Where does the week go?

It’s been a dismaying unsuccessful blogging week. It’s not as if I don’t have material, but life has conspired to sap me of energy, motivation, and vital health essences. As an example, my plans to shower my wife with a myriad of wonderful activities and actions for Mother’s Day has been waylaid by my flourishing throat infection. Stupid throat.

Between Max’s short bout of illness this week (which of course threw his entire sleep schedule into disarray) and the stressful events demanding my attention (driving test, moving the sister-in-law out of my house, doing  an interview for a magazine article), I’ve been too sapped to muster up any work ethic for my ongoing concerns.  I’ll try to catch up later.

Friendship is hard when your friends won’t stop whining

I used to duck my head down low and avoid any eye contact when there was confrontation in the room. Whether it involved me or not, I’d hide as fast and as hard as I could. Becoming more comfortable with confrontation has been another surprising side-effect of being a stay at home dad. Not only do I have to confront my little boss throughout the day, I also have to show him how to resolve conflict with other people when we’re out of the house, which means I have to learn to resolve conflict. I have a pretty significant loss on my conflict resolution record right now, but that’s a story for another time and the source of that problem is finally out of my day-to-day life.  Anyway.

Since I’m more likely to speak up and challenge people when they’re being stupid, I’m entering into a new conundrum: learning how to ignore fights that don’t really matter.

I’ve been able to ignore the majority of the incessant whining from one acquaintance (he occasionally earns his way back to the rank of ‘casual friend’ but then torpedoes himself back down to ‘acquaintance’ with his offensive, stupid mouth).  But our shared friend decided to pipe up and join in with the stupid whining last night, and that set me off a little. It didn’t help that the friend was speaking about a kid’s party and the etiquette therein, when he has zero children. I’m not saying that I don’t have a right to be cheesed off at people who open their yaps to spout some nonsense, but the difficulty or danger is that my response will be too enthusiastic. Just because I can now tell somebody to shut up and take their stupid ideas with them, doesn’t mean I need to go to defcon 1 and destroy the friendship over a difference of opinion.

You have to keep in mind that I have decades of deferred rage that will continually push for escape, and I have to keep re-adjusting my temper controls or I’m going to start making a mess.

Related sub-note: I wonder if anyone else has such a complicated set of expectations that go along with the title of ‘friend’? Because I have some high standards, it seems, and if I hold to them with religious fervor, I’m going to have a friend count of 1 (hi honey!).  Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you get my meaning.

Unrelated sub-note: it’s still really tricky to choose how candid this blog will be. Will I start to name names? Dish the dirt? alienate everyone I know? Or will I neuter the crap out of this blog to make it my list of inoffensive and uninteresting things?

Meet me in the dark places

Poetry and I do not have a healthy relationship. There is a lot of disrespect and outspoken derision when I talk about her to the fellas, and I’ll pass by each and every book of poems that some poor writer has slaved over, but in the darkest of nights, in seclusion and out of eyeshot, we meet up and intertwine. I tell myself that it’s just song lyrics, I’m not like them, but if there’s no tune to hook the words to, let’s be honest and call it for what it is. The compact format, the rhythm buried in each line, the love of the sound of words and words alone, these things are what bring me to the paper to write, in the rare times where these connections happen.

It would be better to hide the words in plain sight, as knotted and dense layers tied within a bigger narrative, and I hope to christ that I manage that from time to time. But too much worry about the where and when will eat away from the act of just doing it. Even now, I can feel the leaden and dull presence of self-criticism and over thinking edge towards my fingers and my thoughts and slowly ebb away my enthusiasm. It’s almost as if I need to write somewhere where I can’t see what I’m doing.

That must the point of the rituals and superstitions, the habits and proclivities of creativity. If you can craft an environment where you feel absolutely free to write in any style or fashion, a place where you can divorce yourself from the normal human baggage of fear, insecurity, resentment, self-pity, worry, anger, and float above all of that detached and amused, then you can lose yourself within your art. The trappings of your workspace have value and meaning. I used to think it was inconsequential, but each unpleasantness is another potential distraction. Your workspace is a type of temple, dedicated to yourself. I suspect there’s an inherent arrogance needed to continually produce work, because that sense of self-satisfaction fuels you when there’s no external feedback coming in.