. Spinning .

With a brief apology for yesterday’s language, both in my misuse of the word prosaic and my proper use of a four-letter word, I offer nothing other than honesty in feelings and admitting when I’m wrong, fiction where appropriate, and realities of life as seen by me. Spinning often gets marked with my first reaction unless I can manage to hold things together and within until calm.

While there’s much more to this writing thing, it’s a learning process and each word that moves from the mind onto a readable, shareable form is best allowed its freedom when first born. Raising the words to be upstanding, self-sufficient and smart is the loving work of the parental author after the orgasmic conception of the idea and the pains of presenting that new life has been accomplished. If we allow their natural development and guide them gently, they will decide themselves whether to be essays, poetry, fiction or non-fiction when they are ready to stand on their own.

Living is writing, writing is living.

Yesterday was our fourteenth wedding anniversary. We celebrated with MacDonald’s rather than the planned lobster. But we’re both alive and okay.

I hate almost no one. I have disagreed with, temporarily disliked strongly–very strongly–but have never hated any person with any real passionate hatred in my life. There have been people who may have been mean, rude, unjust, or just plain annoying in my half-century of interaction with other people, but none that I didn’t forget and forgive easily any transgressions. Even evil people I’ve read about, I don’t hate.

Except for Inspector #35.

Inspector #35 may be male or female, of indeterminate age, but does not live in the United States. It tells me so on the bottom of my office chair just below the sticker identifying Inspector #35. This person probably doesn’t hate anybody either, may simply have dozed off that day, or is ignorant, careless, or naturally mean-tempered. He/she may even have meant this as a practical joke. But nothing I recall has ever gotten me to hate someone with such intensity as I hate Inspector #35, the person who pronounced my chair as fit for consumer use and up to all standards and which drives me as insane as would the Chinese water torture. My chair, with no set reason nor timing (except for bad), for no apparent cause nor regular schedule, drops approximately one-quarter of an inch at a time until it has lost four full inches in height to its lowest setting. While I have been typing, it has intermittently dropped five times. It has not done this for several days, perhaps a couple weeks. It is driving me mad.

For this reason alone, I will not have lived my life in love of all people. When I die, I will probably be stopped at the gate for this very reason.

I don’t care. I hate Inspector #35.

The neighbors were having quite a row earlier this evening. I think I may have set it off by wandering too close to their yard when watering some parched petunias that couldn’t wait for “possible scattered thunderstorms” to possibly scatter rain to quench their thirst.

The Mrs. started in just as I happened by their side window, and eventually the kids were screaming too. It took a while, and she went over all her complaints that I’d suspected she was feeling. They’d had to move here just this spring because their home had been practically leveled and would take too long to rebuild. The grocery is too far away now, and while they’re further from the traffic, she doesn’t like the closeness of the neighbors with their lights shining in their yard late at night, and sounds of tv’s and supper dishes clanking as if they were right in the next room.

Eventually the kids were fed and quiet and the tirade the Mrs. started seemed to simmer to just a word now and then. And all is well again, and she has regained some sense of peace, her spouse’s gentle words have done the trick. They’ve gone out for the evening and their voices are less insistent, less upset and sounding happy now. They’re sitting in the maple tree in my, er, their, backyard, the Mr.’s unmistakable red feathers glowing even in the falling dusk. Hopefully, happily they’ll return soon to the nest and children in the laurel bush beneath the window of this room.

Every time I sink my head in shame at losing what is left of any fight in me, I clearly see the ground and find that I’m still standing, and my eyes are far above it. Ever more nearsighted as I age, my feet look fuzzy but unmoving, planted firmly somewhere that I can’t recall the journey to, but there I am.

Every day now is a school day, every day a lesson is learned, but then I thought I knew it all at twenty-five. So is the world revealing just a little at a time or is it changing and with the changing, so am I? The daily routine calls and at long last I’ve given in, but discovered that it all can be quickly done and over with if faced head-on. Avoidance was a hiding place that grew with need; accumulated needs that bore the need to run away into a safe and quiet cave where I could think and write and write and think. But doing what is needed isn’t shackling nor overwhelming if done with haste and without hatred. It grants a freedom from itself when need is taken care of. Its weight is lifted and its want erased from the mind to leave it clean for what is more important to consider. Life, death, friendship, despair and hope and fear and love. And words to use in any way I want.

Steadfast, slowly moving onward, trying hard for confidence and settling for comfort. And inner peace.

This is interesting, and certainly nothing I’m proud of, but I believe I scare people.

My mood of late has undoubtedly been somber, beset by threatening clouds that have hung over my head for months and blocked the few healing rays of sunshine that human beings can find to brighten up even the most troubling events. But I am not normally a jovial person anyway, so I wouldn’t have thought that not smiling through a framing session would be revealing. A couple customers have reluctantly admitted that they didn’t call about their work being ready because they didn’t want to rush or bother me. This is not acceptable in a professional atmosphere.

Hiding is hard, but preferable to making people uneasy, so I’ll necessarily work on my shell of outer self and reconstruct a bit. I’ve never felt intimidating in my life, yet I have been told that I am strong in relationships, often too strong for lovers who have gone their way long ago. I’ve always been amazed by this perception, thought a bit about it and not being able to reconcile it with my own, gave it up from further introspection.

Me? Scary?

I am consciously focusing all my frustration, anger and feelings of despair upon this animal, the vole. The shotgunning of emotion was ineffective on every target at which I aimed. This will centralize it harmlessly, and thus diffuse it. My enemy is the vole.

Photo credits: Animal Diversity, University of Michigan

Standing outside just now, in a summer night’s dusk under a gathering storm of running clouds, I felt it creep back in. I wanted to howl with the wind.