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Saturday, September 7, 2002

I so suck at responding to blog comments, even more than I do at responding to e-mail. Yea, my suckitude is Hooveresque, but I do truly appreciate the kindness of those who comment here. You all are the greatest.

I ought not to have done my wistful little turn here on adieu to summer, because this weekend summer came back with a whomp, and with the 98 degree heat index, and I am wretched. It shall pass soon, and I shall refrain from lapsing into tedious bitchery about it. But it leaves me enervated and decorticate, and also sticking to the furniture. I swill gin rickeys and loll in front of the fan and watch endless hours of forensics/true-crime crap on Court TV and A&E.

Two Deep Thoughts that have come to me over the past week, and that I'd like to tack down here so I can revisit them at times:

--The stories or scenes I've written that I'm most deeply dissatisfied with, from as objective a craftsman's angle as I can manage, are almost invariably those where I was most conscious of audience, trying to write to please others.

--Simply shoving ahead and doing a thing, no matter how distasteful that thing may seem, is always, in the end, less painful than dithering around on the margins apprehensively contemplating it. Nothing would improve my life more than gaining a solid, once-and-for-all grip on that fact.

Off to seek out air conditioning. Shall return at some point when it goes below 90.

Posted @ 07:04 PM CST [Link]4 comments

Monday, September 2, 2002

So I promised myself I wasn't going to post anything more here until I could quit being so whiny and pissy and ranty. (Jeez, for a while there I thought I was going to have to change the name of this blog to "Spleen Vent.") And today I can make good on that resolve, being all uplifted about having cranked out 2300 words that I'm actually fairly happy with. Woo and also hoo. (I just sublimated all my pissiness onto RayK, and I do so love writing Ray in a pissy mood.) It was quite amazing to me, actually; I said to myself, "Self, you know what, there's a scene that needs to happen right about here, and that scene is MIA, and the problem is, without that scene, the whole frickin' story makes no emotional sense whatsoever." And self said, "Whoa, you know what, you're right, let's just grind that bad boy out." And there it is, and I think it works. Yay me.

And so I've managed to hand-over-hand myself out of the latest depressive bout. In my wholly amateur, non-DSM-ish taxonomy of depression, I identify two main types, what I think of as "squid ink" and "glass curtain." Squid-ink depression is the one where everything, but everything, sucks. The world is bleak, people are cruel and stupid, work is slavery, love is a farce, everything tends downward toward death, and one's own emptiness is simply the mirror of a hollow and meaningless cosmos. Yadda. A state which is, lord knows, painful enough. But then there's glass curtain, wherein one is really capable of seeing the beauty and blessedness of the world; all lovers seem to have found true happiness, all families seem warm and bonded, nature is bounteous and lovely, work is uplifting and purposeful, and all creation is bound together in joy. Except, of course, for oneself, separated from all creation by an invisible but uncrossable divide, standing outside, watching. One turns away from the great banquet table of life, and sets one's plate down, and goes and sits in the cold corner, listening and watching as the others feast. I don't know if it's a worse state than the squid-ink, but it is, in all honesty, bad enough. In any event, I'm out of it now, past the glass curtain and back at the table with everyone else.

And the cool front came through and blasted out all the sticky Sargasso-like heat of recent days. It's still definitely on the cusp of late summer; not yet fall, although a few maples near my house are starting to change. The heat is still soaked deep into the ground, so you can't get cold water from the tap, and all the greenery is ripe and lush almost to the point of rot. But the hot breathless nights are gone for another year; it's cool in the morning, and damp, though we're not yet to the fogs of late September. It's insect time, too, with the locusts singing all day long and the crickets all night, and the huge spiders in their huge webs out by the garage, and the occasional huge-spider forays into the house (I keep the cup-and-lid handy on the counter, so I can trap them and put them back outdoors).

Mmm. Sanity feels good. The rest of the week will be crazed enough, god knows, with all the students thronging back in their confused multitudes. It'll be more difficult than usual, actually, since one of our students was murdered over the weekend, in a fairly high-profile local case, and I anticipate a certain intensification of start-of-term stress, understandably enough. The same day I learned of this killing, I heard the news that my childhood best friend had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He and I haven't been close for a long time; he married my best friend from high school, and then the two of them became rabidly fundamentalist Christians, and moved to North Dakota, and had a whole bunch of children, and our lives diverged in every possible way. So this news is more of a shock (he's just my age, god damn it!) than a grief. But still. Death is part of what you find at the banquet table, I guess, when you pull up a chair, and there's no getting away from it.

Posted @ 08:50 PM CST [Link]7 comments