I’m fine, really. I work at Kraz Construction. (Feel free to like that stuff.) Great moments get me through the difficult times. Great people get me through the difficult moments. And there are plenty of great moments and great people in my life. What more can a dumb bloke like me ask for?
How about you? Are things good?
Oh, Maya. How can you possibly be one year old?
This year has been a rough one for some of us, but I think you enjoyed it more than anyone. And you have brought more joy to more people than you could possibly know. You have no idea how much you are loved. You have only a glimpse of how much I love you, and I’m just one little person.
Photo by Beth Fletcher Photography
From the moment you were just a sparkly thought in my mind, I have loved you. And there has never been, nor will there ever be, a moment in which my heart is not warmed by the thought of your precious, beautiful soul.
I adore you, Maya. I can’t believe you have red hair, but it’s gorgeous, as is the rest of you. Your smile melts me every time I see it, and I can’t wait to see you grow to enjoy and understand your role in this family of ours that you help to make absolutely amazing.
May your every dream and wish come true, baby girl.
Beer is better than I imagined.
Fear is smaller than I gave it credit for.
Sleep and I still don’t hang out that much.
We’re still funny.
I haven’t stopped kicking puppies because I never started kicking puppies.
Gossip is an ugly thing.
30-degree April days are ugly, too. Not gossip ugly, but thoroughly unpretty nonetheless.
No one can stop you from moving on.
I need coffee.
(I miss parentheses.)
I’m going to the dentist.
I have a new job. I do marketing for Kraz Construction.
I have a new car. I wrecked another Corolla. Well, I didn’t wreck it, neither did a tree. Regardless, I needed to replace it because I got hit by someone who blew a red light. It was so red it was almost green again.
I have a newfound love for people who delight when bad things happen to me and tell me so.
I have a newfound appreciation for sarcasm.
I have a new . . . (I’ll make this multiple choice, and I won’t tell you the answer)
a) mole on my neck
b) etsy shop
c) puppy
d) phone
e) auto insurance company
f) all of the above
g) some of the above
h) none of the above
So. That’s what’s new.
When your nose gets all plugged up on account of that cold that just won’t go away . . . like that annoying sort-of friend down the street growing up . . . or, you know, responsibilities, your ability to smell reaches desperately low levels. I’m talking Mariah Carey in Glitter levels. But it’s not completely gone. You can still smell some things. Garlic. Ammonia. Farts. Even brownies. You can smell brownies with a cold, though the taste isn’t quite as supremely glorious as it is in a fully decongested state.
But some things you just don’t smell with a cold. Some of them are not missed. And no, this is not completely random. I do have the sniffles.
1. Caramel. Ugh. And yes, people without colds can smell caramel. Go run and find some. It smells good.
2. Popcorn. Unless it’s burnt popcorn. Then you can definitely smell it. Triple Ugh.
3. Lilacs. Although that may be because I just don’t have any lilacs around.
4. Pepper. And it doesn’t make you sneeze. The cold makes you sneeze. And the sneeze makes the pepper pretty much unusable.
5. Your own breath. It’s debatable if one can smell ones own breath anyway, but with a cold it just ain’t happening.
6. Snow. And no, you can’t really smell snow without a cold. But there it is, all falling on my stuffed up nose, and it’s not helping.
7. What the Rock is cooking.
8. Honey. The first time I ever tried honey (on Chicken McNuggets, FYI) I could neither smell it nor taste it. I spent the next ten years having no clue whether I liked honey or not.
9. Cool Ranch Doritos. This one depends on the severity of the cold, but if you’re so stuffed up that you can’t smell Cool Ranch Doritos, be sure to grab a mint in light of number 5 and the fact that not everyone has a cold.
10. Gravy. It’s true. And it’s tragic.
Words that are mine. From me.
I believe in inspiration. The words aren’t all my own.
But the dark, black, bright center of my soul longs to speak a word unborrowed.
Without regard for tickling eardrums.
Absent of shame.
Unfazed by the risk that its sound would inflict the sting of disappointment upon any soul other than my own.
One true word.
Maybe two.
Mayhaps all.
I am slowly, gradually, glacially easing back into the world of social media. It has been a pretty extensive break, though not a complete one.
There are a few things I’ve learned about the role facebook and twitter (and whatever other site du jour I might have experimented in) played in my life before my like/follow dormancy. I’ll share them randomly:
I’m still capable of inhaling and exhaling without the assistance of Internet memes.
I don’t miss twitter fights and/or facebook debates in the slightest.
I still don’t really get someecards, especially now that everyone just makes their own.
