Rock, Paper, Scissors

Days like today make me wonder what I'm made of.

When the going gets tough and I get tougher, I think I'm a rock. I'm strong. I'm granite. But then there are those scissors. They're sharp and when they come biting, I just don't have what it takes to crush them. I'm no rock. I'm no scissors either. I guess that means I'm paper.

I'm paper because everyone I meet who has survived the streets is a rock. The best I can ever hope to do is to cover them, not in defeat, but to share peace with them. Peace at last.

I'm paper because those scissors, when they come snipping, they get right into the meat of me and slice me up. I'm going to tell you I'm fine, but I'm not. I'm just paper, after all.

I'm paper because you can fold me seven times, but no one will get that eighth crease.

I'm paper because even ripped, torn, wet, and erased, what was written upon me became real when the ink dried, even though no one need ever read the words.

I'm paper, and that's all I would ever aspire to be.

Parable of the Peanut Butter

Consider for a moment that you are a big fan of peanut butter. You are more than a fan, you are a connoisseur of peanut butter who can explain the merits of both crunchy and creamy varieties without bias, and you know the answer to the age-old spreading question: spoon or knife (but you're not telling).

You've tried peanut butters far and wide, and you know quality. For some foods, the generic store brand might taste just as well as their name-brand counterparts, but not peanut butter. With peanut butter, you have to suck it up and go with the good stuff.

You're perusing the grocery store shelves one day to find that last jar of honey-roasted Peter Pan amongst all the Jiffs and Skippys (Skippies?), when your eye falls on one jar in back. It is glass, not plastic, and you know that label. This is not your regular store-brand peanut butter. This is imported, superbly creamy, impossibly delicious, and--whoa. Expensive. Very.

You can't pass it up. You are a peanut butter connoisseur, remember? This is the kind of peanut butter you've been looking for. You're buying it, even if it means you have to put back your copies of Writer's Digest and the National Enquirer. There's only this one jar, and you're not likely to find this stuff again. You tuck the jar in safe next to your bananas and eggs and head for the register. You cock a disdainful eyebrow toward the jelly as you pass. No way, jelly. Not this time. This peanut butter doesn't need your help. It is special. 

You get home and pull out a slice of Wonderbread for your ultimate sandwich. You look at it on the plate, so plain, so white, so boring. This peanut butter can do better than this. It doesn't need any plastic-bag loaf training-wheels bread. You pull out a giant baguette and slice it open. You've broken out the good bread and that means you're putting a lot of pressure on this peanut butter to be able to turn your expensive baguette into the biggest, best peanut butter sandwich you've ever seen, that anyone has ever seen.  You open the jar of peanut butter and take a whiff. Your mouth waters. In goes a spoon and you taste it.

Wow.

You weren't wrong.  This peanut butter is the real deal. This peanut butter actually wants to make you happy; you can feel it in all your taste buds.

You set to work spreading the peanut butter on the baguette. At first, you put down thick creamy blobs. It spreads so well, so smoothly. It is certainly well-behaved; it would spread just as well with a spoon or a knife. The bread is coarse and bigger than it looked at first, and now that you're noticing it, there isn't as much peanut butter in the jar as you thought. As you push the peanut butter over the surface, you realize you have to rethink your peanut butter sandwich making strategy. This is no chintzy white-bread peanut butter sandwich, this is an epic mega-sandwich! You are determined you will succeed, so you push and push the peanut butter, spread, spread, spread until you have a thin layer over the entire baguette. Very thin. You scrape the bottom of the little glass jar one last time for good measure and then...it is time. You take a bite.

It's...okay.

It's...bready.

It's...bread. Mostly.

Where's the taste? You think back to the way the peanut butter first hit your tongue straight out of the jar: strong, fresh, smooth, plentiful. Where has that magic gone? Where has the freakin' peanut butter gone?

You open the sandwich and have a look at the pitiful smearings of your expensive PB-no-J hanging on to the surface of the bread. It's there. It's all there, but it's not enough. The bread is too big, the jar too small. There is more to a dish than the presence of right ingredients, and there just isn't enough peanut butter to turn this bread into a sandwich no matter how far you've spread it, because there's not enough of it to be what it is supposed to be.

You scrape your knife over the bread, trying to reclaim some so you can have half an epic sandwich at least, but it's no use. You really smeared that peanut butter in there. It's smashed down into the bread, an irretrievable done deal. You go back to the jar, but there it sits: empty, only a few sad daubs clinging to the glass. There is no more. There will be no more.

You have your sandwich all right, but your ingredients are wasted just the same.

So, tell me. Where are you wasting your peanut butter?

Live From My Bed (Stage Left)

I am sick, sick, so sick.  I am the kind of sick that has me contemplating whether one more breath is worth the ensuing coughing fit even if it does keep me stringing along as a living creature for another little while.

I have taken up residence in my bed with my new best friends.

As friends go, they are nice enough, but they don't do much to take away the stifling boredom that comes with not being able to move without pain and suffering. I can't help but feel lied to by the Berenstain Bears, who filled my childhood with promises of sick day perks. There are no perky pastel dinosaurs here, smug Brother Bear. No dinosaurs at all.

