Writerly Cures for Feeling Like a PoS, Picking Gravity's Pocket, Sexy Yoga

I haven't been good about blogging—or writing—lately. When I don't write I feel like A Piece of Shit. That gets capital letters because I know everyone feels that sometimes. It's a mixture of sadness, guilt, shame, desire, and laziness. Feeling like A Piece of Shit can go two ways. You can feel like a PoS and decide, Enough, I'm done, I'm going to do something about this. Then, feeling like a PoS is good because it at least gets rid of the laziness—because you're doing something—and it also gets rid of the guilt—because at least you're trying. But feeling like a PoS can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy that makes things worse. You feel like a PoS so you start hitting yourself about it. Hitting yourself about it brings more sadness, guilt, and shame. You feel Overburdened. You're driven deeper and deeper. Now you're so deep you can't do anything, and you feel even lazier, and yadda yadda yadda, on and on, until, damn, do you ever feel like A Piece of Shit.

So—enough of all that.

I have a backlog of ideas for the blog to which I need to give words.

I remember the moment I first swung a bucket of sand around in a windmill and discovered centrifugal force. It was a whisper, a rumor around the playground—swing it around and nothing will come out. Surely, a trick. Surely, a pile of sand on my head and a big, bullying laugh from everyone around. So I used my hands to gather the loose, dry sand in the sand pit and quickly and quietly filled my blue plastic bucket. Careful—not too much. Careful—no wet stuff, because first it could be pee, and second it'd be easier to get dry sand out of my hair. I slipped through the playground, behind the slide, on the outer edges of the trees surrounding the gravel, and found a nice quiet corner where the fences met.

I could barely be seen through the trees and the kicked up dust from two dozen of my fellow classmates causing playground trouble. And no one was watching and I was alone. And my sandy right hand gripped the bucket handle. And I held on tight. And I swung the bucket back and forth like a pendulum, gathering speed, gathering momentum for the eventual loop-the-loop, seriously contemplating my doom. And then—with a heave!—I flexed and tightened and swung as hard as I could and I almost fell with the force but the bucket flew over my head and around again and when I looked down and when I looked at my shirt and felt around I realized—no sand. No sand.

I had picked gravity's pocket. I had slid one by. I had found an anomaly. The bucket was upside down and nothing came out. Nothing fell. Upside down, and nothing. And that day I knew I cheated something, I knew we had all cheated something, us playground desperadoes, because we had figured out something the grown-ups didn't know about, because surely if they knew they would go around all day swinging buckets of sand. And how lucky we were. And how carefully we guarded this secret. And how precious we held this magic.

What

   about

      firemen

        reciting poetry

    on their way

  to a burning

building?

Here are two quotes I like from "Miss Sophia's Diary" by Ding Ling, who was a female writer during the Maoist Cultural Revolution in China:

"I drank as though the liquor might ease me toward death tonight."

"I imagine the pleasure of sex to be like bones dissolving."

I was in yoga the other day, wrapping my hands around my calves, and thought, Doing yoga is like having sex with yourself. I'm not sure how to feel about that, but really—when you do yoga you get sexy with yourself. How else can you describe it? You pay your body acute and unwavering attention, you move slowly and sensually for your own benefit, you relish in your own breathing, in the stretch of your own muscles. It's body worship. Like sex is. Except it's your own body. It's like having sex with yourself. Honestly, it feels strange to be so intimate with myself. I do it, and I like it, it's just new.

And there's nothing like seeing a woman get down with herself. I've decided and it's now a Lucas Law—yoga women are the most attractive and desirable of all women. Why? Well, sure, they're always with the skin-tight yoga pants and the nicely fitting shirts, and downward dog, despite all my attempts to divert my gaze does always yield a nice view, but women these days wear those yoga pants everywhere (though I assure you I do not complain), and the downward dog scenic overlook isn't anything I haven't seen before. It's more than that. Seeing a woman in touch with her own body, seeing the way she rolls her torso and bends toward her calves, hearing her exhale in that special, centered way, seeing her discover her own supple muscles, the grabbing, the smoothing, the reaching, the breathing—that is It. It's enough to make me dumb, and it does, and I very often have little to say after yoga class.

