When I am old (and no, it's not about wearing purple!)

When I am old as old can be

And every year has passed me by,

I hope to sit beneath my tree,

This oak I grew; how times does fly!

            Once, it was young and I was young…

            But it will thrive long after me:

            When I am turned to earth beneath

            The roots it wove, and all you’ll see

Will be fresh blooms, the brighter grown

For growing there, where once I lay;

And high above my tree will stretch

Its branches to another day ―

            But long before I take my rest

            I hope to sit where shade falls deep.

            I’ll knit, read, sing, till memory

            Has ushered me to gentle sleep.

Horizons

I think the poem speaks for itself. And yeees, I'm feeling the "wear and tear" of the carer's life (bluntly: being nailed to the spot while not months but years go by, and one can't help but listen to the steady, relentless "tick-tock" of one's own life rushing by like over-wound clockwork). But we do what we must ... and sometimes we write poems. 

I also have a great fondness for Robert Service, which tends to come out in my poems now and then! Nothing wrong with liking Service, and Kipling, and Patterson, right? Right.

(The image is from one of those wallpaper sites where you slog through ten screens of commercials to get to the picture you want. I don't have a credit for it, but if anyone can provide it, I would be delighted to add it here.)

The art of utterly neglecting a blog

Once upon a time, blogging  was IT. The big IT, the "in thing" that everyone wanted to do because blogging was the way one reached out to people through the medium of writing and snapshots. (And besides, the apps were new and cool.) There are still lovingly-tended blogs out there, which have been around for so many years, they're massive enough to generate their own weather patterns. My all-time favorite, which began in 2005, is Jill Outside -- used to be Arctic Glass, before author Jill Homer left Alaska (which Alaskans call "going outside").  But the art of blogging seems to be waning ...

And I'm becoming the worst offender myself! It's so much easier to click into facebook and slam up a few pictures, tag someone, dash off a couple of notes. Nothing to do but click, post, done, coffee.

It's easy. It's also lazy ... or at the very least one could argue that doing facebook adheres to the Way of Tao, the Watercourse. Which is to say, you take the easiest course (path of least resistance) around or through an obstacle course (life), like a stream of water --

The philosophy is very neat and tidy; but the blog that was such a pleasure a few months ago is barely ticking over now! One is almost inclined to bark, "Shaddap, Chuang Tzu, you hack!" And yet, not ... quite. Because facebook is sooo easy and convenient.

At the same time I do like this blog. It has a sense of coherence and permanence that's entirely missing in the frenetic rush and confusion of facebook. Coming here to write, I don't have 12 people talking to me simultaneously (it's a rare skill, learning to hold 12 coherent conversations at the same time; hairdressers can do it, too) while eight thousand commercials, some laughably inappropriate, interrupt the flow of cute cats, puppies, amazing wildlife, glorious landscapes, hilarious cartoons, Daleks, Captain Picard and crew, Darth Vader, Han Solo  ... not to mention the oddest elderly gent who wears a ludicrous orange wig and prompted me to post two images in protest:

 
And facebook ain't all wine and roses! I got myself called a "burrito brain" when I had the nerve to mention being interested in pre-Vedic Indian philosophies. I've been contacted by some of the strangest people in the known universe, from somewhat weird looking young ladies cutting slices off their own arms with razor blades, to African ministers eager to bring me into their church, to American wannabe servicemen with enormous machine guns, who now live in Kabul are are just dying to be pals with li'l ole me. Who are these people?! What are they?!

I've also met some terrific people on facebook. I've learned a lot, had some good laughs, and I think I'll always "do" facebook (unless President Duck -- I mean Mr. Orange Wig -- manages to "close down" the Internet to save us all from ourselves). But I also want to return to this blog. I liked it. I still do. It's a place where I can THINK, and write something which will still be on the page the next time I look, rather than being chased off the foot of the screen into some apocalyptic limbo by all the cute cats, commercials for poker machines, deals on $60,000 cruises and ... so on.

Blogging is different. It has a philosophy all its own. You just have to make time to sit down and commit to something more substantial than rattling out a few words in a comment before clicking on, and on, to the next, and the next glorious image or hilarious one-line gag, or cute puppy video. One thing about facebook: it seeds and nurtures the grasshopper mind! Which is a slippery slope indeed.

So -- my note to self (not quite a resolution, because it's not quite New Year) is ... slow down, chill out, make time, cogitate, let facebook look after itself for a while. I'm sure it'll be there when I get back, and --

Of course, the inevitable downside to blogging is that almost no one is reading what one writes (insert "LOL" and the mandatory emoticon of giggly face). Well, sure, that's now. Perhaps people will read this blog in future. When one crafts a book, the whole thing is done, finished -- work consuming months or even years -- before one expects it to be read. Another thing about facebook: it seeds and nurtures the mindset of "Now!!!", because if the post you've just written isn't seen/read/liked/shared by your pals in the next 24 hours, it will scroll down into the aforementioned limbo of the apocalypse.

Blogging offers something more permanent. So --

As the man said in the movie, I'll be back. 

Like a movie you've seen too often. Or, just shoot me.

