unorthodox
intense
original
integrative
playful
Month: March 2021
How’s the coffee?
and now that Manchester isn’t quite the same the drive flew along trees past their prime yet beautiful in that chaste turning more shadowy and wintry the closer I got to home, a still full moon flirting with clouds during that final stretch of reggae beat back around to Worcester a few tears shed as I passed sparkling Baltimore in a twelve-hour trip taking a shade over nine but here they still haven’t fixed the dripping kitchen faucet
Some things about NW grunge
Although I’ve concentrated a lot on the hippie end of the counterculture revolution, I’m not that conversant in many of its more recent manifestations.
Considering the events in my novel Nearly Canaan, when Joshua and Jaya settle into a place unlike anything they would have imagined, out in the desert on the other side of the mountains from Seattle, I see I need to pay attention, especially since grunge entered the scene just a little later.
Here are ten points.
- Sometimes called the Seattle Sound, grunge was a blend of punk and heavy metal revolving around the local independent record label Sub Pop and featuring a distorted electric guitar sound. (I’ll let others define both punk and metal.) And then it took off into the ’90s and mainstream.
- The lyrics are typically angst filled of a socially alienated sort. Apparently, we could do a Tendrils right there.
- Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994 likely played into its demise.
- Its mundane, everyday style of clothing sharply contrasted to punk’s mohawks, leather, and chains. It also featured Doc Martens boots, wool flannel plaid shirts, and thermal underwear befitting the Pacific Northwest.
- It was seen as anti-consumerist. The less you spent, the cooler you were. Cobain’s widow Courtney Love was the embodiment of the thrift-shop philosophy.
- Males, especially, had unkempt hair.
- Espresso, beer, and heroin have been cited as its three main drugs.
- It led to a distinctive graphic design based on “lo fi” or low fidelity imagery, with intentionally murky lettering, photography, and collage enhanced by desktop publishing and digital image processing on Macintosh computers.
- The appearance of ‘zines, often of a literary sort, blossomed as an off-shoot of this. I’ve appeared as a poet in many of them, mostly photocopied and stapled.
- Some see the movement as introducing non-binary sexual awareness to the wider culture.
~*~
Can’t help thinking this sounds like hippie on a downer trip to me.
What’s your take on grunge?
Shall we dance?
An insider’s tricks of the trade
Her aunt Nita in my novel What’s Left, has an interesting insight on showing up for work before all the others. It doesn’t fit every job, but it did hers. And then I cut this from the final version of the book:
If you’re the first one in and the last one out, you can disappear in the middle of the day and your coworkers and bosses are none the wiser. They just assume you’re out on assignment.
~*~
Not all jobs require you to punch-in or punch-out on some kind of clock. I’ve never had to work one of those, fortunately, although I’ve often had to fill out weekly time cards before being paid.
What I did find, though, was that even when I was putting in a lot of unpaid overtime (the joys of being low-tier management!), I could still feel the judgmental eyes behind my back.
Are you ever considered a slacker on your job? How does it feel? How do you respond?
~*~
When life collides with fiction
I remember passing the old Hank Stamper place from Kesey’s novel while driving along the river pressed against the coastal mountain. We were driving to visit friends who lived in the tangled woods nearby.
Letting go and moving on
It’s official. We’re selling our home of the past 21 years, including the red barn and my asparagus and fern beds.
It all happened much faster than I had anticipated. In truth, I didn’t expect our dream of relocating to a remote fishing village at the other end of Maine to go into action for another two years. Even when we made our pitch for the house we landed, I didn’t allow myself to get my hopes up – they’d been dashed too many times the previous time we were looking before we anchored in Dover.
But here we are, with any luck beating the crowd on that rising housing market. The trend of moving out from the big-city suburbs into smaller, more viable, pedestrian-friendly towns hasn’t yet reached fever levels in Sunrise County. It is, after all, an eight-hour drive from Boston.
And no, I’m not changing the name of this blog – the barn will live on in my memory and as a metaphor. Guess we’ll just have to get a garden shed, paint it red, and call it our new barn.
~*~
Still, the uprooting and transplanting have stirred up a lot within me.
I’m recalling one neighbor’s comment back in Manchester. “I don’t think anybody can afford to live in New Hampshire for under,” and he named a figure that would have gone up a lot under the inflation in the years since. At the time, I looked at him and replied, “But I do.”
He was shocked and maybe a tad embarrassed.
I still don’t know how most people are affording the prices of homes in much of New England or other hot spots, but they’re also being pressed by outrageous rental costs.
~*~
Reflecting on previous moves, I admit most of them were daring leaps to new jobs and dots on the map where I knew no one. This doesn’t feel so draconian. I’ve visited, after all, and have acquaintances, mostly through Quaker circles.
So now I flip between memories of places I was fond of and of others, well, there were some mean towns and economic struggles. Satellite photos reveal that a handful of the units I occupied have been demolished in the intervening years. Let’s just say that luxury rentals were beyond my means, but a few others had their funky charms or at least memories.
The Dover property was only the second I’d owned. The other was a marvelous 1920s bungalow in a Rust Belt town. (See my novel Hometown News for that one.) When that house was emptied, I sat down and wept in the aftermath of a divorce and the confusing developments with my fiancée.
