Drive

I admit it. My life is a mess. Literally. My studio is always cluttered, my car is always dirty. I don’t eat right or exercise regularly or sleep normal hours. I eat way too much chocolate. I’m always late, for everything, no matter how hard I try. There are always things left undone, loose ends never tied up, bills that should have been paid last week, errands overdue.

I’ve quit making New Year’s resolutions to try to mend my ways. They’re simply my ways, and that’s all there is to it. Who’s to say there’s anything wrong with them? Let someone else live in a spotless house, drive a pristine vehicle and tick everything off their organized little checklist every day. I’ve got more important things to do.

I’m one of those weird creative freaks of nature. It’s who I am, it’s what I am. I didn’t choose it; it chose me. When I’m overtaken by the creative muse, I am 110% consumed by the force. I pursue my creative endeavor to the exclusion of everyone and everything else. Food is uneaten, living space is uncleaned, obligations are unkept.

It’s not my fault.

Blame my muse. Yes, I’ve got one. Every creative soul has one. Anybody who thinks creativity doesn’t flow from a greater source than one’s self suffers from extreme narcissism. I am at the muse’s mercy. I am the conduit and when the energy flows it has its own life, it’s not mine to direct or inhibit. When I attack a creative project I’m not doing it because I need to do it, or because I want to do it, but because I must do it. I don’t have a choice.

It’s an impossible concept to explain to anyone who hasn’t sat awake for 24 hours with a paintbrush, pen or instrument in hand, never noticing the passage of time, nor being touched by fatigue or hunger. The creative force provides everything necessary to sustain its servant, until finally cutting them loose into an exhausted and famished but sublimely satisfied vestige of themselves; a husk, a shell, physically depleted but spiritually fulfilled. We often step back from the work of art, or  written words, or musical composition that has manifested itself on the once-blank page, and think, ‘okay…how the hell did I do that?’  And we never have a really good explanation; at least not one that would stand up to logic.

Nobody else ‘gets’ it. Well, nobody except a kindred spirit, another soul equally stricken with the irrepressible drive to create. To them, no explanation is necessary. They understand instinctively, because they are spun from and connected to the same source. When we find each other, it’s a communion of souls. An automatic, instant connection on a level far below the threshold of ordinary awareness.

We know how to reach into those hidden depths. We know highs and lows and nuances and shades that mere mortals can’t fathom. It’s our blessing and our curse to experience greater joy and more profound sorrow, for to surrender to the muse is to reach for and lay open the deepest parts of one’s self.

The rewards are great, but the muse is a harsh master. So when my refrigerator is empty, my house is cluttered, my car is dirty and I totally forget that I promised to meet you for lunch, kindly remember that it's not my fault. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I don't like spam

I don't like spam.

I'm not talking about the mystery meat-in-a-can that you fry up with eggs and bacon.

I mean the stuff that gets served to my email inbox every morning, afternoon and night.

I try to stop it, but it's like trying to keep ants out of my house. Every time I block off one place that they're coming from, they find another way in. I must get a hundred junk emails every day.

I do not need penile enlargement (although I have to admit that I know several people who do.) I do not want to buy prescription drugs from "reliable" overseas pharmacists who have no vowels in their names and whose license numbers are suspiciously similar to the format used by San Quentin for prisoner IDs. I do not believe for a moment that there is a sick child in Spain who has been collecting emails for fourteen years as his "dying wish." Nor can you convince me that I've won three million dollars in Nigerian Lottery, that Mr. Nivranskinashak Minrovernia of Flakelovakia has left me his estate and only needs my bank account number to deliver my funds or that I will receive a free computer simply by forwarding an email to two hundred people. I do not need to be warned about going to a party, getting drunk and waking up in a tub of ice water missing my kidneys. I am not falling for your claim that someone in Peru tried to use my Visa card, my Paypal account has been locked or that my Facebook password needs updating so that I can sign on to your un-secure server and supply you enough personal information to arm you for identity theft. And no, I do NOT want to 'meet my soul mate in seven days', 'hook up with hot studs in my area' or 'see what Bambi is doing on her webcam.'

Offers and spam. Warnings and spam. Spam, prizes, porn and spam. Spam spam spam spam spam.

I don't like SPAM!

