John Swinburn

I read an obituary this morning. A fifteen-year-old girl in Bedford, Texas committed suicide by hanging herself. Bullying took its toll on her.  Whoever wrote the obituary put the blame squarely on the bully(ies); I hope those responsible read it. They will have to live with what they did. Unless they can no longer live with who they are.

Another morning, just like so many mornings past. This early part of the day is a homonym for bereavement. A drab sky, muted green leaves, the muddy brown bark of trees sliding into black where the dim light of morning can’t reach the surface. Somewhere above me, the sun is hiding, shielded by smoke or clouds or haze so thick its light must bend and perform unenthusiastic acrobatics to make it way past obstacles in the air. I’m trying to make the best of the depressing vision outside my window, but my brain is as foggy as the day is funereal and my fingers protest efforts to make them dance on the keyboard. An image of my mournful countenance accompanies the word “lugubrious” in the unabridged version of the Oxford English Dictionary. Pines and oaks outside my window seems hopeless in the knowledge that they, too, will decay and fall to the ground one day unnoticed, mourned by nothing and no one. Mourning somehow doesn’t suit the natural cycle of life and death. Mourning denies the ebb and flow of life on the planet, as if death is a mistake to be lamented, a grievous error about which we can do nothing but fret. I doubt ants mourn the loss of individual workers who perish under the feet of joggers or demonic children who kill just because they can. They probably don’t even grieve over the loss of an entire colony; they have more pressing things to do than rue the invention of soles to protect the soulless or wish children had never been born. We could be like ants if we were sufficiently single-minded, wherein nothing matters but accomplishing the one goal we have set for ourselves, or which has been set for us. How many ants must there be outside in the half-acre surrounding the spot where I sit? I’d bet the numbers must run into the hundreds of thousands. Every one of them will die one day, maybe soon, but none mourned. It’s not just “that’s life,” it’s simply “that’s reality.” Reality is what me make it, though, isn’t it? Reality is simply the way our brain processes events and experiences. In that sense, someone who’s taken LSD is experiencing a reality that’s very different from mine, but it’s a reality nonetheless. I might like to know what that reality is like; I might like to see trees morph into colorful insects and watch them swallow bits of the sky. I wrote yesterday, during the height of a seemingly non-ending string of NOAA weather radio alerts that I expected the alerts to one day warn that fragments of the moon will soon rip through the atmosphere and smash to earth. Subsequent to that, I’ll hear warnings about monstrous tsunamis caused by lunar debris and then dire warnings about enormous eruptions of magma from the earth’s core, thanks to broken pieces of the moon puncturing earth’s crust. Imagine experiencing a reality in which such events were not simply creations of one’s imagination but, instead, terrors felt in the core of one’s being. Imagine believing such things were actually happening. I gather the realities of LSD succeed in melding dreams or creative interpretations of experience with belief. So the colorful insects actually are eating piece of the sky, right before one’s eyes. Looking outside my window now, I am a bit wistful for those vibrant colors. If insects are eating the sky in my line of vision, they are dull grey beasts, invisible in their dreary camouflage.

Last night’s HSV Open Mic Night had the largest attendance, by far, of any held to date: 152 people in the audience. Last night’s performances were eclectic. Banjo, acoustic guitar, piano, electric guitar, viola, violin, conga, bongos, trombone, spoken word poetry, harmonica. The music mix was just as diverse: country, folk, classical, hard rock. And the people, both audience and performers, ran the gamut from very young to very old, rock “groupie” to folk aficionado, country fan to student of classical, conservative to progressive (I discerned political bent from my biased perspective and not through overt observation). I was pleased with the event, though I can’t really take responsibility for it. The performers, after all, were self-selected volunteers with the exception of the feature performer (an incredibly talented guitarist who brought a singer/conga player to accompany him) and a string trio, who I invited. But I take some pride in it, regardless, because I got the word out and encouraged involvement.