I tried writing for a while, but then my vintage Esterbrook fountain pen leaked on me. I was displeased. Maybe, though, it is sick too. Maybe it can't help leaking out of its section threads, and it is sorry, but it hopes that I'll put it down and let have a mercy nap. Maybe I should dab it with a tissue and feel sorry for it.

Then again, that would mean it leaked ink-snot on me, and that's just gross.

I should probably not anthropomorphize things so much, but that would be no fun, and I am already having very little fun. However, I will say that being the writerly type can be fun when describing symptoms to a doctor.

"Tell me about your cough," becomes, "There is a grenade in my chest, the clip in my throat. Every breath I suck past it flicks the pin."

That one got me a blank stare and a breathing treatment.

"So, you have body aches."

"Yes, it is like my skin is boiled and pain burns up my legs like a slow wick, but not hot enough to chase away the chills."

Slow blink. "You have chills, too?"

"Yes. They leave me desperate and shivering like the last leaf in autumn."

That resulted in a raised eyebrow that said, "You have pneumonia and you read too much."

She's probably into mysteries, the Joe-Friday-Just-the-Facts-Ma'am* kind. They eschew the lacy edges of the language like a boiling plague.

Okay, obviously, I just can't help myself. Anyway, I am going to try to make the best of my confinement by working on that New Year's Resolution Resolution I mentioned before. There are books to finish, stories to write, novels to revise, and book reviews to type. Why did I think I was bored?

I guess there is plenty to do, provided I manage to keep breathing. (I'm on the fence about this.) I'll find something constructive to do right after this next episode of The Big Bang Theory. I swear, just one more. Just...one...more...


*Sergeant Joe Friday never actually said, "Just the facts, ma'am," in all the 1960's Dragnet series. I know this because I just swallowed whole all four seasons on Netflix. All. Four.

Inspiration Monday: Life Inside the Banyan Tree

Thomas Alva Edison's famous banyan, Ft. Myers, FL

This is a banyan tree. Banyan trees are fascinating. They are fascinating because I'm 99.7% certain that my brain is actually a tiny banyan tree straining in my skull.

A banyan tree begins its life as a parasitic vine-like plant that uses a combination of charming pick-up lines and sneaky little seeds to dig itself into the cracks and crevices of a naive host tree.

My brain was once a naive host tree, but somewhere along the line, through huge amounts of fiction reading and an overabundance of precocious creative energy, I picked up a pen. Those little book-seeds have gotten into my cracks and crevices. The banyan brain is born.

Once the host tree is well covered in baby banyan, there is not much it can do but sit there and watch it go. It is an overachiever, completely unsatisfied to just be a tree on top of another tree. It must encompass all it surveys.

The Edison banyan tree was the first on U.S. soil.

It grows up and out, twisting, turning, and showing off. It practices growing branches, out and out and out. They keep growing just to see how far they can go. The branches grow so far and fast that the tree loses sight of the ends of them. They are growing on their own without supervision. These branches are wild things in and of themselves. They sag under their own weight. They are heavy, too heavy for any tree, even our overachieving banyan.

Likewise, too often my stories grow too distant and heavy for my overachieving, well-meaning brain.

These branches, mighty though they be, must have support to stand. The brave banyan rushes to work raining down snaky vine-roots that curve and curl their way to the ground where they push themselves under the dirt and slurp up all its nutrients. They grow thick and solid, assuring the branches success on their journey.

The tree carries on this way, this direction and that, throwing down these auxiliary trunks wherever it needs. This is why the banyan is sometimes called a "walking tree." 

The story threads that zoom off from my banyan brain in directions unbidden can only live if they have something to hold them up and connect them to the ground. This is where I find myself struggling sometimes. It's easy to think up scenarios, but having scenarios that can suck nutrients straight from the ground (reality) and use them to grow strong and prop up the idea can be a little harder to come by. I continue to try. I'm raining down little trunk-vines every which way hoping that some of them take root. I keep walking.

If the banyan is given the room to grow, it will encompass acres of land. It becomes more than a tree, it is a Tree, a forest of Tree, an entire woodland that is made of one sprawling, interconnected, single Tree.

If the idea is given room to thrive, it becomes more than an idea, it is Story, pages of Story, an entire tome of Story that is made of one sprawling, interconnected, single Idea.

So, fellow creatives, what do you see when you sit under the banyan tree? Can you lose yourself in it, dropping breadcrumbs so you remember how to pull yourself out? Maybe you tag every branch and measure it as it grows, trimming any willful sprout that dares to stick out an unwanted tendril.

Maybe your tree is not a banyan at all, but a steadfast oak, or a hard-worn and ever-verdant pine. Write about your tree, maybe even draw it. Close your eyes and smell the sap, listen to the leaves rustling up new thoughts. What kind of fruit does it bear--and is it sweet or sour?

Personally, I'm finding that I like to sit in the middle of my idea-banyan and marvel at it, full of awe and nerves at the sheer magnitude of the human imagination. It reminds me that the struggle is worth it, because the struggle is what it takes to get those roots on the ground and to keep on walking over all the earth.