links: political prisoners, liberation psychology, diseased america, and jokers

These articles all popped up in my feed reader in the past 36 hours or so.

Every Prisoner is a Political Prisoner: A Memoir by Kelly Pflug-Back

All I wanted was to move past the negative experiences I’d had and work towards piecing my life back together. But I realized that the pain I felt was trying to tell me something: I would not be able to forget and move on as though none of this had happened. In a way, I think the disgust and pain we feel when we see or experience something horrific can be the greatest catalyst for creating positive change. When we experience something firsthand we are better equipped to understand it—and with that understanding we can educate others and give real support to those who are also experiencing it. We can see its flaws and weak points, and we can use this knowledge to criticize, discredit, and eventually destroy it.

Is Mental Health a Smoke Screen for Society's Ills? by Vaughan Bell

How would you react if instead of supporting the American civil rights movement in the 1960s, you were told the major problem was that people were being affected by a mental illness called ‘post-discrimination stress disorder’?

The Nauseating Grief of Diseased America by Arthur Silber

These are the remarks of a man who has suffered an irreparable break with reality, a man who who has rendered himself unable to connect obviously related facts. If Obama genuinely meant these comments -- if he understood how these remarks apply with far greater force to him ("we may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings like this") -- his realization of the monster he has allowed himself to become would reduce him to gibbering incoherence for the remainder of his life. In varying degrees, the same is true of any individual who remains in the national government at this point.

The Joke's on You by Steve Almond

In a sense, these quacks have no more reliable allies than Stewart and Colbert. For the ultimate ethos of their television programs is this: the customer is always right. We need not give in to sorrow, or feel disgust, or take action, because our brave clown princes have the tonic for what ails the national spirit. Their clever brand of pseudo-subversion guarantees a jolt of righteous mirth to the viewer, a feeling that evaporates the moment their shows end. At which point we return to our given role as citizens: consuming whatever the quacks serve up next.

---

I think they have a common thread.

Granted, that thread may double as the yellow brick road leading to the shining, green towers of The Disillusioned City, where you're fated to pull back a pretty curtain and learn that the world is ruled by one tiny, mortal man, forever wanking.

Still.

They're all very good, but if you click only one link, let it be Arthur Silber's piece. His thoughts are very much along the lines of what was going on in my own head upon hearing our Dear Leader's reaction to what happened in Aurora.

I'm not sure what kind of reaction I want out of my fellow citizens at this point. A few months ago I was having thoughts like "If only they knew..." or "If only they were enraged enough... then they would do something." Those fantasies seem as far away as Oz itself now. Lots of people do know. And lots of people are enraged. And yet little of interest is occurring on our side. Are we actually unable to think up a viable plan to help right our nations' ill-mapped courses? Or are we (for whatever reason) unable to implement the plans we hatch? Are we too scared, too busy, too vulnerable, too sick? All of the above, I guess. Maybe we're all waiting on each other.

I'd love to change the world

But I don't know what to do

So I'll leave it up to you 

As for me and my house, lately we are busy planning the coming insurrection playing the new Skyrim expansion pack. Well, that along with getting stronger, getting out more, and improving our gallows humor. I think I'm aiming in part to adopt the demeanor of my grandparents and great-grandparents, particularly their resilience and flexibility in the face of challenges.

I have a few stories to tell about the changes in my own neighborhood since the economy tanked, but I'll save those for later (they're not that great).

Oh, and here are the first two pea pods from my very own garden, built, planted, and nurtured by my own two hands. Pea blossoms look so demure until they suddenly drop a giant dong-like pod right out from the middle of their dainty little folds. Then the jig is up and the flowers fall off, having served their purpose.

In another few days those peas fattened up and we shucked and ate them raw.

cookout on a sunny day

I think it's weird, the different ways in which we react to violent events at different times, in different places, with different people beside and around us. Sometimes you'll hear people argue that anybody with feelings (or, conversely, anybody who isn't a flat-out histrionic) will have to have acted a certain way:

"Look at that picture. How could he have been laughing on that day?"

