Day 33

I knew when I set out that this would be difficult. Writing is hard, and on some days finding ten minutes to write is hard. Rather than get mired down in the catch-up game I’ll just post the appropriate day’s writing each time. This will leave gaps that I’ll fill at the end or on days when the words come easy. This whole thing is about discipline and accomplishment but it’s also about expression and a reasonable amount of thought, which are hard to achieve when I’m just spitting out hundred-word chunks to catch up. We’ll see how this goes.

Day 27 makeup

Music is math. There are spatial relationships, numerical patterns, and strictly divided time segments. But it’s also not math. It is an expanse of choices. Which notes to play, how to put them together, where to emphasize, and maybe most importantly, when to play nothing at all. Music is language, and like language it needs rules as a starting point. Also like language, it grows as the rules are broken or reconfigured. It expresses every conceivable emotion including some that are impossible to express with just written or spoken words. Narrowly, it divides. Broadly, it connects across every conceivable divide.

Day 26

Sometimes the dang ketchup won’t come out of the bottle. Everyone has a surefire trick – tap two fingers on a certain part of the neck while maintaining a certain angle, whack the bottom with the meat of your palm like you’re trying to break it, stick some silverware in there, just leave it sitting upside down for a while, and as many other things as you can imagine. All of them work some of the time, none of them work every time. The most important thing is to moderate how badly you want ketchup. That and be willing to wait.

Day 25 makeup

I’m hauling a kayak out of the river and toward my truck as he approaches. He lives in one of the houses nearby. We exchange nods, my hands being too full of kayak to wave. Rather than passing he stops to talk. After some back and forth on fishing, he tells me about the wife he lost to cancer. Then how medicine to cure cancer, hers and others, exists but is being suppressed by big pharma because it isn’t as profitable as chemo drugs.  He’s angry and telling all of this to a stranger by the side of the road.

Day 24 makeup

Forced creativity is the enemy of communication.  It’s a siren song though, and a powerful one. Why just say something right out when you can say it in a metaphor or make up a story to illustrate it? Here’s what happens. You go back and read the masterpiece and it turns out the whole thing is just a bad ripoff of something a good writer already wrote and you read. As long as you know this, I suppose it’s a normal part of growth. If you can’t recognize poor imitations when you see them, probably better to just write plainly.

Day 23

You don’t have to wonder where you stand with a dog.

I love you.

I love you but I’m really interested in this other thing right now.

That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.

This is the happiest moment of my life until the next one.

By any chance are you not going to be able to finish that?

Didn’t you hear that bump by the front door? High alert!

You are my friend but I love this other person more.

Would you please scratch behind my ears for the next 12 years?

There just isn’t much to guess at.

Day 22

I bet I ran 7 miles inside the boundaries of a tennis court that day. I had played maybe twice before, always with people about as experienced as I was. Surely my 22 year old reflexes and 40 years of age advantage would be enough to hold my own. That was my theory. It was soon to be proven wildly false. My partner, grandfather age and all, knew how to play the game and did not play to lose. He gave me the respect of playing at his best and I had no chance. I learned a lot from it.

Day 21

Our neighbor brings little treats over fairly often. Always homemade, always good. She gets a lot of joy from giving them and we are thrilled to get them. The most recent was a little bowl of something. I put it on the counter where it stayed until the next morning. The stuff in the bowl was cream cheese and pomegranate dip. No one in this house knows how long cream cheese can go unrefrigerated, but we tried it after dinner tonight. We still don’t know if it went bad because turns out none of us knows what pomegranates taste like.

Day 20

Beach fishing is a practical study in psychology. If you are on the beach, the goal is to get bait as far out into the ocean as possible. Some use comically long poles, others wade out until they are almost swimming to cast, and the real diehards swim or kayak bait to un-castable distances. If you are in a boat, the goal is to park on the beach – real hardcore boaters wouldn’t get their knees wet if they jumped out. And if you put a beach fisherman in a boat or a boater on the beach, their goal reverses immediately.

Day 19

Hitting what you shoot at with a handgun is difficult, and more so when the handgun is made of plastic or a vaguely handgun-shaped stick or a finger. Many a shootout ended in arguments about who had shot whom first or the difficulty of dodging bullets, even imaginary ones, once they had been fired. This was before the Matrix taught us how. It was a big day when Mom broke down and bought a pair of pistols that fired little yellow BBs. No more arguing, now we’d know for sure. It took us about 15 minutes to lose them all.

