So I guess I dropped the ball on this blog for a week or so. It's not that I did not think about blogging, or more to the point, the fact that I had not contributed anything to my blog in a while, I just did not have any clear inspiration and I was coming home pretty tired all week from my first real physical work in quite some time. Even the inspiration for THIS blog is just the lack of inspiration I have had and to assuage my writer's guilt.
I did have a few thoughts over the course of the last 10 days on some topics I could blog about. I realized that there are some, perhaps even many, things that I do not feel I can share in this particular blog. Things that if I wanted to write about I would publish anonymously or even in a private journal for my eyes only. This is my public blog. I want this blog to be accessible to any of my friends and family on facebook who might be interested in reading what I have to say on whatever various topics I choose to write about. That said, there are certainly some aspects of my(and surely of anyone's) life that I wouldn't choose to share with everyone. And I'm sure it is just as true that not everyone would want to know the things that I would not talk about here.
I am still struggling for inspiration so I guess I will accept that this is all I have to contribute to my blog at this time. Maybe I will just write a detailed account of what I did at work last week for my next post. Could be incredibly boring but at least I will feel like I made an effort to write and share some of my life with others. I did see both a sea otter and a beautiful soaring eagle at my job site last week. Too bad I was not inspired to write a sonnet or something about the graceful beauty of an eagle's flight. Okay, I feel silly and cliched now, so I will end this post. Hopefully I will find something that I want to write about soon. At the very least I can start recycling my old poetry on here. I am sure some of it is in need of a little re-writing.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Who's the A-hole that went and made Cancer a dirty word?
Okay, well maybe not a DIRTY word, but certainly a word with negative connotations and practically synonymous with death.
As you may, or may not, know my astrological sign is Cancer the Crab. I don't find anything too offensive in being a hard exoskeleton having crustacean with pincers. I do however resent the fact that my Zodiacal namesake has also been paired to one of the most deadly and dreaded diseases that one may contract; cancer. Apparently it is all the fault of the early Greek physician Claudius Galenus who thought that the swollen veins surrounding a tumor resembled a crabs limbs.
As you may, or may not, know my astrological sign is Cancer the Crab. I don't find anything too offensive in being a hard exoskeleton having crustacean with pincers. I do however resent the fact that my Zodiacal namesake has also been paired to one of the most deadly and dreaded diseases that one may contract; cancer. Apparently it is all the fault of the early Greek physician Claudius Galenus who thought that the swollen veins surrounding a tumor resembled a crabs limbs.
Now, I grant that that particular cancer cell bears some minute resemblance to a crab, especially when colored red like that, though I say that it more closely resembles a sea urchin. Why couldn't the bad news you hope not to hear at the doctor's office be: "I'm sorry to have to tell you this but... you have Urchin." A quick google of "cancer cells" find many more images that do not resemble a crab, in fact many are in pairs and remind me more of testicles or 'gonads.' "I'm afraid you have Gonads of the prostate.." Alas, no, instead the poor shelled crustacean of the Zodiac gets his good name dragged through the mud and is forever associated in people's minds with the diagnosis equivalent of a death sentence.
I even found THIS awesome representation of the zodiac symbol
in an article about Farrah Fawcett's battle with, and succumbing to, cancer.
I guess I just wanted to write this blog to vent (and gripe a little) about being the only member of the Zodiac to be tied to such a distasteful and unpopular ailment. It peeves me off a little. Thanks a lot Doctor Galenus! Why couldn't you have seen a spider-looking cancer tumor, or the gonadal pictures that are all over the internet nowadays? Ah well.. I guess I could be all dark and morbid and relish in the fact that my signs name is the only one so dreaded in hospital corridors. Watch out for Cancer's.. they have a most deadly condition named after them...
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Alternate Mes
I had an idea for a post, it could even be an idea for a story or book, about possible alternate versions of myself. Say, for instance, I had been born in a different century. I could have been born into a far flung future(if humanity indeed exists far into the future) or into the distant past.
Perhaps there is an alternate me wherein my pirate garbed persona is not just a costumed affectation I don for SCA and other just for fun events, but is, instead, my true swashbuckling self; a salty sea dog aboard a ship of other scoundrels taking what we can from those weaker than us. If an alternate, pirate, me exists, I am sure that he/me would not be a very nice person. As much as Hollywood and books would like to have us believe in the fantasy of the noble and honorable rogue of the sea, the handsome trickster who may be a thief but he loathes to kill and he fights on the side of right, I doubt such fantastical heroic figures existed among the bloodthirsty lot of murderers, rapists and thieves who actually roamed the seas in search of ships to plunder and booty to loot. So, Josh the Red, would likely look upon the version of me who is writing this blog as a weak-bellied land-lubber, and kill me for even pretending to be any kind of relation to his vile rum-swilling self.