"That was seven years ago. Don't you think she should be over it by now?"

Even some experts make the mistake of being too limited in their conception of real grief, real shock, real trauma. They say you'll remember every particular: every scent, sight, and sound in crisp, ever-present detail. They say you'll get amnesia and remember nothing at all. They say there's only one way to be and not be bad or broken; too cold or too given to theatrics. Probably the most manichaean and divisive of psychological "experts" are over-represented in the media, though. News loves a controversy. We shouldn't take them too much to heart.

But I've got my theories, too, and I judge. I scrutinize people's reactions, try my hand at scrying their motives and character in the glassy surfaces of their eyes. I'm not at all convinced that we should avoid such attempts; sometimes our intuitions save us. But my own life experience would indicate that it isn't so simple, that you can never really know how a person will act in the face of something outside his normal experience. Or, for that matter, how he'll react to a stressor he has experienced many times before. An unbroken pattern isn't necessarily unbreakable.

Sometimes people who are afraid of blood and death will be the first to plunge forward and get their hands dirty when the situation calls for it, when somebody needs help. Sometimes a know-it-all will piss his pants the moment his bravado is put to the test. Sometimes you're so scared, your facial expressions get away from you and you'll laugh even though there's not a single funny thing around for miles. Sometimes you barely feel anything at all, even though you always would have thought such an event would leave a person scarred for life.

I can't know anything for sure, even about myself. I'm going to contradict myself about myself a few paragraphs from now. I'm going to declare I'm different from what I've said I was like just two days ago. I guess it wasn't ever true then? But I wasn't lying. Perception, mood, outside pressure, the weather--jeez, everything is always changing. I think I tend to hate that.

When I was a little kid, every time I'd find a black, plastic bag in a ditch or a creek I'd be afraid there'd be a body underneath or a fetus wrapped up inside. Maybe I got this idea from a too-young viewing of Stand By Me. Or some news article about a teenage mother hiding a stillbirth. I read the papers too young, too. I'd think to myself: "If I ever saw something like that, I'd just faint, I know it. I'd never be the same again."

Still, sometimes I'd come back with a stick, and I'd poke around the bag, lift it up, look inside.

---

Once, in that other place I talk about, I saw a girl my own age gunned down a few meters in front of me.

In my memory I am with a group of friends in a public park. We've been cooking thin slices of meat over a fire, root vegetables in the ashes. Making a picnic. We're laughing.

A man is asking me for advice on attracting American women. I'm in a mischievous mood, steering him in entirely the wrong direction. I'm telling him what I like. This won't be of any help to him at the bars down in Tourist Town, which is ostensibly the kind of situation he's asking about. I'm watching his face to see when he'll figure out that I'm full of it, but he's just staring at me, transfixed, hanging on every word. He's looking like he wishes it were socially acceptable to pull out a pad of paper and take notes. His expression seems so earnest, I'm starting to feel bad. It's time for me to end my little ruse and fess up to having no experience whatsoever in this field. So I do. He drops his own ruse and begins openly flirting. It'll never happen; I've never really gone for clubber types. But the attention feels nice. Everything feels nice--the sun, the conversation, the break from work, the hunger in my belly. Even the dusty, parched grass under my bare ankles feels good and grounding.

I don't recall quite how the thing itself unfolds, even though it wasn't that long ago, only a few years. I think there is some kind of vehicle sound. Maybe a revving engine, squealing tires. Something else? I look up, toward the park entrance. At some point--stupidly!--I stand. There must have been gunfire amidst all of this, probably screaming as well, but in my memory it's like the soundtrack is cut for several seconds. I don't remember the sounds, only a sudden surge of human movement, rippling outward from the unlucky spot.

The young woman is on the ground. Red, brown, black. The soft, dark cloud of her hair. Did she come here alone? No one is acting like her friend now. People only want to get away. Fast. That's how people get trampled, I think.

Do we run, too? I wonder, lamely. But surely it's too late to run. And where would we hide? We're already near the only tree. There's little but flat land, human beings, and picnic paraphernalia in any direction. Maybe a few scrubby bushes. I stay put.

