Creative Writing and the Like

I finish school in December. Absolutely nutters. No idea what I'm going to do. But I hope it's something to do with writing. This is my last semester of my undergrad and the first semester of creative writing I've ever taken. A bit too late, but I'm loving it. My other classes are Theater/Arts/Society, Math Decision Making Skills, and Personal Wellness. It's been a dream. In theater we rarely have class, and when we do, it's for watching plays and film. Like Pride and Prejudice. Kiera Knightly version. Swoon. Not applicable, but good. Math is drudgery, but I'm surviving. All that to say, I'm going to start posting the pieces I've been doing for class exercises. The objective of the following piece was to make a list. Here we go:

Men that you will inevitably fall in love with.

Heathcliff, in high school, while sitting in a bathtub until the water has gone cold like jello that hasn’t quite set.  His cruel streak will make you susceptible to other bad boys like Jesse from Gilmore Girls. Crooked smilers and the like.

Obi Wan Kenobi, AKA Ewan McGregor, which will confuse you during your formative years as you saw the originals where Alex Guinness is plodding around looking old and then you look at Ewan McGregor who is just so dashing and do we all turn to dust in the end?

Van Helsing, first as the gun-slinging action hero Hugh Jackman, later as the Dutch professor of Stoker’s world. Having met the first before the other, every reading of Dracula is now more than slightly provocative and sexy. The way he kicks vampire butt with his body and his mind will change you and might make you wish you were Kate Beckinsale.

Wolverine, after reading Ulitmate X-Men Volumes III-V, because when you’re twelve and comics are free in the library you go for it. Incidentally, once more you will fall for Hugh Jackman as he dashes across the screen in countless Marvel mash-ups. But you will always wish he was just a bit more like the comic. You will learn that when hair is drawn by artists it is magnetic and emotes, but when those same styles are attempted in the real world, they are flat and ludicrous.  You’ll still love Hugh Jackman and wish you had Pocahontas’ s hair.

Darcy, Fitzwilliam. You’ll wish you never stumbled across this guy because men. Just men. Also, you might think you want a love story like his and Elizabeth’s, not even considering Colin Firth, but you were just rereading Pride and Prejudice and most of it is bullshit.* It’s a lot of pain for a lot of gain. But whatever happened to being friends from the start?

*You’ll realize that you mistakenly fall for the “what appear to be charming” characters in films and books until they are unmasked, particularly where Austen is concerned. Willoughby and Wickham are just the sort for you, you think. Until you’re utterly in ruin and damn it, Heathcliff, you’ve reared your gorgeous head again.

Papa John. Taco John. Papa Murphy. Colonel Sanders. These are love affairs that will never end.

Tom Stoppard will make you fall in love Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are dead.

But Hugh Jackman? You’ll always have Hugh Jackman.

Also Ewan McGregor. 

