Archives for category: observation

And it came forth that Lynnea spoke the word and the word for Poetry Friday is frame.

There is a folder on my computer with images I need to sort, but I know then I do, it will change the way I feel about the moments captured in those pictures. I didn’t take those photos, or pack the camera. Packing the camera would have been a silent vow to take responsibility for both recording the moments, and hauling the damn camera around (both of which I am tired of doing). There is a marital misconception that because I carry a messenger bag with a sketchbook, and an emergency granola bar I should donate space for a camera, water bottle or anything that might not fit in my partner’s pocket.

“Don’t you want to take the camera?”

No. I do not want the responsibility.

Possessing the camera is like being the master in a miniature universe. You don’t control the moment, but you do control the perception of the way others will experience that moment in the future. You have the power to taint the entire experience without physically manipulating it. You dictate how the moment is framed.

When I cull through those photos, the moment I experienced will be forever altered and filtered through someone else’s vision. I’m not implying the moment will be any less special, but it will no longer belong to me alone. One of my failings is I have spent too much time dwelling upon the past or worrying about the future, but not enough experiencing the moment and being present in the now.

Dealing with Live Chat Customer Service is like resisting the urge to shoot the messenger. Granted, I prefer hurling typos at a faceless stranger over forcing myself to be polite to a real live human being, but the lack of closure leaves a person utterly disgusted. You are talking to the equivalent of employee plankton, the underpaid minions residing at the bottom of the employee food chain.

You can berate them about their employer’s lack of transparency in on-line transactions, and you can tell them there is a special corner in Hell for designing an electronic shopping cart with a mobius strip of payment options, gift credits and promo codes that are completely incompatible with one another, but it won’t change the fact that your merchandising therapist is chained in a cubicle farm with no window and no access to management, production, Information technology, much less an operational toilet.

This is one of those generational moments when you accept life has changed and etiquette is dead. When I am old and grayer, I will be telling the grandchildren, “In the good old days, you could feed the first representative you talked to his ass on a paper plate, now you have to go through six Live Chats, three minions, two middle managers, and a call center in an under developed nation, before you get cut off and try again, only to find out nobody is really responsible for anything, much less service.”

tropical hurricane thinghy lee, was kind enough to deliver much needed rain, as well as, liberate the neighborhood of a few dozen pesky oak trees and telephone poles. i’m not aware of any injuries…so it’s all good. unfortunately other places haven’t been so lucky.

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monday i chose to sleep in the basement because the wind was howling and the trees were flexing in unnatural positions. the b&w kitty was also unnerved making it difficult to share the bed with him. cats are not dogs, but they can be as sensitive to their surroundings making them effective silent alarms.

i located my pants and other essentials like water, cell phone, flashlight, blanket, etc’ and retreated to sleep. the cats followed and were fine with the arrangements as long as a left the door open.

around 2am or so i woke up the sound of gray kitty scaling the christmas tree and rattling the plastic bag containing it, but other than that there were no events of notice….and no there wasn’t much sleeping either, but given the alternative of a tree through the roof…it’s all good

Absorbed in my internal monologue, I think about coincidences. It doesn’t matter if you give meaning to the interconnectedness of multiple experiences or if you accept them as happenstance, serendipity make for fascinating for mental masturbation.

Months ago, I looked up the word, fecund. It was in a biography I tried and failed to finish. After learning the definition, I began to notice the word more. First, in a feminist book from 1949. Later, I read it again in a book about the impact of the alphabet on woman’s equality, and most recently spoken, by Julianne Moore in the movie, The Kids Are Alright.

If you believe everything contains meaning, then you might believe this is the year I was meant to give thought to fertility. But, if you are like me, you are scratching your head, wondering how you managed to study the Venus of Willendorf in art history, without noticing the word, fecund?

When school started this year, the ice cream truck began making regular rounds through the neighborhood, not exactly an existential crisis… but, here I am thinking about the ice cream truck and it has nothing to do with my unexplainable worship of dairy products, or that really catchy music playing that makes you want to slit your wrists….no it’s definitely Julia Sweeney’s book.