Songs of the Season

I didn't write the music, but I am The Master when it comes to bastardizing lyrics. I'd like to apologize to the composers and original performers of the following songs. I'd LIKE to.....but if the shoe fits......

To the Tune of “Winter Wonderland”

Where's my truck

I can't find it

What the fuck's

All this white shit?

You can't see the grass

It's a pain in the ass

Riding in a winter wonderland!

 

Gone away is the pasture

Haven't seen it since last year

There's horses out there

They're buried somewhere

Out there in that winter wonderland

 

We'll just have to hibernate all winter

Cancel all your outdoor plans til May

Make some extra money in the meantime

And rent your horses out to pull a sleigh

 

Forecast said shouldn't worry

Just a chance of a flurry

"Partly cloudy", alas is now up to my ass

Riding in a winter wonderland 

-----------------

To the tune of “Love me or Leave me”

 

This damned stuff is killing me

I can’t stand this cold you see

Tell me now, ‘cause I’ve got to know

Whether this weather will stay or go

 

Turn up the heater and fetch me a sweater

It’s the west coast, WTF’s with this weather?

If I wanted winter I’d move to the freakin’ North Pole

 

You might think December’s the right time for white time

But I’m not the Christmas-y cold snowy night kind

I’d rather be bitchin’ than hitchin’ my horse in the cold

 

There’ll be no fun unless unless there’s some sun and sooooooooooooon

I’m just waiting and hibernating ‘til Juuuuuuuuuuuune

 

If temperatures keep heading in this direction

You weathermen better get witness protection

 

For I hate the mud and the rain and the snow

and the ice and sleet and the cold winds that blow

My pain is your pain there’s no fun for nobody else

 

Twilight Zone

Imagine, if you will, a door.

No, strike that. That sounds way too Rod Serling-like.

Imagine a room. A modest but respectable room just big enough to contain those things important in life. These things are meticulously organized; stacked and categorized, everything in its place. It’s simple, uncomplicated. Mundane, for sure, but drama free. It’s…..nice and you’re….content. You’ve worked diligently for a long time to ensure that everything is exactly where it should be and that nothing that could possibly rock your world (for good or for bad) may enter.

Now imagine the door to this room is flung wide open and hurricane force winds blast through. Everything in the room is uprooted, displaced, hurled and spun out of any semblance of order. You try to collect things and put them back where they were, but the wind keeps coming and nothing will stick. It’s pandelirium.

That’s pretty much my life lately.

For some reason, the great almighty universe, in its infinite wisdom, decided that my world needed some badass shakin’ up.

Nothing is as it once was. I am enjoying things I’ve never before had a taste for. I have become….social. ME, the non-social wonder. I’m going out dancing and to parties and I’m riding mechanical bulls. I’m taking chances. I’m making lists of things I have never done before but am suddenly compelled to learn and master.

It’s like another person is inhabiting my body. Gosh, I hope they can cook and don’t want to get up early. I hope they like shopping. I hope they have more money than I do to GO shopping. I hope they don’t like rap. I hope they have a lot of single, good-looking, wealthy, generous, kind, funny, smart, sexy straight male friends.

But it’s not all good. My normally photographic memory is out of calibration. I am staying up working on creative projects (good)  instead of sleeping (bad). I’m freaked out by the number of paranormal, inexplicable things that are suddenly commonplace in my world. Have I always been attuned to this sort of thing and just never paid attention, or have I acquired some macabre new talent? It’s as though some sort of door has opened and new, fascinating and frightening things are rushing in faster than I can process them.

And NO….it’s NOT “hormones.” For god’s sake, if you’re going to flip me off, come up with a better excuse than THAT.

Something far bigger than me is dealing the cards at the moment, and I’m getting stuck with playing the hand. I don’t like gambling. Why? Well, because it’s….gambling. I like to tie things up with neat, tidy explanations, and I like all those things to fit neatly within my personal paradigm box. 

But for whatever reason, the universe has decided that my previously mundane, boring, hermit-like existence is over. It’s a riptide of change and I can only hope to stay atop the wave and see where it takes me.

I only wish I’d taken those swimming lessons in third grade.

 

Chickens on the Balcony: A metaphor for life

The scene: a hotel room in an undisclosed location, occupied by the author and a gentleman friend who shall remain nameless.

