Slippery bastard, time.

Amid this morning’s chaos, a familiar knock-knock at the door. My Father, dropping by to drop off a language-learning CD. Spanish, French, and Italian among the options. He agreed to give me a lift into work, and while we rode together the comfortably conditioned air of his Avalanche, I mentioned I’d not seen anything new on his blog.

“And I’ve not seen anything new on yours, either.”
“No. That’s true.”

If only there were more of that cherished, calm, collected, everyone occupied, and everyone-being-rational time on a daily basis. Some years ago I used to average one or two blurbs a day. Nowadays I’m lucky if the average week produces two or three suitable hours.

“Have you dabbled at all with your novel?”

Ah, the pain of this sort of question. I’m not offended by his asking, all questions are welcome (until they’re no longer welcome). It is, nonetheless, an emotional topic. The answer is two fold. On a certain level, I’ve made great progress with my novel. It changes daily, sometimes hourly. The characters are improving in depth, and scope, and the plot has taken a number of turns. Including the perspective from which the whole thing is written. However, that’s stuff of the realm of rationalizations and cappuccino. In the more realistic world of concrete and condoms, I’ve not punched a period since February. None of it’s typed, and so the novel hasn’t changed in months!

It all goes back to that wish I made earlier, about calm, collected time. Granted, there’s all sorts of time each day that slips away from us when we’re not looking. But how often do we actually grip it, feel its benevolent presence, and put it to good use? Not nearly often enough. Father time is a slippery bastard!

One day I’ll surprise everyone and publish something. Until then, dear Self, my apologies.

© Jeffrey Puukka, 2009

Rough Red Meat Between Teeth

Dinner is done.  Corned beef and carrots and potatoes, courtesy of my Beloved One’s unpredictable and very Irish craving.  Quite tasty.  Nummy for my tummy, teasing on the tongue, and a royal pain in the anal cavity for my teeth!  But such is the nature of life as a human carnivore. 

And now I plop me down to rest in my red chair.  Pipe in my teeth, scrumpy at my elbow.  (I do hope I won’t knock it down and spill it.)  To my bloggery I go, for as much as I’ve become seduced by Twitter recently, I do suspect the truest twitterers tweet on the go from cellular gadgets.  I have no such gadgetry about me, so I’ll go about expressing myself in the modern age in the old fashioned way: with more than 150 characters on my blog.

. . . . .

The boy with the budding Buddha belly

 One of the commercials for the upcoming television show Parenthood says, “Parenthood is understanding why some animals eat their young…”  I appreciate that.

Sweet Wag—as I call the lad; Falstaff’s name for Hal—is keeping us company again.  What’s more, today it has been more or less good company.  My first impression of Sweet Wag came when I was talking with his Mother in her garage.  He inconspicuously passed beyond his Mother’s line of sight, and picked up a battery operated hand drill, striding tall and laughing towards one of the cats.  In those first months, I also saw him throw furniture at his twin siblings, beat his noggin against the wall until something other than his own will stopped the cadence, and set things on fire.  He’s come a long way since then.  He now minds his place to the extent that he knows how.  He gives us all random gifts at least once a day.  He apologizes for his anxious habits, and politely identifies what bothers him.  In the past he’d just say “I’m stronger than you”, and toss an Atlas at your head.  The biggest problems he brings to daily life are his phobias of immense things—like high ceilings or tall buildings—his wolfish thirteen year old appetite, and his (yes, I’ll say it!) rather off-putting lack of table manners. 

“I’m thirteen, mom!” he’ll say, when he wants to get his way.
‘Then why can’t you chew with your mouth closed, since you’re eating everything in the house?’ I’ll think to myself.

Yes, I confess, I’m a terrible fellow.  A grumpy, festering bastard who’s not quite so openhearted as the mayor of Munchkin city.  Be that as it may, Sweet Wag impresses me. 

Call me harsh and hard of heart, but he does.  There is no way around how far he’s come.  No denying either that some part of him recognizes it took effort to travel from there to here, from then to now.  And when considering that, in sight of the puzzle that he is; the mind of a nine year old trapped in a ragingly pubescent thirteen year old body; I can’t help but find the notion of ‘recognizing and respecting struggle’ hopeful.

. . . . .

From there to here 

It can be a long road sometimes, up and out of one’s hiding places.  Most of the time, there are false exits on that road.  You’ll begin to feel a bit better, and then just as you think you’re about to return from your underworld, it’s not unusual for something or someone to kick you back down into the bog. 

At the moment, I am feeling well.  I’m noticing my thoughts flowing more freely, my inhibitions and masks have shed a layer or two.  I’m taking more responsibility to get what I want, and exerting less patience for the petty things that bother me.  That is all good.  It means I’m far down the road to a lighter state, a more carefree and a jolly state, and I would welcome that.  I’m smoking my pipes again, as I did once upon a time when I felt a bit more balanced.  And I’m successfully over the two week mark of an existence without cigarettes.  That is also a good sign. 

I just hope we all continue in our climbs up toward the light.  I’ve lost my footing one too many times, to not fear the fall.

Oh piss it, look!  I’ve sneezed my emotions all over you.  I’d offer you a towel, but I’m not sure who you are or where you’re reading from, and my arm likely wouldn’t reach.  Forgive me? 

. . . . .

A U2 commercial on the television, sponsoring Blackberry.  I’m gonna go crazy if I don’t go crazy tonight…

Good juju.