In the book, she tells an anecdote about her brother, Mike, who buys an ice cream truck. She speaks with poignancy, love and tenderness as only a sibling who shared a bathroom with you for fifteen years can. Obviously, I don’t know Mike or Julia Sweeney, for that matter, but when I hear the ice-cream truck I think about him for a moment, and how his sibling loved him enough to share his memory with others.

It doesn’t strike me as kismet, but I like that dissimilar things aren’t always as far apart as they seem.

How is it that utterly destroying something can be more gratifying than building it up?

I tore out wall board in the basement. It was old, stained, and holly. It will be replaced with bead-board paneling. There was a physicality to the act of smashing and prying that released tension in a way construction does not. It wasn’t violent so much as controlled disassembly…but the satisfaction was elating in a way that completing a drawing is not.

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There are two boxes on the floor of the kitchen and our cats have laid claim. There is nothing special about them, except for a dime bag of catnip in each, yet the cats like to lay side by side and stare at me as I cook. As if on cue, each cat has chosen the appropriately sized container for a bed.

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You know you’ve assimilated into a community once you find yourself walking around downtown muttering, “fucking tourists” under your breath.

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In southern states, it isn’t unusual to be asked “Where are you from?”. One way of interpreting the statement is an effort of politely implying you aren’t native to the area. Other interpretations are, “where were you born?” and “where do you live?”. Admittedly, the dangling preposition hacks me, but that isn’t the point.

Now that I’ve been an expatriate of my birthplace for over seventeen years, my answer is no longer the town where I spent my childhood. If the question is prefaced, “where are you from, originally?” then my answer is my birthplace. Now when prompted with the “where are you from?” question, I give the answer of the community I currently live in, because this is my home.

There is brutal honesty, truthfulness, lying, lying by omission, and lying to preserve feelings. In spite of the plethora of biblical guidance available, the best tact is hardly black and white. Some lies are based on self-preservation while others are compassionate. I’m not sure how much truth the human condition is prepared to endure.

For my mother’s birthday, I thought it appropriate to share with her something meaningful she gave me in my formative years that truly changed my life and helped shaped the person I am today….for better or worse.

I told her the best gift she gave me was encouraging me to see a different side of the world and study abroad. I’m not talking about major culture shock, I did visit an English speaking country. I knew the world was a larger place than the region where I was raised, and I knew I wanted to see the world beyond the state where I lived, but I don’t think I would have been quit so determined to leave if I had not experienced another country with all five senses.

I thanked her for expanding my world, but I neglected to mention that she also provided an exit from the world that confined me, the world that alienated me, ironically, the only world she has ever known. All unmentioned in the interest of being respectful of her feelings and her generosity.

Later I was listening as a parent complained about her adult daughter not being available for a visit. The daughter is working on her Physical Therapy credentials several states away. She’s an intelligent young woman who has tapped into her independence and begun building a place for herself in the world, as twenty-five-year-olds are known to do. She is fulfilling the desires for success with the skill set instilled in her by her parents, yet they feign abandonment because they have succeeded in raising a self-reliant, bright young woman who will probably go many places, except back home to settle down.

Last week running errands, we had a minor inconvenience. When one task did not go as planned, we coped like any self-respecting couple, and went to a mexican restaurant for a cheap lunch and a stress-reducing margarita.

The waiter who showed us to our booth, was new. He was an older gentleman, whose smile, and demeanor was laced with the kind of euphoria displayed by those who have either dodged a bullet, or beaten cancer. It was the joy of someone who is simply glad to be here, and ecstatic about being alive.

As we were seated, the waiter took notice of my shoes (I wear these odd looking, shoes with separate pockets for each toes, so it looks like you are wearing gloves on your feet.). He asked about the shoes, took our drink order, and showered us with gratuitous thank yous.

When he brought the drinks, he took our food order, and asked about the shoes again, inquiring if I would write the name of the store where they were purchased, showered us with thank yous again, then left us to our margaritas.

After entreés arrived, he enquired if we needed anything else, and asked about the shoes, again. By now we were bemused. His service was fawning, and his interest in the shoes obsessive. If he was angling for a better tip, he was going about it in an interesting way.

After a few more minutes passed, he returned to the table with a water glass to see if we needed anything else, and then he proceeded to show his appreciation (I assume about writing down the shoe vendor) by pouring additional alcohol into our glasses, transforming two house margaritas into margarita martinis…

We smiled and thanked him. After he left, we discussed how much time we needed to walk around before driving home.

