She’s A Tidal River (Uneffwithable Fridays, pt. II)
Don’t worry I’m not here to wax on or wax off about The Moon or about the electric Green Meanie today but I changed the ink cartridge in this bad boy a few weeks back and yesterday I finally changed the correction tape. I’d been running without the X’ing-out key for plenty a few days long enough. The indelible words looked good on the page though, real good, with all those dashes & slashes struck through them. I added the “=” symbol to the editing toolbelt for use along with the “-” & the “/” in the strike-through, set-to-stun arsenal. They each had their place and were beginning to form a pattern among the sentences. The splotches, the shapes on the page had an aesthetic of their own, like the ink were holding its own gatherings in the woods after I’d moved on. And I was picking up speed despite the dead correction key. Hot damn if I weren’t in it again. It had been a while. I was in The Flow. It was Analog Friday, all too coincidentally, and that smell and the F.M.O (Flow Mode Only) and I was making new maps and I may have even been a little manic. Definitely in tune but it felt like one of the brakes may be sticking a little bit. I had a repeating nightmare running all week in whence I ran out of coffee. Shudder to think. But that smell. The Selectric had come up to nominal operating temperature and wafted up a wave with a coffee curl. I think I left off last time writing “Bill Was A Surfer Dude” which was about waves thus far and when to surf one, but I was procrastinating because I was only just beginning to paddle up on what the story was really about, plus I’m only halfway through Updike and only just heard about this guy Chekhov yesterday. And I want to write a short story; a character first, before I get back into my literary science non-fiction spacetime exploration rock opera Nia-Noire adventure trilogy. I want to learn how to draw page flourishes first and paint. I would love to animate a tale, like the Dragons once did, but I’m no good with smoke rings and I want to keep it simple, sketches on a page. Little squigglies and secret love notes between paragraphs. It’s raining, and I’d rather be painting but now Hunter’s here like a bloody parrot digging into my shoulder with a knitting knife. Ahh, needles again. I had upcoming bloodwork and an art class on the calendar, some errands, some grocery-gettin’, the dentist, spring decluttering, the exhaust system just fell out of the Toyota, so much to do, so little ink. And gentle phlebotomy is not what I’m here to write about today. That’s a whole ‘nother grapplin’ match for another Friday but suffice it to say that all the numbers from the lab were spot-on A-OK last time and the doctor prescribed that I go out and find myself something to do that hurts me so he has something to do next time. He’s a new doc, filling in for Dr. A. And I’ve never told a doctor I write before, I just now realized, as I’m trying to read this spent correction tape before the cat gets it. Those who know just knew or else they prodded really, really hard to find out which of my ghosts left the door open. I’m a Generalist first, I think; on Tuesdays & Thursdays anyhow. I love to make things. The things have piled up and now I wish I knew someone with the stomach for marketing. Marketing seems like it’s generally bad for my skin and, historically, destroys my focus; then no things get made. Today is inventory and product photography. Friday could be fun, product copy! Features, benefits, cleaning & care instructions, packaging. Bags. Boxes. Tags! Coffee beans. A brand name. Another pen name. Maybe marketing could be fun again or maybe I could hold my breath and pretend it is for one day a week. I’ll count the number of steps to the post office on today’s walk. I could be sewing today but tomorrow I may be welding, mig or tig, the old Miller does both. I’m out there somewhere I just need a moment to go look. I’m just now finding the words from others who seem to know me, though we’ve never met. A teacher told me I have to make something really bad happen to my character in order to make something at all happen in the story. Find them in some grave desperation. What would they do about it? Where do they want to get to? Where do you want to go? I don’t know. Who are you talking to? And I want to write a short story. I didn’t even know about Chekhov’s Gun. My Musie packs a .357. Man, if it weren’t for bu11et-time and dodgeba11 1’d probably be dead. They’re loaded and casually lying about behind all the furniture and in every corner and I just didn’t think to bother noticing them. I’ve been surrounded while trying to figure out what this character is about in a bad situation; like when Captain Mal was straining blood through the cargo bay floor and all he really needed to keep the crew and the Firefly flying was a fuel filter or a flux-catalyzer whatchamathingy sundry from the nearest scrapyard, a simple transaction, and yet all he got was trouble and bullets. Don’t try to take Mal’s Sky away dammit; he has friends like Wash who would be back with hell to pay if it could get Mal out of a Unification Day pinch…Ha! Fireflies aren’t armed you moon-yokels. So I went without coffee for a little while to glimpse mine character’s eyes upon the valley of grave despair. Sure, it was weird at first and I’m still baffled as to how anyone can get along out there in this noisy flamethrower world of high-speed spin weirdness without a mug or two of analog time in a cup each morning. But nonetheless, I went sans java there for a while. I didn’t have to pee as often so I got longer sentences out of the whole exercise. Maybe it’s time to buy a paragraph break. Where was I? Oh, yeah, here it is in the Owner’s Manual, p. 16, I was changing the correction tape.
