NO REWIND TO LIFE_A GHOST-EYE VIEW OF NANO & LIFE'S FLEETING MOMENTS

Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway (their ghosts rather) and I were playing poker at my table at Meilori's.

Dorothy Parker took a sip of her whiskey and smiled at me. 

"If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style.

The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

"Bah!" snapped Hemingway.  "The lemmings are throwing together words just as fast as they can to create hovels of novels."

Mark lit a cigar and grinned, 

"Well, I certainly believe in using the right word not its second cousin.  Hemingway, did you mean to rhyme?  Weren't you a poet, too, Dorothy?"

Dorothy bent down, grabbed a rubber doll whose throat was torn from ear to ear, and tossed it to her poodle -- 

who faithful even beyond death -- lingered beside her mistress.



"Ha! My verses. I cannot say poems. Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.

 My verses are no damn good. 

Let’s face it, honey, my verse is terribly dated—as anything once fashionable is dreadful now. 

I gave it up, knowing it wasn’t getting any better, but nobody seemed to notice my magnificent gesture."
 

Fitz, as he liked me to call him, took a sip of his own champagne.  "Never confuse a single failure with a final defeat."

Hemingway gruffed, "We are all defeated in the end.  It is only the struggle that matters and why you struggle in the first place."

Hemingway glared at Ratatoskr (the Asgardian squirrel)

who scampered from ghost to ghost, looking at their hands and whispering in my ear.  "He's telling you our cards, isn't he?"

I shook my head.  "He's merely teasing you and telling me terrible jokes."

"How terrible?" frowned Twain.

I sighed, "What did Jay-Z call his girlfriend after he proposed?"

"What?" asked Hemingway.

 I answered, "Feyoncé."

Dorothy groaned, "Ouch!"

I said to her, 

"It’s a popular supposition that there was much more communication between writers in the twenties. The Round Table discussions in the Algonquin, for example."

 {Dorothy and the rest of the Algonquin Round Table}

"Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You’re all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We’re lost.'

 Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. 

Or irresponsibility. 

But don’t forget that, though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren’t.  

Fitzgerald, over there and the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time."

I asked, "Did the “lost generation” attitude you speak of have a detrimental effect on your own work?"

"Silly of me to blame it on dates, but so it happened to be. 

Dammit, it was the twenties and we had to be smarty. I wanted to be cute. That’s the terrible thing. I should have had more sense."

Fitz sighed, 

"At eighteen, our convictions are hills from which we look.  At forty-five, they are caves in which we hide."

Mark Twain nodded,

"Each day is like a coin.  We can spend it any way we like.  But we can only spend it once."

Hemingway lit his own cigar and puffed out the smoky words.  

"The living think they have more days than they do.  They look out at a thousand lives.  

At the end, they'll turn around and find only one --

and if they frittered away precious days investing in work that is inferior, that one life will be inferior."

Fitz looked into the shadows.   

"All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath, knowing it will not last."

Ratatoskr looked up at me from the table top.  "What do you think of this NaNo nonsense, Roland."

I smiled sadly.  "Some of my friends are for it.  Some of them are against it."

Dorothy asked, "And you?"

"I'm for my friends."

Ratatoskr groaned.

ARE YOU HOLDING YOU BACK? IWSG

http://alexjcavanaugh.blogspot.com.au/p/the-insecure-writers-support-group.html  

Do you let others define you?  Do you allow circumstances to confine you?

"If there is no enemy within, there can be no unbeatable enemy without."
- Wolf Howl


Life hits hard.  

It can hit harder than we can.  But it is not about being hit hard.  It is about how hard we can get hit and keep on going.

Pain can take our breath away.  It usually is temporary or at least ebbs.  

But if we quit because of the pain, it will last forever.

You may look around you and think others have things so much easier.

Yet nothing that grieves us can be called little:

 by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a beloved doll and a king's loss of a cherished crown are events of the same pain.