And that's all for now~~

Just to be clear: death still scares the ever living shit out of me.

Clarity, clarity!

The Black Stone

I just read something very useful, something that was just what I needed. I don't feel better, per se, though I feel a little better. I feel at least like I'm on the cusp of feeling better, that I can see what feeling better looks like. And actually, in this case, feeling better means embracing the fact that I don't feel better.

Yeah yeah, I know. Hocus pocus. Voodoo magic and maharishi donganonda propaganda. Really, though.

Lately—and I can't escape this, can't escape writing it down and talking about it—I have been afraid of death. It is hard to describe the level of fear. It is at the same time large and consuming, and also specific and acute. It's a sense of doom. If I sit quietly at night and think about death—which I do—a sense of doom washes over me and I feel petrified, terrified, it makes me cry in a useless way, as if I were crying because the sky is blue or because there is oxygen in the air. There isn't any fear larger than the fear of death because that's the end, and there's no escaping it. That's what is the hardest for me. In life we can fight and claw to get what we want. In life we always have options, we always have the ability to change our lives. No matter how hard I fight and claw and scrape and say No death will come along one day and say quietly, Yes.

I don't feel better. In fact, I feel like every night I open up this box. It's made of paper and it's small, and the only thing keeping it from bursting open is a small toothpick weakly barring it closed. It's not fooling anyone, least of all me. That box can't stay closed too long, and it can be punctured and maimed and it must be treated with the utmost care for it to stay Useful. So the last few nights I've been finding this box which, did I mention?, is conveniently tucked away under many other boxes, much bigger than our little paper box, hidden in the corner under piles of papers and socks and dirty sheets, and all of this is in the very last room on the right that I never visit anyway, tucked away in the last house on the lot of my mind.

You could say this box is Hidden.

Lately though, I've been making the trek to that last house, to that last room, and taking the time to throw off all the trash until I've uncovered my little paper box, and then slowly sliding the toothpick through the paper wedges at the top, and looking inside. It is scary to open the box. I am afraid some black shadowy hand will reach out and grab my face and blind me. Or that I'll be sucked inside by a supernatural vortex and never make it out again. But it does something scarier than that. It does nothing. It just sits there, open, letting me look, and I know that I will have to cover this box again and put it away and know that it still sits there for me, patiently, waiting to be uncovered again.

What is inside the box is a small hard stone. Black, matte. There is no reflection in this stone. You look into it and nothing stares back at you. There is just you looking in, it absorbing the light around it, its blackness weighing heavy in the box, and you left wondering what it means. And looking at it, trying to figure it out—I am made mad.

This morning I woke up and rolled over and picked up a book, Awakening Loving-Kindness by Pema Chödrön (which E.M. gave me for Valentine's Day [thank you, E.M.]), and began reading. I used to read it every day but I hadn't in a while because—of course, hey, it's obvious—I have a handle on my life. Who needs lessons?

But this day I needed a lesson and I must admit it was serendipity. Because it talked about Death, the ultimate terrifying thing that trumps any and all other fears. In the last chapter it talked about being Safe. How we're always trying to do things to maximize safety and comfort. Which I do. Which everyone does, because why wouldn't we? Chödrön said that we can spend all our lives trying to cultivate these zones of safety that are always falling down until we're at the end of our lives and realize what a mistake we've made.

Or, she said, we can leap. We can let all these zones of safety shake down into dust and let ourselves be open to whatever may happen without withdrawing into ourselves and seeking safety. "That's what stirs us and inspires us:" she said, "leaping, being thrown out of the nest, going through the initiation rites, growing up, stepping into something that's uncertain and unknown. From that point of view, death becomes this comfort and this security and this cocoon and this vitamin pill-ness. That's death. Samsara is preferring death to life" (188).