Day 18 makeup

She has tiny pipe cleaner arms. If these were the old kind of slot machines it seems hardly possible that her arms could work the lever, not even if she used both of them at once. She’s in luck though. This is the electronic age, and even pipe cleaner arms can push the big red button. Her environment is raucous – even the colors are loud. She remains undistracted, though. Push, spin, lose. Shake the coin cup, take a drag on the vape pen, push, spin, lose. I guess this is a place for having fun. Not sure she’s having any.

Day 17 makeup

One of the first things you learn in a combat sport is that fighting is hard. The stuff in movies where both people throw each other through furniture for 5 minutes is nonsense. Even people who are already in good shape from other activities have a hard time staying functional for 5 minutes, and that’s in a controlled environment. The second thing you learn is that what someone looks like is not a reliable indicator of how dangerous they are. The third thing you learn is that those who stick around are mostly humble and kind. Comes of getting walloped.

Day 16

In the same way that you have to clear a lot of stuff that doesn’t sound like music out of an instrument before you can make music come out of it, you have to get a lot of bad writing out of the way before the good words come out. At least I hope so. I imagine all writers hope the same thing. On the far side of all the self-consciousness, the self-importance, the hubris, the ever-fragile ego, and the laziness you hope there is something with meaning. You hope you have, after all of the above, something to say.

Day 15 makeup

Physical therapy seems ridiculous while it’s happening. Item one – move the thing that hurts. For real? I’ve been not moving it because it hurts. Item two – move it in some way that seems inconsequential. This can’t be right. I’m to do bicep curls with a rolled up newspaper? The whole enterprise is just this – move the thing that hurts in a way that by any standard of common sense is a lot of tomfoolery. And then after you’ve been doing this nonsense for several weeks, the thing that hurts, doesn’t. Maybe this principle – small, uncomfortable action - improves other things.

Day 14 makeup

The rain looks like water, because it is. The runways look like lakes but they probably aren’t. The gray is in the sky, the ground, and all the in between parts. Everything kind of runs into the next thing – a world without boundaries, or maybe with nothing but boundaries. The kind of world where the planes might be submarines if you look out of the corner of your eye. Real quick and only out of the corner – they won’t stay that way if you look head on. This might be the kind of day where dimensions are real close together.

Day 13 makeup

If we meet suddenly in the grocery store or a hotel hallway or at the county fair, I might act weird. It isn’t because I don’t like you or I’ve recently committed a crime and I’m on the lam. It’s because my brain has decided (deep down in the lizard parts where instincts live) that you are most likely a bear or alligator or other toothy meat lover, and I’m made largely of meat, and so I must escape.  The rest of my brain knows this is malarkey but in the moment it doesn’t get a vote. Sorry about that.

Day 12

The hatch, well oiled all these years, swung open with a whisper of metal on metal. Real sunlight shone through a large oak tree to dapple their jumpsuits. Not their skin, not yet, but soon. The security team was out first to form a perimeter. Next Harris with his scanners and counters. After thirty minutes, then another thirty to be sure, the whole population of Tube 16, seventy-three souls in all, climbed the ladder and breathed unfiltered air for the first time in their lives. It was quiet until someone pointed out the dust cloud. Something was coming. Something big.

Day 11

Comes now the tinkerer, who happily will spend hours dismantling and reassembling, adjusting, and otherwise being near the thing without using it for its function.

Comes now the customizer, who cannot be satisfied with a stock unit, and who will in fact have an entirely new thing once all parts have been replaced with better ones.

Comes now the elocuter, who wants nothing more than to discuss at length the history of the thing and various theories on its use.

Comes now me. I just want to ride the bike, or shoot the gun, or play the instrument. Let’s go!

Day 10

“My Ruggage!” The last 30 minutes of a looong day had been spent circling a Holiday Inn that was easy to see but nearly impossible to get to. About 10 minutes after lights out I heard a key card slide into the door. I ignored it, surely a simple mix up. A few minutes after that, a knock – the manager with a Japanese man in tow who had the room yesterday and thought he still did. Convinced his luggage was still inside. I explained otherwise and as I started to shut the door, he tried to leap into the room.