FEAR is a part of all our lives.  It can paralyze us or haunt us.  What can dissipate fear?

FOCUS.  If you focus on the task at hand, one section at a time, you can dial down the fear.

But Focus gains its strength from our DREAM.  

Not your DREAMS.

Yet those are important, too.

People ask me many times through the course of the day, "How are you?"

I tell them, "I'm pretending I'm dreaming."

There is a reason for that answer:

Most people work hard for a living.  They have tough lives. Structured lives.

They work all day, have dinner, put the kids to bed, go to fitful sleep, and get back to the grind early the next morning.

Everything else in life except for DREAMS has rules.

The only place you're truly free is when you fall asleep and dream.  

If you live life as if it were a dream, you free yourself to be creative, imaginative, and give the day all the wonderful things that are inside you.

But I am talking about your life's DREAM, the image at which your heart is aimed.

How strong is that DREAM?  Do you want it more than being thought cool?

Do you want your dream more than to party, to troll Facebook, to sleep?

That depends on the WHY of your dream.

What is the WHY of your life?

Do you want to succeed to have a sports car in your garage, money in the bank?

Do you want to see a smile on your child's face?

Yet, next September when Wall Street crashes, what will happen to your happiness?  

When your child leaves the nest, will your happiness leave with him?

That depends on your WHO.

WHO do you believe you are?  WHO do you want to become?

Are you who you want to be? Do you even know who that person is?

Not WHAT you want to be but WHO you want to be.

What is the meaning of your life?

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, was sent to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife, where he and she were soon separated.

 His wife Tilly was transferred from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belson camp, where she died. 

Frankl's mother Elsa was killed by the Nazis in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

His brother Walter died working in a mining operation that was part of Auschwitz. Apart from himself, the only survivor of the Holocaust among Frankl's immediate relatives was his sister Stella. 

She had escaped from Austria by emigrating to Australia.  

Viktor speaks of that time:

We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. 

The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles.

The man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us."

Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: 

The salvation of Man is through love and in love. 

I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, 

be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. 

In a position of utter desolation, when Man cannot express himself in positive action, 

when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way –

in such a position Man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. 

 Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

He also said:

 "If we take man as he is we make him worse. If we take man as he should be we make him capable of becoming what he can be."

I believe in the passions of others. It is the greatest act you can do for someone: to have faith in them and who they are.

I will leave you with what he said of happiness and success:

 “Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.

 For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, 

and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself 

or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. 

Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. 

I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. 

Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—

success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”

 What do you think?

MILO JAMES FOWLER BRAVES MEILORI'S

Did Milo see what I saw in the faces of those sitting at the tables in Meilori's?

Eyes haunted by past choices, voices shedding truth like skin or lovers.  Maybe.  Maybe not.

We were both English teachers, engaging in sentimental tango's of Us vs. Them.

http://musapublishing.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=6&products_id=831

We had something else in common: 

we both grew up with magic ...

the magic of creating worlds, pushing against the boundaries of what was and was not possible in publishing.

I smiled at him across the table:
"Your book, YAKUZA TERRITORY, comes out this Friday, doesn't it?

Milo nodded.
"Yes, and I am pretty proud of it.  It is the 3rd time I've used Charlie Madison, a private detective, as my hero."

I said,
" In Girl of Great Price, he was hired to track down a kidnapped little girl with an ability too bizarre to believe.

In  Immaterial Evidence, he was on the trail of an invisible criminal with revenge in his sights. While those two novellas were more like Blade Runner meets The Maltese Falcon,

the third installment, Yakuza Territory, is like Die Hard meets Assault on Precinct 13. "

Milo smiled, "You've read my books?"

"Certainly, but Amazon, or DayStar, keeps taking down my reviews."

Milo paled,
"DayStar is just a fictional character, right?"

I sighed, "Yes, just like Sherlock Holmes ... who is sitting at that far table chastising Benedict Cumberbatch."

