Dress Sizes

I dislike making lists.  I pride myself on my memory, and ability to unfold the recent events that might make up the numbered items on the twice-folded piece of paper shoved into the right pocket of a pair of blue jeans and referred to as needed.   It goes against my grain, and if I was to peel back the layers, I’m sure I’d find that the act of scribing notes to myself is associated  with mental weakness.  It’s not, of course, it’s a pride thing. I have amazing short-term recall, but it’s the older memories that blur between fact and fiction.
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I dislike making lists.  I pride myself on my memory, and ability to unfold the recent events that might make up the numbered items on the twice-folded piece of paper shoved into the right pocket of a pair of blue jeans and referred to as needed.   It goes against my grain, and if I was to peel back the layers, I’m sure I’d find that the act of scribing notes to myself is associated with mental weakness.  It’s not, of course, it’s a pride thing. I have amazing short-term recall, but it’s the older memories that blur between fact and fiction.

When Billy started having his minute memory losses, ultimately diagnosed as a malignant brain tumor, I started writing, a way of making lists I think.  I didn’t want to remember his march to death, but to remember how I got there, which eventually lead to the unthinkable, ‘where do I want to go’ question.  His journey, a fight to his right at life, wasn’t so different from mine, only I didn’t have doctors poisoning my body with chemicals, and cutting me with knives, rather I did that myself with introspection.  I clearly had the better end of the deal, and now that Billy is gone having lost his fight, and I am still here, fighting a different battle—acceptance for those things I cannot change.

I didn’t take if lying down because it felt too much like a shrug of the shoulders, and oh well that is life, what could I do about the cards I was dealt sort of feeling.  I don’t know if my life is predetermined, and regardless of what I do differently now if it will change the events ahead of me, or if I do alter my course now if I’ll end up at the same place regardless, who knows for sure.  Acceptance of loss didn’t mean that I had to surrender or find a rocking chair for the front porch, and wait around for my spirit to leave me.  It simply meant I had a choice.
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I enjoy the overstuffed Laura Ashley chinch cushions scattered carelessly around my cerebral office, like a cup of Joe on the go, so is my office. An anywhere room to retreat to, make notes in, to take comfort in, to sip Coppla’s Claret from cut crystal wine glasses, as needed.  I purposely decorated the virtual Room of my Own to resemble the real one—it reduced my bank balance by eighty thousand dollars and the single biggest purchase in my vast, and color-tainted life—because the physical room is the gateway to me.  It’s where my girl and boy collect.   ‘Mommy, can I?  Where are my…? Do you know..?  I need twenty dollars.  Do you have a book called Wuthering Heights?’  I wonder if the eighty thousand was wasted.

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Dear Lover~

I read an article tonight in the Arts and Entertainment section on the Wall Street Journal’s website. The article was about the loss of artist’s—poets and all others—muses. The writer mentioned Zelda, Gala, Yoko, Gonne, Georgia, and Suzanne (Fitzgerald, Dali, Lennon, Yeats, Stieglitz, and Balanchine’s respectively). There were other famous muses that I remember reading about over the years, it also mentioned others that I had no knowledge of, my incomplete education, I assumed.

The journalist only mentioned male writers, and their female muses! Appalling reporting I thought, what about us women, and our muses. I have to think all women artists have their own muses, but I couldn’t think of any except for Lillian’s Dash. According to the WSJ writer, the muse-world has thinned out, and while the male artist might still have a muse, the infamous relationship between the muse and the artist is no longer. My heart ached for the romance of the past.
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I enjoy the overstuffed Laura Ashley chinch cushions scattered carelessly around my cerebral office, like a cup of Joe on the go, so is my office. An anywhere room to retreat to, make notes in, to take comfort in, to sip Coppla’s Claret from cut crystal wine glasses, as needed.  I purposely decorated the virtual Room of my Own to resemble the real one—it reduced my bank balance by eighty thousand dollars and the single biggest purchase in my vast, and color-tainted life—because the physical room is the gateway to me.  It’s where my girl and boy collect.   ‘Mommy, can I?  Where are my…? Do you know..?  I need twenty dollars.  Do we have the book called Wuthering Heights?’  I wonder if the eighty thousand was wasted.
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To the left of me is solid and lanky dead asleep.  To my right in the corner under the watercolor is my computer.  Inside of me is my muse pushing me out of my bed away from a solid known quantity to the right hand corner of my room where the blank white word document and blinking curser are waiting impatiently.  She woke me from a peaceful and physically sated deep sleep, solid and lanky is responsible for this.  My nasty muse saw a woman today in red boots, they were not the sexy sort with pointy toes, high heels, nor were they sporting the words Tony Lama.
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Disconnected.

There are days when my well of words runs low.  Will I lose the feeling to write, live, and write again and again?

My head is a ghost town, its cranial passageways have a fine layer of dust covering the ground, and my feet leave imprints. The tumbleweeds bounce off the walls leaving a trail of smudge marks on contact.  This is a lonely feeling for a writer, it’s when we are the most vulnerable, the most at risk, the most lost.  Our word pictures can’t connect.  It’s not dot-to-dot. It doesn’t work like that…

My words are suspended in their singular state inside the tumbleweed trying to connect, to form a sentence. 
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I use my blog as a writer’s journal.   We writers are supposed to keep track of our thoughts and observations; the annotations in our journal are the fodder for our stories and missives.  If you adhere to the credo on writing, a writer should have at least one journal, but more is better because a writer’s thoughts are diverse, and having more than one allows the writer to catalog and keep track of those diverse thoughts.  Not able to grasp the concept of multiple journals I only kept one, but I ended up writing ‘Dear Diary’ entries, ‘ he loves me, he loves me not’ and  after the first month or so would leave my journal at the bottom on my bag collecting purse crumbs.   Determined to conquer journaling because of the innate benefits the writer yields from the daily practice I started quizzing other writers about their respective writing processes.
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Tall and lanky, ethereal and elusive, is mine.

“A glass of wine?” he asks.

His come hither eyes bend my will. “I shouldn’t,” I say, “There is much to do.”

“Without me you will not accomplish much. I have little time to spare and I am here now, so spend a moment with me. Have the wine while I entertain you with stories, and when you close your eyes, you will find yourself calm again. Time is all I ask.”
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On the eve of the New Year, not the one that just passed couple of days ago, the previous one, I had an idea for a short story. I wrote passionately for several days and quickly realized it was a book length tale, and not short fiction. I didn’t think of my story as a book because doing so would require a commitment, and since I have issues with committing to a weekly television show I didn’t think I could say aloud to myself that I was writing a book. I continued referring to it as a ‘story’.

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