of course, the audience was emphatic about the story being scary. As scary as humanly possible. 

"Will it have monsters?" This met with two unqualified yeses.

"Will anybody die?" Again, double yes.

We discussed the nature and inward and outward characteristics of the monsters in depth, and carefully laid out a plot, the course of which would see these monsters utterly destroy a well-developed, completely innocent, pure, and true hero. When we had arrived at a workable scaffolding for the story, we turned off most of the lights in the house, prepared a suitable sofa-cushion fort, and began. 

I proceeded to spin those kids a story so terrific and horrific that I managed to give myself goosepimples in the telling of it.

The story went over-length. Only when the hero was well and truly, totally, splendidly dead and the gleefully murderous monsters had danced a long, gruesome victory dance by flickering firelight did I put the kids to bed.

Eventually, the parents returned. They were wasted-drunk, so I just bid a quick goodnight and was on my way. No report of the evening's activities.

The End.

(As an afternote, when word got around in alternative-PTA circles that my idea of good supervision of children was to beat and bloody them and then frighten the wits out of them so fully that they had horrible nightmares and woke their poor, wasted parents in the wee hours, I found that the frequency of my babysitting gigs fell off a bit.)

Really The End.

On Teaching ESL in South Korea (for YeahWrite.Me)

Ten years ago, I was living on Jeju Island off the south coast of South Korea. The five years I spent on Jeju Island were a high plateau in my life. I've had ups and downs enough to recognize and appreciate a nice, long, good run, and my years on Jeju were one of those; I was on top of my game, and my game was... English as a Second Language. ESL.

The reasons I say I was on top of my game are essentially these: I was doing rewarding, soul-satisfying work in which I took delight day-in and day-out and at which, all modestly aside, I excelled; I was also living in love with an incredible woman who loved me back – which I realize is a fairly normal state of affairs for a lot of people, but for me, for whatever combination of blind luck and good reason, has been attainable only occasionally in my life for relatively brief spans of time – and this was the longest cohabitation on record and things were still going swimmingly; and then there was the truly awesome playground that was Jeju - we had beaches galore, from the out-of-the-way and secluded spot for a campfire and a skinny dip to the upscale and touristy attractions… all of these options for enjoying the ocean (a treat beyond treats to someone who'd grown up landlocked in middle America), and we had deep forest aplenty to explore, and we had mountains - mountains! Oh, and this was the only time in my life that I had a motorcycle, too. Can't forget that joy.

ESL with actual foreign, native-speaker instructors like me was fairly new in the public schools of South Korea at that time. I wouldn't go so far as to call it uncharted territory, but we were definitely making up most of what we did as we went along. It took me a couple of years to develop my methods, but once I had them, I was golden. In preparation for most of my classes, I would just sit down and write a Mad Lib. You remember Mad Libs? Sure you do. Maybe you called it something else, but... that word game where you have a little story with a lot of words left out, and whoever you've conned into playing with you has to give you the words to fill in the blanks and complete the story. A (noun) bought a (adjective) (noun) with which (adverb) to (verb) the (noun). Go!

This was the bulk of my lesson planning during the last few years I taught ESL: I would create a fill-in-the-blank story on a worksheet, then I would make little laminated flashcards of words that would go well in the blanks. Usually I would manage to find images for the flashcards, to illustrate to the student what the words meant. So then when the class bell rang, I'd pass out my Mad Lib worksheets and distribute the flashcards and the students and I would get busy composing a story together. Worked like a charm. Next class: new story, different words, same familiar and sure-fire method.

I worked in various schools over the years, teaching everything from kindergarten through the middle- and high-school years to sessions even where I taught the Korean teachers, and my Mad Lib method worked in every setting, with every level of student. Oh, sure, I had to throw in some basic grammar exercises and such here and there, but the core of my classes was almost always the fill-in-the-blank story or dialogue. My bread and butter. And somehow, I never ran out of ideas for them.

