Archive for the ‘Piece of Mind’ Category
She walks up your back, her tiny feet pushing into the natural rungs in your vertebrae. By midnight, though it seems later, her feet are moving further up the spine, then something flashes in her memory – in her dream – and they run up clear to the shoulders. Her feet are blunt, the toes curled in fear, and the push so that the torso rocks, re-settles, then rocks again, so that it is not a painful stamp, like someone climbing stairs. After the first few hits from fisted feet, you come to life. (more…)
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Tags: Family Life
Confined to an orderly existence, nothing about books arranged on shelves shows how provocative the ideas inside them can be. So I keep mine on-the-go because I see them for the motion and fluidity of the material they contain, not as energy trapped in squiggles on margined pages. (more…)
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Tags: Books
The boys at the Henry Wiggen’s blog are back and posting more frequently now. One of the bloggers is my former journalism professor, John Lofflin. Something he added to the site earlier in the week caught my attention. In an excellent post, he asked why so many talented writers turn to baseball as the basis for their literary endeavors. My response (re-published here) was that I loved playing baseball as a kid and that the answer might be as simple as Hemingway, Malamud, Shaahara, and others did, too. I think that response was pretty obvious, but it gave me a reason to reel off a few hundred words. (more…)
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Tags: Literature, Sports
My Type
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
Read the blog posts and the articles on this site if you like, but the way I see the world might be more accessible by reading this web page. With some reluctance, I took the Keirsey test at work about three years ago. I thought it might be as relevant as the career test I completed in high school that suggested I become a fireman. Everyone has a different experience, but when I added the numbers up, what I found was an almost dead-on description of me. The test is based on preferences – what motivates you or what options you would want to take in given situations (for example, do you prefer to work on deadlines or … just whenever?) and from each response, your character and temperaments are etched out. Feeling an eeriness about the outcome, I read the details of my “type” – the INFP – in Please Understand Me. Less than one percent of the population has the INFP character type. The uniqueness comes from the INFPs’ energy sources. There are two: other people (external) and themselves (internal). Yes, I am introvert, but I’ll talk to strangers in line at the grocery store anytime.
This is my favorite part of the write-up I linked to above: INFPs are usually talented writers. They may be awkard and uncomfortable with expressing themselves verbally, but have a wonderful ability to define and express what they’re feeling on paper. INFPs also appear frequently in social service professions, such as counselling or teaching. They are at their best in situations where they’re working towards the public good, and in which they don’t need to use hard logic.
Here’s a link I found if you’d like to take the test.
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Tags: Personality
In the same vein as Allen Ginsberg, I offer this poem … in the guise of a Yahoo! personals ad. Ginsberg’s piece is as honest as anything I’ve ever read. When I was first putting words together, I thought I held the license to deeply personal writing – complete openness to readers – and words that were spontaneous and flowed like music. I didn’t realize the beats had beaten me to it some 30 or 40 years earlier. The times have changed since the original members were writing poetry, which was well into the 1990s. Newspaper classifieds today or the tabloids you pick up in the vending machines downtown are more likely to contain ads for erotic services than ones from innocent hearts hoping to make connections. The following advertisement is fictional. It hasn’t been posted anywhere. Given its themes and proximity to recent changes in my life, it should not be regarded as accurate or as a serious post for what I hope to find from a friend or lover. This site is not about me making a connection (that would be a side benefit.) I am merely playing around with the medium – playing the field, if you will – as a creative writing exercise. I couldn’t tell you what I want now. Probably not for another few months. But it’s fun to imagine that true love can be found through a well-worded sales approach, which is what personal ads are, in the end.
In a few hundred words, it’s almost impossible to condense a person into an accurate portrait while also making them sound appealing. So this is my attempt to make a few broad brushstrokes with a nervous hand – at least turning the sky the right shade and showing the flow in the hills. The landscape is me and you are the audience filling in lovely details from a general description I’ve presented. This metaphor may have something to do with my background as a writer. Or it could just be optimism. (more…)
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Tags: Poetry
