Two Choices

Abby, Marcel's current wife, ensnared him 25 years ago. It was a deliberate plan. At the time Marcel was the headmaster of Saint Peter's private school, married to Genevieve. They had a young son, Marcel junior. Abby was the school's director of public relations.

The couple carried on their affair meeting secretly in the broom closet after hours for over a year until everything broke open. I don't know how but it was not pretty. Poor Genevieve was in shock, devastated and betrayed. 

Abby and Marcel announced that they planned to divorce their spouses and marry each other. There were young children on both sides, all of them boys.

Abby's mother said, A marriage built on an affair is like building your home on a swamp. Abby just laughed.

He traded in his Subaru for a Volvo, Marcel's neighbor said.

Shortly after the divorces and subsequent marriage Abby and Marcel bought a house nearby and Abby gave birth to a daughter. They named her Solei. Sunshine in the swamp, Abby's mother said under her breath.

Now Solei is a gorgeous young princess age 25 with chartreuse and magenta dyed locks. She is now the target and pawn in her mother's latest chess game.

For years Marcel's work has called him to be overseas. He was headmaster at American schools in Japan and then Germany. Abby didn't mind at all in fact she preferred not having him around. 

Meanwhile Abby and Solei became drinking partners. They were more like two sisters than mother and daughter. We're starting a business, they said. It's a nonprofit raising money for the homeless. They went drinking every night and dined at trendy restaurants after shopping for designer handbags.

Now Marcel has finally retired and returned home for good. But the battle lines have been drawn. He is not welcomed. Mother and daughter are in charge with big plans. We plan to tear down the garage and build a new two-story apartment on the premises, Abby said. And I've hired Hilda to plant a garden of flowers and bushes just like Blithewold Arboretum.

Oh, and that business they spoke of running has never existed. It was all talk over drinks at fancy cafes. It was smoke and mirrors. Abby has now decided to get a part-time job at another school about an hour north.

Marcel has two choices. 

He can live 

or he can die.

shadow of an idea

  “Writing takes a pen, a sheet of paper and, to start with, just the shadow of an idea.”
― Françoise Sagan, Dans un mois, dans un an

There is a certain kind of stupidity

“There is a certain kind of stupidity reserved for women's dealings with men.”
― Françoise Sagan, Dans un mois, dans un an

Say Nothing

“It is a great, a pleasant thing to have a friend with whom to walk, untroubled, through the woods, by the stream, saying nothing, at peace--the heart all clean and quiet and empty, ready for the spirit that may choose to be its guest.”
― Catherine Drinker Bowen, Friends and Fiddlers: Memoirs

Twice

“Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.”
― Catherine Drinker Bowen 

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin 

Librarians like to be given trouble

“In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.”

― Catherine Drinker Bowen

Catherine Drinker Bowen

What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

Gabriel García Márquez

One thing that Hemingway wrote that greatly impressed me was that writing for him was like boxing. He took care of his health and his well-being. Faulkner had a reputation of being a drunkard, but in every interview that he gave he said that it was impossible to write one line when drunk. Hemingway said this too. Bad readers have asked me if I was drugged when I wrote some of my works. But that illustrates that they don’t know anything about literature or drugs. To be a good writer you have to be absolutely lucid at every moment of writing, and in good health. I’m very much against the romantic concept of writing which maintains that the act of writing is a sacrifice, and that the worse the economic conditions or the emotional state, the better the writing. I think you have to be in a very good emotional and physical state. Literary creation for me requires good health, and the Lost Generation understood this. They were people who loved life.

Gabriel García Márquez–from a 1981 interview with The Paris Review

Nikki Giovanni

Rage is to writers what water is to fish.

I have been considered a writer who writes from rage and it confuses me. What else do writers write from?

Nikki Giovanni

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.

  —Ernest Hemingway

Resentment sharpens his eye, hostility hones his killer instinct.

Although it is not necessary for a writer to be a prick, neither does it hurt. A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material. Resentment sharpens his eye, hostility hones his killer instinct.

John Gregory Dunne

Southern New England Boiled Dinner

Rinse and chop collard greens. Add frozen corn. Add sprinkles of Adobo, water, and a bloop of olive oil. Boil on stovetop until collards are tender or 4 minutes in pressure cooker. Add sweetened dried cranberries.  It is simple and delicious.

Françoise Sagan

 “I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.”
― Françoise Sagan

with all your heart

“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.”

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

the power to revoke

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

“Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.”

― Marcus Aurelius

see what sort of people they are

“When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

When you wake up in the morning

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Kim Addonizio

"What I've learned is simple: if you nurture it, it will expand, and it will nurture you in return. I have also learned that it is a kind of salvation. Sometimes it's more than enough and sometimes it's not enough — by that I mean one's own creativity. If you can truly tap in to the creative process, you know it's there all the time, and then you probably don't need saving."