Still, it would be interesting to live a day in the life of that cutthroat pirate. Even to experience the more distasteful elements of his sea fairing and marauding, the actions of true pirates, that have been sanitized from all the Disney and family friendly pirate portrayals. Murder, death, sickness at sea, kidnapping, rape, ransoming, primitive medicine and nutrition. Truth is painful in many ways, even the true lives of our stories' white knights in shining armor were much grittier and less honorable than they are portrayed in the stories we tell today. I wanted to go further with this post. Maybe even write an imagined 'Day in the Life Of' Josh the Red. Perhaps I will get around to that in a future post. I would also like to hypothesize on a future-born self. I've met many people who say that they feel as if they were born in the wrong century, wishing they lived in simpler times like the olden days or during the renaissance(often seeming to overlook just how HARD life was in those times..) I am not one of these, I am a lover of sci-fi and often wished as a kid that I lived in the world of Star Trek, where money is an outmoded concept and teleportation as a mode of travel and replicators that can make any meal you desire in an instant are a reality. I do not know if such a Utopian vision of humanity can ever come to pass, but if it could, I would wish to live in THAT century. Even the gritty, near-future world that William Gibson describes in his cyberpunk novels appeals to me more than our world of menial jobs, mortgage payments and reality TV. I don't know. Maybe I am just a dissatisfied soul, and I would find something disagreeable even in an alternate life where I was king of a peaceful empire and had my every need catered to. If so, blame my pessimistic Cancerian nature. I DO love the internet, so I am least grateful to live in the age of Google and information at our fingertips. I know not everyone agrees that this is a good thing, but that is a part of what makes this me ME and I would not have it any other way.
Perhaps there is an alternate me wherein my pirate garbed persona is not just a costumed affectation I don for SCA and other just for fun events, but is, instead, my true swashbuckling self; a salty sea dog aboard a ship of other scoundrels taking what we can from those weaker than us. If an alternate, pirate, me exists, I am sure that he/me would not be a very nice person. As much as Hollywood and books would like to have us believe in the fantasy of the noble and honorable rogue of the sea, the handsome trickster who may be a thief but he loathes to kill and he fights on the side of right, I doubt such fantastical heroic figures existed among the bloodthirsty lot of murderers, rapists and thieves who actually roamed the seas in search of ships to plunder and booty to loot. So, Josh the Red, would likely look upon the version of me who is writing this blog as a weak-bellied land-lubber, and kill me for even pretending to be any kind of relation to his vile rum-swilling self.
Still, it would be interesting to live a day in the life of that cutthroat pirate. Even to experience the more distasteful elements of his sea fairing and marauding, the actions of true pirates, that have been sanitized from all the Disney and family friendly pirate portrayals. Murder, death, sickness at sea, kidnapping, rape, ransoming, primitive medicine and nutrition. Truth is painful in many ways, even the true lives of our stories' white knights in shining armor were much grittier and less honorable than they are portrayed in the stories we tell today. I wanted to go further with this post. Maybe even write an imagined 'Day in the Life Of' Josh the Red. Perhaps I will get around to that in a future post. I would also like to hypothesize on a future-born self. I've met many people who say that they feel as if they were born in the wrong century, wishing they lived in simpler times like the olden days or during the renaissance(often seeming to overlook just how HARD life was in those times..) I am not one of these, I am a lover of sci-fi and often wished as a kid that I lived in the world of Star Trek, where money is an outmoded concept and teleportation as a mode of travel and replicators that can make any meal you desire in an instant are a reality. I do not know if such a Utopian vision of humanity can ever come to pass, but if it could, I would wish to live in THAT century. Even the gritty, near-future world that William Gibson describes in his cyberpunk novels appeals to me more than our world of menial jobs, mortgage payments and reality TV. I don't know. Maybe I am just a dissatisfied soul, and I would find something disagreeable even in an alternate life where I was king of a peaceful empire and had my every need catered to. If so, blame my pessimistic Cancerian nature. I DO love the internet, so I am least grateful to live in the age of Google and information at our fingertips. I know not everyone agrees that this is a good thing, but that is a part of what makes this me ME and I would not have it any other way.
Friday, July 15, 2011
New Old Post..
I failed to post in the past two days so here is a quick re-post from my facebook poetry:
The Ending Has Just Begun
They say all good things must come to an end.
The same must be true of bad things.
But sometimes an ending is just the beginning,
and a new beginning may be the end to an old story.
Endings can take longer than expected,
when expectations are based on false assumptions,
and prior experience of a simpler time.
This ending has just begun.
This ending is a story in itself.
This ending has it's own beginning
and this ending has an end.
This ending has just begun.
I don't know how to end this.
