Won’t be Doing That Again!

I’ve been walking around feeling naked since Saturday. Why? Because my emergency dialer device malfunctioned and I’ve been waiting for a free replacement to come in the mail. I’ve been wearing one around my neck and tucked in my cleavage ever since my husband died. Not that he could have dialed the phone to get help for me should I have fallen and couldn’t get back up with my two fake knees and messed up elbow but he could have fetched the phone for me to do it, assuming I could still talk to 911. One of the two times I’ve fallen since I’ve been wearing the device---when I broke my wrist---I didn’t think to push the damn button to get help. Nope, I scooted my butt across the floor to the bathroom where I was able to fling myself across the toilet face first and haul myself up using the grab bar on the wall. Twice I’ve accidentally hit the button while taking off my shirt and the loud voice coming from my chest scared the crap out of me. Still, I like wearing my security blanket and someday I should bite the bullet and paying extra to have them active the fall detector feature.

There’s a style of writing that I’ve been fascinated with since---well---I learned about it a few years ago. It’s called ‘stream of consciousness’ and it involves depicting the multitude of feelings and thoughts that passes through one’s mind. But when you’re doing a stream of consciousness in a memoir type blog it’s more complicated (or is it less complicated, I can’t decide which) than having a fictional character do it. In fiction you can make stuff up, have your characters be saintly or sinner but in a memoir/blog we’re supposedly striving to find Our Truth---the truth the way we see ourselves in all our actions and feelings but the problem is sometimes our truths can be embarrassing. In fiction, if you’ve read William Faulkner’s Sound and Fury or Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius you’ve read the two best examples of stream of consciousness writing. Or so they say…which always leads me to wonder: who the heck are THEY? 

“...Secrets do not increase in value if kept in a gore-ian lockbox,” wrote Dave Eggers in the above mentioned book, “because one's past is either made useful or else mutates and becomes cancerous. We share things for the obvious reasons: it makes us feel un-alone, it spreads the weight over a larger area, it holds the possibility of making our share lighter. And it can work either way - not simply as a pain-relief device, but, in the case of not bad news but good, as a share-the-happy-things-I've-seen/lessons-I've-learned vehicle. Or as a tool for simple connectivity for its own sake, a testing of waters, a stab at engagement with a mass of strangers.” Gosh, you’d almost think good old Eggers had blogging in mind when he wrote that passage. Maybe he did, I started reading the book but lost interest in it. That quote, however, reminds that I have to quit writing so many diary style posts---I went here, I did that---and try harder to analyze and philosophize along the way. I mean we all know that sharing our heartaches helps but I’ve never thought to compare sharing to an aspirin pain relief medication, so to speak. Truth be told I like using famous quotes like that in my blogs because I think they make me look smarter and better read than I am. But in fact aren’t I just using them as a substitute for not doing my own analyzing and philosophizing? I’m letting the Big Guns do my thinking and I’m just adding, “Ditto!” 

“All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born,” William Faulker wrote, “webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.” Ditto! I was thinking the exact, same thing but Faulker wrote it first. You believe, don't you, about my thoughts matching those of the mighty and masterful William Faulker?

Faulker once said in an interview that a writer “…must never be satisfied with what he does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.” Fine for him to say---he was really talented---but don’t you think that never being satisfied with what one does can be a two-edged sword? At what point do we drive ourselves crazy trying to perfect the un-perfectible? Have the perfect house, write the perfect essay. Do the perfect whatever. At what point is it just plain foolish, for example, to get out of bed after taking a sleeping pill because you thought of a better way to word a sentence? Trust me, I won’t be doing that again. At least not until after my new emergency dialer gets here. ©