Saturday, September 8, 2007

A POTTED PLANT FULL OF COFFEE GROUNDS...

In this installment, our hero delves deep into the already dark and introspective psyche of the self-involved writer. For what reason? To what end, Grasshopper? Read on brave traveler and find out!

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What do writers with writer's block ponder on their blogs? Is there method to madness, or merely more madness? Merely More Madness - I love that title. Patent pending, patent pending. A writer writes. Publish or perish! Well friend, perhaps perish, then publish is the thought for the day, our call to arms! As you stand before Burning Man and watch as his limbs fall away and soot blows out into the desert, imagine it is your responsibility to edit the running dialog of your own life. From the 50 pages of conversation and inner contemplation that is TODAY, chop away, hack at the undergrowth, and resurrect if you can those words to the wise! Generally left with more questions than answers, we putter about in vain attempts to get the juices flowing, constantly overwhelmed by intellectual constipation. Where is my bran muffin for the mind? In what supermarket isle do I find prunes for the intellectual palette? Is there a coupon in the local shopper for a discount on that particular item?

From my own experience I would think it must be something of a chaotic inner dialog, with too much caffeine and too little exercise, eyeballs composed of grapes, and eyelids of rough sandpaper. Every blink is agony.

It could go something like this... Had cup of coffee this morning. Took it with me when I went out to walk the dog. Saw something strange in the neighbors garbage can. There was no one around so I thought I should probably take a look. You know, in case they were doing something illegal. Could have been a meth lab in there, maybe aliens had taken roost... who knows these things? Rooted around in there for awhile. Have never seen so many empty tubes of Preparation H. What the hell? Not enough bran, or perhaps some weird fetish, can you get high off the stuff? Does anyone even use the word perhaps anymore? How non-committal can one get? The dog got anxious standing there, leaning from side to side on her leash, the ground nearby totally sniffed out of mystery. Lions in the zoo pace until their brains reform in schizophrenic patterns. Will my dog go nuts if I provide her with too little sensory stimulation? Is it time for a different colored chew toy? Perhaps the blaze orange one? Eventually, inspired, she moved around to the far side of the garbage can and first urinated on it and then left a little steaming dairy queen as well. That's what my little niece calls them... dairy queens. Remember, use lower case, we don't want any copyright infringements. The largest dairy queen I ever gifted the world with, was following the consumption of 8 ounces of sharp Cheddar, the crackers that went with it, a 1.5 liter bottle of port, tawny, and then a pot of coffee the next morning. 15 minutes after finishing up the coffee, my body decided that as it wasn't able to molt to somehow step out of the collected poisons, it would instead evacuate the entire contents of my frame that weren't held in place by rigid bits of flesh. Turned out all the fuss was about a potted plant full of coffee grounds. How did that happen?

Reminds me of my childhood as a nightcrawler farmer. 10 gallon fish tank in the basement full of dirt and worms. Nightcrawlers love coffee grounds. Good name for a children's book there, need to call my agent when I get home. NIGHTCRAWLERS LOVE COFFEE GROUNDS. Its inspiring, really. Nightcrawlers, rooting around in the dark, long hours, low pay. It makes sense that a mouthful of coffee grounds would go a long way, especially at 3am and the world is asleep and all you want is one mouthful of dirt that hasn't been eaten and pooped out a hundred thousand times before you, by all your parents parents, and all their grandparents parents. When people breathe, each breathe takes i the flavors of 6 billion others. They say when you take a mouthful of water, that its not unusual for some portion of it to be 10,000 years old, once having been frost nestled against a woolly mammoth on a glacier, a thousand miles north of its present position - in your mouth. True too, for dirt, mud, sand, clay. We could not plant crops if not for nightcrawlers. Every mouthful they take having been consumed and ejected by their ancestors, down through the eons, ever since the fateful day the first nightcrawler leaned down and pondered the question of what that dirt must taste like. I myself don't recall. My son is the right age to ask, if he was more into full words. Perhaps he would say: yes papa, that's good eating.

NIGHTCRAWLERS LOVE COFFEE GROUNDS, because well, lets face it, what the hell else are you going to do when you are a worm? Wait for the world to fall over and rot? Poke out of apples and give people the finger as they bite down on your butt? Wait until the next rainstorm and shimmy to the surface, there to engage in every manner of sordid slimy procreation you can possibly envision. Make hay while the sun shines, make worms while the rain pours! Give me my two mouthfuls of coffee grounds and I"ll crawl back under the porch to continue to work my way through Fluffy, the ferret you accidentally killed at the age of six, because you cared for it so much you unintentionally hugged it to death!

No, really now - when your mind is on overdrive, mile-a-minute kind of stuff yet somehow the physical act of sitting down and putting words to paper and/or screen is an impossibility, where does all that work go? When I am through thinking these thoughts (tongue twister anyone) where do my thunk thoughts go? A true point to ponder there, boys and girls. I think those ideas, concepts, turns of phrase, generalizations, feelings, stream into the collective unconsciousness to lie in wait, for some unsuspecting individual to wander along and trip over them. Only then, dear reader to reassemble your unused mental machinations into the next big thing to sell on a home shopping show. I'll tackle the Collective Unconscious, Einstein and Vitamin C next, I should think.

1 comment:

Adam Rau said...

You are a fever-dream of words, my friend.

I too had a childhood run-in with a commercial bucket of nightcrawlers. Over the course of several weeks one summer I brought small containers filled with squirmy "money" to the Bait N' Tackle on Benton County Drive. Then I thought I'd expand my venture, filling a bucket with dirt and worms. But life distracts, and before long something in the shed was smelling bad, bad, bad. I'd forgotten my money-makers, but they remembered how to die and rot. Now their bait for large-mouth bass in the empyrean rivers. Wiggle on, little worms, wiggle on.