Kim Addonizio  

Patrick Ryan

William Styron once said to a group of us that if you truly want to write, you have to set up your life so that you can write. Meaning, do what you have to do to create a life that facilitates writing—even if that’s only for an hour a day.

Paul Monette, in failing health and not long before he died, told me to keep writing because the good stuff would come to the surface. That was such a simple and wonderful idea to plant in my head as I wrote story after story and novel after novel, one unpublished manuscript after another.

Patrick Ryan

See, Biff, everybody around me is so false that I’m constantly lowering my ideals . . .

 Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman

“To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off.”
― Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?

 Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

A man is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime.

  Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy.

― Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

Martha: Oh, I like your anger. I think that's what I like about you most. Your anger.

― Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit.

  Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

Study

“In plain words, you’ve got to make up your mind to study whatever you undertake, and concentrate your mind on it, and really work at it. This isn’t wisdom. Any damned fool in the world knows it’s true, whether it’s a question of raising horses or writing plays. You simply have to face the prospect of starting at the bottom and spending years learning how to do it.”

― Eugene O'Neill

Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

"Tragic is the plight of the tragedian whose only audience is himself! Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors. Terrified is Caligula by the faces he makes! But I tell you to laugh in the mirror, that seeing your life gay, you may begin to live as a guest, and not as a condemned one!"—Act II, Scene I.

Eugene O'Neill  Lazarus Laughed, 1927

I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!.. And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason.

  Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night

Eugene O'Neill

“It's a great game - the pursuit of happiness.”
― Eugene O'Neill

“Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.”
― Eugene O'Neill

Without tenderness, a man is uninteresting.

  Marlene Dietrich

That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world

 “The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.”
― Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night

Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night

“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.”
― Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night

Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.

 Eugene O'Neill

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.

 Eugene O'Neill

When there are more fishes in the tank, kissing fishes realize the crisis. Because the kissing fish itself does not have a strong fighting power, the most commonly used weapon is its jagged mouth. When they kiss, it means they are fighting with each other.

 This is a perfect metaphor for group behavior.

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always. Arthur Miller

Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value. Arthur Miller

You are responsible for the world that you live in. It is not government's responsibility. It is not your school's or your social club's or your church's or your neighbor's or your fellow citizen's. It is yours, utterly and singularly yours. August Wilson

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions. Edward Albee

The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative. ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves. Edward Albee

Responsibility

It is not enough to hold the line against the dark. It is your responsibility to lead into the light. People don't like the light--it reveals too much. But hand in hand with the creative artist, you can lead people into the wisdom that is known to all other animals: simply, that it is the dark we have to fear. 

Edward Albee

If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly. Edward Albee

Most people don't want art to be disturbing.

All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don't want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don't think art should be escapist. That's a waste of time. 

 Edward Albee

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

  Edward Albee

Optimism

“The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.”

 Edward Albee

Edward Albee: "I write about people who are very articulate about choosing not to communicate," he says. "They lie to themselves. They can communicate, but they don't."

The world he depicted 30 years ago, he says, is only getting worse. "We still treat our old people very badly. We still destroy our kids by trying to turn them into carbon copies of ourselves. We are governed by knaves and fools. Every time you write a play, you think you portray a situation that people will try to change. Unfortunately, I haven't seen that happen."

Mr. Albee drew his own conclusions about family values early on. Two weeks after birth, he was adopted by Reed and Frances Albee, wealthy socialites who raised him in upscale Larchmont, N.Y. It was hate at first sight. "As young as I can remember, I despised their values," Mr. Albee says. "They were right-wing. They were bigots. I didn't like them at all."

"I write about people who are very articulate about choosing not to communicate," he says. "They lie to themselves. They can communicate, but they don't."

"I don't think we should go around being idiotically happy, but I think we should fully participate in our lives," he says. That includes acknowledging death.

"If you trick yourself into thinking that you're going to live forever, then there's time for everything. That's why so many people end up at the end of their lives never having lived."

That philosophy resonates in "Three Tall Women." The middle-aged character says, "Make 'em aware that they're dying from the minute they're alive."

"I think plays should be analyzed as a reality experience and not thought of as how they relate to the playwright," Mr. Albee says. "In theory, all plays should be produced with no one knowing who wrote them."

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1995-10-29-1995302144-story.html

Dream

Friday morning I dreamed I baked banana bread for a friends party. During the party I asked for a cup of coffee to squelch my aching head. I woke up with a killer sinus headache. The little bit of rain we had overnight brought out the grass pollen. I'm so grateful for sinus medicine ( a decongestant) along with generic Excedrin. They work if you catch the pain in time.