This is not the end.
But I don't know where to take this.
I don't know where to begin.
This may have ended before it ever began.
And maybe I'm a fool for beginning it to begin with.
This ending has just begun.
This ending is a story in itself.
This ending has it's own beginning
and this ending has an end.
This ending has just begun.
Now I've slipped into absurity and repitition.
Maybe it is time to just end this.
Or begin it properly.
But I am bad at endings.
So I will just say this:
The End.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Summertime Blues
Well, I guess this post would be more accurate if titled: Summertime Illness.. but I couldn't resist the song tie-in. :)
For the past week I have been partially incapacitated with an annoying Summer Cold. I am not certain why I feel the need to describe it as a Summer Cold exactly.. it is presumably the same sort of cold one might catch in Winter, Fall or Spring. But there is something extra depressing and draining about a Summertime Cold to me. Maybe it is the fact that the weather (sometimes) is nice and sunny out and you are stuck in bed feeling shitty, or maybe it just seems to hit harder when it is warm and huddling under the covers in bed does not give the same sort of comfort that it does when you are ill in the winter months. Regardless of why, I have always differentiated the Summertime Cold from other colds or form of illness. They always get me down. Though, to be fair, I cannot think of a single person that I know who gets cheered up by getting sick. (Though I am sure there are some strange germ fetishists out there somewhere who WOULD! :D ) After a week of feeling run down, congested and coughing my lungs out, I feel like I am over the worst of it and have achieved 3/4 human status. At least I no longer feel like blended poop, as my friend Coy so eloquently put it. :) I am certainly smiley emoticon-ing more, and probably ACTUALLY smiling more too.
I am not sure there is a real point to this post. I wanted to blog something, and this is what was on my mind. Aside from the Summertime Cold season(I know of at least 3 others who have or had it in the past weeks) it seems that we are in a period of dying, loss and memorial lately. I just recently lost a close friend of the family, and found out this morning that a cousin of mine, who was my age but had been on dialysis since he was a teenager, passed away. There is a sort of superstition that deaths come in threes, and I am really (selfishly) hoping that the 3rd death in this series does not hit any closer to home. I fully believe that death is a necessary thing, and as my poem post of yesterday may have shown you, I do not believe death is necessarily the end. I feel in my heart at least that my friend and former roommate, Scott, has started on the next path of his souls journey, and that the energy that was him and his spirit is not gone but merely moved on to other planes of existence. He can still reach out to us if he chooses to or needs to send us a message. Though I find it more likely that he will be moving on, not lingering, as some spirits do, to become ghosts or bringers of other paranormal activity. We shall see (or not) I suppose. I have not truly mourned the loss of my friend yet. I am bad at dealing with loss and death. I have been fortunate in my life to have little of such to deal with. I feel like I will mourn soon, if only for my own selfish loss of a great soul in my life.
Anyway, enough of the blues and talk of sad things. Such things may be necessary but no one says we have to like them. I hope these times pass quickly and times of love and light come to fill out the rest of our Summer. Summertime should be a warm and joyous time. Bring on the rays of light and running through sprinklers. I'm ready for an end to the Summertime Blues.
For the past week I have been partially incapacitated with an annoying Summer Cold. I am not certain why I feel the need to describe it as a Summer Cold exactly.. it is presumably the same sort of cold one might catch in Winter, Fall or Spring. But there is something extra depressing and draining about a Summertime Cold to me. Maybe it is the fact that the weather (sometimes) is nice and sunny out and you are stuck in bed feeling shitty, or maybe it just seems to hit harder when it is warm and huddling under the covers in bed does not give the same sort of comfort that it does when you are ill in the winter months. Regardless of why, I have always differentiated the Summertime Cold from other colds or form of illness. They always get me down. Though, to be fair, I cannot think of a single person that I know who gets cheered up by getting sick. (Though I am sure there are some strange germ fetishists out there somewhere who WOULD! :D ) After a week of feeling run down, congested and coughing my lungs out, I feel like I am over the worst of it and have achieved 3/4 human status. At least I no longer feel like blended poop, as my friend Coy so eloquently put it. :) I am certainly smiley emoticon-ing more, and probably ACTUALLY smiling more too.