Where is the killer? Gone, I guess. Must have been in that truck.

None of my companions have so much as flinched, not like the wave of bystanders who were closest to the crime. I'm trying now to get a better look at the girl. We should help, I say. No, says a friend. There's nothing you can do. Sometimes they come back to shoot the first ones to come to the victim's aid. And anyhow, she is clearly dead. There are pieces. No movement. He turns the meat.

There's nothing you can do. It's true. I don't want it to be, but I can't help knowing he's right. The statement courses through me like a sedative.

Look, I know you want to. We all want to. But there's nothing any of us can do now. Let it go.

My heart rate slows.

An emergency vehicle pulls up sooner than I thought possible. Or maybe time is flowing strangely for me. They collect the body. There's no point in gathering any evidence or cordoning off the area. Everybody knows the local authorities won't allow the matter to be pursued. Hell to pay if they did. We're all pretty sure we know what happened, anyhow. We talk about it a little.

Tomorrow the paper will say she tried to escape a certain group of people who don't let anybody bow out of their fold and live. The paper is unreliable. So--who knows? It is a plausible story, though. It happens all the time. Poor dear, the baker's daughter will tell us at the till. Slut should have seen it coming, my street-smart alcoholic neighbor will sneer.

For now, other than the dark stains on the ground, which are smaller than I'd imagined they'd be, it's like nothing ever happened. The groundskeeper will wash it away with a hose later this evening. Nobody cries or stays near. Maybe she really was out all alone, although women don't commonly dare to do such a thing here. Maybe her companions simply know better than to draw targets on their own backs. We're not so far away--not in space, not in time--from the mass graves of the war, full up with non-combatants who paid everything for the twain unpardonable sins of Tarrying Too Long and Appearing Too Involved.

So we're eating lunch next to that lonesome, only tree. We got here early and snatched this spot up because we knew it would be a hot day. We're chatting about some newish type of music that some of our parents don't like, reciting lyrics and snarking on the overblown antics of the singers. We're speaking between mouthfuls of seasoned meat and salty, starchy tubers. Someone cracks open a real Coca-Cola and we pass it around.

---

Umbrella Tree - A Horse That Will Come When I Whistle

What kind of books do you read?

What kind of movies do you like?

I like westerns, I like westerns

I like the guns and the fistfights

And I like the dust in the streets at night

And I like the boots that kick your throat into the back of your head

If you cry

quote and link: when chomsky wept

I was particularly moved one night as I was sitting opposite him at dinner, struck as usual by the enormous distance between what Noam knows about U.S. leaders’ slaughter of innocents around the world and what the public realizes. I suddenly thought of Winston Smith from Orwell’s “1984,” who sees little hope of changing society and focuses only on trying to remain sane and commit to paper the truth in the hope that future generations will remember it. I told Noam that to me, at that moment, he represented Winston Smith to me.

I will always remember his reaction.

He just looked at me.

And smiled sadly.

Source

---

I don't usually comment anymore on the quotes and links I leave here, but I'll say that this one in particular meant a great deal to me. The author, Fred Branfman, captured the very thing about Chomsky (and this sad, sad world) that has haunted me incessantly since I was introduced to the ideas and information that Chomsky tends most often to cover.

Zinn and Chomsky are a big part of why I went where I went, why I saw what I saw and now find myself unable to accept that it's okay to lead a normal, American life. It's not all right, everybody. It's not sane to know this stuff and then go on like it's business as usual. It's wrong to know, and then to bury yourself in trivialities. I can't do it. You shouldn't do it. (edit sept. 29: I take that back. I can do it. And perhaps, indeed, you also should, in the interest of self-preservation on an individual level.)

What's coming next for us is the direct result of our combined inaction, inefficient action, and insufficient action. By "us" I mean everyone, everywhere, of every background, ability set, and personality type, all the world over. But with "our" I refer to the acts of you and me. Not the normals. Not the ones with wool in their ears, Jesus in their hearts, and TMZ on their tellies. Nor the ones with tidy, groundless theories to explain it all away. You and me. The ones who see and hear and know what's going on politically in the world right now, who can't or won't block it out just because it hurts, and who remain firmly grounded in what's real.