Norman Lear at 100

“Yes, the meaning of life can be expressed in one word: tomorrow.” What pieces of advice does he have that stand out above the rest? “There are two little words we don’t pay enough attention to: over and next. When something is over, it is over and we are on to next. Between those words, we live in the moment, make the most of them.” Does he consider a hot dog to be a sandwich? “I consider a hot dog to be a personal delight.” article

Sleep

 Why it's not good to regularly use antihistamines as sleep aids.

Article

Cow Hugging

 Article

Tim Siedell

I’m a night owl, but I tend to do my thinking at night and my writing in the morning. The afternoon is my self-loathing time.

Beyond reading and writing? My advice would be to live a creative life. By that I mean, keep your radar up at all times. Go places. Do things. Look around. Observe other people. Listen to how they talk. The worst thing a creative person can do is sit in a room and create all day. Let new stuff flow into your brain and collide with all that old stuff you’ve accumulated over the years. Then make sure you have a pencil and some blank paper handy, just in case there’s a spark.

          Tim Siedell

You are perfectly cast in your life. I can’t imagine anyone but you in the role. Go play.

 Lin Manuel

Go to where the silence is and say something.

Amy Goodman

Otto Dix Painting "To Beauty"

To Beauty (An die Schönheit), Otto Dix  German, 1891–1969 

1922 Oil on canvas 55 1/10 × 48 in 140 × 122 cm

Rebecca Solnit

The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity.
Rebecca Solnit

aching souls

“Gould is a night wanderer, and he has put down descriptions of dreadful things he has seen on dark New York streets – descriptions, for example, of the herds of big gray rats that come out in the hours before dawn in some neighborhoods of the lower East Side and Harlem and unconcernedly walk the sidewalks. ‘I sometimes believe that these rats are not rats at all,’ he says, ‘but the damned and aching souls of tenement landlords.”
― Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel

I can remember the face on that woman

“I’m not going to stand for it any longer," said Mr. Flood. "I’m going to put my foot down. All I want in this world is a little peace and quiet, and he gets me all raced up. Here a while back I heard a preacher talking on the radio about the peacefulness of the old, and I thought to myself, ‘You ignorant man!’ I’m ninety-four years old and I have never yet had any peace, to speak of. My mind is just a turmoil of regrets. It’s not what I did that I regret, it’s what I didn’t do. Except for the bottle, I always walked the straight and narrow; a family man, a good provider, never cut up, never did ugly, and I regret it. In the summer of 1902 I came real close to getting in serious trouble with a married woman, but I had a fight with my conscience and my conscience won, and what’s the result? I had two wives, good, Christian women, and I can’t hardly remember what either of them looked like, but I can remember the face on that woman so clear it hurts, and there’s never a day passes I don’t think about her, and there’s never a day passes I don’t curse myself. ‘What kind of a timid, dried-up, weevily fellow were you?’ I say to myself. ‘You should’ve said to hell with what’s right and what’s wrong, the devil take the hindmost. You’d have something to remember, you’d be happier now.’ She’s out in Woodlawn, six feet under, and she’s been there twenty-two years, God rest her, and here I am, just an old, old man with nothing but a belly and a brain and a dollar or two."

"Life is sad," said Mr. Maggiani.”
― Joseph Mitchell, Old Mr. Flood

Joseph Mitchell

“We get a lot of goormies in Libby’s,” said Mr. Murchison. “I can spot a goormy right off. Moment he sits down he wants to know do we have any boolybooze.” “Bouillabaisse,” said Mr. Flood. “Yes,” said Mr. Murchison, “and I tell him, ‘Quit showing off! We don’t carry no boolybooze. Never did. There’s a time and a place for everything. If you was to go into a restaurant in France,’ I ask him, ‘would you call for some Daniel Webster fish chowder?’ I love a hearty eater, but I do despise a goormy. All they know is boolybooze and pompano and something that’s out of season, nothing else will do. And when they get through eating they don’t settle their check and go on about their business. No, they sit there and deliver you a lecture on what they et, how good it was, how it was almost as good as a piece of fish they had in the Caffy dee lah Pooty-doo in Paris, France, on January 16, 1928; they remember every meal they ever et, or make out they do. And every goormy I ever saw is an expert on herbs. Herbs, herbs, herbs! If you let one get started on the subject of herbs he’ll talk you deef, dumb, and blind. Way I feel about herbs, on any fish I ever saw, pepper and salt and a spoon of melted butter is herbs aplenty.”
― Joseph Mitchell, Old Mr Flood

Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel

“Mazie became interested in Catholicism in the winter of 1920. A drug addict on Mulberry Street, a prostitute with two small daughters, came to her cage one night and asked for help. The woman said her children were starving. "I knew this babe was a junky," Mazie says, "and I followed her home just to see was she lying about her kids. She had two kids all right, and they were starving in this crummy little room. I tried to get everybody to do something--the cops, the Welfare, the so-called missions on the Bowery that the Methodists run or whatever to hell they are. But all these people said the girl was a junky. That excused them from lifting a hand. So I seen two nuns on the street, and they went up there with me. between us, we got the woman straightened out. I liked the nuns. They seemed real human. Ever since then I been interested in the Cat'lic Church.”
― Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel

Joseph Mitchell

“I’m immune to the average germ; don’t even catch colds; haven’t had a cold since 1912. Only reason I caught that one, I went on a toot and it was a pouring-down rainy night in the dead of winter and my shoes were cracked and they let the damp in and I lost my balance a time or two and sloshed around in the gutter and somewhere along the line I mislaid my hat and I’d just had a haircut and I stood in a draft in one saloon an hour or more and there was a poor fellow next to me sneezing his head off and when I got home I crawled into a bed that was beside an open window like a fool and passed out with my wet clothes on, shoes and all. Also, I’d spent the night before sitting up on a train and hadn’t slept a wink and my resistance was low. If the good Lord can just see His way clear to protect me from accidents, no stumbling on the stairs, no hell-fired automobiles bearing down on me in the dark, no broken bones, I’ll hit a hundred and fifteen easy.”
― Joseph Mitchell, Old Mr Flood

Joseph Mitchell, Old Mr Flood

“The trembly fellow sighed and said, “I’m all out of whack. I’m going uptown and see my doctor.” Mr. Flood snorted again. “Oh, shut up,” he said. “Damn your doctor! I tell you what you do. You get right out of here and go over to Libby’s oyster house and tell the man you want to eat some of his big oysters. Don’t sit down. Stand up at that fine marble bar they got over there, where you can watch the man knife them open. And tell him you intend to drink the oyster liquor; he’ll knife them on the cup shell, so the liquor won’t spill. And be sure you get the big ones. Get them so big you’ll have to rear back to swallow, the size that most restaurants use for fries and stews; God forgive them, they don’t know any better. Ask for Robbins Islands, Mattitucks, Cape Cods, or Saddle Rocks. And don’t put any of that red sauce on them, that cocktail sauce, that mess, that gurry. Ask the man for half a lemon, poke it a time or two to free the juice, and squeeze it over the oysters. And the first one he knifes, pick it up and smell it, the way you’d smell a rose, or a shot of brandy. That briny, seaweedy fragrance will clear your head; it’ll make your blood run faster. And don’t just eat six; take your time and eat a dozen, eat two dozen, eat three dozen, eat four dozen. And then leave the man a generous tip and go buy yourself a fifty-cent cigar and put your hat on the side of your head and take a walk down to Bowling Green. Look at the sky! Isn’t it blue? And look at the girls a-tap-tap-tapping past on their pretty little feet! Aren’t they just the finest girls you ever saw, the bounciest, the rumpiest, the laughingest? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for even thinking about spending good money on a damned doctor? And along about here, you better be careful. You’re apt to feel so bucked-up you’ll slap strangers on the back, or kick a window in, or fight a cop, or jump on the tailboard of a truck and steal a ride.”
― Joseph Mitchell, Old Mr Flood

Twain

“When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.”
― Mark Twain  

The best fighter is never angry. Lao Tzu

Write to please yourself. And don’t expect too much.

Lawrence Block

The best writing advice is also the best life advice: remember that nobody else has any idea what they’re doing, either.

  David Burr Gerrard

Memory

“Memory is a tough place. You were there. If this is not the truth, it is also not a lie.” ― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

Sometimes you read something and a thought that was floating around in your veins organizes itself into the sentence that reflects it.

― Claudia Rankine

Open and Subconscious

I’m always thinking about how to keep the text open, so that other things can happen besides what I intend. Claudia Rankine

Writing is very subconscious and the last thing I want to do is think about it. Cormac McCarthy

Short time here, long time gone

“Short time here, long time gone. The reason to try to be good, smart, kind, and on the side of angels is because it's more fun and because there really aren't any angels.”
― Mark Vonnegut

how hard you look

 “There are no people anywhere who don’t have some mental illness. It all depends on where you set the bar and how hard you look.”
― Mark Vonnegut

It was enough to have been a unicorn.

