By the time this blog entry gets published it will be
Wednesday which is smack-dab in the middle of a week where nothing, absolutely nothing is written in ink on my day
planner but my house cleaner is coming on Friday. That’s a bad thing if you’re struggling
to find a topic to write about. If rain hadn’t been in the forecast I would be
painting my outdoor, metal chairs this week. Likewise, if I wasn’t on the Trump
Diet---the one where you stress-eat everything that isn’t nailed to the wall---I’d put
down the Tostitos Scoops and go to a Tia-Chi class at the senior center instead
of sitting at my computer. I’ve only gone to a handful of those drop-in classes
so it’s safe to say I’m not highly motivated to do slow-motion exercises. I did
get outside to do some weeding and I filled up two 13 gallon trash bags and I
still have enough weeds out there to fill another. They’re at the top of a
slight hill and I should have pulled them on Monday in case my mountain goat
skills have waned and I fall and can’t get back up. That way my lawn care guy
would have found me the next morning. You’ve gotta plan ahead when you’re old
and living alone.
At times like this, when there is nothing going on in my
life to write about, I can’t help thinking of some advice that Stephen King gave
to would-be writers: “You can approach the act of writing with nervousness,
excitement, hopefulness, or even despair---the sense that you can never
completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the
act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take
down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because
you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it
again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.”
I’m not fond of Stephen King’s horror genre books but he’s a
productive (and many would say a brilliant) writer and two of my all-time
favorite movies are adaptations of his stories---The Shawshank Redemption and Stand
by Me. I am, however, a huge fan of his thoughts about writing. More than
once when I’ve wanted to write about something that others might view as too
personal or too controversial I think about that quoted paragraph above, screw
up my courage and start writing while trying not to let the voice of a friend get
into my head. She once told me my writing is too personal, that I reveal too
much and it made her feel uncomfortable. That was back at the beginning of second year of
my widowhood and her words are one reason why I tell so few people in my
off-line life about my on-line presence. I did some soul searching after she
told me those things and I decided that what she said doesn’t jive with
anything I’ve ever read about writing and writers. “You must not come lightly
to the blank page.” Opening up, being vulnerable in memoir-style writing goes
together like salt and pepper shakers. And make no mistake about it, most non-commercial
blogs are memoirs in a roundabout, coming-in-through-the-back-door way.
I suppose it’s normal for people in our circle of casual
friends not to want to know about the inner workings of our minds, especially if
our outside image doesn’t match what’s going on inside our heads. We humans are
good actors. We can walk around looking and acting perfectly normal while we’re
falling apart inside and we want to scream, “Make the world stop! I can’t take
it anymore!” We can go here and there like good soldier ants on a mission but
inside feel lost and alone. “The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and
the heart knows what the heart knows.” I have no idea in what context Stephen King
wrote those words but it doesn’t matter. To me, it’s a statement that explains
how our minds, spirits and hearts can be in three different places all at the
same time.
I don’t do well with unscheduled time---too much of it makes
me feel guilty about what I’m not doing and should be. “Purging here, purging
there and purging everywhere,” says all widows I’ve even known. There’s always
something productive I could be doing if I could get my head out of the clouds.
I did pencil in a day to paint at my easel this week and that went well, but I could
still hear my mom’s voice in my head saying, get your chores done before you go outside to play! And I answered
back, didn’t you see me pencil in a day
to pack up stuff to take to the auction house? But her voice came back even
louder: Thinking about doing something
isn’t the same thing as doing it! At least I’m not delusional enough to
believe the voices in my head are Stephen King-like demons and they’re telling
me to kill the neighbor’s Siamese cat. ©
“I'm one of those
people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.”
― Stephen King
This blog entry is
an example of me writing with no idea what I’d end up saying.