There are still a lot of cats on the internets.
People are nice.
People are mean.
Generalizations are stupid, except when they’re right on.
I still have a hard time trusting events on facebook.
Facebook credits have yet to become the new world currency, though they also may slightly outvalue the dollar.
When you take a significant break from tweeting and posting and blogging and whatever, you kind of lose your place in line. Engagement is built and lost over time, and it can’t simply be renewed at the drop of an @.
I have missed writing a lot. A lot. I miss a lot of the people I used to connect with. I miss the way social media could make that happen instantly, but . . . I’ve completely rediscovered my appreciation for distance. Goodness, it’s a necessity. So much more important than clout. Or Klout.
All Willy Loman seemed to want was to be well liked. There is more to life than that.
It’s good to get back into things, but I doubt I’ll ever be anywhere close to as submerged in social media as I used to be.
Okay. A happy day to you.
Before the days of Netflix, as early as the age of no cable at home, but late into the post-reading era, my family used to hit up the library to check out movies on VHS. They had a selection comparable to what most videophile families wound up with after the fallout from the DVD asteroid finally killed off the last of the VCRosaurs. As a result, we’d wind up revisiting old favorites much more often than we’d explore new cinematic territory. Anne of Green Gables. The Peanut Butter Solution. Steel Magnolias. If watching the same movie 200 times is a crime, these were the objects of our recidivism. But they weren’t my favorites.
My personal favorite, or at least an easy qualifier in the top five, was Throw Momma from the Train, in which Billy Crystal plays a distressed writer who unintentionally inspires Danny DeVito to initiate a murder swap (which would be my new favorite reality show . . . okay, not really, I don’t think people should kill people for ratings . . . but still . . .), Larry’s ex-wife for Owen’s mother. The plot isn’t really isn’t relevant to this post . . . okay, nothing I’ve written so far is relevant to this post, but trust me, this is going somewhere.
My favorite non-funny line in the film is the mantra Larry issues to his writing students at the end of each class: “Remember, a writer writes . . . always.”
I have loved that line and the spirit of it (the weary, crushed spirit of it, in Larry’s severely blocked case) for as long as I’ve been a writer. And I’ve been a writer a long time. I still am. I love the saying more than I apply it, though. I’m prone to going long spells without writing much of anything. I will say, most of what I write you don’t see. Some of what I write, I write for specific people. Some of it is for me. Some is for hire. But not nearly enough of it is for the overarching goal of always generating words and thoughts and stories and dreams and all that my writing could be. My writing should be all that it can be. That comes only from hard work, dedication, discipline, and faithfulness to the streams of inspiration that never cease to flow no matter how persistently I choose to ignore them.
Yes, my writing should be all it can be, so I suppose it’s time for a little Writing Boot Camp. Yep. Definitely.
I’m sure you know the excuses for not writing. I’m too busy. I’m emotionally, physically, and creatively exhausted. I’ve got nothing to write about. I don’t want to write for free. My butt hurts. I can’t write when my butt hurts. All the common excuses we all use every day.
Well guess what? I’m getting off my sore butt and doing something to make my writing what it can be, what it should be, what it must be. Wait . . . I guess I’m not getting off my sore butt so much as getting back on it, since I do write sitting down more than any other position. So . . . that’s right, I finally have the resolve and motivation to get right back on my ass. Who’s with me?
Here’s my plan: write every day for at least an hour. Write for at least ten hours a week. Post something here every day. Write professionally every day. Write something deeply personal every single day. Write one thing that challenges the reader (and the writer) to change in a significant way, every week. (Every day would be seriously annoying overkill. Nobody likes change.) Do this for at least one month, then I’ll evaluate how it went and go from there. I don’t see this as temporary at all, but I do want to define the period of time if for no other reason than to make sense of calling it a boot camp.
Are you a writer? Are you sick and tired of not writing always? Do you want to commit to writing more? If so, join me. Make up your own rules, please. Mine are customized to working around my non-writing schedule, but if you have more time on your hands, by all means commit more time each day and week to writing. Regardless, I think it would be fun and maybe slightly productive to do this as a group.
I realize I have been almost completely socially disconnected from the entire interwebs for quite some time. It’s been my recluse phase. You should try it, it’s great. But not now. Now is Writer Boot Camp time, WBC time, if you will. . . . Will you?
If you want to join in the Writer Boot Camp madness, let me know. Or don’t. But commit to it. Do it. And write your ass off. A writer writes . . . always. And always starts now.
Or it started forever ago, but for motivational purposes it starts now. K? Cool. Let’s do it.
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