I am not sure there is a real point to this post. I wanted to blog something, and this is what was on my mind. Aside from the Summertime Cold season(I know of at least 3 others who have or had it in the past weeks) it seems that we are in a period of dying, loss and memorial lately. I just recently lost a close friend of the family, and found out this morning that a cousin of mine, who was my age but had been on dialysis since he was a teenager, passed away. There is a sort of superstition that deaths come in threes, and I am really (selfishly) hoping that the 3rd death in this series does not hit any closer to home. I fully believe that death is a necessary thing, and as my poem post of yesterday may have shown you, I do not believe death is necessarily the end. I feel in my heart at least that my friend and former roommate, Scott, has started on the next path of his souls journey, and that the energy that was him and his spirit is not gone but merely moved on to other planes of existence. He can still reach out to us if he chooses to or needs to send us a message. Though I find it more likely that he will be moving on, not lingering, as some spirits do, to become ghosts or bringers of other paranormal activity. We shall see (or not) I suppose. I have not truly mourned the loss of my friend yet. I am bad at dealing with loss and death. I have been fortunate in my life to have little of such to deal with. I feel like I will mourn soon, if only for my own selfish loss of a great soul in my life.
Anyway, enough of the blues and talk of sad things. Such things may be necessary but no one says we have to like them. I hope these times pass quickly and times of love and light come to fill out the rest of our Summer. Summertime should be a warm and joyous time. Bring on the rays of light and running through sprinklers. I'm ready for an end to the Summertime Blues.
Summertime Bluesby Alan Jackson
Monday, July 11, 2011
My favorite of my recent poems..
I wanted to start sharing some of my poetry here on this blog, so here
is my favorite of my poems I have written within the last year:
When the World Ends
When the world ends
I will walk with you, hand in hand,
Under starlight, in the middle of the day.
When the world ends
When the world ends
I will stand with you, back to back,
Shotguns at the ready, popping zombie heads.
When the world ends
When the world ends
We will watch as all that we love falls
And laugh, for we know it is just the beginning,
When the world ends
When the world ends
We will joke about reincarnating as roaches
Upon the barren rock that may remain
When the world ends
When the world ends
We shall ascend as beings of Light and Soul
To embark upon a new journey together
When the world Begins...
Sunday, July 10, 2011
First Post
Writer's block is a funny thing. Not "funny ha-ha" mind you, but funny nonetheless. Trying to think of something to write here I ran up against my old friend/foe, the writer's block. I have come to think of it as a sort of entity unto itself after all these years. I have within me, a gift for writing, or at least so I have felt and been told in the past. However, I also struggle to find inspiration, motivation and forward momentum in wordsmithery. (Yeah, I think I just made up that last word, but it sounded right..) I constantly find myself "up against the block" as it were, wanting, on some level at least, to express myself with words(written, typed, even occasionally spoken) and yet unable to think of the thing to say, or the clever metaphor, even just some way new of observing something, so as not to seem boring, obtuse or plagiarizing.
So it comes that my first post on my new blog is about writer's block. I have written about writer's block before. Maybe it comes from a hope that in giving "the block" some undue, hopefully unwanted(it is my FOE after all, I want for 'it' any of the things it does not want) attention, it will GO AWAY. I suppose it is possible that "the block" knows what is best for me, and it only surfaces to stymie and stop my writing efforts when it is in the better interest of my own mental health that I NOT write what I intended to, writing on other subjects, or at times, not writing at all. Perhaps "the block" is a silent hero in my life, saving bits of my sanity by it's efforts to block my creative outlets at times of my own mental weakness. Or it is just a dick. Not wanting creative expression of any kind to exist when it is around.
I think I had more to say in that last paragraph, but I do not think that "the block" likes me talking about him, as my fount of words seems to have run dry once more. Ah well.. I have bleed a fair amount of words onto this digital page all the while fighting the writer's block, so I will have to accept 3 paragraphs as a decent affront to "the block"s efforts to silence my pixelated penmanship. I hope I am able to find a successful outlet in this blog for the imp of creativity that sometimes dwells behind my eyes. And maybe if I battle "the block" more often, he will torment me less.
So it comes that my first post on my new blog is about writer's block. I have written about writer's block before. Maybe it comes from a hope that in giving "the block" some undue, hopefully unwanted(it is my FOE after all, I want for 'it' any of the things it does not want) attention, it will GO AWAY. I suppose it is possible that "the block" knows what is best for me, and it only surfaces to stymie and stop my writing efforts when it is in the better interest of my own mental health that I NOT write what I intended to, writing on other subjects, or at times, not writing at all. Perhaps "the block" is a silent hero in my life, saving bits of my sanity by it's efforts to block my creative outlets at times of my own mental weakness. Or it is just a dick. Not wanting creative expression of any kind to exist when it is around.
I think I had more to say in that last paragraph, but I do not think that "the block" likes me talking about him, as my fount of words seems to have run dry once more. Ah well.. I have bleed a fair amount of words onto this digital page all the while fighting the writer's block, so I will have to accept 3 paragraphs as a decent affront to "the block"s efforts to silence my pixelated penmanship. I hope I am able to find a successful outlet in this blog for the imp of creativity that sometimes dwells behind my eyes. And maybe if I battle "the block" more often, he will torment me less.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)