4:43 a.m. - 2024-01-29
strays and scraps
I sat down at this keyboard last week to recall a dream from months past, the memory of which had persisted. I'd intended to write a paragraph or two every morning as I coffee-ed up, before commencing w/my workday (I'm on as a ranch foreman for a bit--it’s peaceful, high paying work). But maybe I underestimated the strength of this new coffee, 'cause when I sat down today the first half of my yet-unfinished recollection had ballooned, somehow, into four pages. Four pages for what should have left been a brief internal narrative. It was tangential bloat of course, some of it cleverly written (if I just said so myself); but bloat nonetheless. So I got out my editor's scissors, set sentiment aside, and proceeded to litter the cutting room floor.
This is typical, of late.
My parents are pet-rescue people. If they see an “abandoned” dog they'll take it home, have a vet check it over, and proceed to feed and pet it until it dies. But because they're busy professionals, and because of the sheer volume of abandoned dogs where they live (I believe they were housing nine at one point), these animals never get proper training. They jump. They bark. They defecate on the pool-deck...all behavior this visiting son regards with disapproval. One of their current pack lives indoors, and if I'm loading in groceries or my luggage or I step out to sign for a package, I'm supposed to take care that I don't “let the dog out”. Not because he would attack the UPS driver of anything, but because he will, and has, “run off”. Just take off wildly down the street; tongue hangin' and tail a-wag. I find this hilarious, and would happily wave goodbye and wish him many fine adventures out in the dog-wild if my mother didn't get so upset and implore to me to chase the f*cker down. “What are you running here, a pet-prison?”, I always scold her as I search for a leash to fetch him back, “He knows where you live...this whole dynamic is unhealthy, you realize that right?”. She doesn't though, realize that. Anyway, that's how my brain is when I sit down to write sometimes...I crack the door and the f*cker just runs off.
Speaking of unhealthy dynamics, a fellow blogger has taken to reminding me, daily, of how long it's been since I posted anything. Considering that I went eleven years or so w/out an entry, this seems odd. Also odd, considering our brief and problematic relationship, is the fact that I always answer her calls. Perhaps the value of dignity decreases with age and isolation...perhaps I'm too busy tending my other deadly sins to worry about Pride. Regardless—these "reminders" are why, while I was editing, I decided to create this destined-for-deletion post around an otherwise-deleted excerpt...both to illustrate why we can't let my untrained rescue-brain off-leash, and to buy me some time to finish a proper entry in peace, dammit.
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Aside from punctuation and such, the three glaringly-problematic elements I try to edit out of my writing are:Jokes. Have I ever mentioned that I'm hilarious? If so, then I hope I qualified that w/some context: I'm the funniest guy at the bar. Which means I'm great at busting balls and quick w/sexual innuendo, basically. Also loud and generally well-liked. None of this translates on paper unfortunately, and my irrepressible efforts to articulate anything more subtle/highbrow always feel flat or forced on a second reading. So I'm sorry jokes--finish your drinks and get out.
Florid Language. If you think the final product seems overwrought or pretentious, you should see my first drafts. Part of it involves modifier pile-up; this happens when there's seven ways to describe something and they're all so very clever that you just turn 'em loose and hire extra commas and ellipses to play traffic cop. I allow myself a two-modifier max now, and edit to enforce. I also get conceptually florid...a holdover from my philosophy-undergrad days perhaps, because abstract-idea smash/contractions are rampant in the field. I usually let these ride though, because I'd rather the reader's eyes glaze for a moment before returning to a narrative than expounding pedantically and risking that most egregious of my writing sins...
...Tangential Bloat. I generate pages of it, and the example below is telling. I'd only meant to write “There's a terrible beauty to the city under winter duress.”, but somehow found myself, two paragraphs later, arriving at “... an appreciation born of the obverse corollary of that supposition”. None of it relating directly to the dream I was trying to describe of course...the damn dog just got out again.
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There's a terrible beauty to the city under winter duress. An aesthetic tension that brings to mind Turner's theory of the sublime: because from a lived perspective, it's brutal. Eyes water and cheeks sting as skyscrapers funnel trash down frozen avenues. Dog shit (and yes, the occasional syringe) fleck(s) grime-tinted snow berms heaved curbward by street plows. The weather-shattered faces of the homeless are extra grim, and the suffering of those shivering gargoyles, huddled against the marble facades of our capitalist cathedrals, becomes painfully unambiguous. Not that empathy for the less-fortunate makes your own feverish commute any easier--the morning slog to the station leaves you panting now in the arctic air. Coughs both wet and dry rattle up and down train-cars as snotty hands grip hanger straps. Your socks are always wet and one glove is inevitably AWOL...business hours are arbitrary on snow days and every errand becomes a chore, basically.Duck inside your local for a minute though...thaw out and commiserate w/your peers. Put some Ella Fitzgerald on the 'box, order a short whiskey and stare out at the falling snow; it's beautiful isn't it, from the warm side of the window? When the mercury-vapor glare of the street lights turns to faerie halos, when wind-sculpted snowdrifts soften right-angles and icicles drape construction scaffolding; there's an appeal of a different order. That figure across the street—shoulders hunched under a pea-coat, cap pulled low and scarf wrapped-about his face, he's leaning into the wind like a frigate pilot in the teeth of an arctic gale...or like a junior accountant on his way to the deli to buy eggs. Nature neither discriminates nor cares--we get that, and our experience of adversity informs our aesthetic appreciation. Be it of a frozen cityscape, a fishing boat in the face of a great wave, or a regiment of armored elephants crossing the alps: when the subject connects our wary primal brain-stems to our cultured, critical perception of its representation, the beautiful becomes visceral. That's what Turner (and before him Burke) meant by “the artistic sublime". What I'm gettin' at here though, in this rambling aside, is an appreciation born of the obverse corollary of that supposition, the vice-versa...