The shift from winter to spring seems eternal, until it doesn’t. Waiting out the schizophrenic temperature changes, thirty degrees in the a.m. hours, sixty by noon, until, almost overnight, the trees leaf out and flowering plants shed early blooms. It’s a season of hope, emerging from the otherwise dark and barren winter.

I enjoy spring, but she comes with baggage. It is a season intolerant of my procrastination and languid reading sessions of winter. Longer days shame me into spending seemingly endless hours with landscaping tools, weeding, staining, repairing the cracks and peeling paint from a season of neglect. Gone are the days of careless laying about, and surfing the internet with no sense of purpose.

I enjoy being outdoors and I know seasonal tasks are good for me. At least until the humidity matches the air temperature, that can’t possibly be good for me my attitude. There are lessons in nurturing from this seasonal shift, exercises that improve my patience with relationships, if I allow myself to learn from them.

The irony, that ever-present, driving force which motivates me to laugh and not take myself too seriously, is my neighbors believe there is a green thumb and a passion for plants motivating me, actually us, to tend to the yard. The reality is, the process is largely driven by my feeling of overwhelming responsibility to maintain living things left in my care, and my partner’s appreciation of pretty things.

Earlier this month we (in the married sense) received an awkward bulk e-mail asking for sentimental thoughts about how a specific person has had a positive impact upon our lives and why we feel that individual is a special person, so that our heartfelt words, along with the other e-mail recipients’ could be integrated into gift. It reminded me of high school when signing yearbooks was all the rage. The stumbling block, aside from the need it yesterday timeframe, was the person described in the email, wasn’t the person I actually knew.

[……..]

I hate being put on the spot emotionally. It reminds me of childhood when grown-ups attempted to dictate what my feelings should be rather than helping me find more socially acceptable ways of coping with the feelings I actually had.

[……..]

Having an emotionally intimate relationship with the person described in the e-mail, the sender was able to see all the best parts of the person’s psyche. As for me, I was too blinded by the person’s pushiness to bother looking any deeper than a superficial acquaintanceship, confined mainly by my own indifference.

As the deadline to reply approached, I felt empty. On one hand, I couldn’t blow the sender off because it would send the wrong message regarding my relationship with the sender, but on the other hand I resented being called upon to impulsively vomit raw emotion.

With the assistance of an anagram and a thesaurus, we composed a kind, genuine, if slightly sterile message. There is a chance we will see all the great attributes ascribed in the e-mail with our own eyes over time, but for now I am okay with superficial if it means not having to having to subject myself to the emotional equivalent of standing in a public place with pants around my ankles.

When the Better Half’s family was suffering though what was to become the wait for inevitability, a friend rescued me on several occasions from the waiting process. She is a partner in an estate sale business, and they were sorting through the belongings of a new client. She kidnapped me for a few hours under the guise of needling additional help. So, I discarded my own personal baggage to sort through someone else’s.

When you lack emotional ties, a person is just a name, not someone you shared a history with, making it is easier to sort though the trappings of their physical legacy. You are unburdened of the sentimentality and confusion that accompany lengthy relationships. After weeks of being emotionally available it was refreshing to exchange personal attachment for an archaeological dig through someone else’s discarded china.

In sorting the accumulation of multiple generations, it’s easy to compose a history based on the objects left behind, though it is hardly accurate. (I read this week that we have a tendency to imagine others as being happier than they actually are).

Before I leaving, I negotiated a trade. Business cards for the estate sale in exchange for some miscellaneous items: a rusty metal sign, tobacco sticks, and a large mason jar. The rusty sign was cut down to be used as a “canvas” for two paintings. One featured above, the other here. The tobacco sticks will frame a painting in the future, and the mason jar is a depository for loose change.

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&
27 5/8″ X 32 1/4″, Enamel paint and chalk on pre-printed metal sign

I don’t usually discuss symbolism, but in the case I’ll make an exception because much meaning can be attached to “&”. The work has little to do with ampersand as an implication of “more”, or “additional” and everything to do with physical appearance. I like the curve of the ampersand and the way it complements the original arcs adorning the sign. The orange registration mark is a refers to my former life in typesetting and appreciation of letters as shapes separate from their importance as symbols.

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