Tick Tock Through With That

Sometimes dreams are just so large, and instead of getting out there into the vast unknown, into the unrealized, I feel trapped in the soup of reality, a fog that seems to hang out about my mind, thick haze that slows my body down. Confined to a corporeal shell for eighty good years, twenty-two already used. Why the despair? Why such despair and painful longing? Longing that distracts from the present. What if reality and dream were interwoven instead of separate? What if I'm missing out on something right under my nose? Perhaps not what if, but what? For certainly there's a thing in front of me. Happening around me. Juggling relationship, juggling loneliness, a sense of something more, feelings of despair intermingled with joy and hope. Such a roller coaster ride of paint strewn across the canvas. Mixed metaphors aside. Getting inspired, that comes easy, and then it stagnates. Maybe I've run for too long. What am I saying? I've barely even run, and yet it feels so far. My heart is such a twisted thing, filled with longing. Maybe the longing is the hard bit. Maybe the dreams are the hard bit. Everyone wants to turn back the clock, change who we become, when every second is working out who we are becoming for the next. Such a stacked number of events and in-between workings. How are we supposed to know what to be? Who to be? How do we decide what is right and what is wrong? How do we burn one second and the next become so cold? The feeling maybe I've had it all wrong. Maybe we've really got to chase those dreams. Chase down those lies that well up and kill them dead. The vast expanse opens, the galaxy split apart, stars torn from the sky, the earth beneath my feet crumbled. Loneliness is such an odd thing to feel. Even surrounded by those I love, even in the midst of the joy and love, there's some kind of sadness. What is this sadness, this weight that pulls me down? Loss of pleasure in the things that once brought joy. Food that turns to ash in the mouth, stories that lose meaning before the end of the tale. How can we live in such pain? Well, we do. We keep pushing. Even if we'd rather be dead. Funny how you don't know how much you want to be alive until you want to be dead. So much wasted time, wasted breath, wasted hours and seconds. What truly matters? Friends? Family? Relationships? The feel of the sun on our skin? Clouds moving quickly over the horizon? Winds whisper on the raised hair of our arms? Making rent? Working to live. Traveling? Exploring? It's all so damned mundane. They say adventure isn't real anymore. It can't be. It just can't be. I refuse to live in a world where everything is day in and day out. I have to get out. Have to get inspired. Have to inspire others. Change the way they think. Change the way I think. Feel again. Really feel. So over the tortured artist thing. So over feeling everything to the nth degree, not being able to sort it out. Instead becoming a jumbled mess of misunderstanding, no sense to be made of all the live wires crossing. What is the tick? The push. I need to find my push. My tick. I lost it somewhere along the road. Lost my way. I sure as hell can't show anyone their way if I've got no idea what my own is. 

More Endings, More Beginnings

Catching up. Getting into the swing of things? Maybe. Wrapping up another year at university, getting all of my crap together (well pretending to--starting to shuffle through a pile of belongings until I'm distracted by some old letters) and getting ready to move out into a new place with some good friends next store. Moving in with perfect strangers, rolling the dice, playing a little Russian Roulette and crossing my fingers for the year to come. 

Getting so freaking excited to read the things that I want to read. Not that I read a lot of terrible books over the last nine months, but now I get to pick a few of my own. These are the books I actually enjoyed reading for class:

• Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch 5/5
• Jazz by Toni Morrison 4/5
• Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed 3.5/5
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz 5/5
• The Color of Water by James McBride 4/5
• Paradise Lost by Milton 4.5/5
• Our Fathers by Andrew O'Hagan 4/5
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens 5/5
• The Ghost Road by Pat Barker 3/5

My summer reading list so far:

• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewzki (heard it's super trippy, multigenre metafiction spookiness)
• S. by JJ Abrams (started this one back around Christmas but had to drop it for classwork)
• A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle (Irish Rebellion)
• Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (Irish immigrant in Canada sent to prison for assisting in murder)
• A Fine Balance by Rohinton Misty (State of Emergency in India)
• The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald (controversy of atomic physics at cambridge circa 1912)
•  Clash of Kings by George RR Martin (left off about two hundred pages in a year ago)
•  Possibly some more Dickens
• Definitely Romantics: Bring on all the Shelley, Blake, Coleridge, Burns, Keats, and Wordsworth
• Also Yeats

But moving on, getting out, breaking free of the establishment. Well, not quite. Taking spanish one and two this summer in order to graduate in the fall. You should expect me to be fully bi-lingual, or at least fluent in english and know how to say things like dresser in spanish by the end of the summer. 

Breathing deep. Seeing the wonderful world for what it is. Light broken by leaves, the evening sun burning in the panes. Just gorgeous. Delightful. I cannot wait to go floating down the river this summer. It's gonna be a good one. 

Here we go again,

M

Head Clearing

Tonight I hit the pillow, inward eye flashing.
Misconceptions, jumbled thoughts, scrambled sound
grates and stomps and champs through my mind.
The space between awake and asleep; tonight,
the gap ever widening between the two. No time
to decompress until the head hits ground
and the clock
is ever tick tock tick tocking on and on until morning.
Mingled memory and future clasp each other, break and scatter
amongst preserved catalogue of things to be forgotten,
things to be remembered, to be restored,
to be missed, to be loved, to be ignored, to be burned.
Effortlessly pounding, breaking like waves over rock, in tangled web of infantile design.
Faces. Grey. Faces. Defined.
Theories. Broken. Theories. Denied.
Guesses. Wrong. Tricks. Treats.
Trojan horses and minuscule feats. Rattling radiator,
thrum thrum of veins, whistling windows, and thoughts inhumane.
Bouncing, tearing, breaking through, resounding, firing, destroying milieu.
Tonight I hit the pillow and it burns through my mind.
Misconception, jumbled conjecture, fixed image,
treason barking.