I said, "You should thank Benedict.  Before he strolled in, Holmes was about to chastise your Charlie Madison for failing to notice the details when he first walked into that fateful police precinct."

Milo smiled, "Charlie was one of the first characters I created at age 15.  He's grown deeper since then, but he is still all too human."

The ghost of Mark Twain settled into the chair besides a startled Milo and asked, "What writers inspire you?  Besides me, of course."

Milo said, "Ray Bradbury inspired me to write and submit a short story every week since 2011.

Robert Heinlein's rules for writers have also inspired me to keep my work on the market until it sells and to dive right into new projects in the interim."

Whiskey glass in one hand, cigar in the other, the ghost of Ernest Hemingway sat down heavily on the other side of Milo.  "Please tell me you are not one of those NaNo's this month."

Milo said, "No, but I do have a daily goal:

After my day job (teaching junior high English), I try to write 1,000 words of fresh material in addition to ongoing edits, revisions, and resubmissions. 

On bad days, I churn out about 500 words. On great days, it’s closer to 5,000. But I’m content with 1,000 a day."

Hemingway glowered at Milo.  "500 words daily was my usual output."

Victor Standish,  playing the trumpet on stage next to Quincy Coleman, called out.  "Everyone has their own limits, sir."

Victor said loud, "My book came out in 2011. What were your favorite books of that year?"

"I enjoyed Under the Dome by Stephen King; somehow, he was able to keep me reading a thousand-page novel without even realizing it. He’s a master of suspense and escalating conflict.

I also started reading (and still am—I read at a slug’s pace) Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, which has got to be the most imaginative, unique, and utterly cool novel I’ve ever read."

Hemingway smiled smugly and snorted up at Victor, "Ha!  Seems you weren't good enough either."

As Victor lost himself in his music, I asked Milo, "What piece of advice would you give writers for the rest of this bruised year?"

" Believe in yourself, believe in your work, and cool stuff will happen. Write often, submit often, and join Write1Sub1. Come for the challenge, stay for the community. You’ll be glad you did!"

Milo looked around.  "I really like Sam McCord's adventures.  Is he anywhere around?"

A voice of velvet ice murmured behind him, "You are so lucky you mentioned you liked my husband's tales."

Milo looked over to me.  "You did warn me about this place."

A Public Service Announcement concerning Milo James Fowler

HEROES COME IN ALL SIZES

Besides being the tagline of my book, Hibbs, the Cub With No Clue,

it is what could be said of a hero of a different sort. 

J. L. Campbell has a blog-hop to describe your hero.
http://www.joylcampbell.com/

Rhonda Hendee and her cat, Batman
 (@RhondaHendee) brought this "never say die" champion to my attention.

Christina Lang -

Let Christina tell you a bit about herself:


Hi! I’m Christina and I am a 17 year old junior from Dunedin High School in Dunedin, Florida.

While it doesn’t define who I am, I will start with sharing that I am a left below knee amputee.

I lost my leg when I was 2 1/2 due to complications from the chicken pox.

My family has always supported me and never let me forget that I can do anything that I put my mind to.

My journey has been exciting and I am so thankful that you are here reading a bit of it!

I have always loved challenging and pushing myself

and I am ready for the next step in my athletic journey! I train and compete with able body teams,

( Dunedin High School swim and Track & Field and the Palm Harbor YMCA Piranhas)

as well as with my paralympic team, Paralympic Sport Tampa Bay.

I am planning on competing within the USA Paralympic program in swim as well as track & field in 2015

with the hopes of representing the United States in the Paralympics.

And on top of everything else: her wisdom teeth are coming in!

Christina, I was told by my dentist wisdom teeth gave birth to the phrase "Sadder But Wiser!" 

Oh, Christina, the ghost of Mark Twain,

who is a frequent contributor to my blog,

tells me to remind you that it is not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog!