Oh alright, let’s call him Fred.

It’s morning. I think. I know it’s light, because even with my eyes wide shut I can sense sunlight filtering through the gauzy curtains that cover the balcony doors. I have no idea what time it is, but I’m pretty sure it’s waaaaay too soon to think about getting up. It was a late night. I’m happy to just lay (lie?) there next to another warm body.

Said warm body had had the kindness to not snore the preceding night. To what that blessing can be attributed, I know not. I had learned long ago, in dealing with this particular man, to accept small miracles with gratitude and grace. Truth be told, I often times didn’t mind his snoring. It was rhythmical and downright musical at times. Sometimes it made me laugh, because it sounded like he was composing tunes via his nasal passages. Which beat the hell out of other ways his body could be making music while I was essentially trapped under the covers with it. 

Through my I-may-rise-but-I-refuse-to-shine haze, I hear Fred’s voice. Deeper than usual, as it always is immediately upon waking. A voice I loved, no matter what it said.

It said, “I hear a chicken.” 

I don’t have a memory like a steel trap, but I was fairly certain he’d never uttered this particular phrase in bed before. 

This, of course, made absolutely no sense. Any random phrase from Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody  would have made more sense. I assumed he was talking in his sleep and ignored it.

A few steady breaths later, he said, “there it is again.” His tone was more staccato; he definitely was not sleep-talking.

He got out of bed like a man on a mission, and pulled on an ugly white hotel-issued robe – a wise move since he was headed out the doors to the balcony.

From outside, he said, more resolutely, “There’s a bloody chicken out here.”

Now, I didn’t know what he thought he was seeing, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t a chicken. We were five floors up. And while the hotel wasn’t in the midst of a metropolis, I hadn’t noticed any neighboring chicken farms.

I laughed out loud; it was my polite laugh, the one I used when I thought somebody was completely wrong but I didn’t want to be so rude as to say so. 

He knew me well enough to know it was my I-think-you’re-looneytunes laugh. He’d always read me eerily well. I couldn’t get much past him, and certainly not my polite laugh, not even this soon after waking.

A moment later he was dragging me by the hand, throwing the other ugly white hotel-issued bathrobe at me and towing me out the doors to the balcony. He stopped me at the precise mark and turned my body to the precise viewing angle.

There was a freakin’ chicken on the railing of the balcony of the suite next door. It was either a chicken or some other kind of bird that looked like a chicken, talked like a chicken and walked like a chicken. Brown and red and feathered and clucking.

I looked up. There was one more floor above us and then the roof. I looked down. There was a café next to the hotel with annoyingly chipper looking people having breakfast. I saw no way a chicken could have gotten up here. But there it was. 

I turned around and looked at Fred. He was standing with both hands on his hips, head cocked slightly and the most glorious, sleep-tousled wavy masses of hair cascading all to one side. He had hair that people would have killed for. One brow was raised defiantly as he regarded me with his very best “I told you so” look.

I was about to comment when his gaze shifted back to the chicken and he exclaimed, “It’s going to jump!” 

I whirled back ‘round in time to see the chicken leap. It plummeted five floors in a flutter of feathers and squawking, bounced off the edge of a café patio umbrella and landed smack dab in the middle of somebody’s breakfast. People screamed and scattered, dishes flew, and the chicken high-tailed it off the table and scurried away.

Faces turned upward, and we realized to our horror that those people thought we had dropped a chicken bomb on them. We ran inside and recoiled from the balcony before the angry villagers could return fire. Thank goodness we had at least been wearing the bathrobes. I could imagine the headline: Naked Couple Fowls Breakfast of Unsuspecting Diners.

Later, we were having a leisurely lunch in a restaurant in the same hotel.

A waiter walked by and served the people at the next table a delicious looking, lavishly garnished meal of poultry and pasta. 

A few moments passed with no sound other than the delicate, civilized clinking of silverware. 

Then, without looking up, and with totally deadpan delivery, Fred said,  “Do you suppose that’s him?”

He raised his eyes to meet mine, smiled a mischievous smile and we laughed the way two people do when they are the only two people in the world who know what the joke is. It was a silly, irreverent moment that remains as vivid in my mind now, years after, as when it happened.