Some of us have excuses, I suppose. Some of us are simply struggling to keep our own tiny boats from capsizing and haven't got the time or energy for anything else. But when the full enormity of our machine-state surfaces from the murky depths, I think it will be apparent to all who see this monstrosity that no excuse could ever be good enough for our not having joined together and smashed it to bits in the days when it was still possible to do so.

(edit sept 29: btw, I'd personally hazard a conjecture that those days are actually already over, so if you think I'm calling for present or future action here, you're mistaken. ...oh, and hai, govbots. ^_^ How are you? Your algorithms are pretty impressive, I concede. You're barking up the wrong tree, though. I'm just a watcher.)

---

Utopia - Winston Smith Takes It on the Jaw

roll of thunder, smell my shoes

I heard rolling thunder for the first time today--the kind that sounds like someone is pushing a huge, empty garbage bin down the road. It just goes on and on. Completely different from the sharp claps I'm used to.

I can hardly describe how much it pleases me when I experience firsthand a natural phenomenon completely new to me. And I love that restless fascination that seems to come hand-in-hand with storms. Even if you're scared, you're still (hopefully figuratively) electrified. Even more so if there's something new and different about it, and so long as you're not in any appreciable danger for it.

"Is that really even thunder?" I wondered aloud to my Southern mate. Having lived through hurricanes, he laughed. We live directly under a bad weather alternate flight path, so sometimes we'll hear planes over the house that sound for all the world like they're going to crash. This thunder was so strange to me, at first I thought it must be a struggling plane. But it wasn't.

---

In the Other Country I saw my first monsoon rainfall. I remember exactly where I was: with friends in--of all places!--an American-themed hot dog shop. Halfway through our shriveled, mayonnaise-slathered early dinners (which tasted fricking amazing after working with our bodies all day and then walking the three kilometers to town), the rain began to pour.

Within minutes the shop was crowded with shrieking high school students in soaked uniforms, the girls folding their arms across their chests because their blouses were white. Women walking home from market pulled out umbrellas and tsked at the students for not being better prepared for what they all should have known was coming because, after all, it came this time every year.  We watched a bus float past the shop in half a foot of standing water, which impressed no one but me. Half an hour passed and nothing changed for the drier.

We could have waited under cover all afternoon until the downpour stopped, but we didn't. I think my friends could tell I wanted to be out in it, so we headed for home. And I--having no knowledge yet of the terrible things that get washed away by the monsoon rains--hiked up my pants and trudged straight into the water. It was delightful! Even though I spent half of the next afternoon trying to wash the stench of rot and sewage from my sneakers, I felt it was 100% worth it to have run through flooded alleyways sopping wet in a real monsoon.

Once we were in the outskirts of town, the muddy flooded earth was so slick that when we walked uphill we were forced to cling to whatever we could in order not to fall. Branches, boulders, the front walls of houses, the graveyard fence.

---

A few weeks after I'd arrived, a young man around my age demanded my shoes as we crouched together playing cards in front of the house his dead parents had lived in. "Those are nice," he said, poking at the material over my toes. Tan corduroy. "How about you give them to me?"

I demurred, explaining that they were my only sneakers. He offered a trade, but his own sneakers were heavy and black, clearly meant for a man. Mine were unisex. I didn't want a trade. And, truthfully, I was offended. Supposedly we were friends, but he was in the habit of saying lots of brash, intrusive things and this was the worst yet. Taking my shoes? Some friend!

He shrugged. "Let me know if you change your mind."

Much later he explained to me, smirking, that he'd found out at a young age that he could simply demand things of American foreigners. Whether by straight-up pity or some more complicated sense of hegemonic guilt, more often than not they felt compelled to comply. He showed me his collection, an expansive wardrobe of baseball caps, jackets, ties, silky polyester clubbing shirts, stopwatches, crisp designer jeans.

