If you like contemporary poetry and you have not read Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, I can recommend it.

/ 

 You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.

 You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having.

 Why do you feel okay saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, be propelled forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind.

 As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going.

 /

 When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term — John Henryism — for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the build up of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.

 /

 When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers. Hey, I am standing right here, you responded, not necessarily expecting him to turn to you.

 He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say.

 Now there you go, he responds.

 The people around you have turned away from their screens. The teenagers are on pause. There I go? you ask, feeling irritation begin to rain down. Yes, and something about hearing yourself repeating this stranger’s accusation in a voice usually reserved for your partner makes you smile.

 /

 A man knocked over her son in the subway. You feel your own body wince. He’s okay, but the son of a bitch kept walking. She says she grabbed the stranger’s arm and told him to apologize: I told him to look at the boy and apologize. And yes, you want it to stop, you want the black child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet and be brushed off, not brushed off  by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself.

 The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of  bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers.

 /

 The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked.

 At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard?

 It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.

 I am so sorry, so, so sorry.

/

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 021 of 100)

The Kabinet Monastery

Encouraged to visit to help with his chronic lung problems, Trafik Kabinet fell in love with Florida immediately and bought land south of Fort Brooke in the small settlement of Abdera. 

Kabinet was raised in Lithuania and Berlin and traveled throughout Europe when he was young. Inspired by the monasteries he visited in his youth he decided to build a retreat for those with similar lung problems who might seek a place to recuperate in contemplative quiet. Kabinet also developed a philosophy of “miscellaneous spirituality” through his discussions with the guests. By 1846 Kabinet’s monastery had become a quite popular retreat and the attendees styled themselves as Kabinet Monks.

The monastery flourished briefly until Kabinet’s untimely demise in 1851. Within a year the only monk remaining was a man who referred to himself simply as Ismail from Tortosa.

For twenty years after the death of Trafik Kabinet his last remaining disciple, Ismail from Tortosa, dug himself a grave every morning and filled it in every night. Otherwise he was noted for his beekeeping, and most knew him by the name Honey. 

On October 31, 1871 Ismail’s neighbors used his own grave to bury him. Death records read simply: “Kicked by horse. Deceased.”

Not long afterwards the monastery was bought, remodeled and opened as the Tarloff Sanatorium.

(“Abdera Miscellany” is a collection of half-baked ideas about Abdera, Florida.)

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 020 of 100)

A new series to add! I see “Abdera Miscellany” as a collection of half-baked ideas about Abdera, Florida.

I did something similar at the beginning of 2019 with a short-lived series of fictional posts from Abdera.

Below, for example, is excerpted from a post about the Bloodorange Hotel.

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Dr. Bloodorange’s Independent Hotel

In addition to buying and selling real estate, William Bloodorange was one of Florida’s most successful optometrists, and an early innovator in franchising vision health stores. In the boom years after the second world war, Dr, Bloodorange built The Independent Hotel between the Tamiami Trail and the Gulf of Mexico. It was one of the grandest of its era, and notable for its Renaissance-era baroque architecture. Dr. Bloodorange meant for the hotel to spark the tourism trade in Abdera.

The structure was beset by problems almost from the very beginning. In 1958, only five years after the grand opening, the hotel burned to the ground. Bloodorange vowed to rebuild the Independent bigger and better. And he did. The gala opening of the new Independent Hotel in 1961 was one of most celebrated events in Abdera history.

The tourism trade never caught on in Abdera, and since Dr. Bloodorange’s death in 1971 the Independent Hotel has passed through numerous owners, and for a few years in the early 1990s sat empty. In the mid-1990s the city council nearly purchased the hotel to destroy it. A last-second intervention by New Moon Properties to buy the hotel and restore it gave the Independent a new lease on life. Currently the Independent Hotel is half permanent residents, half hotel, and the first floor has been renovated to allow for a dozen small shops to serve the Shoreside neighborhood.

Some claim they can still hear the ghostly screams of those who died in 1958 fire.

An “Abdera Miscellany” will include writing exercises, notes, fragments, figments, snippets, characters, moods, moments, places, and whatever else I can shoehorn in.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 019 of 100)

Nothing to post today, but I want to keep the streak going, so here’s a deer I saw in November.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 018 of 100)

According to the General Social Survey (GSS) we are unhappier than we’ve ever been.

“Taken all together, how would you say things are these days–would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?”

For the first time ever there are more ‘not too happy’ responses than ‘very happy’ responses. (Though to be fair the ‘pretty happy’ category has been in the mid-fifties for the last decade.)

The GSS is a venerable representative survey of US adults. (Learn more here if you’re interested.)

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 017 of 100)

This week’s playlist kicks off with Shirley Bassey, but not the song below.

Oh, and the Glen Campbell version of “Elusive Butterfly of Love” is the creepiest.

This week’s playlist is eleven songs and 28 minutes.

