Took a day off from the day job. The water and city people who are so very good to me. When it comes to a whole city, that is a lot of water. I’m learning more about the world of water—they are very willing share what they know.

What all the operators say: “Sewer is where the big bucks are.”

Sewer performs a valuable job, truly a service people are willing to pay for. That’s not the part that makes it so lucrative though. The money comes from transforming the sewage into something valuable on the other side. That stuff most people are desperate to get rid of still has value

Creating value and therefore money out of garbage. A friend once told me “If you have enough of something, it can be sold. If you have piles of dirt it can be turned into money!” (I miss you, Char-lez. RIP)

I took a day off to take a trip to Las Vegas. I’d been looking forward to this trip for almost a year. We were going to see a show. The rest of the family slept in, but I woke up at my usual time and went out to get some coffee.

Walking through the stale cigarette air I passed people captured by the Medusa’s gaze, turned to stone in front of the spinning slots. A jolt of recognition—this is how I must look if someone passes me when I have fallen into my phone.

The dealer’s tables were mostly empty. One had three girlfriends playing, and the next one had a single man leaning forward intently. The dealer was telling him “Listen to me, I have been around and I’ve seen a lot, you need to slow it down.”

Friday morning, turning a boredom and desperation into a cash crop.

The sewer industry is welcome to my contribution. I’m thinking I could invest my spare time better than I have been. That man was desperate to give his money to the dealer, likely because he hoped he could make more.

I don’t have to get lucky with my time. I have experience to know what happens when I plant the seeds. I’d like to keep my attention to my own business and not give it away.

I wonder ay beauty.

I wonder what a thought or experience means

I wonder if I am capable of making the idea I have into a reality.

Wonder in combination with action is how art happens. I can achieve wonder as a consumer of art. The internalized wonder will change me.

A little.

It’s the action, though—the trying—that births the art. And changes who I am. I want the change, I want to experience new ideas and new thoughts. I reach for it. I would say The Algorithm is pitched to provide interesting but not too challenging packages of thoughts to as much of the human race as possible. I pursue it.

An it’s not enough. I want to get my hands in it and make my own. That means stepping off the conveyor belt of bite sized mind snacks. I am hungry for more than a snack. Can I make something satisfying?

Can I make anything worthwhile? I’ve got this idea. When I start putting into some form—

Words?

Music?

Pictures?

How big is my idea? Maybe it’s too big for me.

The art of creation or creation of art causes a ripple, a current that pulls the artist into realization

Realization of the art

Realization that the art will not match the vision. My idea is far greater than what I can create. I push myself to do a better job. To get better at what what it’s going to take to make this art that haunts me.

I want to be better.

Creating art gives me a place to begin on being a more skilled, disciplined, compassion and wiser person.

I want it, and it is hard. People say, “don’t be so hard on yourself!”

It sounds like compassion, and sometimes it is.

I might need the rest so I can keep going. If I don’t give up there’s still a chance.

I thought I had to be something I wasn’t. See, I wanted to perform and play music with other people. I watched these cool guitar players—I even made friends with them!—on stage at the restaurants. That is what I wanted. They sang and played all these gorgeous songs with their amps as they thumped on the guitar body.

I don’t play guitar. I had an awkward keyboard, big and clumsy to carry around to play with others. It was an impossible dream to make music and get a better set of songs. I was not that cool.

I’ve been waiting two and a half years to be set free. It burned to feel locked out after all that. I set my jaw and looked for a way around this wall. If I couldn’t move my instrument, what could I do where it stood?

Even if no one came with me.

I gave myself a challenge: record and post 100 different songs. Could I play and sing that many? If I posted them on the internet, I could get the joy of performing in a small way.

I’m impatient. And stubborn. If I didn’t make an effort, 100 songs could take years. I started with easy ones and didn’t try to be perfect. I figured I could do my best effort and the goal was to rack up numbers.

Two things happened:

My piano playing got better. Giving myself a goal was very motivating, and I was excited to keep practice and record songs.

I posted 9 songs before I shared one with my husband. He tilted his head. “Your voice sounds different.”

I thought it was just because I was practicing the piano part more than the singing part. I wasn’t picking songs that were hard to sing.

He played a recording of me singing from 3 years ago. He was right. I sounded weak.

I hadn’t realized that my throat surgeries had impacted my singing voice. I had been focusing on strength and range of motion in my right arm after the reconstruction. That was obvious and painful, and I’d already made strides in moving my arm. It barely hurt anymore.

I’d made so much progress on the obvious thing, that I’d moved on to what I thought was extra, just a garnish.

Singing and playing songs was for when the big stuff was under control. I’d been longing to pick it up and do it again. Which I had begun to do.

That’s how I discovered my voice was strangled with the surgery scar tissue. It didn’t affect how I talked. I hadn’t realized what I had lost.