It took months before he really grasped that I didn't have secret barrels of money stashed away like seemingly everyone else from my country, that I wasn't lying about the circumstances under which I'd come there. And when he did understand, he started to introduce me to his other friends as "This is ______, my American friend. She is not rich." It was said in a strange tone, half boasting, half protective. I felt like a black swan or Zuckerman's famous pig--somewhat embarrassed to have been examined so closely and found to be unusual, yet fairly confident this at least meant I wasn't to be treated like a regular pig. She is not rich. That one sentence opened many hearts and doors to me that had previously been barred.

---

I was ashamed of what I was learning about my country, though I didn't know the half of it yet. Not a quarter. Not a tenth.

I'd never been proud to be an American, but only because the idea of being proud of the uncontrollable location of one's own birth seemed ludicrous to me. But these people were telling me, indirectly, that there was another reason I should not be proud. They wouldn't say it outright, but I could feel it skulking around the edges of every interaction.

I wanted them to be wrong. I kept hoping to run into another American like me, one who didn't fit their unjust stereotypes.

In retrospect, the American stereotypes were not so unjust. In retrospect, I actually fit more of them than I thought I did. But when you listen good and keep your mouth shut about most things, people fill in the blanks... and when you set them off kilter with a few of your more flattering oddities, sometimes they fill in the remaining blanks with nicer stuff than you really deserve.

Once I hung back on a bus ride far past my stop, squirming apologetically past all the SRO passengers to reach a pair of white faces in the back row. A young man and an older man. "What are you doing here?" I asked the Americans, breathless and smiling, in the local language.

They shook their heads, laughing. "English, please!"

"What are you doing in _____." I repeated.

"Volunteering!"

"He's volunteering. I'm visiting," said the older one. The younger man's father.

I was pleased. "Me, too! I'm volunteering with ______."

"Yeah? I 'm with the ______." The younger one grinned. "Can't wait to get out of this dirty hellhole!"

---

The day after the first monsoon rains, my friend watched me scrubbing at my flimsy shoes. I've never seen such a rueful smile before or since.

"Now look what you've done. Those pretty shoes are ruined. You should have given them to me when you had the chance."

"Want to make a bet? They're coming clean. See?"

They were improving considerably. I'd been filling a bucket of water, scrubbing the shoes with a brush in the bucket, then emptying out the dark water and filling the bucket again. You couldn't always do such a thing. At certain points in the year, the creeks and the taps both run dry. But for now there was plenty of clear water. You could bathe and wash as much as you pleased.

"So the mud scrubs off. You'll never get the smell out."

He was right. They were fine dry, but every time they got damp, they smelled like a polluted creek. I wore them 'til the rubber soles broke through. Four years.

---

Local Natives - Wide Eyes

the happy medium mafia

Apologies for the extended silence. It will probably continue. I'd love to explain what happened, but it would be imprudent to go into specifics. Furthermore, I'm apparently not imaginative enough to phrase the matter in vague enough terms to satisfy my safety needs without sounding like I'm making shit up, I've gone unhinged, or I'm participating in something completely nefarious (and, uh... none of that is true, of course). Believe me, I have tried. The drafts made me laugh but they were not fit for posting.

(I like to think I'm not half bad at pouring my heart out, sparing no detail. And I'm decent at being blandly pleasant while revealing little to nothing of myself. But the happy medium eludes me....)

Not looking very happy.

Anyhow. Be assured that all is well with my family and I don't need any help or advice. My biggest immediate problem is simply that I have to keep my yap shut about precisely the things I'm most inspired to write on, which feels depressing and stifling. Angering, even. I have notes for nearly one hundred original posts that I'm not sure will ever see the light of day. On the bright side, I'm learning to garden. And maybe I can channel my thwarted blogging urges into my novel.

I'll post a bit on relatively harmless subjects as they occur to me. Along with links, quotes, and such. I've made some rather serious playlists on Youtube lately as well.

the most dangerous gamer

One night in his apartment, with the lights of San Francisco twinkling for miles outside his windows, I warned Blow that I was about to do something that might aggravate him: I was going to tell him what I thought Braid was about, and he could do with that whatever he wanted.

