“Sometimes she went for walks but she didn’t like dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”
Good Country People, Flannery O’Connor
I went home. That’s what people say, isn’t it? I went home.
We spent last weekend back in Northern Ireland, the homeland, only it didn’t feel like home. It felt like a memory of a place I used to know but even when I was there, in it, growing up, it didn’t feel like home. It felt like it belonged to someone else.
Disconnected. I forgot the language. I hid under the bed.
I’m making my own home. A home that’s almost full. Almost overflowing. A place where I might ask you to take your shoes off but probably won’t. A place where you’ll know parts of me and I won’t mind. I won’t mind one bit.
Where feels like home to you?
Alone with Everybody
Charles Bukowski
the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.
there’s no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.
nobody ever finds
the one.
the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill
nothing else
fills.
This sentiment is one I can truly get behind. Now I just need to get this sucker framed and on the wall.
I created other worlds.
I carried speakers across sand dunes to bring them to your party.
I wrote a letter to the Principal explaining why I didn’t want to be a prefect.
I stopped eating for a while.
I typed an essay about the words used by Eugenides, Winterson and Salinger.
I wore Puma Supersuedes to the dance.
I heard you knock at the door and I pretended not to be in.
I laughed out loud listening to recordings of Robert Frost reading his poems. Birches.
I wore a key around my neck.
I wasn’t ready.
I watched My So-Called Life and sighed.
My cat died and I cried while making cheese on toast.
I had flowery silk pyjamas. I miss them.
I read poetry by Bukowski and pulled out strands of hair.
I hid cigarette butts inside a soap dish.
I thought everyone was smarter than me.
I thought everyone was better than me.
I pushed my ear to the ground so I could hear.
I listened to Surfer Rosa. A lot.
I drank carryouts with my best friend.
I couldn’t tell you how I felt because I was forgetting how to feel.
I climbed in windows.
I wrote letters and posted them.
I didn’t think about what was on the outside.
I wanted to hide inside something.
I was figuring it all out. I still am.
or just plain old National Novel Writing Month.
November is sodden and weighed down, like me wearing my school uniform in the bath when I was 12, but it brings it’s own sparkle, it’s own little bath bomb to fizz away under the deluge of rainy metaphors that I’m not going to insert here because you know what I mean.
What is NaNoWriMo? You write a novel in a month, that’s it. Well, it’s unlikely you’ll write a masterpiece but it’s a structured and a finite period of time to bash out 50,000 words that could eventually be a novel, or the beginnings of one. They say it better than I could:
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing programme for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. This approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
So, I’m going to give it a whirl because I need the structure otherwise I fall into procrastination, which is hell for me. Hell = procrastination. The devil is a procrastinator. People who procrastinate are the devil’s children, or the children of this ghost. Can ghosts have children? Has anyone looked into that?
Wish me luck. I wonder if anyone who reads this old blog is a writer. If so, do you have any tips? I tend to be all about the characters, letting any idea of plot dwindle.
Also, if you are a writer you should check out Advice to Writers, I find the tweets can help to depress those keys a little faster.
Not for the first time I woke up thinking of these words:
“This is Plan B. Every day for the rest of your lives, all of your living moments are to be spent making others aware of this need – the need to probe and drill and examine and locate the words that take us beyond ourselves. Scrape. Feel. Dig. Believe. Ask. Ask questions, no, screech questions out loud… Grind questions onto the glass on photocopiers. Scrape challenges onto old auto parts and throw them off of bridges so that future people digging in the mud will question the world, too. Carve eyeballs into tyre treads and onto shoe leathers so that your every trail speaks of thinking and questioning and awareness. Design molecules into question marks. Make bar-codes print out fables, not prices. You can’t even throw away a piece of litter unless it has a question stamped on it – a demand for people to reach a finer place.”
Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma
Ask questions, procrastinate less and use the interrobang more‽
Also, woke up to find a dead mouse on the floor. Again.
My Goodreads review of One Day is here. It was cobbled together whilst in a fit of pique so the punctuation is even more wayward than usual.
Sometimes I think I’m too harsh and then I catch myself and think, ‘People, step up to reality. Reality is your friend. Reality wants to make you happy so let it. Ok. Just let it.’ I love dreaming as much as the next dope but my dreams generally involve winning awards and I’m usually in the bath, or in the house all alone, looking in a mirror, fingers tangled around a glass of red.
So, writers, please write hopeful, beautiful books, not self-indulgent delusional tosh that doesn’t fill the empty spaces but instead brims and hisses inside eked out cavities that ache, growing more decayed with projections and delusions that really should be folded up, pocketed and left to disintegrate in the washing machine like old 3ply. JOY, I want JOY and reality, not a book about a man who makes stupid choices, gets the girl, is redeemed by the girl, loses girl. BORING.