Like wakening to a near collision, I was shocked and horrified that my voice was so affected.

Like I said I’d already been working on breaking up scar tissue. Was I doomed to lose my singing voice?

One thing I’ve learned, a little exercise to loosen scars can restore my abilities. And the sooner the better.

It shouldn’t surprise me that I had scar tissue from my surgeries. I’m so grateful that I discovered it sooner than later so I could smooth it out.

I could have sat back and just WISHED I had a place to play and sing. By making the opportunity for myself, I did more than I expected. I made time for a thing that was non-essential and gave myself a gift for my whole life

All the world can be divided into categories. Each person has their own way of recognizing sameness in things. It’s well known that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

It’s also true that the dark corner of everyone’s heart hides fear.

Who knows what fears lurk in the heart of men? What scares me today could seem insignificant tomorrow. And the opposite could be true the day after.

What am I to do?

When I was a kid, a neighbor loaned me a bike and we went riding around the neighborhood.

Riding through the corner gas station, he said “Don’t ride through that puddle, the gas might degrade the rubber tire.”

I nodded, and I kept the dreaded puddle right in my sights so I could avoid it. I rode straight through it.

NO!

When I focus on my fear, I aim straight for it. I’m the only one who knows what I’m afraid of, and that may very well be why I think I can deceive myself and others to hide from the fears.

I’ll never run out of reasons to be afraid.

That’s not the category to focus on. I’m turning my head to fill my eyes with beauty. My eyes, ears, my thoughts let me fill them with art.

I am re-reading Art & fear. The journey to making art is haunted by fear. Since I want the beauty, I must live through the fear.

Just as no one else can say what I am afraid of, no one can tell me what is beautiful. They both are part of what makes me an individual. Grappling with my fears gives me the power to express myself in art or brave actions.

And the brave act of making art enlarges my personhood, adding complexity with each attempt.

I’ll miss that puddle of gas the next time. I’ve learned to keep my head up as I’m riding.

’ve joined—even started—a few book clubs. Like an orphan or the misfit swan among ducks, I’m looking for my people. I want to get a conversation started, even better a heated one, about the books that I love.

Last summer I paid to join a monthly book club. Okay, it was a sort of continuing education class about books from an east coast liberal arts college. I was glad to pay several hundred for a curated booklist from educated people who were supposed to know and hopefully even have opinions. Last week was the final session.

We discussed Mark Twain’s story of theCelebrated Jumping frog.

That story!read it for yourself.

Twain tells the story as himself, and sets up a contrast right away. He introduces himself to the bartender of Angels’s Camp—a California depleted mining town–this way:

“I told him a friend of mine had commissioned me to make some inquiries about a cherished companion of his boyhood Leonidas W. Smiley…”

Simon Wheeler answered in this way: “ ‘Rev. Leonidas W. H’m, Reverend Le — well, there was a feller here once by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of ’49 — or may be it was the spring of ’50 — I don’t recollect exactly..”

Listen to those sentences! Twain inquires about a firend’s cherished boyhood companion, and Wheeler recollects a feller.

This is the start of Twain’s trademark writing in the colloquial speech patterns of his characters. He is formal and proper, but the bartender Wheeler tells it with all the little details and distractions it deserves.

Twain is a storyteller too, definitively as the author of this celebrated tale. In the story he deprecates the tale and it’s teller from the beginning:

“…he would go to work and bore me to death with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and tedious as it should be useless to me.”

Twain knows this is a good story, but he wants to pshaw it to seem humble.

As he found in his life, and I know in mine, stories are valuable. The mining camp had run out of gold, but the stories are still fresh and flowing.

Now the other side is the class issue. The storyteller is not sophisticated, and Twain positions himself as superior. I am the not sophisticated one, and I agree with Wheeler that this story is important. Twain says it this way:
“all through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that, ·so far from his imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter, and admired its two heroes as men of transcendent genius”

Twain said it’s an interminable narrative, placing himself as the rightful judge

And I am in my zoom room, talking to the fancy east coast college people realizing I’m sitting in Wheeler’s seat again.

And I see that Twain’s with me and has been the whole time. Neither of us are a high class college person.

We both love stories. I guess we both know that not everyone does. I tried to point out the class issue to the zoom group, and no one saw it

Twain was right to be ambiguous about his opinion of the story.

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor Hugo

Learning to play piano as a teenager, my friends would come up to me and try to talk to me while I was playing. I would be thinking of replies so clearly that I was surprised my friend didn’t answer.

She would smack my arm and say, “Answer me!”

Didn’t I? I was thinking it.

I love words, I love reading and writing. Words and music are how I understand myself. They are not the same, though. I wouldn’t know how to make a diagram of it, but words and music don’t completely overlap. Music lives in a different plane of communication.

Music can express things and heal me in places that words cannot touch.

