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Archive for the ‘Navel Gazing’ Category

I wish you could walk with me in the mornings

08 Feb

I have been, as the song goes, one poor correspondent and too too hard to find; but it doesn’t mean you ain’t been on my mind.

I wish you could walk with me in the mornings. I’d like to show you my Gainesville, tell you about the Gainesville that exists in my head. Have I ever told you I dream about this town? The town in my dreams is just a little bit different than Gainesville. The streets are a little bit longer… or shorter (or more curved, or have businesses instead of houses, or visa-versa), houses have moved around. In my dreams, and in my morning walks, my imagination whispers me stories, secrets about these streets. In my head, I hear the Cowboy Junkies – That house there is haunted, that door’s a portal to hell; this street holds its secrets very well.

Sometimes I just make up stories about the people who live in the houses I pass; ideas based on things they leave outside or bumper stickers on cars or things I hear through windows as I pass. But sometimes there’s a full-fledged fictional character that pops into my mind from the pages of my unwritten urban fantasies.

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Posted in Fiction, Navel Gazing

 

The one where I do what my mother would do

19 Oct

Yesterday on my drive to work, about five houses down from me, I thought I saw a burned-out firefighters coat in the yard of a house. “That can’t be what I saw,” I thought (glancing at the house as I drove past), “that house is fine except for being a burned out shell.” Errr? I slammed on my brakes and drove backwards (9:15 AM on a Sunday morning in my ‘hood isn’t really known for heavy traffic). Sure enough, the house was gutted.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it for most of the day. Did she get out? Was anyone injured? It looked like the kind of fire that probably took someone’s life. It looked… violent. Angry. Frightening.

So of course I wanted a photo of it. Voyeuristic? Sure, a bit. But I’m reminded of a story my mom told me, about the house next door, when we lived in Baltimore, catching on fire. And the only thing she could think to do was photograph it, because that helped her process what was going on. And since – and you might not know this if you don’t know my mom – I pretty much am a carbon copy of her, I did take a photograph.

And then of course, I wanted to post the photo in my Photo-of-the-Day album. I’m trying to keep those photos as yarn-free as possible; I started doing the project again because while I love yarn (obviously) I am around yarn 24 hours a day, and I really need one thing in my day that isn’t about knitting. But this is an awfully personal photograph for the family involved. So post it? Or not? After much chewing over it, I decided to post it.

Here’s why: this is affecting me on a number of levels. Although it might sound like it, I’m really not trying to make the actual fire all about me – for fucks sake, I slept through the whole 2 AM event! – but I think the repercussions of this are going to be felt through my neighborhood for a long time, and I’m going to be blogging about that as it happens, so I want a starting point. A place to reference. A place to come back to.

In no particular order, here’s what’s on my mind…

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Posted in Navel Gazing

 

Zen and the Art of the only book I’ve not been able to finish reading, twice

05 Sep

(Originally published on March 7, 2008)

Zen and the Art of the only book I’ve not been able to finish reading, twice

There are so many places I could have gone with this title.

Zen and the Art of Being a Pretentions AssNubbin

Zen and the Art of Stabbing Out My Own Eyes

Zen and the Art of Pointless Repeated Rambling Oh God Make It Stop

Zen and the Art of This is the Book That Never Ends, It Just Goes on and on My Friends

So the other thing in addition to this that’s been making me think a lot of where I was in my early 20’s is that I’ve been trying to reread a book I was reading then, which I could never finish.

I would read about 20 pages, and stop. And think. Think about quality. Think about relationships. Think about how thinking can make you crazy. Think about how smart I must have looked, a hot young thing in her early twenties, reading such a heady book—and a dog-eared copy at that (thank you, Friends of the Library Book Sale). I would think about how brilliant and impassioned my friends were, for they had all read this book and they all had Great Thoughts and Important Things to Say, and my lord weren’t we all just the shit?! We would smoke pot and drink cheap beer and stay up until 3 in the morning debating Great World Issues like politics and religion and sexuality and how Society Was Evil for Putting Labels on Everything and basically how we were all going to Make a Change If We Could Ever Get Our Stoned Asses Off the Couch (and if you did get off the couch, could you please get the rest of us some chips, thanks).

But I could never finish the book. I told myself it was because it was too intense. It was too deep, that I wasn’t ready for it yet, that maybe I needed certain life experiences before My Soul Would Be Ready for Knowledge.

Now I realize, after trying to read it again, that it’s full of insufferable prattling, and I couldn’t finish reading it because it was just So Ungodly Awful.

I apologize now, if this is your favorite book; if you read it and it changed your life or opened new vistas for you or if you actually bought a motorcycle and drove across the country with a beat-up copy of it in your back pocket at all times. Obviously you are more spiritually enlightened than I am, and I bow in your shadow, Pretentious McCrazypants.

I bought the book on tape, thinking that maybe it would be better, HAHAHAHA wrong. And this is so funny I have to blog it: I was walking the dog the other morning, listening to the portion I had downloaded, and the author is going on and on (and on) about how Quality is neither in the mind nor in the object, and my eyes were glazing over… and then there was a pause in the “action” and the narrator said, “Chapter 22.” Yes, I had downloaded Part Two. And apparently I listened to 45 minutes before I figured that out. HAHAHAHAHAH! I rock.

I downloaded Part One, listened to about an hour, and gave up in frustration. Clearly my brain has not grown philosophically enough to appreciate this book.

Posted by Lorena on 03/07 at 10:53 AM in Personal,  Navel Gazing

(Original comments are after the cut…)

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Posted in Navel Gazing