As I think of the characters on stage last night, it occurs to me that I could use them (or my interpretation of them) in my writing. I could (and probably will) craft histories surrounding them: their backgrounds, their motivations for their music or other expression, their attitudes and ideas about life. For example, the duo of two aging artists who rocked the house by playing White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane give me fodder for a story in which country roots and southern racist culture clash with 1960s and 1970s progressive and left-wing rebellion, creating an odd mix of  chauvinism and tolerance. Mind you, I have no idea whether the story would have even a kernel of truth or parallel with the players; it’s my mind taking a close-up snapshot of a flower and using the photo as a model from which to paint a landscape of a mountain range.

Listening to some of the musicians’ self-deprecating comments, warning the audience not to expect much, was at once endearing and heart-breaking. Every person on stage last night had more musical or lyrical talent on display in a few minutes than I could display in a lifetime, yet many of them felt compelled to call attention to what they saw as their inadequacies. That’s painful to watch. That, in and of itself, is the stuff of literature, literature that mines the complexities of the human psyche.

I got off track, didn’t I? I intended to touch on some of the characters I might create from last night’s performers. All right, back to the track. The talented middle school student who sang and played piano and guitar could serve as a model of a young woman who is nurturing a dream of stardom. As the story unfolds in my head, I see her exhibit a single-minded focus that’s rare in someone so young; she wants not only to develop her talent to the fullest, she wants to share it on the world’s stage. But as she matures—physically, emotionally, and musically—she becomes skeptical of fame and stardom. Instead, she finds fulfillment in using her talents to call attention to the plight of the less fortunate, becoming, for lack of a better comparison, the Joan Baez for her age. The altruism that drives her, though, conflicts with the almost unavoidable financial riches her talents deliver to her. Her torment resolves when she comes to grip with one painful truth: the world is not a fair place, but only by pursuing the impossible dream of fairness does it become tolerable.

Following a theme similar to the one that emerged from my thoughts about the young musician, I consider the people behind the intersection between jazz and poetry. The musician, a man whose life has taken him from poverty to riches and back again many times over, struggles to define which experience had the greatest impact on defining who he is at his core. Whenever he find himself at a crossroads, emotionally, in that search for self, he returns to music. The poet, a retired senior-level government diplomat, yearns to forget a lifetime that, in retrospect, has been an empty vessel into which is poured and emptied repeatedly an elixir designed for political gain. She seeks meaning outside her career, which she now sees as hollow and meaningless. Through their unique mix of music and message, the musician and the poet feed one another the energy they need to explore what’s missing from their lives. Neither realizes the power of symbiosis until they achieve, separately, what they could accomplish only by sharing music and message together.

The members of the string trio are sisters who pursue classical music in homage to their father, a brilliant composer who died in a hotel fire in Luxembourg when they were young children. His death devastates their mother. In an effort to keep his memory and his music alive, she insisted that the three sisters learn to play stringed instruments which formed the core of their father’s classical compositions. For years, she had them practice—day after day after day—an unfinished symphony her husband was writing at the time of his death. Her aim, though neither she nor the children knew it at the time, was for the unfinished piece to be completed. She believed, unconsciously, that at some point her daughters would continue playing beyond the notes written by her husband, filling in the emptiness he left with his unfinished piece. At the mother’s insistence, the three sisters—by now adults with children of their own—play a concert of his music. The last piece they play is their fathers’ unfinished piece. But when they reach the last note he wrote, they continue playing until the piece their father was writing comes to a thunderous conclusion, prompting the audience to rise in applause and the mother to finally achieve a moment of peace before her death, just seconds after they play the final.

The rest of the performers could just as easily stoke the fires of creativity, as could every member of the audience. I could make up stories for every one of them. But would I finish the stories? Only the rest of time will tell.

I bounce from project to project, finishing the occasional endeavor if it’s especially short and requires little patience. It occurs to me that, if I were able to transfer the energy expended in one hundred unfinished projects into just a few important ones, I might well be living in a spectacularly well-appointed home with a lovely, productive garden. I might have a superb workshop, drive a gleaming car, and have a dozen novels under my belt. I just can’t seem to sit still long enough to get anything of consequence done. I lose interest. No, that’s not it; I don’t lose interest, I lose drive. I still have the interest, but I lose the initiative, the purpose, the…DRIVE. That’s it. I want to finish, but not badly enough to invest the effort. When I start, I’m gung-ho. And then something else attracts my attention and my energy. It’s simply a lack of discipline. That’s what it is.

