REAL REALIZATIONS

But then there's the need to grab your spoon and join me in a little Ben & Jerry's Karamel Sutra because I, yes me, semi-sorta completed my outline yesterday. I say semi-sorta because I woke up from my slumber thinking about nothing but that outline. Plugged in my Kem CD, tuned to Track 3 which always motivates these charachters, particularly a climactic scene where my protagonist's pregnant mistress says she has had enough and he's begging her to stay saying "Please, N, please just give me time to make this right," and she refuses, insisting "You don't love me. Don't you see? You love what we do together. You love escaping your life in mine. And you've been running all this time, all your life. D it's time you face up to your life. And stop running."

These, of course are not the exact words, but a variation on the theme because here's an unhappy, disgruntled guy that gets tangled in a risky embezzlement scheme and an affair. It's a tale of greed, deception, payback and ultimately two tragic deaths that lead this man and everyone around him on a strange path of self discovery and ultimately, personal change.

So anyhow, I hashed it out. Yea, honey chile, I scribbled like the police where knocking on my door; as if it was my last moment to get this done. And done -- at least preliminarily -- it is. So I'll go back to the file and type in all the changes I've made in long hand (yea, I do long hand) and see where we stand. But suffice it to say there ain' a damn thing like saying you want to do something and doing it. No matter how lumpy it may still be, you know you've got something solid in your hands, something workable. You've got something more than an idea, more than a fleeting thought. You've got a breathing organism in front of you and you are worlds apart from where you were a year (or in my case, two years ago). And suddenly it becomes so clear and so real and so worth it that it's taken this long because you realize you're a better person today than you were then and that you see the world where these charachters live with clearer eyes. You've had time to let the story just *be*, to fall flat as a pancake on the page, stick a Sticky Note on the top that reads "Come back here later," knowing that soon enough you'll figure it out but you do need to keep going.

And you realize that writing is less about classes and workshops and critique groups and more about being present for your life, showing up everyday whether you want to or not. You realize that writing is not about living in a hole but outside of that hole where you can hear the voices, the sounds; where you can see the nuances that make people people, so that when you return to your hole you have something to write about. You realize that all those days you lay spent on your couch, inhaling Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough as if it were air and watching reruns of the Cosby Show were not wasted days but time spent well – giving your mind the respite it needs so that when you return to the page you’ve cleared out the noise that does indeed cause “Writer’s Block.” You realize that the mind is not some infinitesimal machine that can just produce, produce, produce but an organ that needs just as much rest as the heart, the lungs, even the feet which are constantly and assuredly abused everyday.

Suddenly you realize that those children that you’ve always moaned about being such a “distraction” to your work are more of an impetus for the work itself; somehow, in a way you’ve never suspected, you begin to see your own mortality in their eyes and you understand that like it or not, one day you will not be here. And so you struggle to get the work on the page so that you’ll have something to leave behind, some evidence; something like, say, a fossil. Yes, a fossil. Some tracing of your inner self; something that will show those bones that lay deep inside you – your truth – that lies beneath the skin that the rest of the world sees. You see that in those children’s eyes lays your own hope – hope for peace, hope for healing, hope that somebody will soon realize that at the very least – at the very, very least – food and preventative healthcare should be free. No one should have to pay for food. So you keep writing because you know that you are doing something right. You know that you are leaving something in the world; something that didn’t exist before. You know that you are not just taking but you are giving as well. Because this is what writing is: writing is giving to the greater Self, the one Universal Mind from which we all draw, to which we all pray. You realize that writing is first and last, a prayer. And you keep going, no matter how long it takes – no matter how many false starts, no matter how lumpy the clay. You know that soon enough it will be a sculpture, a completed work. And you promise to keep showing up, everyday, not only to your work but to your life.

And so, how pleased am I that my sisters up in this place have written back that they too abhor smalltalk. I thought I was the only one. But I admit, my thing goes a little deeper. I am, admittedly, a snob. I avoid people who think reading the paper is reading. It is not reading. I am turned off by people who do not have a perspective; whose idea of breaking news is a new development in the Kobe Bryant case. I avoid, like the plague, people who do not have any interests – knitting, writing, a sport, a hobby of some kind; people whose feet have never stepped foot inside a museum. I steer real clear of people who don’t travel and have no aspirations of traveling. If you have never been outside of your own state, well, there’s little we have to talk about. I avoid them all. And why? Because 99.9% of the time I will find, more sooner than later, that we have nothing in common and I have wasted my time. And since I have no time to waste, I realize early on that these are the types of people I need to avoid.

Which brings me to my current dilemma: a girl’s night out with a group of women that I once enjoyed being with but suddenly realize – we have nothing in common. A group of women who, when we’re together, talk about nothing but what the kids are doing or not doing. Maybe one or two will talk about a walk she’s participating (Breast Cancer, etc) but rarely more than that. None of them know that I’m a writer because they’re all the type of women who believe in going to college, getting a degree and getting a “real job” so that you can really be happy because, as one of them said, “ain’t no joy in being a poor dancer.”

When you find you have little in common with people that you once enjoyed spending time with, what do you do? And how do you do it without being an overt snob?

And lastly, if anyone out there can give me honest feedback on Goapele, an artist from the Bay Area with a relatively new CD out, please give me a shout. I just didn’t have the heart to lay down $14.99 plus tax last night after striking out twice in the last two innings.

Be Good,

ANGEL