“Okay,” he replied with a half smirk, leaning back in his chair.

“So obviously there’s the theme of the creation of the atomic bomb,” I began.

“I think you can make a very strong case that that is an unambiguous reference,” he replied, which I interpreted as the Blovian equivalent of Yes.

“But I think what has frustrated you about people’s interpretations of Braid is that the atom bomb itself is a metaphor for a certain kind of knowledge,” I continued. “You’ve been chasing some deep form of understanding all your life, and what I think you’ve found is that questing after that knowledge brings alienation with it. The further you’ve gone down that road, the further it’s taken you from other people. So the knowledge is ultimately destructive to your life, just like the atom bomb was—it’s a kind of truth that has a cataclysmic impact. You thought chasing that knowledge would make you happy, but like Tim, part of you eventually wished you could turn back time and do things over again.”

Blow remained silent.

“Does that make sense?,” I asked.

“Yep, yep.”

“So?”

He smiled.

“Well, I would say that I would not be frustrated at all with that interpretation.”

Source

best quote from sunshine week

From the AP:

[T]he White House organized a conference call with two senior administration officials to preview an announcement by President Barack Obama about an important China trade issue but told reporters that no one could be quoted by name. The officials were U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and the deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, Michael Froman.

-source

More of this, please.

prevention of injury

I want to share a film inspired by the case of Bradley Manning. Someone linked to it this week in the Greenwald comment section.

http://www.preventionofinjury.com/

I'll be interested to see whether the mention of Manning's name skyrockets the views on this post. Lately my other post with his name in it has consistently garnered over twice as many views as the next runner up (the post in second place contains the word "sex", of course), in spite of having very little unique content. One calling card in particular made me raise a brow*. Hopefully the numbers are just an indication of growing popular interest in the subject at hand.

I don't want to be paranoid, but--given the long list of keywords flagged and monitored by one arm of the Department of Homeland Security in 2011--I have to wonder if I might have been paid a few visits. By those bizarre standards, I've been seriously cranking out the IOIs since my parents got a modem in '95. More or less like everybody else.

Also... is this kind of talk considered "aggressive counter-surveillance"? =/

Speaking of videos, there's a rather popular one going around right now. I present three more items of interest without further comment:

1) http://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/WhiteHouseLRAStrategy_opt.pdf

2) http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2011-10-17-us-troops-hunt-al-qaeda-in-africa-not-the-lra

3) http://imgur.com/K3mgn

---

*I gather I'm supposed to have seen it, since it would have been really, really easy to avoid leaving that trace. The implications of that drive-by greeting are kind of disquieting to me. Which may very well be the idea. So let's pretend it was just someone from this particular agency on their lunch break browsing the internet and happening to take an intense non-work-related interest in digging around on my wee little blog, shall we?

v-day

"HAPPY VD!" as they say on Cake Wrecks.

There are three camps, as we know. Which are you? Like, dislike, or don't give a rip? We're talking about Valentine's Day, not STDs now.

As for me... gosh darn it, I like it. I've always liked it. Even on years when I haven't had a particular someone, I still liked exchanging token gifts with friends and seeing happy couples around (PDA rocks, I don't care what people say. MOAR MAKING OUT PLEASE.). And I think it's important for people's mental health that we have a few shared cultural traditions. It's not a bad idea to put on a smile and celebrate a little, now and then--even when things mostly suck, even if at first it feels forced.

I don't believe in love.

I mean, I do and I don't. As The Vile Scribbler wrote earlier today, "Step back far enough, and absolutely nothing matters because it's all just supernovas and black holes."

Interiorly, I am often way out there with the black holes, as you may have noticed. Not necessarily feeling nihilistic per se... just observing, holding within me knowledge that isn't quite compatible with full immersion in the day-to-day goings on of my animal half nor with the fairy tales of our milieu. Yet, other than those fairy tales--by that I mean our morals, our values, our sense of wonder and inspiration, our decisions, our idealistic visions, our connections with other people and the sometimes-not-precisely-accurate constructs we create to describe various types of interpersonal phenomena, and possibly the so-called user illusion itself--what else is there to make life meaningful? God is dead and we are meat.