I wonder how I managed to keep my clients happy. I wonder how I managed to stay employed. Have I always been this distracted? I suppose so. But until several years ago, I managed to force myself to plug along. I think that—forcing myself to plug along—may have been what drove me absolutely over the edge and made me decide to shut down the business, sell the assets, and “take a sabbatical.” I actually did intend to return to earning a living. But even that idea and the dozens of possibilities I explored got old and unattractive in short order. I’ve said I want to start a business of one kind or another, but I don’t want to run it once it’s up and operating. The operations and management aspect of business is boring in the extreme; it’s the launch and the scramble to make a go of it in the early stages that’s appealing. Beyond that, it’s dull. And dulling.

One of my less ambitious projects, HSV Open Mic Night, has become another distraction in need of offloading. When I began, I was enthusiastic. I still enjoy it. But I have absolutely no interest in continuing to orchestrate it every few months. It’s not like it requires exceptional efforts; it doesn’t. But I have grown tired of the novelty, I guess. I’m looking for someone else to take it over. Maybe that’s the same tactic I should use with my writing (and my house projects and my painting and my gardening, etc., etc.): look for someone to finish what I began. Hmm, here’s something to consider: I write far enough into a story to begin to develop an interesting plot and some intriguing characters; then, someone else takes over, supplementing my draft and working it over until a complete story emerges.  Meh. No, I don’t think that would go anywhere. It’s not unlike the idea of tearing off part of my deck and then offering others the opportunity to finish it because “it will be fun!” But maybe I can wiggle my way out of Open Mic Night that way; someone is bound to find it interesting. It is. It’s just no longer particularly interesting to me.

The idea of losing interest in projects, activities, endeavors, etc., etc. doesn’t seem so sinister until one considers other aspects of one’s life. Losing interest in one’s spouse, children, friends, et al to the extend that one might consider abandoning them would be viewed as evidence of lapses in morality or worse. At what point do commitments between people and projects and activities, and the loss thereof, blur toward indistinctness? Does the inability to maintain full commitment to endeavors that once meant a great deal offer clues to one’s moral fiber? Does the capacity to lose interest in something once so important suggest the same thing might happen with family and friends? These are scary thoughts, though I realize I may be over thinking the relationship between what could be symptoms of AADHD and one’s core decency as a human being.

Looking back at the preceding paragraphs, I must say I take great pride. Pride in my ability to finish several paragraphs that include complex sentences. Sentences that contain ideas that relate to one another, though in some cases only tangentially. But is this post really finished? Maybe not, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s done. My focus now moves on to a fresh cup of coffee and pumpernickel toast.

Imagine yourself out for a run, or a walk, through the forest. A mile away from the nearest house, you spot a raccoon in the trail in front of you. Though it’s an unusual sighting in broad daylight, more unusual is the animal’s response when it sees you. It bares its teeth and charges at you. Brambles and vines and rocky bumps in the path ahead and behind make it impossible for you to outrun it. It leaps toward you and, as you attempt to push it away as it lunges, it clamps its teeth on your thumb. You scream and try your best to pull the animal’s jaws apart, but your strength does not match that of the clawing animal. As you wrestle with the biting, clawing, scratching beast, you notice a puddle of water at your feet. In a desperate effort to make this nightmare end, you thrust the beast under the water and push with all your might. You hold the animal under for what seems an eternity. Finally, its legs go limp and its grip on your thumb loosens. You’re able to release yourself from its clutches. Almost paralyzed with fear, you run back down the trail from which you came and reach your house. Some of your housemates call 911 for help, while others take to the trail to find your attacker. They find the drowned raccoon, bag it, and  take it to the authorities, who determine it was rabid. You must now get a series of injections to save your life; without them, you will surely die. But the nightmare is nearly over, but not completely. You will live to tell the tale. The authorities caution you, and everyone nearby: when there’s one rabid raccoon, there will be more. Beware the forest trail.

[This may sound like something I’d make up, but it’s actually pretty faithful to a story I read about yesterday in an online newspaper in Maine. Today, the internet is alight with stories recounting the horrible encounter.]