This time, I’ve found myself anxious to move on. Both of us are finally admitting the shortfalls of our home of the past two decades – not just the short treads on the staircase but also the arrangement of the rooms and the fact it just wasn’t designed for our needs. We adapted to the space, and now that there were just two of us, the faults became inescapable.
On top of that, I keep seeing more repairs that are needed – some of them big ones the second time around. I’ve run out of energy. The responsibility – and expense – are simply too much.
But I’m also remembering guests who’ve stayed with us as well as our dinners and parties, not that we ever had as many as we would have liked.
~*~
One thing I have to acknowledge is the emotional weight of things I feel a responsibility for maintaining. As I shed more of them, I’m feel freer and more capable of opening to new experiences. The flip side is the question of just how much and what I might need to sustain that.
So here we go.
Let’s stick just to my end of this endeavor. I won’t get into hers.
Yes, I’m talking about downsizing for real.
In this matter of daily living, I squirreled away a lot of doodads and papers – created quite a compact puzzle arrangement, actually – but preparing to move has meant opening the proverbial Pandora’s box and watching it all jump out, well, like a jack-in-the-box explosion.
There was no way I could take all of this stuff with me. It was time to let go.
Things like the library card, my swim pass and parking permit, old insurance forms and booklets.
Clothing got touchier, as I had to ask if I really planned on wearing this item or that – did I even like it? Old pillows, too.
It was time to let go of the tape cassettes, I had nothing to play them on anyway, but I do have a neighbor who’s big into his sound system, so I’m happy to know they have a new home. I simply realized I was unlikely to listen to them again, considering my schedule, even in retirement. I’ll concentrate on my vinyl and CDs, which will likely get a pruning in the upcoming year. You know, that reality that as you clear out the debris, you discover all kinds of treasures you didn’t know you owned. Ditto for the remaining books, which did get yet another culling but need more. What am I likely to need or revisit in the next five years?
I also passed along my student violin and sheet music.
Another difficult decision was to pitch a complete set of my mimeographed Ramblers, a periodic broadside I published in my years at Wright State University, as well as a long shelf of my contributor’s copies of literary journals where I’d appeared. Plus several boxes of unsold copies of my first novel. Even several drawers of acceptance letters – the more volumous rejections went out a half-dozen years ago. Add to that old genealogy notes and correspondence. The fact was that these imposed an emotional weight on me, and now I let go.
Oh, yes, and then there were several cases of 3½-inch computer cassettes. I couldn’t even access those now if I wanted to, though I moved all of their relevant content over years ago. No problem, overboard they went. Finally.
My cross-country skis are joining the discards. I was never that good on them, and getting older, I’m deciding to shift to snowshoes. Besides, I’ve usually been out on the snow all alone, as in solo, and I need to admit that if I break a bone in a fall, I’d be in big trouble. (Yes, I do tumble.) Oh, the realities and perils of getting old.
I am planning on going through my journals in the next year, and I suspect I’ll actually wind up burning some of them – the ones that have been thoroughly mined for poetry and fiction prompts or the ones that are boringly banal.
In the back of my head are the stories of surviving family members having to clean out the possessions of a deceased parent or grandparent. So my intent is to spare my own much of that burden. Not that they won’t still have plenty to tackle.
Ten things about Martha and Mary
The two sisters of Lazarus in the New Testament play a bigger role in the overall story than they’re usually given credit for. You often have to piece it together from the four different Gospels.
- Mary anoints Jesus with costly oil.
- In one version, she’s identified as a harlot (prostitute).
- So what does that make her sister? And why are they single rather than married? (Take that as a clue.)
- Considering her aforesaid status, as well as the expectation that women not be present alone with unrelated males, see how much scandal that element adds to her going in to listen to the guys rather than help prepare dinner. (Yes, it’s still an affront to social customs, only more.)
- Martha gets slighted for feeling a responsibility for feeding their guests, but she does openly rebuke Jesus earlier for his failure to come to the aid of his (presumably close) friend or relative. That is, don’t see her as some shy feminine type.
- Mary can’t keep a secret. She blabs, and that’s why everybody and his cousin shows up on the streets of Jerusalem for Palm Sunday a few days later.
- By the way, don’t get this Mary confused with Mary Magdalene as a prostitute. No suggestion there, despite widespread assumptions. No, the Magdalene maybe had only mental problems, as far as Scripture reports, nothing of a salacious nature.
- Although Jesus revives Lazarus from the stinky dead, the religious authorities come back and kill the girls’ brother a second time. Is this some kind of bad joke?
- Bethel, where they live, has always had a rap as a disreputable neighborhood. FYI.
- The Hymn of Kasianna, in the Eastern Orthodox Passion Week services, is no doubt the most erotic piece of Christian liturgy ever. Look for it at the end of Tuesday evening’s or Wednesday morning’s service, the only time in the year it is chanted. It voices Mary’s deep gratitude for redemption and salvation despite everything.
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Now, do these considerations add or detract from your estimation of these two saints?
With a focus on the family
Cassia’s future father marries into a family that owns a popular restaurant. So that’s one additional connection for the members.
Considering his wife’s sister and three brothers, all with potential partners of their own, he’s not the only spouse thrown into the mix. And that’s before getting to those who want careers elsewhere.
What holds your extended family together? Or are you widely scattered?
~*~
Jnana's Red Barn 