I'm not ending this post with hope because that feels cheap. And I'm not ending it with a revelation because, damn it, this process isn't something you instill in your life immediately after reading a chapter in a book one fine morning. All I will say is that what Chödrön says sounds pretty damn good and I would like to get to that place.

I still have to contend with my black stone. I think I will try relocating it, giving it a better home. In fact, I will give it a home in my pocket. And, better, I'll remove it from its paper house and hold it in my hand, black and smooth and earthy, and let the chalk rub off on my fingers so I don't forget what it is I'm trying to do.

Plans plans plans

Is it possible to get tired of your own voice?

Oh, yes!

It's strange, my desire to blog lately has been at an All Time Low, though considering I've been doing it two months that's not saying much.

Part of it, I think, has to do with what's been on my mind—namely, death and dying and saying goodbye sorts of things. That's something I have trouble writing about. Doesn't everyone? And I've been avoiding it.

I need to get back on that horse. I feel myself wanting to write something more focused. In my Thinking Like a Working Writer class we all had to write blog posts about how to write a good body of work over the course of a lifetime. There were some good tips from everyone. One that caught me right square on the chest was, Finish Something. That is, don't just piddle around in half-finished work. Because then what do you have to show for it? A whole lot of nothing, or at the very best a whole lot of half-somethings, which aren't impressive to anyone.

Blogging is good, it keeps me sharp and it keeps my brain working and grooving.

It's time to finish something. Wait, strike that, rewind it—it's time to start something, then I will finish that thing. Yes? Yes, that's how the order goes.

I'm not sure what to do, exactly. What to write about. What my project should be. What could I finish? Well, I have Radioland Number Nine going. That's something I could definitely finish. And something I should finish.

And to hell with it. You know another piece of piece of advice? Instead of doing five things half assed, do one thing well. That has to do with Fear. Funny how that is—it's all based in fear. Here's the thing—I commit myself fully to a project like working on Radioland Number Nine, and finishing it, and then what if nothing happens? I can't say I didn't put my all into it, because I did. That's why working on multiple things at once, that's why working on things and not finishing them, that's why I do them—because it protects me and makes me safe. If I don't fully commit to a project, I'm never disappointed.

Now I need to give myself credit. I have finished a handful (okay, three, but don't get so particular) of stories and they're good, they're decent. And I have written a novel draft in six weeks (and come on now, Lucas, that's an accomplishment). And I've finished a graphic novel with a team of artists. And I have and I have . . . yeah yeah, okay, so I've done some things.

That's great. Good for me. Now it's time to do more.

I've got Radioland just sitting there. It's time to dust it off, reread what I've got, find it's pulse, and start pumping blood into that sucker. That's all it needs, a little lifeblood, a little love, and a lot of energy and effort and devotion. But mostly love.

Maybe I'll post some excerpts of Radioland Number Nine up on here. I've got the first two chapters decently solid. I think, though, for a children's book (and any book in general) I could afford to have a good plan. Not an outline—my God, not an outline—just a plan, something to go by. The initial want, the initial conflict. We'll see how it's resolved as I write. But as I learned with Bordeaux Born Anew (wow, it seems forever ago), I would do well to have a solid idea of the initial conflict, the initial premise, before I start.

Plan of action! Reread Radioland, get a plan working, and go go go. Write like NaNoWriMo, write with fingers on fire. That's the way. Write with finger's on fire, write with heat in the stomach, write with lava in the lungs. Write fast and strong and confidently and without hesitation.

Then we'll see what to do about it.

Johnny Victory

Johnny Victory
The unconquerable pilot
Sailed his sea plane
Through shoestring eyelets.

How, you ask?
It's clear to see,
The bumbling scarfed man
Stood, in inches, nothing point three.