We tie ourselves in knots made of sinew and sweat, stress and seclusion, sincerity and suspicion. Nothing is its own thing anymore; everything belongs to something or someone else. Community, insatiable in its allure, topples the towers of individualism, releasing the utopia that togetherness promises to bring. Together, we promise to think and act and wish for the greater good, the genuine sublimity of ego erasure. Egos were meant to be fed a steady diet of hunger; fed, not starved. The starved ego recoils at communalism, for it represents famine; the hungry ego clings to community, for it offers opportunities to partake of readily shared sustenance. Individualism is self-responsibility taken a step too far, a step beyond non-reliance into selfishness and penurious thrift. Where, then, is the proper balance? Where does the individual end and society begin? Every answer is a truthful lie, hidden inextricably inside a kernel of truth sheathed in a web of deceit and ignorance.

A river of light sits just beyond the dark edges of the unseen horizon, poised to burst into morning. Before long, I expect light to flood through the windows. That river of light, spilling from the sky, will flush darkness downstream. But then, as dawn matures into mid-morning, the darkness will crawl back, bringing with it air so thick with tears of the gods that the sky may cry like a wounded water-bucket, its galvanized bottom riddled with holes inflicted by an angry child armed with an ice pick. Clouds, acting like demonic prisms, will amplify the sun’s heat in a conspiracy designed to turn good cheer into beads of sweat and angry curses. The cool breezes of bygone days have left for more charitable climates, leaving us to bake and broil like food for discerning vultures. Those gentle breezes that soothed our skins and our souls may one day return. When the pumpkin shivers, we will know the time has come. We can only hope the pumpkin will, indeed, shiver again.

The shooting in Washington, DC today pierced my heart. It showed me that even people who share my political and social perspectives can be just as monstrous, just as vile as people I’ve labeled demonic and uncaring. I condemn the bastard responsible for today’s attempts on the lives of Republicans. Regardless of how much you hate their politics or their positions on social issues, you have absolutely no right to gun them down. Doing that, aside from its deviant sociopathic elements, gives credence to the same deviants on the conservative side who decide to do the same. Are we not civilized? Are we not decent people?  I will readily admit to hating—truly hating—Donald Trump and his zealot supporters. I think they are psychotic. But I do not condone assassination. I do not condone violence like that done today. If today’s actions have any positive effect, it will be that we, as a society, will take stock of who we are and what we’re doing. We should step back and realize that we are tearing our country apart. Neither conservative nor progressive will “win.” We will achieve success only to the extent that we persuade the “other side” to consider our perspectives and, on occasion, concede that they offer the best course of actions.

Only if we collectively condemn violence, lies, manipulation, and monstrosity, will we progress. I need not retract my condemnation of Trump (I think the man is an affront to civilized thought and deserves to be jailed for crimes against humanity), nor do opponents of Hillary Clinton need to change their hearts and express undying love. But we need to accept that differences of opinion are valid. The hard parts will be the issues that create the most heat; abortion, health care…what else?

If my conservative friends and acquaintances will stop calling for Hillary’s imprisonment long enough to talk about decency in social discourse, I’ll stop insisting on Trump’s imprisonment for crimes against humanity (but I will require him to relinquish the Presidency). 😉

It’s silly to allow a person I find irrelevant, yet offensive, to get under my skin, isn’t it? Yes, indeed it is. But I’m silly in that way. I react to his remarks, obviously intended as provocations, as if they’ve accomplished their aims. And, of course, they have. And that is especially annoying; I’ve fallen into a trap I could feel coming from a mile away. I simply couldn’t wait to see if he would fall into it first. If I had to select, from among my countless faults, the flaw that most frequently results in misgivings, it would be the lack of discipline. My inability to simply wait and see how others react to an overt act of “bull in china closet syndrome” causes more grief than it should. But it does. With some frequency, I find myself learning and relearning a lesson, only to unlearn it; that gives me the opportunity to learn it again, later. I make mistakes of that nature with regularity. I’m trying, I suppose, to get really good at making such mistakes. I want my mistakes to be perfect. In reality, I know before I react that my reaction will simply add fuel to the fire already smoldering in my head. I realize, from the outset, that I’m attempting to smother a forest fire with gasoline. Yet I move forward, deliberately and with the knowledge that my reaction is likely to cause a blaze of equal intensity, though perhaps hidden from my view, in the mind of the irrelevant, offensive instigator. Perhaps that’s why I react. Even though I know my reaction is unlikely to achieve positive forward momentum, at least it may light a fire of rage that may, if the world is just, consume the barrier to progress, leaving it a heap of ashes easily swept aside. My demonic metaphors, this morning, are too brutal even for me. So I’ll attempt to return to a state of quiet contemplation; where is my little desktop copy of The Essence of Zen? I may need that to spur my tranquility.

