Many years ago, while bowling, I knocked pins down in the next lane over.
Oh, yeah. You got nothin’ on me.
Something I’ve done that you haven’t
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Daily Archives: September 22, 2005
Nursing a Blue
We’ve all had the blues. Its a special sort of sadness, a reflective melancholy that does not particularly want to be consoled. From the blues comes a deeper understanding of the world and of who we are. The blues are a window to truth, the time when your brain is naked, when the darkness presses in, asking questions you don’t want to answer.
I have been nursing a blue for about a week now. Just a singular blue, not enough to be crippling or debilitating, just enough to imbue my characters with the pathos that allows a reader to like them. Just enough sadness to make joy feel tenuous, and life an act of courage. The best characters are wounded, birds with broken wings that cannot be healed, but if they can’t fly, they still walk, and perhaps in the end they learn that flight is not about wings at all. Those are my favorite stories.
So for the last few days I’ve been riding this blue, keeping it alive (though I suspect I have no control over it at all), and writing every waking moment. Soup Boy reminded me to eat yesterday. Before that, I think there were days when I lost some weight. I have been consumed by this blue, and I have eaten it alive and sucked every last morsel of sadness from it.
The blue is fading now; I write this from a reverberation, the last echo of the bell over the graveyard.
Just So
I had brunch with Graybeard the other day, at a place popular with Americans. They serve big American breakfasts on the weekends, and that is always a Good Thing. Mmmm… Big Brain Scramble!
After we ordered the waitress brought us our utensils and napkins. Exactly two napkins. Graybeard, as you might guess, has a long, gray beard, and he likes extra napkins to keep it clean. He made a comment about how cheap the Czechs are, only bringing one napkin per person, but on reflection I think he’s missing something about Czech culture.
The czechs as a group are craftsmen. Do not confuse this with industrious or efficient, but in the little daily tasks most czechs I know like things to be just so. Rather than provide some napkins, the waitress will carefully count out the correct number. Not out of cheapness, but out of rightness.
I doubt this attitude would carry over to a repetitious task like working in a manufacturing plant. There’s little opportunity for craftsmanship there, and other czech habits, like drinking beer with breakfast, would probably reduce productivity. Where I would hire a czech would be for something that required skill and patience, but the deadlines could be a little looser. Perhaps manufacturing high-end musical instruments, or glass blowing.