Tag: writing

Whiskey Poetry

My book of poetry is coming along very well. You can read more about it here. I recently received feedback from most of my readers, and have been editing poems and getting them ready for publication.

But that is only half of the job.

The other half is a little more difficult, and involves naming the book of poetry and organizing it. I was finding this particularly challenging. For me, naming something is a process that helps me to figure out the soul of the thing. When naming, I define whatever it is in a way that allows me to hold the sum of it in my head. The organization of the book of poetry had stalled because I hadn’t named it and therefore couldn’t fully understand what it wanted it to be.

Sure, I could have simply listed the poems from A to Z alphabetically by title, but that would lack personality and emotion. It would be less a book of poetry and more a listing of poetry. That isn’t what I am going for. So I have been hunting for a name ever since I began this project.

The other day, I was writing a caption for a photo I was posting on social media, and when I was typing “Ten years ago…” I accidentally wrote it as “Ten tears ago…” and the emotion of that statement really struck a chord. It burrowed into my mind and the rest of the day I pondered permutations of that theme. Eventually, come evening, I had teased out something related to a concept that has long been in my head: Graham Greene wrote a novel named The Power and the Glory. It is about a Catholic priest on the run from a government enforcer. The Mexican government has outlawed the practice of the Catholic religion, and this priest, intent on fulfilling his religious duties, is trying to stay a step ahead of the law. The hitch? The priest is a drunk. Because of this, Greene calls his priest a “whiskey priest” to which he adds the idea of a broken, imperfect practitioner of his profession. That idea has stayed with me ever since I read The Power and the Glory and it even made it into three of my poems, to be included in this collection.

So powerful is this theme with me that while I was thinking about it, I realized that my collection of poems could be nothing else but the writings of a “whiskey poet”. I am an imperfect writer, who nonetheless loves poetry and refuses to put down my pen and stop writing, no matter what. The emotion and feeling involved in writing is undeniable and I cannot nullify the effect it has on my life and psyche.

I introduce: The Whiskey Poetry, A Collection, coming early 2022.

Now that I have a title, a theme, and an emotion to build off of, I have begun to have all sorts of ideas about the structure and the organization of the collection. Already I know how, and more importantly, why I want to order my poems as I do. I still haven’t figured everything out, but I have a starting point. I can make progress and build forward momentum from there. I am very excited about what this will become.

For now, though, I have more work to do!

Ease of Use

I have notice something about myself: I need things to be simple.

I’ll give an example: I don’t drive a standard, or manual, transmission car. I technically know how, but I won’t do it. It is too complicated. Mash this pedal while shifting this knob and not letting up on the gas while steering and maintaining a lane. Nope. Too much happening. I would much rather the car handle the transmission while I steer and adjust the speed. That I can handle.

That brings me to my latest purchase: a Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad Air. I have a traditional computer, but I use it primarily, really only, for work. Sitting there to write a blog post or something else feels too much like work. Plus, it isn’t a laptop, so I can’t take it anywhere I want to go. For these reasons, and a few others, I haven’t really sat down to write that much on the computer. The iPad, while mobile, suffers as well from a variety of issues that for me just don’t make it easy to sit down and start writing. Thus I just haven’t written much. The price of entry is too high.

My new keyboard is a seenda, not a brand I have known or heard of; it was an Amazon find. It is backlit and has a few other great features, but the best part is it makes typing, and therefore writing, easy and uncomplicated. Without making this a product review, I love everything about this keyboard. From the moment I paired it with the iPad and started to type, I knew this was the keyboard to get me writing again.

At the moment I am writing in the WordPress app while watching a baseball game using the picture-in-picture mode of the MLB.TV app. I’m sitting in my easy chair while my wife crochets next to me. It is wonderful. I am so happy writing right now. The flow of this blog post makes me hopeful that regular writing can again be a part of my life. Honestly: I’ve missed it. If this keyboard can bring that back it will be worth way more than I payed for it.

Ease of use is very important to me. Solving the complicating factors standing in the way of something I love is a major win. And I like winning. (Speaking of which, my team needs a win. Currently they have lost 9 in a row and are down 3-1 in the game. C’mon, Cleveland!).

A Tale of Two Parts

Part the First

This is difficult for me to write. Yesterday, January 3rd, would have been my seventh wedding anniversary had I not been divorced. Unlike a spouse who died and is no longer upon the planet Earth, I am dealing with a different kind of loneliness. It is the loneliness of no longer being wanted. I know, approximately, where my ex-wife is, and approximately, what she is doing. And that hurts, because she isn’t here, and she isn’t with me. Once upon a fairy tale time, she was right by my side doing what I was doing, or I was by her side, doing what she was doing. We were together. But now she is beside someone else, and they are doing things together. And that hurts spectacularly.