The ghost of his cat, Bambino, purred that his equating you to a dog was insulting .. to Bambino!  :-)

So ...

Go visit Christina's blog, Dream While Achieving:
http://dreamwhileachieving.wordpress.com/

Show her a heroic heart is never alone. 

Say HELLO and add a few words of encouragement to her day.

And, Christina,  as little Hibbs says, "Seven times down, eight times up makes a winner!"

ONE MORE STEP

“Among answers, I am the question,Among scars, I am the fresh wound."- Lisel Mueller {Night Song}

 
The Lakota in me murmured to go sit beside the snaking bayou outside my window.  

To simply be. So I did. 
The grass was soft like living velvet.

The waters, turned brown by the poisons pumped into them by the nearby petro-chemical plants, bled by me. 

An eye-achingly white egret swept gracefully over the rippling currents.

Its search was a hopeless one: a search for life in the waters of slow death.

Leaves, the bright colors of strangled life, drifted upon my shoulders. 

Like a trick of my melancholy, a voice of winter dreams spoke to my ears.

“The Seasons of Man are much like the Seasons of the Year, GrandSon. 

Man begins in birth. He struggles. He creates. That which he creates dies … then he dies.”

I flicked my eyes to the left. The wavering form of the Turquoise Woman sat beside me, her haunted face terrible and beautiful beyond any singing of it.

She whispered on the cool winds of Autumn.

“Man’s words are dying, Roland. And without words, he is drying up within. His grasp of literature pries him out of his provincialism.

It makes him a witness of time and existence, pulling him out of himself to value the priceless gift of those who struggle beside him ...

and struggled before him.”

I nodded. 

“I think I understand, GrandMother. We are falling under the tyranny of generalizations and catch-words, under the soul-numbing spell of color and sex from tiny TV screens.”

Estanatlehi’s nose wrinkled as she glared at the poisonous plumes from distant smoke-stacks.

“An air that kills

From yon far country blows.”

I shrugged. 

“A man must die somewhere, and this is where my dwindling circle of friends live.”

“But do they live? Can any who do not think beyond the drudgery of the obvious be said to live?”

Her lips twisted as if tasting the bitter dregs of civilization.  

“Rather than say a man is dishonest or cruel or unreliable, they insinuate that he is illegitimate or an offspring of a female dog.”

She sighed, “Hatred obscures all distinctions and most truths.”

The Turquoise Woman turned to me. 

“Like most writers you have a fresh seeing eye. You are as a stranger to your own life, perceiving value in what others see as nothing but the commonplace.”

“Few people read anymore, GrandMother. The giants of literature are fading into the mists of ignorance. 

You mention Faulkner, Steinbeck, or Descartes only to be met with glazed looks and frowns. Libraries are becoming a thing of the past.”

Looking at her features, fine yet otherworldly, I could believe long ago there had been a face that launched a thousand ships.

She whispered, 

“Man divides his books into those of worth which few read and 

‘popular’ ones of which both those who write them and those who enjoy them are half ashamed.”

Estanatlehi’s grew wet, and a flurry of snowflakes swirled from her eyes.

“They hunch over their voice-boxes, typing words of gibberish, squeezing more of their empty lives into fewer and fewer characters and wonder why no one understands them.”

I reached out and held her cold, cold hand.

“I did not ask to be born. But I am here, now. Within me is the ability to feel compassion and the smallness to be arrogant. The end of The Way of the Seeing Eye and the Listening Ear may be upon us.”

I stroked her long, ghostly cheek. 

“It is but a storm. And storms are here for me to learn strength, to find it within myself to stand tall in them, and to hope.”

“Hope what, GrandSon?”

“That one more step will take us beyond where we were,

becoming stronger by the very act of taking it,

leading us to the light of the next sunrise and

the promise of a new day and a fresh blank page upon which to write good things.”
***
I really like this music video.  Give it a chance.

