My Home Town

Beneath a mountain

                above a lake

lies the town

               I chose to forsake

It has left my life

       But not my heart

Nor my mind

I dream

Of the small streets

Filled with love

Old friends of mine

They stop and say hello

How are you doing

How’s your uncle Joe

The words were real

Their hearts were true

When I think of what I left

My heart feels a little blue

Beauty

whence cometh thou

Is it through
my eyes, my touch, my heart, my ears, my mind
 another dimension
 all dimensions

you cannot just be
how can I know thee

I must be you
I must let you be me

I must
climb for you…sweat for you
Feel your dirt…your rocks…your cold…your warmth
hear your winds sing the songs of life and love
hear your birds praise the universe above
hear your waters caress the earth below
 rise to the sky and let it wrap round me
climb your mountains and make them me
lie in your valleys and feel them caress your skies

You must
feel
my aches…my pains…my breath
capture
my eyes, my ears, my mind, my heart, my soul

then

I will be yours
 wherever you are, whatever you are

I will
see you, hear you, feel you, be you

you will be me, I will be you

We will belong

 to the earth, the wind, the clouds, the moon, the sun and the stars,

The stars, the sun, the moon, the clouds, the wind, the earth,
 will belong to us.

Having my Baby

It has occurred to me that writing is just another form of creating a baby.

Every time we write something new, we have sired another baby or child.  True to actual life, a lot these children are created and then abandoned.

An idea, a child, is created and then because the creator, the writer, has created more than he or she can deal with, the fetus is aborted.

We write half a page, half a chapter, half a book and then because we haven't planned properly or prepared ourselves properly, we are not fit to be the parents of what we have created.  We lament that the child is not doing well.  The child is not what we had hoped for but that is not his or her fault. (is the gender of an unborn article male of female?)
 
The fault lies in our inability to be master creators.  We would like to be gods in the world of writing but alas, most of us are not
.
If, by some quirk of fate we are actually able to create a story or a book in its entirety, we are then left with the responsibility of raising our creation.

 But as in human children, we need help.  Someone has to clean up the poop.  By "clean up the poop" I mean the story needs to be edited and proofed.  Editing and proofing is like picking up the poop in your back yard.  No matter hard hard I try I always miss a pile and it's the same way with writing.

When we write we know what we mean to say and it is easy to leave out words or use the wrong word in the wrong places and when we reread what we wrote our eyes see what we think is there
.
Have you seen the email that goes around where all the words are misspelled?  It is very easy to read what is written and that is what we do with our own gibberish.

It is wise if you can beg or pay someone else to do the poop picking.

Once the poop is taken care, hopefully our child will move from grade school to high school where editors and agents may be lurking to grab the little bugger and make sure he or she (there's that gender thing again) stays on the straight and narrow.

If, and that is one big frigging if, (I have a love-hate relationship with the word frigging) it makes it with an agent and then a publisher, it may graduate from college and go on to bigger and better things.

Bigger and better things...like making money to support us in our old age.

Nanny State

It has to make one proud to be part of a state that leads all other states in the creation of new laws

I live in the Nanny State (California) and our latest endeavor is to crack down on the populace for eating and driving.

That’s right…eating and driving!

The Nanny State can and will give you a ticket for eating and driving.  That is the CHP  (California Highway Patrol) has decided that eating while driving in the Golden State between 6 a.m. Friday December 30, 2011 and 6 a.m. Saturday December 31, 2011 could mean as much as a $1,000 fine if it impairs a driver's ability to operate a motor vehicle.

While there is no law saying someone can't eat while driving, a distracted driver is in violation of the law.  Under California's vehicle code, a driver can be ticketed $145 to $1,000 for having "wanton disregard for the safety of persons or property."

There are a couple of things that grab my attention.

The first is the reference to “the Golden State”.  That is the official Nickname of California (since 1968) and I think it refers back to the California gold rush of 1849.  However I have been told that it may refer to the fields of Golden Poppies that cover the state each spring .(I have lived here 40 years and never seen a golden poppy…I guess they are something you have to go out and look for.)

I have to believe that while we may prefer to call ourselves as the “Golden State” others may prefer the name I have chosen for this article.  Maybe we can keep our nickname by saying it comes from all the gold that state extracts from its citizens.