Phil Wickham - "Carry My Soul" (Live at RELEVANT)

A Swift Sunrise

I get in this bind every few months or so. There's a panic button deep inside me, hidden away, in some place that's marked but is yet to be found. Circumstances pile up, situations manifest, until suddenly that button becomes more a part of me than the mechanism it was pulled from. Suddenly, it doesn't matter what glances you throw my direction, what words of wisdom you have to offer me. Hours and hours and hours and seconds become minutes of endless chatter until it becomes clear that there is no answer.

 No definable way to assay my qualms.

There's a fear attached to this mechanism, a fear of the unknown--not exactly. A fear of not knowing the unknown. A paradox. This paradox manifests itself every couple of months. I can be complacent for days on end until suddenly there's a light that breaks the darkness. Suddenly, cascading across the sky like a star crashing through atmosphere, adventure rears its head yet again. A call to the unknown. To slay the dragon. An unexpected journey. Not even a promise of a there and back again adventure. Just adventure. Visceral. Something to be touched, that can be grasped, that can be held tight, can be evident, seen. The tick tock of the clock has brought me this far.

It must be suppressed. But it isn't--I encourage it at every turn. I see here and there mere glimpses of what could be and these glimmers burn behind my retinas. Pieces of another place, something connected to this world and yet completely set apart. It calls. I answer. Tolkien and Lewis are undoubtedly at the center of it all, weaving these places into word. Something inside answers the ethereal.

I want adventure. Real adventure. Unfortunately the need for adventure often leads me to miss what is right in front of my waking eyes, mistaking them for the mundane. I must find adventure elsewhere. Stories. Now I'm bound to the life I lead, but within stories, oh within stories, I'm on adventure. I'm out there. Experiencing. Slaying the dragon. Sure-footed, sure-hearted, sure-handed.

Here's hoping I find the adventure in my life,
M

Bent Corners and Caged Wonders

When you open a book there is more than just a telling, more than just some adventure, there is a story. A story beyond typed words. Beyond each carefully chosen letter, crafted phrase. There's a story in the parchment, in the gritty texture of the page, in the stains, of mosquitos or spiders killed in a frantic shutting of the book, in the slime of some borrowed supper smudge, in the deliberate marring of the page by the pen, the turned corner of the page. 

I've always the devoured the page, the fiction trapped between cover to cover, but I have also stopped to consider the story encapsulated without the book, surrounding it. When I was younger I would frequently bend the top corner of the page to mark my progress, watch in wonder and fulfillment as that little tic mark moved down the spine of the book, some symbol of the experience. I owned a copy of Tolkien that I lovingly dragged around everywhere, and the sloppy cover of this softback book has been bent beyond reckoning, soiled by rain, and trod upon, and kicked around more than one bus. It was there, on that bus, that I was ridiculed for not taking care of the book. That I had diminished its value.

That was when I stopped dog-earing. When I made sure to keep the page pristine, unmarred my experience. There was no longer a story, simply an act. An act of repetition, of guarded emotion, of careful closed thoughts. There was a story and a prison. No longer a story and an adventure. No longer a companion, a confidante. Just another to take care of. Years later I awoke to a revelation.

Books are for experiencing. Books want to be read. Want to be lived in. Crave a reader who will take them through hell and high water, who is not afraid to lovingly curl the corners of the page, to signify a rite of passage. Books that long for an adventure beyond the ideas contained within. Books that don't mind a splatter of this or that. Books want you to keep coming back for more. Rather than a good dusting. 

Books shouldn't expire in some bookshelf, looking classical and morose. They need to breathe. Be kicked around the floor of a bus, shoved into a bag, held closely. Inanimate objects aside, there needs to be more story than the one dictated. Let's be meta, folks.