(God is dead, I know... but I am not.)

So we're big on "I love you" around here, in spite of being a family headed by a pair of brooding-eyed unbelievers. All of us are forever gazing at each other adoringly and saying those words. Not really forever. But 20 times a day. We smile and laugh a lot, and we play. Some would find us nauseating.

And I cannot guess what we'll discover
When we turn the dirt with our palms cupped like shovels
But I know our filthy hands can wash one another’s
And not one speck will remain

Optimistic and realistic at once. This was our song for a while. I still like it.

Pairing off long-term is hard work. Or it was for us. Especially the first couple of years. In the beginning (I mean after the pure magic bit) it was difficult to parse everything. My inner noise and someone else's, mixed together, and so much stimulation to muddy the signals. Perhaps it isn't this way for everybody, but for me it was a puzzle figuring out where it all originated--what is going on here? who is bringing which aspects of it? and does it even matter? Am I ill at ease because of the other, or because of what's inside of me already? (Spoiler: it's always the way your edges and the other person's meet, never just one or the other.) Will I ever feel comfortable bringing my other foot inside the door or will I always need to be crouched down and ready to bolt?

I love where we're at now but I don't think either one of us misses the journey.

I think we all wonder sometimes if the pain of coming together with jagged edges is even worth enduring. I won't say that it is. It turned out to be worthwhile for me in this particular time and space, with this particular person. So what? Sometimes it isn't.

NaNoWriMo update #5

Something about this last NaNoWriMo update twists my stomach. I've always found it hard to talk about work in progress. Do I tell you about the plot? No... I hate summaries. Do I tell you my objectives? How gauche. Do I tell you how pretty I think my book will turn out? My arrogance will jinx me; I'll burn the cake for sure.

I didn't win. There's that. That's easy to say.

But what from there? I wrote this entry twice already and didn't like it the first time or the second. Both attempts were dull and analytical. And defensive. And I kept talking up my work up and then catching myself talking it up and not wanting to, and doing it again. I erased them. Truthfully, I can't care right now about NaNoWriMo 2012 or what I could do better the next hypothetical time I attempt the contest. I can't make myself care even a tiny bit. And I want to keep my half-done project clutched close to my chest. So I will ramble rather than deconstruct my experience in any methodical way.

At one point, early in November, I read an article by a famous author who says that he just sits down and writes manuscripts from beginning to end, without visualizing or writing down any ideas, outlines, or characters beforehand. He just goes. Like a rabbit down a race track. Straight as an arrow, all in chronological order. That killed me.

Wouldn't I like to be the kind of genius who just wakes up one day, walks the dogs (I have no dogs), and sits down to write a completely coherent novel?

I thought so. I spent the first week and a half of November finding out that I am not that guy.

Naw, I lied again. I probably kind of knew already. But I was not okay with it. Maybe still not. It's inconvenient.

How it works for me is this: I imagine up some people, one by one. I study them until I know them better than I know anybody. I set them a stage and invite them on board. Then I draw back the curtain and wait to hear the whispers of their goings on. If what happens doesn't move me, I fiddle with some elements and let it go again. I write nothing. I dream, think, play, work with my hands, listen to music, live life with my family, wait for the fire. And then I record whatever demands to be recorded.

It's not something I ever want to try to squeeze into a month's time again. Or any timeline at all. It cost me a lot to do so.

But... it was good for me. I cannot touch it again yet, but I have a strong feeling that I will finish this novel in the not-too-distant future and that I will be sickeningly proud of it when I am done.

Around the end of the month I was reading some Philip K. Dick:

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind. Not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality.

I think I'll yield to reality a little more than he did. But, still. Yes. I want to write about people I love. Hopefully people you love, too. There is too damn much in this world of everything else.