I don’t know what the time period is supposed to be for getting over a spousal rejection, but I am apparently not there yet as I still memorialize a coupling that has uncoupled. I am sure I will get there at some point, but in the meantime, I am stumped by a simple question: now that she has moved on and put me behind her and someone else beside her, I am a free man. I am as if I was never married. That thought gives me some release, some comfort, but what do I do now to anchor that thought in reality? Do I burn all her love letters in a massive bonfire of dead desire? Do I delete all our pictures and digital memories as if scorching cyberspace? Do I forget her name and erase her influence from my life? Is such a thing even possible? I signed up for eternity. I was hers forever…until I wasn’t. I don’t know what to do.

Except, maybe I do know. I will do what I have done since the first noniversary rolled around: keep moving forward.

Part the Second

It is a brand new year, an entity I am calling twenty17. Thus far in my life I have mostly eschewed this whole idea of “New Year’s Resolutions” in which one is hereby resolved by the arbitrary Gregorian calendar to radically change one’s life in some way. It has seemed like so much hokum to think that just because some number has rolled over on a time keeping device, one is now able to change their life. In my nearly 30 years of experience, I haven’t seen that to be particularly possible. But here I am, about to resolve something on so public a forum as to not be ignored.

I resolve two things, first: to read more. I was a voracious reader in my youth. You would often find me curled up on the couch, or stretched out on a bed with book in hand, eagerly flipping pages, absorbing content like the proverbial sponge absorbs water. In the last few years, my reading has slackened pace to have almost stopped completely. The only reading ritual that continues is my annual reading of the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion. Even that reading has become less a pleasure and more a chore. But I want to regain the magic of reading, and that means actually reading again. Part and parcel with my goal of reading more is to actually find a local library and get a library card so that I might read to my heart’s contentment.

Secondly may it be resolved: to write more. I used to be a prolific writer, at least one who wrote semi often about current events or currently occurring thoughts. However, as can be seen from a perusal of the right hand column on this blog labeled “archives”, there is a gap from 2015 to 2017 in which I didn’t write anything. This I want to remedy. I won’t resolve to write every day, or even every week, but I do promise to write at least once a month. So far, I am doing spectacularly as this will be my second long form essay in this month alone. Go me!

Part the Epilogue

Hereby it can be seen that these two parts join together. In leaving behind one form of life, I pick up another, and move forward. And that perhaps is the answer. Hannah, I sincerely hope, will live a long and happy life, and thus we may even cross paths again in the future. The only way I live life with that knowledge and survive that eventuality with any semblance of me is to create a once and future life that is again mine own.

Excelsior!

As of Yet Untitled

I am frightened that I won’t be any good at this “writing” thing. It’s been over a year since I’ve written anything of note.

I’m terrified. Honestly scared. I am frightened that I won’t be any good at this “writing” thing. It’s been over a year since I’ve written anything of note. Sure, I’ve penned a few poems in recent months, but the last time I wrote something longer form was just after The Force Awakens was released in theaters in 2015.

I have an image in my mind’s eye. I stand upon a precipice, about to fall over. One wrong step, and I plummet to my death. I should be staring at the setting sun, watching the moon rise and the stars appear, but instead my gaze is locked on the long dark below me. Inside my shoes, my toes are desperately curling, trying in vain to clamp on to the narrow ledge in front.

This image represents my fear of failure. It has been so strong it has kept me from writing for over a year. I don’t know where exactly it came from, what manifested it inside my brain, but it has been there: lurking.

I have many things I want to write about: Rogue One, Passengers, the untimely death of a princess turned general, my not-7th wedding anniversary, the passing of the most logical being in the galaxy, a few new year’s resolutions, all the death and gloom that was twenty16, and the list continues. But I have been afraid. Afraid that my opinion is not valid, afraid that I won’t have the words, afraid of what she will think, afraid to memorialize too late, afraid to say the wrong thing…afraid.

The abyss rises to grab me.

I had an interesting experience this evening. I am still not sure what it was I saw, but as I was locking my door, on my way out to pick up dinner, I saw something out of the corner of my eye, something dark and shadowy that disappeared behind the corner of the house as soon as I focused on it. I don’t put faith in ghosts or apparitions, though because of medication that I take I have been known to hallucinate from time to time, except only when I don’t take it. I thought about what I saw all during the drive out and back. Initially, I was spooked. I had no idea what I had I seen, if I had in fact seen anything, and that unknowning, that uncertainty scared me a little. I’m a grown man, almost 30, in fact, and I am not given to remaining afraid. Except…

Except I haven’t written in over a year out of sheer bloody panic.

In the end I decided, on my way home, that what I had seen was the coattail of my future time traveling self ducking out of the way so that I wouldn’t see myself and thereby destroy the space time continuum. (Or pass out from shock.) Instantly, I was unafraid.

And here I am writing. It still took me a few more hours of mindless mobile Scrabble and Ticket to Ride before I pulled myself off my bed and settled down in front of my laptop to actually put one word after another. And somewhere, in my head, in my heart, deep in the outer rim of my soul, I am still afraid. But I cannot let that fear stop me from doing what I love and that is to write. So I will write. I will write about Carrie Fisher, Leonard Nimoy, my ex-wife, movies that I have fallen in love with, what I have resolved this new year, the late twenty-teens and so on.

I am stronger than my fear. I back from the ledge to catch the last few rays of sunlight fading into twilight blue. I write.