Tomorrow
by David BudbillTomorrow
we are
bones and ash,
the roots of weeds
poking through
our skulls.Today,
simple clothes,
empty mind,
full stomach,
alive, aware,
right here,
right now.Drunk on music,
who needs wine?Come on,
Sweetheart,
let’s go dancing
while we’ve
still got feet.
Category: Writing
Writing Project Blueprint, Phase 1
Assignment #1: Prepare an action plan for reaching a medium-term writing goal. You have seven days to complete and submit plan.
Assignment details:
Write up an overarching SMART goal and then generate a series of intermediate objectives, each with its own subset of deliverables. The objectives and deliverables will use measurable action words, such as those in Bloom’s Taxonomy, and will themselves include all the elements of SMART goals (most importantly, specificity and timeline).
As the details of the interim requirements resolve into view, they may reveal that the Big Papi goal is itself problematic. The goal might be too ambitious or your schedule unrealistic. Revise as necessary. The plan will be more effective if it emerges from an adaptive exchange between desired outcome and deliberative process.
Here is an example of my possible Big Papi writing goal: By May 1, 2017, prepare for submission a working draft of book proposal (with complete outline), introduction, and chapter 1.
Write Any Way
He asks me, “What are you writing?”
Should-be-simple question. Nevertheless. WritING and What suggest a singular focus towards an identified goal, and if only.
Of the half dozen projects begun in the past dozen years, I am WritING exactly zero Whats. To complete that sentence: half dozen projects begun and abandoned because (– excuses dolled up as reasons –) keep damming the river.
The biggest boulders of debris may look like procrastination, may feel like avoidance, may clang like doubt
May choke like syrup even as it caulks the leaks where the hunger seeps through
Carry On
Poor as sin, a bottle of wet, two friends dead. A man outside her window. Wallet on the car floor, wheels spitting asphalt, WaWa bathroom, brown tile walls. Lady pushes her girl into the stall, “You go even if you don’t have to.”
First book with chapters: Sweet Valley High. Which one, all the same. Skin dry, skin slick, so pretty before but realized it too late, that’s always the story. She borrows makeup from a friend, color off. Friend is a generous term. They had been small enough to fit on the same block. Once. Adults now, those girls, dulled but also steady. Selective memory to fill gaps.
New shoes she didn’t buy. Two quarters and a dime, a pack of gum gone soft, the name of the baby they took or she gave, who remembers. The recipe for making him stay, the back of a stained receipt, a language she learned to whisper but never to speak. Paycheck stub, proof of value, plastic troll with hair, once blue.
Draws the Eye
For the past year at least, I’ve been struggling with writing. The struggle is against a sense of futility about words that begin in my journal as reflections on my own mind and experiences. Who cares about my son’s bedtime, the trees leafing out along a bus route, the music the metro escalator makes as it howls and sings along its rusted track? My words are outdated vehicles for tired ideas, or so my jerk-brain tells me. I “should” be writing well-researched pieces about student development. Or finely crafted poetry. Or even fiction. But I don’t. Instead, snapshots of this little corner of the world (and my bumbling interactions with it) fill my journal and eventually make their way into my roughly drafted pieces.
Follow These Where
#62 of the first 100 blessings is this right here.
This circle of bloggers and readers.
The blessing is you writing in a voice all your own — meditative, manic, academic, vibrant, raw, irreverent, sweet — and moving your readers to strike their own singular chord. And you who reads, you who lets the words snake in with your breath, who may even follow one whispering trace to its source. Continue reading “Follow These Where”
Bowl Cut
“Can bowls swim?” a question asked. I knew the answer they wanted was No. But bowls could float, even heavy bowls, if flat and large enough. The large, flat-bottomed bowl of an ocean liner, for instance. If Paul thought like that, too, he’d give the wrong answer. They meant small inanimate household bowls. Not the bowl of the deep ocean, say, holding currents, coral, plants, and creatures — itself floating on the earth’s liquid core of iron and nickel, whose swaying produces Earth’s magnetic field. Not the bowl of the earth floating — or, with so many life forms, was it swimming? — in space.
— Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love
It is all okay, just the way they say it is. By every measure, it is fine.
Rise weary. Shower off the animal, dress in unremarkable cloth. Speak in operation manual dialect. Meet only the eyes of the bus driver and snap straight the helicoid moment as you stride to claim your seat.
Write like a man, the librarian says. She scrubs her emails now. Each is an écorché peeled free of padding. Each correspondence a naked, muscled machine, its purpose laid bare.