Day 9

Another rental car (small blue job), another hotel parking lot. The next morning all the cars had 8 inches of snow on them. I spent 15 minutes cleaning off a small blue rental car then clicked the key fob with no results.  After several frantic seconds I remembered that I had left for dinner after check-in last night and parked in a different spot when I got back. I spotted my small blue rental car several spots away. Meanwhile, an elderly Japanese man that had been standing in the hotel entrance came over and got in the snow-less blue car.

Day 8

I play a few instruments. Not especially well, but I’ve put enough time in that the output sounds more like music than noise. My tastes for listening to or playing other people’s music run wide. When I improvise or try to compose, for reasons I can’t explain and don’t understand entirely the music that comes out of me leans hard to wistful and melancholic. This bothers my wife no end, and often after half an hour of dealing with it she’ll request something more upbeat. All I know is I don't feel sad while it’s happening; it just sounds right.

Day 7

“You hear?”

“About the Chrismans?”

“Yeah.”

“Len told me. It’s a real shame.”

“It sure is. Took Job Chrisman three years to build that herd up.”

“Took about three minutes for the slicers to make ‘em disappear.”

“Slicers seem to be coming through more often this season. That’s the second herd lost this month.”

“Len said Job’s kids are still in shock. Won’t go near the viewscreen.”

“Can’t say I blame ‘em. One look at a slicer is enough for a lifetime.”

“Sounds like dinner’s on – see you when we open the hatches.”

“Think we ever will?”

“Hard to say.”

Day 6

The Matchbox milk truck was dark blue, a Model A with big chrome headlights and flared fenders, only just out of the packaging. I took it out to the playground at the center of our oval of single-wides. At some point it went missing. I spent a lot of time scanning grass and digging around in the puddles that had formed in the big divots under the swings. A bigger kid helped me look, all sincerity and sleuthing. Years later I realized that this was the day I learned that someone could look right into your face, smile, and lie.

Day 5

Music is in every instrument, but to get it out you have to slog through a lot of stuff that doesn’t sound like music at all. And that’s how it is for everything. It all starts with the ugly building blocks, stacked clumsily, collapsing often, callusing fingers and bloodying knuckles. Everyone who makes something look easy has spent a LOT of time making it look hard. Effortlessness comes only after effort - and a lot of it. Loving the result is easy. The hard part is embracing the path to the result, when everything is ugly and hard to do.

Day 4

“Meet me at my buddy’s banjo shop” was an unexpected response to my telling my cousin Jeremiah that I was headed his way. He was a great one for unexpected responses.  At Cloverlick Banjo Shop I met two craftsmen and visionaries who are not just dreaming, but making dreams come alive. I heard sounds that I didn’t know a banjo could make - soulful, mellow, full of meaning. Soon after, Jeremiah fought cancer hard and lost. These new friends and this new music on a new instrument are near the top of a long list of gifts he gave me. 

Day 3

Don White talked about keeping things simple and he lived out the philosophy too. One of my favorite ways to see it in action was fishing with him.  

The boat – a 17-foot long hull with a steering wheel at one end, outboard motor at the other, and an expanse of fiberglass in between.  

The target – bluefish.  

The bait - two variations on a topwater plug (one with a little nose propeller, one without).  

The tackle – three of essentially the same rod/reel combo.  

The drift – across the same acre of water, direction depending on the wind and tide.  

The enjoyment – endless. 

Day 2

She paints. It takes a while. I’ve learned that the process is more than just putting oil on canvas in shapes. There is mixing, and thinking, and removing of paint, and adding of more. Sometimes there is putting the canvas away for a while and painting something else. Inspiration, frustration, self-doubt, self-confidence, failure, and triumph are all part of the experience. When all that is past and the paint has dried, there is a picture that tells more stories than I can ever take in.   She says it’s a matter of building skill, but to me it seems like magic.

Day 1

Writing is thinking, and I like to think. At least tell myself that I do. Communication is hard, but it’s worth the effort. These are both good reasons to make myself write. Two more reasons are that the path to getting good at things usually runs straight through doing them poorly for much longer than you’d like, and the path to true enjoyment of something usually involves quite a lot of plain old work building the necessary skills.

I’m doing this to improve and see if I have something to say. To any following along, I promise consistency – nothing else.