This is post number two thousand three hundred and fifty. That’s a boatload of posts. I’ll readily admit the vast majority of them are meritless drivel, thought spilled from the mind of a man who’s confused and uncertain, manic and depressive, and philosophically challenged. That having been said, I am just as certain, if not more so, that I have written some pretty damn powerful words here in the years I’ve been posting to this blog. I’ve expressed joy and pain and I’ve written stories that draw me to tears. So I know my writing here, at least some of it, has value. When I read something I’ve written and find my eyes filling with tears, I know I’ve written something that moves at least one person to the edge of an emotional precipice. So, in spite of all the crap, all the throw-away whimsy and drivel and useless words, there’s material here among the detritus that means something. I seem to have a love affair with that word, detritus, don’t I? Yes, I do. I sure as hell use it a lot in my writing. And that’s one of the things I find absorbing about writing here. At least I amuse myself. And that’s important if we’re to stay, or get, sane.

A while ago, as I sat on the screened porch—eating my dinner of a sardicado sandwich on pumpernickel bread, accompanied by a Shiner Bock beer—I watched a storm brew in the distance. Angry clouds stirred in the distant sky and moved with impressive speed in my direction. By the time I finished my sandwich, I could see a wall of rain move right to left across the forests and fields in the lowlands below. To the left of the moving wall were forests, every tree distinct in its greenery. To the right, a grey tower of rain obliterated everything. The wall moved quickly across my view, closing in not only right to left, but distant to near. Soon, powerful wind gusts bent tree branches just a few feet in front of me and shook the limbs of the trees violently. When the plastic cover of the smoker, anchored by a heavy stone, flew up and attempted to free itself from the stone, I knew the time had come to go inside. In a matter of minutes, the storm was gone. An enormous rainbow appeared out the window, its right-most end touching the ground just below us, maybe a quarter of a mile away. Using my smartphone camera, I took poor shots of my sandwich and the rainbow.

I returned to the screen porch with my notebook computer and add-on keyboard and mouse (I loathe the touch-pad and built-in keyboard) to write this. And to think. And to marvel at the enormity of the sky and beyond. As I sit here—my eyes watching the trees and fields and birds and scanning the sky more often than they scan my screen—I reflect on how fortunate we are to live here, in these troubled times and in this poverty-stricken state. I complain about it all, but my complaints are embarrassments when contrasted with the appreciation expressed by people who have only a fraction for which to be grateful.

All right, emerging from that little dip in mood, I now recall my morning, which was spent in a critique group at the  Garland County Library. It was useful. Though only three of us were there, we went through one another’s pieces in great detail, each helping the other with comments and questions and suggestions. I liked it.  The piece I’ve submitted to the group is the same one I’ve submitted to my “home” critique group, which will meet Thursday. It will be interesting to compare the comments and suggestions. This piece of mine is not as “deep” as most of my writing. It’s more action-adventure, with a bit of psychological thriller and love story thrown in. I’m not sure, frankly, it’s me. But I’m trying it. I enjoy character more than story, I think. This piece is more story than character. But I will see what I can do to bring the characters and their unique traits and characteristics to life. And make their stories more interesting for who they are, than for what they do. Maybe. We’ll see.

The temperatures this morning were almost unpleasantly warm. I’ve been used to upper sixties and low seventies; this morning felt warmer and wetter. The blushing beginning of summer is becoming rosy red-cheeked, the surly beast that causes parents to leave on vacation and to send children to summer camp or, even more punishing, vacation bible school. Ach! I just heard turkeys in my side-yard. Must go find another beer!