High plateau for me though it was, living in South Korea had its share of challenges. There are any number of cultural differences of course, great and small, between the province of Jeju in South Korea and my home state and nation. Some of these differences, such as differences in driving etiquette, can lead to potentially disastrous or even fatal situations. More commonly, these differences, cropping up all unexpected as they usually do, tend to result in… awkward moments. Take, for example, this little cultural difference: on Jeju Island in South Korea at the time that I was living there, it was (and is still today throughout Korea, so far as I am aware) perfectly acceptable for the owner or superintendent of an apartment simply to open the door of that apartment and walk in as if he or she lived there. Free entry, utterly unscheduled and unannounced, anytime at all… If the door happens to be locked, well, the super or owner has a key. Only if it were bolted would he or she bother knocking. This is just a matter of course, quite natural for Koreans, while quite unexpected and I daresay insane… to your average person from, say, Indiana.

So it was that early on a fine Jeju Sunday morning, as I sat at a low table with coffee and a cigarette, working up a few Mad Libs to get me through the week’s teaching, the door to my apartment suddenly opened, and in breezed the estimable grandmother whose building it was. Good Lord only knows what errand or mission she was on. She came a few feet into my one-room apartment, head down, then looked up and froze in her tracks. Startled by her entry, I had arisen quickly to my feet. I then, just as hastily, sat down again at the table, from the surface of which I proceeded to scoop loose-leaf paper and notecards into my lap.

For I was wearing not a stitch of clothing.

Unstable Irony, Postmodern Humor, And Me

“I shall compose long, dry documents about funniness!”

This was my warcry as I entered the MA Lit program at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in the year 2000.

I went to the campus library and checked out a book called A Rhetoric of Irony by Wayne C Booth. In it, I found just what I was seeking. Booth details several types of ‘stable ironies’, various manifestations of mismeaning – funny lies, basically – with which I was already passingly familiar. Then, he goes on to explore ‘unstable ironies’, and it was here that I found what I sought.

You might step out on a rainy day, and say, “Well, at least it’s sunny.” This would be a stable irony: a simple mistruth. Another example is when something dreadful happens and one says, “Great.” This sort of stable ironic statement is mere mismeaning. The day is obviously not sunny. What happened to you is obviously not great.

An unstable ironic statement is one in which the truth or untruth of the statement is ultimately unclear, the final judgement call a subjective one. One example of this is when two assertions effectively cancel each other out: “I am the best! So are you!” Well, we can’t both be the best, can we? And as for which of us, if either, is actually the best, well, it’s just up in the air.

Armed with this powerful concept, unstable irony, I proceeded to root up examples in some of my favorite books, like Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I was actually working up a paper on Catch-22 the very night that Joseph Heller died.

Eventually, I had worked up a decent document about unstable irony, which I called “Postmodern Humor”. I submitted “Postmodern Humor” to that year’s UNLV conference on Postmodernism in Literature and it was accepted; I was invited to present my work at the conference. Since the paper was essentially about how unstable irony creates a blank which the reader must fill in, I entitled my presentation “…”.

I got good and drunk on the plane to Vegas, as one must, and showed up at UNLV to check in for the conference in a glorious stupor. There, I was informed that my presentation was scheduled to take place the day after my return flight to Alaska.

In response to my slurred, bleary inquiry as to whether my presentation might be rescheduled to occur while I was actually in Vegas, I was told that the only available slot was about an hour from that moment.

My only option being to present my long, complex thesis about unstable irony in postmodern literature in a state of complete intoxication, I opted out.

I took myself instead to any number of casinos, where I had a grand time losing all my money.

Expect Delays - In response to this week's prompt from A Week for Writing, Uttley tells about hitting bottom

In 12-step programs, they talk about 'hitting bottom'. When I hit bottom, I did so with credit card in hand. I had no ID card, no car, no home, but I had one working credit card. So I was an odd sort of homeless person. I had washed up in a college town on the west coast of the US, a town where I knew exactly one person, whom I had failed to locate due to his having moved from his old digs, leaving no forwarding address. So I lived on the streets and in the mission house there. Then one afternoon, I used my credit card to check into a hostel. After signing in and stashing my little red cardboard suitcase under my bunk, I walked down to the local co-op grocery store and charged a bag of raw nuts. Returning to the hostel, I sat at a low, metal table on the streetfront and proceeded to eat.