“At the end of his life, which had included financial ruin in the Great Depression, his wife's barbiturate addiction and death by overdose, and then his own lung cancer, Doc said, "It was enough to have been a unicorn." What he meant was that he got to do art. It was magic to him that his hands and mind got to make wonderful things, that he didn't have to be just another goat or horse.”
― Mark Vonnegut

to survive

“Most adults have forgotten what they had to do to survive childhood.”
― Mark Vonnegut

frighten off extroverts

“I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms--it's to frighten off extroverts.”
― Mark Vonnegut

Ann Patchett

The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived.
Ann Patchett

A Writer

 A writer is a guy in the hospital wearing one of those gowns that’s open in the back. An editor is walking behind, making sure that nobody can see his ass.
John Bennett

Art is lunging forward without certainty

“Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.”
― Mark Vonnegut, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So  article

The Alley

This morning I let Romeo out to pee in the small yard and noticed a steady stream of smoke coming from the alley between the two apartment buildings behind us. I walked over to investigate and could see that it was a burning cloth on the asphalt. I phoned the fire department and they showed up wearing helmets, holding axes. They were looking in the back parking lot. So I went out and showed them where it was because by this time it had stopped smoking. I contacted the landlord to let him know.  It's a famous alley in this neighborhood, one that always attracts trouble.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.

 Ralph Waldo Emerson

Forecast

I'm looking at the weather forecast as if she is my fortune teller.

I am drinking Concord grape juice out of my tall yellow rain boots

I am sick of fans blowing on my neck to fend off the heat

I'd prefer cool air, silence and rain

60 Cents

I found 60 cents on my front steps. Must've fallen out of the pants of someone who sat here.
Library book overdue notice arrived. The fine was 60 cents.

Yesterday on the way to Pricerite we fell in line with a funeral procession.
Turned out to be the funeral of a friend of mine.

Sometimes the universe whispers directly to you.

Stephen Kuusisto

I remember my mother saying that she thought she was hanged for horse thievery in a prior life, because to this day she couldn't wear turtlenecks. 

-Stephen Kuusisto, Planet of the Blind a memoir

Ron Koertge Poem

Cinderella's Diary

I miss my stepmother. What a thing to say
but it's true. The prince is so boring: four
hours to dress and then the cheering throngs.
Again. The page who holds the door is cute
enough to eat. Where is he once Mr. Charming
kisses my forehead goodnight?

Every morning I gaze out a casement window
at the hunters, dark men with blood on their
boots who joke and mount, their black trousers
straining, rough beards, callused hands, selfish,
abrupt ...

Oh, dear diary—I am lost in ever after:
Those insufferable birds, someone in every
room with a lute, the queen calling me to look
at another painting of her son, this time
holding the transparent slipper I wish
I'd never seen.

 by Ron Koertge, from Fever. © Red Hen Press

Jay Parini

Write about what really interests you, and do it every day. If you don't do it everyday, you'll never do it. Getting a habit of writing is the key: pick a time of day when you can manage it, and arrange your life so that this time is sacred. Use that time, and don't fret about not getting anything done. That is your time to write. If you just read during that time, that's okay too. Reading and writing go hand in hand. When my reading is not going well, my writing falters. I need to be excited about what I'm reading. Everything follows from that.

Jay Parini

Sometimes

“Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.”

― Dalai Lama XIV

Source of Strength

 “There is a saying in Tibetan, 'Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.'
No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that's our real disaster.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

A sense of universal responsibility

A sense of universal responsibility has the power to negate adverse traits such as selfishness, deceiving others, abuse, and so on. There will be no need to be afraid. Life becomes meaningful, and households, communities, and nations, large and small, become happier.

Dalai Lama

True Change

True change is within; leave the outside as it is. 

14th Dalai Lama

When you hear a one-year-old laugh, it’s pretty much the funniest thing on the planet. Pete Wentz

Bare-chested, Tattooed man with his Sled Dog

Today walking down Social Street with Romeo I saw a bare-chested, tattooed man with his sled dog walking in the Social Street schoolyard.  A few years ago the vacant brick school house was converted to apartments where this man lives. I watched as he led the dog up onto a flat-topped gray retaining wall. What is he doing, I wondered. When the dog was at waist height to the man, he sat down. The dog seemed to know the drill. The man began brushing the dog with a red brush and huge clumps of white fluff were released into the air. The dog turned towards us watching Romeo and I walking by. He didn't bark. A good boy.

Ernest Becker Anthropologist

“Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death 

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would crate such a complex and fancy worm food?
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death 

“The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death 

writers were fortunate enough that they could treat their neurosis every day by writing

“We are so seldom told the truth and in Hamlet, Shakespeare tells us [the truth]; we don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and what the bad news is, and we [as humans] respond to that.” 

— Kurt Vonnegut

“Practicing art is not a way to make money or become famous, it’s a way to make your soul grow.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

In a 1998 discussion with Lee Stringer for Seven Stories Press, Vonnegut recalls a book called “The Writer and Psychoanalysis” by Edmund Burgler who treated writers in New York for years. Burgler had said that “writers were fortunate enough that they could treat their neurosis every day by writing.”