I realized much later that the chicken on the balcony was a metaphor for many things in life; things that defy explanation, things that make no sense, things that simply shouldn’t be but that irrefutably just ARE.

The unexplained doesn't fit comfortably into my personal paradigm box. I prefer to wrap everything up with a tidy, logical explanation. But life isn’t like that. Things that shouldn’t, can’t possibly, happen, do. Sometimes you just have to call a chicken a chicken, and let it go.

You never know when you will discover the chickens on the balconies of your life. The most you can hope for is that when you do, you'll have had the presence of mind to pull on that ugly white hotel-issued bathrobe first.

Ready. Fire. Aim.

How do you know when a gun is loaded?

Knowing the one (and only) correct answer to this question was the first and most important prerequisite to receiving my firearms safety certificate.

I took the firearms safety course when I was in high school, prior to joining the Rifle Club. Our school (and, in fact, most high schools in Western New York State) had a rifle club and team.

Yes. We had guns. In the school. All the time.

If a person was a member of the Rifle Club, they could, during their free periods, sign out a gun, be handed a box of ammunition (with the same have-a-nice-day casualness that a cashier would hand over a box of Tictacs), and shoot on the indoor rifle range in the school basement. Here’s your gun. Here are your shells. Have fun.

And, we did.

I can see your mouths hanging open in amazement, but I promise, I shit you not.

Nobody thought anything of it. Like football, basketball and wrestling, riflery was a bonafide high school sport. I got my varsity letter participating on the Rifle Team. The team was undefeated in the State during my high school years. I received my National Rifle Association Expert Rating – the highest marksmanship designation – when I was a junior. To receive this rating, I had to achieve an average score of 98 or above (on a scale of 1 to 100) shooting at a bullseye the size of a pea from fifty feet. When you consider   the fact that I can’t even back my car into a parking space without hitting something, that accomplishment seems even more amazing.

Rifle clubs in high schools are, unfortunately, a thing of the past. It’s too bad. There’s a lot to be said for teaching respect for firearms and how to handle them properly. I remember the first time I shot a rifle – the noise, the recoil. I thought, ‘Holy shit, I could KILL somebody!’ Granted, it was only a .22 calibre rifle, which was probably less likely to kill than just really tick somebody off.  Still, it made the concept real to me. You point at somebody, you shoot...there are severe consequences.

I’ve fired all kinds of weapons, from shotguns at woodchucks and clay pigeons to semi-automatic weapons at the pistol range. Oh, and ask me about going bat-shooting sometime. It’s never occurred to me to point a weapon at a person. Well….okay, it’s occurred to me (a few past boyfriends pop to mind), but I never acted on it.   It’s not that there weren’t opportunities.  Kids in Phys Ed classes used to run laps in the high school basement, not far from the rifle target bays. I could have taken any one of ‘em out neat as you please. It seemed unsporting, though. After all, if I could hit a hurtling clay pigeon or a mark the size of a pea, busting a cap in some slow, fat kid in a pair of bullseye-red shorts was hardly a challenge.

The demise of riflery as a school sport saddened me. But it’s a different world today. The last thing that comes to people’s minds when they think of guns in school is team sports.

I’m not opposed to people owning guns, but I’d like to see thorough background checks, psychiatric evaluations, competency tests and renewed-yearly licensing required.

There should also be some sort of test to determine whether a gun owner has the stones to actually follow through. I have had a number of people tell me “oh, I’d have a gun for protection, but I’d never use it. “

Excuse me?

Guns are for shooting – plain and simple, at targets, food to put on the table – or attackers. They have no other purpose. Guns are not magical talismans that you keep in your bedside table drawer and wave around to ward off evil. If you do not believe you could pick it up, and point it at someone, and shoot, you have no business owning it. If you can’t use it, I guarantee your aggressor will be more than willing to take it away from you and use it against you. Gun ownership is a solemn responsibility. Never, EVER take it lightly.

I do not currently own a gun, but if circumstances dictated, I would. I’ve still got my NRA “Expert” medals in a little display box on one of my shelves. I look back on them fondly. And, every now and then, I think to myself, a few of you former boyfriends really don’t know how lucky you are.

Oh, and the correct answer to the question at the beginning of this blog?

 A gun is always loaded.