I don’t know how much research went into this ratio or how much good telemetry data IBM has gathered since the engineering was finished but after some time I’d say the ratio is pretty good. Dang it! Scratch that. I just peeked under the hood. I must be halfway through this ink reel already. This is my go-to free-flow machine of choice lately. How long will the ink flow? I don’t know. I counted my cartridges. I only have a drawerful. I’m going to need a bin. I’ve gotta cut back on the correction tape. Abbreviate. Be stingy with extraneous punctuation. Resort to poetry if need be. The ratio is set, the pilot will have to adjust accordingly, adapt and accommodate. Look how many decades it took before we got the ratio of hotdog buns to hotdogs right. If you were close with your math and lucky in life there’d be a hotdog or two leftover to cut up in your macaroni. Shoot, it’s happening again. The economy of writing is scaling. I’m going to need Ink and Coffee. I’m going to be as needy as the machines. I went back to the physics books to look up entropy. An astute college girl I once knew said I was random. I don’t always get it but I can understand it now where she was coming from. She was right, in that moment anyway. I was studying too much at the time and a good deal of it was particle physics and quantum theory. I was also working second and third shifts, mailroom and pizza delivery, while working differential equations in crayon. Crayon & a can of new tennis balls. Ahh, that smell, when life was that good== Hold on, correction tape reloaded, finally. I’m back in business now with a freshly calibrated correcting mechanism at my disposal and a new directive to use it less. Back to work, Speed. Pops is out of acetylene for the torch. The list keeps growing when the wheels in this beast aren’t turning. I still have Santa’s letter sitting here.
Deep down the writer and the ink both know this river will only flow so far for so long. To the sea. To the sea, says the ink to the writer. The Sea. Take me to the sea, take me to your reader. A river that flows both ways may flow forever.
Nonsense. Who are you rambling to now?
I have work to do. I’m not even halfway through revising what I wrote three Fridays ago but I’m learning how to crunch three Fridays at once. I’ll get back to Santa. He and the Mrs. have been RVing to keep up with their North Pole address. I don’t even know if he’s getting his mail yet. I have an old dictionary, fancy embossed covers and everything, a pre-chaos, pre-looneytoons-era Unabridged, and I’m developing some sharp definition in my biceps and shoulders from all the lookin’ up. Man, I wish every day were Analog Friday. I’d be ripped.
My thesaurus is collecting another era of dust. When it had regular hours of visitation I would visit but rarely found the right word in the synonym finder anyhow; a prison for imposters and the-right-word-wannabes. It probably wouldn’t hurt to give it a scan the next time I’m on the can for more words that potentially rhyme, perhaps a good perusing may right a line of accidental alliteration or something. But not today when I’m doing anything I can do to stop rhyming. I don’t want the rhythm to be so regular when I’m trying to write a short story. You can go with The Flow but dammit The Flow takes a weird line through the turns sometimes.
Drats that calendar! The approaching month is full of appointments. Some are good. There’s the Eye Doc coming up. Thank goodness! I’m hoping for new glasses. I just looked up “myopic” to see if it meant what I thought it meant… Okay, I’m back. And yep, it does. Sorry, I was gone for a while. I found “mixty-maxty” on the way in and stopped to visit. These pages are naturally antiqued and they smell so good. I get lost. I have to adjust the rear-view mirrors whenever I drive a strange car but I try to put them back the way I found them. I have reading glasses, everyday runnin’ around glasses, and a special set of glasses for writing tuned to the distance between my eyeballs and the place where the ink meets the paper. I have a lot of glasses that I have to remember to pack whenever I go somewhere, plus the rearview mirrors. The world was a big blue marble once but today we ran a fire drill and it’s a blue-white dot and fading fast into the red-shift. The EXIT door at the bottom of the stairwell is always unlocked in case of fire. Jeez this ship is fast. I always forget when it’s been a while. The objects in this slinky, very streamlined mirror are closer than they appear yet are also fading so fast into the distant past. So how much do they really matter, especially if there’s a good stereo system and a good mix in the tape deck?
Why is there an extra guitar holder where the co-pilot’s seat used to be? Now who are you talking to? Stay awake, snap snap.
Dammit, where are my driving glasses?
And what day is it?
I’ve been keeping track but I’m on metric time.
And my barn door just blew open. No, literally, not figuratively or in any literary device sense, the shed’s hanging wide open and I have to go button things up again from this wind. Hopefully I’ll get back to this within 10 AF’s (ten Analog Fridays, or one metric month).
I wonder what my character would want to find in the shed if they had to go out into that howling wind. Weird! I started a story about that a few years back, twice I think. It didn’t really go anywhere. The last I saw them they were pulling on their gear and wiping the fog out of their helmet’s visor. It’s colder and harder where they are. Now I might know where they went: To Shut A Door.
Sometimes I don’t know if I’m writing or doing word calisthenics. And the bouncing is making me sick to my stomach. This is where I’m glad the sun is out and even though the wind is blowing sideways I can go mow the lawn. It’s that time of year again.
But the birds. Singing. And when I went out there to mow, the yard was all splotched with patches of wildflowers. So I thought I’d mow around them. Then better sense grabbed hold and I thought why mow at all? The wild patches between the wildflowers made them look even wilder. There wasn’t a single mower mowing in all the neighborhood for once, so I stood down in the name of Quiet and let the dandelions stand another day. Besides, I’d have to go find my mowing glasses. So maybe I’ll go fuss and fiddle with the cursed weedwacker. I think I lost my cool with it last spring and chucked it across the yard then immediately recognized what a fine toss it was in slow-motion. It felt wonderful and then I couldn’t stop laughing. Yes, to the bench with the weedwacker again. Anything to get me out there to see what may be in the shed. My wife is in her office finally sorting through her late father’s keepsakes. I can’t go in. I can’t go in there today. Each one’s its own story and it’s really nice stuff and we definitely don’t have room for a grandfather clock and I can’t stop writing and the chores aren’t going anywhere and I want to go paint while the sun’s peeking out. It may not be raining now but the wind is still howling and the puddles are drying up. Stop it. No, you stop it. Who are you talking to? We’ll edit later says a poet to a painter, now let’s go paint.
And grab a 10mm wrench and the hex heads for the /=b//l=ee=p-n= trimmer.