This weekend blew past me. Barely caught my breath and I’m back at work again. Where does it go to – I just don’t know. Weekends need to be longer, so I can do all the things I need to do as well as all the things I want to do. Did manage to read two books – Zalazny’s This Immortal and Earnest Gaines’ A Gathering of Old Men. Both good for different reasons. Both addressing the same problem form different angles. One looks at what it’s liked to be colonized and marginalized, the other at what it’s like to be discriminated against and victimized. One is science fiction, the other is just plain fiction. Or maybe they are both science fiction. Do genre’s really matter? Maybe. But I’m beginning to wonder about that.
But in getting the reading done, the laundry suffered. Things in the basket are developing their own personalities. Then there are the dust bunnies on the kitchen floor that are threatening to take over the house – I think it’ll be a bloodless coup! And I have a fascinating science experiment taking place in the back of my fridge – I think it was beef stew a couple of months ago, but it’s metamorphosing into a new life form. How is one supposed to take care of all the stuff of life when there’s no one else to take care of it? You know – all the pesky details like shopping and going to the post office and dropping off the dry cleaning and calling that bill collector to ask for an extension and dusting and vacuuming and washing dishes and shoveling the sidewalk so the letter carrier doesn’t slip and break his back and making sure you call the kids on their birthdays and cooking and paying the bills and showering and changing the sheets and taking the car in for a tune-up and exercising so you don’t die of a heart attack at fifty and so on and so forth, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. And all of this in addition to working fifty hours a week. I’ll never figured this one out.
And do you know that someone once had the effrontery to call me a “classic under-achiever” because I couldn’t take care of all of this junk and be Superdad at the same time? I had just finished my MA while working two jobs. Underachiever indeed! I suppose the person in question could take care of all that life stuff, in addition to working a second job – and he probably made sure his gutters were cleaned out too! Hmmph! Ya know how I raked my leaves in the fall? I didn’t! I let the snow cover them up. Can’t see leaves under the snow. And come spring, I’ll rake up whatever’s left with the lawn mower! I laugh at leaves. Hah-hah! Who has time to rake leaves that are only going to fall again? Although, for some folks, that marks me as an underachiever, a slacker.
*Dude doesn’t even rake his leaves!*
* What a slacker!*
* Sad, really!*
*Probably one of them meth addicts you read about.*
*And he looked like a decent enough fellow – at first.*
Oh well, the Dude abides!
I’ve been pondering the idea of beginning to think about starting to prepare to look at working on my stories again. I think I wanna open up the rainy city one – see if I can’t work it into . . . something. Or not. I’m wondering if I really have the talent for writing fiction. I mean, I can sit and spew stuff like this out all day long, but my stories don’t seem to be very original or if they are they don’t really seem to be very interesting. But I guess I really shouldn’t give up, huh? Was watching something about Agatha Christie the other night. They said she started writing when she was quite young, because she’d read every book in her parents’ house and wanted more to read. So her mom told her to write her own story if she wanted more. So she did! The rest = HISOTRY!! And in a sense, that’s what I did. I got tired of not finding the kind of stories I wanted to read, or at least not enough of the kind I wanted to read, so I decided to write my own. Unfortunately, it seems that I may not be very good at it. Or maybe I just need more practice.
And now, enough of this pathetic self-reflection. Another day at the salt mines is upon me.
Peace!
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