Give Up, Get Up, and Get On With It!

Ding, ding, ding. Up and at 'em. Let's get rolling. A broken night. About 3 am both dogs went wild. Barking, howling, spinning like the Tasmanian devil on Bugs Bunny. I got control back using ancient, sacred mind control methods. But if you'd heard it, you would have envisioned a full assault was taking place in the front room. I think that the smaller one spooked at something and scared Scout into believing that he'd missed some vital clue, so he just joined in with everything he had. It was exactly like the scene in 'Predator" when Mac yells "Contact" and starts shooting into the jungle and suddenly, the other 4 or 5 guys cut loose and the graph on global warming takes a big uptick.

After that, the crew (my dog crew) was on high alert for the rest of the night. I tried to get back to sleep but never made it. The dogs kept trying to go back into the front room to resume patrol and I kept stopping them. I say them, but it was mostly the little one.

So I gave it a chance and then gave up, got up and got on with it.

Ben had a 9 am interview for a job, he slept in, of course. The guys are here to cut down the tree at the edge of the property. They've been here about an hour and it looks like the branches are gone, it's been topped and they've got a rope on at the top to guide it away from the neighbor's house when it falls.

I don't have any ready-made subjects for today's warm-up and I don't remember any dreams from last night so I'll just have to wing it here until my imagination takes flight. In the meantime, I'm making a lot of mistakes and I need to just keep pushing through, but I'm pausing after typing each word for head to catch up and provide another to follow.

Let's see what else is there. I saw an earlier piece I'd written which proposed a story about a guy becoming aware through periodic dreams between periods of black nothing. The dreams get closer together and are mixed with sound clips from movies and TV shows, and sometimes people talking. Eventually, he becomes more conscious than not, but still cannot move and is on a ventilator. He gradually puts together what happened to him, and I haven't decided what that is yet. The idea is that it's a "murder mystery" of whatever complexity you want, but the whole thing is seen from his perspective and solved from there. Maybe at the end he dies but at least he knows the whole story. Maybe the killer comes in to finish him off and confesses the whole thing to him, of course, he looks comatose.

It could be a very good story. It all depends on how you could structure the twists and how many very believable suspects you could create. Wife, stepson, business partner, brother, sister, accident (which is what the initial event would need to look like anyway).

Maybe I'll open up a Scrivener Outline on it and work on it gradually. That might be interesting. It would lower the pressure on it and make it seem less onerous and impossible.

Possible titles, Dabbling in Life,

It's start and stop, and let things wander off. It's a good thing I'm not a shepherd or I'd be walking home alone. I need to focus to get some words in here and make my mind work uh uh better. Yeah, no kidding.

So let's take a look under the hood here. My mind seems to be constantly returning to things I should be doing. Already this morning I was starting to pick out things I could "harp on". You don't hear that phrase often. Of course, I just stopped and and sent an email to Way with Words o ask about the origin of the verb harp, and whileI was there, I looked around at other fun things and thus, was able to avoid this for a few more minutes. Bad writer! Bad! Bad! I had started in this paragraph to look at my thinking and then went off to play with a word.

The point was that I was running my fingers through the big flip file of worries or concerns and each one that felt valid, I would start to worry about. For instance, I thought about the hedgehog and then thought. Ashton's not paying attention to it. That is not the way to treat a pet. So what are my choices there? Start harping on Ashton to become closer to the hedgehog, acuse her of not taking care of her things, make her feel guilty for not spending time with it, make her feel ashamed and inadequate for accepting the responsibility and then ignoring it. Making her feel little and stupid. At the same time, all of that harrassment would make me feel bad, make me feel like a bad parent, guilty and ashamed for playing that part. "I have to just keep up on you constantly to make you do the right things" etc. etc. That was just one thing. All that thinking took above took about 4 or 5 seconds and even when I stopped the thinking, the feelings stayed behind like a stain.

The flip file is huge. I can dig way in and find hundreds of things to pile onto the list. Each and every one of them makes me feel horrible and inadequate. Any single item makes me feel like a failure. When you add a few up, hopelessness is the only end point. I can't get into that kind of thinking. It does no one good.

A final push to get ready and then I'll go on to the practice Small Story of the day. The tree cutting guy came by 30 minutes ago and I paid him and talked with him a little. He's seems like a very interesting guy. Hard worker. Small crew, does all the climbing himself. Looked 35 maybe a little older. Behind his truck he was towing what looked like a brand new Vermeer chipper and I told him about Pella Iowa and the Vermeer company, at least what I knew of it. He said he loved the Vermeer, tough and reliable. Pretty spendy though, but he said it was worth it.

Alright, that seem sto be about the most you can write about nothing, at least for now. I need to move ahead in hopes of this becoming fun soon. It will be interesting to see what I write for Rising Gorge.

More later,