The second item that grabbed my attention is the date that the CHP chose to impose its food crack down.  Why did they choose the day before New Years?  I can only guess.  I assume it’s because they feel they will be too busy with drunk drivers to worry about arresting or ticketing drivers that are caught eating but as I said, it’s an assumption.

If you should decide to spend some time in the Nanny State please be aware of our Golden rules:

  ·         Do not drink and drive

·         Do not text and drive

       ·         Cell phone hands free only

·         Do not eat and drive

I must confess that I am not sure whether the eating rule includes coffee and sunflower seeds.  I guess it would depend on the whim of the CHPofficer.  

You would be wise not to flip them off.

ECLECTIC

 One Friday evening, my wife, her mother and me were sitting in a small Buena Park restaurant called Salt & Pepper when my wife made what I thought was a very strange statement.

She just blurted out, “There is a very eclectic group of people in this restaurant tonight.”

I was surprised at my wife using the word eclectic and using it in a sentence.  Maybe I was jealous because I love to solve cross word puzzles and eclectic would be a great word for a puzzle. Because I am the cross word nut, I am usually the one to come up with strange and fascinating words.  Maybe I was surprised because I had no idea what eclectic meant.  I had heard the word but I did not have a clue to its meaning.

I commented to my wife that I was surprised with her use of the word and then I asked her what it meant.

“Odd,” she said.  “It means odd.  There are a lot of odd people here tonight.”

“That’s a great word,” I replied.

She was right.  There are always odd people at the Salt & Pepper restaurant and the oddest group there was probably our group.  At least I am very sure that other diners looked at us and giggled under their breaths.

One of the reasons I like Salt & Pepper is the other people that  go there to dine.  The food is good and the service is excellent but I like the people.  They are the people that I like to refer to as “salt of the earth” people.  They are the normal type of people that make and made this country great.  They put on no airs.  They do not pretend to be anything but what they are.

I feel like I am one of them.

I feel comfortable.

I don’t feel odd.

However, I guess I could feel eclectic because once we arrived home I had to Google eclectic. The results indicated that eclectic is close to odd but I wouldn’t provide my wife with a win in a Noah Webster contest.

Noah Webster defines eclectic when it used as adjective and when it is used as a noun as follows:

·      Adjective:  Deriving ideas, style, or taste from a broad and diverse range of sources.

·      Noun:  A person who derives ideas, style, or taste from a broad and diverse range of sources.

So an eclectic person is one who uses a wide range of sources to form his opinions or beliefs. An eclectic person is not an odd person unless one considers it odd to form ideas from different sources.

Therefore, it was not an eclectic crowd at the restaurant.  I refuse to call it an odd crowd because as I stated earlier, I was part of the crowd and I adamantly refuse to admit that I am odd.

The problem for me was to figure out where my wife heard eclectic and why she wanted to impress me with her new found knowledge by using it in sentence and also would I bet wise for me to inform her that she was just a wee bit wrong in her usage of the word?

I suspect that she heard the word on MSNBC because that is what she watches on the mind bending tube that we call television.  She is deeply into politics.  She wakes up and watches MSNBC.  She watches MSNBC in bed at night. 

I am not into politics.  I think all politicians are crazy but I do have my political beliefs and I am very happy with them.  It is not necessary for me to boor you with my beliefs.  I am very happy to let you believe and vote as you see fit. I will believe and vote as I see fit.

However, my wife tries to get me involved in a political “discussion” on various occasions.  Once in a while I will fall for the bait and then regret it.  The “discussion” usually leads to several hours of silence between the two of us.

I am not about to accept some of the premises tossed around on MSNBC and she is not about to accept any idea that I may have so why should we go down that road?  I am happy to let her believe as she wants.  For some reason, the opposite does not hold true.

I have come to the belief that when someone is so adamant in their beliefs that they cannot let another person have any different belief, that person is beginning to go over the Kooky bridge.  I sometimes wonder if my wife in her world of politics isn’t somewhere in the middle of that bridge.

So assuming that she learned eclectic and the miss use of eclectic on MSNBC I have chosen to let sleeping kooks lie and keep my non political mouth shut.  I am happier that way.

Sgbeatty/dec-2011