top o’ th’… afternoon?
17
Mar
2010
I WISH WISH WISH I ‘d had a camera with me today.
Doing a timed run for the bus company, we found ourselves in Rowley, where the farms and houses are awesome and expensive. The midday sun was gorgeous and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky… and to top it all off we saw a duplex built like a castle, with two towers and everything.
Today is Saint Patrick’s Day. I made my hat festive.
This has been the first St. Pat’s day I actively celebrated in a while, mostly because I didn’t think it was fair the native pagan religions were subverted by Christianity (for the record, I am a Catholic.) Then I realized I can’t really change the past by being bored and unhappy in the present. The best course of action would be to celebrate the heck out of Halloween this year, which I plan to do. Since Halloween is on a weekend this year, I think I might head to Salem. I hear they throw a great spooky shindig.
This week was awesome for many reasons, and crappy for a few. I suppose that evens it out? I choose to focus on the good right now.
Shortly after updating my blog last week I started work on an illustration for my friend Lyndsey:
In the process I ran the events of the book (I co-authored) through my head. We’re in the middle of a rewrite as it is, but it never hurts to think over the story and find holes or new ideas and insights to add. It was Thursday, I was in the kitchen doing the dishes when all of a sudden the THING happened.
You know the THING if you ever were truly inspired. Like lightning struck the top of my head, popping my eyes open wide, sticking my tongue to the roof of my mouth, freezing my arms in place and causing my toes to lift off the ground. The THING is a new idea, and it feels like falling in love with your own brain (or wherever it is ideas come from. I heard there’s a place in Schenectady that delivers them.) I hustled to the computer and tapped out some notes in an email, sent them speeding down the wires to Lyndsey, and let the momentum carry me. I wrote a new poem:
L is for Luck
The Bad and the Good
and all Little People who live in the wood.
Under stones, under hills, in the basements of homes,
Trolls, Leprechauns, Brownies and Gnomes.
… inspired partly by Saint Patrick’s Day, naturally. I sketched and I cleaned and I drew. I clean when I can’t draw and I draw when I don’t have anything left to clean. I sketch whenever I feel like it.
I also watched a lot of documentaries this week, and realized what it was I was missing before. The THING, and the joy of having real ideas that belong to me, and just plain LEARNING something new. We’re bombarded by information every day, all the time, and it’s gotten to be so much that I forgot what it felt like to seek information and learn it. You have an answer as soon as you can type the question these days, and I’m not saying that’s wrong (in fact I think it’s awesome) just that I became numbed to the feeling of learning something new.
Didn’t mean for this to become such a novel! As I said, a lot of stuff happened.