If your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to take it away from you.

How do we keep hope alive? I genuinely feel like everything is against us and there's no hope.

That’s how they want you to feel. They want you to feel like your vote doesn’t matter, like the outcome is predetermined, and they want you to stay home. If your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to take it away from you.

 

Take sanity breaks. Go for a walk, read a book. Disconnect from social media and the 24/7 news cycle for a few days. Hell, disconnect for a couple months if you want — just be here to vote in November. Don’t let them win. 

@Angry_Staffer on Twitter

Eavesdropping by Stephen Kuusisto

I love this book so much I grieve having to return it to the library. It's magnificent. A poets memoir. I have read passages aloud to my husband and I wish to reread the book and copy down favorite passages.

There was a wising well in the atrium and children threw coins. I heard their father instructing them, his deep voice like a low hanging branch. He was an American father. He wanted his children's money to land in the right place.

Eavesdropping by Stephen Kuusisto (p71)

The Icelanders in the men's locker room talked together like men in a boat. Their voices were low. Their words soft. Small boys spoke to their fathers. The men's voices were shade. The little boys voices were circles of light.

Eavesdropping by Stephen Kuusisto (p107)

reflect on the meaning

“Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

the artist spews it back out again

“Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural world-view that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create—the “artiste-manque,” as Rank so aptly called him. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex­ternal, active, work project. The neurotic can’t marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his in­troversions. The artist has similar large-scale introversions, but he uses them as material.”

― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

a highly private, conjured sort of being

“We all have numerous identities that shift with circumstances. The writing self is likely to be a highly private, conjured sort of being — you would not find it in a grocery store.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Gregg Mazel: Sweep Walking

Here’s a funny story for you today. The other morning  I was walking to the local hardware store with a small rolly cart box that holds my stuff. As I was walking down the street I see my neighbor Bill sitting outside with his little dog Maggie. Well, when Maggie caught sight of me and heard me coming down her side of the road, she started yelping. So I stopped my cart, and walked over to pet her and calm her down. Bill says to me, “oh, Maggie gets nervous around new things with sounds…” “I completely understand. I am the same way.“
Fast forward to two days later. I am spackling a room in the apartment listening to the Symphony Pops channel on the XM radio, when I hear this loud machine slowly rolling outside. So I stop what I’m doing, put my stuff down, and walk to the front window to look out to see what’s making the racket. To my surprise, it’s one of those big Elgin Street sweepers! And guess who is walking right next to the street sweeper, following them as they cross the river? Maggie and Bill.  Maggie must know the street sweepers that come once a year!
Hilarious.

-Gregg Mazel

Watertower in France

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Artist: Bernd and Hilla Becher (German)

Title: Water tower, Béziers, Hérault, France , 1984

Medium: gelatin silver print

Size: 60 x 48 cm. (23.6 x 18.9 in.)

Penelope Manzella Watertower Painting

 32" x 23 3/4"
oil on canvas

She thought they were hollow

She thought they were hollow, hollow like a chocolate Easter bunny. You could bite off an ear and see all the way through to the tail.

Richard Russo

"Novelists — especially novelists who paint on a broad canvas — are generally not given to undue anxiety, I think. The task is so enormous that if we ever really thought about what we were letting ourselves in for, we'd never begin. Early on we learn to worry only about what we do today. If I get my two or three pages written on Monday my day's work is done. It's useless to worry about Friday or four years from Friday. Pages need our attention; books take care of themselves."

Richard Russo

get my work done

I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. 

James Baldwin

Toni Morrison: Make it Work

As a writer, a failure is just information. It’s something that I’ve done wrong in writing, or is inaccurate or unclear. I recognize failure—which is important; some people don’t—and fix it, because it is data, it is information, knowledge of what does not work. That’s rewriting and editing. With physical failures like liver, kidneys, heart, something else has to be done, something fixable that’s not in one’s own hands. But if it’s in your hands, then you have to pay very close attention to it, rather than get depressed or unnerved or feel ashamed. None of that is useful. It’s as though you’re in a laboratory and you’re working on an experiment with chemicals or with rats, and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t mix. You don’t throw up your hands and run out of the lab. What you do is you identify the procedure and what went wrong and then correct it. If you think of [writing] simply as information, you can get closer to success.

Toni Morrison

Abbi Waxman

My mother was a murder mystery novelist, so she was my greatest influence, largely because I saw it being done every day. It seemed highly attainable, pleasant work, with very little risk of personal injury.

Abbi Waxman

The Colonoscopy

I made it through, whew! I must've been pretty anxious leading up to it or maybe it's the summer of anxiety! The prep started at 4:30 PM and still wasn't taking effect by 10:30 PM. I was panicking since midnight is the cut off time to drink any water or any clear liquids.  I even spit up some of the Gatorade/ generic Miralax, 3 hours after completing the half gallon drinking of it. I was laughing. Vomiting is the wrong direction!!