Many years past in the destruction of my first marriage, I played my antique piano to find my way through. I didn’t know who I was anymore. The meter of the music I created were the railroad ties measuring a path through.

Measure by measure, I was able to sort the chaos from formless and void into my first days. Those dark days in my cinderblock apartment were safe after many years. Protected and trembling from the escape.

Music moves and carries me as I find myself in a new safe place. My hands on the keys, little finger movements probe the tangles. Little strokes finding knots, lining up what allows the harmony.

The beat goes on, relentless but merciful too. No breaks to go make it perfect. And it doesn’t matter because this part can be better than the last. Sweet sounds now forgive the ones I broke before.

Words can be too heavy for the task. I only see darkly what I’m aiming for.

Music walks with me, pushes me along. My long companion and partner. Time might lie on my hands painfully but music raises it up.

I’ve been fighting for a long time. I started training to fight, and then some serious opponents came up

I stayed in the training and got my black belt

I didn’t give up on my serious cancer opponents and they are vanquished and quiet

I think about the boys

Men

Boys

Who stormed normandy beach.THey didn’t get to stop. They training. I don’t know if they volunteered, but the events landed in their lap and they had to walk through them

Up that beach

They didn’t invite the war in

I didn’t ask for cancer

but the fight was upon us

When they went home to their old rooms and their old clothes

Their shirts didn’t fit the same, I’m sure

Mine didn’t either

I don’t know how to fit into the life I previously occuppied. A lot has burned down and i carry scars

The beach

the poisons

I did not dare to stop and feel the seriousness of what I was facing

Eyes on the goal

I did it. I made it.

What do I do now? can I look around now or have I forgotten how?
I have to gently probe the spots to see if I can feel.

Twelve years after I finished high school, I earned a bachelor’s degree. Every day of those twelve years, I felt it’s lack. I wanted that BA. I deserved that BA. I should have it ALREADY!

Until I did.

The wind that pushed me my whole adult life vanished. While I was proud of the accomplishment, I looked over my shoulders for something. I didn’t know this world anymore.

This was a change I’d chased and once achieved everything went quiet.

What now?

Thomas Kuhn noticed a pattern for this “everything changed” situation. The Structure of Scientific Revolution, published in 1962, tracks how the provable and reliable shifts.

Science is definitely repeatable, and therefore reliable. It happens again and again in the same way. The sun rises, and that apple falls when I drop it. Water is wet.

Most of the time.

Don’t get too comfortable. Things are rock solid reliable until people –scientists—start to notice where it isn’t.

Once an aberration is seen, they multiply. Why? Maybe I don’t understand the rules. Maybe I need another rule that bring it all into a working system again.

Then it seems like the system is broken, and a whole new one is needed.

I’d spent time on that broken system. There is good stuff in it! Surely if I jiggle the handle and…

It’s clear it is used up. I’m going to have to learn a new map. Kuhn calls it a paradigm shift.

After my college degree, I found something else to push for. It took some time. It was a long time ago. The pattern is repeating again.

This is the part where I know I don’t know.

Yet.

Eerie silence fills the space.

I’m going to have to look around for a system to use. I know I’m going to have to figure out what is next for me, after the last several years. I was really good at a lot of things that don’t appeal to me anymore.

I’d like to fill that silence by laughing at myself. Here it is again. I’ll look in the forgotten places and make something new.

I am thinking of a wish.

This Sunday is Mother’s day, and as a mother, I am supposed to have a wish. Or maybe a demand.

Like the knights who say “Ni!” from Monty Python’s Holy Grail movie, I could demand a shrubbery. And it totally fits for me to add, “but not too expensive.”

Now that I think of it, I can do better than the knights of Ni! As the matriarch of my little family I have done the work to be granted this wish. I am reminded of The Fault in Our Stars, the John Green novel with a pair of cancer teenagers who fall in love. The cancer is horrible luck, but these kids are aware that it comes with a good choice: how will they use their Make-a-wish foundation wish.

What should I do with my with? The knights if Ni! Were thinking of themselves. Maybe I should uplevel my wish strategically. I could use this chance to turn the gift back onto the giver.

Should I ask my husband to go on a hike with me? I’d like him to do more exercise activities. We would all enjoy nature and it could remind him how much he loves it.

Or what if I chose to make our whole environment better. I could ask everyone to wash the windows and do yard work to make our house beautiful. Maybe the Knights of Ni! had a point about the shrubbery.

I’m balancing the possibilities for the pros and cons. As I think about the day, an important part of the decision comes to me.I am the mother or my family, but I still have to spend part of that day on the other mothers in the chain.

I have to share mother’s Day with the mothers that came before and are still with us. The Mother’s Make-a-Wish day is a pie that we have to slice up. I am not going to be greedy and demand the whole pie.

I think I do want to do some work around the house and go hiking with my husband, but I think I’ll have to plan that to be later.

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