Rambling tchotchka

I was driving home from work this evening listening to one of my favorite books about writing--If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland. E taped it for me, maybe more than a year ago. I listened to it then, and then recently rediscovered it in the pocket on the driver's side door. I love Ueland because she encourages me to be dreamy, and resist stereotypical ideas of what good writing is, and how good writing gets done. She's like an encouraging grandma, who says "just be you...everyone will love you for who you are," and for a moment you believe her.

Anyway, she's talking about being authentic in your writing, and never lying...always writing down your true experience and I'm thinking "Okay...my experience right now. The traffic keeps stopping for no reason. We're traveling at 60 miles an hour and suddenly it stops in front of me. Why? My throat hurts. It feels like someone excavated a hole somewhere near my nasal cavity, and I know that's how I usually feel after work...like someone's scraped out the inside of my head with the edge of a blade. I keep dreaming in excel templates...because that's what I do all day and so it's infecting my dreams. My dreams are orderly and stacked, and I think it's impacting my creative life. Uh. there's a giant brown dumpster outside that house. I wonder what's going on. T will be gone tonight. Should I knit? Write? Swim? Clean?"

Anyway...I'm hoping to spend a little more time in the upcoming weeks being dreamy. I committed myself to too many real things this summer. I should know better. Triathlon training takes up much of my free time, so does gardening and all the while the half-poem about the elephant funeral sits in my journal unworked on.

But speaking of lying...it's not that I've been lying on this blog, but I've been concealing the truth. I started out wanting to be courageous and tell the truth...no matter what the cost. What did I say "go for the venom"? I have not done that. I've been scared. I am scared. So what should I do? Pick one thing a week that I'm scared to death of writing down and just do it?

Iraqi signmaker

He has put his colored ink away.
Black is the color of the day.
No one orders a bright funeral sign.
He traces out the curving letters
naming lost uncles, brothers,
wives and daughters--in memoriam.
Not writing who killed them, how they died,
death squads close in his mind.
Timid customers choose the smallest size,
their tribute will be in flames by sunrise.