Yes -- exactly, life reaches a point where it seems like a movie you've seen too often. You know the plot and everything about it so well, you doze off ... not so much out of boredom (because Harrison Ford will always be a charmer, no matter how many times you've seen him in this), but with the simple familiarityof the action. It's not that this movie is one iota less than it was the first time you saw it --

Just shoot me. Seriously.
Would it be too droll to add "copyright Lucasfilm"or words along those lines?
Fair usage: call it a free promo for Star Wars. (Don't worry, Walt: I won't bill you, LOL)

-- but there's not enough freshness left to keep you awake and aware for two hours. And the real problem starts when LIFE has reached this same point...

Mom's sick again today. Screen door needs fixing. Shower's not draining properly. Garden needs weeding. I'm tired. I have a headache. This laptop is so getting so slow, I think it's having the cybernetic equivalent of a stroke. Blah, etcetera, blah, so forth, blah, such like.

You can always turn off a movie, but what happens if you turn off LIFE?!

Well, the screen door is booked in for a fix-it session on July 25. I have an appointment for an MRI on the 20th. Dave needs to wiggle the wire "snakes" down the shower drain -- again. Mike and I need to get some fresh air and sunshine, and do some work in the garden -- again. I guess I'll take a nap (again) while I have the chance; and I already took the pills for the headache...uh, again.

What the movie of my life need is a new plot, or new characters!

I listened to a podcast last week: turns out, up to 80% of everything we (think we) see with our physical eyeballs is no more than a memory feed. Your brain is showing you old data; most of the time it's not even taking fresh scans of the house, which is why you can be tearing the place apart, looking for something when in fact it's right in front of you all the time, but you can't see it. You're looking an an old scan, in which you glasses were not sitting in front of the TV, or your coffee cup was not sitting on top of the microwave. We see what we expect to see, and only seem to "come alive" when we travel, and the brain/eyes combination is forced to scan new places, new things, or else walk face-first into a camel.

I guess, Step One would be learning how to actually see every day, even while we're not on vacation.

Of course, if I did that, I'd see I also need to dust and vacuum and wash and scrub and...

Uh, tomorrow. Don't want to see all that dust right now.

And LIFE itself begs the question, what does happen if you turn it off or change the channel? But chasing down those answers will take you out of realms of philosophy and into metaphysics.

I wonder if I'll be cross or just bemused if the answer turns out to be 42.

A bunch of stuff that happens

The older you get, the more life looks like "just a bunch of stuff that happens." When you were younger, you looked for meanings in things ... not omens or karma as such, but something to put sense to the drivel life dishes up every day. One day you realize, if any such thing as karma actually exists, it's got to be an almost genetic process, where guff that happened (and the good things, too) forty years ago is acting like the building blocks and glue of what's happening today. A dumb decision you made at age 15 is currently screwing up your life, for example; but eons ago it looked like a terrific idea.

One tends, traditionally, to think about good and bad karma -- something angelic you do might win you a reward to cancel out something demonic you did. Well, maybe. But Fate, or Destiny, is just as likely to be simply the aggregate of the sensible and the silly, the lucky and the unlucky, plus a bunch of blind chance ... all of which accumulates over half a century and eventually dumps you right in it, without a spade.

So much for philosophy. But you gotta wonder, when you find yourself "right in it, without a spade."

Actually, we have a couple of spades. But no one is looking forward much to doing the digging.

So --

What am I reading?

The Exile Waiting, by Vonda N. McIntyre, originally published in 1975, and the copy I have is the 1985 reprint. This has been on the shelf for about thirty years (!) but only in the last few of those years have I owned the chance to read. (I'm currently reading up to a hundred thousand words a week ... and since I've actually started to think seriously about writing professionally, I'm not only looking more critically at my own work, I'm looking more critically at the work of others.)

What a marvelous storyline The Exile Waiting promised. It was filled with potential and started out very well. What happened next is a puzzler. After having read several of McIntyre's books in the past (admittedly, her Star Trek titles) I guess I expected more, either from this writer or this novel. Spider Robinson said of it (quoted from the cover matter), "A cracking good yarn with a very real cast..." And Joanna Russ called it "...one of the most vivid and real science fiction words I've seen..."

All of which gave me high expectations which, in turn, left me scratching my head; because the inescapable fact is -- great plotline and fantastic potential or not, the novel is so underwritten and abbreviated, the story barely survives and the characters don't. It's a quick read, at about 100k words in 248pp, and many of the characters are little more than a name and a cursory physical description. This will work for background filler characters, but when some of your main characters are still close to mysteries when the story ends, the reader is left unfulfilled. The action unfolds in fits and starts, sometimes lovingly detailed (in gorgeous prose), other times "dashed off" with critical sequences told in retrospect, and in shorthand. The overall effect is ... lumpy.

If I were awarding stars, I'd give The Exile Waiting three, because the world it builds is refreshingly strange, a couple of the characters are oddly compelling, and from time to time the prose is luminous. I wanted to love this book, because I know McIntyre's other work quite well; but this one is uncomfortably like a third draft awaiting revision and polishing. It was her first published novel, so I guess it's safe to say everyone has to start somewhere!

Having said that, I come around in a big circle and begin thinking as a writer...