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BNPs_slant
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Name: BNPs_slant
Interests: Life, the Universe, Everything! But most especially books, cultures, art and beauty, wit, and names.
Expertise: misusing society's resources
Occupation: constructing moving sky-castle
Industry: Publishing
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
6/4/2007
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| A poignancy settles over something remembered from a place you can't reach anymore.
I have left so many places I've loved that I try to drink in the beautiful while I can, but sometimes that chance of never seeing it again makes it bittersweet even while you are loving something. There was a park in Washington [state] we loved to go to, but it was too far to go frequently. I always drank in the shade under the tower-tall trees, the green and the red of the woods that ran around it. There was a brilliantly cold creek on the side of it. At 11 or 12 I was still young enough to spend long moments helping to build dams with the lining pebbles and foraged-up sticks, crouched over, darting in and out of the ice-broken water with hands and feet.
There was a playground there, but I only played in it once, when we'd brought along another mother with small children we were to entertain. No, the allure of the place was in that little creek, in following it to a waterfall into a valley that the park was build over. I'm sure most of the kids poking about to scale down it's sides, to ramble along it's less orderly bottom half weren't supposed to be there. I suppose all of us were breaking regulations, but I don't remember guilt of a forbidden pleasure. Woodsy adventure has usually been encouraged in my family. Going into houses without asking? Never. Getting lost in the back-forty when there's a ditch and fences to keep you on the 8 acres? Have at it.
Children bond over labor, just like adults do. Spats over the placement of dams surfaced rarely, usually to mean a new dam was started. There was a post-fence along the creek, and little kids were kept out mostly, but heirarchy wasn't a big issue. Anyone braving the frigid flow was good enough.
Sometimes I recapture that child's way of laboring to fill the hands. Sandcastles in unoccupied volleyball courts, braiding grass into mythic rings, meeting the eyes of a strange cat and waiting ages for it to meet you back. It's not the same; it's relaxing. I don't forget that when I was a child, that play was honest, hard work. It's offering them free pleasure that kills the child's spirit, not expecting them to do their share.
That water was painfully cold.
[Revision Date set for: 6-20]
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| Pyrotechnics are painting the sky in instants of grey-green and purple right now. I complain about being in the boonies of Oklahoma, but I wouldn't trade the storms I've seen here for any livelier occupation elsewhere. They aren't like the storms I've known that shoot a few candids and are gone. They're like the emphasis strobes on a rock band's tightest song in their choreography, rattling behind your eyes with every note.
The clouds are drifting citadels looming into each other and tring to tear each other down. Strike after strike...and I don't hear any thunder yet, at all.
It's amazing.
Man's flash is so sterile in comparison, it's not anything like. Some nights the lightining is blue enough to seem like those puffs of strobe when the family is all precariously grinning, aligned by some half-baked science of the photographer's ritual, and the smell of the carpet shampoo edges with the fake furniture you're sitting on as uncomfortable as smiling for strangers.
We have one realy cool set of photos out of all those times my mom threw it together (after months of anxious procrastination)....
The citadels are drifting. It's very Zen. Or Zazen, as I commented on the latest Crusie/Mayer workshop lesson. The frigid fury. The drifting of monoliths in an electric-smote sky. They drift away...
And the tree outside my window bends in their whispers but stands still, watching their far aloft war rage in timecapture successions of flash.
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| It was probably one of the sticky hot days--they were running a special on Ben&Jerry, and walking into the store we were washed over with iced dryness.
The evening had been planned out--run to the store for a stash of ice cream, then watching the Pirates of the Carribean, all sponsored by a couple working for the camp who knew what it would mean to a handful of grungy, underlaundered camp counselors with the evening off. They had met at Grotonwood themselves; she was in her early twenties; he was about ten years older. She was the kind of girl who radiates sweetness, and apparently he's the kind of man to poker-mein it. She treated him with the respect and told of how he was secretly very much spoiling her. They were still in their first year of marriage--I thought things boded well, for them and those who knew them. Hospitality is priceless.
She chatted with me and the other counselor who had popped in to help her choose flavors. When pressed to chose a quart each for ourselves (my still-Japanese reaction to demur at least twice even overcome) we rummaged some out, and closed the now fogging glass doors. Chocolate Peanut Butter Chunk. What else?
Their house was an old New England Victorian inn. Like many such places big enough for more than a single couple, it had been through many incarnations. They had quips about boarders...and warnings, when they showed us quickly over the common part.
There was a certain drill to hosting counsellors. They offered washing machines, and opened their basement so we could use their internet. Apologized for the dial-up.
Cacooned in a furnished, dust-smelling but precisely neat cellar, I smiled secretly and protested thanks out loud. The long-shanked blonde girl who was too sweet to like me much felt the same. When we traded off with careless comments on our hard-knock lifestyle (worn out, but still applicable, some weeks into the season), there was an undercurrent of dumb gratefulness.
Then we all piled on the floor with blankets and pillows stolen from various furniture in front of their window-sized screen.
I was a bit nervous. I joked about my pre-movie jitters being the same, as it was so big. I also had heard a lot of things about the movie, all positive, but I was much less used to action movies with moving skeletons than anyone could know. The ice cream was fetched out.
It was good. It was all good.
The evening slanted blue in from the French doors beside us for the first part of the movie. As the darkness strengthened, the movie's illusion did to. Then the inevitable harsh return of the light broke the night. We had to get back before curfew, but we'd fit in one of the better civvy events of the summer. Our covers were set free from the job we did 24/6 and we all slept until daybreak on another unlaundered day.
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| My unfictional writing tends to the atrocious.
My fictional writing often does as well, but at a different level; somehow with a spark of something redeemable.
I recently posted an opening of a story for critique, and then a commentary on what I wanted help with: my first response was "Well, I got your lines just fine, it's the explanation that confused me..."
But essaying, analytical writing is not what I seek to remedy HERE. I want to work on writing what I've seen so that I am more easy with incorporating experiences into my fiction. Fantasy is best when it is closest to the world we recognize.
I've been concentrating on incorporating elements from Japan. So far I have used situational pieces
{Tera came to her
house around six, and her mother raced to the door to make him come
in, before Kasumi could pick up her purse and leave her room. “Please, take a
little tea with us, Terase-kun...” He caught Kasumi's
eye, to smile questioningly, so she nodded. They all sat in the main
room, sipping the bitter green liquid and making intent-fraught small
talk.}
or object sets
{O'Neill jumped onto a table, between ceremonial blades and horse-hair
whisks, and opened the ground-level window.}
while also modeling conversations on the differences of lingual patterns if the characters are Japanese themselves. I'd like to embody the mood, ambience of these things much more completely. I plan to blog memories, open for critique, in a way that develops that ability.
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