Maybe we danced before.
Maybe we pretend we haven’t forgotten the petronella turn. Continue reading “Bowl Cut”
How to Use a Rotary Phone
Paint it white. Remove the bottom and peer into its whispering guts. Lay out the parts in a row and dare your child to build a robot.
Make it ring.
Hang the dial in a sunny window. Measure spaghetti with the holes. Braid the cord into the unruly mane of a wild pony. Replace the numbers with photographs of monuments and dead jazz singers.
Walk through a train station talking into the receiver. For dinner, serve a bratwurst on the cradle. For dessert, a cannoli.
Put a tiny baby down to sleep. Ring the operator and ask for a line to Newark.
Scroll down.
Plant rosemary in it.
Call off the Enola Gay.
Scavenge parts to fix a radio. Smack an intruder in the head. String it across the door to catch your teen trying to sneak out.
Speak into it all the things you wished you’d said.
Hold it to your ear and hear the wheels and waves, Coney Island, Venice Beach.
Carry it into a small closet and put on your tights and cape. Fill it with birdseed and set it out after the first thaw. Open the front and store inside a tiny book filled with photographs of switchboards and phone booths.
Replace the dial with a mirror. A clock. A contour map of Mt. Kilamanjaro.
Stack tinder into its corners to prepare for winter. Stuff the seams with the names of those few still alive who knew you when you were young.
When you have lost your way (or maybe when you’re most sure of it), lift the receiver. Listen for the voice of an absent god.
Learn more about the Alternative Uses Test and divergent thinking.
Image: Trendhunter
Fear, Being Anticipatory, is Always Without Knowledge
It is the same path she’s always followed. It’s grown so familiar she can walk it in her sleep. Most days, she does.
Then one December day, slipping into the groove is more of a stumble. Cold seeps under her cuffs. With the sun so far, the chill has no escape, not up or out, so it stays. The fall turns her neck. Looking up now, she sees how deep the trench, how far the sky.
She remembers the open place up there. Unmapped, daunting, the choices had radiated out in all directions. Wearing this furrow into the uneven terrain had seemed the most reasonable way to proceed.
No doubt someone told her then that ambiguity’s promise eclipses certainty’s price. Only now can she grasp what was lost in the exchange.
With damp walls at her hands and back, she presses in. She begins the climb.
It’s a strange thing about the human mind that, despite its capacity and its abundant freedom, its default is to function in a repeating pattern. It watches the moon and the planets, the days and seasons, the cycle of life and death all going around in an endless loop, and unconsciously, believing itself to be nature, the mind echoes these cycles. Its thoughts go in loops, repeating patterns established so long ago we often can’t remember their origin, or why they ever made sense to us. And even when these loops fail over and over again to bring us to a desirable place, even while they entrap us, and make us feel anciently tired of ourselves, and we sense that sticking to their well-worn path means we’ll miss contact with the truth every single time, we still find it nearly impossible to resist them. We call these patterns of thought our “nature” and resign ourselves to being governed by them as if they are the result of a force outside of us, the way that the seas are governed — rather absurdly, when one thinks about it — by a distant and otherwise irrelevant moon.
And yet it is unquestionably within our power to break the loop; to “violate” what presents itself as our nature by choosing to think — and to see, and act — in a different way. It may require enormous effort and focus. And yet for the most part it isn’t laziness that stops us from breaking these loops, it’s fear. In a sense, one could say that fear is the otherwise irrelevant moon that we allow to govern the far larger nature of our minds.
Novelist Nicole Krauss responding to Vincent van Gogh’s 1884 letter to his brother.
87. Things I Can Exchange: Not for Is
Volunteers in the study were asked to hold a grip sensor as they heard a variety of verbs related to manual actions, like ‘throw’ or ‘scratch’, in different sentence structures. The researchers observed a significant increase in the strength of participants’ grip when words were presented in an affirmative sentence, but no such reaction when the same action words were presented in a negative context, such as ‘don’t throw’.
Writing advice from an unknown source: Replace any negative statement with an affirmative one.
“He does not go” becomes “he stays.”
“The delivery hasn’t shown up” becomes “the package has yet to arrive.”
“I haven’t showered” becomes “I need to shower” or “Let me clean up” or “I’m a fragrant mess.”
It seems simple enough. A game, really. It starts as play then becomes imperative. Then mission. Continue reading “87. Things I Can Exchange: Not for Is”
Shannon E. Williams 