. Spinning .

Another fine example of the new generation of literacy:

STAMFORD (AP) — Former Stamford Mayor Stanley Esposito is 64 people who have written letters in support of reputed Connecticut mob boss Anothy Megale.

Megale is to be sentenced tomorrow on racketeering conspiracy charges.

He was indicted in 2004 along with more than a dozen other defendants in what prosecutors said was the most significant assault on the state’s Italian Mafia in more than a decade.

Though Megale was captured on tape in 2002 referring to himself as the "underboss," his attorney says he does not admit to being a member of the Gambino crime family.

Prosecutors say is was the family’s second-in-command and top man in Connecticut.

In his letter, Esposito says he was "impressed" by Megale as an "upbeat family man with a sense of humor."

Megale faces up to six-and-a-half years in prison.

(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)  link

This comes on the heels of feeling my age today in being totally out of sync with the rest of the world as far as caring about mankind and liberal ideas of how to demonstrate it.  I may need to retire to my cave for a while and think.

Highly unusual: A garage-inspired path of thought but in the early morning.  And, with an unlit dipped-in-arrow-lacquer cigarette to satisfy my oral craving, much to my husband’s dismay.

This–and not original at all, but sometimes when one stumbles upon it all by oneself even after having read and believed to be understood–that dreams are the natural magical realism of story.  The black bear we watch cautiously in our dreams as he looms outside our window; and then comes up for a chat.  The house that has no doorways, yet we find ourself within and then without.  The people who we do not recognize throughout an episode turn into our sister just as we awake (or as in reality, vice versa). 

These are the more perplexing of dreams; those that seem so grounded in surrounding or characters, yet turn on a dime with something so out of place that is so normally accepted in our dreamworld.  Verisimilitude at work here, in a place we have created without the taint of pompous conscious thought to say, that just can’t happen.

How can we learn to let these worlds, these parallel worlds that are seen by different parts of our brain in different ways become more dominant–or at least accessible, as dominant would soon see us in a barred windowed-building–so that we can write them from that viewpoint without our reality editor kicking in?  It is symbolism, no doubt, as the subconscious does not see things that the conscious mind does not; but sees it differently. 

This is what I need to learn.  To think as if in dreaming, and then to kick off the restraints that would negate the experience to something less than real.  For real is only what you make it, and nothing is really true to all.

Better known in its simple form as editing, the reading back and changing of one’s own work can be an almost never-ending operation.

For the latest issue of otto, I completed a project that started out a year ago with a concept of tying together a few short stories, in this case four, via characters and words that would "link" back to each other to form a "whole" of mixed time and space point of views.  While I discarded for the time being my original grouping of stories, I resurrected one I’d written for a class at the Wesleyan Writers Conference last summer and along with two paragraphs of a story I had sitting on my hard drive, a recent post here in Spinning, and one story started from scratch, I rewrote each. With the basic characters in mind, their past became clear.  Once I got to understand them a bit better, their present became a question of the decisions they had made decades prior.  It was an interesting and fun thing to write, and along with the technical decisions of where links would be applied, it was a great learning experience.

As I read them now in published form, I see how time would have given me the chance to better position the actors.  Each story could have been more complete within itself, and the links in particular could have been much better planned out to provide a more thoughtful pattern of life going off in different directions.  I am still finding errors in the writing, and finding much more powerful ways that the links could have been used.  There was no time to even allow any reader input, as all four stories and the links needed to be finished to present the project as a whole.

But the big push for deadline got the stories written, and the realization that my original choices were just (to me) too good to rush through may have produced far less than what I wanted it to be.  But the groundwork for the concept has been laid out and it will be easier and far more professionally and creatively worked on for the next experiment.

Four years ago, in visiting my mother at a nursing home, I was struck by the wealth of life inside the drooping heads and vacant stares of the residents.  It was a horrible thought; the accumulated memories of hundreds of years between them that would soon be lost in their dying, that in fact, were already lost to many who, as in the case of my mother, had already had their minds wiped nearly clean by the plague of Alzheimer’s.

In visiting my father-in-law yesterday at a similar home, it hit me again.  The sadness and despair hangs like tear gas in the hallways, emanating from each room where white-haired, toothless, unmoving on beds or propped up in chairs, the elderly await some form of release.  Release from infirmity, from pain, from the frustration of having lost all control of their lives and their bodies.

There are stories here.  Four years ago it was too painful to write about, seeing my mother and how well she fit in among them.  Now seeing my father-in-law, terminal and yet so full of hell and damnation because his mind is still with him, I want to write their stories.  They won’t be able to tell them, it’s true, but from the wrinkles, the eyes, the determination or the resignation, I can guess.