So at 10:30 PM we Googled and learned that sometimes the prep doesn't work which made me more anxious. One colon prep advice on the internet suggested drinking some cold water and my intuition thought I should put a heating pad on my tummy since I felt activity in my abdomen and I was cold. AMEN, the floodgates opened and continued through the night and this morning right up until the appointment. It must be my extra long intestine coupled with extra anxiety this time around. I had followed the instructions to the letter.

 

I told myself to surrender and enjoy the moment.  I called the doctor the rock star when he arrived. We were all clowning around. I think it was my way of harnessing the anxiety energy into the present. 

 

Apparently I talked during the anesthesia. They teased me and said that never happens. So they upped the dose a little to quiet me.

Arthur Laurents Playwrite

He said: "I start with the characters, and I let it happen, and they begin to have a life of their own. [...] People talk about writer's block, or they say how lonely it is. I don't think it's lonely. The people I'm working with — I'll put it that way — are much more interesting than most people I know. And I'm dying to see what they're going to do next. So, it's always exciting. I'm never really happy if I'm not writing. (The Writer's Almanac)

West Side Story is a musical conceived by Jerome Robbins with music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Arthur Laurents. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Laurents

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Shirley Jackson

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.

Shirley Jackson

Accomplish but do not boast, accomplish without show, accomplish without arrogance, accomplish without grabbing, accomplish without forcing.

 Lao Tzu

Dream

I dreamed we were in a brick mill building. All of our belongings were there. Two guys came in and turned on the water deliberately flooding the place. I realized we needed to phone the police. I told a group of people what was happening. One of them phoned the police. Meanwhile I asked everyone to quiet down. I woke up feeling shook up.

Liberation from the Self

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self. 

Albert Einstein

That voice that cries out doesn't have to be a weakling's does it?

 “You're hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it. Something's gone wrong somewhere, hasn't it?”

 ― John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“That voice that cries out doesn't have to be a weakling's does it?”
― John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“Jimmy: The injustice of it is almost perfect! The wrong people going
hungry, the wrong people being loved, the wrong people dying!”
― John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“Jimmy: (in a low, resigned voice) They all want to scape from the pain of being alive. And, most of all, from love. (...) It's no good to fool yourself about love. You can't fall into it like a soft job, without dirtying up your hands.”
― John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“You see I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry - angry and helpless. And I can never forget it. I knew more about - love... betrayal... and death, when I was ten years old than you will probably ever know in your life.”
― John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

Why don't we have a little game? Let's pretend that we're human beings, and that we're actually alive.

 ― John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

 ― John Osborne, Time Magazine, October 31, 1977

You are on the lookout for experience, strength, and hope.

You are on the lookout for experience, strength, and hope. You want to hear from the horse’s mouth exactly how disappointments have been survived. It helps to know that the greats have had hard times too and that your own hard times merely make you part of the club.

Julia Cameron

Zora Neale Hurston

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Zora Neale Hurston

the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.

Ray Bradbury

it's all I can do to remain conscious

I have so little control over the act of writing that it's all I can do to remain conscious. Actual formal considerations are almost beyond my capacity. Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately you are always bad before you can get a little better.  

David Rakoff

Trapped

I dislike getting into cars unless my husband is driving. I'm not sure why but I feel trapped by people in their cars. Perhaps I am reminded of being a child wanting to escape when my mother was driving recklessly, running red lights, all while saying awful things. 

Often this is recreated when someone offers me a lift home or to someplace. Once a friend drove me to a nearby pool when ours was closed. I felt strangled as my friend drove 35 miles an hour on the highway and talked about nearly dying in a crash on the Mass Pike. "I guess it wasn't our time," she said. After my swim I decided to take the local bus home. She was puzzled (and I was too) but I felt compelled to reclaim my independence.

I've had people assail me with their right wing politics, or insane theories, all of which has made me feel trapped. People are crazy. They drive 10 miles an hour in a 35 mile an hour zone, or seem terrified of driving three blocks out of their way. 

Perhaps we need a car etiquette. Meanwhile I prefer walking. I am introverted by nature. My brain needs a lot of space and oxygen to cultivate ideas. Ideally I prefer a few miles with just my dog before encountering people.

Part the Curtain

My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.
Eudora Welty

consoling

A novel’s bulk is a respite from life’s implacable uncertainty. You and I can end in a heartbeat, without warning, but no novel ends until that last page is turned. There’s something deeply consoling about that contract the novel makes with its reader.
Junot Diaz

if you’re willing to lower your expectations, to temporarily mute your inner critic, then incremental progress is always possible.