 

©  Jeffrey Puukka, 2009

Just after the daily ponder

Here’s an experience a lot of us have had.  You see [Fill in the blank] for the first time in [Fill in the blank].  As you’re standing there going on about [Fill in the blank] something about them slowly begins to eat at your brain.  That is, their general visage or persona strikes you with that sense that you aren’t saying something.  Something, moreover, that you really should say.  It would only be polite.  You’re supposed to comment.  Why?  Because something’s different!  That’s why.  You can’t quite place what is different, but you know very well that something has changed since the last time you had the [Fill in the blank] fortune to see them.  Their hair?  Could that be it?  Have they changed their hair; cut it?  Grown it?  Colored it?  Have they lost weight?  Are they wearing a brand new outfit?  Do they suddenly have blue eyes instead of green, or red eyes instead of blue? 

Well, I bring up that socially awkward scenario because; depending upon how often you visit my page/read this blogship; you may not notice that it’s different.  As of today, it’s different.  New colors, slightly new lay-out.  It occurred to me, as I was sitting in front of the window.  There I was, watching rain fall and pool upon the roof of the used-car lot’s office {which sits smack outside my living room}, it occurred to me that it is no longer winter.  Things on my little corner of the web ought to look more ’springly’.  Brighter.  Merrier.  Cheerier.  More color.  So that’s what I did. 

And you [shame, shame, shame] probably don’t visit nearly often enough to appreciate it. 

A sketch of Shakespeare; one with which I can well identify at the moment.

Now, before I bailed you out on having to figure out for yourself what had altered around here, I was sitting in front of the window, having a wee ponder.  It was today’s repetition of the always predictable daily ponder that happens after I’ve come home from work. 

It probably drives my beloved one slightly mad.  She probably feels as though I’m not interested in her, when I come home and the first thing I do is sit in a chair, seeming to stare out at nothing, lost to all living things around me. 

Yes.  It must be maddening for my Beloved one.  But I’ve come to understand there’s a reason I do it so often.  It’s a sort of rethinking of maybe useful thinking that was done earlier that day without my control.

Alright, that makes no sense!  Perhaps what follows will be just as mad, but I’ll try to make a metaphor.    

At the moment I still have no dedicated space from which to do what I used to do in my office.  That’s been the case for the last few years.  Now its not as much of a hurdle as it was six months ago because I have a laptop.  There’s not as much need for an isolated desk if you have a laptop.  However, I do miss having an isolated room.  I’ve noticed I do my best work when I have space to absorb that work, and then spit it back out at me.  The research I do for [Fill in the blank] can take over the wall.  Then, the work that needs to be done happens smoothly in that environment, because I’m swimming in a room full of research, musings, reminder notes, and so on.  And of course, when the subject that needs working-on changes, the rubbish on the wall gets torn down and replaced with new, much more important material.  Now, I don’t have such a closet or cubicle at the moment.  That means the ‘office’ tends to be world-wide, scattered, unorganized, and very much an imagined place I go to inside my head.  That seems to be where I go during the daily ponder.

I think I’ve figured it out, and I suspect it works like this… 

1.  On the way to or from work I tend to read/scribble about things vaguely similar to whatever it is I’m working toward creatively…  {At the moment, solving and building up the infrastructure of The Lab, so that it’s fit to put out work again in a year or so.} 

2.  When I get back home, I seem to be incapable of doing anything around the house until I’ve unwittingly dedicated a-few-cigarettes’ worth of time to staring out the window. 

3.  In that time, I think part of my brain is trying to pin those unorganized and maybe useless thoughts (from the bus rides) to some sort of order in my head.  In other words, I’m tacking all those articles, bits of research, musings, and reminder notes to an imaginary wall instead of a real one. 

4.  So, I sit at the window.  The two eyes in my face are watching the rain gather on the roof of the car lot’s office.  Somewhere in my mind, I’m in my non-physical office of no walls, working away, and actually—surprisingly—getting things done sometimes.

Now, I’ve had a few interesting ponders lately.  And, I suspect that soon I’ll have a much clearer understanding of exactly what I’m going to do, in my efforts towards building up The Lab.  I have a non-linear, not-very-useful vision at the moment.  After all, it’s really hard to tack a linear thing like a time-table to a non-existent {and often spinning} wall in one’s head.  It makes one feel a bit mental!  But I can tell, I can tell, I can tell that soon the eggs will be in a basket.  Then, I’ll be prepared to write a bit about what can be happening, and when.

The only thought to make a note of at the moment, is this.  As a member of the audience, as a director, as a reader, as an actor, the one artist I’ve constantly been moved by is Shakespeare.  There’s a lot of willing and ready arguments for why we should not do Shakespeare.  He’s too old, he’s been done too often, he doesn’t apply to us now, and so on. 

Wrong.  Wrong, wronger, wrongest, wrong as possible.  I’m happy they shared their opinion, but I’m choosing to ignore it.  Shakespeare, as a writer, was very, very daring.  There are a lot of contemporary playwrights who just aren’t that daring.

So, I’m sort of going to just say face it: I am who I am, and certain things about my taste don’t seem to change.  I am deeply drawn to the beauty, the brilliance of the language, and constant echoes of relevance in Shakespeare’s mountain of work.

So, while many of my daily ponders over the last year have had to do with why I should not do Shakespeare, when The Lab is up and running again, the Bard may play a big part in the work we do. 

As I said in one of my recent entries, nothing’s going to be happening right away.  I have a lot of gardening to do, in a sense.  But seeds grow, and blossom when the conditions ripen a bit.

©  Jeffrey Puukka, 2009