GODFORSAKEN

Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.
Hope is the dream of a waking man.
—Pliny the Elder

One of my young customers once said, "Gee, Mr. Roland, you've been everything but a pirate!"

I didn't tell him that to earn my way through college I had worked for a tax preparation firm, so I had even been a pirate. 

He might have thought I was bragging.

I have incorporated some of my life experiences into my books.

I have been laboring for some time on CARNIVAL OF THE DAMNED. 

And yes, I worked as a young carnie for a time.

Carnie life is rough, demanding, and harsh. 

Carnies tend to work 16-hour days.

When they’re not operating rides or luring people to games, workers spend much of the time making sure concession stands have hot dogs,

generators have fuel and simply “putting out fires.

 Carnivals often operate until midnight, even on their last day at an event.

The next day, workers typically begin tearing down rides by 8 a.m. and don’t finish until 10 p.m.

The carnival and its workers then travel to their next destination, usually hours away.

No days off and very little sleep.

Yet, there was a time when it also provided a community of haven for the outsider ... but no longer.

This time of year (mid October to  the end of November) reminds me of Gibsonton, Florida.

The Marks like to call it the town of the freaks. 

Yet, I found the true freaks were to be found in the gawking ranks of the Marks.

(I never thought of the customers as Marks, and, of course, that made me an outsider even in a community of outsiders.)

Gibtown was the Carnies' haven, their reliable retreat, the one place in the world that was truly home. From mid-October to late November they headed toward Gibtown.

Gibtown became the retirement or home-base for a variety of show folks

where your next door neighbors might be Priscilla the Monkey Girl, the Alligator Man, the Lobster family, or Dotty the Fat Lady.

 In other places these strange people would have been met with some degree of social rejection,

but in Gibtown they were treated as average people bonded by the nomadic lifestyle of the traveling show.

Now, of course, side shows are rarely found in carnivals.  You find them these days in the halls of Congress.

I hear there is a horror TV show about a freak show.  I will not watch it ... for a variety of reasons.

While on the road, regardless of where their business took them during their nomadic season, they held fast to the ideal of Gibsonton,

and they returned every night to a familiar place, to their Gibtown-on-Wheels, (their travel trailers).

The rest of modern America seems bent upon fragmentation:

Year by year there is less coherence in every ethnic group; churches, and small neighborhoods,

once the glue of society, are frequently said to be worthless and even oppressive,

as if our fellow citizens see a perversely appealing chaos in the world around them and wish to adopt it,

even if adoption leads to extinction.

Among carnies, however, there was a strong and treasured sense of community that, year by year, never diminished.

But being human, this chaos mind-set has infected them.  And Darkness has made its home among them.

In November 1992, Gibtown was hit with negative publicity when the Lobster Boy was murdered.

Years before, he shot and killed his daughter's fiance. 

Found guilty, he was sentenced to 15 years of probation as the prison could not meet his physical needs.

His wife endured years more of abuse from the alcoholic man and pleaded with her son-in-law for help. 

The solution came with three shots in Stile’s head as he sat watching T.V. in his trailer.

The son-in-law was found guilty of murdering the Lobster Boy and handed a life term in prison.

Mary Stiles was sentenced to 12 years but continues to maintain that she was only doing what was necessary to protect her family.

The case left a heavy dent in Gibtown’s reputation that is still talked about today.

Have any of you noticed a coarsening of the people around you?

It is commonplace for folks to invade your sense of privacy by speaking loudly on their cell phones right by you while waiting in line.

And don't get in their way if they are leaving an airplane, bus, or movie theater!

The internet makes us faceless and anonymous, free to be cruel without consequences.

There’s probably more sex, violence, and salty language in the opening credits of Keeping Up with the Kardashians 

than there was on all of prime-time TV in the 90's.
 
Gallup finds that 72 percent of Americans are convinced that “moral values” are getting worse.

Perhaps it is not that God has forsaken us, but that much of society has forsaken Him?

 

What do you think?