Contrary to popular wisdom, being “blocked” is not about running out of things to say. Instead, it’s succumbing to the unrealistic expectation that your work must Be Great Now. It’s a decision to remain silent rather than speak and maybe stumble. It’s the determination to avoid failure, which is a great way to ensure that the humbling work of getting better will never begin. But if you’re willing to lower your expectations, to temporarily mute your inner critic, then incremental progress is always possible. And that’s where novelists have struck on something. Above all else, writers are people who allow themselves the freedom to suck—unrepentantly, happily, even. They’ve learned through hard experience that out of failure comes something better. And that the only catastrophe, really, is the refusal to keep trying. 

JOE FASSLER

quiet reflection

The faster and busier things get, the more we need to build thinking time into our schedule. And the noisier things get, the more we need to build quiet reflection spaces in which we can truly focus.
Greg McKeown

Wiggles, kisses, and puppy breath.

Volunteers help turn wiggly puppies into dogs with a purpose

Guiding Eyes for the Blind 'puppy raisers’ train dogs to aid people with vision loss.

By Associated Press

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/03/07/service-dogs-for-blind-people/ 

March 7, 2022 at 10:08 a.m. EST

Grand, left, and Kenji are awarded medals in a “Puppy Olympics” for dogs in training with Guiding Eyes for the Blind in Easton, Maryland, on February 15. The medal ceremony helps puppies become comfortable having something placed over their heads. Volunteers work with the puppies before they receive advanced training at the Guiding Eye training center in New York. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

Wiggles, kisses, and puppy breath.

Guiding Eyes has puppy raisers in most East Coast states, Ohio and Colorado. Kids and teens who volunteer are eligible to earn Presidential Volunteer Service Awards (presidentialserviceawards.gov). To find out more information about the puppy raiser program, visit guidingeyes.org/how-to-help/volunteer/puppy-raising.

Don't waste your love on somebody, who doesn't value it. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“I like this place and could willingly waste my time in it.” ― William Shakespeare

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.

 ― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

In Holland People With Dementia Can Work on a Farm

“We don’t focus on what’s missing, but what is still left,” says Arjan Monteny, cofounder of Boerderij Op Aarde, “what is still possible to develop in everybody.”

https://reasonstobecheerful.world/netherlands-care-farms-aging-dementia-work/

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite.

 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.

― William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

Words are easy, like the wind; faithful friends are hard to find.

 William Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim

You speak an infinite deal of nothing. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Timing

by Ginamarie Cohen

I never really liked to cook. For the first 50-or so years of my adult life, cooking was a chore. I was never confident. Always nervous. The food must have picked up those feelings and thus was never as tasty as the recipe said it would be.  It never tasted just like my aunt's cooking - though I was using her recipe. But, Aunt Florence was the epitome of love while she stood over her stove. Her kitchen was always bright and sunny. I think that was the difference. 

 

A few months back I was speaking with my cousin Emily, talking of my kitchen anxiety; comparing myself to her very accomplished sister, and our self taught confident aunts, when Emily said the wisest things to me.......never compare, never compete, cooking should be joyful. Simple ingredients made with a happy heart make the best meals. She promised me that if I entered the kitchen with lighter steps, the lightness would shine bright in my food.

 

Well, I've heard words like that before but the timing of what she said must have been just perfect because the next day, I lightly stepped into the kitchen, the belly of the beast, and I began to make a meal. I pulled simple ingredients. I channeled my aunt's ease at the stove, I remembered Emily's words and cooked a simple meal that came out great. Then it happened another day. And then another. I kept surprising myself and those around me. How was I, Miss Anxiety herself, able to all of a sudden make delicious meals?

 

Months later, I'm still happily cooking. Something that I never thought I would ever say or feel. I channel my aunt Florence and I enter an actual state of flow. All of a sudden, ingredients appear in my hand and then into the pot. I taste what I'm making, and hear my Dad say, needs a little more of this or that, or better yet, I hear him say - that's perfect, let's eat!

 

Now that my kitchen continues to remain sunny and bright, and my meals glow from the inside out, I give all the credit to my younger, wiser cousin, who promised me that this would happen. The timing of her perfect words; her total lack of judgment; all made it possible to channel my ancestors, take a deep breath and lightly step forward into the belly of the beast, where I now know that the beast wasn't the kitchen, the beast was in me.

 

 

Love you Emily - the above is a true story (as you know). You've helped me to grow in so many ways!!  💝💞

 

 Ginamarie Cohen

We know what we are, but not what we may be

 “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― William Shakespear, Hamlet

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”
― William Shakespeare

“If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“We know what we are, but not what we may be.”
― William Shakespeare

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

 ― William Shakespeare, The Tempest