As I was feeding myself, along came an interesting young fellow. He stopped and said hello. His clothing was threadbare, his hair a mess, and one of his eyes listed off into space, peering up and too the left - looking at God, I thought. I invited him to take a seat and have some nuts. He accepted, and produced a bag of raw spinach to share. We sat a while, munching, and he told me that he was from Tennessee, was traveling the country on a wing and a prayer, and was mentally ill. "In my head," he said, "I am a black preacher." Outwardly, he was a white guy. 

After we ate, we decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. We strolled a few blocks, and came across a grey-haired, portly man. The man was standing at the driver's door of an old Volkswagen which was parked in front of a small house. Affixed to the porch of the house was a large yellow sign reading "Expect Delays".

The man greeted us cheerfully, Tennessee and me. He was just popping out to the store, he said, but would be right back, and if we wanted, we could come over and hang out. "I've got some great ganja!" he said enticingly. That sounded pretty wonderful to me, bottoming out as I was, with nothing in the world to do. I looked at Tennessee, and he nodded eagerly.

And so it was that an hour or so later, we were sitting in the living room of the Expect Delays house, passing around a little stone pipe. Once we were good and lit, the old man picked up a huge eagle feather, and told us that he was in psychic contact with his tribe, and that they liked us very much. He was a white guy, too, but I guess inwardly he was Native American. I looked at Tennessee; he appeared to be in a trance - doubtless delivering a momentous sermon in his mind.   

 After a while, Tennessee bestirred himself and said that he had to go find a friend of his who was keeping his backpack in an old schoolbus. The old man and I bid him farewell. I did not return to the hostel that night. I slept on the old man's couch. The next morning, we smoked again, and I decided to wash the dirty dishes which were piled up all around the house. Hours later, when the chore was done, the old man thanked me profusely. 

I asked him if I could use his computer to order a copy of my birth certificate - the first step in the process of getting an ID card and getting off the streets. "You bet!" he said, and so I did.

And that is the tale of how I began my climb back up from the bottom. 

To Juggle the Prose and Make It Milky

Trifecta this week gives us the word 'juggle'...

And the 100-Word Challenge prompt is 'milky'...

The two together have given rise to this little concoction: 


     I often don't realize I'm hungry until I start eating. The moment the first bite passes my lips, I'm suddenly ravenous. Lately, something similar happens with writing. I get the first few sentences out, and suddenly there are several different stories I want to tell: anecdotes from my life, related facts from recent random research, all manner of potential fictions... Writing coherently requires me to juggle these disparate strains of thought. When it works, the product has a nourishing, milky consistency – narrator present but unobtrusive, salient fact blended smoothly with palatable fiction. When it doesn’t work, it’s oil and water….  

Halla-san on Jeju-do

H is for Halla-san - the mountain I miss the most. Ten years ago, I lived on Jeju - an island off the southern shore of mainland South Korea. In the center of Jeju Island was Mount Halla, and it was visible from pretty much everywhere on the island. At other times in my life, I have lived near mountains: in Alaska and in New Mexico. But Halla-san is the mountain I have loved the most. I explored its forested slopes with my hand-held GPS, finding hidden rivers with marbled beds and secret waterfalls to play in. Mount Halla wore all four seasons with dignity and grace. As I cruised around the island in my little hatchback or on my motorcycle, Halla was always there like a friend and guide. I really miss the constant companionship of this majestic volcanic cone. I hope someday to see Halla again.  

I Let a Houseplant Die This Year

Just found one more weekly prompt to spur me along.
One Mrsupole (who has been "preventing blogger burnout since 2008") suggests confession as a topic. That's a good one. Let's see...

Naked vs Nude

Feeling the urge to write, casting about myself for what to write about, I remember Jenny Matlock's AlphabeThursday, which I (almost) missed this week, because of trouble with my WordPress blog.

The letter of the week in 'N'.

'N' is for Naked vs. Nude...

Free Association with Luna Mina

Here's a little something I just found while hopping the list over at IComLeavWe...
This cool blogger from Virginia posts a list of words and we're to fill in what comes to mind.
Here's what she has to say about the exercise: