[fiction, instead of lies]

On NPR Krista Tippet does a lovely job with a show called “On Being,” and I tell you, I come up with something new every time I listen. This poem came from a years-ago meme, was passed from blog to blog, hand to hand, but I refuse to forget it, utterly refuse.

It is how I want to be – happy, in myself.

Happy in my head.

Happy.

Today, be happy…

People who know me know that I am a Serious Choral Person. Other musicians who have heard me laugh hard have commented that I am indeed a singer. (Apparently one’s vocal register(s) are apparent if one has a good laugh. Beware of joke-cracking musicians; they’re making you audition.) For the last five years, chorus music has been a weekly part of my life, and before that (with a pause of a few years), I sang seriously in college and in high school, with the idea that I might someday want to do so professionally. That didn’t come to pass, but I found myself not disappointed, for music remains within reach.

Scotland is a country of choristers, so I am in very good company indeed. Nearly every little village or hamlet has its own singers; every city its choir, every university its community-supported chorus.

Mary’s score is open to Vaughan Williams’ To The Unknown Region (based on a poem by Walt Whitman), a song of amazing complexity and gorgeousness.

Sure, I’ve had bad experiences in choruses with nasty directors and stressful performances – but those are rare. Despite the lingering terror of the audition (oy), for the last two years I’ve had the joy of singing with the city chorus in Glasgow, and I have met some of the most wonderfully odd, insane, ridiculous, friendly, and talented people from their early twenties to their late sixties…with an emphasis on “insane.” We laugh a lot, in our chorus. And when it is cold and dark, we sing aloud for a couple of hours with friends, and rediscover our humanity… and our endorphins.

And, okay, yes: I whine about our chorus outfits – but The Blouse of Purple Hideousness is not that bad. (Hey, it might be short and polyester, but it’s not sequined.) We whinge about standing through a two-hour performance, and complain that “we got that note! It was the basses who threw us off!” but really – who cares whose fault it was? We’ll do it again, work our bums off, until we get it right. We silently stick out our tongues at our director when he berates us for missing an entrance – and then we sing it over again, and come in right on time. We watch the orchestra – distracted by that amazing girl in the brass! – and listen in amazement to the cellists. Whether we’re resurrecting Queen anthems, doing a spot of silliness from Grease or singing the choruses from The Lion King we have fun. And when we sing, we. make. magic.

Music is a gift. Singing with a mass chorus is sparkly wrapping paper, curled ribbons, and a glittery cherry on top.

For the grace of a song in the dark, for the great chords of sacred oratorio reverberating through my mind as I lay wakeful, from the shuffle-side-step-shimmy-bop of ridiculous of 40′s-50′s romantic odes and beach do-wop, to 60′s dance tunes, 80′s anthems, to handbanging metal and grunge, blood-firing gospel, serene flutes and sitars and the swooping romance of Saint-Saëns, I am indeed grateful.

A group of artistic types – Amanda Palmer, her husband, Neil Gaiman, Ben Fold, and OK Go’s Damian Kulash got together at the end of April to write eight songs in eight hours – just to see if they could. (You can listen to the whole record streaming on Amanda’s webpage.) As often happens with random Creative Commons released projects, other artists have put their own creative spin on 8in8, as it’s called. From Neil’s quirky Englishness shining through in The Trouble With Saints to the horribly funny and heartbreaking Because the Origami, this project has just blown me away. This pictorial rendering of 8in8′s song, I’ll Be My Mirror is my favorite by far — it’s a brief musical poem, but the words are too, too true.

“…there’s a fraction of a brain cell that makes us what we are
one false move, you’re in the mirror,
someone’s laughing
from the car.

Mom used to say this little phrase, “There, but for the grace of God go I.” It’s true, isn’t it? For all of us who fear shouting in mirrors, to all of us, afraid in the car, we are all people, and all fearful. That is what we hold in common. That is what I will remember, when next I see a random, wandering homeless person, talking to themselves: there but for the grace of God…

“Good morning, Pooh Bear,” said Eeyore gloomily. “If it is a good morning,” he said. “Which I doubt,” said he.
“Why, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing, Pooh Bear, nothing. We can’t all, and some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it.”
“Can’t all what?” said Pooh, rubbing his nose.
“Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush.”
“Oh!” said Pooh. He thought for a long time, and then asked, “What mulberry bush is that?”
- Winnie the Pooh, by A. A. Milne

Poor Eeyore. His conversation with Pooh just illustrates the weird conversations a depressed person can have with those who don’t get us. (Of course, Eeyore is being somewhat cryptic, but still.) Tons of people love Eeyore, though, despite his habit of seeing the absolute worst in everything, from thistles to aggressively sanguine tigers. He’s moody, grumpy, and generally a melancholy downer — yet the pink ribbon on his tail reminds us that he doesn’t see himself as depressed. Sometimes there are within him flashes of joy.

Today, the character of Eeyore is 140 years old – probably feeling creaky-old and somewhat down, but he’s still my favorite character in the Hundred Acre Wood, after the timid and tongued-tied Roo. But the question of why we actually like what is essentially a depressive donkey is explored today on the Guardian Books Blog. Says the author, “But the key thing that makes Eeyore a great character is that essential literary ingredient: conflict. Eeyore is profoundly conflicted. He craves love – indeed, he’s always lamenting his outsider status – but he struggles to give and receive it. When it’s offered to him, he puts out his hoof and waves it away.” Eeyore is all of us — every one of us, trying to keep our balance and our tails, in a wood populated by hyperactive tigers, bears of very little brain, annoyingly smart owls, and hideously callous and impatient rabbits.

My friend Shawn and I used to have amusing conversations about depression. I think it’s almost harder for guys to be depressed – girls are kind of expected to have at least monthly visits into bad moods, but when a guy is suffering from depression, it seems harder for people to understand. But, what is there to understand? A chemical imbalance in the brain throws a switch and says, “There. You’re sad now.” And that’s that. Some types of depression don’t have to be about anything. And those are the most frustrating kinds, when everything that’s actually wrong is magnified by five thousand percent. And at those times, the Eeyore among us really need our compassion and patience – and sometimes just our presence.

Today, in honor of Eeyore’s birthday, eat your thistles, hang onto your tails, and remember there’s room for all of us in the Hundred Acre Woods, even the loners who are depressive and grumpy. Love us anyway.

Thank you, Ms. Shari Fesko and the Southfield Michigan teens at the library, for the love! In honor of you sharing the A LA CARTE foodie vibe, here’s our Café Lainey blue plate special of Bananas Foster and a fudge brownie for you!

If Lainey got her hands on this recipe, she’d redo the brownie to be one of those flourless chocolate cakes and probably only take a little ice cream… but… the Bananas Foster we can pretend is healthy. It’s fruit, right? So, that’s fair…

Thanks again for the note and the encouragement. Notes like yours make my day.

“…the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Original Caption: 12/21/1956-Montgomery, AL: Rosa Parks, 43, sits in the front of a city bus here Dec. 21 as a Supreme Court ruling which banned segregation on the city's public transit vehicles took effect. Mrs. Parks' arrest on Dec. 1, 1955, for sitting in a bus forward of white passengers, touched off the boycott of Montgomery Negroes against the city's bus lines.

…may I sit next to you?

…and Rick. And Phil. And Kathy. And Steve. And Chris. And Jason. And Reena. And Will. And Stephanie.

— And all of my classmates who chose the military over college – and who stuck with it when it was something most of the rest of us didn’t understand, or particularly respect.

— And all of those who are stuck with it now, who really want to come home, yet understand things about loyalty and duty that I never will.

— And all the families who lost someone in the past, who are missing someone still; for those who lost spirits instead of merely bodies, for all the sacrifices and the reasons that may not never make sense:

… thank you.

Sorry for the muzak reference. Bad Seventies Things have taken over my head today. (I guess I should a.) look up what the real song is, b.) who sings it, c.) and thus get it stuck in my head for life? No. Just remembering my mother’s flirtation with Easy Listening when I was a kid is bad enough, thanks.)

I recently passed along a piece from the blog Write For Your Life to my writing group. The piece on “morning pages” was based on the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and according to this piece, morning pages are “three pages of stream of consciousness writing that you do every morning. The intention is to clear your mind of all the annoying claptrap that buzzes around, getting in the way of your creativity.”

Right.

So, I asked my writing group — three of whom are published writers, one a journalist, one an award-winning short story writer — what they thought of that. I asked if they used morning pages, or something like that, to clear away their cobwebs before they set in to writing.

The response? A wincing, “every single day?!”, a disbelieving, “why would I do that?!,” a rather polite “sounds like an interesting idea,” and my favorite response, hysterical laughter.

Um, yeah.

I have to say I love it when my writing group is in sync with me.

We bounced the idea around of freewriting and what it does for us, but none of us could face the idea of doing three pages of writing like that, every single regimented day. The idea – even for the promised goal of improving ourselves – felt confining and a lot like the crappy busywork we got assigned in the fourth grade when our teacher had a headache.

I have a hard time with regimentation of any kind. I force myself to the gym a minimum of three days a week. I have to remind myself to brush my teeth. I sometimes remind myself that at least things like deodorant and putting on something beneath a t-shirt ::cough:: are automatic now, but boy — I really remember fifth grade when my mother despaired of me. I just can’t seem to get into a groove very easily. At least, not doing things that are supposed to be routine; I often can’t even be bothered to eat lunch until 3:30 or so.

Sadly, I tend to run up against this same feeling of put-upon confinement when I encounter …well, any writing advice. When I graduated from college, my favorite professor gave me a copy of a book called, If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland. In it, I read that she subscribes to the theory of moodling along, coddling creativity by happily doing nothing in particular. Okay, I can agree with that. Unfortunately, she advocated doing that “moodling” by taking several long walks a day.

Hm.

I like walking all right, but I don’t think it makes me more creative. Walking usually makes me hot, unless it’s nice and windy out, and then I enjoy the sensation of being all sweaty with a cold face. (It’s actually quite nice, and we get 70 mph gales here – that’s actually a lot of fun to walk in, and yes I know I’m weird. Hush up.) If I took several long walks a day, I fear I would never finish anything much – including simple things like laundry and making meals. While I’m find living on toast and wearing wrinkled sweats, I’m not sure how successful a writer that would make me, not really.

The proof should be in the doing, yes? I mean, I manage to write because I enjoy sitting down and writing. And when I don’t enjoy it, I frown a lot and mutter, and do it anyway — because I know I’m just at a spot where things aren’t working, and if I backtrack a half a chapter or so and change a few things, usually things turn out all right.

Would that kind of insight be easier with a walk? Or morning pages?

I don’t know. The reason I bring this up is that I’m planning on re-reading all the writing books I have. If they don’t actually contain any helpful information — avast — to the library they shall go. Maybe someone else will be able to get something out of them.

(Why is it that people give writers books on writing advice? Besides the Ueland, I have Bird by Bird, a few more text-book-y types, and a bunch of Annie Dillard, too.) It’s time to make some space on my shelves – past time, with another Cybils coming up – and so I am doing An Almighty Weeding.

But, tell me about you: what do you do with your early morning hours? What writing books have you found useful? What daily practices – if any – make sense to you and inform your writing? Where did you donate all of your unwanted writing books??

Good grief, these soldiers! Always sassy, that 6888th.

I thought I’d posted this about a year ago, but found that I never did! So – enjoy. And imagine Mare…

Revision. Because it means I’ve sold another book, and I’m working, being a writer. Which is just exceptionally cool.

The countdown of “almost done” for Kelly’s Jane poems, and knowing that yet another of my dearest friends will soon be in print.

New story ideas and fun historical research. And poison.

The light at the end of the tunnel for Tech Boy’s PhD.

Actually, the endless rain. Because I’d rather be dreary than too hot, at this point. (This may change.)

Other happiness will surface, but those are the thoughts as of this moment. Also: that Tales of Mere Existence is somewhat addictive, and very depressingly funny.