TMBG came up randomly with someone I was chatting with this morning. The person was a fan of the more child-friendly songs, and all I could think of was —

I’m so tired of the waiting
My heart is cold
The sky is dark
I’m curled up in the ashes

We die alone we die afraid
We live in terror, we’re naked and alone
We die

(from “Last Wave” by TMBG and in this week’s playlist)

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 016 of 100)

UPDATE: The Lowland Hum version of “This Will Be Our Year” is lovely.

Oh no! I have a busy night ahead of me and still no post.

Go buy my book! Or, just as good, leave a glowing review of how awesome it is.

(Whoops. Just realized I need to update my Hillsborough River Press page. The Green New Deal book is out of print. It was getting a little long in the tooth so I decided to pull it.)

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 015 of 100)

I’m not sure if there’s a known source for this quote about advertising, but I’ve seen it referenced about a zillion times – “Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

Something similar comes into play with craft books (or podcasts) about the creative writing process, or self-improvement podcasts (or books). There’s probably (certainly? possibly?) some value in reading books about plot development or character development or scene structuring, etc. But there’s also a lot of magical thinking going on when I read or listen to those kinds of works.

So, to paraphrase — half of what I read about the writing craft isn’t useful, the trouble is I don’t know which half.

For most of my life I’ve avoided books categorized as self-help, self-improvement, motivational, positive thinking, etc. There’s just too much chaff, and not enough wheat.

But in the middle of last year I decided that even some positive-flavored chaff might be better than the hypercritical self-talk constantly looping through my brain.

I started with The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh to start learning about mindfulness and meditation, and Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg to refresh my thinking about writing.

The Miracle of Mindfulness led me to Tara Brach and this free course – Mindfulness Daily at Work with Tara Brach & Jack Kornfield. I found working my way through the course immensely beneficial, and I grew very fond of listening to Tara Brach. I now listen to her podcasts occasionally and follow some of her guided meditations. It’s all very soothing.

I probably read Writing Down the Bones thirty-five or forty years ago. I don’t know how much it actually helped my writing, but it is comforting to read about someone else facing recognizable creative challenges.

The trap I fall into easily is listening to a podcast about the craft of creative writing, or reading a new book about craft, and feeling that that is a substitute for actually doing the work of writing. And this is the problem with even the best human potential books — their effectiveness drops off radically if you (I) don’t do the homework. And, who wants to do homework? Reading the book makes me feel like I’m doing something, but the exercises are too much (I don’t have time for that!), so whatever benefits the book might hold are short-lived.

Last year I read the following books on the craft of writing and on the writing life (Heroine’s Journey stands out from everything in the following list. It is excellent.):

• Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenbourg
• Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders
• The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger
• Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different by Chuck Palahniuk
• Starve Better: Surviving the Endless Horror of the Writing Life by Nick Mamatas
• A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders
• The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling by Charles Johnson
• The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

And I read the following on human potential/self improvment:

• Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin
• Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach

I suppose the point I’m making to myself with this post is to dig deeper when I use these sorts of books, and spend time doing the exercises. Use them as workbooks instead of a respite from the work I actually want to do.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 014 of 100)

I grew up in Texas. I was six years old when Coach Landry of the Dallas Cowboys couldn’t decide between Roger Staubach and Craig Morton as the starting quarterback and so had them alternate games, and in one game, alternate plays. The six year old me greatly approved of this strategy. I thought it was a very smart way to get the next play into the huddle and as a bonus it would keep the quarterbacks fresh.

Coach Landry and I, however, were the only people to appreciate the cleverness of this strategy, and after the different-quarterbacks-on-alternate-plays game, he settled on Roger Staubach who reeled off ten straight wins, including Super Bowl VI.

That means, thanks to Wikipedia, I can pinpoint my earliest football memory to the exact date. It was October 31, 1971.

I’m embarrassed to out myself as a Cowboys fan, but I came by it honestly. My father lived in Texas when the team started and he adopted them from the beginning. I grew up in Texas and until I was eleven or twelve I joined him in front of the TV every Sunday (and occasionally Monday nights) to watch the game. When I was eleven I tried to switch my allegiance to a franchise expansion team (I chose the Buccaneers), but that never really took hold.

I still follow NFL football more closely than I like to admit publicly. I recognize that it is a complete shit show. It’s blatantly racist, deeply misogynistic, and takes a brutal toll on player health. And all for entertainment. And yet, I find it interesting and engaging in a way I don’t find with anything else.

The other thing I learned during those Sundays was the awesomeness of Velveeta cheese mixed with Ro-Tel diced tomates and green chiles. Not a treat I indulge in anymore, but absolutely my favorite game snack.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 013 of 100)

I like this technique used by Lynda Barry to transition from monkey mind to a calmer brain ready to create.

Here’s a longer explanation of the exercise she does after the spiral.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 012 of 100)